II.

STATE OF SOCIETY

 

CARDINAL BARONIUS, the historian of the church down to the year 1198, designated the period which then closed as the Dark Ages. The propriety of the title has insured its perpetuity. The era of the crusades is almost evenly divided by the date which all scholars, following Baronius, regard as marking the end of the worst and the beginning of better times. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were the battle-ground on which the grim spectres of the old met the bright advancing spirits of the new civilization.

It must be remembered that the peoples then dominant were the descendants of those barbaric hordes whose irruption from northern Europe and western Asia had swept away the Roman empire. The fierce spirit of the Frank in Gaul, of the Goth in Spain, and of the Lombard in Italy was not yet tempered by the arts and philosophy their fathers had so nearly destroyed, and whose renaissance had not yet begun.

It was but a few generations since the people that had inherited the Roman civilization had been largely exterminated. So complete had been the ravage that in the eighth century much of the land in Italy still remained forest and marsh, a condition to which it had reverted. Parcels of ground were purchased by strangers as eremi, the title secured by the fact of having cleared and cultivated any given spot. The reader can readily paint his own picture of the society which settled these lands by recalling such facts as that from 900 to 930 Italy was under the Huns; in 911 Normandy was conquered by Rollo the Dane; in 1029 the Normans possessed themselves of the south of Italy.

Culture, however, was not entirely extinct. The age produced many fine specimens of what is best in manhood and womanhood, although, in comparison with the general condition, these were like sporadic bushes on the breast of a land-slide, whose roots have maintained their hold through the rushing debris, or which have sprung up afresh in the new soil.

There were some men whose genius and virtues would have adorned any age. Among these was Gerbert, Pope Sylvester II (died 1003), whose attainments in science led to the legend that he was in communication with the devil. Lanfranc (1005-89), the monk of Bec and Caen, whom William the Conqueror appointed to the see of Canterbury, is still renowned for his great logical ability and biblical scholarship. Anselm (1033-1109) merited the praise which Dante bestowed upon him as among the worthiest spirits he saw in paradise. Berenger (998-1088), though discredited for heresy, possessed a prowess and independence of mind which made him the forerunner of the later Reformers. Hildebrand (1020 (?)-85), however we may reprobate the hardness of his ambition and the tyrannical nature of his projects, must be recognized as among the greatest of mankind for astuteness of judgment and ability to execute the most gigantic and hazardous plans. Abelard (1079-1142) was a lad of sixteen at the time of the first crusade, but had begun to puzzle his teacher, William of Champeaux, in his dialectical tilts, deriding the obsolete method of inquiry, and declaring that it was more sport to debate than to fight in a tournament. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), whose pen was to control Christendom for a generation, and whose sainthood shines through all ages, was in the nursery when the soldiers of the cross started for the East.

There were noble women, too. Bernard owed much of his talent and virtue to his mother, Aletta, whose memory is the imperishable ornament of womanhood. The great Countess Matilda spoke many languages, was chosen counselor of Pope Gregory VII, and won her place in Dante's catalogue of saints as the celestial messenger heralding the chariot throne of the glorified Beatrice. The praise of the great crusading captain Godfrey halos his mother, Ida of Bouillon, to whom he confessed that, next to the grace of God, he owed whatever goodness made him beloved of men.

The intellectuality of this period exercised itself almost entirely with theological and religious subjects. Men in seclusion elaborated and defended existing church doctrines, and gave pious flight to their imaginations. But of literature as such there was none; even the Troubadours had not begun to rhyme the Provençal tongue. The hot breath of the crusades themselves forced the debris of the Latin to send out its first flowers of poesy.

In this age at least may be discerned the budding of a taste and sentiment that betokened the refinement of after times. Gothic architecture, the first efflorescence of the Northern genius after it had been planted in the soil of Southern art, now appeared in such buildings as the cathedrals of Pisa, Modena, Parma, Siena, Strasburg, Treves, Worms, Mayence, Basel, Chartres, Brussels, and the foundation of St. Mark's in Venice. The dreaded year 1000 having safely passed without the anticipated destruction of the world, faith reinspired art to build temples on earth. New monasteries appeared, palatial in structure, to accommodate the people who sought in seclusion escape from the hardness or the dreariness of life in the world.

