Chapter XXVII

EUROPE BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THIRD CRUSADES—SUPERSTITION—THE
WALDENSES—DEGRADATION OF THE PAPACY—FRANCE UNDER LOUIS—ENGLAND UNDER
HENRY II.—RICHARD CŒUR DE LION.

Forty years had elapsed since the ill-fated crusade of Louis VII. and Conrad (1147) to avenge the capture of Edessa by Zenghi, and the crowning calamity, the fall of Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin (1187). We may briefly note some of the conditions and changes in Europe during this period.

Men were thinking, though the dense darkness of mediæval night yet remained, and the spectres of superstition which inhabited the human mind were as many and as strange as ever. For example, the year 1186 was looked for with alarm by the people of northern Europe, because of the predictions of astrologers that certain conjunctions of the stars then betokened dire evils to mankind. In the language of a contemporary: “The planets being in an aërial and windy sign, ... there shall arise in the East a mighty wind, and with its stormy blasts it shall blacken the air and corrupt it with poisonous stench.... The wind shall raise aloft the sands and dust from the face of the earth, and utterly overwhelm such cities as Mecca, Baldac [Bagdad], and Babylon. The regions of Egypt and Ethiopia shall become almost uninhabitable. In the West shall arise dissensions, raised by the wind, and seditions of the people shall take place; and there shall be one of them who shall levy armies innumerable, and shall wage war on the shores of the waters, on which a slaughter so vast will take place that the flow of blood will equal the surging waves. This conjunction signifies the mutation of kingdoms, the superiority of the Franks, the destruction of the Saracenic race, together with longer life to those who shall be born hereafter.”

Other astrologers blew their star-blasts of similar warning. More startling still were the reported words of a pious monk, which he chanted while in a trance, confirming the astrologers with rhapsodic quotations from Scripture and the Greek mythologists. The popular consternation was somewhat allayed by Pharamella the Moor, whose humanity was stronger than his religious bigotry, and led him to write to the Christian Bishop of Toledo, from the tower on which he was watching the stars, that their prognostications of the “aërial or windy signs” were wrong; but that there would be sufficient force of evil abroad in the atmosphere to produce “scanty vintage, crops of only moderate average, much slaughter by the sword, and many shipwrecks.” The most serious chroniclers of the time still associated as effect and cause the rise and fall of kings and the issue of battles with natural phenomena of comets, eclipses, and storms. Epidemic madness continued to see celestial warriors through the dust of earthly combat, and the ubiquitous presence of the mother of God in churches and cells, in the silence of the roadway, and, in company with Mary Magdalene, trudging along amid bands of pilgrims. Men visited purgatory and returned to describe its burning floor and the writhing shapes of its inhabitants. Indeed, the human mind was not yet sufficiently awake to know that it had been dreaming.

Yet here and there were those who threw off the age delusion. The logic of Abélard and the love of liberty voiced by Arnold of Brescia roused more than one of the sleepers, who kept awake and jostled their fellows.

Thus the sect of the Waldenses foretokened the rise of modern Protestantism. Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, was afflicted with the rigors of ecclesiastical rule, which robbed more than it protected the people, and with the dogmatic traditions of the church, which were being manipulated as strangling strings about the mind. He threw off these restraints; he devoted his large fortune to the relief of the poor and organized a brotherhood of kindred spirits, who took the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. There had as yet been no attempt to teach the masses the simple religion of Jesus as contained in the Scriptures, Jerome’s Latin Bible of the fourth century being the only translation in use. Waldo secured a rendering of the four Gospels into French. The reading of this by the people led them to dissent from the assumptions of the Roman Church, to question its sacraments, and to deny to the priesthood the sole prerogative of preaching and administering religion. Waldo and his followers claimed liberty to expound the Word of God according to its own rules, and to interpret its precepts in the light of reason and prayer-illuminated conscience.

The Waldenses were at once proceeded against by the Bishop of Lyons as heretics and rebels. His judgment was confirmed by the anathemas of the papal see. Waldo and his friends fled to the mountains of Piedmont and Dauphine. In 1179 the new doctrines were denounced by the Third Lateran Council. Waldo died the same year, having lived long enough to anticipate in his own person the persecutions which were to make his sect forever famous among martyrs.

