Chapter IV: , VII (30)

Charles IV., dying in 1378, was succeeded by his son Wenzel,
or Wenceslaus, on the imperial throne as well as the Bohemian.
Wenceslaus neglected both the Empire and the Kingdom, and the
confusion of things in Germany grew worse. Some of the
principal cities continued to secure considerable freedom and
prosperity for themselves, by the combined efforts of their
leagues; but everywhere else great disorder and oppression
prevailed. It was at this time that the Swabian towns, to the
number of forty-one, formed a union and waged unsuccessful war
with a league which the nobles entered into against them. They
were defeated, and crushingly dealt with by the Emperor.

In 1400 Wenceslaus was deposed and Rupert of the Palatinate
was elected, producing another civil war, and reducing the
imperial government to a complete nullity. Rupert died in
1410, and, after some contention, Sigmund, or Sigismund,
brother of Wenceslaus, was raised to the throne. He was
Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Hungary, and would become
King of Bohemia when Wenceslaus died.

The Reformation of Huss in Bohemia.

Bohemia was about to become the scene of an extraordinary
religious agitation, which John Huss, teacher and preacher in
the new but already famous University of Prague, was beginning
to stir. Huss, who drew more or less of his inspiration from
Wyclif, anticipated Luther in the boldness of his attacks upon
iniquities in the Church. In his case as in Luther's, the
abomination which he could not endure was the sale of papal
indulgences; and it was by his denunciation of that impious
fraud that he drew on himself the deadly wrath of the Roman
hierarchy. He was summoned before the great Council of the
Church which opened at Constance in 1414. He obeyed the
summons and went to the Council, bearing a safe-conduct from
the Emperor which pledged protection to him until he returned.
Notwithstanding this imperial pledge, he was imprisoned for
seven months at Constance, and was then impatiently listened
to and condemned to the stake. On the 6th of July, 1415, he
was burned. In the following May, his friend and disciple,
Jerome of Prague, suffered the same martyrdom. The Emperor,
Sigismund, blustered a little at the insolent violation of his
safe-conduct; but dared do nothing to make it effective.

In Bohemia, the excitement produced by these outrages was
universal. The whole nation seemed to rise, in the first
wide-spread aggressive popular revolt that the Church of Rome
had yet been called upon to encounter. In 1419 there was an
armed assembly of 40,000 men, on a mountain which they called
Tabor, who placed themselves under the leadership of John
Ziska, a nobleman, one of Huss' friends. The followers of
Ziska soon displayed a violence of temper and a radicalism
which repelled the more moderate Hussites, or Reformers, and
two parties appeared, one known as the Taborites, the other as
the Calixtines, or Utraquists. The former insisted on entire
separation from the Church of Rome; the latter confined their
demands to four reforms, namely: Free preaching of the Word of
God; the giving of the Eucharistic cup to the laity; the
taking of secular powers and of worldly goods from the clergy;
the enforcing of Christian discipline by all authorities. So much
stress was laid by the Calixtines on their claim to the
chalice or cup (communion in both kinds) that it gave them
their name. The breach between these parties widened until
they were as hostile to each other as to the Catholics, and
the Bohemian reform movement was ruined in the end by their
division.

In 1419, the deposed Emperor Wenceslaus, who had still
retained his kingdom of Bohemia, was murdered in his palace,
at Prague. His brother, the Emperor Sigismund, was his heir;
but the Hussites refused the crown to him, and resisted his
pretensions with arms. This added a political conflict to the
religious one, and Bohemia was afflicted with a frightful
civil war for fifteen years. Ziska fortified mount Tabor and
took possession of Prague. The Emperor and the Pope allied
themselves, to crush an insurrection which was aimed against
both. They summoned Christendom to a new crusade, and
Sigismund led 100,000 men against Prague, in 1420. Ziska met
him and defeated him, and drove him, with his crusaders, from
the country. The Taborites were now maddened by their success,
and raged over the land, destroying convents and burning
priests. Their doctrines, moreover, began to take on a
socialistic and republican character, threatening property in
general and questioning monarchy, too. The well-to-do and
conservative classes were more and more repelled from them.

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In 1421 a second crusading army, 200,000 strong, invaded
Bohemia and was scattered like chaff by Ziska (now blind) and
his peasant soldiery. The next year they defeated the Emperor
again; but in 1424 Ziska died, and a priest called Procopius
the Great took his place. Under their new leader, the fierce
Taborites were as invincible as they had been under Ziska.
They routed an imperial army in 1426, and then carried the war
into Austria and Silesia, committing fearful ravages. Still
another crusade was set in motion against them by the Pope,
and still another disastrous failure was made of it. Then
Germany again suffered a more frightful visitation from the
vengeful Hussites than before. Towns and villages were
destroyed by hundreds, and wide tracks of ruin and death were
marked on the face of the land, to its very center. Once more,
and for the last time, in 1431, the Germans rallied a great force
to retaliate these attacks, and they met defeat, as in all
previous encounters, but more completely than ever before.
Then the Pope and the Emperor gave up hope of putting down the
indomitable revolutionists by force, and opened parleyings.
The Pope called a council at Basel for the discussion of
questions with the Hussites, and, finally, in 1433, their
moderate party was prevailed upon to accept a compromise which
really conceded nothing to them except the use of the cup in
the communion. The Taborites refused the terms, and the two
parties grappled each other in a fierce struggle for the
control of the state. But the extremists had lost much of
their old strength, and the Utraquists vanquished them in a
decisive battle at Lipan, in May, 1434. Two years later
Sigismund was formally acknowledged King of Bohemia and
received in Prague. In 1437 he died. His son-in-law, Albert of
Austria, who succeeded him, lived but two years, and the heir
to the throne then was a son, Ladislaus, born after his
father's death. This left Bohemia in a state of great
confusion and disorder for several years, until a strong man,
George Podiebrad, acquired the control of affairs.

