The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
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Title: The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
Editor: Rossiter Johnson
Charles F. Horne
LL. D. John Rudd
Release date: December 18, 2008 [eBook #27562]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS HISTORIANS, VOLUME 07 ***
Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during
the coronation of Charles VII before the high altar at
Rheims.
Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.]
THE GREAT EVENTS
BY
FAMOUS HISTORIANS
+------------------------------------------------------+
| A COMPREHENSIVE AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S |
| HISTORY, EMPHASIZING THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND |
| PRESENTING THESE AS COMPLETE NARRATIVES IN THE |
| MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS |
+------------------------------------------------------+
NON-SECTARIAN NON-PARTISAN NON-SECTIONAL
+------------------------------------------------------+
| ON THE PLAN EVOLVED FROM A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS |
| GATHERED FROM THE MOST DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF |
| AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS BY |
| SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT AND EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED |
| NARRATIVES, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH THOROUGH |
| INDICES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND COURSES |
| OF READING |
+------------------------------------------------------+
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
JOHN RUDD, LL.D.
_With a staff of specialists_
_VOLUME VII_
The National Alumni
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
BY THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
CONTENTS
VOLUME VII
page
_An Outline Narrative of the Great Events_, xiii
CHARLES F. HORNE
_Dante Composes the_ Divina Commedia _(A.D. 1300-1318)_, 1
RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
_Third Estate Joins in the Government of France (A.D.
1302)_, 17
HENRI MARTIN
_War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair of France
(A.D. 1302)_, 23
EYRE EVANS CROWE
_First Swiss Struggle for Liberty (A.D. 1308)_, 28
F. GRENFELL BAKER
_Battle of Bannockburn (A.D. 1314)_, 41
ANDREW LANG
_Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars
Burning of Grand Master Molay (A.D. 1314)_, 51
F. C. WOODHOUSE
HENRY HART MILMAN
_James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt
Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King of
France (A.D. 1337-1340)_, 68
FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT
_Battles of Sluys and Crécy (A.D. 1340-1346)_, 78
SIR JOHN FROISSART
_Modern Recognition of Scenic Beauty
Crowning of Petrarch at Rome (A.D. 1341)_, 93
JACOB BURCKHARDT
_Rienzi's Revolution in Rome (A.D. 1347)_, 104
RICHARD LODGE
_Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance (Fourteenth
to Sixteenth Century)_, 110
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
_The Black Death Ravages Europe (A.D. 1348)_, 130
J. F. C. HECKER
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
_First Turkish Dominion in Europe
Turks Seize Gallipoli (A.D. 1354)_, 147
JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL
_Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at Venice
(A.D. 1355)_, 154
MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT
_Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull
(A.D. 1356)_, 160
SIR ROBERT COMYN
_Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France (A.D. 1358)_, 164
SIR JOHN FROISSART
_Conquests of Timur the Tartar (A.D. 1370-1405)_, 169
EDWARD GIBBON
_Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages (A.D. 1374)_, 187
J. F. C. HECKER
_Election of Antipope Clement VII
Beginning of the Great Schism (A.D. 1378)_, 201
HENRY HART MILMAN
_Genoese Surrender to Venetians (A.D. 1380)_, 213
HENRY HALLAM
_Rebellion of Wat Tyler (A.D. 1381)_, 217
JOHN LINGARD
_Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English (A.D. 1382)_ 227
J. PATERSON SMYTH
_The Swiss Win Their Independence
Battle of Sempach (A.D. 1386-1389)_ 238
F. GRENFELL BAKER
_Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (A.D. 1397)_, 243
PAUL C. SINDING
_Deposition of Richard II
Henry IV Begins the Line of Lancaster (A.D. 1399)_, 251
JOHN LINGARD
_Discovery of the Canary Islands and the African Coast
Beginning of Negro Slave Trade (A.D. 1402)_, 266
SIR ARTHUR HELPS
_Council of Constance (A.D. 1414)_, 284
RICHARD LODGE
_Trial and Burning of John Huss
The Hussite Wars (A.D. 1415)_, 294
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
_The House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg
(A.D. 1415)_, 305
THOMAS CARLYLE
_Battle of Agincourt
English Conquest of France (A.D. 1415)_, 320
JAMES GAIRDNER
_Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans (A.D. 1429)_, 333
SIR EDWARD S. CREASY
_Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc (A.D. 1431)_, 350
JULES MICHELET
_Charles VII Issues His Pragmatic Sanction
Emancipation of the Gallican Church (A.D. 1438)_, 370
W. HENLEY JERVIS
RENÉ F. ROHRBACHER
_Universal Chronology (A.D. 1301-1438)_, 385
JOHN RUDD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME VII page
_Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during the
coronation of Charles VII, before the high altar
at Rheims (page 347)_, Frontispiece
Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.
_Richard II resigns the crown of England to Henry,
Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at
London_, 262
Painting by Sir John Gilbert.
AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS,
AND CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
(FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)
CHARLES F. HORNE
Fifty years ago the term "renaissance" had a very definite meaning to
scholars as representing an exact period toward the close of the
fourteenth century when the world suddenly reawoke to the beauty of the
arts of Greece and Rome, to the charm of their gayer life, the splendor
of their intellect. We know now that there was no such sudden
reawakening, that Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long
centuries, and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer
side of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with
their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.
Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and
there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning
ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid
the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way
of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period
of the great poet's work, the first decade of the fourteenth century,
has certainly the advantage of being characterized by three or four
peculiarly striking events which serve to typify the tendencies of the
coming age.
In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic, by a
political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended
into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended
only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found
expression in his mighty poem, the _Divina Commedia_.[1] Throughout his
masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and
of such Greeks as he knew--so we have admiration of the ancient
intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other
more earthly tyrants--so we have the dawnings of democracy and of
religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's
self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.
More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he
began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon
transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his
commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote
not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly
friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very
truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical
set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous
vitality, were to supersede the old.
In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at
work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the
famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous
bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening enough.
If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene
tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the
Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause
of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the great
jubilee of 1300. Philip's soldiers, forcing their way into the little
town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon
his holiness. If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So
few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of
towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from
the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck--beaten, say not
wholly reliable authorities--and so insulted that rage and shame drove
him mad, and he died.
Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr.
Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope,
venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under
strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the
obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal
authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years
the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the
Church was sudden, terrible, complete.
INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE
Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the
mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders
of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars,
having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had
dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized
the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and
confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles
throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the
extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its
chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their
helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which
knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of
feudalism was past.[2]
We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this cruel,
crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against the Pope, he
called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of his people; and,
following the example already established in England, he gave a voice in
this assembly to the "Third Estate," the common folk or "citizens," as
well as to the nobles and the clergy. So even in France we find the
people acquiring power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but
a timid and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by its
money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one day be strong
enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant overlords.[3]
Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took place farther
northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish cities Ghent, Liège, and
Bruges had grown to be the great centres of the commercial world, so
wealthy and so populous that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish
burghers had not always been subject to France--else they had been less
well to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and
rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and
the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout
leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the
knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers
with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the
helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness
asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself
a fresh nobility to replenish his depleted stock.[4]
The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign will in
itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most important state
in Europe. This, however, was due less to French strength than to the
weakness of the empire, where rival rulers were being constantly elected
and wasting their strength against one another. If Courtrai had given
the first hint that these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war,
it was soon followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among
themselves a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in
1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.[5]
The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival claimants for the
title of emperor, and was much too busy to attend personally to the
chastisement of these presumptuous boors. The army which he sent to do
the work for him was met by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain
passes, overwhelmed with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce
charge of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years to
forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second army into
the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss liberty was
established on an unarguable basis.[6]
A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under Bruce, the
Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the English.[7] Courtrai,
Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new force was growing up over all
Europe, and a new spirit among men. Knighthood, which had lost its power
over kings, seemed like to lose its military repute as well.
The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in Italy, where
democracy had first asserted itself. In its train came intellectual
ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Italy was in the
full swing of the intellectual renaissance.[8] In 1341 Petrarch,
recognized by all his contemporary countrymen as their leading scholar
and poet, was crowned with a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol
in Rome. This was the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for
intellectual worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of
the beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In
reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our own,
with a friend who understands.[9]
THE PERIOD OF DISASTER
Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too intense, too
frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic in Rome and
talked of the restoration of the city's ancient rule. But he governed
like a madman or an inflated fool, and was slain in a riot of the
streets.[10] Scarce one of the famous cities succeeded in retaining its
republican form. Milan became a duchy. Florence fell under the sway of
the Medici. In Venice a few rich families seized all authority, and
while the fame and territory of the republic were extended, its dogeship
became a mere figurehead. All real power was lodged in the dread and
secret council of three.[11] Genoa was defeated and crushed in a great
naval contest with her rival, Venice.[12] Everywhere tyrannies stood out
triumphant. The first modern age of representative government was a
failure. The cities had proved unable to protect themselves against the
selfish ambitions of their leaders.
In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen,
slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of
decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith
of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully
established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth
of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of
Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance of the Hansa, until,
toward the end of the century, Queen Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis
of the North," united the three countries under her sway, and partly at
least upraised them from their sorry plight.[14]
On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look back with
pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of its wrangling rulers,
Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an established government lay
at the root of all the disorder, tried to mend matters by publishing his
"Golden Bull," which exactly regulated the rules and formulæ to be gone
through in choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were
to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested
elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty. The
Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.[15]
Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated
plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered,
began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has
been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation
one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out.
In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed,
humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all
the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its
height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in
Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg
the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to
stop.[17]
France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years'
War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact,
her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting
away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings.
France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe.
England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman
dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived
of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, France was
having much trouble with her Flemish cities, which were in revolt again
under the noted brewer-nobleman, Van Artevelde,[18] yet it seemed
presumption for England to attack her--England, so feeble that she had
been unable to avenge her own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at
Bannockburn.
But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves as had
the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not been in that strife
against the Scots, a brave and impoverished people struggling for
freedom. But hearts and pockets, too, welcomed the quarrel with France,
overbearing France, that plundered their ships when they traded with
their friends the Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a
main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom
ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer
Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and
presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By
asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the
consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King
Philip had on his hands a far more serious quarrel than he realized.[19]
In England's first great naval victory, Edward destroyed the French
fleet at Sluys and so started his country on its wonderful career of
ocean dominance. Moreover, his success established from the start that
the war should be fought out in France and not in England.[20] Then, in
1346, he won his famous victory of Crécy against overwhelming numbers of
his enemies. It has been said that cannon were effectively used for the
first time at Crécy, and it was certainly about this time that gunpowder
began to assume a definite though as yet subordinate importance in
warfare. But we need not go so far afield to explain the English
victory. It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through a century
and a half of freedom, England had been building up a class of sturdy
yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent
lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a
helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they
had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English
peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly
accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized
mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed what the English
yeomen had begun.
Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what with the
Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging
at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which
had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation
into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous
plunderings and burnings of the rich châteaux.[21] A partial peace with
England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary
soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take
their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering
and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and
the English troops caught disease from their victims and perished in the
desolation they had helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles
with them and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won
back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380, the
English power in France had fallen again almost to where it stood at the
beginning of the war.
Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph.
His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen.
England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and
her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of
rebellion--though with them this meant no more than that they felt
themselves over-taxed.[22]
The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be regarded
as a period of depression in European civilization, of retrograde
movement during which the wheels of progress had turned back. It even
seemed as though Asia would once more and perhaps with final success
reassert her dominion over helpless Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in
1291, had conquered Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land,
had lost their power; but a new family of the Turkish race, the one that
dwells in Europe to-day, the Osmanlis, had built up an empire by
conquest over their fellows, and had begun to wrest province after
province from the feeble Empire of the East. In 1354 their advance
brought them across the Bosporus and they seized their first European
territory.[23] Soon they had spread over most of modern Turkey. Only the
strong-walled Constantinople held out, while its people cried
frantically to the West for help. The invaders ravaged Hungary. A
crusade was preached against them; but in 1396 the entire crusading
army, united with all the forces of Hungary, was overthrown, almost
exterminated in the battle of Nicopolis.
Perhaps it was only a direct providence that saved Europe. Another
Tartar conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine, had risen in the Far
East.[24] Like Attila and Genghis Khan he swept westward asserting
sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe
to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which
vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and
slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and
subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real
unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations
reasserted their independence. Yet Europe was granted a considerable
breathing space before the Turks once more felt able to push their
aggressions westward.
THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
Toward the close of this unlucky fourteenth century a marked religious
revival extended over Europe. Perhaps men's sufferings had caused it.
Many sects of reformers appeared, protesting sometimes against the
discipline, sometimes the doctrines, of the Church. In Germany Nicholas
of Basel established the "Friends of God." In England Wycliffe wrote the
earliest translation of the Bible into any of our modern tongues.[25]
The Avignon popes shook off their long submission to France and returned
to Italy, to a Rome so desolate that they tell us not ten thousand
people remained to dwell amid its stupendous ruins. Unfortunately this
return only led the papacy into still deeper troubles. Several of the
cardinals refused to recognize the Roman Pope and elected another, who
returned to Avignon. This was the beginning of the "Great Schism" in the
Church.[26] For forty years there were two, sometimes three, claimants
to the papal chair. The effect of their struggles was naturally to
lessen still further that solemn veneration with which men had once
looked up to the accepted vicegerent of God on earth. Hitherto the
revolt against the popes had only assailed their political supremacy;
but now heresies that included complete denial of the religious
authority of the Church began everywhere to arise. In England Wycliffe's
preachings and pamphlets grew more and more opposed to Roman doctrine.
In Bohemia John Huss not only said, as all men did, that the Church
needed reform, but, going further, he refused obedience to papal
commands.[27] In short, the reformers, finding themselves unable to
purify the Roman Church according to their views, began to deny its
sacredness and defy its power.
At length an unusually energetic though not oversuccessful emperor,
Sigismund, the same whom the Turks had defeated at Nicopolis, persuaded
the leaders of the Church to unite with him in calling a grand council
at Constance.[28] This council ended the great schism and restored order
to the Church by securing the rule of a single pope. It also burned John
Huss as a heretic, and thereby left on Sigismund's hands a fierce
rebellion among the reformer's Bohemian followers. The war lasted for a
generation, and during its course all the armies of Germany were
repeatedly defeated by the fanatic Hussites.[29]
Another interesting performance of the Emperor Sigismund was that, being
deep in debt, he sold his "electorate" of Brandenburg to a friend, a
Hohenzollern, and thus established as one of the four chief families of
the empire those Hohenzollerns who rose to be kings of Prussia and have
in our own day supplanted the Hapsburgs as emperors of Germany.[30] Also
worth noting of Sigismund is the fact that during the sitting of his
Council of Constance he made a tour of Europe to persuade all the
princes and various potentates to join it. When he reached England he
was met by a band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand whether
by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England.
Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look
to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old
mediæval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the
overlord of the whole of Europe.