The history of the Papacy during this period was humiliating. Popes and antipopes strove for the seat of St. Peter. The hierarchy invoked the aid of the Emperor of Germany, Frederick Barbarossa, to overturn the republic of Rome, which Arnold of Brescia had inspired. That leader atoned for his audacity by being hanged and burned. Barbarossa was, however, equally determined that the secular power of the popes should not be rebuilt upon the ruins of Roman independence. Italy was laid waste by the armies of the empire, until the centre of Christendom was disgraced by scenes as cruel as those which marked the contention of Christian and Turk in the East.

France was scarcely less unfortunate. Louis VII., shortly after his return from Palestine, divorced his queen, Eleanor, who became the wife of Henry of Anjou, afterwards Henry II. of England, and added to the possession of England the territories of Aquitaine and Poitou, leaving to the French monarchy less than half of what had been, and was again to be, the land of France. Guizot remarks: “This was the only event under Louis’s reign of any real importance, in view of its long and bloody consequences to his country. A petty war or a sullen strife between the kings of France and England, petty quarrels of Louis with some of the great lords of his kingdom, some vigorous measures against certain districts, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians—such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign.” Kingship, on the death of the Abbé Suger, Louis’s prime minister, steadily declined, until Philip Augustus opened for it a new era of strength and progress. Philip had been seven years on the throne (from 1080) at the time of the capture of Jerusalem.

England at the beginning of this period was distressed with the war between King Stephen and Matilda. Churches were converted into fortifications, and castles into prisons. For nineteen years the country was so ravaged by the contending parties that, in the language of the contemporary chronicler, “to till the ground was to plough the sea,” and brave men, “sickened with the unnatural war, put on the white cross and sailed for a nobler battle-field in the East.” With the son of Matilda, Henry II., the dynasty of the Angevins, or Plantagenets, was established. Inheriting Normandy from his mother, and acquiring by his marriage with Eleanor her estates, at the age of twenty-one Henry II. ruled from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees. “Though a foreigner, never speaking the English tongue, he seems to have possessed something of the spirit which produced the subsequent Anglican civilization. He abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between church and state, and declared that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the common law” (Norgate). Though his quarrel with and murder of Thomas à Becket left in suspension the Constitutions of Clarendon, which gave the kingship preëminence over the hierarchy, the principles of that document were soon revived. Henry II. admitted no papal legate into England without an oath not to interfere with any royal prerogative. Though he repented the death of Becket, he forced the monks of Canterbury to elect a successor of his own nomination.

Perhaps the most important progress of Henry II.’s reign was marked by the Assizes of Clarendon (1166), which gave to England the beginning of trial by jury. A grand jury of twelve men was to hear all accusations, and only on sufficient evidence allow further procedure, although the final trial of a case was, until 1216, allowed to proceed according to the laws of Ordeal and Combat. Circuit judges were also appointed, subject only to the king and his council as a court of appeal.

In 1155 Ireland was given over to the conquest of Henry by Pope Hadrian for one penny a house, to be paid into the papal treasury; for, said the Holy Father, “all the islands on which Christ, the Sun of justice, has shone belong to the see of St. Peter.” Henry’s victory over William of Scotland also gave him the ascendency in that kingdom. Thus was woven the substance of the band which now holds together Great Britain.

The reign of Henry II. was brought to a close in personal disaster. At Le Mans in France he was beaten in battle by his son Richard, who, in conjunction with King Philip Augustus, had raised an unfilial hand against his father. Henry died, cursing God and muttering, “Shame! shame on a conquered king!”

Richard I. (Cœur de Lion) may be said to have been badly born (September 8, 1157). His father, Henry II., though astute in kingcraft, was among the most disreputable of monarchs in personal character. St. Bernard said of Henry, “He comes of the devil, and to the devil he shall return.” His remorse for the murder of Becket, which seems to have been genuine, did not restrain him from spending his later years as a notorious libertine, polluting every innocent thing about him with his lecherous touch. Even childhood was not safe from his lust. It is typical of the man and the times that Geoffrey, for whom the king secured the bishopric of Lincoln, was his own natural son by Rosamond, his concubine.

