Chapter II: Part 2

The inauguration of the communal system had taken place without a struggle, and almost without opposition, as a useful and necessary reform at Metz, at Rheims, in a few midland towns, such as Bourges, Moulins, Lyons, Périgeux, and in most of the southern cities, such as Arles, Aigues-Mortes (Fig. 19), Marseilles, Narbonne, Cahors (Fig. 20), Carcassonne (Fig. 21), Nîmes, and Bordeaux. This was explained by the fact that this independent action of the people had been prepared by the system adopted by the Franks, who allowed no difference to exist between the condition of the conquered and of the conquerors. The rights they might enjoy and the duties they were to perform had been equally shared amongst all the freedmen of the monarchy without any distinction as to nationality; the Franks would have feared, had they acted differently, that they were reserving for the sovereign the possibility of using the oppressed nations as a weapon to overcome the conquerors themselves, and that in this way they might be leaving a loophole through which the monarchy might degenerate into despotism.

Beyond the Alps, particularly in Lombardy, under the fostering action of liberal institutions, commerce and manufactures developed themselves, particularly at Milan, Pavia, Verona, and Florence; and in a still higher degree, owing to their position on the sea-board, at Venice and Genoa. In these rich and prosperous cities the seignorial nobility and the Church reigned side by side, enjoying a nearly equal and parallel influence, and when feudalism attempted to absorb them by its inflexible despotism, the manufacturing and the commercial classes, selecting as their leaders a few more prominent of the artisans and some of the most respected of the clergy, allied themselves with the lesser rural nobles, and, with the assistance of the latter’s vassals, succeeded in repulsing its crushing yoke. This, however, was not accomplished without tremendous struggles, nor without painful trials and heavy sacrifices.

In the Low Countries, which had always so highly exalted the sentiment of local patriotism, the struggle of the villains against the nobles, whether lay or ecclesiastic, differed but little from the struggle of the towns in the north of France against the seigniors, but it assumed larger proportions in accordance with the immense resources of every kind which they had at their disposal. The feudal lord had his drawbridge, his battlements, and his men-at-arms cased in iron; but his rebellious vassal could boast on his side, besides the narrow and winding streets of his stronghold and the number of his fellow-combatants, many warlike engines and well-made weapons which he himself had manufactured. When feudalism, in order to crush what it then termed the populace, summoned to its banner hordes of adventurers recruited from all parts of the world, it was encountered by undisciplined levies of armed mechanics and artisans, who issued forth from Ghent, from Bruges, and from Liége, and not unfrequently returned victorious.

Beyond the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine, feudalism flourished. Lofty fortresses, surrounded with a triple moat, everywhere cast their shadows athwart the land, though the towns enjoyed a full share of municipal liberty, and were not unfrequently the disinterested spectators of the terrible struggles that the feudal nobility carried on between themselves. Nowhere did feudalism display more arrogance or more barbarity than in Germany, which resembled some vast camp to which the nobles flocked to meet face to face in desperate combat.

When it came to pass that the industrial and populous towns of Germany cried out for municipal liberties similar to those enjoyed by the towns of France, Italy, and the Low Countries, the emperor hastened to grant and confirm their desires. He did more, he gave them the right of _immediate appeal_ against the princes of the empire--that is to say, any towns situated in the territory of any prince were responsible, not to the latter, but directly and immediately to the emperor himself, who thus laid for himself the foundations of strong natural supports in the very heart of the larger fiefs. The towns of Germany, already rich and flourishing, increased their commerce and their wealth, thanks to the new position they thus acquired.

The Emperor Henry V. greatly assisted this pacific revolution by granting privileges to the lower class of citizens and to the artisans, who up to that time had, according to the spirit of the Roman law, lived apart from the freedmen and remained at the lowest degree of the social scale. He relieved them, in particular, from the bondage of a custom by virtue of which the seignior at their deaths became entitled to all their personal property, or, at least, enjoyed the power of claiming everything worth having which they had left behind them.

In many towns Henry V. deprived the bishop of his temporal authority, and formed the burgesses into companies or guilds according to the nature of their manual occupation, a custom that was immediately imitated and adopted in other commercial countries. The bourgeoisie, organized in this manner into distinct groups, soon elected councils among themselves, the members of which, under the rule of _senators_, _prud’hommes_, _bonshommes_, _echevins_, and _jurymen_, began by assisting the representative of the imperial authority, whether duke, count, judge, or bishop, and ended by exercising a special and independent authority of their own, not over the vassals, but over citizens and commoners.

It will be asked, what then was the commune which had established itself with more or less effort and sacrifice in the principal parts of Europe? and further, as the commune had succeeded in one way or another in establishing itself, what privileges or immunities remained to the feudal lord, whether clerical or lay? Guilbert de Nogent, the open adversary of communal institutions, will perhaps give the best answer to these inquiries: “Those who pay taxes now pay only once a year the rent they owe to their seignior. If they commit some misdemeanour they have at the most to pay a fine, the amount of which is legally fixed; as for the moneys that were wont to be levied from the serfs, they are now quite exempt from them.” Guilbert de Nogent might have indicated other victories obtained by the bourgeois, victories that were still more important in their moral influence, and which sooner or later were destined to change the face of society. As for the more intelligent seigniors who better understood their own personal interest, as well as the logical results of a paternal administration, they attempted to favour the instinctive movement of the rural populations, who, to shield themselves from the tyranny, the exactions, and the bad treatment of their feudal masters, were in the habit of seeking shelter and protection from some lord more humane or more politic than the rest, and who used, on the faith of a communal charter, to settle beside the ramparts of some seignorial manor (Fig. 22), around some loopholed church, or in the shade of some fortified monastery.

