The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  The new stimulus of freedom co-operated with an immense widening of the agricultural market to improve the methods, tools, and products of tillage. The rising population of the towns, the increase of wealth, the new facilities of finance and trade expanded and enriched the rural economy. New industries created a demand for industrial crops—sugar cane, aniseed, cumin, hemp, flax, vegetable oils, and dyes. The nearness of populous towns promoted cattle raising, dairy farming, and market gardening. From thousands of vineyards in the valleys of the Tiber, the Arno, the Po, the Guadalquivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, the Rhone, the Gironde, the Garonne, the Loire, the Seine, the Moselle, the Meuse, the Rhine, and the Danube wine flowed along the rivers and over land and sea to console the toilers of Europe’s fields, workshops, and counting rooms; even England, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, made wine. To feed the hungry towns, where fast days were numerous and meat was costly, great fleets went out into the Baltic and North Seas to bring in herring and other fish; Yarmouth owed its life to the herring trade; the merchants of Lübeck acknowledged their debt to it by carving herrings on their pews;117 and honest Dutchmen admitted that they had “built upon herrings” the proud city of Amsterdam.118

  Agricultural technique slowly improved. The Christians learned from the Arabs in Spain, Sicily, and the East; and the Benedictine and Cistercian monks brought old Roman and new Italian tricks of farming, breeding, and soil preservation to the countries north of the Alps. The strip system was abandoned in laying out new farms, and each farmer was left to his own initiative and enterprise. In Flanders fields reclaimed from swamps the peasants of the thirteenth century practiced a three-field rotation of crops, in which the soil was used each year, but was triennially replenished by fodder or leguminous plants. Powerful teams of oxen drew iron plowshares more deeply into the soil than before. Most plows, however, were still (1300) of wood; only a few regions knew the use of manure; and wagon wheels were seldom shod with iron tires. Cattle raising was difficult because of prolonged droughts; but the thirteenth century saw the first experiments in the crossing and acclimatization of breeds. Dairy farming was unprogressive; the average cow in the thirteenth century gave little milk, and hardly a pound of butter per week. (A well-bred cow now yields ten to thirty pounds of butter per week.)

  While their masters fought one another, the peasants of Europe fought the greater battle, more heroic and unsung, of man against nature. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth century the sea had thirty-five times swept over barriers and across the Lowlands, creating new gulfs and bays where once there had been land, and drowning 100,000 persons in a century. From the eleventh to the fourteenth century the peasants of these regions, under their princes and abbots, transported blocks of stone from Scandinavia and Germany, and built the “Golden Wall” behind which the Belgians and the Dutch have developed two of the most civilized states in history. Thousands of acres were rescued from the sea, and by the thirteenth century the Lowlands were latticed with canals. From 1179 to 1257 the Italians cut the famous Naviglio Grande, or Great Canal, between Lake Maggiore and the Po, fertilizing 86,485 acres of land. Between the Elbe and the Oder patient immigrants from Flanders, Frisia, Saxony, and the Rhineland turned the marshy Mooren into rich fields. The superabundant forests of France were progressively cleared, and became the farms that through centuries of political turmoil have kept France fed. Perhaps it was this mass heroism of clearance, drainage, irrigation, and cultivation, rather than any victories of war or trade, that provided the foundation on which, in final analysis, rest all the triumphs of European civilization in the last 700 years.

  VIII. THE CLASS WAR

  In the early Middle Ages there had been only two classes in western Europe: German conquerors and native conquered; by and large the later aristocracies in England, France, Germany and northern Italy were descendants of the conquerors, and remained conscious of this blood relationship even amid their wars. In the eleventh century there were three classes: the nobles, who fought; the clergy, who prayed; and the peasants, who worked. The division became so traditional that most men thought it ordained by God; and most peasants, like most nobles, assumed that a man should patiently continue in the class into which he had been born.

  The economic revolution of the twelfth century added a new class—the burgesses or bourgeoisie—the bakers, merchants, and master craftsmen of the towns. It did not yet include the professions. In France the classes were called états—estates or states—and the bourgeoisie was reckoned as the tiers état, or “third estate.” It controlled municipal affairs, and won entry into the English Parliament, the German Diet, the Spanish Cortes, and the States-General—the rarely convened national parliament of France; but it had, before the eighteenth century, little influence on national policy. The nobles continued to rule and administer the state, though they were now a minor force in the cities. They lived in the country (except in Italy), scorned city dwellers and commerce, ostracized any of their class who married a bourgeois, and were certain that an aristocracy of birth is the only alternative to a plutocracy of business, or a theocracy of myths, or a despotism of arms. Nevertheless the wealth that came from commerce and industry began now to compete—and in the eighteenth century would surpass—the wealth that came from the ownership of land.

