History for ready reference, Volume 2, El Dorado to Greaves

by J. N. Larned

The name-giver,--the name-giving hero of primitive myths, in
which tribes and races of people set before themselves, partly
by tradition, partly by imagination, an heroic personage who
is supposed to be their common progenitor and the source of
their name.
EPONYM CANON OF ASSYRIA.
See ASSYRIA, EPONYM CANON OF.
EPPING FOREST.
Once so extensive that it covered the whole county of Essex,
England, and was called the Forest of Essex. Subsequently,
when diminished in size, it was called Waltham Forest. Still
later, when further retrenched, it took the name of Epping,
from a town that is embraced in it. It is still quite large,
and within recent years it has been formally declared by the
Queen "a people's park."
J. C. Brown,
Forests of England.
EPULONES, The.
"The epulones [at Rome] formed a college for the
administration of the sacred festivals."
C. Merivale,
History of the Romans,
chapter 31.
EQUADOR.
See ECUADOR.
EQUAL RIGHTS PARTY.
See NEW YORK: A. D. 1835-1837.
EQUESTRIAN ORDER, Roman.
"The selection of the burgess cavalry was vested in the
censors. It was, no doubt, the duty of these to make the
selection on purely military grounds, and at their musters to
insist that all horsemen incapacitated by age or otherwise, or
at all unserviceable, should surrender their public horse; but
it was not easy to hinder them from looking to noble birth
more than to capacity, and from allowing men of standing, who
were once admitted, senators particularly, to retain their
horse beyond the proper time. Accordingly it became the
practical rule for the senators to vote in the eighteen
equestrian centuries, and the other places in these were
assigned chiefly to the younger men of the nobility. The
military system, of course, suffered from this, not so much
through the unfitness for effective service of no small part
of the legionary cavalry, as through the destruction of
military equality to which the change gave rise; the noble
youth more and more withdrew from serving in the infantry, and
the legionary cavalry became a close aristocratic corps."
T. Mommsen,
History of Rome,
book 3, chapter 11.
"The eighteen centuries, therefore, in course of time ... lost
their original military character and remained only as a
voting body. It was by the transformation thus effected in the
character of the eighteen centuries of knights, whilst the
cavalry service passed over to the richer citizens not
included in the senatorial families, that a new class of Roman
citizens began gradually to be formed, distinct from the
nobility proper and from the mass of the people, and
designated as the equestrian order."
W. Ihne,
History of Rome,
book 7, chapter. 1.
The equestrian order became a legally constituted class under
the judicial law of Caius Gracchus, B. C. 123, which fixed its
membership by a census, and transferred to it the judicial
functions previously exercised by the senators only. It formed
a kind of monetary aristocracy, as a counterweight to the
nobility.
W. Ihne,
History of Rome,
book 7, chapter 6.
{984}
ERA, Christian.
"Unfortunately for ancient Chronology, there was no one fixed
or universally established Era. Different countries reckoned
by different eras, whose number is embarrassing, and their
commencements not always easily to be adjusted or reconciled
to each other; and it was not until A. D. 532 that the
Christian Era was invented by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian by
birth, and a Roman Abbot, who flourished in the reign of
Justinian. ... Dionysius began his era with the year of our
Lord's incarnation and nativity, in U. C. 753, of the
Varronian Computation, or the 45th of the Julian Era. And at
an earlier period, Panodorus, an Egyptian monk, who flourished
under the Emperor Arcadius, A. D. 395, had dated the
incarnation in the same year. But by some mistake, or
misconception of his meaning, Bede, who lived in the next
century after Dionysius, adopted his year of the Nativity, U.
C. 753, yet began the Vulgar Era, which he first introduced,
the year after, and made it commence Jan. 1, U. C. 754, which
was an alteration for the worse, as making the Christian Era
recede a year further from the true year of the Nativity. The
Vulgar Era began to prevail in the West about the time of
Charles Martel and Pope Gregory II. A. D. 730. ... But it was
not established till the time of Pope Eugenius IV. A. D. 1431,
who ordered this era to be used in the public Registers. ...
Dionysius was led to date the year of the Nativity, U. C. 753,
from the Evangelist Luke's account that John the Baptist began
his ministry 'in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius
Cæsar'; and that Jesus, at his baptism, 'was beginning to be
about 30 years of age.' Luke iii. 1-23. ... But this date of
the Nativity is at variance with Matthew's account, that
Christ was born before Herod's death; which followed shortly
after his massacre of the infants at Bethlehem. ... Christ's
birth, therefore, could not have been earlier than U. C. 748,
nor later than U. C. 749. And if we assume the latter year, as
most conformable to the whole tenor of Sacred History, with
Chrysostom, Petavius, Prideaux, Playfair, &c., this would give
Christ's age at his baptism, about 34 years; contrary to
Luke's account."
W. Hales,
New Analysis of Chronology,
volume 1, book l.
In a subsequent table, Mr. Hales gives the results of the
computations made by different chronologists, ancient and
modern, to fix the true year of the Nativity, as accommodated
to what is called "the vulgar," or popularly accepted,
Christian Era. The range is through no less than ten years,
from B. C. 7 to A. D. 3. His own conclusion, supported by
Prideaux and Playfair, is in favor of the year B. C. 5.
Somewhat more commonly at the present time, it is put at B. C.
4.
See, also, JEWS: B. C. 8-A. D. 1.
ERA, French Revolutionary.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1792 (SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER),
and 1793 (OCTOBER).
ERA, Gregorian.
See CALENDAR, GREGORIAN.
ERA, Jalalæan.
See TURKS (THE SELJUK): A. D. 1073-1092.
ERA, Julian.
See CALENDAR, JULIAN.
ERA, Mahometan, or Era of the Hegira.
"The epoch of the Era of the Hegira is, according to the civil
calculation, Friday, the 16th of July, A. D. 622, the day of
the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, which is the date
of the Mahometans; but astronomers and some historians assign
it to the preceding day, viz., Thursday, the 15th of July; an
important fact to be borne in mind when perusing Arabian
writers. The years of the Hegira are lunar years, and contain
twelve months, each commencing with the new moon; a practice
which necessarily leads to great confusion and uncertainty,
inasmuch as every year must begin considerably earlier in the
season than the preceding. In chronology and history, however,
and in dating their public instruments, the Turks use months
which contain alternately thirty and twenty-nine days,
excepting the last month, which, in intercalary years,
contains thirty days. ... The years of the Hegira are divided
into cycles of thirty years, nineteen of which are termed
common years, of 354 days each; and the eleven others
intercalary, or abundant, from their consisting of one day
more: these are the 2d, 5th, 7th, 10th, 13th, 16th, 18th,
21st, 24th, 26th and 29th. To ascertain whether any given year
be intercalary or not divide it by 30; and if either of the
above numbers remain, the year is one of 355 days."
Sir H. Nicolas,
Chronology of History.
See, also, MAHOMETAN CONQUEST: A. D. 609-632.
ERA, Spanish.
"The Spanish era dates from 38 B. C. (A. U. 716) and is
supposed to mark some important epoch in the organization of
the province by the Romans. It may coincide with the campaign
of Calvinus, which is only known to us from a notice in the
Fasti Triumphales. ... The Spanish era was preserved in Aragon
till 1358, in Castile till 1383, and in Portugal till 1415."
C. Merivale,
History of the Romans,
chapter 34, note.
ERA OF DIOCLETIAN, or Era of Martyrs.
See ROME: A. D. 192-284.
ERA OF GOOD FEELING.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1821-1824.
ERA OF THE FOUNDATION OF ROME.
See ROME: B. C. 753.
ERA OF THE OLYMPIADS.
See OLYMPIADS, ERA OF THE.
ERANI.
Associations existing in ancient Athens which resembled the
mutual benefit or friendly-aid societies of modern times.
G. F. Schömann,
Antiquity of Greece: The State,
part 3, chapter 3.
ERASTIANISM.
A doctrine which "received its name from Thomas Erastus, a
German physician of the 16th century, contemporary with
Luther. The work in which he delivered his theory and
reasonings on the subject is entitled 'De Excommunicatione
Ecclesiastica.' ... The Erastians ... held that religion is an
affair between man and his creator, in which no other man or
society of men was entitled to interpose. ... Proceeding on
this ground, they maintained that every man calling himself a
Christian has a right to make resort to any Christian place of
worship, and partake in all its ordinances. Simple as this
idea is, it strikes at the root of all priestcraft."
W. Godwin,
History of the Commonwealth,
volume 1, chapter 13.
ERCTÉ, Mount, Hamilcar on.
See PUNIC WAR, THE FIRST.
See, also, ERYX.
ERDINI, The.
See IRELAND, TRIBES OF EARLY CELTIC INHABITANTS.
EREMITES OF ST. FRANCIS.
See MINIMS.
ERETRIA.
See CHALCIS AND ERETRIA.
ERFURT, IMPERIAL CONFERENCE AND TREATY OF.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1808 (SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER).
{985}
ERECTHEION AT ATHENS, The.
"At a very early period there was, opposite the long northern
side of the Parthenon, a temple which, according to Herodot,
was dedicated jointly to Athene Polias and the Attic hero,
Erectheus. ... This temple was destroyed by fire while the
Persians held the city. Not unlikely the rebuilding of the
Erectheion was begun by Perikles together with that of the
other destroyed temples of the Akropolis; but as it was not
finished by him, it is generally not mentioned amongst his
works. ... This temple was renowned amongst the ancients as
one of the most beautiful and perfect in existence, and seems
to have remained almost intact down to the time of the Turks.
The siege of Athens by the Venetians in 1687 seems to have
been fatal to the Erectheion, as it was to the Parthenon."
E. Guhl and W. Koner,
Life of the Greeks,
section 14.
See, also, ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS.
ERIC,
King of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, A. D. 1412-1439.
Eric Blodaexe, King of Norway, A. D. 934-940.
Eric I., King of Denmark, A. D: 850-854.
Eric I. (called Saint), King of Sweden, A. D. 1155-1161.
Eric II., King of Denmark, A. D. 854-883.
Eric II., King of·Norway, A. D. 1280-1299.
Eric II. (Knutsson), King of Sweden, A. D. 1210-1216.
Eric III., King of Denmark, A. D. 1095-1103.
Eric III. (called The Stammerer), King of Sweden, A. D. 1222-1250.
Eric IV., King of Denmark, A. D. 1134-1137.
Eric V., King of Denmark, A. D. 1137-1147.
Eric VI., King of Denmark, A. D. 1241-1250.
Eric VII., King of Denmark, A. D. 1259-1286.
Eric VIII., King of Denmark, A. D. 1286-1319.
Eric XIV., King of Sweden, A. D. 1560-1568.
ERICSSON, John
Invention and construction of the Monitor.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (MARCH).
ERIE, The City of: A. D. 1735.
Site occupied by the French.
See CANADA: A. D. 1700-1735.
ERIE, Fort: A. D. 1764-1791.
Origin.
Four years after the British conquest of Canada, in 1764,
Colonel John Bradstreet built a blockhouse and stockade near
the site of the later Fort Erie, which was not constructed
until 1791. When war with the United States broke out, in
1812, the British considered the new fort untenable, or
unnecessary, and evacuated and partly destroyed it, in May,
1813.
C. K. Remington,
Old Fort Erie.
ERIE, Fort: A. D. 1814.
The siege and the destruction.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1814 (JULY-SEPTEMBER).
ERIE, Fort: A. D. 1866.
The Fenian invasion.
See CANADA: A. D. 1866-1871.
----------ERIE: End----------
ERIE, Lake:
The Indian name.
See NIAGARA: THE NAME, &c.
ERIE, Lake: A. D. 1679.
Navigated by La Salle.
See CANADA: A. D. 1669-1687.
ERIE, Lake: A. D. 1813.
Perry's naval victory.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1812-1813.
----------ERIE, Lake: End----------
ERIE CANAL, Construction of the.
See NEW YORK: A. D. 1817-1825.
ERIES, The.
See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: HURONS, &c.,
and IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY: THEIR CONQUESTS.
ERIN.
See IRELAND.
ERMANRIC, OR HERMANRIC, The empire of.
See GOTHS (OSTROGOTHS): A. D. 350-375; and 376.
ERMYN STREET.
A corruption of Eormen street, the Saxon name of one of the
great Roman roads in Britain, which ran from London to
Lincoln. Some writers trace it northwards through York to the
Scottish border and southward to Pevensey.
See ROMAN ROADS IN BRITAIN.
ERNESTINE LINE OF SAXONY.
See SAXONY: A. D. 1180-1553.
ERPEDITANI, The.
See IRELAND, TRIBES OF EARLY CELTIC INHABITANTS.
ERTANG, The.
The sacred book of the Manicheans.
See MANICHEANS.
ERYTHRÆ.-ERYTHRÆAN SIBYL.
Erythræ was an ancient Ionian city on the Lydian coast of Asia
Minor, opposite the island of Chios or Scio. It was chiefly
famous as the home or seat of one of the most venerated of the
sibyls--prophetic women--of antiquity. The collection of
Sibylline oracles which was sacredly preserved at Rome appears
to have been largely derived from Erythræ. The Cumæan Sibyl is
sometimes identified with her Erythræan sister, who is said to
have passed into Europe.
See, also, SIBYLS.
ERYTHRÆAN SEA, The.
The Erythræan Sea, in the widest sense of the term, as used by
the ancients, comprised "the Arabian Gulf (or what we now call
the Red Sea), the coasts of Africa outside the straits of Bab
el Mandeb as far as they had then been explored, as well as
those of Arabia and India down to the extremity of the Malabar
coast." The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea is a geographical
treatise of great importance which we owe to some unknown
Greek writer supposed to be nearly contemporary with Pliny. It
is "a kind of manual for the instruction of navigators and
traders in the Erythræan Sea."
E. H. Bunbury,
History of Ancient Geography,
chapter 25.
"The Erythrêam Sea is an appellation ... in all appearance
deduced [by the ancients] from their entrance into it by the
straits of the Red Sea, styled Erythra by the Greeks, and not
excluding the gulph of Persia, to which the fabulous history
of a king Erythras is more peculiarly appropriate."
W. Vincent,
Periplus of the Erythrêan Sea,
book 1, prelim. disquis.
ERYX.--ERCTE.
A town originally Phoœnician or Carthaginian on the
northwestern coast of Sicily. It stood on the slope of a
mountain which was crowned with an ancient temple of
Aphrodite, and which gave the name Erycina to the goddess when
her worship was introduced at Rome.
See PUNIC WAR, THE FIRST.
ERZEROUM: A. D. 1878.
Taken by the Russians.
See TURKS: A. D. 1877-1878.
ESCOCÉS, The party of the.
See MEXICO: A. D. 1822-1828.
ESCOMBOLI.
See STAMBOUL.
ESCORIAL, The.
See SPAIN: A. D. 1559-1563.
ESCUYER.--ESQUIRE.
See CHIVALRY.
ESDRAELON, Valley of.
See MEGIDDO.
ESKIMO, The.
See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: ESKIMAUAN FAMILY.
ESNE.
See THEOW.
ESPARTERO, Regency of.
See SPAIN: A. D. 1833-1846.
ESPINOSA, Battle of.
See SPAIN: A. D. 1808 (SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER).
{986}
ESQUILINE, The.
See SEVEN HILLS OF ROME.
ESQUIRE.--ESCUYER.--SQUIRE.
See CHIVALRY.
ESQUIROS, Battle of (1521).
See NAVARRE: A. D. 1442-1521.
ESSELENIAN FAMILY, The.
See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: ESSELENIAN FAMILY.
ESSENES, The.
See Supplement in volume 5.
ESSEX.
Originally the kingdom formed by that body of the Saxon
conquerors of Britain, in the fifth and sixth centuries, who
acquired, from their geographical position in the island, the
name of the East Saxons. It covered the present county of
Essex and also included London and Middlesex.
See ENGLAND: A. D. 477-527.
ESSEX JUNTO, The.
In the Massachusetts election of 1781, "the representatives of
the State in Congress, and some of the more moderate leaders
at home, opposed Governor Hancock, the popular candidate, and
supported James Bowdoin, who was thought to represent the more
conservative elements. ... It was at this time that Hancock is
said to have bestowed on his opponents the title of the 'Essex
Junto,' and this is the first appearance of the name in
American politics. ... The 'Junto' was generally supposed to
be composed of such men as Theophilus Parsons, George Cabot,
Fisher Ames, Stephen Higginson, the Lowells, Timothy
Pickering, &c., and took its name from the county to which
most of its reputed members originally belonged. ... The
reputed members of the 'Junto' held political power in
Massachusetts [as leaders of the Federalist party] for more
than a quarter of a century." According to Chief Justice
Parsons, as quoted by Colonel Pickering in his Diary, the term
'Essex Junto' was applied by one of the Massachusetts royal
governors, before the Revolution, to certain gentlemen of
Essex county who opposed his measures. Hancock, therefore,
only revived the title and gave it currency, with a new
application.
H. C. Lodge,
Life and Letters of George Cabot,
pages 17-22.
ESSLINGEN, OR ASPERN, Battle of.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1809 (JANUARY-JUNE).
ESSUVII, The.
A Gallic tribe established anciently in the modern French
department of the Orne.
Napoleon III.,
History of Cæsar,
book 3, chapter 2, note.
ESTATES, Assembly of.
"An assembly of estates is an organised collection, made by
representation or otherwise, of the several orders, states or
conditions of men, who are recognised as possessing political
power. A national council of clergy and barons is not an
assembly of estates, because it does not include the body of
the people, the plebs, the simple freemen or commons."
W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 15, section 185.
See, also, ESTATES, THE THREE.
ESTATES, The Three.
"The arrangement of the political factors in three estates is
common, with some minor variations, to all the European
constitutions, and depends on a principle of almost universal
acceptance. This classification differs from the system of
caste and from all divisions based on differences of blood or
religion, historical or prehistorical. ... In Christendom it
has always taken the form of a distinction between clergy and
laity, the latter being subdivided according to national
custom into noble and non-noble, patrician and plebeian,
warriors and traders, landowners and craftsmen. ... The
Aragonese cortes contained four brazos or arms, the clergy,
the great barons or ricos hombres, the minor barons, knights
or infanzones, and the towns. The Germanic diet comprised
three colleges, the electors, the princes and the cities, the
two former being arranged in distinct benches, lay and
clerical. ... The Castilian cortes arranged the clergy, the
ricos hombres and the communidades, in three estates. The
Swedish diet was composed of clergy, barons, burghers and
peasants. ... In France, both in the States General and in the
provincial estates, the division is into gentz de l'eglise,
nobles, and gentz des bonnes villes. In England, after a
transitional stage, in which the clergy, the greater and
smaller barons, and the cities and boroughs, seemed likely to
adopt the system used in Aragon and Scotland, and another in
which the county and borough communities continued to assert
an essential difference, the three estates of clergy, lords
and commons, finally emerge as the political constituents of
the nation, or, in their parliamentary form, as the lords
spiritual and temporal and the commons. This familiar formula
in either shape bears the impress of history. The term commons
is not in itself an appropriate expression for the third
estate; it does not signify primarily the simple freemen, the
plebs, but the plebs organised and combined in corporate
communities, in a particular way for particular purposes. The
commons are the communitates or universitates, the organised
bodies of freemen of the shires and towns. ... The third
estate in England differs from the same estate in the
continental constitutions, by including the landowners under
baronial rank. In most of those systems it contains the
representatives of the towns or chartered communities only."
W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 15, sections 185, 193.
"The words 'gens de tiers et commun état' are found in many
acts [France] of the 15th century. The expressions 'tiers
état,' 'commun état,' and 'le commun' are used indifferently,
... This name of 'Tiers État, when used in its ordinary sense,
properly comprises only the population of the privileged
cities; but in effect it extends much beyond this; it includes
not only the cities, but the villages and hamlets--not only
the free commonalty, but all those for whom civil liberty is a
privilege still to come."
A. Thierry,
Formation and Progress of the Tiers État in France,
volume 1, pages 61 and 60.
ESTATES, or "States," of the Netherland Provinces.
See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1584-1585.
ESTATES GENERAL.
See STATES GENERAL.
ESTE, The House of.
"Descended from one of the northern families which settled in
Italy during the darkest period of the middle ages, the Este
traced their lineal descent up to the times of Charlemagne.
They had taken advantage of the frequent dissensions between
the popes and the German emperors of the houses of Saxony and
Swabia, and acquired wide dominions in Lunigiana, and the
March of Treviso, where the castle of Este, their family
residence, was situated. Towards the middle of the 11th
century, that family had been connected by marriages with the
Guelphs of Bavaria, and one of the name of Este was eventually
to become the common source from which sprung the illustrious
houses of Brunswick and Hanover. The Este had warmly espoused
the Guelph party [see GUELFS], during the wars of the Lombard
League. ...
{987}
Towards the year 1200, Azzo V., Marquis of Este, married
Marchesella degli Adelardi, daughter of one of the most
conspicuous Guelphs at Ferrara, where the influence of the
House of Este was thus first established."
L. Mariotti (A. Gallenga),
Italy,
volume 2, pages 62-63.
The Marquesses of Este became, "after some of the usual
fluctuations, permanent lords of the cities of Ferrara [1264]
and Modena [1288]. About the same time they lost their
original holding of Este, which passed to Padua, and with
Padua to Venice. Thus the nominal marquess of Este and real
lord of Ferrara was not uncommonly spoken of as Marquess of
Ferrara. In the 15th century these princes rose to ducal rank;
but by that time the new doctrine of the temporal dominion of
the Popes had made great advances. Modena, no man doubted, was
a city of the Empire; but Ferrara was now held to be under the
supremacy of the Pope. The Marquess Borso had thus to seek his
elevation to ducal rank from two separate lords. He was
created Duke of Modena [1453] and Reggio by the Emperor, and
afterwards Duke of Ferrara [1471] by the Pope. This difference
of holding ... led to the destruction of the power of the
house of Este. In the times in which we are now concerned,
their dominions lay in two masses. To the west lay the duchy
of Modena and Reggio; apart from it to the east lay the duchy
of Ferrara. Not long after its creation, this last duchy was
cut short by the surrender of the border-district of Rovigo to
Venice. ... Modena and Ferrara remained united, till Ferrara
was annexed [1598] as an escheated fief to the dominions of
its spiritual overlord. But the house of Este still reigned
over Modena with Reggio and Mirandola, while its dominions
were extended to the sea by the addition of Massa and other
small possessions between Lucca and Genoa. The duchy in the
end passed by female succession to the House of Austria
[1771-1803]."
E. A. Freeman,
Historical Geography of Europe,
chapter 8, sections 3-4.
"The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena, and
Reggio displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.
Within the palace frightful deeds were perpetrated; a princess
was beheaded [1425] for alleged adultery with a stepson;
legitimate and illegitimate children fled from the court, and
even abroad their lives were threatened by assassins sent in
pursuit of them (1471). Plots from without were incessant; the
bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the crown from the lawful
heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards (1493) to
have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the
instigation of her brother, Ferrante of Naples, was going to
poison him. This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of
two bastards against their brothers; the ruling Duke Alfonso
I. and the Cardinal Ippolito (1506), which was discovered in
time, and punished with imprisonment for life. ... It is
undeniable that the dangers to which these princes were
constantly exposed developed in them capacities of a
remarkable kind."
J. Burckhardt,
The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy,
part 1, chapter 5.
For the facts of the ending of the legitimate Italian line of
Este,
See PAPACY: A. D. 1597.
ESTHONIA, OR ESTONIA:
Origin of the name.
See ÆSTII.
ESTHONIA, OR ESTONIA: Christian conquest.
See LIVONIA: 12TH-13TH CENTURIES.
ESTIENNES, The Press of the.
See PRINTING: A. D. 1496-1598.
ESTREMOS, OR AMEIXAL, Battle of (1663).
See PORTUGAL: A. D. 1637-1668.
ETCHEMINS, The.
See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: ALGONQUIAN FAMILY.
ETHANDUN, OR EDINGTON, Battle of (A. D. 878).
See ENGLAND: A. D. 855-880.
ETHEL, ETHELINGS, OR ÆTHELINGS.
"The sons and brothers of the king [of the English] were
distinguished by the title of Æthelings. The word Ætheling,
like eorl, originally denoted noble birth simply; but as the
royal house of Wessex rose to pre-eminence and the other royal
houses and the nobles generally were thereby reduced to a
relatively lower grade, it became restricted to the near
kindred of the national king."
T. P. Taswell-Langmead,
English Constitutional History,
page 29.
"It has been sometimes held that the only nobility of blood
recognized in England before the Norman Conquest was that of
the king's kin. The statement may be regarded as deficient in
authority, and as the result of a too hasty generalization
from the fact that only the sons and brothers of the kings
bear the name of ætheling. On the other hand must be alleged
the existence of a noble (edhiling) class among the
continental Saxons who had no kings at all. ... The laws of
Ethelbert prove the existence of a class bearing the name of
eorl of which no other interpretation can be given. That
these, eorlas and æthel, were the descendants of the primitive
nobles of the first settlement, who, on the institution of
royalty, sank one step in dignity from the ancient state of
rude independence, in which they had elected their own chiefs
and ruled their own dependents, may be very reasonably
conjectured. ... The ancient name of eorl, like that of
ætheling, changed its application, and, under the influence,
perhaps, of Danish association, was given like that of jarl to
the official ealdorman. Henceforth the thegn takes the place
of the æthel, and the class of thegns probably embraces all
the remaining families of noble blood. The change may have
been very gradual; the 'north people's law' of the tenth or
early eleventh century still distinguishes the eorl and
ætheling with a wergild nearly double that of the ealdorman
and seven times that of the thegn; but the north people's law
was penetrated with Danish influence, and the eorl probably
represents the jarl rather than the ealdorman, the great eorl
of the fourth part of England as it was divided by Canute. ...
The word eorl is said to be the same as the Norse jarl and
another form of ealdor (?); whilst the ceorl answers to the
Norse Karl; the original meaning of the two being old man and
young man."
W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 6, section 64, and note.
ETHEL.--Family-land.
See ALOD; and FOLCLAND.
ETHELBALD,
King of Mercia, A. D. 716-755.
Ethelbald, King of Wessex, A. D. 858-860.
ETHELBERT,
King of Kent, A. D. 565-616.
Ethelbert, King of Wessex, A. D. 860-866.
ETHELFRITH, King of Northumberland, A. D. 593-617.
ETHELRED,
King of Wessex, A. D. 866-871.
Ethelred, called the Unready, King of Wessex, A. D. 979-1016.
{988}
ETHELSTAN, King of Wessex, A. D. 925-940.
ETHELWULF, King of Wessex, A. D. 836-858.
ETHIOPIA.
The Ethiopia of the ancients, "in the ordinary and vague sense
of the term, was a vast tract extending in length above a
thousand miles, from the 9th to the 24th degree of north
latitude, and in breadth almost 900 miles, from the shores of
the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to the desert of the Sahara. This
tract was inhabited for the most part by wild and barbarous
tribes--herdsmen, hunters, or fishermen--who grew no corn,
were unacquainted with bread, and subsisted on the milk and
flesh of their cattle, or on game, turtle, and fish, salted or
raw. The tribes had their own separate chiefs, and
acknowledged no single head, but on the contrary were
frequently at war one with the other, and sold their prisoners
for slaves. Such was Ethiopia in the common vague sense; but
from this must be distinguished another narrower Ethiopia,
known sometimes as 'Ethiopia Proper' or 'Ethiopia above
Egypt,' the limits of which were, towards the south, the
junction of the White and Blue Niles, and towards the north
the Third Cataract. Into this tract, called sometimes 'the
kingdom of Meroë,' Egyptian civilisation had, long before the
eighth century [B. C.], deeply penetrated. Temples of the
Egyptian type, stone pyramids, avenues of sphinxes, had been
erected; a priesthood had been set up, which was regarded as
derived from the Egyptian priesthood; monarchical institutions
had been adopted; the whole tract formed ordinarily one
kingdom, and the natives were not very much behind the
Egyptians in arts or arms, or very different from them in
manners, customs, and mode of life. Even in race the
difference was not great. The Ethiopians were darker in
complexion than the Egyptians, and possessed probably a
greater infusion of Nigritic blood; but there was a common
stock at the root of the two races--Cush and Mizraim were
brethren. In the region of Ethiopia Proper a very important
position was occupied in the eighth century [B. C.] by Napata.
Napata was situated midway in the great bend of the Nile,
between latitude 18° and 19°. ... It occupied the left bank of
the river in the near vicinity of the modern Gebel Berkal. . .
Here, when the decline of Egypt enabled the Ethiopians to
reclaim their ancient limits, the capital was fixed of that
kingdom, which shortly became a rival of the old empire of the
Pharaohs, and aspired to take its place. ... The kingdom of
Meroë, whereof it was the capital, reached southward as far as
the modern Khartoum, and eastward stretched up to the
Abyssinian highlands, including the valleys of the Atbara and
its tributaries, together with most of the tract between the
Atbara and the Blue Nile. ... Napata continued down to Roman
times a place of importance, and only sank to ruin in
consequence of the campaigns of Petronius against Candacé in
the first century after our era."
G. Rawlinson,
History of Ancient Egypt,
chapter 25.
ALSO IN:
A. H. L. Heeren,
Historical Researches, Carthaginians,
Ethiopians, &c., pages 143-249.
See, also, EGYPT: ABOUT B. C. 1200-670;
and LIBYANS, THE.
ETON SCHOOL.
See EDUCATION, MODERN: EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.--ENGLAND.
ETRURIA, Ancient.
See ETRUSCANS.
ETRURIA, The kingdom of.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1801-1803;
also PORTUGAL: A. D. 1807;
and FRANCE: A. D. 1807-1808(NOVEMBER-FEBRUARY).
ETRUSCANS, The.
"At the time when Roman history begins, we find that a
powerful and warlike race, far superior to the Latins in
civilisation and in the arts of life, hemmed in the rising
Roman dominion in the north. The Greeks called them Turrhenoi,
the Romans called them Etrusci, they called themselves the
Rasenna. Who they were and whence they came has ever been
regarded as one of the most doubtful and difficult problems in
ethnology. One conclusion only can be said to have been
universally accepted both in ancient and in modern times. It
is agreed on every hand that in all essential points, in
language, in religion, in customs, and in appearance, the
Etruscans were a race wholly different from the Latins. There
is also an absolute agreement of all ancient tradition to the
effect that the Etruscans were not the original inhabitants of
Etruria, but that they were an intrusive race of conquerors.
... It has been usually supposed that the Rasenna made their
appearance in Italy some ten or twelve centuries before the
Christian era. ... For some six or seven centuries, the
Etruscan power and territory continued steadily to increase,
and ultimately stretched far south of the Tiber, Rome itself
being included in the Etruscan dominion, and being ruled by an
Etruscan dynasty. The early history of Rome is to a great
extent the history of the uprising of the Latin race, and its
long struggle for Italian supremacy with its Etruscan foe. It
took Rome some six centuries of conflict to break through the
obstinate barrier of the Etruscan power. The final conquest of
Etruria by Rome was effected in the year 281 B. C. ... The
Rasennic people were collected mainly in the twelve great
cities of Etruria proper, between the Arno and the Tiber.
[Modern Tuscany takes its name from the ancient Etruscan
inhabitants of the region.] This region was the real seat of
the Etruscan power. ... From the 'Shah-nameh,' the great
Persian epic, we learn that the Aryan Persians called their
nearest non-Aryan neighbours--the Turkic or Turcoman tribes to
the north of them--by the name Turan, a word from which we
derive the familiar ethnologic term Turanian. The Aryan
Greeks, on the other hand, called the Turkic tribe of the
Rasenna, the nearest non-Aryan race, by the name of Turrhenoi.
The argument of this book is to prove that the Tyrrhenians of
Italy were of kindred race with the Turanians of Turkestan. Is
it too much to conjecture that the Greek form Turrhene may be
identically the same word as the Persian form Turan?"
I. Taylor,
Etruscan Researches,
chapter 2.
"The utmost we can say is that several traces, apparently
reliable, point to the conclusion that the Etruscans may be on
the whole included among the Indo-Germans. ... But even
granting those points of connection, the Etruscan people
appears withal scarcely less isolated. 'The Etruscans,'
Dionysius said long ago, 'are like no other nation in language
and manners'; and we have nothing to add to his statement. ...
Reliable traces of any advance of the Etruscans beyond the
Tiber, by land, are altogether wanting. ... South of the Tiber
no Etruscan settlement can be pointed out as having owed its
origin to founders who came by land; and that no indication
whatever is discernible of any serious pressure by the
Etruscans upon the Latin nation."
T. Mommsen,
History of Rome,
book 1, chapter 9.
{989}
EUBŒA.
"The island of Eubœa, long and narrow like Krête, and
exhibiting a continuous backbone of lofty mountains from
northwest to southeast, is separated from Bœotia at one point
by a strait so narrow (celebrated in antiquity under the name
of the Eurīpus) that the two were connected by a bridge for a
large portion of the historical period of Greece, erected
during the later times of the Peloponnesian war by the
inhabitants of Chalkis [Chalcis]. Its general want of breadth
leaves little room for plains. The area of the island consists
principally of mountain, rock, dell, and ravine, suited in
many parts for pasture, but rarely convenient for
grain-culture or town habitations. Some plains there were,
however, of great fertility, especially that of Lelantum,
bordering on the sea near Chalkis, and continuing from that
city in a southerly direction towards Eretria. Chalkis and
Eretria, both situated on the western coast, and both
occupying parts of this fertile plain, were the two principal
places in the island: the domain of each seems to have
extended across the island from sea to sea. ... Both were in
early times governed by an oligarchy, which among the
Chalcidians was called the Hippobotæ, or Horse feeders,--
proprietors probably of most part of the plain called
Lelantum."
G. Grote,
History of Greece,
part 2, chapter 12.
See, also, NEGROPONT.
EUBOIC TALENT.
See TALENT.
EUCHITES, The.
See MYSTICISM.
EUDES, King of France
(in partition with Charles the Simple), A. D. 887-898.
EUDOSES, The.
See AVIONES.
EUGENE (Prince) of Savoy, Campaigns of.
See HUNGARY: A. D. 1699-1718;
GERMANY: A. D. 1704;
ITALY (SAVOY AND PIEDMONT): A. D. 1701-1713;
NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1708-1709, and 1710-1712.
EUGENE I., Pope, A. D. 655-657.
Eugene II., Pope, A. D. 824-827.
Eugene III., Pope, A. D. 1145-1153.
Eugene IV., Pope, A. D. 1431-1447.
EUGENIANS, The.
See HY-NIALS.
EUMENES, and the wars of the Diadochi.
See MACEDONIA: B. C. 323-316.
EUMOLPHIDÆ, The.
See PHYLÆ.
EUPATRIDÆ, The.
"The Eupatridæ [in ancient Athens] are the wealthy and
powerful men, belonging to the most distinguished families in
all the various gentes, and principally living in the city of
Athens, after the consolidation of Attica: from them are
distinguished the middling and lower people, roughly
classified into husbandmen and artisans. To the Eupatridæ is
ascribed a religious as well as a political and social
ascendency. They are represented as the source of all
authority on matters both sacred and profane,"
G. Grote,
History of Greece,
part 2, chapter 10.
EUROKS, OR YUROKS.
See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: MODOCS.
EUROPE.
A HISTORICAL SKETCH.
A general sketch of the history of Europe at large cannot, for
obvious reasons, be constructed of quotations from the
historians, on the plan followed in other parts of this work.
The editor has found it necessary, therefore, to introduce
here an essay of his own.
The first inhabitants of the continent of Europe have left no
trace of their existence on the surface of the land. The
little that we know of them has been learned by the discovery
of deeply buried remains, including a few bones and skulls,
many weapons and tools which they had fashioned out of stone
and bone, and some other rude marks of their hands which time
has not destroyed. The places in which these remains are
found--under deposits that formed slowly in ancient river beds
and in caves--have convinced geologists that the people whose
existence they reveal lived many thousands of years ago, and
that the continent of Europe in their time was very different
from the Europe of the present day, in its climate, in its
aspect, and in its form. They find reason to suppose that the
peninsula of Italy, as well as that of Spain, was then an
isthmus which joined Europe to Africa; and this helps to
explain the fact that remains of such animals as the elephant,
the lion, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, and the hyena, as
well as the mammoth, are found with the remains of these early
men. They all seem to have belonged, together, to a state of
things, on the surface of the earth, which was greatly changed
before the men and the animals that we have historical
knowledge of appeared.
The Stone Age.
These primitive Europeans were evidently quite at the bottom
of the savage state. They had learned no use of metals, since
every relic of their workmanship that can be found is of
stone, or bone, or wood. It is thought possible that they
shaped rough vessels out of unbaked clay; but that is
uncertain. There is nothing to show that they had domesticated
any animals. It is plain that they dwelt in caves, wherever
nature provided such dwellings; but what shelters they may
have built elsewhere for themselves is unknown.
In one direction, only, did these ancient people exhibit a
faculty finer than we see in the lowest savages of the present
day: they were artists, in a way. They have left carvings and
drawings of animals--the latter etched with a sharp point on
horns, bones, and stones--which are remarkable for uncultured
men.
The period in man's life on the earth at which these people
lived--the period before metals were known--has been named by
archæologists the Stone Age. But the Stone Age covers two
stages of human culture--one in which stone implements were
fashioned unskilfully, and a second in which they were
finished with expert and careful hands. The first is called
the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age, the second the Neolithic or
New Stone Age. Between the two periods in Europe there seems
to have been a long interval of time, and a considerable
change in the condition of the country, as well as in that of
its people.
{990}
In fact, the Europe of the Neolithic Age was probably not very
different in form and climate from the Europe of our own day.
Relics of the human life of that time are abundantly scattered
over the face of the continent. There are notable deposits of
them in the so-called "kitchen-middens" of Denmark, which are
great mounds of shells,--shells of oysters and other
molluscs,--which these ancient fishermen had opened and
emptied, and then cast upon a refuse heap. Buried in those
mounds, many bits of their workmanship have been preserved,
and many hints of their manner of life are gleaned from the
signs and tokens which these afford. They had evidently risen
some degrees above the state of the men of the Palæolithic or
Old Stone Age; but they were inferior in art.
The Bronze Age.
The discovery and use of copper--the metal most easily worked,
and most frequently found in the metallic state--is the event
by which archæologists mark the beginning of a second state in
early civilizations. The period during which copper, and
copper hardened by an alloy of tin, are the only metals found
in use, they call the Bronze Age. There is no line of positive
division between this and the Neolithic period which it
followed. The same races appear to have advanced from the one
stage to the other, and probably some were in possession of
tools and weapons of bronze, while others were still
contenting themselves with implements of stone.
Lake Dwellings.
In many parts of Europe, especially in Switzerland and
northern Italy, plain traces of some curious habitations of
people who lived through the later Stone Age into the Bronze
Age, and even after it, have been brought to light. These are
the "lake dwellings," or "lacustrine habitations," as they
have been called, which have excited interest in late years.
They were generally built on piles, driven into a lake-bottom,
at such distance from shore as would make them easy of defence
against enemies. The foundations of whole villages of these
dwellings have been found in the Swiss and North Italian
lakes, and less numerously elsewhere. From the lake-mud under
and around them, a great quantity of relics of the
lake-dwellers have been taken, and many facts about their arts
and mode of life have been learned. It is known that, even
before a single metal had come into their hands, they had
begun to cultivate the earth; had raised wheat and barley and
flax; had domesticated the horse, the ox, the sheep, the goat,
the pig and the dog; had become fairly skilful in weaving, in
rope-making, and in the art of the potter, but without the
potter's wheel.
Gradually copper and bronze made their appearance among the
implements of these people, as modern search discovers them
imbedded, layer upon layer, in the old ooze of the lake-beds
where they were dropped. In time, iron, too, reveals itself
among their possessions, showing that they lived in their
lake-villages from the later Stone Age into that third period
of the early process of civilization which is named the Iron
Age--when men first acquired the use of the most useful of all
the metals. It appears, in fact, that the lake-dwellings were
occupied even down to Roman times, since articles of Roman
make have been found in the ruins of them.
Barrows.
In nearly all parts of Europe there are found burial mounds,
called barrows, which contain buried relics of people who
lived at one or the other of the three periods named. For the
most part, they represent inhabitants of the Neolithic and of
the Bronze Ages. In Great Britain some of these barrows are
long, some are round; and the skulls found in the long barrows
are different in shape from those in the round ones, showing a
difference of race. The people to whom the first belonged are
called "long-headed," or "dolichocephalic"; the others are
called "broad-headed," or "brachycephalic." In the opinion of
some ethnologists, who study this subject of the distinctions
of race in the human family, the broad-headed people were
ancestors of the Celtic or Keltic tribes, whom the Romans
subdued in Gaul and Britain; while the long-headed men were of
a preceding race, which the Celts, when they came, either
drove out of all parts of Europe, except two or three
mountainous corners, or else absorbed by intermarriage. The
Basques of northwestern Spain, and some of their neighbors on
the French side of the Pyrenees, are supposed to be survivals
of this very ancient people; and there are suspected to be
traces of their existence seen in the dark-haired and
dark-skinned people of parts of Wales, Ireland, Corsica, North
Africa, and elsewhere.
The Aryan Nations.
At least one part of this conjecture has much to rest upon.
