The Eighteen Christian Centuries

by James White

The dreadful event was the entire overthrow of the knights and gentlemen of France by the citizens of a Flemish manufacturing town at the battle of Courtrai. Impetuous valour, and contempt for smiths and weavers, blinded the fiery nobles. They rushed forward with loose bridles, and, as they had disdained to reconnoitre the scene of the display, they fell headlong, one after another, horse and plume, sword and spur, into one enormous ditch which lay between them and their enemies. On they came, an avalanche of steel and horseflesh, and floundered into the muddy hole. Hundreds, thousands, unable to check their steeds, or afraid to appear irresolute, or goggling in vain through the deep holes left for their eyes, fell, struggled, writhed, and choked, till the ditch was filled with trampled knights and tumbling horses, and the burghers on the opposite bank beat in the helmets of those who tried to climb up, with jagged clubs, and hacked their naked heads. And when the whole army was annihilated, and the spoils were gathered, it was found there were princes and lords in almost incredible numbers, and four thousand golden spurs to mark the extent of the knightly slaughter and give name to the engagement. It is called the Battle of the Spurs,—for a nobler cause than another engagement of the same name, which we shall meet with in a future century, and which derived its appellation from the fact that spurs were more in requisition than swords.

Philip was at this moment in the middle of his quarrel with Boniface. He determined to compensate himself for the loss he had sustained in military fame at Courtrai by fiercer exactions on his clergy and bitterer enmity to the Pope. We have seen how he pursued the wretched Boniface to the grave, and persisted in trying to force the obsequious Clement to blacken his memory after he was dead. Clement was unwilling to expose the vices and crimes of his predecessor, and yet he had given a promise in that strange meeting in the forest to work his master’s will; he was also resident in France, and knew how unscrupulous his protector was. Philip availed himself of the discredit brought on knighthood by the loss of all those golden spurs, and compounded for leaving the deceased pontiff alone, by exacting the consent of Clement to his assault on the order of the Templars, the wealthiest institution in the world, who held thousands of the best manors in France, and whose spoils would make him the richest king in Christendom. Yet the Templars were no contemptible foes. In number they were but fourteen thousand, but their castles were over all the land; they were every one of them of noble blood, and strong in the relationship of all the great houses in Europe. If they had united with their brethren, the Knights Hospitallers, no sovereign could have resisted their demands; but, fortunately for Philip, they were rivals to the death, and gave no assistance to each other when oppressed. Both, in fact, had outlived the causes of their institution, and had forfeited the respect of the masses of the people by their ostentatious abnegation of all the rules by which they professed to be bound. Poverty, chastity, and brotherly kindness were the sworn duties of the most rich, sensual, and unpitying society which ever lived. When Richard of England was dying, he made an imaginary will, and said, “I leave my avarice to the Citeaux, my luxury to the Grey Friars, and my pride to the Templars.” And the Templars took possession of the bequest. When driven from the Holy Land, they settled in all the Christian kingdoms from Denmark to the south of Italy, and everywhere presented the same spectacle of selfishness and debauchery. In Paris they had got possession of a tract of ground equal to one-third of the whole city, and had covered it with towers and battlements, and within the unapproachable fortress lived a life of the most luxurious self-indulgence. Strange rumours got abroad of the unholy rites with which their initiations were accompanied. Their receptions into the order were so mysterious and sacred that an interloper (if it had been the King of France) would have been put to death for his intrusion. Frightful stories were told of their blasphemies and hideous ceremonials. Reports came even from over the sea, that while in Jerusalem they had conformed to the Mohammedan faith and had exchanged visits and friendly offices with the chiefs of the unbelievers. Against so dark and haughty an association it was easy to stir up the popular dislike. Nobody could take their part, they lived so entirely to themselves and shunned sympathy and society with so cold a disdain. They were men of religious vows without the humility of that condition, so they were hated by the nobles, who looked on priests as their natural inferiors; they were nobles without the individual riches of the barons and counts, and they were hated by the priests, who were at all times the foes of the aristocracy. Hated, therefore, by priest and noble, their policy would have been to make friends of the lower orders, rising citizens, and the great masses of the people. But they saw no necessity for altering their lofty course. They bore right onward in their haughty disregard of all the rest of the world, and were condemned by the universal feeling before any definite accusation was raised against them.