Meantime, the Utraquists had organized a National Church of
Bohemia, considerably divergent from Rome. It failed to
satisfy the deeper religious feelings that were widely current
among the Bohemians in that age, and there grew up a sect
which took the name of "Unitas Fratrum," or "Unity of the
Brethren," but which afterwards became incorrectly known as
the Moravian Brethren. This sect, still existing, has borne an
important part in the missionary history of the Christian
world.

The Papacy.—The Great Schism.

The Papacy, at the time of its conflict with the Hussites, in
Bohemia, was rapidly sinking to that lowest level of
debasement which it reached in the later part of the fifteenth
century. Its state was not yet so abhorrent as it came to be
under the Borgias; but it had been brought even more into
contempt, perhaps, by the divisions and contentions of "the
Great Schism." The so-called "Babylonish Captivity" of the
series of popes who resided for seventy years at Avignon
(1305-1376), and who were under French influence, had been
humiliating to the Church; but the schism which immediately
followed (1378-1417), when a succession of rival popes, or
popes and antipopes, thundered anathemas and excommunications
at one another, from Rome and from Avignon, was even more
scandalous and shameful. Christendom was divided by the
quarrel. France, Spain, Scotland, and some lesser states, gave
their allegiance to the pope at Avignon; England, Germany and
the northern kingdoms adhered to the pope at Rome. In 1402, an
attempt to heal the schism was made by a general Council of
the Church convened at Pisa. It decreed the deposition of both
the contending pontiffs, and elected a third; but its
authority was not recognized, and the confusion of the Church
was only made worse by bringing three popes into the quarrel,
instead of two. Twelve years later, another Council, held at
Constance,—the same which burned Huss,—had more success.
Europe had now grown so tired of the scandal, and so disgusted
with the three pretenders to spiritual supremacy, that the
action of the Council was backed by public opinion, and they
were suppressed. A fourth pope, Martin V., whom the Council
then seated in the chair of St. Peter (1417), was universally
acknowledged, and the Great Schism was at an end.

But other scandals and abuses in the Church, which public
opinion in Europe had already begun to cry loudly against,
were untouched by these Councils. A subsequent Council at
Basel, which met in 1431, attempted some restraints upon papal
extortion (ignoring the more serious moral evils that claimed
attention); but was utterly beaten in the conflict with Pope
Eugenius IV., which this action brought on, and its decrees
lost all effect. So the religious autocracy at Rome, sinking
stage by stage below the foulest secular courts of the time,
continued without check to insult and outrage, more and more,
the piety, the common sense, and the decent feeling of
Christendom, until the habit of reverence was quite worn out
in the minds of men throughout the better half of Europe.

Rome and the last Tribune, Rienzi.

The city of Rome had fallen from all greatness of its own when
it came to be dependent on the fortunes of the popes. Their
departure to Avignon had reduced it to a lamentable state.
They took with them, in reality, the sustenance of the city;
for it lived, in the main, on the revenues of the Papacy, and
knew little of commerce beyond the profitable traffic in
indulgences, absolutions, benefices, relics and papal
blessings, which went to Avignon with the head of the Church.
Authority, too, departed with the Pope, and the wretched city
was given up to anarchy almost uncontrolled. A number of
powerful families—the Colonna, the Orsini, and
others—perpetually at strife with one another, fought out
their feuds in the streets, and abused and oppressed their
neighbors with impunity. Their houses were impregnable
castles, and their retainers were a formidable army.

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It was while this state of things was at its worst that the
famous Cola di Rienzi, "last of the Tribunes," accomplished a
revolution which was short-lived but extraordinary. He roused
the people to action against their oppressors and the
disturbers of their peace. He appealed to them to restore the
republican institutions of ancient Rome, and when they
responded, in 1347, by conferring on him the title and
authority of a Tribune, he actually succeeded in expelling the
turbulent nobles, or reducing them to submission, and
established in Rome, for a little time, what he called "the
Good Estate." But his head was quickly turned by his success;
he was inflated with conceit and vanity; he became arrogant
and despotic; the people tired of him, and after a few months
of rule he was driven from Rome. In 1354 he came back as a
Senator, appointed by the Pope, who thought to use him for the
restoration of papal authority; but his influence was gone,
and he was slain by a-riotous mob.

The return of the Pope to Rome in 1376 was an event so long
and ardently desired by the Roman people that they submitted
themselves eagerly to his government. But his sovereignty over
the States of the Church was substantially lost, and the
regaining of it was the principal object of the exertions of
the popes for a long subsequent period.

The Two Sicilies.