LATTER HALF OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
By this time England had in fact recovered from her period of temporary
disorder and depression. King Richard II, the feeble son of the Black
Prince, had been deposed in 1399,[31] and a new and vigorous line of
rulers, the Lancastrians, reached their culmination in Henry V
(1415-1422). Henry revived the French quarrel, and paralleled Crécy and
Poitiers with a similar victory at Agincourt.[32] The French King was a
madman, and, aided by a civil war among the French nobility, Henry soon
had his neighbor's kingdom seemingly helpless at his feet. By the
treaty of Troyes he was declared the heir to the French throne, married
the mad King's daughter, and dwelt in Paris as regent of the
kingdom.[33]
The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a similar English
conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his
insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a
tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left a full-grown
though rather worthless son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to
deny the English authority, from a safe distance in Southern France. He
made, however, no effort to assert himself or retrieve his fortunes; and
the English captains in the name of their baby King took possession of
one fortress after another, till, in 1429, Orleans was the only French
city of rank still barring their way from Charles and the far south.[34]
Then came the sudden, wonderful arousing of the French under their
peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture and execution.[35]
At last even the French peasantry were roused; and the French nobles
forgot their private quarrels and turned a united front against the
invaders. The leaderless English lost battle after battle, until of all
France they retained only Edward III's first conquest, the city of
Calais.
France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the Council of
Constance, and, remembering how long she had held the papacy within her
own borders, asserted at least a qualified independence of the Romans by
the "Pragmatic Sanction" which established the Gallican Church.[36]
This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King Charles, who, in
fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the power which his
good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won. Among other innovations he
established a "standing army," the first permanent body of government
troops in Teutonic Europe. By this step he did much to alter the
mediæval into the modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy
of kings over both nobles and people which continued in France and more
or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow.
Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen
in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the
Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a
first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery
into Europe[37]--a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was
to face increasing responsibilities as well.
An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In
that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet
unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a
little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable type, that is,
of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii,
education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries
impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as
much for standing armies.
DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"
A.D. 1300-1318
RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
Out of what may be called the civil and religious
storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into
the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the
new life upon which the world was about to enter. From
Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and
its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy
of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible
world"--Dante's _Divina Commedia_--wherein also the deeper
history of the visible world of man was both embodied from
the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.
Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its
ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it
the epithet "divine." It is in three parts--_Inferno_
(hell), _Purgatorio_ (purgatory), and _Paradiso_ (paradise).
It has been made accessible to English readers in the
metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and
others, and in the excellent prose version (_Inferno_) of
John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.
Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in
May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the
_Divina Commedia_ and his other great work, the _Vita Nuova_
(the new life), narrate the love--either romantic or
passionate--with which he was inspired by Beatrice
Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and
Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed
to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an
equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his
works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein
the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds
of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of
failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials
rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems,
which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of
Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of
the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of
the modern world.
Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life
of Dante, and of the history-making _Commedia_, attest the
importance of including the poet and his work in this record
of Great Events.
The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening
of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of
a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the
mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up
ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by
grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the
consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and
Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the
_Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's Code, with the
Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens
European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And,
like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in
undiminished freshness the literature which it began.
We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have
pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing,
and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a
solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed
up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but
fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature,
so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which he has added
permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power
which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and
creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it
was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of
investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of
the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its
ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among
the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the
solemn recollection supervenes that powers were formed, and life
preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, and thus
it should be; and the work which man has brooded over, and at last
created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end
to end, strongly and sweetly disposing of all things."
It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some cases and to
a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the
particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps
to a heterogeneous and wildly discordant order of things, which are out
of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which
have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to
bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we
feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which
its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to
conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see
nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work
without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of
its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina
Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its
chance incidents.
The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it
ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In
general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great
poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness
in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of
the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined
by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and
flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own
life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all
things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections
of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the
only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure
ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful
company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we
never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to
history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in
Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather
than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as
generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great
mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man
conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among
which he worked; but how the current of purpose threaded its way among
them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot
learn from history.
It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and
enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of
his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder
of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an
autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and
subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with
far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes
it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of
raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he
has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic
change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes
the student--the student of the thirteenth century--struggling painfully
against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight
and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but
omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and
ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of
half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the Provençals.
Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within his reach are
accepted as the consolation of his human griefs; he is filled with the
passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it.
Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems
in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his
learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it
is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by
discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death.
He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a
family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his
full share in the quarrels of the day.
Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and
figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and
natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of
the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been
broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man,
enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and
abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and
brooded once more on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory
had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him
and that stable country "where the angels are in peace." Round her
image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was
grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and
success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged
itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction,
but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the
softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no
figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love,
dissipated by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of
feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's
case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and
suggested the form of the "sacred poem of earth and heaven."
And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this
passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of
poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not
ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration--the political
life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and
passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning,
gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man.
But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet.
The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the
Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving
in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and
contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the
social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more
felicitous in issue, of other western nations. It is remarkable for
keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it
has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that
is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and
empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind
to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger
than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire,
indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not
a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it
prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were
uniting and union was becoming organization--and neither geographical
remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and
differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which
was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and
cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the
attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while
this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in
Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its
narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The
history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one--the history
of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a
history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent
cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within,
theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes
and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and
citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the
minuteness of private life.
Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not less from
the custom of the day than from his own purpose a public man. He took
his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he
fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory at
Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled
himself in one of the guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the
"art" of the apothecaries; he served the state as its agent abroad; he
went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy according
to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies,
even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of jubilee, 1300, he
was one of the priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from
fellowship and coöperation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the
market-place and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn
by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men,
the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought
of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the
real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous
page of Vergil; and no scholar ever read Vergil with such feeling--no
astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The
whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul
and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free
and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes,
seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual,
natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is
placed to labor and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.
The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it
is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know
not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the
parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a
neighboring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and
the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs, who were led by the
Donati, and the White Guelfs, who sided with Cerchi. It is still
professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but
they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the
whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a
time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it
grew evident that one party must crush the other and become dominant in
Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less
formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing
Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely
of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the
martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause.
The Cerchi, with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and
showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the
common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the _Parte
Guelfa_; and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well.
Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they
might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had
chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties
equally, seem to have thought that this would have been the best result
for the state. But the accounts of both, though they are very different
writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They
were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to
aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to
pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when
they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the
moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and
for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune,
"more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared
their adversaries." Boniface VIII had no prepossessions in Florence,
except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he
would have accepted and backed. But he said, "_Io non voglio perdere gli
uomini perle femminelle_."[38] If the Black party furnished types for
the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White
party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly
selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the
vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel
nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is
singled out in the _setta dei cattivi_, for deeper and special
scorn--he,
"Che fece per vilta il gran rifinto,"[39]
the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.
Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general
character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when
they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at
last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he
found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his
exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his
writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but
disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are
not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry,
shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi
and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he
appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates;
in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The
traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with
a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy
form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the
Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he
passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the
West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little
that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored
and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find
him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of
Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not
by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love,"
asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is
better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian
Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the
children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the
assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del
Fiore.
The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's
life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is
that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It
is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle
Ages in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for
this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his state of trial, as
"comprehensor" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly
country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the
recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent
scenery of the _inferno_ and _purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly
marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and
the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such
scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown
dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery
from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and
precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks
of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of
Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna;
the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and
Sestri; the marble quarries of Carrara; the "rough and desert ways
between Lerici and Turbia," and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into
the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty
years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that
picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing
above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly
through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top,
while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:
"Ai raggi, morti gia' bassi lidi,"[40]
or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath
the Alpine fir:
"Un' ombra smorta
Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta;"[41]
or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:
"d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde
Come di neve in Alpe senza vento."[42]
Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_
was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with
some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made
in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes
three lines of it--continued afterward in Italian. This is not
impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the
_Vita Nuova_. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure
and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is
already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the
face of the Ever-blessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the
promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes
how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady
receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed
spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in
which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this
blessed one until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily
of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she
truly knows. So that it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things
live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that
which never hath been said of any woman. And afterward, may it please
him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the
glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously
gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."
It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life
to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or
laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what he was promising, what he
was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would
have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high
venture should be realized.
But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be
surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the
poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the
_Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and
downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is
continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect
work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the
grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a
figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly
wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing
thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the
dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to
naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life.
But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt
whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by
the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand
though barbarous Latin to the _literati_ of the fourteenth century; or a
poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the
literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the
_Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time
when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion and the condition of his
life.
But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante
was alone--except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless.
The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his
home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free
associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all
Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already
in the region of spirits, and meet him there--Casella, Forese; Guido
Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and
writes as a friendless man--to whom all that he had held dearest was
either lost or imbittered; he thinks and writes for himself.
So comprehensive in interest is the _Commedia_. Any attempt to explain
it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life,
or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the
keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art,
each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to
the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in
doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the
plain-spoken prose of the _Convito_ would show how he placed "the Divine
Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and
sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," is
single perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon
speaks, but queens or concubines or maidens; but she is the 'Dove,' and
the 'perfect one'--'Dove,' because without stain of strife; 'perfect,'
because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in which our soul
stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage shows likewise how
he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, as holding their due
place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's
perfection. No account of the _Commedia_ will prove sufficient which
does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep
spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide liberty of
materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his
design.
Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline
poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political
opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt.
And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all
ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That
he should take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part
of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he
subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of
his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet
this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who
read the _Commedia_ in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained
as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labor and
pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than
the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred
cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the
Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and
scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in
all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang
of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the
greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to
which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to
solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in
which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or
infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and
even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic
doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries
of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse
blindness.
Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an
imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party.
It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up,
and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were
at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with
them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in which he
disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his
independence--
"A te fia bello
Averti fatto parte per te stesso."[43]
Dante, by the _Divina Commedia_, was the restorer of seriousness in
literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and
by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the
prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the
faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers
fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously
diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance;
the _Commedia_ checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with
the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively
amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling;
in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it
brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased
at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But
this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was,
was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge
first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all
closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the
idea of infidelity--not heresy, but infidelity--was quite a familiar
one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and
Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and
opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a
profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for
its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and
enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in
safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found
utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the
Italian _Commedia_ had not seized on all minds. It would have been an
evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the siren
tales of the _Decameron_ had not been the first to occupy the ears with
the charms of a new language.
Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to open the grand
procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote
from popular thought--too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted
frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even
enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so
undoubting--her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the
unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and
models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But
with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics
and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil,
Ovid, and Statius--keen and subtle as a schoolman--as much an idolater
of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance--his eye
is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of
external nature, to the wonders of the physical world--his interest in
them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct,
his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened
or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as
elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic
materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days
which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense
of what is real in feeling and image--as if he had never felt the
attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before
the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time
was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and
appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with
a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their
spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material
is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science,
and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he
wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose
their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.
THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT
OF FRANCE
A.D. 1302
HENRI MARTIN[44]
At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the
power of Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at
its height, contentions arose between him and Pope Boniface
VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the right of
nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the
dominions of the French King.
Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the
county of Melgueil, which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in
fief from the holy see. Boniface provoked Philip by a
chiding bull, and added to the provocation by sending to the
King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de
Saisset, whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created
Bishop of Pamiers.
This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant
attitude, and afterward spoke of the King, who received him
in sombre silence, as "that debaser of coinage, that proud
and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare at people
without saying anything."
Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him
arrested and imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of
treason, heresy, and blasphemy, and sent his chancellor,
Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to the Pope, to demand
the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his see.
The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta,
fili," bull, received Philip's ambassadors, but their
interview was marked by a violent scene: "My power!"
exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power embraces and
includes the temporal power!"
"So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that
of the King, real."
To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he
deemed the King guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior
clergy of France to an assembly at Rome.
Philip and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its own weapons,
to enlist public opinion on their side, and to shelter themselves behind
a great national manifestation; the three estates of France were
convoked at Notre Dame in Paris, the 10th of April, 1302, to take
cognizance of the differences between the King and the Pope. For the
first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town
deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside
of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment
of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth
the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective entity, a
political order.
It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked
by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and that he had
the idea to seek in them moral power and support.
The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip
the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the
feudality did not possess sufficient union, the people did not have
enough force to profit on this occasion against the Crown. Besides, the
Pope was more unpopular than the King, and had been so for a much longer
time; the nobility, which, since the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced
to resist clerical jurisdiction, had not changed in sentiment; as to the
people, filled with the remembrance of St. Louis, they loved the King
still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the oppressions of Philip,
and besides it was easy to foresee that the mayors, consuls, aldermen,
jurats or magistrates, who were to represent their cities in the great
assembly at Paris, dazzled with the unaccustomed _rôle_ to which they
were called, and desirous to please the King in their personal interest
or in that of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit
lawyers who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the
debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known,
might well have produced in many respects a contrary effect to the
wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface touching the debasement
of the coinage and the royal exactions, reproaches which so irritated
Philip, might have met with other sentiments from the townsmen. The
chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed among the public,
instead of the original bull, a species of _résumé_ in which he had
assembled, in a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant
pretensions of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which
touched on the troubles of the nation against the King.
"Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of
the French; fear God and observe his commandments. We want you to know
that you are subject to us temporarily as well as spiritually; that the
collation of the benefices and the prebends--revenues attached to the
canonical positions--do not belong to you in any way; that if you have
care of the vacant benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their
successors; that if you have misapplied any of these benefices, we
declare that collation invalid and revoke it, declaring as heretics all
those who think otherwise.
"Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."
At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended answer to the
pretended bull:
"Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives
out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your
very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards
temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends
belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the
collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the
future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and
against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."
This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to
abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the
eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been
greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which
formerly would have drawn universal indignation on the head of the
sacrilegious monarch.
The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual. The
prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute, neutralized by
the difficulties of their position between the King and the Pope; the
lords and the townsmen hastened thither irritated against the bull,
heated by the violence of the royal answer. The members of the assembly
were influenced each by the other according to their arrival; the
pungent and wily eloquence of Peter Flotte did the rest. The chancellor,
as the first of the great crown officers and the king's chief justice,
opened the states by a long harangue in which, speaking in the name of
Philip, he exposed with much force and ingenuity the enterprises of the
court of Rome and its wrongs toward the kingdom and the Church.
"The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers and
unknown individuals who never become residents. The prelates no longer
have benefices to give to nobles whose ancestors founded the churches,
and to other lettered persons; from which results also that gifts are no
longer given to the churches. The Pope imposes on the churches and
benefices pensions, subsidies, exactions of all kinds. The bishops are
kept from their ministry, being obliged to go to the holy see to carry
presents--always presents. All these abuses have done nothing but
increase under the actual pontificate, and increase every
day--conditions that can no longer be tolerated. That is why I command
you as your master and pray you as your friend to give me counsel and
help."
The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his own initiative,
to remedy the encroachments that his officers had made on the rights of
the Church, and would have done so sooner had he not feared the
appearance of submitting to the menaces and orders of the Pope, who
pretended to reduce to a condition of vassalage the most noble kingdom
of France, which had never been raised but from God. Peter Flotte dwelt
especially on this latter argument, and appealed in turn to the
interests of the nobility and of the clergy, and to national pride. The
fiery Count of Artois arose, and exclaimed that even if the King
submitted to the encroachments of the Pope, the nobility would not
suffer them, and that the gentry would never acknowledge any temporal
superior other than the King. The nobility and the Third Estate
confirmed these words by their acclamations, and swore to sacrifice
their properties and lives to defend the temporal independence of the
kingdom. A Norman advocate, named Dubosc, procurator of the commune of
Coutances, accused the Pope, in writing, of heresy for having wanted to
despoil the King of the independence of the crown which he held from
God. The embarrassment of the clergy was extreme; the members of the
Church, fearing to be crushed in the crash between King and Pope, asked
time for deliberation; their declaration in the assembly then being
held, was insisted upon; already cries arose around them that whoever
did not subscribe to the oath would be held as an enemy of the State;
they acquiesced, satisfied apparently by an appearance of violence which
would serve them for an excuse at Rome. They acknowledged themselves
obliged, in common with the other orders, to defend the rights of the
King and of the kingdom, whether they held estates from the King or not;
then they prayed the King to be allowed to go to the council convoked by
the Pope; the King and the barons declared themselves formally opposed.