The seignior in these cases was the gainer of so many able-bodied men, either artisans or agriculturists, but soldiers in case of need; and he was the gainer, moreover, in matters of revenue and influence.

It can easily be understood that in those times many charters were drawn up similar to the following, which is worth quoting as a type: “I, Henry, Count of Troyes, make known to all present and to come, that I have established the undermentioned rules for the inhabitants of my new town (in the neighbourhood of Pont-sur-Seine) between the bridges of Pugny. Every man inhabiting the said town shall pay every year twelve deniers and a measure of oats as the price of his dwelling, and if he desires to hold a portion of land or meadow, he must pay four deniers yearly for every acre. The houses, vines, and fields may be sold or alienated at the pleasure of the holder. The men who reside in the said town shall go neither to the _ost_ (an army in the field), nor shall they join any expedition unless I myself am at their head. I hereby allow them, moreover, to have six aldermen to administer the ordinary business of the town and to assist my provost in his duties. I have decreed that no seignior, be he knight or other, shall be allowed to withdraw from the town any of the men inhabitants for any reason whatsoever, unless such be his own men, or unless he owe the seignior any arrears of taxes.--Given at Provins, in the year of the Incarnation, 1175.” This name of _Ville-neuve_, which is so often found repeated in the charters and deeds of the Middle Ages, as, for example, Ville-neuve-l’Etang, Ville-neuve-Saint-George, Ville-neuve-le-Roi, Ville-neuve-lez-Avignon, &c., is evidence of what was an ordinary event in the twelfth century, namely, the creation of a free town, enfranchised from its birth, and subject to some small and insignificant payments to the seignior, and whose inhabitants, but yesterday serfs or villains, were now proprietors of portions of the soil, which they might dispose of or bequeath, either by gift or by testamentary disposition, under the immediate protection of their nominal seignior.

Some ancient towns of the royal domains of France, such as Paris, Orleans, Meaux, Senlis, and others, which do not seem to have preserved the least trace of Roman institutions, always excepting the company of the _Nautes Parisiennes_, who were the true founders of the ancient municipality of Paris, were each governed by a provost, who was the officer and lieutenant of the king, their seignior, and they further enjoyed certain special liberties and privileges. In 1137, Louis VII., at the suggestion of his minister, Suger, forbade his provost and officers to annoy the burgesses in any manner whatsoever, and fixed the amount of their taxation himself. Ten years later, the same sovereign abolished the right of mortmain, repressed the abuses of the fiscal taxes, instituted a judicial system, and greatly encouraged commerce. It was not as king, but as seignior suzerain, that Louis VII. acted in this manner. The French, bourgeoisie was at this time of but recent origin; it had sprung from a triumphant villanage, and was beginning to form a new branch, from which was to issue, a few centuries later, the third estate. Legal jurisdiction and the right of coinage, feudal privileges of which the royal suzerain had always been very jealous, were favours it then but seldom enjoyed. Philip-Augustus understood better than his predecessors the interests of the royal power, for he graciously granted seventy-eight communal charters; he was rewarded by the effectual assistance the communal levies afforded him at the battle of Bouvines (1214), when he was fortunate enough to overthrow the coalition that foreign feudalism had formed with his rebellious great vassals. He forced the latter to return to their duty, and one of them, the Count of Flanders, remained twelve years a prisoner in the principal tower of the Louvre (Fig. 23). Philip-Augustus had not shrunk from granting a legal constitution to the bourgeoisie of Paris and the principal towns, in opposition to the feudal nobility.

The communal movement, a natural development of the legal rights introduced by the Franks, was scarcely felt in England. Already, long before the Norman Conquest, under the Anglo-Saxon rule, many busy towns, wealthy and populous, such as Canterbury, London, Oxford, and York, took a share in public affairs, a limited share, it is true, but one sufficient for their wellbeing and prosperity. The victorious invasion of William of Normandy, so fatal to the whole country, was still more so to the large towns, which were compelled to behold their own material ruin, the sequestration and confiscation of their property, the dispersion and infeudation of their inhabitants, their agriculturists and their farmers. Unable any longer to invoke the protection of an easy-natured sovereign, they were forced to bow their heads beneath the sway of strangers, lucky adventurers, bold, exacting, despotic, and cruel men, believing in no faith and obeying no law, the very dregs of French feudalism. King Henry I., the third son of William the Conqueror, after many sanguinary struggles, in which his barons were not found wanting in fealty to him, granted them the celebrated charter called Magna Charta--usually, though, erroneously, considered the fundamental origin of English liberties, which, however, really dated from a prior period; at the same time (1132) he released the burgesses of London from the lamentable state of degradation in which they had existed since the Conquest. In the reign of Henry II.--an administrative and judicial reformer--not in England alone, but in those parts of Scotland and Ireland which he had conquered (1154–1182), the inhabitants of many towns acquired the right to purchase the freehold of the soil they occupied, and to free themselves from several special taxes by paying a fixed sum to the feudal lord. Thenceforward arose that haughty bourgeoisie, with which the barons had soon to reckon, a class which John Lackland favoured proportionately as he dreaded the continual rebellions of the feudal seigniors. Twice was Prince Louis, the son of Philip-Augustus, summoned by the Anglo-Norman barons to cross the channel with an army to force the English king to fulfil the clauses of the charters he had granted to his great vassals (1215–1216); on the other hand, the towns and communes, grown rich and powerful, thanks to the privileges which had been granted to them as well as to the intelligent activity of their manufactures, forced the nobles to respect them. The latter no longer attempted to compel assistance, but solicited it, often even humbly, so that the communes and the landed aristocracy held an equal position in the feudal hierarchy. The title of _noble_ and _baron_, bestowed on the leading citizens of London and the Cinque Ports, raised the middle-class to a higher position. Indeed, to enable it, already powerful by its wealth and by its alliances, to become a political body, it only needed the privilege of sending representatives to parliament, a privilege which was granted in 1264 to the principal towns of the kingdom.

