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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
+Volume 07, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Rossiter Johnson
+        Charles Horne
+        John Rudd
+
+Release Date: December 18, 2008 [EBook #27562]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EVENTS, VOLUME 07 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during
+  the coronation of Charles VII before the high altar at
+  Rheims.
+
+  Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.]
+
+
+
+
+                       THE GREAT EVENTS
+
+                              BY
+
+                      FAMOUS HISTORIANS
+
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+    | A COMPREHENSIVE  AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S |
+    | HISTORY, EMPHASIZING  THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND |
+    | PRESENTING  THESE  AS  COMPLETE  NARRATIVES  IN  THE |
+    |     MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS      |
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+    NON-SECTARIAN         NON-PARTISAN        NON-SECTIONAL
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+    | ON  THE  PLAN  EVOLVED FROM  A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS |
+    | GATHERED FROM  THE  MOST DISTINGUISHED  SCHOLARS  OF |
+    | AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS BY |
+    | SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT  AND   EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED |
+    | NARRATIVES, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY,  WITH THOROUGH |
+    | INDICES,  BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND  COURSES |
+    |                     OF READING                       |
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+
+                        EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
+
+                    ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.
+
+                       ASSOCIATE EDITORS
+
+                    CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
+
+                       JOHN RUDD, LL.D.
+
+                _With a staff of specialists_
+
+                         _VOLUME VII_
+
+
+                      The National Alumni
+
+                        COPYRIGHT, 1905,
+
+                    BY THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
+
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS
+
+
+                          VOLUME VII
+
+                                                           page
+
+_An Outline Narrative of the Great Events_,                xiii
+         CHARLES F. HORNE
+
+_Dante Composes the_ Divina Commedia _(A.D. 1300-1318)_,      1
+         RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
+
+_Third Estate Joins in the Government of France (A.D.
+  1302)_,                                                    17
+         HENRI MARTIN
+
+_War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair of France
+  (A.D. 1302)_,                                              23
+         EYRE EVANS CROWE
+
+_First Swiss Struggle for Liberty (A.D. 1308)_,              28
+         F. GRENFELL BAKER
+
+_Battle of Bannockburn (A.D. 1314)_,                         41
+         ANDREW LANG
+
+_Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars
+Burning of Grand Master Molay (A.D. 1314)_,                  51
+         F. C. WOODHOUSE
+         HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+_James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt
+Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King of
+  France (A.D. 1337-1340)_,                                  68
+         FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT
+
+_Battles of Sluys and Crécy (A.D. 1340-1346)_,               78
+         SIR JOHN FROISSART
+
+_Modern Recognition of Scenic Beauty
+Crowning of Petrarch at Rome (A.D. 1341)_,                   93
+         JACOB BURCKHARDT
+
+_Rienzi's Revolution in Rome (A.D. 1347)_,                  104
+         RICHARD LODGE
+
+_Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance (Fourteenth
+  to Sixteenth Century)_,                                   110
+         JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
+
+_The Black Death Ravages Europe (A.D. 1348)_,               130
+         J. F. C. HECKER
+         GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
+
+_First Turkish Dominion in Europe
+Turks Seize Gallipoli (A.D. 1354)_,                         147
+         JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL
+
+_Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at Venice
+  (A.D. 1355)_,                                             154
+         MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT
+
+_Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull
+  (A.D. 1356)_,                                             160
+         SIR ROBERT COMYN
+
+_Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France (A.D. 1358)_,      164
+         SIR JOHN FROISSART
+
+_Conquests of Timur the Tartar (A.D. 1370-1405)_,           169
+         EDWARD GIBBON
+
+_Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages (A.D. 1374)_,             187
+         J. F. C. HECKER
+
+_Election of Antipope Clement VII
+Beginning of the Great Schism (A.D. 1378)_,                 201
+         HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+_Genoese Surrender to Venetians (A.D. 1380)_,               213
+         HENRY HALLAM
+
+_Rebellion of Wat Tyler (A.D. 1381)_,                       217
+         JOHN LINGARD
+
+_Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English (A.D. 1382)_    227
+         J. PATERSON SMYTH
+
+_The Swiss Win Their Independence
+Battle of Sempach (A.D. 1386-1389)_                         238
+         F. GRENFELL BAKER
+
+_Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (A.D. 1397)_,         243
+         PAUL C. SINDING
+
+_Deposition of Richard II
+Henry IV Begins the Line of Lancaster (A.D. 1399)_,         251
+         JOHN LINGARD
+
+_Discovery of the Canary Islands and the African Coast
+Beginning of Negro Slave Trade (A.D. 1402)_,               266
+         SIR ARTHUR HELPS
+
+_Council of Constance (A.D. 1414)_,                        284
+         RICHARD LODGE
+
+_Trial and Burning of John Huss
+The Hussite Wars (A.D. 1415)_,                             294
+         RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
+
+_The House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg
+  (A.D. 1415)_,                                            305
+         THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+_Battle of Agincourt
+English Conquest of France (A.D. 1415)_,                   320
+         JAMES GAIRDNER
+
+_Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans (A.D. 1429)_,           333
+         SIR EDWARD S. CREASY
+
+_Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc (A.D. 1431)_,         350
+         JULES MICHELET
+
+_Charles VII Issues His Pragmatic Sanction
+Emancipation of the Gallican Church (A.D. 1438)_,          370
+         W. HENLEY JERVIS
+         RENÉ F. ROHRBACHER
+
+_Universal Chronology (A.D. 1301-1438)_,                   385
+         JOHN RUDD
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+VOLUME VII                                                page
+
+_Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during the
+coronation of Charles VII, before the high altar
+at Rheims (page 347)_,                            Frontispiece
+  Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.
+
+_Richard II resigns the crown of England to Henry,
+Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at
+London_,                                                   262
+  Painting by Sir John Gilbert.
+
+
+
+
+                     AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
+
+           TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS,
+                     AND CONSEQUENCES OF
+                      THE GREAT EVENTS
+
+     (FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)
+
+                      CHARLES F. HORNE
+
+
+Fifty years ago the term "renaissance" had a very definite meaning to
+scholars as representing an exact period toward the close of the
+fourteenth century when the world suddenly reawoke to the beauty of the
+arts of Greece and Rome, to the charm of their gayer life, the splendor
+of their intellect. We know now that there was no such sudden
+reawakening, that Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long
+centuries, and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer
+side of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with
+their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.
+
+Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and
+there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning
+ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid
+the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way
+of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period
+of the great poet's work, the first decade of the fourteenth century,
+has certainly the advantage of being characterized by three or four
+peculiarly striking events which serve to typify the tendencies of the
+coming age.
