Fig. 403.—The Adoration of the Lamb by the Elders and Virgins of the Apocalypse.—Centre Panel of the Triptych painted on wood by Jean Van Eyck, and preserved in the Church of St. Bavon, at Ghent (Fifteenth Century).

MILITARY AND RELIGIOUS
LIFE IN
THE MIDDLE AGES
AND AT THE PERIOD OF
THE RENAISSANCE

By PAUL LACROIX

(Bibliophile Jacob)

CURATOR OF THE IMPERIAL LIBRARY OF THE ARSENAL, PARIS

Illustrated with

UPWARDS OF FOUR HUNDRED ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD

LONDON
BICKERS & SON, LEICESTER SQUARE

PREFACE.

Lately we published the “Manners, Customs, and Dress during the Middle Ages,” a necessary sequel to “The Arts of the Middle Ages.” To understand this important period of our history, we must, as was pointed out at the time, go back to the very source of art, and study society itself—the life of our forefathers. The volume of “Manners and Customs” initiated our readers into all the secrets of Civil Life; the present work treats of the Military and Religious Life of the same period.

The subject is not wanting in grandeur, and we shall endeavour to throw into relief the two parallel forces—namely, the military and the religious life—which shaped the habits of the nation in the epoch of which our work treats.

The influence of these forces was immense. Society was made up of barbarous nations and of the corrupt remnants of the heathen world. Conquerors and conquered had nothing to put in common, with a view to forming a new society, beyond their ruins and their vices. How was a state of things, higher and better than that which had gone before, to be created out of this shapeless mass? What principle of life was there powerful enough to evoke from amid this chaos modern Europe, with all its variety of forces and of glory, its influence and authority over the rest of the world? Religious life, aided by military power, has brought about such a creation, after all the misery and suffering preceding its birth. Gradually gaining a hold upon society, and elevating its ideas as the tie became closer, religious life endowed it with new manners, a new social life, a set of institutions of which it before knew nothing, and a character which raised it to a degree of moral grandeur which humanity had never as yet attained.

Christianity civilised the barbarians; by unity of faith, it established political unity amongst peoples who were split up into hostile races—a result which would only have been arrived at in former days by the annihilation of nationalities, the dominion of the sword, and the force of oppression. History presents no spectacle more worthy of our attention than the steady and deep operation of this new principle of life infused into a society in a state of decay. This principle could only succeed in remoulding and directing the world by first assimilating men as individuals, and that amidst the excesses, the violence, and the disorders of a barbarism which, even after the lapse of centuries, would not allow itself to be crushed. But it was endowed with a persevering and indomitable energy. Consider how it affected everything, how it enlisted into its service all the forces which society from time to time placed at its disposal, or, to speak more correctly, permitted it to create! By means of the monastic orders, how many necessary works did it not accomplish? The soil was transformed by cultivation; bridges, dykes, and aqueducts were constructed in every direction; manuscripts were preserved in the monasteries; education was given in numberless schools, where the poor were taught gratuitously; the universities were made learned and prosperous; architecture was raised into a science; beneficent institutions were established and liberally endowed.

“Christianity was the greatest benefactor of the Middle Ages,” said M. Benjamin Guérard; “and what is most striking in the revolutions which took place in these semi-barbarous times, is the action of the Church and of religion. The dogma of a common origin and destiny for all men alike, was an unceasing argument for the emancipation of the people; it brought together men of all stations, and opened the way for modern civilisation. Men, though they did not cease to oppress one another, began to recognise the fact that they were all members of the same family, and were led, through religious equality, up to civil and political equality; being brothers in the sight of God, they became equal before the law, the Christian became the citizen.

“This transformation took place gradually and slowly, as being necessary and inevitable, by the continued and simultaneous enfranchisement of men and of land. The slave whom paganism, as it disappeared, handed over to the Christian religion, passed first from a state of servitude to a state of bondage, from bondage he rose to mortmain, and from mortmain to liberty.”

Under the influence of the bishops, legislation was formed upon the principles of Christian morality. In the great councils of the nation, and in the royal councils, they gave a Christian direction to the government of the country, and more than once preserved national unity from being broken up. “The bishops,” says Gibbon, “constructed the French monarchy just as the bees construct the hive.”

At the same time the popes were incessant in their efforts to convert all the Christian peoples into one vast republic; and they attained their purpose in a great measure. The idea was a sublime one, springing so naturally from the unity of the doctrines which all were required to profess. As early as the twelfth century the idea was thus enunciated by Tertullian in his “Apologetica”—“We remain strangers to your factions and to your parties.... The republic of the human race is what we demand.”

Such was the work of Christianity in that society of the Middle Ages of which it was the life and soul. It is necessary to follow it in the accomplishment of this varied task, and, if we would thoroughly understand it, we must consider it in itself, in its inward life, in its form of worship and liturgy, in its monasteries, in its clergy, and in its different institutions, for herein lay its means of action.

The military power placed itself, as a general rule, at the service of the Church, and it was thus that Christianity was enabled to complete its work. Clovis, the conqueror of the Romans, the Germans, the Burgundians, and the Visigoths, was baptized at Rheims, and brought France within the fold of the Church, just when a great number of the barbarians, the new masters of the Roman empire, were embracing Arianism. In after-days the Church, represented by the sword of Joan of Arc, was instrumental in saving France and restoring her to herself. Between these two extreme points of the history of the Middle Ages, Charlemagne, Godefroi de Bouillon, St. Louis, the age of chivalry and the Crusades, prove to us that this combined action of military and religious life is a true exponent of the character of France. But when we come to consider the ordinary condition of things as they absolutely existed, we find it to be full of evils. Military life amongst the German people had produced feudalism, and with it a terrible anarchy. Royalty was powerless. Authority had not, so to speak, any centre; it was cut up and subdivided throughout the nation. Private or civil warfare became, by the mere force of things, legal for several centuries; and disorder, violence, oppression, and tyranny followed as a natural consequence. Military life, in all its manifestations, hampered and counteracted the beneficent influence of Christianity, and served as the last refuge of barbarism. The Church, however, managed to make the principle of feudalism exercise a moderating influence upon its very excesses, by the creation of chivalry, the noblest military institution which the world has ever known. Chivalry represented the Christian form of the profession of arms. The first duty was “to defend in this world the weakness of all, but especially the weakness of the Church, of justice, and of right.”

“Fais ce que dois, adviegne que peut,

C’hest commandé au chevalier.”

Ordinances of Chivalry.

It was, in fact, an armed force in the service of truth and justice, themselves defenceless. It was at the same time a bright example, the influence of which extended beyond the most brilliant of its exploits. Even this, however, was not sufficient to check the evil and insatiable desire for fighting. Under the powerful impulse of the popes, the Crusaders served to utilise this warlike spirit, and acted as a diversion which saved Europe from the fury of its own inhabitants and from the dominion of the Koran. Internal discords were brought to an end, the Communes were enfranchised, feudal power decreased, and the royal influence gained in strength, diminishing again during the long crisis of the hundred years’ war, and being once more reinstated by Joan of Arc. Such was the part played by “Military Life in the Middle Ages.”

The development of modern habits, however, is gradually to be traced. The feudal army was replaced by mercenary troops. As military power became concentrated within the hands of the sovereign, monarchy, in the true sense of the term, succeeded to feudalism.

At the same time another and deeper movement was taking place in the moral and religious order of things. A new spirit was convulsing the world. The ideas and manners established in society by Christianity were destined to undergo a change. After the capture of Constantinople, the Grecian savants who had found a refuge in the courts of Italy inspired their Western confrères with such an affection for ancient literature, that everything which was old came to be regarded with enthusiasm, while, as a natural consequence, every—thing which Christianity had produced was looked upon with contempt. The faith in and the influence of the Church diminished, and individual reason was tempted to throw off the yoke of all teaching authority. Printing, then just invented, served to accelerate this mental revolution. The principle of free examination was proclaimed by Luther, and one-half of Western Europe became Protestant. The tie, at once religious and political, which held Christian nationalities together, was thus broken, and unity amongst people who were divided in their religious doctrine became impossible. At the same period the discovery of America and of a new route to the Indies lent immense force to the development of material interests.

Thus we had the commencement of a complete revolution. The world entered upon new paths, along which it has continued to advance without interruption to our own day.

This work derives a special interest from the circumstances amidst which it is published. Ancient Europe has reached one of those solemn epochs of its history when, divided within itself and uncertain of the turn which events may take, it finds itself face to face with the problem of its future destiny, demanding an immediate solution. What will that solution be? The emotions of the present may incline us to look back regretfully upon that past which reminds us of so much that is great and noble, in spite of its many and inevitable drawbacks, and which, by showing us the origin of modern society, by revealing to us the manner of its birth and its onward progress, may give us the key to its present critical condition when a profound and universal transformation seems about to take place.

It is superfluous to say anything about the engravings contained in this volume. They have been selected with the same view that dictated the publication of those appearing in the two previous volumes—a desire to produce a living image of the past. Each volume forms a collection of archæological treasures got together after the most laborious research; they are attractive to the eye, full of interest and instruction, and we feel that our readers will have in them a complete museum such as has not hitherto been within their reach.

PAUL LACROIX.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

MILITARY AND RELIGIOUS LIFE

IN

THE MIDDLE AGES,

AND AT THE

PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE.

FEUDALISM.

Origin.—Barbaric Laws.—Enfeoffment.—Charlemagne and the Church.—First Construction of Strongholds.—Vassal and Suzerain.—Feudal Rights.—The Truce of God.—Feudal Churches and Abbeys.—Communal Principles.—New Townships.—Origin of the French Bourgeoisie.—The English Magna Charta.—Alienation of Fiefs.—Liberation of the Serfs.—Imperial Cities.—Feudal Rights of the Bishops.—St. Louis.—Wars between France and England.—The Bulle d’Or.—The States-General.—Origin of the Third Estate.

Before presenting any manifestation of its existence, feudalism had long been gradually developing, and seemed to be moving forward invisibly at the head of the barbarian conquerors of Roman Gaul. From the day that their great leader, Clovis, shared amongst his leudes, or companions-in-arms, the lands that they had won at the price of their blood while fighting under his orders—from the day when, by his miraculous baptism after the victory of Tolbiac (Fig. 1), he himself a proud Sicamber, submitted himself to and became a vassal of the Christian Church, simultaneously sprang into existence a theocratic and a martial aristocracy. In this simultaneous double origin might have already been perceived the hidden cause of the future inevitable antagonism between the modern influence of the cross and the material power of the sword. Conspiracies, bloodthirsty executions, continual revolts, divers plots, in which were concerned at one time the king’s leudes, at another the principal clergy; ecclesiastical censures, ceaselessly threatening these blind and savage tyrants, who, while bending to the reproof, at the same time panted for revenge; curbless ambitions, terrible hatreds, the continued strife of opposing races; on one side the Gallo-Romanic (Figs. 2 and 3) and its heir the Gothic, on the other the barbarous Germanic and Slavonian, more or less christianized; all these were the endless signs by which the coming reign of feudalism, at each successive stage of modern civilisation, marked its advent. The political system which a barbarous legal code had inaugurated for the benefit of the leudes, was entirely opposed to the system sanctioned by the Roman law. It was the desire of the leudes that a seignior, the owner of the land and of the men who cultivated it, should possess the right of infeudalising, that is to say, of ceding, as an inferior freehold, a certain portion of his own estate, abandoning in so doing to the concessionary or vassal not only the rights of the soil, but the sovereignty over those who occupied it. For a vassal to forfeit his rights, he must first have failed to fulfil the engagements he undertook when he received the investiture of the fief. The cession of lands and the rights attached to it, which were the foundation of dawning feudalism, remained for more than a century in that state of oscillation which precedes a stable equilibrium.

Fig. 1.—Battle of Tolbiac and Baptism of King Clovis.—Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Mirouer Historial de France,” in folio, printed in Paris by Galliot du Pré in 1516.

Fig. 2.—Gallo-Roman Lords of the Fourth Century.—Sculpture from the Tomb of the Gallic Consul Jovinus, General under the Emperor Julian, at Rheims.

Fig. 3.—Mounted Barbarian in the Roman Service.—From an Antique Monument.