Clement yielded a faint consent to the proceedings of Philip, and that honourable champion of the faith gave full loose to his covetousness and hatred. First of all he prayed meekly for admission as a brother of the order. He would wear the red cross upon his shoulder and obey their godly laws. If he had obtained his object, he would have procured the grand-mastership for himself and disposed of their wealth at his own discretion. The order might have survived, but their possessions would have been Philip’s. They perhaps perceived his aim, and declined to admit him into their ranks. A rejected candidate soon changes his opinion of the former object of his ambition. He now reversed his plan, and declared they were unworthy, not only to wallow in the wealth and splendour of their commanderies, but to live in a Christian land. He said they were guilty of all the crimes and enormities by which human nature was ever disgraced. James de Molay, the grand-master, and all the knights of the order throughout France, were seized and thrown into prison. Letters were written to all other kings and princes, inciting them to similar conduct, and denouncing the doomed fraternity in the harshest terms. The promise of the spoil was tempting to the European sovereigns, but all of them resisted the inducement, or at least took gentler methods of attaining the same end. But Philip was as much pleased with the pursuit as with the catching of the game. He summoned a council of the realm, and obtained at the same time a commission of inquiry from the Pope. With these two courts to back him, it was impossible to fail. The knights were kept in noisome dungeons. They were scantily fed, and tormented with alternate promises and threats. When physically weak and mentally depressed, they were tortured in their secret cells, and under the pressure of fear and desperation confessed to whatever was laid to their charge. Relieved from their torments for a moment, they retracted their confessions; but the written words remained. |A.D. 1312.|And in one day, before the public had been prepared for such extremity of wrong, fifty-four of these Christian soldiers—now old, and fallen from their high estate—were publicly burned in the place of execution, and no further limit was placed to the rapacity of the king. Still the odious process crept on with the appearance of law, for already the forms of perverted justice were found safer and more certain than either sword or fagot; and at last, in 1314, the ruined brotherhood were allowed to join themselves to other fraternities. The name of Templar was blotted out from the knightly roll-call of all Europe; and in every nation, in England and Scotland particularly, the order was despoiled of all its possessions. Clement, however, was furious at seeing the moderation of rulers like Edward II., who merely stripped the Templars of their houses and lands, and did not dabble, as his patron Philip had done, in their blood, and rebuked them in angry missives for their coldness in the cause of religion.

Now, early in this century, a Pope had been personally ill used, and his successor had become the pensioner and prisoner of one of the basest of kings; a glorious brotherhood of Christian knights had been shamelessly and bloodily destroyed. Was there no outcry from outraged piety?—no burst of indignation against the perpetrator of so foul a wrong? Pity was at last excited by the sufferings and humiliations of the brothers of the Temple; but pity is not a feeling on which knighthood can depend for vitality or strength. Perhaps, indeed, the sympathy raised for the sad ending of that once-dreaded institution was more fatal to its revival, and more injurious to the credit of all surviving chivalry, than the greatest amount of odium would have been. Speculative discussions were held about the guilt or innocence of the Templars, but the worst of their crimes was the crime of being weak. If they had continued united and strong, nobody would have heard of the excesses laid to their charge. Passing over the impossible accusations brought against them by ignorance and hatred, the offence they were charged with which raised the greatest indignation, and was least capable of disproof, was that in their reception into the order they spat upon the crucifix and trampled on the sign of our salvation. Nothing can be plainer than that this, at the first formation of the order, had been a symbol, which in the course of years had lost its significance. At first introduced as an emblem of Peter’s denial and of worldly disbelief, to be exchanged, when once they were clothed with the Crusader’s mantle, for unflinching service and undoubting Faith,—a passage from death unto life,—it had been retained long after its intention had been forgotten; and nothing is so striking as the confession of some of the younger knights, of the reluctance, the shame and trembling, with which, at the request of their superior, they had gone through the repulsive ceremony. This is one of the dangers of a symbolic service. The symbol supersedes the fact. The imitation of Peter becomes a falling away from Christ. But a century before this time, who can doubt that all Christendom would have rushed to the rescue of the Pope if he had been seized in his own city and maltreated as Boniface had been, and that every gentleman in Europe would have drawn sword in behalf of the noble Templars?

