A century before his birth, his ancestors had lived by looting their neighbors. They were highwaymen, robbers, by profession. And, to increase his ineligibility, his mother, a pretty Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, had ensnared the affections of that pleasant Duke of Normandy, known as "Robert the Devil."
William, the fruit of this unconsecrated union, became in time Duke of Normandy. With that reversion to ancestral types to which scientists tell us we are all liable, he seems to have looked across the Channel toward England, with an awakening of his robber-instincts. In a few weeks, Harold, the last King of the Saxons, lay dead at his feet, and William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.
Then was presented the curious anomaly of an English sovereign who was also ruler of a French province; an English king who was vassal to the King of France. A door was thus opened (1066 A.D.) through which entered entangling complications and countless woes in the future.
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If Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in the ninth century, the Church now in the eleventh century wore all the European states, a tiara of jewels in her mitre. The centre of dominion had passed from the Empire of Germany to Rome, when Henry IV. prostrated himself barefooted before Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1072.
The Church was at its zenith. As a political system it was unrivalled; but its triumphs brought little joy to the earnest souls still clinging to the ideals of primitive Christianity. But what availed it for Abelard to lead an intellectual revolt against corrupted beliefs in the North, or the Albigenses a spiritual one in the South? He was silenced and immured for life, while the unhappy inhabitants of Languedoc were massacred and almost exterminated, and an inquisition, established at Toulouse, made sure that heretical germs should not again spread from that infected centre.
But however imperfect the religious sentiment of the time, however it may have departed from the simple precepts of its founder, its power to sway the hearts and lives of the people may be judged from the extraordinary movement started in France in the twelfth century.
How inconceivable, in this practical age, that Europe should three times have emptied her choicest and best into Asia for a sentiment! Business suspended, private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life, treasure, all eagerly given—for what? That a small bit of territory, a thousand miles away, be torn from profaning infidels, because of its sacred associations, because it was the birthplace of a religion whose meaning seems to have escaped them—a religion which they wore on their battle-flags, but not in their hearts. How would a barefooted, rope-girdled monk, however inspired and eloquent, fare to-day in New York, or London, or Paris?
History has no stranger chapter than that of the Crusades. When Peter the Hermit pictured the desecration of the Holy Land by Mohammedans, all classes in France, from King to serf, were for the first time moved by a common sentiment, and poured life and treasure with passionate zeal into those streams which three times inundated Palestine.
The order of Knights Templar had been created, and a splendid ideal of manhood held up before the French nation, and now the knightly ideal, side by side with the Christian and the romantic ideal, entered into the life of the people. Romance, song, poetry, eloquence came into being from a sort of spiritual baptism, and France began to wear the mantle of beauty which was to be her chief glory in the future.