In France, about the same period, the industrial and trading bourgeoisie had seats in the privy council of St. Louis, and, advancing in letters and science, it gradually obtained possession of all the chairs at the university. As early as the reign of Philip the Bold (Fig. 24), it occupied all the higher positions in the judicature, and hence it assumed a place in the great bailiwicks and parliaments, from which the feudal nobility did not condescend to oust it, and which, after a time, enabled it to offer a successful resistance to the abuse of power on the part of this same nobility, whose authority steadily diminished. Admitted by Philippe-le-Bel to the general assemblies of the nation and to the sessions of the states-general, the bourgeoisie became one of the states, an order of the kingdom, that is, the _tiers-état_. It absorbed the offices pertaining to the general administration and to finance, it furnished the lower orders of the clergy with most of their distinguished representatives, and the municipalities with the most gifted of their magistrates; it acquired the right of purchasing offices which carried nobility with them, of possessing seignorial domains with high and petty justice, and thus it forced its way like ivy into the crevices of the feudal edifice, which stone by stone crumbled to pieces. Philippe-le-Bel, surnamed the _King of the Lawyers_--who helped him in a material degree to carry out his designs--showed himself, as a natural consequence, the King of the Commons (_tiers-état_), and the secret enemy of the Church and the nobility. The latter, valiant and chivalrous, but devoid of forethought, rushing headlong into every kind of adventure, and caring only for deeds of daring and warlike achievements, regardless of their material interests, gradually allowed themselves to be divested of a considerable part of their domains by the bourgeoisie, who lent them money upon mortgage, and by the _voués_ or _procureurs_, who ruined them. The decadence of their wealth dated from the First Crusade, when they encumbered their estates to pay the expenses of distant expeditions, which they undertook almost entirely at their own cost; and when they wished to recover possession of the properties which they had handed over to some third party, they found them loaded with fresh debts, which had been contracted during their absence, and producing but nominal revenues for want of hands to cultivate the soil. They then were obliged to sell a portion of the property, and that at a great loss. The only resource remaining was the concession of their feudal privileges, and in this way the nobility lost the right of coining money and of exercising justice, while the sovereigns--Philippe-le-Bel in particular--seconded by the bourgeoisie, increased their absolute power.

The massacre of more than six thousand chevaliers at Courtray (1302), by the Flemish militia (Fig. 25), was a heavy blow to the pride of the generous but reckless nobility of France. It was humiliating to these lords to find that the villains knew how to wield the arms which they had been in the habit of making for others; they saw that they possessed the courage and skill needed to win battles, and that henceforward they must be reckoned upon as a force able to take the field as well as formidable when engaged in street riots.

In Germany, the fall of the Hohenstaufen family, formerly Dukes of Swabia and Franconia, favoured the enfranchisement of towns; all the cities in these two principalities, hitherto subject to the mediatised lords, reverted to the emperor, who, without any real power over them, left them free to establish the franchise and immunities of a republic. In order to increase their populations, they followed the example of the sovereigns and feudal lords of France and Lombardy in regard to the formation of _new towns_, establishing around their walls, as feudalism had done outside its donjons, fields of refuge. These were occupied by a host of strangers, who received the designation of _Pfahlbürger_--citizens of the palisades, or faubourgians, originally sheltered and protected by a wooden barrier. These receded in proportion as the number of inhabitants increased, and according as their trade developed. Many serfs deserted the neighbouring fiefs to seek in these free towns the independence, position, success, and all the advantages which they could not enjoy under the feudal régime. Their lords demanded their extradition by virtue of their feudal rights, accompanying the demand with threats, which were sometimes effectual; but the free towns, not less interested in keeping the fugitive than the latter was in remaining with them, endeavoured to gain time and to favour his retreat until after the expiration of three hundred and sixty-five days, when the right of the lord to his liegeman or vassal ceased.

