If the tide of Moslem conquest had been early checked in the West, in the East it had flowed steadily if slowly. [pg 019] In 1338, Orchan, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks, seized on Gallipoli, the fortified town which guarded the eastern entrance to the Dardanelles, and the Moslems won a footing on European soil. A few years later the troops of his son Murad i. had seized a portion of the Balkan peninsula, and had cut off Constantinople from the rest of Christendom. A hundred years after, Constantinople (1453) had fallen, the Christian population had been slain or enslaved, the great church of the Holy Wisdom (St. Sophia) had been made a Mohammedan mosque, and the city had become the metropolis of the wide-spreading empire of the Ottoman Turks. Servia, Bosnia, Herzogovina (the Duchy, from Herzog, a Duke), Greece, the Peloponnesus, Roumania, Wallachia, and Moldavia were incorporated in the Moslem Empire. Belgrade and the island of Rhodes, the two bulwarks of Christendom, had fallen. Germany was threatened by Turkish invasions, and for years the bells tolled in hundreds of German parishes calling the people to pray against the coming of the Turk. It was not until the heroic defence of Vienna, in 1529, that the victorious advance of the Moslem was stayed. Only the Adriatic separated Italy from the Ottoman Empire, and the great mountain wall with the strip of Dalmatian coast which lies at its foot was the bulwark between civilisation and barbarism.
§ 2. Consolidation.
In Western Europe, and within the limits affected directly or indirectly by the Reformation, the distinctive political characteristic of the times immediately preceding the movement was consolidation or coalescence. Feudalism, with its liberties and its lawlessness, was disappearing, and compact nations were being formed under monarchies which tended to become absolute. If the Scandinavian North be excluded, five nations included almost the whole field of Western European life, and in all of them the principle of consolidation is to be seen at work. In three, England, France, and Spain, there emerged great united [pg 020] kingdoms; and if in two, Germany and Italy, there was no clustering of the people round one dynasty, the same principle of coalescence showed itself in the formation of permanent States which had all the appearance of modern kingdoms.
It is important for our purpose to glance at each and show the principle at work.
§ 3. England.
By the time that the Duke of Richmond had ascended the English throne and ruled with “politic governance” as Henry vii., the distinctively modern history of England had begun. Feudalism had perished on the field of the battle of Bosworth. The visitations of the Black Death, the gigantic agricultural labour strike under Wat Tylor and priest Ball, and the consequent transformation of peasant serfs into a free people working for wages, had created a new England ready for the changes which were to bridge the chasm between mediæval and modern history. The consolidation of the people was favoured by the English custom that the younger sons of the nobility ranked as commoners, and that the privileges as well as the estates went to the eldest sons. This kept the various classes of the population from becoming stereotyped into castes, as in Germany, France, and Spain. It tended to create an ever-increasing middle class, which was not confined to the towns, but permeated the country districts also. The younger sons of the nobility descended into this middle class, and the transformation of the serfs into a wage-earning class enabled some of them to rise into it. England was the first land to become a compact nationality.
The earlier portion of the reign of Henry vii. was not free from attempts which, if successful, would have thrown the country back into the old condition of disintegration. Although the king claimed to unite the rival lines of York and Lancaster, the Yorkists did not cease to raise difficulties at home which were eagerly fostered from abroad. Ireland [pg 021] was a Yorkist stronghold, and Margaret, the dowager Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward iv., exercised a sufficiently powerful influence in Flanders to make that land a centre of Yorkist intrigue.
Lambert Simnel, a pretender who claimed to be either the son or the nephew of Edward iv. (his account of himself varied), appeared in Ireland, and the whole island gathered round him. He invaded England, drew to his standard many of the old Yorkists, but was defeated at Stoke-on-Trent in 1487. This was really a formidable rebellion. The rising under Perkin Warbeck, a young Burgundian from Tournay, though supported by Margaret of Burgundy and James iv. of Scotland, was more easily suppressed. A popular revolt against severe taxation was subdued in 1497, and it may be said that Henry's home difficulties were all over by the year 1500. England entered the sixteenth century as a compact nation.