The three orders then separated, so as to write to the court at Rome
each its own side of the affair; the letters of the nobility and of the
Third Estate--which as may be imagined were all prepared in advance by
the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the
assistants--were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of
cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and
unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and
government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the
universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any
trouble, whether by the authority of the Pope or anyone else--unless it
be from their sire, the King. This letter is signed, not only by the
principal lords of the kingdom, but also by several great barons of the
empire.
The epistle of the mayors, aldermen, jurats, consuls, universities,
communes, and communities of the towns of the kingdom of France has not
been preserved. It is known only, by the answer that the cardinals made,
that it was conceived in the same spirit as the letter of the barons.
The letter of the clergy is quite in another style: the clerks address
their very holy father and very holy sire, the Pope; expose to him the
complaints of the King and of the nobility; the necessity in which they
find themselves engaged to defend the King's rights, and the anger of
the laity; the imminent rupture of France with the Roman Church--and
even of the people with the clergy in general--and conjure the highest
prudence of the Pope to conserve the ancient union by revoking the
convocation of the ecclesiastical council.
The states-general were dissolved immediately after the unique _séance_
which had so well responded to the desires of the King. The means
employed to attain this result were not entirely loyal, nor was public
opinion altogether free; it was but slightly enlightened on the grave
debates that the authorities affected to submit to it. Nevertheless it
was an important matter, this call to the French nation, and it must be
acknowledged that the genius of France responded in proclaiming national
independence, and in repelling the intervention of the court of Rome in
the internal politics of the country.
WAR OF THE FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE
FAIR OF FRANCE
A.D. 1302
EYRE EVANS CROWE
Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century the people of
Flanders, whose country had been for centuries a feudal
dependency of France, were considerably advanced in wealth
and importance. They had become restive under the French
rule, and their discontent ripened into settled hostility.
Common commercial interests drew them into friendship with
England, and in the quarrel between Philip the Fair and
Edward I, 1295, concerning Edward's rule in Guienne
(Aquitaine) the Flemings allied themselves with the English
King.
In 1297 Philip invaded Flanders and gained several successes
against the Flemings, who were feebly aided by King Edward.
In 1299 the two kings settled their quarrel, and the
Flemings were left to the vengeance of Philip, for in the
pacification the court of Flanders was not included. A
French army entered the Flemish territory, inflicted two
defeats upon the Count's troops, and received the submission
of the Count. Philip annexed Flanders to his crown and
appointed a governor over the Flemings. In less than two
years they rose in furious revolt. The insurrection began at
Bruges, May 18, 1302, when over three thousand Frenchmen in
that city were massacred by the insurgents. This massacre
was called the "Bruges Matins." Such an outrage upon the
French crown could not but bring upon the Flemings all the
forces that Philip was able to muster. The two leading
actions of the ensuing war--that at Courtrai, known as the
"Battle of the Spurs," on account of the number of gilt
spurs captured by the Flemings, and the engagement at
Mons-la-Puelle--are described in the course of the narrative
which follows. As a result of the battle of Courtrai the
French nobility were nearly destroyed, and Philip found it
necessary to recreate his titled bodies.
The Flemings prepared to resist the storm. They chose Guy of Juliers,
grandson of the Count of Flanders, to be their commander. Though a
cleric, he did not hesitate to obey the call, in order to avenge his
family, so cruelly betrayed by the French King. His brother, made
prisoner at Furnes by the Count d'Artois, had perished in that rude
Prince's keeping. His first attempt was to induce the people of Ghent to
join the insurrection, but its rich burgesses preferred French rule to
that of the Count of Flanders. Bruges, however, was supported by all
the lesser and maritime towns of Flanders. Guy of Namur, a son of the
Count, who had escaped to Germany, also returned with a body of soldiers
from that country, and reassured the Flemings. These surprised one of
the ducal manors, in which were five hundred French, and then took
Courtrai, occupying the town, but not the castle. It was immediately
besieged, as well as that of Cassel, the people of Ypres rallying to the
French cause. The French garrison of the town of Courtrai sent pressing
messengers for aid, and Robert of Artois marched with seven thousand
knights and forty thousand foot, of which one-fourth were archers. The
Flemish were but twenty thousand, of which none but the chiefs had
horses. Neither was their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the
latter being a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with
iron, and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers and
Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads from Courtrai to
Ghent, behind a canal that communicated with the river Lys. A priest
came with the host, but, there being no time to receive the communion,
each man took some earth in his mouth. The counts then knighted Pierre
Konig and the chiefs of bands, and took their station on foot with the
rest.
The French had nine battalions or divisions, their archers or light
troops being Lombards or Navarrese and Provençals. These the constable
placed foremost, to commence the fight and harass the Flemings by their
missiles. But the Count d'Artois overruled this manoeuvre, and called
it a Lombard trick, reproaching the Constable de Nesle with appreciating
the Flemings too highly because of his connection with them. (He had
married a daughter of the Count of Flanders.) "If you advance as far as
I shall," replied the Count, "you will go far enough, I warrant." So
saying he put spurs to his horse and led on his knights; on which the
Count d'Artois and the French squadrons charged also. This formidable
cavalry could not reach the Flemings, but fell one over the other into
the canal, which they had not perceived, and which was five fathoms wide
and three deep. The Flemish counts, seeing the disorder, instantly
passed the canal on either side to take advantage of it, and fell on the
discomfited French. The battle was but a massacre. Numbers of the French
nobles perished--the Count d'Artois, Godfrey of Brabant and his son,
the counts of Eu and of Albemarle, the Constable and his brother, De
Tanquerville, Pierre Flotte, the Chancellor, and Jacques de St. Pol--in
all some six thousand knights. Louis of Clermont and one or two others
escaped, to the damage of their reputation. This battle of Courtrai was
fought on July 11, 1302.
Had the war not been one exclusively of defence on the part of the
Flemings, or had they had ambitious and adventurous chiefs, such a
disaster might have endangered the throne of France. It was the Flemish
democracy which had conquered, and its chiefs contented themselves with
reducing the remaining cities, and expelling the gentry and rich
citizens as of French inclinations. This reaction extended from Flanders
into Brabant and Hainault. Philip in the mean time exerted all his
activities and resources. Had he been an English king he would have
called his parliament together, and have found national support and
national supplies. The French King preferred having recourse to a
recoinage. In 1294 he had forbidden any persons to keep plate unless
they possessed an annual revenue of six thousand livres. He now ordered
his bailies to deliver up their plate, and all non-functionaries to send
half of theirs. Those who did so received payment in the new coin, and
lost one-half thereby. A tax of one-fifth, or 20 per cent., of the
annual revenue was levied on the land, and a twentieth was levied on the
movable property. In the following year the King found it more
advantageous to order that all prelates and barons should, for every
five hundred livres of yearly revenue in land, furnish an armed and
mounted gentleman for five months' service, while the non-noble was to
furnish and keep up six infantry soldiers (_sergens de pied_) for every
hundred hearths. This decree was a return to feudal military service,
occasioned, no doubt, by the general disaffection caused by the raising
of the war supplies in money. As if to recompense all classes for the
severity of the exaction, Philip published an _ordonnance_ of reform for
the protection of both laymen and ecclesiastics from the arbitrary
encroachments or interference of his officers.
Having thus set his realm in order, and collected an army of seventy
thousand men at Arras, the King marched to meet the Flemings, who in
equal force had mustered in the vicinity of Dovai. They kept, as at
Courtrai, on the defensive; and the King of France, too cautious to
attack them, allowed the whole autumn to pass, and returned to France
after a campaign as inefficient as inglorious.
Philip had been long involved in a controversy with Pope Boniface VIII,
and the quarrel still continued. It was not till some time after the
battle of Courtrai that the King at last, delivered from the menacing
hostility of Rome, had leisure to turn his mind and efforts again toward
Flanders. During the year 1303 he had sought to keep the Flemings at bay
by bodies of Lombard and Tuscan infantry, whom his Florentine banker
persuaded him to hire, and by Amadeus V, Duke of Savoy, who brought
soldiers of that country to his aid. Although the long lances and more
perfect armor of these troops gave them some advantage over the
Flemings, the latter took and burned Therouanne, overran Artois, and
laid siege to Tournai. Amadeus of Savoy, unable to overcome the Flemings
by arms, recommended Philip to do so by treaty, and the King accordingly
concluded a pacification, one condition of which was that the Count of
Flanders should be released from prison to negotiate terms of fresh
accommodation. The Flemings received the aged Count with respect; but he
brought no terms which they were willing to accept; and he returned, as
he had pledged his word, to captivity at Compiègne, where he soon after
died.
For the campaign of the following year Philip, in lieu of Italian
infantry, took sixteen Genoese galleys into his pay, commanded by
Rainier de Grimaldi. This admiral passed through the Straits of
Gibraltar and assailed the maritime towns and shipping of Flanders. Guy
of Namur mustered to oppose them a fleet of greater numbers; but the
Genoese, accustomed to naval warfare, defeated the Flemings and took Guy
of Namur prisoner. Philip, at the same time, assembled a large army at
Tournai, and marched to Mons-la-Puelle, near Lille, where the Flemings,
to the number of seventy thousand, were encamped within a
circumvallation of cars and chariots. There was no Robert of Artois on
this occasion to precipitate a rash onslaught, and by Philip's order the
southern light troops harassed the Flemings all day with arrows and
missiles, allowing them no repose. Toward the evening many of the
French withdrew to refresh themselves and take off their armor; the King
himself was of this number; the Flemings, perceiving this slackness, and
divining the cause, poured forth from their encampment in three
divisions, which at first drove all before them, and reached as far as
the King's tent, then in full preparation for supper. The monarch
himself, without armor or helmet, was fortunately not recognized; his
secretary, De Boville, and two Parisians of the name of Gentien, whom
Philip had always about his person, were slain before his eyes. The King
withdrew, but it was to arm, mount on horseback, and cry out to his
followers to stand their ground. He himself, says Villani, "one of the
strongest and best made men of his time," fought valiantly until his
brother Charles and most of the barons, recovering from the first panic,
came to his rescue, and the Flemings were finally repulsed and put to
the rout. William of Juliers fell on the side of the Flemings; the son
of the Duke of Burgundy and many others on that of the French. Philip
immediately laid siege to Lille, deeming the Flemings totally
discomfited. They had, however, rallied, obtained reënforcements at
Bruges and at Ghent, and in three weeks appeared to the number of fifty
thousand before the King's camp at Lille, crying for battle. Philip
called a council, and observed that "even a victory would be dearly
purchased over a party so desperate."
The Duke of Brabant and the Count of Savoy therefore undertook to
negotiate with the Flemings, and Philip consented to grant them fair
terms. He recognized their independent rights, agreed to liberate
Robert, eldest son of Guido, Count of Flanders, as well as all those in
captivity. He granted Robert and his son the fiefs which belonged to him
in France, especially that of Nevers, and promised to give him
investiture of the County of Flanders. The Flemings, on their side,
consented to pay two hundred thousand livres, and to leave the King of
France in possession of the three towns of Lille, Douai, and Béthune,
that part of Flanders in which French was spoken. It was thus, at least,
that the French interpreted the treaty, while the Flemings afterward
alleged that French Flanders was merely a pledge for the payment of the
money, not an alienation to the crown of France.
FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY
A.D. 1308
F. GRENFELL BAKER
Owing to the fact that the house of Hapsburg had its origin
in Switzerland, the accession of Rudolph I, founder of the
Hapsburg dynasty, to the throne of Germany (1273), with the
virtual headship of the Holy Roman Empire, was an event of
great importance in the history of the Swiss cantons. To
this day the paternal domains whence the Hapsburg family
takes its name are a part of Swiss territory. The local
administration, as well as such imperial offices as still
remained in the free communities of Switzerland, were
largely in the hands of this family long before it gave
sovereigns to the empire itself. Its chiefs were the chosen
champions or advocates of the district.
Of the Swiss communities Uri seems to have first established
its freedom within the empire, and in that canton liberty
was most completely preserved from the perils that always
threatened Switzerland in this period. Under Rudolph it was
at first the policy of the empire to secure the attachment
of the Swiss by making the two other cantons, Schwyz and
Unterwalden, similarly independent. But toward the end of
his reign the policy of Rudolph was so influenced by
ambition for territorial expansion that the Swiss began to
feel an encroachment upon their independence. In 1291, the
year of Rudolph's death, the three cantons, fearing danger
to their interests in the new settlement of the crown,
formed a league for mutual protection and coöperation. The
very parchment on which the terms of this union were written
"has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence
of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The
formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first
combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in
defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and
legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, are
romantically blended.
The empire passed out of the Hapsburg control when Rudolph
died, but the family again got possession of it in 1298,
when Rudolph's son Albert was elected German king. In the
following account the relations of Switzerland and Austria,
under the renewed Hapsburg sovereignty, are circumstantially
set forth.
There can be little doubt that most of the many stories related by the
Swiss of the cruelty and extortion of the Austrian bailies are wholly or
in great part devoid of a historical basis of truth, as are the dates
given for their occurrence. They doubtless sprang from the very natural
feelings of hatred the mountaineers of the Forest State felt against a
foreign master, who was probably only too ready to punish them for the
part they took against him in the struggle for the imperial throne.
Indeed, it was not till about two centuries after this period that any
reference to the alleged cruelties of the Austrians can be found in the
local records, though legends about them have been plentiful.
Many and various are the stories that have come down to our times of the
oppression and licentiousness of the bailies, most of which have
probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not
wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According
to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for
trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be
tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and
imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless
manner; they openly violated the liberties of the people, and chose
every occasion to insult and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of
their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly
reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another
occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of
Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's
messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost
his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a
plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this
insult Henry's son Arnold responded by attacking the messenger and
breaking his fingers, and then, fearing lest his act should bring down
some serious punishment, fled to the mountains, and left his aged father
to Landenburg's vengeance. The bailie confiscated his little property,
imposed a heavy fine, and finally burned out both his eyes.
The hot irons used in this barbarous punishment, the Swiss are fond of
saying, went deeper than the tyrant intended, and penetrated to the
hearts and aroused the sympathies of their ancestors to perform such
acts of heroism that tyranny fled in fear from the land. The conduct of
Arnold, however, can hardly at this period of his life warrant the
eulogies bestowed upon his memory, though he subsequently figures as one
of the "Men of Ruetli."
Landenburg lived in a castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden, where his
imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his debaucheries
aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the peasants, that
culminated in his expulsion and the destruction of his stronghold. The
latter is popularly believed to have occurred on January 1, 1308. As the
bailie left his castle to attend mass, some forty determined peasants,
who had already bound themselves by oath to free their country at a
solemn meeting on the steep promontory over the Lake of Lucerne known as
the Ruetli, appeared before him carrying sheep, fowls, and other
customary presents, and thus gained admission to the castle. No sooner
were they past the gates than, drawing the weapons they had till then
concealed beneath their clothes, they disarmed the guard and took
possession of the fortress. Other conspirators were admitted, and the
people at once rose in revolt. Landenburg, hearing while still at church
of what had occurred, managed to effect his escape, and fled to Lucerne.