The imperial towns--which, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, after having freed themselves from the fetters of feudalism, had risen to such a height of independence that the emperor himself had but a nominal supremacy over them--were Ratisbon, in Bavaria; Augsburg and Ulm, in Swabia; Nuremberg, Spiers, Worms, and Frankfort-on-the-Main, in Franconia; Magdeburg, in Saxony; Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck, in the Hanseatic League; Aix-la-Chapelle, Bonn, Cologne, Coblentz, Mayence, Strasburg, and Metz, in the Rhenish and Lotharingian provinces. These towns, essentially industrial and commercial, in which the middle-classes were for the most part supreme, formed vast emporiums, teeming with the products of the north, the south, and the east. They were looked upon as the store-houses and arsenals of Europe. Feudalism, unable to produce anything for itself, was always replenishing from these depôts the resources necessary for equipping and revictualling its armies. From them came the arms and the engines of warfare, as well as the special workmen, the cross-bowmen, the carpenters, the founders, and the artillerymen, who composed the _personnel_ of the artillery at this period. If the free towns had arrived at a common understanding, and formed a pacific league between themselves, they would have presented a serious obstacle to the struggles of the suzerain lords; but their distance from each other, especially those in the centre of Germany, prevented them from coming to such an arrangement. Nor could they, as in England, form an alliance with the feudal nobility, nor, as in France, make common cause with the suzerain. As the emperor left them to act independently, they were obliged to organize their own defence, to contract alliances with some powerful neighbour, and weaken, by dividing them, those enemies whom they deemed stronger than themselves. Thus these free towns never constituted a homogeneous body; they were isolated and spread over a vast extent of territory, being only brought together by feelings of interest and sympathy, but without any mutual tie or political cohesion. The lord with whom they were at war to-day, would enter their service and pay the next, with the title of _soldarien_; and at times a single town would have as many as two or three hundred of these allies, who were always followed by a swarm of marauders, and who spread desolation throughout the land. The lords who were without fortune, who represented the petty feudalism of the country districts, finding in the service of these towns a means for keeping up their state and paying their followers, passed from one to the other, and only enlisted under the standard of a sovereign prince for want of better employment, for the latter did not as a rule pay so well as these free towns.

From the eleventh to the fourteenth century, the position of the bishop, in point of political influence, did not improve in these free or republican towns, either in England, France, or Germany. Suzerain lord by moral authority, he was only so to a very limited degree (Fig. 26) in respect to his temporal power. He only exercised justice over his vassals, or at most over the members of the secular and inferior clergy, for the canons, the incumbents, and even the deacons, enjoying as they did special immunities, would have appealed, in the event of a dispute or of censure, to their metropolitan archbishop, or even to Rome. It is true that the lay depositaries of municipal authority did not, on their side, take any judicial steps against the ecclesiastics, except in case of conspiracy against the State, which alone rendered them answerable to secular justice. Outside the subordinates of the bishop and the chapter, the episcopal court or tribunal took cognizance of the crimes, the offences, and misdemeanours against religion of which any citizen might be guilty, and also of the heresies, blasphemies, breaking of images, glaring infractions of the commandments of God and of the Church, insults and assaults of the priests, &c. And even in these cases, where the delinquent could plead nobility, and especially when he belonged to the higher classes of feudalism, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical tribunals could not reach him. As the nobility could always claim to be judged by their peers, there was rarely any infraction of this feudal principle, and then only where some diocesan bishop or metropolitan was powerful enough to substitute his own will for the customary right.

In nearly all the episcopal towns, the judgment of the prelate or of his delegates was delivered from the square in front of the cathedral, or from the doorway of some exterior and adjacent chapel. This practice, maintained during the first centuries of the Church’s existence, ceased when another form of justice, namely, civil justice, took its place. In order to avoid the conflicts which must have ensued, and to furnish no pretext for popular disturbance, the ecclesiastical justice took refuge in some special place, generally called the _Cour l’éresque_, till at last the diocesan power, deprived of its temporal prerogatives within the boundary of the free towns, found itself obliged to transfer somewhere else the seat of its jurisdiction and of those feudal rights which it still retained. The mint of the prelate was established there; but so wide was the disagreement between the ecclesiastical and the civil authorities, and so sustained the struggle between the feudal and the middle-class interests, that it often happened that the episcopal money was not accepted as current coin, even in the town where the bishop was spiritually supreme, nor in the territory annexed to the free town and enjoying equal prerogatives.

In Germany and in Italy the emperor, in France and England the king, as the highest representatives of feudalism, possessed in every large city--notably in the cities termed imperial or royal--an official delegate, called burgrave, count, or viscount, who, originally at the head of the army, the magistracy, and the finances, gradually lost his prerogatives till, in the thirteenth century, he was scarcely more than a mere dignitary, without either power or credit. Many bishops, authorised by the lay sovereign, took the title of _count_, without, however, adding in any material degree to their influence. Besides, whatever may have been the nature and extent of the functions of a count, it does not appear that the free towns paid any more heed to them than to the pre-eminence of the bishop in all that appertained to the administration and government of the commune. In many places, especially in Italy and upon the banks of the Moselle and the Rhine, the bourgeoisie possessed councils invested both with the judicial and executive power, also a senate and a parliament, which was summoned by the ringing of a bell, and to which the lords inhabiting the adjacent castles were admitted, but only as ordinary citizens; without, however, losing any of their domainial privileges.

Though feudalism possessed nearly the same generic type in all European countries, it presented here and there varying shades of nationality, due to the dissimilarity of race, to the habits of the people, to the different modes in which it had been introduced, and to the diverse phases of its struggle and growth.

