Chapter XLII: Appendix: Feudalism

[Sidenote: [800-1450 A.D.]]

To the average mind the term Middle Ages is a synonym for chaos. And, compared with the periods before and after, it is indeed chaos. But, in a sense, all human history is “without form,” even if not “void,” and the comparative simplicity which we see in certain periods is arrived at chiefly by a process of the cancellation of numberless confusing details and the concentration of the attention on certain large and picturesque personages or movements which were actually far from holding such stark and eminent importance in the eyes of contemporaries.

Thus in the case of Alexander’s conquest of that little segment of space which he called “the world,” to the contemporary Athenian, Alexander was almost a myth lost in the wilderness of the East as in a fog. The Athenian found his immediate troubles and triumphs in his own family, in his shop, in his deme. To myriads of other peoples, however, Alexander’s very existence was unknown; and splendid intrigues, superb politics, lofty feats of statecraft and of warfare were taking place far from the orbit of Alexander. These deeds were never chronicled, or the chronicles are lost, or perhaps only waiting discovery. Consequently we are ignorant of these confusing histories, and sum up in the exclusive phrase “Alexandrian epoch” a vast web of what were chaos, did we but know more of it.

But still, taking history as we have it, the Middle Ages torment and bewilder us with the variety and seeming unimportance of their events. They are called the Dark Ages, though, upon a closer look, they deserve the name no more than the Night herself with all her revelation of the stars which the Day absorbs in the one central splendour of the sun.

Let the name of Dark Ages stand, however, though it must not be forgotten that human history at least dreamed and walked in this apparent sleep. There is no lack of chronicle and no lack of action. Nor, in spite of the common idea, was there lack of progress. The barbarians had come down in avalanches of stolid clay upon the gardens of civilisation. During the seeming idleness the seeds were at work and ideals were busily thrusting upward till of a sudden they burst forth in that springtime known as the Renaissance.

The history of each major country is given, in this work, its own chronicle, but for the better comprehension of the forces that were making possible the Renaissance and driving mankind to cry aloud for a betterment of conditions, it will be useful to set apart for brief consideration certain special phases and forces of Middle Age life. It will make it the easier to comprehend that life was by no means without the ferment of progress during that period which we so arbitrarily cleave out of history and put aside as the Middle Age.

Throughout the various histories of modern nations will be found a discussion of the multiform phases of feudalism. It is desirable, however, to give it some isolated discussion, though necessarily brief. A guide might be found in the words of Bryce, whose definition of feudalism also makes a good beginning; and in the words of the philosopher Hegel:[a]

BRYCE AND HEGEL ON FEUDALISM

“This is not the place for tracing the origin of feudality on Roman soil, nor for showing how, by a sort of contagion, it spread into Germany, how it struck firm root in the period of comparative quiet under Pepin and Charles, how from the hands of the latter it took the impress which determined its ultimate form, how the weakness of his successors allowed it to triumph everywhere. Still less would it be possible here to examine its social and moral influence. Politically it might be defined as the system which made the owner of a piece of land, whether large or small, the sovereign of those who dwelt thereon; an annexation of personal to territorial authority more familiar to eastern despotism than to the free races of primitive Europe. On this principle were founded, and by it are explained, feudal law and justice, feudal finance, feudal legislation, each tenant holding towards his lord the position which his own tenants held towards himself. And it is just because the relation was so uniform, the principle so comprehensive, the ruling class so firmly bound to its support, that feudalism has been able to lay upon society that grasp which the struggles of more than twenty generations have scarcely shaken off.”[b]

The three steps by which feudalism was reached are thus broadly summed up by Hegel:

“While the first period of the German world ends brilliantly with a mighty empire, the second is commenced by the reaction resulting from the antithesis occasioned by that infinite falsehood which rules the destinies of the Middle Ages and constitutes their life and spirit. This reaction is, first, that of the particular nationalities against the universal sovereignty of the Frankish Empire, manifesting itself in the splitting up of that great empire. The second reaction is that of individuals against legal authority and the executive power--against subordination, and the military and judicial arrangements of the constitution. This produced the isolation and therefore defencelessness of individuals. The universality of the power of the state disappeared through this reaction; individuals sought protection with the powerful, and the latter became oppressors. Thus was gradually introduced a condition of universal independence, and this protecting relation was then systematised into the feudal system.”[c]

COMMENCEMENT OF THE FEUDAL RÉGIME

The true heirs of Charlemagne were not the kings of France, nor those of Germany and Italy, at first, but rather the feudal lords. Not only had the empire been dismembered after the deposition of Charles the Fat, but its composing kingdoms and even its great fiefs as well. Dukes and counts had been quite as powerless as kings against the Northmen, Saxons, and Hungarians, and quite as unable to maintain the vast domains under their control. Populations whose leaders did not know how to bring them together for concerted action had acquired, little by little, the habit of depending upon themselves alone.

After having fled for a long time at the approach of the heathen to the woods among the wild beasts, some stout-hearted people had turned their heads and refused to abandon all their possessions without an attempt at defence. Here and there in mountain gorges, at river fords, on the hill overlooking the plain, entrenchments and walls were raised where the brave and the strong held out. An edict of 853 directed the counts and vassals of the king to repair their old castles and to build new ones. The country was soon covered with fortresses against which invaders flung themselves in vain. A few reverses quickly taught these bold adventurers prudence. They no longer dared to venture so far, to where these strongholds had sprung up from the ground on all sides, and the new invasion meeting with fresh obstacles and difficulties came to an end in the following century. It was not until afterwards that the masters of these castles became the terror of the countryside they had once helped to save.

Feudalism, so oppressive in its age of decline, had therefore its time of lawful and just existence. All power is raised up by its virtues and falls by its abuse.

But what was the new régime? We have seen the matter of acquiring and holding property become more uniform among barbarian nations, by the settlement of heredity upon lands ceded by the king, and the law’s sanction given to another kind of usurpation--the heredity of the royal offices. It was generally the owners of freehold property or of royal lands who became the holders of these offices, which brought about the union of sovereignty and proprietorship in the same hands. This is essentially what constitutes feudalism.

In the absolute monarchy of the Roman Empire public offices in all degrees of the hierarchy were bestowed directly by the ruler, and their disposition remained always in his power, so that he could take them back when and under what condition he pleased. Furthermore the public official held neither the land of the province he governed nor the control of any particular piece of property that he might happen to own as a private citizen. He was bound therefore, as landlord, by the civil law applicable to the whole empire, and as governor, to the voluntary will of his sovereign. In the feudal régime it was exactly the opposite. The lord who _enfeoffed_, that is, conceded by title of sub-fief some portion of his own fief, gave up entirely to the grantee or _vassal_ the property and its control, and it could not be taken back unless the vassal failed to perform some part of the agreement made at the time of receiving the investiture.