+
+In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic, by a
+political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended
+into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended
+only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found
+expression in his mighty poem, the _Divina Commedia_.[1] Throughout his
+masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and
+of such Greeks as he knew--so we have admiration of the ancient
+intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other
+more earthly tyrants--so we have the dawnings of democracy and of
+religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's
+self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.
+
+More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he
+began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon
+transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his
+commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote
+not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly
+friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very
+truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical
+set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous
+vitality, were to supersede the old.
+
+In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at
+work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the
+famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous
+bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening enough.
+
+If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene
+tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the
+Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause
+of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the great
+jubilee of 1300. Philip's soldiers, forcing their way into the little
+town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon
+his holiness. If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So
+few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of
+towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from
+the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck--beaten, say not
+wholly reliable authorities--and so insulted that rage and shame drove
+him mad, and he died.
+
+Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr.
+Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope,
+venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under
+strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the
+obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal
+authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years
+the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the
+Church was sudden, terrible, complete.
+
+
+INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE
+
+Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the
+mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders
+of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars,
+having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had
+dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized
+the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and
+confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles
+throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the
+extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its
+chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their
+helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which
+knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of
+feudalism was past.[2]
+
+We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this cruel,
+crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against the Pope, he
+called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of his people; and,
+following the example already established in England, he gave a voice in
+this assembly to the "Third Estate," the common folk or "citizens," as
+well as to the nobles and the clergy. So even in France we find the
+people acquiring power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but
+a timid and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by its
+money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one day be strong
+enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant overlords.[3]
+
+Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took place farther
+northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish cities Ghent, Liège, and
+Bruges had grown to be the great centres of the commercial world, so
+wealthy and so populous that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish
+burghers had not always been subject to France--else they had been less
+well to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and
+rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and
+the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout
+leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the
+knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers
+with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the
+helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness
+asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself
+a fresh nobility to replenish his depleted stock.[4]
+
+The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign will in
+itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most important state
+in Europe. This, however, was due less to French strength than to the
+weakness of the empire, where rival rulers were being constantly elected
+and wasting their strength against one another. If Courtrai had given
+the first hint that these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war,
+it was soon followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among
+themselves a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in
+1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.[5]
+The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival claimants for the
+title of emperor, and was much too busy to attend personally to the
+chastisement of these presumptuous boors. The army which he sent to do
+the work for him was met by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain
+passes, overwhelmed with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce
+charge of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years to
+forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second army into
+the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss liberty was
+established on an unarguable basis.[6]
+
+A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under Bruce, the
+Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the English.[7] Courtrai,
+Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new force was growing up over all
+Europe, and a new spirit among men. Knighthood, which had lost its power
+over kings, seemed like to lose its military repute as well.
+
+The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in Italy, where
+democracy had first asserted itself. In its train came intellectual
+ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Italy was in the
+full swing of the intellectual renaissance.[8] In 1341 Petrarch,
+recognized by all his contemporary countrymen as their leading scholar
+and poet, was crowned with a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol
+in Rome. This was the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for
+intellectual worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of
+the beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In
+reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our own,
+with a friend who understands.[9]
+
+
+THE PERIOD OF DISASTER
+
+Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too intense, too
+frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic in Rome and
+talked of the restoration of the city's ancient rule. But he governed
+like a madman or an inflated fool, and was slain in a riot of the
+streets.[10] Scarce one of the famous cities succeeded in retaining its
+republican form. Milan became a duchy. Florence fell under the sway of
+the Medici. In Venice a few rich families seized all authority, and
+while the fame and territory of the republic were extended, its dogeship
+became a mere figurehead. All real power was lodged in the dread and
+secret council of three.[11] Genoa was defeated and crushed in a great
+naval contest with her rival, Venice.[12] Everywhere tyrannies stood out
+triumphant. The first modern age of representative government was a
+failure. The cities had proved unable to protect themselves against the
+selfish ambitions of their leaders.
+
+In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen,
+slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of
+decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith
+of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully
+established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth
+of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of
+Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark, Norway,
+and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance of the Hansa, until,
+toward the end of the century, Queen Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis
+of the North," united the three countries under her sway, and partly at
+least upraised them from their sorry plight.[14]
+
+On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look back with
+pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of its wrangling rulers,
+Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an established government lay
+at the root of all the disorder, tried to mend matters by publishing his
+"Golden Bull," which exactly regulated the rules and formulæ to be gone
+through in choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were
+to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested
+elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty. The
+Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.[15]
+
+Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated
+plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered,
+began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has
+been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation
+one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out.
+In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed,
+humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all
+the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its
+height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in
+Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg
+the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to
+stop.[17]
+
+France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years'
+War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact,
+her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting
+away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings.
+France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe.
+England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman
+dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived
+of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, France was
+having much trouble with her Flemish cities, which were in revolt again
+under the noted brewer-nobleman, Van Artevelde,[18] yet it seemed
+presumption for England to attack her--England, so feeble that she had
+been unable to avenge her own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at
+Bannockburn.
+
+But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves as had
+the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not been in that strife
+against the Scots, a brave and impoverished people struggling for
+freedom. But hearts and pockets, too, welcomed the quarrel with France,
+overbearing France, that plundered their ships when they traded with
+their friends the Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a
+main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom
+ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer
+Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and
+presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By
+asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the
+consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King
+Philip had on his hands a far more serious quarrel than he realized.[19]
+
+In England's first great naval victory, Edward destroyed the French
+fleet at Sluys and so started his country on its wonderful career of
+ocean dominance. Moreover, his success established from the start that
+the war should be fought out in France and not in England.[20] Then, in
+1346, he won his famous victory of Crécy against overwhelming numbers of
+his enemies. It has been said that cannon were effectively used for the
+first time at Crécy, and it was certainly about this time that gunpowder
+began to assume a definite though as yet subordinate importance in
+warfare. But we need not go so far afield to explain the English
+victory. It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through a century
+and a half of freedom, England had been building up a class of sturdy
+yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent
+lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a
+helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they
+had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English
+peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly
+accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized
+mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed what the English
+yeomen had begun.
+
+Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what with the
+Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging
+at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which
+had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation
+into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous
+plunderings and burnings of the rich châteaux.[21] A partial peace with
+England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary
+soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take
+their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering
+and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and
+the English troops caught disease from their victims and perished in the
+desolation they had helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles
+with them and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won
+back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380, the
+English power in France had fallen again almost to where it stood at the
+beginning of the war.
+
+Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph.
+His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen.