The illustrious house of Franconia, alarmed at the incessant progress of high German feudalism, and anxious to check it, created, in the midst of the duchies by which it was threatened, a number of _immediate_ lordships, owing fealty only to the emperor, and having an hereditary right over the _fiefs of chivalry_. This step met with an obstinate resistance from the great vassals who possessed this hereditary right, which the elected monarch did not enjoy of himself. On the other hand, the palatine lords, agents of the emperor, and empowered to represent him in the great fiefs or in his domains, and the burgraves of the towns, impatient to free themselves from the imperial suzerainty, displayed at the same time the insubordination which the leudes had practised in the Carlovingian epoch, and endeavoured to establish for themselves an independence transmissible to their heirs. While this movement was going on, the Pope was lowering the status of the empire; Innocent II. compelled the Emperor Lothair II. to receive in fee from him Tuscany, the Duchy of Spoleta, the Marches of Ancona, Bologna, Parma, Placenza, &c., forming part of the legacy bequeathed to the Holy See by the Countess Matilda. From this flagrant humiliation, submitted to by Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the successor of Lothair, and haughtily rejected by Henry the Haughty when he refused to render feudal homage to the Pope, arose the celebrated quarrel of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, which, from the banks of the Rhine, spread beyond the Alps, and implanted itself in the very heart of Italy. Henry the Haughty, chief of the Guelphs, independent and royal, was proscribed and stripped of his duchies, while Conrad, chief of the Ghibellines, inaugurated the brilliant dynasty of the Hohenstaufens. Thirty years of bitter warfare, during which the alliance of the papacy with the national party was cemented, seconded by the efforts of petty feudalism, led up to the treaty of Constance, which brought to a definite close the struggle of the feudal empire against the popular independence of the cities of Italy. The Pope had recovered the freeholds left him by the Countess Matilda; the towns preserved their regal prerogatives, entire liberty to raise armies, to surround themselves with walls (Fig. 29), to exercise criminal and civil jurisdiction, and to form confederations with other towns, &c. The emperor was left with no other privileges than those of confirming, through his ambassadors, the consular elections, and of appointing in each town a judge of appeal in his name. It was in vain that the Emperor Henry VI. endeavoured to re-establish high feudalism; he died in the attempt (1199), and Innocent III., who considered himself to be the natural defender of all the rights and the supreme judge in all the monarchies in Europe, resisted every effort made by Henry VI. Several Crusades, moreover, which occurred at about this period, created a modification in the warlike sentiments of the feudal nobility, until, thanks to the policy of the illustrious pontiffs who had occupied the chair of St. Peter, and to the efforts of the Italian free towns, backed up by the petty feudal nobility, the independence of Italy rose triumphant from the tomb which opened for the Emperor Frederick II. on December 13th, 1250.

In England, John Lackland had, by the Magna Charta of 1215–1216, promised the clergy to respect the liberties of the Church, and notably the freedom of election; to the feudal lords he had promised to observe the feudal conditions of release, of ward, and of marriage; to the bourgeois, that no new tax should be levied without the consent of the common council; and to all his subjects he accorded the _habeas corpus_--that is to say, the liberty of the person, with trial by jury, by constituting the court of common pleas at a certain fixed place. A second charter, called the _Forest Charter_, mitigated the extreme severity of the penalties for infraction of the laws appertaining to the chase, and guaranteed the whole of the liberties which had been extracted from him by creating a tribunal of twenty-five barons, entrusted with the function of seeing that this charter was carried out, and, further, of keeping watch over the action of the crown. This was submitting the Government to a regular course of discipline. Just as the feudal nobility had been kept under and oppressed by the sovereign power, so was the latter now hedged in, thwarted, and hampered in its despotic tendencies.

St. Louis, following in the footsteps of Philip Augustus, laboured to suppress the abuses of the feudal régime; he compelled his barons to choose between the fiefs which they held from him and those which they had received from the kings of England; he rooted out the old feudal stocks, created a new feudalism, not less valiant but more moral than the old, and never lost sight of the formidable opposition which the old nobility had ventured to set up against the Queen-Regent, Blanche of Castile, when it declared that the young King Louis should not be consecrated until the suzerain aristocracy was restored to the plenitude of its privileges. After Louis IX., French feudalism, transformed by the saint-king, was neither less haughty, less trivial, nor less insolent than before, but it was more favourable to the crown and less hostile to the Church. It formed a brilliant array of chivalry, full of enthusiasm and impetuosity, commencing a battle well, always winning it at the very beginning of the action, but losing it afterwards for want of being supported by a national body of infantry, whose help it despised; it made up a body of cavalry admirably adapted for tournaments and feats of arms, but incapable of carrying on a regular warfare, or even of ensuring success in a great battle. The victories of Mons-en-Puelle, under Philip IV., and of Cassel, under Philip of Valois (1328), increased to the utmost the blind confidence of the French nobility, and brought about, by absolutely identical means, the disasters of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt (1346, 1356, 1415).

From the events which took place during the space of a century, from the accession to the imperial throne of the Emperor Louis V. (1313) to the Peace of Brétigny (1360), it was made manifest that the destinies of the feudal world rested henceforth upon France and England, those two rival powers, both of which were acquisitive and inflexible; that the Emperor and the Pope occupied but the second place in this latest evolution of feudalism; that Rome, compelled to bend towards France, gave the latter a considerable preponderance, and that the force of equilibrium must inevitably bring together the King of England and the Emperor of Germany. The French royalty, despite the vicissitudes caused by an incessant struggle against the English, despite the ravages of the plague, which had depopulated two-thirds of the kingdom, despite its financial burdens and the precarious position of the monarchy, continued its work of assimilation and feudal incorporation; the suzerainty attaching to the great fiefs gradually fell under the jurisdiction of the sovereign, while, upon the right bank of the Rhine, the great barons remained almost as omnipotent as ever they had been.