But papacy, feudalism, and knighthood, as they had risen and flourished together, were enveloped in the same fall. The society of the Dark Ages had been perfect in its symmetry and compactness. Kings were but feudal leaders and chiefs in their own domains. Knighthood was but the countenance which feudalism turned to its enemies, while hospitality, protection, and alliance were its offerings to its friends. Over all, representative of the heavenly power which cared for the helpless multitudes, the serfs and villeins, those who had no other friend,—the Church extended its sheltering arms to the lowest of the low. Feudalism could take care of itself; knighthood made itself feared; but the multitudes could only listen and be obedient. All, therefore, who had no sword, and no broad acres, were natural subjects of the Pope. But with the rise of the masses the relations between them and the Church became changed. It was found that during the last two hundred years, since the awakening of mercantile enterprise by the Crusades and the commingling of the population in those wild and yet elevating expeditions, by the progress of the arts, by the privileges wrung from king and noble by flourishing towns or purchased from them with sterling coin, by the deterioration in the morals of priest and baron, and the rise in personal importance of burghers, who could fight like those of Courtrai or raise armies like those of Pisa and Genoa,—that the state of society had gradually been changed; that the commons were well able to defend their own interest; that the feudal proprietor had lost his relative rank; that the knight was no longer irresistible as a warrior; and that the Pope had become one of the most worldly and least scrupulous of rulers. Far from being the friend of the unprotected, the Church was the subject of all the ballads of every nation, wherein its exactions and debaucheries were sung at village fairs and conned over in chimney-corners. Cannon were first used in this century at the siege of Algesiras in 1343; and with the first discharge knighthood fell forever from the saddle. The Bible was first translated into a national tongue,[C] and Popery fell forever from its unopposed dominion. How, indeed, even without this incident, could the Papacy have retained its power? From 1305 till 1376 the wearers of the tiara were the mere puppets of the Kings of France. They lived in a nominal freedom at Avignon, but the college of electors was in the pay of the French sovereign, and the Pope was the creature of his hands. This was fatal to the notion of his independence. But a heavier blow was struck at the unity of the papal power when a double election, in 1378, established two supreme chiefs, one exacting the obedience of the faithful from his palace on the banks of the Rhone, and the other advancing the same claim from the banks of the Tiber. From this time the choice of the chief pontiff became a political struggle between the principal kings. There were French and German, and even English, parties in the conclave, and bribes were as freely administered as at a contested election or on a dubious question in the time of Sir Robert Walpole. Family interest also, from this time, had more effect on the policy of the Popes than the ambition to extend their spiritual authority. They sacrificed some portion of their claims to insure the elevation of their relations. Alliances were made, not for the benefit of the Roman chair, but for some kinsman’s establishment in a principality. Dukedoms became appanages of the papal name, and every new Pope left the mark of his beneficence in the riches and influence of the favourite nephew whom he had invested with sovereign rank. Italy became filled with new dynasties created by these means, and the politics of the papal court became complicated by this diversity of motive and influence. Yet feudalism struggled on in spite of cannon and the rise of the middle orders; and Popery struggled on in spite of the spread of information and the diffusion of wealth and freedom. For some time, indeed, the decline of both those institutions was hidden by a factitious brilliancy reflected on them by other causes. The increase of refinement gave rise to feelings of romance, which were unknown in the days of darkness and suffering through which Europe had passed. A reverence for antiquity softened the harsher features by which they had been actually distinguished, and knighthood became subtilized into chivalry. |A.D. 1350.|As the hard and uninviting reality retreated into the past, the imagination clothed it in enchanting hues; and at the very time when the bowmen and yeomanry of England had shown at Crecy how unfounded were the “boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,” Edward III. had instituted the Order of the Garter,—a transmutation as it were of the rude shocks of knighthood into carpet pacings in the gilded halls of a palace; as in a former age the returned Crusaders had supplied the want of the pride and circumstance of the real charge against the Saracen by introducing the bloodless imitation of it afforded by the tournament. In the same way the personal disqualification of the Pope was supplied by an elevation of the ideal of his place and office. Religion became poetry and sentiment; and though henceforth the reigning pontiff was treated with the harshness and sometimes the contempt his personal character deserved, his throne was still acknowledged as the loftiest of earthly thrones. The plaything of the present was nevertheless an idol and representative of the past; and kings who drove him from his home, or locked him up in their prisons, pretended to tremble at his anger, and received his letters on their knees.