Richard’s mother, Eleanor, was perhaps of as unwholesome a sort as his father. She never blushed except at the failure of some intrigue which in our later age is regarded as shameful to her sex. Her first royal husband, Louis VII. of France, though fascinated by her beauty, could not abide her infidelities, and put her away. If the chronicle be true, she avenged the marital sins of Henry II. by slaying with her own hand his mistress, Rosamond.

Richard thus inherited much of the disposition which marred his many nobler traits. Guizot’s portrait of him is fair: “Beyond comparison the boldest, the most unreflecting, the most passionate, the most ruffianly, the most heroic adventurer of the middle ages.” The first suggestion of his title, “Lion-hearted,” is perhaps in the pages of Roger de Wendover (died 1237), who, describing the ravages Richard committed in France, says: “He invaded the territory with more than a lion’s fury, carried off the produce, cut down the vines, burned the villages, and demolished everything.” His first act upon coming to power was to release his mother, Eleanor, from the twelve years’ imprisonment she suffered at the hands of her husband, Henry II. Then was remembered, and applied to her and to Richard, a prediction of Merlin, the “Wizard of the North,” in the fifth century: “The eagle of the broken treaty shall rejoice in her third nestling.” Roger de Wendover thus interpreted the hitherto enigmatic words: “The queen [Eleanor] is meant by the eagle, because she stretches out her two wings over two kingdoms, France and England. She was separated from the king of the French by divorce on account of consanguinity, and from the king of the English by suspicion and imprisonment; and so she was on both sides the eagle of a broken treaty. ‘She shall rejoice in her third nestling’ may be understood in this way: the queen’s first-born son, named William, died when he was a boy; Henry, her second son, was raised to the rank of king, and paid the debt of nature after he had engaged in hostilities with his father; and Richard, her third son, who is denoted by the ‘third nestling,’ was a source of joy to his mother.”

Richard was crowned September 11, 1189. Wendover, who may have witnessed it, describes the coronation service. Richard was conducted to Westminster in solemn procession, headed by ecclesiastics bearing the cross, holy water, and censers; four barons carried candlesticks with wax candles, two earls holding aloft two sceptres, one surmounted with a golden cross, the other with a dove; three earls followed, carrying three swords with golden sheaths; six earls and barons carried a checker, over which were placed the royal arms and robes, while a seventh held aloft a golden crown. Richard swore upon the Gospels his kingly devotion, pledging to observe peace, honor, and reverence towards God and the holy church, and to exercise true justice to all his people. “After this they stripped him of all his clothes except his breeches and shirt, which had been ripped apart over his shoulders to receive the unction. He was then shod with sandals interwoven with gold thread, and Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, anointed him king in three places, namely, on his head, his shoulders, and his right arm, using prayers composed for the occasion. Then a consecrated linen cloth was placed on his head, over which was put a hat, and when they had again clothed him in his royal robes, with the tunic and gown, the archbishop gave into his hands a sword wherewith to crush all the enemies of the church.... Then they placed the crown upon his head, with the sceptre in his right hand and the royal wand in his left.” Preceded by candles and cross, he went to the celebration of mass; thence “to the dinner-table, and feasted splendidly, so that the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palace.”

A very different scene, though not less characteristic of the age, took place beyond the palace. Richard had issued an edict forbidding any Jew to appear at his coronation. Some of the wealthiest Hebrews, presuming upon the splendid gifts they brought, approached the dining-hall. The populace, willingly interpreting the king’s mandate as a license for persecution, set upon the Jews, not only at the palace gate, but throughout the city. They murdered them without stint and looted their houses. The king, essaying an investigation, found that the chief dignitaries and citizens were leaders of the mob, and stayed further inquiry. Other cities emulated the cruelty and greed of the Londoners. At York five hundred Jews, who had fled for safety to the castle, unable to defend themselves, slaughtered their own wives and children to save them from worse fate, threw the dead bodies to the Christians without the walls, and then set fire to their refuge, perishing in the flames. The people to whom the Jew’s had loaned money, the bonds of which were kept in the cathedral, seized these evidences of debt and burned them in pious offering before the altar.

The chief interest of Richard, even surpassing the care of his throne, was to fulfil the vow he had taken two years before (1187) to join a new crusade against the Infidels in Palestine.

THE THIRD CRUSADE.