One lord might obtain land from another and thus become his vassal. The former had to go to the latter, and between the two there took place the ceremony known as homage. Kneeling before his future lord, with their hands together, the future vassal proclaimed loudly that he would be the other’s _homme_, or man, that is to say, that he would be attached and devoted to him, defend him with his own life, somewhat as the ancient _leudes_ of Germany did towards their warrior chiefs. After this profession, which is homage in the original sense of the word, he took an oath of fidelity or faith to the lord, promising to fulfil the new duties required of him under the new title of _homme_ of the lord. When he had contracted this double tie, the lord no longer feared to confide his land to a man so strongly bound to him, and gave it to him by investiture or seizin, accompanied with symbolic emblems--a sod of grass, a stone, or some other object according to the custom of the fief. “It is the custom,” says Otto von Freising,[e] “to deliver up kingdoms by the sword, and provinces by the standard.” This three-part ceremony of homage once completed, the reciprocal obligations began.

RECIPROCAL OBLIGATIONS OF VASSAL AND LORD

There were in the first place the moral obligations of the vassal towards his lord, such as keeping his secrets, revealing the machinations of his enemies, to give one’s horse to him in battle if he be unseated, to take his place in captivity, to respect and to cause his honour to be respected, to assist him with good counsel, etc. The material obligations, the services due from the vassal, were of several kinds.

(1) Military service. This was the very basis of the feudal relation and the principle of that state of society which does not contain permanent and organised armies. The vassal on the requisition of his lord was bound to follow him, either alone, or to bring such and such a number of men according to the importance of his fief. The duration of this service also was dependent on the same thing--it might be sixty, forty, or only twenty days--a system which did not permit of distant expeditions and could be employed only in neighbourhood or private wars. There were some fiefs where military service held only within the feudal domain, or could be called on only for purposes of defence.

(2) The “fiance,” or obligation to serve the lord in his court of justice. As under the feudal régime the lord replaced the states general, and was invested with the functions of public power, it was necessary in order to exercise these to hold at his command the forces disseminated through the hands of his vassals. War was one of these functions; justice was another.

The lord summonsed his men to court, and they had to attend, either to serve him with their advice or to take part in the judging of disputes brought before him, and they thus bound themselves to assistance in carrying out the judgments their own mouths had proclaimed.

(3) The “aids,” some legal and compulsory, others courteous and voluntary. Legal aids were usually demanded under three conditions--when the lord was a prisoner and required to pay a ransom, when he knighted his eldest son, and when he gave his eldest daughter in marriage. This aid took the place of the public imposts of ancient and modern legislatures, but as may be seen was of a totally different character. It was not, in fact, periodic or exacted in a regular manner for public needs; it had the appearance of a voluntary gift under certain peculiar circumstances. An annual tax would have seemed an affront to the vassals.

To these services must be added certain feudal rights by which the lord, in virtue of his sovereignty, intervened in any important change the ceded fief might undergo. Some of these were for him a new source of revenue. These rights were the relief, a sum of money due from every major individual who entered into possession of a fief by right of succession, and more particularly if that succession did not take place in line of direct descent; the right to the alienation tax, which he who sold or alienated his fief in any fashion must pay; the right of disinheritance and confiscation by which the fief reverted to the lord when the vassal died without heirs or when he had forfeited his fief or deserved for any reason to be deprived of it; the right of guardianship, by virtue of which the lord, during the minority of his vassal, undertook his tutelage and the administration of his fief, and enjoyed its revenue; the marriage right, that is to say, the right of the overlord to provide a husband for the heiress of a fief, and oblige her to choose from the suitors he presents.

The vassal who fulfilled his obligations fully and conscientiously was as nearly as possible master of his own fief. He could in turn enfeoff the whole or part of his domain, and become in turn the sovereign lord of vassals of a lower rank, or _vavasseurs_, holding towards him the same obligations as he to his own lord. Such was the fabric of the hierarchy.

If the vassal had his obligations, the lord also had his. He could not take back a fief arbitrarily or without a legitimate reason from his vassal. He must protect him if he were attacked, see that he received justice, etc.

Let us note that the feudal system in developing itself made a fief of everything. Every concession--for hunting in the forests, for ferrying across rivers, for acting as guides on the roads, for escorting merchants, for running communal ovens in the towns--every useful employment, in fact, conceded in return for fidelity and homage, became a fief.

Lords multiplied concessions of this kind in order to multiply the number of men owing them military service. But the fief itself, to which the rights of justice were attached, remained in general undivided and was handed down according to the laws of primogeniture.

FEUDAL JUSTICE

The obligation of the vassals to attend the courts of their lord has made it clear that the principle of feudal justice was trial by one’s peers, a principle which was entirely in the customs and even the institutions of the Germanic peoples, where freedmen were tried by an assembly of freedmen.

They called peers (_pares_, equals), vassals of the same lord settled around him on his domain, and holding fiefs of the same rank. The king himself had his peers who were those holding their estates directly from him, not only as feudal lord but as king. Each had the right to be judged by his peers before his lord. If the peers refused him justice or the vassal believed that it had been unfairly rendered, he made a complaint “in default of right,” and brought the matter to the attention of his lord’s suzerain. It was to this higher tribunal that it was necessary always to bring disputes which arose between a lord and his vassal.

But this right of appeal did not entirely satisfy the spirit of independence which animated this warlike society. The lords preserved with jealous care another right of appeal--that which is addressed to the power of arms; they preferred to obtain justice for themselves rather than receive it from the hands of others. So thoroughly was the custom enrooted in their manners that the king regulated the formalities which preceded this species of warfare and had for their object the warning of the party to be attacked and the giving of an opportunity to place himself in a state of defence. After all, our international wars proceed from the same principle and are no better. The lords waged their wars with their little armies as we with our greater ones. Only hostilities had a more individual character since the states were much smaller.[i]

Besides the _Fehde_ or right of private warfare--an old Germanic custom--there was the “trial by combat,” which must not be confused with it. The true “judicial combat,” in which champions fight for a cause, or for the settlement of a quarrel, is a product of the Middle Ages, when faith in God was as strong as faith in the strength of the human arm. This custom became so universal a method of settlement of difficult questions that it was even used by Alfonso, the great Spanish lawgiver, to decide upon the introduction of new laws concerning inheritance. This much at least may be said in favour of it, that it was less of an evil than the torture which tended to supplant it in judicial proceedings in the later Middle Ages.[a]

Justice was not the prerogative of all the lords to the same extent. It was distinguished in France by three degrees, high, low, and middle justice. The first alone gave the right of life and death. In general it may be said it was the largest and most important fiefs that had powers of justice to the greatest extent. Still it was possible for a simple _vavasseur_ to possess the functions of “high justice,” and in some places the lord who could dispense but “low justice” could punish with death the robber caught at his crime. Within these variable limits the lord alone dispensed justice on his fief, and when, later on, royalty usurped the right, there was a revolution.