There existed in Germany at that time two kinds of leagues between the nobility, the one offensive and the other defensive; that of the _Gauerbinate_ or _Gauerbschaften_, by virtue of which the petty nobility formed family pacts for transmitting their fiefs by indirect line when the direct line should fail, and for reconstructing or repairing their castles out of a common fund; and that of the _Teutonic Hanse_, the league of the prince-archbishops and electors with sixty towns upon the Rhine. Rodolph of Hapsburg (Fig. 30), a monarch as resolute as he was able, put a stop to proceedings which were full of danger to the imperial authority, compelled his vassals to do him homage, and razed to the ground seventy fortresses whose feudal brigandage had scattered desolation and ruin; but, after his death, the usurpation of the suzerain lords began afresh, and the _Bulle d’Or_, which was the basis of public right in Germany, confirmed the downfall of the imperial suzerainty (1378).

In France, on the other hand, as each convocation of the States-General was attended with the creation or levying of some new tax, the third estate attempted to exact all the more from royalty in proportion as it gratified the latter’s pecuniary demands, claiming to have a voice in the question of peace or war, to direct the financial affairs of the kingdom, to be convoked every year, and to share, with the two other orders, the weight of the charges the profit of which ought to be shared by all. The feudal nobility resisted the exorbitant pretensions of the third estate, but when they saw this class forming a secret alliance with the clergy, and setting on foot a formidable league, the password of which was the destruction of the castles and the annihilation of the nobles, they hesitated, and did nothing until the horrible excesses committed by the league in the country districts had given the feudal reaction a character of legality. In 1383, after the battle of Rosebecque, which inflicted a heavy blow upon the communal cause in Flanders and in France, it seemed as if the power of suzerainty was about to revive once more. Froissart, in his Chronicles, rejoiced at this fact, because he believed that social order was threatened with utter ruin (see his Chronicles, year 1383); but French chivalry succumbed in its turn at Agincourt beneath the onslaught of the English archers. This was the final condemnation of feudal armies, as well as of the system which these armies represented, and which they had failed in sustaining. French feudalism had already ceased to be anything more than a storehouse of traditions which were still held in respect, and of old customs which had fallen into disuse among the ancient nobility.

In England, Scotland, and Ireland, high feudalism was rapidly in course of decay, before Henry VIII. dealt it its death-blow; in Germany it struggled for existence during the reign of Maximilian (Fig. 31); in France it was crushed by Louis XI. with the help of the third estate. Beyond the Alps, in Italy, its existence was prolonged for a short period, partly under a clerical disguise, partly by the hired help of the _condottieri_, and in some places by the support of the urban democracy, that is the industrial and trading part of the population. Everywhere, however, it disappeared with the Middle Ages, of which, both in its acts and in its first principles, it bore the ineffaceable imprint (Fig. 32).

WAR AND ARMIES.

The Invasions of the Barbarians.--Attila.--Theodoric
seizes Italy.--Organization of Military Fiefs.--Defences
of Towns.--Totila and his Tactics.--The Military
Genius of Charlemagne.--Military Vassalage.--Communal
Militia.--Earliest Standing Armies.--Loss of Technical
Tradition.--The Condottieri.--The Gendarmerie.--The
_Lances Fournies_.--Weakening of Feudal Military
Obligations.--The French Army in the Time of Louis
XI. and his Successors.--Absence of Administrative
Arrangement.--Reforms.--Mercenary Troops.--Siege Operations and
Engines.

The art of war had attained its highest degree of perfection among the Romans, when the successive invasions of the barbarians began to burst like an overflowing river over the richest of the Roman colonies. These barbarians, most of whom were natives of the Caucasian mountains, were the Iberians, who never halted till they had reached Spain; the Celts or Cimbrians, who installed themselves among the Gauls; and the Sarmatians and the Scythians, who inhabited the vast forests of Germany before the great wars of Julius Cæsar (Fig. 33). Suddenly, in the fourth century of the Christian era, a movement which commenced in the centre of Asia caused an irruption of a race hitherto unknown upon the Caucasian races. These were the Huns, before whom the terrified Goths retreated, but who at first made but a brief apparition in Europe; for if Rome at that time was wanting in seasoned legions, she could rely, at least in the provinces of her empire, upon many numerous and powerful auxiliaries who were accustomed to fight under her standard (Fig. 34), some for the sake of pay, others to defend their own hearths.

In 451, in the reign of the Emperor Valentinian III., who had bribed the barbarians instead of repulsing them with the sword, Attila, the King of the Huns, bore down upon Europe at the head of seven hundred thousand fighting men of various races. In less than three months he had overrun and laid waste Moravia, Bohemia, Hesse, and Wurtemburg, crossed the Rhine below Strasburg, the Moselle at Trèves and at Metz, the Meuse at Tongres, the Scheldt at Tournay; and after two sanguinary raids into Burgundy and the country around Orleans, pitched his tents in the plains of Champagne. The tactics of Attila were to avoid pitched battles, to give a wide berth to the fortresses, contenting himself with sacking and plundering their outskirts. He laid waste the open country, burnt villages, put their inoffensive inhabitants to the sword, and making it his chief object to divide and isolate the Roman legions, finally crushed them by the weight of numbers.

The whole West was stirred up at the tidings of this terrible invasion. Ætius, the Roman leader among the Gauls, had called to his aid the confederates of Amorica, the Frank-Salians, whose leader was Merovius, the Burgundians, the Saxons, and the southern Visigoths, whose king was Theodoric. This numerous army, composed of excellent troops under the orders of Ætius, marched to meet the barbarians, and encountered them in the neighbourhood of Châlons-sur-Marne. The battle lasted three days, and the defeat of the Huns was complete.

