by Will Durant
He had made no provision for so ignominious a revenge by the climate of his conquest. His only son was a lad of three; a decade of disorder ensued while would-be emperors fought for the throne. When Frederick II came of age the war of empire and papacy was resumed; it was fought in Italy by a German-Norman monarch become Italian, and will be better viewed from the Italian scene. Another generation of turmoil followed the death of Frederick II (1250)—that herrenlose, schreckliche Zeit (Schiller called it), that “masterless, frightful age” in which the electoral princes sold the throne of Germany to any weakling who would leave them free to consolidate their independent power. When the chaos cleared the Hohenstaufen dynasty had ended; and in 1273 Rudolf of Hapsburg, making Vienna his capital, began a new line of kings. To win the imperial crown Rudolf signed in 1279 a declaration recognizing the complete subordination of the royal to the papal power, and renouncing all claims to southern Italy and Sicily. Rudolf never became emperor; but his courage, devotion, and energy restored order and prosperity to Germany, and firmly established a dynasty that ruled Austria and Hungary till 1918.
Henry VII (1308–13) made a final effort to unite Germany and Italy. With scant support from the nobles of Germany, and a small following of Walloon knights, he crossed the Alps (1310), and was welcomed by many Lombard cities tired of class war and interurban strife, and anxious to throw off the political authority of the Church. Dante hailed the invader with a treatise On Monarchy boldly proclaiming the freedom of the secular from the spiritual power, and appealed to Henry to save Italy from papal domination. But the Florentine Guelfs won the upper hand, the turbulent cities withdrew their support, and Henry, surrounded with enemies, died of the malarial fever with which Italy now and then repays her importunate lovers.
Turned back in the south by natural barriers of topography, race, and speech, Germany found outlet and recompense in the east. German and Dutch migration, conquest, and colonization reclaimed three fifths of Germany from the Slavs; fertile Germans expanded along the Danube into Hungary and Rumania; German merchants organized fairs and outlets at Frankfort on the Oder, Breslau, Prague, Cracow, Danzig, Riga, Dorpat, and Reval, and trading centers everywhere from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Alps and the Black Sea. The conquest was brutal, the results were an immense advance in the economic and cultural life of the border.
Meanwhile the absorption of the emperors in Italian affairs, the recurrent need of enlisting or rewarding the support of lords and knights with grants of land or power, and the weakening of the German monarchy by papal opposition and Lombard revolts, had left the nobility free to engross the countryside and reduce the peasantry to serfdom; and feudalism triumphed in thirteenth-century Germany at the very time when it was succumbing to the royal power in France. The bishops, whom the earlier emperors had favored as a foil to the barons, had become a second nobility, as rich, powerful and independent as the secular lords. By 1263 seven nobles—the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, the count palatine, and the margrave of Brandenburg—had been entrusted by the feudality with the authority to choose the king; and these electors hedged in the powers of the ruler, usurped royal prerogatives, and seized crown lands. They might have acted as a central government and given the nation unity; they did not; between elections they went their several ways. No German nation existed yet; there were only Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, Franks…. There was as yet no national parliament, but only territorial diets, Landtage; a Reichstag, or Diet of the Commonwealth, established in 1247, languished feebly in the Interregnum, and acquired prominence only in 1338. A corps of ministeriales—serfs or freedmen appointed by the king—provided a loose bureaucracy and continuity of government. No one capital centered the country’s loyalty and interest; no one system of laws governed the realm. Despite the efforts of Barbarossa to impose Roman law upon all Germany, each region kept its own customs and code. In 1225 the laws of the Saxons were formulated in the Sachsenspiegel, or Saxon Mirror; in 1275 the Schwabenspiegel codified the laws and customs of Swabia. These codes asserted the ancient right of the people to choose their king, and of the peasants to keep their freedom and their land; serfdom and slavery, said the Sachsenspiegel, are contrary to nature and the will of God, and owe their origin to force or fraud.23 But serfdom grew.