Of the other bailies, Gessler and Wolfenschiess are believed to have
excited even more hatred than their colleague Landenburg, and to have
exceeded him in acts of savage cruelty and vicious living.
One example out of many similar ones will show the spirit in which the
Swiss traditions have treated the memory of Wolfenschiess. On a certain
day, finding that a peasant named Conrad, of Baumgarten, whose wife he
had frequently tried in vain to seduce, was absent from home,
Wolfenschiess entered Conrad's house and ordered his wife to prepare him
a bath, at the same time renewing with ardor his former proposals. With
the cunning of her sex, the wife feigned to be willing to accede to his
wishes, and on the pretence of retiring to another room to undress sped
to her husband, who quickly returned and slew Wolfenschiess while he was
still in the bath. After this exploit an entrance was effected into the
bailies' castle of Rotzberg by one of the conspirators, who was in the
habit of paying nightly visits to a servant living in the castle, by
means of a rope attached to her window, and who then admitted his
companions, who were lying concealed in the moat.
But, probably in consequence of his supposed connection with the legend
of William Tell, the bailie to whom the name of Gessler has been given
stands out more prominently in Swiss history than any other. Gessler's
residence, according to tradition, was a strongly fortified castle built
in the valley of Uri, near Altorf, and this he named Zwing Uri ("Uri's
Restraint"). He used every means that cruelty or avarice could suggest
in his conduct as governor, and incurred additional hatred from the
methods he adopted to discover the members of a secret conspiracy he
believed existed against him in the district. With this object in view,
Gessler caused a pole, surmounted with the ducal cap of Austria, to be
set up in the market-place at Altorf, before which emblem of authority
he ordered every man to uncover and do reverence as he passed. The
refusal of a peasant to obey this command, his arrest, trial, and
condemnation to pierce with an arrow an apple placed on his own child's
head, his dexterity in performing this feat, his escape from his
enemies, his murder of the tyrant Gessler, the solemn compact sworn at
Ruetli, and the revolutionary events that followed form the motive of
the much-celebrated legend of William Tell.
The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his
person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and
the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name
has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse
by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a
noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular
act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque
representative of liberty has done much to mould the political life, if
not also to write many pages of the history of the people, and that in
spite of the questionable morality of the received narrative of his
career, and its unquestionable untruth. The emergence of the Swiss from
slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly
a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the
narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to
have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies
from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a
possible substratum of actual fact.
It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the
illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge
of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When,
however, the naked truth can be discovered--and that is seldom the
case--it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot
receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of
the former, not with the material of the latter.
As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical
foundation, and is more widely known and believed than are the many
others related as the records of events happening at the period from
which the Swiss date their independence, it may be as well to devote
some little space to its consideration. All the local records that might
possibly throw some light on the existence and career of Tell have now
been thoroughly searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as
well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that, till
a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their deaths,
not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending to prove the
identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant Gessler. On the other
hand, many local authorities, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, when the story was fully established, have gone
out of their way to deny its truth and prove its entire falsity from
their own researches. Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events
that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies,
whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the
highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken
so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly
assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all
contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and
fifty or two hundred years--yet such is the case.
William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds in or about
the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474 are his acts recorded,
when in a collection of the traditions of the Canton of Unterwalden,
transcribed by a notary at Sarnen, an account is given of the apple
episode and the subsequent escape of the famous archer, and his murder
of Gessler, though nothing is said of his having taken part in a league
to free his country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A
little prior to the compilation of the _White Book of Sarnen_, as this
collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a _Song of the Origin
of the Confederation_, in which, although no reference is made to
Gessler, the other details are related concerning William Tell shooting
at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the expulsion of the bailies,
and the formation of a patriotic league. It is, of course, quite
possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was
common enough at the time, but no member of that family--the records of
which have now been most carefully traced--held any office under the
Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all
probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231.
Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the
castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been
pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated
Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly
not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss
hero.
"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious case of
confusion in identity. At least three totally different men seem to have
been blended into one in the course of an attempt to reconcile the
different versions of the three cantons. Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in
1450, tells of a Hapsburg governor being on the little island of
Schwanan, in the lake of Lowerz, who seduced a maid of Schwyz, and was
killed by her brothers. Then there was another person, strictly
historical, Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for
the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his
district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant
bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler,
writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These
three persons were combined, and the result was named Gessler."
Moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether the green plateau of the
Ruetli below Seelisberg, and some six hundred and fifty feet above the
lake, with its miraculous springs, ever witnessed the patriotic
gathering of the thirty-three peasants who, tradition asserts, there
formed the league against Austrian rule, or heard the solemn oath they
and their leaders, Stauffacher, Fuerst, and Arnold, mutually swore.
In all probability the legend of Tell and the apple originated in
Scandinavia, and was brought by the Alemanni into Switzerland; as into
other lands. Saxo Grammaticus, in the _Withina Saga_, places the scene
of a very similar story in that country, some three hundred years before
the appearance of the Swiss version, and tells of a certain Danish king
named Harold, the counterpart of Gessler, and one Toki, who played the
same _rôle_ enacted by Tell. Like legends are also related of Olaf,
Eindridi, and an almost identical one to that of William Tell of Egil,
who, being ordered by King Nidung to shoot an apple off the head of the
son of the former, took two arrows from his quiver and prepared to obey.
On the King asking why he had selected two arrows, Egil replied, "To
shoot thee, tyrant, with the second, should the first fail."
Neither are similar narratives absent from the legends of other
countries. Thus Reginald Scott says: "Puncher shot a penny on his son's
head, and made ready another arrow to have slain the Duke of Rengrave,
who commanded it." So also similar incidents occur in the tales of Adam
Bell, _Clym of the Clough_, and William of Claudeslie in the _Percy
Ballads_, and in the legends of many places in Northern Europe. On this
subject Sir Francis Adams mentions, in a note to his valuable book on
the Swiss Confederation, that a well-known citizen of Berne, in answer
to his inquiry as to whether Tell ever existed, replied: "Not in
Switzerland. If you travel in the Hasli districts you will find a
distinct race of men, who are of Scandinavian origin, and I believe that
their ancestors brought the legend with them." To this it may be added
that philologists have long since traced the rude dialect of Oberhasli
to its Scandinavian sources, and the physical characteristics of the
people mark them as of different racial origin from those around them.
At the period these events were in progress, or, rather, about the time
that the Austrian bailies were expelled, toward the close of the
thirteenth century, the Emperor's[45] attention was too fully occupied
conducting a war against the Bishop of Basel to allow him to enforce
his authority among the revolted Waldstaette. He did not, however, allow
the peasants for long to enjoy the fruits of their energetic and
successful action, as some six months later he headed a large army with
which he intended to enforce obedience. The expedition thus begun led to
Albert's tragic death, and reared another step leading to the final
independence of the Swiss. On reaching Baden, in the Aargau, a halt was
made in order to deliberate on the best mode of punishing the rebels.
Here a general council of nobles decided, after careful deliberation, on
the route to be taken, and the nature of the measures best calculated to
enforce Albert's authority. On May 1, 1308, the Emperor, with a few
followers, returned to Rheinfelden, in order to visit the Empress
Elizabeth, preparatory to marching against the Waldstaette. Shortly
before this time Albert had had a violent quarrel with his nephew John,
son of Duke Rudolph of Swabia, touching the youth's paternal
inheritance, which he persistently declined to allow John to take
possession of, and whom he had, moreover, publicly insulted by offering
him a coronet of twigs as the only recompense for his just claims.
In spite of this quarrel Albert allowed John and four of his fastest
friends to occupy a place in his suite when he left Baden to visit his
consort. Albert's disregard of his nephew's resentment was further shown
when the party arrived on the bank of the Reuss, as he allowed him, with
his friends, to accompany him in the boat in which he crossed the river.
The passage was made in safety, but just as the Emperor was stepping on
shore near the town of Windisch, John and three of his companions struck
him down with their swords, and after inflicting a number of severe
wounds left him for dead. The unhappy monarch expired a few minutes
after in the arms of a passing peasant woman. All this bloody scene took
place in full view of the Emperor's train on the opposite side of the
river, though no one apparently was able to render him assistance,
probably from the absence of boats and the suddenness of the tragedy.
The murderers succeeded in making good their escape, though two of them
were afterward captured and executed, as were also a number of innocent
people believed to be participators in the conspiracy. John himself was
more fortunate, for, disguised as a monk, he managed for many years to
hide his identity, and, after wandering in Tuscany unsuspected,
eventually died in a monastery at Pisa.
Albert's daughter Agnes, Queen of Hungary, "a woman unacquainted with
the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of
devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable
vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to
have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and
revenge. Aided by those in authority, who feared lest a widespread
conspiracy had been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion,
hundreds of innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity
of a famished beast. Members of nearly a hundred noble families, and at
least a thousand persons of lower rank, of every age and of both sexes,
fell beneath her savage vengeance. She is said to have further whetted
her appetite for horrors by wading, at Fahrwangen, in the blood of
sixty-three innocent knights, exclaiming the while, "This day we bathe
in May-dew." But at last, after several months, even the implacable
bloodthirstiness of the Hungarian Queen was satisfied, and the massacre
ceased. Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a
monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of
her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life,
and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and
here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried.
Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and
within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house of
Austria.
Strenuous efforts were made by Albert's widow to obtain the succession
to the imperial throne for her son, Frederick, Duke of Austria, but the
choice of the prince-electors, headed by the Archbishop of Mainz, fell
on Count Henry of Luxemburg, a liberal-minded and generous noble, who
was accordingly crowned, under the title of Henry VII. During the short
reign of this monarch he proved himself a wise and generous friend to
the Swiss, whose privileges he confirmed. He made no effort to reimpose
local governors on the people of the Waldstaette, but, on the contrary,
confirmed the charters of Schwyz and Uri, granted one to Unterwalden,
and acknowledged jurisdiction. After Henry's death, in 1313, civil war
once more divided the empire through the rival contentions of Ludwig
(Louis) of Bavaria and Albert's son, Frederick of Austria. In this
contest the powerful monastery of Einsiedeln sided with the Austrian
candidate, and through its influence induced the Bishop of Constance to
place the large portion of Switzerland supporting the Bavarian cause
under a sentence of excommunication.
Between Einsiedeln and the Waldstaette there had long existed a feeling
of bitter hostility, the canons resenting the independent spirit
displayed by the peasants, and the latter remembering the many acts of
arbitrary oppression they and their ancestors had suffered at the
instance of the abbey. Indeed, actual hostilities were only prevented by
the friendly, though interested, mediation of the citizens of Zurich,
who were most anxious to preserve tranquillity in the territories of
both, in order to allow their trade with Italy over the St. Gothard
being carried on. They also favored peace, because since the Hapsburgs
had refused permission to the peasants to enter Lucerne, these had been
in the habit of bringing their cattle and dairy produce through
Einsiedeln to the monks of Zurich. The action of the monks, however, in
bringing about the serious sentence of excommunication so roused the
spirit of the mountaineers that, headed by their Landammann, Werner
Stauffacher, they attacked and captured the abbey, ransacked the whole
building from cellar to altar, and carried off the monks captive to the
town of Schwyz. This daring and sacrilegious act led Frederick--the
hereditary avoyer of the abbey--to place the Waldstaette under the
further punishment of the "ban of the empire." Both these sentences were
alike fruitless in bringing the peasants to submission to the house of
Austria. Shortly after, on Ludwig ascending the throne, the "ban" was
removed by the new monarch, and, with the aid of the Archbishop of
Mainz, the Metropolitan of Constance in 1315, the excommunication was
also revoked.
The triumph of Ludwig's claims over those of Frederick began that long
series of deadly conflicts between the Swiss and the house of Austria
that led the two nations for so many years to regard each other as
natural and implacable enemies. At this time Austria was governed by
Duke Leopold, a man of arrogant, passionate temper, of unscrupulous
ambition, and brutal cruelty, according to the Swiss chronicles, but
who, from other accounts, does not appear specially to have deserved
this character. His hatred of the Swiss was greatly increased by their
action in opposing his brother, Frederick, in the late contest. No
sooner, indeed, were the troubles of that contest over than he prepared
to wreak his vengeance, and once for all crush the power and
independence of the Forest States, and, as he declared, "trample the
audacious rustics under his feet."
Rapidly collecting his forces, Leopold soon found himself at the head of
fifteen thousand or twenty thousand well-armed men, including a large
body of heavily equipped cavalry. These latter were then looked upon as
the main strength of an army. Most of the ancient nobility of Hapsburg,
Kyburg, and Lenzburg rallied to his banners, besides many of the lesser
nobles and a contingent from Zurich, the citizens of which, deserting
their natural allies, had formed a treaty with Austria. Against this
formidable array the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden were only able
to muster some fourteen hundred men, who, however, made up for their
want of weapons and discipline by the geographical advantages of the
country, by their patriotism, unity, and determined bravery.
Nothing now seemed to intervene between the Swiss and imminent
destruction, when, viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days,
the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of
Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms,
however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing
came of these proposals.
On November 3, 1315, Leopold's army reached Baden, where a council was
held to determine upon the details of the campaign, a campaign having
for its object, as the Duke openly declared, "the extirpation of the
whole race of the people of Waldstaette." The difficulties of the
enterprise now began to show themselves, as several of Leopold's
followers, being well acquainted with the nature of the country and the
characters of the inhabitants, pointed out that both would offer a
determined resistance. Finally, relying upon their numbers and superior
arms, it was settled to march on Schwyz, through the Sattel Pass by
Morgarten, making Zug the base of operations; and while a false attack
should be threatened on the side of Arth, Unterwalden should be attacked
from Lucerne, as well as by a large force under the Count of Strasburg
by way of the Bruenig. Leopold himself was to lead the main army and
enter Schwyz through the pass. Had these operations remained secret, or
been carried out successfully, the course of Swiss history would
probably have been very different from what it was; but fortunately for
the cause of freedom, the Austrian plans became known in time, and
failed signally when put to the test. According to ancient chronicles,
as the Confederates were hurrying to repel the feint from Arth, a
friendly Austrian baron, named Henry of Huenenberg, shot an arrow amid
them bearing the message, "Guard Morgarten on the eve of St. Othmar." Be
this as it may, the Swiss collected their little band on the Sattel,
between which mountain and the eastern shore of the Lake of Egeri is
situated the ever-memorable Pass of Morgarten. Here, on the night of
November 14th, they collected a number of loose bowlders and
tree-trunks, and then, having offered up prayers for the preservation of
their country, they awaited with resolution the coming struggle.
With the first dawn of morning the Austrian army--the first that ever
entered the country--made its appearance in the pass, headed by Duke
Leopold and his formidable cavalry. Suddenly, when the whole narrow
defile was blocked with horse and foot, thousands of heavy stones and
trees were hurled among them from the neighboring heights, where the
peasant band, forming the Swiss force, lay concealed. The suddenness and
vigor of this unexpected attack quickly threw the first ranks of the
invaders into confusion, and caused a panic to seize the horses, many of
which in their fright turned and trampled down the men behind. Rapidly
the panic increased as the showers of missiles came tearing down, and
soon the whole army was in a state of wild terror and confusion--a
condition greatly assisted by the slippery nature of the ground. Then,
with wild shouts, and brandishing their iron-studded clubs and their
formidable halberts and scythes, down the mountain-side rushed, with the
fury of their native avalanche, the heroic Confederates; and falling on
their foes literally slew them by thousands. Many hundreds of the
Austrians perished in the lake, the men of Zurich alone making a stand,
and falling each where he fought. Few succeeded in effecting their
escape from what was little less than a general butchery.
