Books: Medieval Europe
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H. W. C. Davis >> Medieval Europe
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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
No. 13
Editors:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D.,
F.B.A. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
MEDIEVAL EUROPE
BY H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD AUTHOR OF "CHARLEMAGNE,"
"ENGLAND UNDER THE NORMANS AND ANGEVINS" ETC.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
II THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
III THE EMPIRE AND THE NEW MONARCHIES (800-1000 A.D.)
IV FEUDALISM
V THE PAPACY BEFORE GREGORY VII
VI THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH
VII THE MEDIEVAL STATE
VIII THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE--THE CRUSADES
IX THE FREE TOWNS
NOTE ON BOOKS
MAP OF THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS AND FRANKISH EMPIRE
MAP OF FRANCE
MAP OF HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
MAP OF THE CRUSADES
MAP OF THE ALPS AND NORTH ITALY
MEDIEVAL EUROPE
INTRODUCTION
All divisions of history into periods are artificial in proportion as
they are precise. In history there is, strictly speaking, no end and no
beginning. Each event is the product of an infinite series of causes,
the starting-point of an infinite series of effects. Language and
thought, government and manners, transform themselves by imperceptible
degrees; with the result that every age is an age of transition, not
fully intelligible unless regarded as the child of a past and the parent
of a future. Even so the species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms
shade off one into another until, if we only observe the marginal cases,
we are inclined to doubt whether the species is more than a figment of
the mind. Yet the biologist is prepared to defend the idea of species;
and in like manner the historian holds that the distinction between one
phase of culture and another is real enough to justify, and, indeed, to
demand, the use of distinguishing names. In the development of single
communities and groups of communities there occurs now and again a
moment of equilibrium, when institutions are stable and adapted to the
needs of those who live under them; when the minds of men are filled
with ideas which they find completely satisfying; when the statesman,
the artist, and the poet feel that they are best fulfilling their
several missions if they express in deed and work and language the
aspirations common to the whole society. Then for a while man appears to
be the master of his fate; and then the prevailing temper is one of
reasoned optimism, of noble exaltation, of content allied with hope. The
spectator feels that he is face to face with the maturity of a social
system and a creed. These moments are rare indeed; but it is for the
sake of understanding them that we read history. All the rest of human
fortunes is in the nature of an introduction or an epilogue. Now by a
period of history we mean the tract of years in which this balance of
harmonious activities, this reconciliation of the real with the ideal,
is in course of preparing, is actually subsisting, and is vanishing
away.
Such a period were the Middle Ages--the centuries that separate the
ancient from the modern world. They were something more than centuries
of transition, though the genius of a Gibbon has represented them as a
long night of ignorance and force, only redeemed from utter squalor by
some lingering rays of ancient culture. It is true that they began with
an involuntary secession from the power which represented, in the fifth
century, the wisdom of Greece and the majesty of Rome; and that they
ended with a jubilant return to the Promised Land of ancient art and
literature. But the interval had been no mere sojourning in Egypt. The
scholars of the Renaissance destroyed as much as they created. They
overthrew one civilisation to clear the ground for another. It was
imperative that the old canons of thought and conduct should be
reconsidered. The time comes in the history of all half-truths when they
form the great obstacles to the pursuit of truth. But this should not
prevent us from recognising the value of the half-truth as a guide to
those who first discover it; nor should we fall into the error, common
to all reformers, of supposing that they comprehend the whole when they
assert the importance of the neglected half. Erasmus had reason on his
side; but so, too, had Aquinas. Luther was in his rough way a prophet;
but St. Bernard also had a message for humanity.
Medieval culture was imperfect, was restricted to a narrow circle of
superior minds, offered no satisfaction to some of the higher faculties
and instincts. Measure it, however, by the memories and the achievements
that it has bequeathed to the modern world, and it will be found not
unworthy to rank with those of earlier and later Golden Ages. It
flourished in the midst of rude surroundings, fierce passions, and
material ambitions. The volcanic fires of primitive human nature
smouldered near the surface of medieval life; the events chronicled in
medieval history are too often those of sordid and relentless strife, of
religious persecutions, of crimes and conquests mendaciously excused by
the affectation of a moral aim. The truth is that every civilisation has
a seamy side, which it is easy to expose and to denounce. We should not,
however, judge an age by its crimes and scandals. We do not think of the
Athenians solely or chiefly as the people who turned against Pericles,
who tried to enslave Sicily, who executed Socrates. We appraise them
rather by their most heroic exploits and their most enduring work. We
must apply the same test to the medieval nations; we must judge of them
by their philosophy and law, by their poetry and architecture, by the
examples that they afford of statesmanship and saintship. In these
fields we shall not find that we are dealing with the spasmodic and
irreflective heroisms which illuminate a barbarous age. The highest
medieval achievements are the fruit of deep reflection, of persevering
and concentrated effort, of a self forgetting self in the service of
humanity and God. In other words, they spring from the soil, and have
ripened in the atmosphere, of a civilised society.