It must, however, be recognized that whatever brilliancy of intelligence, beauty of character, or enterprise appeared betokened a coming rather than illustrated a passing age, like the wild flowers that shoot from the cold ground in the early spring. To picture these brighter things, were the genial task pursued to any great extent, would endanger the accuracy of the impression made upon the reader's mind. Hallam truly says of this period: "History which reflects only the more prominent features of society cannot exhibit the virtues that were scarcely able to struggle through the general depravation."

Ignorance

This was an age of gross ignorance. The art of making paper from cotton had just been discovered, and, while it contributed somewhat to the diffusion of knowledge by giving cheaper manuscript books than those on vellum, the world was to wait four centuries longer for the printing-press to popularize the habit of seeking information. The few manuscripts which existed were the property of monasteries or of the nobility, who kept them as articles of furniture rather than for their practical use. We have a verbal monument to the ignorance of these times in the expression we still use when we speak of "signing", or making a mark to signify, one's name. In the ninth century Herbaud, the supreme judge of the empire, could not write his name, and as late as the fourteenth century Du Guesclin, high constable of France, was equally innocent of letters. One of their contemporaries gives this tribute to the ecclesiastics of the time: "They were given rather to the gullet than to the tongue. They preferred to be schooled in salmon rather than in Solomon". Few priests could translate the breviary they recited with parrot tongues. Of the history of the grand civilization just behind them the people knew nothing; even the laws which had so long preserved the state and society, those of Justinian, were forgotten except in some cloisters, where they were studied as classic lore.

The practical methods of modern inquiry into the meaning of the world, the incessant discovery of new resources in nature for the comfort and luxury of living, have stimulated and enlarged the human mind; and in the new interests thus created men have found a healthful diversion alike from the engrossments of animalism and the morbid fancies of superstition. But in the time we are studying there was no real scientific thought that was not instantly suppressed by the authorities of the church as the suggestion of heretics or of the Saracens. Roger Bacon, who flourished so late as the close of the crusades, paid with fourteen years' imprisonment for his temerity in proposing the more rational methods of viewing the world, which his great namesake, Francis Bacon, three hundred and fifty years later, more completely formulated for general acceptance.

The industrial arts had been lost or had come to be entirely neglected after the barbaric conquest which swept away the Roman civilization, and during the centuries since there had been scarcely any attempt to revive them. The very faculty of invention seems to have become paralyzed by disuse. It was not until 1148 that Roger of Sicily established a silk factory at Palermo, which, Hallam says, "gave the earliest impulse to the industry of Italy."

Such times were necessarily marked by the narrow limitation and degradation of common life.

The vast majority of people lived in the country, in complete isolation from their fellows, seeking sustenance in most primitive ways from the breast of mother nature; or they were huddled together in rude hamlets under the walls of the castles, whose lords enslaved while they protected them; for such was the chaotic condition of society that everyone was compelled to seek safety with service under some possessor of a stronghold. Cities there were, crowded with dense masses of humanity, the breeding-places of all sorts of vice and social disorder. Towns owe their existence to some community of interest, such as similar industrial pursuits or convenience for trade; these, of course, had scarcely begun to spring up.

If the immediate environment of the common man furnished no stimulus to enterprise, neither was it provided by anything beyond his neighborhood. Without a system of monetary exchange, trade was limited to barter or to the purchasing power of purse and belt. A brief journey with merchandise was executed with hazard. Every petty lord exacted toll of those who passed the border of his estate. Many of the occupants of the castles lived by open robbery, and kept men-at-arms, as they kept their falcons, to pounce upon their prey. Not only the goods, the persons also of travelers were regarded as legitimate booty, the victims being held for ransom and often sold as slaves. So enterprising were these robber knights that it is said to have been dangerous for the king to go from Paris to St.-Denis without an army at his back. The armed merchantman rode generally with lance in rest. In towns, says Thierry, "nobles, sword in hand, committed robbery on the burghers, and in turn the burghers committed violence upon the peasants who came to buy or sell at the market of the town".