On that memorable day all the flower of Austria's nobility lay dead
within the country they had hoped so easily to conquer. The Duke, with a
handful of followers, alone survived, and even these were forced to
undergo many perils before they eventually arrived in safety at
Winterthur. Neither were the other attacks, under the Count of Strasburg
and the forces from Lucerne, more successful for the invaders. Both
armies were repulsed with enormous loss by the men of Unterwalden, who
gave no quarter, many of their opponents being their own countrymen from
the estates of the abbey of Interlaken. After these signal victories the
Swiss, according to ancient custom, offered up a solemn thanksgiving to
almighty God for their success and the overthrow of their enemies; and
then, having laden themselves with the spoils of the dead, they returned
to their humble occupations, whence the defence of their country and
their lives had called them away. Among the Swiss, Morgarten has always
taken the first place in the long record of heroic victories that since
1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms second to none in Europe. This
victory at once brought the Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and
placed them in the front rank as powerful and respected states in
Switzerland.
Leopold, on his return to Austria, was so satisfied with the ability of
the "audacious rustics" to defend themselves that he made no further
attempt to enter their country.
BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN
A.D. 1314
ANDREW LANG
After the submission of Scotland in 1303, at the end of
Wallace's heroic struggle, Edward I undertook to complete
the union of that kingdom with England. "But the great
difficulty," says a historian, "in dealing with the Scots
was that they never knew when they were conquered; and just
when Edward hoped that his scheme for union was carried out,
they rose in arms once more."
The Scottish leader now was Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale
and Earl of Carrick. He had acted with Wallace, but
afterward swore fealty to Edward. Still later he united with
William Lamberton, Bishop of St. Andrews, against the
English King. Edward heard of their compact while Bruce was
in London, and the Scot fled to Dumfries. There, 1306, in
the Church of the Gray Friars, he had an interview with John
Comyn, called the Red Comyn--Bruce's rival for the Scottish
throne--which ended in a violent altercation and the killing
of Comyn by Bruce with a dagger. Next to the Baliols, Bruce
was now nearest heir to the throne, and March 27, 1306, he
was crowned.
Edward now determined to take more vigorous measures than
ever against the Scots. He denounced as traitors all who had
participated in the murder of Comyn, and declared that all
persons taken in arms would be put to death. He made great
preparations for subduing Scotland, but while leading his
army into that country, 1307, he died at Burgh-on-the-Sands,
near Carlisle.
Meanwhile Bruce, who ranks with Wallace as a Scottish hero,
had suffered some reverses at the hands of the English.
Under the Earl of Pembroke, in 1306, they took Perth and
drove Bruce into the wilds of Athol. In the same year, at
Dairy, Bruce was defeated by Comyn's uncle, Macdougal, Lord
of Lorn, and escaped to Ireland. But in 1307 Bruce returned
to Scotland and carried on the war against Edward II. The
English were driven out of the strong places one by one; war
alternated with diplomacy through several years; and at last
came a crisis which roused the English government to a
supreme effort.
Stirling castle still held out, besieged by Edward Bruce,
Robert's brother, 1313, but its surrender was promised by
Mowbray, the governor, in the event of his not being
relieved before June 24, 1314. The relieving of Stirling
meant for the English a new invasion of Scotland. On both
sides the strongest efforts were made--on the one side to
relieve the castle, on the other to strengthen its
besiegers. The opposing forces met in battle at
Bannockburn, June 24, 1314, an action which has never been
better described than in this characteristic recital by
Professor Lang.
Bannockburn, like the relief of Orleans, or Marathon, was one of the
decisive battles of the world. History hinged upon it. If England had
won, Scotland might have dwindled into the condition of Ireland--for
Edward II was not likely to aim at a statesmanlike policy of union, in
his father's manner. Could Scotland have accepted union at the first
Edward's hands; could he have refrained from his mistreatment as we must
think it of Baliol, the fortunes of the isle of Britain might have been
happier. But had Scotland been trodden down at Bannockburn, the fortunes
of the isle might well have been worse.
The singular and certain fact is that Bannockburn was fought on a point
of chivalry, on a rule in a game. England must "touch bar," relieve
Stirling, as in some child's pastime. To the securing of the castle, the
central gate of Scotland, north and south, England put forth her full
strength. Bruce had no choice but to concentrate all the power of a now,
at last, united realm, and stand just where he did stand. His enemies
knew his purpose: by May 27th writs informed England that the Scots were
gathering on heights and morasses inaccessible to cavalry. If ever
Edward showed energy, it was in preparing for the appointed Midsummer
Day of 1314. The _Rotuli Scotiæ_ contain several pages of his demands
for men, horses, wines, hay, grain, provisions, and ships. Endless
letters were sent to master mariners and magistrates of towns. The King
appealed to his beloved Irish chiefs, O'Donnells, O'Flyns, O'Hanlens,
MacMahons, M'Carthys, Kellys, O'Reillys, and O'Briens, and to _Hiberniæ
Magnates, Anglico genere ortos_, Butlers, Blounts, De Lacys, Powers, and
Russels. John of Argyll was made admiral of the western fleet, and was
asked to conciliate the Islesmen, who, under Angus Og, were rallying to
Bruce. The numbers of men engaged on either side in this war cannot be
ascertained. Each kingdom had a year within which to muster and arm.
"Then all that worthy were to fight
Of Scotland, set all hale their might;"
while Barbour makes Edward assemble not only
"His own chivalry
That was so great it was ferly,"
but also knights of France and Hainault, Bretagne and Gascony, Wales,
Ireland, and Aquitaine. The whole English force is said to have exceeded
one hundred thousand, forty thousand of whom were cavalry, including
three thousand horses "barded from counter to tail," armed against
stroke of sword or point of spear. The baggage train was endless,
bearing tents, harness, "and apparel of chamber and hall," wine, wax,
and all the luxuries of Edward's manner of campaigning, including
_animalia_, perhaps lions. Thus the English advanced from Berwick,
"Banners rightly fairly flaming,
And pencels to the wind waving."
On June 23d Bruce heard that the English host had streamed out of
Edinburgh, where the dismantled castle was no safe hold, and were
advancing on Falkirk. Bruce had summoned Scotland to tryst in Torwood,
whence he could retreat at pleasure, if, after all, retreat he must. The
Fiery Cross, red with blood of a sacrificed goat, must have flown
through the whole of the Celticland. Lanarkshire, Douglasdale, and
Ettrick Forest were mustered under the banner of Douglas, the mullets
not yet enriched with the royal heart. The men of Moray followed their
new earl, Randolph, the adventurous knight who scaled the rock of the
castle of the Maidens. Renfrewshire, Bute, and Ayr were under the _fesse
chequy_ of young Walter Stewart. Bruce had gathered his own Carrick men,
and Angus Og led the wild levies of the Isles. Of stout spearmen and
fleet-footed clansmen Bruce had abundance; but what were his archers to
the archers of England, or his five hundred horse under Keith the
mareschal, to the rival knights of England, Hainault, Guienne, and
Almayne?
Battles, however, are won by heads, as well as by hearts and hands. The
victor of Glen Trool and Cruachen and London Hill knew every move in the
game, while Randolph and Douglas were experts in making one man do the
work of five. Bruce, too, had choice of ground, and the ground suited
him well.
To reach Stirling the English must advance by their left, along the
so-called German way, through the village of St. Nian's, or by their
right, through the Carse, partly enclosed, and much broken, in drainless
days, by reedy lochans. Bruce did not make his final dispositions till
he learned that the English meant to march by the former route. He then
chose ground where his front was defended, first by the little burn of
Bannock, which at one point winds through a cleugh with steep banks, and
next by two morasses, Halbert's bog and Milton bog. What is now arable
ground may have been a loch in old days, and these two marshes were then
impassable by a column of attack.
Between Charter's Hall--where Edward had his head-quarters--and Park's
Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in
scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land.
By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These
approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and
even by caltrops to maim the horses. He determined to fight on foot, the
wooded country being difficult for horsemen, and the foe being
infinitely superior in cavalry. His army was arranged in four "battles,"
with Randolph to lead the vaward and watch against any attempt to throw
cavalry into Stirling. Edward Bruce commanded the division on the right,
next the Torwood. Walter Stewart, a lad, with Douglas led the third
division. Bruce himself and Angus Og, with the men of Carrick and the
Celts, were in the rear. Bruce had no mind to take the offensive, and as
at the Battle of the Standard, to open the fight with a charge of
impetuous mountaineers. On Sunday morning mass was said, and men shrived
them.
"They thought to die in the mêlée,
Or else to set their country free."
They ate but bread and water, for it was the vigil of St. John. News
came that the English had moved out of Falkirk, and Douglas and the
Steward brought tidings of the great and splendid host that was rolling
north. Bruce bade them make little of it in the hearing of the army.
Meanwhile Philip de Mowbray, who commanded in Stirling, had ridden
forth to meet and counsel Edward. His advice was to come no nearer;
perhaps a technical relief was held to have already been secured by the
presence of the army.
Mowbray was not heard--"the young men" would not listen. Gloucester,
with the van, entered the park, where he was met, as we shall see, and
Clifford, Beaumont, and Sir Thomas Grey, with three hundred horsemen,
skirted the wood where Randolph was posted, a clear way lying before
them to the castle of Stirling. Bruce had seen this movement, and told
Randolph that "a rose of his chaplet was fallen," the phrase attesting
the King's love of chivalrous romance. To pursue horsemen with infantry
seemed vain enough; but Randolph moved out of cover, thinking perhaps
that knights adventurous would refuse no chance to fight. If this was
his thought, he reckoned well. Beaumont cried to his knights, "Give
ground, leave them fair field." Grey hinted that the Scots were in too
great force, and Beaumont answered, "If you fear, fly!" "Sir," said Sir
Thomas, "for fear I fly not this day!" and so spurred in between
Beaumont and D'Eyncourt and galloped on the spears. D'Eyncourt was
slain, Grey was unhorsed and taken. The three hundred lances of Beaumont
then circled Randolph's spearmen round about on every side, but the
spears kept back the horses. Swords, maces, and knives were thrown; all
was done as by the French cavalry against the British squares at
Waterloo, and all as vainly. The hedge of steel was unbroken, and, in
the hot sun of June, a mist of dust and heat brooded over the battle.
"Sic mirkness
In the air above them was"
as when the sons of Thetis and the Dawn fought under the walls of windy
Troy. Douglas beheld the distant cloud, and rode to Bruce, imploring
leave to hurry to Randolph's aid. "I will not break my ranks for him,"
said Bruce; yet Douglas had his will. But the English wavered, seeing
his line advance, and thereon Douglas halted his men, lest Randolph
should lose renown. Beholding this the spearmen of Randolph, in their
turn, charged and drove the weary English horse and their disheartened
riders.
Meanwhile Edward had halted his main force to consider whether they
should fight or rest. But Gloucester's party, knowing nothing of his
halt, had advanced into the wooded park; and Bruce rode down to the
right in his armor, and with a gold coronal on his basnet, but mounted
on a mere palfrey. To the front of the English van, under Gloucester and
Hereford, rode Sir Henry Bohun, a bow-shot beyond his company.
Recognizing the King, who was arraying his ranks, Bohun sped down upon
him, apparently hoping to take him.
"He thought that he should dwell lightly,
Win him, and have him at his will."
But Bruce, in this fatal movement, when history hung on his hand and
eye, uprose in his stirrups and clove Bohun's helmet, the axe breaking
in that stroke. It was a desperate but a winning blow: Bruce's spears
advanced, and the English van withdrew in half superstitious fear of the
omen. His lords blamed Bruce, but
"The King has answer made them none,
But turned upon the axe-shaft, wha
Was with the stroke broken in twa."
"_Initium malorum hoc_" ("This was the beginning of evil"), says the
English chronicler.
After this double success in the Quatre Bras of the Scottish Waterloo,
Bruce, according to Barbour, offered to his men their choice of
withdrawal or of standing it out. The great general might well be of
doubtful mind--was to-morrow to bring a second and a more fatal Falkirk?
The army of Scotland was protected, as Wallace's army at Falkirk had
been, by difficult ground. But the English archers might again rain
their blinding showers of shafts into the broad mark offered by the
clumps of spears, and again the English knights might break through the
shaken ranks. Bruce had but a few squadrons of horse--could they be
trusted to scatter the bowmen of the English forests, and to escape a
flank charge from the far heavier cavalry of Edward? On the whole, was
not the old strategy best, the strategy of retreat? So Bruce may have
pondered. He had brought his men to the ring, and they voted for
dancing. Meanwhile the English rested on a marshy plain
"_outre_-Bannockburn" in sore discomfiture, says Gray. He must mean south
of Bannockburn, taking the point of view of his father, at that hour
captive in Bruce's camp. He tells us that the Scots meant to retire
"into the Lennox, a right strong country"--this confirms, in a way,
Barbour's tale of Bruce suggesting retreat--when Sir Alexander Seton,
deserting Edward's camp, advised Bruce of the English lack of spirit,
and bade him face the foe next day. To retire, indeed, was Bruce's, as
it had been Wallace's, natural policy. The English would soon be
distressed for want of supplies; on the other hand, they had clearly
made no arrangements for an orderly retreat if they lost the day; with
Bruce this was a motive for fighting them. The advice of Seton
prevailed; the Scots would stand their ground.
The sun of Midsummer Day rose on the rite of the mass done in front of
the Scottish lines. Men breakfasted, and Bruce knighted Douglas, the
Steward, and other of his nobles. The host then moved out of the wood,
and the standards rose above the spears of the soldiers. Edward Bruce
held the right wing; Randolph the centre; the left, under Douglas and
the Steward, rested of St. Ninian's. Bruce, as he had arranged, was in
reserve with Carrick and the Isles. "Will these men fight?" asked
Edward, and Sir Ingram assured him that such was their intent. He
advised that the English should make a feigned retreat, when the Scots
would certainly break their ranks--
"Then prick we on them hardily."
Edward rejected his old ruse, which probably would not have beguiled the
Scottish leader. The Scots then knelt for a moment of prayer, as the
Abbot of Inchafray bore the crucifix along the line; but they did not
kneel to Edward. His van, under Gloucester, fell on Edward Bruce's
division, where there was hand-to-hand fighting, broken lances, dying
chargers, the rear ranks of Gloucester pressing vainly on the front
ranks, unable to deploy for the straitness of the ground.
Meanwhile, Randolph's men moved forward slowly with extended spears, "as
they were plunged in the sea" of charging knights. Douglas and the
Steward were also engaged, and the "hideous shower" of arrows was ever
raining from the bows of England. This must have been the crisis of the
fight, according to Barbour, and Bruce bade Keith with his five hundred
horse charge the English archers on the flank. The bowmen do not seem to
have been defended by pikes; they fell beneath the lances of the
mareschal, as the archers of Ettrick had fallen at Falkirk. The Scottish
archers now took heart, and loosed into the crowded and reeling ranks of
England, while the flying bowmen of the south clashed against and
confused the English charge. Then Scottish archers took to their steel
sparths--who ever loved to come to hand strokes--and hewed into the mass
of the English, so that the field, whither Bruce brought up his reserves
to support Edward Bruce on the right, was a mass of wild, confused
fighting. In this mellay the great body of the English army could deal
no stroke, swaying helplessly as southern knights or northern spears won
some feet of ground. So, in the space between Halbert's bog and the
burn, the mellay rang and wavered, the long spears of the Scottish ranks
unbroken and pushing forward, the ground before them so covered with
fallen men and horses that the English advance was clogged and crushed
between the resistance in front and the pressure behind.
