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New classes rose to economic and political power, and gave to the medieval city that virile and pugnacious independence which culminated in the Renaissance.
The Spanish kings favored the communes as foils to a troublesome nobility,
By the end of the twelfth century the communal revolution was won in western Europe. The cities, though seldom completely free, had thrown off their feudal masters, ended or reduced feudal tolls, and severely limited ecclesiastical rights.
As in the French Revolution, the defeat of the feudal lords was a victory chiefly for the business class.
Nevertheless the communes were a magnificent reassertion of human liberty. At the call of the bell from the town campanile, the citizens flocked to assemble, and chose their municipal officers.
But all in all, the work of the medieval communes did credit to the skill and courage of the businessmen who managed them.
The emancipation in western Europe was not quite complete till 1789; many feudal lords still claimed the old rights in law, and would try, in the fourteenth century, to restore them in fact; but the movement toward free and mobile labor could not be stopped so long as commerce and industry grew.
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.
The economic revolution of the twelfth century added a new class—the burgesses or bourgeoisie—the bakers, merchants, and master craftsmen of the towns.
Toward the end of the thirteenth century the class struggle became class war. Every generation saw some revolt of the peasantry, particularly in France.
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.
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.
The Mongols rejected the papal plan on the ironical pretense that they were loath to encourage “the mutual hatred of Christians.”
suzerainty
“Today they have seized our land, tomorrow they will take yours.”
“If you want peace, give us the tenth of your goods”; he answered, “When we are dead you may have the whole.”12
Thence Batu and his successors kept most of Russia under domination for 240 years.
They joined the Mongols in attacking other peoples, even Russian principalities. Many Russians married Mongols, and certain features of Mongolian physiognomy and character may have entered the Russian stock.
The absolutism of the khan united with that of the Byzantine emperors to beget the “Autocrat of All the Russias” in later Muscovy.
Recognizing that they could not keep Russia quiet by force alone, the Mongol chieftains made peace with the Russian Church, protected her possessions and personnel, exempted them from taxation, and punished sacrilege with death. Grateful or compelled, the Church recommended Russian submission to the Mongol masters, and publicly prayed for their safety.
We may judge the extent of the Mongol reach and grasp when we note that in 1235 Ogadai, the Great Khan, sent out three armies—against Korea, China, and Europe.
the other, under Batu, surmounted the Carpathians, invaded Hungary, met the united forces of Hungary and Austria at Mohi, and so overwhelmed them that medieval chroniclers, never moderate with figures, estimated the Christian dead at 100,000, and the Emperor Frederick II reckoned the Hungarian casualties as “almost the whole military force of the kingdom.”
What saved Christianity and Europe was simply the death of Ogadai, and the return of Batu to Karakorum to participate in the election of a new khan.
Never in history had there been so extensive a devastation—from the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic and the Baltic Seas.
As, in a limitless universe, any point may be taken as center, so, in the pageant of civilizations and states, each nation, like each soul, interprets the drama of history or life in terms of its own role and character.
Polanie—“people of the fields”—
Pomorzanie (“by the sea”),
In 1225 the laws of the Saxons were formulated in the Sachsenspiegel, or Saxon Mirror;
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.
Faith declines as wealth increases.
Siamo Veneziani, poi Cristiani, ran their motto: “We are Venetians; after that we are Christians.”12
No contributions to learning, no lasting poetry, appeared amid this unrivaled wealth.
The rebellious Saracens of the hills were captured, were transported to Italy, were trained as mercenaries, and became the most reliable soldiers in Frederick’s army; we may imagine the wrath of the popes at the sight of Moslem warriors led by a Christian emperor against papal troops.
There were many other taxes, for this government, like all others, could always find uses for money. To Frederick’s credit must be put a sound and conscientious currency.
Next to hunting, he took delight in educated and graceful conversation—delicato parlare.
The virtù, or masculine unscrupulous intelligence, of the Renaissance despots was an echo of Frederick’s character and mind, without his grace and charm.
Frederick was the “man of the Renaissance” a century before its time. Machiavelli’s Prince had Caesar Borgia in mind, but it was Frederick who had prepared its philosophy. Nietzsche had Bismarck and Napoleon in mind, but he acknowledged the influence of Frederick—“the first of Europeans according to my taste.”
stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis—“the marvelous transformer and wonder of the world.”
“Sicilian Vespers”
We must remind ourselves again that the historian, like the journalist, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic, and never quite conveys an adequate picture of any age.
tumescence
IN many aspects religion is the most interesting of man’s ways, for it is his ultimate commentary on life and his only defense against death.
Then, above all, the world needed a creed that would balance tribulation with hope, soften bereavement with solace, redeem the prose of toil with the poetry of belief, cancel life’s brevity with continuance, and give an inspiring and ennobling significance to a cosmic drama that might else be a meaningless and intolerable procession of souls, species, and stars stumbling one by one into an inescapable extinction.
The greatest gift of medieval faith was the upholding confidence that right would win in the end, and that every seeming victory of evil would at last be sublimated in the universal triumph of the good.
Men hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell.
Pope Gregory IX condemned as heresy Raymond Lully’s hope that “God hath such love for His people that almost all men will be saved, since, if more were damned than saved, Christ’s mercy would be without great love.”
Apparently there were village atheists then as now. But village atheists leave few memorials behind them;
The power of Christianity lay in its offering to the people faith rather than knowledge, art rather than science, beauty rather than truth. Men preferred it so.
In the twelfth century the sacraments were finally fixed at seven: baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, matrimony, holy orders, and extreme unction.
chrism,
