The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

Like most economic and political systems in history, feudalism was what it had to be to meet the necessities of place and time and the nature of man.

The women kept the place as clean as circumstances would permit, but the busy peasants found cleanliness a nuisance, and stories told how Satan excluded serfs from hell because he could not bear their smell.

He was greedy because poor, cruel because fearful, violent because repressed, churlish because treated as a churl. He was the mainstay of the Church, but he had more superstition than religion.

Normally, in eleventh-century France and England, the cultivated land of the manor was yearly divided into three fields; one was planted to wheat or rye, one to barley or oats, one was left fallow. Each field was subdivided into acre or half-acre strips, separated by “balks” of unplowed turf.

about 1000 the harness makers invented the stiff collar that would allow a horse to draw a load without choking; so dressed, the horse could plow three or four times as much in a day as the ox; in wet temperate climates speed of plowing was important; so during the eleventh century the horse more and more replaced the ox, and lost his high status as reserved for travel, hunting, and war.

Looking now at these neat hedges and ordered fields, we cannot see the centuries of toil and tribulation, breaking back and heart, that beat the raw materials of reluctantly bountiful nature into the economic foundations of our life.

Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things.

normally the kings of feudal Europe were not so much the rulers of their peoples as the delegates of their vassals. They were chosen or accepted by the great barons and ecclesiastics; their direct power was limited to their own feudal domain or manors; elsewhere in their kingdom the serf and vassal swore fealty to the lord who protected them, rarely to the king whose small and distant forces could not reach out to guard the scattered outposts of the realm. The state, in feudalism, was merely the king’s estate.

But as the inability of the kings to protect their realm had generated feudalism, so the inability of feudal lords to maintain order among themselves, or to provide a uniform government for an expanding commercial economy, weakened the barons and strengthened the kings.

the French and English kings made their power hereditary, instead of elective, by crowning a son or brother before their own death; and men accepted hereditary monarchy as the alternative to feudal anarchy.

The feudal lords crowded to the court of the monarchy that had subdued them, and the Church conferred divine right upon the kings who would destroy her European leadership and power.

Usually the whole estate was bequeathed to the eldest son. This custom of primogeniture, unknown to Roman or barbarian law,45 became advisable under feudal conditions because it put the military protection and economic management of the estate under one head, presumably the most mature.

essentially the feudal army was the man on horseback multiplied. Infantry, insufficiently mobile, had lost its pre-eminence since Hadrianople (378), and would not regain it till the fourteenth century.

The development of the bow began the military debacle of feudalism; the knight scorned to fight on foot, but the archers killed his horse, and forced him to uncongenial ground. The final blow to feudal military power would come in the fourteenth century with gunpowder and cannon, which, from a safe distance, killed the armored knight and shattered his castle.

Chivalry, despite its religious aura, represented a victory of Germanic, pagan, and Arab conceptions over Christianity; a Europe attacked on every side needed the martial virtues again.

It would of course be absurd to expect soldiers to be saints; good killing requires its own unique virtues. These rough knights drove the Moors into Granada, the Slavs from the Oder, the Magyars from Italy and Germany; they tamed the Norse into Normans, and brought French civilization into England on the points of their swords. They were what they had to be.

Chivalry, beginning in the tenth century, reached its height in the thirteenth, suffered from the brutality of the Hundred Years’ War, shriveled in the merciless hate that divided the English aristocracy in the Wars of the Roses, and died in the theological fury of the religious wars of the sixteenth century.

As the knight learned manners and gallantry at the court of noble or king, so he transmitted something of this courtoisie to those below him in the social scale; modern politeness is a dilution of medieval chivalry.

The great task of feudalism was to restore political and economic order to Europe after a century of disruptive invasions and calamities. It succeeded; and when it decayed, modern civilization rose upon its ruins and its legacy.

The Dark Ages are not a period upon which the scholar can look with superior scorn. He no longer denounces their ignorance and superstition, their political disintegration, their economic and cultural poverty; he marvels, rather, that Europe ever recovered from the successive blows of Goths, Huns, Vandals, Moslems, Magyars, and Norse, and preserved through the turmoil and tragedy so much of ancient letters and techniques.

Saladin’s moderation, patience, and justice had defeated Richard’s brilliance, courage, and military art; the relative unity and fidelity of the Moslem leaders had triumphed over the divisions and disloyalties of the feudal chiefs; and a short line of supplies behind the Saracens proved of greater advantage than Christian control of the seas.

Moslem civilization had proved itself superior to the Christian in refinement, comfort, education, and war.

