Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

When the Crusades brought about the concord, or rather the calm, of which the Church had so long been deprived, its progress became more regular, more marked, and more easy; it also suffered less from the encroachment of laymen upon its rights and privileges (Fig. 233), but the enormous expenses of these distant expeditions had ruined it. There was not, indeed, a single diocese where the property was not loaded with mortgages, nor where the services were not crippled by the reduction of the diocesan revenues. This penury, coupled with the absence of a great number of the most esteemed ecclesiastics, who had taken up the cross, left many important churches almost without resources or guidance; hence arose a general relaxation of morals on the part of the clerks, whose misconduct was in some cases so flagrant that it became necessary to expel them from the religious houses and parishes which had been committed to their charge. The abuses of authority, the uncertainty in point of faith, and the Vaudois heresy, which shot through Western Europe like a poisoned barb, gave rise to frequent dissensions amongst the faithful, the disputes being carried on even amongst members of the same family, whilst in many localities the people, attracted by a form of worship where the chanting and the prayers were recited in the vulgar tongue, deserted their parish church for the heretic priest; this was the origin of an infinity of disturbances and tumults in the large towns, especially in those governed by a municipality.

And yet the bishops had contributed in a material degree to the establishment of the communes; for, if history tells us of some towns being at war with their ecclesiastical lord, in order to declare themselves independent, we find, on the other hand, that a great number of the charters of enfranchisement were due to the initiative of the bishops. The two most interesting of these documents which have been preserved to us in their integrity, are the charter and the law of Beaumont-en-Argonne, formerly a fortified place, but almost forgotten in the present day, until brought into prominence by the war of 1870. This town had the satisfaction, not of imposing its law, but of seeing it adopted by numerous communes, amongst which may be cited Nancy, Lunéville, Verdun, Luxemburg, and Longwy, together with all the Duchy of Bar, Montmédy, &c. A lord-bishop, William, whose love of equity earned him the appellation of William the White-handed, was the author both of this law and of this charter, in the twelfth century (Fig. 234). By the charter, the lord-bishop made all the inhabitants of the commune of Beaumont proprietors of a sufficient quantity of land to give them the means of subsistence, with the use of the woods and water-courses; every precaution was taken to prevent fraud in commerce and trade, especially in regard to the millers, the bakers, and the butchers; and the administration of the commune was entrusted to so many burghers elected by the most notable citizens; while intrigue was powerless in its attempts to bias the free and independent suffrages of the burgher-electors. The time that the Beaumont law has lasted is a proof of its merits, for, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of time, five hundred communes were being governed by it in the eighteenth century.

Fig. 234.—Reduced fac-simile from the commencement of the Charter of William the White-handed, Archbishop of Rheims (Twelfth Century).—From the work of M. Defourny.

In the communes which adopted the Beaumont law, the burghers, exempt from all military burdens, were only compelled to take arms in the event of a sudden invasion of their territory, and this forced service was only of twenty-four hours’ duration. After that, the lord had to provide for the ordinary protection of the inhabitants in return for the trifling taxes which they paid him. In the commune of Escombes, for instance, which, being a frontier village, was very exposed to attack, the right of safe-guard (le droit de sauvement) consisted of two measures of oats, a hen, and a French denier for each burgher. A charter of an archbishop of Rheims, successor of William the White-handed, recounts how a good chevalier, in return for the gift of a piece of land belonging to the bishopric, undertook to bring together, train, and maintain a body of armed men for the protection of the burghers of Beaumont, who were thus enabled safely to carry on the tillage of the land and their commercial operations. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, the Archbishop of Rheims exchanged with the King of France the sovereignty over the towns of Mouzon and Beaumont-en-Argonne against the lordship of Vailly and its dependencies; but the law of Beaumont was respected, and by letters patent, “given at Montargis in the month of September, the year of grace one thousand three hundred and seventy-nine,” King Charles V. solemnly recognised and sanctioned all the advantages which the law of Beaumont assured to the inhabitants. “By these presents,” said the king, “we approve and confirm all their charters and liberties, franchises, usages, privileges, and customs which they have been granted by our above-mentioned Archbishops of Rheims in times past, to enjoy and use without deducting, innovating, or diminishing anything, and in the same manner and fashion as they have formerly enjoyed and used them before our acquisition.”