There was considerable foreign commerce on the Mediterranean. The merchants of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice were in rivalry with those of Byzantium, and with the Saracens who held the ports of Spain and North Africa. But, as what are known as maritime laws were not agreed upon until the thirteenth century, commerce was little more than piracy. The trade vessels were burdened with men for their defense, or for rifling the cargoes of less puissant marauders. The mariner's compass had been invented, but was not in common use, so that trade was compelled to follow the coast-lines, in perpetual hazard of wreck and robbers. There was no importation of things for common use; the labor and danger of transportation limited the articles of trade to those of rarest value, which became the spoil of the powerful or the purchase of the rich. The ordinary man received no benefit from other neighborhoods than his own, except that the air of heaven was sweetened by its passage over the mountains and seas which separated him from his kind.

It is difficult for us to realize what must have been the inane stupidity of the ordinary lives of men. Homes were almost as dreary in their outward appointments as the nests of eagles or the caves of beasts. In the city were narrow apartments of stone or the shanty with its mud-built walls, often as contracted as the cells of the monastery and as damp and fetid as the vaults of the prison; so that the monk lost little of this world's comfort in entering his religious retreat, and the prisoner might think himself happy at times in being better housed than he would have been had he made his home with honest toil. If one lived in the country the habitation was a hut but little better than the shelter provided for cattle. Indeed, in many cases the "ox knew his owner" from having slept on the same straw, and the "ass his master's crib" from its proximity to the family table. The floor of the rude domicile was of earth or stone, the windows unglazed, so that to exclude the winter weather was to shut out the light also. A hole in the roof scarcely sufficed to carry off the smoke from the stoveless fires. No books entertained man's thoughts, no pictures pleased his eye; his news was the gossip of oft-told tales, his faith such as a priest, himself unable to read, might impose upon his less intelligent parishioners. Even the peasant's liberty of his own solitude was denied him; he could not range the woods nor float upon the streams at his pleasure. We are told of certain instances where the rustics rebelled against these restrictions imposed upon them. "They took short cuts through the woods, or used the fords and rivers at will;" but they were punished by the knights, who "cut off the hands and feet of the trespassers." If the rich were better conditioned, their residences were unfurnished with that which the middle classes in our day regard as necessary to comfort and decency. The bounty of the table was without variety. Apparel, however gay, was such as could be wrought by the women of the household. The tapestries which excite our admiration were the product of untold toil or purchased at vast expense. Within the castle was spacious monotony, relieved too generally by the grossness of private debauch; without was the wilderness, threaded by roads that were unfit for wheeled vehicles, menaced by wild beasts and more dangerous men.

The common recreation of the lordly classes was hunting and hawking, bear-baiting and fighting. Men rode with sword and spear, the ubiquitous falcon on arm, and hounds in leash. So universal were such pastimes that, in lack of more intellectual and refined resources, the highest dignitaries of the church displayed the weapons of the chase together with the insignia of their sacred office. So much of life was wasted in these amusements that the Council of the Lateran, in 1180, forbade the bishops indulging in these sports while on their pastoral journeys. Previously Pope Alexander III (1159-64), by special edict, relieved the common clergy from the necessity of keeping the archdeacons in hounds and falcons during their visits to the churches.

Such a limitation of the more generous and worthy interests of mankind, which stimulate and enlarge the mind, left the common intelligence in an almost infantile condition. Sismondi says that even the nobles came to count it a duty not to think. One can readily believe this on recalling the titles given at court to the various royal personages who graced it: Pepin the Short, Charles the Bald, William the Red, Louis the Fat, etc.

Fancy, however, will generally survive the failure of the logical and aesthetic faculties, and thus men become the easy prey of superstition. All sorts of stories of things supernatural, the invention of designing priests or born of the surprise of ignorance at the unusual in nature, were believed without question. The winds that rustled the leaves of the forest were supposed to be the voices of saintly ghosts, and when with wintry weight the}' moaned through the branches or screeched along the icy rocks, it was believed that the damned were groaning in their pains or that demons were threatening men. Every flash or shadow that could not readily be explained was regarded as a hopeful or vengeful apparition from the unseen world. This credulity was not confined to the illiterate and boorish. The chroniclers of that age, upon whose learning we depend for the facts of our history, relate with equal gravity the deeds of demons and men, connect the doings of courts and the course of comets, and intermingle in relation of cause and effect the storms of nature and the wars of nations. Thus superstition completed the work of mental inoccupancy, as vermin and bats inhabit an unfurnished cell.

