Improvement of Europe (1300–1905)

Improvement of Europe (1300–1905)

I – The Byzantine Empire

Alexios I Komnenos, after successfully leading the Eastern Empire through wars with the Turks, Normans, and the First Crusade, ended his long reign (1081–1118) amid the palace intrigues characteristic of the Byzantine Empire. His eldest daughter, Anna Komnene, was a model of learning, a paragon of wisdom, a poet of various compositions, a shrewd politician, and a historian supreme in fabrication. After marrying the son of Emperor Michael VII, she felt that by nobility, beauty, and intelligence she was destined to become empress and could never forgive her brother John for being born and succeeding their father. She therefore plotted his murder; the plot was discovered, she was pardoned, retired from the world, entered a convent, and published her father's reign under the title Alexiad. John II Komnenos in his reign (1118–1143), by purity of life, administrative ability, and victorious struggles against pagan, Christian, and Muslim enemies, astonished Europe. For a time it seemed that he would restore the Empire to its former glory and extent, but a poisoned arrow from his own quiver ended his life and his dreams. His son Manuel I Komnenos (1143–1180) was a war god in human form, who devoted his life to war, enjoyed it, always led his soldiers into battle, prized single combat, and was victorious in every war except the last. In the field he was a man who took life to its utmost degree of hardship, but in his palace he indulged in pleasures, wore luxurious food and clothing, and enjoyed illicit relations with his niece. Through his attention and favors, the market of literature and scholarship again flourished. Court ladies encouraged writers and themselves composed poetry, and in this period Zonaras undertook his great historical work. Manuel built a new palace called Blachernae at the end of the Golden Horn, beside the Bosporus. Odo of Deuil wrote of this palace: “It was the most beautiful building on earth. Half its walls and columns were covered with gold and adorned with jewels that shone even in the darkness of night.” In twelfth-century Constantinople the preliminaries of the Italian Renaissance were prepared. The splendor of the imperial capital, and the repeated wars to repel enemies, required heavy taxes that the luxury-loving imposed on the producers of life's necessities. The poorer peasants became serfs, and the industrial workers of the cities lived in filthy slums that were breeding grounds for countless crimes. Rebellious movements, believing in a vague semi-communist creed, fanned the flames of repeated proletarian revolts, but these tumults were forgotten in the monotonous repetitions of time's indifferent cycle. Meanwhile the Crusaders' conquest of Palestine had opened the ports of Syria to Latin merchants, and thus a third of Constantinople's maritime trade fell into the hands of the rising Italian cities. Christians and Muslims alike burned with desire to seize this treasure house containing a thousand years of wealth. One devout Muslim who visited Constantinople at the height of Manuel's prosperity prayed: “May God in His mercy and immense bounty make Constantinople the capital of Islam!” Finally, as we saw, Venice invited the chivalry of Europe to share with her in violating the queen of the Bosporus.

The Latin Empire of Constantinople, established by the leaders of the Fourth Crusade, lasted only fifty-seven years (1204–1261). The new kingdom, having no roots or precedents in race, religion, or national customs, was hated by a Greek Church that had been forcibly subjected to Rome; and because it was itself divided into numerous feudal principalities each claiming sovereignty in imitation of the others, this weakened the kingdom; and since these units lacked the necessary experience to organize a commercial and industrial economy, they were attacked from without by Byzantine armies and from within by the conspiracies of opponents; moreover, it could not extract the necessary funds for military defense from a hostile population. For these reasons the Latin Empire endured only as long as the Byzantine Empire lacked unity and arms for revenge.

II – The Armenians: 1060–1300

Around 1080 many Armenian families opposed to Seljuk Turkish rule left their homeland, crossed the Taurus Mountains, and founded the kingdom of Lesser Armenia in Cilicia. While Turks, Kurds, and Mongols ruled the main Armenian territory, the new country preserved its independence for three centuries. Leo II during his thirty-four-year reign repelled attacks from the kings of Aleppo and Damascus. He conquered Isauria, made Sis (in modern Turkey) his capital, concluded alliances with the Crusaders, adopted European laws, encouraged industry and commerce, granted privileges to Venetian and Genoese merchants, built orphanages, hospitals, and schools, and raised his people's prosperity to an unparalleled degree. For all these services he was given the title “the Magnificent.” Leo was one of the wisest and most benevolent kings in medieval history. His son-in-law Hethum I, not trusting Christians, allied with the Mongols and rejoiced at the expulsion of the Seljuk Turks from Armenia (1240). But the Mongols converted to Islam. They began raiding Lesser Armenia and devastated the land (c. 1303). In 1335 Armenia was conquered by the Mamluks and divided among feudal lords. Amid all these upheavals the Armenians continued to display their inventive talent in architecture, their skill in miniature painting, and their determination to preserve a form of independent Catholicism that rendered futile every effort by the Orthodox Church of Constantinople or the Catholic Church of Rome to dominate them.

III – Russia and the Mongols: 1054–1315

In the eleventh century southern Russia was dominated by semi-savage tribes such as the Cumans, Bulgars, Khazars, Polovtsians, Pechenegs, and the like. The rest of European Russia was divided into sixty-four principalities, the most important of which were Kiev, Volhynia, Novgorod, Suzdal, Smolensk, Ryazan, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl. Most of these principalities acknowledged Kiev's supremacy. Yaroslav, the father of the Kievan princes, on his death (1054) divided the various principalities among his sons according to importance: that is, he gave the most important, Kiev, to his eldest son; the brothers agreed among themselves that thereafter, whenever one of the elder princes died, the others should move up one rank, that is, from a smaller principality to a larger one. In the thirteenth century several principalities were further subdivided into smaller parts, since each prince allotted a portion of his domain to his sons. In time these “appanages” became hereditary and formed the basis of a modified feudalism that later, with the Mongol invasion, became two factors in Russia's backwardness while Western Europe advanced. But in this period handicrafts flourished in Russian cities, and Russian commerce was far more prosperous than it would be for several centuries. Each prince's authority, though usually hereditary, was limited by a council or veche and a “senate of nobles” or boyarskaya duma. Administration and the execution of laws were mostly in the hands of the clergy. This group, with a small number of nobles, merchants, and moneylenders, formed almost all the literate people of the country. This literate class, with the help of Byzantine models or texts they kept in mind, gave Russia literature, laws, religion, and art. It was through their efforts that during Yaroslav's reign the Russian laws or Russkaya Pravda were for the first time compiled, corrected, and definitively codified (c. 1160).

The Russian Church was given complete authority in religious matters, clerical affairs, marriage, morals, and wills; and the Church gained absolute power over slaves and others who served on its estates. The Church's efforts somewhat improved the legal status of slaves in Russia, but the buying and selling of slaves continued and reached its peak in the twelfth century.

It was during this same century that the principality of Kiev began to decline. Just as Western Europe had fallen into feudal chaos, the East was not spared chaos from tribes and various princes. Between 1054 and 1224 eighty-three civil wars broke out in Russia, it was invaded forty-six times, the Russian principalities fought non-Russian peoples sixteen times, and 293 princes claimed the thrones of 64 other princes. In 1113 the poverty of Kiev's population, caused by war, exorbitant interest, exploitation, and unemployment, caused a revolution. The angry people stormed the houses of employers and moneylenders and plundered them, and for a brief victorious moment seized the government offices. The council of the city of Kiev invited Monomakh, prince of Pereyaslavl, to assume the senior principality of Kiev. Monomakh, against his will, consented and undertook an action similar to what Solon had done in Athens in 594 B.C. He reduced the interest rate on loans, prevented the enslavement of impoverished debtors, limited the powers that employers had over their workers, and by these and similar measures (which the rich considered tyrannical and the weak insufficient) prevented the revolution from intensifying and established peace. He made the utmost effort to end the struggles and wars of the princes and to give Russia political unity, but this task was greater than he could accomplish in his twelve years of rule.

After his death the struggles of princes and classes began anew. Meanwhile the continued domination of foreign tribes over the lower Dniester, Dnieper, and Don on one side, and the expansion of Italian commerce in Constantinople, the Black Sea, and the ports of Syria on the other, diverted most of the trade that the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire had previously conducted through Russia's rivers with the Baltic countries to the Mediterranean ports. Kiev's wealth declined, and the power and warlike spirit of its people availed nothing. Even from 1096 onward Kiev's barbarian neighbors began raiding its villages, towns, and distant districts, plundering monasteries, and seizing defenseless peasants and selling them into slavery. Since Kiev was recognized as a dangerous region, its population gradually decreased. In 1169 the army of Andrei Bogolyubsky so plundered Kiev and enslaved so many of its people that for three centuries the name “mother of Russian cities” almost vanished from the pages of history. The conquest of Constantinople and the fall of its trade into the hands of Venetians and Franks in 1204, and the Mongol invasions between 1229 and 1240 completed Kiev's ruin. In the second half of the twelfth century leadership in Russia passed from the “Little Russians” of Ukraine to tougher and bolder peoples living around Moscow and the upper Volga, known as “Great Russians.” Moscow, founded in 1156, was at this time a small village serving as a frontier outpost for Suzdal (northeast of Moscow) on the road from the cities of Vladimir and Suzdal to Kiev. Andrei Bogolyubsky, to make his principality of Suzdal supreme over all Russia, engaged in struggles, but when he tried to bring Novgorod under his control like Kiev, he was killed by an assassin.

The city of Novgorod, in northwestern Russia, lay on both sides of the Volkhov near its outlet from Lake Ilmen. Since the Volkhov flowed north into Lake Ladoga and other rivers flowed south and west from Lake Ilmen, and the route to the Baltic via Lake Ladoga was neither close enough to be safe nor far enough to be useful for trade, the city of Novgorod became a powerful center of internal and external commerce and the eastern axis of the Hanseatic League. The city traded with Kiev and the Byzantine Empire via the Dnieper and with the Islamic world via the Volga. It almost monopolized the Russian fur trade, since its control extended from Pskov in the west to the frozen regions in the north and to the Ural Mountains in the east. After 1196 the powerful merchant nobility of Novgorod dominated the association that governed the principality through an elected prince. The country-city of Novgorod was a free republic and called itself “Lord Great Novgorod.” If the elected prince did not perform his duties satisfactorily, the city's inhabitants “with due respect showed him the way out of the city.” If he resisted, they imprisoned him. When Svyatopolk, the senior prince of Kiev, tried to impose his son as prince over the people of Novgorod (1015), the city's inhabitants sent word: “If he has too many heads, send him to us.” With all this, the republic was not a democracy. Workers and small traders had no hand in city government and could influence policy only through repeated revolts.

It was during the reign of Prince Alexander Nevsky that Novgorod reached the height of its power. Pope Gregory IX, eager to bring Orthodox Russia into the Latin Church, called on the people to launch a crusade against Novgorod. As a result, an army of Swedish soldiers advanced on the Neva River. Alexander defeated these forces near present-day Leningrad (1240) and, because of this honor, added the name of the Neva River to his family title. He was far too great a man to rule a republic and was therefore exiled.

But when the Germans continued their crusade, captured Pskov, and advanced to within twenty-seven kilometers of Novgorod, the city council in terror begged Alexander to return and drive out the Germans. Alexander returned, captured the city of Pskov, and defeated the Livonian Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus (1242). Alexander Nevsky in the last years of his life was forced to endure the humiliation of leading his people under the Mongol yoke.

A great multitude of Mongols entered Russian territory. These invaders set out from Turkestan, defeated a Georgian army in the Caucasus, and plundered the Crimean peninsula. The Cumans, who for centuries had fought against Kiev, stretched out a helping hand to the Russians and said: “Today the Mongols have conquered our land; tomorrow it will be your turn.” Some Russian princes realized the gravity of the situation, gathered an army, and hastened to aid the Cumans. The Mongols sent several envoys to the Russians proposing alliance against the Cumans; but the Russians killed the envoys. In the battle that took place on the banks of the Kalka River near the Sea of Azov, the Mongols defeated the combined Russian and Cuman forces; by trickery they captured several Russian commanders, bound their hands and feet, imprisoned them in a cage, and built a platform over it. While the Mongol tribal chiefs held a feast on that platform, the imprisoned Russian nobles suffocated beneath their feet (1223).

The Mongol forces returned to Mongolia; while they were busy conquering China, the Russian princes again began their fraternal struggles. In 1237 the Mongol attack under Batu, a descendant of Genghis Khan, began anew. This time the Mongol army numbered 500,000 men, almost all mounted. The Mongol horde advanced from the far north to the Caspian Sea, slaughtered the Bulgars of the Volga region, and destroyed their capital, Bulgar. Then Batu sent a message to the prince of Ryazan demanding: “If you want peace, surrender one-tenth of your wealth.” The prince replied: “When we are all dead, all our wealth will be yours.” Ryazan sought help from the various Russian principalities. All refused to give aid.

Ryazan fought bravely and staked everything on the struggle. The irresistible Mongol forces plundered and razed all the cities of Ryazan, poured like a flood into the land of Suzdal, routed its army, burned Moscow, and besieged Vladimir. The nobles, fearing for their lives, shaved their heads and, disguised as monks, hid in the city's cathedral; when the whole city was consumed by fire, they too perished. Suzdal, Rostov, and many towns of that principality were reduced to ashes (1238). The Mongols turned toward Novgorod but, encountering dense forests and rushing rivers, abandoned the plan and plundered Chernigov and Pereyaslavl before reaching Kiev. First they sent envoys to the city demanding its surrender. The people of Kiev killed the envoys. The Mongols crossed the Dnieper, broke slight resistance, plundered the city, and slaughtered thousands. Six years later when Giovanni da Pian del Carpine saw Kiev, he described it as a city with two hundred huts whose surrounding fields were everywhere covered with the skulls of the dead. The upper and middle classes of Russia had never dared to arm the peasants or city folk. Therefore when the Mongols came, the city's population, unable to defend itself, was either put to the sword or enslaved at the victors' will.

The Mongols advanced into Central Europe, won and lost several battles, on their return plundered Russia again, and beside one branch of the Volga built a city called Sarai that became the center of the “Golden Horde” or “Altan Ordu.” From then on Batu and his successors ruled most of Russia for 240 years. Russian princes were allowed to keep their lands and enjoy them only on condition that they annually pay tribute to the Mongol khan or even to the Great Khan in Karakorum, and every prince was obliged occasionally to visit the khan to express gratitude or pay homage. The Russian princes, to pay the tribute, imposed a poll tax that was ruthlessly applied equally to rich and poor; those unable to pay were sold into slavery. The princes accepted Mongol supremacy because it protected them against social revolts. This group joined Mongol forces in attacking other peoples and even other Russian principalities. Many Russians intermarried with Mongols, and probably from this some physical and moral traits of the Mongol race entered the Russian stock. Some Russians imitated Mongol speech and dress. Now that Russia had become a dependency of a powerful Asian government, most of its contact with European civilization was severed. The autocratic rule of the Mongol khan and the autocratic style of the Byzantine emperors later combined in the ruler of Moscow and made him “the absolute sovereign of all Russia.”

The Mongol tribal chiefs realized that they could not keep Russia submissive by sheer force alone, so they made peace with the Russian Church, protected its property and officials, exempted them from taxes, and made insulting sacred things and religion a capital offense. The Russian Church, out of gratitude mixed with necessity, urged the people to obey and submit to the Mongol conquerors and openly prayed for their health. Thousands of Russians, in fear and terror, entered the monastic life seeking security. Gifts and offerings flowed from all sides to ecclesiastical institutions, and the Russian Church became immensely wealthy amid general poverty and want. Gradually a spirit of submission developed among the people and prepared the ground for centuries of despotism. With all this, it was Russia that, by bowing before the whirlwind of the Mongol onslaught, acted as a purgatory or wide moat between the invaders and the European countries and protected most of Europe from the Mongol onslaught.

All the force and violence of that human thunderbolt fell upon the Slavs (Russians, Bohemians, Moravians, Poles) and the Hungarians. Western Europe trembled for its life but suffered no harm. Perhaps because Russia remained subjugated, humiliated, stagnant, and impoverished for more than two centuries, the rest of Europe was able to advance toward political and intellectual freedom, wealth, luxury, and art.

IV – Successive Developments in the Balkans

To distant foreigners the Balkan peninsula is a vast tangle of instability and intrigue, novel tricks and deception in trade, wars, murders, and massacres. But to a native of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, or Yugoslavia his nation is the product of a thousand years of effort to gain independence from the empires that once surrounded these countries—a thousand years of struggle to preserve a unique and interesting culture, for the unimpeded and unhindered expression of national character in architecture, dress, literature, music, and song.