To complete the enumeration of rights inherent in the sovereignty of the lords it is necessary to mention two: first, that of recognising throughout the whole extent of the fief no higher legislative power. We find in the last collection of laws made in the ninth century by Charles the Simple the final manifestation of law-bearing public power. After that, there were no laws, civil or political, to be applied generally, but only local customs, isolated, independent, and differing one from the other, in fact possessing a territorial character in distinction from those of the barbaric nations, which were entirely personal.

Second, the right to coin money, which was always a sign of lordship. Before Charlemagne it seems that some private individuals, who doubtless possessed the privilege, coined money. After him this was one of the prerogatives of the lords, and at the advent of Hugh Capet there were no less than 150 who exercised this right.

Every political régime may be characterised by the place where the exercise of power is bestowed. Ancient republics had their agora and fora. The great monarchy of Louis XIV had its palace of Versailles. The feudal lords had their castles. They were, as a usual thing, enormous edifices, situated on high places, massive, round, or square, without architecture or ornamentation, the walls pierced by a few loopholes for the discharge of arrows. There was a single entrance giving on a great moat which could only be passed by a drawbridge. The castle was crowned with parapets and battlements, from which rocks, molten pitch, and lead could be thrown down on the heads of too venturesome assailants at the foot of the walls. To-day the gaping gray masses are but nests for crows, crumbled and eaten away by time. Seen from afar they quite eclipse the small and light habitation of modern days--these monuments at once of legitimate defence and oppression. But they could have been nothing less than they were to provide shelter from the northern incursions and the feudal wars. Everyone sought refuge in them. Those who had not the right to live within the castle, who were neither lords nor warriors, settled around its great walls, under their powerful protection. This was the nucleus of many towns.

ECCLESIASTICAL FEUDALISM

Even the clergy had their place in this system. The bishop, formerly “defender of the city,” had often become its count, by traditional usurpation or by express royal concession when the king had united the county and the bishopric, the temporal and the spiritual authority. This made the bishop sovereign of all the lords of his diocese.

Besides her tithes the church possessed, through the donation of the faithful, immense wealth, and in order to protect this from the brigandage of the times she had recourse to secular arms. She chose laymen, men of courage and wisdom, to whom she confided her property that they might defend it, if necessary at the point of the sword. But these attorneys of the monasteries and churches did as the counts of the king--made their functions hereditary, and took for themselves the wealth entrusted to their care. They condescended, however, to regard themselves as the vassals of those whom they had despoiled, and to swear faith and homage under ordinary conditions of natural right and personal service.

Abbés and bishops in consequence became suzerains, temporal lords having numerous vassals ready to take up arms for their cause, courts of justice--in fact all the prerogatives exercised by the great landlords. There were bishops, dukes, and bishop-counts, vassals themselves of greater lords and especially of the king, from whom they received the investiture of the property attached to their churches, or, as it was called, their temporal domain.

This ecclesiastical feudalism was so extensive, so powerful, that in France and England it possessed during the Middle Ages more than a fifth of all the land; in Germany nearly a third. For there was this difference between the church and king, that the latter, a conquest once made, received nothing more, but on the contrary constantly gave away until it came to pass that he possessed nothing but the town of Laon; while the church, if she did lose some of her land (a difficult thing since she had excommunication to defend it with), was acquiring more every day, since few of the faithful died without leaving her something. And so it was that she constantly got more and never or very rarely gave anything up, and then only when it was wrested from her by force.[i]

The manner in which the church often lost her property in feudal times is described by Carl Spannagel:

THE CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL ARMY

The bishops and abbots as land proprietors went into the battle-field at the head of their contingents. They often wore armour under their priestly garments, and they did not shrink from actual fighting in action. The care for souls (if such an expression can be used with regard to a priestly dignitary of the Middle Ages) which even in peace made but a slight demand upon them, must have nearly vanished under such circumstances in the field. The account of Bishop Daniel of Prague attending to the wounded and administering them spiritual comfort has a modern foreign tone about it. Only special royal permission could exempt the bishops and their respective abbots from appearing at the head of their men.

But the king did not make such frequent demands upon the participation of the spiritual dignitaries in campaigns as we are inclined to think. This idea arose from the command of Otto II in 981, which demanded the personal command of their contingents of seven bishops and the seven abbots, whilst twelve bishops and three abbots are told only to send their _loricati_ to the emperor. Substitutes for the bishops and abbots in this case would be priests or vassals of rank of their diocese, or abbotship.

It is worthy of note that the immunity, the purport of which had so increased in extent since the Carlovingian time, exercised no influence on the military obligations of the churches to which it was addressed. In most of the immunity documents military duty is not touched upon, so it was considered something quite independent. In some it is expressly mentioned that no _index publicus_ should exercise the arrière-ban over the particular cloister, but this made no change in the obligation of the abbots themselves. On the contrary, in a privilege of Otto I for the bishopric of Worms, the sentence from a document of Louis the Pious is retained which commands that the military followers of the men of the church are only to be called upon in the interest of the kingdom. The transfer of their service to the princes was of greater import to the military obligations of the church than the immunity.

Such transfers, however, only refer to monasteries and not also to bishoprics. There were two different kinds of exemption--either the king gives the cloister in question to a lord of his kingdom as a favour or as his property, so that (forever or for a time) it ceases to be a royal cloister, or he takes away a part of its landed property and makes it over to lay princes who thenceforward undertake the military duties hitherto pertaining to the cloister. By this means the cloister remains royal, only it is exempt from military obligations. A third possibility was added to these two. Very often the great lords did not wait for the king’s initiative to enrich themselves with church property, but they seized it on their own account and obtained possession of the longed-for cloister by any means.

