← catalogue

The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History

by Brooks Adams · English · Gutenberg #44908 · 686,703 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History

Author: Brooks Adams


        
Release date: February 14, 2014 [eBook #44908]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44908

Credits: Produced by Sean (scribe_for_hire@yahoo.com), based on
        page images generously made available by the Internet
        Archive
        (https://archive.org/details/lawofcivilizatio00adam).


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY: AN ESSAY ON HISTORY ***

  [Italics are indicated by _underscores_.

  Superscript is indicated by this format: ^{superscript}.]




  THE LAW OF
  CIVILIZATION AND DECAY

  An Essay on History


  BY

  BROOKS ADAMS


  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
  1897

  _All rights reserved_




  Copyright, 1896,
  By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped September, 1896. Reprinted February,
  September, 1897.


  Norwood Press
  J. S. Cushing & Co. Berwick & Smith
  Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




PREFACE


In offering to the public a second edition of _The Law of Civilization
and Decay_ I take the opportunity to say emphatically that such value
as the essay may have lies in its freedom from any preconceived bias.
All theories contained in the book, whether religious or economic, are
the effect, and not the cause, of the way in which the facts unfolded
themselves. I have been passive.

The value of history lies not in the multitude of facts collected, but
in their relation to each other, and in this respect an author can have
no larger responsibility than any other scientific observer. If the
sequence of events seems to indicate the existence of a law governing
social development, such a law may be suggested, but to approve or
disapprove of it would be as futile as to discuss the moral bearings of
gravitation.

Some years ago, when writing a sketch of the history of the colony of
Massachusetts Bay, I became deeply interested in certain religious
aspects of the Reformation, which seemed hardly reconcilable with
the theories usually advanced to explain them. After the book had
been published, I continued reading theology, and, step by step,
was led back, through the schoolmen and the crusades, to the revival
of the pilgrimage to Palestine, which followed upon the conversion
of the Huns. As ferocious pagans, the Huns had long closed the road
to Constantinople; but the change which swept over Europe after the
year 1000, when Saint Stephen was crowned, was unmistakable; the West
received an impulsion from the East. I thus became convinced that
religious enthusiasm, which, by stimulating the pilgrimage, restored
communication between the Bosphorus and the Rhine, was the power which
produced the accelerated movement culminating in modern centralization.

Meanwhile I thought I had discovered not only that faith, during
the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries, spoke by
preference through architecture, but also that in France and Syria,
at least, a precise relation existed between the ecclesiastical and
military systems of building, and that the one could not be understood
without the other. In the commercial cities of the same epoch, on
the contrary, the religious idea assumed no definite form of artistic
expression, for the Gothic never flourished in Venice, Genoa, Pisa,
or Florence, nor did any pure school of architecture thrive in the
mercantile atmosphere. Furthermore, commerce from the outset seemed
antagonistic to the imagination, for a universal decay of architecture
set in throughout Europe after the great commercial expansion of the
thirteenth century; and the inference I drew from these facts was,
that the economic instinct must have chosen some other medium by
which to express itself. My observations led me to suppose that the
coinage might be such a medium, and I ultimately concluded that, if the
development of a mercantile community is to be understood, it must be
approached through its money.

Another conviction forced upon my mind, by the examination of long
periods of history, was the exceedingly small part played by conscious
thought in moulding the fate of men. At the moment of action the human
being almost invariably obeys an instinct, like an animal; only after
action has ceased does he reflect.

These controlling instincts are involuntary, and divide men into
species distinct enough to cause opposite effects under identical
conditions. For instance, impelled by fear, one type will rush upon an
enemy, and another will run away; while the love of women or of money
has stamped certain races as sharply as ferocity or cunning has stamped
the lion or the fox.

Like other personal characteristics, the peculiarities of the mind
are apparently strongly hereditary, and, if these instincts be
transmitted from generation to generation, it is plain that, as the
external world changes, those who receive this heritage must rise or
fall in the social scale, according as their nervous system is well
or ill adapted to the conditions to which they are born. Nothing is
commoner, for example, than to find families who have been famous
in one century sinking into obscurity in the next, not because the
children have degenerated, but because a certain field of activity
which afforded the ancestor full scope, has been closed against his
offspring. Particularly has this been true in revolutionary epochs such
as the Reformation; and families so situated have very generally become
extinct.

When this stage had been reached, the Reformation began to wear a new
aspect, but several years elapsed before I saw whither my studies led.
Only very slowly did a sequence of cause and effect take shape in my
mind, a sequence wholly unexpected in character, whose growth resembled
the arrangement of the fragments of an inscription, which cannot be
read until the stones have been set in a determined order. Finally, as
the historical work neared an end, I perceived that the intellectual
phenomena under examination fell into a series which seemed to
correspond, somewhat closely, with the laws which are supposed to
regulate the movements of the material universe.

Theories can be tested only by applying them to facts, and the facts
relating to successive phases of human thought, whether conscious or
unconscious, constitute history; therefore, if intellectual phenomena
are evolved in a regular sequence, history, like matter, must be
governed by law. In support of such a conjecture, I venture to offer
an hypothesis by which to classify a few of the more interesting
intellectual phases through which human society must, apparently,
pass, in its oscillations between barbarism and civilization, or, what
amounts to the same thing, in its movement from a condition of physical
dispersion to one of concentration. The accompanying volume contains
the evidence which suggested the hypothesis, although, it seems hardly
necessary to add, an essay of this size on so vast a subject can only
be regarded as a suggestion.

The theory proposed is based upon the accepted scientific principle
that the law of force and energy is of universal application in nature,
and that animal life is one of the outlets through which solar energy
is dissipated.

Starting from this fundamental proposition, the first deduction is,
that, as human societies are forms of animal life, these societies must
differ among themselves in energy, in proportion as nature has endowed
them, more or less abundantly, with energetic material.

Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the
earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous--Fear and
Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief
in an invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and Greed,
which dissipates energy in war and trade.

Probably the velocity of the social movement of any community
is proportionate to its energy and mass, and its centralization
is proportionate to its velocity; therefore, as human movement
is accelerated, societies centralize. In the earlier stages of
concentration, fear appears to be the channel through which energy
finds the readiest outlet; accordingly, in primitive and scattered
communities, the imagination is vivid, and the mental types produced
are religious, military, artistic. As consolidation advances, fear
yields to greed, and the economic organism tends to supersede the
emotional and martial.

Whenever a race is so richly endowed with the energetic material that
it does not expend all its energy in the daily struggle for life,
the surplus may be stored in the shape of wealth; and this stock of
stored energy may be transferred from community to community, either by
conquest, or by superiority in economic competition.

However large may be the store of energy accumulated by conquest, a
race must, sooner or later, reach the limit of its martial energy,
when it must enter on the phase of economic competition. But, as the
economic organism radically differs from the emotional and martial,
the effect of economic competition has been, perhaps invariably, to
dissipate the energy amassed by war.

When surplus energy has accumulated in such bulk as to preponderate
over productive energy, it becomes the controlling social force.
Thenceforward, capital is autocratic, and energy vents itself through
those organisms best fitted to give expression to the power of capital.
In this last stage of consolidation, the economic, and, perhaps, the
scientific intellect is propagated, while the imagination fades,
and the emotional, the martial, and the artistic types of manhood
decay. When a social velocity has been attained at which the waste of
energetic material is so great that the martial and imaginative stocks
fail to reproduce themselves, intensifying competition appears to
generate two extreme economic types,--the usurer in his most formidable
aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive
on scanty nutriment. At length a point must be reached when pressure
can go no further, and then, perhaps, one of two results may follow: A
stationary period may supervene, which may last until ended by war, by
exhaustion, or by both combined, as seems to have been the case with
the Eastern Empire; or, as in the Western, disintegration may set in,
the civilized population may perish, and a reversion may take place to
a primitive form of organism.

The evidence, however, seems to point to the conclusion that, when
a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of
economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been
exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the
power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain
inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of
barbarian blood.

                                                 BROOKS ADAMS.

  Quincy, August 20, 1896.




CONTENTS

                                                   PAGE

                      CHAPTER I

  The Romans                                          1

                      CHAPTER II

  The Middle Age                                     48

                      CHAPTER III

  The First Crusade                                  79

                      CHAPTER IV

  The Second Crusade                                103

                      CHAPTER V

  The Fall of Constantinople                        124

                      CHAPTER VI

  The Suppression of the Temple                     152

                      CHAPTER VII

  The English Reformation                           186

                      CHAPTER VIII

  The Suppression of the Convents                   220

                      CHAPTER IX

  The Eviction of the Yeomen                        243

                      CHAPTER X

  Spain and India                                   286

                      CHAPTER XI

  Modern Centralization                             313

                      CHAPTER XII

  Conclusion                                        352

  Index                                             385




CIVILIZATION AND DECAY




CHAPTER I

THE ROMANS


When the Romans first emerged from the mist of fable, they were already
a race of land-owners who held their property in severalty, and, as the
right of alienation was established, the formation of relatively large
estates had begun. The ordinary family, however, held, perhaps, twelve
acres, and, as the land was arable, and the staple grain, it supported
a dense rural population. The husbandmen who tilled this land were
of the martial type, and, probably for that reason, though supremely
gifted as administrators and soldiers, were ill-fitted to endure
the strain of the unrestricted economic competition of a centralized
society. Consequently their conquests had hardly consolidated before
decay set in, a decay whose causes may be traced back until they are
lost in the dawn of history.

The Latins had little economic versatility; they lacked the instinct
of the Greeks for commerce, or of the Syrians and Hindoos for
manufactures. They were essentially land-owners, and, when endowed with
the acquisitive faculty, usurers. The latter early developed into a
distinct species, at once more subtle of intellect and more tenacious
of life than the farmers, and on the disparity between these two types
of men, the fate of all subsequent civilization has hinged. At a remote
antiquity Roman society divided into creditors and debtors; as it
consolidated, the power of the former increased, thus intensifying the
pressure on the weak, until, when centralization culminated under the
Cæsars, reproduction slackened, disintegration set in, and, after some
centuries of decline, the Middle Ages began.

The history of the monarchy must probably always remain a matter of
conjecture, but it seems reasonably certain that the expulsion of
the Tarquins was the victory of an hereditary monied caste, which
succeeded in concentrating the functions of government in a practically
self-perpetuating body drawn from their own order.[1] Niebuhr has
demonstrated, in one of his most striking chapters, that usury was
originally a patrician privilege; and some of the fiercest struggles
of the early republic seem to have been decided against the oligarchy
by wealthy plebeians, who were determined to break down the monopoly
in money-lending. At all events, the conditions of life evidently
favoured the growth of the instinct which causes its possessor to suck
the vitality of the economically weak; and Macaulay, in the preface to
_Virginia_, has given so vivid a picture of the dominant class, that
one passage at least should be read entire.

   “The ruling class in Rome was a monied class; and it made and
    administered the laws with a view solely to its own interest.
    Thus the relation between lender and borrower was mixed up
    with the relation between sovereign and subject. The great
    men held a large portion of the community in dependence by
    means of advances at enormous usury. The law of debt, framed
    by creditors, and for the protection of creditors, was the
    most horrible that has ever been known among men. The liberty,
    and even the life, of the insolvent were at the mercy of
    the patrician money-lenders. Children often became slaves in
    consequence of the misfortunes of their parents. The debtor was
    imprisoned, not in a public gaol under the care of impartial
    public functionaries, but in a private workhouse belonging
    to the creditor. Frightful stories were told respecting these
    dungeons.”

But a prisoner is an expense, and the patricians wanted money. Their
problem was to exhaust the productive power of the debtor before
selling him, and, as slaves have less energy than freemen, a system was
devised by which the plebeians were left on their land, and stimulated
to labour by the hope of redeeming themselves and their children from
servitude. Niebuhr has explained at length how this was done.

For money weighed out a person could pledge himself, his family, and
all that belonged to him. In this condition he became _nexus_, and
remained in possession of his property until breach of condition,
when the creditor could proceed by summary process.[2] Such a contract
satisfied the requirements, and the usurers had then only to invent a
judgment for debt severe enough to force the debtor to become _nexus_
when the alternative was offered him. This presented no difficulty.
When an action was begun the defendant had thirty days of grace, and
was then arrested and brought before the prætor. If he could neither
pay nor find security, he was fettered with irons weighing not less
than fifteen pounds, and taken home by the plaintiff. There he was
allowed a pound of corn a day, and given sixty days in which to settle.
If he failed, he was taken again before the prætor and sentenced.
Under this sentence he might be sold or executed, and, where there
were several plaintiffs, they might cut him up among them, nor was
any individual liable for carving more than his share.[3] A man so
sentenced involved his descendants, and therefore, rather than submit,
the whole debtor class became _nexi_, toiling for ever to fulfil
contracts quite beyond their strength, and year by year sinking more
hopelessly into debt, for ordinarily the accumulated interest soon
raised “the principal to many times its original amount.”[4] Niebuhr
has thus summed up the economic situation:--

   “To understand the condition of the plebeian debtors, let the
    reader, if he is a man of business, imagine that the whole of
    the private debts in a given country were turned into bills
    at a year, bearing interest at twenty per cent or more; and
    that the non-payment of them were followed on summary process
    by imprisonment, and by the transfer of the debtor’s whole
    property to his creditor, even though it exceeded what he
    owed. We do not need those further circumstances, which are
    incompatible with our manners, the personal slavery of the
    debtor and of his children, to form an estimate of the fearful
    condition of the unfortunate plebeians.”[5]

Thus the usurer first exhausted a family and then sold it; and as his
class fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as
ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable
when contracted. One characteristic device was the power given the
magistrate of fining for “offences against order.” Under this head “men
might include any accusations they pleased, and by the higher grades
in the scale of fines they might accomplish whatever they desired.”[6]
As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had
the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.
Nevertheless, the stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which
down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy.
Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment,
to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business
was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country
was subjected to a levy unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich
speculators. “Ubi publicanus est,” said Livy, quoting the Senate, “ibi
aut jus publicum vanum, aut libertatem sociis nullam esse.”[7]

Usury was the cream of this business. The custom was to lend to
defaulters at such high rates of interest that insolvency was nearly
certain to follow; then the people were taken on execution, and
slave-hunting formed a regular branch of the revenue service. In
Cicero’s time whole provinces of Asia Minor were stripped bare by the
traffic. The effect upon the Latin society of the fifth century before
Christ was singularly destructive. Italy was filled with petty states
in chronic war, the troops were an unpaid militia, which comprised the
whole able-bodied population, and though the farms yielded enough for
the family in good times, when the males were with the legions labour
was certain to be lacking. The campaigns therefore brought want, and
with want came the inability to pay taxes.

As late as the Tunic War, Regulus asked to be relieved from his
command, because the death of his slave and the incompetence of his
hired man left his fields uncared for; and if a general and a consul
were pinched by absence, the case of the men in the ranks can be
imagined. Even in victory the lot of the common soldier was hard
enough, for, beside the chance of wounds and disease, there was the
certain loss of time, for which no compensation was made. Though the
plebeians formed the whole infantry of the line, they received no part
of the conquered lands, and even the plunder was taken from them, and
appropriated by the patricians to their private use.[8] In defeat, the
open country was overrun, the cattle were driven off or slaughtered,
the fruit trees cut down, the crops laid waste, and the houses burned.
In speaking of the Gallic invasion, Niebuhr has pointed out that the
ravaging of the enemy, and the new taxes laid to rebuild the ruined
public works, led to general insolvency.[9]

Such conditions fostered the rapid propagation of distinct types of
mind, and at a very early period Romans had been bred destitute of the
martial instinct, but more crafty and more tenacious of life than the
soldier. These were the men who conceived and enforced the usury laws,
and who held to personal pledges as the dearest privilege of their
order; nor does Livy attempt to disguise the fact “that every patrician
house was a gaol for debtors; and that in seasons of great distress,
after every sitting of the courts, herds of sentenced slaves were led
away in chains to the houses of the nobless.”[10]

Of this redoubtable type the Claudian family was a famous specimen,
and the picture which has been drawn by Macaulay of the great usurer,
Appius Claudius, the decemvir, is so brilliant that it cannot be
omitted.

   “Appius Claudius Crassus ... was descended from a long line of
    ancestors distinguished by their haughty demeanour, and by the
    inflexibility with which they had withstood all the demands
    of the plebeian order. While the political conduct and the
    deportment of the Claudian nobles drew upon them the fiercest
    public hatred, they were accused of wanting, if any credit
    is due to the early history of Rome, a class of qualities
    which, in a military commonwealth, is sufficient to cover a
    multitude of offences. The chiefs of the family appear to have
    been eloquent, versed in civil business, and learned after the
    fashion of their age; but in war they were not distinguished
    by skill or valour. Some of them, as if conscious where their
    weakness lay, had, when filling the highest magistracies, taken
    internal administration as their department of public business,
    and left the military command to their colleagues. One of them
    had been entrusted with an army, and had failed ignominiously.
    None of them had been honoured with a triumph....

   “His grandfather, called, like himself, Appius Claudius, had
    left a name as much detested as that of Sextus Tarquinius. This
    elder Appius had been consul more than seventy years before
    the introduction of the Licinian Laws. By availing himself
    of a singular crisis in public feeling, he had obtained the
    consent of the commons to the abolition of the tribuneship, and
    had been the chief of that Council of Ten to which the whole
    direction of the State had been committed. In a few months
    his administration had become universally odious. It had been
    swept away by an irresistible outbreak of popular fury; and
    its memory was still held in abhorrence by the whole city. The
    immediate cause of the downfall of this execrable government
    was said to have been an attempt made by Appius Claudius upon
    the chastity of a beautiful young girl of humble birth. The
    story ran that the Decemvir, unable to succeed by bribes and
    solicitations, resorted to an outrageous act of tyranny. A vile
    dependant of the Claudian house laid claim to the damsel as his
    slave. The cause was brought before the tribunal of Appius.
    The wicked magistrate, in defiance of the clearest proofs,
    gave judgment for the claimant. But the girl’s father, a brave
    soldier, saved her from servitude and dishonour by stabbing her
    to the heart in the sight of the whole Forum. That blow was the
    signal for a general explosion. Camp and city rose at once; the
    Ten were pulled down; the tribuneship was re-established; and
    Appius escaped the hands of the executioner only by a voluntary
    death.”[11]

Virginia was slain in 449 B.C., just in the midst of the long
convulsion which began with the secession to the Mons Sacer, and ended
with the Licinian Laws. During this century and a quarter, usury
drained the Roman vitality low. Niebuhr was doubtless right in his
conjecture that the mutinous legions were filled with nexi to whom
the continuance of the existing status meant slavery, and Mommsen also
pointed out that the convulsions of the third and fourth centuries, in
which it seemed as though Roman society must disintegrate, were caused
by “the insolvency of the middle class of land-holders.”[12]

Had Italy been more tranquil, it is not inconceivable that the small
farmers might even then have sunk into the serfdom which awaited them
under the Empire, for in peace the patricians might have been able
to repress insurrection with their clients; but the accumulation of
capital had hardly begun, and several centuries were to elapse before
money was to take its ultimate form in a standing army. Meanwhile,
troops were needed almost every year to defend the city; and, as the
legions were a militia, they were the enemy and not the instrument of
wealth. Until the organization of a permanent paid police they were,
however, the highest expression of force, and, when opposed to them,
the monied oligarchy was helpless, as was proved by the secession to
the Mons Sacer. The storm gathered slowly. The rural population was
ground down under the usury laws, and in 495 B.C. the farmers refused
to respond to the levy. The consul Publius Servilius had to suspend
prosecutions for debt and to liberate debtors in prison; but at the
end of the campaign the promises he had made in the moment of danger
were repudiated by Appius Claudius, who rigorously enforced the usury
legislation, and who was, for the time, too strong to be opposed.