Master of France, of Germany, and of Italy, and protector of the Church, Charlemagne (Fig. 4) enjoyed all the prerogatives of the Western emperors. On two occasions he delivered the Holy Seat from its enemies, and in Germany as well as in Italy he placed his sword at the service of the Christian faith. One of the popes, Adrian, bestowed upon him the dignity of patron; another, Adrian’s successor, Leo III., placed, in the year 800, the imperial crown upon his head. Then might have been seen, better than in the days of the Roman and Greek Emperors, the spectacle of the Church protected by the head of the State, to whom the seignorial aristocracy paid feudal obedience, and who controlled with an iron hand their tendencies to schism. Feudalism, which was gathering strength, and which already knew its own power, never retrograded; it sometimes halted and was at rest, but it was only waiting a more propitious season to continue its path. Charlemagne’s successors were, in fact, neither the kings of France nor the emperors of Germany, but the feudal lords, the great landowners; and their power waxed all the greater from the fact that, in 853, an edict of Charles the Bald ordered the reconstruction of the ancient manors, the repair of their fortifications, and the construction of new ones, so as to arrest the devastating invasions of the Normans, of the Saracens, of the Hungarians, and of the Danes. Thus Europe became dotted with fortresses, behind which both nobles and villains found a refuge against the new flood of barbarians. There was soon scarcely a stream, a mountain pass, or an important road which was left undefended either by military posts or by strong walls (Figs. 5 to 10). The invaders, formerly rendered so bold and indomitable by the fear they had succeeded in inspiring, now ceased their raids, or at most ventured no farther than the shores on which they had disembarked. Little by little a sense of security returned to the inhabitants, and the welfare of the civilised world was assured. A service of this importance, rendered by the nobles and seigniors to society at large, naturally gave them legitimate claims to the exclusive guardianship of the frontiers which they protected from the common enemy.

Fig. 4.—Statue of Charlemagne (formerly in the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, Paris).—Eleventh to Twelfth Century.

Towards the tenth century, every noble who desired to obtain from another noble, richer or more powerful than himself, a portion of land to be held as a fief, and who consented thus to become his vassal, personally declared in the chief’s presence that for the future he wished to be his faithful, devoted servant and his defender until death; with his sword girded to his side and his spurs on his heels, he solemnly swore this on the Holy Writ. In the subsequent ceremony of hommage-lige the vassal, bareheaded, knelt on one knee, and, placing his hands within those of his seignior, swore fealty to him, and undertook to follow him to the wars (Figs. 11 and 12), an obligation not entailed by the first act of homage, namely, that of hommage-simple. Thenceforward the seignior ceded to him the land or the feudal domain, by investiture or by seizin, a ceremony often accompanied by the giving of a symbolical sign, such as a clod of earth, a little stick, or a stone, according to the custom of the soil. The investiture of kingdoms was conferred with the sword, that of provinces with a standard.

Fig. 5.—Tower of the Walls of Provins, Twelfth Century.

Fig. 6.—Tower of the Castle of Fougères, Twelfth Century.

Fig. 7.—Tower of the Castle of Loches, Twelfth Century.

Fig. 8.—Tower of Beaucaire, Thirteenth Century.

Fig. 9.—Tour du Télégraphe, Narbonne, Fourteenth Century.

Fig. 10.—Old Castle of Angoulême, Thirteenth Century.

The reciprocal obligations of the vassal and his suzerain were numerous, some moral, some material. The vassal was bound to loyally preserve the secrets confided to him by his suzerain (Fig. 13), to prevent and frustrate any treachery on the part of his enemies, to defend him at the risk of his own life, to resign his own horse on the battle-field should his lord have lost his, to go as a prisoner in his stead, to cause his honour to be respected, and to assist him with his advice. At the simple request of the suzerain, the vassal was bound to follow him to the field, either alone or accompanied with a specified number of armed men, according to the importance of the fief. The duration of this military service varied, in like manner, in proportion to the fief, from twenty to sixty days—a period that did not admit of very distant expeditions. The feudal seignior stood in place of the sovereign, and being invested with executive authority, had necessarily, in order to exercise it, recourse to the latent force distributed amongst his vassals, and he naturally did so in accordance with his own convenience. Justice, administered in this manner, was termed fiance, that is to say, public security. The seignior was wont to summon the men of his fief or fiefs to his plaids, or assizes, either for the purpose of assisting him with their advice, to act with him as judges, or to carry out the sentences he pronounced. He had a right to two kinds of assistance—obligatory, or legal aids, and voluntary, or gracious aids. Legal aids were due from the vassal under three sets of circumstances: when the seignior was taken prisoner and had to pay a ransom, when his eldest son was about to be made a knight, and when he gave away his eldest daughter in marriage. In feudal society these aids stood in the place of the public taxes, which in ancient times, as in our own days, were collected by the State alone; they differed, however, in this respect, that they were not due at any stated periods, nor perhaps could they ever be absolutely enforced, they were a kind of voluntary gift—from the bestowal of which, however, few vassals dared to free themselves.

Fig. 11.—Act of Faith and Homage, Twelfth Century.—Seal of Conon de Béthune, preserved in the National Archives of France.

Fig. 12.—Act of Faith and Homage, Thirteenth Century.—Seal representing Raimond de Mont-Dragon kneeling before the Archbishop of Arles, his Suzerain, in the National Archives of France.

The seignior, who never abdicated his sovereignty over his vassal, sometimes interfered in certain essential modifications necessary to the fief—modifications that the vassal was incompetent to undertake. These gave rise to new rights, and became a fresh source of revenue to the seignior. For instance, the seignior was entitled—first, to the right of relief, a sum of money payable by every person of full age who succeeded to the possession of a fief, which sum became larger as the line of succession became less direct; secondly, to the right of alienation, payable by those who sold or alienated the fief in any way; thirdly, to the rights of escheat and of confiscation, in accordance with which the fief reverted to the suzerain when the vassal died without leaving an heir, or when, from some act of his own, he had incurred the penalty of being deprived of his feudatory rights; fourthly, to the right of guardianship, in virtue of which the seignior, during the minority of his vassals, held the ward and administration of the fief besides enjoying its revenues; fifthly, to the right of marriage, which consisted in finding a husband for the female inheritor of a fief; this right gave the seignior the privilege of forcing her to select one of the suitors that he chose to present to her.

As long as a vassal scrupulously fulfilled his numerous and delicate obligations he might consider himself as the absolute master of his fief, he might partially or entirely sub-feudalise it, and become in his own turn the suzerain of vassals of an inferior order termed vavasseurs, who were bound to render to him the same obligations that he himself paid to his own seignior. On the other hand, the suzerain was bound to respect his contract, not to dispossess his vassal without a legitimate motive, but to protect him, and to render him on all occasions substantial justice. It was, moreover, to his interest to do this, for the prosperity of the fief depended upon the security and welfare of the vassal.

Fig. 13.—Act of Faith and Homage, with the Legend, Secretum meum mici (“My Secret is to myself”).—Seal of Gérard de Saint-Amand, 1199, National Archives of France.

Vassals of the same suzerain, residing in the same territory, and possessing fiefs of a similar value, were termed pairs (pares), or equals. Suzerains of every rank, the king included, had their pairs, and all could claim the privilege of being tried by these pairs in the presence of his immediate seignior. If the seignior refused to act justly, and the vassal considered himself unrighteously condemned, he had the right of making an appeal in default of justice to the suzerain of his own seignior. Another right of appeal, that of arms, prevailed also in feudal society. The nobles, as a rule, preferred to carry out their own justice rather than await from others a slow and uncertain decision. This was the cause of there being so many little wars and so many desperate and bloody struggles between different seigniorships. Might made right; but custom, nevertheless, to some extent regulated the formalities that preceded these internecine conflicts, so that the seignior or the vassal who was to be attacked might be forearmed, and might put himself upon his guard (Figs. 14 and 15). Further, to remedy as much as possible the calamities ensuing from these perpetual contentions, the Church had the power of suspending and preventing them, under pain of excommunication, from sunset on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday during the festivals of Lent and Advent, and at all periods of high religious solemnity. This was the Peace or the Truce of God.

Fig. 14.—Château de la Panouze (Aveyron), type of a French Feudal Castle of the Fourteenth Century, of which remains still exist.—From a Miniature in a Manuscript in the National Library of Paris.

The seigniors possessed no right of uniform justice. In France, a superior, a middle, and an inferior judicial court were recognised. The first alone possessed the power of life and death. The more considerable fiefs had usually attached to them the right to exercise the highest justice, but there were exceptions to this rule. A vavasseur, for instance, might sometimes appeal against this highest justice, while a seignior, who was only entitled to exercise the inferior justiciary rights, might inflict death on all robbers caught in flagrante delicto on his lands.

Fig. 15.—View overlooking the Castle of Pierrefonds (beginning of the Fifteenth Century), as restored by M. Viollet-le-Duc, in his “Dictionnaire d’Architecture.”

The privilege of coining money, always a sure index of sovereignty, together with the exclusion of all foreign jurisdiction and of all external authority from the area of each fief, also constituted two important prerogatives. Finally, the fief, with its privileges, always remained intact; it passed invariably to the eldest of the family, on the sole condition of his paying homage to the suzerain.

Most of the churches and abbeys, such as those of Saint-Denis, of Saint-Martin des Champs, and of Saint-Germain des Prés (Fig. 16), which proudly reared their towers and spires opposite the Louvre of the kings of France, exercised on their own account all the feudal rights which they had acquired by reason of the territorial possessions as well as by the concessions lavishly ceded to them by their sovereigns. The archbishops, the bishops, and the abbots thus became temporal lords, and were consequently forced to have vassals for military service, to keep up a court of justice, and to support a mint, thus uniting—in the case of bishops who enjoyed the temporal rank of count—spiritual with political authority.

Fig. 16.—View of the Abbey of Saint-Germain des Prés, from the East, as it stood in 1361.—Fac-simile of an Engraving in the “Histoire de Saint-Germain des Prés,” by Dom Bouillard: in folio.

A, Road leading to the River Seine; B, St. Peter’s Chapel; C, the Close; D, Road leading to the Pré-aux Clercs; E, Place of the Breach; F, Ditch; G, the Pope’s Gate; H, Cloister; I, Refectory; K, Dormitory; L, the Church; M, Chapel of the Virgin; N, Road between the Ditch and the Pré-aux-Clercs; O, space between the Barrier to the Rue des Ciseaux; P, Great Gate of the Monastery; Q, Road to the River; R, Barrier close to the Ditch; S, the Inn called the Chapeau Rouge; T, the Pillory.

This twofold power made the prelate the suzerain of all the seigniors in his diocese. Towards the end of the tenth century the feudal ecclesiastics, by reason of the permission granted to laymen to bequeath their property to the Church, as well as of the strictness of the laws which forbade the alienation of ecclesiastical property, possessed a fifth part of all French and English soil, and nearly a third of Germany; whilst the last surviving Carlovingian could only claim the town of Laon, where he resided, to such an extent had his predecessors despoiled themselves of their lands in favour of their great vassals, who still, however, recognised him as their suzerain. In the eleventh century Europe was divided into a multitude of fiefs, each having its own mode of life, its own laws, its own customs, and its ecclesiastical or lay head, who was as independent as he well could be. Around these, but under certain conditions of dependence and of subordination, was developed the much more numerous class of freedmen. Gradually manual labour and the efforts of a growing intelligence led to the political existence of the bourgeois, those worthy representatives of the labouring portion of society. The part which was taken by the latter was not always of a passive character. As early as the year 987 the villains of Normandy rebelled and leagued themselves against their feudal lords, claiming the right of fishing and of the chase, and the privilege of having an administration and a magistracy of their own; it was thus that the innate power of the people revealed itself: the towns and the boroughs were peopled with inhabitants who held their homes in tenure from the seigniors—who were the proprietors of the soil—under certain servile obligations as to the payment of taxes. As soon as the establishment of the hierarchy of fiefs had put an end to discord and anarchy, the germs of the Great Revolution—destined to restore civil liberty to the heirs of the countless inhabitants whom the misfortunes of Gaul and the tyranny of the emperors had reduced to servitude—began to show themselves. It was in this wise that the communal movement originated, and the town of Mans is generally credited with having been the first to set the example of having, through the agency of the working classes, conspired against the seignior. We find in the annals of Metz, about the year 1098, record of the election for life of a maître-échevin (high-sheriff), named Millon, in place of one, by name Hennolu-Bertin, who had been elected for one year, but who, doubtless, was not the first in his office. And we find an echevinal council, termed the council of the twelve, enjoying functions at once magisterial, administrative, and military. Metz possessed at the same time, by the side of their communal organization, a count of the name of Gerald, who was succeeded in 1063 by another count named Folmar. It had also a bishop, rich, powerful, firm, full of learning, named Adalbéron, a favourite both with the Pope and with the Emperor, influential enough to obtain anything, but never asking anything but what was just. It was, therefore, under the protection of the sword of the count and of the crozier of the bishop that the municipal liberties of Metz began to grow—liberties that became within a single century so developed and powerful that Bertram, another bishop of Saxon origin, undertook the task of restricting them, and endeavoured to regulate them by a charter which restored to the Church its electoral but not its governmental influence. This first communal organization, a type of many other municipalities in France and in Germany, was inaugurated without bloodshed. But this was not everywhere the case; at Cambrai, for instance, the commune was only established after a century of open warfare between the inhabitants and the bishop, their suzerain. At Laon—that ancient feudal city where the nobility and the burgesses engaged in all kinds of brigandage, where the bishop, who was a famous warrior and huntsman, was in the habit of sharing with the dignitaries of his cathedral and with the aristocracy of the town the fruit of his exactions—the commune inaugurated itself with the blood of their bishop, who was assassinated in the midst of a terrible insurrection. The towns of Amiens, of Beauvais, of Noyon, of Saint-Quentin, of Sens, of Soissons (Fig. 17), and of Vézelay, underwent nearly the same vicissitudes that Cambrai and Laon had experienced, and finally attained, after similar trials, a similar position. Perhaps Cambrai, of all the French communes, was the most exacting towards the feudal power that it was trampling under foot. “Ni l’évêque, ni l’Empereur, ne peuvent mia asseoir ne taxe, ne tribut, et n’en peult issir la malice, fors que pour la bonne garde et défense de la ville, et ce depuis coq chantant jusques à la nuit.”[1] No vassal had ever claimed or obtained more in the exercise of his feudal rights (Fig. 18).