It must have been evident to any far-seeing observer that some great change was in progress during the whole of this century, not so much from the results of Courtrai, or Crecy, or Poictiers, or the migration of the Pope to Avignon, or the increasing riches of the trading and manufacturing towns, as from the great uprising of the human mind which was shown by the almost simultaneous appearance of such stars of literature as Dante, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and our English Chaucer. I suppose no single century since has been in possession of four such men. Great geniuses, indeed, and great discoveries, seem to come in crops, as if a certain period had been fixed for their bursting into flower; and we find the same grand ideas engaging the intellects of men widely dispersed, so that a novelty in art or science is generally disputed between contending nations. But this synchronous development of power is symptomatic of some wide-spread tendency, which alters the ordinary course of affairs; and we see in the Canterbury Tales the dawning of the Reformation; in Shakspeare and Bacon the inauguration of a new order of government and manners; in Locke and Milton a still further liberation from the chains of a worn-out philosophy; in Watt, and Fulton, and Cartwright, we see the spread of civilization and power. In Walter Scott and Wordsworth, and the wonderful galaxy of literary stars who illuminated the beginning of this century, we see Waterloo and Peace, a widening of national sympathies, and the opening of a great future career to all the nations of the world. For nothing is so true an index of the state and prospects of a people as the healthfulness and honest taste of its literature. It was in this sense that Fletcher of Saltoun said, (or quoted,) “Give me the making of the ballads of a people, and I don’t care who makes the laws.” While we have such pure and wholesome literature as is furnished us by Hallam, and Macaulay, and Alison, by Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest, philosophy like Hamilton’s, and science like Herschel’s and Faraday’s, we have no cause to look forward with doubt or apprehension.

“Naught shall make us rue If England to herself do rest but true.”