That year the men submitted, but the next the legions had again to be
embodied; they again returned victorious; their demands were again
rejected; and then, instead of disbanding, they marched in martial
array into the district of Crustumeria, and occupied the hill which
ever after was called the Sacred Mount.[13] Resistance was not even
attempted; and precisely the same surrender was repeated in 449. When
Virginius stabbed his daughter he fled to the camp, and his comrades
seized the standards and marched for Rome. The Senate yielded at once,
decreed the abolition of the Decemvirate, and the triumphant cohorts,
drawn up upon the Aventine, chose their tribunes.

Finally, in the last great struggle, when Camillus was made dictator
to coerce the people, he found himself impotent. The monied oligarchy
collapsed when confronted with an armed force; and Camillus, reduced
to act as mediator, vowed a temple to Concord, on the passage of
the Licinian Laws.[14] The Licinian Laws provided for a partial
liquidation, and also for an increase of the means of the debtor class
by redistribution of the public land. This land had been seized in war,
and had been monopolized by the patricians without any particular legal
right. Licinius obtained a statute by which back payments of interest
should be applied to extinguishing the principal of debts, and balances
then remaining due should be liquidated in three annual instalments.
He also limited the quantity of the public domain which could be held
by any individual, and directed that the residue which remained after
the reduction of all estates to that standard should be distributed in
five-acre lots.

Pyrrhus saw with a soldier’s eye that Rome’s strength did not lie in
her generals, who were frequently his inferiors, but in her farmers,
whom he could not crush by defeat, and this was the class which was
favoured by the Licinian Laws. They multiplied greatly when the usurers
capitulated, and, as Macaulay remarked, the effect of the reform
was “singularly happy and glorious.” It was indeed no less than the
conquest of Italy. Rome, “while the disabilities of the plebeians
continued ... was scarcely able to maintain her ground against the
Volscians and Hernicans. When those disabilities were removed, she
rapidly became more than a match for Carthage and Macedon.”[15]

But nature’s very bounty to the Roman husbandman and soldier proved
his ruin. Patient of suffering, enduring of fatigue, wise in council,
fierce in war, he routed all who opposed him; and yet the vigorous mind
and the robust frame which made him victorious in battle, were his
weakness when at peace. He needed costly nutriment, and when brought
into free economic competition with Africans and Asiatics, he starved.
Such competition resulted directly from foreign conquests, and came
rapidly when Italy had consolidated, and the Italians began to extend
their power over other races. Nearly five centuries intervened between
the foundation of the city and the defeat of Pyrrhus, but within little
more than two hundred years from the victory of Beneventum, Rome was
mistress of the world.

Indeed, beyond the peninsula, there was not much, save Carthage, to
stop the march of the legions. After the death of Alexander, in 323
B.C., Greece fell into decline, and by 200, when Rome attacked Macedon,
she was in decrepitude. The population of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt
was not martial, and had never been able to cope in battle with the
western races; while Spain and Gaul, though inhabited by fierce and
hardy tribes, lacked cohesion, and could not withstand the onset of
organized and disciplined troops. Distance, therefore, rather than
hostile military force, fixed the limit of the ancient centralization,
for the Romans were not maritime, and consequently failed to absorb
India or discover America. Thus their relatively imperfect movement
made the most material difference between the ancient and modern
economic system.

By conquest the countries inhabited by races of a low vitality and
great tenacity of life were opened both for trade and slaving, and
their cheap labour exterminated the husbandmen of Italy. Particularly
after the annexation of Asia Minor this labour overran Sicily, and the
cultivation of the cereals by the natives became impossible when the
island had been parcelled out into great estates stocked by capitalists
with eastern slaves who, at Rome, undersold all competitors. During
the second century the precious metals poured into Latium in a flood,
great fortunes were amassed and invested in land, and the Asiatic
provinces of the Empire were swept of their men in order to make
these investments pay. No data remain by which to estimate, even
approximately, the size of this involuntary migration, but it must
have reached enormous numbers, for sixty thousand captives were the
common booty of a campaign, and after provinces were annexed they were
depopulated by the publicans.

The best field hands came from the regions where poverty had always
been extreme, and where, for countless generations, men had been
inured to toil on scanty food. Districts like Bithynia and Syria, where
slaves could be bought for little or nothing, had always been tilled
by races far more tenacious of life than any Europeans. After Lucullus
plundered Pontus, a slave brought only four drachmæ, or, perhaps,
seventy cents.[16] On the other hand, competition grew sharper among
the Italians themselves. As capital accumulated in the hands of the
strongest, the poor grew poorer, and pauperism spread. As early as the
Marsian War, in 90 B.C., Lucius Marcius Philippus estimated that there
were only two thousand wealthy families among the burgesses. In about
three hundred years nature had culled a pure plutocracy from what had
been originally an essentially martial race.

The primitive Roman was a high order of husbandman, who could only when
well fed flourish and multiply. He was adapted to that stage of society
when the remnants of caste gave a certain fixity of tenure to the
farmer, and when prices were maintained by the cost of communication
with foreign countries. As the world centralized, through conquest,
these barriers were swept away. Economic competition became free,
land tended to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, and this land was
worked by eastern slaves, who reduced the wages of labour to the lowest
point at which the human being can survive.

The effect was to split society in halves, the basis being servile, and
the freemen being separated into a series of classes, according to the
economic power of the mind. Wealth formed the title to nobility of the
great oligarchy which thus came to constitute the core of the Empire.
At the head stood the senators, whose rank was hereditary unless they
lost their property, for to be a senator a man had to be rich. Augustus
fixed $48,000 as the minimum of the senatorial fortune, and made up the
deficiency to certain favoured families,[17] but Tiberius summarily
ejected spendthrifts.[18] All Latin literature is redolent of money.
Tacitus, with an opulent connection, never failed to speak with disdain
of the base-born, or, in other words, of the less prosperous. “Poppæus
Sabinus, a man of humble birth,” raised to position by the caprice of
two emperors;[19] “Cassius Severus, a man of mean extraction”;[20] and,
in the poetry of antiquity, there are few more famous lines than those
in which Juvenal has described the burden of poverty:

   “Haud facile emergunt, quorum virtutibus obstat
    Res angusta domi.”[21]

Perhaps no modern writer has been so imbued with the spirit of the
later Empire as Fustel de Coulanges, and on this subject he has been
emphatic. Not only were the Romans not democratic, but at no period of
her history did Rome love equality. In the Republic rank was determined
by wealth. The census was the basis of the social system. Every citizen
had to declare his fortune before a magistrate, and his grade was then
assigned him. “Poverty and wealth established the legal differences
between men.”

The first line of demarcation lay between those who owned land and
those who did not. The former were _assidui_: householders rooted in
the soil. The latter were _proletarians_. The _proletarians_ were equal
in their poverty; but the _assidui_ were unequal in their wealth, and
were consequently divided into five classes. Among these categories all
was unequal--taxes, military service, and political rights. They did
not mix together.

“If one transports oneself to the last century of the Republic ...
one finds there an aristocracy as strongly consolidated as the ancient
patrician.... At the summit came the senatorial order. To belong to it
the first condition was to possess a great fortune.... The Roman mind
did not understand that a poor man could belong to the aristocracy, or
that a rich man was not part of it.”[22]

Archaic customs lingered late in Rome, for the city was not a centre
of commercial exchanges; and long after the death of Alexander, when
Greece passed its meridian, the Republic kept its copper coinage.
Regulus farmed his field with a single slave and a hired servant,
and there was, in truth, nothing extraordinary in the famous meeting
with Cincinnatus at the plough, although such simplicity astonished
a contemporary of Augustus. Advancing centralization swept away these
ancient customs, a centralization whose march is, perhaps, as sharply
marked by the migration of vagrants to the cities, as by any single
phenomenon. Vagrant paupers formed the proletariat for whose relief
the “Frumentariæ Leges” were framed; and yet, though poor-laws in some
form are considered a necessity in modern times, few institutions of
antiquity have been more severely criticised than those regulating
charity. From the time of Cato downward, the tendency has been to
maintain that at Rome demagogues fed the rabble at the cost of the
lives of the free-holders.

Probably the exact converse is the truth; the public gifts of food
appear to have been the effect of the ruin of agriculture, and not
its cause. After the Italian husbandmen had been made insolvent by
the competition of races of lower vitality, they flocked starving to
the capital, but it was only reluctantly that the great speculators in
grain, who controlled the Senate, admitted the necessity of granting
State aid to the class whom they had destroyed.

Long before the Punic Wars the Carthaginians had farmed Sicily on
capitalistic principles; that is to say, they had stocked domains with
slaves, and had traded on the basis of large sales and narrow profits.
The Romans when they annexed the island only carried out this system to
its logical end. Having all Asia Minor to draw upon for labour, they
deliberately starved and overworked their field-hands, since it was
cheaper to buy others than to lose command of the market. The familiar
story of the outbreak of the Servile War, about 134 B.C., shows how far
the contemporaries of the Sicilian speculators believed them capable of
going.

Damophilus, an opulent Sicilian landlord, being one day implored by his
slaves to have pity on their nakedness and misery, indignantly demanded
why they went hungry and cold, with arms in their hands, and the
country before them. Then he bound them to stakes and flayed them with
the lash.[23]

The reduction of Syracuse by Marcellus broke the Carthaginian power
in the island, and, after the fall of Agrigentum in 210 B.C., the
pacification of the country went on rapidly. Probably from the outset,
even in the matter of transportation, the provinces of the mainland
were at a disadvantage because of the cheapness of sea freights, but
at all events the opening of the Sicilian grain trade had an immediate
and disastrous effect on Italy. The migration of vagrants to Rome began
forthwith, and within seven years, 203 B.C., a public distribution of
wheat took place, probably by the advice of Scipio. Nevertheless the
charity was private and not gratuitous. On the contrary, a charge of
six sesterces, or twenty-five cents the bushel, was made, apparently
near half the market rate, a price pretty regularly maintained on such
occasions down to the Empire. This interval comprehended the whole
period of the Sicilian supremacy in the corn trade, for in 30 B.C.
Egypt was annexed by Augustus.

The distress which followed upon free trade with Egypt finally broke
down the resistance of the rich to gratuitous relief for the poor.
Previously the opposition to State aid had been so stubborn that until
123 B.C. no legal provision whatever was made for paupers; and yet the
account left by Polybius of the condition of Lombardy toward the middle
of the second century shows the complete wreck of agriculture.

“The yield of corn in this district is so abundant that wheat is
often sold at four obols a Sicilian medimnus [about eight cents by
the bushel, or a little less than two sesterces], barley at two, or
a metretes of wine for an equal measure of barley.... The cheapness
and abundance of all articles of food may also be clearly shown from
the fact that travellers in these parts, when stopping at inns, do not
bargain for particular articles, but simply ask what the charge is per
head for board. And for the most part the innkeepers are content” with
half an as (about half a cent) a day.[24]

These prices indicate a lack of demand so complete, that the debtors
among the peasantry must have been ruined, and yet tax-payers remained
obdurate. Gratuitous distributions were tried in 58 B.C. by the Lex
Clodia, but soon abandoned as costly, and Cæsar applied himself to
reducing the outlay on the needy. He hoped to reach his end by cutting
down the number of grain-receivers one-half, by providing that no
grain should be given away except on presentation of a ticket, and by
ordering that the number of ticket-holders should not be increased. The
law of nature prevailed against him, for the absorption of Egypt in the
economic system of the Empire, marked, in the words of Mommsen “the end
of the old and the beginning of a new epoch.”[25]

Among the races which have survived through ages upon scanty nutriment,
none have, perhaps, excelled the Egyptian fellah. Even in the East no
peasantry has probably been so continuously overworked, so under-paid,
and so taxed.

   “If it is the aim of the State to work out the utmost possible
    amount from its territory, in the Old World the Lagids were
    absolutely the masters of statecraft. In particular they
    were in this sphere the instructors and the models of the
    Cæsars.”[26]

In the first century Egypt was, as it still is, preeminently a land
of cheap labour; but it was also something more. The valley of the
Nile, enriched by the overflow of the river, returned an hundred-fold,
without manure; and this wonderful district was administered, not like
an ordinary province, but like a private farm belonging to the citizens
of Rome. The emperor reserved it to himself. How large a revenue he
drew from it is immaterial; it suffices that one-third of all the
grain consumed in the capital came from thence. According to Athenæus,
some of the grain ships in use were about 420 feet long by 57 broad,
or nearly the size of a modern steamer in the Atlantic trade.[27]
From the beginning of the Christian era, therefore, the wages of the
Egyptian fellah regulated the price of the cereals within the limits
where trade was made free by Roman consolidation, and it is safe to
say that, thenceforward, such of the highly nourished races as were
constrained to sustain this competition, were doomed to perish. It
is even extremely doubtful whether the distributions of grain by the
government materially accelerated the march of the decay. Spain should
have been far enough removed from the centre of exchanges to have had
a certain local market of her own, and yet Martial, writing about 100
A.D., described the Spanish husbandman eating and drinking the produce
he could not sell, and receiving but four sesterces the bushel for his
wheat, which was the price paid by paupers in the time of Cicero.[28]

Thus by economic necessity great estates were formed in the hands of
the economically strong. As the value of cereals fell, arable land
passed into vineyards or pasture, and, the provinces being unable to
sustain their old population, eviction went on with gigantic strides.
Had the Romans possessed the versatility to enable them to turn
to industry, factories might have afforded a temporary shelter to
this surplus labour, but manufactures were monopolized by the East;
therefore the beggared peasantry were either enslaved for debt, or
wandered as penniless paupers to the cities, where gradually their
numbers so increased as to enable them to extort a gratuitous dole.
Indeed, during the third century, their condition fell so low that they
were unable even to cook the food freely given them, and Aurelian had
their bread baked at public ovens.[29]

As centralization advanced with the acceleration of human movement,
force expressed itself more and more exclusively through money, and
the channel in which money chose to flow was in investments in land.
The social system fostered the growth of large estates. The Romans
always had an inordinate respect for the landed magnate, and a contempt
for the tradesman. Industry was reputed a servile occupation, and,
under the Republic, the citizen who performed manual labour was almost
deprived of political rights. Even commerce was thought so unworthy
of the aristocracy that it was forbidden to senators. “The soil was
always, in this Roman society, the principal source and, above all, the
only measure of wealth.”

A law of Tiberius obliged capitalists to invest two-thirds of their
property in land. Trajan not only exacted of aspirants to office that
they should be rich, but that they should place at least one-third
of their fortune in Italian real estate; and, down to the end of the
Empire, the senatorial class “was at the same time the class of great
landed proprietors.”[30]

The more property consolidated, the more resistless the momentum
of capital became. Under the Empire small properties grew steadily
rarer, and the fewer they were, the greater the disadvantage at which
their owners stood. The small farmer could hardly sustain himself
in competition with the great landlord. The grand domain of the
capitalist was not only provided with a full complement of labourers,
vine-dressers, and shepherds, but with the necessary artisans. The
poor farmer depended on his rich neighbour even for his tools. “He was
what a workman would be to-day who, amidst great factories, worked
alone.”[31] He bought dearer and sold cheaper, his margin of profit
steadily shrunk; at last he was reduced to a bare subsistence in good
years, and the first bad harvest left him bankrupt.

The Roman husbandman and soldier was doomed, for nature had turned
against him; the task of history is but to ascertain his fate, and
trace the fortunes of his country after he had gone.

Of the evicted, many certainly drifted to the cities and lived upon
charity, forming the proletariat, a class alike despised and lost to
self-respect: some were sold into slavery, others starved; but when all
deductions have been made, a surplus is left to be accounted for, and
there is reason to suppose that these stayed on their farms as tenants
to the purchasers.

In the first century such tenancies were common. The lessee remained
a freeman, under no subjection to his landlord, provided he paid his
rent; but in case of default the law was rigorous. Everything upon the
land was liable as a pledge, and the tenant himself was held in pawn
unless he could give security for what he owed. In case, therefore,
of prolonged agricultural depression, all that was left of the ancient
rural population could hardly fail to pass into the condition of serfs,
bound to the land by debts beyond the possibility of payment.

That such a depression actually occurred, and that it extended through
several centuries, is certain. Nor is it possible that its only cause
was Egyptian competition, for had it been so, an equilibrium would have
been reached when the African exchanges had been adjusted, whereas a
continuous decline of prices went on until long after the fall of the
Western Empire. The only other possible explanation of the phenomenon
is that a contraction of the currency began soon after the death of
Augustus, and continued without much interruption down to Charlemagne.
Between the fall of Carthage and the birth of Christ, the Romans
plundered the richest portions of the world west of the Indus; in the
second century, North Africa, Macedon, Spain, and parts of Greece and
Asia Minor; in the first, Athens, Cappadocia, Syria, Gaul, and Egypt.
These countries yielded an enormous mass of treasure, which was brought
to Rome as spoil of war, but which was not fixed there by commercial
exchanges, and which continually tended to flow back to the natural
centres of trade. Therefore, when conquests ceased, the sources of
new bullion dried up, and the quantity held in Italy diminished as the
balance of trade grew more and more unfavourable.

Under Augustus the precious metals were plenty and cheap, and the
prices of commodities were correspondingly high; but a full generation
had hardly passed before a dearth began to be felt, which manifested
itself in a debasement of the coinage, the surest sign of an
appreciation of the currency.

Speaking generally, the manufactures and the more costly products of
antiquity came from countries to the east of the Adriatic, while the
West was mainly agricultural; and nothing is better established than
that luxuries were dear under the Empire, and food cheap.[32] Therefore
exchanges were unfavourable to the capital from the outset; the exports
did not cover the imports, and each year a deficit had to be made good
in specie.

The Romans perfectly understood the situation, and this adverse balance
caused them much uneasiness. Tiberius dwelt upon it in a letter to the
Senate as early as 22 A.D. In that year the ædiles brought forward
proposals for certain sumptuary reforms, and the Senate, probably
to rid itself of a delicate question, referred the matter to the
executive. Most of the emperor’s reply is interesting, but there is one
particularly noteworthy paragraph. “If a reform is in truth intended,
where must it begin? and how am I to restore the simplicity of ancient
times?... How shall we reform the taste for dress?... How are we to
deal with the peculiar articles of female vanity, and, in particular,
with that rage for jewels and precious trinkets, which drains the
Empire of its wealth, and sends, in exchange for bawbles, the money
of the Commonwealth to foreign nations, and even to the enemies of
Rome?”[33] Half a century later matters were, apparently, worse, for
Pliny more than once returned to the subject. In the twelfth book of
his Natural History, after enumerating the many well-known spices,
perfumes, drugs, and gems, which have always made the Eastern trade
of such surpassing value, he estimated that at the most moderate
computation 100,000,000 sesterces, or about $4,000,000 in coin, were
annually exported to Arabia and India alone; and at a time when silk
was worth its weight in gold, the estimate certainly does not seem
excessive. He added, “So dear do pleasures and women cost us.”[34]

The drain to Egypt and the Asiatic provinces could hardly have been
much less serious. Adrian almost seems to have been jealous of the
former, for in his letter to Servianus, after having criticised the
people, he remarked that it was also a rich and productive country
“in which no one was idle,” and in which glass, paper and linen were
manufactured.[35] The Syrians were both industrial and commercial.
Tyre, for example, worked the raw silk of China, dyed and exported
it. The glass of Tyre and Sidon was famous; the local aristocracy were
merchants and manufacturers, “and, as later the riches acquired in the
East flowed to Genoa and Venice, so then the commercial gains of the
West flowed back to Tyre and Apamea.”[36]

Within about sixty years from the final consolidation of the Empire
under Augustus, this continuous efflux of the precious metals began
to cause the currency to contract, and prices to fall; and the first
effect of shrinking values appears to have been a financial crisis in
33 A.D. Probably the diminution in the worth of commodities relatively
to money, had already made it difficult for debtors to meet their
liabilities, for Tacitus has prefaced his story by pointing out that
usury had always been a scourge of Rome, and that just previous to
the panic an agitation against the money-lenders had begun with a view
to enforcing the law regarding interest. As most of the senators were
deep in usury they applied for protection to Tiberius, who granted what
amounted to a stay of proceedings, and then, as soon as the capitalists
felt themselves safe, they proceeded to take their revenge. Loans were
called, accommodation refused, and mortgagors were ruthlessly sold
out. “There was great scarcity of money ... and, on account of sales
on execution, coin accumulated in the imperial, or the public treasury.
Upon this the Senate ordered that every one should invest two-thirds of
his capital on loan, in Italian real estate; but the creditors called
in the whole, nor did public opinion allow debtors to compromise.”
Meanwhile there was great excitement but no relief, “as the usurers
hoarded for the purpose of buying low. The quantity of sales broke the
market, and the more liabilities were extended, the harder liquidation
became. Many were ruined, and the loss of property endangered
social station and reputation.”[37] The panic finally subsided, but
contraction went on and next showed itself, twenty-five years later,
in adulterated coinage. From the time of the Punic Wars, about two
centuries and a half before Christ, the silver denarius, worth nearly
seventeen cents, had been the standard of the Roman currency, and it
kept its weight and purity unimpaired until Nero, when it diminished
from 1⁄84 to 1⁄96 of a pound of silver, the pure metal being mixed with
1⁄10 of copper.[38] Under Trajan, toward 100 A.D., the alloy reached
twenty per cent; under Septimius Severus a hundred years later it had
mounted to fifty or sixty per cent, and by the time of Elagabalus,
220 A.D., the coin had degenerated into a token of base metal, and was
repudiated by the government.