Fig. 17.—Seal of the Commune of Soissons, representing the Mayor of Soissons, armed at all points, in the midst of the Sheriffs of the Town (1228).—National Archives of France.

The inauguration of the communal system had taken place without a struggle, and almost without opposition, as a useful and necessary reform at Metz, at Rheims, in a few midland towns, such as Bourges, Moulins, Lyons, Périgeux, and in most of the southern cities, such as Arles, Aigues-Mortes (Fig. 19), Marseilles, Narbonne, Cahors (Fig. 20), Carcassonne (Fig. 21), Nîmes, and Bordeaux. This was explained by the fact that this independent action of the people had been prepared by the system adopted by the Franks, who allowed no difference to exist between the condition of the conquered and of the conquerors. The rights they might enjoy and the duties they were to perform had been equally shared amongst all the freedmen of the monarchy without any distinction as to nationality; the Franks would have feared, had they acted differently, that they were reserving for the sovereign the possibility of using the oppressed nations as a weapon to overcome the conquerors themselves, and that in this way they might be leaving a loophole through which the monarchy might degenerate into despotism.

Fig. 18.—Thomas of Savoy, Count of Flanders, and Joan his Wife, grant to the Town of Cambrai the Charter of Peace made between the Counts of Hainaut and the Chapter of Cambrai in 1240.—Miniature from the “Chroniques de Hainaut,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Burgundian Library, Brussels).

Beyond the Alps, particularly in Lombardy, under the fostering action of liberal institutions, commerce and manufactures developed themselves, particularly at Milan, Pavia, Verona, and Florence; and in a still higher degree, owing to their position on the sea-board, at Venice and Genoa. In these rich and prosperous cities the seignorial nobility and the Church reigned side by side, enjoying a nearly equal and parallel influence, and when feudalism attempted to absorb them by its inflexible despotism, the manufacturing and the commercial classes, selecting as their leaders a few more prominent of the artisans and some of the most respected of the clergy, allied themselves with the lesser rural nobles, and, with the assistance of the latter’s vassals, succeeded in repulsing its crushing yoke. This, however, was not accomplished without tremendous struggles, nor without painful trials and heavy sacrifices.

Fig. 19.—Fortified Gate of the Town of Aigues-Mortes, which Town obtained in 1246 a Communal Charter (Military Architecture of the Thirteenth Century).

In the Low Countries, which had always so highly exalted the sentiment of local patriotism, the struggle of the villains against the nobles, whether lay or ecclesiastic, differed but little from the struggle of the towns in the north of France against the seigniors, but it assumed larger proportions in accordance with the immense resources of every kind which they had at their disposal. The feudal lord had his drawbridge, his battlements, and his men-at-arms cased in iron; but his rebellious vassal could boast on his side, besides the narrow and winding streets of his stronghold and the number of his fellow-combatants, many warlike engines and well-made weapons which he himself had manufactured. When feudalism, in order to crush what it then termed the populace, summoned to its banner hordes of adventurers recruited from all parts of the world, it was encountered by undisciplined levies of armed mechanics and artisans, who issued forth from Ghent, from Bruges, and from Liége, and not unfrequently returned victorious.

Fig. 20.—Fortified Bridge, from Valentré to Cahors (1308).

Fig. 21.—Plan of the Fortified City of Carcassonne (Thirteenth Century).

Beyond the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine, feudalism flourished. Lofty fortresses, surrounded with a triple moat, everywhere cast their shadows athwart the land, though the towns enjoyed a full share of municipal liberty, and were not unfrequently the disinterested spectators of the terrible struggles that the feudal nobility carried on between themselves. Nowhere did feudalism display more arrogance or more barbarity than in Germany, which resembled some vast camp to which the nobles flocked to meet face to face in desperate combat.

When it came to pass that the industrial and populous towns of Germany cried out for municipal liberties similar to those enjoyed by the towns of France, Italy, and the Low Countries, the emperor hastened to grant and confirm their desires. He did more, he gave them the right of immediate appeal against the princes of the empire—that is to say, any towns situated in the territory of any prince were responsible, not to the latter, but directly and immediately to the emperor himself, who thus laid for himself the foundations of strong natural supports in the very heart of the larger fiefs. The towns of Germany, already rich and flourishing, increased their commerce and their wealth, thanks to the new position they thus acquired.

The Emperor Henry V. greatly assisted this pacific revolution by granting privileges to the lower class of citizens and to the artisans, who up to that time had, according to the spirit of the Roman law, lived apart from the freedmen and remained at the lowest degree of the social scale. He relieved them, in particular, from the bondage of a custom by virtue of which the seignior at their deaths became entitled to all their personal property, or, at least, enjoyed the power of claiming everything worth having which they had left behind them.

In many towns Henry V. deprived the bishop of his temporal authority, and formed the burgesses into companies or guilds according to the nature of their manual occupation, a custom that was immediately imitated and adopted in other commercial countries. The bourgeoisie, organized in this manner into distinct groups, soon elected councils among themselves, the members of which, under the rule of senators, prud’hommes, bonshommes, echevins, and jurymen, began by assisting the representative of the imperial authority, whether duke, count, judge, or bishop, and ended by exercising a special and independent authority of their own, not over the vassals, but over citizens and commoners.

It will be asked, what then was the commune which had established itself with more or less effort and sacrifice in the principal parts of Europe? and further, as the commune had succeeded in one way or another in establishing itself, what privileges or immunities remained to the feudal lord, whether clerical or lay? Guilbert de Nogent, the open adversary of communal institutions, will perhaps give the best answer to these inquiries: “Those who pay taxes now pay only once a year the rent they owe to their seignior. If they commit some misdemeanour they have at the most to pay a fine, the amount of which is legally fixed; as for the moneys that were wont to be levied from the serfs, they are now quite exempt from them.” Guilbert de Nogent might have indicated other victories obtained by the bourgeois, victories that were still more important in their moral influence, and which sooner or later were destined to change the face of society. As for the more intelligent seigniors who better understood their own personal interest, as well as the logical results of a paternal administration, they attempted to favour the instinctive movement of the rural populations, who, to shield themselves from the tyranny, the exactions, and the bad treatment of their feudal masters, were in the habit of seeking shelter and protection from some lord more humane or more politic than the rest, and who used, on the faith of a communal charter, to settle beside the ramparts of some seignorial manor (Fig. 22), around some loopholed church, or in the shade of some fortified monastery.

Fig. 22.—Seal of the Lord of Corbeil (1196).—National Archives of France.

The seignior in these cases was the gainer of so many able-bodied men, either artisans or agriculturists, but soldiers in case of need; and he was the gainer, moreover, in matters of revenue and influence.

It can easily be understood that in those times many charters were drawn up similar to the following, which is worth quoting as a type: “I, Henry, Count of Troyes, make known to all present and to come, that I have established the undermentioned rules for the inhabitants of my new town (in the neighbourhood of Pont-sur-Seine) between the bridges of Pugny. Every man inhabiting the said town shall pay every year twelve deniers and a measure of oats as the price of his dwelling, and if he desires to hold a portion of land or meadow, he must pay four deniers yearly for every acre. The houses, vines, and fields may be sold or alienated at the pleasure of the holder. The men who reside in the said town shall go neither to the ost (an army in the field), nor shall they join any expedition unless I myself am at their head. I hereby allow them, moreover, to have six aldermen to administer the ordinary business of the town and to assist my provost in his duties. I have decreed that no seignior, be he knight or other, shall be allowed to withdraw from the town any of the men inhabitants for any reason whatsoever, unless such be his own men, or unless he owe the seignior any arrears of taxes.—Given at Provins, in the year of the Incarnation, 1175.” This name of Ville-neuve, which is so often found repeated in the charters and deeds of the Middle Ages, as, for example, Ville-neuve-l’Etang, Ville-neuve-Saint-George, Ville-neuve-le-Roi, Ville-neuve-lez-Avignon, &c., is evidence of what was an ordinary event in the twelfth century, namely, the creation of a free town, enfranchised from its birth, and subject to some small and insignificant payments to the seignior, and whose inhabitants, but yesterday serfs or villains, were now proprietors of portions of the soil, which they might dispose of or bequeath, either by gift or by testamentary disposition, under the immediate protection of their nominal seignior.

Fig. 23.—Ferrand of Portugal, Count of Flanders, made Prisoner at the Battle of Bouvines, and taken to Paris: “The Clergy and Laity singing Hymns and Songs.”—Fac-simile of a Miniature in the “Chroniques de Hainaut,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Burgundian Library, Brussels).

Some ancient towns of the royal domains of France, such as Paris, Orleans, Meaux, Senlis, and others, which do not seem to have preserved the least trace of Roman institutions, always excepting the company of the Nautes Parisiennes, who were the true founders of the ancient municipality of Paris, were each governed by a provost, who was the officer and lieutenant of the king, their seignior, and they further enjoyed certain special liberties and privileges. In 1137, Louis VII., at the suggestion of his minister, Suger, forbade his provost and officers to annoy the burgesses in any manner whatsoever, and fixed the amount of their taxation himself. Ten years later, the same sovereign abolished the right of mortmain, repressed the abuses of the fiscal taxes, instituted a judicial system, and greatly encouraged commerce. It was not as king, but as seignior suzerain, that Louis VII. acted in this manner. The French, bourgeoisie was at this time of but recent origin; it had sprung from a triumphant villanage, and was beginning to form a new branch, from which was to issue, a few centuries later, the third estate. Legal jurisdiction and the right of coinage, feudal privileges of which the royal suzerain had always been very jealous, were favours it then but seldom enjoyed. Philip-Augustus understood better than his predecessors the interests of the royal power, for he graciously granted seventy-eight communal charters; he was rewarded by the effectual assistance the communal levies afforded him at the battle of Bouvines (1214), when he was fortunate enough to overthrow the coalition that foreign feudalism had formed with his rebellious great vassals. He forced the latter to return to their duty, and one of them, the Count of Flanders, remained twelve years a prisoner in the principal tower of the Louvre (Fig. 23). Philip-Augustus had not shrunk from granting a legal constitution to the bourgeoisie of Paris and the principal towns, in opposition to the feudal nobility.

The communal movement, a natural development of the legal rights introduced by the Franks, was scarcely felt in England. Already, long before the Norman Conquest, under the Anglo-Saxon rule, many busy towns, wealthy and populous, such as Canterbury, London, Oxford, and York, took a share in public affairs, a limited share, it is true, but one sufficient for their wellbeing and prosperity. The victorious invasion of William of Normandy, so fatal to the whole country, was still more so to the large towns, which were compelled to behold their own material ruin, the sequestration and confiscation of their property, the dispersion and infeudation of their inhabitants, their agriculturists and their farmers. Unable any longer to invoke the protection of an easy-natured sovereign, they were forced to bow their heads beneath the sway of strangers, lucky adventurers, bold, exacting, despotic, and cruel men, believing in no faith and obeying no law, the very dregs of French feudalism. King Henry I., the third son of William the Conqueror, after many sanguinary struggles, in which his barons were not found wanting in fealty to him, granted them the celebrated charter called Magna Charta—usually, though, erroneously, considered the fundamental origin of English liberties, which, however, really dated from a prior period; at the same time (1132) he released the burgesses of London from the lamentable state of degradation in which they had existed since the Conquest. In the reign of Henry II.—an administrative and judicial reformer—not in England alone, but in those parts of Scotland and Ireland which he had conquered (1154–1182), the inhabitants of many towns acquired the right to purchase the freehold of the soil they occupied, and to free themselves from several special taxes by paying a fixed sum to the feudal lord. Thenceforward arose that haughty bourgeoisie, with which the barons had soon to reckon, a class which John Lackland favoured proportionately as he dreaded the continual rebellions of the feudal seigniors. Twice was Prince Louis, the son of Philip-Augustus, summoned by the Anglo-Norman barons to cross the channel with an army to force the English king to fulfil the clauses of the charters he had granted to his great vassals (1215–1216); on the other hand, the towns and communes, grown rich and powerful, thanks to the privileges which had been granted to them as well as to the intelligent activity of their manufactures, forced the nobles to respect them. The latter no longer attempted to compel assistance, but solicited it, often even humbly, so that the communes and the landed aristocracy held an equal position in the feudal hierarchy. The title of noble and baron, bestowed on the leading citizens of London and the Cinque Ports, raised the middle-class to a higher position. Indeed, to enable it, already powerful by its wealth and by its alliances, to become a political body, it only needed the privilege of sending representatives to parliament, a privilege which was granted in 1264 to the principal towns of the kingdom.

