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

by P. L. Jacob

Dambrooka, daughter of the despotic Boleslav, Duke of Bohemia, and wife of a duke of Poland whose hardness of heart she succeeded in softening, afterwards mother of Boleslav the Great, together with the Princess Adelaide of Poland, mother of St. Stephen I., the most famous of the Hungarian kings, were both celebrated for their charity and self-devotion, and, with St. Margaret of Scotland, Matilda of England, Matilda of Germany, and Adelaide of Germany, they prepared the way for St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231), who reflected so faithfully the angelic disposition of her aunt Hedwiga, the patron-saint of the kingdom of Poland. It would seem, indeed, as if they all followed the same programme of benevolence. St. Hedwiga, daughter of the Duke of Carinthia, who by her marriage with Boleslav the Modest became Duchess of Poland and Silesia, created a new kind of charitable institution which was calculated to bring about the best results. She founded a convent of the Carthusian order at Trebnitz, of which her daughter Gertrude became an inmate, with the view of devoting it specially to the education, the marriage, and the dowry of girls who had been left unprovided for. She enriched it with very large donations, and a thousand needy persons were fed there every day, exclusive of the abundant alms and relief in kind which the community distributed without its walls.

At this epoch, the Abbey of Longchamps, near Paris, began its existence with the modest and touching title of “the Humility of our Lady.” Isabella, the only sister of Louis IX., whom the saintly monarch made the minister of his bounty and kindness to the suffering, was the foundress of this institution. The nuns at Longchamps educated and maintained poor girls, and distributed the rest of their revenues in alms. Their rules, a model of good sense, wisdom, and charity, approved of by St. Bonaventura, were copied by several similar establishments. Isabella, who had consecrated herself to the service of God by taking the veil, besides instructing, caring for, and feeding the poor, also worked for them with her own hands. She established in the abbey a kind of workshop in which ladies of the highest rank, while singing hymns and reciting prayers, spun wool and made garments for the poor.

The Crusades, what with the additional calls which they made on public charity, and the epidemic diseases which they brought, had rendered greater development of works of mercy absolutely indispensable. Works of charity are, in fact, the most marked characteristics of the reigns of Louis VII., Philip Augustus, and Louis IX. (1179–1270); most notably of the last, in which the saint-king set all his contemporaries such an example of Christian self-denial. We possess, under the title Etablissements de Saint Louis, a collection of the laws and ordinances framed by this great monarch, and forming an administrative code which displays wonderful sagacity, firmness, and forethought. His saintly mother, Blanche of Castille, to whose counsels he perhaps paid too little heed, seems to have taken a prominent part in the drawing up of this admirable code, which seems to breathe the true spirit of the Gospel. In St. Louis’s numerous and important charitable foundations, such as the Quinze-vingts, the Maison-Dieu, enlarged and endowed in Paris, the Hostelleries des Postes, in the chief towns of the kingdom, we recognise the collective work of this great king and his mother, who threw their love for humanity into the scale of politics (Fig. 271).

The angel of charity spread its wings over the West and the East, and whatever might be the final result of so many distant wars which were on that account the more perilous, they could not fail to bring about an infinite increase of benevolent institutions. The most important, in point of utility, was the extension of the hospitaller order of St. Lazarus.

Fig. 271.—St. Louis serving a Repast to the Poor.—Miniature from the “Petites Heures” of Anne of Brittany, which belonged to Catherine de Medicis (beginning of the Sixteenth Century), in the Library of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.

The Lazarists had two hospitals in Jerusalem, when Godfroi de Bouillon entered the holy city with the Crusaders (1099). Subsequently Louis VIII., having induced these monks to send some of their brethren to France, settled them outside Paris at the extreme end of the Faubourg St. Denis, in the lazaretto originally founded by Queen Adelaide, wife of Louis le Gros. These monks were also endowed with a rich domain at Boigny, near Orleans (1154), which afterwards became the head-quarters of their order. Louis VII., who had seen female communities in the East devoted to the tending of lepers, and who wished to create similar ones in France, founded a house at La Saussaie, near Villejuif, where nuns had charge of leprous women, and he assigned them, as a revenue, the tithe on the wine brought into Paris, which belonged by right to the king and queen. This establishment rapidly became rich: Philip Augustus bequeathed to it at his death all his gold and silver seals, on condition that prayers should be said on behalf of himself and the members of his family; other sovereigns gave it the privilege of claiming, at the death of a king or a prince of the house of France, his linen, his mules, the state-horses, and all the other horses used at his funeral, together with all the mourning harness and drapery. These privileges were so fully recognised, and the rights of the nuns so completely understood, that, a century and a half later, after the death of King John in England, eight hundred pounds (800 livres parisis) were paid to this convent as an indemnity for the horses which, owing to the death of the insolvent monarch in captivity, had not been bequeathed. Charles VI. paid the convent 2,500 livres to buy back the horses belonging to his father, Charles V.

A lazar-house had also been established by Louis VII. at Etampes, in an ancient hospital for indigent lepers, and the monks of this house, being entitled to call themselves maîtres and frères, were authorised to hold chapters and to sign their own capitulary documents. Their founder assigned them valuable property, with right of petty and ordinary justice, with right of toll, of market, &c. Several institutions of a similar kind were also set up in different parts of France, for the public health required that persons afflicted with leprosy should be provided with asylums where they could not come in contact with any one. Henry II., King of England and Duke of Normandy (1133–1189), founded one house at Rouen for lepers and for the monks in charge of them, and another in the forest of Rouvrai, not far from Rouen, for leprous women, with the condition that their nurses should be ladies of noble birth. Henry II., moreover, in founding a number of lazarettos in England, did for his kingdom what Louis VII. had done for France upon a much smaller scale. Both were seconded by the aristocracy of their respective countries, as the progressive development of a disease which science deemed incurable was beginning to cause great alarm.

Fig. 272.—The Banner of a Flemish Lazaretto with the Arms of the Gruthuyse Family, dating from 1502.—From a painted Curtain preserved among the Collection of Engravings in the National Library. The picture refers to the life of St. Lazarus. In the middle are the Virgin and St. Lazarus, the latter with traces of the sores which the dogs licked. In the top medallion to the left is the rich man driving Lazarus from his door. Opposite, Lazarus is standing at the rich man’s door, while a dog licks his sores. Below, the rich man is upon his death-bed, with an evil spirit waiting to carry off his soul. Upon the opposite side, Lazarus is lying dead upon the bare ground, but a dove is bearing his soul to heaven. The donors of the banner are kneeling before the Virgin and St. Lazarus. The clapper (which was used to announce the approach of the lepers) is depicted eight times in the border.