Throughout nearly all France, justice, which had been for eight centuries episcopal, became almost entirely civil; but the bishop still levied a part of the fines imposed, and when the citizens of a town or district were brought together to settle some grave dispute, it was the prelate of the diocese, or the dean of the chapter, or the precentor, who had the right of naming the day and the place of the meeting, which they had no power to prevent. Louis IX., great as was his piety, undertook the task of forming a lay magistracy capable of rendering justice. To avoid a conflict with the national clergy, he obtained from Innocent IV. a dispensation from the ordinary jurisdiction for the person of the King of France, for his consort, and his heir-presumptive. He solicited the intervention of the Pope to reform numerous abuses that had crept into the Church in France, especially in respect of the right of asylum, and the excessive immunities accorded to the ecclesiastical tribunals. Towards the end of the thirteenth century the jurisdiction of the clergy was, with the exception of the episcopal court, confined to the vassals of the bishops’ temporalities.

Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the episcopal power was engaged in a ceaseless struggle with a turbulent bourgeoisie (Fig. 235), whose spirit of opposition drove it into open and armed rebellion. In order to obviate this, and to order an effective resistance to the civil authority, itself overpowered by the populace, several diocesan chapters formed a league with the clergy and with the monks; but this did not bring them any increase of strength to combat the lay magistrates, because the bishop often deserted their cause or showed himself indifferent to it. Hence arose excommunications, imprisonments, proscriptions, and acts of seizure which only led to increased scandal. The schism which desolated the Christian world since the death of Gregory IX. (1378), the struggle for influence between the anti-pope Urban VI. and Pope Clement VII., were not calculated to allay the internal troubles of the Church.

Fig. 235.—Title of the Concordat of Cambrai, agreed upon in 1466 by the bishop, the chapter, and the commune of the town, for the maintenance of peace. This charter commences with the word NOUS in illuminated letters. The first letter (N) encircles an angel holding the escutcheon of Bishop John of Burgundy; the Latin inscription signifies, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” The letter O represents the arms of the chapter, surmounted by Notre-Dame des Flammes, with the words in Latin, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” The third letter (U) is symbolic of the commune of Cambrai, and also expresses a peaceful idea in the motto, “His abode is an abode of peace.” Amongst the witnesses, numbering more than a hundred, who signed this Concordat, was the Chronicler of Cambrai, Enguerrand de Monstrelet.—Fac-simile of the original, preserved in the Archives du Nord, at Lille, and the text of which was published by M. L. Dancoisne, at Hénin-Liétard. (The illuminated letters in this engraving are one-fourth the size of the original.)

The desire to remedy this general disorder was at that time uppermost in every Christian mind, for the question as to the territorial possessions of the two Churches had long been settled. Rome possessed nearly all Italy, except the manufacturing and maritime States of the peninsula; she also had Germany, a part of Switzerland, Bohemia, Hungary, England, and Holland. The other Church was recognised by France, French or Vaudois Switzerland, Savoy, Lorraine, Luxemburg, the Metz district, Scotland, and Spain. The most respected of the Christians, alarmed at a state of things which was so fatal to religion, in vain attempted to stem the torrent. The only remedy lay in the reformation of the clergy, and the Church’s independence of the civil power. In the year 1469, a noble and pious woman, the Countess Vio di Thiene, gave birth at Gaeta to a son, afterwards known as Cajetan, who became cardinal-bishop, and was one of the greatest men of the age. The Countess Vio di Thiene had resolved that the heir of her noble house should be born, as was the Saviour of mankind, in a stable. It was thus that in an actual manger this blessed infant first obtained his indifference to the world, his love of simplicity, his spirit of prayer and charity, his angelic modesty, which made him a martyr of penitence, a hero of self-denial, and a model of humility. When in 1505 Luther received the minor orders at the monastery of the Augustines at Erfurt, and when, upon the occasion of a granting of indulgences by Leo X. to the Dominicans (1517), he published the programme of his anti-papal and anti-canonical propositions, he at once found himself face to face with Cajetan, who was the leader and promoter of the Catholic movement in opposition to the German pervert. Cajetan conceived the happy idea of instituting a vast confraternity of the regular clergy, with the view of re-establishing ecclesiastical discipline. He was the ideal of the praying and working priest, without family ties, with no close or continuous relations with the outside world, and yet so brought up that while mixing with it he could forward the interests of the Church. The Somasques, regular clergy for the education of orphans (1528); the Barnabites, regular clergy of St. Paul (1532); the Jesuits, regular clergy of the Company of Jesus; the Crucifers, regular clergy ministering to the sick (1592); the Scholopians, regular clergy for the poor of the Mother of God; the Minorites, regular clergy of the minor order, and many other institutions of the same kind, are the offspring of Cajetan’s creation, and thus he has been called the patriarch of the clergy. The project of the Council of Trent was the conception, and its preliminary elaboration was the work, of Cajetan, and this famous council, which was to have so much influence over the Christian world, raised the moral dignity of the clergy, while it prepared the way for a general reform of the Church.