Fig. 24.—Philip III., called “the Bold,” in Royal Costume.—From a Miniature in a Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Burgundian Library, Brussels).

In France, about the same period, the industrial and trading bourgeoisie had seats in the privy council of St. Louis, and, advancing in letters and science, it gradually obtained possession of all the chairs at the university. As early as the reign of Philip the Bold (Fig. 24), it occupied all the higher positions in the judicature, and hence it assumed a place in the great bailiwicks and parliaments, from which the feudal nobility did not condescend to oust it, and which, after a time, enabled it to offer a successful resistance to the abuse of power on the part of this same nobility, whose authority steadily diminished. Admitted by Philippe-le-Bel to the general assemblies of the nation and to the sessions of the states-general, the bourgeoisie became one of the states, an order of the kingdom, that is, the tiers-état. It absorbed the offices pertaining to the general administration and to finance, it furnished the lower orders of the clergy with most of their distinguished representatives, and the municipalities with the most gifted of their magistrates; it acquired the right of purchasing offices which carried nobility with them, of possessing seignorial domains with high and petty justice, and thus it forced its way like ivy into the crevices of the feudal edifice, which stone by stone crumbled to pieces. Philippe-le-Bel, surnamed the King of the Lawyers—who helped him in a material degree to carry out his designs—showed himself, as a natural consequence, the King of the Commons (tiers-état), and the secret enemy of the Church and the nobility. The latter, valiant and chivalrous, but devoid of forethought, rushing headlong into every kind of adventure, and caring only for deeds of daring and warlike achievements, regardless of their material interests, gradually allowed themselves to be divested of a considerable part of their domains by the bourgeoisie, who lent them money upon mortgage, and by the voués or procureurs, who ruined them. The decadence of their wealth dated from the First Crusade, when they encumbered their estates to pay the expenses of distant expeditions, which they undertook almost entirely at their own cost; and when they wished to recover possession of the properties which they had handed over to some third party, they found them loaded with fresh debts, which had been contracted during their absence, and producing but nominal revenues for want of hands to cultivate the soil. They then were obliged to sell a portion of the property, and that at a great loss. The only resource remaining was the concession of their feudal privileges, and in this way the nobility lost the right of coining money and of exercising justice, while the sovereigns—Philippe-le-Bel in particular—seconded by the bourgeoisie, increased their absolute power.

The massacre of more than six thousand chevaliers at Courtray (1302), by the Flemish militia (Fig. 25), was a heavy blow to the pride of the generous but reckless nobility of France. It was humiliating to these lords to find that the villains knew how to wield the arms which they had been in the habit of making for others; they saw that they possessed the courage and skill needed to win battles, and that henceforward they must be reckoned upon as a force able to take the field as well as formidable when engaged in street riots.

Fig. 25.—Flemish Warrior in the Uniform of the Van Artevelde Militia: Stone Statue formerly in one of the niches in the Belfry at Ghent, now in the Ruins of St. Bavon of Ghent (Fourteenth Century).

In Germany, the fall of the Hohenstaufen family, formerly Dukes of Swabia and Franconia, favoured the enfranchisement of towns; all the cities in these two principalities, hitherto subject to the mediatised lords, reverted to the emperor, who, without any real power over them, left them free to establish the franchise and immunities of a republic. In order to increase their populations, they followed the example of the sovereigns and feudal lords of France and Lombardy in regard to the formation of new towns, establishing around their walls, as feudalism had done outside its donjons, fields of refuge. These were occupied by a host of strangers, who received the designation of Pfahlbürger—citizens of the palisades, or faubourgians, originally sheltered and protected by a wooden barrier. These receded in proportion as the number of inhabitants increased, and according as their trade developed. Many serfs deserted the neighbouring fiefs to seek in these free towns the independence, position, success, and all the advantages which they could not enjoy under the feudal régime. Their lords demanded their extradition by virtue of their feudal rights, accompanying the demand with threats, which were sometimes effectual; but the free towns, not less interested in keeping the fugitive than the latter was in remaining with them, endeavoured to gain time and to favour his retreat until after the expiration of three hundred and sixty-five days, when the right of the lord to his liegeman or vassal ceased.

The imperial towns—which, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, after having freed themselves from the fetters of feudalism, had risen to such a height of independence that the emperor himself had but a nominal supremacy over them—were Ratisbon, in Bavaria; Augsburg and Ulm, in Swabia; Nuremberg, Spiers, Worms, and Frankfort-on-the-Main, in Franconia; Magdeburg, in Saxony; Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck, in the Hanseatic League; Aix-la-Chapelle, Bonn, Cologne, Coblentz, Mayence, Strasburg, and Metz, in the Rhenish and Lotharingian provinces. These towns, essentially industrial and commercial, in which the middle-classes were for the most part supreme, formed vast emporiums, teeming with the products of the north, the south, and the east. They were looked upon as the store-houses and arsenals of Europe. Feudalism, unable to produce anything for itself, was always replenishing from these depôts the resources necessary for equipping and revictualling its armies. From them came the arms and the engines of warfare, as well as the special workmen, the cross-bowmen, the carpenters, the founders, and the artillerymen, who composed the personnel of the artillery at this period. If the free towns had arrived at a common understanding, and formed a pacific league between themselves, they would have presented a serious obstacle to the struggles of the suzerain lords; but their distance from each other, especially those in the centre of Germany, prevented them from coming to such an arrangement. Nor could they, as in England, form an alliance with the feudal nobility, nor, as in France, make common cause with the suzerain. As the emperor left them to act independently, they were obliged to organize their own defence, to contract alliances with some powerful neighbour, and weaken, by dividing them, those enemies whom they deemed stronger than themselves. Thus these free towns never constituted a homogeneous body; they were isolated and spread over a vast extent of territory, being only brought together by feelings of interest and sympathy, but without any mutual tie or political cohesion. The lord with whom they were at war to-day, would enter their service and pay the next, with the title of soldarien; and at times a single town would have as many as two or three hundred of these allies, who were always followed by a swarm of marauders, and who spread desolation throughout the land. The lords who were without fortune, who represented the petty feudalism of the country districts, finding in the service of these towns a means for keeping up their state and paying their followers, passed from one to the other, and only enlisted under the standard of a sovereign prince for want of better employment, for the latter did not as a rule pay so well as these free towns.

From the eleventh to the fourteenth century, the position of the bishop, in point of political influence, did not improve in these free or republican towns, either in England, France, or Germany. Suzerain lord by moral authority, he was only so to a very limited degree (Fig. 26) in respect to his temporal power. He only exercised justice over his vassals, or at most over the members of the secular and inferior clergy, for the canons, the incumbents, and even the deacons, enjoying as they did special immunities, would have appealed, in the event of a dispute or of censure, to their metropolitan archbishop, or even to Rome. It is true that the lay depositaries of municipal authority did not, on their side, take any judicial steps against the ecclesiastics, except in case of conspiracy against the State, which alone rendered them answerable to secular justice. Outside the subordinates of the bishop and the chapter, the episcopal court or tribunal took cognizance of the crimes, the offences, and misdemeanours against religion of which any citizen might be guilty, and also of the heresies, blasphemies, breaking of images, glaring infractions of the commandments of God and of the Church, insults and assaults of the priests, &c. And even in these cases, where the delinquent could plead nobility, and especially when he belonged to the higher classes of feudalism, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical tribunals could not reach him. As the nobility could always claim to be judged by their peers, there was rarely any infraction of this feudal principle, and then only where some diocesan bishop or metropolitan was powerful enough to substitute his own will for the customary right.

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.

Fig. 29.—The fortified Bridge of Lamentano, near Rome, theatre of the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, in the Twelfth Century.

St. Louis, following in the footsteps of Philip Augustus, laboured to suppress the abuses of the feudal régime; he compelled his barons to choose between the fiefs which they held from him and those which they had received from the kings of England; he rooted out the old feudal stocks, created a new feudalism, not less valiant but more moral than the old, and never lost sight of the formidable opposition which the old nobility had ventured to set up against the Queen-Regent, Blanche of Castile, when it declared that the young King Louis should not be consecrated until the suzerain aristocracy was restored to the plenitude of its privileges. After Louis IX., French feudalism, transformed by the saint-king, was neither less haughty, less trivial, nor less insolent than before, but it was more favourable to the crown and less hostile to the Church. It formed a brilliant array of chivalry, full of enthusiasm and impetuosity, commencing a battle well, always winning it at the very beginning of the action, but losing it afterwards for want of being supported by a national body of infantry, whose help it despised; it made up a body of cavalry admirably adapted for tournaments and feats of arms, but incapable of carrying on a regular warfare, or even of ensuring success in a great battle. The victories of Mons-en-Puelle, under Philip IV., and of Cassel, under Philip of Valois (1328), increased to the utmost the blind confidence of the French nobility, and brought about, by absolutely identical means, the disasters of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt (1346, 1356, 1415).

From the events which took place during the space of a century, from the accession to the imperial throne of the Emperor Louis V. (1313) to the Peace of Brétigny (1360), it was made manifest that the destinies of the feudal world rested henceforth upon France and England, those two rival powers, both of which were acquisitive and inflexible; that the Emperor and the Pope occupied but the second place in this latest evolution of feudalism; that Rome, compelled to bend towards France, gave the latter a considerable preponderance, and that the force of equilibrium must inevitably bring together the King of England and the Emperor of Germany. The French royalty, despite the vicissitudes caused by an incessant struggle against the English, despite the ravages of the plague, which had depopulated two-thirds of the kingdom, despite its financial burdens and the precarious position of the monarchy, continued its work of assimilation and feudal incorporation; the suzerainty attaching to the great fiefs gradually fell under the jurisdiction of the sovereign, while, upon the right bank of the Rhine, the great barons remained almost as omnipotent as ever they had been.

There existed in Germany at that time two kinds of leagues between the nobility, the one offensive and the other defensive; that of the Gauerbinate or Gauerbschaften, by virtue of which the petty nobility formed family pacts for transmitting their fiefs by indirect line when the direct line should fail, and for reconstructing or repairing their castles out of a common fund; and that of the Teutonic Hanse, the league of the prince-archbishops and electors with sixty towns upon the Rhine. Rodolph of Hapsburg (Fig. 30), a monarch as resolute as he was able, put a stop to proceedings which were full of danger to the imperial authority, compelled his vassals to do him homage, and razed to the ground seventy fortresses whose feudal brigandage had scattered desolation and ruin; but, after his death, the usurpation of the suzerain lords began afresh, and the Bulle d’Or, which was the basis of public right in Germany, confirmed the downfall of the imperial suzerainty (1378).

Fig. 30.—Equestrian Stone Statue of Rodolph of Hapsburg, Emperor of Germany, by Erwin de Steinbach, placed above the Grand Portal of Strasburg Cathedral (Thirteenth Century).

Fig. 31.—Maximilian of Austria, with Mary of Burgundy, his wife, only daughter of Charles the Bold, and their young son Philip, afterwards King of Castile.—“Abridged Chronicles of Burgundy,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Library of M. Ambroise-Firmin Didot.

In France, on the other hand, as each convocation of the States-General was attended with the creation or levying of some new tax, the third estate attempted to exact all the more from royalty in proportion as it gratified the latter’s pecuniary demands, claiming to have a voice in the question of peace or war, to direct the financial affairs of the kingdom, to be convoked every year, and to share, with the two other orders, the weight of the charges the profit of which ought to be shared by all. The feudal nobility resisted the exorbitant pretensions of the third estate, but when they saw this class forming a secret alliance with the clergy, and setting on foot a formidable league, the password of which was the destruction of the castles and the annihilation of the nobles, they hesitated, and did nothing until the horrible excesses committed by the league in the country districts had given the feudal reaction a character of legality. In 1383, after the battle of Rosebecque, which inflicted a heavy blow upon the communal cause in Flanders and in France, it seemed as if the power of suzerainty was about to revive once more. Froissart, in his Chronicles, rejoiced at this fact, because he believed that social order was threatened with utter ruin (see his Chronicles, year 1383); but French chivalry succumbed in its turn at Agincourt beneath the onslaught of the English archers. This was the final condemnation of feudal armies, as well as of the system which these armies represented, and which they had failed in sustaining. French feudalism had already ceased to be anything more than a storehouse of traditions which were still held in respect, and of old customs which had fallen into disuse among the ancient nobility.