The age of the Hohenstaufens (1138–1254) was the greatest age of Germany before Bismarck. The manners of the people were still crude, their laws chaotic, their morals half Christian, half pagan, and their Christianity half a cover for territorial robbery. Their wealth and comforts could not compare, city for city, with those of Flanders or Italy. But their peasantry was industrious and fertile, their merchants enterprising and adventurous, their aristocracy the most cultured and powerful in Europe, their kings the secular heads of the Western world, ruling a realm from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Rhone to the Balkans, from the Baltic to the Danube, from the North Sea to Sicily. Out of a virile commercial life a hundred cities had taken form; many of them had charters of self-government; decade by decade they grew in wealth and art, until in the Renaissance they would be the pride and glory of Germany, and be mourned in our day as a beauty that has passed from the earth.
VII. SCANDINAVIA
After a century of happy obscurity Denmark re-entered world history with Waldemar I (1157–82). Helped by his minister Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, he organized a strong government, cleared his seas of pirates, and enriched Denmark by protecting and encouraging trade. In 1167 Absalon founded Copenhagen as a “market haven”—Kjoebenhavn. Waldemar II (1202–41) replied to German aggression by conquering Holstein, Hamburg, and Germany northeast of the Elbe. “For the honor of the Blessed Virgin” he undertook three “crusades” against the Baltic Slavs, captured northern Estonia, and founded Reval. In one of these campaigns he was attacked in his camp, and escaped death, we are told, partly by his own valor, partly through the timely descent, from heaven, of a red banner bearing a white cross; this Dannebrog, or Dane’s Cloth, became thereafter the battle standard of the Danes. In 1223 he was taken prisoner by Count Henry of Schwerin, and was released, after two and a half years, only on his surrendering to the Germans all his Germanic and Slav conquests except Rügen. He devoted the remainder of his remarkable life to internal reforms and the codification of Danish law. At his death Denmark was double its present area, included southern Sweden, and had a population equal to that of Sweden (300,000) and Norway (200,000) combined. The power of the kings declined after Waldemar II, and in 1282 the nobles secured from Eric Glipping a charter recognizing their assembly, the Danehof, as a national parliament.
Only the imaginative empathy of a great novelist could make us visualize the achievement of Scandinavia in these early centuries—the heroic conquest, day by day, foot by foot, of a difficult and dangerous peninsula. Life was still primitive; hunting and fishing, as well as agriculture, were primary sources of sustenance; vast forests had to be cleared, wild animals had to be brought under control, waters had to be channeled to productive courses, harbors had to be built, men had to harden themselves to cope with a nature that seemed to resent the intrusion of man. Cistercian monks played a noble role in this agelong war, cutting timber, tilling the soil, and teaching the peasants improved methods of agriculture. One of the many heroes of the war was Earl Birger, who served Sweden as prime minister from 1248 to 1266, abolished serfdom, established the reign of law, founded Stockholm (c. 1255), and inaugurated the Folkung dynasty (1250–1365) by putting his son Waldemar on the throne. Bergen grew rich as the outlet of Norway’s trade, and Visby, on the island of Gotland, became the center of contact between Sweden and the Hanseatic League. Excellent churches were built, cathedral and monastic schools multiplied, poets strummed their lays; and Iceland, far off in the Arctic mists, became in the thirteenth century the most active literary center in the Scandinavian world.
VIII. ENGLAND
1. William the Conqueror
William the Conqueror ruled England with
a masterly mixture of force, legality, piety, subtlety, and fraud. Elevated to the throne by a cowed Witan, he swore to observe existing English law. Some thanes in the west and north took advantage of his absence in Normandy to try revolt (1067); he returned, and passed like a flame of revenge through the land, and “harried the north” with such judicious killing and destruction of homes, barns, crops, and cattle that northern England did not fully recover till the nineteenth century.24 He distributed the choicest lands of the kingdom in great estates among his Norman aides, and encouraged these to build castles as fortresses of defense against a hostile population.* He kept large tracts as crown lands; one parcel, thirty miles long, was set aside as a royal hunting preserve; all houses, churches, and schools therein were leveled to the ground to clear the way for horses and hounds; and any man who slew a hart or hind in this New Forest was to lose his eyes.25
So was founded the new nobility of England, whose progeny still bear, now and then, French names; and the feudalism that before had been relatively weak covered the land, and reduced most of the conquered people to serfdom. All the soil belonged to the king; but Englishmen who could show that they had not resisted the Conquest were allowed to repurchase their lands from the state. To list and know his spoils, William sent agents in 1085 to record the ownership, condition, and contents of every parcel of land in England; and “so narrowly did he commission them,” says the old Chronicle, “that there was not a yard of land, nay … not even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine, that was not set down in his writ.”26 The result was the Domesday Book, ominously so named as the final “doom” or judgment in all disputes of realty. To assure himself military support, and limit the power of his great vassals, William summoned all important landowners of England—60,000 of them—to a concourse at Salisbury (1086), and made every man pledge his paramount fealty to the king. It was a wise precaution against the individualistic feudalism that was at that time dismembering France.