"God will have a stroke in every fight," says the romance of Malory.
While the discipline was lost, and England was trusting to sheer weight
and "who will pound longest," a fresh force, banners displayed, was seen
rushing down the Gillies' Hill, beyond the Scottish right. The English
could deem no less than that this multitude were tardy levies from
beyond the Spey, above all when the slogans rang out from the fresh
advancing host. It was a body of yeomen, shepherds, and camp-followers,
who could no longer remain and gaze when fighting and plunder were in
sight. With blankets fastened to cut saplings for banner-poles, they ran
down to the conflict. The King saw them, and well knew that the moment
had come: he pealed his ensenye--called his battle-cry--faint hearts of
England failed; men turned, trampling through the hardy warriors who
still stood and died; the knights who rode at Edward's rein strove to
draw him toward the castle of Stirling. But now the foremost knights of
Edward Bruce's division, charging on foot, had fought their way to the
English King and laid hands on the rich trappings of his horse. Edward
cleared his way with strokes of his mace; his horse was stabbed, but a
fresh mount was found for him. Even Sir Giles de Argentine, the best
knight on ground, bade Edward fly to Stirling castle. "For me, I am not
of custom to fly," he said, "nor shall I do so now. God keep you!"
Thereon he spurred into the press, crying "Argentine!" and died among
the spears.
None held his ground for England. The burn was choked with fallen men
and horses, so that folk might pass dry-shod over it. The country people
fell on and slew. If Bruce had possessed more cavalry, not an Englishman
would have reached the Tweed. Edward, as Argentine bade him, rode to
Stirling, but Mowbray told him that there he would be but a captive
king. He spurred south, with five hundred horse, Douglas following with
sixty, so close that no Englishman might alight, but was slain or taken.
Laurence de Abernethy, with eighty horse, was riding to join the
English, but turned, and with Douglas, pursued them. Edward reached
Dunbar, whence he took boat for Berwick. In his terror he vowed to build
a college of Carmelites, students in theology. It is Oriel College
to-day, with a Scot for provost. Among those who fell on the English
side were the son of Comyn, Gloucester, Clifford, Harcourt, Courtenay,
and seven hundred other gentlemen of coat-armor were slain. Hereford
(later), with Angus, Umfraville, and Sir Thomas Grey, was among the
prisoners. Stirling, of course, surrendered.
The sun of Midsummer Day set on men wounded and weary, but victorious
and free. The task of Wallace was accomplished. To many of the
combatants not the least agreeable result of Bannockburn was the
unprecedented abundance of the booty. When campaigning Edward denied
himself nothing. His wardrobe and arms; his enormous and apparently
well-supplied array of food wagons; his ecclesiastical vestments for the
celebration of victory; his plate; his siege artillery; his military
chests, with all the jewelry of his young minion knights, fell into the
hands of the Scots. Down to Queen Mary's reign we read, in inventories,
about costly vestments "from the fight at Bannockburn." In Scotland it
rained ransoms. The _Rotuli Scotiæ_, in 1314 full of Edward's
preparation for war, in 1315 are rich in safe-conducts for men going
into Scotland to redeem prisoners. One of these, the brave Sir Marmaduke
Twenge, renowned at Stirling bridge, hid in the woods on Midsummer's
Night, and surrendered to Bruce next day. The King gave him gifts and
set him free unransomed. Indeed, the clemency of Bruce after his success
is courteously acknowledged by the English chroniclers.
This victory was due to Edward's incompetence, as well as to the
excellent dispositions and indomitable courage of Bruce, and to "the
intolerable axes" of his men. No measures had been taken by Edward to
secure a retreat. Only one rally, at "the Bloody Fauld," is reported.
The English fought widely, their measures being laid on the strength of
a confidence which, after the skirmishes of Sunday, June 23d, they no
longer entertained. They suffered what, at Agincourt, Crécy, Poitiers,
and Verneuil, their descendants were to inflict. Horses and banners, gay
armor and chivalric trappings, were set at naught by the sperthes and
spears of infantry acting on favorable ground. From the dust and reek of
that burning day of June, Scotland emerged a people, firm in a glorious
memory. Out of weakness she was made strong, being strangely led through
paths of little promise since the day when Bruce's dagger-stroke at
Dumfries closed from him the path of returning.
EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS
BURNING OF GRAND MASTER MOLAY
A.D. 1314
F. C. WOODHOUSE H. H. MILMAN
The quarrel between Philip the Fair of France and Pope
Boniface VIII, concerning the taxation of the clergy, and
the right of nomination to vacant bishoprics within the
dominions of Philip, had far-reaching effects. It led, in
1302, to the convocation of the first properly so-called
Parliament in France, to offset the actions of the Pope, who
excommunicated the King; and also to an expedition into
Italy of a small body of French troops which made the Pope
prisoner at Agnani, but were subsequently expelled with
great loss of life. The Pope was reinstated, but died
shortly afterward from brain fever; he was succeeded by
Benedict XI, whom the King of France sought to placate, but
unsuccessfully. Within nine months Benedict died, presumably
from poison, and Philip, by his intrigues, was enabled to
secure the election to the pontificate of Bertrand de Goth,
who became pope as Clement V, and was pledged to the service
of the French King.
Philip, who had obstructed the operations of commerce by
debasing the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the
state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited
by the wealth of the order of Knights Templars, and,
emboldened by his successes over the spiritual power, he now
entered upon the career of intrigue which resulted in the
destruction and plunder of the order.
The famous Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, founded in 1118
by a small band of nine French knights, sworn to protect
Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre, had become, in
almost every kingdom of the West, a powerful, wealthy,
semimilitary, semimonastic republic, governed by its own
laws, animated by the closest corporate spirit, under the
severest internal discipline, an all-pervading organization,
independent alike of the civil power and of the spiritual
hierarchy.
During two centuries as crusaders, the knights fought
valiantly and shed their blood in defence of the Sepulchre
of our Lord, earning the devout admiration of Western
Christendom, and receiving splendid endowments of lands,
castles, and riches of all kinds as contributions to the
cause of the holy wars.
But despite their valor, Mahometan persistency prevailed,
and the total expulsion of the Templars, with the rest of
the Christian establishments from Palestine, followed the
downfall of Acre in 1291.
F. C. WOODHOUSE
The loss of Palestine led indirectly to the ruin of the order of the
Templars. The record is one of the dark episodes of history, encompassed
with contradictions, full of surprises, painful to contemplate, whatever
view may be taken, whichever side espoused.
It is difficult to understand how an order of men who for nearly two
hundred years earned the thanks and praise of Christendom for their
bravery and devotion; who had shed blood like water to defend the places
dearest to all Christian hearts; who had been recruited from the noblest
families in every country in Europe, and had had princes of royal blood
in their ranks; who claimed to act upon the purest and most exalted
Christian principles; and who proved the sincerity of their professions
by their lives of self-sacrifice, and their deaths, for the cause they
had taken up; who had been honored and favored and dowered with gifts
and privileges, in gratitude for their exploits--should suddenly have
fallen into the blackest crimes. So it is no less difficult to
understand how public opinion should turn against them as it did, and
how all Europe should set itself to disgrace and despoil, to malign and
execrate, those who had so long been its favorites and its champions. It
is not easy to understand this, and it is painful to read the story in
its sad and miserable details.
But there are other pages of history that more or less correspond with
this; and there are well-known characteristics of human nature that
explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been
found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and
powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible
and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy
members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and
crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and
prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation. Then, too,
facts may be perverted, circumstances may be made to bear a meaning
that does not really belong to them, and fear and torture may force the
weak to say anything that they are required. And, finally, the evidence
and the judgment of those who have everything to gain by the
condemnation of those whom they accuse, must always be viewed with
suspicion by sober and truth-loving minds. Moreover, in judging the
Templars, we must not forget the lapse of time and the change of
circumstances that separate our age from theirs.
After the loss of Acre a chapter of the surviving Templars was gathered,
and James de Molay, preceptor of England, was elected grand master. One
more attempt was made to recover a footing in the Holy Land, but it was
defeated with great loss to the order, and all hope of restoring the
Latin kingdom in Palestine seems to have been abandoned. The occupation
of the Templars was gone. They had been banded together to fight upon
the sacred soil of Palestine, and to defend pilgrims, but now they had
been driven out of the country, and they could no longer execute their
mission or fulfil their vows. We soon hear of them being engaged in
civil or international wars, which seems to be a violation of their oath
not to draw sword upon any Christian. Thus we read of Templars fighting
on the side of the King of England, in the battle of Falkirk, 1298, and
similar occurrences are recorded in the French wars of the time. Those
against whom the Templars fought would not be slow to complain of them.
But the real cause of the downfall of the Templars was probably the
enormous wealth of the order. There had not been wanting indications for
some years of covetous eyes and itching hands turned toward the
possession of the Knights. Sometimes complaints were made because the
rents of their estates were all sent out of the country; sometimes the
grievance alleged was that they were exempted from paying taxes and
other levies, civil and ecclesiastical. Sometimes open acts of
spoliation were committed upon their property, and that even by royal
hands.
But it was in France that the final attack was made. Philip the Fair was
king at this time, a man of bad character and unscrupulous as to the
means by which he attained his ends. The country was exhausted and the
treasury empty, and the idea seems to have occurred to him, as it did
later to Henry VIII of England under similar circumstances, that an easy
way to fill his own purse was to put his hand into the purses of others.
But even kings cannot appropriate the property of a religious order
without offering some apology or justification to the world. And so it
began to be whispered that the Holy Land would never have been lost to
Christendom if its sworn defenders had not failed in their Christian
character. The whole blame of the defeat of the crusades was laid upon
the Templars. It was said they had treacherously betrayed the Christian
cause, that they had treated with the enemy, and by their personal sins,
especially by secret, unhallowed rites, had provoked the just wrath of
God, and so brought about the ruin of the dominion of the Cross in the
East.
When Ahab has determined to put Naboth to death, that he may seize his
coveted vineyard, it is not difficult to find witness that he is a
blasphemer of God and a traitor to the King; and so Philip found his
first tool in a man guilty of a multitude of crimes, who secured his own
pardon by a denunciation of the Templars.
But even a king could not ruin a great religious order without the aid
of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Templars had always been favored
and protected by the popes, and nothing was in itself so likely to evoke
that protection again as an attack upon the order by the secular powers.
But Philip was prepared for this. The Pope of the day, Clement V, had
been a subject of his own. As bishop of Bordeaux, he owed his election
to the pontificate to Philip's own intrigues, and had been easily
induced to quit Rome and live in France, so as to be more completely
under the dictation of the King. Moreover, the majority of the cardinals
were also French and entirely devoted to the King's interests.
Clement V was one of the worst of those miserable men who have from time
to time disgraced the papal chair, and was guilty of almost every crime.
There are, indeed, authorities worthy of credit who assert that before
his election he had been made to promise to perform six favors to the
King, and that the last was not to be divulged till the time for its
execution came. This last was then found to be the suppression of the
order of the Templars. There was no difficulty, under these
circumstances, in getting the so-called sanction of the Church for an
inquiry into the crimes of which the Templars were accused.
Accordingly, in 1307, Philip issued letters to his officers throughout
the kingdom, commanding them to seize all the Templars on a certain day,
that they might be tried for crimes of which he and the Pope had
satisfied themselves they were guilty. They had apostatized from the
Christian religion, worshipped idols in their secret meetings, and had
been guilty of horrible and shameful offences against God, the Church,
the State, and humanity itself. Philip professed the most pious horror
at what he had discovered; he lamented the grievous necessity laid upon
him, and urged upon the guilty men the expediency of a full and
immediate confession of their wicked doings as the only way to secure
pardon and escape the just and extreme penalty of such outrageous
wickedness.
It was during the night of October 13, 1307, that the King's orders were
executed. Every house of the Templars in the dominions of the King of
France was suddenly surrounded by a strong force, and all the Knights
and members of the order were simultaneously taken prisoners.
At the same time a strenuous endeavor was made to arouse popular
indignation against the order. The regular and secular clergy were
commanded to preach against the Templars, and to describe the horrible
enormities that were practised among them. It is incredible to us in
these days that such charges should be made, and still more that they
should actually be believed. It was said that the Templars worshipped
some hideous idol in their secret assemblies, that they offered
sacrifices to it of infants and young girls, and that although every one
saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties,
people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak
intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene
orgies.
It was hoped that some confession of guilt might be readily obtained
from some of the weaker brethren in order to receive the pardon which
was promised by the King. But no such confession was made. All the
prisoners denied the charges brought against them. Then the usual
mediæval expedient was resorted to, and torture was used to extort
acknowledgments of guilt. The unhappy Templars in Paris were handed over
to the tender mercies of the tormentors with the usual results. One
hundred and forty were subjected to trial by fire.
The details preserved are almost too horrible to be related. The feet of
some were fastened close to a hot fire till the very flesh and even the
bones were consumed. Others were suspended by their limbs, and heavy
weights attached to them to make the agony more intense. Others were
deprived of their teeth; and every cruelty that a horrible ingenuity
could invent was used.
While this was going on, questions were asked, and offers of pardon were
made if they would acknowledge themselves or others guilty of the
monstrous wickednesses which were detailed to them. At the same time
forged letters were read, purporting to come from the grand master
himself, exhorting them to make a full confession, and declarations were
made of the confessions which were said to have been already freely
given by other members of the order.
What wonder, then, that the usual consequences followed. Those who had
strong will and indomitable courage stood firm and endured the slow
martyrdom till death released them, maintaining to the last their own
innocence, and the innocence of their order, of the crimes with which
they were charged. But some weaker men broke down. In hope of release
from the agony which they could not endure, they confessed anything and
everything that was required of them, and these things were at once
written down as grave facts and made matter of accusation of others.
Often these unhappy men almost immediately recanted, and as soon as the
torture ceased withdrew their confessions, and repeated their original
denial of the accusations one and all.
We have long ago ceased to set any value upon confessions extorted by
torture, and the system has happily been abolished by all civilized
nations, but in those days this was not understood; torture was relied
upon as a means of extracting truth from unwilling witnesses when all
other means failed; indeed, it was simpler and more expeditious than the
calling of many witnesses, the testing of evidence by cross-examination,
and other surer but slower methods; and especially when conviction, not
truth, was the end in view, torture was a welcome and efficacious ally.
All this was but too sadly exemplified in the proceedings against the
Templars in France. No sooner were those who had made confessions of
guilt while under torture released from their tormentors than they
disavowed their forced admissions and proclaimed their innocence and the
purity of their order, appealing to history and the testimony of their
own day for evidence of their courage and devotion to the Catholic
faith.
Upon hearing of this Philip immediately ordered the rearrest of the
Templars, and, proceeding against them as relapsed heretics, they were
condemned to be burned alive. In Paris alone one hundred and thirteen
suffered this terrible punishment, and many more were burned in other
towns. In Spain, Portugal, and Germany, proceedings were taken against
the order; their property was confiscated, and in some cases torture was
used; but it is remarkable that it was only in France, and in those
places where Philip's influence was powerful, that any Templar was
actually put to death.