With such measures by force there was certainly no legal adoption of the obligation which the cloister owed the kingdom. But there is no doubt that the property thus gained was taken into account in the valuation of the service due to the kingdom by the new owner. The documental protection of the king generally proved most inefficient against such seizures. In more ancient times, particularly under the later Carlovingians, we find taxations of abbotships. The cases became rarer later on without quite disappearing. The kingdom evidently did not depend upon increasing the power of the princes which was continually developing by such means, so that the seizures of the princes increased with the feudal system.[d]

SERFS AND VILLEINS

In the eleventh century, Carlovingian Europe was divided into a multitude of fiefs which formed each its own state, having its own life, laws, customs, and its almost perfectly independent lay or ecclesiastical chief.

We have described the community of the lords, but they were not the only feudal community. That was the fighting and war-making community, the community that ruled, judged, punished, and oppressed. Below this was the community that worked, by which the other lived, got its clothes, its arms, its castles, and its bread--the community of serfs, or rather craftsmen (_gens potestatis_). We must not now look for free men, for they have disappeared. Some have raised themselves and become the fortunate lords; others have been pushed back into the lower regions of society and have become serfs and villeins. That class of simple freemen which had been nearly swept away in the invasion of the Roman Empire had been engulfed a second time. There were no longer any freehold owners, or so few that their mention is not worth while.

But the villeins were a numerous lot. The chief, the noble, had not only vassals but subjects residing on that portion of his estate that he never enfeoffed. And these were the serfs, properly called, men of the soil who were entirely at their lord’s disposal. “The lord,” says Beaumanoir,[f] “can take from them all that they have, put them in prison, rightly or wrongly, and as often as he pleases, and has no account to give of them except to God.”

In spite of this the condition of the serf was better than that of the slave of ancient times. The progress which slavery had made at the fall of the Roman Empire was not entirely lost in the wreckage of invasion, but appeared again in feudal society. The freeman of antiquity had been harder towards his slave than was the barbarian in whom the leaven of Christianity had produced some effect. The serf was recognised as a man having a family, sharing the common ancestry of his lord, and made in the image of God. Serfs finally entered the church, and sometimes mounted higher than the most powerful lords.

Above the serfs were the inalienables (_mainmortables_), “more kindly treated,” continues the old jurist of Beauvais,[f] “since the lord, if they did no wrong, could ask nothing of them except their dues and rents and the debts which they were accustomed to pay for their servitude.” But the inalienable could not marry without the consent of his lord, and if he took a free wife, or one outside the seigneury, there was a fine at the pleasure of the lord. This was the right of “formarriage” (a tax for marriage out of rank or condition), and the issue of such a marriage was divided between the lords of the husband and of the wife. If there was but one child, it went to the lord of the mother. At an inalienable’s death all his property went to his lord. For these people there was no way of escape from the hand that bent them to the furrow. Wherever they went the right of succession was attached to their persons and their purse. The lord inherited on every hand from his serfs.

In a higher degree still were to be found the free tenants known as villeins, peasants, or commoners. Their condition was less precarious. They had preserved the freedom the serf did not possess, and had hung on to it at the sacrifice of an annual tax, a statute duty, and the rent of the land which the landlord had ceded them and which they could transmit with all their other property to their children. But while the beneficiary holdings or fiefs were under the protection of a public and well-defined law, the land of the villeins was under the absolute jurisdiction of the landlord and protected only by private agreements. This is why the villeins, and especially those in the country, where it was not necessary to oversee them as strictly as those in the large towns, were often under the heel of absolute dominion.

One reads in ancient documents about the lords: “They are masters of heaven and earth; they have jurisdiction above and beneath the ground, over necks and heads, over the water, winds, and fields.” The villeins could not escape their jurisdiction, for the feudal law said, “Between thee, lord, and thee, villein, there is no judge but God.” “We recognise from our gracious lords,” runs another formula, “both ban and convocation; the high forest, the bird in the air, the fish in the stream, the beast in the bush, as far as our sovereign lord, or the servants of his grace, can hold his own. For this our gracious lord will take under his shelter and protection the widow and orphan as well as the peasant.” Thus were all rights given over to the lord, but in exchange he protected the weak. Such is the principle of feudal society towards its subjects. Royalty no longer filled the office for which it was instituted; bishops, counts, barons, and other powers were called upon for the protection which could no longer be expected from the nominal head of the state.

Everything belonged to the lord; but since there was no industry or commerce, no luxury by which one alone could consume in a few moments the fruit of the labour of many, the exactions of this lord were not at first oppressive, and for the villeins these exactions were as systematically determined as are to-day the rights of the landlord over his farmer-tenants. Only in the Middle Ages was there always the element of arbitrariness and violence which modern law does not allow. The villeins’ tax was paid either in natural produce, as provisions, corn, cattle, and fowl, products of the soil and the farm; or in work, or manual labour, as statute labour in the fields and vineyards of the lord, in the building of his castle, or digging ditches, in the repair of roads; or the making of furniture, utensils, horseshoes, ploughshares, carts, etc. In towns and wherever money was scarce, the lord did not make the mistake, it must be understood, of demanding his dues in coin, or of imposing arbitrary taxes. But let us go back to the times themselves and listen to the words of a scribe: “The lord who demands unjust rights of his villein, does so at the peril of his soul.” If the fear of heaven did not suffice, here were the commoners coming to the rescue, and the king’s officials were not far behind.

There were some strange compensations to enliven the sad life of the feudal lord, shut up the whole year within the sombre walls of his castle. At Bologna, in Italy, the tenantry of the Benedictines of St. Procule paid as a tax the steam from a boiled capon. Every year each man brought his capon between two plates to the abbot, uncovered it, and, the steam having all been given off, was quits, and took his capon back with him. Elsewhere the peasants brought solemnly before their lord, in a carriage drawn by four horses, a little bird, or perhaps a may-bush decorated with ribbons. The man who owned a monkey was quits, according to an ordinance of St. Louis, when he had caused the monkey to perform before the lord’s tax-gatherer; the jongleur had to pay with one song. The lords themselves did not refuse, sometimes, to play a rôle in these folk comedies. The markgraf of Jülich, whenever he made a solemn entry, was mounted on a one-eyed horse, with wooden saddle, and bridle of bark from the linden, and wearing two spires of hawthorn, and carrying a white stick. When the abbé of Figeac came into town the lord of Monbrun received him in a most grotesque costume with one leg bare.

Feudalism, bored with itself, laughed sometimes with the poor people, as did also the church when she authorised the celebration in the basilicas of the feast of the Asses. The powerful and the fortunate, in this age so sad and so stern, where misery was everywhere and security nowhere, owed much to their villeins and peasants for giving them some moments of forgetfulness and pleasure.