Something similar happened to the gold. The aureus, though it kept its
fineness, lost in weight down to Constantine. In the reign of Augustus
it equalled one-fortieth of a Roman pound of gold, in that of Nero
one forty-fifth, in that of Caracalla but one-fiftieth, in that of
Diocletian one-sixtieth, and in that of Constantine one seventy-second,
when the coin ceased passing by tale and was taken only by weight.[39]

The repudiation of the denarius was an act of bankruptcy; nor did
the financial position improve while the administration remained at
Rome. Therefore the inference is that, toward the middle of the third
century, Italy had lost the treasure she had won in war, which had
gradually gravitated to the centre of exchanges. This inference is
confirmed by history. The movements of Diocletian seem to demonstrate
that after 250 A.D. Rome ceased to be either the political or
commercial capital of the world.

Unquestionably Diocletian must have lived a life of intense activity at
the focus of affairs, to have raised himself from slavery to the purple
at thirty-nine; and yet Gibbon thought he did not even visit Rome until
he went thither to celebrate his triumph, after he had been twenty
years upon the throne. He never seemed anxious about the temper of the
city. When proclaimed emperor he ignored Italy and established himself
at Nicomedia on the Propontis, where he lived until he abdicated in
305. His personal preferences evidently did not influence him, since
his successors imitated his policy; and everything points to the
conclusion that he, and those who followed him, only yielded to the
same resistless force which fixed the economic capital of the world
upon the Bosphorus. In the case of Constantine the operation of this
force was conspicuous, for it was not only powerful enough to overcome
the habit of a lifetime, but to cause him to undertake the gigantic
task of building Constantinople.

Constantine was proclaimed in Britain in 306, when only thirty-two.
Six years later he defeated Maxentius, and then governed the West alone
until his war with Licinius, whom he captured in 323 and afterward put
to death. Thus, at fifty, he returned to the East, after an absence of
nearly twenty years, and his first act was to choose Byzantium as his
capital, a city nearly opposite Nicomedia.

The sequence of events seems plain. Very soon after the insolvency
of the government at Rome, the administration quitted the city and
moved toward the boundary between Europe and Asia; there, after some
forty years of vacillation, it settled permanently at the true seat of
exchanges, for Constantinople remained the economic centre of the earth
for more than eight centuries.

Similar conclusions may be drawn from the fluctuations of the currency.
At Rome the coin could not be maintained at the standard, because of
adverse exchanges; but when the political and economic centres had come
to coincide, at a point upon the Bosphorus, depreciation ceased, and
the aureus fell no further.

This migration of capital, which caused the rise of Constantinople,
was the true opening of the Middle Ages, for it occasioned the
gradual decline of the rural population, and thus brought about the
disintegration of the West. Victory carried wealth to Rome, and wealth
manifested its power in a permanent police; as the attack in war
gained upon the defence, and individual resistance became impossible,
transportation grew cheap and safe, and human movement was accelerated.
Then economic competition began, and intensified as centralization
advanced, telling always in favour of the acutest intellect and the
cheapest labour. Soon, exchanges became permanently unfavourable,
a steady drain of bullion set in to the East, and, as the outflow
depleted the treasure amassed at Rome by plunder, contraction began,
and with contraction came that fall of prices which first ruined, then
enslaved, and finally exterminated, the native rural population of
Italy.

In the time of Diocletian, the ancient silver currency had long
been repudiated, and, in his well-known edict, he spoke of prices as
having risen ninefold, when reckoned in the denarii of base metal;
the purchasing power of pure gold and silver had, however, risen
very considerably in all the western provinces. Nor was this all. It
appears to be a natural law that when social development has reached
a certain stage, and capital has accumulated sufficiently, the class
which has had the capacity to absorb it shall try to enhance the
value of their property by legislation. This is done most easily by
reducing the quantity of the currency, which is a legal tender for the
payment of debts. A currency obviously gains in power as it shrinks
in volume, and the usurers of Constantinople intuitively condensed to
the utmost that of the Empire. After the insolvency under Elagabalus,
payments were exacted in gold by weight, and as it grew scarcer its
value rose. Aurelian issued an edict limiting its use in the arts; and
while there are abundant reasons for inferring that silver also gained
in purchasing power, gold far outstripped it. Although no statistics
remain by which to establish, with any exactness, the movement of
silver in comparison with commodities, the ratio between the precious
metals at different epochs is known, and gold appears to have doubled
between Cæsar and Romulus Augustulus.

    47 B.C.                       gold stood to silver as 1 : 8.9
    1 A.D. under Augustus,           “    “       “       1 : 9.3
    100–200, Trajan to Severus,      “    “       “       1 : 9–10
    310, Constantine,                “    “       “       1 : 12.5
    450, Theodosius II.,             “    “       “       1 : 18

As gold had become the sole legal tender, this change of ratio
represents a diminution, during the existence of the Western Empire, of
at least fifty per cent in the value of property in relation to debt,
leaving altogether out of view the appreciation of silver itself, which
was so considerable that the government was unable to maintain the
denarius.[40]

Resistance to the force of centralized wealth was vain. Aurelian’s
attempt to reform the mints is said to have caused a rebellion, which
cost him the lives of seven thousand of his soldiers; and though his
policy was continued by Probus, and Diocletian coined both metals
again at a ratio, expansion was so antagonistic to the interests of the
monied class that, by 360, silver was definitely discarded, and gold
was made by law the only legal tender for the payment of debts.[41]
Furthermore, the usurers protected themselves against any possible
tampering with the mints by providing that the solidus should pass by
weight and not by tale; that is to say, they reserved to themselves
the right to reject any golden son which contained less than one
seventy-second of a pound of standard metal, the weight fixed by
Constantine.[42]

Thus, at a time when the exhaustion of the mines caused a failure in
the annual supply of bullion, the old composite currency was split
in two, and the half retained made to pass by weight alone, so as to
throw the loss by clipping and abrasion upon the debtor. So strong a
contraction engendered a steady fall of prices, a fall which tended
rather to increase than diminish as time went on. But in prolonged
periods of decline in the market value of agricultural products,
farmers can with difficulty meet a money rent, because the sale of
their crops leaves a greater deficit each year, and finally a time
comes when insolvency can no longer be postponed.

In his opening chapter Gibbon described the Empire under the Antonines
as enjoying “a happy period of more than fourscore years” of peace and
prosperity; and yet nothing is more certain than that this halcyon age
was in reality an interval of agricultural ruin. On this point Pliny
was explicit, and Pliny was a large land-owner.

He wrote one day to Calvisius about an investment, and went at length
into the condition of the property. A large estate adjoining his own
was for sale, and he was tempted to buy, “for the land was fertile,
rich, and well watered,” the fields produced vines and wood which
promised a fair return, and yet this natural fruitfulness was marred by
the misery of the husbandmen. He found that the former owner “had often
seized the ‘pignora,’ or pledges [that is, all the property the tenants
possessed]; and though, by so doing, he had temporarily reduced their
arrears, he had left them” without the means of tilling the soil. These
tenants were freemen, who had been unable to meet their rent because of
falling prices, and who, when they had lost their tools, cattle, and
household effects, were left paupers on the farms they could neither
cultivate nor abandon. Consequently the property had suffered, the
rent had declined, and for these reasons and “the general hardness of
the times,” its value had fallen from five million to three million
sesterces.[43]

In another letter he explained that he was detained at home making new
arrangements with his tenants, who were apparently insolvent, for “in
the last five years, in spite of great concessions, the arrears have
increased. For this reason most [tenants] take no trouble to diminish
their debt, which they despair of paying. Indeed, they plunder and
consume what there is upon the land, since they think they cannot
save for themselves.” The remedy he proposed was to make no more money
leases, but to farm on shares.[44]

The tone of these letters shows that there was nothing unusual in all
this. Pliny nowhere intimated that the tenants were to blame, or that
better men were to be had. On the contrary, he said emphatically that
in such hard times money could not be collected, and therefore the
interest of the landlord was to cultivate his estates on shares, taking
the single precaution to place slaves over the tenants as overseers and
receivers of the crops.

In the same way the digest referred to such arrears as habitual.[45] In
still another letter to Trajan, Pliny observed, “Continuæ sterilitates
cogunt me de remissionibus cogitare.”[46] Certainly these insolvent
farmers could have held no better position when working on shares than
before their disasters, for as bankrupts they were wholly in their
creditors’ power, and could be hunted like slaves, and brought back in
fetters if they fled. They were tied to the property by a debt which
never could be paid, and they and their descendants were doomed to stay
for ever as _coloni_ or serfs, chattels to be devised or sold as part
of the realty. In the words of the law, “they were considered slaves
of the land.”[47] The ancient martial husbandman had thus “fallen
from point to point, from debt to debt, into an almost perpetual
subjection.”[48] Deliverance was impossible, for payment was out of the
question. He was bound to the soil for his life, and his children after
him inherited his servitude with his debt.

The customs, according to which the _coloni_ held, were infinitely
varied; they differed not only between estates, but between the hands
on the same estate. On the whole, however, the life must have been
hard, for the serfs of the Empire did not multiply, and the scarcity of
rural labour became a chronic disease.

Yet, relatively, the position of the _colonus_ was good, for his wife
and children were his own; slavery was the ulcer which ate into the
flesh, and the Roman fiscal system, coupled as it was with usury, was
calculated to enslave all but the oligarchy who made the laws.

The taxes of the provinces were assessed by the censors and then sold
for cash to the publicans, who undertook the collection. Italy was at
first exempted, but after her bankruptcy she shared the common fate.
Companies were formed to handle these ventures. The knights usually
subscribed the capital and divided the profits, which corresponded
with the severity of their administration; and, as the Roman conquests
extended, these companies grew too powerful to be controlled. The
only officials in a position to act were the provincial governors,
who were afraid to interfere, and preferred to share in the gains of
the traffic, rather than to run the risk of exciting the wrath of so
dangerous an enemy.[49]

According to Pliny the collection of a rent in money had become
impossible in the reign of Trajan. The reason was that with a
contracting currency prices of produce fell, and each year’s crop
netted less than that of the year before; therefore a rent moderate in
one decade was extortionate in the next. But taxes did not fall with
the fall in values; on the contrary, the tendency of centralization is
always toward a more costly administration. Under Augustus, one emperor
with a moderate household sufficed; but in the third century Diocletian
found it necessary to reorganize the government under four Cæsars, and
everything became specialized in the same proportion.

In this way the people were caught between the upper and the nether
millstone. The actual quantity of bullion taken from them was
greater, the lower prices of their property fell, and arrears of taxes
accumulated precisely as Pliny described the accumulation of arrears
of rent. These arrears were carried over from reign to reign, and even
from century to century; and Petronius, the father-in-law of Valens, is
said to have precipitated the rebellion of Procopius, by exacting the
tribute unpaid since the death of Aurelian a hundred years before.

The processes employed in the collection of the revenue were severe.
Torture was freely used,[50] and slavery was the fate of defaulters.
Armed with such power, the publicans held debtors at their mercy.
Though usury was forbidden, the most lucrative part of the trade
was opening accounts with the treasury, assuming debts, and charging
interest sometimes as high as fifty per cent. Though, as prices fell,
the pressure grew severer, the abuses of the administration were never
perhaps worse than toward the end of the Republic. In his oration
against Verres, Cicero said the condition of the people had become
intolerable: “All the provinces are in mourning, all the nations that
are free are complaining; every kingdom is expostulating with us about
our covetousness and injustice.”[51]

The well-known transactions of Brutus are typical of what went on
wherever the Romans marched. Brutus lent the Senate of Salaminia at
forty-eight per cent a year. As the contract was illegal, he obtained
two decrees of the Senate at Rome for his protection, and then to
enforce payment of his interest, Scaptius, his man of business,
borrowed from the governor of Cilicia a detachment of troops. With
this he blockaded the Senate so closely that several members starved
to death. The Salaminians, wanting at all costs to free themselves from
such a load, offered to pay off both interest and capital at once; but
to this Brutus would not consent, and to impose his own terms upon the
province he demanded from Cicero more troops, “only fifty horse.”[52]

When at last, by such proceedings, the debtors were so exhausted
that no torment could wring more from them, they were sold as slaves;
Nicodemus, king of Bithynia, on being reproached for not furnishing his
contingent of auxiliaries, replied that all his able-bodied subjects
had been taken by the farmers of the revenue.[53] Nor, though the
administration doubtless was better regulated under the Empire than
under the Republic, did the oppression of the provinces cease. Juvenal,
who wrote about 100, implored the young noble taking possession
of his government to put some curb upon his avarice, “to pity the
poverty of the allies. You see the bones of kings sucked of their very
marrow.”[54] And though the testimony of Juvenal may be rejected as
savouring too much of poetical licence, Pliny must always be treated
with respect. When Maximus was sent to Achaia, Pliny thought it well
to write him a long letter of advice, in which he not only declared
that to wrest from the Greeks the shadow of liberty left them would be
“durum, ferum, barbarumque;” but adjured him to try to remember what
each city had been, and not to despise it for what it was.[55]

Most impressive, perhaps, of all, is the statement of Dio Cassius that
the revolt led by Boadicea in Britain in 61 A.D., which cost the Romans
seventy thousand lives, was provoked by the rapacity of Seneca, who,
having forced a loan of ten million drachmas ($1,670,000) on the people
at usurious interest, suddenly withdrew his money, thereby inflicting
intense suffering.[56] As Pliny said with bitterness and truth, “The
arts of avarice were those most cultivated at Rome.”[57]

The stronger type exterminated the weaker; the money-lender killed out
the husbandman; the race of soldiers vanished, and the farms, whereon
they had once flourished, were left desolate. To quote the words
of Gibbon: “The fertile and happy province of Campania ... extended
between the sea and the Apennines from the Tiber to the Silarus. Within
sixty years after the death of Constantine, and on the evidence of an
actual survey, an exemption was granted in favour of three hundred and
thirty thousand English acres of desert and uncultivated land; which
amounted to one-eighth of the whole surface of the province.”[58]

It is true that Gibbon, in this paragraph, described Italy as she
was in the fourth century, just before the barbarian invasions, but a
similar fate had overtaken the provinces under the Cæsars. In the reign
of Domitian, according to Plutarch, Greece had been almost depopulated.

   “She can with much difficulty raise three thousand men, which
    number the single city of Megara sent heretofore to the battle
    of Platæa.... For of what use would the oracle be now, which
    was heretofore at Tegyra or at Ptous? For scarcely shall you
    meet, in a whole day’s time, with so much as a herdsman or
    shepherd in those parts.”[59]

Wallon has observed that Rome, “in the early times of the Republic,
was chiefly preoccupied with having a numerous and strong population of
freemen. Under the Empire she had but one anxiety--taxes.”[60]

To speak with more precision, force changed the channel through which
it operated. Native farmers and native soldiers were needless when
such material could be bought cheaper in the North or East. With money
the cohorts could be filled with Germans; with money, slaves and serfs
could be settled upon the Italian fields; and for the last century,
before the great inroads began, one chief problem of the imperial
administration was the regulation of the inflow of new blood from
without, lacking which the social system must have collapsed.

The later campaigns on the Rhine and the Danube were really slave-hunts
on a gigantic scale. Probus brought back sixteen thousand men from
Germany, “the bravest and most robust of their youth,” and distributed
them in knots of fifty or sixty among the legions. “Their aid was
now become necessary.... The infrequency of marriage, and the ruin
of agriculture, affected the principles of population; and not only
destroyed the strength of the present, but intercepted the hope of
future generations.”[61]

His importations of agricultural labour were much more considerable. In
a single settlement in Thrace, Probus established one hundred thousand
Bastarnæ; Constantius Chlorus is said to have made Gaul flourish by
the herds of slaves he distributed among the landlords; in 370, large
numbers of Alemanni were planted in the valley of the Po, and on the
vast spaces of the public domain there were barbarian villages where
the native language and customs were preserved.

Probably none of these Germans came as freemen. Many, of course,
were captives sold as slaves, but perhaps the majority were serfs.
Frequently a tribe, hard pressed by enemies, asked leave to pass
the frontier, and settle as tributaries, that is to say as _coloni_.
On one such occasion Constantius II. was nearly murdered. A body of
Limigantes, who had made a raid, surrendered, and petitioned to be
given lands at any distance, provided they might have protection. The
emperor was delighted at the prospect of such a harvest of labourers,
to say nothing of recruits, and went among them to receive their
submission. Seeing him alone, the barbarians attacked him, and he
escaped with difficulty. His troops slaughtered the Germans to the last
man.

This unceasing emigration gradually changed the character of the
rural population, and a similar alteration took place in the army.
As early as the time of Cæsar, Italy was exhausted; his legions were
mainly raised in Gaul, and as the native farmers sank into serfdom or
slavery, and then at last vanished, recruits were drawn more and more
from beyond the limits of the Empire. At first they were taken singly,
afterwards in tribes and nations, so that, when Aëtius defeated Attila
at Châlons, the battle was fought by the Visigoths under Theodoric, and
the equipment of the Romans and Huns was so similar that when drawn up
the lines “presented the image of civil war.”

This military metamorphosis indicated the extinction of the martial
type, and it extended throughout society. Rome not only failed to
breed the common soldier, she also failed to produce generals. After
the first century, the change was marked. Trajan was a Spaniard,
Septimius Severus an African, Aurelian an Illyrian peasant, Diocletian
a Dalmatian slave, Constantius Chlorus a Dardanian noble, and the son
of Constantius, by a Dacian woman, was the great Constantine.

All these men were a peculiar species of military adventurer, for
they combined qualities which made them, not only effective chiefs
of police, but acceptable as heads of the civil bureaucracy, which
represented capital. Severus was the type, and Severus has never been
better described than by Machiavelli, who said he united the ferocity
of the lion to the cunning of the fox. This bureaucracy was the core
of the consolidated mass called the Empire; it was the embodiment of
money, the ultimate expression of force, and it recognized and advanced
men who were adapted to its needs. When such men were to be found, the
administration was thought good; but when no one precisely adapted for
the purple appeared, and an ordinary officer had to be hired to keep
the peace, friction was apt to follow, and the soldier, even though of
the highest ability, was often removed. Both Stilicho and Aëtius were
murdered.

The monied oligarchy which formed this bureaucracy was a growth as
characteristic of the high centralization of the age, as a sacred
caste is characteristic of decentralization. Perhaps the capitalistic
class of the later Empire has been better understood and appreciated by
Fustel de Coulanges than by any other historian.

   “All the documents which show the spirit of the epoch show
    that this noblesse was as much honoured by the government as
    respected by the people.... It was from it that the imperial
    government chose ordinarily its high functionaries.”