Bulgaria, which under Khan Krum and Simeon had been a powerful country, remained under Byzantine domination for 168 years. In 1186 the discontent of the Bulgarian and Vlach (or Wallachian) populations found expression in two brothers, Ivan and Peter Asen, who possessed the mixture of cunning and courage necessary for the needs of their time and countrymen. The two brothers summoned the people of the city of Tarnovo to the church of St. Demetrius and instilled in them that the patron saint, Demetrius, had left the region of Thessalonica in Greece to reside in Tarnovo. Now if the people gathered under his banner, Bulgaria could regain its lost freedom. The two brothers succeeded in this struggle and amicably divided the new empire between them, with Ivan making the city of Tarnovo his seat of government and Peter taking Preslav. The greatest sultan of their dynasty, and also the most illustrious ruler in Bulgarian history, was Ivan Asen II. Ivan not only annexed Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, and Albania to his domain but ruled with such justice that even his Greek subjects loved him. He showed loyalty and endowed monasteries, thereby pleasing the popes; by approving enlightened laws and bestowing attention he encouraged trade, literature, and art. He made his capital Tarnovo one of the most beautiful cities in Europe; and raised Bulgaria in culture and civilization to the level of most advanced contemporary nations. His successors did not inherit Ivan's wisdom and prudence. Mongol invasions disturbed and weakened the country (1292–1295), and in the fourteenth century Bulgaria first submitted to Serbia and then to the Turks.

Stefan Nemanja in 1159 gathered the leaders of tribes, clans, and various regions of Serbia under one banner and in effect founded the kingdom of Serbia; his dynasty ruled there for two hundred years. His son Sava was an archbishop and statesman considered one of the most revered saints. At this time Serbia was still a poor country, and even its royal palaces were built of wood. It had a prosperous port called Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik); this port was an independent city-state that in 1221 became a protectorate of Venice. During these centuries Serbian art, whose origin was Byzantine, developed its own style and superiority. In the monastery church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi the wall paintings (c. 1164) show a realism so astonishing that it usually had no precedent in Byzantine painting and anticipated by a century the particular refinements once considered the innovation of painters like Duccio and Giotto. Among such wall paintings Serbian artists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries depict princes so prominent and lifelike that no parallel is found in Byzantine wall paintings. Medieval Serbia was advancing toward a brilliant civilization that innovation and persecution destroyed, annihilating the national unity that might have halted the Turkish invasions. Bosnia also, after reaching the height of its medieval prosperity under Ban (king) Kulin, was weakened by religious conflicts and in 1254 fell under Hungarian domination.

After the death of St. Stephen (1038) Hungary's affairs were disturbed by revolts of pagan Magyars against Catholic kings and by Henry III's efforts to annex Hungary to German territory. Andrew I defeated Henry, and when Emperor Henry IV again attempted to carry out his predecessor's designs, the king of Hungary, Géza I, by giving Hungary to Pope Gregory VII and accepting the land as a papal fief, thwarted the German emperor's plans (1076). In the twelfth century claimants to the Hungarian throne, by granting vast lands to the nobility in exchange for their support, strengthened the foundations of feudalism, and by 1222 the nobility of the kingdom was so powerful that it forced Andrew II to issue a Golden Bull. This decree remarkably resembled Magna Carta signed by King John Lackland of England in 1215. The Golden Bull rejected the principle of hereditary feudal fiefs but promised that the king would annually convene the diet, would not imprison any noble without trial in the presence of the count palatine (or, in other words, a count belonging to the emperor's palace), and would take no taxes from the estates of nobles or clergy. This royal charter, named for its gold seal or box, remained for seven centuries the charter of liberty for the Hungarian nobility and, just when the Mongols were preparing one of the greatest crises in European history, provided the means to weaken the Hungarian monarchy.

It is worth noting that in 1235 the Great Khan Ögedei sent three armies to conquer various lands in Korea, China, and Europe. The third Mongol army under Batu, numbering three hundred thousand, crossed the Volga in 1237. This army was not composed of undisciplined soldiers but of highly trained men under capable commanders, armed not only with powerful siege engines but also with new firearms whose use they had learned from the Chinese. In three years these warriors devastated almost all the southern regions of Russia. Then Batu, as if incapable of understanding defeat, divided his forces into two subsidiary armies, one advancing on Poland, capturing Cracow and Lublin, crossing the Oder, and defeating the Germans at Liegnitz (1241); the second under Batu crossed the Carpathians, attacked Hungary, and clashed with the combined Austrian and Hungarian forces at Mohi, defeating them so thoroughly that medieval chroniclers (though they never dealt in small or modest numbers) reckoned the Christian dead at one hundred thousand, and Emperor Frederick II estimated that the Hungarian killed and wounded were almost equal to the entire military force of the kingdom. In this case, by a cruel joke of fate, victor and vanquished were of one blood, and the slain Hungarian nobles were all descendants of the Mongol tribe that three centuries earlier had laid this same land waste with blood and fire. Batu captured the cities of Pest and Esztergom in 1241; meanwhile a detachment of Mongols crossed the Danube and pursued the Hungarian king Béla IV toward the Adriatic coast, burning and destroying settlements along the way. Frederick II in vain invited the European countries to unite against the threat of these Asian peoples' conquest. Innocent IV in vain tried to persuade the Mongols to follow the Christian faith and make peace. What saved Christendom and Europe was only the death of Ögedei and Batu's return to Karakorum to participate in the election of the new khan. Never in human history had so vast an area of the world—from the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic and the Baltic—been subjected to such devastation.

Béla IV, king of Hungary, returned to the ruined city of Pest, settled groups of Germans there, moved his capital to the city of Buda on the other side of the Danube (1247), and gradually restored order to his shattered economy. The newly created nobility again formed vast estates and rural districts in which slave herdsmen and peasant cultivators prepared food for the nation.

German miners descended from the Erzgebirge and began extracting the rich mines of Transylvania. Life and customs were still incomplete and rough, tools primitive, and dwellings mere huts of reeds. Amid various races, mixed languages, class and religious divisions, individuals continued to seek sustenance and profit, renewing that economic chain that is fertile ground for the seed of civilization.

V – The Border Countries

Just as in infinite space any point can be considered the center, so in the panorama of civilizations and countries every nation, like every individual, interprets the flow of history or life according to its own character and the share it bears. North of the Balkans lived another mixture of diverse peoples: Bohemians, Poles, Lithuanians, Livonians, and Finns. Each of these nations with a life-giving pride considered the world dependent on its national history.

In the early Middle Ages the Finns, distant relatives of the Magyars and Huns, settled on the upper Volga and Oka. By the eighth century this people had migrated to the rugged and picturesque land known to other nations as Finland (“land of the Finns”), which the Finns themselves called Suomi (“marshy lands”).

Finnish raids on the coasts of Scandinavia forced Eric IX, king of Sweden, in 1157 to conquer that people. Eric left a bishop in Uppsala among the Finns to spread civilization. This bishop, named Henry, who was killed by them, later became the patron saint of Finland. These people with quiet courage cleared forests, drained marshes, linked their ten thousand lakes, gathered furs, and fought snow. In the south of the Gulf of Finland similar successes fell to tribes related to the Finns composed of: Borussians (Prussians), Estonians, Livonians, Lithuanians, and Letts. These tribes spent the day hunting, fishing, beekeeping, and farming. They left literature and art to weaker descendants who labored for their comfort. All these tribes, except the Estonians, remained pagan until the twelfth century, and it was then that the Germans with fire and sword spread Christianity and civilization among them. The Livonians, realizing that the Germans had made religion a means of penetrating among them and establishing their supremacy, killed the Christian missionaries, threw themselves into the Dvina to wash away the stain of baptism, and again devoted themselves to worshiping their native gods.

Innocent III urged Christians to launch a crusade against them; Bishop Albert with twenty-three fighting men entered the Dvina and built his capital at Riga, bringing Livonia under German control (1201).

Two religious-military orders—the Livonian Knights and the Teutonic Knights—completed the German conquest of the Baltic lands, personally took vast territories, converted the natives to Christianity, and reduced them to mere bodies. The Teutonic Knights, encouraged by success, hoping at least to conquer the western Russian principalities for Germany and the Latin Christian world, turned toward that country but were defeated beside Lake Peipus in one of the decisive battles of history (1242).

These Baltic countries were surrounded on all sides by a sea of Slavs. One group of these peoples called themselves “Polani” or inhabitants of fields and engaged in agriculture in the valleys of the Warthe and Oder. Another group were the Mazovians living on the banks of the Vistula. A third called themselves “Pomorzani” or shore-dwellers, from whom the land of Pomerania derived its name. In 963 the prince of Poland, Mieszko I, to avoid German domination, placed Poland under the protection of the popes, and from then on this land turned its back on the Slavic-Byzantine methods of Eastern Europe and allied itself with Western Europe and Roman Christianity. Mieszko's son Bolesław I conquered Pomerania, annexed Breslau and Cracow, and called himself the first king of Poland. Bolesław III divided his country among his four sons. The monarchy weakened, the nobility divided the lands into feudal principalities, and for a time Poland was sometimes free and sometimes subject to Germany or Bohemia. In 1241 the Mongol flood poured in, and the country's capital, the city of Cracow, fell to them and was razed. As soon as the Mongol flood subsided, a wave of German immigrants swept over western Poland and caused a severe mixture of blood, laws, and the German language in Poland. Meanwhile (1246) Bolesław V gave refuge to Jews fleeing the massacres of Germany and encouraged them to develop commerce and finance. In 1310 Wenceslaus II, king of Bohemia, was raised to the Polish throne and the two countries came under one ruler. In the fifth and sixth centuries the Slavs had settled in Bohemia and Moravia. In 623 one of the Slavic tribal chiefs, named Samo, repelled the Avar invaders from Bohemia and founded a kingdom that expired with his death in 658. In 805 Charlemagne conquered this land, and for an unknown period Bohemia and Moravia both formed part of the Carolingian Empire. In 894 the Přemyslid family made these two lands the domain of their long dynasty, but for half a century (907–957) the Hungarians ruled Moravia, and in 928 Emperor Henry I made Bohemia subject to Germany. Duke Wenceslaus I, although Bohemia was alternately subject to others, brought prosperity to the country; this man, who under his mother St. Ludmila had fully learned Christian teachings, when he ascended the throne did not abandon his beliefs. He fed the poor, clothed the naked, supported widows and orphans, welcomed strangers, and in short gave freedom to the Slavs. His brother, believing that Wenceslaus lacked the special vices of a king, plotted his murder. But Wenceslaus threw his brother to the ground and pardoned him. The others who shared in the conspiracy finally killed him on September 25, 935, as he was going to Mass. Now every year such a day is celebrated with special ceremonies as the feast of Wenceslaus, patron saint of Bohemia.

Warlike dukes succeeded Wenceslaus. Bolesław I, Bolesław II, and Břetislav I conquered Moravia, Silesia, and Poland, but Henry III forced Břetislav to abandon Poland and again become tributary to Germany, and Ottokar I freed Bohemia and became its first king. Ottokar II made Austria, Styria, and Carinthia subject to him and, being interested in industry and the emergence of a middle class as a counterbalance to the rebellious nobility, encouraged the entry of German immigrants into Bohemia, to the point that most of the population of the cities of Bohemia and Moravia were German. The silver mines of Kutná Hora were the cause of Bohemia's prosperity and wealth and the ultimate aim of many invaders. In 1274 Germany declared war on Ottokar. His nobles refused to support their sultan, and Ottokar was forced to surrender all his possessions to Germany and keep only his royal throne as a German fief. But when Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg began interfering in Bohemia's internal affairs, Ottokar prepared a new army and fought the Germans at Dürnkrut. Again his nobles scattered from around him; Ottokar threw himself into the thick ranks of the enemy and perished in a heroic battle. Wenceslaus II, by again recognizing the German emperor as his overlord, established peace and made great efforts to restore calm and prosperity. With his death the Přemyslid dynasty, after five hundred years of rule, became extinct.

The Bohemians, Moravians, and Poles were the only groups of Slavic immigrants who had once made all of eastern Germany as far as the Elbe their home and now lived under a German government.

VI – Germany

In the historic struggle over the issue of investiture by secular authorities, victory went to the German nobility—a class composed of dukes, lords, bishops, and heads of monasteries who, after Henry IV's defeat, controlled the weakened monarchy and created a decentralized feudalism that in the thirteenth century removed Germany from leadership in Europe.

Henry V, after cutting his father's hand from the empire's affairs, continued his father's struggles against the lords and popes. When Paschal II refused to crown him—except on condition of renouncing the right of investiture—Henry imprisoned the pope and cardinals. After Henry died the nobility abolished the principle of hereditary monarchy and extinguished the Franconian dynasty, raising Lothair III, duke of Saxony, to the throne. Thirteen years later Conrad III, duke of Swabia, formed the Hohenstaufen dynasty, counted among Germany's most powerful rulers. Henry, duke of Bavaria, opposed the choice of the nobility and emperors and strengthened his uncle called Welf or Guelf for such a position. Thus began the conflict between Guelfs and Ghibellines that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries manifested itself in various issues and forms. The Hohenstaufen army besieged the Bavarian rebels in the city and fortress of Weinsberg, and according to an old account, since members of each of these two hostile groups, when encountering each other, called one another “Welf hi” (“Hey, wolves”) or “Weibling hi” (“Hey, old women”), these names became attached to them. An interesting old legend relates that the victorious Swabian soldiers in this place agreed to spare the city only on condition that only the women's lives be safe, and when they allowed the strong women of the city to carry on their backs whatever they wished and take it with them, the women carried their husbands on their shoulders and set out. In 1142, when Conrad set out on a crusade, a truce was made between the parties, but Conrad was defeated and returned home in disgrace. When the first worthy man of the Hohenstaufen house ascended the throne, it seemed that the hem of this dynasty would always be stained with the mark of disgrace. Frederick (“Lord of Peace”) or Frederick I was thirty when elected king. He had no particularly imposing or distinguished appearance. He was a small man with white skin and yellow hair, and a red beard, which is why in Italy he was nicknamed Barbarossa [Redbeard], but he had a sound mind and a strong will. His life was devoted to state affairs and although he suffered numerous defeats in struggles, he again made Germany the leader of the Christian world.

Since the blood of both the Hohenstaufen and Welf families flowed in his veins, he proclaimed a general peace, reconciled with enemies and soothed friends, and prevented struggles, chaos, and crimes with the utmost severity. His contemporaries described him as a cheerful man who always had a pleasant smile on his lips but was “the scourge of evildoers.” The violence of his criminal laws advanced civilization in Germany. His chastity and integrity in private life have been rightly praised, but he divorced his first wife on grounds of consanguinity and married a woman who was heiress to the count of Burgundy. Thus he acquired a kingdom as dowry. Since Frederick desired to be crowned in the presence of the pope, he promised Pope Eugenius III that in return for such an act he would help him repel the rebellious Romans and troublesome Normans. When the young Frederick reached Nepi near the city of Rome and met the new pope Hadrian IV, out of pride he refused to hold the bridle and stirrup of the pope's horse and help him dismount.

Hadrian IV dismounted without Frederick's help and claimed that until those ceremonies were performed he would refuse the “kiss of peace” and the conferral of the imperial crown. For about two days the sultan's attendants and the pope's assistants argued over this issue and the empire hung on ceremonies. Finally Frederick consented. The pope also moved a little from that place and entered again on horseback, and this time Frederick held the bridle and stirrup of the pope and from then on always spoke of the Holy Roman Empire so that the world, in addition to the pope himself, might consider him also the spiritual caliph and vicar of God on earth. The title of emperor also made Frederick king of Lombardy. Since Henry IV no German ruler had considered this title real, but now Frederick sent a governor to each of the cities of northern Italy to rule in his name. Some cities accepted these governors and some refused. Since Frederick valued discipline more than freedom, and perhaps was eager to control the Italian ports for trade routes with the East, in 1158 he set out to subdue the rebellious cities that valued freedom more than discipline. He summoned learned jurists busy reviving Roman law in the city of Bologna to his court at Roncaglia and asked their opinion.

They opined that by law the emperor had absolute sovereignty over all the lands of the empire, owned all its property, and whenever he saw fit for the state's interests could abolish or modify private rights. Pope Alexander III, fearing that the non-spiritual powers of the papal office might be lost, citing the “Donation of Pepin” and Charlemagne's decrees, denied the German emperor's claims, and when Frederick insisted on confirming his claim, he excommunicated him (1160). Now the scope of the conflict between the two Guelf and Ghibelline factions extended to Italy, meaning that supporters of the former sided with the pope and supporters of the latter rose to support the emperor. For two years Frederick besieged the stubborn city of Milan and when he finally captured it he burned the whole city and razed it to the ground (1162). The Italian cities of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Ferrara, Mantua, Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Milan, angered by the German emperor's cruelty and wearied by the extortions of German governors, joined hands and formed the Lombard League. In 1176 the soldiers of the League defeated Frederick's German forces at Legnano and forced him to accept a six-year truce. A year later peace was made between the emperor and the pope, and Frederick in Constance signed a treaty by which the Italian cities again regained their right to self-government (1183). These cities in return agreed to nominally recognize the German emperor as their overlord and out of magnanimity consented that whenever Frederick and his retinue visited Lombardy they would provide the necessary provisions. Although Frederick was defeated in Italy, he succeeded elsewhere in his struggles. He successfully established his imperial sovereignty over Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary; he regained all the powers that Henry IV had claimed regarding the appointment and dismissal of clergy; and although this was not explicitly stated, in practice he dominated the German clergy and even gained their support in the struggle against the popes.