ANARCHY AND VIOLENCE; FRIGHTFUL CONDITION OF THE PEASANTS AND SOME HAPPY RESULTS THEREFROM

They were in truth hard times for the poor people, these Middle Ages, when in spite of all the formulæ and other conventions, the noble did not believe in anything but the right of the sword. In theory the principles of the feudal relation were very beautiful; in practise they nearly brought matters to a state of anarchy, for its judicial institutions were too defective to prevent the tie of vassalage from being constantly broken. Here lay the cause of the interminable wars which broke out in all parts of feudal Europe, and which were the great affliction of that epoch. Everyone could have recourse to his sword in a proven wrong or a sentence he deemed unjust, and a state of war was chronic in that society. Every hill became a fortress; every plain a field of battle.

Shut up in strong castles, covered with mail, and surrounded by armed men, the feudal lords, “the tyrants,” as a monk of the eleventh century calls them, lived but to fight, and knew no other mode of enrichment than pillage. There was no more commerce--the roads were no longer safe; no more industry, for the lords, masters of the towns, levied upon the burghers as soon as some little sign of wealth would appear. The most different customs were established everywhere, since there was no longer any general legislation, each noble having sole law-making power on his own fief.[83] Everywhere, likewise, there was the deepest ignorance except perhaps in the heart of some of the monasteries; and the clergy, guardians of moral law, were compelled not to forbid violence, but to regulate it by the “Truce of God” [_Treuga Dei_], which forbade killing and robbing from Wednesday evening to Monday morning.

On whom fell all the burden of these feudal wars? They were not very murderous for the nobles wrapped in steel, but they were so for the peasant with scarcely any defensive armour. At Brenneville, where the kings of France and England fought, nine hundred knights took part, and only three were left on the battle-field. At Bouvines, Philip Augustus was thrown from his horse and remained some time helpless amidst the foot-soldiers of the enemy. They vainly sought some opening in his armour through which to pass a dagger blade, and they dealt heavy blows which could not break his cuirass. His knights took their time about rescuing and replacing him in the saddle. After which he threw himself with them into the midst of that rabble where their long lances and heavy axes did not deliver a single blow in vain. The sovereign captured, another calamity; his ransom must be paid. But who paid for the cottage and the burned fields of the poor peasant--who stanched his wounds, who provided for his widow and orphans?

Two contemporary writers, historians of the Crusades, paint thus these direful times: “Before the Christians left for the countries beyond the sea,” says Guibert de Nogent, “the kingdom of France was in the throes of constant trouble and hostilities. One heard nothing but of brigandage on the public roads. Fires were innumerable, and war was inflicted on every hand for no other reason than insatiable cupidity. In short, grasping men respected no right of property and gave themselves up to pillage with unrestrained boldness.”

And William, archbishop of Tyre,[h] says: “There was no security for property. Were a man regarded as rich, this was sufficient excuse for throwing him into prison, keeping him in irons, and putting him to cruel torture. Sword-girded brigands infested the roads, lay in ambush, and spared neither strangers nor men devoted to the service of God. Cities and fortified towns were not safe from such crimes. Cut-throats made the streets and squares dangerous for the wealthy man.” In the seventy years between 970 and 1040 there were forty of famine and pestilence.

However, the onward march of civilisation can never be so completely suspended that these centuries were absolutely sterile for the progress of humanity. In the church thought awakened, and in lay society poetry made its appearance. There was even some progress in morals, at least among the ruling classes. In the isolation in which each one lived, exposed to all sorts of perils, the soul fortified itself to meet them. The feeling of the dignity of man, which despotism managed to smother, was revived; and the society which spilled blood with such deplorable facility showed often a moral elevation which is to be found only in this age. The low vices and cowardice of the decadent Romans or enslaved peoples were unknown to them, and the Middle Ages have bequeathed to modern times the sentiment of honour. The feudal nobility knew how to die, which is the first condition of knowing how to get the most out of life.

Another beneficial consequence was the reorganisation of the family. In ancient cities the head of the family lived outside his house, in the fields or in the forum. He scarcely knew his wife and children, yet had over them the right of life and death. In primitive times the custom of polygamy and the facility for divorce prevented the family from establishing itself on any better basis. In feudal society men lived in isolation, and the head of the family was brought into close touch with it. When wars gave him leisure in his castle, perched like an eagle’s nest on the mountain top, he had nothing to occupy his life and his heart but his wife and children. The church, which brought rough soldiers to the feet of a virgin and made them for the sake of the mother of Christ respect female virtue, softened the temper of the warrior and prepared him to come under the spell of the finer feelings and more delicate sentiments with which nature had endowed the other sex.

Woman assumed, then, her place in the family and in society which the Mosaic law had once given her. Things went even further--she became the object of a cult which created new sentiments, which the poetry of troubadours and minstrels seized upon and which chivalry expressed in action. As in the beautiful legend of St. Christopher, the strong was conquered by the weak, the giant by the little child.

This is seen in an institution of the times. Robert d’Arbrissel founded near Saumur at Fontevrault, about the year 1100, an abbey which soon became famous, and which opened its gates to recluses of both sexes. The women were cloistered, and spent their time in prayer. The men worked in the fields, drained the marshes, cleared the land, and remained the perpetual servants of the women. The abbey was governed by an abbess, “because,” says the bull of confirmation, “Jesus Christ in dying gave his best beloved disciple to his mother for a son.”

Outside the family, the state was doubtless badly organised. It is necessary to call attention, in spite of all contradictory facts, to the political theory which this society represents. If the serf had no rights, the vassals had them, and well-defined ones too. The feudal tie was formed on conditions well known and accepted by him in advance; new conditions could not be placed upon him except by his own agreement. From these come those grand and strong maxims of common law which, in spite of a thousand violations, have come down to us--no tax can be imposed without the consent of the contributants; no law is valid unless accepted by those who must obey it; no sentence is legal unless declared by the peers of the accused. These are the laws of feudalism which the states general of 1789 buried under the débris of absolute monarchy; and in guarantee of these rights the vassal had the power of breaking the tie of vassalage by giving up his fief or of responding by war to a denial of justice from his lord. This right of armed resistance, which St. Louis himself recognised, led, it is true, to anarchy; it weakened the social structure, but it strengthened the individual. But it is with the individual that we must commence. Before intelligently building up the state, it is necessary to elevate the individual and the family; this double work was the task of the Middle Ages.

The church worked with energy to establish the sanctity of marriage, even for the serf; in preaching the equality of all men before God, which was a threat to the great inequalities of this world; by proclaiming by the principle of election that she reserved for herself at the very pinnacle of hierarchy the rights of the intellect, in contradistinction to the feudal world which recognised but the right of blood; and in crowning with the triple crown and seating in the chair of St. Peter, where they had one foot on the neck of kings, a serf like Adrian II and the son of a poor carpenter, like Gregory VII.