Such a condition of the mental faculties could have only a deleterious influence on the moral sense. We are not, therefore, surprised to find the conscience of the age correspondingly crude.

This ethical degradation was reflected in the low state of the laws, if the changeable wills or whims of a host of petty lords can be dignified with the title of legislation. Power claimed possession with little regard for the method of acquisition. Disputes, when relegated to the pretence of a court, were tried not by weighing evidence, but by counting the number of compurgators, that is, of those persons who would swear that they believed the oath of one or the other party. When the contestants were gentlemen or of the noble order, the cases were arbitrated on the field of Private Combat. Even the judge or referee of the combat was himself liable to challenge from either party that felt itself aggrieved by his decision. Priests, invalids, and women were accustomed to choose someone from among their relatives or friends to champion their cause. There was no appeal to candid judgment after a full hearing of the facts, except in case of dispute between slaves, villains, and freemen of inferior condition, whose owners or lords might be disposed to fair dealing. A relic of the mediaeval custom of private combat is the modern duel.

The personal encounter often grew to the dimensions of neighborhood war, in which kinsmen and retainers were involved until entire districts were laid waste. Neither the power of Charlemagne nor that of the church prevailed against this unreasonable custom. The one exception to this statement was the temporary lull in the carnage during what was known as the Truce of God, an expedient agreed upon in certain places, according to which raids and riots were confined to the half of the week succeeding the Sabbath. But the adoption of this merciful rule forces our attention to its necessity, since "man's inhumanity to man" was destroying entire populations as in a deluge of blood.

When for any reason the combat was inexpedient the question of right was decided by the Ordeal. The accused party presumed to walk through fire or on burning ploughshares, to handle hot iron, float upon water, plunge the bare arm into a boiling caldron, or swallow a bit of consecrated bread with appeal to Heaven to strike one dead if guilty. If one endured the Ordeal unscathed he was said to be acquitted by the judgment of God. It is not necessary to explain the apparent impunity with which some of the worst criminals passed these trials, nor to cite the multitude of cases in which persons of otherwise undoubted innocence were adjudged guilty because they perished in this irrelevant attempt to vindicate themselves. The fact that questions involving the most sacred rights of the individual, such as the holding of property, the protection of the body from mutilation on the rack, the retaining of life, and the vindication of character, were not so much as brought to the court of intelligence and conscience argues the degradation of both these faculties.

If further evidence be needed that the very sense of justice had become largely extinguished, it is found in the prevalence of judicial perjury, allowed, and even prompted, by legalized custom. Before the combat both parties were required to partake of the sacrament, in which act one of the contestants, being guilty, was forced to commit sacrilege. Witnesses were sworn upon the relics of the saints; but, notwithstanding these things were believed to have in them a limitless power to help or hurt those who touched their sacred incasements, the people seem to have credited the righteousness of the dead as little as the impartiality of the living, and the guilty were accustomed to perjure themselves without dread of consequences. The soul of good Robert of France was so afflicted by the universal consciencelessness in this respect that he devised an expedient for averting the wrath of the saints, who might justly avenge the slight put upon their bones. He ordered that the relics should be secretly removed from the casket that was supposed to contain them, so that the would-be perjurer might not actually commit the crime he intended. If this act illustrated the mercy, it also displayed the lack of true moral sentiment in him who, in contrast with his fellows, was known as the "good king."