The inhabitants of western Europe when our historical
knowledge of them--that is, our recorded and reported
knowledge of them--begins, were, certainly, for the most
part, Celtic peoples, and it is extremely probable that they
had been occupying the country as long as the period
represented by the round barrows. It is no less probable that
they were the lake-dwellers of Switzerland, North Italy, and
other regions; and that they did, in fact, displace some
earlier people in most parts of Western Europe.
The Celts--whose nearly pure descendants are found now in the
Bretons of France, the Welsh, the Highland Scotch and the
Celtic Irish, and who formed the main stock of the larger part
of the French nation--were one branch of the great family of
nations called Aryan or Indo-European. The Aryan peoples are
assumed to be akin to one another--shoots from one
stem--because their languages are alike in grammatical
structure and contain great numbers of words that are

manifestly formed from the same original "root"; and because
they differ in these respects from all other languages. The
nations thus identified as Aryan are the nations that have
acted the most important parts in all human history except the
history of extremely ancient times. Besides the Celtic peoples
already mentioned, they include the English, the Dutch, the
Germans, and the Scandinavians, forming the Teutonic race; the
Russians, Poles, and others of the Slavonic group; the ancient
Greeks and Romans, with their modern representatives, and the
Persians and Hindus in Asia. According to the evidence of
their languages, there must have been a time and a place, in
the remote past, when and where a primitive Aryan race, which
was ancestral to all these nations, lived and multiplied until
it outgrew its original country and began to send forth
successive "swarms," or migrating hordes, as many unsettled
races have been seen to do within the historic age.
{991}
It is hopeless, perhaps, to think of determining the time when
such a dispersion of the Aryan peoples began; but many
scholars believe it possible to trace, by various marks and
indications, in language and elsewhere, the lines of movement
in the migration, so far as to guess with some assurance the
region of the primitive Aryan home; but thus far there are
great disagreements in the guessing. Until recent years, the
prevailing judgment pointed to that highland district in
Central Asia which lies north of the Hindoo-Koosh range of
mountains, and between the upper waters of the Oxus and
Jaxartes. But later studies have discredited this first theory
and started many opposing ones. The strong tendency now is to
believe that the cradle of all the peoples of Aryan speech was
somewhere in Europe, rather than in Asia, and in the north of
Europe rather than in the center or the south. At the same
time, there seems to be a growing opinion that the language of
the Aryans was communicated to conquered peoples so
extensively that its spread is not a true measure of the
existing diffusion of the race.
The Celtic Branch.
Whatever may have been the starting-point of the Aryan
migrations, it is supposed that the branch now distinguished
as Celtic was the first to separate from the parent stem and
to acquire for itself a new domain. It occupied southwestern
Europe, from northern Spain to the Rhine, and across the
Channel to the British islands, extending eastward into
Switzerland, North It&ly and the Tyrol. But little of what the
tribes and nations forming this Celtic race did is known,
until the time when another Aryan people, better civilized,
came into collision with them, and drew them into the written
history of the world by conquering them and making them its
subjects.
The people who did this were the Romans, and the Romans and
the Greeks are believed to have been carried into the two
peninsulas which they inhabited, respectively, by one and the
same movement in the Aryan dispersion. Their languages show
more affinity to one another than to the other Aryan tongues,
and there are other evidences of a near relationship between
them; though they separated, it is quite certain, long before
the appearance of either in history.
The Hellenes, or Greeks.
The Greeks, or Hellenes, as they called themselves, were the
first among the Aryan peoples in Europe to make themselves
historically known, and the first to write the record which
transmits history from generation to generation. The peninsula
in which they settled themselves is a very peculiar one in its
formation. It is crossed in different directions by mountain
ranges, which divide the land into parts naturally separated
from one another, and which form barriers easily defended
against invading foes. Between the mountains lie numerous
fertile valleys. The coast is ragged with gulfs and bays,
which notch it deeply on all sides, making the whole main
peninsula a cluster of minor peninsulas, and supplying the
people with harbors which invite them to a life of seafaring
and trade. It is surrounded, moreover, with islands, which
repeat the invitation.
Almost necessarily, in a country marked with such features so
strongly, the Greeks became divided politically into small
independent states--city-states they have been named--and
those on the sea-coast became engaged very early in trade with
other countries of the Mediterranean Sea. Every city of
importance in Greece was entirely sovereign in the government
of itself and of the surrounding territory which formed its
domain. The stronger among them extended their dominion over
some of the weaker or less valiant ones; but even then the
subject cities kept a considerable measure of independence.
There was no organization of national government to embrace
the whole, nor any large part, of Greece. Certain among the
states were sometimes united in temporary leagues, or
confederacies, for common action in war; but these were
unstable alliances, rather than political unions. In their
earliest form, the Greek city-states were governed by kings,
whose power appears to have been quite limited, and who were
leaders rather than sovereigns. But kingship disappeared from
most of the states in Greece proper before they reached the
period of distinct and accepted history. The kings were first
displaced by aristocracies--ruling families, which took all
political rights and privileges to themselves, and allowed
their fellows (whom they usually oppressed) no part or voice
in public affairs. In most instances these aristocracies, or
oligarchies, were overthrown, after a time, by bold agitators
who stirred up a revolution, and then contrived, while
confusion prevailed, to gather power into their own hands.
Almost every Greek city had its time of being ruled by one or
more of these Tyrants, as they were called. Some of them, like
Pisistratus of Athens, ruled wisely and justly for the most
part, and were not "tyrants" in the modern sense of the term;
but all who gained and held a princely power unlawfully were
so named by the Greeks. The reign of the Tyrants was nowhere
lasting. They were driven out of one city after another until
they disappeared. Then the old aristocracies came uppermost
again in some cities, and ruled as before. But some, like
Athens, had trained the whole body of their citizens to such
intelligence and spirit that neither kingship nor oligarchy
would be endured any longer, and the people undertook to
govern themselves. These were the first democracies--the first
experiments in popular government--that history gives any
account of. "The little commonwealths of Greece," says a great
historian, "were the first states at once free and civilized
which the world ever saw. They were the first states which
gave birth to great statesmen, orators, and generals who did
great deeds, and to great historians who set down those great
deeds in writing. It was in the Greek commonwealths, in short,
that the political and intellectual life of the world began."
In the belief of the Greeks, or of most men among them, their
early history was embodied with truth in the numerous legends
and ancient poems which they religiously preserved; but people
in modern times look differently upon those wonderful myths
and epics, studying them with deep interest, but under more
critical views. They throw much light on the primitive life of
the Hellenes, and more light upon the development of the
remarkable genius and spirit of those thoughtful and
imaginative people; but of actual history there are only
glimpses and guesses to be got from them.
{992}
The Homeric poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," describe a
condition of things in which the ruling state of Peloponnesus
(the southern peninsula of Greece) was a kingdom of the
Achaians, having its capital at Mycenæ, in Argolis,--the realm
of King Agamemnon,--and in which Athens is unknown to the
poet. Within recent years, Dr. Schliemann has excavated the
ruins of Mycenæ, and has found evidence that it really must
have been, in very early times, the seat of a strong and rich
monarchy. But the Achaian kingdom had entirely disappeared,
and the Achaian people had shrunk to an insignificant
community, on the Gulf of Corinth, when the first assured
views of Greek history open to us.
The Dorians.
It seems to be a fact that the Achaians had been overwhelmed
by a great invasion of more barbarous Greek tribes from the
North, very much as the Roman Empire, in later times, was
buried under an avalanche of barbarism from Germany. The
invaders were a tribe or league of tribes called Dorians, who
had been driven from their own previous home on the slopes of
the Pindus mountain range. Their movement southward was part,
as appears, of an extensive shifting of place, or migration,
that occurred at that time (not long, it is probable, before
the beginning of the historic period) among the tribes of
Hellas. The Dorians claimed that in conquering Peloponnesus
they were recovering a heritage from which their chiefs had
been anciently expelled, and their legends were shaped
accordingly. The Dorian chiefs appeared in these legends as
descendants of Hercules, and the tradition of the conquest
became a story of "The Return of the Heraclids."
The principal states founded or possessed and controlled by
the Dorians in Peloponnesus, after their conquest, were
Sparta, or Lacedæmon, Argos, and Corinth. The Spartans were
the most warlike of the Greeks,--the most resolute and
energetic,--and their leadership in practical affairs common
to the whole came to be generally acknowledged. At the same
time they had little of the intellectual superiority which
distinguished some of their Hellenic kindred in so remarkable
a degree. Their state was organized on military principles;
its constitution (the body of famous ordinances ascribed to
Lycurgus) was a code of rigid discipline, which dealt with the
citizen as a soldier always under training for war, and
demanded from him the utmost simplicity of life. Their form of
government combined a peculiar monarchy (having two royal
families and two kings) with an aristocratic senate (the
Gerousia), and a democratic assembly (which voted on matters
only as submitted to it by the senate), with an irresponsible
executive over the whole, consisting of five men called the
Ephors. This singular government, essentially aristocratic or
oligarchical, was maintained, with little disturbance or
change, through the whole independent history of Sparta. In
all respects, the Spartans were the most conservative and the
least progressive among the politically important Greeks.
At the beginning of the domination of the Dorians in
Peloponnesus, their city of Argos took the lead, and was the
head of a league which included Corinth and other city-states.
But Sparta soon rose to rivalry with Argos; then reduced it to
a secondary place, and finally subjugated it completely.
The Ionians.
The extensive shifting of population which had produced its
most important result in the invasion of Peloponnesus by the
Dorians, must have caused great commotions and changes
throughout the whole Greek peninsula; and quite as much north
of the Corinthian isthmus as south of it. But in the part
which lies nearest to the isthmus--the branch peninsula of
Attica--the old inhabitants appear to have held their ground,
repelling invaders, and their country was affected only by an
influx of fugitives, flying from the conquered Peloponnesus.
The Attic people were more nearly akin to the expelled
Achaians and Ionians than to the conquering Dorians, although
a common brotherhood in the Hellenic race was recognized by
all of them. Whatever distinction there may have been before
between Achaians and Ionians now practically disappeared, and
the Ionic name became common to the whole branch of the Greek
people which derived itself from them. The important division
of the race through all its subsequent history was between
Dorians and Ionians. The Æolians constituted a third division,
of minor importance and of far less significance. The
distinction between Ionians and Dorians was a very real one,
in character no less than in traditions and name. The Ionians
were the superior Greeks on the intellectual side. It was
among them that the wonderful genius resided which produced
the greater marvels of art, literature and philosophy in Greek
civilization. It was among them, too, that the institutions of
political freedom were carried to their highest attainment.
Their chief city was Athens, and the splendor of its history
bears testimony to their unexampled genius. On the other hand,
the Dorians were less thoughtful, less imaginative, less broad
in judgment or feeling--less susceptible, it would seem, of a
high refinement of culture; but no less capable in practical
pursuits, no less vigorous in effective action, and sounder,
perhaps, in their moral constitution. Sparta, which stood at
the head of the Doric states, contributed almost nothing to
Greek literature, Greek thought, Greek art, or Greek commerce,
but exercised a great influence on Greek political history.
Other Doric states, especially Corinth, were foremost in
commercial and colonizing enterprise, and attained some
brilliancy of artistic civilization, but with moderate
originality.
Greeks and Phœnicians.
It was natural, as noted above, that the Greeks should be
induced at an early day to navigate the surrounding seas, and
to engage in trade with neighboring nations. They were not
original, it is supposed, in these ventures, but learned more
or less of ship-building and the art of navigation from an
older people, the Phœnicians, who dwelt on the coast of Syria
and Palestine, and whose chief cities were Sidon and Tyre. The
Phœnicians had extended their commerce widely through the
Mediterranean before the Greeks came into rivalry with them.
Their ships, and their merchants, and the wares they bartered,
were familiar in the Ægean when the Homeric poems were
composed.
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They seem to have been the teachers of the early Greeks in
many things. They gave them, with little doubt, the invention
of the alphabet, which they themselves had borrowed from
Egypt. They conveyed hints of art, which bore astonishing
fruits when planted in the fertile Hellenic imagination. They
carried from the East strange stories of gods and demigods,
which were woven into the mythology of the Greeks. They gave,
in fact, to Greek civilization, at its beginning, the greatest
impulse it received. But all that Hellas took from the outer
world it wrought into a new character, and put upon it the
stamp of its own unmistakable genius. In navigation and
commerce the Greeks of the coast-cities and the islands were
able, ere long, to compete on even terms with the Phœnicians,
and it happened, in no great space of time, that they had
driven the latter entirely from the Ægean and the Euxine seas.
Greek Colonies.
They had now occupied with colonies the coast of Asia Minor
and the islands on both their own coasts. The Ionian Greeks
were the principal colonizers of the Asiatic shore and of the
Cyclades. On the former and near it they founded twelve towns
of note, including Samos, Miletus, Ephesus, Chios, and Phocæa,
which are among the more famous cities of ancient times. Their
important island settlements in the Cyclades were Naxos,
Delos, Melos, and Paros. They possessed, likewise, the great
island of Eubœa, with its two wealthy cities of Chalcis and
Eretria. These, with Attica, constituted, in the main, the
Ionic portion of Hellas.
The Dorians occupied the islands of Rhodes and Cos, and
founded on the coast of Asia Minor the cities of Halicarnassus
and Cnidus. The important Æolian colonies in Asia were Smyrna
(acquired later by the Ionians), Temnos, Larissa, and Cyme. Of
the islands they occupied Lesbos and Tenedos.
From these settlements on neighboring coasts and islands the
vigorous Greeks pushed on to more distant fields. It is
probable that their colonies were in Cyprus and Crete before
the eighth century, B. C. In the seventh century B. C., during
a time of confusion and weakness in Egypt, they had entered
that country as allies or as mercenaries of the kings, and had
founded a city, Naucratis, which became an important agent in
the exchange of arts and ideas, as well as of merchandise,
between the Nile and the Ægean. Within a few years past the
site of Naucratis has been uncovered by explorers, and much
has been brought to light that was obscure in Greek and
Egyptian history before. Within the same seventh century,
Cyrene and Barca had been built on the African coast, farther
west. Even a century before that time, the Corinthians had
taken possession of Corcyra (modern Corfu), and they, with the
men of Chalcis and Megara, had been actively founding cities
that grew great and rich, in Sicily and in southern Italy,
which latter acquired the name of "Magna Græcia" (Great
Greece). At a not much later time they had pressed northwards
to the Euxine or Black Sea, and had scattered settlements
along the Thracian and Macedonian coast, including one
(Byzantium) on the Bosphorus, which became, after a thousand
years had passed, the imperial city of Constantinople. About
597 B. C., the Phocæans had planted a colony at Massalia, in
southern Gaul, from which sprang the great city known in
modern times as Marseilles. And much of all this had been
done, by Ionians and Dorians together, before Athens (in which
Attica now centered itself, and which loomed finally greater
in glory than the whole Hellenic world besides) had made a
known mark in history.
Rise of Athens.
At first there had been kings in Athens, and legends had
gathered about their names which give modern historians a
ground-work for critical guessing, and scarcely more. Then the
king disappeared and a magistrate called Archon took his
place, who held office for only ten years. The archons are
believed to have been chosen first from the old royal family
alone; but after a time the office was thrown open to all
noble families. This was the aristocratic stage of political
evolution in the city-state. The next step was taken in 683 B.
C. (which is said to be the beginning of authentic Athenian
chronology) when nine archons were created, in place of the
one, and their term of office was reduced to a single year.
Fifty years later, about 621 B. C., the people of Athens
obtained their first code of written law, ascribed to one
Draco, and described as a code of much severity. But it gave
certainty to law, for the first time, and was the first great
protective measure secured by the people. In 612 B. C. a noble
named Kylon attempted to overthrow the aristocratic government
and establish a tyranny under himself, but he failed.
Legislation of Solon.
Then there came forward in public life another noble, who was
one of the wisest men and purest patriots of any country or
age, and who made an attempt of quite another kind. This was
Solon, the famous lawgiver, who became archon in 594 B. C. The
political state of Athens at that time has been described for
us in an ancient Greek treatise lately discovered, and which
is believed to be one of the hitherto lost writings of
Aristotle. "Not only," says the author of this treatise, "was
the constitution at this time oligarchical in every respect,
but the poorer classes, men, women, and children, were in
absolute slavery to the rich. ... The whole country was in the
hands of a few persons, and if the tenants failed to pay their
rent, they were liable to be haled into slavery, and their
children with them. Their persons were mortgaged to their
creditors." Solon saw that this was a state of things not to
be endured by such a people as the Athenians, and he exerted
himself to change it. He obtained authority to frame a new
constitution and a new code of laws for the state. In the
latter, he provided measures for relieving the oppressed class
of debtors. In the former, he did not create a democratic
government, but he greatly increased the political powers of
the people. He classified them according to their wealth,
defining four classes, the citizens in each of which had
certain political duties and privileges measured to them by
the extent of their property and income. But the whole body of
citizens, in their general assembly (the Ecclesia), were given
the important right of choosing the annual archons, whom they
must select, however, from the ranks of the wealthiest class.
At the same time, Solon enlarged the powers of the old
aristocratic senate--the Areopagus--giving it a supervision of
the execution of the laws and a censorship of the morals of
the people.
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"These changes did not constitute Democracy,--a form of
government then unknown, and for which there was as yet no
word in the Greek language. But they initiated the democratic
spirit. ... Athens, thus fairly started on her
way,--emancipated from the discipline of aristocratic
school-masters, and growing into an age of manly liberty and
self-restraint,--came eventually nearer to the ideal of 'the
good life' [Aristotle's phrase] than any other State in
Hellas."
(W. W. Fowler.)
Tyranny of Pisistratus.
But before the Athenians reached their nearness to this "good
life," they had to pass under the yoke of a "tyrant,"
Pisistratus, who won the favor of the poorer people, and, with
their help, established himself in the Acropolis (560 B. C.)
with a foreign guard to maintain his power. Twice driven out,
he was twice restored, and reigned quite justly and prudently,
on the whole, until his death in 527 B. C. He was succeeded by
his two sons, Hippias and Hipparchus; but the latter was
killed in 514, and Hippias was expelled by the Spartans in 510
B. C.; after which there was no tyranny in Athens.
The Democratic Republic.
On the fall of the Pisistratidæ, a majority of the noble or
privileged class struggled hard to regain their old
ascendancy; but one of their number, Cleisthenes, took the
side of the people and helped them to establish a democratic
constitution. He caused the ancient tribal division of the
citizens to be abolished, and substituted a division which
mixed the members of clans and broke up or weakened the
clannish influence in politics. He enlarged Solon's senate or
council and divided it into committees, and he brought the
"ecclesia," or popular assembly, into a more active exercise
of its powers. He also introduced the custom of ostracism,
which permitted the citizens of Athens to banish by their vote
any man whom they thought dangerous to the state. The
constitution of Cleisthenes was the final foundation of the
Athenian democratic republic. Monarchical and aristocratic
Sparta resented the popular change, and undertook to restore
the oligarchy by force of arms; but the roused democracy of
Athens defended its newly won liberties with vigor and
success.
The Persian Wars.
Not Athens only, but all Greece, was now about to be put to a
test which proved the remarkable quality of both, and formed
the beginning of their great career. The Ionian cities of Asia
Minor had recently been twice conquered, first by Crœsus, King
of Lydia, and then by Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian
empire, who had overthrown Crœsus (B. C. 547), and taken his
dominions. The Persians oppressed them, and in 500 B. C. they
rose in revolt. Athens and Eretria sent help to them, while
Sparta refused. The revolt was suppressed, and Darius, the
king of Persia, planned vengeance upon the Athenians and
Eretrians for the aid they had given to it. He sent an
expedition against them in 493 B. C., which was mostly
destroyed by a storm. In 490 B. C. he sent a second powerful
army and fleet, which took Eretria and razed it to the ground.
The great Persian army then marched upon Athens, and was met at
Marathon by a small Athenian force of 9,000 men. The little
city of Platæa sent 1,000 more to stand with them in the
desperate encounter. They had no other aid in the fight, and
the Persians were a great unnumbered host. But Miltiades, the
Greek general that day, planned his battle-charge so well that
he routed the Asiatic host and lost but 192 men. The Persians
abandoned their attempt and returned to their wrathful king.
One citizen of Athens, Themistocles, had sagacity enough to
foresee that the "Great King," as he was known, would not rest
submissive under his defeat; and with difficulty he persuaded
his fellow citizens to prepare themselves for future conflicts
by building a fleet and by fortifying their harbors, thus making
themselves powerful at sea. The wisdom of his counsels was
proved in 480 B. C., when Xerxes, the successor of Darius, led
an army of prodigious size into Greece, crossing the
Hellespont by a bridge of boats. This time, Sparta, Corinth,
and several of the lesser states, rallied with Athens to the
defence of the common country; but Thebes and Argos showed
friendship to the Persians, and none of the important
island-colonies contributed any help. Athens was the brain and
right arm of the war, notwithstanding the accustomed
leadership of Sparta in military affairs.
The first encounter was at Thermopylæ, where Leonidas and his
300 Spartans defended the narrow pass, and died in their place
when the Persians found a way across the mountain to surround
them. But on that same day the Persian fleet was beaten at
Artemisium. Xerxes marched on Athens, however, found the city
deserted, and destroyed it. His fleet had followed him, and
was still stronger than the naval force of the Greeks.
Themistocles forced a battle, against the will of the
Peloponnesian captains, and practically destroyed the Persian
fleet. This most memorable battle of Salamis was decisive of
the war, and decisive of the independence of Greece. Xerxes,
in a panic, hastened back into Asia, leaving one of his
generals, Mardonius, with 300,000 men, to pursue the war. But
Mardonius was routed and his host annihilated, at Platæa, the
next year, while the Persian fleet was again defeated on the
same day at Mycale.
The Golden Age of Athens.
The war had been glorious for the Athenians, and all could see
that Greece had been saved by their spirit and their
intelligence much more than by the valor of Sparta and the
other states. But they were in a woful condition, with their
city destroyed and their families without homes. Wasting no
time in lamentations, they rebuilt the town, stretched its
walls to a wider circuit, and fortified it more strongly than
before, under the lead of the sagacious Themistocles. Their
neighbors were meanly jealous, and Sparta made attempts to
interfere with the building of the walls; but Themistocles
baffled them cunningly, and the new Athens rose proudly out of
the ashes of the old.
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The Ionian islands and towns of Asia Minor (which had broken
the Persian yoke) now recognized the superiority and
leadership of Athens, and a league was formed among them,
which held the meetings of its deputies and kept its treasury
in the temple of Apollo on the sacred island of Delos; for
which reason it was called the Confederacy of Delos, or the
Delian League. The Peloponnesian states formed a looser rival
league under the headship of Sparta. The Confederacy of Delos
was in sympathy with popular governments and popular parties
everywhere, while the Spartans and their following favored
oligarchies and aristocratic parties. There were many
occasions for hostility between the two.
The Athenians, at the head of their Confederacy, were strong,
until they impaired their power by using it in tyrannical
ways. Many lesser states in the league were foolish enough to
commute in money payments the contribution of ships and men
which they had pledged themselves to make to the common naval
force. This gave Athens the power to use that force
despotically, as her own, and she did not scruple to exercise
the power. The Confederacy was soon a name; the states forming
it were no longer allies of Athens, but her subjects; she
ruled them as the sovereign of an Empire, and her rule was
neither generous nor just. Thereby the double tie of kinship
and of interest which might have bound the whole circle of
Ionian states to her fortunes and herself was destroyed by her
own acts. Provoking the hatred of her allies and challenging
the jealous fear of her rivals, Athens had many enemies.
At the same time, a dangerous change in the character of her
democratic institutions was begun, produced especially by the
institution of popular jury-courts, before which prosecutions
of every kind were tried, the citizens who constituted the
courts acting as jury and judge at once. This gave them a
valuable training, without doubt, and helped greatly to raise
the common standard of intelligence among the Athenians so
high; but it did unquestionably tend also to demoralizations
that were ruinous in the end. The jury service, which was
slightly paid, fell more and more to an unworthy class, made
up of idlers or intriguers. Party feeling and popular passions
gained an increasing influence over the juries, and demagogues
acquired an increasing skill in making use of them.
But these evils were scarcely more than in their seed during
the great period of "Athenian Empire," as it is sometimes
called, and everything within its bounds was suffused with the
shining splendor of that matchless half-century. The genius of
this little Ionic state was stimulated to amazing achievements
in every intellectual field. Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Aristophanes, within a single generation, crowded Athenian
literature with the masterpieces of classic drama. Pheidias
and his companions crowned the Acropolis and filled the city
with works that have been the models in art for all ages
since. Socrates began the quizzing which turned philosophy
into honest truth-seeking paths, and Plato listened to him and
was instructed for his mission. Thucydides watched events with
sagacious young eyes, and prepared his pen for the chronicling
of them; while Herodotus, pausing at Athens from his wide
travels, matured the knowledge he had gathered up and
perfected it for his final work. Over all of them came
Pericles to preside and rule, not as a master, or "tyrant,"
but as leader, guide, patron, princely republican,--statesman
and politician in one.
The Peloponnesian War.
The period of the ascendancy of Pericles was the "golden age"
of Athenian prosperity and power, both material and
intellectual. The beginning of the end of it was reached a
little before he died, when the long-threatened war between
Athens and the Peloponnesian league, led by Sparta, broke out
(B. C. 431). If Athens had then possessed the good will of the
cities of her own league, and if her citizens had retained
their old sobriety and intelligence, she might have triumphed
in the war; for she was all powerful at sea and fortified
almost invincibly against attacks by land. But the subject
states, called allies, were hostile, for the most part, and
helped the enemy by their revolts, while the death of Pericles
(B. C. 429) let loose on the people a swarm of demagogues who
flattered and deluded them, and baffled the wiser and more
honest, whose counsels and leadership might have given her
success.
The fatal folly of the long war was an expedition against the
distant city of Syracuse (B. C. 415-413), into which the
Athenians were enticed by the restless and unscrupulous
ambition of Alcibiades. The entire force sent to Sicily
perished there, and the strength and spirit of Athens were
ruinously sapped by the fearful calamity. She maintained the
war, however, until 404 B. C., when, having lost her fleet in
the decisive battle of Ægospotami, and being helplessly
blockaded by sea and land, the city was surrendered to the
Spartan general Lysander. Her walls and fortifications were
then destroyed and her democratic government was overthrown,
giving place to an oligarchy known as the "thirty tyrants."
The democracy soon suppressed the thirty tyrants and regained
control, and Athens, in time, rose somewhat from her deep
humiliation, but never again to much political power in
Greece. In intellect and cultivation, the superiority of the
Attic state was still maintained, and its greatest productions
in philosophy and eloquence were yet to be given to the world.
Spartan and Theban Ascendancy.
After the fall of Athens, Sparta was dominant in the whole of
Greece for thirty years and more, exercising her power more
oppressively than Athens had done. Then Thebes, which had been
treacherously seized and garrisoned by the Spartans, threw off
their yoke (B. C. 379) and led a rising, under her great and
high-souled citizen, Epaminondas, which resulted in bringing
Thebes to the head of Greek affairs. But the Theban ascendancy
was short-lived, and ended with the death of Epaminondas in
362 B. C.
Macedonian Supremacy.
Meantime, while the city-states of Hellas proper had been
wounding and weakening one another by their jealousies and
wars, the semi-Greek kingdom of Macedonia, to the north of
them, in their own peninsula, had been acquiring their
civilization and growing strong. And now there appeared upon
its throne a very able king, Philip, who took advantage of
their divisions, interfered in their affairs, and finally made
a practical conquest of the whole peninsula, by his victory at
the battle of Chæronea (B. C. 338). At Athens, the great
orator Demosthenes had exerted himself for years to rouse
resistance to Philip. If his eloquence failed then, it has
served the world immortally since, by delighting and
instructing mankind.
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King Philip was succeeded by his famous son, Alexander the
Great, who led an army of Macedonians and Greeks into Asia (B.
C. 334), overthrew the already crumbling Persian power,
pursued his conquests through Afghanistan to India, and won a
great empire which he did not live to rule. When he died (B.
C. 323), his generals divided the empire among them and fought
with one another for many years. But the general result was
the spreading of the civilization and language of the Greeks,
and the establishing of their intellectual influence, in
Egypt, in Syria, in Asia Minor, and beyond.
In Greece itself, a state of disturbance and of political
confusion and weakness prevailed for another century. There
was promise of something better, in the formation, by several
of the Peloponnesian states, of a confederacy called the
Achaian League, which might possibly have federated and
nationalized the whole of Hellas in the end; but the Romans,
at this juncture, turned their conquering arms eastward, and
in three successive wars, between 211 and 146 B. C., they
extinguished the Macedonian kingdom, and annexed it, with the
whole peninsula, to the dominions of their wonderful republic.
The Romans.
The Romans, as stated already, are believed to have been
originally near kindred to the Greeks. The same movement, it
is supposed, in the successive outswarmings of Aryan peoples,
deposited in one peninsula the Italian tribes, and in the next
peninsula, eastward, the tribes of the Hellenes. Among the
Italian tribes were Latins, Umbrians, Sabines, Samnites, etc.,
occupying the middle and much of the southern parts of the
peninsula, while a mysterious alien people, the Etruscans,
whose origin is not known, possessed the country north of them
between the Arno and the Tiber. In the extreme south were
remnants of a primitive race, the Iapygian, and Greek colonies
were scattered there around the coasts. From the Latins sprang
the Romans, at the beginning of their separate existence; but
there seems to have been a very early union of these Romans of
the primitive tradition with a Sabine community, whereby was
formed the Roman city-state of historical times. That union
came about through the settlement of the two communities,
Latin and Sabine, on two neighboring hills, near the mouth of
the river Tiber, on its southern bank. In the view of some
historians, it is the geographical position of those hills,
hardly less than the masterful temper and capacity of the race
seated on them, which determined the marvellous career of the
city founded on that site. Says Professor Freeman: "The whole
history of the world has been determined by the geological
fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Tiber
and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one another
than most of the other hills of Latium. On a site marked out
above all other sites for dominion, the centre of Italy, the
centre of Europe, as Europe then was, a site at the junction
of three of the great nations of Italy, and which had the
great river as its highway to lands beyond the bounds of
Italy, stood two low hills, the hill which bore the name of
Latin Saturn, and the hill at the meaning of whose name of
Palatine scholars will perhaps guess for ever. These two
hills, occupied by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood
so near to one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on
those who dwelled on them. They must either join together on
terms closer than those which commonly united Italian leagues,
or they must live a life of border warfare more ceaseless,
more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of Italian enemies.
Legend, with all likelihood, tells us that warfare was tried;
history, with all certainty, tells us that the final choice
was union. The two hills were fenced with a single wall; the
men who dwelled on them changed from wholly separate
communities into tribes of a single city."
The followers of Romulus occupied the Palatine Mount, and the
Sabines were settled on the Quirinal. At subsequent times, the
Cœlian, the Capitoline, the Aventine, the Esquiline and the
Viminal hills were embraced in the circumvallation, and the
city on the seven hills thus acquired that name.
If modern students and thinkers, throwing light on the
puzzling legends and traditions of early Rome from many
sources, in language and archæology, have construed their
meaning lightly, then great importance attaches to those first
unions or incorporations of distinct settlements in the
forming of the original city-state. For it was the beginning
of a process which went on until the whole of Latium, and then
the whole of Italy, and, finally, the whole Mediterranean
world, were joined to the seven hills of Rome. "The whole
history of Rome is a history of incorporation"; and it is
reasonable to believe that the primal spring of Roman
greatness is found in that early adoption and persistent
practice of the policy of political absorption, which gave
conquest a character it had never borne before. At the same
time, this view of the creation of the Roman state contributes
to an understanding of its early constitutional history. It
supposes that the union of the first three tribes which
coalesced--those of the Palatine, the Quirinal and Capitoline
(both occupied by the Sabines) and the Cœlian hills--ended the
process of incorporation on equal terms. These formed the
original Roman people--the "fathers," the "patres," whose
descendants appear in later times as a distinct class or
order, the "patricians"--holding and struggling to maintain
exclusive political rights, and exclusive ownership of the
public domain, the "ager publicus," which became a subject of
bitter contention for four centuries. Around these heirs of
the "fathers" of Rome arose another class of Romans, brought
into the community by later incorporations, and not on equal
terms. If the first class were "fathers," these were children,
in a political sense, adopted into the Roman family, but without
a voice in general affairs, or a share in the public lands, or
eligibility to the higher offices of the state. These were the
"plebeians" or "plebs" of Rome, whose long struggle with the
patricians for political and agrarian rights is the more
interesting side of Roman history throughout nearly the whole
of the prosperous age of the republic.
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At Rome, as at Athens, there was a period of early kingship,
the legends of which are as familiar to us all as the stories
of the Bible, but the real facts of which are almost totally
unknown. It is surmised that the later kings--the well known
Tarquins of the classical tale--were Etruscan princes (it is
certain that they were Etruscans), who had broken for a time
the independence of the Romans and extended their sovereignty
over them. It is suspected, too, that this period of Etruscan
domination was one in which Roman civilization made a great
advance, under the tuition of a more cultivated people. But if
Rome in its infancy did know a time of subjugation, the
endurance was not long. It ended, according to Roman
chronology, in the 245th year of the city, or 509 B.C., by the
expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, the last of the kings.
The Roman Republic.
The Republic was then founded; but it was an aristocratic and
not a democratic republic. The consuls, who replaced the
kings, were required to be patricians, and they were chosen by
the landholders of the state. The senate was patrician; all
the important powers of government were in patrician hands,
and the plebs suffered grievous oppression in consequence.
They were not of a tamely submissive race. They demanded
powers for their own protection, and by slow degrees they won
them--strong as the patricians were in their wealth and their
trained political skill.
Precisely as in Athens, the first great effort among the
common people was to obtain relief from crushing burdens of
debt, which had been laid upon them in precisely the same
way--by loss of harvests while in military service, and by the
hardness of the laws which creditors alone had framed. An army
of plebs, just home from war, marched out of the city and
refused to return until magistrates of their own choosing had
been conceded to them. The patricians could not afford to lose
the bone and sinew of their state, and they yielded the point
in demand (B. C. 494). This first "secession of the plebs"
brought about the first great democratic change in the Roman
constitution, by calling into existence a powerful
magistracy--the Tribunes of the Plebs--who henceforth stood
between the consuls and the common people, for the protection
of the latter.
From this first success the plebeian order went forward, step
by step, to the attainment of equal political rights in the
commonwealth, and equal participation in the lands which Roman
conquest was continually adding to the public domain. In 450
B. C., after ten years of struggle, they secured the
appointment of a commission which framed the famous Twelve
Tables of the Law, and so established a written and certain
code. Five years later, the caste exclusiveness of the
patricians was broken down by a law which permitted marriages
between the orders. In 367 B. C. the patrician monopoly of the
consular office was extinguished, by the notable Licinian
Laws, which also limited the extent of land that any citizen
might occupy, and forbade the exclusive employment of slave
labor on any estate. One by one, after that, other
magistracies were opened to the plebs; and in 287 B. C. by the
Lex Hortensia, the plebeian concilium, or assembly, was made
independent of the senate and its acts declared to be valid
and binding. The democratic commonwealth was now completely
formed.
Roman Conquest of Italy.
While these changes in the constitution of their Republic were
in progress, the Romans had been making great advances toward
supremacy in the peninsula. First they had been in league with
their Latin neighbors, for war with the Æquians, the
Volscians, and the Etruscans. The Volscian war extended over
forty years, and ended about 450 B. C. in the practical
disappearance of the Volscians from history. Of war with the
Æquians, nothing is heard after 458 B. C., when, as the tale
is told, Cincinnatus left his plow to lead the Romans against
them. The war with the Etruscans of the near city of Veii had
been more stubborn. Suspended by a truce between 474 and 438
B. C., it was then renewed, and ended in 396 B. C., when the
Etruscan city was taken and destroyed. At the same time the
power of the Etruscans was being shattered at sea by the
Greeks of Tarentum and Syracuse, while at home they were
attacked from the north by the barbarous Gauls or Celts.
These last named people, having crossed the Alps from Gaul and
Switzerland and occupied northern Italy, were now pressing
upon the more civilized nations to the south of the Po. The
Etruscans were first to suffer, and their despair became so
great that they appealed to Rome for help. The Romans gave
little aid to them in their extremity; but enough to provoke
the wrath of Brennus, the savage leader of the Gauls. He
quitted Etruria and marched to Rome, defeating an army which
opposed him on the Allia, pillaging and burning the city (B.
C. 390) and slaying the senators, who had refused to take
refuge, with other inhabitants, in the capitol. The defenders
of the capitol held it for seven months; Rome was rebuilt,
when the Gauls withdrew, and soon took up her war again with
the Etruscan cities. By the middle of the same century she was
mistress of southern Etruria, though her territories had been
ravaged twice again by renewed incursions of the Gauls. In a
few years more, when her allies of Latium complained of their
meager share of the fruits of these common wars, and demanded
Roman citizenship and equal rights, she fought them fiercely
and humbled them to submissiveness (B. C. 339-338), reducing
their cities to the status of provincial towns.
And now, having awed or subdued her rivals, her friends, and
her enemies, near at hand, the young Republic swung into the
career of rapid conquest which subdued to her will, within
three-fourths of a century, the whole of Italy below the mouth
of the Arno.
In 343 B. C. the Roman arms had been turned against the
Samnites at the south, and they had been driven from the
Campania. In 327 B. C. the same dangerous rivals were again
assailed, with less impunity. At the Caudine Forks, in 321 B.
C., the Samnites inflicted both disaster and shame upon their
indomitable foes; but the end of the war (B. C. 304) found
Rome advanced and Samnium fallen back. A third contest ended
the question of supremacy; but the Samnites (B. C. 290)
submitted to become allies and not subjects of the Roman
state.
In this last struggle the Samnites had summoned Gauls and
Etruscans to join them against the common enemy, and Rome had
overcome their united forces in a great fight at Sentinum.
This was in 295 B. C. Ten years later she annihilated the
Senonian Gauls, annexed their territory and planted a colony
at Sena on the coast. In two years more she had paralyzed the
Boian Gauls by a terrible chastisement, and had nothing more
to fear from the northward side of her realm. Then she turned
back to finish her work in the south.
{998}
War with Pyrrhus.
The Greek cities of the southern coast were harassed by
various marauding neighbors, and most of them solicited the
protection of Rome, which involved, of course, some surrender
of their independence. But one great city, Tarentum, the most
powerful of their number, refused these terms, and hazarded a
war with the terrible republic, expecting support from the
ambitious Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, on the Greek coast opposite
their own. Pyrrhus came readily at their call, with dreams of
an Italian kingdom more agreeable than his own. Assisted in
the undertaking by his royal kinsmen of Macedonia and Syria,
he brought an army of 25,000 men, with 20 elephants--which
Roman eyes had never seen before. In two bloody fights (B. C.
280-279), Pyrrhus was victorious; but the cost of victory was
so great that he dared not follow it up. He went over to
Sicily, instead, and waged war for three years (B. C. 278-276)
with the Carthaginians, who had subjugated most of the island.
The Epirot king brought timely aid to the Sicilian Greeks, and
drove their Punic enemies into the western border of the
island; but he claimed sovereignty over all that his arms
delivered, and was not successful in enforcing the claim. He
returned to Italy and found the Romans better prepared than
before to face his phalanx and his elephants. They routed him
at Beneventum, in the spring of 275 B. C. and he went back to
Epirus, with his dreams dispelled. Tarentum fell, and Southern
Italy was added to the dominion of Rome.
Punic Wars.
During her war with Pyrrhus, the Republic had formed an
alliance with Carthage, the powerful maritime Phœnician city
on the African coast. But friendship between these two cities
was impossible. The ambition of both was too boundless and too
fierce. They were necessarily competitors for supremacy in the
Mediterranean world, from the moment that a narrow strait
between Italy and Sicily was all that held them apart. Rome
challenged her rival to the duel in 264 B. C., when she sent
help to the Mamertines, a band of brigands who had seized the
Sicilian city of Messina, and who were being attacked by both
Carthaginians and Syracusan Greeks. The "First Punic War,"
then begun, lasted twenty-four years, and resulted in the
withdrawal of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and in their
payment of an enormous war indemnity to Rome. The latter
assumed a protectorate over the island, and the kingdom of
Hiero of Syracuse preserved its nominal independence for the
time; but Sicily, as a matter of fact, might already be looked
upon as the first of those provinces, beyond Italy, which Rome
bound to herself, one by one, until she had compassed the
Mediterranean with her dominion and gathered to it all the
islands of that sea.
The "Second Punic war," called sometimes the "Hannibalic war,"
was fought with a great Carthaginian, rather than with
Carthage herself. Hamilcar Barca had been the last and ablest
of the Punic generals in the contest for Sicily. Afterwards he
undertook the conquest of Spain, where his arms had such
success that he established a very considerable power, more
than half independent of the parent state. He nursed an
unquenchable hatred of Rome, and transmitted it to his son
Hannibal, who solemnly dedicated his life to warfare with the
Latin city. Hamilcar died, and in due time Hannibal found
himself prepared to make good his oath. He provoked a
declaration of war (B. C. 218) by attacking Saguntum, on the
eastern Spanish coast--a town which the Romans "protected."