These functionaries were not sought among the lower classes. The high
offices were not given as a reward of long and faithful service; they
belonged by prescriptive right to the great families. The Empire made
the wealthy, senators, prætors, consuls, and governors; all dignities,
except only the military, were practically hereditary in the opulent
class.

   “This class is rich and the government is poor. This class is
    mistress of the larger part of the soil; it is in possession
    of the local dignities, of the administrative and judicial
    functions. The government has only the appearance of power, and
    an armed force which is continually diminishing....

   “The aristocracy had the land, the wealth, the distinction,
    the education, ordinarily the morality of existence; it did
    not know how to fight and to command. It withdrew itself from
    military service; more than that, it despised it. It was one of
    the characteristic signs of this society to have always placed
    the civil functions not on a level with, but much above, the
    grades of the army. It esteemed much the profession of the
    doctor, of the professor, of the advocate; it did not esteem
    that of the officer and the soldier, and left it to men of low
    estate.”[62]

This supremacy of the economic instinct transformed all the relations
of life, the domestic as well as the military. The family ceased
to be a unit, the members of which cohered from the necessity of
self-defence, and became a business association. Marriage took the form
of a contract, dissoluble at the will of either party, and, as it was
somewhat costly, it grew rare. As with the drain of their bullion to
the East, which crushed their farmers, the Romans were conscious, as
Augustus said, that sterility must finally deliver their city into the
hand of the barbarians.[63] They knew this and they strove to avert
their fate, and there is little in history more impressive than the
impotence of the ancient civilization in its conflict with nature.
About the opening of the Christian era the State addressed itself
to the task. Probably in the year 4 A.D., the emperor succeeded in
obtaining the first legislation favouring marriage, and this enactment
not proving effective, it was supplemented by the famous Leges Julia
and Papia Poppæa of the year 9. In the spring, at the games, the
knights demanded the repeal of these laws, and then Augustus, having
called them to the Forum, made them the well-known speech, whose
violence now seems incredible. Those who were single were the worst
of criminals, they were murderers, they were impious, they were
destroyers of their race, they resembled brigands or wild beasts. He
asked the _equites_ if they expected men to start from the ground to
replace them, as in the fable; and declared in bitterness that while
the government liberated slaves for the sole purpose of keeping up the
number of citizens, the children of the Marcii, of the Fabii, of the
Valerii, and the Julii, let their names perish from the earth.[64]

In vain celibacy was made almost criminal. In vain celibates were
declared incapable of inheriting, while fathers were offered every
bribe, were preferred in appointments to office, were even given the
choice seats at games; in the words of Tacitus, “not for that did
marriage and children increase, for the advantages of childlessness
prevailed.”[65] All that was done was to breed a race of informers, and
to stimulate the lawyers to fresh chicane.[66]

When wealth became force, the female might be as strong as the male;
therefore she was emancipated. Through easy divorce she came to stand
on an equality with the man in the marriage contract. She controlled
her own property, because she could defend it; and as she had power,
she exercised political privileges. In the third century Julia Domna,
Julia Mamæa, Soæmias, and others, sat in the Senate, or conducted the
administration.

The evolution of this centralized society was as logical as every other
work of nature. When force reached the stage where it expressed itself
exclusively through money, the governing class ceased to be chosen
because they were valiant or eloquent, artistic, learned, or devout,
and were selected solely because they had the faculty of acquiring and
keeping wealth. As long as the weak retained enough vitality to produce
something which could be absorbed, this oligarchy was invincible; and
for very many years after the native peasantry of Gaul and Italy had
perished under the load, new blood injected from more tenacious races
kept the dying civilization alive.

The weakness of the monied class lay in their very power, for they not
only killed the producer, but in the strength of their acquisitiveness
they failed to propagate themselves. The State feigned to regard
marriage as a debt, and yet the opulent families died out. In the reign
of Augustus all but fifty of the patrician houses had become extinct,
and subsequently the emperor seemed destined to remain the universal
heir through bequests of the childless.

With the peasantry the case was worse. By the second century barbarian
labour had to be imported to till the fields, and even the barbarians
lacked the tenacity of life necessary to endure the strain. They ceased
to breed, and the population dwindled. Then, somewhat suddenly, the
collapse came. With shrinking numbers, the sources of wealth ran dry,
the revenue failed to pay the police, and on the efficiency of the
police the life of this unwarlike civilization hung.

In early ages every Roman had been a land-owner, and every land-owner
had been a soldier, serving without pay. To fight had been as essential
a part of life as to plough. But by the fourth century military service
had become commercial; the legions were as purely an expression of
money as the bureaucracy itself.

From the time of the Servian constitution downward, the change in the
army had kept pace with the acceleration of movement which caused the
economic competition that centralized the State. Rome owed her triumphs
over Hannibal and Pyrrhus to the valour of her infantry, rather than to
the genius of her generals; but from Marius the census ceased to be the
basis of recruitment, and the rich refused to serve in the ranks.

This was equivalent in itself to a social revolution; for, from the
moment when the wealthy succeeded in withdrawing themselves from
service, and the poor saw in it a trade, the citizen ceased to be a
soldier, and the soldier became a mercenary. From that time the army
could be used for “all purposes, provided that they could count on
their pay and their booty.”[67]

The administration of Augustus organized the permanent police, which
replaced the mercenaries of the civil wars, and this machine was the
greatest triumph and the crowning glory of capital. Dio Cassius has
described how the last vestige of an Italian army passed away. Up to
the time of Severus it had been customary to recruit the Prætorians
either from Italy itself, from Spain, Macedonia, or other neighbouring
countries, whose population had some affinity with that of Latium.
Severus, after the treachery of the guard to Pertinax, disbanded it,
and reorganized a corps selected from the bravest soldiers of the
legions. These men were a horde of barbarians, repulsive to Italians
in their habits, and terrible to look upon.[68] Thus a body of
wage-earners, drawn from the ends of the earth, was made cohesive by
money. For more than four hundred years this corps of hirelings crushed
revolt within the Empire, and regulated the injection of fresh blood
from without, with perfect promptitude and precision; nor did it fail
in its functions while the money which vitalized it lasted.

But a time came when the suction of the usurers so wasted the life
of the community that the stream of bullion ceased to flow from the
capital to the frontiers; then, as the sustaining force failed, the
line of troops along the Danube and the Rhine was drawn out until it
broke, and the barbarians poured in unchecked.

The so-called invasions were not conquests, for they were not
necessarily hostile; they were only the logical conclusion of a process
which had been going on since Trajan. When the power to control the
German emigration decayed, it flowed freely into the provinces.

By the year 400 disintegration was far advanced; the Empire was
crumbling, not because it was corrupt or degenerate, but because the
most martial and energetic race the world had ever seen had been so
thoroughly exterminated by men of the economic type of mind, that petty
bands of sorry adventurers might rove whither they would, on what had
once been Roman soil, without meeting an enemy capable of facing them,
save other adventurers like themselves. Goths, not Romans, defeated
Attila at Châlons.

The Vandals, who, in the course of twenty years, wandered from the Elbe
to the Atlas, were not a nation, not an army, not even a tribe, but a
motley horde of northern barbarians, ruined provincials, and escaped
slaves--a rabble whom Cæsar’s legions would have scattered like chaff,
had they been as many as the sands of the shore; and yet when Genseric
routed Boniface and sacked Carthage, in 439, he led barely fifty
thousand fighting men.




CHAPTER II

THE MIDDLE AGE


Probably the appreciation of the Roman monetary standard culminated
during the invasion of the Huns toward the middle of the fifth century.
In the reign of Valentinian III. gold sold for eighteen times its
weight of silver, and Valentinian’s final catastrophe was the murder of
Aëtius in 454, with whose life the last spark of vitality at the heart
of Roman centralization died. The rise of Ricimer and the accession
of Odoacer, mark the successive steps by which Italy receded into
barbarism, and, in the time of Theoderic the Ostrogoth, she had become
a primitive, decentralized community, whose poverty and sluggishness
protected her from African and Asiatic competition. The Ostrogoths
subdued Italy in 493, and by that date the barbarians had overrun
the whole civilized world west of the Adriatic, causing the demand
for money to sustain a consolidated society to cease, the volume of
trade to shrink, the market for eastern wares to contract, and gold to
accumulate at the centre of exchanges. As gold accumulated, its value
fell, and during the first years of the sixth century it stood at a
ratio to silver of less than fifteen to one, a decline of eighteen per
cent.[69] As prices correspondingly rose, the pressure on the peasantry
relaxed, prosperity at Constantinople returned, and the collapse of the
Western Empire may have prolonged the life of the European population
of the Eastern for above one hundred and fifty years. The city which
Constantine planted in 324 on the shore of the Bosphorus, was in
reality a horde of Roman capitalists washed to the confines of Asia
by the current of foreign exchanges; and these emigrants carried with
them, to a land of mixed Greek and barbarian blood, their language and
their customs. For many years these monied potentates ruled their new
country absolutely. All that legislation could do for them was done.
They even annexed rations to their estates, to be supplied at the
public cost, to help their children maintain their palaces. As long as
prices fell, nothing availed; the aristocracy grew poorer day by day.
Their property lay generally in land, and the same stringency which
wasted Italy and Gaul operated, though perhaps less acutely, upon the
Danubian peasantry also. By the middle of the fifth century the country
was exhausted and at the mercy of the Huns.

Wealth is the weapon of a monied society; for, though itself lacking
the martial instinct, it can, with money, hire soldiers to defend it.
But to raise a revenue from the people, they must retain a certain
surplus of income after providing for subsistence, otherwise the
government must trench on the supply of daily food, and exhaustion must
supervene. Finlay has explained that chronic exhaustion was the normal
condition of Byzantium under the Romans.

“The whole surplus profits of society were annually drawn into the
coffers of the State, leaving the inhabitants only a bare sufficiency
for perpetuating the race of tax-payers. History, indeed, shows that
the agricultural classes, from the labourer to the landlord, were
unable to retain possession of the savings required to replace that
depreciation which time is constantly producing in all vested capital,
and that their numbers gradually diminished.”[70]

Under Theodosius II., when gold reached its maximum, complete
prostration prevailed. The Huns marched whither they would, and
one swarm “of barbarians followed another, as long as anything was
left to plunder.” The government could no longer keep armies in the
field. A single example will show how low the community had fallen.
In 446, Attila demanded of Theodosius six thousand pounds of gold
as a condition of peace, and certainly six thousand pounds of gold,
equalling perhaps $1,370,000, was a small sum, even when measured by
the standard of private wealth. The end of the third century was not a
prosperous period in Italy, and yet before his election as emperor in
275, the fortune of Tacitus reached 280,000,000 sesterces, or upwards
of $11,000,000.[71] Nevertheless Theodosius was unable to wring this
inconsiderable indemnity from the people, and he had to levy a private
assessment on the senators, who were themselves so poor that to pay
they sold at auction the jewels of their wives and the furniture of
their houses.

Almost immediately after the collapse of the Western Empire the tide
turned. With the fall in the price of gold the peasantry revived and
the Greek provinces flourished. In the reign of Justinian, Belisarius
and Narses marched from end to end of Africa and Europe, and Anastasius
rolled in wealth.

Anastasius, the contemporary of Theoderic, acceded to the throne in
491. He not only built the famous long wall from the Propontis to the
Euxine, and left behind him a treasure of three hundred and twenty
thousand pounds of gold, but he remitted to his subjects the most
oppressive of their taxes, and the reign of Justinian, who succeeded
him at an interval of only ten years, must always rank as the prime
of the Byzantine civilization. The observation is not new, it has been
made by all students of Byzantine history.

“The increased prosperity ... infused into society soon displayed its
effects; and the brilliant exploits of the reign of Justinian must
be traced back to the reinvigoration of the body politic of the Roman
Empire by Anastasius.”[72]

Justinian inherited the throne from his uncle Justin, a Dardanian
peasant, who could neither read nor write. But the barbarian shepherd
was a thorough soldier, and the army he left behind him was probably
not inferior to the legions of Titus or Trajan. At all events, had
Justinian’s funds sufficed, there seems reason to suppose he might
have restored the boundaries of the Empire. His difficulty lay not in
lack of physical force, but in dearth of opulent enemies; in the sixth
century conquest had ceased to be profitable. The territory open to
invasion had been harried for generations, and hardly a country was to
be found rich enough to repay the cost of a campaign by mercenaries.
Therefore, the more the emperor extended his dominions, the more they
languished; and finally to provide for wars, barbarian subsidies, and
building, Justinian had to resort to over-taxation. With renewed want
came renewed decay, and perhaps the completion of Saint Sophia, in
558, may be taken as the point whence the race which conceived this
masterpiece hastened to its extinction.

In the seventh century Asiatic competition devoured the Europeans
in the Levant, as three hundred years before it had devoured the
husbandmen of Italy; and this was a disease which isolation alone
could cure. But isolation of the centre of exchanges was impossible,
for the vital principle of an economic age is competition, and,
when the relief afforded by the collapse of Rome had been exhausted,
competition did its work with relentless rapidity. Under Heraclius
(610–640) the population sank fast, and by 717 the western blood
had run so low that an Asiatic dynasty reigned supreme. Everywhere
Greeks and Romans vanished before Armenians and Slavs, and for years
previous to the accession of Leo the Isaurian the great waste tracts
where they once lived were systematically repeopled by a more enduring
race. The colonists of Justinian II. furnished him an auxiliary army.
At Justinian’s death in 711 the revolution had been completed; the
population had been renovated, and Constantinople had become an Asiatic
city.[73] The new aristocracy was Armenian, as strong an economic
type as ever existed in western Asia; while the Slavic peasantry
which underlay them were among the most enduring of mankind. There
competition ended, for it could go no further; and, apparently, from
the accession of Leo in 717, to the rise of Florence and Venice, three
hundred and fifty years later, Byzantine society, in fixity, almost
resembled the Chinese. Such movement as occurred, like Iconoclasm, came
from the friction of the migrating races with the old population. As
Texier has observed of architecture: “From the time of Justinian until
the end of the Empire we cannot remark a single change in the modes of
construction.”[74]

Only long after, when the money which sustained it was diverted toward
Italy during the crusades, did the social fabric crumble; and Gibbon
has declared that the third quarter of the tenth century “forms the
most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.”[75]

The later Byzantine was an economic civilization, without aspiration
or imagination, and perhaps the most vivid description which has
survived of that ostentatious, sordid, cowardly, and stagnant race, is
the little sketch of the Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled to the
Levant in 1173.

Benjamin called the inhabitants of Constantinople Greeks, because
of their language, and he described the city as a vast commercial
metropolis, “common to all the world, without distinction of country
or religion.” Merchants from the East and West flocked thither--from
Babylon, Mesopotamia, Media, and Persia, as well as from Egypt,
Hungary, Russia, Lombardy, and Spain. The rabbi thought the people well
educated and social, liking to eat and drink, “every man under his vine
and under his fig tree.” They loved gold and jewels, pompous display,
and gorgeous ceremonial; and the Jew has dwelt with delight on the
palace, with its columns of gold and silver, and the wonderful crown so
studded with gems that it lighted the night without a lamp. The Greeks
also roused his enthusiasm for the splendour of their clothes and
of their horses’ trappings, for when they went abroad they resembled
princes; but on the other hand, he remarked with a certain scorn, that
they were utterly cowardly, and, like women, had to hire men to protect
them.

   “The Greeks who inhabit the country are extremely rich and
    possess great wealth of gold and precious stones. They dress
    in garments of silk, ornamented by gold and other valuable
    materials.... Nothing upon earth equals their wealth.”

   “The Greeks hire soldiers of all nations whom they call
    barbarians, for the purpose of carrying on ... wars with ...
    the Turks.” “They have no martial spirit themselves and like
    women are unfit for war.”[76]

The movement of races in the Eastern Empire proceeded with automatic
regularity. The cheaper organism exterminated the more costly, because
energy operated through money strongly enough to cause free economic
competition; nor is the evidence upon which this conclusion rests to
be drawn from books alone. Coinage and architecture, sculpture and
painting, tell the tale with equal precision.

When, in the fourth century, wealth, ebbing on the Tiber, floated to
the Bosphorus the core of the Latin aristocracy, it carried with it
also the Latin coinage. For several generations this coinage underwent
little apparent alteration, but after the final division of the Empire,
in 395, between the sons of Theodosius, a subtle change began in the
composition of the ruling class; a change reflected from generation
to generation in the issues of their mints. Sabatier has described the
transformation wrought in eight hundred years with the minuteness of an
antiquary.

If a set of Byzantine coins are arranged in chronological order, those
of Anastasius, about 500, show at a glance an influence which is not
Latin. Strange devices have appeared on the reverse, together with
Greek letters. A century later, when the great decline was in progress
under Heraclius, the type had become barbarous, and the prevalence of
Greek inscriptions proves the steady exhaustion of the Roman blood.
Another fifty years, and by 690, under Justinian II., the permanent
and conventional phase had been developed. Religious emblems were
used; the head of Christ was struck on the golden son, and fixity
of form presaged the Asiatic domination. The official costumes, the
portraits of the emperors, certain consecrated inscriptions, all were
changeless; and in 717, an Armenian dynasty ascended the throne in
the person of Leo the Isaurian.[77] This motionless period lasted for
full three hundred and fifty years, as long as the exchanges of the
world centred at Byzantium, and the monied race who dwelt there sucked
copious nutriment from the pool of wealth in which it lay. But even
before the crusades the tide of trade began to flow to the south, and
quitting Constantinople passed directly from Bagdad to the cities of
Italy. Then the sustenance of the money-changers gradually failed. From
the reign of Michael VI. effigies of the saints were engraved upon the
coin, and after the revolution led by Alexius Comnenus, in 1081, the
execution degenerated and debasement began. This revolution marked the
beginning of the end. Immediately preceding the crusades, and attended
by sharp distress, it was probably engendered by an alteration in the
drift of foreign exchanges. Certainly the currency contracted sharply,
and the gold money soon became so bad that Alexius had to stipulate to
pay his debts in the byzants of his predecessor Michael.[78] For the
next hundred years, as the Italian cities rose, the Empire languished,
and with the thirteenth century, when Venice established its permanent
silver standard by coining the “grosso,” Constantinople crumbled into
ruin.

In architecture the same phenomena appear, only differently clothed.
Though the Germans, who swarmed across the Danube, often surged against
the walls of Constantinople, they never became the ruling class of the
community, because they were of the imaginative type. Money retained
its supremacy, and while it did so energy expressed itself through the
economic mind. Though Justinian was of barbarian blood, the nephew
of a barbarian shepherd, the aristocracy about him, which formed
the core of society, was neither imaginative nor devotional. Hardly
Christian, it tended toward paganism or scepticism. The artists were
of the subject caste, and they earned their living by gratifying the
tastes of the nobles; but the nobles loved magnificence and gorgeous
functions; hence all Byzantine architecture favoured display, and
nowhere more so than in Saint Sophia. “Art delighted in representing
Christ in all the splendour of power.... To glorify him the more all
the magnificence of the imperial court was introduced into heaven....
Christ no longer appeared under the benevolent aspect of the good
shepherd, but in the superb guise of an oriental monarch: he is seated
on a throne glittering with gold and precious stones.”[79] Here then
lay the impassable gulf between Byzantium and Paris; while Byzantium
remained economic and materialistic, Paris passed into the glory of an
imaginative age.

The Germans who overran the Roman territory were of the same race
as the Greeks, the Latins, or the Gauls, but in a different stage
of development. They tilled farms and built villages and perhaps
fortresses, but they were not consolidated, and had neither nations
nor federations. They were substantially in the condition in which the
common family had been, when it divided many centuries before, and
their minds differed radically from the minds of the inhabitants of
the countries beyond the Danube and the Rhine. They were infinitely
more imaginative, and, as the flood of emigration poured down from the
north, the imagination came more and more to prevail.

