by Will Durant
4. Italian Civilization: 566–1095
While eastern and southern Italy remained Byzantine in culture, the rest of the peninsula evolved a new civilization—a new language, religion, and art—from its Roman heritage. For even amid invasion, chaos, and poverty, that heritage was never wholly lost. The Italian language was the rude Latin of the ancient populace, transforming itself slowly into the most melodious of all tongues. Italian Christianity was a romantic and colorful paganism, an affectionate polytheism of local and protective saints, a frank mythology of legend and miracle. Italian art suspected Gothic as barbarous, clung to the basilican style, and finally, in the Renaissance, returned to Augustan forms. Feudalism never prospered in Italy; the cities never lost their ascendancy over the countryside; industry and commerce, not agriculture, paved the roads to wealth.
Rome, never a commercial city, continued to decline. Its senate had perished in the Gothic War; its ancient municipal institutions, after 700, were empty tools and rebel dreams. The motley populace, living in a squalor alleviated by sexual license and papal alms, could express its political emotions only by frequent uprisings against foreign masters or disfavored popes. The old aristocratic families spent their time competing with one another for control of the papacy, or with the papacy for control of Rome. Where consuls, tribunes, and senators had once forged laws with rods and axes, social order was now barely sustained by the decrees of ecclesiastical councils, the sermons and agents of bishops, and the dubious example of thousands of monks, of every nationality, not seldom idle and not always celibate. The Church had denounced the promiscuity of the public baths; the great halls and pools of the thermae were deserted, and the pagan art of cleanliness was in decay. The imperial aqueducts having been ruined by neglect or war, the people drank the waters of the Tiber.11 The Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, of bloody memory, were no longer used; the Forum began in the seventh century to revert to the cow pasture from which it had been formed; the Capitol was paved with mire; old temples and public buildings were dismembered to provide material for Christian churches and palaces. Rome suffered more from Romans than from Vandals and Goths.12 The Rome of Caesar was dead, and the Rome of Leo X had yet to be born.
The old libraries were scattered or destroyed, and intellectual life was almost confined to the Church. Science succumbed to the superstition that gives romance to poverty. Only medicine kept its head up, clinging with monastic hands to the Galenic heritage. Perhaps out of a Benedictine monastery at Salerno, in the ninth century, a lay medical school took form which bridged the gap between ancient and medieval medicine, as Hellenized south Italy bridged the gap between Greek and medieval culture. Salerno had been a health resort for over a thousand years. Local tradition described its collegium Hippocraticum as composed of ten physician instructors, of whom one was a Greek, one a Saracen, one a Jew.13 About the year 1060 Constantine “the African,” a Roman citizen who had studied medicine in the Moslem schools of Africa and Baghdad, brought to Monte Cassino (where he became a monk) and to nearby Salerno an exciting cargo of Islamic medical lore. His translations of Greek and Arabic works in medicine and other fields shared in the resurrection of science in Italy. At his death (c. 1087) the school of Salerno stood at the head of medical knowledge in the Christian West.
The distinctive achievement of art in this age was the establishment of the Romanesque architectural style (774-1200). Inheriting the Roman tradition of solidity and permanence, the Italian builders thickened the walls of the basilica, crossed the nave with a transept, added towers or attached pillars as buttresses, and supported with columns or clustered piers the arches that upheld the roof. The characteristic Romanesque arch was a simple semicircle, a form of noble dignity, better fitted to span a space than to bear a weight. In early Romanesque the aisles—in later Romanesque the nave and aisles—were vaulted, i.e., roofed with arched masonry. The exterior was usually plain, and of unfaced brick. The interior, though moderately adorned with mosaics, frescoes, and carvings, shunned the luxurious decoration of the Byzantine style. Romanesque was Roman; it sought stability and power rather than Gothic elevation and grace; it aimed to subdue the soul to a quieting humility rather than lift it to a heaven-storming ecstasy.