The ferocious Attila, who had called himself the Scourge of God, and who had run his course like some fatal meteor, leaving in his track nothing but conflagrations and ruins, expired in the midst of an orgie in 455. A truceless, unceasing war was still being waged all over Europe, a sanguinary and implacable war of race and of party. Political chaos, a chaos that Christianity alone was destined to regenerate, was at its height in the old world, when, towards the close of the sixth century, Theodoric, King of the Eastern Goths, who had protected Byzantium when threatened by the Bulgarians, and who had remained in the pay of the Emperor Zeno, determined to find occupation for his warlike and restless subjects by leading them against Odoacer, the sovereign of the Herulians, who at that time united under his sway Sicily and the Italian peninsula, but whose subjects were at best but a ferocious and turbulent mob. The young King of the Goths (he was only thirty-four years of age) started from the depths of Mœsia (now Servia), with the consent of the chief of the empire, at the head of an entire warlike population, to whom he promised the conquest of Italy. He easily overcame the King of the Herulians; and, having conquered Italy, he posted his soldiers in the various provinces of the peninsula, in such a manner that their pay and their rations might continue to be supplied to them as regularly in peace as in war.

The system of government and administration established by Theodoric had the advantage of distributing two hundred thousand excellent troops in the midst of a population which, glad to find itself uncalled upon for military service, and but little taxed, allowed the work of the conquest to be consolidated. The _millénaires_ (soldiers of a battalion numbering a thousand men) occupied with their families distinct portions of territory, and were bound to hold themselves under arms, and ready to march, whenever the defence of the country required it (Fig. 35). Theodoric had already recognised the utility of urban garrisons. The flower of the country’s youth, organized in a military manner, flocked to the gymnasium of Ravenna, and the king himself presided over their exercises. His levies, as regards their discipline, their instruction, and their equipment, resembled the ancient legions of Rome. The iron cap, the shield, the broadsword, and the arrow of the Goths had been replaced by the spear, the javelin, the helmet, and the cuirass of the Romans. The old soldiers received from the royal treasury for their services as instructors a particular grant, which was annually paid to them till they retired altogether from the profession of arms. When the troops were about to take the field, the intendants, under the orders of the counts, superintended the commissariat and the gathering and the march of the different army corps. The provincial officers had to distribute arms, food, and hay on the different points of the road that the troops were expected to follow, and the inhabitants had to provide lodgings--this was the only military service expected of them, but none could escape it.

The towns were at this time almost always fortified, and entrenched camps covered nearly the whole of Italy. The castles in the rural districts, constructed to protect the frontiers, were usually full of troops, whose support was part of the duty of the pretorial prefect, and whose insubordination often necessitated severe measures of repression. “Keep up a spirit of military discipline; it is often difficult to enforce it under civil rule,” said Theodoric to Servatus, one of his generals.

If it is a matter of surprise to meet with such a right moral feeling in the sovereign of reputed barbarians, barbarians half civilised, however, by their contact with the Latin race, it is not the less so to find, in the wars which occurred in the years 507, 508, and 509, other barbarian kings, namely, Alaric, Clovis, Gondebaud, and Thierry, make use of and apply with skill the rules of Greco-Roman strategy, either in executing long military manœuvres, or in displaying all the strategic science that sieges then required, in attacking or defending the fortified towns of Avignon, of Carcassonne, and of Arles.

In proportion as the preponderance of the Goths (Fig. 36), of the Ostrogoths, and of the Visigoths diminished in Europe, that of the Franks and of the Lombards increased. The latter were the first to institute in Italy the feudal system, founded on the possession of conquered territory. The conquerors established their camp in the midst of the vanquished country, seized half the land, reduced into servitude a portion of the colons, and imposed heavy taxes on those whom they had not despoiled. The king having at first distributed the great fiefs among his principal officers, these great vassals then made a subdivision of the land granted them by their suzerains in favour of their own men-at-arms and satellites, and these latter, in their turn, ceded a portion of their lands to the common soldiers. The obligation of personal service, the hierarchic subordination of vassalage, were the necessary consequence of feudal institutions.

In all probability the establishment of the _arrière-ban_, or the _ban-fieffe_, dates from the sixth century. It was a call to arms of the vassals that the suzerain alone had a right to command. A century later, feudalism, which was beginning to establish itself in Gaul as in Italy, as a consequence of the successful invasion of the Franks, was nearly stamped out by the Mahometan invasion of the Spanish Moors, who had been led by their chief, Abderamus, as far as the banks of the Loire, where they were stopped by Charles Martel, who routed them with great slaughter.

After the brilliant victory of Poitiers (732), where the repulse of Arab civilisation left the field open to the defenders of the Christian faith, and to the originators of the feudal régime, the victorious army underwent a sudden change. The Frankish knights adopted as an inheritance of conquest the rich Saracen armour (Figs. 37, 38, 39, 40); the feudal troopers donned a coat of mail, and, henceforward, a full suit of armour became a necessary accessory to a warrior of high rank. The bow, which had long been thrown aside, was once more taken into favour, and became the special arm of the footmen. But we have exhaustively treated of the armament and equipment of the soldiery of the period (see the chapter on Armoury in “Art in the Middle Ages”), and we can only here deal with military tactics and organization; in a word, with the theoretical part of the art of war.

