This system of law differs from others in this important respect, that the highest nobility and bravest heroes of the Christian Orient were the most zealous and successful jurists. We cannot give them a special notice. The most distinguished was John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa, Ascalon, and Rama, born about the year 1200. His attempts to restore the lost Lettres du Sepulcre has succeeded so well that his work has, until recently, been regarded as identical with those lost books, and even now, when the laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem are spoken of, the work of John of Ibelin is generally understood to be meant. It was this very book which the barons of the kingdom of Cyprus, in 1368, when Peter I, by his arbitrary rule, had subverted justice, set up in a solemn assembly as the code of the kingdom. In order to make it as like as possible to the Lettres du Sepulcre, it was sealed in the same manner, placed in a closed chest, and kept in the cathedral of Nicosia, and this chest was not allowed to be opened except in the presence of the king and four vassals.
When in the year 1489 the republic of Venice obtained, through Catharine Cornaro, possession of the isle of Cyprus, the republic bound itself by a solemn act to observe these assizes. The copy which had been preserved at Nicosia was subsequently lost by some unknown event, and when in the mean time the French language had ceased to be the prevailing one, there was a commission appointed in the year 1531 to make out a new text from the best manuscripts which could be found. This revision of the assizes of Jerusalem was translated into Italian, and was still in use in 1571, making the period during which it was in force almost five centuries.
Having thus traced the external history of this system, we now turn to its material contents.
No one any longer regards the forming of a system of law as an independent, arbitrary, or accidental thing. Every such must be a product and copy of the entire intellectual life of the age, and this piece of legislation is indeed a true mirror of the Christian world in Europe at the time; and the outline only rises more sharply, boldly, and clearly to view, because there is presented to us at the same time so rare a phenomenon in the march of civilization as the building up of a state organization, for which there is no foundation in the land where it is to be established.
The manner in which the spiritual elements fermented and boiled at that time in the Occident—how the most shocking rudeness and barbarism throve side by side with the most exalted religious enthusiasm—the lowest forms of materialism by the side of spiritual fanaticism—superstition, ignorance, and vile falsehood, side by side with energy, valor, and generosity—all this is drawn with sharpest features in the assizes.
The history shows us these men in their frantic cruelty, butchering the inhabitants of conquered Jerusalem, men, women, and children without distinction, delighting in their torment, and then, smeared with their blood, moving in procession to the holy places, singing their Christian songs of praise, all dissolved in tears of deepest emotion. They had left Europe in swarms, many so ignorant as not to know whether the holy land which they sought lay on this earth or in those regions which they had heard called heaven—so frenzied in their fanaticism as to forget that they might still have bodily wants, and hence throwing away their effects, and yet so low in their ideas as only to enjoy physical things. Such are very much the men for which these laws seem to have been made. Upon one leaf we read: 'That man is without sentiments of honor, though he be of highest rank, who, being called to stand as counsel by the lowest vassal, before a tribunal of justice, declines to do so; for they are all alike the true followers of Christ;' and by the side of this that most unchristian of all legal institutions, slavery, assumes a form so barbarous that the legislator does not blush to place slaves, though among them were Christians, on the same level with domestic animals.
This same irreconcilable opposition which appears in moral principles, shows itself again in the political foundation of the assizes. Originating in the clash of arms, grown up in the contests and necessities of war, on a soil where nothing but constant war could save it from annihilation, the system is purely martial—made for conflict and strife. And still it is but one side which shows this character; for, in the midst of this precarious existence of the new kingdom, is seen an elevation of commerce till then unknown—a pursuit of trade for which feudal ideas had provided no place. As Schiller declared that the Crusaders laid the foundation of civil liberty in Europe, so we may say that in the assizes of Jerusalem the narrow views in regard to civil life, which controlled the west of Europe in the middle ages, were exploded. Here the idea of the modern state dawned, though of course and singularly enough, side by side with its absolute antithesis, the feudal state in its purest form.
In the ancient view, it was natural that any man should rule who had the power, and incomprehensible that any one should allow himself to be ruled who could avoid it. Any other than a forced relation to a lord was nonsense to antiquity, and the moral duty of obedience was unknown.
The idea of voluntary obedience, however, having dawned and become penetrated with the light of Christianity, formed the first element of the feudal system. No prescribed series of duties within the cold enclosure of legal forms bound mutually to each other the lord and his vassal. They were bound by the all-embracing feeling of fidelity. Hence the Lombard law of feuds compares the relation to that of husband and wife.
While on the one hand, in the youth of this institution, the virtues which spring from reciprocal fidelity and love developed themselves from this relation—a relation inwardly and mutually binding lord and vassal, and resulting in holding together all the members of the state—so on the other hand, where there is no restraint to insolence and arbitrary despotism, except that found in the mere sense of moral obligation, they transcend all bounds, and find their natural reaction in the resistance of the subject, destroying the very idea of a state. In the feudal system, however, it is not the state which guarantees, secures, and defends the rights of the individual. Whoever claims protection and justice is referred to his immediate feudal superior, to whom alone, and not to the state, as a whole, he owes duty. The state, as a moral person—as a society—is entirely in the background.