Although the lowest of existing savages are relatively advanced, they
suggest that the strongest passion of primeval man must have been fear;
and fear, not so much of living things, as of nature, which seemed to
him resolutely hostile. Against wild beasts, or savages like himself,
he might prevail by cunning or by strength; but against drought and
famine, pestilence and earthquake, he was helpless, and he regarded
these scourges as malevolent beings, made like himself, only more
formidable. His first and most pressing task was to mollify them, and
above the warrior class rose the sacred caste, whose function was to
mediate between the visible and the invisible world.

Originally these intercessors appear to have been sorcerers, rather
than priests, for spirits were believed to be hostile to man; and
perhaps the first conception of a god may have been reached through
the victory of a clan of sorcerers in fight. As Statius said eighteen
hundred years ago, “Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.”[80] Probably the
early wizards won their power by the discovery of natural secrets,
which, though they could be transmitted to their descendants, might
also be discovered by strangers. The later discoverers would become
rival medicine men, and battle would be the only test by which the
orthodoxy of the competitors could be determined. The victors would
almost certainly stigmatize the beings the vanquished served, as
devils who tormented men. There is an example of this process in the
eighteenth chapter of 1 Kings:--

“And Elijah ... said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the
Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people
answered him not a word.”

Then Elijah proposed that each side should dress a bullock, and lay it
on wood, and call upon their spirit; and the one who sent down fire
should be God. And all the people answered that it was well spoken.
And Jezebel’s prophets took their bullock and dressed it, and called
on “Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us!” But
nothing came of it.

Then Elijah mocked them, “and said, Cry aloud: ... either he is
talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he
sleepeth, and must be awaked.”

And they cried aloud, and cut themselves with knives till “blood gushed
out upon them. And ... there was neither voice, nor any to answer.”
Then Elijah built his altar, and cut up his bullock and laid him on
wood, and poured twelve barrels of water over the whole, and filled a
trench with water.

And “the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and
the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that
was in the trench.

“And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they
said, The Lord, he is the God.

“And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of
them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the
brook Kishon, and slew them there.”

The Germans of the fourth century were a very simple race, who
comprehended little of natural laws, and who therefore referred
phenomena they did not understand to supernatural intervention.
This intervention could only be controlled by priests, and thus the
invasions caused a rapid rise in the influence of the sacred class.
The power of every ecclesiastical organization has always rested on
the miracle, and the clergy have always proved their divine commission
as did Elijah. This was eminently the case with the mediæval Church.
At the outset Christianity was socialistic, and its spread among the
poor was apparently caused by the pressure of competition; for the
sect only became of enough importance to be persecuted under Nero,
contemporaneously with the first signs of distress which appeared
through the debasement of the denarius. But socialism was only a
passing phase, and disappeared as the money value of the miracle rose,
and brought wealth to the Church. Under the Emperor Decius, about
250, the magistrates thought the Christians opulent enough to use gold
and silver vessels in their service, and, by the fourth century, the
supernatural so possessed the popular mind, that Constantine not only
allowed himself to be converted by a miracle, but used enchantment as
an engine of war.

In one of his marches, he encouraged the belief that he saw a luminous
cross in the sky, with the words “By this conquer.” The next night
Christ appeared to him, and directed him to construct a standard
bearing the same design, and, armed with this, to advance with
confidence against Maxentius.

The legend, preserved by Eusebius, grew up after the event; but, for
that very reason, it reflects the feeling of the age. The imagination
of his men had grown so vivid that, whether he believed or not,
Constantine found it expedient to use the Labarum as a charm to ensure
victory. The standard supported a cross and a mystic monogram; the
army believed its guards to be invulnerable, and in his last and most
critical campaign against Licinius, the sight of the talisman not only
excited his own troops to enthusiasm, but spread dismay through the
enemy.

The action of the Milvian Bridge, fought in 312, by which Constantine
established himself at Rome, was probably the point whence nature began
to discriminate decisively against the monied type in Western Europe.
Capital had already abandoned Italy; Christianity was soon after
officially recognized, and during the next century the priest began to
rank with the soldier as a force in war.

Meanwhile, as the population sank into exhaustion, it yielded less and
less revenue, the police deteriorated, and the guards became unable
to protect the frontier. In 376, the Goths, hard pressed by the Huns,
came to the Danube and implored to be taken as subjects by the emperor.
After mature deliberation, the Council of Valens granted the prayer,
and some five hundred thousand Germans were cantoned in Mœsia. The
intention of the government was to scatter this multitude through
the provinces as coloni, or to draft them into the legions; but the
detachment detailed to handle them was too feeble, the Goths mutinied,
cut the guard to pieces, and having ravaged Thrace for two years,
defeated and killed Valens at Hadrianople. In another generation the
disorganization of the Roman army had become complete, and Alaric gave
it its deathblow in his campaign of 410.

Alaric was not a Gothic king, but a barbarian deserter, who, in 392,
was in the service of Theodosius. Subsequently, he sometimes held
imperial commands, and sometimes led bands of marauders on his own
account, but was always in difficulty about his pay. Finally, in the
revolution in which Stilicho was murdered, a corps of auxiliaries
mutinied and chose him their general. Alleging that his arrears were
unpaid, Alaric accepted the command, and with this army sacked Rome.

During the campaign the attitude of the Christians was more interesting
than the strategy of the soldiers. Alaric was a robber, leading
mutineers, and yet the orthodox historians did not condemn him. They
did not condemn him because the sacred class instinctively loved the
barbarians whom they could overawe, whereas they could make little
impression on the materialistic intellect of the old centralized
society. Under the Empire the priests, like all other individuals, had
to obey the power which paid the police; and as long as a revenue could
be drawn from the provinces, the Christian hierarchy were subordinate
to the monied bureaucracy who had the means to coerce them.

   “It was long since established, as a fundamental maxim of the
    Roman constitution, that every rank of citizens were alike
    subject to the laws, and that the care of religion was the
    right as well as duty of the civil magistrate.”[81]

Their conversion made little change in the attitude of the emperors,
and Constantine and his successors continued to exercise a supreme
jurisdiction over the hierarchy. The sixteenth book of the Theodosian
Code sufficiently sets forth the plenitude of their authority. In
theory, bishops were elected by the clergy and the people, but in
practice the emperor could control the patronage if it were valuable;
and whether bishops were elected or appointed, as long as they were
created and paid by laymen, they were dependent. The priesthood could
only become autocratic when fear of the miracle exempted them from
arrest; and toward the middle of the fifth century this point was
approaching, as appears by the effect of the embassy of Leo the Great
to Attila.

In 452 the Huns had crossed the Alps and had sacked Aquileia. The Roman
army was demoralized; Aëtius could not make head against the barbarians
in the field; while Valentinian was so panic-stricken that he abandoned
Ravenna, which was thought impregnable, and retreated to the capital,
which was indefensible. At Rome, finding himself helpless in an open
city, the emperor conceived the idea of invoking the power of the
supernatural. He proposed to Leo to visit Attila and persuade him to
spare the town. The pope consented without hesitation, and with perfect
intrepidity caused himself to be carried to the Hun’s tent, where he
met with respect not unalloyed by fear. The legend probably reflects
pretty accurately the feeling of the time. As the bishop stood before
the king, Peter and Paul appeared on either side, menacing Attila
with flaming swords; and though this particular form of apparition may
be doubted, Attila seems beyond question to have been oppressed by a
belief that he would not long survive the capture of Rome. He therefore
readily agreed to accept a ransom and evacuate Italy.

From the scientific standpoint the saint and the sorcerer are akin;
for though the saint uses the supernatural for man’s benefit, and
the sorcerer for his hurt, both deal in magic. The mediæval saint was
a powerful necromancer. He healed the sick, cast out devils, raised
the dead, foretold the future, put out fires, found stolen property,
brought rain, saved from shipwreck, routed the enemy, cured headache,
was sovereign in child-birth, and, indeed, could do almost anything
that was asked of him, whether he were alive or dead. This power was
believed to lie in some occult property of the flesh, which passed by
contact. The woman in the Bible said, “If I may touch but his clothes,
I shall be whole.” Moreover, this fluid was a substance whose passage
could be felt, for “Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue
had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who
touched my clothes?”[82]

Anything which came in contact with the saint was likely to have been
impregnated with this magical quality, and thus became a charm, or
relic, whose value depended primarily on the power of the man himself,
and secondly, on the thoroughness with which the material had been
charged.

The tomb, which held the whole body, naturally stood highest; then
parts of the body, according to their importance--a head, an arm, a
leg, down to hairs of the beard. Then came hats, boots, girdles, cups,
anything indeed which had been used. The very ground on which a great
miracle-worker had stood might have high value.

The Holy Grail, which had held Christ’s blood, would cure wounds,
raise the dead, and fill itself with choice food, at the command of
the owner. The eucharist, though not properly a relic, and which only
became God through an incantation, would, in expert hands, stop fires,
cure disease, cast out devils, expound philosophy, and detect perjury
by choking the liar.

Every prize in life was to be obtained by this kind of magic. When the
kings of France made war, they carried with them the enchanted banner
of Saint Denis, and Froissart has told how even in the reign of Charles
VI. it decided the battle of Roosebeke.[83]

Disease was treated altogether by miracle, and the Church found
the business so profitable that she anathematized experimental
practitioners. In the thirteenth century Saint Thomas of Canterbury and
Saint James of Compostello were among the most renowned of healers,
and their shrines blazed with the gifts of the greatest and richest
persons of Europe. When Philip Augustus lay very ill, Louis the Pious
obtained leave to visit the tomb of Saint Thomas, then in the height of
the fashion, and left as part of his fee the famous regal of France, a
jewel so magnificent that three centuries and a half later Henry VIII.
seized it and set it in a thumb ring. Beside this wonderful gem, at
the pillage of the Reformation, “the king’s receiver confessed that the
gold and silver and precious stones and sacred vestments taken away ...
filled six-and-twenty carts.”[84] The old books of travel are filled
with accounts of this marvellous shrine.

   “But the magnificence of the tomb of Saint Thomas the Martyr,
    Archbishop of Canterbury, is that which surpasses all belief.
    This, notwithstanding its great size, is entirely covered with
    plates of pure gold; but the gold is scarcely visible from the
    variety of precious stones with which it is studded, such as
    sapphires, diamonds, rubies, balas-rubies, and emeralds ...
    and agates, jaspers and cornelians set in relievo, some of the
    cameos being of such a size, that I do not dare to mention it;
    but everything is left far behind by a ruby, not larger than
    a man’s thumb-nail, which is set to the right of the altar....
    They say that it was the gift of a king of France.”[85]

But beside these shrines of world-wide reputation, no hamlet was too
remote to possess its local fetish, which worked at cheap rates for the
peasantry. A curious list of these was sent to the Government by two of
Cromwell’s visitors in the reign of Henry VIII.

The nuns of Saint Mary, at Derby, had part of the shirt of Saint
Thomas, reverenced by pregnant women; so was the girdle of Saint
Francis at Grace Dieu. At Repton, a pilgrimage was made to Saint
Guthlac and his bell, which was put on the head for headache. The
wimple of Saint Audrede was used for sore breasts, and the rod of Aaron
for children with worms. At Bury Saint Edmund’s, the shrine of Saint
Botulph was carried in procession when rain was needed, “and Kentish
men ... carry thence ... wax candles, which they light at the end of
the field while the wheat is sown, and hope from this that neither
tares nor other weeds will grow in the wheat that year.”[86] Most
curious of all, perhaps, at Pontefract, Thomas, Duke of Lancaster’s
belt and hat were venerated. They were believed to aid women in
child-birth, and also to cure headache.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, a great venerator of the eucharist, used it to
help him in his lectures. When treating of the dogma of the Supper at
the University of Paris, many questions were asked him which he never
answered without meditating at the foot of the altar. One day, when
preparing an answer to a very difficult question, he placed it on the
altar, and cried, “Lord, who really and veritably dwells in the Holy
Sacrament, hear my prayer. If what I have written upon your divine
eucharist be true, let it be given me to teach and demonstrate it. If I
am deceived, stop me from proposing doctrines contrary to the truth of
your divine Sacrament.” Forthwith the Lord appeared upon the altar, and
said to him, “You have written well upon the Sacrament of My body, and
you have answered the question which has been proposed to you as well
as human intelligence can fathom these mysteries.”[87]

Primitive people argue directly from themselves to their divinities,
and throughout the Middle Ages men believed that envy, jealousy, and
vanity were as rampant in heaven as on earth, and behaved accordingly.
The root of the monastic movement was the hope of obtaining advantages
by adulation.

   “A certain clerk, who had more confidence in the Mother than
    the Son, continually repeated the Ave Maria as his only prayer.
    One day, while so engaged, Christ appeared to him and said, ‘My
    mother thanks you very much for your salutations, ... _tamen et
    me salutare memento_.’”[88]

To insure perpetual intercession it was necessary that the song
of praise and the smoke of incense should be perpetual, and
therefore monks and nuns worked day and night at their calling. As a
twelfth-century bishop of Metz observed, when wakened one freezing
morning by the bell of Saint Peter of Bouillon tolling for matins:
“Neither the drowsiness of the night nor the bitterness of a glacial
winter [kept them] from praising the Creator of the world.”[89]

Bequests to convents were in the nature of policies of insurance in
favour of the grantor and his heirs, not only against punishment in
the next world, but against accident in this. On this point doubt is
impossible, for the belief of the donor is set forth in numberless
charters. Cedric de Guillac, in a deed to la Grande-Sauve, said that he
gave because “as water extinguishes fire, so gifts extinguish sin.”[90]
And an anecdote preserved by Dugdale, shows how valuable an investment
against accident a convent was thought to be as late as the thirteenth
century.

When Ralph, Earl of Chester, the founder of the monastery of
Dieulacres, was returning by sea from the Holy Land, he was overtaken
one night by a sudden tempest. “How long is it till midnight?” he asked
of the sailors. They answered, “About two hours.” He said to them,
“Work on till midnight, and I trust in God that you may have help,
and that the storm will cease.” When it was near midnight the captain
said to the earl, “My lord, commend yourself to God, for the tempest
increases; we are worn out, and are in mortal peril.” Then Earl Ralph
came out of his cabin, and began to help with the ropes, and the rest
of the ship’s tackle; nor was it long before the storm subsided.

The next day, as they were sailing over a tranquil sea, the captain
said to the earl, “My lord, tell us, if you please, why you wished us
to work till the middle of the night, and then you worked harder than
all the rest.” To which he replied, “Because at midnight my monks, and
others, whom my ancestors and I have endowed in divers places, rise
and sing divine service, and then I have faith in their prayers, and
I believe that God, because of their prayers and intercessions, gave
me more fortitude than I had before, and made the storm cease as I
predicted.”[91]

Philip Augustus, when caught in a gale in the Straits of Messina,
showed equal confidence in the matins of Clairvaux, and was also
rewarded for his faith by good weather towards morning.

The power of the imagination, when stimulated by the mystery which,
in an age of decentralization, shrouds the operations of nature,
can be measured by its effect in creating an autocratic class of
miracle-workers. Between the sixth and the thirteenth centuries, about
one-third of the soil of Europe passed into the hands of religious
corporations, while the bulk of the highest talent of the age sought
its outlet through monastic life.

The force operated on all; for, beside religious ecstasy, ambition and
fear were at work, and led to results inconceivable when centralization
has begot materialism. Saint Bernard’s position was more conspicuous
and splendid than that of any monarch of his generation, and the agony
of terror which assailed the warriors was usually proportionate to the
freedom with which they had violated ecclesiastical commands. They fled
to the cloister for protection from the fiend, and took their wealth
with them.

Gérard le Blanc was even more noted for his cruelty than for his
courage. He was returning to his castle one day, after having committed
a murder, when he saw the demon whom he served appear to claim him.
Seized with horror, he galloped to where six penitents had just founded
the convent of Afflighem, and supplicated them to receive him. The news
spread, and the whole province gave thanks to God that a monster of
cruelty should have been so converted.

A few days after, his example was followed by another knight, equally a
murderer, who had visited the recluses, and, touched by their piety and
austerity, resolved to renounce his patrimony and live a penitent.[92]

Had the German migrations been wars of extermination, as they have
sometimes been described, the imagination, among the new barbaric
population, might have been so stimulated that a pure theocracy would
have been developed between the time of Saint Benedict and Saint
Bernard. But the barbarians were not animated by hate; on the contrary,
they readily amalgamated with the old population, amongst whom the
materialism of Rome lay like a rock in a rising tide, sometimes
submerged, but never obliterated.

The obstacle which the true emotionalists never overcame was the
inheritance of a secular clergy, who, down to the eleventh century,
were generally married, and in the higher grades were rather barons
than prelates. In France the Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishops of
Beauvais, Noyon, Langres, and others, were counts; while in Germany
the Archbishops of Mayence, of Treves, and of Cologne were princes
and electors, standing on the same footing as the Dukes of Saxony and
Bavaria.

As feudal nobles these ecclesiastics were retainers of the king, owed
feudal service, led their vassals in war, and some of the fiercest
soldiers of the Middle Ages were clerks. Milo of Treves was a famous
eighth-century bishop. Charles Martel gave the archbishopric of Rheims
to a warrior named Milo, who managed also to obtain the see of Treves.
This Milo was the son of Basinus, the last incumbent of the preferment.
He was a fierce and irreligious soldier, and was finally killed
hunting; but during the forty years in which he held his offices,
Boniface, with all the aid of the crown and the pope, was unable to
prevail against him, and in 752 Pope Zachary wrote advising that he
should be left to the divine vengeance.[93]

Such a system was incompatible with the supremacy of a theocracy.
The essence of a theocracy is freedom from secular control, and this
craving for freedom was the dominant instinct of monasticism. Saint
Anselm, perhaps the most perfect specimen of a monk, felt it in the
marrow of his bones; it was the master passion of his life, and he
insisted upon it with all the fire of his nature: “Nihil magis diligit
Deus in hoc mundo quam libertatem ecclesiæ suæ.... Liberam vult esse
Deus sponsam suam, non ancillam.”

Yet only very slowly, as the Empire disintegrated, did the theocratic
idea take shape. As late as the ninth century the pope prostrated
himself before Charlemagne, and did homage as to a Roman emperor.[94]

Saint Benedict founded Monte Cassino in 529, but centuries elapsed
before the Benedictine order rose to power. The early convents were
isolated and feeble, and much at the mercy of the laity, who invaded
and debauched them. Abbots, like bishops, were often soldiers, who
lived within the walls with their wives and children, their hawks,
their hounds, and their men-at-arms; and it has been said that, in all
France, Corbie and Fleury alone kept always something of their early
discipline.

Only in the early years of the most lurid century of the Middle
Ages, when decentralization culminated, and the imagination began to
gain its fullest intensity, did the period of monastic consolidation
open with the foundation of Cluny. In 910 William of Aquitaine drew
a charter[95] which, so far as possible, provided for the complete
independence of his new corporation. There was no episcopal visitation,
and no interference with the election of the abbot. The monks were
put directly under the protection of the pope, who was made their
sole superior. John XI. confirmed this charter by his bull of 932, and
authorized the affiliation of all convents who wished to share in the
reform.[96]

The growth of Cluny was marvellous; by the twelfth century two thousand
houses obeyed its rule, and its wealth was so great, and its buildings
so vast, that in 1245 Innocent IV., the Emperor Baldwin, and Saint
Louis were all lodged together within its walls, and with them all the
attendant trains of prelates and nobles with their servants.

In the eleventh century no other force of equal energy existed.
The monks were the most opulent, the ablest, and the best organized
society in Europe, and their effect upon mankind was proportioned
to their strength. They intuitively sought autocratic power, and
during the centuries when nature favoured them, they passed from
triumph to triumph. They first seized upon the papacy and made
it self-perpetuating; they then gave battle to the laity for the
possession of the secular hierarchy, which had been under temporal
control since the very foundation of the Church.