In Southern Italy and Sicily, since the fall of the
Hohenstaufens (1268), the times had been continuously evil.
The rule of the French conqueror, Charles of Anjou, was hard
and unmerciful, and the power he established became
threatening to the Papacy, which gave the kingdom to him. In
1282, Sicily freed itself, by the savage massacre of Frenchmen
which bears the name of the Sicilian Vespers. The King of
Aragon, Peter III., whose queen was the Hohenstaufen heiress,
supported the insurrection promptly and vigorously, took
possession of the island, and was recognized by the people as
their king. A war of twenty years' duration ensued. Both
Charles and Peter died and their sons continued the battle. In
the end, the Angevin house held the mainland, as a separate
kingdom, with Naples for its capital, and a younger branch of
the royal family of Aragon reigned in the island. But both
sovereigns called themselves Kings of Sicily, so that History,
ever since, has been forced to speak puzzlingly of "Two
Sicilies." For convenience it seems best to distinguish them
by calling one the kingdom of Naples and the other the kingdom
of Sicily. On the Neapolitan throne there came one estimable
prince, in Robert, who reigned from 1309 to 1343, and who was
a friend of peace and a patron of arts and letters. But after
him the throne was befouled by crimes and vices, and the
kingdom was made miserable by civil wars. His grand-daughter
Joanna, or Jane, succeeded him. Robert's elder brother
Caribert had become King of Hungary, and Joanna now married
one of that king's sons—her cousin Andrew. At the end of two
years he was murdered (1345) and the queen, a notoriously
vicious woman, was accused of the crime. Andrew's brother,
Louis, who had succeeded to the throne in Hungary, invaded
Naples to avenge his death, and Joanna was driven to flight.
The country then suffered from the worst form of civil war—a
war carried on by the hireling ruffians of the "free
companies" who roamed about Italy in that age, selling their
swords to the highest bidders. In 1351 a peace was brought
about which restored Joanna to the throne. The Hungarian
King's son, known as Charles of Durazzo, was her recognized
heir, but she saw fit to disinherit him and adopt Louis, of
the Second House of Anjou, brother of Charles V. in France.
Charles of Durazzo invaded Naples, took the queen prisoner and
put her to death. Louis of Anjou attempted to displace him, but
failed. In 1383 Louis died, leaving his claims to his son.
Charles of Durazzo was called to Hungary, after a time, to
take the crown of that kingdom, and left his young son,
Ladislaus, on the Neapolitan throne. The Angevin claimant,
Louis II., was then called in by his partisans, and civil war
was renewed for years. When Ladislaus reached manhood he
succeeded in expelling Louis, and he held the kingdom until
his death, in 1414. He was succeeded by his sister, Joanna
II., who proved to be as wicked and dissolute a woman as her
predecessor of the same name. She incurred the enmity of the
Pope, who persuaded Louis III., son of Louis II., to renew the
claims of his house. The most renowned "condottiere" (or
military contractor, as the term might be translated), of the
day, Atteridolo Sforza, was engaged to make war on Queen
Joanna in the interest of Louis. On her side she obtained a
champion by promising her dominions to Alfonso V., of Aragon
and Sicily. The struggle went on for years, with varying
fortunes. The fickle and treacherous Joanna revoked her
adoption of Alfonso, after a time, and made Louis her heir.
When Louis died, she bequeathed her crown to his brother René,
Duke of Lorraine. Her death occurred in 1435, but still the
war continued, and nearly all Italy was involved in it, taking
one side or the other. Alfonso succeeded at last (1442) in
establishing himself at Naples, and René practically gave up
the contest, although he kept the title of King of Naples. He
was the father of the famous English Queen Margaret of Anjou,
who fought for her weak-minded husband and her son in the Wars
of the Roses.

While the Neapolitan kingdom was passing through these endless
miseries of anarchy, civil war, and evil government, the
Sicilian kingdom enjoyed a more peaceful and prosperous
existence. The crown, briefly held by a cadet branch of the
House of Aragon, was soon reunited to that of Aragon; and
under Alfonso, as we have seen, it was once more joined with
that of Naples, in a "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies." But both
these unions were dissolved on the death of Alfonso, who
bequeathed Aragon and Sicily to his legitimate heir, and
Naples to a bastard son.

The Despots of Northern Italy.

In Northern Italy a great change in the political state of
many among the formerly free commonwealths had been going on
since the thirteenth century. The experience of the Greek
city-republics had been repeated in them. In one way and
another, they had fallen under the domination of powerful
families, who had established a despotic rule over them,
sometimes gathering several cities and their surrounding
territory into a considerable dominion, and obtaining from the
Emperor or the Pope a formally conferred and hereditary title.
Thus the Visconti had established themselves at Milan, and had
become a ducal house. After a few generations they gave way to
the military adventurer, Francesco Sforza, son of the Sforza
who made war for Louis III. of Anjou on Joanna II. of Naples.
In Verona, the Della Scala family reigned for a time, until
Venice overcame them; at Modena and Ferrara, the Estes; at
Mantua, the Gonzagas; at Padua, the Carraras.

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The Italian Republics.

In other cities, the political changes were of a different
character. Venice, which grew rich and powerful with
extraordinary rapidity, was tyrannically governed by a haughty
and exclusive aristocracy. In commerce and in wealth she
surpassed all her rivals, and her affairs were more shrewdly
conducted. She held large possessions in the East, and she was
acquiring an extensive dominion on the Italian mainland. The
Genoese, who were the most formidable competitors of Venice in
commerce, preserved their democracy, but at some serious
expense to the administrative efficiency of their government.
They were troubled by a nobility which could only be turbulent
and could not control. They fought a desperate but losing
fight with the Venetians, and were several times in subjection
to the dukes of Milan and the kings of France. Pisa, which had
led both Venice and Genoa in the commercial race at the
beginning, was ruined by her wars with the latter, and with
Florence, and sank, in the fourteenth century, under the rule
of the Visconti, who sold their rights to the Florentines.