I
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Medieval history begins with the dissolution of the Western Empire, with
the abandonment of the Latin world to German conquerors. Of the
provinces affected by the catastrophe the youngest was Britain; and even
Britain had then been Roman soil for more than three hundred years. For
Italy, Spain, and Gaul, the change of masters meant the atrophy of
institutions which, at first reluctantly accepted, had come by lapse of
time to be accepted as part of the natural order. Large tracts of Europe
lay outside the evacuated provinces; for the Romans never entered
Ireland or Scandinavia or Russia, and had failed to subjugate Scotland
and the greater part of modern Germany. But the Romanised provinces long
remained the dominant force in European history; the hearth-fire of
medieval culture was kindled on the ruins of the Empire. How far the
victorious Teuton borrowed from the conquered provincial is a question
still debated; the degree and the nature of Rome's influence on the new
rulers varied in every province, indeed in different parts of the same
province. The fact of the debt remains, suggesting a doubt whether in
this case it was indeed the fittest who survived. The flaws in a social
order which has collapsed under the stress of adverse fortunes are
painfully apparent. It is natural to speak of the final overthrow as the
judgment of heaven or the verdict of events. But it has still to be
proved that war is an unfailing test of worth; we have banished the
judicial combat from our law courts, and we should be rash in assuming
that a process obviously absurd when applied to the disputes of
individuals ought to determine the judgments of history on nationalities
or empires.
The immediate and obvious causes which ruined the Western Empire were
military and political--the shortcomings of a professional army and
professional administrators. If asked whether these shortcomings were
symptomatic of evils more generally diffused through other ranks and
classes of society, we must go deeper in the analysis of facts. No _a
priori_ answer would be satisfactory.
The beginning and the end of the disaster were successful raids on
Italy. Alaric and his Visigoths (401-410 A.D.) shattered the prestige
and destroyed the efficiency of the government which ruled in the name
of the feeble Honorius. The Ostrogoths under Theodoric destroyed the
last simulacrum of an imperial power rooted in Italy (489-493 A.D.).
After Theodoric had vanquished Odoacer, it was clear that the western
provinces would not again acknowledge an Emperor acclaimed at Ravenna;
although the chance remained that they might be reconquered and
reorganised from Constantinople. This chance disappeared when the
Lombards crossed the Alps (568 A.D.) and descended on the Po valley.
From first to last Italy was the key to the West. And these successive
shocks to imperial power in Italy were all due to one cause. All three
of the invading hordes came from the Danube. The Roman bank of the great
river was inadequately garrisoned, and a mistaken policy had colonised
the Danubian provinces with Teutonic peoples, none the less dangerous
for being the nominal allies (_foederati_) of the Empire. The
Visigothic raids, which were in fact decisive, succeeded because the
military defences of the Western Empire were already strained to
breaking-point; and because the Roman armies were not only outnumbered,
but also paralysed by the jealousies of rival statesmen, and divided by
the mutinies of generals aspiring to the purple. The initial disasters
were irreparable, because the whole machine of Roman officialdom came to
a standstill when the guiding hand of Ravenna failed. Hitherto dependent
on Italy, the other provinces were now like limbs amputated from the
trunk. Here and there a local leader raised the standard of resistance
to the barbarians. But a large proportion of the provincials made peace
on the best terms they could obtain. Such are the essential facts.
Evidently the original error of the Romans was the undue extension of
their power. This was recognised by no less a statesman than Augustus,
the founder of the Empire; but even in his time it was too late to sound
a retreat; he could only register a protest against further annexations.