+England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and
+her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of
+rebellion--though with them this meant no more than that they felt
+themselves over-taxed.[22]
+
+The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be regarded
+as a period of depression in European civilization, of retrograde
+movement during which the wheels of progress had turned back. It even
+seemed as though Asia would once more and perhaps with final success
+reassert her dominion over helpless Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in
+1291, had conquered Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land,
+had lost their power; but a new family of the Turkish race, the one that
+dwells in Europe to-day, the Osmanlis, had built up an empire by
+conquest over their fellows, and had begun to wrest province after
+province from the feeble Empire of the East. In 1354 their advance
+brought them across the Bosporus and they seized their first European
+territory.[23] Soon they had spread over most of modern Turkey. Only the
+strong-walled Constantinople held out, while its people cried
+frantically to the West for help. The invaders ravaged Hungary. A
+crusade was preached against them; but in 1396 the entire crusading
+army, united with all the forces of Hungary, was overthrown, almost
+exterminated in the battle of Nicopolis.
+
+Perhaps it was only a direct providence that saved Europe. Another
+Tartar conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine, had risen in the Far
+East.[24] Like Attila and Genghis Khan he swept westward asserting
+sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe
+to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which
+vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and
+slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and
+subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real
+unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations
+reasserted their independence. Yet Europe was granted a considerable
+breathing space before the Turks once more felt able to push their
+aggressions westward.
+
+
+THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
+
+Toward the close of this unlucky fourteenth century a marked religious
+revival extended over Europe. Perhaps men's sufferings had caused it.
+Many sects of reformers appeared, protesting sometimes against the
+discipline, sometimes the doctrines, of the Church. In Germany Nicholas
+of Basel established the "Friends of God." In England Wycliffe wrote the
+earliest translation of the Bible into any of our modern tongues.[25]
+The Avignon popes shook off their long submission to France and returned
+to Italy, to a Rome so desolate that they tell us not ten thousand
+people remained to dwell amid its stupendous ruins. Unfortunately this
+return only led the papacy into still deeper troubles. Several of the
+cardinals refused to recognize the Roman Pope and elected another, who
+returned to Avignon. This was the beginning of the "Great Schism" in the
+Church.[26] For forty years there were two, sometimes three, claimants
+to the papal chair. The effect of their struggles was naturally to
+lessen still further that solemn veneration with which men had once
+looked up to the accepted vicegerent of God on earth. Hitherto the
+revolt against the popes had only assailed their political supremacy;
+but now heresies that included complete denial of the religious
+authority of the Church began everywhere to arise. In England Wycliffe's
+preachings and pamphlets grew more and more opposed to Roman doctrine.
+In Bohemia John Huss not only said, as all men did, that the Church
+needed reform, but, going further, he refused obedience to papal
+commands.[27] In short, the reformers, finding themselves unable to
+purify the Roman Church according to their views, began to deny its
+sacredness and defy its power.
+
+At length an unusually energetic though not oversuccessful emperor,
+Sigismund, the same whom the Turks had defeated at Nicopolis, persuaded
+the leaders of the Church to unite with him in calling a grand council
+at Constance.[28] This council ended the great schism and restored order
+to the Church by securing the rule of a single pope. It also burned John
+Huss as a heretic, and thereby left on Sigismund's hands a fierce
+rebellion among the reformer's Bohemian followers. The war lasted for a
+generation, and during its course all the armies of Germany were
+repeatedly defeated by the fanatic Hussites.[29]
+
+Another interesting performance of the Emperor Sigismund was that, being
+deep in debt, he sold his "electorate" of Brandenburg to a friend, a
+Hohenzollern, and thus established as one of the four chief families of
+the empire those Hohenzollerns who rose to be kings of Prussia and have
+in our own day supplanted the Hapsburgs as emperors of Germany.[30] Also
+worth noting of Sigismund is the fact that during the sitting of his
+Council of Constance he made a tour of Europe to persuade all the
+princes and various potentates to join it. When he reached England he
+was met by a band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand whether
+by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England.
+Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look
+to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old
+mediæval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the
+overlord of the whole of Europe.
+
+
+LATTER HALF OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
+
+By this time England had in fact recovered from her period of temporary
+disorder and depression. King Richard II, the feeble son of the Black
+Prince, had been deposed in 1399,[31] and a new and vigorous line of
+rulers, the Lancastrians, reached their culmination in Henry V
+(1415-1422). Henry revived the French quarrel, and paralleled Crécy and
+Poitiers with a similar victory at Agincourt.[32] The French King was a
+madman, and, aided by a civil war among the French nobility, Henry soon
+had his neighbor's kingdom seemingly helpless at his feet. By the
+treaty of Troyes he was declared the heir to the French throne, married
+the mad King's daughter, and dwelt in Paris as regent of the
+kingdom.[33]
+
+The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a similar English
+conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his
+insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a
+tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left a full-grown
+though rather worthless son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to
+deny the English authority, from a safe distance in Southern France. He
+made, however, no effort to assert himself or retrieve his fortunes; and
+the English captains in the name of their baby King took possession of
+one fortress after another, till, in 1429, Orleans was the only French
+city of rank still barring their way from Charles and the far south.[34]
+
+Then came the sudden, wonderful arousing of the French under their
+peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture and execution.[35]
+At last even the French peasantry were roused; and the French nobles
+forgot their private quarrels and turned a united front against the
+invaders. The leaderless English lost battle after battle, until of all
+France they retained only Edward III's first conquest, the city of
+Calais.
+
+France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the Council of
+Constance, and, remembering how long she had held the papacy within her
+own borders, asserted at least a qualified independence of the Romans by
+the "Pragmatic Sanction" which established the Gallican Church.[36]
+
+This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King Charles, who, in
+fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the power which his
+good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won. Among other innovations he
+established a "standing army," the first permanent body of government
+troops in Teutonic Europe. By this step he did much to alter the
+mediæval into the modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy
+of kings over both nobles and people which continued in France and more
+or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow.
+
+Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen
+in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the
+Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a
+first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery
+into Europe[37]--a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was
+to face increasing responsibilities as well.
+
+An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In
+that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet
+unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a
+little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable type, that is,
+of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii,
+education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries
+impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as
+much for standing armies.
+
+
+
+
+DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"
+
+A.D. 1300-1318
+
+RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
+
+
+  Out of what may be called the civil and religious
+  storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into
+  the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the
+  new life upon which the world was about to enter. From
+  Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and
+  its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy
+  of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible
+  world"--Dante's _Divina Commedia_--wherein also the deeper
+  history of the visible world of man was both embodied from
+  the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.
+
+  Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its
+  ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it
+  the epithet "divine." It is in three parts--_Inferno_
+  (hell), _Purgatorio_ (purgatory), and _Paradiso_ (paradise).
+  It has been made accessible to English readers in the
+  metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and
+  others, and in the excellent prose version (_Inferno_) of
+  John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.