Florence.

The wonderful Florentine republic was the one which preserved
its independence under popular institutions the longest, and
in which they bore the most splendid fruit. For a period that
began in the later part of the thirteenth century, the
government of Florence was so radically democratic that the
nobles (grandi) were made ineligible to office, and could only
qualify themselves for election to any place in the magistracy
by abandoning their order and engaging in the labor of some
craft or art. The vocations of skilled industry were all
organized in gilds, called Arti, and were divided into two
classes, one representing what were recognized as the superior
arts (Arti Major, embracing professional and mercantile callings,
with some others); the other including the commoner
industries, known as the Arti Minori. From the heads, or
Priors, of the Arti were chosen a Signory, changed every two
months, which was entrusted with the government of the
republic. This popular constitution was maintained in its
essential features through the better part of a century, but
with continual resistance and disturbance from the excluded
nobles, on one side, and from the common laboring people, on
the other, who belonged to no art-gild and who, therefore,
were excluded likewise from participation in political
affairs. Between these two upper and lower discontents, the
bourgeois constitution gave way at last. The mob got control
for a time; but only, as always happens, to bring about a
reactionary revolution, which placed an oligarchy in power;
and the oligarchy made smooth the way for a single family of
great wealth and popular gifts and graces to rise to supremacy
in the state. This was the renowned family which began to rule
in Florence in 1435, when Cosimo de' Medici entered on the
office of Gonfaloniere. The Medici were not despots, of the
class of the Visconti, or the Sforzas, or the Estes. They
governed under the old constitutional forms, with not much
violation of anything except the spirit of them. They acquired
no princely title, until the late, declining days of the
house. Their power rested on influence and prestige, at first,
and finally on habit. They developed, and enlisted in their
own support, as something reflected from themselves, the pride
of the city in itself,—in its magnificence,—in its great and
liberal wealth,—in its patronage of letters and art,—in its
fame abroad and the admiration with which men looked upon it.

Through all the political changes in Florence there ran an
unending war of factions, the bitterest and most inveterate in
history. The control of the city belonged naturally to the
Guelfs, for it was the head and front of the Guelfic party in
Italy. "Without Florence," says one historian, "there would
have been no Guelfs." But neither party scrupled to call armed
help from the outside into its quarrels, and the Ghibellines
were able, nearly as often as the Guelfs, to drive their
opponents from the city. For the ascendancy of one faction
meant commonly the flight or expulsion of every man in the
other who had importance enough to be noticed. It was thus
that Dante, an ardent Ghibelline, became an exile from his
beloved Florence during the later years of his life. But the
strife of Guelfs with Ghibellines did not suffice for the
partisan rancor of the Florentines, and they complicated it
with another split of factions, which bore the names of the
Bianchi and the Neri, 01' the Whites and the Blacks.

For two or three centuries the annals of Florence are naught,
one thinks in reading them, but an unbroken tale of strife
within, or war without—of tumult, riot, revolution,
disorder. And yet, underneath, there is an amazing story to be
found, of thrift, industry, commerce, prosperity, wealth, on
one side, and of the sublimest genius, on another, giving
itself, in pure devotion, to poetry and art. The contradiction
of circumstances seems irreconcilable to our modern
experience, and we have to seek an explanation of it in the
very different conditions of mediæval life. It is with
certainty a fact that Florence, in its democratic time, was
phenomenal in genius, and in richness of life,—in prosperity
both material and intellectual; and it is reasonable to credit
to that time the planting and the growing of fruits which
ripened surpassingly in the Medicean age.

The Ottomans and the Eastern Empire.

So little occasion has arisen for any mention of the lingering
Eastern Empire, since Michael Palæologus, the Greek, recovered
Constantinople from the Franks (1261), that its existence
might easily be forgotten. It had no importance until it fell,
and then it loomed large again, in history, not only by the
tragic impression of its fall upon the imaginations of men,
but by the potent consequences of it.

For nearly two hundred years, the successors of Palæologus,
still calling themselves "Emperors of the Romans," and ruling
a little Thracian and Macedonian corner of the old dominion of
the Eastern Cæsars, struggled with a new race of Turks, who
had followed the Seljuk horde out of the same Central Asian
region. One of the first known leaders of this tribe was
Osman, or Othman, after whom they are sometimes called
Osmanlis, but more frequently Ottoman Turks. They appeared in
Asia Minor about the middle of the thirteenth century,
attacking both Christian and Mahometan states, and gradually
extending their conquest over the whole. About the end of the
first century of their career, they passed the straits and won
a footing in Europe. In 1361, they took Hadrianople and made
it their capital. Their sultan at this time was Amurath.

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As yet, they did not attack Constantinople. The city itself
was too strong in its fortifications; but beyond the walls of
the capital there was no strength in the little fragment of
Empire that remained. It appealed vainly to Western Europe for
help. It sought to make terms with the Church of Rome. Nothing
saved it for the moment but the evident disposition of the
Turk to regard it as fruit which would drop to his hand in due
time, and which he might safely leave waiting while he turned
his arms against its more formidable neighbors. He contented
himself with exacting tribute from the emperors, and
humiliating them by commands which they dared not disobey. In
the Servians, the Bosnians, and the Bulgarians, Amurath found
worthier foes. He took Sophia, their principal city, from the
latter, in 1382; in 1389 he defeated the two former nations in
the great battle of Kossova. At the moment of victory he was
assassinated, and his son Bajazet mounted the Ottoman throne.
The latter, at Nicopolis (1396), overwhelmed and destroyed the
one army which Western Europe sent to oppose the conquering
march of his terrible race. Six years later, he himself was
vanquished and taken prisoner in Asia by a still more terrible
conqueror,—the fiendish Timour or Tamerlane, then scourging
the eastern Continent. For some years the Turks were paralyzed
by a disputed succession; but under Amurath II., who came to
the throne in 1421, their advance was resumed, and in a few
years more their long combat with the Hungarians began.