One must expect a strong government after a conquest. William set up or deposed knights and earls, bishops and archbishops and abbots; he did not hesitate to jail great lords, and to assert his right over ecclesiastical appointments against the same powerful Gregory VII who was in these years bringing the Emperor Henry IV to Canossa. To prevent fires he ordered a curfew —i.e., a covering or extinction of hearth fires, and therefore in winter retirement to bed—by eight P.M. for the people of England.27 To finance his spreading government and conquests he laid heavy taxes upon all sales, imports, exports, and the use of bridges and roads; he restored the Danegeld, which Edward the Confessor had abolished; and when he learned that some Englishmen, to elude his fingers, had placed their money in monastic vaults, he had all monasteries searched and all such hoards removed to his own treasury. His royal court readily accepted bribes, and honestly recorded them in the public register.28 It was frankly a government of conquerors resolved that the profits of their enterprise should be commensurate with its risks.
The Norman clergy shared in the victory. The able and pliant Lanfranc was brought in from Caen and was made Archbishop of Canterbury and first minister to the King. He found the Anglo-Saxon clergy addicted to hunting, dicing, and marriage,29 and replaced them with Norman priests, bishops, and abbots; he drew up a new monastic constitution, the Customs of Canterbury, and raised the mental and moral level of the English clergy. Probably at his suggestion William decreed the separation of ecclesiastical from secular courts, ordered all spiritual matters to be submitted to the canon law of the Church, and pledged the state to enforce the penalties fixed by ecclesiastical tribunals. Tithes were levied upon the people for the support of the Church. But William required that no papal bull or letter should be given currency or force in England without his approval, and that no papal legate should enter England without the royal consent. The national assembly of the bishops of England, which had been part of the Witan, was hereafter to be a distinct body, and its decrees were to have no validity except when confirmed by the King.30
Like most great men, William found it easier to rule a kingdom than his family. The last eleven years of his life were clouded by quarrels with his Queen Matilda. His son Robert demanded full authority in Normandy; denied this, he rebelled; William fought him indecisively, and made peace by promising to bequeath the duchy to Robert. The King grew so stout that he could hardly mount a horse. He warred with Philip I of France over boundaries; when he tarried at Rouen, almost immovable with corpulence, Philip jested (it was said) that the King of England was “lying in,” and there would be a grand display of candles at his churching. William swore that he would indeed light many candles. He ordered his army to burn down Mantes and all its neighborhood, and to destroy all crops and fruits; and it was done. Riding happily amid the ruins, William was thrown against the iron pommel of his saddle by a stumble of his horse. He was carried to the priory of St. Gervase near Rouen. He confessed his sins in gross, and made his will; distributed his treasure penitently among the poor and to the Church, and provided for the rebuilding of Mantes. All his sons except Henry deserted his deathbed to fight for the succession; his officers and servants fled with what spoils they could take. A rustic vassal bore his remains to the Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen (1087). The coffin made for him proved too small for his corpse; when the attendants tried to force the enormous bulk into the narrow space the body burst, and filled the church with a royal stench.31
The results of the Norman Conquest were limitless. A new people and class were imposed upon the Danes who had displaced the Anglo-Saxons who had conquered the Roman Britons who had mastered the Celts …; and centuries would elapse before the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elements would reassert themselves in British blood and speech. The Normans were akin to the Danes, but in the century since Rollo they had become Frenchmen; and with their coming the customs and speech of official England became for three centuries French. Feudalism was imported from France into England with its trappings, chivalry, heraldry, and vocabulary. Serfdom was more deeply and mercilessly imposed than ever in England before.32 The Jewish moneylenders who came in with William gave a new stimulus to English trade and industry. The closer connection with the Continent brought to England many ideas in literature and art; Norman architecture achieved its greatest triumphs in Britain. The new nobility brought new manners, fresh vitality, a better organization of agriculture; and the Norman lords and bishops improved the administration of the state. The government was centralized. Though it was through despotism, the country was unified; life and property were made more secure, and England entered upon a long period of internal peace. She was never successfully invaded again.