Embracing the whole of the Mediterranean littoral and a large part of
the territories to the south, east, and north, the Empire was encumbered
with three land frontiers of enormous length. Two of these, the European
and the Asiatic, were perpetual sources of anxiety, and called for
separate military establishments. That neither might be neglected in the
interest of the other it was reasonable to put the imperial power in
commission between two colleagues. Diocletian (284-305 A.D.) was the
first to adopt this plan; from his time projects of partition were in
the air and would have been more regularly carried out, had not
experience shown that partitions led naturally to civil wars between
rival Emperors. In 395, on the death of the great Theodosius, the
hazardous expedient was given a last trial. His youthful sons, Arcadius
and Honorius, were allowed to divide the Empire; but the line of
partition was drawn with more regard to racial jealousies than military
considerations. It extended from the middle Danube (near Belgrade) to a
point near Durazzo on the Adriatic coast, and thence to the Gulf of
Sidra. East of this line lay the sphere of Greek civilisation, the
provinces which looked to Alexandria and Antioch and Constantinople as
their natural capitals. West of it the prevailing language was Latin,
and the higher classes of society modelled themselves upon the Italian
aristocracy.
Founded upon a principle which appeals to our modern respect for
nationality, this partition only gave a legal form to a schism which had
been long in preparation. But in one respect it was disastrous. The
defence of the Danube frontier was divided between the two governments;
and that of the East, rating the impoverished Balkan peninsula as of
secondary importance, and envisaging the problem from a wholly selfish
point of view, left unguarded the great highways leading from the Danube
into Italy. Stilicho, the great general who administered the West in the
name of Honorius, ventured to meet this danger by intervening in the
peninsula, and even in the political intrigues of Constantinople. He
only succeeded in winning a precarious alliance with the Visigoths and
the permanent ill-will of the Eastern Empire. He was left to deal
single-handed with the first invaders of Italy; and the estrangement of
the two imperial courts persisted after his untimely fall. The Western
Empire, betrayed by the one possible ally, collapsed under the strain
of simultaneous attacks along the whole line of the European frontier.
It has been alleged that the Roman armies were neither so robust nor so
well disciplined in the fifth century as they had been in an earlier
age. However this may be, they could still give a good account of
themselves when matched on equal terms with the most warlike of the
barbarians. It was in patriotism and in numbers, rather than in
professional efficiency, that they failed when put to the supreme test.
The armies were now largely recruited with barbarians, who numbered more
than half the fighting strength and were esteemed the flower of the
Roman soldiery. Many of these hirelings showed an open contempt for
their employers, and sympathised with the enemies whom they were paid to
fight. Furthermore, each army, whatever its constituent elements, tended
to be a hereditary caste, with a strong corporate spirit, respecting no
authority but that of the general. The soldiers had no civic interests;
but they had standing grievances against the Empire. Any political
crisis suggested to them the idea of a mutiny led by the general,
sometimes to obtain arrears of pay and donatives, sometimes to put their
nominee upon the throne. The evil was an old one, dating from the latter
days of the Republic, when Marius, in the interests of efficiency, had
made military service a profession. But it was aggravated under the
successors of Diocletian, as the barbarian element in the armies
increased and the Roman element diminished. Its worst effects appeared
in the years 406-407. The German inroads upon Italy and Gaul were then
followed by the proclamation of military usurpers in Britain and on the
Rhine; the Roman West was divided by civil war at the very moment when
union was supremely important. Hence the strange spectacle of the
Visigoths, still laden with the spoils of Rome, entering Gaul by
invitation of the Empire to fight against imperial armies.
The problem of numbers had been earlier recognised, but not more
adequately met. Diocletian is said to have quadrupled the armies, and in
the fourth century they were far larger than they had been under Julius
and Augustus; Constantine had revised the scheme of frontier-defence to
secure the greatest possible economy of men. Still, under Honorius, we
find that one vital point could only be defended by withdrawing troops
from another. The difficulty of increasing the numbers was twofold.
First, the army was mercenary, and taxation was already strained to the
point of diminishing returns. Secondly, it was difficult to raise
recruits among the provincials. The old principle of universal service
had been abandoned by Valentinian I (364-375); and although compulsory
levies were still made from certain classes, the Government had thought
fit to prohibit the enlistment of those who contributed most to
taxation. Every citizen was legally liable for the defence of local
strongholds; but the use of arms was so unfamiliar, the idea of military
service as a national duty was so far forgotten, that Stilicho, when the
barbarians were actually in Italy, preferred the desperate measure of
enlisting slaves to the obvious resource of a general call to arms.
We find ourselves here confronted with a social malady which was more
than an economic weakness. The Empire was, no doubt, a complex and
expensive form of government superimposed upon a society which stood at
a rudimentary stage of economic development. Barbarous methods of
taxation and corrupt practices among the ruling classes had aggravated
the burden to such a degree that the municipalities of the provinces
were bankrupt, and the middle-class capitalist was taxed out of
existence. For this and other reasons the population of the older
provinces was stationary or declining. But there was still much wealth
in the Empire; and the great landowners of the provinces could raise
considerable armies among their dependants when they saw fit to do so.