Germany, pleased that it had been able to divert Frederick from thoughts of Italy, rested in the shadow of the glory and majesty of his rule and boasted of the magnificent ceremonies of knighthood during his coronations, marriages, and festivals. In 1189 the valiant emperor, with an army of one hundred thousand, set out for Palestine with the intention of the Third Crusade, and perhaps hoped to unite East and West under one Roman Empire and restore it to its former extent and glory. A year later he drowned in a stream in Cilicia. Frederick, like Charlemagne, was extraordinarily imbued with the Roman tradition. He exhausted all his powers in reviving a dead past. His supporters mourned his defeats as victories for the anarchists; whereas supporters of democracy joyfully regarded them as stages in the development of freedom. Frederick's actions were not without justification according to his own conception. Both Germany and Italy were sinking into a vortex of chaos from licentiousness; only a strong imperial government could end the feudal struggles and wars between cities. Before room could be made for the growth of the tree of intellectual freedom, calm had to be established. In later periods when Germany saw itself weak, legends of perfect affection were invented about Frederick I. The German people gradually attributed to Barbarossa himself what they had imagined in the thirteenth century about his grandson. They said that he had not really died but had fallen asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia; one could see his long beard growing beneath the marble stone that lay on his grave; one day he would awaken, shake the dust from his shoulders, and again make Germany a strong and secure country. When Bismarck created a united Germany a proud nation saw in his person Frederick Barbarossa rising victorious from the grave.

Henry VI almost brought his father's long-cherished wish from potential to actual. In 1194, with the help of Genoa and Pisa, he wrested southern Italy and Sicily from the Normans. All of Italy except the papal states submitted to him. Provence, Dauphiné, Burgundy, Alsace, Lorraine, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland all came under his rule. England recognized itself as his fief. The Almohad Arabs became his tributaries. Antioch, Cilicia, and Cyprus asked him to annex them to his empire. Henry with an insatiable appetite cast his eyes on France and Spain and was preparing to conquer the Byzantine Empire. The first detachments of his army had set out for the East when at the age of thirty-three he died of dysentery in Sicily.

Henry had made no preparations against the probable revenge that might arise from his conquered territories.

His only son was a three-year-old child; with his death chaos reigned for ten years, and claimants to the imperial throne fell upon one another. When Frederick II came of age the struggle between the empire and the papal office began anew. In Italy since this struggle was waged by a German and Norman king and took on an Italian color, it is better understood from the Italian viewpoint. After Frederick II's death (1250) chaos reigned for a generation; in this period, which Schiller the German poet called “an era without a lord and terrifying,” the German princes sold the imperial throne to any weak person willing to leave them free in consolidating their individual powers.

When the flood of chaos subsided the Hohenstaufen dynasty had become extinct, and in 1273 Rudolf of the Habsburg family made Vienna his capital and founded a new dynasty. Rudolf, to obtain the imperial throne, in 1279 by proclamation formally accepted the complete subjection of the German king to the pope and denied all German claims to southern Italy and Sicily. Rudolf never attained the imperial title but through his courage, dedication, and strength restored order and prosperity to Germany and laid a solid foundation for a dynasty that ruled Austria and Hungary until 1918. Henry VII made the final effort to unite Germany and Italy. With little support from the German nobility and a small number of Walloon knights he crossed the Alps (1310) and set foot on Italian soil. Many Lombard cities, wearied by class wars and struggles between different cities and eager to free themselves from the political authority of the Church, received the invading king with open arms. The Italian poet Dante welcomed the invading king by writing a treatise entitled On Monarchy, in which he proclaimed the freedom of secular authorities from the authority of the clergy and asked Henry to free Italy from the bondage of papal domination. But in this struggle superiority lay with the Guelfs of Florence. As a result the rebellious cities withdrew their support and Henry, seeing himself surrounded by enemies on all sides, succumbed to a fever—the occasional reward Italy gave its persistent lovers—and died. Germany's progress, now blocked in the south by natural, geographical, racial, and linguistic barriers, found reward and another way to the outside world in the east. The migration of Germans and Dutch, and conquest and the establishment of colonies, became a means for Germans to wrest three-fifths of German soil from the Slavs. The vigorous German race expanded along the Danube and reached the lands of Hungary and Romania. German merchants established markets and centers for exporting goods in the cities of Frankfurt on the Oder, Breslau, Cracow, Danzig, Riga, Dorpat, and Reval and through their efforts markets for trade appeared everywhere from the North Sea and Baltic to the Alps and the Black Sea. This conquest was carried out with the utmost cruelty and the results achieved were a great advance in the economic and cultural life of the border countries.

Meanwhile the emperors' preoccupation with Italian affairs, the urgent need to grant lands or powers to lords and knights in exchange for their support, and finally the weakening of the German monarchy due to opposition from the popes and Lombard revolts all left the field open for the nobility to seize the countryside and turn the peasant class into a mass of serfs. Moreover in thirteenth-century Germany feudalism triumphed just when in France it was subdued by the power of its own monarch. The bishops, the very class that previous emperors had considered useful for thwarting the plans of the lords, now formed a secondary nobility: that is, in wealth, power, and independence they were in no way inferior to the non-clerical lords. By 1263 the feudal nobility in general had transferred the right to elect the king to seven nobles—the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, the count palatine, and the margrave of Brandenburg. These seven nobles, whom we call electors, placed themselves in the safe haven of the king's protection, usurped the special powers of the monarchy, and seized royal estates. It was possible for this group to act as a central government and unite their nation, but they did not do so; in the intervals between elections each went about his own business and went his own way. There was still no German nation but only Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, Franks, and so on. There was still no national parliament or diet. Each land had its own diet or Landtag. A common diet or Reichstag was established in 1247, which during the interregnum existed weakly and feebly, and only in 1338 gained considerable vigor. A group of state officials, composed of serfs or freemen appointed by the king, formed a kind of free bureaucracy and preserved governmental continuity. There was no capital that was the focus of the country's interest and loyalty. No particular legal principles governed the entire realm of the kings. Despite Frederick Barbarossa's efforts to impose Roman law on all German soil, each region preserved its own collection of laws and customs. In 1225 the laws of the Saxons were compiled into a collection known as the Sachsenspiegel or “Saxon Mirror” and in 1275 the Schwabenspiegel or “Swabian Mirror,” a collection of laws and customs of the Swabian region, was compiled. These law books confirmed the work of electing the king, which from ancient times had been the nation's legitimate right, and established the right of peasants to preserve their freedom and lands. (The Saxon Mirror) said that serfdom and slavery were contrary to nature and divine will, and that the origin of both was violence or deception. “23” Despite this serfdom continued to develop.

The period of Hohenstaufen rule, before the appearance of Bismarck, was Germany's greatest age. People's manners and customs were still primitive and rough, their laws confused, their moral principles half Christian and half pagan, and their Christianity to some extent a pretext for conquering others' lands. In wealth and comforts German cities were not comparable to the cities of Flanders and Italy. But German peasants were industrious and vigorous people, their merchants bold and adventurous, their nobility more powerful and knowledgeable in Europe than others, and their kings the secular rulers of the Western world, whose domain extended from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Rhône to the Balkan peninsula, from the Baltic to the Danube, and from the North Sea to the island of Sicily. From a strong commercial environment a hundred cities had arisen and many of them had obtained charters of self-government. With the passage of years the wealth and art of these cities gradually increased until in the Renaissance period they became the pride and glory of Germany and in our era observers mourn the beauty that has departed this world.

VII – Scandinavia

After a century of obscurity accompanied by happiness, Denmark again entered the pages of world history with the accession of Valdemar I. Valdemar, with the help of his minister Absalon, who was archbishop of Lund, formed a strong government, drove the sea-raiders from the seas, and by encouraging and supporting merchants made Denmark a wealthy country. In 1167 Absalon founded the city of Copenhagen (or originally København, meaning “merchants' harbor”). Valdemar II, to counter German encroachments, conquered Holstein, Hamburg, and the northeastern regions. “For the exaltation of the holy name of the Virgin Mary” he undertook three “crusades” against the Baltic Slavs, conquered northern Estonia, and built the city of Reval. In one of these struggles the enemy attacked his camp, but Valdemar escaped with his life. It is related that this was partly due to his personal courage and partly to a red banner descending from heaven on which a white cross was depicted. From then on this Dannebrog or “Danish cloth” became the war flag of the Danes. In 1223 he was captured by Henry, count of Schwerin, and after two and a half years, only after surrendering all his German and Slavic possessions except Rügen, was freed. He spent the rest of his interesting life in internal reforms and codifying Danish laws. When Valdemar II died Denmark's territory was twice its present size, including southern Sweden, and had a population equal to the combined population of Sweden (300,000) and Norway (200,000). After Valdemar II the power of the kings declined and in 1282 the nobility succeeded in obtaining from Eric Glipping a charter according to which the king accepted their assembly called the Danehof as a national parliament.

Only the boiling of a master storyteller's imagination can depict for us the immense success of the Scandinavian peoples in these early centuries and describe how these peoples inch by inch, day by day, courageously conquered the rugged and dangerous lands of that peninsula. Life was still primitive. Hunting, fishing, in addition to agriculture, were the basic sources of finding sustenance. They were forced to clear vast forests, stop wild animals, divert waters for productive uses, build harbors, and in short make themselves invulnerable to a nature that apparently saw humans as disturbers of its peace. In this continuous struggle the Cistercian monks played a proud role and cut down trees, sowed seeds, and taught farmers better methods. One of the heroes of this war was Earl Birger, who served as chancellor of Sweden from 1248 to 1266, abolished serfdom, promoted the rule of law, founded the city of Stockholm (c. 1255), and by placing his son Valdemar on the throne established the Folkung dynasty. It was in this period that Bergen, Norway's important commercial port, became a wealthy city and Visby on the island of Gotland became the center of contact between Sweden and the Hanseatic League. Magnificent churches were built, schools attached to churches and monasteries increased, poets tuned their lyres and sang their odes, and Iceland, that distant island shrouded in polar mist and fog, in the thirteenth century became the most bubbling source of literature in the Scandinavian world.

VIII – England

1 – William the Conqueror

William the Conqueror ruled England with a masterful mixture of force, respect for law, sanctity, cunning, and trickery. After the timid Witan assembly raised him to the throne, William swore to observe the existing laws of England. In the western and northern regions of the kingdom some local assemblies took advantage of William's absence in Normandy and revolted (1067); but he returned, like a flame of vengeance swept through the kingdom, and with such wise “harrying of the North” and so much killing of people and destruction of houses, barns, crops, herds, and flocks that the northern regions of England for three centuries did not fully recover.

William the Conqueror divided large estates of the kingdom's best lands among his Norman followers and encouraged these individuals to build castles as defensive strongholds against the hostile population. He confiscated large estates as royal demesne; one stretch of this land, fifty kilometers long, was dedicated as a royal hunting ground. Every house, church, and school in this area was razed to the ground so that the field would be open for horses and greyhounds. Anyone who hunted a stag or doe in this new forest had his eyes gouged out.

Thus the new English nobility came into being, some of whose descendants still bear French titles; feudalism, which before the Norman conquest was relatively weak, triumphed over the whole kingdom and reduced most of the conquered nation to serfdom. All the kingdom's lands belonged to the king, but any native Englishman who could prove that he had offered no resistance to the Norman conquest was allowed to buy back his land from the government. William, to inventory and learn his spoils, in 1085 sent officials around to determine the details of ownership and nobility of every piece of land in England; according to the old history of the English peoples, William's instructions to his officials and their census work were so precise that “not one inch of land … not one ox or cow and not one pig escaped their notice.” The result of this census was the compilation of the Domesday Book, which had an ominous title and was so named because in all disputes and property claims it served as the final court of judgment and justice. William, to secure himself from the support of his soldiers and limit the power of his subject lords, summoned all the important landowners of England, numbering about 60,000, to an assembly in Salisbury (1086) and forced each of them to recognize the sultan as their ultimate overlord and swear fealty to him. In an era when the individual freedom of feudal lords was fragmenting the land of France, William the Conqueror's action was a wise one.

It is obvious that after conquering a people one must expect a strong government from the conquerors. William removed a number of knights and earls, archbishops, and heads of monasteries from office and installed others in their place.

He without any hesitation imprisoned high nobles and, just at the time when Gregory VII, the powerful pope, was dragging the German emperor Henry IV to Canossa, William despite the pope's inclinations established his right to appoint and dismiss the clergy of the kingdom. To prevent fires William ordered the people of England to cover their hearths or extinguish the fire before going to bed at night; therefore people went to bed around eight o'clock in winter. When he heard that some English, to evade taxes, had hidden their cash in the cellars of monasteries, he ordered that the cellars of all the kingdom's monasteries be searched and whatever gold and silver of this kind was found be transferred to the royal treasury. The officials of his royal court accepted bribes that people gave without any qualms and recorded them in the public account books. William's government, without any hypocrisy or concealment, was the government of conquerors who decided that the profits from their great labor should correspond to the dangers they had risked. The Norman clergy shared in this victory. Lanfranc, that capable and flexible man, was summoned from Caen and became archbishop of Canterbury and the king's chancellor. Lanfranc, seeing the English clergy addicted to hunting, gambling, and fornication, removed them all from office and appointed a group of Norman clergy, bishops, and heads of monasteries in their place. He established new rules for the monasteries of England known as the customs of Canterbury and raised the intellectual and moral level of the English clergy. Perhaps it was at his suggestion that William by issuing a decree separated the ecclesiastical courts from the secular courts, ordered that all matters relating to religion be conducted according to canon law, and undertook that the government would guarantee the execution of punishments determined by ecclesiastical courts. To gain the people's support for the Church all were obliged to pay tithes. But William stipulated that no papal letters or bulls be published or enforced without his personal approval, and that no papal representatives have the right to enter English soil without the king's consent. The national assembly of English bishops, which was part of the Witan assembly, from then on became a separate assembly, and it was decided that its issued decrees would have no legal validity unless confirmed by the king.

Like most great men, ruling one country was far easier for William than managing his family. The last eleven years of his life were disturbed by quarrels with his queen Matilda. His son Robert demanded absolute powers to rule Normandy, and when William refused to grant such powers he faced his son's rebellion.

William reluctantly went to war with him and finally made peace by promising to bequeath the duchy to Robert. In these years William had become so fat that mounting a horse was very difficult for him. A dispute over borders arose between him and Philip I, king of France. When William, because of excessive corpulence, was forced to stay in Rouen, it is related that Philip mockingly said that the corpse of the king of England had been “laid out” and that his funeral would present an interesting sight with many lighted candles. William swore that he would make many candles truly burn in France. He ordered his soldiers to burn Mantes and all its surroundings and destroy all crops and fruits. His soldiers also obeyed their king's orders. As William rode joyfully among the ruins, his horse suddenly slipped and threw him hard against the iron pommel of the saddle. He was carried to the small monastery of St. Gervais near Rouen. There William confessed all his sins; wrote his will; to atone divided his treasures among the poor and churches and allocated funds for the rebuilding of Mantes. All his children except Henry left their father alone on his deathbed and, claiming succession, set out for the battlefield. His commanders and servants took as much of his property as they could and fled. A simple undecorated boat carried William's body to the monastery of the men in Caen (1087). The coffin made for him could not accommodate his fat body. When the attendants tried to force his huge frame into that narrow coffin his body burst and filled the church with its royal stench.

The results of the Norman conquest were boundless. It imposed a new class and nation on the Danes who had conquered the Anglo-Saxons; they in turn had subdued the Roman Britons; and those Britons had once overcome the Celts …; centuries had to pass before the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elements could again, with English blood and language, establish their lost rights. The Normans were related to the Danes but in the hundred years since Rollo's time had become French. With their domination of English soil for three centuries the customs and official language of this land were French. Feudalism with all its appendages, such as knighthood and family coats of arms and related terms, was brought from France to England. Serfdom, deeper and more ruthless than what had previously been customary in England, became widespread. Jewish moneylenders who came to England with William gave new impetus to the kingdom's commerce and industry. The closer relationship established between England and other parts of Europe promoted the spread of many ideas in literature and art. Norman-style architecture in England reached its peak. The new nobility brought with it new customs, an active and vigorous spirit, and a better organization for agriculture, and Norman lords and bishops perfected the kingdom's administrative organization. The government was centralized. Although it operated despotically, the kingdom was united, people's lives and property became safer, and England entered a long period of internal peace. From then on no invading people could successfully conquer England.

