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

by P. L. Jacob

Fig. 26.—Seal of John, Bishop of Puy and Count of Velay (1305), holding in his right hand a naked sword as a token of secular jurisdiction.

Fig. 27.—The Tree of Battles: Allegorical Figures representing the discord which exists between the various classes of society.—Reproduced from a Miniature of “The Tree of Battles” of Honoré Bouet, Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Burgundian Library, Brussels).

In nearly all the episcopal towns, the judgment of the prelate or of his delegates was delivered from the square in front of the cathedral, or from the doorway of some exterior and adjacent chapel. This practice, maintained during the first centuries of the Church’s existence, ceased when another form of justice, namely, civil justice, took its place. In order to avoid the conflicts which must have ensued, and to furnish no pretext for popular disturbance, the ecclesiastical justice took refuge in some special place, generally called the Cour l’éresque, till at last the diocesan power, deprived of its temporal prerogatives within the boundary of the free towns, found itself obliged to transfer somewhere else the seat of its jurisdiction and of those feudal rights which it still retained. The mint of the prelate was established there; but so wide was the disagreement between the ecclesiastical and the civil authorities, and so sustained the struggle between the feudal and the middle-class interests, that it often happened that the episcopal money was not accepted as current coin, even in the town where the bishop was spiritually supreme, nor in the territory annexed to the free town and enjoying equal prerogatives.

In Germany and in Italy the emperor, in France and England the king, as the highest representatives of feudalism, possessed in every large city—notably in the cities termed imperial or royal—an official delegate, called burgrave, count, or viscount, who, originally at the head of the army, the magistracy, and the finances, gradually lost his prerogatives till, in the thirteenth century, he was scarcely more than a mere dignitary, without either power or credit. Many bishops, authorised by the lay sovereign, took the title of count, without, however, adding in any material degree to their influence. Besides, whatever may have been the nature and extent of the functions of a count, it does not appear that the free towns paid any more heed to them than to the pre-eminence of the bishop in all that appertained to the administration and government of the commune. In many places, especially in Italy and upon the banks of the Moselle and the Rhine, the bourgeoisie possessed councils invested both with the judicial and executive power, also a senate and a parliament, which was summoned by the ringing of a bell, and to which the lords inhabiting the adjacent castles were admitted, but only as ordinary citizens; without, however, losing any of their domainial privileges.

Though feudalism possessed nearly the same generic type in all European countries, it presented here and there varying shades of nationality, due to the dissimilarity of race, to the habits of the people, to the different modes in which it had been introduced, and to the diverse phases of its struggle and growth.

Fig. 28.—Seal of John, Duke of Burgundy, Count of Nevers and Baron of Donzy, surnamed Jean sans Peur (1371–1419).—National Archives of Paris.

The illustrious house of Franconia, alarmed at the incessant progress of high German feudalism, and anxious to check it, created, in the midst of the duchies by which it was threatened, a number of immediate lordships, owing fealty only to the emperor, and having an hereditary right over the fiefs of chivalry. This step met with an obstinate resistance from the great vassals who possessed this hereditary right, which the elected monarch did not enjoy of himself. On the other hand, the palatine lords, agents of the emperor, and empowered to represent him in the great fiefs or in his domains, and the burgraves of the towns, impatient to free themselves from the imperial suzerainty, displayed at the same time the insubordination which the leudes had practised in the Carlovingian epoch, and endeavoured to establish for themselves an independence transmissible to their heirs. While this movement was going on, the Pope was lowering the status of the empire; Innocent II. compelled the Emperor Lothair II. to receive in fee from him Tuscany, the Duchy of Spoleta, the Marches of Ancona, Bologna, Parma, Placenza, &c., forming part of the legacy bequeathed to the Holy See by the Countess Matilda. From this flagrant humiliation, submitted to by Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the successor of Lothair, and haughtily rejected by Henry the Haughty when he refused to render feudal homage to the Pope, arose the celebrated quarrel of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, which, from the banks of the Rhine, spread beyond the Alps, and implanted itself in the very heart of Italy. Henry the Haughty, chief of the Guelphs, independent and royal, was proscribed and stripped of his duchies, while Conrad, chief of the Ghibellines, inaugurated the brilliant dynasty of the Hohenstaufens. Thirty years of bitter warfare, during which the alliance of the papacy with the national party was cemented, seconded by the efforts of petty feudalism, led up to the treaty of Constance, which brought to a definite close the struggle of the feudal empire against the popular independence of the cities of Italy. The Pope had recovered the freeholds left him by the Countess Matilda; the towns preserved their regal prerogatives, entire liberty to raise armies, to surround themselves with walls (Fig. 29), to exercise criminal and civil jurisdiction, and to form confederations with other towns, &c. The emperor was left with no other privileges than those of confirming, through his ambassadors, the consular elections, and of appointing in each town a judge of appeal in his name. It was in vain that the Emperor Henry VI. endeavoured to re-establish high feudalism; he died in the attempt (1199), and Innocent III., who considered himself to be the natural defender of all the rights and the supreme judge in all the monarchies in Europe, resisted every effort made by Henry VI. Several Crusades, moreover, which occurred at about this period, created a modification in the warlike sentiments of the feudal nobility, until, thanks to the policy of the illustrious pontiffs who had occupied the chair of St. Peter, and to the efforts of the Italian free towns, backed up by the petty feudal nobility, the independence of Italy rose triumphant from the tomb which opened for the Emperor Frederick II. on December 13th, 1250.

In England, John Lackland had, by the Magna Charta of 1215–1216, promised the clergy to respect the liberties of the Church, and notably the freedom of election; to the feudal lords he had promised to observe the feudal conditions of release, of ward, and of marriage; to the bourgeois, that no new tax should be levied without the consent of the common council; and to all his subjects he accorded the habeas corpus—that is to say, the liberty of the person, with trial by jury, by constituting the court of common pleas at a certain fixed place. A second charter, called the Forest Charter, mitigated the extreme severity of the penalties for infraction of the laws appertaining to the chase, and guaranteed the whole of the liberties which had been extracted from him by creating a tribunal of twenty-five barons, entrusted with the function of seeing that this charter was carried out, and, further, of keeping watch over the action of the crown. This was submitting the Government to a regular course of discipline. Just as the feudal nobility had been kept under and oppressed by the sovereign power, so was the latter now hedged in, thwarted, and hampered in its despotic tendencies.