In England, Scotland, and Ireland, high feudalism was rapidly in course of decay, before Henry VIII. dealt it its death-blow; in Germany it struggled for existence during the reign of Maximilian (Fig. 31); in France it was crushed by Louis XI. with the help of the third estate. Beyond the Alps, in Italy, its existence was prolonged for a short period, partly under a clerical disguise, partly by the hired help of the condottieri, and in some places by the support of the urban democracy, that is the industrial and trading part of the population. Everywhere, however, it disappeared with the Middle Ages, of which, both in its acts and in its first principles, it bore the ineffaceable imprint (Fig. 32).

Fig. 32.—Doorways of the Old Castle of Loches, in Touraine, a favourite Manor of Louis XI. (Fifteenth Century).

WAR AND ARMIES.

The Invasions of the Barbarians.—Attila.—Theodoric seizes Italy.—Organization of Military Fiefs.—Defences of Towns.—Totila and his Tactics.—The Military Genius of Charlemagne.—Military Vassalage.—Communal Militia.—Earliest Standing Armies.—Loss of Technical Tradition.—The Condottieri.—The Gendarmerie.—The Lances Fournies.—Weakening of Feudal Military Obligations.—The French Army in the Time of Louis XI. and his Successors.—Absence of Administrative Arrangement.—Reforms.—Mercenary Troops.—Siege Operations and Engines.

The art of war had attained its highest degree of perfection among the Romans, when the successive invasions of the barbarians began to burst like an overflowing river over the richest of the Roman colonies. These barbarians, most of whom were natives of the Caucasian mountains, were the Iberians, who never halted till they had reached Spain; the Celts or Cimbrians, who installed themselves among the Gauls; and the Sarmatians and the Scythians, who inhabited the vast forests of Germany before the great wars of Julius Cæsar (Fig. 33). Suddenly, in the fourth century of the Christian era, a movement which commenced in the centre of Asia caused an irruption of a race hitherto unknown upon the Caucasian races. These were the Huns, before whom the terrified Goths retreated, but who at first made but a brief apparition in Europe; for if Rome at that time was wanting in seasoned legions, she could rely, at least in the provinces of her empire, upon many numerous and powerful auxiliaries who were accustomed to fight under her standard (Fig. 34), some for the sake of pay, others to defend their own hearths.

Fig. 33.—War Trophy and Barbarian Prisoners.—From Sculptures on the Triumphal Arch of Orange (Second Century).

In 451, in the reign of the Emperor Valentinian III., who had bribed the barbarians instead of repulsing them with the sword, Attila, the King of the Huns, bore down upon Europe at the head of seven hundred thousand fighting men of various races. In less than three months he had overrun and laid waste Moravia, Bohemia, Hesse, and Wurtemburg, crossed the Rhine below Strasburg, the Moselle at Trèves and at Metz, the Meuse at Tongres, the Scheldt at Tournay; and after two sanguinary raids into Burgundy and the country around Orleans, pitched his tents in the plains of Champagne. The tactics of Attila were to avoid pitched battles, to give a wide berth to the fortresses, contenting himself with sacking and plundering their outskirts. He laid waste the open country, burnt villages, put their inoffensive inhabitants to the sword, and making it his chief object to divide and isolate the Roman legions, finally crushed them by the weight of numbers.

Fig. 34.—German and Gallic Auxiliaries, one wearing Trousers (Braccæ), and the other a Tunic.—From a Roman Monument of the Second Century.

The whole West was stirred up at the tidings of this terrible invasion. Ætius, the Roman leader among the Gauls, had called to his aid the confederates of Amorica, the Frank-Salians, whose leader was Merovius, the Burgundians, the Saxons, and the southern Visigoths, whose king was Theodoric. This numerous army, composed of excellent troops under the orders of Ætius, marched to meet the barbarians, and encountered them in the neighbourhood of Châlons-sur-Marne. The battle lasted three days, and the defeat of the Huns was complete.

The ferocious Attila, who had called himself the Scourge of God, and who had run his course like some fatal meteor, leaving in his track nothing but conflagrations and ruins, expired in the midst of an orgie in 455. A truceless, unceasing war was still being waged all over Europe, a sanguinary and implacable war of race and of party. Political chaos, a chaos that Christianity alone was destined to regenerate, was at its height in the old world, when, towards the close of the sixth century, Theodoric, King of the Eastern Goths, who had protected Byzantium when threatened by the Bulgarians, and who had remained in the pay of the Emperor Zeno, determined to find occupation for his warlike and restless subjects by leading them against Odoacer, the sovereign of the Herulians, who at that time united under his sway Sicily and the Italian peninsula, but whose subjects were at best but a ferocious and turbulent mob. The young King of the Goths (he was only thirty-four years of age) started from the depths of Mœsia (now Servia), with the consent of the chief of the empire, at the head of an entire warlike population, to whom he promised the conquest of Italy. He easily overcame the King of the Herulians; and, having conquered Italy, he posted his soldiers in the various provinces of the peninsula, in such a manner that their pay and their rations might continue to be supplied to them as regularly in peace as in war.

The system of government and administration established by Theodoric had the advantage of distributing two hundred thousand excellent troops in the midst of a population which, glad to find itself uncalled upon for military service, and but little taxed, allowed the work of the conquest to be consolidated. The millénaires (soldiers of a battalion numbering a thousand men) occupied with their families distinct portions of territory, and were bound to hold themselves under arms, and ready to march, whenever the defence of the country required it (Fig. 35). Theodoric had already recognised the utility of urban garrisons. The flower of the country’s youth, organized in a military manner, flocked to the gymnasium of Ravenna, and the king himself presided over their exercises. His levies, as regards their discipline, their instruction, and their equipment, resembled the ancient legions of Rome. The iron cap, the shield, the broadsword, and the arrow of the Goths had been replaced by the spear, the javelin, the helmet, and the cuirass of the Romans. The old soldiers received from the royal treasury for their services as instructors a particular grant, which was annually paid to them till they retired altogether from the profession of arms. When the troops were about to take the field, the intendants, under the orders of the counts, superintended the commissariat and the gathering and the march of the different army corps. The provincial officers had to distribute arms, food, and hay on the different points of the road that the troops were expected to follow, and the inhabitants had to provide lodgings—this was the only military service expected of them, but none could escape it.

Fig. 35.—Military Costume from the Sixth to the Tenth Centuries.—From a Miniature in the “Dialogues de Saint Grégoire,” Manuscript of the Eleventh Century (National Library of Paris).]

The towns were at this time almost always fortified, and entrenched camps covered nearly the whole of Italy. The castles in the rural districts, constructed to protect the frontiers, were usually full of troops, whose support was part of the duty of the pretorial prefect, and whose insubordination often necessitated severe measures of repression. “Keep up a spirit of military discipline; it is often difficult to enforce it under civil rule,” said Theodoric to Servatus, one of his generals.

If it is a matter of surprise to meet with such a right moral feeling in the sovereign of reputed barbarians, barbarians half civilised, however, by their contact with the Latin race, it is not the less so to find, in the wars which occurred in the years 507, 508, and 509, other barbarian kings, namely, Alaric, Clovis, Gondebaud, and Thierry, make use of and apply with skill the rules of Greco-Roman strategy, either in executing long military manœuvres, or in displaying all the strategic science that sieges then required, in attacking or defending the fortified towns of Avignon, of Carcassonne, and of Arles.

Fig. 36.—St. Benedict reproaches Totila with having deceived him, and predicts his death.—Fresco in the Church of San Miniato, Florence, painted by Spinelli of Arezzo (Thirteenth Century).

Fig. 37.—Moorish Arms from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century: Armlet.—From the Armeria Real, Madrid.

Fig. 38.—Moorish Arms: Daggers.—Armeria Real, Madrid.

Fig. 39.—Moorish Arms: Trident.—Armeria Real, Madrid.

In proportion as the preponderance of the Goths (Fig. 36), of the Ostrogoths, and of the Visigoths diminished in Europe, that of the Franks and of the Lombards increased. The latter were the first to institute in Italy the feudal system, founded on the possession of conquered territory. The conquerors established their camp in the midst of the vanquished country, seized half the land, reduced into servitude a portion of the colons, and imposed heavy taxes on those whom they had not despoiled. The king having at first distributed the great fiefs among his principal officers, these great vassals then made a subdivision of the land granted them by their suzerains in favour of their own men-at-arms and satellites, and these latter, in their turn, ceded a portion of their lands to the common soldiers. The obligation of personal service, the hierarchic subordination of vassalage, were the necessary consequence of feudal institutions.

Fig. 40.—Dagger with Moorish Blade and Flemish Handle (Fourteenth Century).—Collection of M. Onghena, Ghent.

In all probability the establishment of the arrière-ban, or the ban-fieffe, dates from the sixth century. It was a call to arms of the vassals that the suzerain alone had a right to command. A century later, feudalism, which was beginning to establish itself in Gaul as in Italy, as a consequence of the successful invasion of the Franks, was nearly stamped out by the Mahometan invasion of the Spanish Moors, who had been led by their chief, Abderamus, as far as the banks of the Loire, where they were stopped by Charles Martel, who routed them with great slaughter.

After the brilliant victory of Poitiers (732), where the repulse of Arab civilisation left the field open to the defenders of the Christian faith, and to the originators of the feudal régime, the victorious army underwent a sudden change. The Frankish knights adopted as an inheritance of conquest the rich Saracen armour (Figs. 37, 38, 39, 40); the feudal troopers donned a coat of mail, and, henceforward, a full suit of armour became a necessary accessory to a warrior of high rank. The bow, which had long been thrown aside, was once more taken into favour, and became the special arm of the footmen. But we have exhaustively treated of the armament and equipment of the soldiery of the period (see the chapter on Armoury in “Art in the Middle Ages”), and we can only here deal with military tactics and organization; in a word, with the theoretical part of the art of war.

The reign of Charlemagne, which was one long series of expeditions and conquests, was naturally favourable to the progress and development of this art. The Emperor of the Franks, like a man of genius, understood how to profit by the inventions and creations of his predecessors. To the warlike traditions of Greece and Rome he added, step by step, the improvements that were rendered necessary by the nature of the enemies with whom he had to contend, namely, the Lombards, the Saxons, &c. He kept up the feudal service of the ban; he established permanent orders of militia, composed of his own serfs and vassals; but, as soon as he undertook a distant expedition, his auxiliaries, ten times as numerous as his vassals, rendered his army rather a German than a French one. He caused a number of fortresses to be constructed everywhere throughout his vast empire, but he never allowed his subjects to build any on their own account. Yet he never seems to have attached any importance, as a protection to his territory, to the larger enclosed towns, in which he might have held in reserve considerable depôts of troops. He himself usually resided in rural residences and in open and unprotected villages, barely guarded by a few military pickets. At the slightest signal, it is true, a whole army of fidèles and servitors would have arisen as one man to defend him; but under no circumstances would he have consented to await his enemy under the shelter of fortifications; he was always the true primeval German, seeking for his field of battle the open plain rather than the hillside, preferring cavalry to infantry, and a direct struggle, a hand-to-hand fight, to encounters at a distance, waged and won by the missiles of the slinger and the shafts of the bowmen. His principal victories were gained in the open country, where he was enabled to deploy his masses of mailed horsemen; he never willingly sat down before a stronghold, a circumstance which shows that he was aware of his want of skill in the conduct of a siege; and he was never fortunate in mountain warfare, as was evidenced in the disastrous day of Roncevaux (778), which cast a shadow over the last years of his life.

Thirty years after the death of the great emperor, the treaty of Mersen (847) freed the great vassals from the obligation of answering the summonses of the sovereign, and of rushing to arms at his appeal, unless for the purpose of defending the State, and substituted the practice of furnishing armed contingents, whose services were to be rendered for a fixed period, settled beforehand. Infeudation—a kind of political and pecuniary contract, in virtue of which a fief was subdivided into several smaller ones—perpetuated the feudal régime, each man becoming the man of another man, bound to place himself at his disposal in time of war, and to be ready to start on any expedition at his command, and according to the wishes of his immediate seignior.

Fig. 41.—Bishop Eudes, holding his baton of office, encouraging the young soldiers of the Duke of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings.—Military Costumes of the Eleventh Century, from the Bayeux Tapestry.