The latter expected to encounter him in Spain; but before the
fleet bearing their legions to that country had reached
Massilia, he had already passed the Pyrenees and the Rhone,
with nearly 100,000 men, and was crossing the Alps, to assail
his astounded foes on their own soil. The terrific barrier was
surmounted with such suffering and loss that only 20,000 foot
and 6,000 horse, of the great army which left Spain, could be
mustered for the clearing of the last Alpine pass. With this
small following, by sheer energy, rapidity and precision of
movement--by force, in other words, of a military genius never
surpassed in the world--he defeated the armies of Rome again
and again, and so crushingly in the awful battle of Cannæ (B.
C. 216) that the proud republic was staggered, but never
despaired. For fifteen years the great Carthaginian held his
ground in southern Italy; but his expectation of being joined
by discontented subjects of Rome in the peninsula was very
slightly realized, and his own country gave him little
encouragement or help. His brother Hasdrubal, marching to his
relief in 207 B. C., was defeated on the river Metaurus and
slain. The arms of Rome had prospered meantime in Sicily and
in Spain, even while beaten at home, and her Punic rival had
been driven from both. In 204 B. C. the final field of battle
was shifted to Carthaginian territory by Scipio, of famous
memory, thereafter styled Africanus, because he "carried the
war into Africa." Hannibal abandoned Italy to confront him,
and at Zama, in the autumn of 202 B. C., the long contention
ended, and the career of Carthage as a Power in the ancient
world was forever closed. Existing by Roman sufferance for
another half century, she then gave her implacable conquerors
another pretext for war, and they ruthlessly destroyed her
(B.C. 146).
Roman Conquest of Greece.
In that same year of the destruction of Carthage, the conquest
of Greece was finished. The first war of the Romans on that
side of the Adriatic had taken place during the Second Punic
war, and had been caused by an alliance formed between
Hannibal and King Philip of Macedonia (B. C. 214). They
pursued it then no further than to frustrate Philip's designs
against themselves; but they formed alliances with the Greek
states oppressed or menaced by the Macedonian, and these drew
them into a second war, just as the century closed. On
Cynoscephalæ, Philip was overthrown (B. C. 197), his kingdom
reduced to vassalage, and the freedom of all Greece was
solemnly proclaimed by the Roman Consul Flaminius.
{999}
And now, for the first time, Rome came into conflict with an
Asiatic power. The throne of the Syrian monarchy, founded by
one of the generals of Alexander the Great, was occupied by a
king more ambitious than capable, who had acquired a large and
loosely jointed dominion in the East, and who bore the
sounding name of Antiochus the Great. This vainglorious King,
having a huge army and many elephants at his disposal, was
eager to try a passage at arms with the redoubtable men of
Rome. He was encouraged in his desire by the Ætolians in
Greece, who bore ill-will to Rome. Under this encouragement,
and having Hannibal--then a fugitive at his court--to give him
counsel, which he lacked intelligence to use, Antiochus
crossed the Ægean and invaded Greece (B. C. 192). The Romans
met him at the pass of Thermopylæ; drove him back to the
shores from which he came; pursued him thither; crushed and
humbled him on the field of Magnesia, and took the kingdoms
and cities of Asia Minor under their protection, as the allies
(soon to be subjects) of Rome.
Twenty years passed with little change in the outward
situation of affairs among the Greeks. But discontent with the
harshness and haughtiness of Roman "protection" changed from
sullenness to heat, and Perseus, son of Philip of Macedonia,
fanned it steadily, with the hope of bringing it to a flame.
Rome watched him with keen vigilance, and before his plans
were ripe her legions were upon him. He battled with them

obstinately for three years (B. C. 171-168); but his fate was
sealed at Pydna. He went as a prisoner to Rome; his kingdom
was broken into four small republics; the Achæan League was
stricken by the captivity of a thousand of its chief men; the
whole of Greece was humbled to submissiveness, though not yet
formally reduced to the state of a Roman province. That
followed some years later, when risings in Macedonia and
Achaia were punished by the extinction of the last semblance
of political independence in both (B. C. 148-146).
The Zenith of the Republic.
Rome now gripped the Mediterranean (the ocean of the then
civilized world) as with four fingers of a powerful hand: one
laid on Italy and all its islands, one on Macedonia and
Greece, one on Carthage, one on Spain, and the little finger
of her "protection" reaching over to the Lesser Asia. Little
more than half a century, since the day that Hannibal
threatened her own city gates, had sufficed to win this vast
dominion. But the losses of the Republic had been greater,
after all, than the gains; for the best energies of its
political constitution had been expended in the acquisition,
and the nobler qualities in its character had been touched
with the incurable taints of a licentious prosperity.
Beginning of Decline.
A century and a half had passed since the practical ending of
the struggle of plebeians with patricians for political and
agrarian rights. In theory and in form, the constitution
remained as democratic as it was made by the Licinian Laws of
367 B. C., and by the finishing touch of the Hortensian Law of
287 B. C. But in practical working it had reverted to the
aristocratic mode. A new aristocracy had risen out of the
plebeian ranks to reinforce the old patrician order. It was
composed of the families of men who had been raised to
distinction and ennobled by the holding of eminent offices,
and its spirit was no less jealous and exclusive than that of
the older high caste.
The Senate and the Mob.
Thus strengthened, the aristocracy had recovered its
ascendancy in Rome, and the Senate, which it controlled, had
become the supreme power in government. The amazing success of
the Republic during the last century just reviewed--its
successes in war, in diplomacy, and in all the sagacious
measures of policy by which its great dominion had been
won--are reasonably ascribed to this fact. For the Senate had
wielded the power of the state, in most emergencies, with
passionless deliberation and with unity and fixity of aim.
But it maintained its ascendancy by an increasing employment
of means which debased and corrupted all orders alike. The
people held powers which might paralyze the Senate at any
moment, if they chose to exercise them, through their
assemblies and their tribunes. They had seldom brought those
powers into play thus far, to interfere with the senatorial
government of the Republic, simply because they had been
bribed to abstain. The art of the politician in Rome, as
distinguished from the statesman, had already become
demagoguery. This could not well have been otherwise under the
peculiar constitution of the Roman citizenship. Of the
thirty-five tribes who made up the Roman people, legally
qualified to vote, only four were within the city. The
remaining thirty-one were "plebs urbana." There was no
delegated representation of this country populace--citizens
beyond the walls. To exercise their right of suffrage they
must be personally present at the meetings of the "comitia
tributa"--the tribal assemblies; and those of any tribe who
chanced to be in attendance at such a meeting might give a
vote which carried with it the weight of their whole tribe.
For questions were decided by the majority of tribal, not
individual, votes; and a very few members of a tribe might act
for and be the tribe, for all purposes of voting, on occasions
of the greatest possible importance. It is quite evident that
a democratic system of this nature gave wide opportunity for
corrupt "politics." There must have been, always, an
attraction for the baser sort among the rural plebs, drawing
them into the city, to enjoy the excitement of political
contests, and to partake of the flatteries and largesses which
began early to go with these. And circumstances had tended
strongly to increase this sinister sifting into Rome of the
most vagrant and least responsible of her citizens, to make
them practically the deputies and representatives of that
mighty sovereign which had risen in the world--the "Populus
Romanus." For there was no longer either thrift or dignity
possible in the pursuits of husbandry. The long Hannibalic War
had ruined the farming class in Italy by its ravages; but the
extensive conquests that followed it had been still more
ruinous to that class by several effects combined. Corn
supplies from the conquered provinces were poured into Rome at
cheapened prices; enormous fortunes, gathered in the same
provinces by officials, by farmers of taxes, by money-lenders,
and by traders, were largely invested in great estates,
absorbing the small farms of olden time; and, finally,
free-labor in agriculture was supplanted, more and more, by
the labor of slaves, which war and increasing wealth combined
to multiply in numbers. Thus the "plebs urbana" of Rome were a
depressed and, therefore, a degenerating class, and the same
circumstances that made them so impelled them towards the
city, to swell the mob which held its mighty sovereignty in
their hands.
{1000}
So far, a lavish amusement of this mob with free games, and
liberal bribes, had kept it generally submissive to the
senatorial government. But the more it was debased by such
methods, and its vagrancy encouraged, the more extravagant
gratuities of like kind it claimed. Hence a time could never
be far away when the aristocracy and the senate would lose
their control of the popular vote on which they had built
their governing power.
Agrarian Agitations.
But they invited the quicker coming of that time by their own
greediness in the employment of their power for selfish and
dishonest ends. They had practically recovered their monopoly
of the use of the public lands. The Licinian law, which
forbade any one person to occupy more than five hundred jugera
(about three hundred acres) of the public lands, had been made
a dead letter. The great tracts acquired in the Samnite wars,
and since, had remained undistributed, while the use and
profit of them were enjoyed, under one form of authority or
another, by rich capitalists and powerful nobles.
This evil, among many that waxed greater each year, caused the
deepest discontent, and provoked movements of reform which
soon passed by rapid stages into a revolution, and ended in
the fall of the Republic. The leader of the movement at its
beginning was Tiberius Gracchus, grandson of Scipio Africanus
on the side of his mother, Cornelia. Elected tribune in 133 B.
C., he set himself to the dangerous task of rousing the people
against senatorial usurpations, especially in the matter of
the public domain. He only drew upon himself the hatred of the
senate and its selfish supporters; he failed to rally a
popular party that was strong enough for his protection, and
his enemies slew him in the very midst of a meeting of the
tribes. His brother Caius took up the perilous cause and won
the office of tribune (B. C. 123) in avowed hostility to the
senatorial government. He was driven to bid high for popular
help, even when the measures which he strove to carry were
most plainly for the welfare of the common people, and he may
seem to modern eyes to have played the demagogue with some
extravagance. But statesmanship and patriotism without
demagoguery for their instrument or their weapon were hardly
practicable, perhaps, in the Rome of those days, and it is not
easy to find them clean-handed in any political leader of the
last century of the Republic. The fall of Caius Gracchus was
hastened by his attempt to extend the Roman franchise beyond
the "populus Romanus," to all the freemen of Italy. The mob in
Rome was not pleased with such political generosity, and
cooled in its admiration for the large-minded tribune. He lost
his office and the personal protection it threw over him, and
then he, like his brother, was slain (B. C. 121) in a melee.
Jugurthine War.
For ten years the senate, the nobility, and the capitalists
(now beginning to take the name of the equestrian order), had
mostly their own way again, and effaced the work of the
Gracchi as completely as they could. Then came disgraceful
troubles in Numidia which enraged the people and moved them to
a new assertion of themselves. The Numidian king who helped
Scipio to pull Carthage down had been a ward of Rome since
that time. When he died, he left his kingdom to be governed
jointly by two young sons and an older nephew. The latter,
Jugurtha, put his cousins out of the way, took the kingdom to
himself, and baffled attempts at Rome to call him to account,
by heavy bribes. The corruption in the case became so flagrant
that even the corrupted Roman populace revolted against it, and
took the Numidian business into its own hands. War was
declared against Jugurtha by popular vote, and, despite
opposing action in the Senate, one Marius, an experienced
soldier of humble birth, was elected consul and sent out to
take command. Marius distinguished himself in the war much
less than did one of his officers, Cornelius Sulla; but he
bore the lion's share of glory when Jugurtha was taken captive
and conveyed to Rome (B. C. 104). Marius was now the great
hero of the hour, and events were preparing to lift him to the
giddiest heights of popularity.
Teutones and Cimbri.
Hitherto, the barbarians of wild Europe whom the Romans had
met were either the Aryan Celts, or the non-Aryan tribes found
in northern Italy, Spain and Gaul. Now, for the first time,
the armies of Rome were challenged by tribes of another grand
division of the Aryan stock, coming out of the farther North.
These were the Cimbri and the Teutones, wandering hordes of
the great Teutonic or Germanic race which has occupied Western
Europe north of the Rhine since the beginning of historic
time. So far as we can know, these two were the first of the
Germanic nations to migrate to the South. They came into
collision with Rome in 113 B. C., when they were in Noricum,
threatening the frontiers of her Italian dominion. Four years
later they were in southern Gaul, where the Romans were now
settling colonies and subduing the native Celts. Twice they
had beaten the armies opposed to them; two years later they
added a third to their victories; and in 105 B. C. they threw
Rome into consternation by destroying two great armies on the
Rhone. Italy seemed helpless against the invasion for which
these terrible barbarians were now preparing, when Marius went
against them. In the summer of 102 B. C. he annihilated the
Teutones, near Aquæ Sextiæ (modern Aix), and in the following
year he destroyed the invading Cimbri, on a bloody field in
northern Italy, near modern Vercellæ.
Marius.
From these great victories, Marius went back to Rome, doubly
and terribly clothed with power, by the devotion of a reckless
army and the hero-worship of an unthinking mob. The state was
at his mercy. A strong man in his place might have crushed the
class-factions and accomplished the settlement which Cæsar
made after half a century more of turbulence and shame. But
Marius was ignorant, he was weak, and he became a mere
blood-stained figure in the ruinous anarchy of his time.
{1001}
Optimates and Populares.
The social and political state of the capital had grown
rapidly worse. A middle-class in Roman society had practically
disappeared. The two contending parties or factions, which had
taken new names--"optimates" and "populares"--were now
divided almost solely by the line which separates rich from
poor. "If we said that 'optimates' signified the men who
bribed and abused office under the banner of the Senate and
its connections, and that 'populares' meant men who bribed and
abused office with the interests of the people outside the
Senatorial pale upon their lips, we might do injustice to many
good men on both sides, but should hardly be slandering the
parties" (Beesly). There was a desperate conflict between the
two in the year 100, B. C. and the Senate once more recovered
its power for a brief term of years.
The Social War.
The enfranchisement of the so-called "allies"--the Latin and
other subjects of Rome who were not citizens--was the burning
question of the time. The attempt of Caius Gracchus to extend
rights of citizenship to them had been renewed again and
again, without success, and each failure had increased the
bitter discontent of the Italian people. In 90 B. C. they drew
together in a formidable confederation and rose in revolt. In
the face of this great danger Rome sobered herself to action
with old time wisdom and vigor. She yielded her full
citizenship to all Italian freemen who had not taken arms, and
then offered it to those who would lay their arms down. At the
same time, she fought the insurrection with every army she
could put into the field, and in two years it was at an end.
Marius and his old lieutenant, Sulla, had been the principal
commanders in this "Social War," as it was named, and Sulla
had distinguished himself most. The latter had now an army at
his back and was a power in the state, and between the two
military champions there arose a rivalry which produced the
first of the Roman Civil Wars.
Marius and Sulla.
A troublesome war in the East had been forced upon the Romans
by aggressions of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Both Marius and
Sulla aspired to the command. Sulla obtained election to the
consulship in 88 B. C. and was named for the coveted place.
But Marius succeeded in getting the appointment annulled by a
popular assembly and himself chosen instead for the Eastern
command. Sulla, personally imperilled by popular tumults, fled
to his legions, put himself at their head, and marched back to
Rome--the first among her generals to turn her arms against
herself. There was no effective resistance; Marius fled; both
Senate and people were submissive to the dictates of the
consul who had become master of the city. He "made the tribes
decree their own political extinction, resuscitating the
comitia centuriata; he reorganized the Senate by adding three
hundred to its members and vindicating the right to sanction
legislation; conducted the consular elections, exacting from
L. Cornelius Cinna, the newly elected consul, a solemn oath
that he would observe the new regulations, and securing the
election of Cn. Octavius in his own interest, and then, like
'a countryman who had just shaken the lice off his coat,' to
use his own figure, he turned to do his great work in the
East."
(Horton).
Sulla went to Greece, which was in revolt and in alliance with
Mithridates, and conducted there a brilliant, ruthless
campaign for three years (B. C. 87-84), until he had restored
Roman authority in the peninsula, and forced the King of
Pontus to surrender all his conquests in Asia Minor. Until
this task was finished, he gave no heed to what his enemies
did at Rome; though the struggle there between "Sullans" and
"Marians" had gone fiercely and bloodily on, and his own
partisans had been beaten in the fight. The consul Octavius,
who was in Bulla's interest, had first driven the consul Cinna
out of the city, after slaying 10,000 of his faction. Cinna's
cause was taken up by the new Italian citizens; he was joined
by the exiled Marius, and these two returned together, with an
army which the Senate and the party of Sulla were unable to
resist. Marius came back with a burning heart and with savage
intentions of revenge. A horrible massacre of his opponents
ensued, which went on unchecked for five days, and was
continued more deliberately for several months, until Marius
died, at the beginning of the year 86 B. C. Then Cinna ruled
absolutely at Rome for three years, supported in the main by
the newly-made citizens; while the provinces generally
remained under the control of the party of the optimates. In
83 B. C. Sulla, having finished with carefulness his work in
the East, came back into Italy, with 40,000 veterans to attend
his steps. He had been outlawed and deprived of his command,
by the faction governing at the capital; but its decrees had
no effect and troubled him little. Cinna had been killed by
his own troops, even before Bulla's landing at Brundisium.
Several important leaders and soldiers on the Marian side,
such as Pompeius, then a young general, and Crassus, the
millionaire, went over to Sulla's camp. One of the consuls of
the year saw his troops follow their example, in a body; the
other consul was beaten and driven into Capua. Sulla wintered
in Campania, and the next spring he pressed forward to Rome,
fighting a decisive battle with Marius the younger on the way,
and took possession of the city; but not in time to prevent a
massacre of senators by the resentful mob.
Sulla's Dictatorship.
Before that year closed, the whole of Italy had been subdued,
the final battle being fought with the Marians and Italians at
the Colline Gate, and Sulla again possessed power supreme. He
placed it beyond dispute by a deliberate extermination of his
opponents, more merciless than the Marian massacre had been.
They were proscribed by name, in placarded lists, and rewards
paid to those who killed them; while their property was
confiscated, and became the source of vast fortunes to Sulla's
supporters, and of lands for distribution to his veterans.
When this terror had paralyzed all resistance to his rule, the
Dictator (for he had taken that title) undertook a complete
reconstruction of the constitution, aiming at a permanent
restoration of senatorial ascendancy and a curbing of the
powers which the people, in their assemblies, and the
magistrates who especially represented them, had gained during
the preceding century. He remodelled, moreover, the judicial
system, and some of his reforms were undoubtedly good, though
they did not prove enduring. When he had fashioned the state
to his liking, this extraordinary usurper quietly abdicated
his dictatorial office (B. C. 80) and retired to private life,
undisturbed until his death (B. C. 78).
{1002}
After Sulla.
The system he had established did not save Rome from renewed
distractions and disorder after Sulla died. There was no
longer a practical question between Senate and people--between
the few and the many in government. The question now, since
the legionaries held their swords prepared to be flung into
the scale, was what one should again gather the powers of
government into his hands, as Sulla had done.
The Great Game and the Players.
The history of the next thirty years--the last generation of
republican Rome--is a sad and sinister but thrilling chronicle
of the strifes and intrigues, the machinations and
corruptions, of a stupendous and wicked game in politics that
was played, against one another and against the Republic, by a
few daring, unscrupulous players, with the empire of the
civilized world for the stake between them. There were more
than a few who aspired; there were only three players who
entered really as principals into the game. These were
Pompeius, called "the Great," since he extinguished the Marian
faction in Sicily and in Spain; Crassus, whose wealth gave him
power, and who acquired some military pretensions besides, by
taking the field against a formidable insurrection of slaves
(B. C. 73-71); and Julius Cæsar, a young patrician, but nephew
of Marius by marriage, who assiduously strengthened that
connection with the party of the people, and who began, very
soon after Sulla's death, to draw attention to himself as a
rising power in the politics of the day. There were two other
men, Cicero and the younger Cato, who bore a nobler and
greater because less selfish part in the contest of that
fateful time. Both were blind to the impossibility of
restoring the old order of things, with a dominant Senate, a
free but well guided populace, and a simply ordered social
state; but their blindness was heroic and high-souled.
Pompeius in the East.
Of the three strong rivals for the vacant dictatorial chair
which waited to be filled, Pompeius held by far the greater
advantages. His fame as a soldier was already won; he had been
a favorite of Fortune from the beginning of his career;
everything had succeeded with him; everything was expected for
him and expected from him. Even while the issues of the great
struggle were pending, a wonderful opportunity for increasing
his renown was opened to him. The disorders of the civil war
had licensed a swarm of pirates, who fairly possessed the
eastern Mediterranean and had nearly extirpated the maritime
trade. Pompeius was sent against them (B. C. 67), with a
commission that gave him almost unlimited powers, and within
ninety days he had driven them from the sea. Then, before he
had returned from this exploit, he was invested with supreme
command in the entire East, where another troublesome war with
Mithridates was going on. He harvested there all the laurels
which belonged by better right to his predecessor, Lucullus,
finding the power of Mithridates already broken down. From
Pontus he passed into Armenia, and thence into Syria, easily
subjugating both, and extinguishing the monarchy of the
Seleucids. The Jews resisted him and he humbled them by the
siege and conquest of their sacred city. Egypt was now the
only Mediterranean state left outside the all-absorbing
dominion of Rome; and even Egypt, by bequest of its late king,
belonged to the Republic, though not yet claimed.
The First Triumvirate.
Pompeius came back to Rome in the spring of 61 B. C. so
glorified by his successes that he might have seemed to be
irresistible, whatever he should undertake. But, either
through an honest patriotism or an overweening confidence, he
had disbanded his army when he reached Italy, and he had
committed himself to no party. He stood alone and aloof, with
a great prestige, great ambitions, and no ability to use the
one or realize the other. Before another year passed, he was
glad to accept offers of a helping hand in politics from
Cæsar, who had climbed the ladder of office rapidly within
four or five years, spending vast sums of borrowed money to
amuse the people with games, and distinguishing himself as a
democratic champion. Cæsar, the far seeing calculator,
discerned the enormous advantages that he might gain for
himself by massing together the prestige of Pompeius, the
wealth of Crassus and his own invincible genius, which was
sure to be the master element in the combination. He brought
the coalition about through a bargain which created what is
known in history as the First Triumvirate, or supremacy of
three.
Cæsar in Gaul.
Under the terms of the bargain, Cæsar was chosen consul for 59
B. C., and at the end of his term was given the governorship
of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, with command of three
legions there, for five years. His grand aim was a military
command--the leadership of an army--the prestige of a
successful soldier. No sooner had he secured the command than
fortune gave him opportunities for its use in the most
striking way and with the most impressive results. The Celtic
tribes of Gaul, north of the two small provinces which the
Romans had already acquired on the Mediterranean coast, gave
him pretexts or provocations (it mattered little to Cæsar
which) for war with them, and in a series of remarkable
campaigns, which all soldiers since have admired, he pushed
the frontiers of the dominion of Rome to the ocean and the
Rhine, and threatened the nations of Germany on the farther
banks of that stream. "The conquest of Gaul by Cæsar," says
Mr. Freeman, "is one of the most important events in the
history of the world. It is in some sort the beginning of
modern history, as it brought the old world of southern
Europe, of which Rome was the head, into contact with the
lands and nations which were to play the greatest part in
later times--with Gaul, Germany, and Britain." From Gaul
Cæsar crossed the channel to Britain in 55 B. C. and again in
the following year, exacting tribute from the Celtic natives,
but attempting no lodgment in the island.
{1003}
Meantime, while pursuing a career of conquest which excited
the Roman world, Cæsar never lost touch with the capital and
its seething politics. Each winter he repaired to Lucca, the
point in his province which was nearest to Rome, and conferred
there with his friends, who flocked to the rendezvous. He
secured an extension of his term, to enable him to complete
his plans, and year by year he grew more independent of the
support of his colleagues in the triumvirate, while they
weakened one another by their jealousies, and the Roman state
was more hopelessly distracted by factious strife.
End of the Triumvirate.
The year after Cæsar's second invasion of Britain, Crassus,
who had obtained the government of Syria, perished in a
disastrous war with the Parthians, and the triumvirate was at
an end. Disorder in Rome increased and Pompeius lacked energy
or boldness to deal with it, though he seemed to be the one
man present who might do so. He was made sole consul in 52 B.
C.; he might have seized the dictatorship, with approval of
many, but he waited for it to be offered to him, and the offer
never came. He drew at last into close alliance with the party
of the Optimates, and left the Populares to be won entirely to
Cæsar's side.
Civil War.
Matters came to a crisis in 50 B. C., when the Senate passed
an order removing Cæsar from his command and discharging his
soldiers who had served their term. He came to Ravenna with a
single legion and concerted measures with his friends. The
issue involved is supposed to have been one of life or death
to him, as well as of triumph or failure in his ambitions; for
his enemies were malignant. His friends demanded that he be
made consul, for his protection, before laying down his arms.
The Senate answered by proclaiming him a public enemy if he
failed to disband his troops with no delay. It was a
declaration of war, and Cæsar accepted it. He marched his
single legion across the Rubicon, which was the boundary of
his province, and advanced towards Rome.
Pompeius, with the forces he had gathered, retreated
southward, and consuls, senators and nobles generally streamed
after him. Cæsar followed them--turning aside from the
city--and his force gathered numbers as he advanced. The
Pompeians continued their flight and abandoned Italy,
withdrawing to Epirus, planning to gather there the forces of
the East and return with them. Cæsar now took possession of
Rome and secured the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, from
which it drew its supply of food. This done, he proceeded
without delay to Spain, where seven legions strongly devoted
to Pompeius were stationed. He overcame them in a single
campaign, enlisted most of the veterans in his own service,
and acquired a store of treasure. Before the year ended he was
again in Rome, where the citizens had proclaimed him dictator. He
held the dictatorship for eleven days, only, to legalize an
election which made him consul, with a pliant associate. He
reorganized the government, complete in all its branches,
including a senate, partly composed of former members of the
body who had remained or returned. Then (B. C. 48.--January) he
took up the pursuit of Pompeius and the Optimates. Crossing to
Epirus, after some months of changeful fortune, he fought and
won the decisive battle of Pharsalia. Pompeius, flying to
Egypt, was murdered there. Cæsar, following, with a small
force, was placed in great peril by a rising at Alexandria,
but held his ground until assistance came. He then garrisoned
Egypt with Roman troops and made the princess Cleopatra, who
had captivated him by her charms, joint occupant of the throne
with her younger brother. During his absence, affairs at Rome
were again disturbed, and he was once more appointed dictator,
as well as tribune for life. His presence restored order at
once, and he was soon in readiness to attack the party of his
enemies who had taken refuge in Africa. The battle of Thapsus,
followed by the suicide of Cato and the surrender of Utica,
practically finished the contest, though one more campaign was
fought in Spain the following year.
Cæsar Supreme.
Cæsar was now master of the dominions of Rome, and as entirely
a monarch as anyone of his imperial successors, who took his
name, with the power which he caused it to symbolize, and
called themselves "Cæsars," and "Imperators," as though the
two titles were equivalent. "Imperator" was the title under
which he chose to exercise his sovereignty. Other Roman
generals had been Imperators before, but he was the first to
be named Imperator for life, and the word (changed in our
tongue to Emperor) took a meaning from that day more regal
than Rex or King. That Cæsar, the Imperator, first of all
Emperors, ever coveted the crown and title of an
older-fashioned royalty, is not an easy thing to believe.
Having settled his authority firmly, he gave his attention to
the organization of the Empire (still Republic in name) and to
the reforming of the evils which afflicted it. That he did
this work with consummate judgment and success is the opinion
of all who study his time. He gratified no resentments,
executed no revenges, proscribed no enemies. All who submitted
to his rule were safe; and it seems to be clear that the
people in general were glad to be rescued by his rule from the
old oligarchical and anarchical state. But some of Cæsar's own
partisans were dissatisfied with the autocracy which they
helped to create, or with the slenderness of their own parts
in it. They conspired with surviving leaders of the Optimates,
and Cæsar was assassinated by them, in the Senate chamber, on
the 15th of March, B. C. 44.
Professor Mommsen has expressed the estimate of Cæsar which
many thoughtful historians have formed, in the following
strong words: "In the character of Cæsar the great contrasts
of existence meet and balance each other. He was of the
mightiest creative power, and yet of the most penetrating
judgment; of the highest energy of will and the highest
capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals, and at
the same time born to be king. He was 'the entire perfect
man'; and he was this because he was the entire and perfect
Roman." This may be nearly true if we ignore the moral side of
Cæsar's character. He was of too large a nature to do evil
things unnecessarily, and so he shines even morally in
comparison with many of his kind; but he had no scruples.
{1004}
After the Murder of Cæsar.
The murderers of Cæsar were not accepted by the people as the
patriots and "liberators" which they claimed to be, and they
were soon in flight from the city. Marcus Antonius, who had
been Cæsar's associate in the consulship, now naturally and
skilfully assumed the direction of affairs, and aspired to
gather the reins of imperial power into his own hands. But
rivals were ready to dispute with him the great prize of
ambition. Among them, it is probable that Antony gave little
heed at first to the young man, Caius Octavius, or Octavianus,
who was Cæsar's nephew, adopted son and heir; for Octavius was
less than nineteen years old, he was absent in Apollonia, and
he was little known. But the young Cæsar, coming boldly though
quietly to Rome, began to push his hereditary claims with a
patient craftiness and dexterity that were marvellous in one
so young.
The Second Triumvirate.
The contestants soon resorted to arms. The result of their
first indecisive encounter was a compromise and the formation
of a triumvirate, like that of Cæsar, Pompeius and Crassus.
This second triumvirate was made up of Antonius, Octavius, and
Lepidus, lately master of the horse in Cæsar's army. Unlike
the earlier coalition, it was vengeful and bloody-minded. Its
first act was a proscription, in the terrible manner of Sulla,
which filled Rome and Italy with murders, and with terror and
mourning. Cicero, the patriot and great orator, was among the
victims cut down.
After this general slaughter of their enemies at home,
Antonius and Octavius proceeded against Brutus and Cassius,
two of the assassins of Cæsar, who had gathered a large force
in Greece. They defeated them at Philippi, and both
"liberators" perished by their own hands. The triumvirs now
divided the empire between them, Antonius ruling the East,
Octavius the West, and Lepidus taking Africa--that is, the
Carthaginian province, which included neither Egypt nor
Numidia. Unhappily for Antonius, the queen of Egypt was among
his vassals, and she ensnared him. He gave himself up to
voluptuous dalliance with Cleopatra at Alexandria, while the
cool intriguer, Octavius, at Rome, worked unceasingly to
solidify and increase his power. After six years had passed,
the young Cæsar was ready to put Lepidus out of his way, which
he did mercifully, by sending him into exile. After five years
more, he launched his legions and his war galleys against
Antonius, with the full sanction of the Roman senate and
people. The sea-fight at Actium (B. C. 31) gave Octavius the
whole empire, and both Antonius and Cleopatra committed
suicide after flying to Egypt. The kingdom of the Ptolemies
was now extinguished and became a Roman province in due form.
Octavius (Augustus) Supreme.
Octavius was now more securely absolute as the ruler of Rome
and its great empire than Sulla or Julius Cæsar had been, and
he maintained that sovereignty without challenge for
forty-five years, until his death. He received from the Senate
the honorary title of "Augustus," by which he is most commonly
known. For official titles, he took none but those which had
belonged to the institutions of the Republic, and were
familiarly known. He was Imperator, as his uncle had been. He
was Princeps, or head of the Senate; he was Censor; he was
Tribune; he was Supreme Pontiff. All the great offices of the
Republic he kept alive, and ingeniously constructed his
sovereignty by uniting their powers in himself.
Organization of the Empire.
The historical position of Augustus, as the real founder of
the Roman Empire, is unique in its grandeur; and yet History
has dealt contemptuously, for the most part, with his name.
His character has been looked upon, to use the language of De
Quincey, as "positively repulsive, in the very highest
degree." "A cool head," wrote Gibbon of him, "an unfeeling
heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him, at the age of
nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never
afterwards laid aside." And again: "His virtues, and even his
vices, were artificial; and according to the various dictates
of his interest, he was at first the enemy, and at last the
father, of the Roman world." Yet, how can we deny surpassing
high qualities of some description to a man who set the
shattered Roman Republic, with all its democratic bases broken
up, on a new--an imperial--foundation, so gently that it
suffered no further shock, and so solidly that it endured, in
whole or in part, for a millennium and a half?
In the reign of Augustus the Empire was consolidated and
organized; it was not much extended. The frontiers were
carried to the Danube, throughout, and the subjugation of
Spain was made complete. Augustus generally discouraged wars
of conquest. His ambitious stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius,
persuaded him into several expeditions beyond the Rhine,
against the restless German nations, which perpetually menaced
the borders of Gaul; but these gained no permanent footing in
the Teutonic territory. They led, on the contrary, to a
fearful disaster (A. D. 9), near the close of the reign of
Augustus, when three legions, under Varus, were destroyed in
the Teutoburg Forest by a great combination of the tribes,
planned and conducted by a young chieftain named Hermann, or
Arminius, who is the national hero of Germany to this day.
The policy of Drusus in strongly fortifying the northern
frontier against the Germans left marks which are
conspicuously visible at the present day. From the fifty
fortresses which he is said to have built along the line
sprang many important modern cities,--Basel, Strasburg, Worms,
Mainz, Bingen, Coblenz, Bonn, Cologne, and Leyden, among the
number. From similar forts on the Danubian frontier rose
Vienna, Regensburg and Passau.
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.
Augustus died A. D. 11, and was succeeded in his honors, his
offices, and his powers, by his step-son, Tiberius Claudius
Nero, whom he had adopted. Tiberius, during most of his reign,
was a vigorous ruler, but a detestable man, unless his
subjects belied him, which some historians suspect. Another
attempt at the conquest of Germany was made by his nephew
Germanicus, son of Drusus; but the jealousy of the emperor
checked it, and Germanicus died soon after, believing that he
had been poisoned. A son of Germanicus, Caius, better known by
his nick-name of Caligula, succeeded to the throne on the
death of Tiberius (A. D. 37), and was the first of many
emperors to be crazed and made beast-like, in lust, cruelty
and senselessness, by the awful, unbounded power which passed
into their hands.
{1005}
The Empire bore his madness for three years, and then he was
murdered by his own guards. The Senate had thoughts now of
restoring the commonwealth, and debated the question for a
day; but the soldiers of the prætorian guard took it out of
their hands, and decided it, by proclaiming Tiberius Claudius
(A. D. 41), a brother of Germanicus, and uncle of the emperor
just slain. Claudius was weak of body and mind, but not
vicious, and his reign was distinctly one of improvement and
advance in the Empire. He began the conquest of Britain, which
the Romans had neglected since Cæsar's time, and he opened the
Senate to the provincials of Gaul. He had two wives of
infamous character, and the later one of these, Agrippina,
brought him a son, not his own, whom he adopted, and who
succeeded him (A.D. 54). This was Nero, of foul memory, who
was madman and monster in as sinister a combination as history
can show. During the reign of Nero, the spread of
Christianity, which had been silently making its way from
Judæa into all parts of the Empire, began to attract the
attention of men in public place, and the first persecution of
its disciples took place (A. D. 64). A great fire occurred in
Rome, which the hated emperor was believed to have caused; but
he found it convenient to accuse the Christians of the deed,
and large numbers of them were put to death in horrible ways.
Vespasian and his Sons.
Nero was tolerated for fourteen years, until the soldiers in
the provinces rose against him, and he committed suicide (A.
D. 68) to escape a worse death. Then followed a year of civil
war between rival emperors--Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and
Vespasian--proclaimed by different bodies of soldiers in
various parts of the Empire. The struggle ended in favor of
Vespasian, a rude, strong soldier, who purged the government,
disciplined the army, and brought society back toward simpler
and more decent ways. The great revolt of the Jews (A. D.
66-70) had broken out before he received the purple, and he
was commanding in Judæa when Nero fell. The siege, capture and
destruction of Jerusalem was accomplished by his son Titus. A
more formidable revolt in the West (A. D. 69) was begun the
Batavians, a German tribe which occupied part of the
Netherland territory, near the mouth of the Rhine. They were
joined by neighboring Gauls and by disaffected Roman
legionaries, and they received help from their German kindred
on the northern side of the Rhine. The revolt, led by a
chieftain named Civilis, who had served in the Roman army, was
overcome with extreme difficulty.
Vespasian was more than worthily succeeded (A. D. 79) by his
elder son, Titus, whose subjects so admired his many virtues
that he was called "the delight of the human race." His short
reign, however, was one of calamities: fire at Rome, a great
pestilence, and the frightful eruption of Vesuvius which
destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii. After Titus came his
younger brother Domitian (A. D. 81), who proved to be another
creature of the monstrous species that appeared so often in
the series of Roman emperors. The conquest of southern Britain
(modern England) was completed in his reign by an able
soldier, Agricola, who fought the Caledonians of the North,
but was recalled before subduing them. Domitian was murdered
by his own servants (A. D. 96), after a reign of fifteen
years.
Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian.
Rome and the Empire were happy at last in the choice that was
made of a sovereign to succeed the hateful son of Vespasian.
Not the soldiery, but the Senate, made the choice, and it fell
on one of their number, Cocceius Nerva, who was already an
aged man. He wore the purple but sixteen months, and his
single great distinction in Roman history is, that he
introduced to the imperial succession a line of the noblest
men who ever sat in the seat of the Cæsars. The first of these
was the soldier Trajan, whom Nerva adopted and associated with
himself in authority. When Nerva died (A. D. 97), his son by
adoption ascended the throne with no opposition. The new
Emperor was simple and plain in his habits and manners of
life; he was honest and open in all his dealings with men; he
was void of suspicion, and of malice and jealousy no less. He
gave careful attention to the business of state and was wise
in his administration of affairs, improving roads, encouraging
trade, helping agriculture, and developing the resources of the
Empire in very prudent and practical ways. But he was a
soldier, fond of war, and he unwisely reopened the career of
conquest which had been almost closed for the Empire since
Pompeius came back from the East. A threatening kingdom having
risen among the Dacians, in the country north of the lower
Danube--the Transylvania and Roumania of the present day--he
attacked and crushed it, in a series of vigorous campaigns (A.
D. 101-106), and annexed the whole territory to the dominion
of Rome. He then garrisoned and colonized the country, and
Romanized it so completely that it keeps the Roman name, and
its language to this day is of the Latin stock, though Goths,
Huns, Bulgarians and Slavs have swept it in successive
invasions, and held it among their conquests for centuries at
a time. In the East, he ravaged the territory of the Parthian
king, entered his capital and added Mesopotamia, Armenia, and
Arabia Petræa to the list of Roman provinces. But he died (A.
D. 117) little satisfied with the results of his eastern
campaigns.
His successor abandoned them, and none have doubted that he
did well; because the Empire was weakened by the new frontier
in Asia which Trajan gave it to defend. His Dacian conquests
were kept, but all beyond the Euphrates in the East were given
up. The successor who did this was Hadrian, a kinsman, whom
the Emperor adopted in his last hours. Until near the close of
his life, Hadrian ranked among the best of the emperors. Rome
saw little of him, and resented his incessant travels through
every part of his great realm. His manifest preference for
Athens, where he lingered longest, and which flourished anew
under his patronage, was still more displeasing to the ancient
capital. For the Emperor was a man of cultivation, fond of
literature, philosophy and art, though busy with the cares of
State. In his later years he was afflicted with a disease
which poisoned his nature by its torments, filled his mind
with dark suspicions, and made him fitfully tyrannical and
cruel. The event most notable in his generally peaceful and
prosperous reign was the renewed and final revolt of the Jews,
under Barchochebas, which resulted in their total expulsion
from Jerusalem, and its conversion into a heathen city, with a
Roman name.
{1006}
The Antonines.
Hadrian had adopted before his death (A. D. 138) a man of
blameless character, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, who received
from his subjects, when he became Emperor, the appellation
"Pius," to signify the dutiful reverence and kindliness of his
disposition. He justified the name of Antoninus Pius, by which
he is historically known, and his reign, though disturbed by
some troubles on the distant borders of the Empire, was happy
for his subjects in nearly all respects. "No great deeds are
told of him, save this, perhaps the greatest, that he secured
the love and happiness of those he ruled" (Capes).
Like so many of the emperors, Antoninus had no son of his own;
but even before he came to the throne, and at the request of
Hadrian, he had adopted a young lad who won the heart of the
late Emperor while still a child. The family name of this son
by adoption was Verus, and he was of Spanish descent; the name
which he took, in his new relationship, was Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus. It is unquestionably the most illustrious name in
the whole imperial line, from Augustus to the last
Constantine, and made so, not so much by deeds as by
character. He gave the world the solitary example of a
philosopher upon the throne. There have been a few--a very
few--surpassingly good men in kingly places; but there has
never been another whose soul was lifted to so serene a height
above the sovereignty of his station. Unlimited power tempted
no form of selfishness in him; he saw nothing in his imperial
exaltation but the duties which it imposed. His mind was
meditative, and inclined him to the studious life; but he
compelled himself to be a man of vigor and activity in
affairs. He disliked war; but he spent years of his life in
camp on the frontiers; because it fell to his lot to encounter
the first great onset of the barbarian nations of the north,
which never ceased from that time to beat against the barriers
of the Empire until they had broken them down. His struggle
was on the line of the Danube, with the tribes of the
Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Vandals, and others of less
formidable power. He held them back, but the resources of the
Empire were overstrained and weakened lastingly by the effort.