Italy produced in this period two masterpieces of Romanesque: the modest church of Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan, and the immense duomo of Pisa. The building from whose doors Ambrose had barred an emperor was rebuilt by Benedictines in 789, and again decayed. From 1046 to 1071 Archbishop Guido had it completely remodeled from a colonnaded basilica into a vaulted church. Nave and aisles, formerly roofed with wood, now sustained—by round arches springing from compound piers—a vaulted ceiling of brick and stone. The groins or ridges formed in the vault by the intersecting masonry arches were reinforced with “ribs” of brick; this is the oldest “ribbed vault” in Europe.
The simple front of Sant’ Ambrogio seems all the world apart from the complex façade of the cathedral of Pisa, but the elements of style are the same. After the decisive victory of the Pisan over the Saracen fleet near Palermo (1063), the city commissioned the architects Buschetto (a Greek?) and Rinaldo to commemorate the battle, and offer part of the spoils to the Virgin, by erecting a shrine that should make all Italy envious. Nearly the entire massive edifice was made of marble. Above the west portals—later (1606) equipped with superb bronze doors—four tiers of open arcades spanned the facade in immoderate iteration. Within, a profusion of elegant columns—booty of varied provenance—divided the church into nave and double aisles; and over the crossing of transept and nave rose an unpleasantly elliptical dome. This was the first of the great cathedrals of Italy; and it remains one of the most impressive works of medieval man.
II. CHRISTIAN SPAIN: 711–1095
The history of Christian Spain in this period is that of one long crusade—the rising resolve to expel the Moors. These were rich and strong; they held the most fertile terrain, and had the best government; the Christians were poor and weak, their soil was difficult, their mountain barriers shut them off from the rest of Europe, divided them into petty kingdoms, and encouraged provincial chauvinism and fraternal strife. In this passionate peninsula more Christian blood was shed by Christians than by Moors.
The Moslem invasion of 711 drove the unconquered Goths, Suevi, Christianized Berbers, and Iberian Celts into the Cantabrian Mountains of northwestern Spain. The Moors pursued them, but were defeated at Covadonga (718) by a small force under the Goth Pelayo, who thereupon made himself King of Asturias, and so founded the Spanish monarchy. The repulse of the Moors at Tours allowed Alfonso I (739–57) to extend the Asturian frontiers into Galicia, Lusitania, and Viscaya. His grandson Alfonso II (791-842) annexed the province of Leon, and made Oviedo his capital.
In this reign occurred one of the pivotal events of Spanish history. A shepherd, allegedly guided by a star, found in the mountains a marble coffin whose contents were believed by many to be the remains of the Apostle James, “brother of the Lord.” A chapel was built on the site, and later a splendid cathedral; Santiago de Compostela—“St. James of the Field of the Star”—became a goal of Christian pilgrimage only less sought than Jerusalem and Rome; and the sacred bones proved invaluable in stirring morale, and raising funds, for the wars against the Moors. St. James was made the patron saint of Spain, and spread the name Santiago over three continents. Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died.
East of Asturias, and just south of the Pyrenees, lay Navarre. Its inhabitants were mostly of Basque stock—probably of mixed Celtic Spanish and African Berber blood. Helped by their mountains they successfully defended their independence against Moslems, Franks, and Spaniards; and in 905 Sancho I García founded the kingdom of Navarre, with Pamplona as his capital. Sancho “the Great” (994-1035) won his title by absorbing Leon, Castile, and Aragon; for a time Christian Spain verged on unity; but at his death Sancho undid his life’s work by dividing his realm among his four sons. The k
ingdom of Aragon dates its existence from this division. By pressing back the Moslems in the south, and peacefully incorporating Navarre in the north (1076), it came by 1095 to include a large part of north-central Spain. Catalonia—northeastern Spain around Barcelona—was conquered by Charlemagne in 788, and was ruled by French counts who made the region a semi-independent “Spanish March”; its language, Catalan, was an interesting compromise between Provençal French and Castilian. Leon, in the northwest, entered history with Sancho the Fat, who was so heavy that he could walk only by leaning upon an attendant. Deposed by the nobles, he went to Cordova, where the famous Jewish physician and statesman Hasdai ben Shaprut cured him of obesity. Now as lithe as Don Quixote, Sancho returned to Leon and reconquered his throne (959).14 Castile, in central Spain, was named from its castles; it fronted Moslem Spain, and lived in continual readiness for war. In 930 its knights refused any longer to obey the kings of Asturias or Leon, and set up an independent state, with its capital at Burgos. Fernando I (1035-65) united Leon and Galicia to Castile, compelled the emirs of Toledo and Seville to pay him yearly tribute, and, like Sancho the Great, canceled his labors with his death by dividing his realm among his three sons, who zealously continued the tradition of internecine war among the Christian Spanish kings.