About the year 1000 Rome was in chaos. The Counts of Tusculum, who
had often disposed of the tiara, on the death of John XIX., bought it
for Benedict IX. Benedict was then a child of ten, but he grew worse
as he grew older, and finally he fell so low that he was expelled by
the people. He was succeeded by Sylvester; but, a few months after his
coronation, Benedict re-entered the city, and crowned John XX. with
his own hands. Shortly after, he assaulted the Vatican, and then three
popes reigned together in Rome. In this crisis Gregory VI. tried to
restore order by buying the papacy for himself; but the transaction
only added a fourth pope to the three already consecrated, and two
years later he was set aside by the Emperor Henry, who appointed his
own chancellor in his place.

It was a last triumph for the laity, but a triumph easier to win than
to sustain. When the soldier created the high priest of Christendom,
he did indeed inspire such terror that no man in the great assembly
dared protest; but in nine months Clement was dead, his successor lived
only twenty-four days, poisoned, as it was rumoured, by the perfidious
Italians; and when Henry sought a third pope among his prelates, he met
with general timidity to accept the post. Then the opportunity of the
monks came: they seized it, and with unerring instinct fixed themselves
upon the throne from which they have never been expelled. According to
the picturesque legend, Bruno, Bishop of Toul, seduced by the flattery
of courtiers and the allurements of ambition, accepted the tiara from
the emperor, and set out upon his journey to Italy with a splendid
retinue, and with his robe and crown. On his way he turned aside at
Cluny, where Hildebrand was prior. Hildebrand, filled with the spirit
of God, reproached him with having seized upon the seat of the vicar
of Christ by force, and accepted the holy office from the sacrilegious
hand of a layman. He exhorted Bruno to cast away his pomp, and to
cross the Alps humbly as a pilgrim, assuring him that the priests
and people of Rome would recognize him as their bishop, and elect him
according to canonical forms. Then he would taste the joys of a pure
conscience, having entered the fold of Christ as a shepherd and not as
a robber. Inspired by these words, Bruno dismissed his train, and left
the convent gate as a pilgrim. He walked barefoot, and when after two
months of pious meditations he stood before Saint Peter’s, he spoke to
the people and told them it was their privilege to elect the pope, and
since he had come unwillingly he would return again, were he not their
choice.

He was answered with acclamations, and on February 2, 1049, he was
enthroned as Leo IX. His first act was to make Hildebrand his minister.

The legend tells of the triumph of Cluny as no historical facts could
do. Ten years later, in the reign of Nicholas II., the theocracy made
itself self-perpetuating through the assumption of the election of
the pope by the college of cardinals, and in 1073 Hildebrand, the
incarnation of monasticism, was crowned under the name of Gregory VII.

With Hildebrand’s election, war began. The council of Rome, held
in 1075, decreed that holy orders should not be recognized where
investiture had been granted by a layman, and that princes guilty of
conferring investiture should be excommunicated. The council of the
next year, which excommunicated the emperor, also enunciated the famous
propositions of Baronius--the full expression of the theocratic idea:--

   “That the Roman pontiff alone can be called universal.

   “That he alone can depose or reconcile bishops.

   “That his legate, though of inferior rank, takes precedence
    of all bishops in council, and can pronounce sentence of
    deposition against them.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

   “That all princes should kiss the pope’s feet alone.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

   “That he may depose emperors.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

   “That his judgments can be overruled by none, and he alone can
    overrule the judgments of all.

   “That he can be judged by no one.

   “That the Roman Church never has, and never can err, as the
    Scriptures testify.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

   “That by his precept and permission it is lawful for subjects
    to accuse their princes.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

   “That he is able to absolve from their allegiance the subjects
    of the wicked.”[97]

The monks had won the papacy, but the emperor still held his secular
clergy, and, at the diet of Worms, where he undertook to depose
Hildebrand, he was sustained by his prelates. Without a moment of
hesitation the enchanter cast his spell, and it is interesting to
see, in the curse which he launched at the layman, how the head of
monasticism had become identified with the spirit which he served. The
priest had grown to be a god on earth.

   “So strong in this confidence, for the honour and defence
    of your Church, on behalf of the omnipotent God, the Father,
    the Son, and the Holy Ghost, by your power and authority, I
    forbid the government of the German and Italian kingdoms, to
    King Henry, the son of the Emperor Henry, who, with unheard-of
    arrogance, has rebelled against your Church. I absolve all
    Christians from the oaths they have made, or may make to him,
    and I forbid that any one should obey him as king.”[98]

Henry marched on Italy, but in all European history there has been
no drama more tremendous than the expiation of his sacrilege. To his
soldiers the world was a vast space, peopled by those fantastic beings
which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk of
Rome, and his army, melting from the emperor under a nameless horror,
left him helpless.

Gregory lay like a magician in the fortress of Canossa; but he had no
need of carnal weapons, for when the emperor reached the Alps he was
almost alone. Then his imagination also took fire, the panic seized
him, and he sued for mercy.

For three days long he stood barefoot in the snow at the castle gate;
and when at last he was admitted, half-naked and benumbed, he was
paralyzed rather by terror than by cold. Then the great miracle was
wrought, by which God was made to publicly judge between them.

Hildebrand took the consecrated wafer and broke it, saying to the
suppliant, “Man’s judgments are fallible, God’s are infallible; if I
am guilty of the crimes you charge me with, let Him strike me dead as I
eat.” He ate, and gave what remained to Henry; but though for him more
than life was at stake, he dared not taste the bread. From that hour
his fate was sealed. He underwent his penance and received absolution;
and when he had escaped from the terrible old man, he renewed the war.
But the spell was over him, the horror clung to him, even his sons
betrayed him, and at last his mind gave way under the strain and he
abdicated. In his own words, to save his life he “sent to Mayence the
crown, the sceptre, the cross, the sword, the lance.”

On August 7, 1106, Henry died at Liège, an outcast and a mendicant, and
for five long years his body lay at the church door, an accursed thing
which no man dared to bury.

Such was the evolution of the mediæval theocracy, the result of that
social disintegration which stimulates the human imagination, and
makes men cower before the unknown. The force which caused the rise
of an independent priesthood was the equivalent of magic, and it was
the waxing of this force through the dissolution of the Empire of the
West which made the schism which split Christendom in two. The Latin
Church divided from the Greek because it was the reflection of the
imaginative mind. While the West grew emotional, Constantinople stayed
the centre of exchanges, the seat of the monied class; and when Cluny
captured Rome, the antagonism between these irreconcilable instincts
precipitated a rupture. The schism dated from 1054, five years after
the coronation of Leo. Nor is the theory new; it was explained by
Gibbon long ago.

   “The rising majesty of Rome could no longer brook the insolence
    of a rebel; and Michael Cerularius was excommunicated in the
    heart of Constantinople by the pope’s legates....

   “From this thunderbolt we may date the consummation of the
    schism. It was enlarged by each ambitious step of the Roman
    pontiffs; the emperors blushed and trembled at the ignominious
    fate of their royal brethren of Germany; and the people were
    scandalized by the temporal power and military life of the
    Latin clergy.”[99]





CHAPTER III

THE FIRST CRUSADE


Until the mechanical arts have advanced far enough to cause the attack
in war to predominate over the defence, centralization cannot begin;
for when a mud wall can stop an army, a police is impossible. The
superiority of the attack was the secret of the power of the monied
class who controlled Rome, because with money a machine could be
maintained which made individual resistance out of the question, and
revolt difficult. Titus had hardly more trouble in reducing Jerusalem,
and dispersing the Jews, than a modern officer would have under similar
circumstances.

As the barbarians overran the Roman provinces, and the arts declined,
the conditions of life changed. The defence gained steadily on the
attack, and, after some centuries, a town with a good garrison, solid
ramparts, and abundant provisions had nothing to fear from the greatest
king. Even the small, square Norman tower was practically impregnable.
As Viollet-le-Duc has explained, these towers were mere passive
defences, formidable to a besieger only because no machinery existed
for making a breach in a wall. The beleaguered nobles had only to watch
their own men, see to their doors, throw projectiles at the enemy if he
approached too near, counter-mine if mined, and they might defy a great
army until their food failed. Famine was the enemy most feared.[100]

By the eleventh century these towers had sprung up all over the West.
Even the convents and churches could be defended, and every such
stronghold was the seat of a count or baron, an abbot or bishop, who
was a sovereign because no one could coerce him, and who therefore
exercised all the rights of sovereignty, made war, dispensed justice,
and coined money. In France alone there were nearly two hundred mints
in the twelfth century.

Down to the close of the Merovingian dynasty the gold standard had
been maintained, and contraction had steadily gone on; but, for reasons
which are not understood, under the second race, the purchasing power
of bullion temporarily declined, and this expansion was probably one
chief cause of the prosperity of the reign of Charlemagne. Perhaps the
relief was due to the gradual restoration of silver to circulation,
for the coinage was then reformed, and the establishment of the silver
pound as the measure of value may be considered as the basis of all the
monetary systems of modern Europe.

The interval of prosperity was, however, brief; no permanent addition
was made to the stock of precious metals, and prices continued to fall,
as is demonstrated by the rapid deterioration of the currency. In this
second period of relapse disintegration reached its limit.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries the Northmen infested the
coasts of France, and sailed up the rivers burning and ravaging, as
far as Rouen and Orléans. Even the convents of Saint Martin of Tours
and Saint Germain des Près were sacked. The Mediterranean swarmed with
Saracenic corsairs, who took Fraxinetum, near Toulon, seized the passes
of the Alps, and levied toll on travel into Italy. The cannibalistic
Huns overran the Lower Danube, and closed the road to Constantinople.
Western Europe was cut off from the rest of the world. Commerce nearly
ceased--the roads were so bad and dangerous, and the sea so full of
pirates.

The ancient stock of scientific knowledge was gradually forgotten, and
the imagination had full play. Upon philosophy the effect was decisive;
Christianity sank to a plane where it appealed more vividly to the
minds of the surrounding pagans than their own faiths, and conversion
then went on rapidly. In 912 Rollo of Normandy was baptized; the Danes,
Norwegians, Poles, and Russians followed; and in 997 Saint Stephen
ascended the throne of Hungary and reopened to Latin Christians the way
to the Sepulchre.

Perhaps the destiny of modern Europe has hinged upon the fact that
the Christian sacred places lay in Asia, and therefore the pilgrimage
brought the West into contact with the East. But the pilgrimage was
the effect of relic-worship, and relic-worship the vital principle of
monasticism. In these centuries of extreme credulity monasticism had
its strongest growth. A faculty for scientific study was abnormal, and
experimental knowledge was ascribed to sorcery. The monk Gerbert, who
became pope as Sylvester II., was probably the most remarkable man of
his generation. Though poor and of humble birth, he attracted so much
attention that he was sent to Spain, where he studied in the Moorish
schools at Barcelona and Cordova, and where he learned the rudiments of
mathematics and geography. His contemporaries were so bewildered by his
knowledge that they thought it due to magic, and told how he had been
seen flying home from Spain, borne on the back of the demon he served,
and loaded with the books he had stolen from the wizard, his master.
Sylvester died in 1003, but long afterwards anatomy was still condemned
by the Church, and four separate councils anathematized experimental
medicine, because it threatened to destroy the value of the shrines.
The ascendency of Cluny began with Saint Hugh, who was chosen abbot in
1049, the Year Leo’s election. The corporation then obtained control
of Rome, and in another twenty-five years was engaged in its desperate
struggle with the remains of the old secular police power. But though
Hildebrand crushed Henry, the ancient materialism was too deeply
imbedded to be eradicated in a single generation, and meanwhile the
imagination had been brought to an uncontrollable intensity. A new and
fiercer excitement seethed among the people--a vision of the conquest
of talismans so powerful as to make their owners sure of heaven and
absolute on earth.

The attraction of Palestine had been very early felt, for in 333 a
guide-book had been written, called the _Itinerary from Bordeaux to
Jerusalem_, which gave the route through the valley of the Danube,
together with an excellent account of the Holy Land. In those
days, before the barbaric inroads, the journey was safe enough; but
afterwards communication nearly ceased, and when Stephen was baptized
in 997, the relics of Jerusalem had all the excitement of novelty.
Europe glowed with enthusiasm. Sylvester proposed a crusade, and
Hildebrand declared he would rather risk his life for the holy places
“than rule the universe.”

Each year the throngs upon the road increased, convents sprang up along
the way to shelter the pilgrims, the whole population succoured and
venerated them, and by the time Cluny had seized the triple crown, they
left in veritable armies. Ingulf, secretary to William the Conqueror,
set out in 1064 with a band seven thousand strong.

In that age of faith no such mighty stimulant could inflame the human
brain as a march to Jerusalem. A crusade was no vulgar war for a
vulgar prize, but an alliance with the supernatural for the conquest
of talismans whose possession was tantamount to omnipotence. Urban’s
words at Clermont, when he first preached the holy war, have lost their
meaning now; but they burned like fire into the hearts of his hearers
then, for he promised them glory on earth and felicity in heaven, and
he spoke in substance thus: No longer do you attack a castle or a town,
but you undertake the conquest of the holy places. If you triumph, the
blessings of heaven and the kingdoms of the East will be your share; if
you fall, you will have the glory of dying where Christ died, and God
will not forget having seen you in His holy army.[101]

Urban told them “that under their general Jesus Christ ... they, the
Christian, the invincible army,” would march to certain victory. In
the eleventh century this language was no metaphor, for the Cluniac
monk spoke as the mouthpiece of a god who was there actually among
them, offering the cross he brought from the grave, and promising them
triumphs: not the common triumphs which may be won by man’s unaided
strength, but the transcendent glory which belongs to beings of another
world.

So the crusaders rode out to fight, the originals of the fairy knights,
clad in impenetrable armour, mounted on miraculous horses, armed with
resistless swords, and bearing charmed lives.

Whole villages, even whole districts, were left deserted; land lost its
value; what could not be sold was abandoned; and the peasant, loaded
with his poor possessions, started on foot with his wife and children
in quest of the Sepulchre, so ignorant of the way that he mistook each
town upon the road for Zion. Whether he would or no, the noble had
to lead his vassals or be forsaken, and riding at their head with his
hawks and hounds, he journeyed towards that marvellous land of wealth
and splendour, where kingdoms waited the coming of the devoted knight
of God. Thus men, women, and children, princes and serfs, priests and
laymen, in a countless, motley throng, surged toward that mighty cross
and tomb whose possessor was raised above the limitations of the flesh.

The crusaders had no commissariat and no supply train, no engines of
attack, or other weapons than those in their hands, and the holy relics
they bore with them. There was no general, no common language, no
organization; and so over unknown roads, and through hostile peoples,
they wandered from the Rhine to the Bosphorus, and from the Bosphorus
to Syria.

These earlier crusades were armed migrations, not military invasions,
and had they met with a determined enemy, they must have been
annihilated; but it chanced that the Syrians and Egyptians were at
war, and the quarrel was so bitter that the caliph actually sought the
Christian alliance. Even under such circumstances the waste of life
was fabulous, and, had not Antioch been betrayed, the starving rabble
must have perished under its walls. At Jerusalem, also, the Franks were
reduced to the last extremity before they carried the town; and had it
not been for the arrival of a corps of Genoese engineers, who built
movable towers, they would have died miserably of hunger and thirst.
Nor was the coming of this reinforcement preconcerted. On the contrary,
the Italians accidentally lost their ships at Joppa, and, being left
without shelter, sought protection in the camp of the besiegers just in
time.

So incapable were the crusaders of regular operations, that even
when the towers were finished and armed, the leaders did not know how
to fill the moat, and Raymond of Saint Gilles had nothing better to
propose than to offer a penny for every three stones thrown into the
ditch.

On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem was stormed; almost exactly three years
after the march began. Eight days later Godfrey de Bouillon was elected
king, and then the invaders spread out over the strip of mountainous
country which borders the coast of Palestine and Syria, and the
chiefs built castles in the defiles of the hills, and bound themselves
together by a loose alliance against the common enemy.

The decentralization of the colony was almost incredible. The core of
the kingdom was the barony of Jerusalem, which extended only from the
Egyptian desert to a stream just north of Beyrout, and inland to the
Jordan and the spurs of the hills beyond the Dead Sea, and yet it was
divided into more than eighteen independent fiefs, whose lords had all
the rights of sovereignty, made war, administered justice, and coined
money.[102]

Beside these petty states, the ports were ceded to the Italian cities
whose fleets helped in the conquest. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa held
quarters in Ascalon, Joppa, Tyre, Acre, and Beyrout, which were
governed by consuls or viscounts, who wrangled with each other and with
the central government.

Such was the kingdom over which Godfrey reigned, but there were three
others like it which together made up the Frankish monarchy. To the
north of the barony of Jerusalem lay the county of Tripoli, and beyond
Tripoli, extending to Armenia, the principality of Antioch. To the east
of Antioch the county of Edessa stretched along the base of the Taurus
Mountains and spread out somewhat indefinitely beyond the Euphrates.

Thus on the north Edessa was the outwork of Christendom, while to the
south the castle of Karak, which commanded the caravan road between
Suez and Damascus, held a corresponding position among the hills to the
east of the Dead Sea.

Beyond the mountains the great plain sweeps away into Central Asia,
and in this plain the Franks never could maintain their footing. Their
failure to do so proved their ruin, for their position lay exposed to
attack from Damascus; and it was by operating from Damascus as a base
that Saladin succeeded in forcing the pass of Banias, and in cutting
the Latin possessions in two at the battle of Tiberias.

A considerable body of Europeans were thus driven in like a wedge
between Egypt and the Greek Empire, the two highest civilizations of
the Middle Ages, while in front lay the Syrian cities of the plain,
with whom the Christians were at permanent war. The contact was the
closest, the struggle for existence the sharpest, and the barbaric mind
received a stimulus not unlike the impulse Gaul received from Rome; for
the interval which separated the East from the West, at the beginning
of the twelfth century, was probably not less than that which divided
Italy from Gaul at the time of Cæsar.

When Godfrey de Bouillon took the cross, the Byzantine Empire was
already sinking. The Eastern trade which, for so many centuries, had
nourished its population, was beginning to flow directly from Asia
into Italy, and, as the economic aristocracy of the capital lost its
nutriment, it lost its energy. Apparently it fell in 1081, in the
revolution which raised Alexius Comuenus to the throne. Because Alexius
sacked Constantinople with a following of mongrel Greeks, Slavs, and
Bulgarians, he has been called the first Greek emperor, but in reality
the pure Greek blood had long since perished. The Byzantine population
at the end of the eleventh century was the lees of a multitude of
races,--a mixture of Slavs, Armenians, Jews, Thracians, and Greeks;
a residuum of the most tenacious organisms, after all that was higher
had disappeared. The army was a mixed horde of Huns, Arabs, Italians,
Britons, Franks; of all in short who could fight and were for sale,
while the Church was servile, the fancy dead, and art and literature
were redolent of decaying wealth.

Nevertheless, ever since the fall of Rome, Constantinople had been the
reservoir whence the West had drawn all its materialistic knowledge,
and therefore, it was during the centuries when the valley of the
Danube was closed, that the arts fell to their lowest ebb beyond the
Alps and Rhine. After pilgrimages began again in the reign of Stephen,
the Bosphorus lay once more in the path of travel, and as the returning
palmers spread over the West, a revival followed in their track; a
revival in which the spirit of Byzantium may yet be clearly read in the
architecture of Italy and France. Saint Mark is a feeble imitation of
Saint Sophia, while Viollet-le-Duc has described how long he hesitated
before he could decide whether the carving of Vézelay, Autun, and
Moissac was Greek or French; and has dwelt upon the laborious care with
which he pored over all the material, before he became convinced that
the stones were cut by artists trained at Cluny, who copied Byzantine
models.[103]

But the great gulf between the economic and the imaginative
development, separated the moribund Greek society from the
semi-childhood of the Franks; a chasm in its nature impassable because
caused by a difference of mind, and which is, perhaps, seen most
strikingly in religious architecture; for religious architecture,
though always embodying the highest poetical aspirations of every
civilization, yet had in the East and West diametrically opposite
points of departure.