For the first time, too, there were colonies of barbarians
brought into the Empire, from beyond its lines, to be settled
for the supply of soldiers to the armies of Rome: It was a
dangerous sign of Roman decay and a fatal policy to begin. The
decline of the great world-power was, in truth, already well
advanced, and the century of good emperors which ended when
Marcus Aurelius died (A. D. 180), only retarded, and did not
arrest, the progress of mortal maladies in the state.
From Commodus to Caracalla.
The best of emperors was followed on the throne by a son,
Commodus, who went mad, like Nero and Caligula, with the
drunkenness of power, and who was killed (A. D. 192) by his
own servants, after a reign of twelve years. The soldiers of
the prætorian guard now took upon themselves the making of
emperors, and placed two upon the throne--first, Pertinax, an
aged senator, whom they murdered the next year, and then
Didius Julianus, likewise a senator, to whom, as the highest
bidder, they sold the purple. Again, as after Nero's death,
the armies on the frontiers put forward, each, a rival
claimant, and there was war between the competitors. The
victor who became sovereign was Septimius Severus (A. D.
194-211), who had been in command on the Danube. He was an
able soldier, and waged war with success against the Parthians
in the East, and with the Caledonians in Britain, which latter
he could not subdue. Of his two sons, the elder, nicknamed
Caracalla (A. D. 211-217), killed his brother with his own
hands, and tortured the Roman world with his brutalities for
six years, when he fell under the stroke of an assassin. The
reign of this foul beast brought one striking change to the
Empire. An imperial edict wiped away the last distinction
between Romans and Provincials, giving citizenship to every
free inhabitant of the Empire. "Rome from this date became
constitutionally an empire, and ceased to be merely a
municipality. The city had become the world, or, viewed from
the other side, the world had become 'the City'" (Merivale).
Anarchy and Decay.
The period of sixty-seven years from the murder of Caracalla
to the accession of Diocletian--when a great constitutional
change occurred--demands little space in a sketch like this.
The weakening of the Empire by causes inherent in its social
and political structure,--the chief among which were the
deadly influence of its system of slavery and the paralyzing
effects of its autocracy,--went on at an increasing rate,
while disorder grew nearly to the pitch of anarchy, complete.
There were twenty-two emperors in the term, which scarcely
exceeded that of two generations of men. Nineteen of these
were taken from the throne by violent deaths, through mutiny
or murder, while one fell in battle, and another was held
captive in Persia till he died. Only five among these
twenty-two ephemeral lords of the world,--namely Alexander
Severus, Decius (who was a vigorous soldier and ruler, but who
persecuted the Christians with exceptional cruelty), Claudius,
Aurelian, and Probus,--can be credited with any personal
weight or worth in the history of the time; and they held
power too briefly to make any notable mark.
The distractions of the time were made worse by a great number
of local "tyrants," as they were called--military adventurers
who rose in different parts of the Empire and established
themselves for a time in authority over some district, large
or small. In the reign of Gallienus (A. D. 260-268) there were
nineteen of these petty "imperators," and they were spoken of
as the "thirty tyrants." The more important of the "provincial
empires" thus created were those of Postumus, in Gaul, and of
Odenatus of Palmyra. The latter, under Zenobia; queen and
successor of Odenatus, became a really imposing monarchy,
until it was overthrown by Aurelian, A. D. 273.
{1007}
The Teutonic Nations.
The Germanic nations beyond the Rhine and the Danube had, by
this time, improved their organization, and many of the tribes
formerly separated and independent were now gathered into
powerful confederations. The most formidable of these leagues
in the West was that which acquired the common name of the
Franks, or Freemen, and which was made up of the peoples
occupying territory along the course of the Lower Rhine.
Another of nearly equal power, dominating the German side of
the Upper Rhine and the headwaters of the Danube, is believed
to have absorbed the tribes which had been known in the
previous century as Boii, Marcomanni, Quadi, and others. The
general name it received was that of the Alemanni. The
Alemanni were in intimate association with the Suevi, and
little is known of the distinction that existed between the
two. They had now begun to make incursions across the Rhine,
but were driven back in 238. Farther to the East, on the Lower
Danube, a still more dangerous horde was now threatening the
flanks of the Empire in its European domain. These were Goths,
a people akin, without doubt, to the Swedes, Norsemen and
Danes; but whence and when they made their way to the
neighborhood of the Black Sea is a question in dispute. It was
in the reign of Caracalla that the Romans became first aware
of their presence in the country since known as the Ukraine. A
few years later, when Alexander Severus was on the throne, they
began to make incursions into Dacia. During the reign of
Philip the Arabian (A. D. 244-249) they passed through Dacia,
crossed the Danube, and invaded Mœsia (modern Bulgaria). In
their next invasion (A. D. 251) they passed the Balkans,
defeated the Romans in two terrible battles, the last of which
cost the reigning Emperor, Decius, his life, and destroyed the
city of Philippopolis, with 100,000 of its people. But when, a
few years later, they attempted to take possession of even
Thrace and Macedonia, they were crushingly defeated by the
Emperor Claudius, whose successor Aurelian made peace by
surrendering to them the whole province of Dacia (A. D. 270),
where they settled, giving the Empire no disturbance for
nearly a hundred years. Before this occurred, the Goths,
having acquired the little kingdom of Bosporus (the modern
Crimea) had begun to launch a piratical navy, which plundered
the coast cities of Asia Minor and Greece, including Athens
itself.
On the Asiatic side of the Empire a new power, a revived and
regenerated Persian monarchy, had risen out of the ruins of
the Parthian kingdom, which it overthrew, and had begun
without delay to contest the rule of Rome in the East.
Diocletian.
Briefly described, this was the state and situation of the
Roman Empire when Diocletian, an able Illyrian soldier, came
to the throne (A. D. 284). His accession marks a new epoch.
"From this time," says Dean Merivale, "the old names of the
Republic, the consuls, the tribunes, and the Senate itself,
cease, even if still existing, to have any political
significance." "The empire of Rome is henceforth an Oriental
sovereignty." But the changes which Diocletian made in the
organization and administration of the Empire, if they did
weigh it down with a yet more crushing autocracy and
contribute to its exhaustion in the end, did also, for the
time, stop the wasting of its last energies, and gather them
in hand for potent use. It can hardly be doubted that he
lengthened the term of its career.
Finding that one man in the exercise of supreme sovereignty,
as absolute as he wished to make it, could not give sufficient
care to every part of the vast realm, he first associated one
Maximian with himself, on equal terms, as Emperor, or
Augustus, and six years later (A. D. 292) he selected two
others from among his generals and invested them with a
subordinate sovereignty, giving them the title of "Cæsars."
The arrangement appears to have worked satisfactorily while
Diocletian remained at the head of his imperial college. But

in 305 he wearied of the splendid burden that he bore, and
abdicated the throne, unwillingly followed by his associate,
Maximian. The two Cæsars, Constantius and Galerius, were then
advanced to the imperial rank, and two new Cæsars were named.
Jealousies, quarrels, and civil war were soon rending the
Empire again. The details are unimportant.
Constantine and Christianity.
After nine years of struggle, two competitors emerged (A. D.
314) alone, and divided the Empire between them. They were
Constantine, son of Constantius, the Cæsar, and one Licinius.
After nine years more, Licinius had disappeared, defeated and
put to death, and Constantine (A. D. 323) shared the
sovereignty of Rome with none. In its final stages, the
contest had become, practically, a trial of strength between
expiring Paganism in the Roman world and militant
Christianity, now grown to great strength. The shrewd
adventurer Constantine saw the political importance to which
the Christian Church had risen, and identified himself with it
by a "conversion" which has glorified his name most
undeservedly. If to be a Christian with sincerity is to be a
good man, then Constantine was none; for his life was full of
evil deeds, after he professed the religion of Christ, even
more than before. "He poured out the best and noblest blood in
torrents, more especially of those nearly connected with
himself. ... In a palace which he had made a desert, the
murderer of his father-in-law, his brothers-in-law, his
sister, his wife, his son, and his nephew, must have felt the
stings of remorse, if hypocritical priests and courtier
bishops had not lulled his conscience to rest" (Sismondi).
But the so-called "conversion" of Constantine was an event of
vast import in history. It changed immensely, and with
suddenness, the position, the state, the influence, and very
considerably the character and spirit of the Christian Church.
The hierarchy of the Church became, almost at once, the
greatest power in the Empire, next to the Emperor himself, and
its political associations, which were dangerous from the
beginning, soon proved nearly fatal to its spiritual
integrity. "Both the purity and the freedom of the Church were
in danger of being lost. State and Church were beginning an
amalgamation fraught with peril. The State was becoming a kind
of Church, and the Church a kind of State. The Emperor
preached and summoned councils, called himself, though half in
jest, a 'bishop,' and the bishops had become State officials,
who, like the high dignitaries of the Empire, travelled by the
imperial courier-service, and frequented the ante-chambers of
the palaces in Constantinople." "The Emperor determined what
doctrines were to prevail in the Church, and banished Arius
to-day and Athanasius to-morrow." "The Church was surfeited
with property and privileges. The Emperor, a poor financier,
impoverished the Empire to enrich" it (Uhlhorn). That
Christianity had shared the gain of the Christian Church from
these great changes, is very questionable.
{1008}
By another event of his reign, Constantine marked it in
history with lasting effect. He rebuilt with magnificence the
Greek city of Byzantium on the Bosphorus, transferred to it
his imperial residence, and raised it to a nominal equality
with Rome, but to official find practical superiority, as the
capital of the Empire. The old Rome dwindled in rank and
prestige from that day; the new Rome--the city of Constantine,
or Constantinople--rose to the supreme place in the eyes and
the imaginations of men.
Julian and the Pagan Revival.
That Constantine added the abilities of a statesman to the
unscrupulous cleverness of an adventurer is not to be
disputed; but he failed to give proof of this when he divided
the Empire between his three sons at his death (A. D. 337).
The inevitable civil wars ensued, until, after sixteen years,
one survivor gathered the whole realm under his scepter again.
He (Constantius), who debased and disgraced the Church more
than his father had done, was succeeded (A. D. 361) by his
cousin, Julian, an honest, thoughtful, strong man, who, not
unnaturally, preferred the old pagan Greek philosophy to the
kind of Christianity which he had seen flourishing at the
Byzantine court. He publicly restored the worship of the
ancient gods of Greece and Rome; he excluded Christians from
the schools, and bestowed his favor on those who scorned the
Church; but he entered on no violent persecution. His reign
was brief, lasting only two years. He perished in a hapless
expedition against the Persians, by whom the Empire was now
almost incessantly harassed.
Valentinian and Valens.
His successor, Jovian, whom the army elected, died in seven
months; but Valentinian, another soldier, raised by his
comrades to the throne, reigned vigorously for eleven years.
He associated his brother, Valens, with him in the
sovereignty, assigning the latter to the East, while he took
the administration of the West.
Until the death of Valentinian, in 375, the northern frontiers
of the Empire, along the Rhine and the Danube, were well
defended. Julian had commanded in Gaul, with Paris for his
capital, six years before he became Emperor, and had organized
its defence most effectively. Valentinian maintained the line
with success against the Alemanni; while his lieutenant,
Theodosius, delivered Roman Britain from the ruinous attacks
of the Scots and Picts of its northern region. On the Danube,
there continued to be peace with the Goths, who held back all
other barbarians from that northeastern border.
The Goths in the Empire.
But the death of Valentinian was the beginning of fatal
calamities. His brother, Valens, had none of his capability or
his vigor, and was unequal to such a crisis as now occurred.
The terrible nation of the Huns had entered Europe from the
Asiatic steppes, and the Western Goths, or Visigoths, fled
before them. These fugitives begged to be permitted to cross
the Danube and settle on vacant lands in Mœsia and Thrace.
Valens consented, and the whole Visigothic nation, 200,000
warriors, with their women and children, passed the river (A.
D. 376). It is possible that they might, by fair treatment,
have been converted into loyal citizens, and useful defenders
of the land. But the corrupt officials of the court took
advantage of their dependent state, and wrung extortionate
prices from them for disgusting food, until they rose in
desperation and wasted Thrace with fire and sword. Fresh
bodies of Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) and other barbarians came
over to join them (A. D. 378); the Roman armies were beaten in
two great battles, and Valens, the Emperor, was slain. The
victorious Goths swept on to the very walls of Constantinople,
which they could not surmount, and the whole open country,
from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, was ravaged by them at
will.
Theodosius.
In the meantime, the western division of the Empire had
passed, on the death of Valentinian, under the nominal rule of
his two young sons, Gratian, aged sixteen, and Valentinian
II., aged four. Gratian had made an attempt to bring help to
his uncle Valens; but the latter fought his fatal battle while
the boy emperor was on the way, and the latter, upon hearing
of it, turned back. Then Gratian performed his one great act.
He sought a colleague, and called to the throne the most
promising young soldier of the day. This was Theodosius, whose
father, Count Theodosius, the deliverer of Britain, had been
put to death by Valens, on some jealous accusation, only three
years before. The new Emperor took the East for his realm, having
Gratian and Valentinian II. for colleagues in the West. He
speedily checked the ravages of the Goths and restored the
confidence of the Roman soldiers. Then he brought diplomacy to
bear upon the dangerous situation, and succeeded in arranging
a peace with the Gothic chieftains, which enlisted them in the
imperial service with forty thousand of their men. But they
retained their distinctive organization, under their own
chiefs, and were called "fœderati," or allies. This concession
of a semi-independence to so great a body of armed barbarians
in the heart of the Empire was a fatal mistake, as was proved
before many years.
For the time being it secured peace, and gave Theodosius
opportunity to attend to other things. The controversies of
the Church were among the subjects of his consideration, and
by taking the side of the Athanasians, whom his predecessor
had persecuted, he gave a final victory to Trinitarianism, in
the Roman world. His reign was signalized, moreover, by the
formal, official abolition of paganism at Rome.
The weak but amiable Gratian, reigning at Paris, lost his
throne and his life, in 383, as the consequence of a revolt
which began in Britain and spread to Gaul. The successful
rebel and usurper, Maximus, seemed so strong that Theodosius
made terms with him, and acknowledged his sovereignty for a
number of years. But, not content with a dominion which
embraced Britain, Gaul and Spain, Maximus sought, after a
time, to add Italy, where the youth, Valentinian II., was
still enthroned (at Milan, not Rome), under the tutelage of
his mother. Valentinian fled to Theodosius; the Eastern
Emperor adopted his cause, and restored him to his throne,
defeating the usurper and putting him to death (A. D. 388).
Four years later Valentinian II. died; another usurper arose,
and again Theodosius (A. D. 394) recovered the throne.
{1009}
Final Division of the Empire.
Theodosius was now alone in the sovereignty. The Empire was
once more, and for the last time, in its full extent, united
under a single lord. It remained so for but a few months. At
the beginning of the year 395, Theodosius died, and his two
weak sons, Arcadius and Honorius, divided the perishing Empire
between them, only to augment, in its more venerable seat, the
distress of the impending fall.
Arcadius, at the age of eighteen, took the government of the
East; Hononus, a child of eleven, gave his name to the
administration of the West. Each emperor was under the
guardianship of a minister chosen by Theodosius before he
died. Rufinus, who held authority at Constantinople, was
worthless in all ways; Stilicho, who held the reins at Milan,
was a Vandal by birth, a soldier and a statesman of vigorous
powers.
Decay of the Western Empire.
The West seemed more fortunate than the East, in this
division; yet the evil days now fast coming near fell
crushingly on the older Rome, while the New Rome lived through
them, and endured for a thousand years. No doubt the Empire
had weakened more on its elder side; had suffered more
exhaustion of vital powers. It had little organic vitality now
left in it. If no swarms of barbaric invaders had been waiting
and watching at its doors, and pressing upon it from every
point with increasing fierceness, it seems probable that it
would have gone to pieces ere long through mere decay. And if,
on the other hand, it could have kept the vigorous life of its
best republican days, it might have defied Teuton and Slav
forever. But all the diseases, political and social, which the
Republic engendered in itself, had been steadily consuming the
state, with their virulence even increased, since it took on the
imperial constitution. All that imperialism did was to gather
waning energies in hand, and make the most of them for
external use. It stopped no decay. The industrial palsy,
induced by an ever-widening system of slave-labor, continued
to spread. Production decreased; the sum of wealth shrunk in
the hands of each succeeding generation; and yet the great
fortunes and great estates grew bigger from age to age. The
gulf between rich and poor opened deeper and wider, and the
bridges once built across it by middle-class thrift were
fallen down. The burden of imperial government had become an
unendurable weight; the provincial municipalities, which had
once been healthy centers of a local political life, were
strangled by the nets of taxation flung over them. Men sought
refuge even in death from the magistracies which made them
responsible to the imperial treasury for revenues which they
could not collect. Population dwindled, year by year.
Recruiting from the body of citizens for the common needs of
the army became more impossible. The state was fully
dependent, at last, on barbaric mercenaries of one tribe for
its defence against barbaric invaders of another; and it was
no longer able, as of old, to impress its savage servitors
with awe of its majesty and its name.
Stilicho and Alaric.
Stilicho, for a time, stoutly breasted the rising flood of
disaster. He checked the Picts and Scots of Northern Britain,
and the Alemanni and their allies on the frontiers of Gaul.
But now there arose again the more dreadful barbarian host
which had footing in the Empire itself, and which Theodosius
had taken into pay. The Visigoths elected a king (A. D. 395),
and were persuaded with ease to carve a kingdom for him out of
the domain which seemed waiting to be snatched from one or
both of the feeble monarchs, who sat in mockery of state at
Constantinople and Milan. Alaric, the new Gothic king, moved
first against the capital on the Bosphorus; but Rufinus
persuaded him to pass on into Greece, where he went pillaging
and destroying for a year. Stilicho, the one manly defender of
the Empire, came over from Italy with an army to oppose him;
but he was stopped on the eve of battle by orders from the
Eastern Court, which sent him back, as an officious meddler.
This act of mischief and malice was the last that Rufinus
could do. He was murdered, soon afterwards, and Arcadius,
being free from his influence, then called upon Stilicho for
help. The latter came once more to deliver Greece, and did so
with success. But Alaric, though expelled from the peninsula,
was neither crushed nor disarmed, and the Eastern Court had
still to make terms with him. It did so for the moment by
conferring on him the government of that part of Illyricum
which the Servia and Bosnia of the present day coincide with,
very nearly. He rested there in peace for four years, and then
(A. D. 400) he called his people to arms again, and led the whole
nation, men, women and children, into Italy. The Emperor,
Honorius, fled from Milan to Ravenna, which, being a safe
shelter behind marshes and streams, became the seat of the
court for years thereafter. Stilicho, stripping Britain and
Gaul of troops, gathered forces with which, at Eastertide in
the year 402, and again in the following year, he defeated the
Goths, and forced them to retreat.
He had scarcely rested from these exertions, when the valiant
Stilicho was called upon to confront a more savage leader,
Radagaisus by name, who came from beyond the lines (A. D.
405), with a vast swarm of mixed warriors from many tribes
pouring after him across the Alps. Again Stilicho, by superior
skill, worsted the invaders, entrapping them in the mountains
near Fiesole (modern Florence), and starving them there till
they yielded themselves to slavery and their chieftain to
death.
This was the last great service to the dying Roman state which
Stilicho was permitted to do. Undermined by the jealousies of
the cowardly court at Ravenna, he seems to have lost suddenly
the power by which he held himself so high. He was accused of
treasonable designs and was seized and instantly executed, by
the Emperor's command.
{1010}
Alaric and his Goths in Rome.
Stilicho dead, there was no one in Italy for Alaric to fear,
and he promptly returned across the Alps, with the nation of
the Visigoths behind him. There was no resistance to his
march, and he advanced straight upon Rome. He did not assail
the walls, but sat down before the gates (A. D. 408), until
the starving citizens paid him a great ransom in silver and
gold and precious spices and silken robes. With this booty he
retired for the winter into Tuscany, where his army was
swelled by thousands of fugitive barbarian slaves, and by
reinforcements of Goths and Huns. From his camp he opened
negotiations with Honorius, demanding the government of
Dalmatia, Venetia and Noricum, with certain subsidies of money
and corn. The contemptible court, skulking at Ravenna, could
neither make war nor make concessions, and it soon exhausted
the patience of the barbarian by its puerilities. He marched
again to Rome (A. D. 409), seized the port of Ostia, with its
supplies of grain, and forced the helpless capital to join him
in proclaiming a rival emperor. The prefect of the city, one
Attalus, accepted the purple at his hands, and played the
puppet for a few months in imperial robes. But the scheme
proved unprofitable, Attalus was deposed, and negotiations
were reopened with Honorius. Their only result was a fresh
provocation which sent Alaric once more against Rome, and this
time with wrath and vengeance in his heart. Then the great,
august capital of the world was entered, through treachery or
by surprise, on the night of the 24th of August, 410, and
suffered all that the lust, the ferocity and the greed of a
barbarous army let loose could inflict on an unresisting city.
It was her first experience of that supreme catastrophe of
war, since Brennus and the Gauls came in; but it was not to be
the last.
From the sack of Rome, Alaric moved southward, intending to
conquer Sicily; but a sudden illness brought his career to an
end.
The Barbarians Swarming in.
The Empire was now like a dying quarry, pulled down by fierce
hunting packs and torn on every side. The Goths were at its
throat; the tribes of Germany--Sueves, Vandals, Burgundians,
Alans--had leaped the Rhine (A. D. 406) and swarmed upon its
flanks, throughout Gaul and Spain. The inrush began after
Stilicho, to defend Italy against Alaric and Radagaisus, had
stripped the frontiers of troops. Sueves, Vandals, and Alans
passed slowly through the provinces, devouring their wealth
and making havoc of their civilization as they went. After
three years, they had reached and surmounted the Pyrenees, and
were spreading the same destruction through Spain.
The confederated tribes of the Franks had already been
admitted as allies into northwestern Gaul, and were settled
there in peace. At first, they stood faithful to the Roman
alliance, and valiantly resisted the new invasion; but its
numbers overpowered them, and their fidelity gave way when
they saw the pillage of the doomed provinces going on. They
presently joined the barbarous mob, and with an energy which
secured the lion's share of plunder and domain.
The Burgundians did not follow the Vandals and Sueves to the
southwest, but took possession of the left bank of the middle
Rhine, whence they gradually spread into western Switzerland
and Savoy, and down the valleys of the Rhone and Saone,
establishing in time an important kingdom, to which they gave
their name.
No help from Ravenna or Rome came to the perishing provincials
of Gaul in the extremity of their distress; but a pretender
arose in Britain, who assumed the imperial title and promised
deliverance. He crossed over to Gaul in 407 and was welcomed
with eagerness, both there and in Spain, to which he advanced.
He gained some success, partly by enlisting and partly by
resisting the invaders; but his career was brief. Other
pretenders appeared in various provinces, of the West; but the
anarchy of the time was too great for any authority,
legitimate or revolutionary, to establish itself.
The Visigoths in Gaul.
And, now, into the tempting country of the afflicted Gauls,
already crowded with rapacious freebooters, the Visigoths made
their way. Their new king, Ataulph, or Adolphus, who succeeded
Alaric, passed into Gaul, but not commissioned, as sometimes
stated, to restore the imperial sovereignty there. He moved
with his nation, as Alaric had moved, and Italy, by his
departure, was relieved; but Narbonne, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and
the Aquitainian country at large, was soon subject to his
command (A. D. 412-419). He passed the Pyrenees and entered
Spain, where an assassin took his life. His successor, Wallia,
drove the Sueves into the mountains and the Vandals into the
South; but did not take possession of the country until a
later time. The Visigoths, returning to Aquitaine, found
there, at last, the kingdom which Alaric set out from the
Danube to seek, and they were established in it with the Roman
Emperor's consent. It was known as the kingdom of Gothia, or
Septimania, but is more commonly called, from its capital, the
kingdom of Toulouse.
The Eastern Empire.
Affairs in the Eastern Empire had never arrived at so
desperate a state as in the West. With the departure of
Alaric, it had been relieved from its most dangerous immediate
foe. There had been tumults, disorders, assassinations, court
conspiracies, fierce religious strifes, and every evidence of
a government with no settled authority and no title to
respect; but yet the Empire stood and was not yet seriously
shaken. In 408 Arcadius died. His death was no loss, though he
left an infant son to take his place; for he also left a
daughter, Pulcheria, who proved to be a woman of rare virtue
and talents, and who reigned in her brother's name.
Aetius and the Huns.
The imbecile Honorius, with whose name the failing sovereignty
of Rome had been so disastrously linked for eight and twenty
rears, died in 423. An infant nephew was his heir, and
Placidia, the mother, ruled at Ravenna for a fourth of a
century, in the name of her child. Her reign was far stronger
than her wretched brother's had been, because she gave loyal
support to a valiant and able man, who stood at her side.
Aetius, her minister, did all, perhaps, that man could do to
hold some parts of Gaul, and to play barbarian against
barbarian--Hun against Goth and Frank--in skilful diplomacy
and courageous war. But nothing that he won was any lasting
gain. In his youth, Aetius had been a hostage in the camps of
both the Goths and the Huns, and had made acquaintances among
the chieftains of both which served his policy many times.
{1011}
He had employed the terrible Huns in the early years of his
ministry, and perhaps they had learned too much of the
weakness of the Roman State. These most fearful of all the
barbarian peoples then surging in Europe had been settled, for
some years, in the region since called Hungary, under Attila,
their most formidable king. He terrorized all the surrounding
lands and exercised a lordship from the Caspian to the Baltic
and the Rhine. The imperial court at the East stooped to pay
him annual tribute for abstaining from the invasion of its
domain. But in 450, when the regent Pulcheria became Empress
of the East, by her brother's death, and married a brave old
soldier, Marcian, in order to give him the governing power, a
new tone was heard in the voice from Constantinople which
answered Attila's demands.
Defeat of Attila.
The Hun then appears to have seen that the sinking Empire of
the West offered a more certain victim to his terrors and his
arms, and he turned them to that side. First forming an
alliance with the Vandals (who had crossed from Spain to
Africa in 429, had ravaged and subdued the Roman provinces,
and had established a kingdom on the Carthaginian ground, with
a naval power in the Carthaginian Sea), Attila led his huge
army into suffering Gaul. There were Ostrogoths, and warriors
from many German tribes, as well as Huns, in the terrific
host; for Attila's arm stretched far, and his subjects were
forced to follow when he led. His coming into Gaul affrighted
Romans and barbarians alike, and united them in a common
defense. Aetius formed an alliance with Theodoric, the
Visigothic king, and their forces were joined by Burgundians
and Franks. They met Attila near Chalons, and there, on a day
in June, A. D. 451, upon the Catalaunian fields, was fought a
battle that is always counted among the few which gave shape
to all subsequent history. The Huns were beaten back, and
Europe was saved from the hopeless night that must have
followed a Tartar conquest in that age.
Attila threatening Rome.
Attila retreated to Germany, foiled but not daunted. The next
year (A. D. 452) he invaded Italy and laid siege to Aquileia,
an important city which stood in his path. It resisted for
three months and was then utterly destroyed. The few
inhabitants who escaped, with fugitives from neighboring
ports, found a refuge in some islands of the Adriatic coast,
and formed there a sheltered settlement which grew into the
great city and republican state of Venice. Aetius made
strenuous exertions to gather forces for another battle with
the Huns; but the resources of the Empire had sunk very low.
While he labored to collect troops, the effect of a pacific
embassy was despairingly tried, and it went forth to the camp
of Attila, led by the venerable bishop of Rome--the first
powerful Pope--Leo I., called the Great. The impression which
Leo made on the Hunnish king, by his venerable presence, and
by the persuasiveness of his words, appears to have been
extraordinary. At all events, Attila consented to postpone his
designs on Rome; though he demanded and received promise of an
annual tribute. The next winter he died, and Rome was troubled
by him no more.
Rome Sacked by the Vandals.
But another enemy came, who rivalled Attila in ruthlessness,
and who gave a name to barbarity which it has kept to this
day. The Vandal king, Genseric, who now swept the
Mediterranean with a piratical fleet, made his appearance in
the Tiber (A. D. 455) and found the Roman capital powerless to
resist his attack. The venerable Pope Leo again interceded for
the city, and obtained a promise that captives should not be
tortured nor buildings burned,--which was the utmost stretch
of mercy that the Vandal could afford. Once more, then, was
Rome given up, for fourteen days and nights, to pillage and
the horrors of barbaric debauch. "Whatever had survived the
former sack,--whatever the luxury of the Roman Patriciate,
during the intervening forty-five years, had accumulated in
reparation of their loss,--the treasures of the imperial
palace, the gold and silver vessels employed in the churches,
the statues of pagan divinities and men of Roman renown, the
gilded roof of the temple of Capitolian Jove, the plate and
ornaments of private individuals, were leisurely conveyed to
the Vandal fleet and shipped off to Africa" (Sheppard).
The Vandal invasion had been preceded, in the same year, by a
palace revolution which brought the dynasty of Theodosius to
an end. Placidia was dead, and her unworthy son, Valentinian
III., provoked assassination by dishonoring the wife of a
wealthy senator, Maximus, who mounted to his place. Maximus
was slain by a mob at Rome, just before the Vandals entered
the city. The Empire was now without a head, and the throne
without an heir. In former times, the Senate or the army would
have filled the vacant imperial seat; now, it was a barbarian
monarch, Theodoric, the Visigothic king, who made choice of a
successor to the Cæsars. He named a Gallic noble, Avitus by
name, who had won his esteem, and the nomination was confirmed
by Marcian, Emperor of the East.
Ricimer and Majorian.
But the influence of Theodoric in Roman affairs was soon
rivalled by that of Count Ricimer, another Goth, or Sueve, who
held high command in the imperial army, and who resented the
elevation of Avitus. The latter was deposed, after reigning a
single year; and Majorian, a soldier of really noble and
heroic character, was promoted to the throne. He was too great
and too sincere a man to be Ricimer's tool, and the same hand
which raised him threw him down, after he had reigned four
years (A. D. 457-461). He was in the midst of a powerful
undertaking against the Vandals when he perished. Majorian was
the last Emperor in the Western line who deserves to be named.
The last Emperors in the West.
Ricimer ruled Italy, with the rigor of a despot, under the
modest title of Patrician, until 472. His death was soon
followed by the rise of another general of the barbarian
troops, Orestes, to like autocracy, and he, in turn, gave way
to a third, Odoacer, who slew him and took his place. The
creatures, half a dozen in number, who put on and put off the
purple robe, at the command of these adventurers, who played
with the majesty of Rome, need no further mention.
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The last of them was Romulus Augustulus, son of Orestes, who
escaped his father's fate by formally resigning the throne. He
was the last Roman Emperor in the West, until Charlemagne
revived the title, three centuries and a quarter later. "The
succession of the Western Emperors came to an end, and the way
in which it came to an end marks the way in which the names
and titles of Rome were kept on, while all power was passing
into the hands of the barbarians. The Roman Senate voted that
one Emperor was enough, and that the Eastern Emperor, Zeno,
should reign over the whole Empire. But at the same time Zeno
was made to entrust the government of Italy, with the title of
Patrician, to Odoacer. ... Thus the Roman Empire went on at
Constantinople, or New Rome, while Italy and the Old Rome
itself passed into the power of the Barbarians. Still the
Roman laws and names went on, and we may be sure that any man
in Italy would have been much surprised if he had been told
that the Roman Empire had come to an end" (Freeman).
Odoacer.
The government of Odoacer, who ruled with the authority of a
king, though pretending to kingship only in his own nation,
was firm and strong. Italy was better protected from its
lawless neighbors than it had been for nearly a century
before. But nothing could arrest the decay of its
population--the blight that had fallen upon its prosperity.
Nor could that turbulent age afford any term of peace that
would be long enough for even the beginning of the cure of
such maladies and such wounds as had brought Italy low. For
fourteen years Odoacer ruled; and then he was overthrown by a
new kingdom-seeking barbarian, who came, like Alaric, out of
the Gothic swarm.
Theodoric the Ostrogoth.
The Ostrogoths had now escaped, since Attila died, from the
yoke of the Huns, and were prepared, under an able and
ambitious young king, Theodoric, who had been reared as a
hostage at Constantinople, to imitate the career of their
cousins, the Visigoths. Having troubled the Eastern Court
until it stood in fear of him, Theodoric asked for a
commission to overthrow Odoacer, in Italy, and received it
from the Emperor's hand. Thus empowered by one still
recognized as lawful lord on both sides of the Adriatic,
Theodoric crossed the Julian Alps (A. D. 489) with the
families of his nation and their household goods. Three
battles made him master of the peninsula and decided the fate
of his rival. Odoacer held out in Ravenna for two years and a
half, and surrendered on a promise of equal sovereignty with
the Ostrogothic king. But Theodoric did not scruple to kill
him with his own sword, at the first opportunity which came.
In that act, the native savagery in him broke loose; but
through most of his life he kept his passions decently tamed,
and acted the barbarian less frequently than the civilized
statesman and king. He gave Italy peace, security, and
substantial justice for thirty years. With little war, he
extended his sovereignty over Illyrium, Pannonia, Noricum,
Rhætia and Provence, in south-eastern Gaul. If the extensive
kingdom which he formed--with more enlightenment than any
other among those who divided the heritage of Rome--could have
endured, the parts of Europe which it covered might have fared
better in after times than they did. "Italy might have been
spared six hundred years of gloom and degradation." But
powerful influences were against it from the first, and they
were influences which proceeded mischievously from the
Christian Church. Had the Goths been pagans, the Church might
have turned a kindly face to them, and wooed them to
conversion as she wooed the Franks. But they were Christians,
of a heretic stamp, and the orthodox Christianity of Rome held
them in deadly loathing. While still beyond the Danube, they had
received the faith from an Arian apostle, at the time of the
great conflict of Athanasius against Arius, and were stubborn
in the rejection of Trinitarian dogma. Hence the Church in the
West was never reconciled to the monarchy of Theodoric in
Italy, nor to that of the Visigoths at Toulouse; and its
hostility was the ultimate cause of the failure of both.
The Empire in the East.
To understand the events which immediately caused the fall of
the Ostrogothic power, we must turn back for a moment to the
Empire in the East. Marcian, whom Pulcheria, the wise daughter
of Arcadius, made Emperor by marrying him, died in 457, and
Aspar, the barbarian who commanded the mercenaries, selected
his successor. He chose his own steward, one Leo, who proved
to have more independence than his patron expected, and who
succeeded in destroying the latter. After Leo I. came (474)
his infant grandson; Leo II., whose father, an Isaurian
chieftain, took his place when he died, within the year. The
Isaurian assumed a Greek name, Zeno, and occupied the
throne--with one interval of flight and exile for twenty
months--during seven years. When he died, his widow gave her
hand in marriage to an excellent officer of the palace,
Anastasius by name, and he was sovereign of the Empire for
twenty-seven years.
The reign of Justinian.
After Anastasius, came Justin I., born a peasant in Dacia
(modern Roumania), but advanced as a soldier to the command of
the imperial guards, and thence to the throne. He had already
adopted and educated his nephew, Justinian, and before dying,
in 527, he invested him with sovereignty as a colleague. The
reign of Justinian was the most remarkable in the whole
history of the Empire in the East. Without breadth of
understanding, or notable talents of any kind: without
courage; without the least nobility of character; without even
the virtue of fidelity to his ministers and friends,--this
remarkable monarch contrived to be splendidly served by an
extraordinary generation of great soldiers, great jurists,
great statesmen, who gave a brilliance to his reign that was
never rivalled while the Byzantine seat of Empire stood. It
owes, in modern esteem, its greatest fame to the noble
collection of Roman laws which was made, in the Pandects and
the Code, under the direction of the wise and learned
Tribonian. Transiently it was glorified by conquests that bore
a likeness to the march of the resistless legions of ancient
Rome; and the laurelled names of Belisarius and Narses claimed
a place on the columns of victory with the names of Cæsar and
Pompeius.
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But the splendors of the reign were much more than offset by
miseries and calamities of the darkest kind. "The reign of
Justinian, from its length, its glory and its disasters, may
be compared to the reign of Louis XIV., which exceeded it in
length, and equalled it in glory and disaster. ... He extended
the limits of his empire; but he was unable to defend the
territory he had received from his predecessors. Everyone of
the thirty-eight years of his reign was marked by an invasion
of the barbarians; and it has been said that, reckoning those
who fell by the sword, who perished from want, or were led
into captivity, each invasion cost 200,000 subjects to the
empire. Calamities which human prudence is unable to resist
seemed to combine against the Romans, as if to compel them to
expiate their ancient glory. ... So that the very period which
gave birth to so many monuments of greatness, may be looked
back upon with horror, as that of the widest desolation and
the most terrific mortality" (Sismondi). The first and longest
of the wars of Justinian was the Persian war, which he inherited
from his predecessors, and which scarcely ceased while the
Persian monarchy endured. It was in these Asiatic campaigns
that Belisarius began his career. But his first great
achievement was the overthrow and extinction of the Vandal
power in Africa, and the restoration of Roman authority (the
empire of the new Rome) in the old Carthaginian province (A.
D. 533-534). He accomplished this with a force of but 10,000
foot and 5,000 horse, and was hastily recalled by his jealous
lord on the instant of his success.
Conquests of Belisarius in Italy.
But the ambition of Justinian was whetted by this marvellous
conquest, and he promptly projected an expedition against the
kingdom of the Eastern Goths. The death of Theodoric had
occurred in 526. His successor was a child of ten years, his
grandson, whose mother exercised the regency. Amalsuentha, the
queen-regent, was a woman of highly cultivated mind, and she
offended her subjects by too marked a Romanization of her
ideas. Her son died in his eighteenth year, and she associated
with herself on the throne the next heir to it, a worthless
nephew of Theodoric, who was able, in a few weeks, to strip
all her power from her and consign her to a distant prison,
where she was soon put to death (A. D. 535). She had
previously opened negotiations with Justinian for the
restoration of his supremacy in Italy, and the ambitious
Emperor assumed with eagerness a right to avenge her
deposition and death. The fate of Amalsuentha was his excuse,
the discontent of Roman orthodoxy with the rule of the heretic
Goths was his encouragement, to send an army into Italy with
Belisarius at its head. First taking possession of Sicily,
Belisarius landed in Italy in 536, took Naples and advanced on
Rome. An able soldier, Vitiges, had been raised to the Gothic
throne, and he evacuated Rome in December; but he returned the
following March and laid siege to the ancient capital, which
Belisarius had occupied with a moderate force. It was defended
against him for an entire year, and the strength of the Gothic
nation was consumed on the outer side of the walls, while the
inhabitants within were wasted by famine and disease. The
Goths invoked the aid of the Franks in Gaul, and those fierce
warriors, crossing the Alps (A. D. 538), assailed both Goths
and Greeks, with indiscriminate hostility, destroyed Milan and
Genoa, and mostly perished of hunger themselves before they
retreated from the wasted Cisalpine country.
Released from Rome, Belisarius advanced in his turn against
Ravenna, and took the Gothic capital, making Vitiges a
prisoner (A. D. 539). His reward for these successes was a
recall from command. The jealous Emperor could not afford his
generals too much glory at a single winning. As a consequence
of his folly, the Goths, under a new king, Totila, were
allowed to recover so much ground in the next four years that,
when, in 544, Belisarius was sent back, almost without an
army, the work of conquest had to be done anew. Rome was still
being held against Totila, who besieged it, and the great
general went by sea to its relief. He forced the passage of
the Tiber, but failed through the misconduct of the commander
in the city to accomplish an entry, and once more the great
capital was entered and yielded to angry Goths (A. D. 546).
They spared the lives of the few people they found, and the
chastity of the women; but they plundered without restraint.
Rome a Solitude for Forty Days.
Totila commanded the total destruction of the city; but his
ruthless hand was stayed by the remonstrances of Belisarius.
After demolishing a third of the walls, he withdrew towards
the South, dragging the few inhabitants with him, and, during
forty days, Rome is said to have been an unpeopled solitude.
The scene which this offers to the imagination comes near to
being the most impressive in history. At the end of that
period it was entered by Belisarius, who hastily repaired the
walls, collected his forces, and was prepared to defend
himself when Totila came back by rapid marches from Apulia.
The Goths made three assaults and were bloodily repulsed.
End of the Ostrogothic Kingdom.
But again Belisarius was recalled by a mean and jealous court,
and again the Gothic cause was reanimated and restored. Rome
was taken again from its feeble garrison (A. D. 549), and this
time it was treated with respect. Most of Italy and Sicily,
with Corsica and Sardinia, were subdued by Totila's arms, and
that king, now successful, appealed to Justinian for peace. It
was refused, and in 552 a vigorous prosecution of the war
resumed, under a new commander--the remarkable eunuch Narses,
who proved himself to be one of the great masters of war.
Totila was defeated and slain in the first battle of the
campaign; Rome was again beleaguered and taken; and the last
blow needed to extinguish the Gothic kingdom in Italy was
given the following year (A. D. 553), when Totila's successor,
Teia, ended his life on another disastrous field of battle.
The Exarchate.
Italy was restored for the moment to the Empire, and was
placed under the government of an imperial viceroy, called
Exarch, which high office the valiant Narses was the first to
fill. His successors, known in history as the Exarchs of
Ravenna, resided in that capital for a long period, while the
arm of their authority was steadily shortened by the conquests
of new invaders, whose story is yet to be told.
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Events in the West.