Hungary and the Turks.

The original line of kings of Hungary having died out in 1301,
the influence of the Pope, who claimed the kingdom as a fief
of the papal see, secured the election to the throne of
Charles Robert, or Caribert, of the Naples branch of the House
of Anjou. He and his son Louis, called the Great, raised the
kingdom to notable importance and power. Louis added the crown
of Poland to that of Hungary, and on his death, leaving two
daughters, the Polish crown passed to the husband of one and
the Hungarian crown to the husband of the other. This latter
was Sigismund of Luxemburg, who afterwards became Emperor, and
also King of Bohemia. Under Sigismund, Hungary was threatened
on one side by the Turks, and ravaged on the other by the
Hussites of Bohemia. He was succeeded (1437) by his
son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who lived only two years, and
the latter was followed by Wladislaus, King of Poland; who
again united the two crowns, though at the cost of a
distracting civil war with partisans of the infant son of
Albert. It was in the reign of this prince that the Turks
began their obstinate attacks on Hungary, and thenceforth, for
two centuries and more, that afflicted country served
Christendom as a battered bulwark which the new warriors of
Islam could beat and disfigure but could not break down. The
hero of these first Hungarian wars with the Turks was John
Huniades, or Hunyady, a Wallachian, who fought them with
success until a peace was concluded in 1444. But King
Wladislaus was persuaded the same year by a papal agent to
break the treaty and to lead an expedition against the enemy's
lines. The result was a calamitous defeat, the death of the
king, and the almost total destruction of his army. Huniades
now became regent of the kingdom, during the minority of the
late King Albert's young son, Ladislaus.

He suffered one serious defeat at the hands of the Turks, but
avenged it again and again, with help from an army of
volunteers raised in all parts of Europe by the exertions of a
zealous monk named Capistrano. When Huniades died, in 1456,
his enemies already controlled the worthless young king,
Ladislaus, and the latter pursued him in his grave with
denunciations as a traitor and a villain. In 1458, Ladislaus
died, and Mathias, a son of Huniades, was elected king. After
he had settled himself securely upon the throne, Mathias
turned his arms, not against the Turks, but against the
Hussites of Bohemia, in an attempt to wrest the crown of that
kingdom from George Podiebrad.

The Fall of Constantinople.

Meantime, the Turkish Sultan, Mohammed II., had accomplished
the capture of Constantinople and brought the venerable Empire
of the East—Roman, Greek, or Byzantine, as we choose to name
it—to an end. He was challenged to the undertaking by the
folly of the last Emperor, Constantine Palæologus, who
threatened to support a pretender to Mohammed's throne. The
latter began serious preparations at once for a siege of the
long coveted city, and opened his attack in April, 1453. The
Greeks, even in that hour of common danger, were too hotly
engaged in a religious quarrel to act defensively together.
Their last preceding emperor had gone personally to the
Council of the Western Church, at Florence, in 1439, with some
of the bishops of the Greek Church, and had arranged for the
submission of the latter to Rome, as a means of procuring help
from Catholic Europe against the Turks. His successor,
Constantine, adhered to this engagement, professed the
Catholic faith and observed the Catholic ritual. His subjects
in general repudiated the imperial contract with scorn, and
avowedly preferred a Turkish master to a Roman shepherd. Hence
they took little part in the defense of the city. Constantine,
with the small force at his command, fought the host of
besiegers with noble courage and obstinacy for seven weeks,
receiving a little succor from the Genoese, but from no other
quarter. On the 29th of May the walls were carried by storm;
the Emperor fell, fighting bravely to the last; and the Turks
became masters of the city of Constantine. There was no
extensive massacre of the inhabitants; the city was given up
to pillage, but not to destruction, for the conqueror intended
to make it his capital. A number of fugitives had escaped,
before, or during the siege, and made their way into Italy and
other parts of Europe, carrying an influence which was
importantly felt, as we shall presently see; but 60,000
captives, men, women and children, were sold into slavery and
scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Greece and most of the islands of the Ægean soon shared the
fate of Constantinople, and the subjugation of Servia and
Bosnia was made complete. Mohammed was even threatening Italy
when he died, in 1481.

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Renaissance.

We have now come, in our hasty survey of European history, to
the stretch of time within which historians have quite
generally agreed to place the ending of the state of things
characteristic of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the
changed conditions and the different spirit that belong to the
modern life of the civilized world. The transition in European
society from mediæval to modern ways, feelings, and thoughts
has been called Renaissance, or new birth; but the figure
under which this places the conception before one's mind does
not seem to be really a happy one. There was no birth of
anything new in the nature of the generations of men who
passed through that change, nor in the societies which they
formed. What occurred to make changes in both was an
expansion, a liberation, an enlightenment—an opening of eyes,
and of ears, and of inner senses and sensibilities. There was no
time and no place that can be marked at which this began; and
there is no cause nor chain of causes to which it can be
traced. We have found signs of its coming, here and there, in
one token of movement and another, all the way through later
mediæval times—at least since the first Crusades. In the
thirteenth century there was a wonderful quickening of all the
many processes which made it up. In the fourteenth century
they were checked; but still they went on. In the fifteenth
they revived with greater energy than before; and in the
sixteenth they rose to their climax in intensity and effect.
That which took place in European society was not a
re-naissance so much as the re-wakening of men to a day-light
existence, after a thousand years of sunless
night,—moonlighted at the best. The truest descriptive figure
is that which represents these preludes to our modern age as a
morning dawn and daybreak.