The Crusades, however, had this measure of success, that without them the Turks would have taken Constantinople long before 1453. For Islam, too, was weakened by the Crusades, and fell more easily before the Mongol flood.

Like Venice and Pisa, Genoa traded freely with Islam: Venice with Egypt, Pisa with Tunisia, Genoa with Moorish Africa and Spain. Many of them sold arms to the Saracens during the Crusades. Powerful popes like Innocent III denounced all traffic with the Moslems, but gold ran thicker than faith or blood, and the “blasphemous trade” went on.

It controlled the prices and qualities of goods traded in by its members, and established such a reputation for integrity that the name Easterlings (Men from the East), which the English gave them, was adopted by the English as meaning sterling worth, and was in this form attached to silver or pound as meaning trustworthy or real.

they sold, as well as bought, wholesale—en gros, said the French. The English translated en gros into grosser, and used this first form of the word grocer to mean one who sold spices in bulk.

Annaberg became the centers of a medieval “gold rush”; and from the little town of Joachimsthal came the word joachimsthaler—meaning coins mined there—and, by inevitable shortening, the German and English words thaler and dollar.

Saxony was famous for its bronze founders, England for its pewter —a mixture of copper, bismuth, antimony, and tin.

the “company” (companis, bread-sharer) or family investment became a societas, a partnership in which several persons, not necessarily kin, financed a group or series of ventures rather than one.

After two or three years the journeyman, if he had enough capital to open his own shop, was examined for technical ability by a board of his guild; if he passed he was made a master. Sometimes—but only in the later Middle Ages—the candidate was required to submit to the governors of the guild a “masterpiece”—a satisfactory sample of his craft.

They were excellent organizations for an industrial age when difficulties of transportation often narrowed the market to local buyers, and capital accumulations were not yet sufficiently rich and fluid to finance large-scale undertakings. When such funds appeared the guilds—merchant or craft —lost control of the market, and therefore of the conditions of work. The Industrial Revolution destroyed them in England by the slow fatality of economic change; and the French Revolution abruptly disbanded them as hostile to that freedom and dignity of work that for a bright moment they had once sustained.

Municipal institutions were alien, feudal institutions natural, to the Teutonic conquerors. Outside of Italy, the medieval city rose through the formation of new commercial centers, classes, and powers.

Towards the end of the eleventh century the merchant leaders began to demand from the feudal overlords charters of communal freedom for the towns. With characteristic shrewdness they played one overlord against the other—baron against bishop, knight against baron, king against any of them or all.

Though the administrative councils soon narrowed their membership to a mercantile aristocracy, the municipal assemblies were the first representative government since Tiberius; they, rather than Magna Carta, were the chief parent of modern democracy.

Constantinople with 800,000, Cordova and Palermo with half a million each, had long been populous; but before 1100 only a few cities north of the Alps had more than 3000 souls.

The municipalities, eager to get new “hands,” announced that any person living in a town for 366 days without being claimed, identified, and taken as a serf, became automatically free, and would enjoy the protection of the commune’s laws and power.

Year by year, following the lead of the Moslem and Byzantine East, western Europe, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, passed from payments predominantly in kind to payments predominantly in currency.

Gradually, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, at different times in divers countries west of the Elbe, serfdom gave place to peasant proprietorship; the feudal manor broke up into small estates, and the peasantry rose in the thirteenth century to a degree of freedom and prosperity that it had not known for a thousand years.

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.

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.

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 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.

fed and clothed the poor, protected orphans and widows, gave hospitality to strangers, and bought freedom for slaves. His brother tried to assassinate him as lacking the vices desirable in a king; Wenceslas struck him down with his own hand, and forgave him; but other members of the conspiracy murdered the King on his way to Mass

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

A hardy busy peasantry covered the rich soil with crops, and kept the cities fed. They lived in hovels, and suffered the usual exploitation of the useful by the clever,

Rome was the center, but hardly the model, of Latin Christianity. No city in Christendom had less respect for religion, except as a vested interest.

Faith declines as wealth increases. The Venetians made much use of religion in government, and consoled the voteless with processions and paradise; but the ruling classes rarely allowed Christianity, or excommunication, to interfere with business or war.

It is difficult for those who today live in comfort and plenty to go down in spirit into the chaos and penury that molded medieval faiths. But we must think of the superstitions, apocalypses, idolatry, and credulity of medieval Christians, Moslems, and Jews with the same sympathy with which we should think of their hardships, their poverty, and their griefs.

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.

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.