Such stifling of the sense of justice was quite naturally attended by the suppression of the gentler emotions of kindness and humanity. This was an age of almost incredible cruelty. Natural affection, of course, survived in the love of parents and children, husbands and wives. There were delightful friendships which illumined the social gloom like threads of gold in some dark fabric. Men and women lived and died for one another, as they will always do while a lineament of the divine remains in the human. But, beyond the fascination of the individual and the obligations of kinship, the sentiment of love seemed unknown to the masses. The founders of the great benevolent orders, men like Dominic and Francis of Assisi, oppressed by this deadness to the essential Christian spirit, were in the near future to unbind the hearts of men that they might come forth to more generous life; but that day had not yet come. Men apparently had lost the sympathetic imagination by which the pains and grief of the unfortunate are transferred to the hearts of others. Dean Stanley remarks of even the thirteenth century that "the age had no sense of obligation to the poor and middle class". It was still needful that riders should repeat the dying counsel of Charlemagne to his sons, "not to deprive widows and orphans of their remaining estates".

This insensibility to the needs of others was accompanied by a positive gratification in scenes of cruelty. The popular stories which mothers taught their children were in praise of heroes whom we would regard as butchers and bruisers. A favorite legend was of Renoart, the flower of early Chivalry—he of the ugly visage and gigantic frame, whose mace laid open the brains of his antagonists, and who broke the skull of the monk who refused to indulge his whim of exchanging clothes with him. What child of that age had not heard of Roland, the hero of Roncesvalles, whose unstinted praises went far to form the manly habits of many generations? He was an enfant terrible, who tore his swaddling-clothes in pieces, belabored his mother furiously, and gave early promise of his prowess by beating lifeless the porter of the castle who would not let him go out to play. And how charming Roland's love-making to the fair Aude! He saw her for the first time amid the galaxy of beauties assembled to witness his combat with Oliver. Unable to restrain his passion, he rushed from the lists, threw himself upon her, and would have carried her off bodily had not Oliver given him one of those blows the echo of which has rung the praises of this mediaeval prize-fighter down the ages.

But the people of the eleventh century did not need to go back to an earlier era for examples of this sort of manliness. Foulques the Black, the greatest of the counts of Anjou (987-1040), was pious enough to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but not sufficiently humane to refrain from burning his young wife at the stake, decked for her doom in her gayest attire. He was so humble that he paraded the streets of the Holy City with a halter about his neck, while the blood streamed from the scourge-wounds on his shoulders, yet he forced his own son to be bridled and saddled like an ass and to crouch on all fours at his feet. Of the whole line of Anjou at this period the historian Green remarks that "their shameless wickedness degraded them below the level of man". The house of Normandy contested the palm of greatness with the Angevins, but were equally rude. When William of Normandy, afterwards the Conqueror of England, learned that Baldwin of Flanders had refused him his daughter Matilda in marriage, the chronicle says "he forced his way into the countess's chamber, found the daughter, took her by her tresses, dragged her about the room, and trampled her under his feet". The young lady does not seem to have been grieved by the violence of the wooing, but rather to have acquired a better appreciation of the lordly qualities of her future husband. We may be permitted to doubt the accuracy of this story, but the fact that it was so early chronicled and generally believed attests the popular taste. William Rufus (1056-1100) is thus described by one who knew him: "The outrager of humanity, of law, and of nature; beastly in his pleasures, a murderer and blasphemous scoffer." Henry I of England (1068-1135) put out the eyes of his brother Robert and of his two grandchildren, and forced his daughter to cross a frozen fosse, stripped half naked.

The penalties under law also revealed the hardness of men's hearts. Criminals were hung by their feet, by  their necks, or by their thumbs, with burning matter fastened upon some part of the body; they were put into dungeons with snakes, and into cages too small to allow the full motion of the limbs; they were made to wear wooden or iron collars of enormous weight, so arranged that the culprit could take no position without feeling the burden.

In battle the soldier was to despise the bow, his delight to face the enemy at point of sword, his glory the blood that bespattered him from the gurgling arteries of the foe, or that trickled from his own wounds. No Fabian policy gave éclat to the warrior; victory was measured by the heaps of the slain, not by the progress of the cause. No quarter was ordinarily given or expected on the capture of strongholds; and not infrequently the entire surviving population of conquered cities paid with their lives the penalty for having permitted themselves to be defended by the vanquished. Raymond of Toulouse we shall learn to admire as our story advances. He was one of the most self-restrained and chivalric of the early crusaders; yet he put out the eyes and cut off the noses of his captives, and sent them thus mutilated to their homes, as a warning to their neighbors not to molest the march of the "soldiers of the cross". Of this act of atrocity the chronicler of the day remarks: "It is not easy to do justice to the bravery and wisdom conspicuously displayed by the count here". Too commonly the innocence of childhood, the venerableness of age, and the sacredness of sex were indiscriminately outraged by the license of conquest.