2 – Thomas à Becket

In England there is a proverb that always between the reigns of two strong kings a weak king sits on the throne, but the number of mediocre kings is beyond counting. After William the Conqueror's death his eldest son Robert took Normandy as a separate domain. His younger son, William known as Rufus or the Red, promised Lanfranc good conduct and was anointed and crowned king of England by him. He ruled with utmost savagery until 1093 when he suddenly fell ill, repented that he would cease his tyranny, recovered, again began his oppression, and finally while hunting was killed by an unknown person's arrow. St. Anselm, who after Lanfranc became archbishop of Canterbury, with all patience resisted William Rufus and finally by the king's order returned to France. When the third son of William the Conqueror, Henry I, ascended the throne he recalled Anselm from France. Anselm, that wise archbishop, asked the king to renounce the right to appoint bishops; Henry did not accept such a demand; after a series of wearisome struggles it was decided that the heads of English monasteries and bishops should be elected by the general assembly of cathedrals or monks of the monasteries in the king's presence and the elected individuals should bow their heads to the king as their overlord for their powers and feudal properties and recognize him as their benefactor.

Henry was a money-loving man and hated waste. He took heavy taxes from his subjects but his reign was just and prudent. During his reign England enjoyed peace and calm, and the only war of Henry's reign was the battle of Tinchebray in 1106 as a result of which Normandy was again annexed to the English king's domains.

He commanded the nobility to “show self-restraint in dealing with women, their sons, daughters, and servants”; he himself had several illegitimate sons and daughters from various mistresses, but by insight and dignity he married Maud, who was of Anglo-Saxon royal and pre-Norman kingly descent, and thus mingled the blood of the ancient kings with the new royal dynasty.

Henry, in his later years, forced the lords and bishops to swear allegiance to his daughter Matilda and her infant son who later became Henry II. But as soon as he died his grandson, William the Conqueror's descendant Stephen of Blois, claimed the throne, and England for fourteen years was forced to pay heavy casualties and taxes in a bloody civil war during which both sides committed the most horrible atrocities. Meanwhile Henry II grew up, married Eleanor of Aquitaine, acquired the duchy, attacked England, and forced Stephen to recognize him as crown prince and successor, and when Stephen died he ascended the throne (1154). Thus the Norman dynasty became extinct and the Plantagenet dynasty began. Henry was a quick-tempered, very ambitious man with natural intelligence and somewhat inclined to atheism. Since he nominally ruled a land that extended from Scotland to the Pyrenees and included half of France, he apparently saw himself in a feudal society—a feudal society in which high lords, by arming mercenary soldiers and taking positions in fortified castles, had fragmented the whole kingdom into numerous feudal principalities. The young king with awesome force gathered the necessary money and men, fought the kingdom's rebellious lords one by one and subdued them, destroyed the feudal castles, and established calm, security, justice, and peace in the kingdom. With a relatively small army and low cost he brought Ireland, which had been conquered and plundered by Welsh sea-raiders, under English control. But this powerful man, one of England's greatest kings, when faced with a man like Thomas à Becket—who had a will as inflexible as his and in the clerical world of that era possessed power far greater than any government—saw his will shaken and became contemptible in the eyes of all.

Thomas was born around 1118 in the bosom of a middle-class Norman family in London. His extraordinary intelligence in youth attracted the attention of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. At the archbishop's suggestion Thomas went to Bologna and Auxerre to study civil and canon law. Upon returning to England he entered the clergy and soon rose to the position of archdeacon of the monastery of Canterbury. But like many clergy of those centuries Thomas was more a man skilled in government and management of important affairs than an ordinary priest; his interest and ability were dedicated to statecraft and politics, and in these arts he showed such competence that at the age of thirty-seven he was appointed chancellor. For a time there was complete agreement between Thomas and Henry, and that handsome minister enjoyed the king's companionship, participation in knightly tournaments, and almost the wealth and power of the kingdom's monarch. His table was considered the finest in all England; he helped the weak as much as he was hospitable to his friends. In war he personally led 700 knights, engaged in single combat with enemies, and was responsible for planning campaigns and battles. When he went to Paris as representative of his king, his magnificent retinue consisted of eight carriages, forty horses, and two hundred attendants, and was so luxurious that the French were awed and thought that if the minister's splendor was like this, what must his king's wealth be. In 1162 he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. As soon as Thomas attained such a position it was as if by magic he suddenly changed all his customs from the root. He abandoned his magnificent palace, decorations, expensive robes, and conversation with aristocratic friends. He resigned from the chancellorship. He wore coarse and coarse woolen garments, satisfied his hunger with vegetables, legumes, and water, and every night washed the feet of thirteen beggars. Now he had become a staunch defender of the rights, privileges, and income of the clergy. One of these rights was the exemption of clergy from trial in secular courts. Henry, who desired to make all classes equally subject to his commands, became very angry when he saw that most clergy were not punished in ecclesiastical courts for committing crimes. To remove some of these difficulties he gathered the knights and bishops of England at Clarendon and urged them to sign the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), which abolished many clerical immunities; but Thomas refused to seal these documents with his archiepiscopal seal. Despite this action Henry proceeded to enact new laws and summoned the ailing Thomas à Becket to trial in his court. Thomas appeared in that assembly and with utmost gentleness stood against his subordinate bishops, who had united against him and considered him guilty of disobeying the commands of the king, his overlord. The court sentenced him to imprisonment. Thomas declared that he would appeal the court's sentence to the pope and after making this statement, wearing his archiepiscopal robe that no one dared touch, he left the hall unharmed. That evening he fed many poor people in his house in London and during the night Thomas thoughtfully took a side road toward the English Channel and crossed that turbulent strait with a fragile boat and took refuge in a monastery in Saint-Omer in the territory of the king of France. Thomas sent his resignation from the archiepiscopal office to Pope Alexander III. The pope sanctified his resistance and again appointed him to the head of his spiritual diocese, but for a time sent him to the monastery of Pontigny to live as an ordinary Cistercian monk. Henry exiled all Thomas's relatives of every age, male and female, from England. When Henry traveled to Normandy Thomas left his cell and from Vézelay, from the pulpit, excommunicated all the English clergy who supported the Constitutions of Clarendon (1166). Henry sent a message to the abbot of Pontigny that if he continued to shelter Thomas there he would confiscate all the properties of the monasteries associated with that monastery in England, Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. The abbot became alarmed and asked Thomas to leave; the rebellious and ailing Thomas spent some time in a humble inn in Sens living on alms. Alexander III, under pressure from the king of France Louis VII, ordered Henry to restore the archbishop to his office or he would prohibit all religious ceremonies throughout the king's realm. Henry submitted to such a threat. He came to Avranches, met Thomas, promised to investigate all his complaints, and when the archbishop was mounting his horse to set out for England held his stirrup (1169). When Thomas returned to Canterbury he again renewed the excommunication of the bishops who had opposed him. Some of these bishops went to Normandy to meet Henry and, probably with exaggerated reports of Thomas's behavior, angered him. Henry cried out: “Alas! A man who has eaten my bread … insults the king and the whole kingdom, and none of the idle servants who enjoy my table vindicate my right against such an insult.” Four knights who heard the king's words apparently without his knowledge set out for England. On December 30, 1170, the knights found the archbishop in the sanctuary of Canterbury Cathedral and there struck him down with their swords. The whole Christian world rose in horror against Henry, and everywhere people spontaneously excommunicated him. Henry, after locking himself in his room for three days, refusing to see anyone, and abstaining from food, ordered that Thomas's murderers be arrested, sent representatives to the pope to declare his innocence, and promised to pay any penance the pope deemed necessary. He abolished the Constitutions of Clarendon and restored all ecclesiastical properties and rights in his realm.

Meanwhile the people placed Thomas among the saints and declared that many miracles occurred at his tomb. The Church officially recognized him as a saint (1172), and soon thousands flocked to Canterbury to visit his shrine. Finally Henry himself as a pilgrim turned toward that place and walked the last five kilometers of the road with bare feet that were wounded and bloodied on the flint stones of the road, threw himself on the ground before the tomb of his martyred enemy, asked the monks to flog him, and willingly endured those blows. Henry's strong will broke under public reproach and the increasing annoyances that arose in his realm. His wife Eleanor, who had been exiled by order of that adulterous king, conspired with her sons to depose her husband. His eldest son, who was also named Henry, twice in 1173 and 1183 with the help of some feudal lords rebelled against his father and finally died in a revolt. In 1189 his two other sons Richard and John, who were impatiently awaiting their father's death, allied with Philip Augustus, king of France, and rose in war against their father, defeated Henry, and drove him from Le Mans. The king of England, while cursing the God who had taken his birthplace and beloved city from him, turned toward Chinon, fell ill, and in his last moments cursed his sons who had betrayed him and the life that had given him power, majesty, wealth, numerous mistresses, enemies, dishonor, betrayal, and defeat, and died (1189).

Henry had not completely failed in his struggle. After Thomas's death he agreed to surrender what he had refused to give during Thomas's lifetime. Nevertheless in that fierce dispute it was Henry's claim that gradually became a proud victory for him; that is, he began the work that subsequent kings one by one continued and gradually expanded the jurisdiction of secular courts until all the king's subjects, clergy and laity alike, became subject to the judgments of these courts. He freed English law from the constraints and limitations of feudal and ecclesiastical law and led it along the evolutionary path whose result was one of the highest achievements of human law since the Roman Empire. Henry II, like his grandfather William the Conqueror, subdued the rebellious and anarchic nobility of England and thereby consolidated and unified the English government. In this he succeeded too well: that is, the central government became so strong that it almost became a very despotic and irresponsible government, and in this historical alternation of order and freedom the next cycle belonged to aristocracy and liberty.

3 – Magna Carta

Richard I, known as the Lionheart, without any opposition ascended his father's throne. Richard in character resembled his mother Eleanor more than his father; Eleanor was an adventurous, quarrelsome, and untamable woman. He was born in 1157 in Oxford and when he came of age his mother sent him to Aquitaine to administer his maternal family's domain. It was during this period that the skeptical culture of Provence and the “art of love” of its troubadours conquered the depths of his soul, and from then on it was impossible for Richard to be an Englishman.

His love of adventure and singing was far greater than politics and statecraft. In his relatively short life, that is, in the course of forty-two years, he at least manifested a century's worth of love's passions and desires and, in addition to encouraging the troubadours of his time by imitating their style in poetry, showed the utmost interest in literature. The first five months of his reign were spent collecting funds for a crusade. He took whatever remained in Henry II's treasury for this purpose and removed thousands of government officials from office and, in exchange for money, reappointed them. He sold charters of freedom to cities that could afford to pay and recognized Scotland's independence in exchange for 15,000 marks. All this effort was not because he had less interest in silver and gold but because his restless heart preferred adventure. Six months after ascending the throne he set out for Palestine. Richard valued his own life as little as he valued others' rights. He took as much tax as possible from his subjects and spent it all on luxuries, feasting, and displays. But the pages of the last ten years of the twelfth century were so filled with his heroic deeds and bravery that his contemporary poets considered him more worthy than Alexander the Great, Arthur, and Charlemagne. Richard fought Saladin and became fond of him, did not defeat him but swore to defeat him eventually; when he decided to return home he was captured by Leopold, duke of Austria, who had been offended by him in Asia (1192). In early 1193 Leopold handed Richard over to the German emperor Henry VI, who bore a grudge against the king of England and his father Henry II. Despite the law generally observed throughout Europe that no one was allowed to imprison a crusader, Henry VI imprisoned the king of England in a castle at Dürnstein beside the Danube and demanded 150,000 marks (equivalent to fifteen million dollars in today's money) ransom from England—twice the annual revenue of the kingdom's royal treasury. Meanwhile Richard's brother John tried to seize the throne; there was resistance; he fled to France, broke his peace with Philip, attacked and captured England's possessions in France, and bribed Henry VI heavily to keep Richard in prison.

Richard in the corner of his prison passed his days in burning and longing and composed an eloquent ode addressed to his countrymen in which he asked them for ransom. Meanwhile Queen Eleanor, as regent, with the wise guidance of her chief justice and political advisor Hubert Walter, successfully managed the kingdom's affairs. But both found collecting the necessary funds to pay the ransom difficult. When Richard was finally freed (1194) he hastened to England, imposed taxes on the people, gathered an army, and crossed the English Channel to take revenge on Philip for himself and England.

It is related that for many years he refused to perform religious rites because he feared that this might require forgiving his infidel enemy. He recovered all the lost lands from Philip's grasp and made peace on terms that allowed Philip to enjoy life. Meanwhile a dispute arose between Richard and Adémar, viscount of Limoges, one of his vassals, over a quantity of gold found in a hole on Adémar's estate; Adémar agreed to surrender part of it to Richard, but Richard, who wanted all the gold, besieged Adémar's castle. An arrow released from the fortress struck the king, and Richard the Lionheart at the age of forty-three died over a quantity of gold. His brother John, after facing some suspicion and opposition, succeeded Richard, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Walter, at his coronation forced him to swear that he would rule by the choice of the nation (that is, the nobility and chief priests) and with divine approval. But John, who lied to his father, brother, and wife, had no qualms about eating another false oath. John, like Henry II and Richard I, apparently paid little attention to religious beliefs. It was said that from the time he came of age he never participated in the holy sacrifice, not even on his coronation day. The monks accused him of atheism and related how one day while hunting after catching a fat stag he said: “What a coarse-boned and fat animal! Yet I swear it has never attended Mass.” The reason for the monks' anger was that they considered this sentence an allusion to their own fatness. John was a man of great intelligence and a very capable administrator who was not very bound by moral principles. “He had little love for the clergy” and therefore, according to the historian Holinshed, was to some extent the target of the monks' chroniclers' spiteful arrows. He was not always at fault but mostly because of his sharp tongue and bad temper, his insolent jokes, his boasting of absolute power, and the heavy taxes he imposed to defend England's possessions in French territory against Philip Augustus, he made people his enemies. In 1199 John asked Pope Innocent III for permission to divorce his wife Isabel of Gloucester on grounds of consanguinity, and shortly after this married Isabel of Angoulême, despite her betrothal to the count of Lusignan. The nobility of both countries were angered by this action, and the count of Lusignan appealed to Philip. Meanwhile the lords of Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, and Maine complained to Philip that John was encroaching on their provinces. By feudal obligations dating back to the grant of Normandy to Rollo, the French lords even in provinces belonging to England recognized the king of France as their feudal overlord and, according to feudal law, John as duke of Normandy and therefore a vassal of the king of France. Philip summoned John to Paris to prove his innocence against various complaints and accusations. The king of England refused to accept such an invitation. The French feudal court ruled that his properties in France should be confiscated as a penalty and awarded Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou to Arthur, count of Brittany, who was Henry II's grandson.

Arthur claimed the English throne and gathered an army and besieged Queen Eleanor at Mirebeau; Eleanor, at eighty, had risen with a large army to defend the rights of her rebellious son. John hastened to rescue his mother, captured Arthur, and apparently ordered his murder. Philip attacked Normandy. At this time John, who was spending his “honeymoon” with his bride in Rouen, was too busy to pay attention to military matters; therefore his and his mother's soldiers were defeated. John fled to England, and Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine fell into the hands of the king of France. Pope Innocent III, who was at odds with Philip, had helped John as much as he could; now John began quarreling with Innocent. Upon the death (1205) of Hubert Walter, the king of England urged the elderly monks of Canterbury to elect John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, as Walter's successor. A group of younger monks elected their leader Reginald as archbishop. Both de Gray and Reginald, eager to attain such a position, hastened to Rome to gain the pope's approval; but Innocent accepted neither's demand and appointed an English priest named Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury; Langton had lived in Paris for twenty-five years and at this time was a professor of theology at its university. John protested that Langton had no qualifications for becoming archbishop of England, a position involving both political and religious duties. Innocent, without heeding John's protests, consecrated Langton in Viterbo, Italy, for his new office (1207). John sent word that if Langton dared set foot on English soil; he threatened to burn the monasteries over the heads of the rebellious monks of Canterbury; and swore that if the pope prohibited religious ceremonies in England he would exile all Catholic clergy from his realm, gouge out the eyes of some, and cut off the noses and ears of others. The pope by a decree prohibited all religious ceremonies in England except baptism and the anointing of the dying sick (1208). The clergy closed the churches, the bells fell silent, and the dead were buried in unconsecrated cemeteries. John confiscated all the properties of the bishops and monasteries and distributed them among the laity. Innocent excommunicated the king of England, but John ignored the pope's decree and victoriously marched on Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The people trembled at the pope's interdict, but the nobility, seeing the confiscation and distribution of church property as a means to divert the king's plundering hand from their wealth, did not oppose. John, inflated by his apparent victory, by his excesses angered and alienated many. He neglected his second wife and had several illegitimate children from bold mistresses. He imprisoned a group of Jews out of greed for their wealth; he tormented some imprisoned bishops until they died in prison; by adding insults to taxes he made the nobility his enemies; and by intensifying the hated forest laws he provoked the common people. In 1213 Innocent, reaching for the last arrow in his quiver, issued a decree deposing John from the English throne, absolved his subjects from their oath of allegiance, and declared that from then on whoever could seize any of the king's property could keep it as lawful spoils. Philip Augustus accepted the pope's invitation, prepared an army, and set out for the English Channel. John prepared to confront the invaders; but he realized that the nobility would not support him in war against a pope armed with both material and spiritual powers. John, furious at the nobility's action and facing imminent defeat, negotiated with Pandulf, the pope's representative, and agreed that if the pope would annul the decrees of excommunication, interdict, and deposition and make peace with him, John in return would restore all confiscated church property, surrender the throne and crown to the pope, and recognize himself as his vassal. The pope accepted these conditions. John placed all England at the pope's disposal and after five days took it back as a papal fief requiring perpetual homage and fealty (1213). John set out for Poitou to attack Philip and ordered the barons of England to follow him with men and equipment. The barons refused the king's call. Philip's victory at Bouvines left the king of England defenseless against his barons. John returned to England and faced an angry nobility. The nobility opposed the heavy taxes he imposed for his disastrous wars, his lawbreaking and disregard of legal precedents, and his exchange of England for the support and pardon of Innocent. The action that filled the barons' cup of patience was John's demand that they pay the tax known as scutage or military service tax, according to which every baron was obliged to pay a certain tribute in lieu of military service. The barons sent representatives to John demanding the restoration of Henry I's laws—according to which the rights of the nobility were protected and the king's powers limited.