Leaving Italy and Rome, once more in the imperial fold, but
mere provinces now of a distant and alienated sovereignty, it
is necessary to turn back to the West, and glance over the
regions in which, when we looked at them last, the
institutions of Roman government and society were being
dissolved and broken up by flood upon flood of barbaric
invasion from the Teutonic North.
Teutonic Conquest of Britain.
If we begin at the farthest West which the Roman dominion
reached, we shall find that the island of Britain was
abandoned, practically, by the imperial government earlier
than the year 410, when Rome was sinking under the blows of
Alaric. From that time the inhabitants were left to their own
government and their own defense. To the inroads of the savage
Caledonian Picts and Irish Scots, there were added, now, the
coast ravages of a swarm of ruthless pirates, which the tribes
of northwestern Europe had begun to launch upon the German or
North Sea. The most cruel and terrible of these ocean
freebooters were the Saxons, of the Elbe, and they gave their
name for a time to the whole. Their destructive raids upon the
coasts of Britain and Gaul had commenced more than a century
before the Romans withdrew their legions, and that part of the
British coast most exposed to their ravages was known as the
Saxon Shore. For about thirty years after the Roman and
Romanized inhabitants of Britain had been left to defend
themselves, they held their ground with good courage, as
appears; but the incessant attacks of the Picts wore out, at
last, their confidence in themselves, and they were fatally
led to seek help from their other enemies, who scourged them
from the sea. Their invitation was given, not to the Saxons,
but to a band of Jutes--warriors from that Danish peninsula in
which they have left their name. The Jutes landed at
Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet (A. D. 449 or 450), with two
chiefs, Hengest and Horsa, at their head. They came as allies,
and fought by the side of the Britons against the Picts with
excellent success. Then came quarrels, and presently, in 455,
the arms of Hengest and Horsa were turned against their
employers. Ten years later the Jutes had secure possession of
the part of Britain now called Kent, and Hengest was their
king, Horsa having fallen in the war. This was the beginning
of the transformation of Roman-Celtic Britain into the
Teutonic England of later history. The success of the Jutes
drew their cousins and piratical comrades, the Saxons and the
Angles, to seek kingdoms in the same rich island. The Saxons
came first, landing near Selsey, in 477, and taking gradual
possession of a district which became known as the kingdom of
the South Saxons, or Sussex. The next invasion was by Saxons
under Cerdic, and Jutes, who joined to form the kingdom of the
West Saxons, or Wessex, covering about the territory of modern
Hampshire. So much of their conquest was complete by the year
519. At about the same time, other colonies were established
and gave their names, as East Saxons and Middle Saxons, to the
Essex and Middlesex of modern English geography. A third tribe
from the German shore, the Angles, now came (A. D. 547) to
take their part in the conquest of the island, and these laid
their hands upon kingdoms in the East and North of England, so
much larger than the modest Jute and Saxon realms in the south
that their name fixed itself, at last, upon the whole country,
when it lost the name of Britain. Northumberland, which
stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, Mercia, which
covered at one time the whole middle region of England, and
East Anglia, which became divided into the two English
counties of Norfolk (North-folk) and Suffolk (South-folk),
were the three great kingdoms of the Angles.
The Making of England.
Before the end of the sixth century, almost the whole of
modern England, and part of Scotland, on its eastern side, as
far to the north as Edinburgh, was in possession of the German
invaders. They had not merely subdued the former
possessors--Britons and Roman provincials (if Romans remained
in the island after their domination ceased),--but, in the
judgment of the best investigators of the subject, they had
practically swept them from all the parts of the island in
which their own settlements were established. That is to say,
the prior population was either exterminated by the merciless
swords of these Saxon and English pagans, or was driven into
the mountains of Wales, into the peninsula of Cornwall and
Devon, or into the Strathclyde corner of Scottish
territory,--in all which regions the ancient British race has
maintained itself to this day. Scarcely a vestige of its
existence remains elsewhere in England,--neither in language,
nor in local names, nor in institutions, nor in survivals of
any other kind; which shows that the inhabitants were effaced
by the conquest, as the inhabitants of Gaul, of Spain, and of
Italy, for example, were not.
The new society and the new states which now arose on the soil
of Britain, and began to shape themselves into the England of
the future, were as purely Germanic as if they had grown up in
the Jutish peninsula or on the Elbe. The institutions,
political and social, of the immigrant nations, had been
modified by changed circumstances, but they had incorporated
almost nothing from the institutions which they found existing
in their new home and which they supplanted. Broadly speaking,
nothing Roman and nothing Celtic entered into them. They were
constructed on German lines throughout.
The barbarism of the Saxons and their kin when they entered
Britain was far more unmitigated than that of most of the
Teutonic tribes which overwhelmed the continental provinces of
Rome had been. The Goths had been influenced to some extent
and for quite a period by Roman civilization, and had
nominally accepted Christian precepts and beliefs, before they
took arms against the Empire. The Franks had been allies of
Rome and in contact with the refinements of Roman Gaul, for a
century or two before they became masters in that province.
Most of the other nations which transplanted themselves in the
fifth century from beyond the Rhine to new homes in the
provinces of Rome, had been living for generations on the
borders of the Empire, or near; had acquired some
acquaintance, at least, with the civilization which they did
not share, and conceded to it a certain respect; while some of
them had borne arms for the Emperor and taken his pay. But the
Saxons, Angles and Jutes had thus far been remote from every
influence or experience of the kind.
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They knew the Romans only as rich strangers to be plundered
and foes to be fought. Christianity represented nothing to
them but an insult to their gods. There seems to be little
doubt, therefore, that the civilizing work which Rome had done
in western Europe was obliterated nowhere else so ruthlessly
and so wantonly as in Britain. Christianity, still sheltered
and strong in Ireland, was wholly extinguished in England for
a century and more, until the memorable mission of Augustine,
sent by Pope Gregory the Great (A. D. 597), began the
conversion of the savage islanders.
The Kingdom of the Franks.
In Gaul, meanwhile, and in southwestern Germany, the Franks
had become the dominant power. They had moved tardily to the
conquest, but when they moved it was with rapid strides. While
they dwelt along the Lower Rhine, they were in two divisions:
the Salian Franks, who occupied, first, the country near the
mouth of the river, and then spread southwards, to the Somme,
or beyond; and the Ripuarians, who lived farther up the Rhine,
in the neighborhood of Cologne, advancing thence to the
Moselle. In the later part of the fifth century a Roman
Patrician, Syagrius, still exercised some kind of authority in
northern Gaul; but in 486 he was defeated and overthrown by
Chlodvig, or Clovis, the chief of the Salian Franks. Ten years
later, Clovis, leading both the Salian and the Ripuarian
Franks in an attack upon the German Alemanni, beyond the Upper
Rhine, subdued that people completely, and took their country.
Their name survived, and adhered to the whole people of
Germany, whom the Franks and their successors the French have
called Allemands to this day. After his conquest of the
Alemanni, Clovis, who had married a Christian wife, accepted
her faith and was baptized, with three thousand of his chief
men. The professed conversion was as fortunate politically for
him as it had been for Constantine. He adopted the
Christianity which was that of the Roman Church--the Catholic
Christianity of the Athanasian creed--and he stood forth at
once as the champion of orthodoxy against the heretic Goths
and Burgundians, whose religion had been poisoned by the
condemned doctrines of Arius. The blessings, and the more
substantial endeavors, of the Roman Church were, therefore, on
his side, when he attacked the Burgundians and made them
tributary, and when, a few years later, he expelled the Goths
from Aquitaine and drove them into Spain (A.D. 500-508).
Beginning, apparently, as one of several chiefs among the
Salian Franks, he ended his career (510) as sole king of the
whole Frank nation, and master of all Gaul except a Gothic
corner of Provence, with a considerable dominion beyond the
Rhine.
The Merovingian Kings.
But Clovis left his realm to four sons, who divided it into as
many kingdoms, with capitals at Metz, Orleans, Paris, and
Soissons. There was strife and war between them, until one of
the brothers, Lothaire, united again the whole kingdom, which,
meantime, had been enlarged by the conquest of Thuringia and
Provence, and by the extinction of the tributary Burgundian
kings. When he died, his sons rent the kingdom again, and
warred with one another, and once more it was brought
together. Says Hallam: "It is a weary and unprofitable task to
follow these changes in detail, through scenes of tumult and
bloodshed, in which the eye meets with no sunshine, nor can
rest upon any interesting spot. It would be difficult, as
Gibbon has justly observed, to find anywhere more vice or less
virtue." But, as Dean Church has remarked, the Franks were
maintained in their ascendancy by the favor of the clergy and
the circumstances of their position, despite their divisions
and the worthless and detestable character of their kings,
after Clovis. "They occupied a land of great natural wealth,
and great geographical advantages, which had been prepared for
them by Latin culture; they inherited great cities which they
had not built, and fields and vineyards which they had not
planted; and they had the wisdom, not to destroy, but to use
their conquest. They were able with singular ease and
confidence to employ and trust the services, civil and
military, of the Latin population. ... The bond between the
Franks and the native races was the clergy. ... The forces of
the whole nation were at the disposal of the ruling race; and
under Frank chiefs, the Latins and Gauls learned once more to
be warriors." This no doubt suggests a quite true explanation
of the success of the Franks; but too much may easily be
inferred from it. It will not be safe to conclude that the
Franks were protectors of civilization in Gaul, and did not
lay destroying hands upon it. We shall presently see that it
sank to a very darkened state under their rule, though the
eclipse may have been less complete than in some other of the
barbarized provinces of Rome.
Rise of the Carolingians.
The division in the Frankish dominion which finally marked
itself deeply and became permanent was that which separated
the East Kingdom, or Austrasia, from the West Kingdom, or
Neustria. In Austrasia, the Germanic element prevailed; in
Neustria, the Roman and Gallic survivals entered most largely
into the new society. Austrasia widened into the Germany of
later history; Neustria into France. In both these kingdoms,
the Frankish kings sank lower and lower in character, until
their name (of Merwings or Merovingians, from an ancestor of
Clovis) became a byword for sloth and worthlessness. In each
kingdom there arose, beside the nominal monarch, a strong
minister, called the Major Domus, or Mayor of the Palace, who
exercised the real power and governed in the king's name.
During the last half of the seventh century, the Austrasian
Mayor, Pippin of Heristal, and the Neustrian Mayor, Ebroin,
converted the old antagonism of the two kingdoms into a
personal rivalry and struggle for supremacy. Ebroin was
murdered, and Pippin was the final victor, in a decisive
battle at Testry (687), which made him virtual master of the
whole Frank realm, although the idle Merwings still sat on
their thrones. Pippin's son, Charles Martel, strengthened and
extended the domination which his father had acquired. He
drove back the Saxons and subdued the Frisians in the North,
and, in the great and famous battle of Tours (732) he

repelled, once for all, the attempt of the Arab and Moorish
followers of Mahomet, already lodged in Spain, to push their
conquests beyond the Pyrenees.
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The next of the family, Pippin the Short, son of Charles
Martel, put an end to the pretence of governing in the name of
a puppet-king. The last of the Merovingians was quietly
deposed--lacking even importance enough to be put to death--
and Pippin received the crown at the hands of Pope Zachary (A.
D. 751). He died in 768, and the reign of his son, who
succeeded him--the Great Charles--the Charlemagne of mediæval
history--is the introduction to so new an era, and so changed
an order of circumstances in the European world, that it will
be best to finish with all that lies behind it in our hasty
survey before we take it up.
The Conquests of Islam.
Outside of Europe, a new and strange power had now risen, and
had spread its forces with extraordinary rapidity around the
southern and eastern circuit of the Mediterranean, until it
troubled both extremities of the northern shore. This was the
power of Islam--the proselyting, war-waging religion of
Mahomet, the Arabian prophet. At the death of Mahomet, in 632,
he was lord of Arabia, and his armies had just crossed the
border, to attack the Syrian possessions of the Eastern Roman
Empire. In seven years from that time, the whole of Palestine
and Syria had been overrun, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, and
all the strong cities taken, and Roman authority expelled. In
two years more, they had dealt the last blow to the Sassanian
monarchy in Persia and shattered it forever. At the same time
they were besieging Alexandria and adding Egypt to their
conquests. In 668, only thirty-six years after the death of
the Prophet, they were at the gates of Constantinople, making
the first of their many attempts to gain possession of the New
Rome. In 698 they had taken Carthage, had occupied all North
Africa to the Atlantic coast, had converted the Mauretanians,
or Moors, and absorbed them into their body politic as well as
into their communion. In 711 the commingled Arabs and Moors
crossed the Straits and entered Spain, and the overthrow of
the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths was practically
accomplished in a single battle that same year. Within two
years more, the Moors (as they came to be most commonly
called) were in possession of the whole southern, central, and
eastern parts of the Spanish peninsula, treating the
inhabitants who had not fled with a more generous toleration
than differing Christians were wont to offer to one another.
The Spaniards (a mixed population of Roman, Suevic, Gothic,
and aboriginal descent) who did, not submit, took refuge in
the mountainous region of the Asturias and Galicia, where they
maintained their independence, and, in due time, became
aggressive, until, after eight centuries, they recovered their
whole land.
The Eastern Empire.
At the East, as we have seen, the struggle of the Empire with
the Arabs began at the first moment of their career of foreign
conquest. They came upon it when it was weak from many wounds,
and exhausted by conflict with many foes. Before the death of
Justinian (565), the transient glories of his reign had been
waning fast. His immediate successor saw the work of
Belisarius and Narses undone, for the most part, and the
Italian peninsula overrun by a new horde of barbarians, more
rapacious and more savage than the Goths. At the same time,
the Persian war broke out again, and drained the imperial
resources to pay for victories that had no fruit. Two better
and stronger emperors--Tiberius and Maurice--who came after
him, only made an honorable struggle, without leaving the
Empire in a better state. Then a brutal creature--Phocas--held
the throne for eight years (602-610) and sunk it very low by his
crimes. The hero, Heraclius, who was now raised to power, came
too late. Assailed suddenly, at the very beginning of his
reign, by a fierce Persian onset, he was powerless to resist.
Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were successively ravaged and
conquered by the Persian arms. They came even to the
Bosphorus, and for ten years they held its eastern shore and
maintained a camp within sight of Constantinople itself; while
the wild Tartar nation of the Avars raged, at the same time,
through the northern and western provinces of the Empire, and
threatened the capital on its landward sides. The Roman Empire
was reduced, for a time, to "the walls of Constantinople, with
the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime
cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast." But in
622 Heraclius turned the tide of disaster and rolled it back
upon his enemies. Despite an alliance of the Persians with the
Avars, and their combined assault upon Constantinople in 626,
he repelled the latter, and wrested from the former, in a
series of remarkable campaigns, all the territory they had
seized. He had but just accomplished this great deliverance of
his dominions, when the Arabs came upon him, as stated above.
There was no strength left in the Empire to resist the
terrible prowess of these warriors of the desert. They
extinguished its authority in Syria and Egypt, as we have
seen, in the first years of their career; but then turned
their arms to the East and the West, and were slow in
disputing Asia Minor with its Christian lords. "From the time
of Heraclius the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened:
the line of empire which had been defined by the laws of
Justinian and the arms of Belisarius recedes on all sides from
our view" (Gibbon). There was neither vigor nor virtue in the
descendants of Heraclius; and when the last of them was
destroyed by a popular rising against his vicious tyranny
(711), revolution followed revolution so quickly that three
reigns were begun and ended in six years.
The so-called Byzantine Empire.
Then came to the throne a man of strong character, who
redeemed it at least from contempt; who introduced a dynasty
which endured for a century, and whose reign is the beginning
of a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire, so marked
that the Empire has taken from that time, in the common usage,
a changed name, and is known thenceforth as the Byzantine,
rather than the Eastern or the Greek. This was Leo the
Isaurian, who saved Constantinople from a second desperate
Moslem siege; who checked for a considerable period the
Mahometan advance in the East; who reorganized the imperial
administration on lasting lines; and whose suppression of
image-worship in the Christian churches of his empire led to a
rupture with the Roman Church in the West,--to the breaking of
all relations of dependence in Rome and Italy upon the Empire
in the East, and to the creating of a new imperial sovereignty
in Western Europe which claimed succession to that of Rome.
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Lombard Conquest of Italy.
On the conquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, for
Justinian, the eunuch Narses, as related before, was made
governor, residing at Ravenna, and bearing the title of
Exarch. In a few years he was displaced, through the influence
of a palace intrigue at Constantinople. To be revenged, it is
said that he persuaded the Lombards, a German tribe lately
become threatening on the Upper Danube, to enter Italy. They
came, under their leader Alboin, and almost the whole northern
and middle parts of the peninsula submitted to them with no
resistance. Pavia stood a siege for three years before it
surrendered to become the Lombard capital; Venice received an
added population of fugitives, and was safe in her
lagoons--like Ravenna, where the new Exarch watched the march
of Lombard conquest, and scarcely opposed it. Rome was
preserved, with part of southern Italy and with Sicily; but no
more than a shadow of the sovereignty of the Empire now
stretched westward beyond the Adriatic.
Temporal Power of the Popes.
The city of Rome, and the territory surrounding it, still
owned a nominal allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople;
but their immediate and real ruler was the Bishop of Rome, who
had already acquired, in a special way, the fatherly name of
"Papa" or Pope. Many circumstances had combined to place both
spiritual and temporal power in the hands of these Christian
pontiffs of Rome. They may have been originally, in the
constitution of the Church, on an equal footing of
ecclesiastical authority with the four other chiefs of the
hierarchy--the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch and Jerusalem; but the great name of Rome gave them
prestige and weight of superior influence to begin with. Then,
they stood, geographically and sympathetically, in nearest
relations with that massive Latin side of Christendom, in
western Europe, which was never much disturbed by the raging
dogmatic controversies that tore and divided the Church on its
Eastern, Greek side. It was inevitable that the Western Church
should yield homage to one head--to one bishopric above all
other bishoprics; and it was more inevitable that the See of
Rome should be that one. So the spiritual supremacy to which
the Popes arrived is easily enough explained. The temporal
authority which they acquired is accounted for as obviously.
Even before the interruption of the line of emperors in the
West, the removal of the imperial residence for long periods
from Rome, to Constantinople, to Milan, to Ravenna, left the
Pope the most impressive and influential personage in the
ancient capital. Political functions were forced on him,
whether he desired to exercise them or not. It was Pope Leo
who headed the embassy to Attila, and saved the city from the
Huns. It was the same Pope who pleaded for it with the Vandal
king, Genseric. And still more and more, after the imperial
voice which uttered occasional commands to his Roman subjects
was heard from a distant palace in Constantinople, and in
accents that had become wholly Greek, the chair of St. Peter
grew throne-like,--the respect paid to the Pope in civil
matters took on the spirit of obedience, and his aspect before
the people became that of a temporal prince.
This process of the political elevation of the Papacy was
completed by the Lombard conquest of Italy. The Lombard kings
were bent upon the acquisition of Rome; the Popes were
resolute and successful in holding it against them. At last
the Papacy made its memorable and momentous alliance with the
Carolingian chiefs of the Franks. It assumed the tremendous
super-imperial right and power to dispose of crowns, by taking
that of the kingdom of the Franks from Childeric and giving it
to Pippin (751); and this was the first assumption of that
right by the chief priest of Western Christendom. In return,
Pippin led an army twice to Italy (754-755), humbled the
Lombards, took from them the exarchate of Ravenna and the
Pentapolis (a district east of the Appenines, between Ancona
and Ferrara), and transferred this whole territory as a
conqueror's "donation" to the Apostolic See. The temporal
sovereignty of the Popes now rested on a base as political and
as substantial as that of the most worldly and vulgar
potentates around them.
Charlemagne's restored Roman Empire.
Pippin's greater son, Charlemagne, renewed the alliance of his
house with the Papacy, and strengthened it by completing the
conquest of the Lombards, extinguishing their kingdom (774),
and confirming his father's donation of the States of the
Church. Charlemagne was now supreme in Italy, and the Pope
became the representative of his sovereignty at Rome,--a
position which lastingly enhanced the political importance of
the Roman See in the peninsula. But while Pope and King stood
related, in one view, as agent and principal, or subject and
sovereign, another very different relationship slowly shaped
itself in the thoughts of one, if not of both. The Western
Church had broken entirely with the Eastern, on the question
of image-worship; the titular sovereignty of the Eastern
Emperor in the ancient Roman capital was a worn-out fiction;
the reign of a female usurper, Irene, at Constantinople
afforded a good occasion for renouncing and discarding it. But
a Roman Emperor there must be, somewhere, for lesser princes
and sovereigns to do homage to; the political habit and
feeling of the European world, shaped and fixed by the long
domination of Rome, still called for it. "Nor could the
spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal;
without the Roman Empire there could not be," according to the
feeling of the ninth century, "a Roman, nor by necessary
consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church." For "men could
not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought:
Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian
state: they were but two names for one and the same thing"
(Bryce). Therefore the head of the Church, boldly enlarging
the assumption of his predecessor who bestowed the crown of
the Merovingians upon Pippin, now took it upon himself to set
the diadem of the Cæsars on the head of Charlemagne. On the
Christmas Day, in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter,
at Rome, the solemn act of coronation was performed by Pope
Leo III.; the Roman Empire lived again, in the estimation of
that age, and Charles the Great reopened the interrupted line
of successors to Augustus.
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Before this imperial coronation of Charlemagne occurred, he
had already made his dominion imperial in extent, by the
magnitude of his conquests. North, south, east, and west, his
armies had been everywhere victorious. In eighteen campaigns
against the fierce and troublesome Saxons, he subdued those
stubborn pagans and forced them to submit to a Christian
baptism--with how much of immediate religious effect may be
easily surmised. But by opening a way for the more Christ-like
missionaries of the cross, who followed him, this missionary
of the battle-ax did, no doubt, a very real apostolic work. He
checked the ravages of the piratical Danes. He crushed the
Avars and took their country, which comprised parts of the
Austria and Hungary of the present day. He occupied Bavaria,
on the one hand, and Brittany on the other. He crossed the
Pyrenees to measure swords with the Saracens, and drove them
from the north of Spain, as far as the Ebro. His lordship in
Italy has been noticed already. He was unquestionably one of
the greatest monarchs of any age, and deserves the title
Magnus, affixed to his name, if that title ever has been
deserved by the kings who were flattered with it. There was
much more in his character than the mere aggressive energy
which subjugated so wide a realm. He was a man of
enlightenment far beyond his time; a man who strove after
order, in that disorderly age, and who felt oppressed by the
ignorance into which the world had sunk. He was a seeker after
learning, and the friend and patron of all in his day who
groped in the darkness and felt their way towards the light.
He organized his Empire with a sense of political system which
was new among the Teutonic masters of Western Europe (except
as shown by Theodoric in Italy); but there were not years
enough in his own life for the organism to mature, and his
sons brought back chaos again.
Appearance of the Northmen.
Before Charlemagne died (814) he saw the western coasts and
river valleys of his Empire harried by a fresh outpouring of
sea-rovers from the far North, and it is said that he had sad
forebodings of the affliction they would become to his people
thereafter. These new pirates of the North Sea, who took up,
after several centuries, the abandoned trade of their kinsmen,
the Saxons (now retired from their wild courses and
respectably settled on one side of the water, while subdued
and kept in order on the other), were of the bold and rugged
Scandinavian race, which inhabited the countries since known
as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are more or less confused
under the general name of Northmen, or Norsemen--men of the
North; but that term appears to have been applied more
especially to the freebooters from the Norwegian coast, as
distinguished from the "Danes" of the lesser peninsula. It is
convenient, in so general a sketch as this, to ignore the
distinction, and to speak of the Northmen as inclusive, for
that age, of the whole Scandinavian race.
Their visitations began to terrify the coasts of England,
France and Germany, and the lower valleys of the rivers which
they found it possible to ascend, some time in the later half
of the eighth century. It is probable that their appearance on
the sea at this time, and not before, was due to a revolution
which united Norway under a single king and a stronger
government, and which, by suppressing independence and
disorder among the petty chiefs, drove many of them to their
ships and sent them abroad, to lead a life of lawlessness more
agreeable to their tastes. It is also probable that the
northern countries had become populated beyond their
resources, as seemed to have happened before, when the Goths
swarmed out, and that the outlet by sea was necessarily and
deliberately opened. Whatever the cause, these Norse
adventurers, in fleets of long boats, issued with some
suddenness from their "vics," or fiords (whence the name
"viking"), and began an extraordinary career. For more than
half a century their raids had no object but plunder, and what
they took they carried home to enjoy. First to the Frisian
coast, then to the Rhine--the Seine--the Loire,--they came
again and again to pillage and destroy; crossing at the same
time to the shores of their nearest kinsmen--but heeding no
kinship in their savage and relentless forays along the
English coasts--and around to Ireland and the Scottish
islands, where their earliest lodgments were made.
The Danes in England.
About the middle of the ninth century they began to seize
tracts of land in England and to settle themselves there in
permanent homes. The Angles in the northern and eastern parts
and the Saxons in the southern part of England had weakened
themselves and one another by rivalry and war between their
divided kingdoms. There had been for three centuries an
unceasing struggle among them for supremacy. At the time of
the coming of the Danes (who were prominent in the English
invasion and gave their name to it), the West Saxon kings had
won a decided ascendancy. The Danes, by degrees, stripped them
of what they had gained. Northumberland, Mercia and East
Anglia were occupied in succession, and Wessex itself was
attacked. King Alfred, the great and admirable hero of early
English history, who came to the throne in 871, spent the
first eight years of his reign in a deadly struggle with the
invaders. He was obliged in the end to concede to them the
whole northeastern part of England, from the Thames to the
Tyne, which was known thereafter as "the Danelaw"; but they
became his vassals, and submitted to Christian baptism. A
century later, the Norse rovers resumed their attacks upon
England, and a cowardly English king, distrusting the now
settled and peaceful Danes, ordered an extensive massacre of
them (1002). The rage which this provoked in Denmark led to a
great invasion of the country. England was completely
conquered, and remained subject to the Danish kings until
1042, when its throne was recovered for a brief space of time
by the English line.
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The Normans in Normandy.
Meanwhile the Northmen had gained a much firmer and more
important footing in the territory of the Western
Franks--which had not yet acquired the name of France. The
Seine and its valley attracted them again and again, and after
repeated expeditions up the river, even to the city of Paris,
which they besieged several times, one of their chiefs, Rolf
or Rollo, got possession of Rouen and began a permanent
settlement in the country. The Frank King, Charles the Simple,
now made terms with Rollo and granted him a district at the
mouth of the Seine, (912), the latter acknowledging the
suzerainty or feudal superiority of Charles, and accepting at
the same time the doubly new character of a baptised Christian
and a Frankish Duke. The Northmen on the Seine were known
thenceforth as Normans, their dukedom as Normandy, and they
played a great part in European history during the next two
centuries.
The Northmen in the West.
The northern sea-rovers who had settled neither in Ireland,
England, nor Frankland, went farther afield into the West and
North and had wonderful adventures there. They took possession
of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and other islands
in those seas, including Man, and founded a powerful
island-kingdom, which they held for a long period. Thence they
passed on to Faroë and Iceland, and in Iceland, where they
lived peaceful and quiet lives of necessity, they founded an
interesting republic, and developed a very remarkable
civilization, adorned by a literature which the world is
learning more and more to admire. From Iceland, it was a
natural step to the discovery of Greenland, and from
Greenland, there is now little doubt that they sailed
southwards and saw and touched the continent of America, five
centuries before Columbus made his voyage.
The Northmen in the East.
While the Northmen of the ninth and tenth centuries were
exciting and disturbing all Western Europe by their naval
exploits, other adventurers from the Swedish side of the
Scandinavian country were sallying eastwards under different
names. Both as warriors and as merchants, they made their way
from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and bands
of them entered the service of the Eastern Emperor, at
Constantinople, where they received the name of Varangians,
from the oath by which they bound themselves. One of the
Swedish chiefs, Rurik by name, was chosen by certain tribes of
the country now called Russia, to be their prince. Rurik's
capital was Novgorod, where he formed the nucleus of a kingdom
which grew, through many vicissitudes, into the modern empire
of Russia. His successors transferred their capital to Kief,
and ultimately it was shifted again to Moscow, where the
Muscovite princes acquired the title, the power, and the great
dominion of the Czars of all the Russias.
The Slavonic Race.
The Russian sovereigns were thus of Swedish origin; but their
subjects were of another race. They belonged to a branch of
the great Aryan stock, called the Slavic or Slavonic, which
was the last to become historically known. The Slavonians bore
no important part in events that we have knowledge of until
several centuries of the Christian era had passed. They were
the obscure inhabitants in that period of a wide region in
Eastern Europe, between the Vistula and the Caspian. In the
sixth century, pressed by the Avars, they crossed the Vistula,
moving westwards, along the Baltic; and, about the same time
they moved southwards, across the Danube, and established the
settlements which formed the existing Slavonic states in
South-eastern Europe--Servia, Croatia and their lesser
neighbors. But the principal seat of the Slavonic race within
historic times has always been in the region still occupied by
its principal representatives, the Russians and the Poles.
Mediæval Society.--The Feudal System.
We have now come to a period in European history--the middle
period of the Middle Ages--when it is appropriate to consider
the peculiar state of society which had resulted from the
transplanting of the Germanic nations of the North to the
provinces of the Roman Empire, and from placing the well
civilized surviving inhabitants of the latter in subjection to
and in association with masters so vigorous, so capable and so
barbarous. In Gaul, the conquerors, unused to town-life, not
attracted to town pursuits, and eager for the possession of
land, had generally spread themselves over the country and
left the cities more undisturbed, except as they pillaged them
or extorted ransom from them. The Roman-Gallic population of
the country had sought refuge, no doubt, to a large extent, in
the cities; the agricultural laborers were already, for the
most part, slaves or half-slaves--the coloni of the Roman
system--and remained in their servitude; while some of the
poorer class of freemen may have sunk to the same condition.
How far the new masters of the country had taken possession of
its land by actual seizure, ousting the former owners, and
under what rules, if any, it was divided among them, are
questions involved in great obscurity. In the time of
Charlemagne, there seems to have been a large number of small
landowners who cultivated their own holdings, which they
owned, not conditionally, but absolutely, by the tenure called
allodial. But alongside of these peasant proprietors there was
another landed class whose estates were held on very different
terms, and this latter class, at the time now spoken of, was
rapidly absorbing the former. It was a class which had not
existed before, neither among the Germans nor among the
Romans, and the system of land tenure on which it rested was
equally new to both, although both seem to have contributed
something to the origin of it. This was the Feudal System,
which may be described, in the words of Bishop Stubbs, as
being "a complete organization of society through the medium
of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the landowner,
all are bound together by obligation of service and defence:
the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to
his lord; the defence and service being based on, and
regulated by, the nature and extent of the land held by the
one of the other." Of course, the service exacted was, in the
main, military, and the system grew up as a military system,
expanding into a general governing system, during a time of
loose and ineffective administration. That it was a thing of
gradual growth is now fairly well settled, although little is
clearly known of the process of growth. It came to its
perfection in the tenth century, by which time most other
tenures of land had disappeared. The allodial tenure gave way
before it, because, in those disorderly times, men of small or
moderate property in land were in need of the protection which
a powerful lord, who had many retainers at his back, or a strong
monastery, could give, and were induced to surrender, to one
or the other, their free ownership of the land they held,
receiving it back as tenants, in order to establish the
relation which secured a protector.
{1020}
In its final organization, the feudal system, as stated
before, embraced the whole society of the kingdom.
Theoretically, the king was the pinnacle of the system. In the
political view of the time--so far as a political view
existed--he was the over-lord of the realm rather by reason of
being its ultimate land-lord, than by being the center of
authority and the guardian of law. The greater subordinate
lordships of the kingdom--the dukedoms and counties--were
held as huge estates, called fiefs, derived originally by
grant from the king, subject to the obligation of military
service, and to certain acts of homage, acknowledging the
dependent relationship. The greater feudatories, or vassals,
holding immediately from the king, were lords in their turn of
a second order of feudatories, who held lands under them; and
they again might divide their territories among vassals of a
third degree; for the process of sub-infeudation went on until
it reached the cultivator of the soil, who bore the whole
social structure of society on his bent back.
But the feudal system would have wrought few of the effects
which it did if it had involved nothing but land tenure and
military service. It became, however, as before intimated, a
system of government, and one which inevitably produced a
disintegration of society and a destruction of national bonds.
A grant of territory generally carried with it almost a grant
of sovereignty over the inhabitants of the territory, limited
only by certain rights and powers reserved to the king, which
he found extreme difficulty in exercising. The system was one
"in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class
next below him, in which abject slavery formed the lowest and
irresponsible tyranny the highest grade, in which private war,
private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the
imperial institutions of government" (Stubbs). This was the
singular system which had its original and special growth
among the Franks, in the Middle Ages, and which spread from
them, under the generally similar conditions of the age, to
other countries, with various degrees of modification and
limitation. Its influence was obviously opposed to political
unity and social order, and to the development of institutions
favorable to the people.
But an opposing influence had kept life in one part of society
which feudalism was not able to envelope. That was in cities.
The cities, as before stated, had been the refuge of a large
and perhaps a better part of the Roman-Gallic free population
which survived the barbarian conquest. They, in conjunction
with the Church, preserved, without doubt, so much of the
plant of Roman civilization as escaped destruction. They
certainly suffered heavily, and languished for several
centuries; but a slow revival of industries and arts went on
in them,--trade crept again into its old channels, or found
new ones,--and wealth began to be accumulated anew. With the
consciousness of wealth came feelings of independence; and
such towns were now beginning to acquire the spirit which made
them, a little later, important instruments in the weakening
and breaking of the feudal system.
Rise of the Kingdom of France.
During the period between the death of Charlemagne and the
settlement of the Normans in the Carlovingian Empire, that
Empire had become permanently divided. The final separation
had taken place (887) between the kingdom of the East Franks,
or Germany, and the kingdom of the West Franks, which
presently became France. Between them stretched a region in
dispute called Lotharingia, out of which came the duchy of
Lorraine. The kingdom of Burgundy (sometimes cut into two) and
the kingdom of Italy, had regained a separate existence; and
the Empire which Charlemagne had revived was nothing but a
name. The last of the Carlovingian emperors was Arnulf, who
died in 899. The imperial title was borne afterwards by a
number of petty Italian potentates, but lost all imperial
significance for two-thirds of a century, until it was
restored to some grandeur again and to a lasting influence in
history, by another German king.
Before this occurred, the Carlovingian race of kings had
disappeared from both the Frank kingdoms. During the last
hundred years of their reign in the West kingdom, the throne
had been disputed with them two or three times by members of a
rising family, the Counts of Paris and Orleans, who were also
called Dukes of the French, and whose duchy gave its name to
the kingdom which they finally made their own. The kings of
the old race held their capital at Laon, with little power and
a small dominion, until 987, when the last one died. The then
Count of Paris and Duke of the French, Hugh, called Capet,
became king of the French, by election; Paris became the
capital of the kingdom, and the France of modern times had its
birth, though very far from its full growth.
The royal power had now declined to extreme weakness. The
development of feudalism had undermined all central authority,
and Hugh Capet as king had scarcely more power than he drew
from his own large fief. "At first he was by no means
acknowledged in the kingdom; but ... the chief vassals
ultimately gave at least a tacit consent to the usurpation,
and permitted the royal name to descend undisputed upon his
posterity. But this was almost the sole attribute of
sovereignty which the first kings of the third dynasty
enjoyed. For a long period before and after the accession of
that family France has, properly speaking, no national
history" (Hallam).
The Communes.
When the royal power began to gain ascendancy, it seems to
have been largely in consequence of a tacitly formed alliance
between the kings and the commons or burghers of the towns.
The latter, as noted before, were acquiring a spirit of
independence, born of increased prosperity, and were
converting their guilds or trades unions into crude forms of
municipal organization, as "communes" or commons. Sometimes by
purchase and sometimes by force, they were ridding themselves
of the feudal pretensions which neighboring lords held over
them, and were obtaining charters which defined and guaranteed
municipal freedom to them. One or two kings of the time
happened to be wise enough to give encouragement to this
movement towards the enfranchisement of the communes, and it
proved to have an important influence in weakening feudalism
and strengthening royalty.

{1021}
Germany.
In the German kingdom, much the same processes of
disintegration had produced much the same results as in
France. The great fiefs into which it was divided--the duchies
of Saxony, Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria--were even more
powerful than the great fiefs of France. When the Carlovingian
dynasty came to an end, in 911, the nobles made choice of a
king, electing Conrad of Franconia, and, after him (919),
Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony. The monarchy continued
thereafter to be elective, actually as well as in theory, for
a long period. Three times the crown was kept in the same
family during several successive generations: in the House of
Saxony from 919 to 1024; in the House of Franconia from 1024
to 1137; in the House of the Hohenstaufens, of Swabia, from
1137 to 1254: but it never became an acknowledged heritage
until long after the Hapsburgs won possession of it; and even
to the end the forms of election were preserved.
The Holy Roman Empire.
The second king of the Saxon dynasty, Otho I., called the
Great, recovered the imperial title, which had become extinct
again in the West, added the crown of Lombardy to the crown of
Germany, and founded anew the Germanic Roman Empire, which
Charlemagne had failed to establish enduringly, but which now
became one of the conspicuous facts of European history for
more than eight hundred years, although seldom more than a
shadow and a name. But the shadow and the name were those of
the great Rome of antiquity, and the mighty memory it had left
in the world gave a superior dignity and rank to these German
emperors, even while it diminished their actual power as kings
of Germany. It conferred upon them, indeed, more than rank and
dignity; it bestowed an "office" which the ideas and feelings
of that age could not suffer to remain vacant. The Imperial
office seemed to be required, in matters temporal, to balance
and to be the complement of the Papal office in matters
spiritual. "In nature and compass the government of these two
potentates is the same, differing only in the sphere of its
working; and it matters not whether we call the Pope a
spiritual Emperor, or the Emperor a secular Pope." "Thus the
Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the
same thing, in two aspects; and Catholicism, the principle of
the universal Christian society, is also Romanism; that is,
rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its universality"
(Bryce). These mediæval ideas of the "Holy Roman Empire," as
it came to be called (not immediately, but after a time), gave
importance to the imperial coronation thenceforth claimed by
the German kings. It was a factitious importance, so far as
concerned the immediate realm of those kings. In Germany,
while it brought no increase to their material power, it
tended to alarm feudal jealousies; it tended to draw the kings
away from their natural identification with their own country; it
tended to distract them from an effective royal policy at
home, by foreign ambitions and aims; and altogether it
interfered seriously with the nationalization of Germany, and
gave a longer play to the disrupting influences of feudalism
in that country than in any other.
Italy, the Empire and the Papacy.
Otto I. had won Italy and the Imperial crown (962) very
easily. For more than half a century the peninsula had been in
a deplorable state. The elective Lombard crown, quarreled over
by the ducal houses of Friuli, Spoleto, Ivrea, Provence, and
others, settled nowhere with any sureness, and lost all
dignity and strength, though several of the petty kings who
wore it had been crowned emperors by the Pope. At Rome, all
legitimate government, civil or ecclesiastical, had
disappeared. The city and the Church had been for years under
the rule of a family of courtesans, who made popes of their
lovers and their sons. Southern Italy was being ravaged by the
Saracens, who occupied Sicily, and Northern Italy was
desolated by the Hungarians. Under these circumstances, Otto
I., the German king, listened to an appeal from an oppressed
queen, Adelaide, widow of a murdered king, and crossed, the
Alps (951), like a gallant knight, to her relief. He chastised
and humbled the oppressor, rescued the queen, and married her. A
few years later, on further provocation, he entered Italy
again, deposed the troublesome King Berengar, caused himself
to be crowned King of Italy, and received the imperial crown
at Rome (962) from one of the vilest of a vile brood of popes,
John XII. Soon afterwards, he was impelled to convoke a synod
which deposed this disgraceful pope and elected in his place
Leo VIII., who had been Otto's chief secretary. The citizens
now conceded to the Emperor an absolute veto on papal
elections, and the new pope confirmed their act. The German
sovereigns, from that time, for many years, asserted their
right to control the filling of the chair of St. Peter, and
exercised the right on many occasions, though always with
difficulty.
Nominally they were sovereigns of Rome and Italy; but during
their long absences from the country they scarcely made a show
of administrative government in it, and their visits were
generally of the nature of expeditions for a reconquest of the
land. Their claims of sovereignty were resisted more and more,
politically throughout Italy and ecclesiastically at Rome. The
Papacy emancipated itself from their control and acquired a
natural leadership of Italian opposition to German imperial
pretensions. The conflict between these two forces became, as
will be seen later on, one of the dominating facts of European
history for four centuries--from the eleventh to the
fourteenth.
{1022}
The Italian City-republics.
The disorder that had been scarcely checked in Italy since the
Goths came into it,--the practical extinction of central
authority after Charlemagne dropped his sceptre, and the
increasing conflicts of the nobles among themselves,--had one
consequence of remarkable importance in Italian history. It
opened opportunities to many cities in the northern parts of
the peninsula for acquiring municipal freedom, which they did
not lack spirit to improve. They led the movement and set the
example which created, a little later, so many vigorous
communes in Flanders and France, and imperial free cities in
Germany at a still later day. They were earlier in winning
their liberties, and they pushed them farther,--to the point
in many cases of creating, as at Pisa, Genoa, Florence, and
Venice, a republican city state. Venice, growing up in the
security of her lagoons, from a cluster of fishing villages to
a great city of palaces, had been independent from the
beginning, except as she acknowledged for a time the nominal
supremacy of the Eastern Emperor. Others won their way to
independence through struggles that are now obscure, and
developed, before these dark centuries reached their close, an
energy of life and a splendor of genius that come near to
comparison with the power and the genius of the Greeks. But,
like the city-republics of Greece, they were perpetually at
strife with one another, and sacrificed to their mutual
jealousies, in the end, the precious liberty which made them
great, and which they might, by a well settled union, have
preserved.