The love of war for its own sake was the dominant passion of such people. When no plausible pretext could be urged for declaration of hostilities, it burst out between neighborhoods as by spontaneous combustion. Raids and counter-raids took the place of the commercial rivalries of later times.

From the days of Charlemagne it had been the custom to signalize entrance upon manhood by buckling about the loins the sword, the investment with "virile arms". The church, in hopeless inability to check the universal passion for fight, sought only to direct it to the suppression of ecclesiastical enemies. Pope Paschal (1099) exhorted Count Robert of Flanders to persecute to the utmost the Emperor Henry, saying: "By such battles you shall obtain a place in the heavenly Jerusalem". Bernard, without dispute the holiest man of the next century, offered no excuse or pallia­tion for his harangue to the faithful: "Let them kill the enemy or die. To submit to die for Christ, or to cause one of His enemies to die, is naught but glory."

Very characteristic is the story of the death of the youthful Vivien, as told in the famous "Chansons de Geste," composed about this time, though its alleged events belong to an earlier date. Vivien was the nephew of that William of Orange whose name is associated with the rise of knighthood, as that of the later William of Orange is with a nobler patriotism. There had been a fearful fight. Vivien was mortally wounded, and lay dying ere he had partaken of his first sacrament. The older warrior bent over him on the corpse-strewn field :

"You must confess to me, because I am your nearest relative and there is no priest here."

The failing lips of the lad began the confession of the sins of his brief lifetime. He could think of but a single offence against God or his own nature; so heinous was his conception of the greatness of this one crime that it blotted out the memory of all else. What was this monstrous iniquity?

"I made a vow that I would never retreat one step before an enemy, and this day I have failed to keep my oath".

William raised the head of the dying boy, placed the consecrated wafer, which he was accustomed to carry for such emergencies, between the eager lips of Vivien, and watched the young soul as, without fear or misgiving, it went to the judgment of Him who is preeminently the God of battles.

In the wars of this period a common sight was that of bishops and archbishops, clad in coats of mail, riding through the streets of their episcopal towns on fierce chargers, and returning to their palaces clotted with dirt and blood. That was a deserved rebuke, as well as a fine sarcasm, with which Richard Coeur de Lion sent the blood-stained armor of the Bishop of Beauvais to the Pope, as the garment of Joseph to Jacob, asking the Holy Father if he recognized his son's coat.

Even women on occasion put on armor and mingled in the mêlée. Gaita, the wife of Robert Guiscard, fought in the front rank of the Normans in their conflict with the Greeks. When the crusades were in progress many a fair woman adopted the martial costume. The Amazonian Brunhilde is scarcely overdrawn by Scott in "Count Robert of Paris", and the Moslem heroines of Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," stripped of their supernatural resources, might have figured in the Christian camp.

Walter Scott put into the mouth of the Greek Nicephorus a pertinent description of his fellow-Christians of the West: "To whom the strife of combat is as the breath of their nostrils, who, rather than not be engaged in war, will do battle with their nearest neighbors and challenge each other to mortal fight, as much in sport as we would defy a comrade to a chariot-race."

It is but just to say that, if the Greeks were amazed at the warlike propensities of the Catholics, they expressed no wonder at their cruelty. In this they themselves even excelled their more robust rivals. The dungeons of Constantinople were filled with political offenders whose eyes were torn from their sockets; and more than one imperial candidate resumed his place of honor among a people whose waving banners he was unable to see. The Greek differed from the Frank and German, the Norman and Saxon, chiefly in being a coward and choosing to glut his brutal instincts with the use of the secret torture, the poisoned cup, or the dagger in the back of his victim, rather than with the sword and battle-axe in open fight.

To a people such as we have described the appeal for the crusades, in which the imagined cause of heaven marched in step with their own tastes and habits, was irresistible.