+
+  Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in
+  May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the
+  _Divina Commedia_ and his other great work, the _Vita Nuova_
+  (the new life), narrate the love--either romantic or
+  passionate--with which he was inspired by Beatrice
+  Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and
+  Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed
+  to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an
+  equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his
+  works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein
+  the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds
+  of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of
+  failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials
+  rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems,
+  which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of
+  Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of
+  the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of
+  the modern world.
+
+  Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life
+  of Dante, and of the history-making _Commedia_, attest the
+  importance of including the poet and his work in this record
+  of Great Events.
+
+The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
+magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening
+of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of
+a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the
+mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up
+ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by
+grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the
+consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and
+Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the
+_Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's Code, with the
+Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens
+European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And,
+like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in
+undiminished freshness the literature which it began.
+
+We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have
+pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing,
+and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a
+solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed
+up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but
+fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
+world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature,
+so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which he has added
+permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power
+which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and
+creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it
+was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of
+investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of
+the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its
+ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among
+the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the
+solemn recollection supervenes that powers were formed, and life
+preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, and thus
+it should be; and the work which man has brooded over, and at last
+created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end
+to end, strongly and sweetly disposing of all things."
+
+It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some cases and to
+a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the
+particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps
+to a heterogeneous and wildly discordant order of things, which are out
+of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which
+have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to
+bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we
+feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which
+its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to
+conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see
+nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work
+without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of
+its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina
+Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
+yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its
+chance incidents.
+
+The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it
+ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In
+general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great
+poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness
+in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of
+the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined
+by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and
+flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own
+life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all
+things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections
+of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the
+only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure
+ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful
+company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we
+never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to
+history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in
+Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather
+than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as
+generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great
+mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man
+conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among
+which he worked; but how the current of purpose threaded its way among
+them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot
+learn from history.
+
+It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and
+enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of
+his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder
+of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an
+autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and
+subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with
+far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes
+it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of
+raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he
+has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic
+change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes
+the student--the student of the thirteenth century--struggling painfully
+against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight
+and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but
+omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and
+ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of
+half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the Provençals.
+
+Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within his reach are
+accepted as the consolation of his human griefs; he is filled with the
+passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it.
+Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems
+in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his
+learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it
+is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by
+discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death.
+He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a
+family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his
+full share in the quarrels of the day.
+
+Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and
+figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and
+natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of
+the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been
+broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man,
+enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and
+abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and
+brooded once more on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory
+had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him
+and that stable country "where the angels are in peace." Round her
+image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was
+grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and
+success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged
+itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction,
+but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the
+softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no
+figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love,
+dissipated by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of
+feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's
+case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and
+suggested the form of the "sacred poem of earth and heaven."
+
+And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this
+passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of
+poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not
+ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration--the political
+life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and
+passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning,
+gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man.
+But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet.
+
+The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the
+Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving
+in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and
+contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the
+social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more
+felicitous in issue, of other western nations. It is remarkable for
+keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it
+has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that
+is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and
+empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind
+to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger
+than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire,
+indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not
+a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it
+prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were
+uniting and union was becoming organization--and neither geographical
+remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and
+differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which
+was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and
+cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the
+attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while
+this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in
+Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its
+narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The
+history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one--the history
+of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a
+history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent
+cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within,
+theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes
+and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and
+citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the
+minuteness of private life.
+
+Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not less from
+the custom of the day than from his own purpose a public man. He took
+his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he
+fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory at
+Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled
+himself in one of the guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the
+"art" of the apothecaries; he served the state as its agent abroad; he
+went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy according
+to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies,
+even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of jubilee, 1300, he
+was one of the priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from
+fellowship and coöperation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the
+market-place and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn
+by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men,
+the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought
+of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the
+real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous
+page of Vergil; and no scholar ever read Vergil with such feeling--no
+astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The
+whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul
+and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free
+and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes,
+seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual,
+natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is
+placed to labor and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.
+
+The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it
+is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know
+not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the
+parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a
+neighboring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and
+the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs, who were led by the
+Donati, and the White Guelfs, who sided with Cerchi. It is still
+professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but
+they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the
+whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a
+time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it
+grew evident that one party must crush the other and become dominant in
+Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less
+formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing
+Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely
+of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the
+martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause.
+The Cerchi, with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and
+showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the
+common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the _Parte
+Guelfa_; and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well.
+
+Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they
+might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had
+chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties
+equally, seem to have thought that this would have been the best result
+for the state. But the accounts of both, though they are very different
+writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They
+were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to
+aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to
+pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when
+they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the
+moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and
+for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune,
+"more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared
+their adversaries." Boniface VIII had no prepossessions in Florence,
+except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he
+would have accepted and backed. But he said, "_Io non voglio perdere gli
+uomini perle femminelle_."[38] If the Black party furnished types for
+the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White
+party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly
+selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the
+vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel
+nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is
+singled out in the _setta dei cattivi_, for deeper and special
+scorn--he,
+
+  "Che fece per vilta il gran rifinto,"[39]
+
+the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.
+
+Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general
+character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when
+they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at
+last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he
+found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his
+exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his
+writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but
+disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are
+not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry,
+shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi
+and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he
+appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates;
+in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The
+traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with
+a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
+recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy
+form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the
+Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he
+passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the
+West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little
+that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored
+and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find
+him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of
+Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not
+by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love,"
+asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is
+better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian
+Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the
+children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the
+assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del
+Fiore.
+
+The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's
+life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is
+that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It
+is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle
+Ages in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for
+this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his state of trial, as
+"comprehensor" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly
+country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the
+recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent
+scenery of the _inferno_ and _purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly
+marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and
+the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such
+scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown
+dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery
+from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and
+precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks
+of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of
+Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna;
+the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and
+Sestri; the marble quarries of Carrara; the "rough and desert ways
+between Lerici and Turbia," and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into
+the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty
+years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that
+picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing
+above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly
+through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top,
+while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:
+
+  "Ai raggi, morti gia' bassi lidi,"[40]
+
+or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath
+the Alpine fir:
+
+        "Un' ombra smorta
+  Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
+  Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta;"[41]
+
+or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:
+
+      "d'un cader lento
+  Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde
+  Come di neve in Alpe senza vento."[42]
+
+Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_
+was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with
+some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made
+in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes
+three lines of it--continued afterward in Italian. This is not
+impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the
+_Vita Nuova_. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure
+and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is
+already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the
+face of the Ever-blessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the
+promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes
+how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady
+receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed
+spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in
+which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this
+blessed one until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily
+of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she
+truly knows. So that it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things
+live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that
+which never hath been said of any woman. And afterward, may it please
+him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the
+glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously
+gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."