When the king paid no attention to this demand the barons gathered their armed soldiers at Stamford and, while John stalled in Oxford, sent representatives to London and gained the support of the city's commune and courtiers. In the meadow of Runnymede beside the Thames near Windsor the barons' army encamped opposite a few of the king's supporters. It was here that John made his second great concession and set his seal to Magna Carta or the Great Charter, the most famous document in English history (1215).

From John, by the grace of God king of England … to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons … and all his faithful subjects. Know that we … by this charter have granted for us and our heirs forever the liberties mentioned below:

1 – The Church of England shall be free, and all its liberties and rights shall remain intact …

2 – To all free men of our realm, for us and our heirs forever, we grant the liberties mentioned below …

12 – No scutage or aid shall be imposed or demanded except by the common council of our realm …

14 – For holding the common council to estimate the amount of scutage and the measure of aid … we will cause the archbishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons of the realm … and all others who hold of us in chief to be summoned …

15 – In future we will not grant to anyone license to take an aid from his free tenants except to ransom his body, to make his eldest son a knight, or once to marry his eldest daughter, and for these only a reasonable aid shall be taken …

17 – Common pleas shall not follow our court but shall be held in some fixed place …

36 – In future nothing shall be given or taken for a writ of inquisition of life or limb … but it shall be given gratis … (that is, no one shall be kept in prison for a long time without trial).

39 – No free man shall be arrested, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, exiled, or in any way destroyed … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

40 – To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.

41 – All merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to enter and leave England, to dwell in it, and to move about by land and water for buying and selling, without any unjust tolls …

60 – All the customs and liberties mentioned above … all the people of our realm, both clergy and laity, shall observe as far as concerns them, toward their dependents … This charter was sealed in the presence of witnesses in the meadow called Runnymede on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign.

Magna Carta has been called the foundation of the liberties that English-speaking peoples now enjoy, and it certainly deserves such fame. In reality it was limited; for it defined more the rights of the nobility and clergy than the rights of all the people of the kingdom. No executive guarantee was provided for clause sixty of the charter, which in fact was a sanctimonious formulation. Magna Carta was more a victory for feudalism than for democracy, but this very charter clearly defined and protected fundamental rights, established that no subject of the king could be deprived of liberty without summons to court and trial, and that trial must be in the presence of a jury; it gave the nascent parliament power in determining the kingdom's expenses so that later it could arm the nation against despotic government; and it turned absolute monarchy into a constitutional government with limited powers.

Yet John, when he set his seal to this charter, was completely unaware that by surrendering his absolute powers he was making himself an immortal figure in history. He appealed to the pope and Innocent III, who now needed England's support against France to carry out his wishes, rose to help his humiliated vassal and annulled Magna Carta, ordering John to refuse obedience to its provisions and the English barons to refrain from enforcing it. The barons ignored the pope's decree. Innocent excommunicated them, the citizens of the city of London, and the Cinque Ports; but Stephen Langton, who had helped draft the charter, refused to publish the pope's decree. The pope's representatives in England deposed Langton and proceeded to publish the decree, and in Flanders and France gathered an army of mercenaries and with sword, fire, plunder, murder, and rape fell upon the nobility. Apparently the nobility, lacking popular support, instead of arming their dependents to resist the invaders, invited Louis, son of the king of France, to attack England, defend their rights, and seize the English throne as his reward. If such a plan had succeeded England would probably have become part of French territory; the pope's representatives refused Louis permission to cross the English Channel, and when Louis insisted they excommunicated him and his companions. When Louis entered London the barons welcomed him and swore fealty to him.

Outside the trading city of London John was victorious and ruthless everywhere; but suddenly in the midst of his power and victorious madness he fell ill with dysentery, with great suffering reached a monastery, and at the age of forty-nine died in Newark. One of the pope's representatives raised John's six-year-old son, Henry III, to the throne. A regency council was formed with the earl of Pembroke at its head; the nobility, now seeing one of their peers in the highest positions of the kingdom, were encouraged, supported Henry, and sent Louis back to France. When Henry came of age he became a cultured and aesthetic king. The building of Westminster Abbey was due to his inspiration and generous purse. In Henry III's view Magna Carta was an instrument for dismembering the kingdom, so he tried to abolish it but did not succeed. He always swore that he would impose no more taxes on the nobility but constantly took such heavy taxes from them that it seemed that if he exceeded even a little there would be danger of revolution. The pope also needed money and with Henry's permission collected tithes from the ecclesiastical dioceses of England to help defray the costs of his wars against Frederick II. The bitter memory of these tyrannical tributes prepared the ground for the revolts of Wycliffe and Henry VIII.

Edward I was not as scholarly or refined as his father but the royal robe suited him better. He was an ambitious, strong-willed, hard-fighting, politically cunning, and militarily and financially rich man; yet he had the power of moderation and restraint, and through these good qualities his reign became one of the most brilliant periods in English history. He reorganized the kingdom's army, compelled large numbers of longbowmen to learn the use of the longbow, ordered every able-bodied Englishman throughout the kingdom to possess arms and learn the use of various weapons, and thus, in addition to providing a national militia, unwittingly helped create a military foundation for democracy. After thus consolidating his power Edward imitated Simon's action as a profitable matter. Since he was simultaneously engaged in war with Scotland, Wales, and France he saw himself forced to gain the support and financial help of all classes. In 1295 the king summoned the “Model Parliament,” the first complete parliament in English history. His summons stated that “what touches all should be approved by all and … measures should be taken against common dangers that are agreed upon by all.” Thus Edward summoned “from every borough, city, and county” two citizens to join the assembly of barons and chief priests in the great council at Westminster. These individuals were elected in each locality from among the most prominent citizens; in a society where very few were literate general elections in the modern sense never occurred to anyone. In the “Model Parliament” the “commons” did not have equal powers with the nobility. Parliament still did not meet annually and, being the sole legislative authority, convened its sessions at its own pleasure. But by 1295 the principle had been accepted that no one had the right to repeal a law passed by parliament except parliament itself. Two years later in 1297 it was also agreed that no authority had the right to impose taxes without parliament's approval. These were small seeds that in time grew into the most fruitful tree of democratic government in human history. The clergy only reluctantly participated in this expanded parliament. The clergy sat separately and, except in their diocesan assemblies, gave no vote for state expenses in any matter. Ecclesiastical courts continued to handle all cases relating to canon law and most cases in which one party was a cleric. Clergy accused of misdemeanors or felonies could be tried in secular courts but their conviction for crimes, except those guilty of high treason, was handed over to an ecclesiastical court because of “benefit of clergy,” and only that court had the right to punish them. Moreover in secular courts most judges were members of the clergy since the study of human law was the preserve of the clergy. During Edward I's reign the secular character of the secular courts increased. When the clergy refused to vote on state expenses in parliament Edward I, saying that whoever is protected by the government must bear the government's burdens, ordered his courts to hear any case in which the defendant was a cleric. Moreover Edward in retaliation had the council of 1279 approve the Statute of Mortmain, which made the granting of lands to religious institutions conditional on the king's consent. Despite this separation of jurisdictions English law during the reigns of William I, Henry II, John, and Edward I rapidly evolved. These laws were completely feudal and harshly oppressive toward the serf class. Free men were usually fined for crimes against serfs. The law granted women the right to own property, inherit, donate, contract, sue and be sued, and considered a woman entitled to one-third of her husband's immovable property as dower, but all movable property that a woman brought to her husband's house at marriage or acquired during married life belonged to the husband. From a legal viewpoint all the kingdom's lands belonged to the king, and whoever owned land was a vassal of the monarch.

Normally the entire estate of a feudal baron was transferred to his eldest son so that not only the estate remained intact and undivided but the vassal's responsibility for paying tributes and performing military service to his feudal overlord would not be divided. Among free peasants such a rule for restricting and transferring all property to the eldest son was not customary. In a law so devoted to feudal principles and foundations the law of contracts remained imperfect. The “Great Charter of Measures” in 1197 classified weights, measures, and coins according to principles and subjected them to certain rules, and stipulated that government officials should supervise their enforcement. The enactment of enlightened laws for commercial transactions in England began with the Statute of Merchants (1283) and the Charter of Merchants (1303), two other achievements of the creative reign of Edward I. Legal procedure gradually evolved. To guarantee the enforcement of laws every district had a “reeve,” every borough a sheriff, and every county a governor or reeve. All individuals were obliged, as soon as they observed a violation of the law, to “raise the hue and cry” and join others in arresting the offender. The law allowed a defendant to be released on bail.

It is to the credit of English law that it did not permit torture in the interrogation of suspects or witnesses.

When Edward II, at the insistence of the French king Philip IV, arrested the Knights Templar in England he could find no evidence to prove their guilt. Therefore Pope Clement V, undoubtedly under pressure from Philip, wrote to Edward: “We have heard that you prohibit torture because it is contrary to the laws of the country. But no law of the land can be superior to canon law, that is, our law. Therefore we command you to immediately torture those individuals.” Edward submitted, but torture was not used again in English judicial procedure until the reign of Bloody Mary Tudor (1553–1558). The Normans introduced the old system known as inquest by jury—composed of several local sworn citizens to discover the truth—into financial and judicial affairs of every district. The “Great Charter of Clarendon” (c. 1166) used this jury precedent and stipulated that litigants could, instead of resorting to trial by combat, refer disputed issues to a court composed of four knights appointed by the sheriff or reeve, to a jury of twelve knights chosen from the local people. Usually such an assembly formed the high court or criminal court; in the court of first instance or misdemeanor court, which handled ordinary and misdemeanor cases, the reeve himself selected twelve free men from the local people to form the jury. Men sometimes avoided jury service, and it never occurred to them that the principle of jury formation would become one of the foundations of popular or democratic government. By the end of the thirteenth century almost everywhere in England the jury trial plan had replaced the age-old methods of barbarian law.

5 – The Scene of English Society

In 1300 England was ninety percent a rural country with a hundred towns, none of which by modern standards was larger or more important than a large village, and one city, London, which boasted about forty thousand inhabitants—such a population four times that of any other town in England—but London in wealth or beauty was in no way comparable to Paris, Bruges, Venice, or Milan, let alone cities like Constantinople, Palermo, or Yarm. Houses with triangular roofs, two or three stories of wood whose upper floors often projected beyond the lower ones. City regulations did not allow kitchen, bedroom, or bath waste and refuse to be thrown from windows, but tenants of the upper floors often used this convenient means. Most house drains joined the rainwater flow that ran beside the sidewalks in streets and alleys. Emptying excrement into this street gutter was prohibited, but urinating into it was permitted. The city association did what it could for improvement and sanitation: it forced citizens to sweep the part of the street in front of their houses; in case of failure to perform such a duty it fined individuals and hired “sweepers” to collect garbage and refuse and transfer it by special refuse boats on the Thames. Many city dwellers kept horses, herds, pigs, and poultry, but this was not so problematic since there was plenty of open land and almost every house had a garden. Here and there a stone building like the Temple Church or Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London stood out—the latter, by order of William the Conqueror, was built as a fortress to protect the capital and imprison important persons. The people of London were proud of their city; Froissart the chronicler wrote: “These people are more influential than all the people of other parts of England, since they surpass them in number and power”; and the opinion of the English monk Thomas Walsingham was that “they are almost the most greedy, quarrelsome, and selfish people of the kingdom, who believe neither in ancient customs nor in God.”

During these centuries the fusion of Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Celtic stocks and the mixture of the language and customs of all of them created English morals, language, and nation. As soon as Normandy was separated from England the English Norman families forgot Normandy and became attached to their new homeland. The mystical and poetic traits of the Celtic people especially remained among the lower classes but were moderated by the strength and worldliness of the Norman race. Amid the conflict between nations and classes and the pressures of famine and plague the British native was still able to create an environment that Henry of Huntingdon (1084–1155) called “merry England”—a nation overflowing with vigorous energy, rough jokes, loud games, sociable, and fond of dancing, singing, and drinking beer. From those generations and that vigorous stock came the extraordinary lust of the pilgrims in Chaucer's tales and the bombastic boasts of the rough and refined knights of Elizabeth's time.

IX – Ireland, Scotland, Wales: 1066–1318

In 1154 Henry II became king of England and an Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, as Adrian IV ascended the papal throne. A year later Henry sent John of Salisbury with a clever message as representative to the pope in Rome. Henry said that Ireland was a country afflicted with political chaos, literary decline, moral decay, and religious independence and corruption, and under these conditions asked the pope for permission to conquer that independent-minded island, establish social order there, and make the people obedient to the pope. If Gerald of Wales is to be believed the pope agreed to this proposal and by a bull granted Ireland to Henry on condition that he again establish proper government there, provide better cooperation between the Irish clergy and Rome, and decree that every family in Ireland annually pay one penny to the Roman ecclesiastical diocese. Henry at that time was too busy to use this official papal approval, but he accepted what the pope had proposed. In 1166 Dermot MacMurrough, king of Leinster, whose wife had been seduced by the wife of the king of Brefni, Tiernan O'Rourke, was defeated by him in war and, when his subjects exiled him, fled with his beautiful daughter Eva to England and France.

Dermot received a letter from Henry II to the effect that anyone among his subjects who helped Dermot to achieve his legitimate right, that is, the kingship of Leinster, should consider himself under the king's favor. In Bristol, in the Welsh region, Dermot agreed, in exchange for obtaining a military aid commitment, to give his daughter Eva in marriage to Richard fitz Gilbert, earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow (strong bow), and transfer the right of succession to the kingship of Leinster to him. In 1169 Richard again regained the throne for Dermot and after his death in 1171 inherited Leinster. Rory O'Connor, who was then high king of Ireland, moved with an army against the Welsh invaders and besieged them in Dublin. The besieged Welsh soldiers with great courage broke the enemy ranks, and the Irish army, which had neither skill in the arts of war nor sufficient equipment, fled. At this time since Henry II had summoned “Strongbow” he set out for Wales, met the king, and agreed to surrender Dublin and other Irish ports to Henry and keep the rest of Leinster as a fief of the English king.

Henry landed near Waterford with four thousand soldiers (1171), gained the support of the Irish clergy, and all Ireland except Connacht and Ulster swore fealty to him. Thus the conquest by a group of Welsh became the Norman and English domination of Irish soil. A synod composed of Irish chief priests declared complete obedience to the pope and decreed that from then on the rites and ceremonies of worship in the Irish Church must conform to those of England and Rome. Most Irish kings were allowed to keep their crowns and thrones on condition of feudal obligations and paying annual tribute to the king of England. Henry had cleverly and economically accomplished his intention, but by mistake thought that the forces he had left behind could preserve peace and calm. His appointees fell upon one another over the spoils, and their assistants and soldiers plundered the country without restraint. The conquerors did their utmost to reduce Irish peasants to serfdom. The Irish resisted with guerrilla warfare, and the result of these clashes was a century of chaos and destruction. In 1315 some Irish chiefs agreed to place their country at Scotland's disposal. At this time the Scottish leader Robert the Bruce had defeated the English at Bannockburn, and Edward, Robert's brother, with 6,000 soldiers had landed on Irish soil. Pope John XXII excommunicated all who rose to help the Scots; nevertheless all the Irish gathered under Edward's banner and in 1316 conferred the kingship on him. Two years later he was defeated near Dundalk and killed, and the revolt collapsed in exhaustion and despair. Ranulf Higden, the fourteenth-century English chronicler, wrote: “The Scots are a hopeful and strong people, and sufficiently headstrong, but when they mix with the English their morals are greatly improved. This people is merciless toward its enemies; it hates slavery more than anything; if a man dies in bed they consider his action a contemptible laziness, and if he gives his life in battle they deem him worthy of great praise.” Ireland remained Irish but lost its freedom. Scotland became British but preserved its freedom.