The real evil was a moral evil, the decay of civic virtue.
We do not mean that the ethics of private life had deteriorated from the
standard of the past. This is incredible when we remember that
Christianity was now the all but universal religion of the Empire; for
Christianity, at its worst and weakest, laid more stress upon ethical
duties, in the narrower sense, than any of the older religions. The
provincial was a more moral being than the Goth or the Vandal. It is a
mere superstition that every victorious race is chaste and frugal, just
and law-abiding; or that ill success in the struggle for existence is a
symptom of the contrary vices. In many respects the Greeks who submitted
to Philip and Alexander were morally superior to the victors of Salamis
and Plataea. Private and political morality may spring from the same
root; but the one has often flourished where the other has been stunted.
Perhaps this is only natural. Human nature seldom develops equally in
all directions. Men who are intensely concerned with the right ordering
of their relations to neighbours, friends and family, may well forget
the larger community in which their private circle is contained. The
Roman provincial had exceptional excuses for remaining indifferent to a
state which claimed his loyalty, not in the name of nationality or
religion, but in that of reason and the common good. Loyalty for him
could only be an intellectual conviction. But, unless he could enter the
privileged ranks of the army or the higher civil service, he had no
opportunities of studying, still less of helping to decide, the
questions of policy and administration with which his welfare was
closely though indirectly linked. Political ideas only came before the
private citizen under the garb of literature. The most admired authors
only taught him to regret republican polities long out of date. The
antiquarian enthusiasms which he acquired by his studies were in no way
corrected by the experience of daily life. If a townsman, he was legally
prohibited from changing his residence and even from travelling about
the Empire, for fear that he might evade the tax-collector. If a rural
landowner, he lived in a community which was economically
self-sufficient, and consequently provincial to the last degree. The
types of character which developed under such conditions were not
wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was
often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, a polished
letter-writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of his little
world, an exemplary husband and father, courteous to inferiors,
warm-hearted to his friends. Sometimes he found in religion or
philosophy an antidote to the pettiness of daily life, and was roused
into rebellion against the materialism of his equals, the greed and the
injustice of his rulers. But he despaired of bridging the gulf between
the Empire, as he saw it, and the ideal commonwealth--City of God or
Republic of the Universe--which his teachers held up to him as the goal
of human aspirations. Rather he was inclined, like the just man of
Plato, to seek the nearest shelter, to veil his head, and to wait
patiently till the storm of violence and wrong should pass away.
It is hard to condemn such conduct when we remember the appalling
contrast between the weakness of the individual and the strength of a
social order coextensive with civilisation itself. But in this spirit of
reasonable submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally
unreasonable, in this conviction that the bad could not be bettered by
reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass
indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural
leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism
spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even
discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The
idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their
fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual
patrimony. Just as a government deteriorates when it is no longer tested
by continual reference to principles of justice, so a Utopia, however
magnificent, fades from the mind of the believer when he ceases to
revise it by comparison with facts, when it is no longer a reply to the
problems suggested by workaday experience. Life and theory being once
divorced, the theorist becomes a vendor of commonplaces, and the plain
man is fortified in his conviction that he must take life as he finds
it.
This analysis helps us to understand why the Western Empire, on the eve
of dissolution, had already assumed the appearance of a semi-barbarian
state. In those districts which had been lately settled with Teutonic
colonists the phenomenon may be explained as resulting from
over-sanguine attempts to civilise an intractable stock. But even in the
heart of the oldest provinces the conditions were little better. Law and
custom had conspired to sap the ideas and principles that we regard as
essentially Roman. The civil was now subjected to the military power.
The authority of the state was impaired by the growth of private
jurisdictions and defied by the quasi-feudal retinues of the great. For
civic equality had been substituted an irrational system of
class-privileges and class-burdens. Law was ceasing to be the orderly
development of general principles, and was becoming an accumulation of
ill-considered, inconsistent edicts. So far had decay advanced through
the negligence of those most vitally concerned that, if Europe was ever
to learn again the highest lessons which Rome had existed to teach, the
first step must be to sweep away the hybrid government which still
claimed allegiance in the name of Rome. The provincials of the fifth
century possessed the writings in which those lessons were recorded, but
possessed them only as symbols of an unintelligible past. A long
training in new schools of thought, under new forms of government, was
necessary before the European mind could again be brought into touch
with the old Roman spirit.