Saint Sophia is pregnant with the spirit of the age of Justinian. There
was no attempt at mystery, or even solemnity, about the church, for the
mind of the architect was evidently fixed upon solving the problem of
providing the largest and lightest space possible, in which to display
the functions of a plutocratic court. His solution was brilliantly
successful. He enlarged the dome and diminished the supports, until,
nothing remaining to interrupt the view, it seemed as though the roof
had been suspended in the air. For his purpose the exterior had little
value, and he sacrificed it.

The conception of the architects of France was the converse of this,
for it was highly emotional. The gloom of the lofty vaults, dimly
lighted by the subdued splendour of the coloured windows, made the
interior of the Gothic cathedral the most mysterious and exciting
sanctuary for the celebration of the miracle which has ever been
conceived by man; while without, the doors and windows, the pinnacles
and buttresses, were covered with the terrific shapes of demons and the
majestic figures of saints, admonishing the laity of the danger lurking
abroad, and warning them to take refuge within.

But if the Greeks and the Franks had little affinity for each other,
the case was different with the Saracens, who were then in the full
vigour of their intellectual prime, and in the meridian of their
material splendour.

In the eleventh century, when Paris was still a cluster of huts
cowering for shelter on the islands of the Seine, and the palace of
the Duke of Normandy and King of England was the paltry White Tower of
London, Cairo was being adorned with those masterpieces which are still
the admiration of the world.

Prisse d’Avennes considered that, among the city gates the Bab-el-Nasr
stands first in “taste and style,” and the famous Bab-el-Zouilyeh is
of the same period. He also thought the mosque of Teyloun a “model of
elegance and grandeur,” and observed, when criticising the mosque of
the Sultan Hassan, built in 1356, that though imposing and beautiful,
it lacks the unity which is only found in the earlier Arabic monuments,
such as Teyloun.[104] Indeed, the signs are but too apparent that, from
the twelfth century, the instinct for form began to fail in Egypt, the
surest precursor of artistic decay.

The magnificence of the decoration and furnishing of the Arabic palaces
and houses has seldom been surpassed, and a few extracts from an
inventory of a sale of the collections of the Caliph Mostanser-Billah,
held in 1050, may give some idea of its gorgeousness.

    _Precious Stones._--A chest containing 7 _Mudds_ of emeralds;
    each of these worth at least 300,000 dynars, which makes in all
    at the lowest estimation, 36,000,000 francs.

    A necklace of precious stones worth about 80,000 dynars.

    Seven _Waïbah_ of magnificent pearls sent by the Emir of Mecca.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

    _Glass._--Several chests, containing a large number of vases ...
    of the purest crystal, chased and plain.

    Other chests filled with precious vases of different materials.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

    _Table Utensils._--A large number of gold dishes, enamelled or
    plain, in which were incrusted all sorts of colours, forming
    most varied designs.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

    One hundred cups and other shapes, of bezoar-stone, on most of
    which was engraved the name of the Caliph Haroun-el-Raschid.

    Another cup which was 3 1⁄2 hands wide and one deep.

    _Different Articles._--Chests containing inkstands of different
    shapes, round or square, small or large, of gold or silver,
    sandal wood, aloe, ebony, ivory, and all kinds of woods,
    enriched with stones, gold and silver, or remarkable for beauty
    and elegance of workmanship.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

    Twenty-eight enamel dishes inlaid with gold, which the Caliph
    Aziz had received as a present from the Greek emperor and each
    of which was valued at 3000 dynars.

    Chests filled with an enormous quantity of steel, china, and
    glass mirrors, ornamented with gold and silver filagree; some
    were bordered with stones, and had cornelian handles, and
    others precious stones. One of them had quite a long and thick
    handle of emeralds. These mirrors were enclosed in cases made
    of velvet or silk or most beautiful wood; their locks were of
    gold or silver.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

    Four hundred large cases, ornamented with gold and filled with
    all sorts of jewels.

    Various silver household goods, and six thousand gold vases, in
    which were put narcissus or violets.

    Thirty-six thousand pieces of crystal, among them a box
    ornamented with figures in relief, weighing 17 roks.

    A large number of knives which, at the lowest price, were sold
    for 36,000 dynars.

        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

    A turban enriched with precious stones, one of the most curious
    and valuable articles in the palace: it was said to be worth
    130,000 dynars. The stones which covered it, and whose weight
    was 17 roks, were divided between two chiefs, who both claimed
    it. One had in his share a ruby weighing 23 mitqâls, and in the
    share which fell to the other were 100 pearls each of which
    weighed 3 mitqâls. When the two generals were obliged to fly
    from Fostat, all these valuables were given up to pillage.

    A golden peacock enriched with the most valuable precious
    stones: the eyes were rubies, the feathers gilded enamel
    representing all the colours of peacock feathers.

    A cock of the same metal, with a comb of the largest rubies
    covered with pearls and other stones; the eyes also were made
    of rubies.

    A gazelle whose body was covered all over with pearls and the
    most precious stones; the stomach was white and composed of a
    series of pearls of the purest water.

    A sardonyx table, with conical feet of the same substance; it
    was large enough for several people to eat there at the same
    time.

    A garden, the soil made of chased and gilt silver and yellow
    earth. There were silver trees, with fruits made of precious
    materials.

    A golden palm-tree enriched with superb pearls. It was in
    a golden chest and its fruit was made of precious stones
    representing dates in every stage of ripeness. This tree was of
    inestimable value.[105]

About the time the monk Gerbert was accused of sorcery because he
understood the elements of geometry, the Caliph Aziz-Billah founded the
university of Cairo, the greatest Mohammedan institution of learning.
This was two hundred years before the organization of the university
of Paris, and the lectures at the mosque of El-Azhar are said to have
been attended by twelve thousand students. Munk was of opinion that
Arabic philosophy reached its apogee with Averrhoës, who was born about
1120.[106] Certainly he was the last of a famous line which began at
Bagdad three centuries earlier; and Hauréau, in describing the great
period of Saint Thomas at Paris, dwelt upon the debt Western learning
owed to the Saracens.

The splendour of Haroun-al-Raschid is still proverbial. The tales of
his gold and silver, his silks and gems, almost surpass belief, and
even in his reign the mechanical arts were so advanced that he sent a
clock to Charlemagne.

Humboldt considered the Arabs as the founders of modern experimental
science, and they were relatively skilful chemists, for they understood
the composition of sulphuric and nitric acid, and of aqua regia,
beside the preparation of mercury and of various oxides of metals. As
physicians they were far in advance of Europe. While the Church healed
by miracles, and put experimental methods under her ban, the famous
Rhazes conducted the hospitals of Bagdad, and in the tenth century
wrote a work in ten books, which was printed at Venice as late as 15
10. Practitioners of all nations have used his treatise on small-pox
and measles; he introduced mild purgatives, invented the seton, and was
a remarkable anatomist. He died in 932.

William of Tyre stated that the Frankish nobles of Syria preferred
the native or Jewish doctors; and though Saladin sent his physician to
Richard, Richard never thought of sending an Englishman to Saladin when
afterwards attacked by illness.

Even as late as the middle of the thirteenth century little advance
seems to have been made in Europe, for one of the most curious
phenomena of the crusades was the improvement in the health of the
army of Saint Louis after it surrendered. During the campaign various
epidemics had been very fatal; but when the soldiers were subjected
to the sanitary regulations of the Egyptian medical staff, disease
disappeared.

The Arabs had a strong taste for mathematics, and were familiar with
most of the discoveries which have been attributed to astronomers of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

As early as 1000 spherical trigonometry was in use, and Aboul-Hassan
wrote an excellent treatise on conic sections. In 833 the Caliph
El-Mamoun, having founded observatories at Bagdad and Damascus, caused
a degree to be measured on the plain of Palmyra. By the thirteenth
century the Arabic instruments were comparatively perfect. They had
the astrolabe, the gnomon, the sextant, and the mariner’s compass,
and Aboul-Wafa determined the third lunar variation six hundred years
before Tycho Brahe.

To enumerate all the improvements in agriculture and manufactures which
came from the mediæval pilgrimage would take a separate treatise. A
French savant thought of writing a book upon the flora of the crusades
alone. The mulberry and the silkworm were brought from Greece, the
maize from Turkey, the plum from Damascus, the eschalot from Ascalon,
and the windmills with which, down to the present century, corn was
ground, were one of the importations from the Levant.

It might almost be said that all the West knew of the arts was learned
on the road to the sepulchre. The Tyrians taught the Sicilians to
refine sugar, and the Venetians to make glass; Damascus steel was a
proverb, Damascus potters were the masters of the potters of France;
the silk, brocades, and carpets of Syria and Persia were in the twelfth
century what they have been down to the present day, at once the
admiration and despair of Western weavers, while there can be little
doubt that gunpowder was the invention of the chemists of the East.

All the evidence tends to prove that the ogive came from the
Levant, and without the ogive Gothic architecture could never have
developed.[107] Prior to the council of Clermont the pointed arch was
practically unknown west of the Adriatic; but the Arabs had long used
it, and it may still be seen in the ninth century mosque of Teyloun.

In Palestine the Franks were surrounded by Saracenic buildings, and
employed Saracenic masons, and the attention of Western architects
seems no sooner to have been drawn to the possibilities of the ogive,
than they saw in it the solution of those problems which had before
defied them. An arch formed by two intersecting segments of a circle
could be raised to any height from any base, and was perfectly adapted
to vaulting the parallelograms formed by the columns of the nave.
Therefore, contemporaneously with the building of the church of the
Holy Sepulchre, the period of transition between the Romanesque and the
Gothic opened in France. The two most important transition buildings
were the abbey of Saint Denis and the cathedral of Noyon, and, while
the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 1149, the abbey was completed in
1144, and the cathedral was begun almost immediately after.[108]

Thenceforward the movement was rapid, and before the year 1200,
Christian sacred architecture was culminating in those marvels of
beauty, the cathedrals of Paris, of Bourges, of Chartres, and of Le
Alans. Yet, though sacred architecture tells the story of the rise of
the imagination as nothing else can, if it be true that centralization
hinges on the preponderance of the attack in war, the surest way of
measuring the advance toward civilization of rude peoples must be by
military engineering.

In the eleventh century, north of the Alps, this science was
rudimentary, and nothing can be more impressive than to compare the
mighty ramparts of Constantinople with the small square tower which
William the Conqueror found ample for his needs in London.

When the crusaders were first confronted with the Greek and Arabic
works, they were helpless; nor were their difficulties altogether those
of ignorance. Such fortifications were excessively costly, and a feudal
State was poor because the central power had not the force to constrain
individuals to pay taxes. The kingdom of Jerusalem was in chronic
insolvency.

The life of the Latin colony in Syria, therefore, hung on the
development of some financial system which should make the
fortification of Palestine possible, and such a system grew up through
the operation of the imagination, though in an unusual manner.

Fetish worship drew a very large annual contribution from the
population in the shape of presents to propitiate the saints, and
one of the effects of the enthusiasm for the crusades was to build up
conventual societies in the Holy Land, which acted as standing armies.
The most famous of the military orders were the Knights of the Temple
and the Knights of Saint John. William of Tyre has left an interesting
description of the way in which the Temple came to be organized:--

   “As though the Lord God sends his grace there where he
    pleases, worthy knights, who were of the land beyond the sea,
    proposed to stay for ever in the service of Our Lord, and
    to live in common, like regular canons. In the hand of the
    patriarch they vowed chastity and obedience, and renounced all
    property.... The king and the other barons, the patriarch and
    other prelates of the Church, gave them funds to live on and
    to clothe themselves.... The first thing which was enjoined
    on them in pardon for their sins was to guard the roads by
    which the pilgrims passed, from robbers and thieves, who did
    great harm. This penance the patriarch and the other bishops
    enjoined. Nine years they remained thus in secular habit,
    wearing such garments as were given them by the knights and
    other good people, for the love of God. In the ninth a council
    was assembled in France in the city of Troyes. There were
    assembled the archbishops of Rheims and Sens and all their
    bishops. The bishop of Albano especially was there as papal
    legate, the abbots of Citeau and Clairvaux, and many other of
    the religious.

   “There were established the order and the rules by which they
    were to live as monks. Their habit was ordered to be white, by
    the authority of Pope Honorius and the patriarch of Jerusalem.
    This order had already existed nine years, as I have told
    you, and there were as yet only nine brothers, who lived from
    day to day on charity. From that time their numbers began to
    increase, and revenues and tenures were given them. In the time
    of Pope Etigenius it was ordered that they should have sewn
    upon their copes and on their robes a cross of red cloth, so
    that they should be known among all men.... From thence have
    their possessions so increased as you can see, that the order
    of the Temple is in the ascendant.... Hardly can you find on
    either side of the sea a Christian land where this order has
    not to-day houses and brethren, and great revenues.”[109]

The council of Troyes was held in 1128, and in the next fifty years,
in proportion as the feudal organization of the Latin kingdom decayed,
the military orders increased in wealth and power. The Hospital held
nineteen thousand manors in Europe, the Temple nine thousand, and each
manor could maintain a knight in the field.

At Paris the house of the Temple filled a whole quarter; its donjon was
one of the most superb buildings of the Middle Ages; at a later period,
when the corporation took to banking, it served as a place of deposit
for both public and private treasure, and in times of danger the king
himself was glad to take shelter within its walls.

The creation of this monastic standing army was evidently due to the
inferiority of the attack to the defence, which made the civil power
incapable of coercing the individual who refused to pay taxes. The
petty barons who built the castles throughout Palestine were too poor
to erect fortifications capable of resisting the superior engines used
in the East. Therefore the whole burden of the war was thrown upon the
Church, and in all modern history nothing is more wonderful than the
way in which this work was done.

Within fifty years after the conquest the feudal machinery was in
ruin, and the strategic points, one after another, passed into the
hands of the strongest force of the age, the force which was incarnate
imagination.

The fortresses built by the monks were the ramparts of Christendom,
and among the remains which have survived the past, perhaps none are
more impressive than the huge castles of the crusaders in the gorges
of the Syrian mountains; nor do any show so clearly whence came the
rationalistic stimulus which revolutionized Europe, shattered the
Church, and brought in the economic society which has ruled Europe
since the Templars passed away.

Twenty-five miles due west of Homs, at the point where the Lebanon
melts into the Ansarieh range, the mountains open, and two passes
lead by easy descents to the sea. Through the southern runs the road
to Tripoli, through the northern that to Tortosa. Between them, on a
crag a thousand feet above the valleys, still stands the castle of the
Krak des Chevaliers, ceded by Count Raymond of Tripoli to the Hospital
in 1145. Towering above the plain it can be seen for miles, and no
description can give an idea of its gigantic size and power. Coucy and
Pierrefonds are among the largest fortresses of Europe, and yet Coucy
and Pierrefonds combined are no larger than the Krak.

Compared with it, the works then built in the West were toys, and
the engineering talent shown in its conception was equalled by the
magnificence of its masonry. The Byzantine system was adopted. A double
wall, the inner commanding the outer, with a moat between; and three
enormous towers rising from the moat, formed the donjon. There were
stone machicoulis and all the refinements of defence which appeared in
France under Saint Louis and his son, and a study of this stupendous
monument shows plainly whence Europeans drew their military instruction
for a century to come.

The Krak was the outwork dominating the plain where the Christians
never made their footing good, and stood at the apex of a triangle
of fortresses as remarkable as itself. From its ramparts the great
white tower of Chastel-Blanc can be seen, midway between the outpost
commanding the mountain passes and the base upon the sea held by the
Temple; and from that tower the troop of Templars rode to relieve
the knights of Saint John, on the day when the crusaders routed the
conqueror Nour-ed-Din, and cut his army to pieces as it fled toward the
Lake of Homs, which lies in the distance.

But the white tower is unlike the donjons of other lands, and bears the
imprint of the force which built it, for it is not a layman’s hold, but
a church, whose windows are cut in walls thirteen feet thick, whence
the dim light falls across the altar where the magicians wrought their
miracles.

Within easy supporting distance lay Tortosa, a walled town, the outwork
of a donjon at least as strong as the Krak, and built with a perfection
of workmanship, and a beauty of masonry, which proves at once the
knowledge and the resources of the order. No monarch of the West could,
probably, at that time have undertaken so costly an enterprise, and
yet Tortosa was but one of four vast structures which lie within a few
miles of each other. The place was ceded to the Temple in 1183, just
at the beginning of the reign of Philip Augustus, before men dreamed of
the more important French fortifications.

At Margat, a day’s journey to the north, the Hospital had their
base upon the sea: a stronghold whose cost must have been fabulous,
for it is perched upon a crag high above the Mediterranean, and so
inaccessible that it is not easy to understand how the materials for
building were collected. Viollet-le-Duc, who was lost in admiration at
Coucy, declared that it was colossal enough to befit a race of giants,
and yet Coucy could have stood in the courtyard of Margat.

The Arabs, who were excellent engineers, deemed it a masterpiece, and
the Sultan Kalaoun could not endure the thought of injuring it. After
he had mined the great tower and was sure of victory, he proved to the
garrison his power to destroy it, in order to induce them to accept
most liberal terms of surrender, and let him have the prize. Perhaps
the best description ever given of the work is in a letter written by
the Sultan of Hamah to his vizier to announce its fall:

   “The devil himself had taken pleasure in consolidating its
    foundations. How many times have the Mussulmans tried to reach
    its towers and fallen down the precipices! Markab is unique,
    perched on the summit of a rock. It is accessible to relief,
    and inaccessible to attack. The eagle and the vulture alone can
    fly to its ramparts.”[110]




CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND CRUSADE


As the East was richer than the West, the Saracens were capable of a
higher centralization than the Franks, and although they were divided
amongst themselves at the close of the eleventh century, no long time
elapsed after the fall of Jerusalem before the consolidation began
which annihilated the Latin kingdom.

The Sultan of Persia made Zenghi governor of Mosul in 1127. Zenghi,
who was the first Atabek, was a commander and organizer of ability,
and with a soldier’s instinct struck where his enemy was vulnerable. He
first occupied Aleppo, Hamah, and Homs. He then achieved the triumph of
his life by the capture of Edessa. The next year he was murdered, and
was succeeded by his still more celebrated son, Nour-ed-Din, who made
Aleppo his capital, and devoted his life to completing the work his
father had begun.

After a series of brilliant campaigns, by a mixture of vigour and
address, Nour-ed-Din made himself master of Damascus, and, operating
thence as a base, he conquered Egypt, and occupied Cairo in 1169.
During the Egyptian war, a young emir, named Saladin, rose rapidly into
prominence. He was the nephew of the general in command, at whose death
the caliph made him vizier, because he thought him pliable. In this the
caliph was mistaken, for Saladin was a man of iron will and consummate
ability. William of Tyre even accused him of having murdered the last
Fatimite caliph with his own hands in order to cause the succession to
pass to Nour-ed-Din, and to seize on the substance of power himself, as
Nour-ed-Din’s representative.

Certainly he administered Egypt in his own interest, and not in
his master’s; so much so that Nour-ed-Din, having failed to obtain
obedience to his commands, had prepared to march against him in person,
when, on the eve of his departure, he died. Saladin then moved on
Damascus, and having defeated the army of El Melek, the heir to the
crown, at Hamah, he had himself declared Sultan of Egypt and Syria.

With a power so centralized the Franks would probably, under the best
circumstances, have been unable to cope. The weakness of the Christians
was radical, and arose from the exuberance of their imagination, which
caused them to proceed by miracles, or more correctly, by magical
formulas. An exalted imagination was the basis of the characters of
both Louis VII. and Saint Bernard, and the faith resulting therefrom
led to the defeat of the second crusade.

The Christian collapse began with the fall of Edessa, for the County of
Edessa was the extreme northeastern state of the Latin community, and
the key to the cities of the plain. When the first crusaders reached
Armenia, Baldwin, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, conceived the idea of
carving a kingdom for himself out of the Christian country to the south
of the Taurus range. Taking with him such pilgrims as he could persuade
to go, he started from Mamistra, just north of the modern Alexandretta,
and marched east along the caravan road. Edessa lay sixteen hours’ ride
beyond the Euphrates, and he reached it in safety.