Probably foremost among the causes of the change in Western
Europe from the mediæval to the modern state, we must place
those influences that extinguished the disorganizing forces in
feudalism. Habits and forms of the feudal arrangement remained
troublesome in society, as they do in some measure to the
present day; but feudalism as a system of social disorder and
disintegration was by this time cleared away. We have noted in
passing some of the undermining agencies by which it was
destroyed: the crusading movements; the growth and
enfranchisement of cities; the spread of commerce; the rise of
a middle class; the study of Roman law; the consequent increase
of royal authority in France,—all these were among the causes
of its decline. But possibly none among them wrought such
quick and deadly harm to feudalism as the introduction of
gunpowder and fire-arms in war, which occurred in the
fourteenth century. When his new weapons placed the
foot-soldier on a fairly even footing in battle with the
mailed and mounted knight, the feudal military organization of
society was ruined beyond remedy. The changed conditions of
warfare made trained armies, and therefore standing armies, a
necessity; standing armies implied centralized authority; with
centralized authority the feudal condition disappeared.

If these agencies in the generating of the new movement of
civilization which we call Modern are placed before the
subtler and more powerful influence of the printing press, it
is because they had to do a certain work in the world before
the printing press could be an efficient educator. Some
beginning of a public, in our modern sense, required to be
created, for letters to act upon. Until that came about, the
copyists of the monasteries and of the few palace libraries
existing were more than sufficient to satisfy all demands for
the multiplication of ancient writings or the publication of
new ones. The printer, if he had existed, would have starved
for want of employment. He would have lacked material,
moreover, to work upon; for it was the rediscovery of a great
ancient literature which made him busy when he came.

Invention of Printing.

The preparation of Europe for an effective use of the art of
printing may be said to have begun in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, when the great universities of Paris,
Bologna, Naples, Padua, Modena, and others, came into
existence, to be centers of intellectual
irritation—disputation—challenge—groping inquiry. But it
was not until the fourteenth century, when the labors and the
influence of Petrarch and other scholars and men of genius
roused interest in the forgotten literature of ancient Rome
and Greece, that the craving and seeking for books grew
considerable. Scholars and pretended scholars from the Greek
Empire then began to find employment, in Italy more
especially, as teachers of the Greek language, and a market
was opened for manuscripts of the older Greek writings, which
brought many precious ones to light, after long burial, and
multiplied copies of them. From Italy, this revival of classic
learning crept westward and northward somewhat slowly, but it
went steadily on, and the book as a commodity in the commerce
of the world rose year by year in importance, until the
printer came forward, about the middle of the fifteenth
century, to make it abundant and cheap.

Whether John Gutenberg, at Mentz, in 1454, or Laurent Coster,
at Haarlem, twenty years earlier, executed the first printing
with movable types, is a question of small importance, except
as a question of justice between the two possible inventors,
in awarding a great fame which belongs to one or both. The
grand fact is, that thought and knowledge took wings from that
sublime invention, and ideas were spread among men with a
swift diffusion that the world had never dreamed of before.
The slow wakening that had gone on for two centuries became
suddenly so quick that scarcely more than fifty years, from
the printing of the first Bible, sufficed to inoculate half of
Europe with the independent thinking of a few boldly
enlightened men.

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The Greek Revival.

If Gutenberg's printing of Pope Nicholas' letter of
indulgence, in 1454, was really the first achievement of the
new-born art, then it followed by a single year the event
commonly fixed upon for the dating of our Modern Era, and it
derived much of its earliest importance indirectly from that
event. For the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, was preceded
and followed by a flight of Greeks to Western Europe, bearing
such treasures as they could save from the Turks. Happily
those treasures included precious manuscripts; and among the
fugitives was no small number of educated Greeks, who became
teachers of their language in the West. Thus teaching and text
were offered at the moment when the printing press stood ready
to make a common gift of them to every hungering student. This
opened the second of the three stages which the late John
Addington Symonds defined in the history of scholarship during
the Renaissance: "The first is the age of passionate desire;
Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and
Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he
might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the
heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a
thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition
and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library
in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolani, who ransacked all the
cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with
the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth
century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of
classic literature, are the heroes of this second period."
"Then came the third age of scholarship—the age of the
critics, philologers, and printers. … Florence, Venice,
Basle, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The Aldi, the
Stephani, and Froben, toiled by night and day, employing
scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of
sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the
press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of
envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists
in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of
scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labours of
these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of
Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil
was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato
in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind.
… This third age in the history of the Renaissance
Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus
[1465-1536]; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch
of learning to the northern nations" (Symonds).

Art had already had its new birth in Italy; but it shared with
everything spiritual and intellectual the wonderful quickening
of the age, and produced the great masters of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries: Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, Titian, in Italy, the Brothers Van Eyck in Flanders,
Holbein and Dürer, in Germany, and the host of their compeers
in that astonishing age of artistic genius.