GEOGRAPHIC OUTLINES OF THE KINGDOM OF GERMANY

Such were the principles that ruled in all the countries comprised within the limits of Charlemagne’s empire, that is to say, almost the whole of the Germanic peoples, France, Germany, Italy, and the north of Spain. The political geography of the countries formed itself after the fashion of its feudal organisations. As the fundamental axiom of feudalism expressed itself, “No territory without its lord,” there did not exist throughout the land a domain so small that it was not incorporated in some degree in the hierarchy. Of all these superimposed suzerainties, the royal was the only one whose limits served to determine the extent of the realms already formed but still very vaguely outlined.[i]

The difference between feudalism and the politics both of antiquity and of modern times lies, according to Paul von Roth,[j] chiefly in the absence of a state power. There was no proper monarchy; public offices are hereditary or belong to an estate. The impossibility of the permanence of feudalism is shown, he says, most clearly in the feudal army by which even feudal justice suffered. Von Roth draws a vivid comparison between France and Germany at the end of the tenth century: France is much the more feudal and anarchic under the powerless Hugh Capet; Germany is more centralised under monarchic power. He compares them again three centuries later: France is a consolidated monarchy; Germany weak with a lasting weakness. The cause he finds above all is this--that the French kings had vigorously and in every way worked for the uprooting of the feudal system.[a]

THE TRANSITION FROM FEUDALISM TO MONARCHY

The moral phenomena above mentioned, tending in the direction of a general principle, were partly of a subjective, partly of a speculative order. But we must now give particular attention to the practical political movements of the period. The advance which that period witnessed presents a negative aspect, in so far as it involves the termination of the sway of individual caprice and of the isolation of power. Its affirmative aspect is the rise of a supreme authority whose dominion embraces all--a political power properly so called, whose subjects enjoy an equality of rights, and in which the will of the individual is subordinated to that common interest which underlies the whole.

This is the advance from feudalism to monarchy. The principle of feudal sovereignty is the outward force of individuals--princes, liege lords; it is a force destitute of intrinsic right. The subjects of such a constitution are vassals of a superior prince or seigneur, towards whom they have stipulated duties to perform; but whether they perform these duties or not depends upon the seigneur’s being able to induce them so to do, by force of character or by grant of favours. Conversely, the recognition of those feudal claims themselves was extorted by violence in the first instance; and the fulfilment of the corresponding duties could be secured only by the constant exercise of the power which was the sole basis of the claims in question. The monarchical principle also implies a supreme authority, but it is an authority over persons possessing no independent power to support their individual caprice, where we have no longer caprice opposed to caprice; for the supremacy implied in monarchy is essentially a power emanating from a political body, and is pledged to the furtherance of that equitable purpose on which the constitution of a state is based.

Feudal sovereignty is a polyarchy--we see nothing but lords and serfs; in monarchy, on the contrary, there is one lord and no serf, for servitude is abrogated by it, and in it right and law are recognised; it is the source of real freedom. Thus in monarchy the caprice of individuals is kept under, and a common gubernatorial interest established. But since this monarchy is developed from feudalism, it bears in the first instance the stamp of the system from which it sprang. Individuals quit their isolated capacity and become members of estates (or orders of the realm) and corporations; the vassals are powerful only by combination as an order; in contraposition to them the cities constitute powers in virtue of their communal existence. Thus the authority of the sovereign ceases to be mere arbitrary sway. The consent of the estates and corporations is essential to its maintenance; and if the prince wishes to have it, he must will what is reasonable.

We now see a constitution embracing various orders, while feudal rule knows no such orders. We observe the transition from feudalism to monarchy taking place in three ways: (1) Sometimes the lord paramount gains a mastery over his independent vassals, by subjugating their individual power, thus making himself sole ruler. (2) Sometimes the princes free themselves from the feudal relation altogether, and become the territorial lords of certain states; or lastly (3) the lord paramount unites the particular lordships that own him as their superior with his own particular suzerainty in a more peaceful way, and thus becomes master of the whole.

These processes do not indeed present themselves in history in that pure and abstract form in which they are exhibited here; often we find more modes than one appearing contemporaneously, but one or the other always predominates. The cardinal consideration is that the basis and essential condition of such a political formation is to be looked for in the particular nationalities in which it had its birth. Europe presents particular nations, constituting a unity in their very nature, and having the absolute tendency to form a state. All did not succeed in attaining this political unity; we have now to consider them severally in relation to the change thus introduced. First, as regards the Roman Empire, the connection between Germany and Italy naturally results from the idea of that empire: the secular dominion united with the spiritual was to constitute one whole; but this state of things was rather the object of constant struggle than one actually attained. In Germany and Italy the transition from the feudal condition to monarchy involved the entire abrogation of the former; the vassals became independent monarchs.

PROGRESS IN GERMANY

Germany had always embraced a great variety of stocks--Swabians, Bavarians, Franks, Thuringians, Saxons, Burgundians; to these must be added the Slavs of Bohemia, Germanised Slavs in Mecklenburg, in Brandenburg, and in a part of Saxony and Austria; so that no such combination as took place in France was possible. Italy presented a similar state of things. The Lombards had established themselves there, while the Greeks still possessed the exarchate and lower Italy; the Normans too established a kingdom of their own in lower Italy, and the Saracens maintained their ground for a time in Sicily. When the rule of the house of Hohenstaufen was terminated, barbarism got the upper hand throughout Germany; the country being broken up into several sovereignties, in which a forceful despotism prevailed. It was the maxim of the electoral princes to raise only weak princes to the imperial throne; they even sold the imperial dignity to foreigners. Thus the unity of the state was virtually annulled.

A number of centres of power were formed, each of which was a predatory state; the legal constitution recognised by feudalism was dissolved, and gave place to undisguised violence and plunder; and powerful princes made themselves lords of the country. After the interregnum the count of Habsburg was elected emperor, and the house of Habsburg continued to fill the imperial throne with but little interruption. These emperors were obliged to create a force of their own, as the princes would not grant them an adequate power attached to the empire. But that state of absolute anarchy was at last put an end to by associations having general aims in view. In the cities themselves we see associations of a minor order; but now confederations of cities were formed with a common interest in the suppression of predatory violence. Of this kind was the Hanseatic League in the north, the Rhenish League consisting of cities lying along the Rhine, and the Swabian League. The aim of all these confederations was resistance to the feudal lords; and even princes united with the cities, with a view to the subversion of the feudal condition and the restoration of a peaceful state of things throughout the country.