The Angles, Saxons, and Normans multiplied in the Lowlands and reorganized the country's agricultural life in a feudal manner. Malcolm III was a warrior who repeatedly attacked English soil, but his queen Margaret was a princess of Anglo-Saxon descent who introduced the speaking of English in the Scottish court, brought English-speaking clergy to Scotland, and raised her children with English customs and traditions. The last and strongest of Queen Margaret's sons, David I, made the Church the only means of his rule; he founded monasteries for English-speaking monks at Kelso, Melrose, and Holyrood; to strengthen the Church's finances he collected tithes for the first time in Scotland, and gave so generously from his own purse to chief priests and abbots that the people mistakenly considered him one of the saints. During David I's reign all of Scotland except the Highlands became an English country.

Despite this, nothing was taken from Scotland's independence. English immigrants became patriotic Scots and from among this group came the Stewarts and Bruces. David I attacked Northumberland and conquered it. Malcolm IV lost those lands. William, known as the Lion, who tried to reconquer Northumberland, was captured by Henry II and, in exchange for a pledge to accept the English king's overlordship and be his debtor, regained his throne (1174). Fifteen years later, in exchange for financial help to Richard I for preparing the Third Crusade, he freed himself from this pledge, but the English kings continued to claim feudal overlordship over the Scottish monarchs. Alexander III wrested the Hebrides from Norway and established friendly relations with England; Scotland during his reign enjoyed an age of golden peace and prosperity. After Alexander's death a dispute over succession arose between Robert the Bruce and John Balliol, descendants of David I.

Edward I, king of England, took advantage of this situation and with his help Balliol ascended the throne. But in return the king of England was recognized as overlord (1292). However when Edward ordered Balliol to gather an army and fight France on England's behalf the Scottish nobility and clergy raised the banner of revolt and ordered Balliol to ally with France against England (1295). Edward defeated the Scots at Dunbar (1296), subdued the nobility, deposed Balliol, appointed three Englishmen as governors of Scotland on his behalf, and returned to England.

Many Scottish nobles owned land in England and therefore had no choice but to obey Edward's commands. But older Scots strongly opposed obeying the English. One of these, Sir William Wallace, formed “an army of the common people of Scotland,” routed the English garrison, and for a year ruled as Balliol's regent. But Edward returned and defeated Wallace at Falkirk (1298). In 1305 he captured Wallace and ordered him, according to English law, to be disemboweled and quartered for treason. A year after this event another defender was forced to enter the arena. Robert the Bruce, grandson of the same Bruce who had claimed the throne in 1286, quarreled with John Comyn, one of Edward I's prominent representatives in Scotland, and as a result killed him. After committing such a crime Bruce was forced to raise the banner of revolt and, despite papal excommunication and the support of few nobles, compelled those around him to crown him. As soon as Edward heard this news he set out north with his soldiers but died on the way (1307). Edward II's incompetence was a blessing for Bruce. The Scottish nobility and clergy gathered under that excommunicated king's banner. His strengthened soldiers, under the command of two brave men, his brother Edward and Sir James Douglas, captured Edinburgh, attacked Northumberland, and conquered Durham. In 1314 Edward II advanced north with the largest army Scotland had seen until that date and clashed with the Scots at Bannockburn. Bruce had ordered his soldiers to dig pits in front of their ranks and cover them. Many English soldiers fell into these trenches during the attack, and Edward's army was almost completely destroyed. In 1328 the regency council, which administered England in the name of Edward III, was engaged in war with France and therefore was forced to sign the Treaty of Northampton, according to which Scotland again became an independent country.

Meanwhile a similar struggle in the land of Wales had led to another dispute. William I claimed rule over Wales because he considered it part of the domain of his conquered enemy Harold. William during his reign did not find time to annex Wales to his possessions, but on its eastern border he created three different principalities and encouraged those three princes to expand their domains into Welsh territory. Meanwhile southern Wales was subjected to raids by Norman sea-raiders, and one of the traces of their conquest was the prefix fitz (the same as French fils, meaning son) that was added to some Welsh names. In 1094 Cadwgan ap Bleddyn subdued these Normans. In 1165 the Welsh forces defeated the English at Corwen, and Henry II, who at this time was engaged in conflict with Becket, recognized the independence of southern Wales under the leadership of a enlightened king like Rhys ap Gruffydd (1171). Llywelyn the Great by his skill in war and statecraft almost brought all of Wales under his command. His sons fell upon one another and plunged the kingdom into chaos; but his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (d. 1282) restored unity, made peace with Henry III, and thus created the title Prince of Wales for himself. Edward I, determined to unite Wales and Scotland with England, attacked Wales with a fleet and large army (1282). Llywelyn was killed in an accidental clash with a few border forces. His brother David was captured by Edward, and by order of the English king his head was severed from his body, and the heads of the two brothers were exposed to sun, wind, and rain atop the Tower of London. Wales was annexed to England (1284), and in 1301 Edward conferred the title Prince of Wales exclusively on the crown prince. Amid all these triumphs and falls the people of Wales preserved their ancient language and customs, courageously brought their rugged lands under cultivation, and soothed the pains of their nights and days with storytelling, poetry, music, and singing. It was in this period that their minstrel singers gave shape to the Mabinogion legends and, with a delicate and harmonious mysticism characteristic of the Welsh temperament, enriched their land's literature. Every year minstrels and musicians gathered in an eisteddfod or national assembly—and the antiquity of forming such assemblies is known from 1176. In an eisteddfod assembly the participants usually competed in oratory, literature, singing, and playing musical instruments.

The men of Wales fought bravely, but their warlike period did not last long, since they had a great eagerness to leave the battlefield and return to their homes and personally take charge of protecting their wives, children, and homes. One Welsh proverb testifies to this eagerness for life: “Would that every ray of sunlight were a dagger to pierce the flanks of war lovers.”

X – The Rhineland: 1066–1315

The countries around the lower Rhine and its numerous mouths were among the richest lands of the medieval world. South of the Rhine lay the country of Flanders, which began at Calais, passed through modern Belgium, and ended at Scheldt. Flanders was nominally a fief of the king of France but in practice was ruled by a dynasty of enlightened counts whose only obstacle was the proud independence of the cities. The people near the Rhine were of Flemish stock or of German Lowland descent and spoke a German dialect. West of the Lys River was the home of the Walloons, a mixture of Germans and French of Celtic origin who spoke a French dialect.

Commerce and industry were both the cause of wealth and the source of distress for Ghent, Oudenaarde, Kortrijk, Ypres, and Cassel in the northeastern Flemish regions, and Bruges, Lille, and Douai in the Walloon regions. In 1300 the cities dominated the counts; the heads of the lower courts of the larger communities formed a high court for the whole kingdom and negotiated independently with cities and foreign states. Usually the counts cooperated with the cities, encouraged industries and commerce, kept the purchasing power and value of coins stable, and even from 1100 (two centuries before England) had introduced a uniform system of weights and measures in all the kingdom's cities. Class war ultimately destroyed both the freedom of the cities and the freedom of the counts. While the number, anger, and power of the proletarians increased, and the counts to create a balance against the self-satisfied bourgeoisie took the side of the proletarians, the wealthy merchants stretched out a helping hand to the French king Philip Augustus, and he promised to effectively subject Flanders to the French monarchy and help them.

England, eager to keep its main wool export market free from the supervision of the French king, allied with the counts of Flanders and Hainaut, the duke of Brabant, and Otto IV, emperor of Germany. Philip broke this opportunistic alliance at Bouvines (1214), subdued the counts, and supported the oligarchic government of the Flemish merchants. The struggle between the powers and classes continued. In 1297 Count Guy de Dampierre again allied Flanders with England. The French king Philip the Fair attacked Flanders, imprisoned Guy, and forced him to surrender Flanders to France. But when the French soldiers tried to capture Bruges the common people rose, defeated the invading soldiers, massacred the wealthy merchants, and themselves took control of the city's affairs. Philip, to avenge this disgrace, sent a large army to Flanders. The workers of the cities without prior preparation gathered and formed a large army and at the battle of Courtrai defeated the French knights and mercenary soldiers (1302). Guy de Dampierre, the elderly count, was freed from prison and again appointed to his former position, and the strange alliance of feudal counts and revolutionary proletarians enjoyed victory for ten years. The land that we today call the Netherlands from the third to the ninth century formed part of the domain of the Frankish kings. In 843 this land formed the northern end of the middle kingdom of Lotharingia created by the Treaty of Verdun. In the ninth and tenth centuries the land, to improve defense against Norse invasions, was divided into several feudal fiefs. The Germans who cleared the northern Rhine region of dense forests and settled there called this land Holtland or “wooded lands.” Most of the people of this region were serfs who constantly saw themselves forced to build dikes against floods or drain the lands to find sustenance. Even today half of Holland's soil consists of lands brought out from under the sea waves by creating dikes. There were also cities that were not as wealthy and proud as the cities of Flanders but had a solid foundation in orderly commerce and gradual industry. Among these cities Dordrecht was more prosperous than all. Utrecht was considered one of the centers of learning. Haarlem was the seat of government of the count of Holland. For a time Delft became the capital, and then around 1250 The Hague or 's-Gravenhage was chosen as the seat of government. Amsterdam was first built in 1204; the city originally was a fortress built by one of the feudal lords at the mouth of the Amstel River.

This safe refuge, beside the Zuiderzee and the existence of canals that connected with all sides, encouraged trade. In 1297 the city of Amsterdam was made a free port, meaning that the port accepted merchants' goods and re-exported all without customs duties. From this date onward little Holland played a large share in the economic world. There too, like other prosperous cities of the world, commerce caused the growth of culture. In the thirteenth century we see that Maerlant, one of the poets of Holland, with intense tone mocks the luxurious life of the clergy of the time; and in the monasteries the fine arts of the Dutch, such as sculpture, pottery, painting, and illumination, have begun their unique and very strange life. In the south of Holland lay the duchy of Brabant, which at that time included the cities of Antwerp, Brussels, and Leuven. Liège was independently in the hands of a group of bishops who had given the city a great deal of internal independence.

Lower than the duchy of Brabant and Liège were the states of Hainaut and also the duchies of Limburg and Luxembourg, as well as the duchy of Lorraine with the cities of Trier, Nancy, Metz, and several other principalities that were nominally subject to the German Empire and in practice for most of their affairs under the command of the ruling counts. Each of these regions had its own exciting history of political events, love affairs, and wars, and we mention them with respect and pass on. In the south and west of these regions lay Burgundy, which today forms the eastern part of central France; the borders of this province over time underwent so much change and transformation that mentioning them, even briefly, is beyond the scope of this history, and so many proud necks fell to the ground over its possession that counting them requires a separate chapter. In 888 Rudolf I made it an independent kingdom. In 1032 Rudolf III ceded it to Germany, but in the same year part of Burgundy's land, as a duchy, was annexed to France.

The dukes of Burgundy, like the previous kings of this region, ruled their subjects with prudence and most desired peace. The brilliant age of their rule is one of the important events of fifteenth-century Europe. In classical times Switzerland was the home of several tribes such as the Helvetii, Raetians, and Lepontii—a mixture of Celtic, Teutonic, and Italian stocks. In the third century the Germans conquered the northern plateau and gave it a Germanic character. After the fall of the Carolingian Empire this land was divided into several feudal fiefs, all subject to the Holy Roman Empire. But enslaving mountain people is a difficult matter, and the Swiss, while accepting some feudal obligations, soon freed themselves from the bondage of serfdom. The inhabitants of this region's villages gathered without outside interference, freely elected their leaders, and according to the laws of the Germans and Burgundians, which were based on ancient Germanic systems, managed their affairs. The peasants around Lake Lucerne united to protect one another's lives and property and formed the “Forest Cantons” (or Waldstätte), which consisted of Uri, Nidwalden, and Schwyz—from the last of which the name of the country of Switzerland is derived.

The strong inhabitants of the cities that had arisen beside the Alpine passes, such as Geneva, Constance, Freiburg, Bern, and Basel, enjoyed independence and freedom in choosing their officials and governors and enforcing their laws as long as they paid the basic feudal tributes; the feudal lords did not oppose this practice. The counts of Habsburg, who from 1173 held the northern regions, were an exception to this general rule, and since they tried in the worst way to force their subjects to pay feudal tributes they made themselves hated by the people of Schwyz. In 1291 the three forest cantons formed a “perpetual alliance” and swore to help one another in case of foreign invasion or internal disturbance, to settle all their disputes by mediation, and to consider worthy of the robe of judgment only one who was a native of the Swiss valley or had not bought his office with money. Soon Lucerne, Zurich, and Constance joined the alliance. In 1315 the Habsburg dukes, to force the people to pay all feudal tributes, sent two armies to Switzerland. The infantry of Schwyz and Uri, armed with battle-axes, at the Morgarten pass defeated the Austrian cavalry in the “Swiss Marathon battle.” The Austrian forces retreated. The three forest cantons renewed their mutual defense pact on December 9, 1315, and formed the Swiss Confederation. At this time Switzerland was still not an independent country; the free citizens of this alliance accepted some feudal obligations and the overlordship of the Holy Roman Emperor, but the feudal lords and Holy Roman emperors (by their experiences) had learned that they must respect the power of the freedom of Swiss cities and cantons; the victory at Morgarten prepared the ground for creating the most solid and reasonable democracy in history.

XI – France: 1060–1328

1 – Philip Augustus

When Philip II, known as Augustus, ascended the throne (1180) France was a small country, weary of foreign invasions, and its outward appearance did not indicate its future power and greatness. Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Touraine, and Aquitaine, with an area three times the entire domain of the king of France, were in England's hands. Most of Burgundy had joined Germany, and the prosperous province of Flanders was in practice an independent principality. The provinces of Lyon, Savoy, Chambéry, Provence (in southeastern France, famous for its excellent wines, vegetable oil, fruit, and lyric poets), and the cities of Arles, Avignon, Aix, and Marseille each enjoyed independence.

Dauphiné, around Vienne, as part of Burgundy's land had been ceded to Germany and was now independently under a dauphin who took this title as his family name from “dolphin.” France itself was divided into several duchies, counties, seigneuries, and estates of stewards and royal overseers, this hierarchy indicating the degrees of dependence of the governors of these divisions—or in other words the dukes, counts, lords, stewards, and overseers—on the king. The collection of these lands, which in the ninth century was called Francia, to varying degrees and with many limitations was subject to the commands of the king of France. Paris, the king's capital, in 1180 was a city with wooden buildings and streets full of mud; even its Roman name testified to this, since at that time the capital was called Lutetia or “city of mud.” Philip Augustus, annoyed by the stench of the city's streets beside the Seine, ordered that all the streets of Paris be paved with solid stones.

He was one of the three powerful kings who in this era raised France to the leadership of Europe in intellectual, moral, and political matters. But before him also powerful men had ruled France. Philip I, who at the age of forty-five divorced his wife and encouraged Fulk, count of Anjou, to give him his wife Countess Bertrade in marriage, was one of these, since with this action he made a place for himself in history. A priest was found to help with religious ceremonies turn this adultery into a legitimate marriage, but Pope Urban II, who at this time had entered French soil to incite people to the First Crusade, excommunicated the king. Philip for twelve years persisted in his action; finally he separated from Bertrade and confessed his sin; but shortly after this event he regretted his action and recalled his queen. Bertrade accompanied Philip to Anjou. She taught her two husbands the lesson of friendship; and apparently as far as her seductive charm allowed she won the hearts of both.

Philip, who at forty-five had become a fat man, handed over the important affairs of the kingdom to his son Louis VI, who was also known as Louis the Fat; he deserved a better name. Louis spent twenty-four years fighting robber barons who stole travelers' goods on the roads and finally succeeded in these struggles. He strengthened the foundations of the monarchy by forming a capable army; he did what he could to support peasants, artisans, and communes and, with good judgment, chose Suger, the abbot of Saint-Denis, as chancellor and intimate advisor. Suger was the Richelieu of the twelfth century. Through wisdom, justice, and foresight he managed France's affairs; he encouraged agriculture and advanced it; he undertook the design and construction of one of the first and finest masterpieces of the Gothic style; and he wrote a comprehensive and accurate account of his administrative work and daily actions. Suger served Louis the Fat until the last moment of his life; and he himself was the most precious legacy that Louis left for his son. Louis VII was a man about whom Eleanor of Aquitaine said: “I thought I was marrying a king, but I found him to be a monk.” Louis endeavored with sincerity and according to his conscience to perform the duties of kingship, but his virtues ruined his home. His devotion to governing the kingdom seemed to Eleanor a neglect of marital duties. His patience toward her love affairs added insult to negligence until finally Eleanor divorced her husband, married Henry II king of England, and presented the duchy of Aquitaine to her new husband.

Louis, thus disappointed, again returned to the corner of asceticism and piety and left the important task of creating a strong France to his son. Philip II, known as Augustus, like another Philip who later ascended the throne, was like a “noble bourgeois” who had placed the royal crown on his head; that is, he had much intelligence for performing affairs that feelings diminished in intensity; he encouraged learning and literature without himself having talent for acquiring knowledge; he was a man cautious with cunning, cautious yet brave, of a quick-tempered nature, and ready to pardon.