Portuguese Explorations.

A ruder and more practical direction in which the spirit of
the age manifested itself conspicuously and with prodigious
results was that of exploring navigation, to penetrate the
unknown regions of the globe and find their secrets out. But,
strangely, it was none of the older maritime and commercial
peoples who led the way in this: neither the Venetians, nor
the Genoese, nor the Catalans, nor the Flemings, nor the Hansa
Leaguers, nor the English, were early in the search for new
countries and new routes of trade. The grand exploit of
"business enterprise" in the fifteenth century, which changed
the face of commerce throughout the world, was left to be
performed by the Portuguese, whose prior commercial experience
was as slight as that of any people in Europe. And it was one
great man among them, a younger son in their royal family,
Prince Henry, known to later times as "the Navigator," who
woke the spirit of exploration in them and pushed them to the
achievement which placed Portugal, for a time, at the head of
the maritime states. Beginning in 1434, Prince Henry sent
expedition following expedition down the western coast of
Africa, searching for the southern extremity of the continent,
and a way round it to the eastward—to the Indies, the goal of
commercial ambition then and long after. In our own day it
seems an easy thing to sail down the African coast to the
Cape; but it was not easy in the middle of the fifteenth
century; and when Prince Henry died, in 1460, his ships had
only reached the mouth of the Gambia, or a little way beyond
it. His countrymen had grown interested, however, in the
pursuit which he began, and expeditions were continued, not
eagerly but at intervals, until Bartolomew Diaz, in 1486,
rounded the southern point of the continent without knowing
it, and Vasco da Gama, in 1497, passed beyond, and sailed to
the coast of India.

Discovery of America.

Five years before this, Columbus, in the service of Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain, had made the more venturesome voyage
westward, and had found the New World of America. That the
fruits of that surpassing discovery fell to Spain, is one of
the happenings of history which one need not try to explain;
since (if we except the Catalans among them) there were no
people in Europe less inclined to ocean adventure than the
Spaniards. But they had just finished the conquest of the
Moors; their energies, long exercised in that struggle,
demanded some new outlet, and the Genoese navigator, seeking
money and ships, and baffled in all more promising lands, came
to them at the right moment for a favorable hearing. So
Castile won the amazing prize of adventure, which seems to
have belonged by more natural right to Genoa, or Venice, or
Bruges, or Lubeck, or Bristol.

The immediate material effects of the finding of the new way
to the Asiatic side of the world were far more important than
the effects of the discovery of America, and they were
promptly felt. No sooner had the Portuguese secured their
footing in the eastern seas, and on the route thither, which
they proceeded vigorously to do, than the commerce of Europe
with that rich region of spices and silks, and curious
luxuries which Europe loved, abandoned its ancient channels
and ran quickly into the new one. There were several strong
reasons for this: (1) the carriage of goods by the longer
ocean route was cheaper than by caravan routes to the
Mediterranean; (2) the pestilent Moorish pirates of the
Barbary Coast were escaped; (3) European merchants found heavy
advantages in dealing directly with the East instead of
trading at second hand through Arabs and Turks. So the
commerce of the Indies fled suddenly away from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic; fled from Venice, from Genoa,
from Marseilles, from Barcelona, from Constantinople, from
Alexandria; fled, too, from many cities of the arrogant Hanse
league in the North, which had learned the old ways of traffic
and were slow to catch the idea of a possible change. At the
outset of the rearrangement of trade, the Portuguese won and
held, for a time, the first handling of East Indian
commodities, while Dutch, English and German
traders—especially the first named—met them at Lisbon and
took their wares for distribution through central and northern
Europe. But, in no long time, the Dutch and English went to
India on their own account, and ousted the Portuguese from
their profitable monopoly.

{1051}

Commercially, the discovery of America had little effect on
Europe for a century or two. Politically, it had vast
consequences in the sixteenth century, which came, in the
main, from the power and prestige that accrued to Spain. But
perhaps its most important effects were those moral and
intellectual ones which may be attributed to the sudden,
surprising enlargement of the geographical horizon of men. The
lifting of the curtain of mystery which had hung so long
between two halves of the world must have compelled every man,
who thought at all, to suspect that other curtains of mystery
might be hiding facts as simple and substantial, waiting for
their Columbus to disclose them; and so the bondage of the
mediæval mind to that cowardice of superstition which fears
inquiry, must surely have been greatly loosened by the
startling event. But the Spaniards, who rushed to the
possession of the new-found world, showed small signs of any
such effect upon their minds; and perhaps it was the greedy
thought of their possession which excluded it.

Nationalization of Spain.

The Spaniards were one of half-a-dozen peoples in Western
Europe who had just arrived, in this fifteenth century, at a
fairly consolidated nationality, and were prepared, for the
first time in their history, to act with something like
organic unity in the affairs of the world. It was one of the
singular birth-marks of the new era in history, that so many
nations passed from the inchoate to the definite form at so
nearly the same time. The marriage of Isabella of Castile to
Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1469, effected a permanent union of
the two crowns, and a substantial incorporation of the greater
part of the Spanish peninsula into a single strong kingdom,
made yet stronger in 1491 by the conquest of Grenada and
subjugation of the last of the Spanish Moors.

Louis XI. and the Nationalizing of France.