What the state of society was under feudal sovereignty is evident from the notorious association formed for executing criminal justice; it was a private tribunal, which, under the name of the _Vehmgericht_, held secret sittings; its chief seat was the northwest of Germany. A peculiar peasant association was also formed. In Germany the peasants were bondmen; many of them took refuge in the towns, or settled down as freemen in the neighbourhood of the towns (_Pfahlbürger_); but in Switzerland a peasant fraternity was established. The peasants of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden were under imperial governors; for the Swiss governments were not the property of private possessors, but were official appointments of the empire. These the sovereigns of the Habsburg line wished to secure to their own house. The peasants, with club and iron-studded mace (_Morgenstern_), returned victorious from a contest with the haughty steel-clad nobles, armed with spear and sword, and practised in the chivalric encounters of the tournament.

INFLUENCE OF GUNPOWDER

Another invention also tended to deprive the nobility of the ascendency which they owed to their accoutrements--that of gunpowder. Humanity needed it, and it made its appearance forthwith. It was one of the chief instruments in freeing the world from the dominion of physical force and placing the various orders of society on a level. With the distinction between the weapons they used, vanished also that between lords and serfs. And before gunpowder, fortified places were no longer impregnable, so that strongholds and castles now lost their importance. We may indeed be led to lament the decay or the depreciation of the practical value of personal valour--the bravest, the noblest may be shot down by a cowardly wretch at safe distance in an obscure lurking-place; but, on the other hand, gunpowder has made a rational, considerate bravery, spiritual valour, the essential to martial success.

Only through this instrumentality could that superior order of valour be called forth--that valour in which the heat of personal feeling has no share; for the discharge of firearms is directed against a body of men--an abstract enemy, not individual combatants. The warrior goes to meet deadly peril calmly, sacrificing himself for the commonweal; and the valour of civilised nations is characterised by the very fact that it does not rely on the strong arm alone, but places its confidence essentially in the intelligence, the generalship, the character of its commanders, and, as was the case among the ancients, in a firm combination and unity of spirit on the part of the forces they command.

MONARCHISM IN ITALY

In Italy, as already noticed, we behold the same spectacle as in Germany--the attainment of an independent position by isolated centres of power. In that country, warfare in the hands of the condottieri became a regular business. The towns were obliged to attend to their trading concerns, and therefore employed mercenary troops, whose leaders often became feudal lords; Francis Sforza even made himself duke of Milan. In Florence, the Medici, a family of merchants, rose to power. On the other hand, the larger cities of Italy reduced under their sway several smaller ones and many feudal chiefs. A papal territory was likewise formed. There, also, a very large number of feudal lords had made themselves independent; by degrees they all became subject to the one sovereignty of the pope.

How thoroughly equitable in the view of social morality such a subjugation was, is evident from Machiavelli’s celebrated work _The Prince_. This book has often been thrown aside in disgust, as replete with the maxims of the most revolting tyranny; but nothing worse can be urged against it than that the writer, having the profound consciousness of the necessity for the formation of a state, has here exhibited the principles on which alone states could be founded in the circumstances of the times. The chiefs who asserted an isolated independence, and the power they arrogated, must be entirely subdued; and though we cannot reconcile with our idea of freedom the means which he proposes as the only efficient ones, and regards as perfectly justifiable--inasmuch as they involve the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, assassination, and so forth--we must nevertheless confess that the feudal nobility, whose power was to be subdued, were assailable in no other way, since an indomitable contempt for principle and an utter depravity of morals were thoroughly engrained in them.

IN FRANCE

In France we find the converse of that which occurred in Germany and Italy. For many centuries the kings of France possessed only a very small domain, so that many of their vassals were more powerful than themselves; but it was a great advantage to the royal dignity in France that the principle of hereditary monarchy was firmly established there. The consideration it enjoyed was increased by the circumstance that the corporations and cities had their rights and privileges confirmed by the king, and that the appeals to the supreme feudal tribunal--the court of peers, consisting of twelve members enjoying that dignity--became increasingly frequent. The king’s influence was extended by his affording that protection which only the throne could give. But that which essentially secured respect for royalty, even among the powerful vassals, was the increasing personal power of the sovereign. In various ways, by inheritance, by marriage, by force of arms, etc., the kings had come into possession of many earldoms (_Grafschaften_) and several duchies. The dukes of Normandy had, however, become kings of England; and thus a formidable power confronted France, whose interior lay open to it by way of Normandy. Besides this there were powerful duchies still remaining; nevertheless, the king was not a mere feudal suzerain (_Lehnsherr_) like the German emperors, but had become a territorial possessor (_Landesherr_); he had a number of barons and cities under him, that were subject to his immediate jurisdiction; and Louis IX succeeded in rendering appeals to the royal tribunal common throughout his kingdom.

The towns attained a position of greater importance in the state. For when the king needed money, and all his usual resources, such as taxes and forced contributions of all kinds, were exhausted, he made application to the towns and entered into separate negotiations with them. It was Philip the Fair who, in the year 1302, first convoked the deputies of the towns as a third estate, in conjunction with the clergy and the barons. All indeed that they were in the first instance concerned with was the authority of the sovereign as the power that had convoked them, and the raising of taxes as the object of their convocation; the states nevertheless secured an importance and weight in the kingdom, and as a natural result, an influence on legislation also.

A fact which is particularly remarkable is the proclamation issued by the kings of France, giving permission to the bondsmen on the crown lands to purchase their freedom at a moderate price. In the way we have indicated the kings of France very soon attained great power; while the flourishing state of the poetic art in the hands of the troubadours, and the growth of the scholastic theology, whose especial centre was Paris, gave France a culture superior to that of the other European states, and which secured the respect of foreign nations.

IN ENGLAND

William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, introduced the feudal system into England, and divided the kingdom into fiefs, which he granted almost exclusively to his Norman followers. He himself retained considerable crown possessions; the vassals were under obligation to perform service in the field, and to aid in administering justice; the king was the guardian of all vassals under age; they could not marry without his consent. Only by degrees did the barons and the towns attain a position of importance. It was especially in the disputes and struggles for the throne that they acquired considerable weight.