Everywhere else the monstrous charges were declared to be unproved, and
the order was declared innocent of heresy and sacrilegious rites.
In October, 1311, a council was held at Vienna to dissolve the Order of
the Temple, but the majority of the bishops were decidedly opposed to
such a proceeding against so ancient and illustrious an order, till its
members had been heard in their own defence in a fair and open trial.
The Pope was furious at this and dismissed the council, and in the
following year, 1312, by a papal brief, abolished the order and forbade
its reconstitution. The property of the order in France was nominally
made over to the Hospitallers, but Philip laid claim to an immense sum
for the expenses of the prosecution, and by this and other means he
obtained what he had all along desired--the greatest part of the
possessions of the order. Similar proceedings took place in other
countries. In some, new orders were founded in the place of the
Templars, with the sovereign at their head, by which means the estates
came into the possession of the Crown as completely as if they had
been actually confiscated.
In France the Templars who survived their torture and the horrors of
their prisons were either executed or left to linger out a miserable
existence in their dungeons till death released them. The grand master
and a few other brethren of the highest rank were thus kept in prison
for five years. They were then taken to Notre Dame in Paris, and
required to give verbal assent to the confessions which had been
extorted from them under torture. But the grand master, James de Molay,
the grand preceptor, and some others seized the opportunity of declaring
their innocence, and disowning the alleged confessions as forgeries. The
old veterans stood up in the church before the assembled multitude, and,
raising their chained hands to heaven, declared that whatever had been
confessed to the detriment of the illustrious order was only forced from
them by extreme agony and fear of death, and that they solemnly and
finally repudiated and revoked all such admissions.
On hearing of this, Philip ordered their immediate execution, and the
same evening the last grand master of the Temple and his faithful
comrades were burned to death at a slow fire.
Impartial men had formed their own judgment, and a very strong feeling
prevailed that justice had not been done. It was remarked that those who
had been foremost in the proceedings against the Templars came to a
speedy and miserable end. The Pope, the kings of France and of England,
and others, all soon followed their victims and died violent or shameful
deaths.
We have somewhat anticipated the order of events, and must return to the
earlier stage of the proceedings against the Templars. As soon as Philip
had determined upon his own course of action, he desired to find
countenance for it by stirring up other sovereigns to imitate it. He
therefore wrote letters to the kings of other European states, informing
them of his discovery of the guilt of the Templars, and urging them to
adopt a similar course in their own dominions. The Pope, too, summoned
the grand master to France, but with every mark of respect, and so got
him into his power before the terrible proceedings against the members
of his order were made public.
The King of England, Edward II, acted with prudence. He expressed his
unbounded astonishment at the contents of the French King's letter, and
at the particulars detailed to him by an agent specially sent to him by
Philip, but he would do no more at the time than promise that the matter
should receive his serious attention in due course.
He wrote at the same time to the kings of Portugal, Aragon, Castile, and
Sicily, telling them of the extraordinary information he had received
respecting the Templars, and declaring his unwillingness to believe the
dreadful charges brought against them. He referred to the services
rendered to Christendom by the order, and to its unblemished reputation
ever since it was founded. He urged upon his fellow-sovereigns that
nothing should be done in haste, but that inquiry should be made in due
and solemn legal form, expressing his belief that the order was
guiltless of the crimes alleged against it, and that the charges were
merely the result of slander and envy and of a desire to appropriate the
property of the order.
At the same time Edward wrote to the Pope in similar terms. He declared
that the Templars were universally respected by all classes throughout
his dominions as pious and upright men, and begged the Pope to promote a
just inquiry which should free the order from the unjust slander and
injuries to which it was being subjected. But hardly was this letter
despatched than Edward received another from the Pope, which had crossed
his own on its way, calling upon him to imitate Philip, King of France,
in proceeding against the Templars. The Pope professed great distress
and astonishment that an order that had so long enjoyed the respect and
gratitude of the Church for its worthy deeds in defence of the faith
should have fallen into grievous and perfidious apostasy. He then
narrated the commendable zeal of the King of France in rooting out the
secrets of these men's hidden wickedness, and gave particulars of some
of their confessions of the crimes with which they had been charged. He
concluded by commanding the King of England to pursue a similar course,
to seize and imprison all members of the order on one day, and to hold,
in the Pope's name, all the property of the order till it should be
determined how it was to be disposed of.
King Edward, notwithstanding his recent declaration of confidence in the
integrity of the Templars, yielded obedience to this missive of the
Pope. Whether he was overawed by the authority of the Pontiff, and
deferred his own opinion to that of so great a personage, or whether, as
some suppose, he desired to give the Templars a fair and honorable
trial, and the opportunity of clearing themselves; or whether he gave
way to the evil counsels of those who whispered that the great wealth of
the Templars would be useful to the Crown, and that he might avail
himself of the opportunity of taking all--as his predecessors had taken
some--of their treasure; whatever may have been his real motive, and the
cause of his change of conduct, it is certain that he issued an order
for the arrest of the Templars, and the seizure of all their estates,
houses, and property.
The greatest caution and secrecy were adopted. Instructions were sent to
all the sheriffs throughout England to hold themselves in readiness to
execute certain orders which would be given to them by trusty persons on
that day. Similar arrangements were made in Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales; and on January 8, 1308, every Templar was simultaneously
arrested.
It was not till October in the following year that any trial took place.
All this time the Templars had been suffering the miseries of
imprisonment. More than two hundred men of high rank, many of them
veterans who had fought and bled in Palestine, and who were now grown
old and feeble after a life of hardship and privation, maimed with
wounds, bronzed with exposure to the Eastern sun, languished under the
tender mercies of jailers, with no opportunity of defending themselves
or of raising up friends to say a word for them. Some were foreigners
who happened to be in England on the business of the order. A few
managed to evade the vigilance of the King's emissaries, notwithstanding
the secrecy and suddenness of the arrest, and escaped in various
disguises to the wild and remote mountain districts of Scotland, Wales,
and Ireland.
The court appointed by the Pope commenced its proceedings in London, in
October, 1309, under the presidency of the Bishop of London. Several
French ecclesiastics had come over to take their seat upon the bench as
judges--an ill omen for the English Templars. After the usual
preliminaries, which were long and tedious, the articles of accusation
were read. They stated that those who were received into the order of
the Knights of the Temple did, at their reception, formally deny Jesus
Christ and renounce all hope of salvation through him; that they
trampled and spat upon the cross; that they worshipped a cat(!); that
they denied the sacraments, and looked only to the grand master for
absolution; that they possessed and worshipped various idols; that they
practised a variety of cruel, degrading, and filthy customs and rites;
that the grand master and many of the brethren had confessed to these
things even before they had been arrested. Such is a brief summary of
the accusation, the original documents of which have happily come down
to us.
It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity,
profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a
so-called court of justice in England as a state paper--a bill of
indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order
that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the
defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless
enemies. No writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a
trial, and no one unacquainted with mediæval history would credit the
record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such a document,
and then set themselves to prove the truth of its monstrous allegations
by the use of torture.
Students of the Middle Ages know well that such things were done in
those days. They remember Savonarola and Beatrice Cenci in Italy, Jeanne
d'Arc in France, Abbot Whiting and others in England. They call to mind
the cruelties and exactions practised so often upon the Jews in every
country in Europe; and with the contemporary records in their hands,
they do not hesitate to accept as undoubted historical fact what would
otherwise be rejected as a slander upon humanity and an outrage upon
common-sense.
If the Templars had been accused of the crimes vulgarly supposed to
attach themselves to religious orders; if they had been charged with
falling into the sins to which poor human nature by its frailty is
liable; if erring members had been denounced, men who had entered the
order through disappointment, or from some other unworthy motive, men
such as Sir Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de
Bois Guilbert, in his novel, _Ivanhoe_, we might well believe that some
at least of the accusations against them were true.
It is singular that no such charges are alleged against the Templars,
though they were freely brought, two hundred years later, against the
regular monks by the commissioners of Henry VIII. This fact has been
noticed by most thoughtful historians, and has been considered to tell
strongly in the tribunal of equity in favor of the Templars. Instead of
these probable or possible crimes, we find nothing but monstrous charges
of sorcery, idolatry, apostasy, and such like, instances of which we
know are to be found in those strange times; but which it seems
altogether unlikely would infect a large body whose fundamental
principle was close adherence to Christianity; a body which was spread
all over the world, and which included in its ranks such a multitude and
variety of men and of nationalities, among whom there must have been, to
say the least, some sincere, upright, and godly men who would have set
themselves to root out such miserable errors, or, if they were found to
be ineradicable, would have left the order as no place for them.
Even Voltaire acknowledges that such an indictment destroys itself. It
recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing but their intense hatred of
their victims and their total unfitness to sit as judges.
When this extraordinary paper had been read, the prisoners were asked
what they had to say to it, and, as might be expected, they at once and
unanimously declared that they and their order were absolutely guiltless
of the crimes of which they were accused. After this the prisoners were
examined one by one.
It would be tedious to follow the long and wearisome questionings and to
record the replies given by the several brethren of the Temple during
their trial in London. One and all agreed in denying the existence of
the horrible and ridiculous rites which were said to be used at the
reception of new members; and whether they had been received in England
or abroad, detailed the ceremonies that were used, and showed that they
were substantially the same everywhere. The candidate was asked what he
desired, and on replying that he desired admission to the order of the
Knights of the Temple, he was warned of the strict and severe life that
was demanded of members of the order; of the three vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience; and, moreover, that he must be ready to go and
fight the enemies of Christ even to the death.
Others related details of the interior discipline and regulations of the
order, which were stern and rigorous, as became a body that added to the
strictness of the convent the order and system of a military
organization. Many of the brethren had been nearly all their lives in
the order, some more than forty years, a great part of which had been
spent in active service in the East.
The witnesses who were summoned were not members of the order, and had
only hearsay evidence to give. They had _heard_ this and that report,
they _suspected_ something else, they had been _told_ that certain
things had been said or done. Nothing definite could be obtained, and
there was no proof whatever of any of the extravagant and incredible
charges. Similar proceedings took place in Lincoln and York, and also in
Scotland and Ireland; and in all places the results were the same, and
the matter dragged on till October, 1311.
Hitherto torture had not been resorted to; but now, in accordance with
the repeated solicitations of the Pope, King Edward gave orders that the
imprisoned Templars should be subjected to the rack in order that they
might be forced to give evidence of their guilt. Even then there seems
to have been reluctance to resort to this cruel and shameful treatment,
and a series of delays occurred, so that nothing was done till the
beginning of the following year.
The Templars, having been now three years in prison, chained,
half-starved, threatened with greater miseries here, and with eternal
damnation hereafter; separated from one another, without friend,
adviser, or legal defence, were now removed to the various jails in
London and elsewhere, and submitted to torture. We have no particular
record of the horrible details, but some evidence was afterward adduced
which was said to have been obtained from the unhappy victims during
their agony. It was such as was desired; an admission of the truth of
the monstrous accusations that were detailed to them, which had been
obtained, for the most part, from their tortured brethren in France.
In April, 1311, these depositions were read in the court, in the
presence of the Templars, who were required to say what they could
allege in their defence. They replied that they were ignorant of the
processes of law, and that they were not permitted to have the aid of
those whom they trusted and who could advise them, but that they would
gladly make a statement of their faith and of the principles of their
order. This they were permitted to do, and a very simple and touching
paper was produced and signed by all the brethren. They declared
themselves, one and all, good Christians and faithful members of the
Church, and they claimed to be treated as such, and openly and fairly
tried if there were any just cause of complaint against them. But their
persecutors were by no means satisfied. Fresh tortures and cruelties
were resorted to to force confessions of guilt from these worn-out and
dying men. A few gave way, and said what they were told to say; and
these unhappy men were produced in St. Paul's Cathedral shortly
afterward, and made to recant their errors, and were then "reconciled to
the Church." A similar scene was enacted at York.
The property of the Templars in England was placed under the charge of a
commission at the time that proceedings were commenced against them, and
the King very soon treated it as if it were his own, giving away manors
and convents at his pleasure. A great part of the possessions of the
order was subsequently made over to the Hospitallers. The convent and
church of the Temple in London were granted, in 1313, to Aymer de
Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whose monument is in Westminster Abbey. Other
property was pawned by the King to his creditors as security for payment
of his debts; but constant litigation and disputes seem to have pursued
the holders of the ill-gotten goods.
Some of the surviving Templars retired to monasteries, others returned
to the world and assumed secular habits, for which they incurred the
censures of the Pope.
HENRY HART MILMAN
The tragedy of the Templars had not yet drawn to its close. The four
great dignitaries of the order, the grand master Du Molay, Guy, the
commander of Normandy, son of the Dauphin of Auvergne, the commander of
Aquitaine, Godfrey de Gonaville, the great visitor of France, Hugues de
Peraud, were still pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to
determine on their fate. The King and the Pope were now equally
interested in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So
long as these men lived, uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not
extinct. A commission was named: the Cardinal-Archbishop of Albi, with
two other cardinals, two monks, the Cistercian Arnold Novelli, and
Arnold de Fargis, nephew of Pope Clement, the Dominican Nicolas de
Freveauville, akin to the house of Marigny, formerly the King's
confessor. With these the Archbishop of Sens sat in judgment on the
Knights' own former confessions. The grand master and the rest were
found guilty, and were to be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.
A scaffold was erected before the porch of Notre Dame. On one side
appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four noble prisoners, in
chains, under the custody of the Provost of Paris. Six years of dreary
imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the
most valiant had been burned alive; the recreants had purchased their
lives by confession; the Pope, in a full council, had condemned and
dissolved the order. If a human mind--a mind like that of Du
Molay--could be broken by suffering and humiliation, it must have
yielded to this long and crushing imprisonment. The Cardinal-Archbishop
of Albi ascended a raised platform: he read the confessions of the
Knights, the proceedings of the court; he enlarged on the criminality of
the order, on the holy justice of the Pope, and the devout,
self-sacrificing zeal of the King; he was proceeding to the final, the
fatal sentence. At that instant the grand master advanced; his gesture
implored silence; judges and people gazed in awestruck apprehension. In
a calm, clear voice Du Molay spoke: "Before heaven and earth, on the
verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable
weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved death, not
on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves or our order have
been guilty, but because we have yielded, to save our lives, to the
seductive words of the Pope and of the King; and so by our confessions
brought shame and ruin on our blameless, holy, and orthodox
brotherhood."
The cardinals stood confounded; the people could not suppress their
profound sympathy. The assembly was hastily broken up; the Provost was
commanded to conduct the prisoners back to their dungeons. "To-morrow we
will hold further counsel." But on the moment that the King heard these
things, without a day's delay, without the least consultation with the
ecclesiastical authorities, he ordered them to death as relapsed
heretics. On the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of
Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the
Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised--two out of
the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour
of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned;
they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily;
the wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the
tardiness was designed that the victims might have time, while the fire
was still curling round their extremities, to recant their bold
recantation. But there was no sign, no word of weakness. Du Molay
implored that the image of the Mother of God might be held up before
him, and his hands unchained, that he might clasp them in prayer. Both,
as the smoke rose to their lips, as the fire crept up to their vital
parts, continued solemnly to aver the innocence and the Catholic faith
of the order. The King himself sat and beheld, it might seem without
remorse, this hideous spectacle; the words of Du Molay might have
reached his ears. But the people looked on with far other feelings.