Such a man, who was at once harsh and respectable, pleasantly inflexible and cruelly wise, was exactly the person France needed for its survival against Henry II's England and Frederick Barbarossa's Germany.

His marriages caused turmoil in Europe. His first wife, Isabelle, died in 1189. Four years later he married Ingeborg, a Danish princess. These marriages had a political character and involved more wealth than love. Ingeborg did not please Philip. After one day he ignored her, and before a year had passed since this marriage he forced a council of French bishops to issue a divorce decree. Pope Celestine III refused to confirm the bishops' decree. In 1196 Philip, despite the pope's opposition, married Agnes of Merania. Celestine excommunicated him, but Philip persisted and it is related that when his concubine's feelings were aroused he said: “I would rather lose half my realm than separate from Agnes.” Innocent III ordered him to take Ingeborg back; when Philip refused the invincible pope prohibited all religious ceremonies in the churches of France. Philip became angry and deposed all the bishops who obeyed the pope and envied Saladin “who is not under the command of one pope,” and threatened to convert to the faith of Muhammad [peace be upon him]. After four years of this religious struggle the people gradually began to murmur from fear of hell's torment. Philip was forced to separate from his beloved Agnes (1202) but kept Ingeborg imprisoned at Étampes until 1213. And finally in that year he admitted her to his bed.

Amid these joys and hardships Philip again wrested Normandy from England's grasp (1204) and in the next two years annexed Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou to the lands directly under his administration.

Now he was strong enough to overcome all the dukes, counts, and lords of his realm. His special overseers and stewards supervised local governments; his royal domain was no longer a strip of land beside the Seine but a great and powerful kingdom counted among the important countries of the world. John, king of England, who had now lost his possessions in France, could not remain idle. He encouraged Otto IV, emperor of Germany, and the counts of Boulogne and Flanders to ally with him against this French expansionism.

It was agreed that John would attack from Aquitaine (which was still in England's possession) and the others from the northeast. Instead of dividing his soldiers into large groups to counter these separate attacks Philip with his main forces attacked John's allies and defeated them at Bouvines near Lille (1214). That battle decided several matters: it caused Otto's deposition; it placed the German throne in Frederick II's hands; it ended German domination; it accelerated the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; it made the counts of Flanders subject to the king of France; it added Amiens, Douai, Lille, and Saint-Quentin to French territory and in effect extended northeastern France to the Rhine. It left John, king of England, defenseless against his barons and forced him to sign Magna Carta. It weakened the monarchy and strengthened feudalism in England and Germany but, quite the opposite, strengthened the French monarchy and weakened its feudalism; and finally created favorable conditions for the progress and advancement of the communes and middle classes of France that in war and peace had supported Philip separately. Philip, who had tripled his royal domain, with sincerity and skill set about organizing its affairs. Since he had been in conflict with the Church for half his time he shortened the hand of the clergy from the state council and government formations and employed members of the legal class. He granted charters of self-government to many cities; by granting privileges to merchants he encouraged commerce; he intermittently supported the Jews and plundered their property; he received cash instead of feudal services and thus filled his treasury. The king's daily revenues doubled from 600 livres to 1,200 livres (240,000 dollars). During his reign the exterior of Notre-Dame was completed and the Louvre was built as a fortress to protect the Seine. When Philip died (1223) modern France had come into existence.

2 – St. Louis

The reign of his son Louis VIII was too short to accomplish any brilliant work. History remembers Louis VIII more because he married a woman as virtuous as Blanche of Castile and by this marriage had a son who in medieval history, like Ashoka in ancient India, was both a king and a saint. When Louis VIII died his son Louis IX was twelve years old and Blanche was thirty-eight. Blanche was the daughter of Alfonso IX king of Castile and granddaughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, that is, of royal lineage, and lived like a princess. She was a beautiful and charming, strong, and virtuous and capable woman; at the same time, since during her married life and after her husband's death she kept her chastity and devoted herself to raising her eleven children, she greatly influenced the people of her time; France not only honored her as “Blanche, the beloved queen” but respected her equally as “Blanche, the beloved mother.” Blanche freed many serfs of the royal estates; she spent large sums on charitable works; she prepared dowries for girls who because of poverty did not dare to love or hope for marriage; and she helped pay the costs of building Chartres Cathedral; it was through her influence that on the stained-glass windows of that cathedral Mary was depicted not as a girl with a child but as a queen. Blanche loved her son Louis exceedingly and her jealousy in this regard was so great that she was narrow-minded toward Louis's wife.

The queen with great effort honestly educated Louis in Christian principles and told him that the death of her child was far preferable to his committing one of the mortal sins. But Blanche was not responsible for Louis's strange devotion to the Church. She herself less often sacrificed politics to feelings, as her joining the cruel crusade against the Albigensians was for the purpose of extending royal power in the southern regions of France. For nine years (1226–1235), while Louis was growing up, Blanche administered the kingdom, and it had rarely happened that France had seen a more capable king than this woman. At the beginning of Blanche's regency the barons, hoping that they could regain the powers they had lost in Philip II's time from a woman, raised the banner of revolt. Blanche with her wisdom and diplomacy combined with patience overcame them. She resisted England with sufficient ability and then agreed to fair conditions for a truce. When Louis IX came of age and took the reins of government he inherited a kingdom that was strong, prosperous, and enjoying peace.

Louis was a handsome youth, a head taller than most knights, with finely chiseled features, white skin, and rich golden hair. He was a very cheerful man who loved fine clothes and luxurious furnishings; he showed great interest in books; but he was fond of hunting and falconry, amusements, and field sports.

At this time he had not yet become a saint, since a monk complained to Blanche that the king consorted with women.

Blanche found him a wife, and Louis settled down. He became a model of fidelity to marital principles and an outstanding example of performing paternal duties; Louis had eleven children and he himself carefully supervised their education. Gradually he abandoned luxuries, became more interested in simple living, and devoted all his efforts to government affairs, charitable works, and worship. Louis believed that the monarchy was a means for national unity and the survival of the people, and also for protecting the weak and poor against the strong or a few fortunate people.

He respected the rights of the nobility, encouraged them to fulfill their obligations toward serfs, vassals, and overlords, but was unwilling to see any of the feudal governors violate the new royal powers. Wherever there was injustice by a lord toward a subject Louis intervened severely and in several cases harshly punished lords who without due process had killed their men. When Enguerrand de Coucy hanged three Flemish students for killing some rabbits in his domain, by Louis's order he was imprisoned in the Louvre fortress, and the king threatened to hang Coucy; finally he was released from prison on conditions—1) to build three chapels where daily Mass would be celebrated for the three slain; 2) to donate the forest where the young students had caught rabbits to the monastery of St. Nicholas; 3) to be deprived in his domains of hunting rights and jurisdiction over disputes; 4) to spend three years of his life in Palestine in service; 5) to pay the king a fine equivalent to 12,500 pounds. Louis condemned vengefulness, revenge, and feudal private wars and considered dueling a reprehensible matter. As trial by evidence gradually replaced single combats the baronial courts also gave way to royal courts. These courts in each locality were formed by overseers or representatives of the king. The right of appeal from the judgments of baronial court judges to the king's central court of justice was established, and during the thirteenth century in the country of France, like England, feudal law gave way to a common national law. Since the Roman conquest France had never enjoyed such prosperity and security. During the reign of St. Louis France's wealth reached a degree that enabled it to raise the Gothic architectural style to its peak of elevation and richness. Louis believed and proved that a government could be just and generous in its foreign relations without losing any of its dignity and power. He avoided war as much as possible, but when there was danger of aggression he skillfully prepared his soldiers, planned his campaigns before the wars began, and in Europe carried out such plans with strength and skill and made peace so honorably that there was no room for attention to revenge. He restored to those two countries territories that his successors had taken from England and Spain. His advisors were distressed and saddened by this action, but Louis's action caused the continuation of peace and even during the long years that Louis was away from home engaged in crusades France remained safe from the danger of invasion. Guillaume de Chartres wrote of Louis: “The people feared him because they knew he was a just man.” From 1243 to 1270 France was not at war with any Christian enemy. When France's neighbors fought one another Louis made the utmost effort to reconcile them and mocked the opinion of his advisors who said that such conflicts should be encouraged to weaken potential enemies.

Foreign kings referred their disputes to his arbitration. People wondered how such a gentle man was such a gentle king. Louis was not completely without fault or, as one writer said, “a perfect monster that the world has never seen”; he was sometimes, perhaps because of illness, hot-tempered. Sometimes his inner purity reached a degree that inclined him to gullibility or committing foolishness, among which were his crusades that were taken on miscalculation, and his clumsy struggles in Egypt and Tunis that cost his own life and that of others. Although Louis was upright in dealing with his Muslim enemies he could not apply to them the same gentlemanly understanding that he successfully used toward his Christian enemies.

His childish certainty in religion led him to a religious intolerance that helped establish the Inquisition in France and silenced the natural compassion of his for the victims of the Albigensian Crusade. His treasury was filled with the confiscation of the property of condemned heretics, and the usual humor of his feet when it reached the French Jews became lame.

Apart from these defects Louis, in the details of morality, in a worthy manner resembled a man who was the Christian ideal. Joinville says: “I never heard him speak ill of anyone in my life. When the Muslims released Louis in exchange for a sum they thought was the full ransom and in reality was less than 10,000 livres (2,000,000 dollars), the king, despite his advisors' protests, sent the remainder to the Muslims. Before setting out on his first crusade he ordered all his officials throughout the kingdom to “accept in writing the complaints of anyone who has a grievance against us or our ancestors, and also regarding the injustices or extortions of the overseers, governors, foresters, executioners, and their subordinates, and investigate those complaints.” Joinville says: “Often, after Mass, he would go to the forest of Vincennes, sit on the ground, lean against a tree, and force us to sit around him; all who had demands or complaints, without usher or doorkeeper or hindrance, would come and speak with him.” He personally handled some cases and referred others to advisors sitting around him; but for every complaint he granted the right of appeal to the king. Louis founded and endowed a countless number of hospitals, asylums, monasteries, hostels for pilgrims, residences for the blind, and a house (famous as the house of the daughters of God) for repentant prostitutes. He ordered his officials in every province to find elderly and needy people and provide them with aid from the public treasury. He had made this a moral duty that wherever he went he daily fed one hundred and twenty poor people, invited three of them to sit at his table, served them food himself, and washed their feet. Like Henry king of England he served lepers and fed them with his own hands. When famine struck Normandy he spent large sums to provide food for the needy people of that region. Every day he gave “so much alms to the sick, poor, widows, imprisoned women, prostitutes, and disabled laborers that it was almost impossible to count the amount.” Moreover he did not allow any noise to be made about such alms so that their reward would not be lost. The poor whose feet he washed were chosen from among the blind. This act was performed in private and away from view, and the poor were not told that the one who had girded himself to serve them was the king. The wounds he had inflicted on himself in the corner of solitude remained unknown to others until after his death they were clearly seen on his skin. In the struggles of 1242 in the marshy regions of Saintonge he fell ill with fever and ague. The illness caused chronic anemia; Louis was near death in 1244. Perhaps because of understanding such conditions he turned more to religion. To tell the truth, it was after recovering from this particular illness that he participated in the ceremonies of taking the cross for a crusade. He, in the manner of ascetics, by killing carnal desires weakened his own strength.

When he returned from the first crusade, although he was only thirty-eight, his back was bent and his head hairless, and nothing remained of his youth except the radiant dignity of his faith. Under his brown monk's robe he wore a garment woven of hair and ordered small iron chains to be beaten on his body like a scourge. He loved the Franciscan and Dominican monks dearly and helped them generously. His interest in monasticism was so great that he really wanted to become a Franciscan and with difficulty could dissuade himself from such a thought. One day a bold woman said to him: “It would be better if someone else were king instead of you, for you are only king of the Franciscans and Dominicans … It is a disgrace that you are king of France. It is strange that you are not deposed.” Louis replied: “You are right … I do not deserve to be king and if the Savior's will had so decreed another person would have sat in my place who would better know how to govern the kingdom.”

He with all his deep piety and asceticism was not a tool of the clergy. He knew that the clergy were also human and fallible; he gave them good examples and did not refrain from open rebuke. He limited the powers of ecclesiastical courts and confirmed the power of civil law over all subjects, clergy and laity. In 1268 by issuing the first royal decree he limited the powers of the papal office in appointing persons to ecclesiastical positions and imposing taxes in France: “We decree that no one in any way has the right to collect or obtain the taxes and dues imposed by the court of Rome … unless it is for a reasonable, sacred, and very necessary matter … and is explicitly approved by our will and from us and is with the consent of the Church of our realm.” Although historians generally consider this action of Louis noble it is possible that Philip IV's advisors forged it as a weapon against Boniface VIII. See also “The Catholic Encyclopedia,” Louis IX.

Despite Louis's inclinations toward seclusion and association with monks he always remained a king, and even when Joinville described him as “a thin and slender man with a face like an angel and a countenance shining with the light of faith” his royal dignity was preserved. Before setting out on his first crusade he walked on foot, wearing coarse clothes and holding a staff like one of the pilgrims. When he appointed Queen Blanche with full powers to the regency he, that elderly woman who was sixty, wept bitterly at parting and said: “O most beautiful sweet soul, O dear and beloved son, my eyes will no longer be brightened by your beauty.” Louis was captured in Egypt and with great difficulty Blanche was able to collect and pay the sums the Muslims demanded as ransom. But when he returned defeated and humiliated to France (1252) his mother had passed away. In 1270 Louis, weakened by illness, again set out on a crusade, this time to Tunis. This perilous action was not as strange, fruitless, and ridiculous as it was mocked after Louis's defeat. Louis had sent his brother Charles d'Anjou with a French army to Italy hoping not only to prevent German domination of that land but also to make the island of Sicily a base for a French attack on Tunisian soil. Shortly after Louis set foot on Tunisian soil that great crusader, who was physically much thinner than his years, died of dysentery. Twenty-seven years later the Church officially placed him among the saints. Subsequent centuries and generations considered his reign the golden age of France and wondered why the mysterious power of the Creator did not again grant them a man like him. Louis was a Christian king.

3 – Philip the Fair

France became stronger as a result of the crusades in which it played an important role. The long reigns of Philip Augustus and Louis IX gave the French government durability and stability, whereas England suffered from the rule of a careless man like Richard I, a reckless king like John, and an incompetent person like Henry III, and Germany was also fragmented due to wars between emperors and popes. In the history of 1300 AD France had become the strongest country in Europe. Philip IV was called “the Fair” because he had a tall stature and a handsome face; in statecraft he was cunning and a ruthless daredevil. The scope of his ambitions and goals was broad: he wanted to bring all classes—nobility, clergy, townspeople, and serfs—under the direct supervision of the king and the law of the country, to base the foundations of France's progress more on trade and industry than on agriculture, and to extend France's borders to the Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean Sea, the Alps, and the Rhine. Philip chose his attendants and advisors from among jurists who when they entered his court were imbued with the ideas of the empire and Roman law rather than from among the lords and great clergy who had served the kings of France in the past four centuries. Pierre Flotte and Guillaume de Nogaret were brilliant minds who were indifferent to moral principles and precedents, and Philip, guided by them, reorganized France's legal formations, replaced feudal rights with royal rights, overcame enemies with clever diplomacy, and finally broke the power of the papal office and in effect made the pope a prisoner of France. Philip tried to separate Guyenne from England but found Edward I a very powerful rival. Through marriage he acquired Champagne, Brie, and Navarre, and bought Chartres, Franche-Comté, Lyon, and part of Lorraine with cash. Since Philip the Fair always needed money he spent half his time and alertness inventing taxes and collecting funds. He forced lords to pay cash to be exempt from their military obligations to the king; he repeatedly reduced the fineness of gold coins and insisted that taxes be paid in full-value coins or gold bullion. He exiled the Jews and Lombards; he destroyed the Knights Templar and confiscated their wealth. He prohibited the export of precious metals from his realm; he imposed heavy taxes on imports, exports, and the sale of goods; and he decreed that, as a war tax, every livre of private wealth in France should be subject to one penny duty. Finally Philip, without the pope's approval, taxed the wealth of the Church, which now owned one-fourth of all French soil. The results of this action formed the story of the life of Pope Boniface VIII, and when that elderly pope was defeated in the struggle with Philip and died, it was Philip's money and agents that facilitated the election of a Frenchman named Clement V to the papal throne and transferred the papal office from Rome to Avignon. Never in history had a layman achieved such a great victory in the struggle with the Church. From then on in France jurists ruled over priests. When they wanted to burn the head of the Knights Templar alive, he prophesied at the foot of the pyre that within a year Philip would also close his eyes to the world. This prophecy came true and not only Philip but also Clement died in 1314. At this time the victorious king of France was only forty-six years old. The French people admired his perseverance and courage and had supported him in the struggle with Boniface, but they mentioned his name as the greediest king in their history and cursed him. France was shattered by his victories. His action in debasing the fineness of coins disrupted the country's economy, high prices and rents impoverished the nation, taxes retarded industry, and the expulsion of Jews and Lombards damaged the veins and arteries of commerce and ruined the great fairs. The prosperity that had risen in St. Louis's time took the path of decline during the reign of the master of legal tricks and diplomatic ruses.