During the tenth century this régime grew stronger and stronger. The oath of infeudation, or the act of homage, remained a sacred tie between the seignior and the vassal. This homage involved the rendering of numerous feudal services, such as those of the ban, and of the arrière-ban, those rendered by the servitors of different ranks, known as bachelors, clients, esquires, bannerets, men-at-arms, barons, &c., names already ancient, but whose rank and place in battle were only determined on the day when they were all grouped and posted, each under his special banner or gonfanon, a distinction that implied a separate kind of equipment for each.

Thus the vassals were in the power of the seignior, who, having the right to dispose of their military services, enjoyed the right of reize—a right that gave him the power of assembling and leading to battle a certain number of feudal groups. “Obey my summons, or I will burn you!”[2] were the words of the seignior in the ban published by the crier, and, at the second summons, the sound of the trumpet rang out in the cross roads, in the streets, and in the country places, calling the men to arms. To fail to answer the call of the ban was to commit a crime of the worst character.

Fig. 42.—After the Battle of Hastings (14th October, 1066), the relatives of the vanquished came to carry away their dead. The body of the Saxon King, Harold, is taken to Waltham by the monks of that monastery. In the background is seen Battle Abbey, founded by Duke William on the site of the battle.—Fac-simile of a Miniature in the “Chroniques de Normandie.” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the possession of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.

In the great expedition of William, Duke of Normandy, against the Anglo-Saxons (1066), he had no other auxiliaries than his Norman vassals and subjects. He conquered Harold and took possession of England with a numerous and trained army, furnished with terrible warlike machines and engines (Figs. 41 and 42). The Norman Conquest was, to a certain extent, a prelude to the Crusades, for those raids across the seas, repeated from time to time for more than two centuries, bore no resemblance to the barbarian invasions, either Saracen or Norman, which had been previously recorded in history. New measures, inspired by the circumstances of the times, were the consequence of the general crumbling to pieces of all the Eastern nations; among these may be mentioned the establishment of the communal militia, which set out for a campaign accompanied by its spiritual pastors, and received the last offices of religion at their hands on the field of battle; the regular pay allowed to those who were destitute of private resources (a knight received at first ten sous a day—equivalent to ten francs of modern money—and a squire received five); the chartering of ships intended for the transport of troops; the system of commissariat for armies in the field; and the supply of military equipments, arms, &c.

This communal militia, sprung from the freeing of the communes, and detachments of soudoyers, or paid troops, soon grew into a standing army, which was formally incorporated for the first time by Louis le Jeune about 1140, and increased by Philip Augustus, who added to it the affiliated knights. Under the latter sovereign, an army in the field presented three ranks of combatants—bannerets, knights, and squires, to whom were added the men-at-arms. A motley crew of varlets on foot, without officers or discipline, followed the troops, and hovered about them during an engagement, picking up the spoil of the conquered, and killing the wounded with clubs or battle-axes, called glaives de mercy.

The disasters of the Crusaders in the East, after two centuries of useless heroism and tremendous efforts, were principally due to the defects in their military administration, which foresaw nothing, and was incapable of adjusting itself to the difficulties inherent to a war in a distant and almost unknown land whither the enthusiastic crowds who wore the cross bent their adventurous steps. Famine, plague, leprosy, and fever destroyed the Christian armies on their journey to Palestine, and during their stay there; and these evils would have been greater still had it not been for the creation of the different military orders which sprang into existence under the pressure of these almost inevitable calamities, and which supplied hospital attendants, chaplains, and soldiers. The continuation of the feudal wars (Fig. 43) in Europe gave the last blow to the disorganization of the armies of Christ.

Fig. 43.—Richard Cœur-de-Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy, mortally wounded by an arrow shot by Bertrand de Gourdon, at the Siege of the Castle of Chalus, in Limousin (1199).—“Chroniques de Normandie,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Library of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot).

Fig. 44.—Soldier of the Time of Philippe le Bel.—Miniature in a Manuscript of the Period (National Library of Paris).

Fig. 45.—Man-at-arms with a pot de fer with nose-piece, a coat of mail over his leather tunic, and armed with a short broadsword.—From a Miniature in the “Dialogues de Saint Grégoire,” a Manuscript of the Eleventh Century, in the National Library of Paris.

While Philippe le Bel was destroying the Knights Templars, whom he held to be obstacles to his political plans, he was at the same time seeking in every way the means of restraining a haughty aristocracy, always under arms, whose systematic want of discipline was a danger both to the throne and to the country. As soon as he had obtained from the representatives of the nation, assembled together in States-General, the right to impose taxes according to the requirements of the sovereign, he set to work on the definitive organization of a permanent paid army (Fig. 44). He fixed the age of military service at eighteen, and decreed that none of his subjects, except the old and the sick, should be exempt from it, unless they paid a certain sum to the royal treasury, and supplied, according to their rank and means, one or more substitutes (decree of 1302, 1303, 1306) to serve under the flag of the ost of the king (Fig. 46). Till that time, military service had only been obligatory for forty consecutive days, or, at the most, for three months. This service was, indeed, often of less duration, according to the different degree of infeudation of any particular fief, and was hedged about, besides, with so many privileges and with so many exemptions, that if a feudal army did not succeed in bringing a short campaign to a prosperous issue, it generally met with a fatal collapse. In accordance with this design, Philippe le Bel, at the opening of the Flemish campaign, summoned “for four months to his standards, archbishops, bishops, abbots, dukes, counts, barons, and other nobles, all liable to the ban,” each of whom could claim pay at the rate of twelve deniers (about four francs) a day, besides a sum of thirty sous (about thirty francs) for their equipment.

Philippe le Long (1314) and Philippe de Valois 1337–1340) continued and improved the work of Philippe le Bel. Thenceforward, the ost or army of the king was regularly established; the cross-bowmen and the men-at-arms were the first corps who received a permanent organization and a fixed rate of pay.

Fig. 46.—Messenger bringing a Letter to the King’s Army.—From a Manuscript in the National Library of Paris (Thirteenth Century).

In the fourteenth century, the French infantry, composed merely of more or less badly-armed archers, inspired its leaders with no great confidence. Its want of skill and its cowardice too often compromised the issue of an engagement. It was necessary, in order to support those combatants always ready to take to flight, to employ foreign mercenaries, English, Italian, or German, who fought well when they were liberally paid. These mercenaries, more practised in war and more courageous than the soldiers of the ban, were entrusted with the management of the cannon, which at this time were first employed, and which were carried by the camp followers. We may here repeat what we have spoken of elsewhere, viz., that the imperfections of the earliest cannons, the difficulty which attended their use, and the danger incurred by those who discharged them, caused the old arms to be long preferred to these new ones. In fact, long after the new artillery had made considerable progress, it was employed simultaneously with the ancient style of projectiles. The long period during which this important transition in projectile weapons was slowly taking place, was one of the most wretched in the annals of military art. All the great battles of the fourteenth century present us with striking examples of an entire absence of skill in tactics. Mons-en-Puelle (1304), where King Philippe le Bel was all but surprised in his camp; Cassel (1328), where Philippe de Valois escaped half naked from his enemies’ hands; Crecy (1346), where the English used cannon for the first time; Poitiers (1356), where King John was taken prisoner on the battle-field; Nicopolis (1393), where knighthood covered itself with disgrace; Agincourt, where the flower of the French nobility perished—are all examples of the most shameful confusion during the struggle, of the most disgraceful butchery after the defeat. It is not too much to say, that during the whole of this long epoch of bloody contests, true knights and staunch soldiers were very rare, and that good leaders were even rarer still.

In Italy, the condottieri, whose principal commander was the Englishman, John Hawkwood, and in France, the free companies, commanded by the renowned Armand de Cervoles, and even those bands of routiers, Brabançons, and tard-venus, who pillaged and plundered the realm to such an extent, says an old chronicler, “that not even a cock was heard to crow in it,” were the only troops who showed any acquaintance with the resources of military warfare or the slightest knowledge of strategic science. It was amongst the ranks of these indefatigable soldiers that the celebrated Bertrand du Guesclin made his first campaign (Fig. 47).

Fig. 47.—Battle of Auray (Sept. 29, 1364), between John de Montfort and Charles de Blois, in which Bertrand du Guesclin was made prisoner by Chandos.—Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Chroniques de Bretagne,” by Alain Bouchard: 4to, Galliot du Pré, 1514.

The paid gendarmery, a mixture of heavy and light cavalry, committed, in the reign of Charles VI., many breaches of discipline, without atoning for them by lending any really efficacious aid to French chivalry, which was almost entirely cut to pieces in the bloody disaster of Agincourt (October 25th, 1415). Charles VII., replaced on the throne of his ancestors by his nobles after he had driven out the English, “by the help of God and Joan the Virgin,” determined therefore to disband the gendarmery. From the picked men of the body he formed the framework of fifteen new companies of artillery, numbering nine thousand combatants, amongst whom were incorporated all the regular cavalry of the kingdom. Each gendarme, thoroughly equipped, was attended by two archers and two followers on horseback; this group of five mounted men was called a lance fully equipped. In 1447, a sixth man and horse were added to it. A little later, Charles VII. raised several paid bands, recruited by voluntary enlistment and commanded by responsible captains, who were paid by the war treasurers, according to the number of men on the monthly muster-roll. This creation of mercenary troops diminished still further the importance of the ban, which was no longer anything but a badly-equipped secondary militia, though still armed with bows and pikes, and still obliged to wear a uniform. On the actual field of battle the pikemen were always posted in the van; behind them came the foot archers, wearing salades, or helmets without vizors, the brigandine or short coat of mail, and armed with cross-bows. But this reorganization of the troops had no invigorating effect on the infantry of the communes, and the franc-archer remained the type of the cowardly soldier.

Fig. 48.—Great Seal of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. The Legend, in Latin, enumerates his titles and feudal possessions.—National Archives of France (Fifteenth Century).

The death of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, slain in the battle of Nancy (1477), completed the downfall of the feudal chivalry, whose last and most martial representative he was (Fig. 48). Louis XI., who had gathered around him a devoted army, composed of mercenaries from all countries, and who could entirely rely upon the fidelity of his Scottish guard, began attacking the great fiefs, which were in reality the rivals of his throne, and succeeded in destroying them, having no further need of them and their haughty vassalage. Little by little the seigniorial standards disappeared, and their war-cries ceased to resound; a fief held under the obligation to carry arms no longer forced the vassal, its occupier, under the pain of felony and bodily confiscation, to equip and arm himself at the first appeal of his suzerain, and to follow the royal ost with a definite number of fighting men. The principle of purchasing exemption from military service being henceforward admitted, all, whether nobles or villains, were at liberty either to serve or to purchase their exemption. Some few feudal gendarmes still remained, but most were free. Of the squires-at-arms, some were feudal, others free or even plain varlets. Canons, abbots, and prelates whom feudal laws had forced to contribute their personal military service, had long since found substitutes in the persons of the attorneys or bailiffs, who superintended the ban and arrière-ban of the land-owning nobles. Some of the clergy, however, preferred to be individually present with the armies of their sovereign; many a prelate or abbot was delighted to add to his coat-of-arms a cuirass, a sword, a helmet, or some other warlike emblem. In 1356, the bishops of Châlons, of Sens, and of Melun distinguished themselves by feats of personal bravery at the bloody engagement of Poitiers; in 1359, the Bishop of Rheims, by a few vigorous sorties, was the means of saving that city when the English were besieging it; the Archbishop of Sens, William of Montaigu, fell sword in hand on the field of Agincourt; in 1455, a simple monk successfully defended Belgrade; while at the siege of Plaisance, Philip of Savoy, Bishop of Valence, was knighted for his prowess in the breach itself. It is true that many of these ecclesiastical dignitaries had never been solemnly invested; but the example they followed was a lofty one, for several popes, John X., Leo IX., Urban II., Innocent II., and Julius II. (who had first distinguished himself as an able leader under the name of Julien de la Rovère) had personally commanded the troops of the Holy See.

The fire-stick, that is to say the arquebuse, which was then called hequebutte, with difficulty took the place of the bow, and with still greater difficulty that of the cross-bow. In 1481, Louis XI. deprived his sergeants-at-arms of both the latter weapons, not to arm them with fire-sticks, but in order to give them the pike, the halbert, and the broadsword, of which the Swiss in the recent wars had made such formidable use. Louis XI., however, increased the number of his mounted archers, and placed them later under the orders of the colonel of a company of free-lances known as Albanais or Scouts. These combined bodies formed the French national light cavalry till Francis I. replaced them by the light horse, a body chiefly composed of mercenaries of different nations. In England, ever since the thirteenth century, the mounted archers formed a considerable portion of the national forces. An army of fifteen hundred complete lances, which represented a total of six or seven thousand horsemen, required a complement of at least five thousand mounted archers, who were all skilful marksmen. In the time of Henry VIII., an English bowman could discharge as many as twelve arrows in a minute, and he would have considered himself disgraced if he had let fly a single shaft which failed to kill, wound, or at least strike an enemy.