  The rich merchants fretted over aristocratic airs, and scorned and exploited the craftsman class. They lived in ornate mansions, bought fine furniture, ate exotic foods, and garbed themselves in costly dress. Their wives covered expanding forms with silks and furs, velvets and jewelry; and Jeanne of Navarre, Queen of France, was piqued to find herself welcomed into Bruges by 600 bourgeois ladies as gorgeously robed as herself. The nobles complained, and demanded sumptuary laws to check this insolent display; such laws were periodically passed; but as the kings needed bourgeois support and funds, these laws were only spasmodically enforced.

  The rapid growth of urban population favored the bourgeois owners of city realty; and the consequent unemployment made it easier to manage the manual working class. The proletariat of servants, apprentices, and journeymen had little education and no political power, and lived in a poverty sometimes more dismal than the serf’s. A thirteenth-century day laborer in England received some two pence per day—roughly equivalent, in purchasing power, to two dollars in the United States of America in 1948. A carpenter received four and one eighth pence ($4.12) per day; a mason three and one eighth, an architect twelve pence plus traveling expenses and occasional gifts.119 Prices, however, were commensurately low: in England in 1300 a pound of beef cost a farthing (twenty-one cents); a fowl one penny (eighty-four cents); a quarter of wheat five shillings nine and one half pence ($57.90).120 The work day began at dawn and ended at dusk—sooner on the eve of Sunday or a feast day. There were some thirty feast days in the year, but in England probably not more than six exempted the people from toil. The hours were a bit longer, the real wages no worse—some would say higher121—than in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century England.

  Toward the end of the thirteenth century the class struggle became class war. Every generation saw some revolt of the peasantry, particularly in France. In 1251 the oppressed peasantry of France and Flanders rose against their secular and ecclesiastical landlords. Calling themselves Pastoureux (Shepherds), they formed a kind of revolutionary crusade under the lead of an unlicensed preacher known as “the Master of Hungary.” They marched from Flanders through Amiens to Paris; discontented peasants and proletaires joined them en route, until they numbered over a hundred thousand men. They bore religious banners, and proclaimed devotion to King Louis IX, then a prisoner of the Moslems in Egypt; but they were ominously armed with clubs, daggers, axes, pikes, and swords. They denounced the corruption of government, the tyranny of the rich over the poor, the covetous hypocrisy of priests and monks; and the populace cheered their denunciations. They assumed the ecclesiastical rights of preaching, granting absolution, and performing marriages, and slew some priests who opposed them. Passing on to
Orléans, they massacred scores of clergy and university students. But there and at Bordeaux the police overcame them; their leaders were captured and executed; and the wretched survivors of the futile march were hunted like dogs and dispersed into divers haunts of misery. Some escaped to England, and raised a minor peasant uprising, which was in turn suppressed.122

  In the industrial towns of France the craft guilds rose in repeated strikes or armed insurrection against the political and economic monopoly and dictation of the merchant class. In Beauvais the mayor and some bankers were manhandled by 1500 rioters (1233). At Rouen the textile workers rebelled against the merchant drapers, and killed the mayor who intervened (1281). At Paris King Philip the Fair dissolved the workers’ unions on the ground that they were plotting revolution (1295, 1307). Nevertheless the craft guilds won admission to the municipal assemblies and magistracies at Marseille (1213), Avignon, Arles (1225), Amiens, Montpellier, Nîmes…. Sometimes a member of the clergy would side with the rebels, and give them slogans. “All riches,” said a thirteenth-century bishop, “come from theft; every rich man is a thief or the heir of a thief.”123 Similar revolts disordered the Flanders towns. Despite the penalty of death or banishment for strike leaders, the coppersmiths of Dinant rose in 1255, the weavers of Tournai in 1281, of all Ghent in 1274, of Hainault in 1292. The workers of Ypres, Douai, Ghent, Lille, and Bruges joined in revolt in 1302, defeated a French army at Courtrai, won the admission of their representatives to communal councils and offices, and revoked the oppressive legislation with which the mercantile oligarchy had harassed the crafts. Acquiring power for a time, the weavers sought to fix—even to reduce—the wages of the fullers, who then allied themselves with the merchant rich.124

  In 1191 the merchant guilds won control of London; soon afterward they offered King John an annual payment if he would suppress the weavers’ guild; John complied (1200).125 In 1194 one William Fitzobert or Long-beard preached to the poor of London the need of a revolution. Thousands listened to him eagerly. Two burgesses sought to kill him; he fled into a church, was forced out by smoke, and committed hara-kiri almost by the Japanese ritual. His followers worshiped him as a martyr, and kept as sacred the soil that had received his blood.126 The popularity of Robin Hood, who robbed great lords and prelates but was kind to the poor, suggests the class feeling in twelfth-century Britain.