The great service that the barbarians rendered was a service of
destruction. In doing so they prepared the way for a return to the past.
Their first efforts in reconstruction were also valuable, since the
difficulty of the work and the clumsiness of the product revived the
respect of men for the superior skill of Rome. In the end the barbarians
succeeded in that branch of constructive statesmanship where Rome had
failed most signally. The new states which they founded were smaller and
feebler than the Western Empire, but furnished new opportunities for the
development of individuality, and made it possible to endow citizenship
with active functions and moral responsibilities. That these states
laboured under manifold defects was obvious to those who made them and
lived under them. The ideal of the world-wide Empire, maintaining
universal peace and the brotherhood of men, continued to haunt the
imagination of the Middle Ages as a lost possibility. But in this case,
as so often, what passed for a memory was in truth an aspiration; and
Europe was advancing towards a higher form of unity than that which had
been destroyed.
II
THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
The barbarian states which arose on the ruins of the Western Empire were
founded, under widely different circumstances of time and place, by
tribes and federations of tribes drawn from every part of Germany. We
expect to find, and we do find, infinite varieties of detail in their
laws, their social distinctions, their methods of government. But from a
broader point of view they may be grouped in two classes, not according
to affinities of race, but according to their relations with the social
order which they had invaded.
[Illustration: The Barbarian Kingdoms and Frankish Empire]
One group of kingdoms was founded under cover of a legal fiction; the
Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Burgundians claimed to be the allies
of the Empire. At one time or another they obtained the recognition of
Constantinople for their settlements. Their kings accepted or usurped
the titles of imperial administrators, stamped their coins with the
effigies of the reigning Emperor, dated their proclamations by the names
of the consuls for the year, and in many other ways flaunted their
nominal subjection as the legal basis of their actual sovereignty. This
fiction did not prevent them from governing their new dominions in true
Teutonic fashion, through royal bailiffs, who administered the state
demesnes, and military officers (dukes, counts, etc.) who ruled with
autocratic sway over administrative districts. Nor did the most lenient
of them hesitate to provide for their armies by wholesale confiscations;
the ordinary rule was to take from the great proprietor one-third or
two-thirds of his estate for the benefit of the Teutonic immigrant.
Further, we have ample evidence that the provincials found existence
considerably more precarious under the new order. The rich were exposed
to the malice of the false informer and the venal judge; the cultivators
of the soil were often oppressed and often reduced from partial freedom
to absolute slavery. Yet in some respects the invaders of this type were
tolerant and adaptable. They left to the provincials the civil law of
Rome, and even codified it to guard against unauthorised innovations;
the _Lex Romana Burgundionum_ and the Visigothic _Breviarium Alarici_
are still extant as memorials of this policy. They realised the
necessity of compelling barbarians and provincials alike to respect
the elementary rights of person and property; Theodoric the Ostrogoth
and Gundobad the Burgundian were the authors of new criminal codes, in
the one case mainly, in the other partially, derived from Roman
jurisprudence. Such rulers were not content with professing an impartial
regard for both classes of their subjects; they frequently raised the
better-class provincials to posts of responsibility and confidence. By a
singular fatality the chief races of this group had embraced the Arian
heresy, which was repudiated and detested by their subjects. Yet their
great statesmen uniformly extended toleration to the rival creed, and
even patronised the orthodox bishops, by whom they were secretly
regarded as worse than the lowest of the heathen. This generosity was
little more than common prudence. Numerically the conquerors were much
inferior to the provincials; economically they had everything to lose by
needless ill-treatment of those whom they exploited. But the best of
them had studied the organisation of the Empire at close quarters,
sometimes as captains in the imperial service, sometimes as neighbours
of flourishing provinces in the years preceding the grand catastrophe;
and knowledge rarely failed to produce in them some respect or even
enthusiasm for the _Respublica Romana_. "When I was young," said
King Athaulf the Visigoth, "I desired to obliterate the Roman name and
to bring under the sway of the Goths all that once belonged to the
Romans. But I learned better by experience. The Goths were licentious
barbarians who would obey no laws; and to deprive the commonwealth of
laws would have been a crime. So for my part I chose the glory of
restoring the Roman name to its old estate." To such men the ideal of
the future was a federation of states owing a nominal allegiance to the
official head of the Empire, but cherishing an effective loyalty to all
that was best in Roman law and culture.
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