The age of the crusades

by James M. Ludlow

Thus the sect of the Waldenses foretokened the rise of modern Protestantism. Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, was afflicted with the rigors of ecclesiastical rule, which robbed more than it protected the people, and with the dogmatic traditions of the church, which were being manipulated as strangling strings about the mind. He threw off these restraints; he devoted his large fortune to the relief of the poor and organized a brotherhood of kindred spirits, who took the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. There had as yet been no attempt to teach the masses the simple religion of Jesus as contained in the Scriptures, Jerome’s Latin Bible of the fourth century being the only translation in use. Waldo secured a rendering of the four Gospels into French. The reading of this by the people led them to dissent from the assumptions of the Roman Church, to question its sacraments, and to deny to the priesthood the sole prerogative of preaching and administering religion. Waldo and his followers claimed liberty to expound the Word of God according to its own rules, and to interpret its precepts in the light of reason and prayer-illuminated conscience.

The Waldenses were at once proceeded against by the Bishop of Lyons as heretics and rebels. His judgment was confirmed by the anathemas of the papal see. Waldo and his friends fled to the mountains of Piedmont and Dauphine. In 1179 the new doctrines were denounced by the Third Lateran Council. Waldo died the same year, having lived long enough to anticipate in his own person the persecutions which were to make his sect forever famous among martyrs.

The history of the Papacy during this period was humiliating. Popes and antipopes strove for the seat of St. Peter. The hierarchy invoked the aid of the Emperor of Germany, Frederick Barbarossa, to overturn the republic of Rome, which Arnold of Brescia had inspired. That leader atoned for his audacity by being hanged and burned. Barbarossa was, however, equally determined that the secular power of the popes should not be rebuilt upon the ruins of Roman independence. Italy was laid waste by the armies of the empire, until the centre of Christendom was disgraced by scenes as cruel as those which marked the contention of Christian and Turk in the East.

France was scarcely less unfortunate. Louis VII., shortly after his return from Palestine, divorced his queen, Eleanor, who became the wife of Henry of Anjou, afterwards Henry II. of England, and added to the possession of England the territories of Aquitaine and Poitou, leaving to the French monarchy less than half of what had been, and was again to be, the land of France. Guizot remarks: “This was the only event under Louis’s reign of any real importance, in view of its long and bloody consequences to his country. A petty war or a sullen strife between the kings of France and England, petty quarrels of Louis with some of the great lords of his kingdom, some vigorous measures against certain districts, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians—such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign.” Kingship, on the death of the Abbé Suger, Louis’s prime minister, steadily declined, until Philip Augustus opened for it a new era of strength and progress. Philip had been seven years on the throne (from 1080) at the time of the capture of Jerusalem.

England at the beginning of this period was distressed with the war between King Stephen and Matilda. Churches were converted into fortifications, and castles into prisons. For nineteen years the country was so ravaged by the contending parties that, in the language of the contemporary chronicler, “to till the ground was to plough the sea,” and brave men, “sickened with the unnatural war, put on the white cross and sailed for a nobler battle-field in the East.” With the son of Matilda, Henry II., the dynasty of the Angevins, or Plantagenets, was established. Inheriting Normandy from his mother, and acquiring by his marriage with Eleanor her estates, at the age of twenty-one Henry II. ruled from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees. “Though a foreigner, never speaking the English tongue, he seems to have possessed something of the spirit which produced the subsequent Anglican civilization. He abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between church and state, and declared that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the common law” (Norgate). Though his quarrel with and murder of Thomas à Becket left in suspension the Constitutions of Clarendon, which gave the kingship preëminence over the hierarchy, the principles of that document were soon revived. Henry II. admitted no papal legate into England without an oath not to interfere with any royal prerogative. Though he repented the death of Becket, he forced the monks of Canterbury to elect a successor of his own nomination.

Perhaps the most important progress of Henry II.’s reign was marked by the Assizes of Clarendon (1166), which gave to England the beginning of trial by jury. A grand jury of twelve men was to hear all accusations, and only on sufficient evidence allow further procedure, although the final trial of a case was, until 1216, allowed to proceed according to the laws of Ordeal and Combat. Circuit judges were also appointed, subject only to the king and his council as a court of appeal.

In 1155 Ireland was given over to the conquest of Henry by Pope Hadrian for one penny a house, to be paid into the papal treasury; for, said the Holy Father, “all the islands on which Christ, the Sun of justice, has shone belong to the see of St. Peter.” Henry’s victory over William of Scotland also gave him the ascendency in that kingdom. Thus was woven the substance of the band which now holds together Great Britain.

The reign of Henry II. was brought to a close in personal disaster. At Le Mans in France he was beaten in battle by his son Richard, who, in conjunction with King Philip Augustus, had raised an unfilial hand against his father. Henry died, cursing God and muttering, “Shame! shame on a conquered king!”

Richard I. (Cœur de Lion) may be said to have been badly born (September 8, 1157). His father, Henry II., though astute in kingcraft, was among the most disreputable of monarchs in personal character. St. Bernard said of Henry, “He comes of the devil, and to the devil he shall return.” His remorse for the murder of Becket, which seems to have been genuine, did not restrain him from spending his later years as a notorious libertine, polluting every innocent thing about him with his lecherous touch. Even childhood was not safe from his lust. It is typical of the man and the times that Geoffrey, for whom the king secured the bishopric of Lincoln, was his own natural son by Rosamond, his concubine.

Richard’s mother, Eleanor, was perhaps of as unwholesome a sort as his father. She never blushed except at the failure of some intrigue which in our later age is regarded as shameful to her sex. Her first royal husband, Louis VII. of France, though fascinated by her beauty, could not abide her infidelities, and put her away. If the chronicle be true, she avenged the marital sins of Henry II. by slaying with her own hand his mistress, Rosamond.