At this time, though Edessa still nominally formed part of the Greek
Empire, it was in reality independent, and was governed by an old man
named Theodore, who had originally been sent from Constantinople, but
who had gradually taken the position of a sovereign. The surrounding
country had been overrun by Moslems, and Theodore only maintained
himself by paying tribute. The people, therefore, were ready to welcome
any Frankish baron capable of defending them; and Baldwin, though a
needy adventurer, was an excellent officer, and well adapted to the
emergency.

As he drew near, the townsmen went out to meet him, and escorted him to
the city in triumph, where he soon supplanted the old Theodore, whom
he probably murdered. He then became Count of Edessa, but he remained
in the country only two years, for in 1100 he was elected to succeed
his brother Godfrey. He was followed as Lord of Edessa by his cousin
Godfrey de Bourg, who, in his turn, was crowned King of Jerusalem in
1119, and the next count was de Bourg’s cousin, Joscelin de Courtney,
who had previously held as a fief the territory to the west of the
Euphrates. This Joscelin was one of the most renowned warriors who ever
came from France, and while he lived the frontier was well defended. So
high was his prowess that he earned the title of “the great,” in an age
when every man was a soldier, and in a country where arms were the only
path to fortune save the Church.

The story of his death is one of the most dramatic of that dramatic
time. As he stood beneath the wall of a Saracenic tower he had mined,
it suddenly fell and buried him in the ruins. He was taken out a
mangled mass to die, but, as he lay languishing, news came that the
Sultan of Iconium had laid siege to one of his castles near Tripoli.
Feeling that he could not sit his horse, he called his son and directed
him to collect his vassals and ride to the relief of the fortress. The
youth hesitated, fearing that the enemy were too numerous. Then the
old man, grieving to think of the fate of his people when he should
be gone, had himself slung in a litter between two horses, and marched
against the foe.

He had not gone far before he was met by a messenger, who told him
that when the Saracens heard the Lord of Courtney was upon the march,
they had raised the siege and fled. Then the wounded baron ordered his
litter to be set down upon the ground, and, stretching out his hands to
heaven, he thanked God who had so honoured him that his enemies dared
not abide his coming even when in the jaws of death, and died there
where he lay.

The second generation of Franks seems to have deteriorated through the
influence of the climate, but the character of the younger Joscelin
was not the sole cause of the disasters which overtook him. Probably
even his father could not permanently have made head against the forces
which were combining against him. The weakness of the Frankish kingdom
was inherent: it could not contend with enemies who were further
advanced upon the road toward consolidation. Had Western society been
enough centralized to have organized a force capable of collecting
taxes, and of enforcing obedience to a central administration, a
wage-earning army might have been maintained on the frontier. As
it was, concentration was impossible, and the scattered nobles were
crushed in detail.

Antioch was the nearest supporting point to Edessa, and, when Zenghi
made his attack, Raymond de Poitiers, one of the ablest soldiers of
his generation, was the reigning prince. But he was at feud with the
Courtneys; the king at Jerusalem could not force him to do his duty;
the other barons were too distant, even had they been well disposed;
and thus the key to the Christian position fell without a blow being
struck in its defence.

To that emotional generation the loss of Edessa seemed a reversal of
the laws of nature; a consequence not of bad organization but of divine
wrath. The invincible relics had suddenly refused to act, and the only
explanation which occurred to the men of the time was, that there must
have been neglect of the magical formulas.

Saint Bernard never doubted that God would fight if duly propitiated;
therefore all else must bend to the task of propitiation: “What think
ye, brethren? Is the hand of the Lord weakened, or unequal to the work
of defence, that he calls miserable worms to guard and restore his
heritage? Is he not able to send more than twelve legions of angels,
or, to speak truly, by word deliver his country?”[111]

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the soul of the second crusade, was born
at the castle of Fontaines, near Dijon, in 1091, so that his earliest
impressions must have been tinged by the emotional outburst which
followed the council of Clermont. The third son of noble parents, he
resembled his mother, who had the ecstatic temperament. While she lived
she tried to imitate the nuns, and at her death she was surrounded
by holy clerks, who sung with her while she could speak, and, when
articulation failed, watched her lips moving in praise to God.

From the outset, Bernard craved a monastic life, and when he grew
up insisted on dedicating himself to Heaven. His first success was
the conversion of his brothers, whom he carried with him to the
cloister, with the exception of the youngest, who was then a child.
As the brothers passed through the castle courtyard, on their way to
the convent, Guy, the eldest, said to the boy, who was playing there
with other children, “Well, Nivard, all our land is now yours.” “So
you will have heaven and I earth,” the child answered; “that is an
unequal division.” And a few years after he joined his brothers.[112]
The father and one daughter then were left alone, and at last they too
entered convents, where they died.

At twenty-two, when Bernard took his vows at Citeaux, his influence was
so strong that he carried with him thirty of his comrades, and mothers
are said to have hid their sons from him, and wives their husbands,
lest he should lure them away. He actually broke up so many homes that
the abandoned wives formed a nunnery, which afterward grew rich.

His abilities were so marked that his superiors singled him out,
when he had hardly finished his novitiate, to found a house in the
wilderness. This house became Clairvaux, in the twelfth century the
most famous monastery of the world.

In the Middle Ages, convents were little patronized until by some
miracle they had proved themselves worthy of hire; their early years
were often passed in poverty, and Clairvaux was no exception to the
rule, for the brethren suffered privations which nearly caused revolt.
In the midst of his difficulties, Bernard’s brother Gérard, who was
cellarer, came to him to complain that the fraternity were without
the barest necessities of life. The man of God asked, “How much will
suffice for present wants?” Gérard replied, “Twelve pounds.” Bernard
dismissed him and betook himself to prayer. Soon after Gérard returned
and announced that a woman was without and wished to speak with
him. “She, when he had come to her, prostrating herself at his feet,
offered him a gift of twelve pounds, imploring the aid of his prayers
for her husband, who was dangerously sick. Having briefly spoken with
her, he dismissed her, saying: ‘Go. You will find your husband well.’
She, going home, found what she had heard had come to pass. The abbot
comforting the weakness of his cellarer, made him stronger for bearing
other trials from God.”[113]

Although his family were somewhat sceptical about his gifts, and even
teased him to tears, the monk William tells, in his chronicle, how he
soon performed an astounding miracle which made Clairvaux a “veritable
valley of light,” and then wealth poured in upon him.

Meanwhile, his constitution, which had never been vigorous, had been so
impaired by his penances that he was unable to follow the monastic life
in its full rigour, and he therefore threw himself into politics, to
which he was led both by taste and by the current of events.

Clairvaux was founded in 1115, and fifteen years later Bernard had
risen high in his profession. The turning-point in his life was the
part he took in the recognition of Innocent II. In 1130, Honorius II.
died, and two popes were chosen by the college of cardinals, Anacletus
and Innocent II. Anacletus stayed in Rome, but Innocent crossed
the Alps, and a council was summoned at Étampes to decide upon his
title. By a unanimous vote the question was referred to Bernard, and
his biographer described how he examined the evidence with fear and
trembling, and how at last the Holy Ghost spoke through his mouth,
and he recognized Innocent. His decision was ratified, and soon after
he managed to obtain the adhesion of the King of England to the new
pontiff.

His success made him the foremost man in Europe, and when, in 1145, one
of his monks was raised to the papacy as Eugenius III., he wrote with
truth, “I am said to be more pope than you.”

Perhaps no one ever lived more highly gifted with the ecstatic
temperament than Saint Bernard. He had the mysterious attribute of
miracles, and, in the twelfth century, the miracle was, perhaps, the
highest expression of force. To work them was a personal gift, and the
possessor of the faculty might, at his caprice, use his power, like the
sorcerer, to aid or injure other men.

One day as Saint Bernard was on his way to a field at harvest time, the
monk who drove the donkey on which he rode, fell in an epileptic fit.
“Seeing which the holy man had pity on him, and entreated God that for
the future he would not seize him unaware.” Accordingly from that day
until his death, twenty years after, “whenever he was to fall from that
disease, he felt the fit coming for a certain space of time, so that he
had an opportunity to lie down on a bed, and so avert the bruises of a
sudden fall.”[114]

This cure was a pure act of grace, like alms, made to gratify the whim
of the saint; and a man who could so control nature was more powerful
than any other on earth. Bernard was such a man, and for this reason he
was chosen by acclamation to preach the second crusade.

His sermons have perished, but two of his letters have survived,[115]
and they explain the essential weakness of a military force raised on
the basis of supernatural intervention. He looked upon the approaching
campaign as merely the vehicle for a miracle, and as devised to offer
to those who entered on it a special chance for salvation. Therefore
he appealed to the criminal classes. “For what is it but an exquisite
and priceless chance of salvation due to God alone, that the Omnipotent
should deign to summon to his service, as though they were innocent,
murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every
crime?”[116]

Even had an army composed of such material been well disciplined and
well led, it would have been untrustworthy in the face of an adversary
like Nour-ed-Din; but Louis VII. of France was as emotional and as
irrational as Saint Bernard. His father had been a great commander,
but he himself had been educated in the Abbey of Saint Denis, and
justified his wife’s scornful jest, who, when she left him for Raymond
de Poitiers, said she had married a monk. The whole world held him
lightly, even the priests sneered at him, and Innocent II. spoke of
him as a child “who must be stopped from learning rebellion.” Indeed,
the pope underrated him, for he appointed his own nephew to the See
of Bourges in defiance of the king, and the insult roused him to
resistance. Louis raised an army and invaded the County of Champagne,
where the bishop had taken refuge. There he stormed and burnt Vitry,
and some thirteen hundred men, women, and children, who had taken
refuge in the church, perished in the flames of the blazing town.
Horror seems to have unhinged his mind, absolution did not calm him,
and at last he came to believe that his only hope of salvation lay
in a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre. On Palm Sunday, 1146, when Bernard
harangued a vast throng at Vézelay, the king was the first to prostrate
himself, and take the cross from his hands.

With that day began the most marvellous part of the saint’s marvellous
career, and were the events which followed less well authenticated,
they would be incredible. In that age miracles were as common as
medical cures are now, and yet Bernard’s performances so astonished
his contemporaries that they drew up a solemnly attested record of what
they saw, that the story of his preaching might never be questioned.

When he neared a town the bells were rung, and young and old, from far
and near, thronged about him in crowds so dense that, at Constance, no
one saw what passed, because no one dared to venture into the press. At
Troyes he was in danger of being suffocated. Elsewhere the sick were
brought to him by a ladder as he stood at a window out of reach. What
he did may be judged by the work of a single day.

   “When the holy man entered Germany he shone so marvellously by
    cures, that it can neither be told in words, nor would it be
    believed if it were told. For those testify who were present
    in the country of Constance, near the town of Doningen, who
    diligently investigated these things, and saw them with their
    eyes, that in one day eleven blind received their sight by the
    laying on of his hands, ten maimed were restored, and eighteen
    lame made straight.”[117]

Thus, literally by thousands, the blind saw, the lame walked, the
maimed were made whole. He cast out devils, turned water into wine,
raised the dead. But no modern description can give an idea of the
paroxysm of excitement; the stories must be read in the chronicles
themselves. Yet, strangely enough, such was the strength of the
materialistic inheritance from the Empire, that Bernard does not always
seem fully to have believed in himself. He was tinged with some shade
of scepticism. The meeting at Vézelay was held on March 24, 1146. Four
weeks later, on April 21, at a council held at Chartres, the command
of the army to invade Palestine was offered to the Abbot of Clairvaux.
Had the saint thoroughly believed in himself and his twelve legions of
angels, he would not have hesitated, for no enemy could have withstood
God. In fact he was panic-stricken, and wrote a letter to the pope
which might befit a modern clergyman.

After explaining that he had been chosen commander against his will, he
exclaimed, “Who am I, that I should set camps in order, or should march
before armed men? Or what is so remote from my profession, even had I
the strength, and the knowledge were not lacking?... I beseech you, by
that charity you especially owe me, that you do not abandon me to the
wills of men.”[118]

During 1146 and 1147 two vast mixed multitudes, swarming with criminals
and women, gathered at Metz and Ratisbon. As a fighting force these
hosts were decidedly inferior to the bands which had left Europe fifty
years before, under Tancred and Godfrey de Bouillon, and they were
besides commanded by the semi-emasculated King of France.

The Germans cannot be considered as having taken any part in the war,
for they perished without having struck a blow. The Greek emperor
caused them to be lured into the mountains of Asia Minor, where they
were abandoned by their guides, and wasted away from exposure, hunger,
and thirst, until the Saracens destroyed them without allowing them to
come to battle.

The French fared little better. In crossing the Cadmus Mountains, their
lack of discipline occasioned a defeat, which made William of Tyre
wonder at the ways of God.

   “To no one should the things done by our Lord be displeasing,
    for all his works are right and good, but according to the
    judgment of men it was marvellous how our Lord permitted the
    Franks (who are the people in the world who believe in him and
    honour him most) to be thus destroyed by the enemies of the
    faith.”[119]

Soon after this check Louis was joined by the Grand Master of the
Temple, under whose guidance he reached Atalia, a Greek port in
Pamphylia: and here, had the king been a rationalist, he would have
stormed the town and used it as a base of operations against Syria. In
the eyes of laymen, the undisguised hostility of the emperor would have
fully justified such an attack. But Louis was a devotee, bound by a
vow to the performance of a certain mystic formula, and one part of his
vow was not to attack Christians during his pilgrimage. In his mind the
danger of disaster from supernatural displeasure was greater than the
strategic advantage; and so he allowed his army to rot before the walls
in the dead of winter, without tents or supplies, until it wasted to a
shadow of its former strength.

Finally the governor contracted to provide shipping, but he delayed
for another five weeks, and when the transports came they were too few.
Even then Louis would not strike, but abandoning the poor and sick to
their fate, he sailed away with the flower of his troops, and by spring
the corpses of those whom he had deserted bred a pestilence which
depopulated the city.

When he arrived at Antioch new humiliations and disasters awaited him.
Raymond de Poitiers was one of the handsomest and most gifted men of
this time. Affable, courteous, brave, and sagacious, in many respects a
great captain, his failing was a hot temper, which led him to his ruin.
He forsook Joscelin through jealousy, and the fall of Edessa cost him
throne and life.

After the successes of Zenghi, a very short experience of Nour-ed-Din
sufficed to convince Prince Raymond that Antioch could not be held
without re-establishing the frontier; and when Louis arrived, Raymond
tried hard to persuade him to abandon his pilgrimage for that season,
and make a campaign in the north.

William of Tyre thought the plan good, and believed that the Saracens
were, for the moment, too demoralized to resist. Evidently, by
advancing from Antioch, Nour-ed-Din could have been isolated, whereas
on the south he was covered by Damascus, one of the strongest places in
the East.

Such considerations had no weight with Louis, for, to his emotional
temperament, military strategy lay in obtaining supernatural aid,
without which no wisdom could avail, and with which victory was sure.
He therefore insisted on the punctilious performance of the religious
rites, and one of the most interesting passages in _William of Tyre_ is
the account of the interview between him and Raymond, when a movement
against the cities of the north was discussed.

   “The prince, who had tried the temper of the king several
    times privately, and not found what he wanted, came one day
    to him before his barons and made his requests to the best of
    his power. Many reasons he showed that if he would agree, he
    would do his soul much good, and would win the applause of his
    age; Christendom would be so benefited by this thing. The king
    took counsel, and then he answered that he was vowed to the
    Sepulchre, and had taken the cross particularly to go there;
    that, since he had left his country, he had met with many
    hindrances, and that he had no wish to begin any wars until he
    had perfected his pilgrimage.”[120]

This refusal so exasperated Prince Raymond that he threw off all
disguise, and became the avowed lover of the queen, who detested her
husband. Louis, shortly afterward, escaped by night from Antioch,
taking Eleanor with him by force, and thus the only hope for the
recovery of Edessa was lost.

For the emotionalist everything yielded to the transcendent importance
of propitiatory rites; therefore Louis ascended Calvary, kissed
the stones, intoned the chants, received the benediction, and lost
Palestine. Thus, by the middle of the twelfth century, the idealist had
begun to flag in the struggle for life.

An attempt, indeed, was afterwards made upon Damascus, but it only
served to expose the weakness of the men who relied on magic. By
the time the advance began, confidence had been restored among the
Saracens, the attack was repulsed, and Nour-ed-Din had only to move
from the north to throw the crusaders back upon Jerusalem, covered with
ridicule. Nothing conveys so vivid an idea of the shock these reverses
gave believers, as the words in which Saint Bernard defended his
prophecies.

   “Do they not say among the pagans, where is their God? Nor is
    it wonderful. The sons of the Church, who are known by the name
    of Christians, are laid low in the desert, destroyed by the
    sword, or consumed by famine. The Lord hath poured contempt
    upon princes, and hath caused them to wander in the wilderness,
    where there is no way. Grief and misfortune have followed their
    steps, fear and confusion have been in the palaces of the kings
    themselves. How have the feet strayed of those promising peace
    and blessings. We have said peace and there is no peace, we
    have promised good fortune and behold tribulation, as if we
    had acted in this matter with rashness and levity.... Yet if
    one of two things must be, I prefer to have men murmur against
    me rather than God. It is good if I am worthy to be used as a
    shield. I take willingly the slanders of detractors, and the
    poisoned stings of blasphemers, that they may not reach him. I
    do not shrink from loss of glory that his may not be attacked,
    who gives it to me to be glorified in the words of the
    Psalmist: ‘Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame
    hath covered my face.’”[121]

According to the account of William of Tyre, both sides felt the end
to be near. After the failure of Louis the Pious, Prince Raymond was
the first to go down before the storm he had too late seen gathering.
Nour-ed-Din fell upon his country with fire and sword, defeated him,
cut off his head and right arm, and sent them to Bagdad as trophies.
The wretched Joscelin died in a dungeon at Aleppo, while Nour-ed-Din
entered Damascus, and thus consolidated the Syrian cities of the
plain. Thenceforward the decentralized Franks lay helpless in the
grasp of their compact adversary, and all that was imaginative in the
Middle Ages received its death-wound at Tiberias. That action was the
beginning of the decay of fetish-worship.

The crusaders believed they had found the cross on which Christ died
at Jerusalem. They venerated it as a charm no less powerful than the
Sepulchre itself, and having this advantage over the tomb, that it
was portable. They thought it invincible, and used it not only as a
weapon against living enemies, but as a means of controlling nature. A
remarkable example of the magical properties of this relic was given in
the retreat from Bosra.

Baldwin III. was crowned in 1144, when only thirteen. The kingdom
was then at peace with Damascus, in whose territory Bosra lay; but,
notwithstanding, the child’s advisers eagerly listened to the offer
of the emir in command to betray the town, and hastened forward the
departure of an expedition, in spite of the protests of the envoys
from Damascus. On the march the troops suffered severely from heat and
thirst, and on their arrival were appalled to find a loyal garrison. A
siege was out of the question, and a regular retreat so hazardous that
the barons besought the king to fly and save the cross; but the boy
refused, and stayed with his men to fight to the last. The outlook was
terrible, for the vegetation was dry, and when the march began--

   “The Turks threw Greek fire everywhere, so that it seemed as
    if the whole country burned. The high flames and thick smoke
    blinded our men. Then were they so beset they knew not what to
    do. But when there is great need, and men’s help fails, then
    should one seek aid of our Lord, and cry to him to care for
    us; so did our Christians then; for they called the Archbishop
    Robert of Nazareth, who carried the true cross before them, and
    begged him that he would pray our Lord, who to save them had
    suffered death upon that cross, that he would bring them from
    this peril; for they could not endure it, nor did they look
    for other help than his. Truly, they were there all black and
    scorched, like smiths, from the fire and smoke. The archbishop
    dismounted and kneeled down, and prayed our Lord with many
    tears that he would have mercy on his people; then he arose
    and held the true cross toward the fire which the wind brought
    strongly against them. Our Lord by his great mercy regarded
    his

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/44908