When the oppressive rule and fiscal exactions of the kings became intolerable, contentions and even war ensued; the barons compelled King John to swear to Magna Charta, the basis of English liberty, _i.e._, more particularly of the privileges of the nobility. Among the liberties thus secured, that which concerns the administration of justice was the chief; no Englishman was to be deprived of personal freedom, property, or life without the judicial verdict of his peers. Everyone, moreover, was to be entitled to the free disposition of his property. Further, the king was to impose no taxes without the consent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, and barons. The towns, also, favoured by the kings in opposition to the barons, soon elevated themselves into a third estate and to representation in the commons’ house of parliament. Yet the king was always very powerful, if he possessed strength of character: his crown estates procured for him due consideration; in later times, however, these were gradually alienated, given away, so that the king was reduced to apply for subsidies to the parliament.

We shall not pursue the minute and specifically historic details that concern the incorporation of principalities with states, or the dissensions and contests that accompanied such incorporations. We have only to add that the kings, when by weakening the feudal constitution they had attained a higher degree of power, began to use that power against each other in the undisguised interest of their own dominion. Thus France and England carried on wars with each other for a century. The kings were always endeavouring to make foreign conquests; the towns, which had the largest share of the burdens and expenses of such wars, were opposed to them, and in order to placate them the kings granted them important privileges.

THE PAPACY AND FEUDALISM

The popes endeavoured to make the disturbed state of society, to which each of these changes gave rise, an occasion for the intervention of their authority; but the interest of the growth of states was too firmly established to allow them to make their own interest of absolute authority valid against it. Princes and peoples were indifferent to papal clamour urging them to new crusades. The emperor Louis set to work to deduce from Aristotle, the Bible, and the Roman law a refutation of the assumptions of the papal see; and the electors declared at the diet held at Rense in 1338, and afterwards still more decidedly at the imperial diet held at Frankfort, that they would defend the liberties and hereditary rights of the empire, and that to make the choice of a Roman emperor or king valid, no papal confirmation was needed. So, at an earlier date, 1302, on occasion of a contest between Pope Boniface and Philip the Fair, the assembly of the states convoked by the latter had offered opposition to the pope. For states and communities had arrived at the consciousness of independent moral worth.

Various causes had united to weaken the papal authority; the great schism of the church, which led men to doubt the pope’s infallibility, gave occasion to the decisions of the councils of Constance and Bâle, which assumed an authority superior to that of the pope, and therefore deposed and appointed popes. The numerous attempts directed against the ecclesiastical system confirmed the necessity of a reformation. Arnold of Brescia, Wycliffe, and Huss met with sympathy in contending against the dogma of the papal vicegerency of Christ, and the gross abuses that disgraced the hierarchy. These attempts were, however, only partial in their scope. On the one hand the time was not yet ripe for a more comprehensive onslaught; on the other hand the assailants in question did not strike at the heart of the matter, but (especially the two latter) attacked the teaching of the church chiefly with the weapons of erudition, and consequently failed to excite a deep interest among the people at large.

HEGEL ON THE RISE OF MANKIND THROUGH FEUDALISM

But the ecclesiastical principle had a more dangerous foe in the incipient formation of political organisations than in the antagonists above referred to. A common object, an aim intrinsically possessed of perfect moral validity, presented itself to secularity in the formation of states; and to this aim of community the will, the desire, the caprice of the individual submitted itself. The hardness characteristic of the self-seeking quality of “heart,” maintaining its position of isolation--the knotty heart of oak underlying the national temperament of the Germans--was broken down and mellowed by the terrible discipline of the Middle Ages.

The two iron rods which were the instruments of this discipline were the church and serfdom. The church drove the “heart” (_Gemüth_) to desperation--made spirit pass through the severest bondage, so that the soul was no longer its own; but it did not degrade it to Hindu torpor, for Christianity is an intrinsically spiritual principle and, as such, has a boundless elasticity. In the same way serfdom, which made a man’s body not his own but the property of another, dragged humanity through all the barbarism of slavery and unbridled desire, and the latter was destroyed by its own violence.

It was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated. For barbarism, lust, injustice constitute evil: man, bound fast in its fetters, is unfit for morality and religiousness; and it is from this intemperate and ungovernable state of volition that the discipline in question emancipated him. The church fought the battle with the violence of rude sensuality in a temper equally wild and terroristic with that of its antagonist; it prostrated the latter by dint of the terrors of hell, and held it in perpetual subjection, in order to break down the spirit of barbarism and to tame it into repose.

Theology declares that every man has this struggle to pass through, since he is by nature evil, and only by passing through a state of mental laceration arrives at the certainty of reconciliation. But granting this, it must on the other hand be maintained that the form of the contest is very much altered when the conditions of its commencement are different, and when that reconciliation has had an actual realisation. The path of torturous discipline is in that case dispensed with (it does indeed make its appearance at a later date, but in quite a different form), for the waking up of consciousness finds man surrounded by the elements of a moral state of society. The phase of negation is, indeed, a necessary element in human development, but it has now assumed the tranquil form of education, so that all the terrible characteristics of that inward struggle vanish.[c]

FOOTNOTES

[83] [In the words of Bryce,[b] “Nascent feudalism was but one remove from anarchy.”]

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter [a] is reserved for Editorial Matter.]

CHAPTER I. ORIGIN OF THE CRUSADES

[b] J. F. MICHAUD, _History of the Crusades_.

[c] CHARLES MILLS, _History of the Crusades_.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST CRUSADE

[b] E. GIBBON, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

[c] FR. WILKEN, _Geschichte der Kreuzzüge_.

[d] J. F. MICHAUD, _Bibliothèque des Croisades_ (including many Arab accounts).

[e] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire du Moyen Age_.

CHAPTER III. THE SECOND CRUSADE

[b] E. GIBBON, _op. cit._

[c] CHARLES MILLS, _History of the Crusades_.

[d] L. VON RANKE, _Weltgeschichte_.

[e] “Imad ad-Din” and others in MICHAUD’S _Bibliothèque des Croisades_.

CHAPTER IV. THE THIRD CRUSADE

[b] CHARLES MILLS, _op. cit._

[c] J. F. MICHAUD, _op. cit._

[d] “Imad ad-Din” quoted in MICHAUD’S _Bibliothèque des Croisades_.

[e] RICHARD DEVIZES, _Chronicle Concerning the Deeds of King Richard the First, King of England_.

[f] BOHA AD-DIN, _Life of Saladin_.

[g] GEOFFREY DE VINSAUF, _Itinerary of Richard I and others to the Holy Land_.

[h] ROGER OF HOVEDEN, _Historia post Bedam_.

[i] THOMAS FULLER, _Holy War_.

[j] ABULFEDA, _History of the Human Race_.

[k] J. F. MICHAUD, _Bibliothèque des Croisades_.