+It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life
+to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or
+laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what he was promising, what he
+was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would
+have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high
+venture should be realized.
+
+But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be
+surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the
+poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the
+_Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and
+downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is
+continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect
+work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the
+grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a
+figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly
+wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing
+thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the
+dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to
+naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life.
+But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt
+whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by
+the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand
+though barbarous Latin to the _literati_ of the fourteenth century; or a
+poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the
+literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the
+_Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time
+when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion and the condition of his
+life.
+
+But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante
+was alone--except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless.
+The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his
+home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free
+associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all
+Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already
+in the region of spirits, and meet him there--Casella, Forese; Guido
+Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and
+writes as a friendless man--to whom all that he had held dearest was
+either lost or imbittered; he thinks and writes for himself.
+
+So comprehensive in interest is the _Commedia_. Any attempt to explain
+it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life,
+or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the
+keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art,
+each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to
+the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in
+doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the
+plain-spoken prose of the _Convito_ would show how he placed "the Divine
+Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and
+sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," is
+single perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon
+speaks, but queens or concubines or maidens; but she is the 'Dove,' and
+the 'perfect one'--'Dove,' because without stain of strife; 'perfect,'
+because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in which our soul
+stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage shows likewise how
+he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, as holding their due
+place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's
+perfection. No account of the _Commedia_ will prove sufficient which
+does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep
+spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide liberty of
+materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his
+design.
+
+Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline
+poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political
+opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt.
+And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all
+ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That
+he should take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part
+of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he
+subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of
+his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet
+this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who
+read the _Commedia_ in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained
+as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labor and
+pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than
+the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred
+cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the
+Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and
+scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in
+all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang
+of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the
+greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to
+which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to
+solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in
+which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or
+infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and
+even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic
+doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries
+of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse
+blindness.
+
+Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an
+imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party.
+It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up,
+and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were
+at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with
+them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in which he
+disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his
+independence--
+
+      "A te fia bello
+  Averti fatto parte per te stesso."[43]
+
+Dante, by the _Divina Commedia_, was the restorer of seriousness in
+literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and
+by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the
+prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the
+faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers
+fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously
+diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
+Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance;
+the _Commedia_ checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with
+the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively
+amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
+had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling;
+in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it
+brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased
+at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But
+this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was,
+was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge
+first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all
+closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the
+idea of infidelity--not heresy, but infidelity--was quite a familiar
+one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and
+Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and
+opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a
+profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for
+its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and
+enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in
+safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found
+utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the
+Italian _Commedia_ had not seized on all minds. It would have been an
+evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the siren
+tales of the _Decameron_ had not been the first to occupy the ears with
+the charms of a new language.
+
+Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to open the grand
+procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote
+from popular thought--too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted
+frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even
+enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so
+undoubting--her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the
+unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and
+models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But
+with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics
+and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil,
+Ovid, and Statius--keen and subtle as a schoolman--as much an idolater
+of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance--his eye
+is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of
+external nature, to the wonders of the physical world--his interest in
+them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct,
+his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened
+or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as
+elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic
+materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days
+which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense
+of what is real in feeling and image--as if he had never felt the
+attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before
+the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time
+was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and
+appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with
+a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their
+spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material
+is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science,
+and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he
+wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose
+their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT
+OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1302
+
+HENRI MARTIN[44]
+
+
+  At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the
+  power of Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at
+  its height, contentions arose between him and Pope Boniface
+  VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the right of
+  nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the
+  dominions of the French King.
+
+  Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the
+  county of Melgueil, which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in
+  fief from the holy see. Boniface provoked Philip by a
+  chiding bull, and added to the provocation by sending to the
+  King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de
+  Saisset, whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created
+  Bishop of Pamiers.
+
+  This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant
+  attitude, and afterward spoke of the King, who received him
+  in sombre silence, as "that debaser of coinage, that proud
+  and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare at people
+  without saying anything."
+
+  Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him
+  arrested and imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of
+  treason, heresy, and blasphemy, and sent his chancellor,
+  Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to the Pope, to demand
+  the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his see.
+
+  The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta,
+  fili," bull, received Philip's ambassadors, but their
+  interview was marked by a violent scene: "My power!"
+  exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power embraces and
+  includes the temporal power!"
+
+  "So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that
+  of the King, real."
+
+  To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he
+  deemed the King guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior
+  clergy of France to an assembly at Rome.
+
+Philip and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its own weapons,
+to enlist public opinion on their side, and to shelter themselves behind
+a great national manifestation; the three estates of France were
+convoked at Notre Dame in Paris, the 10th of April, 1302, to take
+cognizance of the differences between the King and the Pope. For the
+first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town
+deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside
+of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment
+of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth
+the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective entity, a
+political order.
+
+It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked
+by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and that he had
+the idea to seek in them moral power and support.
+
+The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip
+the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the
+feudality did not possess sufficient union, the people did not have
+enough force to profit on this occasion against the Crown. Besides, the
+Pope was more unpopular than the King, and had been so for a much longer
+time; the nobility, which, since the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced
+to resist clerical jurisdiction, had not changed in sentiment; as to the
+people, filled with the remembrance of St. Louis, they loved the King
+still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the oppressions of Philip,
+and besides it was easy to foresee that the mayors, consuls, aldermen,
+jurats or magistrates, who were to represent their cities in the great
+assembly at Paris, dazzled with the unaccustomed _rôle_ to which they
+were called, and desirous to please the King in their personal interest
+or in that of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit
+lawyers who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the
+debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known,
+might well have produced in many respects a contrary effect to the
+wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface touching the debasement
+of the coinage and the royal exactions, reproaches which so irritated
+Philip, might have met with other sentiments from the townsmen. The
+chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed among the public,
+instead of the original bull, a species of _résumé_ in which he had
+assembled, in a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant
+pretensions of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which
+touched on the troubles of the nation against the King.
+
+"Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of
+the French; fear God and observe his commandments. We want you to know
+that you are subject to us temporarily as well as spiritually; that the
+collation of the benefices and the prebends--revenues attached to the
+canonical positions--do not belong to you in any way; that if you have
+care of the vacant benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their
+successors; that if you have misapplied any of these benefices, we
+declare that collation invalid and revoke it, declaring as heretics all
+those who think otherwise.
+
+"Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."
+
+At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended answer to the
+pretended bull:
+
+"Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives
+out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your
+very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards
+temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends
+belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the
+collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the
+future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and
+against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."