The reign of Charlemagne, which was one long series of expeditions and conquests, was naturally favourable to the progress and development of this art. The Emperor of the Franks, like a man of genius, understood how to profit by the inventions and creations of his predecessors. To the warlike traditions of Greece and Rome he added, step by step, the improvements that were rendered necessary by the nature of the enemies with whom he had to contend, namely, the Lombards, the Saxons, &c. He kept up the feudal service of the _ban_; he established permanent orders of militia, composed of his own serfs and vassals; but, as soon as he undertook a distant expedition, his auxiliaries, ten times as numerous as his vassals, rendered his army rather a German than a French one. He caused a number of fortresses to be constructed everywhere throughout his vast empire, but he never allowed his subjects to build any on their own account. Yet he never seems to have attached any importance, as a protection to his territory, to the larger enclosed towns, in which he might have held in reserve considerable depôts of troops. He himself usually resided in rural residences and in open and unprotected villages, barely guarded by a few military pickets. At the slightest signal, it is true, a whole army of _fidèles_ and servitors would have arisen as one man to defend him; but under no circumstances would he have consented to await his enemy under the shelter of fortifications; he was always the true primeval German, seeking for his field of battle the open plain rather than the hillside, preferring cavalry to infantry, and a direct struggle, a hand-to-hand fight, to encounters at a distance, waged and won by the missiles of the slinger and the shafts of the bowmen. His principal victories were gained in the open country, where he was enabled to deploy his masses of mailed horsemen; he never willingly sat down before a stronghold, a circumstance which shows that he was aware of his want of skill in the conduct of a siege; and he was never fortunate in mountain warfare, as was evidenced in the disastrous day of Roncevaux (778), which cast a shadow over the last years of his life.

Thirty years after the death of the great emperor, the treaty of Mersen (847) freed the great vassals from the obligation of answering the summonses of the sovereign, and of rushing to arms at his appeal, unless for the purpose of defending the State, and substituted the practice of furnishing armed contingents, whose services were to be rendered for a fixed period, settled beforehand. Infeudation--a kind of political and pecuniary contract, in virtue of which a fief was subdivided into several smaller ones--perpetuated the feudal _régime_, each man becoming _the man_ of another man, bound to place himself at his disposal in time of war, and to be ready to start on any expedition at his command, and according to the wishes of his immediate seignior.

During the tenth century this régime grew stronger and stronger. The oath of infeudation, or the act of homage, remained a sacred tie between the seignior and the vassal. This homage involved the rendering of numerous feudal services, such as those of the _ban_, and of the _arrière-ban_, those rendered by the servitors of different ranks, known as bachelors, clients, esquires, bannerets, men-at-arms, barons, &c., names already ancient, but whose rank and place in battle were only determined on the day when they were all grouped and posted, each under his special banner or _gonfanon_, a distinction that implied a separate kind of equipment for each.

Thus the vassals were in the power of the seignior, who, having the right to dispose of their military services, enjoyed the right of _reize_--a right that gave him the power of assembling and leading to battle a certain number of feudal groups. “Obey my summons, or I will burn you!”[2] were the words of the seignior in the _ban_ published by the crier, and, at the second summons, the sound of the trumpet rang out in the cross roads, in the streets, and in the country places, calling the men to arms. To fail to answer the call of the _ban_ was to commit a crime of the worst character.

In the great expedition of William, Duke of Normandy, against the Anglo-Saxons (1066), he had no other auxiliaries than his Norman vassals and subjects. He conquered Harold and took possession of England with a numerous and trained army, furnished with terrible warlike machines and engines (Figs. 41 and 42). The Norman Conquest was, to a certain extent, a prelude to the Crusades, for those raids across the seas, repeated from time to time for more than two centuries, bore no resemblance to the barbarian invasions, either Saracen or Norman, which had been previously recorded in history. New measures, inspired by the circumstances of the times, were the consequence of the general crumbling to pieces of all the Eastern nations; among these may be mentioned the establishment of the communal militia, which set out for a campaign accompanied by its spiritual pastors, and received the last offices of religion at their hands on the field of battle; the regular pay allowed to those who were destitute of private resources (a knight received at first ten sous a day--equivalent to ten francs of modern money--and a squire received five); the chartering of ships intended for the transport of troops; the system of commissariat for armies in the field; and the supply of military equipments, arms, &c.

This communal militia, sprung from the freeing of the communes, and detachments of _soudoyers_, or paid troops, soon grew into a standing army, which was formally incorporated for the first time by Louis le Jeune about 1140, and increased by Philip Augustus, who added to it the affiliated knights. Under the latter sovereign, an army in the field presented three ranks of combatants--_bannerets_, _knights_, and _squires_, to whom were added the _men-at-arms_. A motley crew of _varlets_ on foot, without officers or discipline, followed the troops, and hovered about them during an engagement, picking up the spoil of the conquered, and killing the wounded with clubs or battle-axes, called _glaives de mercy_.

The disasters of the Crusaders in the East, after two centuries of useless heroism and tremendous efforts, were principally due to the defects in their military administration, which foresaw nothing, and was incapable of adjusting itself to the difficulties inherent to a war in a distant and almost unknown land whither the enthusiastic crowds who wore the cross bent their adventurous steps. Famine, plague, leprosy, and fever destroyed the Christian armies on their journey to Palestine, and during their stay there; and these evils would have been greater still had it not been for the creation of the different military orders which sprang into existence under the pressure of these almost inevitable calamities, and which supplied hospital attendants, chaplains, and soldiers. The continuation of the feudal wars (Fig. 43) in Europe gave the last blow to the disorganization of the armies of Christ.