Fig. 269.—Works of Charity.—Reduced Fac-simile of a Drawing of the Fifteenth Century, attributed to Savonarola, in the National Collection of Drawings. The artist shows the practice of works of mercy being carried on in each of the detached cottages, the mottoes recalling the texts in which Christ intimates that at the Last Judgment the exercise of Charity will weigh heaviest in the scale. In No. 1, the sick are being tended in their beds or picked up in the streets; in No. 2, the people are being clothed; No. 3 represents travellers who are being given to drink; No. 4, the hungry receiving bread; No. 5, pilgrims being sheltered; No. 6, a dead body being prepared for burial; No. 7, the visiting of prisoners. The last scene is a sanctuary in which the divine sacrifice—the true source of Christian charity—is being celebrated, whilst a penitent is obtaining the remission of his sins because he has practised charity. In the foreground rich men are throwing their money into a heap, and the poor are receiving their share of it. The monk whose bust is seen to the left is perhaps Bernardin de Feltri, preaching in encouragement of this good work.
During the eighth and ninth centuries, a great number of hospitable houses were built upon the high-roads leading from France to Italy, from France to Spain, and also from Spain to the confines of civilised Germany. The Carlovingian kings, beginning with Charlemagne and ending with Charles the Bald, with the view of facilitating international commerce throughout the vast extent of their empire, ordered the establishment of a number of free houses of which travellers might make halting-places, and in which they could count upon finding not only security, but any assistance which they might require. The establishment of lazar-houses or lazarettos, the origin of which dates from the fifth century, seems to have been less a work of charity than a sanitary measure of precaution against leprosy, a terrible and incurable malady which was generally looked upon as a punishment from heaven. These lazar-houses increased in the West, as the relations of Europe with the East became more general. It is from this period also that may be dated the foundation of many Hôtels-Dieu, religious asylums, most of which were constructed in close proximity to the porch of the cathedral churches, taking the place of the ancient canonical infirmaries. Such was the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, the origin of which is lost in the obscurities of the Middle Ages.
After an interval of dejection and selfishness which must be attributed to the misfortunes that overwhelmed the peoples and ruined the Church, Christian charity, though permanent and persistent in each diocese, though too often ineffectual, was the distinguishing characteristic of several contemporary sovereigns. Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great (900–925), surnamed in the Roman breviary “the father of the poor and of the orphan,” must be mentioned as the first of them, for the various benevolent institutions which he created were never a burden upon his subjects, the whole cost coming out of his private revenues.
Canute I., leader of the Danes, converted to Christianity by a French princess to whom he was married, did as much good at the close of his reign as he had done evil in the early part of it by his persecution of the Christians (1016–1036). Olaus or Olaf of Sweden, and Olaus of Norway, King of the Scandinavians, founders of two Christian monarchies in the North, intermixed works of charity with dogmatic principles, and rendered the religion of Christ popular by making it contribute to the welfare of their subjects. But the two noblest types of the Christian Church in Northern Europe during the eleventh century were Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm, King of Scotland (1070–1095), and St. Matilda their daughter, wife of Henry I. of England.
Margaret, the mother of the poor, the consoler of the afflicted, looking upon her subjects as a large family committed to her charge by providence, underwent constant privations that she might have more to distribute in alms; she relieved sufferers before they had time to ask for help; inquired into hidden distress; sought out the insolvent debtors in order to free them from their liabilities; ransomed the prisoners of war, and visited constantly the hospitals which she had endowed or founded. Before sitting down to table, she washed the feet and dressed the wounds of the sick poor, while nine orphans and twenty-four widows or aged persons were always partakers of her meals. During Advent and Lent she had as many as three hundred at her table.
Her daughter Matilda, who was also canonised, survived her more than twenty-six years (1118). She founded two hospitals in London, and took great pleasure in visiting them, and tending the inmates with her own hands.
Fig. 270.—St. Elizabeth of Hungary, going to relieve the poor, suddenly sees the folds of her cloak covered with roses in full bloom.—From a Painting by Fra Angelico in the Academy of Fine Arts at Perugia (Fifteenth Century).
Before her day there was another St. Matilda, who was early instructed in the exercise of charity, first by her august mother, and afterwards by her grandmother, abbess of a convent at Erfurt, where she spent several years: she was a woman of true piety. She married the Emperor Henry, surnamed the Fowler, and owing to the wars in which her husband was constantly engaged, the regency was often entrusted to her. When she had resigned these high functions, which were very burdensome to her, she again became the influential adviser of the emperor, the counsellor of justice, the minister of clemency, and the friend of the unfortunate. Left a widow, she retired, when her son succeeded his father on the throne, to her favourite convent of Northausen, a vast charitable foundation in which three thousand maidens belonging to the first families of Germany passed their lives in holy meditation, and in the relief of human suffering. Her three children, the Emperor Otho I., the Archbishop Bruno, the apostle of Germany, and Queen Gerberga, wife of Louis d’Outremer, King of France, reflected the virtues of their mother; but the memory of St. Matilda of Germany was still more vividly awakened in the person of her grand-daughter St. Adelaide, and of her great-grand-daughter Emma, wife of King Lothair.
Under the Emperor Henry II., surnamed the Pious, and the Empress Cunegunda, charitable establishments, hospitals, houses of relief, and places of refuge increased very largely, and when Conrad came to the throne at the death of Henry II., the empress-regent retired to the convent of Kaffung, which she had founded in the diocese of Paderborn, and devoted herself to the service of the poor and the sick who were under the special care of this institution.