  The bitterest conflicts took place in Italy. At first the workers joined with the merchant guilds in a series of bloody insurrections against the nobles; by the end of the thirteenth century this struggle was won. For a time the industrial population shared in the government of Florence. Soon, however, the great merchants and entrepreneurs secured ascendancy in the city council, and imposed such arduous and arbitrary rules upon their employees that the struggle entered, in the fourteenth century, its second phase —sporadic and intermittent war between the rich industrialists and the workers in the factories. It was amid these scenes of civil strife that St. Francis preached the gospel of poverty, and reminded the nouveaux riches that Christ had never had any private property.127

  The communes, like the guilds, declined in the fourteenth century through the expansion of a municipal into a national economy and market, in which their rules and monopolies obstructed the development of invention, industry, and trade. They suffered further through their chaotic internal strife, their ruthless exploitation of the surrounding countryside, their narrow municipal patriotism, their conflicting policies and currencies, their petty wars upon one another in Flanders and Italy, and their inability to organize themselves into an autonomous confederation that might have survived the growth of the royal power. After 1300 several French communes petitioned the king to assume their governance.

  Even so the economic revolution of the thirteenth century was the making of modern Europe. It eventually destroyed a feudalism that had completed the function of agricultural protection and organization, and had become an obstacle to the expansion of enterprise. It transformed the immobile wealth of feudalism into the fluent resources of a world-wide economy. It provided the machinery for a progressive development of business and industry, which substantially increased the power, comforts, and knowledge of European man. It brought a prosperity that in two centuries could build a hundred cathedrals, any one of which presumes an amazing abundance and variety of means and skills. Its production for an extending market made possible the national economic systems that underlay the growth of the modern states. Even the class war that it let loose may have been an added stimulant to the minds and energies of men. When the storm of the transition had subsided, the economic and political structure of Europe had been transformed. A flowing tide of industry and commerce washed away deep-rooted impediments to human development, and carried men onward from the scattered glory of the cathedrals to the universal frenzy of the Renaissance.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The Recovery of Europe

  1095–1300

  I. BYZANTIUM

  ALEXIUS I COMNENUS, after guiding the Eastern Empire success fully through Turkish and Norman wars and the First Crusade, ended his long reign (1081–1118) amid a characteristically Byzantine intrigue. His eldest daughter, Anna Comnena, was a paragon of learning, a compendium of philosophy, a poet of parts, a politician of subtlety, an historian of accomplished mendacity. Betrothed to the son of the Emperor Michael VII, she felt herself marked for empire by her birth, her beauty, and her brains, and she could never forgive her brother John for being born and succeeding to the throne. She conspired to assassinate him, was detected and forgiven, retired to a convent, and chronicled her father’s career in a prose Alexiad. John Comnenus (1118–43) astonished Europe by a reign of private virtue, administrative competence, and victorious campaigns against pagan, Moslem, and Christian foes; for a time it seemed that he would restore the Empire to its former scope and glory; but a scratch from a poisoned arrow in his own quiver ended his life and his dream.

  His son Manuel I (1143–80) was an incarnate Mars, dedicated to war and delighting in it, ever in the van of his troops, welcoming single combat, and winning every battle but the last. Stoic in the field, he was an epicurean in his palace, luxurious in food and dress, and happy in the incestuous love of his niece. Under his indulgent patronage literature and scholarship flourished again; the ladies of the court encouraged authors, and themselves condescended to write poetry; and Zonaras now compiled his immense Epitome of History. Manuel built for himself a new palace, the Blachernae, on the seashore at the end of the Golden Horn; Odom of Deuil thought it “the fairest building in the world; its pillars and walls were half covered with gold, and encrusted with jewels that shone even in the obscurity of the night.”1 Constantinople in the twelfth century rehearsed the Italian Renaissance.

  This splendor of the capital, and the many wars that the aging empire waged to ward off death, required heavy taxation, which the enjoyers of luxuries passed on to the producers of necessaries. The peasants grew poorer, and surrendered to serfdom; the manual workers of the cities lived in noisome slums, whose dark filth harbored uncounted crimes. Vague semicommunistic movements of revolt agitated the proletarian flux,2 but have been forgotten in the careless repetitiousness of time. Meanwhile the capture of Palestine by the Crusaders had opened Syrian ports to Latin commerce, and Constantinople lost to the rising cities of Italy a third of its maritime trade. Christian and Moslem alike aspired to capture this treasury of a millenníum’s wealth. A good Moslem, visiting the city in Manuel’s heyday, prayed: “May God in His generosity and grace deign to make Constantinople the capital of Islam!”3 And Venice, daughter of Byzantium, invited the chivalry of Europe to join her in raping the Queen of the Bosporus.

  The Latin kingdom of Constantinople, established by the Fourth Crusade, endured but fifty-seven years (1204–61). Rootless in the race, faith, or customs of the people—hated by a Greek Church forcibly subjected to Rome —weakened by its division into feudal principalities each aping sovereignty-lacking the experience required to o
rganize and regulate an industrial and commercial economy—attacked by Byzantine armies without and conspiracies within—and unable to draw from a hostile population the revenues needed for military defense, the new kingdom stood only as long as Byzantine revenge lacked unity and arms.