In the course of four decades after Philip's death three of his sons sat on the throne and were buried in the ground.

None of them left a son to inherit the powers of government. Charles IV (d. 1328) had several daughters, but opponents to prevent them from ascending the throne revived the ancient Salic law, according to which the daughters of the king of France were deprived of the right to the throne. The closest male who could place the royal crown on his head was Philip of Valois, nephew of Philip the Fair. With his accession to the French throne the Capetian dynasty [which had begun with Hugh Capet] ended and the rule of the Valois dynasty began. With a glance at France in this era it is seen that in economy, law, education, and literature and art significant progress had been made. Because the development of urban industry attracted individuals from fields to cities serfdom was rapidly declining. Paris in 1314 had about two hundred thousand inhabitants and the population of all France was almost 22,000,000. Brunetto Latini, who had fled to France from the political injustices of Florence, was amazed at seeing the peace and calm that reigned in the streets of Paris during Louis IX's reign, the prosperity of the city's trade and handicraft markets, and the fruitful fields and delightful vineyards of the countryside around the capital.

The advancement of the merchant classes and those engaged in professions such as judging, lawyering, and medicine, whose wealth almost rivaled that of the nobility, made the presence of their representatives in the Estates-General or general assembly of classes necessary. This was the same general assembly of the three classes—composed of nobility, clergy, and commoners—that in 1302 in the city of Paris by order of Philip IV was formed to help him financially and morally in his dispute with Pope Boniface. Such general assemblies of the three classes met only in very necessary cases (1302, 1308, 1314, and …) and carried out their duties under the clever guidance of jurists who had bound themselves to serve the king in a state council. The Parliament of Paris, which was formed during Louis IX's reign, was not an assembly whose members were elected by the nation as representatives, but an assembly composed of about 94 jurists and clergy appointed by the king who met once or twice a year to perform the function of a high court. The judgments issued by this parliament created a series of national laws based on Roman law rather than the law codes of the Franks, and according to classical legal tradition fully supported the monarchy.

The intellectual excitement of the age of Philip IV is well evident from a series of political treatises written by one of the king's supporters named Pierre Dubois (1255–1312). This man was a jurist who in the general assembly of classes in 1302 represented the district of Coutances. Dubois, in an article entitled Petition of the French Nation to the King against Pope Boniface (1304), and in a treatise entitled On the Recovery of the Holy Land (1306), set forth opinions indicating a severe rift that existed at this time between the ideas of French jurists and clergy. Dubois said that church endowments should be confiscated; from now on the Church should receive no financial help from the government; the French Church should be separated from the Roman papal office; all secular powers should be taken from the papal office; and governmental powers should be above all formations. He also suggested that Philip should be placed at the head of a united empire in the position of emperor and make Constantinople his capital.

To handle and settle disputes between nations a international court should be formed and trade with any Christian nation that starts a war with another nation should be prohibited; a language and Eastern sciences school should be established in Rome and women should enjoy the same cultural facilities and political rights that exist for men.

This was the age of the troubadours in Provence and the trouvères in the northern regions, the age of romantic epics like the Chanson de Roland and other songs that appear in the Chanson de geste, and the story of love Aucassin and Nicolette and the Romance of the Rose, and the emergence of the first prominent French historians—Villehardouin and Joinville. In this era great universities appeared in Paris, Orléans, Angers, Toulouse, and Montpellier. It began with men like Roscelin and Abelard and ended with the peak of the perfection of scholastic philosophy. It was the age of the manifestation of the Gothic style, which appeared in the construction of magnificent cathedrals like Saint-Denis, Chartres, Notre-Dame, Amiens, and Reims, and Gothic-style sculpture rose to its highest spiritual degrees of perfection. The French boasted of their country, capital, and culture in a way that is forgivable. A kind of unifying national patriotism replaced the interest in decentralization that was characteristic of the feudal period. People were just beginning to look at their country with a new view, so that in the Chanson de Roland “sweet France” was spoken of with great affection. In France, like Italy, this period was the peak of the perfection of Christian civilization.

XII – Spain: 1096–1285

The Christian reconquest in Spanish soil advanced at the same speed that chaos among the Spanish kings allowed. The popes granted the same title and privileges to Christians who were willing to help expel the Western Muslims from Spain as were special to the crusaders; some Knights Templar came from France to Spain to accomplish this task, and in the twelfth century three religious-military orders of Spanish individuals were formed that were called the Knights of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcántara. In 1118 Alfonso I, king of Aragon, captured Zaragoza. In 1195 the Christians were defeated at Alarcos, but in 1212 they almost completely destroyed the main forces of the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa. This was a decisive victory. The resistance of the Western Muslims collapsed and the Muslims' fortified strongholds fell one after another into Christian hands: Córdoba (1236), Valencia (1238), Seville (1248), and Cádiz (1250). From then on this Christian reconquest remained in abeyance for two centuries until the struggles between the kings were settled.

When Alfonso VIII, king of Castile, was defeated at Alarcos the kings of León and Navarre, who had promised to hasten to his aid, attacked his territory, and Alfonso saw himself forced to make peace with the Muslims to preserve himself against Christian trickery. Ferdinand III again united León and Castile, extended the borders of the Catholic lands to Granada, made Seville his capital, turned its great mosque into his cathedrals, and the Alcázar into his residence. The Church, which at his birth had considered him illegitimate, after his death placed him among the saints. His son Alfonso X was a great scholar and an weak king and was given the titles “the Wise” and “the Astronomer.” Alfonso, fascinated by Islamic culture in Seville, hired Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars to translate Islamic books into Latin for the instruction and increasing knowledge of the people of Europe. He undertook the establishment of an astronomical school whose “Alfonsine Tables” of the celestial bodies and movements of its stars became a standard rule for all Christian astronomers. He gathered a group of historians who in his name compiled a history of Spain and a vast general history of the world. Alfonso composed about 450 poetic pieces, some of which were in Castilian and some in Galician-Portuguese. Many of these poems were set to music and these are the pieces that today are mentioned as the most important authentic songs of the Middle Ages. All the books written by himself or by his order on chess, backgammon, stones, music, navigation, alchemy, and philosophy indicate the enthusiasm and unity of his literary talent. Apparently Alfonso ordered that the Holy Book be translated directly from the original Hebrew into Castilian. During his reign the Castilian language reached the height of its importance and from that date until today has dominated the literary life of Spain. In fact Alfonso laid the foundation of Spanish-language literature. James I of Aragon was wiser than the wise Alfonso; he was the most powerful king of his century in Spain and a rival to Frederick II and Louis IX. In intelligence and fearless courage he resembled Frederick; but because of his disregard for moral principles, multiple divorces, ruthless wars, and occasional ferocity he is not comparable to St. Louis. He plotted to take the southwestern regions of France but Louis with all patience thwarted James's plans, although he was forced to cede Montpellier to him. In old age James planned to conquer Sicily and turn it into a strategic fortress and refuge for commerce, and make the western Mediterranean a Spanish sea, but his life was not long enough and the realization of his wishes was left to his son. Peter III married Constance, daughter of Manfred, son of Frederick who was king of Sicily, and when Charles d'Anjou, enjoying the blessing of the pope, conquered Sicily he felt that that robe suited his own person better, especially since by marriage he inherited it there. Peter rejected the papal overlordship over Aragon, accepted excommunication, and with his soldiers set out by sea toward Sicily.

Spain, like England and France in this era, was both witness to the rise of feudalism and its decline. At the beginning of the era the nobility almost ignored the central government; both this class and the clergy were exempt from taxes, and thus the heavy tax burden on cities and merchants became heavier. But at the end of this era all had submitted to a kingship that was equipped with its own soldiers, supported by the revenues and soldiers of the cities, and enjoying the prestige of a reviving Roman law and considered absolute royal government one of the necessities of rule. At the beginning of this period there was no Spanish law, meaning that the domain of each sultan and emir was subject to a separate law code, and each class in each of these regions had a law specific to itself. By order of Ferdinand III the drafting of new legal principles for Castile began; this action was completed in the reign of Alfonso X. The new legal principles were divided into seven parts, for which reason they became known as the (Laws of the) Seven Parts (1260–1265), which is one of the most complete and important law codes in human legal history. The collection of the Seven Parts, which was based on the laws of the Spanish Visigoths but written in the style of Justinian's legal principles, was more progressive than the conditions of the era allowed; for this reason these laws were mostly ignored for seventy years until in 1338 they became the real laws of Castile and in 1492 encompassed all of Spain. James introduced a similar law code in the land of Aragon. In 1283 Aragon enacted an important law code for regulating commercial and maritime regulations and, first in Valencia and then in Barcelona and Majorca, established courts called the Consulate of the Sea. In the expansion and development of free cities and people's elected organizations medieval Christian Spain was a pioneer of other countries.

The kings, seeking to gain the support of cities against the nobility, granted charters of self-government to many cities. Urban independence in Spain manifested itself as strong feelings. Small cities sought independence from larger cities or from the nobility, the Church, and the king, and when they achieved their goal they installed their gallows in the city square as a sign of freedom. In 1258 Barcelona was administered by a council of two hundred, most of whom were representatives of craft guilds or merchants. For a time the freedom of cities had reached a degree that they independently declared war on one another or on the Moors. But at the same time one of the results of this freedom was the creation of “brotherhood associations” for security or reciprocal actions. In 1295 when the nobility tried to subdue the communes thirty-four cities allied and formed the “Brotherhood of Castile” and undertook to defend their collective rights; and for this purpose they formed a common army. After this association subdued the nobility it supervised and handled the affairs of the king's officials and governors and approved laws that were binding for all member cities (whose number sometimes reached one hundred).

The issue of government in Spain was difficult because of the existence of mountains that separated different regions, since these natural barriers made the implementation of a common and general law impossible. The rugged lands, barren plateaus, and repeated destructions of wars had discouraged farmers from work and turned Spain more into a pasture for herds and flocks. The wool obtained from very purebred sheep flocks set thousands of weaving machines in the cities to work, and through this Spain was able to preserve the fame it had had since ancient times for its fine wool. Internal trade was subject to transportation difficulties and the diversity of weights, measures, and coins. Nevertheless foreign trade in the ports of Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Seville, and Cádiz increased. Catalan merchants were scattered around and about; in 1282 Castilian merchants had a position in Bruges that only the Hanseatic League rivaled. Merchants and manufacturers of goods became the most important source of financial help to the king. The urban proletariat organized itself into craft guilds, but the kings closely supervised these guilds and the working classes were forced to pay all kinds of taxes without having representatives in political formations.

In Christian Spain most industrial workers were either Jewish or Muslim. The Jews in Aragon and Castile became prosperous and successful people and effectively participated in the intellectual activities of these two lands; many of them were wealthy merchants, but at the end of the era under discussion they day by day saw themselves faced with more constraints and limitations. The Muslims were also given much freedom of worship and internal independence. Many of them also became rich merchants, and a few of them became employed in royal courts; Muslim craftsmen by applying Syrian and Iranian shapes and motifs in Christian fine industries created a special style and severely influenced Spanish architecture, carpentry, inlay work, and metalwork. Alfonso VI once out of broad-mindedness called himself “emperor of the followers of two religions.” But in general the Muslims were forced to wear distinctive clothing, reside in a specific quarter in every city, and especially bear a heavy burden of taxes. Finally the wealth that had come from their skill in industrial works and commercial transactions caused the envy and hatred of most Christians. In 1247 James I issued the decree of their expulsion from Aragon. About one hundred thousand of them left there, deprived Aragon of their technical skills, and as a result the country's industry from then on declined. The absorption of part of Islamic culture into Spanish civilization, the incentive to victory over an ancient enemy, the development of industry and wealth, the perfection of customs, manners, and tastes, all provided the grounds for a series of intellectual and aesthetic activities in Spain. In the thirteenth century six universities were established in Spain. It began with Alfonso II king of Aragon, the first troubadour of Spain; soon hundreds like him appeared; these not only composed poetry but cast ecclesiastical rites into non-religious plays and prepared the ground for the masterpieces of Lope de Vega and Calderón; the Spanish national epic known as the Cid belongs to this period. Above all these were the music, songs, and dances that sprang from the hearts of the people and were performed in homes and streets and gradually perfected, becoming magnificent and splendid displays in the courts of kings. The first mention of bullfighting in the modern style is recorded in a wedding celebration that took place in 1107 in Ávila in Castile. By 1300 bullfighting had become a common sport that was popular in all Spanish cities; at the same time the French knights who had come to help expel the Moors brought with them ideas related to chivalry and tournament competitions. Respect for women or the sanctity of one man's exclusive ownership of one woman became a moral restraint and gained importance equal to a man's pride in his courage and honor; dueling to preserve honor became part of Spanish individual life. The mixture of European and African-Semitic blood, the combination of Western and Eastern culture, the blending of major Syrian and Iranian shapes and motifs with Gothic art, and the fusion of Roman solidity with Eastern feelings created the Spanish character and made Spanish civilization in the thirteenth century a unique and interesting element among the arena of European culture.

XIII – Portugal: 1095

In 1095 Count Henry of Burgundy, one of the crusading knights in Spain, so pleased Alfonso VI king of Castile and León that the king gave him his daughter Teresa in marriage and also granted him as a fief and as the bride's dowry a province belonging to León called Portugal—which only thirty-one years earlier had been taken from the Muslims of Spain—and at this time the Moors still ruled the region south of the Mondego River. Count Henry was not a man to submit to anyone and would be satisfied with nothing less than the title of king; therefore from the time the marriage contract was concluded he and his wife began plotting to turn that fief into an independent kingdom. When Henry died (1112) Teresa continued her efforts toward achieving independence. She taught her nobles and vassals to measure affairs by the standard of national freedom; and she encouraged her cities to build fortresses, strengthen positions, and learn the secrets of war. This woman personally led her soldiers in war and during the wars gathered musicians, poets, and lovers around her. Teresa was defeated, captured, freed, and returned to her realm. She spent large amounts of the kingdom's revenues on an illicit love; she was removed from her position, fled the country with her lover, and died in a corner of poverty (1130).

It was through the inspirations and preliminary works of Queen Teresa that her son Alfonso I, known as Henriques, carried out his mother's intentions and goals. Alfonso VII, king of Castile, promised that if Henriques drove the Moors from the lands south of the Douro River he would recognize him as the independent king of all those regions. Alfonso Henriques with all the fearless courage of his father and the liveliness and stubbornness of his mother attacked the Moors and defeated them at Ourique (1139) and called himself king of Portugal. The nobility and great men of both countries encouraged the king to refer his dispute to Pope Innocent II. The pope in this dispute decided in favor of Castile. Alfonso Henriques, to thwart this decision, agreed to consider the new kingdom of Portugal a papal fief and recognize the pope himself as his overlord. The new pope Alexander III accepted this proposal and recognized Henriques as king of Portugal on condition that he annually send a sum as tribute to the papal seat in Rome (1143). After this deal Alfonso Henriques again engaged in war with the Moors, captured the two cities of Santarém and Lisbon, and extended his domain to the Tagus River. During the reign of Alfonso III the kingdom of Portugal reached its present borders, and the city of Lisbon at the mouth of the Tagus, which had an important strategic position, became an important port and the capital of Portugal (1263). An old legend related that Ulysses or Odysseus had discovered this city and given it the ancient name Olisipo, and it was this same ancient name that over time was corrupted and became Olisipo and finally Lisbon. The last years of Alfonso II's reign, because of the outbreak of a civil war between him and his son Denis who had long been waiting for his father's death, were a heart-rending and distressing period. Although Denis's beginning was so suspicious his reign was long (1279–1325) and beneficial. Through marriage with the royal family of León and Castile peace was guaranteed between the two countries and through the mediation of the chaste Queen Isabel the danger of war from his son, that is, the legitimate heir to the throne, was removed. Denis, who had turned his back on the pomp and splendor of war, devoted all his efforts to the economic and cultural progress of his kingdom. He established agricultural schools, taught his subjects better ways of livestock breeding, to prevent soil erosion planted trees, encouraged commerce, undertook the building of ships and the establishment of cities; he created a naval force for Portugal; and he entered negotiations to conclude a commercial treaty with England. For this reason his subjects with great affection called him the “Farmer.” Denis was a diligent administrator and a just judge. He took scholars and poets under his protection and the best poems of that era and environment flowed from his pen. Through his efforts the Portuguese language emerged from being a Galician dialect and became a literary language. In his pastorals Denis cast folk songs into literary form and in his court encouraged troubadours to sing the pleasures and pains of love. Denis himself had a specialty in finding women and preferred his illegitimate children to his legitimate son. When his son raised the banner of revolt and tried to depose his father the saintly Isabel, his mother who lived far from the revelry and merriment of the court, rode into the midst of the hostile armies and bared her breast to be the first victim of that battle, and by this action shamed her husband and son and forced them to make peace (1323).