+
+This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to
+abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the
+eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been
+greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which
+formerly would have drawn universal indignation on the head of the
+sacrilegious monarch.
+
+The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual. The
+prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute, neutralized by
+the difficulties of their position between the King and the Pope; the
+lords and the townsmen hastened thither irritated against the bull,
+heated by the violence of the royal answer. The members of the assembly
+were influenced each by the other according to their arrival; the
+pungent and wily eloquence of Peter Flotte did the rest. The chancellor,
+as the first of the great crown officers and the king's chief justice,
+opened the states by a long harangue in which, speaking in the name of
+Philip, he exposed with much force and ingenuity the enterprises of the
+court of Rome and its wrongs toward the kingdom and the Church.
+
+"The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers and
+unknown individuals who never become residents. The prelates no longer
+have benefices to give to nobles whose ancestors founded the churches,
+and to other lettered persons; from which results also that gifts are no
+longer given to the churches. The Pope imposes on the churches and
+benefices pensions, subsidies, exactions of all kinds. The bishops are
+kept from their ministry, being obliged to go to the holy see to carry
+presents--always presents. All these abuses have done nothing but
+increase under the actual pontificate, and increase every
+day--conditions that can no longer be tolerated. That is why I command
+you as your master and pray you as your friend to give me counsel and
+help."
+
+The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his own initiative,
+to remedy the encroachments that his officers had made on the rights of
+the Church, and would have done so sooner had he not feared the
+appearance of submitting to the menaces and orders of the Pope, who
+pretended to reduce to a condition of vassalage the most noble kingdom
+of France, which had never been raised but from God. Peter Flotte dwelt
+especially on this latter argument, and appealed in turn to the
+interests of the nobility and of the clergy, and to national pride. The
+fiery Count of Artois arose, and exclaimed that even if the King
+submitted to the encroachments of the Pope, the nobility would not
+suffer them, and that the gentry would never acknowledge any temporal
+superior other than the King. The nobility and the Third Estate
+confirmed these words by their acclamations, and swore to sacrifice
+their properties and lives to defend the temporal independence of the
+kingdom. A Norman advocate, named Dubosc, procurator of the commune of
+Coutances, accused the Pope, in writing, of heresy for having wanted to
+despoil the King of the independence of the crown which he held from
+God. The embarrassment of the clergy was extreme; the members of the
+Church, fearing to be crushed in the crash between King and Pope, asked
+time for deliberation; their declaration in the assembly then being
+held, was insisted upon; already cries arose around them that whoever
+did not subscribe to the oath would be held as an enemy of the State;
+they acquiesced, satisfied apparently by an appearance of violence which
+would serve them for an excuse at Rome. They acknowledged themselves
+obliged, in common with the other orders, to defend the rights of the
+King and of the kingdom, whether they held estates from the King or not;
+then they prayed the King to be allowed to go to the council convoked by
+the Pope; the King and the barons declared themselves formally opposed.
+
+The three orders then separated, so as to write to the court at Rome
+each its own side of the affair; the letters of the nobility and of the
+Third Estate--which as may be imagined were all prepared in advance by
+the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the
+assistants--were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of
+cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and
+unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and
+government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the
+universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any
+trouble, whether by the authority of the Pope or anyone else--unless it
+be from their sire, the King. This letter is signed, not only by the
+principal lords of the kingdom, but also by several great barons of the
+empire.
+
+The epistle of the mayors, aldermen, jurats, consuls, universities,
+communes, and communities of the towns of the kingdom of France has not
+been preserved. It is known only, by the answer that the cardinals made,
+that it was conceived in the same spirit as the letter of the barons.
+The letter of the clergy is quite in another style: the clerks address
+their very holy father and very holy sire, the Pope; expose to him the
+complaints of the King and of the nobility; the necessity in which they
+find themselves engaged to defend the King's rights, and the anger of
+the laity; the imminent rupture of France with the Roman Church--and
+even of the people with the clergy in general--and conjure the highest
+prudence of the Pope to conserve the ancient union by revoking the
+convocation of the ecclesiastical council.
+
+The states-general were dissolved immediately after the unique _séance_
+which had so well responded to the desires of the King. The means
+employed to attain this result were not entirely loyal, nor was public
+opinion altogether free; it was but slightly enlightened on the grave
+debates that the authorities affected to submit to it. Nevertheless it
+was an important matter, this call to the French nation, and it must be
+acknowledged that the genius of France responded in proclaiming national
+independence, and in repelling the intervention of the court of Rome in
+the internal politics of the country.
+
+
+
+
+WAR OF THE FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE
+FAIR OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1302
+
+EYRE EVANS CROWE
+
+
+  Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century the people of
+  Flanders, whose country had been for centuries a feudal
+  dependency of France, were considerably advanced in wealth
+  and importance. They had become restive under the French
+  rule, and their discontent ripened into settled hostility.
+  Common commercial interests drew them into friendship with
+  England, and in the quarrel between Philip the Fair and
+  Edward I, 1295, concerning Edward's rule in Guienne
+  (Aquitaine) the Flemings allied themselves with the English
+  King.
+
+  In 1297 Philip invaded Flanders and gained several successes
+  against the Flemings, who were feebly aided by King Edward.
+  In 1299 the two kings settled their quarrel, and the
+  Flemings were left to the vengeance of Philip, for in the
+  pacification the court of Flanders was not included. A
+  French army entered the Flemish territory, inflicted two
+  defeats upon the Count's troops, and received the submission
+  of the Count. Philip annexed Flanders to his crown and
+  appointed a governor over the Flemings. In less than two
+  years they rose in furious revolt. The insurrection began at
+  Bruges, May 18, 1302, when over three thousand Frenchmen in
+  that city were massacred by the insurgents. This massacre
+  was called the "Bruges Matins." Such an outrage upon the
+  French crown could not but bring upon the Flemings all the
+  forces that Philip was able to muster. The two leading
+  actions of the ensuing war--that at Courtrai, known as the
+  "Battle of the Spurs," on account of the number of gilt
+  spurs captured by the Flemings, and the engagement at
+  Mons-la-Puelle--are described in the course of the narrative
+  which follows. As a result of the battle of Courtrai the
+  French nobility were nearly destroyed, and Philip found it
+  necessary to recreate his titled bodies.