The Saxon line of Emperors.
Such were the conditions existing or taking shape in Italy
when the Empire of the West--the Holy Roman Empire of later
times--was founded anew by Otho the Great. Territorially, the
Empire as he left it covered Germany to its full extent, and
two-thirds of Italy, with the Emperor's superiority
acknowledged by the subject states of Burgundy, Bohemia,
Moravia, Poland, Denmark, and Hungary--the last named with
more dispute.
Otho the Great died in 972. His two immediate successors, Otho
II. (973-983) and Otho III. (983-1002) accomplished little,
though the latter had great ambitions, planning to raise Rome
to her old place as the capital of the world; but he died in
his youth in Italy, and was succeeded by a cousin, Henry II.,
whose election was contested by rivals in Germany, and
repudiated in Italy. In the latter country the great nobles
placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the Lombard throne; but
the factions among them soon caused his overthrow, and, Henry,
crossing the Alps, reclaimed the crown.
The Franconian Emperors.
Henry II. was the last of the Saxon line, and upon his death,
in 1024, the House of Franconia came to the throne, by the
election of Conrad II., called "the Salic." Under Conrad, the
kingdom of Burgundy, afterwards called the kingdom of Arles
(which is to be distinguished from the French Duchy of
Burgundy--the northwestern part of the old kingdom), was
reunited to the Empire, by the bequest of its last king,
Rudolph III. Conrad's son, grandson, and great grandson
succeeded him in due order; Henry III. from 1039 to 1056;
Henry IV. from 1056 to 1106; Henry V. from 1106 to 1125. Under
Henry III. the Empire was at the summit of its power. Henry
II., exercising the imperial prerogative, had raised the Duke
of Hungary to royal rank, giving him the title of king. Henry
III. now forced the Hungarian king to acknowledge the imperial
supremacy and pay tribute. The German kingdom was ruled with a
strong hand and peace among its members compelled. "In Rome,
no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful
contest between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked
even the reckless apathy of Italy. Henry deposed them all and
appointed their successor." "The synod passed a decree
granting to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff;
and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the
world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant
corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German
after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so
powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments
alarmed his own nobles no less than the Italians, and the
reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was
fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some might call it,
determined the course of history. The great Emperor died
suddenly in A. D. 1056, and a child was left at the helm,
while storms were gathering that might have demanded the
wisest hand" (Bryce).
Hildebrand and Henry IV.
The child was Henry IV., of unfortunate memory; the storms
which beset him blew from Rome. The Papacy, lifted from its
degradation by Henry's father and grandfather, had recovered
its boldness of tone and enlarged its pretensions and claims.
It had come under the influence of an extraordinary man, the
monk Hildebrand, who swayed the councils of four popes before
he became pope himself (1073), and whose pontifical reign as
Gregory VII. is the epoch of greatest importance in the
history of the Roman Church. The overmastering ascendancy of
the popes, in the Church and over all who acknowledge its
communion, really began when this invincible monk was raised
to the papal throne. He broke the priesthood and the whole
hierarchy of the West to blind obedience by his relentless
discipline. He isolated them, as an order apart, by enforcing
celibacy upon them; and he extinguished the corrupting
practices of simony. Then, when he had marshalled the forces
of the Church, he proclaimed its independence and its
supremacy in absolute terms. In the growth of feudalism
throughout Europe, the Church had become compromised in many
ways with the civil powers. Its bishoprics and abbeys had
acquired extensively the nature of fiefs, and bishops and
abbots were required to do homage to a secular lord before
they could receive an "investiture" of the rich estates which
had become attached by a feudal tenure to their sees. The
ceremony of investiture, moreover, included delivery of the
crozier and the pastoral ring, which were the very symbols of
their spiritual office. Against this dependence of the Church
upon temporal powers, Gregory now arrayed it in revolt, and
began the "War of Investitures," which lasted for half a
century. The great battle ground was Germany; the Emperor, of
necessity, was the chief opponent; and Henry IV., whose youth
had been badly trained, and whose authority had been weakened
by a long, ill-guardianed minority, was at a disadvantage in
the contest. His humiliation at Canossa (1077), when he stood
through three winter days, a suppliant before the door of the
castle which lodged his haughty enemy, praying to be released
from the dread penalties of excommunication, is one of the
familiar tableaux of history. He had a poor revenge seven
years later, when he took Rome, drove Gregory into the castle
St. Angelo, and seated an anti-pope in the Vatican. But his
triumph was brief. There came to the rescue of the
beleaguered Pope certain new actors in Italian history, whom
it is now necessary to introduce.
{1023}
The Normans in Italy and Sicily.
The settlement of predatory Northmen on the Seine, which took
the name of Normandy and the constitution of a ducal fief of
France, had long since grown into an important
half-independent state. Its people--now called Normans in the
smoother speech of the South--had lost something of their
early rudeness, and had fallen a little under the spell of the
rising chivalry of the age; but the goad of a warlike temper
which drove their fathers out of Norway still pricked the sons
and sent them abroad, in restless search of adventures and
gain. Some found their way into the south of Italy, where
Greeks, Lombards and Saracens were fighting merrily, and where
a good sword and a tough lance were tools of the only industry
well-paid. Presently there was banded among them there a
little army, which found itself a match for any force that
Greek or Lombard, or other opponent, could bring against it,
and which proceeded accordingly to work its own will in the
land. It seized Apulia (1042) and divided it into twelve
countships, as an aristocratic republic. Pope Leo IX. led an
army against it and was beaten and taken prisoner (1053). To
release himself he was compelled to grant the duchy they had
taken to them, as a fief of the Church, and to extend his
grant to whatever they might succeed in taking, beyond it. The
chiefs of the Normans thus far had been, in succession, three
sons of a poor gentleman in the Cotentin, Tancred by name, who
now sent a fourth son to the scene. This new comer was Robert,
having the surname of Guiscard, who became the fourth leader
of the Norman troop (1057), and who, in a few years, assumed
the title of Duke of Calabria and Apulia. His duchies
comprised, substantially, the territory of the later kingdom
of Naples. A fifth brother, Roger, had meantime crossed to
Sicily, with a small following of his countrymen; and, between
1060 and 1090, had expelled the Saracens from that island, and
possessed it as a fief of his brother's duchy. But in the next
generation these relations between the two conquests were
practically reversed. The son of Roger received the title of
King of Sicily from the Pope, and Calabria and Apulia were
annexed to his kingdom, through the extinction of Robert's
family.
These Normans of Southern Italy were the allies who came to
the rescue of Pope Gregory, when the Emperor, Henry IV.,
besieged him in Castle St. Angelo. He summoned Robert Guiscard
as a vassal of the Church, and the response was prompt. Henry
and his Germans retreated when the Normans came near, and the
latter entered Rome (1084). Accustomed to pillage, they began,
soon, to treat the city as a captured place, and the Romans
rose against them. They retaliated with torch and sword, and
once more Rome suffered from the destroying rage of a
barbarous soldiery let loose. "Neither Goth nor Vandal,
neither Greek nor German, brought such desolation on the city
as this capture by the Normans" (Milman). Duke Robert made no
attempt to hold the ruined capital, but withdrew to his own
dominions. The Pope went with him, and died soon afterwards
(1085), unable to return to Rome. But the imperious temper he
had imparted to the Church was lastingly fixed in it, and his
lofty pretensions were even surpassed by the pontiffs who
succeeded him. He spoke for the Papacy the first syllables of
that awful proclamation that was sounded in its finality,
after eight hundred years, when the dogma of infallibility was
put forth.
Norman Conquest of England.
The Normans in Italy established no durable power. In another
quarter they were more fortunate. Their kinsmen, the Danes,
who subjugated England and annexed it to their own kingdom in
1016, had lost it again in 1042, when the old line of kings
was restored, in the person of Edward, called the Confessor.
But William, Duke of Normandy, had acquired, in the course of
these shiftings of the English crown, certain claims which he
put forth when Edward died, and when Harold, son of the great
Earl Godwine, was elected king to succeed him, in 1066. To
enforce his claim, Duke William, commissioned by the Pope,
invaded England, in the early autumn of that year, and won the
kingdom in the great and decisive battle of Senlac, or
Hastings, where Harold was slain. On Christmas Day he was
crowned, and a few years sufficed to end all resistance to his
authority. He established on the English throne a dynasty
which, though shifting sometimes to collateral lines, has held
it to the present day.
The Norman Conquest, as estimated by its greatest historian,
Professor Freeman, wrought more good effects than ill to the
English people. It did not sweep away their laws, customs or
language, but it modified them all, and not unfavorably; while
"it aroused the old national spirit to fresh life, and gave
the conquered people fellow-workers in their conquerors." The
monarchy was strengthened by William's advantages as a
conqueror, used with the wisdom and moderation of a statesman.
Feudalism came into England stripped of its disrupting forces;
and the possible alternative of absolutism was hindered by
potent checks. At the same time, the Conquest brought England
into relations with the Continent which might otherwise have
arisen very slowly, and thus gave an early importance to the
nation in European history.
The Crusades.
At the period now reached in our survey, all Europe was on the
eve of a profounder excitement and commotion than it had ever
before known--one which stirred it for the first time with a
common feeling and with common thoughts. A great cry ran
through it, for help to deliver the holy places of the
Christian faith from the infidels who possessed them. The
pious and the adventurous, the fanatical and the vagrant, rose
up in one motley and tumultuous response to the appeal, and
mobs and armies (hardly distinguishable) of Crusaders--
warriors of the Cross--began to whiten the highways into Asia
with their bones. The first movement, in 1096, swept 300,000
men, women and children, under Peter the Hermit, to their
death, with no other result; but nearly at the same time there
went an army, French and Norman for the most part, which made its
way to Jerusalem, took the city by assault (1099) and founded
a kingdom there, which defended itself for almost a hundred
years. Long before it fell, it was pressed sorely by the
surrounding Moslems and cried to Europe for help.
{1024}
A Second Crusade, in 1147, accomplished nothing for its
relief, but spent vast multitudes of lives; and when the
feeble kingdom disappeared, in 1187, and the Sepulchre of the
Saviour was defiled again by unbelievers, Christendom grew
wild, once more, with passion, and a Third Crusade was led by
the redoubtable Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, of Germany, King
Richard Cœur de Lion, of England, and King Philip Augustus of
France. The Emperor perished miserably on the way and his army
was wasted in its march; the French and English exhausted
themselves in sieges which won nothing of durable advantage to
the Christian world; the Sultan Saladin gathered most of the
laurels of the war.
The Turks on the Scene.
The armies of Islam which the Crusaders encountered in Asia
Minor and the Holy Land were no longer, in their leadership,
of the race of Mahomet. The religion of the Prophet was still
triumphant in the East, but his nation had lost its lordship,
and Western Asia had submitted to new masters. These were the
Turks--Turks of the House of Seljuk--first comers of their
swarm from the great Aral basin. First they had been
disciples, won by the early armed missionaries of the
Crescent; then servants and mercenaries, hired to fight its
battles and guard its princes, when the vigor of the Arab
conquerors began to be sapped, and their character to be
corrupted by luxury and pride; then, at last, they were
masters. About the middle of the ninth century, the Caliph at
Bagdad became a puppet in their hands, and the Moslem Empire
in Asia (Africa and Spain being divided between rival Caliphs)
soon passed under their control.
These were the possessors of Jerusalem and its sacred shrines,
whose grievous and insulting treatment of Christian pilgrims,
in the last years of the eleventh century, had stirred Europe
to wrath and provoked the great movement of the Crusades. The
movement had important consequences, both immediate and
remote; but its first effects were small in moment compared
with those which lagged after. To understand either, it will
be necessary to glance back at the later course of events in
the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.
The Byzantine Empire.
The fortunes of the Empire, since it gave up Syria and Egypt
to the Saracens, had been, on the whole, less unhappy than the
dark prospect at that time. It had checked the onrush of Arabs
at the Taurus mountain range, and retained Asia Minor; it had
held Constantinople against them through two terrible sieges;
it had fought for three centuries, and finally subdued, a new
Turanian enemy, the Bulgarians, who had established a kingdom
south of the Danube, where their name remains to the present
day. The history of its court, during much of the period, had
been a black and disgusting record of conspiracies,
treacheries, murders, mutilations, usurpations and foul vices
of every description; with now and then a manly figure
climbing to the throne and doing heroic things, for the most
part uselessly; but the system of governmental administration
seems to have been so well constructed that it worked with a
certain independence of its vile or imbecile heads, and the
country was probably better and better governed than its
court.
At Constantinople, notwithstanding frequent tumults and
revolutions, there had been material prosperity and a great
gathering of wealth. The Saracen conquests, by closing other
avenues of trade between the East and the West, had
concentrated that most profitable commerce in the Byzantine
capital. The rising commercial cities of Italy--Amalphi,
Venice, Genoa, Pisa--seated their enterprises there. Art and
literature, which had decayed, began then to revive, and
Byzantine culture, on its surface, took more of superiority to
that of Teutonic Europe.
The conquests of the Seljuk Turks gave a serious check to this
improvement of the circumstances of the Empire. Momentarily,
by dividing the Moslem power in Asia, they had opened an
opportunity to an energetic Emperor, Nicephorus Phocas, to
recover northern Syria and Cilicia (961-969). But when, in the
next century, they had won a complete mastery of the dominions
of the Caliphate of Bagdad, they speedily swept back the
Byzantines, and overran and occupied the most of Asia Minor
and Armenia. A decisive victory at Manzikert, in 1071, when
the emperor of the moment was taken prisoner and his army
annihilated, gave them well nigh the whole territory to the
Hellespont. The Empire was nearly reduced to its European
domain, and suffered ten years of civil war between rivals for
the throne.
At the end of that time it acquired a ruler, in the person of
Alexius Comnenus, who is the generally best known of all the
Byzantine line, because he figures notably in the stories of
the First Crusade. He was a man of crafty abilities and
complete unscrupulousness. He took the Empire at its lowest
state of abasement and demoralization. In the first year of
his reign he had to face a new enemy. Robert Guiscard, the
Norman, who had conquered a dukedom in Southern Italy, thought
the situation favorable for an attack on the Eastern Empire,
and for winning the imperial crown. Twice he invaded the Greek
peninsula (1081-1084) and defeated the forces brought against
him by Alexius; but troubles in Italy recalled him on the
first occasion, and his death brought the second expedition to
naught.
Such was the situation of the Byzantines when the waves of the
First Crusade, rolling Asia-ward, surged up to the gates of
Constantinople. It was a visitation that might well appall
them,--these hosts of knights and vagabonds, fanatics and
freebooters, who claimed and proffered help in a common
Christian war with the infidels, and who, nevertheless, had no
Christian communion with them--schismatics as they were,
outside the fold of the Roman shepherd. There is not a doubt
that they feared the crusading Franks more than they feared
the Turks. They knew them less, and the little hearsay
knowledge they had was of a lawless, barbarous, fighting
feudalism in the countries of the West,--more rough and
uncouth, at least, than their own defter methods of murdering
and mutilating one another. They received their dangerous
visitors with nervousness and suspicion; but Alexius Comnenus
proved equal to the delicate position in which he found
himself placed. He burdened his soul with lies and perfidies;
but he managed affairs so wonderfully that the Empire plucked
the best fruits of the first Crusades, by recovering a great
part of Asia Minor, with all the coasts of the Euxine and the
Ægean, from the weakened Turks. The latter were so far shaken
and depressed by the hard blows of the Crusaders that they
troubled the Byzantines very little in the century to come.
{1025}
But against this immediate gain to the Eastern Empire from the
early Crusades, there were serious later offsets. The commerce
of Constantinople declined rapidly, as soon as the Moslem
blockade of the Syrian coast line was broken. It lost its
monopoly. Trade ran back again into other reopened channels.
The Venetians and Genoese became more independent. Formerly,
they had received privileges in the Empire as a gracious
concession. Now they dictated the terms of their commercial
treaties and their naval alliances. Their rivalries with one
another involved the Empire in quarrels with both, and a state
of things was brought about which had much to do with the
catastrophe of 1204, when the fourth Crusade was diverted to
the conquest of Constantinople, and a Latin Empire supplanted
the Empire of the Roman-Greeks.
Effects of the Crusades.
Briefly noted, these were the consequences of the early
Crusades in the East. In western Europe they had slower, but
deeper and more lasting effects. They weakened feudalism, by
sending abroad so many of the feudal lords, and by
impoverishing so many more; whereby the towns gained more
opportunity for enfranchisement, and the crown, in France
particularly, acquired more power. They checked smaller wars
and private quarrels for a time, and gave in many countries
unwonted seasons of peace, during which the thoughts and
feelings of men were acted on by more civilizing influences.
They brought men into fellowship who were only accustomed to
fight one another, and thus softened their provincial and
national antipathies. They expanded the knowledge--the
experience--the ideas--of the whole body of those who visited
the East and who survived the adventurous expedition; made
them acquainted with civilizations at least more polished than
their own; taught them many things which they could only learn in
those days by actual sight, and sent them back to their homes
throughout Europe, to be instructors and missionaries, who did
much to prepare Western Christendom for the Renaissance or new
birth of a later time. The twelfth century--the century of the
great Crusades--saw the gray day-break in Europe after the
long night of darkness which settled down upon it in the
fifth. In the thirteenth it reached the brightening dawn, and
in the fifteenth it stood in the full morning of the modern
day. Among all the movements by which it was pushed out of
darkness into light, that of the Crusades would appear to have
been the most important; important in itself, as a social and
political movement of great change, and important in the seeds
that it scattered for a future harvest of effects.
In both the Byzantine and Arabian civilizations of the East
there was much for western Europe to learn. Perhaps there was
more in the last named than in the first; for the Arabs, when
they came out from behind their deserts, and exchanged the
nomadic life for the life of cities, had shown an amazing
avidity for the lingering science of old Greece, which they
encountered in Egypt and Syria. They had preserved far more of
it, and more of the old fineness of feeling that went with it,
than had survived in Greece itself, or in any part of the
Teutonized empire of Rome. The Crusaders got glimpses of its
influence, at least, and a curiosity was wakened, which sent
students into Moorish Spain, and opened scholarly interchanges
which greatly advanced learning in Europe.
Rising Power of the Church.
Not the least important effect of the Crusades was the
atmosphere of religion which they caused to envelope the great
affairs of the time, and which they made common in politics
and society. The influence of the Church was increased by
this; and its organization was powerfully strengthened by the
great monastic revival that followed presently: the rise of
purer and more strictly disciplined orders of the "regular"
(that is the secluded or monastic) clergy--Cistercians,
Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, etc.; as well as the
creation of the great military-religious orders--Knights
Templars, Knights of the Hospital of St. John, Teutonic
Knights, and others, which were immediately connected with the
Crusades.
To say that the Church gained influence is to say that the
clergy gained it, and that the chief of the clergy, the Pope,
concentrated the gain in himself. The whole clerical body was
making encroachments in every field of politics upon the
domain of the civil authority, using shrewdly the advantages
of superior learning, and busying itself more and more in
temporal affairs. The popes after Gregory VII. maintained his
high pretensions and pursued his audacious course. In most
countries they encountered resistance from the Crown; but the
brunt of the conflict still fell upon the emperors, who, in
some respects, were the most poorly armed for it.
Guelfs and Ghibellines.
Henry IV., who outlived his struggle with Gregory, was beaten
down at last--dethroned by a graceless son, excommunicated by
a relentless Church and denied burial when he died (1106) by
its clergy. The rebellious son, Henry V., in his turn fought
the same battle over for ten years, and forced a compromise
which saved about half the rights of investiture that his
father had claimed. His death (1125) ended the Franconian
line, and the imperial crown returned for a few years to the
House of Saxony, by the election of the Duke Lothaire. But the
estates of the Franconian family had passed, by his mother, to
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia; and now a bitter
feud arose between the House of Saxony and the House of
Hohenstaufen or Swabia,--a feud that was the most memorable
and, the longest lasting in history, if measured by the
duration of party strifes which began in it and which took
their names from it. For the raging factions of Guelfs and
Ghibellines which divided Italy for two centuries had their
beginning in this Swabian-Saxon feud, among the Germans. The
Guelfs were the partisans of the House of Saxony; the
Ghibellines were the party of the Hohenstaufens. The
Hohenstaufens triumphed when Lothaire died (1138), and made
Conrad of their House Emperor. They held the crown, moreover,
in their family for four generations, extending through more
than a century; and so it happened that the German name of the
German party of the Hohenstaufens came to be identified in
Italy with the party or faction in that country which
supported imperial interests and claims in the free cities and
against the popes. Whereupon the opposed party name was
borrowed from Germany likewise and applied to the Italian
faction which took ground against the Emperors--although these
Italian Guelfs had no objects in common with the partisans of
Saxony.
{1026}
The Hohenstaufens in Italy.
The first Hohenstaufen emperor was succeeded (1152) by his
nephew Frederick I., called Barbarossa, because of his red
beard. The long reign of Frederick, until 1190, was mainly
filled with wars and contentions in Italy, where he pushed the
old quarrel of the Empire with the Papacy, and where,
furthermore, he resolutely undertook to check the growing
independence of the Lombard cities. Five times during his
reign he led a great army into the peninsula, like a hostile
invader, and his destroying marches through the country, of
which he claimed to be sovereign, were like those of the
barbarians who came out of the North seven centuries before.
The more powerful cities, like Milan, were undoubtedly
oppressing their weaker neighbors, and Barbarossa assumed to
be the champion of the latter. But he smote impartially the
weak and the strong, the village and the town, which provoked
his arrogant temper in the slightest degree. Milan escaped his
wrath on the first visitation, but went down before it when he
came again (1158), and was totally destroyed, the inhabitants
being scattered in other towns. Even the enemies of Milan were
moved to compassion by the savageness of this punishment, and
joined, a few years later, in rebuilding the prostrate walls
and founding Milan anew. A great "League of Lombardy" was
formed by all the northern towns, to defend their freedom
against the hated Emperor, and the party of the Ghibellines
was reduced for the time to a feeble minority. Meantime
Barbarossa had forced his way into Rome, stormed the very
Church of St. Peter, and seated an anti-pope on the throne.
But a sudden pestilence fell upon his army, and he fled before
it, out of Italy, almost alone. Yet he never relaxed his
determination to bend both the Papacy and the Lombard
republics to his will. After seven years he returned, for the
fifth time, and it proved to be the last. The League met him
at Legnano (1176) and administered to him an overwhelming
defeat. Even his obstinacy was then overcome, and after a
truce of six years he made peace with the League and the Pope,
on terms which conceded most of the liberties that the cities
claimed. It was in the reign of Frederick that the name "Holy
Roman Empire" began, it seems, to be used.
Frederick died while on a crusade and was succeeded (1190) by
his son, Henry VI., who had married the daughter and heiress
of the King of Sicily and who acquired that kingdom in her
right. His short reign was occupied mostly in subduing the
Sicilian possession. When he died (1197) his son Frederick was
a child. Frederick succeeded to the crown of Sicily, but his
rights in Germany (where his father had already caused him to
be crowned "King of the Romans"--the step preliminary to an
imperial election) were entirely ignored. The German crown was
disputed between a Swabian and a Saxon claimant, and the
Saxon, Otho, was King and Emperor in name, until 1218, when he
died. But he, too, quarreled with a pope, about the lands of
the Countess Matilda, which she gave to the Church; and his
quarrel was with Innocent III., a pope who realized the
autocracy which Hildebrand had looked forward to, and who
lifted the Papacy to the greatest height of power it ever
attained. To cast down Otho, Innocent took up the cause of
Frederick, who received the royal crown a second time, at
Aix-la-Chapelle (1215) and the imperial crown at Rome (1220).
Frederick II. (his designation) was one of the few men of
actual genius who have ever sprung from the sovereign families
of the world; a man so far in advance of his time that he
appears like a modern among his mediæval contemporaries. He
was superior to the superstitions of his age,--superior to its
bigotries and its provincialisms. His large sympathies and
cosmopolitan frame of mind were acted upon by all the new
impulses of the epoch of the crusades, and made him reflect,
in his brilliant character, as in a mirror, the civilizing
processes that were working on his generation.
Between such an emperor as Frederick II. and such popes as
Innocent III. and his immediate successors, there could not
fail to be collision and strife. The man who might, perhaps,
under other circumstances, have given some quicker movement to
the hands which measure human, progress on the dial of time,
spent his life in barely proving his ability to live and reign
under the anathemas and proscriptions of the Church. But he
fought a losing fight, even when he seemed to be winning
victories in northern Italy, over the Guelf cities of
Lombardy, and when the party of the Ghibellines appeared to be
ascendant throughout the peninsula. His death (1250) was the
end of the Hohenstaufens as an imperial family. His son,
Conrad, who survived him four years, was king of Sicily and
had been crowned king of Germany; but he never wore the crown
imperial. Conrad's illegitimate brother, Manfred, succeeded on
the Sicilian throne; but the implacable Papacy gave his
kingdom to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX. of
France, and invited a crusade for the conquest of it. Manfred
was slain in battle, Conrad's young son, Conradin, perished on
the scaffold, and the Hohenstaufens disappeared from history.
Their rights, or claims, in Sicily and Naples, passed to the
Spanish House of Aragon, by the marriage of Manfred's daughter
to the Aragonese king; whence long strife between the House of
Anjou and the House of Aragon, and a troubled history for the
Neapolitans and the Sicilians during some centuries. In the
end, Anjou kept Naples, while Aragon won Sicily; the kings in
both lines called themselves Kings of Sicily, and a subsequent
re-union of the two crowns created a very queerly named
"Kingdom of the Two Sicilies."
{1027}
Germany and the Empire.
After the death of Frederick II., the German kings, while
maintaining the imperial title, practically abandoned their
serious attempts to enforce an actual sovereignty in Italy.
The Holy Roman Empire, as a political factor comprehending
more than Germany, now ceased in reality to exist. The name
lived on, but only to represent a flattering fiction for
magnifying the rank and importance of the German kings. In
Italy, the conflict, as between Papacy and Empire, or between
Lombard republican cities and Empire, was at an end. No
further occasion existed for an imperial party, or an
anti-imperial party. The Guelf and Ghibelline names and
divisions had no more the little meaning that first belonged
to them. But Guelfs and Ghibellines raged against one another,
more furiously than before, and generations passed before
their feud died out.
While the long, profitless Italian conflict of the Emperors
went on, their kingship in Germany suffered sorely. As they
grasped at a shadowy imperial title, the substance of royal
authority slipped from them. Their frequent prolonged absence
in Italy gave opportunities for enlarged independence to the
German princes and feudal lords; their difficulties beyond the
Alps forced them to buy support from their vassals at home by
fatal concessions and grants; their neglect of German affairs
weakened the ties of loyalty, and provoked revolts. The result
might have been a dissolution of Germany so complete as to
give rise to two or three strong states, if another potent
influence had not worked injury in a different way. This came
from the custom of equalized inheritance which prevailed among
the Germans. The law of primogeniture, which already governed
hereditary transmissions of territorial sovereignty in many
countries, even where it did not give an undivided private
estate, as in England, to the eldest son of a family, got
footing in Germany very late and very slowly. At the time now
described, it was the quite common practice to divide
principalities between all the sons surviving a deceased duke
or margrave. It was this practice which gave rise to the
astonishing number of petty states into which Germany came to
be divided, and the forms of which are still intact. It was
this, in the main, which prevented the growth of any states to
a power that would absorb the rest. On the other hand, the
flimsy, half fictitious general constitution which the Empire
substituted for such an one as the Kingdom of Germany would
naturally have grown into, made an effective centralization of
sovereignty--easy as the conditions seemed to be prepared for
it--quite impossible.
Free Cities in Germany and their Leagues.
One happy consequence of this state of things was the
enfranchisement, either wholly or nearly so, of many thriving
cities. The growth of cities, as centers of industry and
commerce, and the development of municipal freedom among them,
was considerably later in Germany than in Italy, France and
the Netherlands; but the independence gained by some among
them was more entire than in the Low Countries or in France,
and more lasting than in Italy.
Most of the free cities of Germany were directly or
immediately subject to the Emperor, and wholly independent of
the princes whose territories surrounded them; whence they
were called "imperial cities." This relationship bound them to
the Empire by strong ties; they had less to fear from it than
from the nearer small potentates of their country; and it
probably drew a considerable part of such strength as it
possessed, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from their
support. Their own power was being augmented at this period by
the formation of extensive Leagues among them, for common
defense, and for the protection, regulation and extension of
their trade. In that age of lawless violence, there was so
little force in government, everywhere, and so entire a want
of co-operation between governments, that the operations of
trade were exposed to piracy, robbery, and black-mail, on
every sea and in every land. By the organization of their
Leagues, the energetic merchants of north-western Europe did
for themselves what their half-civilized governments failed to
do for them. They not only created effective agencies for the
protection of their trade, but they legislated, nationally and
internationally, for themselves, establishing codes and
regulations, negotiating commercial treaties, making war, and
exercising many functions and powers that seem strange to
modern times. The great Hansa, or Hanseatic League, which rose
to importance in the thirteenth century among the cities in
the north of Germany, was the most extensive, the longest
lasting and the most formidable of these confederations. It
controlled the trade between Germany, England, Russia, the
Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands, and through the
latter it made exchanges with southern Europe and the East. It
waged successful war with Denmark, Sweden and Norway combined,
in defiance of the opposition of the Emperor and the Pope. But
the growth of its power engendered an arrogance which provoked
enmity in all countries, while the slow crystalizing of
nationalities in Europe, with national sentiments and
ambitions, worked in all directions against the commercial
monopoly of the Hansa towns. By the end of the fifteenth
century their league had begun to break up and its power to
decline. The lesser associations of similar character--such as
the Rhenish and the Swabian--had been shorter-lived.
The Great Interregnum.
These city-confederations represented in their time the only
movement of concentration that appeared in Germany. Every
other activity seemed tending toward dissolution. Headship
there was none for a quarter of a century after Frederick II.
died. The election of the Kings, who took rank and title as
Emperors when crowned by the Pope, had now become the
exclusive privilege of three prince-bishops and four temporal
princes, who acquired the title of Electors. Jealous of one
another, and of all the greater lords outside their electoral
college, it was against their policy to confer the scepter on
any man who seemed likely to wield it with a strong hand. For
twenty years--a period in German history known as the Great
Interregnum--they kept the throne practically vacant. Part of
the Electors were bribed to choose Richard, Earl of Cornwall,
brother of the English King Henry III., and the other part
gave their votes to Alfonso, King of Castile. Alfonso never
came to be crowned, either as King or Emperor; Richard was
crowned King, but exercised no power and lived mostly in his
own country. The Empire was virtually extinct; the Kingdom
hardly less so. Burgundy fell away from the imperial
jurisdiction even more than Italy did. Considerable parts of
it passed to France.
{1028}
Rise of the House of Austria.
At last, in 1273, the interregnum was ended by the election of
a German noble to be King of Germany. This was Rodolph, Count
of Hapsburg,--lord of a small domain and of little importance
from his own possessions, which explains, without doubt, his
selection. But Rodolph proved to be a vigorous king, and he
founded a family of such lasting stamina and such self-seeking
capability that it secured in time permanent possession of the
German crown, and acquired, outside of Germany, a great
dominion of its own. He began the aggrandizement of his House
by taking the fine duchy of Austria from the kingdom of
Bohemia and bestowing it upon his sons. He was energetic in
improving opportunities like this, and energetic, too, in
destroying the castles of robber-knights and hanging the
robbers on their own battlements; but of substantial authority
or power he had little enough. He never went to Rome for the
imperial crown; nor troubled himself much with Italian
affairs.
On Rodolph's death (1291), his son Albert of Austria was a
candidate for the crown. The Electors rejected him and ejected
another poor noble, Adolphus of Nassau; but Adolphus
displeased them after a few years, and they decreed his
deposition, electing Albert in his place. War followed and
Adolphus was killed. Albert's reign was one of vigor, but he
accomplished little of permanent effect. He planted one of his
sons on the throne of Bohemia, where the reigning family had
become extinct; but the new king died in a few months, much
hated, and the Bohemians resisted an Austrian successor. In
1308, Albert was assassinated, and the electors raised Count
Henry of Luxemburg to the throne, as Henry VII. Henry VII. was
the first king of Germany since the Hohenstaufens who went to
Italy (1310) for the crown of Lombardy and the crown of the
Cæsars, both of which he received. The Ghibelline party was
still strong among the Italians. In the distracted state of
that country there were many patriots--the poet Dante
prominent among them--who hoped great things from the
reappearance of an emperor; but the enthusiastic welcome he
received was mainly from those furious partisans who looked
for a party triumph to be won under the new emperor's lead.
When they found that he would not let himself be made an
instrument of faction in the unhappy country, they turned
against him. His undertakings in Italy promised nothing but
failure, when he died suddenly (1313), from poison, as the
Germans believed. His successor in Germany, chosen by the
majority of the electors, was Lewis of Bavaria; but Frederick
the Fair of Austria, supported by a minority, disputed the
election, and there was civil war for twelve years, until
Frederick, a prisoner, so won the heart of Lewis that the
latter divided the throne with him and the two reigned
together.
France under the Capetians.
While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were
thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into
the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of
the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of
authority and law which creates stable and substantial power.
France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian
kings, had made little progress to that end. At the accession
(1103) of the fourth of those kings, namely, Louis VI., it is
estimated that the actual possessions of the Crown, over which
it exercised sovereignty direct, equalled no more than about
five of the modern departments of France; while twenty-nine
were in the great fiefs of Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne,
Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Vermandois, and Boulogne, where the
royal authority was but nominal; thirty-three, south of the
Loire, were hardly connected with the Crown, and twenty-one
were then dependent on the Empire. The actual "France," as a
kingdom, at that time, was very small. "The real domain of
Louis VI. was almost confined to the five towns of Paris,
Orleans, Estampes, Melun, and Compiegne, and to estates in
their neighbourhood." But the strengthening of the Crown was
slightly begun in the reign of this king, by his wise policy
of encouraging the enfranchisement of the communes, as noted
before, which introduced a helpful alliance between the
monarchy and the burgher-class, or third estate, as it came to
be called, of the cities, against the feudal aristocracy.
But progress in that direction was slight at first and slowly
made. Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired
momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his
marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her,
and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King
of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by
inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in
Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the
great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a
larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the
French king.
French recovery of Normandy and Anjou,
But the next king in France, Philip, called Augustus (1180),
who was the son of Louis VII., wrought a change of these
circumstances. He was a prince of remarkable vigor, and he
rallied with rare ability all the forces that the Crown could
command. He wrested Vermandois from the Count of Flanders, and
extorted submission from the rebellious Duke of Burgundy.
Suspending his projects at home for a time, to go crusading to
the Holy Land in company with King Richard of England, he
resumed them with fresh energy after Richard's death. The
latter was succeeded by his mean brother John, who seems to
have been hated with unanimity. John was accused of the murder
of his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who disputed the
inheritance from Richard. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, John,
though King of England, was nevertheless a vassal of the King
of France. Philip summoned him, on charges, to be tried by his
peers. John failed to answer the summons, and the forfeiture
of his fiefs was promptly declared. The French king stood well
prepared to make the confiscation effective, while John, in
serious trouble with his English subjects, could offer little
resistance. Thus the Norman realm of the English kings--their
original dominion--was lost beyond recovery, and with it Anjou
and Maine. They held Guienne and Poitou for some years; but
the bases of the French monarchy were broadened immensely from
the day when the great Norman and Angevin fiefs became royal
domain.
{1029}
The Albigenses.
Events in the south of France, during Philip's reign, prepared
the way for a further aggrandisement of the Crown. Ancient
Latin civilization had lingered longer there, in spirit, at
least, than in the central and northern districts of the
kingdom, and the state of society intellectually was both
livelier and more refined. It was the region of Europe where
thought first showed signs of independence, and where the
spiritual despotism of Rome was disputed first. A sect arose
in Languedoc which took its name from the district of Albi,
and which offended the Church perhaps more by the freedom of
opinion that it claimed than by the heresy of the opinions
themselves. These Albigeois, or Albigenses, had been at issue
with the clergy of their country and with the Papacy for some
years before Innocent III., the pontifical autocrat of his
age, proclaimed a crusade against them (1208), and launched
his sentence of excommunication against Raymond, Count of
Toulouse, who gave them countenance if not sympathy. The
fanatical Simon de Montfort, father of the great noble of like
name who figures more grandly in English history, took the
lead of the Crusade, to which bigots and brutal adventurers
flocked together. Languedoc was wasted with fire and sword,
and after twenty years of intermittent war, in which Peter of
Aragon took part, assisting the Albigeois, the Count of
Toulouse purchased peace for his ruined land by ceding part of
it to the king of France, and giving his daughter in marriage
to the king's brother Alphonso,--by which marriage the
remainder of the country was transferred, a few years later,
to the French crown.
The Battle of Bouvines.
Philip Augustus, in whose reign this brutal crushing of
Provençal France began, took little part in it, but he saw
with no unwillingness another too powerful vassal brought low.
The next blow of like kind he struck with his own hand. John
of England had quarreled with the mighty Pope Innocent III.;
his kingdom had been placed under interdict and his subjects
absolved from their allegiance. Philip of France eagerly
offered to become the executor of the papal decree, and
gathered an army for the invasion of England, to oust John
from his throne. But John hastened now to make peace with the
Church, submitting himself, surrendering his kingdom to the
Pope, and receiving it back as a papal fief. This
accomplished, the all-powerful pontiff persuaded the French
king to turn his army against the Count of Flanders, who had
never been reduced to a proper degree of submission to his
feudal sovereign. He seems to have become the recognized head
of a body of nobles who showed alarm and resentment at the
growing power of the Crown, and the war which ensued was quite
extraordinary in its political importance. King John of

England came personally to the assistance of the Flemish
Count, because of the hatred he felt towards Philip of France.
Otho, Emperor of Germany, who had been excommunicated and
deposed by the Pope, and who was struggling for his crown with
the young Hohenstaufen, Frederick II., took part in the melee,
because John was his uncle, and because the Pope was for
Philip, and because Germany dreaded the rising power of
France. So the war, which seemed at first to be a trifling
affair in a corner, became in fact a grand clearing storm, for
the settlement of many large issues, important to all Europe.
The settlement was accomplished by a single decisive battle,
fought at Bouvines (1214), not far from Tournay. It
established effectively in France the feudal superiority and
actual sovereignty of the king. It evoked a national spirit
among the French people, having been their first national
victory, won under the banners of a definite kingdom, over
foreign foes. It was a triumph for the Papacy and the Church
and a crushing blow to those who dared resist the mandates of
Rome. It sent King John back to England so humbled and
weakened that he had little stomach for the contest which
awaited him there, and the grand event of the signing of Magna
Charta next year was more easily brought about. It settled the
fate of Otho of Germany, and cleared the bright opening of the
stormy career of Frederick II., his successor. Thus the battle
of Bouvines, which is not a famous field in common knowledge,
must really be numbered among the great and important battles
of the world.
When Philip Augustus died in 1223, the regality which he
bequeathed to his son, Louis VIII., was something vastly
greater than that which came to him from his predecessors. He
had enhanced both the dignity and the power, both the
authority and the prestige, of the Crown, and made a
substantial kingdom of France. Louis VIII. enlarged his
dominions by the conquest of Lower Poitou and the taking of
Rochelle from the English; but he sowed the seeds of future
weakness in the monarchy by creating great duchies for his
children, which became as troublesome to later kings as
Normandy and Anjou had been to those before him.
Saint Louis.
Louis IX.--Saint Louis in the calendar of the Catholic
Church--who came to the throne in 1226, while a child of
eleven years, was a king of so noble a type that he stands
nearly alone in history. Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor, and
King Alfred of England, are the only sovereigns who seem
worthy to be compared with him; and even the purity of those
rare souls is not quite so simple and so selfless, perhaps, as
that which shines in the beautiful character of this most
Christian king. His goodness was of that quality which rises
to greatness--above all other measures of greatness in the
distinction of men. It was of that quality which even a wicked
world is compelled to feel and to bend to as a power, much
exceeding the power of state-craft or of the sword. Of all the
kings of his line, this Saint Louis was probably the one who
had least thought of a royal interest in France distinct from
the interest of the people of France; and the one who
consciously did least to aggrandize the monarchy and enlarge
its powers; but no king before him or after him was so much
the true architect of the foundations of the absolute French
monarchy of later times. His constant purpose was to give
peace to his kingdom and justice to his people; to end
violence and wrong-doing.
{1030}
In pursuing this purpose, he gave a new character and a new
influence to the royal courts,--established them in public
confidence,--accustomed his subjects to appeal to them; he
denounced the brutal senselessness of trials by combat, and
commanded their abolition; he gave encouragement to the study
and the introduction of Roman law, and so helped to dispel the
crude political as well as legal ideas that feudalism rested
on. His measures in these directions all tended to the
undermining of the feudal system and to the breaking down of
the independence of the great vassals who divided sovereignty
with the king. At the same time the upright soul of King
Louis, devotedly pious son of the Church as he was, yielded
his conscience to it, and the just ordinances of his kingdom,
no more than he yielded to the haughty turbulence of the great
vassals of the crown.