But those pioneers of the Fourteenth Century had dangers and difficulties to encounter from which their successors have been free. It is a very different thing for authors to write for the applause of an appreciating public, and for them to create an appreciating public for themselves. Their audience must at first have been hostile. First, the critical and scholarly part of the world was offended with the bad taste of writing in the modern languages at all. Secondly, the pitch at which they struck the national note was too high for the ears of the vulgar. A correct and dignified use of the spoken tongue, the conveyance, in ordinary and familiar words, of lofty or poetical thoughts, filled both those classes with surprise. To the scholar it seemed good materials enveloped in a very unworthy covering. To “the general” it seemed an attempt to deprive them of their vernacular phrases and bring bad grammar and coarse expressions into disrepute. Petrarch was so conscious of this that he speaks apologetically of his sonnets in Italian, and founds his hope of future fame on his Latin verses. But more important than the poems of Dante and Chaucer, or the prose of Boccaccio, was the introduction of the new literature represented by Froissart. Hitherto chronicles had for the most part consisted of the record of such wandering rumours as reached a monastery or were gathered in the religious pilgrimages of holy men. Mingled, even the best of them, with the credulity of inexperienced and simple minds, their effect was lost on the contemporary generation by the isolation of the writers. Nobody beyond the convent-walls knew what the learned historians of the establishment had been doing. Their writings were not brought out into the light of universal day, and a knowledge of European society gathered point by point, by comparing, analyzing, and contrasting the various statements contained in those dispersed repositories. But at this time there came into notice the most inquiring, enterprising, picturesque, and entertaining chronicler that had ever appeared since Herodotus read the result of his personal travels and sagacious inquiries to the assembled multitudes of Greece.

John Froissart, called by the courtesy of the time Sir John, in honour of his being priest and chaplain, devoted a long life to the collection of the fullest and most trustworthy accounts of all the events and personages characteristic of his time. From 1326, when his labours commenced, to 1400, when his active pen stood still, nothing happened in any part of Europe that the Paul Pry of the period did not rush off to verify on the spot. If he heard of an assemblage of knights going on at the extremities of France or in the centre of Germany, of a tournament at Bordeaux, a court gala in Scotland, or a marriage festival at Milan, his travels began,—whether in the humble guise of a solitary horseman with his portmanteau behind his saddle and a single greyhound at his heels, as he jogged wearily across the Border, till he finally arrived in Edinburgh, or in his grander style of equipment, gallant steed, with hackney led beside him, and four dogs of high race gambolling round his horse, as he made his dignified journey from Ferrara to Rome. Wherever life was to be seen and painted, the indefatigable Froissart was to be found. Whatever he had gathered up on former expeditions, whatever he learned on his present tour, down it went in his own exquisite language, with his own poetical impression of the pomps and pageantries he beheld; and when at the end of his journey he reached the court of prince or potentate, no higher treat could be offered to the “noble lords and ladies bright” than to form a glittering circle round the enchanting chronicler and listen to what he had written. From palace to palace, from castle to castle, the unwearied “picker-up of unconsidered trifles” (which, however, were neither trifles nor unconsidered, when their true value became known, as giving life and reality to the annals of a whole period) pursued his happy way, certain of a friendly reception when he arrived, and certain of not losing his time by negligence or blindness on the road. If he overtakes a stately cavalier, attended by squires and men-at-arms, he enters into conversation, drawing out the experiences of the venerable warrior by relating to him all he knew of things and persons in which he took an interest. And when they put up at some hostelry on the road, and while the gallant knight was sound asleep on his straw-stuffed couch, and his followers were wallowing amid the rushes on the parlour floor, Froissart was busy with pen and note-book, scoring down all the old gentleman had told him, all the fights he had been present at, and the secret history (if any) of the councils of priests and kings. In this way knights in distant parts of the world became known to each other. The same voice which described to Douglas at Dalkeith the exploits of the Prince of Wales sounded the praises of Douglas in the ears of the Black Prince at Bordeaux. A community of sentiment was produced between the upper ranks of all nations by this common register of their acts and feelings; and knighthood received its most ennobling consummation in these imperishable descriptions, at the very time when its political and military influence came to a close. Froissart’s Chronicles are the epitaph of feudalism, written indeed while it was yet alive, but while its strength was only the convulsive energy of approaching death. The standard of knightly virtue became raised in proportion as knightly power decayed. In the same way as the increased civilization and elevating influences of the time clothed the Church in colours borrowed from the past, while its real influence was seriously impaired, the expiring embers of knighthood occasionally flashed up into something higher; and in this century we read of Du Guesclin of France, Walter Manny and Edward the Third of England, and many others, who illustrated the order with qualifications it had never possessed in its palmiest state.