+
+The Flemings prepared to resist the storm. They chose Guy of Juliers,
+grandson of the Count of Flanders, to be their commander. Though a
+cleric, he did not hesitate to obey the call, in order to avenge his
+family, so cruelly betrayed by the French King. His brother, made
+prisoner at Furnes by the Count d'Artois, had perished in that rude
+Prince's keeping. His first attempt was to induce the people of Ghent to
+join the insurrection, but its rich burgesses preferred French rule to
+that of the Count of Flanders. Bruges, however, was supported by all
+the lesser and maritime towns of Flanders. Guy of Namur, a son of the
+Count, who had escaped to Germany, also returned with a body of soldiers
+from that country, and reassured the Flemings. These surprised one of
+the ducal manors, in which were five hundred French, and then took
+Courtrai, occupying the town, but not the castle. It was immediately
+besieged, as well as that of Cassel, the people of Ypres rallying to the
+French cause. The French garrison of the town of Courtrai sent pressing
+messengers for aid, and Robert of Artois marched with seven thousand
+knights and forty thousand foot, of which one-fourth were archers. The
+Flemish were but twenty thousand, of which none but the chiefs had
+horses. Neither was their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the
+latter being a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with
+iron, and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers and
+Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads from Courtrai to
+Ghent, behind a canal that communicated with the river Lys. A priest
+came with the host, but, there being no time to receive the communion,
+each man took some earth in his mouth. The counts then knighted Pierre
+Konig and the chiefs of bands, and took their station on foot with the
+rest.
+
+The French had nine battalions or divisions, their archers or light
+troops being Lombards or Navarrese and Provençals. These the constable
+placed foremost, to commence the fight and harass the Flemings by their
+missiles. But the Count d'Artois overruled this manoeuvre, and called
+it a Lombard trick, reproaching the Constable de Nesle with appreciating
+the Flemings too highly because of his connection with them. (He had
+married a daughter of the Count of Flanders.) "If you advance as far as
+I shall," replied the Count, "you will go far enough, I warrant." So
+saying he put spurs to his horse and led on his knights; on which the
+Count d'Artois and the French squadrons charged also. This formidable
+cavalry could not reach the Flemings, but fell one over the other into
+the canal, which they had not perceived, and which was five fathoms wide
+and three deep. The Flemish counts, seeing the disorder, instantly
+passed the canal on either side to take advantage of it, and fell on the
+discomfited French. The battle was but a massacre. Numbers of the French
+nobles perished--the Count d'Artois, Godfrey of Brabant and his son,
+the counts of Eu and of Albemarle, the Constable and his brother, De
+Tanquerville, Pierre Flotte, the Chancellor, and Jacques de St. Pol--in
+all some six thousand knights. Louis of Clermont and one or two others
+escaped, to the damage of their reputation. This battle of Courtrai was
+fought on July 11, 1302.
+
+Had the war not been one exclusively of defence on the part of the
+Flemings, or had they had ambitious and adventurous chiefs, such a
+disaster might have endangered the throne of France. It was the Flemish
+democracy which had conquered, and its chiefs contented themselves with
+reducing the remaining cities, and expelling the gentry and rich
+citizens as of French inclinations. This reaction extended from Flanders
+into Brabant and Hainault. Philip in the mean time exerted all his
+activities and resources. Had he been an English king he would have
+called his parliament together, and have found national support and
+national supplies. The French King preferred having recourse to a
+recoinage. In 1294 he had forbidden any persons to keep plate unless
+they possessed an annual revenue of six thousand livres. He now ordered
+his bailies to deliver up their plate, and all non-functionaries to send
+half of theirs. Those who did so received payment in the new coin, and
+lost one-half thereby. A tax of one-fifth, or 20 per cent., of the
+annual revenue was levied on the land, and a twentieth was levied on the
+movable property. In the following year the King found it more
+advantageous to order that all prelates and barons should, for every
+five hundred livres of yearly revenue in land, furnish an armed and
+mounted gentleman for five months' service, while the non-noble was to
+furnish and keep up six infantry soldiers (_sergens de pied_) for every
+hundred hearths. This decree was a return to feudal military service,
+occasioned, no doubt, by the general disaffection caused by the raising
+of the war supplies in money. As if to recompense all classes for the
+severity of the exaction, Philip published an _ordonnance_ of reform for
+the protection of both laymen and ecclesiastics from the arbitrary
+encroachments or interference of his officers.
+
+Having thus set his realm in order, and collected an army of seventy
+thousand men at Arras, the King marched to meet the Flemings, who in
+equal force had mustered in the vicinity of Dovai. They kept, as at
+Courtrai, on the defensive; and the King of France, too cautious to
+attack them, allowed the whole autumn to pass, and returned to France
+after a campaign as inefficient as inglorious.
+
+Philip had been long involved in a controversy with Pope Boniface VIII,
+and the quarrel still continued. It was not till some time after the
+battle of Courtrai that the King at last, delivered from the menacing
+hostility of Rome, had leisure to turn his mind and efforts again toward
+Flanders. During the year 1303 he had sought to keep the Flemings at bay
+by bodies of Lombard and Tuscan infantry, whom his Florentine banker
+persuaded him to hire, and by Amadeus V, Duke of Savoy, who brought
+soldiers of that country to his aid. Although the long lances and more
+perfect armor of these troops gave them some advantage over the
+Flemings, the latter took and burned Therouanne, overran Artois, and
+laid siege to Tournai. Amadeus of Savoy, unable to overcome the Flemings
+by arms, recommended Philip to do so by treaty, and the King accordingly
+concluded a pacification, one condition of which was that the Count of
+Flanders should be released from prison to negotiate terms of fresh
+accommodation. The Flemings received the aged Count with respect; but he
+brought no terms which they were willing to accept; and he returned, as
+he had pledged his word, to captivity at Compiègne, where he soon after
+died.
+
+For the campaign of the following year Philip, in lieu of Italian
+infantry, took sixteen Genoese galleys into his pay, commanded by
+Rainier de Grimaldi. This admiral passed through the Straits of
+Gibraltar and assailed the maritime towns and shipping of Flanders. Guy
+of Namur mustered to oppose them a fleet of greater numbers; but the
+Genoese, accustomed to naval warfare, defeated the Flemings and took Guy
+of Namur prisoner. Philip, at the same time, assembled a large army at
+Tournai, and marched to Mons-la-Puelle, near Lille, where the Flemings,
+to the number of seventy thousand, were encamped within a
+circumvallation of cars and chariots. There was no Robert of Artois on
+this occasion to precipitate a rash onslaught, and by Philip's order the
+southern light troops harassed the Flemings all day with arrows and
+missiles, allowing them no repose. Toward the evening many of the
+French withdrew to refresh themselves and take off their armor; the King
+himself was of this number; the Flemings, perceiving this slackness, and
+divining the cause, poured forth from their encampment in three
+divisions, which at first drove all before them, and reached as far as
+the King's tent, then in full preparation for supper. The monarch
+himself, without armor or helmet, was fortunately not recognized; his
+secretary, De Boville, and two Parisians of the name of Gentien, whom
+Philip had always about his person, were slain before his eyes. The King
+withdrew, but it was to arm, mount on horseback, and cry out to his
+followers to stand their ground. He himself, says Villani, "one of the
+strongest and best made men of his time," fought valiantly until his
+brother Charles and most of the barons, recovering from the first panic,
+came to his rescue, and the Flemings were finally repulsed and put to
+the rout. William of Juliers fell on the side of the Flemings; the son
+of the Duke of Burgundy and many others on that of the French. Philip
+immediately laid siege to Lille, deeming the Flemings totally
+discomfited. They had, however, rallied, obtained reënforcements at
+Bruges and at Ghent, and in three weeks appeared to the number of fifty
+thousand before the King's camp at Lille, crying for battle. Philip
+called a council, and observed that "even a victory would be dearly
+purchased over a party so desperate."