Agricultural poverty and political disunity kept Christian Spain far behind its Moslem rival in the south and its Frank rival in the north in the amenities and arts of civilization. Even within each little kingdom unity was an interlude; the nobles almost ignored the kings except in war, and ruled their serfs and slaves in feudal sovereignty. The ecclesiastical hierarchy formed a second nobility; bishops, too, owned land, serfs, and slaves, led their own troops in war, usually ignored the popes, and ruled Spanish Christianity as a well-nigh independent church. In 1020 at Leon, nobles and bishops joined in national councils, and legislated as a parliament for the kingdom of Leon. The Council of Leon granted to that city a charter of self-government, making it the first autonomous commune in medieval Europe; similar charters were granted to other Spanish cities, probably to enlist their ardor and funds in the war against the Moors; and a limited urban democracy rose amid the feudalism, and under the monarchies, of Spain.
The career of Rodrigo (Ruy) Diaz illustrates the bravery, chivalry, and chaos of Christian Spain in the eleventh century. He has come down to us rather under the title the Moors gave him of EI Cid (Arabic sayid)—noble or lord—than under his Christian sobriquet of El Campeador—the Challenger or Champion. Born at Bivar near Burgos about 1040, he grew up as a caballero or military adventurer, fighting anywhere for any paying cause; by the age of thirty he was admired throughout Castile for his daring skill in combat, and distrusted for his apparently equal readiness to fight Moors for Christians, or Christians for Moors. Sent by Alfonso VI of Castile to collect tribute due from al-Mutamid, the poet emir of Seville, he was accused, on his return, of keeping part of the tribute, and was banished from Castile (1081). He became a freebooter, organized a small army of soldiers of fortune, and sold his services to Christian or Moslem rulers indifferently. For eight years he served the emir of Saragossa, and extended the Moorish dominion at the expense of Aragon. In 1089, leading 7000 men, mostly Moslems, he captured Valencia, and exacted from it a monthly tribute of 10,000 gold dinars. In 1090 he seized the count of Barcelona, and held him for a ransom of 80,000 dinars. Finding Valencia closed to him on his return from this expedition, he besieged it for a year; when it surrendered (1094) he violated all the conditions on which it had laid down its arms, burned its chief justice alive, divided the possessions of the citizens among his followers, and would have burned the judge’s wife and daughters too had not the city and his own soldiers raised a cry of protest.15 In this and other ways the Cid behaved in the fashion of his times. He atoned for his sins by governing Valencia with ability and justice, and making it a saving rampart against the Almoravid Moors. When he died (1099) his wife Jimena held the city for three years. An admiring posterity transformed him by legend into a knight moved only by a holy zeal to restore Spain to Christ; and his bones at Burgos are revered as those of a saint.16
So divided against itself, Christian Spain achieved its slow reconquista only because Moslem Spain finally surpassed it in fragmèntation and anarchy. The fall of the Cordovan caliphate in 1036 offered an opportunity brilliantly used by Alfonso VI of Castile. With the help of al-Mutamid of Seville he captured Toledo (1085) and made it his capital. He treated the conquered Moslems with Moslem decency, and encouraged the absorption of Moorish culture into Christian Spain.