Fig. 49.—German Foot-soldiers fighting.—From a Drawing by Holbein preserved in the Museum at Basle (Sixteenth Century).

Fig. 50.—Italian Warriors of the Fifteenth Century.—From a Bas-relief on the Triumphal Arch of Castel Nuovo, Naples, erected in 1470 by Ferdinand of Aragon, to celebrate his Victories over John of Calabria, Son of René d’Anjou.

The desperate mêlée of Fornoue (July 6th, 1495), which forced Charles VIII. to retrace his steps after his successful Italian expedition, was nearly the last of the confused and sanguinary struggles of the Middle Ages. The sword and the bow contributed more than the cannon and the fire-stick to the terrible result of the day. From that time the infantry regained its old pre-eminence over the cavalry, and cannon were employed preferably to all other projectile weapons. A complete revolution was also about to ensue, as well in the tactics of an army in the field as in the attack and defence of fortresses. Louis XII. and Francis I., in their Italian campaigns, in which, they wasted so much of the resources and treasures of France, had to contend with German and Spanish mercenaries, at that time the best soldiers in the world; they opposed to them bodies of foreign infantry, sometimes lansquenets (Fig. 49), sometimes Swiss, who made a trade of war, and who, to earn their pay, did not hesitate to fight against their own countrymen. There was one drawback, however, to the acceptance of their services, and that was that they frequently changed sides on the eve of an engagement, or refused to fight on the slightest pretext. More than once the knights of France saw themselves suddenly abandoned by the infantry whose duty it was to support them, and who allowed them to be cut to pieces before their eyes without stirring to assist them (Fig. 50). This happened at the fatal battle of Pavia, when the king and his nobles struggled on foot in hand-to-hand desperation till they fell or were taken prisoners.

In the ordinary arrangement, at this period, of any army giving battle in the open field, the free archers, the men-at-arms, and the knights were posted either in the centre or at the wings, while the infantry, properly so called, divided into little groups of five, termed cinquains, was either thrown forward to skirmish, or sent behind to cover the rearguard, or detached at intervals on the flanks in order to harass the enemy and to protect the baggage. During the engagement, all the knights, clad entirely in armour, dismounted in order to fight, and left their horses to the care of the infantry. In these days horses were only used to carry their riders on the march, which the weight of their armour would not have allowed them to perform on foot.

A horseman, when disabled by long service or by age, was no longer employed in the cavalry, but retired into the infantry, where he enjoyed, under the title of anspessade (from the Italian spezzate, broken), the privileges that were at a later period granted to veterans.

No troops, until the time of the Crusades, had any distinguishing mark among themselves, except the difference of their arms, and the idea of a military uniform had not then arisen. But with the emblazoned arms, the standards, and the pennants, there came into use scarves, worn as baldricks or sashes, over the cuirass, and of which the colour, which generally matched that of the standard of the feudal seignior of the wearer, became as much a rallying signal as the standards themselves (Fig. 51). The necessity of distinguishing friends from foes at a distance naturally also brought about more or less marked distinctions of dress.

Fig. 51.—Representations of the Banner of St. Denis: No. 1, the oldest, is from a window in the Cathedral of Chartres; No. 3, the latest, is from a Manuscript of Froissart, No. 2644, in the National Library (the original which it represents was carried at the defeat of Artevelde at Rosebecque); No. 2, Drawing from the Library of the Célestins, preserved by Montfaucon.—From “Paris and its Historians,” by MM. Leroux de Lincy and L. Tisserand.

The administration and inner regulation of an army, which had been one of the principal cares of the Gothic and earlier Frankish kings, were entirely neglected, like everything pertaining to the art of war, for many centuries. For instance, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the captains of the different companies were allowed to distribute the pay to their men as they pleased after each muster, and were solely and entirely entrusted with the administration of their companies. They were thus entirely irresponsible, and did not concern themselves to see that the regulations, prescribed by superior authority, concerning the general discipline of the army, were carried into effect. In 1355, daring the captivity of King John in England, special commissioners were appointed, with the title of controllers, whose duty it was to superintend the internal economy of the army generally, with a view to put a stop to the numerous abuses that existed; but the disturbed and unfortunate period at which this attempt was made rendered it almost necessarily a barren one. When the dauphin came to the throne as Charles V., he returned to this project, which he had indeed himself originated, but at his death anarchy again reigned for more than a century. Civil and foreign wars laid waste and exhausted France, without bringing to the surface one single creative mind, with the exception perhaps of Jean Bureau, the grand master of artillery under Charles VIII. It is by no means going beyond the mark to state that the reverses sustained in Italy, in the reigns of Charles VIII. and Louis XII., were owing less to the chivalrous recklessness of the nobility and their ignorance of the first principles of warfare, than to the gross faults of the military administration of the country. Even in Francis I.’s time, the public service was in such a miserable condition that he was never really properly informed of the actual effective strength of his army, for his captains, whose interest it was to exaggerate the number of the rank and file under their standards (Figs. 52 and 53), habitually deceived the generals and their superiors. To such a degree was this carried that, on the eve of the battle of Pavia, Francis I. was led to believe that his army was a third stronger than it really was. At last, however, in 1517, there issued from this chaotic confusion the first germ of a proper system of supervision and control of all matters relating to war.

Fig. 52.—Knight in complete Armour.

After Cesare Vecellio, “Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni:” 8vo, 1590.

Fig. 53.—Arquebusier of the Sixteenth Century.

After Cesare Vecellio, “Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni:” 8vo, 1590.

If the tacticians of Italy were the first to fathom theoretically the science of war, it was the Swiss, under Marshal Trivulce, the Spaniards, under Gonzalvez of Cordova, and finally the Flemish, under the Duke of Alba, who successfully restored the military combinations of ancient Greece. They were the first to manœuvre in dense masses and in battalions, and they were the first to successfully employ the column formation of troops. The pikemen of France followed their example, while the troops armed with projectile weapons fought as skirmishers in the van, or in lines two or three deep. It was not, however, till Henry IV.’s time that any considerable body of troops was seen capable of advancing in close column without breaking its formation, and it was not till Louis XIII.’s time that the regiment, first introduced in the preceding reign, became a recognised permanent military unit.

Fig. 54.—The Reapers of Death, an Allegory of War, from an Engraving of Hans-Sebald Beham (Sixteenth Century).—Collection of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.

Fig. 55.—Battle of Dreux, December 19, 1562, won by François de Guise over the Protestants. In the foreground is Marshal Saint-André being shot by a soldier.—Fac-simile of an Engraving of the period by Tortorel and Périssin (Collection of M. Guénebaut).

Towards the close of the fifteenth century the French native cavalry still consisted entirely of heavy troopers. The Albanians, the mercenaries of whom the French light cavalry were composed, sold their services, man and horse, as the Swiss sold theirs, man and halbert. Charles VIII. enrolled eight thousand Albanians for his Italian expedition; but, fifty years later, this foreign element had disappeared from the French army, which had by that time, in addition to its heavy cavalry, a body of light cavalry of its own (Fig. 55).

Until the reign of Henry IV., who was the first monarch to dispense with their dangerous and immoral assistance, free lances were universally employed even by those sovereigns who had promulgated the severest decrees against them, but who, for want of regular soldiers, found themselves forced to accept their doubtful services. Brantôme has thus portrayed them: “Vestus à la pendarde, un haut de chausses bouffant; monstrant la jambe nue, une ou deux, portant leurs bas déchaussés pendant à la ceinture; chantant en cheminant pour soulager le travail de leur chemin.”[3] These scouts, who served on foot, were only allowed l’étape—that is to say, a daily allowance of food and forage; but they enjoyed in war time the right of pillage in all towns and fortresses taken by assault (Fig. 56).

This system of paying auxiliary troops à l’étape was first adopted in France in the fourteenth century, and had continued in use in a desultory manner till the reign of Henry II., under whose order a ration scale was drawn up, as well as a scale of provisions, cartage, and billeting due to the king’s troops from the churches, monasteries, communes, nobles, and burgesses, through the possessions of which and in whose neighbourhood their road lay.

The legal age at which the enlistment of soldiers could be made, the manner in which it was effected, and the length of service, varied considerably throughout the Middle Ages and the period of the Renaissance. In Henry II.’s time it was a custom to hire the soldier for three months; Henry IV. increased this period, but not without difficulty, for, to quote, the words of Sully, “Our soldiers can now only be enlisted by force, and can only be persuaded to march by the use of the stick and the threat of the gibbet.” To this picture we must add the significant fact that the system of drill was a very insufficient one, and that it was by no means unusual to find soldiers, whose stay with the standards was after all but a very temporary one, entirely incapable of handling the arms they were entrusted with. The urban militia were, however, far superior to these recruits, for, since the reign of Charles V., it was customary to drill the citizen every Sunday with pike, bow, and cross-bow, particularly in the frontier towns. It is not till Coligny’s time, in the middle of the sixteenth century, that traces can be found of any regulations imposing on commanding officers the duties of teaching and drilling their soldiers.

Fig. 56.—Soldiers of the German Bands.—From an Oil Painting by Joachim Bueckelaer (Frankfort, 1548–1596), in the possession of M. Paul de Saint-Victor.

We have attempted to outline the general military physiognomy of the Middle Ages; we will now rapidly examine the weapons and warlike engines that were invented for the attack and defence of fortified places.

Until the invention of gunpowder, or rather till that of artillery (Fig. 57) the whole art of fortification, says the learned Prosper Mérimée, consisted in following more or less exactly the traditions handed down by the Romans. The stronghold of the Middle Ages had precisely the same characteristic as the ancient castellum. The methods of attack against which the engineers had to guard were the assault by escalade, either by surprise or by force of numbers, and the breach, caused either by sapping, mining, or by the battering-rams of the besiegers. The employment of machines or engines of this description was much less frequent after than before the fall of the Roman empire, when the art of war knew no higher flight than to lay siege to a place or sustain a siege.

Fig. 57.—Mortars on Movable Carriages.—From an Engraving in the “Kriegsbuch” of Fronsperger: in folio, Frankfort, 1575.

The first operation of the besiegers was to destroy the outworks of the besieged place, such as the posterns, the barbicans, the barriers, &c. As most of these outworks were built of wood, attempts were generally made to cut them to pieces with hatchets, or to set them on fire with arrows to which were fastened pieces of burning tow steeped in sulphur, or some other incendiary composition.

Fig. 58.—Caltrop, or Crow’s-foot (Fourteenth Century).

If the main body of the place were not so strongly fortified as to render a successful assault by force impossible, it was usual to attempt an escalade. With this end in view, the moat, which was generally literally strewn with caltrops (Fig. 58), was filled up with fascines, on which ladders were reared against the ramparts, while archers on the brink of the ditch, protected by mantlets stuck in the ground, drove away with their arrows any of the defenders who attempted to show themselves above the parapets or at the loopholes.

Fig. 59.—Rolling Tower for scaling the Walls of Towns.—Miniature from the “Histoire du Monde,” Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Library of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot).

If the siege, in spite of the efforts of the besiegers, promised to be a long one, a blockade was the sole remaining means of reduction, though this was a thing difficult to carry out with forces which were not permanent, and which were generally far from numerous. It therefore became necessary for the besieger to protect his approaches by wooden, earthen, or even stone works, constructed under cover of the night, and solid and lofty enough to enable his archers to aim right on to the battlements of the besieged place. Wooden towers, several stories high, were also frequently resorted to, put together piece by piece at the edge of the moat, or constructed out of bow-shot, and subsequently rolled on wheels to the foot of the walls (Fig. 59). At the siege of Toulouse, in 1218, a machine of this kind was built by the order of Simon de Montfort, capable of accommodating, according to the ballad of the “Albigeois,” five hundred men.

Fig. 60.—Siege of a Town: Summons to lay down the arms and open the gates.—From a Copper-plate in the “Kreigsbuch” of Fronsperger.

When the missiles hurled from the higher stories of these towers—termed chattes in the south, chats, châteaux, bretesches, in the north—had driven the besieged from their ramparts and battlements, a movable bridge was lowered across the moat, and a hand-to-hand struggle then took place (Fig. 59). The besieged, to prevent or retard the approach of these dreaded towers, were accustomed to hurl immense stones and lighted darts against them, or to undermine or inundate the ground on which they stood, so that their own weight might cause them to topple over.

Fig. 61.—Capture of a Town: The Garrison surrendering and throwing themselves on the mercy of the captors.—Miniature from the “Histoire du Monde,” Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Library of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot).