The great misfortunes of the reign of Saint Louis were the two
calamitous Crusades in which he engaged (1248-1254, and 1270),
and in the last of which he died. They were futile in every
way--as unwisely conducted as they were unwisely conceived;
but they count among the few errors of a noble, great life.
Regarded altogether, in the light which after-history throws
back upon it, the reign of Louis IX. is more loftily
distinguished than any other in the annals of France.
Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface.
There is little to distinguish the reign of St. Louis' son,
Philip III., "le Hardi," "the Rash" (1270-1285), though the
remains of the great fief of Toulouse were added in his time
to the royal domain; but under the grandson of St. Louis, the
fourth Philip, surnamed "le Bel," there was a season of storms
in France. This Philip was unquestionably a man of clear, cold
intellect, and of powerful, unbending will. There was nothing
of the soldier in him, much of the lawyer-like mind and
disposition. The men of the gown were his counsellors; he
advanced their influence, and promoted the acceptance in
France of the principles of the Roman or civil law, which were
antagonistic to feudal ideas. In his attitude towards the
Papacy--which had declined greatly in character and power
within the century past--he was extraordinarily bold. His
famous quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. resulted in
humiliations to the head of the Church from which, in some
respects, there was no recovery. The quarrel arose on
questions connected chiefly with the taxing of the clergy. The
Pope launched one angry Bull after another against the
audacious king, and the latter retorted with Ordinances which
were as effective as the Bulls. Excommunication was defied;
the Inquisition was suppressed in France; appeal taken to a
General Council of the Church. At last Boniface suffered
personal violence at the hands of a party of hired ruffians,
in French pay, who attacked him at his country residence, and
received such indignities that he expired soon after of shame
and rage. The pope immediately succeeding died a few months
later, and dark suspicions as to the cause of his death were
entertained; for he gave place (1305) to one, Clement V., who
was the tool of the French king, bound to him by pledges and
guarantees before his election. This Pope Clement removed the
papal residence from Rome to Avignon, and for a long
period--the period known as "the Babylonish Captivity"--the
Holy See was subservient to the monarchy of France.
In this contest with the Papacy, Philip threw himself on the
support of the whole body of his people, convoking (1302) the
first meeting of the Three Estates--the first of the few
general Parliaments--ever assembled in France.
Destruction of the Templars.
A more sinister event in the reign of Philip IV. was his
prosecution and destruction of the famous Order of the Knights
Templars. The dark, dramatic story has been told many times,
and its incidents are familiar. Perhaps there will never be
agreement as to the bottom of truth that might exist in the
charges brought against the Order; but few question the fact
that its blackest guilt in the eyes of the French King was its
wealth, which he coveted and which he was resolved to find
reasons for taking to himself. The knights were accused of
infidelity, blasphemy, and abominable vices. They were tried,
tortured, tempted to confessions, burned at the stake, and
their lands and goods were divided between the Crown and the
Knights of St. John.
Flemish Wealth and Independence.
The wilful king had little mercy in his cold heart and few
scruples in his calculating brain. His character was not
admirable; but the ends which he compassed were mostly good
for the strength and independence of the monarchy of France,
and, on the whole, for the welfare of the people subject to
it. Even the disasters of his reign had sometimes their good
effect: as in the case of his failure to subjugate the great
county of Flanders. Originally a fief of the Kings of France,
it had been growing apart from the French monarchy, through
the independent interests and feelings that rose in it with
the increase of wealth among its singularly industrious and
thrifty people. The Low Countries, or Netherlands, on both
sides of the Rhine, had been the first in western Europe to
develop industrial arts and the trade that goes with them in a
thoroughly intelligent and systematic way. The Flemings were
leaders in this industrial development. Their country was full
of busy cities,--communes, with large liberties in
possession,--where prosperous artisans, pursuing many crafts,
were organized in gilds and felt strong for the defense of
their chartered rights. Ghent exceeded Paris in riches and
population at the end of the thirteenth century. Bruges was
nearly its equal; and there were many of less note. The
country was already a prize to be coveted by kings; and the
kings of France, who claimed the rights of feudal superiority
over its count, had long been seeking to make their
sovereignty direct, while the spirit of the Flemings carried
them more and more toward independence.
In 1294, Philip IV. became involved in war with Edward I. of
England over Guienne. Flanders, which traded largely with
England and was in close friendship with the English king and
people, took sides with the latter, and was basely abandoned
when Philip and Edward made peace, in 1302. The French king
then seized his opportunity to subjugate the Flemings, which
he practically accomplished for a time, mastering all of their
cities except Ghent. His need and his greed made the burden of
taxes which he now laid on these new subjects very heavy and
they were soon in revolt. By accident, and the folly of the
French, they won a fearfully decisive victory at Courtray,
where some thousands of the nobles and knights of France
charged blindly into a canal, and were drowned, suffocated and
slaughtered in heaps. The carnage was so great that it broke
the strength of the feudal chivalry of France, and the French
crown, while it lost Flanders, yet gained power from the very
disaster.
{1031}
In 1314, Philip IV. died, leaving three sons, who occupied the
throne for brief terms in succession: Louis X, surnamed Hutin
(disorder), who survived his father little more than a year;
Philip V., called "the Long" (1316-1322), and Charles IV.,
known as "the Fair" (1322-1328). With the death of Charles the
Fair, the direct line of the Capetian Kings came to an end,
and Philip, Count of Valois, first cousin of the late kings,
and grandson of Philip III., came to the throne, as Philip
VI.--introducing the Valois line of kings.
Claims of Edward III. of England.
The so-called Salic law, excluding females, in France, from
the throne, had now, in the arrangement of these recent
successions, been affirmed and enforced. It was promptly
disputed by King Edward III. of England, who claimed the
French crown by right of his mother, daughter of Philip IV.
and sister of the last three kings. His attempt to enforce
this claim was the beginning of the wicked, desolating
"Hundred Years War" between England and France, which
well-nigh ruined the latter, while it contributed in the
former to the advancement of the commons in political power.
England after the Norman Conquest.
The England of the reign of Edward III., when the Hundred
Years War began, was a country quite different in condition
from that which our narrative left, at the time it had yielded
(about 1071) to William the Norman conqueror. The English
people were brought low by that subjugation, and the yoke
which the Normans laid upon them was heavy indeed. They were
stripped of their lands by confiscation; they were disarmed
and disorganized; every attempt at rebellion failed miserably,
and every failure brought wider confiscations. The old
nobility suffered most and its ranks were thinned. England
became Norman in its aristocracy and remained English in its
commons and its villeinage.
Modified Feudalism in England.
Before the Conquest, feudalism had crept into its southern
parts and was working a slow change of its old free Germanic
institutions. But the Normans quickened the change and widened
it. At the same time they controlled it in certain ways,
favorably both to the monarchy and the people. They
established a feudal system, but it was a system different
from that which broke up the unity of both kingdoms of the
Franks. William, shrewd statesman that he was, took care that
no dangerous great fiefs should be created; and he took care,
too, that every landlord in England should swear fealty direct
to the king,--thus placing the Crown in immediate relations
with all its subjects, permitting no intermediary lord to take
their first allegiance to himself and pass it on at second
hand to a mere crowned overlord.
The effect of this diluted organization of feudalism in
England was to make the monarchy so strong, from the
beginning, that both aristocracy and commons were naturally
put on their defence against it, and acquired a feeling of
association, a sense of common interest, a habit of alliance,
which became very important influences in the political
history of the nation. In France, as we have seen, there had
been nothing of this. There, at the beginning, the feudal
aristocracy was dominant, and held itself so haughtily above
the commons, or Third Estate, that no political cooperation
between the two orders could be thought of when circumstances
called for it. The kings slowly undermined the aristocratic
power, using the communes in the process; and when, at last,
the power of the monarchy had become threatening to both
orders in the state, they were separated by too great an
alienation of feeling and habit to act well together.
It was the great good fortune of England that feudalism was
curbed by a strong monarchy. It was the greater good fortune
of the English people that their primitive Germanic
institutions--their folk-moots, and their whole simple popular
system of local government--should have had so long and sturdy
a growth before the feudal scheme of society began seriously
to intrude upon them. The Norman conqueror did no violence to
those institutions. He claimed to be a lawful English king,
respecting English laws. The laws, the customs, the
organization of government, were, indeed, greatly modified in
time; but the modification was slow, and the base of the whole
political structure that rose in the Anglo-Norman kingdom
remained wholly English.
Norman Influences in England.
The Normans brought with them into England a more active,
enterprising, enquiring spirit than had animated the land
before. They brought an increase of learning and of the
appetite for knowledge. They brought a more educated taste in
art, to improve the building of the country and its
workmanship in general. They brought a wider acquaintance with
the affairs of the outside world, and drew England into
political relations with her continental neighbors, which were
not happy for her in the end, but which may have contributed
for a time to her development. They brought, also, a more
powerful organization of the Church, which gave England
trouble in later days.
The Conqueror's Sons.
When the Conqueror died (1087), his eldest son Robert
succeeded him in Normandy, but he wished the crown of England
to go to his son William, called Rufus, or "the Red." He could
not settle the succession by his will, because in theory the
succession was subject to the choice or assent of the nobles
of the realm. But, in fact, William Rufus became king through
mere tardiness of opposition; and when, a few months after his
coronation, a formidable rebellion broke out among the Normans
in England, who preferred his wayward brother Robert, it was
the native English who sustained him and established him on
the throne. The same thing occurred again after William Rufus
died (1100). The Norman English tried again to bring in Duke
Robert, while the native English preferred the younger
brother, Henry, who was born among them. They won the day.
Henry I., called Beauclerc, the Scholar, was seated on the
throne. Unlike William Rufus, who had no gratitude for the
support the English gave him, and ruled them harshly, Henry
showed favor to his English subjects, and, during his reign of
thirty-five years, the two races were so effectually
reconciled and drawn together that little distinction between
them appears thereafter.
{1032}
Henry acquired Normandy, as well as England, uniting again the
two sovereignties of his father. His thriftless brother,
Robert, had pledged the dukedom to William Rufus, who lent him
money for a crusading expedition. Returning penniless, Robert
tried to recover his heritage; but Henry claimed it and made
good the claim.
Anarchy in Stephen's Reign.
At Henry's death, the succession fell into dispute. He had
lost his only son. His daughter, Matilda, first married to the
Emperor Henry V., had subsequently wedded Count Geoffrey of
Anjou, by whom she had a son. Henry strove, during his life,
to bind his nobles by oath to accept Matilda and her son as
his successors. But on his death (1135) their promises were
broken. They gave the crown to Stephen of Blois, whose mother
was Henry's sister; whereupon there ensued the most dreadful
period of civil war and anarchy that England ever knew.
Stephen, at his coronation, swore to promises which he did not
keep, losing many of his supporters for that reason; the
Empress Matilda and her young son Henry had numerous
partisans; and each side was able to destroy effectually the
authority of the other. "The price of the support given to
both was the same--absolute licence to build castles, to
practise private war, to hang their private enemies, to
plunder their neighbours, to coin their money, to exercise
their petty tyrannies as they pleased." "Castles innumerable
sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled
with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined. The feudal
spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even
party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own
behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its
triumph ensured its fall" (Stubbs).
Angevin Kings of England.
At length, in 1153, peace was made by a treaty which left
Stephen in possession of the throne during his life, but made
Henry, already recognized as Duke of Normandy, his heir.
Stephen died the following year, and Henry II., now twenty-one
years old, came quietly into his kingdom, beginning a new
royal line, called the Angevin kings, because of their descent
from Geoffrey of Anjou; also taking the name Plantagenets from
Geoffrey's fashion of wearing a bit of broom, Planta Genista,
in his hat.
Henry II. proved, happily, to be a king of the strong
character that was needed in the England of that wretched
time. He was bold and energetic, yet sagacious, prudent,
politic. He loved power and he used it with an unsparing hand;
but he used it with wise judgment, and England was the better
for it. He struck hard and persistently at the lawlessness of
feudalism, and practically ended it forever as a menace to
order and unity of government in England. He destroyed
hundreds of the castles which had sprung up throughout the
land in Stephen's time, to be nests of robbers and strongholds
of rebellion. He humbled the turbulent barons. He did in
England, for the promotion of justice, and for the enforcement
of the royal authority, what Louis IX. did a little later in
France: that is, he reorganized and strengthened the king's
courts, creating a judicial system which, in its most
essential features, has existed to the present time. His
organizing hand brought system and efficiency into every
department of the government. He demanded of the Church that
its clergy should be subject to the common laws of the
kingdom, in matters of crime, and to trial before the ordinary
courts; and it was this most just reform of a crying
abuse--the exemption of clerics from the jurisdiction of
secular courts--which brought about the memorable collision
of King Henry with Thomas Becket, the inflexible archbishop of
Canterbury. Becket's tragical death made a martyr of him, and
placed Henry in a penitential position which checked his great
works of reform; but, on the whole, his reign was one of
splendid success, and shines among the epochs that throw light
on the great after-career of the English nation.
Aside from his importance as an English statesman, Henry II.
figured largely, in his time, among the most powerful of the
monarchs of Europe. His dominions on the continent embraced
much more of the territory of modern France than was ruled
directly by the contemporary French king, though nominally he
held them as a vassal of the latter. Normandy came to him from
his grandfather; from his father he inherited the large
possessions of the House of Anjou; by his marriage with
Eleanor of Aquitaine (divorced by Louis VII. of France, as
mentioned already) he acquired her wide and rich domain. On
the continent, therefore, he ruled Normandy, Maine, Touraine,
Anjou, Guienne, Poitou and Gascony. He may be said to have
added Ireland to his English kingdom, for he began the
conquest. He held a great place, in his century, and
historically he is a notable figure in the time.
His rebellious, undutiful son Richard, Cœur de Lion, the
Crusader, the hard fighter, the knight of many rude
adventures, who succeeded Henry II. in 1189, is popularly
better known than he; but Richard's noisy brief career shows
poorly when compared with his father's life of thoughtful
statesmanship. It does not show meanly, however, like that of
the younger son, John, who came to the throne in 1199. The
story of John's probable murder of his young nephew, Arthur,
of Brittany, and of his consequent loss of all the Angevin
lands, and of Normandy (excepting only the Norman islands, the
Jerseys, which have remained English to our own day) has been
briefly told heretofore, when the reign of Philip Augustus of
France was under review.
{1033}
The whole reign of John was ignominious. He quarreled with the
Pope--with the inflexible Innocent III., who humbled many
kings--over a nomination to the Archbishopric of Canterbury
(1205); his kingdom was put under interdict (1208); he was
threatened with deposition; and when, in affright, he
surrendered, it was so abjectly done that he swore fealty to
the Pope, as a vassal to his suzerain, consenting to hold his
kingdom as a fief of the Apostolic See. The triumph of the
Papacy in this dispute brought one great good to England. It
made Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, and thereby
gave a wise and righteous leader to the opponents of the
king's oppressive rule. Lords and commons, laity and clergy,
were all alike sufferers from John's greed, his perfidy, his
mean devices and his contempt of law. Langton rallied them to
a sober, stern, united demonstration, which awed King John,
and compelled him to put his seal to Magna Charta--the grand
Charter of English liberties (1215). A few weeks later he
tried to annul what he had done, with encouragement from the
Pope, who anathematized the Charter and all who had to do with
it. Then certain of the barons, in their rage, offered the
English crown to the heir of France, afterwards Louis VIII.;
and the French prince actually came to England (1216) with an
army to secure it. But before the forces gathered on each side
were brought to any decisive battle, John died. Louis'
partisans then dropped away from him and the next year, after
a defeat at sea, he returned to France.
Henry III. and the Barons' War.
John left a son, a lad of nine years, who grew to be a better
man than himself, though not a good king, for he was weak and
untruthful in character, though amiable and probably
well-meaning. He held the throne for fifty-six years, during
which long time, after his minority was passed, no minister of
ability and honorable character could get and keep office in
the royal service. He was jealous of ministers, preferring
mere administrative clerks; while he was docile to favorites,
and picked them for the most part from a swarm of foreign
adventurers whom the nation detested. The Great Charter of his
father had been reaffirmed in his name soon after he received
the crown, and in 1225 he was required to issue it a third
time, as the condition of a grant of money; but he would not
rule honestly in compliance with its provisions, and sought
continually to lay and collect heavy taxes in unlawful ways.
He spent money extravagantly, and was foolish and reckless in
foreign undertakings, accepting, for example, the Kingdom of
Sicily, offered to his son Edmund by the Pope, whose gift
could only be made good by force of arms. At the same time he
was servile to the popes, whose increasing demands for money
from England were rousing even the clergy to resistance. So
the causes of discontent grew abundantly until they brought it
to a serious head. All classes of the people were drawn
together again, as they had been to resist the aggressions of
John. The great councils of the kingdom, or assemblies of
barons and bishops (which had taken the place of the
witenagemot of the old English time, and which now began to be
called Parliaments), became more and more united against the
king. At last the discontent found a leader of high capacity
and of heroic if not blameless character, in Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon de Montfort was of foreign
birth,--son of that fanatical crusader of the same name, who
spread ruin over the fair country of the Albigeois. The
English earldom of Leicester had passed to his family, and the
younger Simon, receiving it, came to England and became an
Englishman. After some years he threw himself into the
struggle with the Crown, and his leadership was soon
recognized. In 1258, a parliament held at London compelled the
king to consent to the appointment of an extraordinary
commission of twenty-four barons, clothed with full power to
reform the government. The commission was named at a
subsequent meeting of parliament, the same year, at Oxford,
where the grievances to be redressed were set forth in a paper
known as the Provisions of Oxford. From the twenty-four
commissioners there were chosen fifteen to be the King's
Council. This was really the creation of a new constitution
for the kingdom, and Henry swore to observe it. But ere long
he procured a bull from the Pope, absolving him from his oath,
and he began to prepare for throwing off the restraints that
had been put upon him. The other side took up arms, under
Simon's lead; but peace was preserved for a time by referring
all questions in dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX. of
France. The arbiter decided against the barons (1264) and
Montfort's party refused to abide by the award. Then followed
the civil conflict known as the Barons' War. The king was
defeated and taken prisoner, and was obliged to submit to
conditions which practically transferred the administration of
the government to three counsellors, of whom Simon de Montfort
was the chief.
Development of the English Parliament;
In January, 1265, a memorable parliament was called together.
It was the first national assembly in which the larger element
of the English Commons made its appearance; for Montfort had
summoned to it certain representatives of borough towns, along
with the barons, the bishops and the abbots, and along,
moreover, with representative knights, who had been gaining
admittance of late years to what now became a convocation of
the Three Estates. The parliamentary model thus roughly shaped
by the great Earl of Leicester was not continuously followed
until another generation came; but it is his glory,
nevertheless, to have given to England the norm and principle
on which its unexampled parliament was framed. By dissensions
among themselves, Simon de Montfort and his party soon lost
the great advantage they had won, and on another appeal to
arms they were defeated (1265) by the king's valiant and able
son, afterwards King Edward I., and Montfort was slain. It was
seven years after this before Edward succeeded his father, and
nine before he came to the throne, because he was absent on a
Crusade; but when he did, it was to prove himself, not merely
one of the few statesmen-kings of England, but one large
enough in mind to take lessons from the vanquished enemies of
the Crown. He, in reality, took up the half-planned
constitutional work of Simon de Montfort, in the development
of the English Parliament as a body representative of all
orders in the nation, and carried it forward to substantial
completion. He did it because he had wit to see that the
people he ruled could be led more easily than they could be
driven, and that their free-giving of supplies to the Crown
would be more open-handed than their giving under compulsion.
The year 1295 "witnessed the first summons of a perfect and
model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops,
deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned
severally in person by the king's special writ, and the
commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing
them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two
elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from
each borough" (Stubbs).
{1034}
Two years later, the very fundamental principle of the English
Constitution was established, by a Confirmation of the
Charters, conceded in Edward's absence by his son, but
afterwards assented to by him, which definitely renounced the
right of the king to tax the nation without its consent. Thus
the reign of Edward I. was really the most important in the
constitutional history of England. It was scarcely less
important in the history of English jurisprudence; for Edward
was in full sympathy with the spirit of an age in which the
study and reform of the law were wonderfully awakened
throughout Europe. The great statutes of his reign are among
the monuments of Edward's statesmanship, and not the least
important of them are those by which he checked the
encroachments of the Church and its dangerous acquisition of
wealth.
At the same time, the temper of this vigorous king was warlike
and aggressive. He subdued the Welsh and annexed Wales as a
principality to England. He enforced the feudal supremacy
which the English kings claimed over Scotland, and, upon the
Scottish throne becoming vacant, in 1290, seated John Baliol,
as a vassal who did homage to him. The war of Scottish
Independence then ensued, of which William Wallace and Robert
Bruce were the heroes. Wallace perished on an English scaffold
in 1305; Bruce, the next year, secured the Scottish crown, and
eventually broke the bonds in which his country was held.
Edward I. died in 1307, and his kingly capability died with
him. He transmitted neither spirit nor wisdom to his son, the
second Edward, who gave himself and his kingdom up to foreign
favorites, as his grandfather had done. His angry subjects
practically took the government out of his hands (1310), and
confided it to a body of twenty-one members, called Ordainers.
His reign of twenty years was one of protracted strife and
disorder; but the constitutional power of Parliament made
gains. In outward appearance, however, there was nothing to
redeem the wretchedness of the time. The struggle of factions
was pushed to civil war; while Scotland, by the great blow
struck at Bannockburn (1314), made her independence complete.
In 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whose descent was as royal
as the king's, but who headed the opponents of Edward and
Edward's unworthy favorites, was defeated in battle, taken
prisoner, and brought to the block. This martyrdom, as it was
called, embalmed Lancaster's memory in the hearts of the
people.
Edward III. and his French Claims.
The queen of Edward II., Isabella of France, daughter of
Philip the Fair, made, at last, common cause with his enemies.
In January, 1327, he was forced to formally resign the crown,
and in September of the same year he was murdered, the queen,
with little doubt, assenting to the deed. His son, Edward
III., who now came to the throne, founded claims to the crown
of France upon the rights of his mother, whose three brothers,
as we have seen, had been crowned in succession and had died,
bringing the direct line of royalty in France to an end. By
this claim the two countries were plunged into the miseries of
the dreadful Hundred Years War, and the progress of
civilization in Europe was seriously checked.
Recovery of Christian Spain.
Before entering that dark century of war, it will be necessary
to go back a little in time, and carry our survey farther
afield, in the countries of Europe more remote from the center
of the events we have already scanned. In Spain, for example,
there should be noticed, very briefly, the turning movement of
the tide of Mahometan conquest which drove the Spanish
Christians into the mountains of the North. In the eighth
century, their little principality of Asturia had widened into
the small kingdom of Leon, and the eastern county of Leon had
taken the name of Castella (Castile) from the number of forts
or castles with which it bristled, on the Moorish border. East
of Leon, in the Pyrenees, there grew up about the same time the
kingdom of Navarre, which became important in the eleventh
century, under an enterprising king, Sancho the Great, who
seized Castile and made a separate kingdom of it, which he
bequeathed to his son. The same Navarrese king extended his
dominion over a considerable part of the Spanish March, which
Charlemagne had wrested from the Moors in the ninth century,
and out of this territory the kingdom of Aragon was presently
formed. These four kingdoms, of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and
Aragon, were shuffled together and divided again, in changing
combinations, many times during the next century or two; but
Castile and Leon were permanently united in 1230. Meantime
Portugal, wrested from the Moors, became a distinct kingdom;
while Navarre was reduced in size and importance. Castile,
Aragon, and Portugal are from that time the Christian Powers
in the Peninsula which carried on the unending war with their
Moslem neighbors. By the end of the thirteenth century they
had driven the Moors into the extreme south of the peninsula,
where the latter, thenceforth, held little beyond the small
kingdom of Granada, which defended itself for two centuries
more.
Moorish Civilization and its Decay.
The Christians were winners and the Moslems were losers in
this long battle, because adversity had disciplined the one
and prosperity had relaxed and vitiated the other. Success
bred disunion, and the spoils of victory engendered
corruption, among the followers of Mahomet, very quickly in
their career. The middle of the eighth century was hardly
passed when the huge empire they had conquered broke in twain,
and two Caliphates on one side of the Mediterranean, imitated the
two Roman Empires on the other. We have seen how the Caliphate
of the East, with its seat at Bagdad, went steadily to wreck;
but fresh converts of Islam, out of deserts at the North, were
in readiness, there, to gather the fragments and construct a
new Mahometan power. In the West, where the Caliphs held their
court at Cordova, the same crumbling of their power befell
them, through feuds and jealousies and the decay of a sensuous
race; but there were none to rebuild it in the Prophet's name.
The Moor gave way to the Castilian in Spain for reasons not
differing very much from the reasons which explain the
supplanting of the Arab by the Turk in the East.
{1035}
While its grandeur lasted in Spain,--from the eighth to the
eleventh centuries--the empire of the Saracens, or Moors, was
the most splendid of its age. It developed a civilization
which must have been far finer, in the superficial showing,
and in much of its spirit as well, than anything found in
Christian Europe at that time. Its religious temper was less
fierce and intolerant. Its intellectual disposition was
towards broader thinking and freer inquiry. Its artistic
feeling was truer and more instinctive. It took lessons from
classic learning and philosophy before Germanized Europe had
become aware of the existence of either, and it gave the
lessons at second hand to its Christian neighbors. Its
industries were conducted with a knowledge and a skill that
could be found among no other people. Says Dr. Draper: "Europe
at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement,
more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of
which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs.
Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. Their houses
were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by
furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by
underground pipes from flower beds. They had baths, and
libraries, and dining halls, fountains of quicksilver and
water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of
dancing to lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and
gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern neighbors, the
feasts of the Saracens were marked with sobriety."
The brilliancy of the Moorish civilization seems like that of
some short-lived flower, which may spring from a thin soil of
no lasting fertility. The qualities which yielded it had their
season of ascendancy over the deeper-lying forces that worked
in the Gothic mind of Christian Spain; but time exhausted the
one, while it matured the other.
Mediæval Spanish Character.
There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and
religions in the peninsula affected the character of the
Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill,
than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened
and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures
they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a
lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered
and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some
likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the
partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. It
tended to put bigotry in the place of piety--religious rancor
in the place of charity--priests and images in the place of
Christ--much more among the Spaniards than among other
peoples; for they, alone, were Crusaders against the Moslem
for eight hundred years.
Early Free Institutions in Spain.
The political effects of those centuries of struggle in the
peninsula were also remarkable and strangely mixed. In all the
earlier stages of the national development, until the close of
the mediæval period, there seems to have been as promising a
growth of popular institutions, in most directions, as can be
found in England itself. Apparently, there was more good
feeling between classes than elsewhere in Europe. Nobles,
knights and commons fought side by side in so continuous a
battle that they were more friendly and familiar in
acquaintance with one another. Moreover, the ennobled and the
knighted were greatly more numerous in Spain than in the
neighboring countries. The kings were lavish of such honors in
rewarding valor, on every battlefield and after every campaign.
It was impossible, therefore, for so great a distance to widen
between the grandee and the peasant or the burgher as that
which separated the lord and the citizen in Germany or France.
The division of Christian Spain into several petty kingdoms,
and the circumstances under which they were placed, retarded
the growth of monarchical power, and yet did not tend to a
feudal disintegration of society; because the pressure of its
perpetual war with the infidels forced the preservation of a
certain degree of unity, sufficient to be a saving influence.
At the same time, the Spanish cities became prosperous, and
naturally, in the circumstances of the country, acquired much
freedom and many privileges. The inhabitants of some cities in
Aragon enjoyed the privileges of nobility as a body; the
magistrates of other cities were ennobled. Both in Aragon and
Castile, the towns had deputies in the Cortes before any
representatives of boroughs sat in the English Parliament; and
the Cortes seems to have been, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, a more potent factor in government than any
assembly of estates in any other part of Europe.
But something was wanting in Spain that was not wanting in
England and in the Netherlands, for example, to complete the
evolution of a popular government from this hopeful beginning.
And the primary want, it would seem, was a political sense or
faculty in the people. To illustrate this in one particular:
the Castilian Commons did not grasp the strings of the
national purse when they had it in their hands, as the
practical Englishmen did. They allowed the election of
deputies from the towns to slip out of their hands and to
become an official function of the municipalities, where it
was corrupted and controlled by the Crown. In Aragon, the
popular rights were more efficiently maintained, perhaps; but
even there the political faculty of the people must have been
defective, as compared with that of the nations in the North
which developed free government from less promising germs.
And, yet, it is possible that the whole subsequent failure of
Spain may be fully explained by the ruinous prosperity of her
career in the sixteenth century,--by the fatal gold it gave
her from America, and the independent power it put into the
hands of her kings.
Northern and North-eastern Europe.
While the Spaniards in their southern peninsula were wrestling
with the infidel Moor, their Gothic kindred of Sweden, and the
other Norse nations of that opposite extremity of Europe, had
been casting off paganism and emerging from the barbarism of
their piratical age, very slowly. It was not until the tenth
and eleventh centuries that Christianity got footing among
them. It was not until the thirteenth century that unity and
order, the fruits of firm government, began to be really fixed
in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas.
{1036}
The same is substantially true of the greater Slavic states on
the eastern side of Europe. The Poles had accepted
Christianity in the tenth century, and their dukes, in the
same century, had assumed the title of kings. In the twelfth
century they had acquired a large dominion and exercised great
power; but the kingdom was divided, was brought into collision
with the Teutonic Knights, who conquered Prussia, and it fell
into a disordered state. The Russians had been Christianized
in the same missionary century--the tenth; but civilization
made slow progress among them, and their nation was being
divided and re-divided in shifting principalities by
contending families and lords. In the thirteenth century they
were overwhelmed by the fearful calamity of a conquest by
Mongol or Tartar hordes, and fell under the brutal domination
of the successors of Genghis Khan.
Latin Conquest of Constantinople.
At Constantinople, the old Greek-Roman Empire of the East had
been passing through singular changes since we noticed it
last. The dread with which Alexius Comnenius saw the coming of
the Crusaders in 1097 was justified by the experience of his
successors, after little more than a hundred years. In 1204, a
crusade, which is sometimes numbered as the fourth and
sometimes as the fifth in the crusading series, was diverted
by Venetian influence from the rescue of Jerusalem to the
conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly in the interest of a
claimant of the Imperial throne. The city was taken and
pillaged, and the Greek line of Emperors was supplanted by a
Frank or Latin line, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was
the first. But this Latin Empire was reduced to a fraction of
the conquered dominion, the remainder being divided among
several partners in the conquest; while two Greek princes of
the fallen house saved fragments of the ancient realm in Asia,
and throned themselves as emperors at Trebizond and Nicæa. The
Latin Empire was maintained, feebly and without dignity, a
little more than half a century; and then (1261) it was
extinguished by the sovereign of its Nicæan rival, Michael
Palæologus, who took Constantinople by a night surprise,
helped by treachery within. Thus the Greek or Byzantine Empire
was restored, but much shorn of its former European
possessions, and much weakened by loss of commerce and wealth.
It was soon involved in a fresh struggle for life with the
Turks.
The Thirteenth Century.
We have now, in our general survey of European history, just
passed beyond the thirteenth century, and it will be
instructive to pause here a moment and glance back over the
movements and events which distinguish that remarkable age.
For the thirteenth century, while it belongs chronologically
to mediæval times, seems nearer in spirit to the
Renaissance--shows more of the travail of the birth of our
modern mind and life--than the fourteenth, and even more than
the greater part of the years of the fifteenth century.
For England, it was the century in which the enduring bases of
constitutional government were laid down; within which Magna
Charta and its Confirmations were signed; within which the
Parliament of Simon de Montfort and the Parliaments of Edward
I. gave a representative form and a controlling power to the
wonderful legislature of the English nation. In France, it was
the century of the Albigenses; of Saint Louis and his judicial
reforms; and it stretched within two years of the first
meeting of the States-General of the kingdom. In Switzerland,
it was the century which began the union of the three forest
cantons. In Spain, it was the century which gave Aragon the
"General Privilege" of Peter III.; in Hungary, it was the
century of its Golden Bull. In Italy it was the century of
Frederick II.,--the man of modern spirit set in mediæval
circumstances; and it was the century, too, which moulded the
city-republics that resisted and defeated his despotic
pretensions. Everywhere, it was an age of impulses toward
freedom, and of mighty upward strivings out of the chaos and
darkness of the feudal state. It was an age of vast energies,
directed with practical judgment and power. It organized the
great league of the Hansa Towns, which surpassed, as an
enterprise of combination in commercial affairs, the most
stupendous undertakings of the present time. It put the
weavers and traders of Flanders on a footing with knights and
princes. In Venice and Genoa it crowned the merchant like a
king. It sent Marco Polo to Cathay, and inoculated men with
the itch of exploration from which they find no ease to this
day. It was the century which saw painting revived as a living
art in the world by Cimabue and Giotto, and sculpture restored
by Niccola Pisano. It was the age of great church-building in
Italy, in Germany and in France. It was the century of St.
Francis of Assisi, and of the creation of the mendicant orders
in the Church,--a true religious reformation in its spirit,
however unhappy in effect it may have been. It was the time of
the high tide of mediæval learning; the epoch of Aquinas, of
Duns Scotus, of Roger Bacon; the true birth-time of the
Universities of Paris and Oxford. It was the century which
educated Dante for his immortal work.
The Fourteenth Century.
The century which followed was a period of many wars--of
ruinous and deadly wars, and miserable demoralizations and
disorders, which depressed all Europe by their effects. In the
front of them all was the wicked Hundred Years War, forced on
France by the ambition of an English king to wear two crowns;
while with it came the bloody insurrection of the Jacquerie,
the ravages of the free companies, and ruinous anarchy
everywhere. Then, in Italy, there was a duel to the death
between Venice and Genoa; and a long, wasting contest of
rivals for the possession of Naples. In Germany, a contested
imperial election, and the struggle of the Swiss against the
Austrian Dukes. In Flanders, repeated revolts under the two
Artevelds. In the East, the terrible fight of Christendom with
the advancing Turk. And while men were everywhere so busily
slaying one another, there came the great pestilence which
they called the Black Death, to help them in the grim work,
and Europe was half depopulated by it. At the same time, the
Church, which might have kindled some beacon lights of faith
and hope in the midst of all this darkness and terror, was
sinking to its lowest state, and Rome had become an unruled
robbers' den.
There were a few voices heard, above the wailing and the
battle-din of the afflicted age, which charmed and comforted
it; voices which preached the pure gospel of Wycliffe and
Huss,--which recited the great epic of Dante,--which syllabled
the melodious verse of Petrarch and Chaucer,--which told the
gay tales of Boccaccio; but the pauses of peace in which men
might listen to such messages and give themselves to such
delights were neither many nor long.
{1037}
The Hundred Years War.
The conflict between England and France began in Flanders,
then connected with the English very closely in trade. Philip
VI. of France forced the Count of Flanders to expel English
merchants from his territory. Edward III. retaliated (1336) by
forbidding the exportation of wool to Flanders, and this
speedily reduced the Flemish weavers to idleness. They rose in
revolt, drove out their count, and formed an alliance with
England, under the lead of Jacob van Arteveld, a brewer, of
Ghent. The next year (1337) Edward joined the Flemings with an
army and entered France; but made no successful advance,
although his fleet won a victory, in a sea-fight off Sluys,
and hostilities were soon suspended by a truce. In 1341 they
were renewed in Brittany, over a disputed succession to the
dukedom, and the scattered sieges and chivalric combats which
made up the war in that region for two years are described
with minuteness by Froissart, the gossipy chronicler of the
time. After a second truce, the grimly serious stage of the
war was reached in 1346. It was in that year that the English
won the victory at Crécy, which was the pride and boast of
their nation for centuries; and the next season they took
Calais, which they held for more than two hundred years.
Philip died in 1350 and was succeeded by his son John. In
1355, Edward of England repeated his invasion, ravaging
Artois, while his son, the Black Prince, from Guienne (which
the English had held since the Angevin time), devastated
Languedoc. The next year, this last named prince made another
sally from Bordeaux, northwards, towards the Loire, and was
encountered by the French king, with a splendid army, at
Poitiers. The victory of the English in this case was more
overwhelming than at Crécy, although they were greatly
outnumbered. King John was taken prisoner and conveyed to
London. His kingdom was in confusion. The dauphin called
together the States-General of France, and that body, in which
the commons, or third estate, attained to a majority in numbers,
assumed powers and compelled assent to reforms which seemed
likely to place it on a footing of equal importance with the
Parliament of England. The leader of the third estate in these
measures was Etienne or Stephen Marcel, provost of Paris, a
man of commanding energy and courage. The dauphin, under
orders from his captive father, attempted to nullify the
ordinances of the States-General. Paris rose at the call of
Marcel and the frightened prince became submissive; but the
nobles of the provinces resented these high-handed proceedings
of the Parisians and civil war ensued. The peasants, who were
in great misery, took advantage of the situation to rise in
support of the Paris burgesses, and for the redressing of
their own wrongs. This insurrection of the Jacquerie, as it is
known, produced horrible deeds of outrage and massacre on both
sides, and seems to have had no other result. Paris, meantime
(1358), was besieged and hard pressed; Marcel, suspected of an
intended treachery, was killed, and with his death the whole
attempt to assert popular rights fell to the ground.
The state of France at this time was one of measureless
misery. It was overrun with freebooters--discharged soldiers,
desperate homeless and idle men, and the ruffians who always
bestir themselves when authority disappears. They roamed the
country in bands, large and small, stripped it of what war had
spared, and left famine behind them.
At length, in 1360, terms of peace were agreed upon, in a
treaty signed at Bretigny, and fighting ceased, except in
Brittany, where the war went on for four years more. By the
treaty, all French claims upon Aquitaine and the dependencies
were given up, and Edward acquired full sovereignty there, no
longer owing homage, as a vassal, to the king of France.
Calais, too, was ceded to England, and so heavy a ransom was
exacted from the captive King John that he failed to collect
money for the payment of it and died in London (1364).
Charles the Wise.
Charles V., who now ruled independently, as he had ruled for
some years in his father's name, proved to be a more prudent
and capable prince, and his counsellors and captains were
wisely chosen. He was a man of studious tastes and of
considerable learning for that age, with intelligence to see
and understand the greater sources of evil in his kingdom.
Above all, he had patience enough to plant better things in
the seed and wait for them to grow, which is one of the
grander secrets of statesmanship. By careful, judicious
measures, he and those who shared the task of government with
him slowly improved the discipline and condition of their
armies. The "great companies" of freebooters, too strong to be
put down, were lured out of the kingdom by an expedition into
Spain, which the famous warrior Du Guesclin commanded, and
which was sent against the detestable Pedro, called the Cruel,
of Castile, whom the English supported. A stringent economy in
public expenditure was introduced, and the management of the
finances was improved. The towns were encouraged to strengthen

their fortifications, and the state and feeling of the whole
country were slowly lifted from the gloomy depth to which the
war had depressed them.
At length, in 1369, Charles felt prepared to challenge another
encounter with the English, by repudiating the ignominious
terms of the treaty of Bretigny. Before the year closed,
Edward's armies were in the country again, but accomplished
nothing beyond the havoc which they wrought as they marched.
The French avoided battles, and their cities were well
defended. Next year the English returned, and the Black Prince
earned infamy by a ferocious massacre of three thousand men,
women, and children, in the city of Limoges, when he had taken
it by storm. It was his last campaign. Already suffering from
a mortal disease, he returned to England, and died a few years
later. The war went on, with no decisive results, until 1375,
when it was suspended by a truce. In 1377, Edward III. died,
and the French king began war again with great success. Within
three years he expelled the English from every part of France
except Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.
If he had lived a little longer, there might soon have been an
end of the war. But he died in 1380, and fresh calamities fell
upon unhappy France.
{1038}
Rising Power of Burgundy.
The son who succeeded him, Charles VI., was an epileptic boy
of twelve years, who had three greedy and selfish uncles to
quarrel over the control of him, and to plunder the Crown of
territory and treasures. One of these was the Duke of
Burgundy, the first prince of a new great house which King
John had foolishly created. Just before that fatuous king
died, the old line of Burgundian dukes came to an end, and he
had the opportunity, which wise kings before him would have
improved very eagerly, to annex that fief to the crown.
Instead of doing so, he gave it as an appanage to his son
Philip, called "the Bold," and thus rooted a new plant of
feudalism in France which was destined to cause much trouble.
Another of the uncles was Louis, Duke of Anjou, heir to the
crown of Naples under a will of the lately murdered Queen
Joanna, and who was preparing for an expedition to enforce his
claim. The third was Duke of Berry, upon whom his father, King
John, had conferred another great appanage, including Berry,
Poitou and Auvergne.
The pillage and misgovernment of the realm under these
rapacious guardians of the young king was so great that
desperate risings were provoked, the most formidable of which
broke out in Paris. They were all suppressed, and with
merciless severity. At the same time, the Flemings, who had
again submitted to their count, revolted once more, under the
lead of Philip van Arteveld, son of their former leader. The
French moved an army to the assistance of the Count of
Flanders, and the sturdy men of Ghent, who confronted it
almost alone, suffered a crushing defeat at Roosebeke (1382).