III FRANCE: 614–1060
1. The Coming of the Carolingians: 614–768
When Clotaire II became king of the Franks, the Merovingian dynasty seemed secure; never before had a monarch of that family ruled so large and united a realm. But Clotaire was indebted for his rise to the nobles of Austrasia and Burgundy; he rewarded them with increased independence and enlarged domains, and chose one of them, Pepin I the Elder, as his “Mayor of the Palace.” The major domus—“head of the house”—had been originally the superintendent of the royal household and overseer of the royal estates; his administrative functions grew as the Merovingian kings concentrated on debauchery and intrigue; step by step he took control of the courts, the army, the finances. Clotaire’s son King Dagobert (628-39) checked for a time the power of the major domus and the grandees. “He rendered justice to rich and poor alike,” says the chronicler Fredegar; “he took little sleep or food, and cared only so to act that all men should leave his presence full of joy and admiration”;17 however, Fredegar adds, “he had three queens and a host of concubines,” and was “a slave to incontinence.”18 Under his negligent successors—the rois fainéants or do-nothing kings—power passed again to the mayor of the palace. Pepin II the Younger defeated his rivals at the battle of Testry (687), expanded his title from major domus to dux et princeps Francorum, and ruled all Gaul except Aquitaine. His illegitimate son Charles Martel (the Hammer), nominally as mayor of the palace and Duke of Austrasia, ruled all Gaul under Clotaire IV (717-19). He resolutely repelled invasions of Gaul by Frisians and Saxons, and saved Europe for Christianity by turning back the Moslems at Tours. He supported Boniface and other missionaries in the conversion of Germany, but in the critical financial needs of his career he confiscated church lands, sold bishoprics to generals, quartered his troops on monasteries, beheaded a protesting monk,19 and was condemned to hell in a hundred sermons and tracts.
In 751 his son Pepin III, as major domus to Childeric III, sent an embassy to Pope Zacharias to ask would it be sinful to depose the Merovingian puppet and make himself king in fact as well as name. Zacharias, who needed Frank support against the ambitious Lombards, answered with a comforting negative. Pepin called an assembly of nobles and prelates at Soissons; he was there unanimously chosen king of the Franks (751); and the last of the do-nothing kings was tonsured and sent to a monastery. In 754 Pope Stephen II came to the abbey of St. Denis outside of Paris, and anointed Pepin rex Dei gratia, “king by the grace of God.” So ended the Merovingian dynasty (486-751), so began the Carolingian (751-987).
Pepin III “the Short” was a patient and far-seeing ruler, pious and practical, loving peace and invincible in war, and moral beyond any royal precedent in the Gaul of those centuries. All that Charlemagne accomplished was prepared by Pepin; in their two reigns of sixty-three years (751-814) Gaul was at last transformed into France. Pepin recognized the difficulty of governing without the aid of religion; he restored the property, privileges, and immunities of the Church; brought sacred relics to France, and bore them on his shoulders in impressive pageantry; rescued the papacy from the Lombard kings, and gave it a spacious temporal power in the “Donation of Pepin” (756). He was content to receive in return the title of patricius Romanus, and a papal injunction to the Franks never to choose a king except from his progeny. He died in the fullness of his power in 768, after bequeathing the realm of the Franks jointly to his sons Carloman II and the Ch
arles who was to be Charlemagne.
2. Charlemagne: 768–814
The greatest of medieval kings was born in 742, at a place unknown. He was of German blood and speech, and shared some characteristics of his people—strength of body, courage of spirit, pride of race, and a crude simplicity many centuries apart from the urbane polish of the modern French. He had little book learning; read only a few books—but good ones; tried in his old age to learn writing, but never quite succeeded; yet he could speak old Teutonic and literary Latin, and understood Greek.20