Besides the means we have just described, there still remained the sap and the mine. Miners, equipped with pickaxes, were sent into the ditch under the protection of a body of archers. A sloping roof, covered with mantlets, sheltered them from the missiles of the besieged. They then pierced the wall, stone by stone, till they had made a hole large enough to allow the passage of several soldiers at once, while the sappers put the finishing stroke to the aperture. The besieged, observing in what direction the enemy was pursuing his operations, strove to concentrate all his means of defence at this point. Sometimes he attempted to crush the miners with immense stones or pieces of wood, sometimes he poured molten lead or boiling oil over them, sometimes, by hastily constructing a fresh wall in rear of the one the miners were breaking through, he gave the latter the trouble of beginning their work all over again just as they thought it was complete.

The mine had this advantage over the sap—that the besieger, being out of sight while engaged in the former method of subterranean work, had every chance of surprising the besieged. In order to effect this, an underground gallery was dug as noiselessly as possible, and carried beneath the foundations of the ramparts. When the mine had reached the walls, these were propped up with pieces of timber, and the earth was dug away until they were supported entirely by this artificial method. Dry vine wood and other inflammable materials were then piled round the props and set on fire, so that when the timber was consumed the walls crumbled down and opened a large breach to the besiegers. Nothing then was left to the garrison but to surrender, in order to avoid the horrors of an assault and the sack of the town (Figs. 60 and 61).

Fig. 62.—Watch-tower, lighted up with beacons and protected by dogs.—Fac-simile of a Miniature of the Fifteenth Century, from a drawing by M. Prosper Mérimée.

The only remedy possessed by a garrison against this last method of attack was to keep a good watch and to endeavour to discover the whereabouts of the mine, and neutralise it by a countermine. At the siege of Rennes, in 1356, the governor of the town ordered basins of copper, each containing several globes of the same metal, to be placed all about the ramparts; when these globes were seen to vibrate and tremble at each stroke of the hidden pickaxe, it was easy to guess that the mine was not far off. There was also a body of night watchmen, who carefully noted the enemy’s movements, and who rang the alarm-bell at the slightest noise. These watchmen were often replaced by dogs, whose barks, in case of a surprise, gave notice to the garrison (Fig. 62).

Fig. 63.—Machine intended to break the ranks of the enemy and to crush his soldiers.—Végèce, “L’Art Militaire:” 1532.

Fig. 64.—Machine to shoot arrows, and to assist in approaching a besieged town.—Robert Valturin, “La Discipline Militaire:” 1555.

The slow and laborious work of the miner was often advantageously replaced by the more powerful action of certain machines, which may be divided into two distinct classes. The first, intended to be used at close quarters and to make a breach in the wall, comprised several varieties of the ancient battering-ram; the second, employed at a distance, were termed pierriers, mangonneaux, espringales, &c. (Figs. 63 and 64).

The battering-ram, which was probably well known from the remotest periods, is described, in the documents of the Middle Ages, pretty much as we see it figured on the monuments of Nineveh. “On Easter day,” says the anonymous author of the chronicle of the “Albigeois,” “the bosson (the southern name of the battering-ram) was placed in position; it is long, iron-headed, straight, and pointed, and it so hammered, and pierced, and smashed, that the wall was broken through (Fig. 65); but they (the besieged) lowered a loop of rope suspended from a machine, and in this noose the bosson was caught and retained.”

Fig. 65.—Battering-ram.—From a Miniature in Manuscript 17,339 in the National Library of Paris.

Generally speaking, the battering-ram was a long, heavy beam, suspended in the centre from a kind of massive trestle. The end which battered the wall was either covered with an iron hood or pointed with brass. The beam was swung backward and forward by the besiegers, and by dint of striking a wall always in the same spot it often succeeded in shattering or overthrowing it. At other times the ram, instead of being suspended in an oscillating manner, was mounted on wheels, and ran forward with great rapidity against the wall to be battered. The chronicle of the “Albigeois,” just quoted, alludes to the head of the ram being caught in a noose; besides this manœuvre, the garrison would hurl stones and pieces of timber upon it, in order to break it or to put it out of trim; or else they would strive to deaden its blows by interposing a thick mattress of wool covered with leather between it and the stonework of their stronghold.

Fig. 66.—Catapult.—When the lever revolves rapidly on its axis, the centrifugal power causes the loop C to slip off the hook D, when the barrel held on the fork E E is liberated and projected to a distance. F represents the end of the lever when held down by the windlass A, and loaded with a barrel of combustible matter or iron. B, rings of stone, iron, or lead.

The machines which they employed to hurl their projectiles seem to have corresponded in nearly every respect with the catapults of the ancients. It was often merely a species of gigantic sling, worked by several men, and throwing pieces of rock and round masses of stone. The mangonneau, bricole, or trabuch, was a kind of square wooden platform, made of thick planks laid crosswise; a long beam, fastened at its lower end by a revolving axis to the platform, was supported at an angle of about 45° by an elevated crosspiece resting on two uprights. The distance between the revolving axis and the point of support was about one-half of the length of the beam. The latter was then secured in this position by long cords fastened to the front of the platform. The men who managed the bricole then lowered the beam backwards by a windlass fixed in the rear, till it (the beam) formed an obtuse instead of an acute angle with the platform, and till the cord securing it in front was stretched to its utmost tension. While it was in this position the projectile they wished to cast was placed in the spoonshaped extremity of the beam. A spring, termed déclic, then released the tension of the windlass and the beam, obeying that of the cord fastened to the front of the platform, swung rapidly forward, and hurled the projectile to great distances and to some considerable height (Fig. 66). These bricoles were sometimes employed to throw into besieged strongholds the dead bodies of horses and other animals, fire-balls, and cases of inflammable matter; but they were generally used to shatter the roofs of the buildings inside the walls, and to crush the protecting wooden sheds constructed on the ramparts.

Their use was still continued long after the invention of gunpowder. In the wars of the fourteenth century, particularly in the sieges of Tarazonia, Barcelona, and Burgos, bricoles were made use of side by side with cannons discharged with gunpowder. It was not until the close of the fifteenth century that the rapid progress of the new artillery, which enabled besiegers to breach a wall from a considerable distance, and with a smaller expenditure both of time and men, caused the whole paraphernalia of the old-fashioned ballistic machines to fall into disuse. Thenceforward a new era commenced in the science of attack and defence—an era of which the immense results do not belong only to the period of the Renaissance.

Fig. 67.—Ballísta.—From a Miniature in Manuscript 17,339, in the National Library of Paris.

NAVAL MATTERS.

Old Traditions: Long Vessels and Broad Vessels.—The Dromon.—The Galéasse.—The Coque.—Caracks and Galleons.—Francis I.’s Great Carack.—Caravelles.—The Importance of a Fleet.—Hired Fleets.—Poop Guards.—Naval Laws.—Seaport Tribunals.—Navigation in the open Seas.—The Boussole.—Armament of Men-of-War.—Towers and Ballistic Engines.—Artillery.—Naval Strategy.—Decorations and Magnificent Appointments of Vessels.—Sails and Flags.—The Galley of Don Juan of Austria.—Sailors’ Superstitions.—Discipline and Punishments.

Ships from the most remote ages have been divided into two classes, namely, long vessels, those propelled by the oar, or by the wind, sometimes by the two combined, and vessels of greater beam, which trusted to their sails alone. The Middle Ages conformed to these traditions; they possessed galleys which answered to the long vessels of antiquity, and ships which corresponded to the larger class.

The galleys of the Middle Ages, like the long vessels of antiquity, may be divided into several varieties. The large galley (Fig. 68), strong in build and swift in sailing, had received from the Greeks the significant name of dromon (runner). In the fifth century Theodoric had a thousand dromons constructed for the defence of the Italian coasts and for the transport of corn; in the ninth, the Emperor Leo the Philosopher, in the military precepts he gave to his son, recommended the construction of dromons with two tiers of oars, five-and-twenty in each tier on each side. For the flag-ship (if we may use the term) of the commander of the fleet, he recommended the construction of a much larger dromon with a hundred oars in each tier, similar to those that used to be built in Pamphylia, and which, for that reason, were known as pamphiles. The fleet was to be accompanied by smaller dromons, with a single tier of oars, for the purpose of carrying despatches, and to act as scouts. These bore more particularly the name of galleys. For more than three hundred years the construction and rigging of ships underwent no change (Fig. 69); in the twelfth century the dromon was still the principal type of the class of ships propelled by oars. Next came the galley, smaller than the dromon, but fitted, like it, with two tiers of oars, and lastly, the galion or galéide (termed later the galiot), a much smaller vessel than the galley.

Fig. 68.—Poop of an Ancient Galley.—From Pompeian Paintings collected in the Bourbon Museum, Naples.

The largest and the best-armed galley which at that period ploughed the Mediterranean was the one encountered by Richard Cœur de Lion, according to the historian Matthew Paris, on the 3rd of June, 1191, near the coast of Syria, and which was carrying large reinforcements to the camp of the unbelievers, who were besieging at that time the town of Acre. When the sailors of the English fleet first perceived this gigantic vessel, whose vast hull was painted with the most brilliant colours, whose poop was surmounted with a castellated tower, whose three masts unfurled to the wind an immense expanse of canvas, and whose long oars beat the waves with majestic rhythm, they were surprised, and undecided how to act. Richard, however, ordered his men to attack the floating fortress. His lighter galleys surrounded it on all sides, in spite of the arrows and glass vases showered on them by the dromon. These vases broke when they came in contact with the galleys, and enveloped them in Greek fire. The captain of the Arab craft attempted to sail away from his swarm of assailants, but the wind fell, and half his rowers having been slain by the English arrows, he was forced to accept battle. The galleys skirmished around the dromon, striking it repeated blows with their brazen prows, and making large holes in its sides. At last, after a desperate resistance, the giant was engulfed in the waters with all its defenders.

Fig. 69.—A Norman Vessel (Eleventh Century).—Restoration from the Bayeux Tapestry.

A companion craft to the dromon, as before mentioned, was the pamphile, which, before disappearing in the fifteenth century, frequently changed its shape and character. Nor must we forget the chelande (Fig. 70), or sélandre, which a writer of the eleventh century represents as a ship of extraordinary length, of great speed, possessing two tiers of oars, and a crew of a hundred and fifty men, and which, three centuries later, became a large flat sailing vessel, and was termed chaland. The taride, a kind of merchant galley with oars, and the huissier, the name of which was derived from a huis, or large door, which opened in its side in front of the poop to allow of the embarkation of horses, were contemporaneous with the pamphile and with the sélandre; as also was the chat or chatte, which William of Tyre mentions in connection with a maritime war which took place in 1121. According to him it was a ram-armed vessel larger than a galley, and carried a hundred oars, each of which was handled by two men.

Besides all these there were the bucentaures (Fig. 71), large Venetian galleys, and the sagettes, or saïties (arrows), whose names denote their slender shape and speed, and which, with their twelve or fifteen oars on each side, played the same part in the twelfth century as the baliner, or barineal, and the brigantin played from the fourteenth to the seventeenth.

Fig. 70.—Turreted Vessel which protected the Port of Venice.—From a Medal struck in honour of the Doge P. Candiano I., who died in 887 (Venetian Museum).

There were two sorts of vessels used in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries also belonging to the numerous and varied family of the galley—the fuste and the frégate, both smaller examples of the galéasse. A galley was termed galéasse (Fig. 72) when it was of large size, powerfully armed, and propelled by such long and heavy oars that it took six or seven men to work one of them.

Fig. 71.—The Bucentaure, State Barge used for the Marriage of the Doge of Venice with the Sea.—From the Model preserved in the Arsenal of Venice.

We have not by any means exhausted the number of long vessels propelled by oars, but we will now turn to those which only used sails, and which were termed nefs, or round vessels.

In the tenth century the Venetians employed these large heavy vessels, which they had adopted from the Saracens, and which were termed cumbaries (from the Latin cymba), or gombaries. To the same class belonged the coque (Fig. 73), which, according to an old chronicler, had a round stem and stern, a high freeboard, and drew very little water. This style of vessel, which from its shape was considered insubmersable, was largely used both for warlike and commercial purposes, from the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century.

The coque, so frequently employed in the Middle Ages, doubtless suggested the construction of another large vessel of the same sort, called by the Venetians buzo, by the Genoese panzono, and busse by the Provençaux, three words having a similar signification.[4] These various names plainly indicate the character of this kind of vessel, namely, that it was a broad-beamed, slow-sailing craft, but one capable of carrying large and heavy cargoes.

Fig. 72.—Sketch of a Galley of the Sixteenth Century, painted in distemper on the door of a cupboard preserved in the Doria Palace, Genoa.

Such names, however, as gombaries, coques, and busses, are nowadays as completely forgotten as the ships to which they were applied, while such terms as carraque and galliot still convey a meaning understood by everybody. Indeed, they immediately call up in the mind the memory of the numerous Spanish galleons which, according to popular tradition, were constantly returning home laden with Peruvian gold, and of those gigantic caracks which, hailing from the French ports on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, invested the navy of France, in the reigns of Louis XII. and Francis I., with such a splendid and imposing renown.