2. Thomas à Becket
It is an adage in England that between two strong kings a weak king intervenes; but there is no limit to the number of intermediate middlings. After the Conqueror’s death his eldest son Robert received Normandy as a separate kingdom. A younger son, William Rufus (the Red, 1087–1100), was crowned King of England on promising good behavior to his anointer and minister Lanfranc. He ruled as a tyrant till 1093, fell sick, promised good behavior, recovered, and ruled as a tyrant till he was shot to death, while hunting, by an unknown hand. The saintly Anselm, who succeeded Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury, withstood him patiently, and was sent back to France.
A third son of the Conqueror, Henry I (1100–35), recalled Anselm. The prelate-philosopher demanded an end to the royal election of bishops; Henry refused; after a tedious quarrel it was agreed that English bishops and abbots were to be chosen by cathedral chapters or the monks in the presence of the king, and should do homage to him for their feudal possessions and powers. Henry loved money and hated waste; he taxed heavily but governed providently and justly; he kept England in order and at peace, except that with one battle—at Tinchebrai in 1106—he restored Normandy to the British crown. He bade the nobles “restrain themselves in dealing with the wives, sons, and daughters of their men”;33 he himself had many illegitimate sons and daughters by various mistresses,34 but he ha
d the grace and wisdom to marry Maud, scion of both the Scottish and pre-Norman English kings, thereby bringing old royal blood into the new royal line.
In his last days Henry made the barons and bishops swear fealty to his daughter Matilda and her young son, the future Henry II. But on the King’s death Stephen of Blois, grandson of the Conqueror, seized the throne, and England suffered fourteen years of death and taxes in a civil war marked by the most horrible cruelties.35 Meanwhile Henry II grew up, married Eleanor of Aquitaine and her duchy, invaded England, forced Stephen to recognize him as heir to the throne, and, on Stephen’s death, became king (1154); so ended the Norman, and began the Plantagenet, dynasty.* Henry was a man of strong temper, eager ambition, and proud intellect, half inclined to atheism.36 Nominally master of a realm that reached from Scotland to the Pyrenees, including half of France, he found himself apparently helpless in a feudal society where the great lords, armed with mercenaries and fortified in castles, had pulverized the state into baronies. With awesome energy the youthful king gathered money and men, fought and subdued one lord after another, destroyed the feudal castles, and established order, security, justice, and peace. With a masterly economy of cost and force he brought under English rule an Ireland conquered and despoiled by Welsh buccaneers. But this strong man, one of the greatest kings in England’s history, was shattered and humbled by encountering in Thomas à Becket a will as inflexible as his own, and in religion a power then mightier than any state.
Thomas was born in London about 1118, of middle-class Norman parentage. His precocious brilliance of mind caught the eye of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent him to Bologna and Auxerre to study civil and canon law. Returning to England he entered orders, and soon rose to be Archdeacon of Canterbury. But, like so many churchmen of those centuries, he was a man of affairs rather than a clergyman; his interest and skill lay in administration and diplomacy; and he showed such ability in these fields that at the age of thirty-seven he was made secretary of state. For a time he and Henry accorded well; the handsome chancellor shared the intimacy and knightly sports, almost the wealth and power, of the King. His table was the most sumptuous in England; and his charity to the poor was equaled by his hospitality to his friends. In war he led in person 700 knights, fought single combats, planned campaigns. When he was sent on a mission to Paris his luxurious equipage of eight chariots, forty horses, and 200 attendants alarmed the French, who wondered how rich must be the king of so opulent a minister.