Philip van Arteveld fell in the battle, with twenty-six
thousand of his men. Two years later, the Count of Flanders
died, and the Duke of Burgundy, who had married his daughter,
acquired that rich and noble possession. This beginning of the
union of Burgundy and the Netherlands, creating a power by the
side of the throne of France which threatened to overshadow
it, and having for its ultimate consequence the casting of the
wealth of the Low Countries into the lap of the House of
Austria and into the coffers of Spain, is an event of large
importance in European history.
Burgundians and Armagnacs.
When Charles VI. came of age, he took the government into his
own hands, and for some years it was administered by capable
men. But in 1392 the king's mind gave way, and his uncles
regained control of affairs. Philip of Burgundy maintained the
ascendancy until his death, in 1404. Then the controlling
influence passed to the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans,
between whom and the new Duke of Burgundy, John, called the
Fearless, a bitter feud arose. John, who was unscrupulous,
employed assassins to waylay and murder the Duke of Orleans,
which they did in November, 1407. This foul deed gave rise to
two parties in France. Those who sought vengeance ranged
themselves under the leadership of the Count of Armagnac, and
were called by his name. The Burgundians, who sustained Duke
John, were in the main a party of the people; for the Duke had
cultivated popularity, especially in Paris, by advocating
liberal measures and extending the rights and privileges of
the citizens.
The kingdom was kept in turmoil and terror for years by the
war of these factions, especially in and about Paris, where
the guild of the butchers took a prominent part in affairs, on
the Burgundian side, arming a riotous body of men who were
called Cabochiens, from their leader's name. In 1413 the
Armagnacs succeeded in recovering possession of the capital
and the Cabochiens were suppressed.
Second Stage of the Hundred Years War.
Meantime, Henry V. of England, the ambitious young Lancastrian
king who came to the throne of that country in 1413, saw a
favorable opportunity, in the distracted state of France, to
reopen the questions left unsettled by the breaking of the
treaty of Bretigny. He invaded France in 1415, as the rightful
king coming to dethrone a usurper, and began by taking
Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine, after a siege which cost
him so heavily that he found it prudent to retreat towards
Calais. The French intercepted him at Agincourt and forced him
to give them battle. He had only twenty thousand men, but they
formed a well disciplined and well ordered army. The French
had gathered eighty thousand men, but they were a feudal mob.
The battle ended, like those of Crécy and Poitiers, in the
routing and slaughter of the French, with small loss to
Henry's force. His army remained too weak in numbers, however,
for operations in a hostile country, and the English king
returned home, with a great train of captive princes and
lords.
He left the Armagnacs and Burgundians still fighting one
another, and disabling France as effectually as he could do if
he stayed to ravage the land. In 1417 he came back and began
to attack the strong cities of Normandy, one by one, taking
Caen first. In the next year, by a horrible massacre, the
Burgundian mob in Paris overcame the Armagnacs there, and
reinstated Duke John of Burgundy in possession of the capital.
The latter was already in negotiation with the English king,
and evidently prepared to sacrifice the kingdom for whatever
might seem advantageous to himself. But in 1419 Henry V. took
Rouen, and, when all of Normandy submitted with its capital,
he demanded nothing less than that great province, with
Brittany, Guienne, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in addition,--or,
substantially, the western half of France.
Burgundian and English Alliance.
Parleyings were brought to an end in September of that year by
the treacherous murder of Duke John. The Armagnacs slew him
foully, at an interview to which he had been enticed, on the
bridge of Montereau. His son, Duke Philip of Burgundy, now
reopened negotiations with the invader, in conjunction with
Queen Isabella (wife of the demented king), who had played an
evil part in all the factious troubles of the time. These two,
having control of the king's person, concluded a treaty with
Henry V. at Troyes, according to the terms of which Henry
should marry the king's daughter Catherine; should be
administrator of the kingdom of France while Charles VI.
lived, and should receive the crown when the latter died. The
marriage took place at once, and almost the whole of France
north of the Loire seemed submissive to the arrangement. The
States-General and the Parliament of Paris gave official
recognition to it; the disinherited dauphin of France, whose
own mother had signed away his regal heritage, retired, with
his Armagnac supporters, to the country south of the Loire,
and had little apparent prospect of holding even that.
{1039}
Two Kings in France.
But a mortal malady had already stricken King Henry V., and he
died in August, 1422. The unfortunate, rarely conscious French
king, whose crown Henry had waited for, died seven weeks
later. Each left an heir who was proclaimed king of France.
The English pretender (Henry VI. in England, Henry II. in
France) was an innocent infant, ten months old; but his court
was in Paris, his accession was proclaimed with due ceremony
at St. Denis, his sovereignty was recognized by the Parliament
and the University of that city, and the half of France
appeared resigned to the lapse of nationality which its
acceptance of him signified. The true heir of the royal house
of France (Charles VII.) was a young man of nearly mature age
and of fairly promising character; but he was proclaimed in a
little town of Berry, by a small following of lords and
knights, and the nation for which he stood hardly seemed to
exist.
The English supporters of the English king of France were too
arrogant and overbearing to retain very long the good will of
their allies among the French people. Something like a
national feeling in northern France was aroused by the
hostility they provoked, and the strength of the position in
which Henry V. left them was steadily but slowly lost. Charles
proved incapable, however, of using any advantages which
opened to him, or of giving his better counsellors an
opportunity to serve him with good effect, and no important
change took place in the situation of affairs until the
English laid siege, in 1428, to the city of Orleans, which was
the stronghold of the French cause.
Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
Then occurred one of the most extraordinary episodes in
history; the appearance of the young peasant girl of Lorraine,
Jeanne d'Arc, whose coming upon the scene of war was like the
descent of an angel out of Heaven, sent with a Divine
commission to rescue France. Belief in the inspiration of this
simple maiden, who had faith in her own visions and voices,
was easier for that age than belief in a rational rally of
public energies, and it worked like a miracle on the spirit of
the nation. But it could not have done so with effect if the
untaught country girl of Domremy had not been endowed in a
wonderful way, with a wise mind, as well as with an
imaginative one, and with courage as well as with faith. When
the belief in her inspired mission gave her power to lead the
foolish king, and authority to command his disorderly troops,
she acted almost invariably with understanding, with good
sense, with a clear, unclouded judgment, with straightforward
singleness of purpose, and with absolute personal
fearlessness. She saw the necessity for saving Orleans; and
when that had been done under her own captaincy (1429), she
saw how greatly King Charles would gain in prestige if he made
his way to Rheims, and received, like his predecessors, a
solemn coronation and consecration in the cathedral of that
city. It was by force of her gentle obstinacy of determination
that this was done, and the effect vindicated the sagacity of
the Maid. Then she looked upon her mission as accomplished,
and would have gone quietly home to her village; for she seems
to have remained as simple in feeling as when she left her
father's house, and was innocent to the end of any selfish
pleasure in the fame she had won and the importance she had
acquired. But those she had helped would not let her go; and
yet they would not be guided by her without wrangle and
resistance. She wished to move the army straight from Rheims
to Paris, and enter that city before it had time to recover
from the consternation it was in. But other counsellors
retarded the march, by stopping to capture small towns on the
way, until the opportunity for taking Paris was lost. The
king, who had been braced up to a little energy by her
influence, sank back into his indolent pleasures, and faction
and frivolity possessed the court again. Jeanne strove with
high courage against malignant opposition and many
disheartenments, in the siege of Paris and after, exposing
herself in battle with the bravery of a seasoned warrior; and
her reward was to find herself abandoned at last, in a
cowardly way, to the enemy, when she had led a sortie from the
town of Compiegne, to drive back the Duke of Burgundy, who was
besieging it. Taken prisoner, she was given up to the Duke,
and sold by him to the English at Rouen.
That the Maid acted with supernatural powers was believed by
the English as firmly as by the French; but those powers, in
their belief, came, not from Heaven, but from Hell. In their
view she was not a saint, but a sorceress. They paid a high
price to the Duke of Burgundy for his captive, in order to put
her on trial for the witchcraft which they held she had
practised against them, and to destroy her mischievous power.
No consideration for her sex, or her youth, or for the beauty
and purity of character that is revealed in all the accounts
of her trial, moved her judges to compassion. They condemned
her remorselessly to the stake, and she was burned on the 31st
of May, 1431, with no effort put forth on the part of the
French or their ungrateful king to save her from that horrible
fate.
End of the Hundred Years War.
After this, things went badly with the English, though some
years passed before Charles VII. was roused again to any
display of capable powers. At last, in 1435, a general
conference of all parties in the war was brought about at
Arras. The English were offered Normandy and Aquitaine in full
sovereignty, but they refused it, and withdrew from the
conference when greater concessions were denied to them. The
Duke of Burgundy then made terms with King Charles, abandoning
the English alliance, and obtaining satisfaction for the
murder of his father. Charles was now able, for the first time
in his reign, to enter the capital of his kingdom (May, 1436),
and it is said that he found it so wasted by a pestilence and
so ruined and deserted, that wolves came into the city, and
that forty persons were devoured by them in a single week,
some two years later.
{1040}
Charles now began to show better qualities than had appeared
in his character before. He adopted strong measures to
suppress the bands of marauders who harassed and wasted the
country, and to bring all armed forces in the kingdom under
the control and command of the Crown. He began the creation of
a disciplined and regulated militia in France. He called into
his service the greatest French merchant of the day, Jacques
Cœur, who successfully reorganized the finances of the state,
and whose reward, after a few years, was to be prosecuted and
plundered by malignant courtiers, while the king looked
passively on, as he had looked on at the trial and execution
of Jeanne d'Arc.
In 1449, a fresh attack upon the English in Normandy was
begun; and as civil war--the War of the Roses--was then at the
point of outbreak in England, they could make no effective
resistance. Within a year, the whole of Normandy had become
obedient again to the rule of the king of France. In two years
more Guienne had been recovered, and when, in October, 1453,
the French king entered Bordeaux, the English had been finally
expelled from every foot of the realm except Calais and its
near neighborhood. The Hundred Years War was at an end.
England under Edward III.
The century of the Hundred Years War had been, in England, one
of few conspicuous events; and when the romantic tale of that
war--the last sanguinary romance of expiring Chivalry--is
taken out of the English annals of the time, there is not much
left that looks interesting on the surface of things. Below
the surface there are movements of no little importance to be
found.
When Edward III. put forward his claim to the crown of France,
and prepared to make it good by force of arms, the English
nation had absolutely no interest of its own in the
enterprise, from which it could derive no possible advantage,
but which did, on the contrary, promise harm to it, very
plainly, whatever might be the result. If the king succeeded,
his English realm would become a mere minor appendage to a far
more imposing continental dominion, and he and his successors
might easily acquire a power independent and absolute, over
their subjects. If he failed, the humiliation of failure would
wound the pride and the prestige of the nation, while its
resources would have been drained for naught. But these
rational considerations did not suffice to breed any
discoverable opposition to King Edward's ambitious
undertaking. The Parliament gave sanction to it; most probably
the people at large approved, with exultant expectations of
national glory; and when Crécy and Poitiers, with victories
over the hostile Scots, filled the measure of England's glory
to overflowing, they were intoxicated by it, and had little
thought then of the cost or the consequences.
But long before Edward's reign came to an end, the splendid
pageantries of the war had passed out of sight, and a new
generation was looking at, and was suffering from, the
miseries and mortifications that came in its train. The
attempt to conquer France had failed; the fruits of the
victories of Crécy and Poitiers had been lost; even Guienne,
which had been English ground since the days of Henry II., was
mostly given up. And England was weak from the drain of money
and men which the war had caused. The awful plague of the 14th
century, the Black Death, had smitten her people hard and left
diminished numbers to bear the burden. There had been famine
in the land, and grievous distress, and much sorrow.
But the calamities of this bitter time wrought beneficent
effects, which no man then living is likely to have clearly
understood. By plague, famine and battle, labor was made
scarce, wages were raised, the half-enslaved laborer was
speedily emancipated, despite the efforts of Parliament to
keep him in bonds, and land-owners were forced to let their
lands to tenant-farmers, who strengthened the English
middle-class. By the demands of the war for money and men, the
king was held more in dependence on Parliament than he might
otherwise have been, and the plant of constitutional
government, which began its growth in the previous century,
took deeper root.
In the last years of his life Edward III. lost all of his
vigor, and fell under the influence of a woman, Alice Perrers,
who wronged and scandalized the nation. The king's eldest son,
the Black Prince, was slowly dying of an incurable disease,
and took little part in affairs; when he interfered, it seems
to have been with some leanings to the popular side. The next
in age of the living sons of Edward was a turbulent, proud,
self-seeking prince, who gave England much trouble and was
hated profoundly. This was John, Duke of Lancaster, called
John of Gaunt, or Ghent, because of his birth in that city.
England under Richard II.
The Black Prince, dying in 1376, left a young son, Richard,
then ten years old, who was immediately recognized as the heir
to the throne, and who succeeded to it in the following year,
when Edward III. died. The Duke of Lancaster had been
suspected of a design to set Richard aside and claim the crown
for himself. But he did not venture the attempt; nor was he
able to secure even the regency of the kingdom during the
young king's minority. The distrust of him was so general that
Parliament and the lords preferred to invest Richard with full
sovereignty even in his boyhood. But John of Gaunt,
notwithstanding these endeavors to exclude him from any place
of authority, contrived to attain a substantial mastery of the
government, managing the war in France and the expenditure of
public moneys in his own way, and managing them very badly. At
least, he was held chiefly responsible for what was bad, and
his name was heard oftenest in the mutterings of popular
discontent. The peasants were now growing very impatient of
the last fetters of villeinage which they wore, and very
conscious of their right to complete freedom. Those feelings
were strongly stirred in them by a heavy poll-tax which
Parliament levied in 1381. The consequence was an outbreak of
insurrection, led by one Wat the Tyler, which became
formidable and dangerous. The insurgents began by making
everybody they encountered swear to be true to King Richard,
and to submit to no king named John, meaning John of Gaunt.
They increased in numbers and boldness until they entered and
took possession of the city of London, where they beheaded the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and other obnoxious persons; but
permitted no thieving to be done.
{1041}
The day after this occurred, Wat Tyler met the young king at
Smithfield, for a conference, and was suddenly killed by one
of those who attended the king. The excuse made for the deed
was some word of insolence on the part of the insurgent
leader; but there is every appearance of a foul act of
treachery in the affair. Richard on this occasion behaved
boldly and with much presence of mind, acquiring by his
courage and readiness a command over the angry rebels, which
resulted in their dispersion.
The Wat Tyler rebellion appears to have manifested a more
radically democratic state of thinking and feeling among the
common people than existed again in England before the
seventeenth century. John Ball, a priest, and others who were
associated with Wat Tyler in the leadership, preached
doctrines of social equality that would nearly have satisfied
a Jacobin of the French Revolution.
This temper of political radicalism had no apparent connection
with the remarkable religious feeling of the time, which the
great reformer, Wyclif, had aroused; yet the two movements of
the English mind were undoubtedly started by one and the same
revolutionary shock, which it took from the grave alarms and
anxieties of the age, and for which it had been prepared by
the awakening of the previous century. Wyclif was the first
English Puritan, and more of the spirit of the reformation of
religion which he sought, than the spirit of Luther's
reformation, went into the Protestantism that ultimately took
form in England. The movement he stirred was a more wonderful
anticipation of the religious revolt of the sixteenth century
than any other which occurred in Europe; for that of Huss in
Bohemia took its impulse from Wyclif and the English Lollards,
as Wyclif's followers were called.
Richard was a weak but wilful king, and the kingdom was kept
in trouble by his fitful attempts at independence and
arbitrary rule. He made enemies of most of the great lords,
and lost the good will and confidence of Parliament. He did
what was looked upon as a great wrong to Henry of Bolingbroke,
son of John of Gaunt, by banishing both him and the Duke of
Norfolk from the kingdom, when he should have judged between
them; and he made the wrong greater by seizing the lands of
the Lancastrian house when John of Gaunt died. This caused his
ruin. Henry of Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, came back to
England (1399), encouraged by the discontent in the kingdom,
and was immediately joined by so many adherents that Richard
could offer little resistance. He was deposed by act of
Parliament, and the Duke of Lancaster (a grandson of Edward
III., as Richard was), was elected to the throne, which he
ascended as Henry IV. By judgment of King and Parliament,
Richard was presently condemned to imprisonment for life in
Pomfret Castle; and, early in the following year, after a
conspiracy in his favor had been discovered, he died
mysteriously in his prison.
England Under Henry IV.
The reign of Henry IV., which lasted a little more than
thirteen years, was troubled by risings and conspiracies, all
originating among the nobles, out of causes purely personal or
factious, and having no real political significance. But no
events in English history are more commonly familiar, or seem
to be invested with a higher importance, than the rebellions
of Owen Glendower and the Percys,--Northumberland and Harry
Hotspur,--simply because Shakespeare has laid his magic upon
what otherwise would be a story of little note. Wars with the
always hostile Scots supplied other stirring incidents to the
record Of the time; but these came to a summary end in 1405,
when the crown prince, James, of Scotland, voyaging to France,
was driven by foul winds to the English coast and taken
prisoner. The prince's father, King Robert, died on hearing
the news, and James, the captive, was now entitled to be king.
But the English held him for eighteen years, treating him as a
guest at their court, rather than as a prisoner, and educating
him with care, but withholding him from his kingdom.
To strengthen his precarious seat upon the throne, Henry
cultivated the friendship of the Church, and seems to have
found this course expedient, even at considerable cost to his
popularity. For the attitude of the commons towards the Church
during his reign was anything but friendly. They went so far
as to pass a bill for the confiscation of Church property,
which the Lords rejected; and they seem to have repented of an
Act passed early in his reign, under which a cruel persecution
of the Lollards was begun. The clergy and the Lords, with the
favor of the king, maintained the barbarous law, and England
for the first time saw men burned at the stake for heresy.
England Under Henry V. and Henry VI.
Henry IV. died in 1413, and was succeeded by his spirited and
able, but too ambitious son, Henry V., the Prince Hal of
Shakespeare, who gave up riotous living when called to the
grave duties of government and showed himself to be a man of
no common mould. The war in France, which he renewed, and the
chief events of which have been sketched already, filled up
most of his brief reign of nine years. His early death (1422)
left two crowns to an infant nine months old. The English
crown was not disputed. The French crown, though practically
won by conquest, was not permanently secured, but was still to
be fought for; and in the end, as we have seen, it was lost.
No more need be said of the incidents of the war which had
that result.
The infant king was represented in France by his elder uncle,
the Duke of Bedford. In England, the government was carried on
for him during his minority by a council, in which his younger
uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, occupied the chief place,
but with powers that were jealously restricted. While the war
in France lasted, or during most of the thirty-one years
through which it was protracted after Henry V.'s death, it
engrossed the English mind and overshadowed domestic
interests, so that the time has a meagre history.
Soon after he came of age, Henry VI. married (1444) Margaret
of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, who claimed to be
King of Naples and Jerusalem. The marriage, which aimed at
peace with France, and which had been brought about by the
cession to that country of Maine and Anjou, was unpopular in
England. Discontent with the feeble management of the war, and
with the general weakness and incapability of the government,
grew apace, and showed itself, among other exhibitions, in a
rebellion (1450) known as Jack Cade's, from the name of an
Irishman who got the lead of it. Jack Cade and his followers
took possession of London and held it for three days, only
yielding at last to an offer of general pardon, after they had
beheaded Lord Say, the most obnoxious adviser of the king. A
previous mob had taken the head of the Earl of Suffolk, who
was detested still more as the contriver of the king's
marriage and of the humiliating policy in France.
{1042}
The Wars of the Roses.
At length, the Duke of York, representing an elder line of
royal descent from Edward III., took the lead of the
discontented in the nation, and civil war was imminent in
1452; but pacific counsels prevailed for the moment. The king,
who had always been weak-minded, and entirely under the
influence of the queen, now sank for a time into a state of
complete stupor, and was incapable of any act. The Lords in
Parliament thereupon appointed the Duke of York Protector of
England, and the government was vigorously conducted by him
for a few months, until the king recovered. The queen, and the
councillors she favored, now regained their control of
affairs, and the opposition took arms.
The long series of fierce struggles between these two parties,
which is commonly called the Wars of the Roses, began on the
22d of May, 1455, with a battle at St. Albans--the first of
two that were fought on the same ground. At the beginning, it
was a contest for the possession of the unfortunate,
irresponsible king, and of the royal authority which resided
nominally in his person. But it became, ere long, a contest
for the crown which Henry wore, and to which the Duke of York
denied his right. The Duke traced his ancestry to one son of
Edward III., and King Henry to another son. But the Duke's
forefather, Lionel, was prior in birth to the King's
forefather, John of Gaunt, and, as an original proposition,
the House of York was clearly nearer than the House of
Lancaster to the royal line which had been interrupted when
Richard II. was deposed. The rights of the latter House were
such as it had gained prescriptively by half a century of
possession.
At one time it was decided by the Lords that Henry should be
king until he died, and that the Duke of York and his heirs
should succeed him. But Queen Margaret would not yield the
rights of her son, and renewed the war. The Duke of York was
killed in the next battle fought. His son, Edward, continued
the contest, and early in 1461, having taken possession of
London, he was declared king by a council of Lords, which
formally deposed Henry. The Lancastrians were driven from the
kingdom, and Edward held the government with little
disturbance for eight years. Then a rupture occurred between
him and his most powerful supporter, the Earl of Warwick.
Warwick put himself at the head of a rebellion which failed in
the first instance, but which finally, when Warwick had joined
forces with Queen Margaret, drove Edward to flight. The latter
took refuge in the Netherlands (1470), where he received
protection and assistance from the Duke of Burgundy, who was
his brother-in-law. Henry VI. was now restored to the throne;
but for no longer a time than six months. At the end of that
period Edward landed again in England, with a small force,
professing that he came only to demand his dukedom. As soon as
he found himself well received and strongly supported, he
threw off the mask, resumed the title of king, and advanced to
London, where the citizens gave him welcome. A few days later
(April 14, 1471) he went out to meet Warwick and defeated and
slew him in the fierce battle of Barnet. One more fight at
Tewkesbury, where Queen Margaret was taken prisoner, ended the
war. King Henry died, suspiciously, in the Tower, on the very
night of his victorious rival's return to London, and Edward
IV. had all his enemies under his feet.
England under the House of York.
For a few years England enjoyed peace within her borders, and
the material effects of the protracted civil wars were rapidly
effaced. Indeed, the greater part of England appears to have
been lightly touched by those effects. The people at large had
taken little part in the conflict, and had been less disturbed
by it, in their industries and in their commerce, than might
have been expected. It had been a strife among the great
families, enlisting the gentry to a large extent, no doubt,
but not the middle class. Hence its chief consequence had been
the thinning and weakening of the aristocratic order, which
relatively enhanced the political importance of the commons.
But the commons were not yet trained to act independently in
political affairs. Their rise in power had been through joint
action of lords and commons against the Crown, with the former
in the lead; they were accustomed to depend on aristocratic
guidance, and to lean on aristocratic support. For this
reason, they were not only unprepared to take advantage of the
great opportunity which now opened to them, for decisively
grasping the control of government, but they were unfitted to
hold what they had previously won, without the help of the
class above them. As a consequence, it was the king who
profited by the decimation and impoverishment of the nobles,
grasping not only the power which they lost, but the power
which the commons lacked skill to use. For a century and a
half following the Wars of the Roses, the English monarchy
approached more nearly to absolutism than at any other period
before or after.
The unsparing confiscations by which Edward IV. and his
triumphant party crushed their opponents enriched the Crown
for a time and made it independent of parliamentary subsidies.
When supply from that source began to fall short, the king
invented another. He demeaned himself so far as to solicit
gifts from the wealthy merchants of the kingdom, to which he
gave the name of "benevolences," and he practiced this system
of royal beggary so persistently and effectually that he had
no need to call Parliament together. He thus began, in a
manner hardly perceived or resisted, the arbitrary and
unconstitutional mode of government which his successors
carried further, until the nation roused itself and took back
its stolen liberties with vengeance and wrath.
{1043}
Richard III. and the first of the Tudors.
Edward IV. died in 1483, leaving two young sons, the elder not
yet thirteen. Edward's brother, Richard, contrived with
amazing ability and unscrupulousness to acquire control of the
government, first as Protector, and presently as King. The
young princes, confined in the Tower, were murdered there, and
Richard III. might have seemed to be secure on his wickedly
won throne; for he did not lack popularity, notwithstanding
his crimes. But an avenger soon came, in the person of Henry,
Earl of Richmond, who claimed the Crown. Henry's claim was not
a strong one. Through his mother, he traced his lineage to
John of Gaunt, as the Lancastrians had done; but it was the
mistress and not the wife of that prince who bore Henry's
ancestor. His grandfather was a Welsh chieftain, Sir Owen
Tudor, who won the heart of the widowed queen of Henry V.,
Catherine of France, and married her. But the claim of Henry
of Richmond, if a weak one genealogically, sufficed for the
overthrow of the red-handed usurper, Richard. Henry, who had
been in exile, landed in England in August, 1485, and was
quickly joined by large numbers of supporters. Richard
hastened to attack them, and was defeated and slain on
Bosworth Field. With no more opposition, Henry won the
kingdom, and founded, as Henry VII., the Tudor dynasty which
held the throne until the death of Elizabeth.
Under that dynasty, the history of England took on a new
character, disclosing new tendencies, new impulses, new
currents of influence, new promises of the future. We will not
enter upon it until we have looked at some prior events in
other regions.
Germany.
If we return now to Germany, we take up the thread of events
at an interesting point. We parted from the affairs of that
troubled country while two rival Emperors, Louis IV., or
Ludwig, of Bavaria, and Frederick of Austria, were endeavoring
(1325) to settle their dispute in a friendly way, by sharing
the throne together. Before noting the result of that
chivalric and remarkable compromise, let us glance backward
for a moment at the most memorable and important incident of
the civil war which led to it.
Birth of the Swiss Confederacy.
The three cantons of Switzerland which are known distinctively
as the Forest Cantons, namely, Schwytz (which gave its name in
time to the whole country), Uri, and Unterwalden, had stood in
peculiar relations to the Hapsburg family since long before
Rudolph became Emperor and his house became the House of
Austria. In those cantons, the territorial rights were held
mostly by great monasteries, and the counts of Hapsburg for
generations past had served the abbots and abbesses in the
capacity of advocates, or champions, to rule their vassals for
them and to defend their rights. Authority of their own in the
cantons they had none. At the same time, the functions they
performed so continually developed ideas in their minds,
without doubt, which grew naturally into pretensions that were
offensive to the bold mountaineers. On the other hand, the
circumstances of the situation were calculated to breed
notions and feelings of independence among the men of the
mountains. They gave their allegiance to the Emperor--to the
high sovereign who ruled over all, in the name of Rome--and
they opposed what came between them and him. It is manifest
that a threatening complication for them arose when the Count
of Hapsburg became Emperor, which occurred in 1273. They had
no serious difficulty with Rudolph, in his time; but they
wisely prepared themselves for what might come, by forming, or
by renewing, in 1291, a league of the three cantons,--the
beginning and nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, which has
maintained its independence and its freedom from that day to
this. The league of 1291 had existed something more than
twenty years when the confederated cantons were first called
upon to stand together in resistance to the Austrian
pretensions. This occurred in 1315, during the war between
Louis and Frederick, when Leopold, Duke of Austria, invaded
the Forest Cantons and was disastrously beaten in a fight at
the pass of Morgarten. The victory of the confederates and the
independence secured by it gave them so much prestige that
neighboring cities and cantons sought admission to their
league. In 1332 Luzern was received as a member; in 1351,
1352, and 1353, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern came in,
increasing the membership to eight. It took the name of the
Old League of High Germany, and its members were known as
Eidgenossen, or Confederates.
Such, in brief, are the ascertained facts of the origin of the
Swiss Confederacy. There is nothing found in authentic history
to substantiate the popular legend of William Tell.
The questions between the league and the Austrian princes,
which continued to be troublesome for two generations, were
practically ended by the two battles of Sempach and Naefels,
fought in 1386 and 1388, in both of which the Austrians were
overthrown.
The Emperor Louis IV. and the Papacy,
While the Swiss were gaining the freedom which they never
lost, Germany at large was making little progress in any
satisfactory direction. Peace had not been restored by the
friendly agreement of 1325 between Ludwig and Frederick. The
partisans of neither were contented with it. Frederick was
broken in health and soon retired from the government; in 1330
he died. The Austrian house persisted in hostility to Louis;
but his more formidable enemies were the Pope and the King of
France. The period was that known in papal history as "the
Babylonish Captivity," when the popes resided at Avignon and
were generally creatures of the French court and subservient
to its ambitions or its animosities. Philip of Valois, who now
reigned in France, aspired to the imperial crown, which the head
of the Church had conferred on the German kings, and which the
same supreme pontiff might claim authority to transfer to the
sovereigns of France. This is supposed to have been the secret
of the relentless hostility with which Louis was pursued by
the Papacy--himself excommunicated, his kingdom placed under
interdict, and every effort made to bring about his deposition
by the princes of Germany. But divided and depressed as the
Germans were, they revolted against these malevolent
pretensions of the popes, and in 1338 the electoral princes
issued a bold declaration, asserting the sufficiency of the
act of election to confer imperial dignity and power, and
denying the necessity for any papal confirmation whatever. Had
Louis been a commanding leader, and independent of the Papacy in
his own feelings, he could probably have rallied a national
sentiment on this issue that would have powerfully affected
the future of German history.
{1044}
But he lacked the needful character, and his troubles
continued until he died (1347). A year before his death, his
opponents had elected and put forward a rival emperor,
Charles, the son of King John of Bohemia. Charles (IV.) was
subsequently recognized as king without dispute, and secured
the imperial crown. "It may be affirmed with truth that the
genuine ancient Empire, which contained a German kingdom, came
to an end with the Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. None strove
again after his death to restore the imperial power. The
golden bull of his successor Charles IV. sealed the fate of
the old Empire. Through it, and indeed through the entire
conduct of Charles IV., King of Bohemia as he really was, and
emperor scarcely more than in name, the imperial government
passed more and more into the hands of the prince-electors,
who came to regard the emperor no longer as their master, but
as the president of an assembly in which he shared the power
with themselves." "From the time of Charles IV. the main
object and chief occupation of the emperors was not the
Empire, but the aggrandisement and security of their own
house. The Empire served only as the means and instrument of
their purpose" (Dollinger).
The Golden Bull of Charles IV.
The Golden Bull referred to by Dr. Dollinger was an instrument
which became the constitution, so to speak, of the Holy Roman
or Germanic Empire. It prescribed the mode of the election of
the King, and definitively named the seven Electors. It also
conferred certain special powers and privileges on these seven
princes, which raised them much above their fellows and gave
them an independence that may be said to have destroyed every
hope of Germanic unity. This was the one mark which the reign
of Charles IV. left upon the Empire. His exertions as Emperor
were all directed to the aggrandizement of his own family, and
with not much lasting result. In his own kingdom of Bohemia he
ruled with better effect. He made its capital, Prague, an
important city, adorning it with noble buildings and founding
in it the most ancient of German universities. This University
of Prague soon sowed seeds from which sprang the first
movement of religious reformation in Germany.
Charles IV., dying in 1378, was succeeded by his son Wenzel,
or Wenceslaus, on the imperial throne as well as the Bohemian.
Wenceslaus neglected both the Empire and the Kingdom, and the
confusion of things in Germany grew worse. Some of the
principal cities continued to secure considerable freedom and
prosperity for themselves, by the combined efforts of their
leagues; but everywhere else great disorder and oppression
prevailed. It was at this time that the Swabian towns, to the
number of forty-one, formed a union and waged unsuccessful war
with a league which the nobles entered into against them. They
were defeated, and crushingly dealt with by the Emperor.
In 1400 Wenceslaus was deposed and Rupert of the Palatinate
was elected, producing another civil war, and reducing the
imperial government to a complete nullity. Rupert died in
1410, and, after some contention, Sigmund, or Sigismund,
brother of Wenceslaus, was raised to the throne. He was
Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Hungary, and would become
King of Bohemia when Wenceslaus died.
The Reformation of Huss in Bohemia.
Bohemia was about to become the scene of an extraordinary
religious agitation, which John Huss, teacher and preacher in
the new but already famous University of Prague, was beginning
to stir. Huss, who drew more or less of his inspiration from
Wyclif, anticipated Luther in the boldness of his attacks upon
iniquities in the Church. In his case as in Luther's, the
abomination which he could not endure was the sale of papal
indulgences; and it was by his denunciation of that impious
fraud that he drew on himself the deadly wrath of the Roman
hierarchy. He was summoned before the great Council of the
Church which opened at Constance in 1414. He obeyed the
summons and went to the Council, bearing a safe-conduct from
the Emperor which pledged protection to him until he returned.
Notwithstanding this imperial pledge, he was imprisoned for
seven months at Constance, and was then impatiently listened
to and condemned to the stake. On the 6th of July, 1415, he
was burned. In the following May, his friend and disciple,
Jerome of Prague, suffered the same martyrdom. The Emperor,
Sigismund, blustered a little at the insolent violation of his
safe-conduct; but dared do nothing to make it effective.
In Bohemia, the excitement produced by these outrages was
universal. The whole nation seemed to rise, in the first
wide-spread aggressive popular revolt that the Church of Rome
had yet been called upon to encounter. In 1419 there was an
armed assembly of 40,000 men, on a mountain which they called
Tabor, who placed themselves under the leadership of John
Ziska, a nobleman, one of Huss' friends. The followers of
Ziska soon displayed a violence of temper and a radicalism
which repelled the more moderate Hussites, or Reformers, and
two parties appeared, one known as the Taborites, the other as
the Calixtines, or Utraquists. The former insisted on entire
separation from the Church of Rome; the latter confined their
demands to four reforms, namely: Free preaching of the Word of
God; the giving of the Eucharistic cup to the laity; the
taking of secular powers and of worldly goods from the clergy;
the enforcing of Christian discipline by all authorities. So much
stress was laid by the Calixtines on their claim to the
chalice or cup (communion in both kinds) that it gave them
their name. The breach between these parties widened until
they were as hostile to each other as to the Catholics, and
the Bohemian reform movement was ruined in the end by their
division.
In 1419, the deposed Emperor Wenceslaus, who had still
retained his kingdom of Bohemia, was murdered in his palace,
at Prague. His brother, the Emperor Sigismund, was his heir;
but the Hussites refused the crown to him, and resisted his
pretensions with arms. This added a political conflict to the
religious one, and Bohemia was afflicted with a frightful
civil war for fifteen years. Ziska fortified mount Tabor and
took possession of Prague. The Emperor and the Pope allied
themselves, to crush an insurrection which was aimed against
both. They summoned Christendom to a new crusade, and
Sigismund led 100,000 men against Prague, in 1420. Ziska met
him and defeated him, and drove him, with his crusaders, from
the country. The Taborites were now maddened by their success,
and raged over the land, destroying convents and burning
priests. Their doctrines, moreover, began to take on a
socialistic and republican character, threatening property in
general and questioning monarchy, too. The well-to-do and
conservative classes were more and more repelled from them.
{1045}
In 1421 a second crusading army, 200,000 strong, invaded
Bohemia and was scattered like chaff by Ziska (now blind) and
his peasant soldiery. The next year they defeated the Emperor
again; but in 1424 Ziska died, and a priest called Procopius
the Great took his place. Under their new leader, the fierce
Taborites were as invincible as they had been under Ziska.
They routed an imperial army in 1426, and then carried the war
into Austria and Silesia, committing fearful ravages. Still
another crusade was set in motion against them by the Pope,
and still another disastrous failure was made of it. Then
Germany again suffered a more frightful visitation from the
vengeful Hussites than before. Towns and villages were
destroyed by hundreds, and wide tracks of ruin and death were
marked on the face of the land, to its very center. Once more,
and for the last time, in 1431, the Germans rallied a great force
to retaliate these attacks, and they met defeat, as in all
previous encounters, but more completely than ever before.
Then the Pope and the Emperor gave up hope of putting down the
indomitable revolutionists by force, and opened parleyings.
The Pope called a council at Basel for the discussion of
questions with the Hussites, and, finally, in 1433, their
moderate party was prevailed upon to accept a compromise which
really conceded nothing to them except the use of the cup in
the communion. The Taborites refused the terms, and the two
parties grappled each other in a fierce struggle for the
control of the state. But the extremists had lost much of
their old strength, and the Utraquists vanquished them in a
decisive battle at Lipan, in May, 1434. Two years later
Sigismund was formally acknowledged King of Bohemia and
received in Prague. In 1437 he died. His son-in-law, Albert of
Austria, who succeeded him, lived but two years, and the heir
to the throne then was a son, Ladislaus, born after his
father's death. This left Bohemia in a state of great
confusion and disorder for several years, until a strong man,
George Podiebrad, acquired the control of affairs.
Meantime, the Utraquists had organized a National Church of
Bohemia, considerably divergent from Rome. It failed to
satisfy the deeper religious feelings that were widely current
among the Bohemians in that age, and there grew up a sect
which took the name of "Unitas Fratrum," or "Unity of the
Brethren," but which afterwards became incorrectly known as
the Moravian Brethren. This sect, still existing, has borne an
important part in the missionary history of the Christian
world.
The Papacy.--The Great Schism.
The Papacy, at the time of its conflict with the Hussites, in
Bohemia, was rapidly sinking to that lowest level of
debasement which it reached in the later part of the fifteenth
century. Its state was not yet so abhorrent as it came to be
under the Borgias; but it had been brought even more into
contempt, perhaps, by the divisions and contentions of "the
Great Schism." The so-called "Babylonish Captivity" of the
series of popes who resided for seventy years at Avignon
(1305-1376), and who were under French influence, had been
humiliating to the Church; but the schism which immediately
followed (1378-1417), when a succession of rival popes, or
popes and antipopes, thundered anathemas and excommunications
at one another, from Rome and from Avignon, was even more
scandalous and shameful. Christendom was divided by the
quarrel. France, Spain, Scotland, and some lesser states, gave
their allegiance to the pope at Avignon; England, Germany and
the northern kingdoms adhered to the pope at Rome. In 1402, an
attempt to heal the schism was made by a general Council of
the Church convened at Pisa. It decreed the deposition of both
the contending pontiffs, and elected a third; but its
authority was not recognized, and the confusion of the Church
was only made worse by bringing three popes into the quarrel,
instead of two. Twelve years later, another Council, held at
Constance,--the same which burned Huss,--had more success.
Europe had now grown so tired of the scandal, and so disgusted
with the three pretenders to spiritual supremacy, that the
action of the Council was backed by public opinion, and they
were suppressed. A fourth pope, Martin V., whom the Council
then seated in the chair of St. Peter (1417), was universally
acknowledged, and the Great Schism was at an end.
But other scandals and abuses in the Church, which public
opinion in Europe had already begun to cry loudly against,
were untouched by these Councils. A subsequent Council at
Basel, which met in 1431, attempted some restraints upon papal
extortion (ignoring the more serious moral evils that claimed
attention); but was utterly beaten in the conflict with Pope
Eugenius IV., which this action brought on, and its decrees
lost all effect. So the religious autocracy at Rome, sinking
stage by stage below the foulest secular courts of the time,
continued without check to insult and outrage, more and more,
the piety, the common sense, and the decent feeling of
Christendom, until the habit of reverence was quite worn out
in the minds of men throughout the better half of Europe.
Rome and the last Tribune, Rienzi.
The city of Rome had fallen from all greatness of its own when
it came to be dependent on the fortunes of the popes. Their
departure to Avignon had reduced it to a lamentable state.
They took with them, in reality, the sustenance of the city;
for it lived, in the main, on the revenues of the Papacy, and
knew little of commerce beyond the profitable traffic in
indulgences, absolutions, benefices, relics and papal
blessings, which went to Avignon with the head of the Church.
Authority, too, departed with the Pope, and the wretched city
was given up to anarchy almost uncontrolled. A number of
powerful families--the Colonna, the Orsini, and
others--perpetually at strife with one another, fought out
their feuds in the streets, and abused and oppressed their
neighbors with impunity. Their houses were impregnable
castles, and their retainers were a formidable army.
{1046}
It was while this state of things was at its worst that the
famous Cola di Rienzi, "last of the Tribunes," accomplished a
revolution which was short-lived but extraordinary. He roused
the people to action against their oppressors and the
disturbers of their peace. He appealed to them to restore the
republican institutions of ancient Rome, and when they
responded, in 1347, by conferring on him the title and
authority of a Tribune, he actually succeeded in expelling the
turbulent nobles, or reducing them to submission, and
established in Rome, for a little time, what he called "the
Good Estate." But his head was quickly turned by his success;
he was inflated with conceit and vanity; he became arrogant
and despotic; the people tired of him, and after a few months
of rule he was driven from Rome. In 1354 he came back as a
Senator, appointed by the Pope, who thought to use him for the
restoration of papal authority; but his influence was gone,
and he was slain by a-riotous mob.
The return of the Pope to Rome in 1376 was an event so long
and ardently desired by the Roman people that they submitted
themselves eagerly to his government. But his sovereignty over
the States of the Church was substantially lost, and the