Stupor kindled into admiration; the execution was a martyrdom; friars
gathered up their ashes and bones and carried them away, hardly by
stealth, to consecrated ground; they became holy relics. The two who
wanted courage to die pined away their miserable life in prison.
The wonder and the pity of the times which immediately followed, arrayed
Du Molay not only in the robes of the martyr, but gave him the terrible
language of a prophet. "Clement, iniquitous and cruel judge, I summon
thee within forty days to meet me before the throne of the Most High!"
According to some accounts this fearful sentence included the King, by
whom, if uttered, it might have been heard. The earliest allusion to
this awful speech does not contain that striking particularity, which,
if part of it, would be fatal to its credibility, _i.e._, the precise
date of Clement's death. It was not till the year after that Clement and
King Philip passed to their account. The fate of these two men during
the next year might naturally so appal the popular imagination, as to
approximate more closely the prophecy and its accomplishment. At all
events it betrayed the deep and general feeling of the cruel wrong
inflicted on the order; while the unlamented death of the Pope, the
disastrous close of Philip's reign, and the disgraceful crimes which
attainted the honor of his family seemed as declarations of heaven as to
the innocence of their noble victims.
JAMES VAN ARTEVELDE LEADS A
FLEMISH REVOLT
EDWARD III OF ENGLAND ASSUMES THE
TITLE OF KING OF FRANCE
A.D. 1337-1340
FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT
Having defeated the Flemings at Mons-la-Puelle in 1304,
Philip the Fair of France found that they were unsubdued and
ready to renew their war against him. Therefore he very soon
acknowledged their independence under their count, Robert de
Béthune. But Philip continually violated the treaty he had
made, and just before his death (1314) he again began
hostilities against Flanders.
Little of historical importance occurred in that country
between the death of Philip the Fair and the accession of
Philip of Valois (1328). His first act was to take up the
cause of Louis de Nevers, then Count of Flanders, whom the
independent burghers of most of the chief cities had united
to deprive of his territories, leaving him only Ghent for a
refuge. In the first year of his reign Philip gained a
victory over the Flemish "weavers" at Cassel, and laid all
Flanders at the feet of its rejected count.
In 1338 began the Hundred Years' War, arising from the claim
of Edward III of England to the French throne. Edward's most
important measure in preparation for the war was the
securing of an alliance with the Flemish burghers, whose
French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their
affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which
confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to
Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by
various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and
industry of both Flanders and England.
At last, by prohibiting the exportation of wool to Flanders,
Edward reduced the Flemings to despair and forced them to
fling themselves into his arms. Many of them emigrated to
England, where they helped to lay the foundation of
manufactures. But the Flemish towns burst into insurrection
and proceeded to organized action in the manner here related
by Guizot, who draws largely upon the narrative of
Froissart.
The Flemings bore the first brunt of that war which was to be so cruel
and so long. It was a lamentable position for them; their industrial and
commercial prosperity was being ruined; their security at home was going
from them; their communal liberties were compromised; divisions set in
among them; by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn toward
England, but the Count, their lord, did all he could to turn them away
from her, and many among them were loath to separate themselves entirely
from France. "Burghers of Ghent, as they chatted in the thoroughfares
and at the cross-roads, said one to another that they had heard much
wisdom, to their mind, from a burgher who was called James van
Artevelde, and who was a brewer of beer. They had heard him say that, if
he could obtain a hearing and credit, he would in a little while restore
Flanders to good estate, and they would recover all their gains without
standing ill with the King of France or the King of England.
"These sayings began to get spread abroad insomuch that a quarter or
half the city was informed thereof, especially the small folk of the
commonalty, whom the evil touched most nearly. They began to assemble in
the streets, and it came to pass that one day, after dinner, several
went from house to house calling for their comrades, and saying, 'Come
and hear the wise man's counsel.' On December 26, 1337, they came to the
house of the said James van Artevelde, and found him leaning against his
door. Far off as they were when they first perceived him, they made him
a deep obeisance, and 'Dear sir,' they said, 'we are come to you for
counsel; for we are told that by your great and good sense you will
restore the country of Flanders to good case. So tell us how.'
"Then James van Artevelde came forward, and said: 'Sirs comrades, I am a
native and burgher of this city, and here I have my means. Know that I
would gladly aid you with all my power, you and all the country; if
there were here a man who would be willing to take the lead, I would be
willing to risk body and means at his side; and if the rest of ye be
willing to be brethren, friends, and comrades to me, to abide in all
matters at my side, notwithstanding that I am not worthy of it, I will
undertake it willingly.' Then said all with one voice: 'We promise you
faithfully to abide at your side in all matters and to therewith
adventure body and means, for we know well that in the whole countship
of Flanders there is not a man but you worthy so to do.'" Then Van
Artevelde bound them to assemble on the next day but one in the
grounds of the monastery of Biloke, which had received numerous benefits
from the ancestors of Sohier of Courtrai, whose son-in-law Van Artevelde
was.
This bold burgher of Ghent, who was born about 1285, was sprung from a
family the name of which had been for a long while inscribed in their
city upon the register of industrial corporations. His father, John van
Artevelde, a cloth-worker, had been several times over-sheriff of Ghent,
and his mother, Mary van Groete, was great-aunt to the grandfather of
the illustrious publicist called in history Grotius. James van Artevelde
in his youth accompanied Count Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the
Handsome, upon his adventurous expeditions in Italy, Sicily, and Greece,
and to the island of Rhodes; and it had been close by the spots where
the soldiers of Marathon and Salamis had beaten the armies of Darius and
Xerxes that he had heard of the victory of the Flemish burghers and
workmen attacked in 1302, at Courtrai, by the splendid army of Philip
the Handsome.
James van Artevelde, on returning to his country, had been busy with his
manufactures,[46] his fields, the education of his children, and Flemish
affairs up to the day when, at his invitation, the burghers of Ghent
thronged to the meeting on December 28, 1337, in the grounds of the
monastery of Biloke. There he delivered an eloquent speech, pointing out
unhesitatingly but temperately the policy which he considered good for
the country. "Forget not," he said, "the might and the glory of
Flanders. Who, pray, shall forbid that we defend our interests by using
our rights? Can the King of France prevent us from treating with the
King of England? And may we not be certain that if we were to treat with
the King of England, the King of France would not be the less urgent in
seeking our alliance? Besides, have we not with us all the communes of
Brabant, of Hainault, of Holland, and of Zealand?" The audience cheered
these words; the commune of Ghent forthwith assembled, and on January 3,
1337, reëstablished the offices of captains of parishes according to
olden usage, when the city was exposed to any pressing danger.
It was carried that one of these captains should have the chief
government of the city; and James van Artevelde was at once invested
with it. From that moment the conduct of Van Artevelde was ruled by one
predominant idea: to secure free and fair commercial intercourse for
Flanders with England, while observing a general neutrality in the war
between the kings of England and France, and to combine so far all the
communes of Flanders in one and the same policy. And he succeeded in
this twofold purpose. On April 29, 1338, the representatives of all the
communes of Flanders--the city of Bruges numbering among them a hundred
and eight deputies--repaired to the castle of Mâle, a residence of Count
Louis, and then James van Artevelde set before the Count what had been
resolved upon among them. The Count submitted, and swore that he would
thenceforth maintain the liberties of Flanders in the state in which
they had hitherto existed. In the month of May following a deputation,
consisting of James van Artevelde and other burghers appointed by the
cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres scoured the whole of Flanders, from
Bailleul to Termonde, and from Ninove to Dunkirk, "to reconcile the good
folk of the communes to the Count of Flanders, as well for the Count's
honor as for the peace of the country." Lastly, on June 10, 1338, a
treaty was signed at Anvers between the deputies of the Flemish communes
and the English ambassadors, the latter declaring: "We do all to wit
that we have negotiated the way and substance of friendship with the
good folk of the communes of Flanders, in form and manner hereinafter
following:
"First, they shall be able to go and buy the wools and other merchandise
which have been exported from England to Holland, Zealand, or any other
place whatsoever; and all traders of Flanders who shall repair to the
ports of England shall there be safe and free in their persons and their
goods, just as in any other place where their ventures might bring them
together.
"_Item_, we have agreed with the good folk and with all the common
country of Flanders that they must not mix nor intermeddle in any way,
by assistance in men or arms, in the wars of our lord the King and the
noble Sir Philip of Valois (who holdeth himself for King of France)."
Three articles following regulated in detail the principles laid down in
the first two, and, by another charter, Edward III ordained that "all
stuffs marked with the seal of the city of Ghent might travel freely in
England without being subject according to ellage and quality to the
control to which all foreign merchandise was subject."
Van Artevelde was right in telling the Flemings that, if they treated
with the King of England, the King of France would be only the more
anxious for their alliance. Philip of Valois and even Count Louis of
Flanders, when they got to know of the negotiations entered into between
the Flemish communes and King Edward, redoubled their offers and
promises to them. But when the passions of men have taken full
possession of their souls, words of concession and attempts at
accommodation are nothing more than postponements or lies. Philip, when
he heard about the conclusion of a treaty between the Flemish communes
and the King of England, sent word to Count Louis "that this James van
Artevelde must not, on any account, be allowed to rule or even live, for
if it were so for long, the Count would lose his land." The Count, very
much disposed to accept such advice, repaired to Ghent and sent for Van
Artevelde to come and see him at his hotel. He went, but with so large a
following that the Count was not at the time at all in a position to
resist him. He tried to persuade the Flemish burgher that "if he would
keep a hand on the people so as to keep them to their love for the King
of France, he having more authority than anyone else for such a purpose,
much good would result to him; mingling, besides, with this address,
some words of threatening import."
Van Artevelde, who was not the least afraid of the threat, and who at
heart was fond of the English, told the Count that he would do as he had
promised the communes. "Hereupon he left the Count, who consulted his
confidants as to what he was to do in this business, and they counselled
him to let them go and assemble their people, saying that they would
kill Van Artevelde secretly or otherwise. And, indeed, they did lay many
traps and made many attempts against the captain; but it was of no
avail, since all the commonalty was for him." When the rumor of these
projects and these attempts was spread abroad in the city, the
excitement was extreme, and all the burghers assumed white hoods, which
was the mark peculiar to the members of the commune when they assembled
under their flags; so that the Count found himself reduced to assuming
one, for he was afraid of being kept captive at Ghent, and, on the
pretext of a hunting-party, he lost no time in gaining his castle of
Mâle.
The burghers of Ghent had their minds still filled with their late alarm
when they heard that by order, it was said, of the King of France--Count
Louis had sent and beheaded at the castle of Rupelmonde, in the very bed
in which he was confined by his infirmities, their fellow-citizen Sohier
of Courtrai, Van Artevelde's father-in-law, who had been kept for many
months in prison for his intimacy with the English. On the same day the
Bishop of Senlis and the Abbot of St. Denis had arrived at Tournai, and
had superintended the reading out in the market-place of a sentence of
excommunication against the Ghentese.
It was probably at this date that Van Artevelde in his vexation and
disquietude assumed in Ghent an attitude threatening and despotic even
to tyranny. "He had continually after him," says Froissart, "sixty or
eighty armed varlets, among whom were two or three who knew some of his
secrets. When he met a man whom he hated or had in suspicion, this man
was at once killed, for Van Artevelde had given this order to his
varlets: 'The moment I meet a man, and make such and such a sign to you,
slay him without delay, however great he may be, without waiting for
more speech.' In this way he had many great masters slain. And as soon
as these sixty varlets had taken him home to his hotel, each went to
dinner at his own house; and the moment dinner was over they returned
and stood before his hotel and waited in the street until that he was
minded to go and play and take his pastime in the city, and so they
attended him to supper-time.
"And know that each of these hirelings had _per diem_ four groschen of
Flanders for their expenses and wages, and he had them regularly paid
from week to week. And even in the case of all that were most powerful
in Flanders, knights, esquires, and burghers of the good cities, whom he
believed to be favorable to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from
Flanders and levied half their revenues. He had levies made of rents,
of dues on merchandise and all the revenues belonging to the Count,
wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his will, and
gave them away without rendering any account. And when he would borrow
of any burghers on his word for payment, there was none that durst say
him nay. In short there was never in Flanders, or in any other country,
duke, count, prince, or other who can have had a country at his will as
James van Artevelde had for a long time." It is possible that, as some
historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers
than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this
portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events
and passions into a demagogic tyrant.
While the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted to excite an
uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced, in order to escape
from the people of Bruges, to mount his horse in hot haste, at night and
barely armed, and to flee away to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward
III were preparing on either side, for the war which they could see
drawing near. Philip was vigorously at work on the Pope, the Emperor of
Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to raise
obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies. He ordered that
short-lived meeting of the states-general about which we have no
information left us, save that it voted the principle that "no talliage
could be imposed on the people if urgent necessity or evident utility
should not require it, and unless by concession of the estates."
Philip, as chief of feudal society rather than of the nation which was
forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked at Amiens all
his vassals great and small, laic or cleric, placing all his strength in
their coöperation, and not caring at all to associate the country itself
in the affairs of his government. Edward, on the contrary, while
equipping his fleet and amassing treasure at the expense of the Jews and
Lombard usurers, was assembling his parliament, talking to it "of this
important and costly war," for which he obtained large subsidies, and
accepting, without making any difficulty, the vote of the commons'
house, which expressed a desire "to consult their constituents upon this
subject, and begged him to summon an early parliament, to which there
should be elected, in each county, two knights taken from among the best
landowners of their counties."
The King set out for the Continent; the parliament met and considered
the exigences of the war by land and sea, in Scotland and in France;
traders, shipowners, and mariners were called and examined; and the
forces determined to be necessary were voted. Edward took the field,
pillaging, burning, and ravaging, "destroying all the country for twelve
or fourteen leagues in extent," as he himself said in a letter to the
Archbishop of Canterbury. When he set foot on French territory, Count
William of Hainault, his brother-in-law and up to that time his ally,
came to him and said that "he would ride with him no farther, for that
his presence was prayed and required by his uncle the King of France, to
whom he bore no hate, and whom he would go and serve in his own kingdom,
as he had served King Edward on the territory of the Emperor, whose
vicar he was," and Edward wished him "Godspeed!" Such was the binding
nature of feudal ties that the same lord held himself bound to pass from
one camp to another according as he found himself upon the domains of
one or the other of his suzerains in a war one against the other.
Edward continued his march toward St. Quentin, where Philip had at last
arrived with his allies the kings of Bohemia, Navarre, and Scotland,
"after delays which had given rise to great scandal and murmurs
throughout the whole kingdom." The two armies, with a strength,
according to Froissart, of a hundred thousand men on the French side,
and forty-four thousand on the English, were soon facing one another,
near Buironfosse, a large burgh of Picardy. A herald came from the
English camp to tell the King of France that the King of England
"demanded of him battle. To which demand," says Froissart, "the King of
France gave willing assent and accepted the day which was fixed at first
for Thursday the 21st, and afterward for Saturday the 25th of October,
1339."
To judge from the somewhat tangled accounts of the chroniclers and of
Froissart himself, neither of the two kings was very anxious to come to
blows. The forces of Edward were much inferior to those of Philip; and
the former had accordingly taken up, as it appears, a position which
rendered attack difficult for Philip. There was much division of
opinion in the French camp. Independently of military grounds, a great
deal was said about certain letters from Robert, King of Naples, "a
mighty necromancer and full of mighty wisdom, it was reported, who,
after having several times cast their h
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