Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

THE HALL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN

frontiers and dynastic vicissitudes, the great unity of mediævalism blends the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Artois, Champagne, Eastern Normandy, Eastern France, into a consistent whole, so far as all real things are concerned. In spite of its bickerings and fightings and jealousies and plots and counterplots, Europe was really more united, more a working whole, during the Middle Ages than ever it has been since. One religion and one philosophy did for the fluctuant states what the Reformation, democracy, and “enlightenment” could only undo, and in this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest history man can record, we find the dynamic force, the creative power, of a culture and a civilisation that took little count of artificial barriers between perfectly artificial nations, but included all in the greatest and most beneficent syntheses Europe has ever known.

The art of this land—or these lands, if you like—should be so considered; not as an interesting and even stimulating by-product of social, industrial, and political evolution, with only an accidental relationship to them, and only an empirical interest for the men of to-day, but as the most perfect material expression of the great reality that existed through and by these agencies that were in themselves nothing; the character that emerged through the turmoil of human activity, as it shows itself in the men and women of the time, and expresses itself in their art.

To do this fully is impossible; every province would require a volume, every art a series of volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the more salient qualities of the greater masterpieces, and try to co-ordinate them into some outward semblance of that essential unity they both promised and expressed.

II
THE FORGING OF MEDIÆVALISM

IT is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country—or the men that made it great—was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of mediævalism, even though for its full manifestation you must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia.

The great empires of to-day, England, France, Germany, Italy, two of which have eaten steadily into its territories until only a tiny Luxembourg remains, together with a small new state with a novel name made greater and more lasting by the events of a year than those of its predecessors, have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, taking to themselves at the same time credit, that is none of theirs, for men and happenings that made ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory, the high achievements of the small old states are forgotten. And yet, out of these little dukedoms and counties and free cities came the men who made France and Germany, who determined the genius of mediævalism, imparted to it the high soul and the swift hand of its peculiar personality, and gave to the world the memory and tradition of faith and heroism, together with so much of that inimitable art that was its perfect showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible monument of its accomplishment.

National unity this territory and these peoples have never possessed. During the Roman dominion they formed the provinces of Germania and Belgica, in the diocese of Gaul; under the Merovings all was comprised in the Frankish kingdom, the old line between the Roman provinces remaining to divide Austrasia and Neustria, as the northern and southern sections came to be called under the Carolings. With the disruption of the empire of Charlemagne, Austrasia went to the kingdom of the East Franks, Neustria to that of the West Franks, the former becoming (west of the Rhine) the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine, the latter (east of the Seine) Flanders and Champagne. When Otto the Great restored the Holy Roman Empire in A. D. 962, the Lorraines of course formed a part. These comprised all that is now (or was, in June, 1915) Germany west of the Rhine, together with all of Belgium except Flanders, Luxembourg, and a strip of territory along the northeast frontier of France. Westward to the Seine the land was divided into many feudal holdings, Flanders, which then comprised not only northern Belgium but the present French departments of Nord and Pas de Calais; Champagne, Amiens, Vermandois, Laon, Reims, Châlons. During the Middle Ages Lower Lorraine became the duchy of Brabant and the county of Hainault. Upper Lorraine, Luxembourg and Bar, southern Flanders, Artois. Picardy and Valois became entities, and the great bishoprics of Cologne, Trèves, Strasbourg, Cambray, Liége acquired more and more land until they were principalities in themselves.