The nationalizing of France had been a simultaneous but quite
different process. From the miserably downfallen and divided
state in which it was left by the Hundred Years War, it was
raised by a singular king, who employed strange, ignoble
methods, but employed them with remarkable success. This was
Louis XI., who owes to Sir Walter Scott's romance of "Quentin
Durward" an introduction to common fame which he could hardly
have secured otherwise; since popular attention is not often
drawn to the kind of cunning and hidden work in politics which
he did.

Louis XI., on coming to the throne in 1461, found himself
surrounded by a state of things which seemed much like a
revival of the feudal state at its worst, when Philip Augustus
and Louis IX. had to deal with great vassals who rivalled or
overtopped them in power. The reckless granting of appanages
to children of the royal family had raised up a new group of
nobles, too powerful and too proud to be loyal and obedient
subjects of the monarchy. At the head of them was the Duke of
Burgundy, whose splendid dominion, extended by marriage over
most of the Netherlands, raised him to a place among the
greater princes of Europe, and who quite outshone the King of
France in everything but the royal title. It was impossible,
under the circumstances, for the crown to establish its
supremacy over these powerful lords by means direct and open.
The craft and dishonesty of Louis found methods more
effectual. He cajoled, beguiled, betrayed and cheated his
antagonists, one by one. He played the selfishness and
ambitions of each against the others, and he skilfully evoked
something like a public opinion in his kingdom against the
whole. At the outset of his reign the nobles formed a
combination against him which they called the League of the
Public Weal, but which aimed at nothing but fresh gains to the
privileged class and advantages to its chiefs. Of alliance with
the people against the crown, as in England, there was no
thought. Louis yielded to the League in appearance, and
cunningly went beyond its demands in his concessions, making
it odious to the kingdom at large, and securing to himself the
strong support of the States-General of France, when he
appealed to it.

The tortuous policy of Louis was aided by many favoring
circumstances and happenings. It was favored not least,
perhaps, by the hot-headed character of Charles the Bold, who
succeeded his father, Philip, in the Duchy of Burgundy, in
1467. Charles was inspired with a great and not unreasonable
ambition, to make his realm a kingdom, holding a middle place
between France and Germany. He had abilities, but he was of a
passionate and haughty temper, and no match for the cool,
perfidious, plotting King of France. The latter, by skilful
intrigue, involved him in a war with the Swiss, which he
conducted imprudently, and in which he was defeated and killed
(1477). His death cleared Louis' path to complete mastery in
France, and he made the most of his opportunity. Charles left
only a daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and her situation was
helpless. Louis lost no time in seizing the Duchy of Burgundy,
as a fief of France, and in the pretended exercise of his
rights as godfather of the Duchess Mary. He also took
possession of Franche Comté, which was a fief of the Empire,
and he put forward claims in Flanders, Artois, and elsewhere.
But the Netherlanders, while they took advantage of the young
duchess' situation, and exacted large concessions of chartered
privileges from her, yet maintained her rights; and before the
first year of her orphanage closed, she obtained a champion by
marriage with the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the
Emperor, Frederick III. Maximilian was successful in war with
Louis; but the latter succeeded, after all, in holding
Burgundy, which was thenceforth absorbed in the royal domain
of France and gave no further trouble to the monarchy, while
he won some important extensions of the northwestern frontiers
of his kingdom.

Before the death of Louis XI. the French crown regained Anjou,
Maine, and Provence, by inheritance from the last
representative of the great second House of Anjou. Thus the
kingdom which he left to his son, Charles VIII. (1483), was a
consolidated nation, containing in its centralized government
the germs of the absolute monarchy of a later day.

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Italian Expedition of Charles VIII.

Charles VIII. was a loutish and uneducated boy of eight years
when his father died. His capable sister Anne carried on the
government for some years, and continued her father's work by
defeating a revolt of the nobles, and by marrying the young
king to the heiress of Brittany—thereby uniting to the crown
the last of the great semi-independent fiefs. When Charles
came of age, he conceived the idea of recovering the kingdom
of Naples, which the House of Anjou claimed, and which he
looked upon as part of his inheritance from that House. He was
incited to the enterprise, moreover, by Ludovico il Moro, or
Louis the Moor, an intriguing uncle of the young Duke of
Milan, who conspired to displace his nephew. In 1494 Charles
crossed the Alps with a large and well-disciplined army, and
met with no effectual opposition. The Medici of Florence and
the Pope had agreed together to resist this French intrusion,
which they feared; but the invading force proved too
formidable, and the Florentines, then under the influence of
Savonarola, looked to it for their liberation from the
Medicean rule, already oppressive. Accordingly Charles marched
triumphantly through the peninsula, making some stay at Rome.
On his approach to Naples, the Aragonese King, Alfonso,
abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II., and died soon
after. Ferdinand, shut out of Naples by an insurrection, fled
to Sicily, and Charles entered the city, where the populace
welcomed him with warmth. Most of the kingdom submitted within
a few weeks, and the conquest seemed complete, as it had been
easy.

But what they had won so easily the French held with a
careless hand, and they lost it with equal ease. While they
revelled and caroused in Naples, abusing the hospitality of
their new subjects, and gathering plunder with reckless greed,
a dangerous combination was formed against them, throughout
the peninsula. Before they were aware, it had put them in
peril, and Charles was forced to retreat with haste, in the
spring of 1495, leaving an inadequate garrison to hold the
Neapolitan capital. In Lombardy, he had to fight with the
Venetians, and with his protege, Louis the Moor, now Duke of
Milan. He defeated them, and regained France in November. Long
before that time, the small force he left at Naples had been
overcome, and Ferdinand had recovered his kingdom.