+
+The Duke of Brabant and the Count of Savoy therefore undertook to
+negotiate with the Flemings, and Philip consented to grant them fair
+terms. He recognized their independent rights, agreed to liberate
+Robert, eldest son of Guido, Count of Flanders, as well as all those in
+captivity. He granted Robert and his son the fiefs which belonged to him
+in France, especially that of Nevers, and promised to give him
+investiture of the County of Flanders. The Flemings, on their side,
+consented to pay two hundred thousand livres, and to leave the King of
+France in possession of the three towns of Lille, Douai, and Béthune,
+that part of Flanders in which French was spoken. It was thus, at least,
+that the French interpreted the treaty, while the Flemings afterward
+alleged that French Flanders was merely a pledge for the payment of the
+money, not an alienation to the crown of France.
+
+
+
+
+FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY
+
+A.D. 1308
+
+F. GRENFELL BAKER
+
+
+  Owing to the fact that the house of Hapsburg had its origin
+  in Switzerland, the accession of Rudolph I, founder of the
+  Hapsburg dynasty, to the throne of Germany (1273), with the
+  virtual headship of the Holy Roman Empire, was an event of
+  great importance in the history of the Swiss cantons. To
+  this day the paternal domains whence the Hapsburg family
+  takes its name are a part of Swiss territory. The local
+  administration, as well as such imperial offices as still
+  remained in the free communities of Switzerland, were
+  largely in the hands of this family long before it gave
+  sovereigns to the empire itself. Its chiefs were the chosen
+  champions or advocates of the district.
+
+  Of the Swiss communities Uri seems to have first established
+  its freedom within the empire, and in that canton liberty
+  was most completely preserved from the perils that always
+  threatened Switzerland in this period. Under Rudolph it was
+  at first the policy of the empire to secure the attachment
+  of the Swiss by making the two other cantons, Schwyz and
+  Unterwalden, similarly independent. But toward the end of
+  his reign the policy of Rudolph was so influenced by
+  ambition for territorial expansion that the Swiss began to
+  feel an encroachment upon their independence. In 1291, the
+  year of Rudolph's death, the three cantons, fearing danger
+  to their interests in the new settlement of the crown,
+  formed a league for mutual protection and coöperation. The
+  very parchment on which the terms of this union were written
+  "has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence
+  of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The
+  formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first
+  combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in
+  defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and
+  legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, are
+  romantically blended.
+
+  The empire passed out of the Hapsburg control when Rudolph
+  died, but the family again got possession of it in 1298,
+  when Rudolph's son Albert was elected German king. In the
+  following account the relations of Switzerland and Austria,
+  under the renewed Hapsburg sovereignty, are circumstantially
+  set forth.
+
+There can be little doubt that most of the many stories related by the
+Swiss of the cruelty and extortion of the Austrian bailies are wholly or
+in great part devoid of a historical basis of truth, as are the dates
+given for their occurrence. They doubtless sprang from the very natural
+feelings of hatred the mountaineers of the Forest State felt against a
+foreign master, who was probably only too ready to punish them for the
+part they took against him in the struggle for the imperial throne.
+Indeed, it was not till about two centuries after this period that any
+reference to the alleged cruelties of the Austrians can be found in the
+local records, though legends about them have been plentiful.
+
+Many and various are the stories that have come down to our times of the
+oppression and licentiousness of the bailies, most of which have
+probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not
+wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According
+to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for
+trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be
+tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and
+imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless
+manner; they openly violated the liberties of the people, and chose
+every occasion to insult and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of
+their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly
+reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another
+occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of
+Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's
+messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost
+his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a
+plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this
+insult Henry's son Arnold responded by attacking the messenger and
+breaking his fingers, and then, fearing lest his act should bring down
+some serious punishment, fled to the mountains, and left his aged father
+to Landenburg's vengeance. The bailie confiscated his little property,
+imposed a heavy fine, and finally burned out both his eyes.
+
+The hot irons used in this barbarous punishment, the Swiss are fond of
+saying, went deeper than the tyrant intended, and penetrated to the
+hearts and aroused the sympathies of their ancestors to perform such
+acts of heroism that tyranny fled in fear from the land. The conduct of
+Arnold, however, can hardly at this period of his life warrant the
+eulogies bestowed upon his memory, though he subsequently figures as one
+of the "Men of Ruetli."
+
+Landenburg lived in a castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden, where his
+imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his debaucheries
+aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the peasants, that
+culminated in his expulsion and the destruction of his stronghold. The
+latter is popularly believed to have occurred on January 1, 1308. As the
+bailie left his castle to attend mass, some forty determined peasants,
+who had already bound themselves by oath to free their country at a
+solemn meeting on the steep promontory over the Lake of Lucerne known as
+the Ruetli, appeared before him carrying sheep, fowls, and other
+customary presents, and thus gained admission to the castle. No sooner
+were they past the gates than, drawing the weapons they had till then
+concealed beneath their clothes, they disarmed the guard and took
+possession of the fortress. Other conspirators were admitted, and the
+people at once rose in revolt. Landenburg, hearing while still at church
+of what had occurred, managed to effect his escape, and fled to Lucerne.
+Of the other bailies, Gessler and Wolfenschiess are believed to have
+excited even more hatred than their colleague Landenburg, and to have
+exceeded him in acts of savage cruelty and vicious living.
+
+One example out of many similar ones will show the spirit in which the
+Swiss traditions have treated the memory of Wolfenschiess. On a certain
+day, finding that a peasant named Conrad, of Baumgarten, whose wife he
+had frequently tried in vain to seduce, was absent from home,
+Wolfenschiess entered Conrad's house and ordered his wife to prepare him
+a bath, at the same time renewing with ardor his former proposals. With
+the cunning of her sex, the wife feigned to be willing to accede to his
+wishes, and on the pretence of retiring to another room to undress sped
+to her husband, who quickly returned and slew Wolfenschiess while he was
+still in the bath. After this exploit an entrance was effected into the
+bailies' castle of Rotzberg by one of the conspirators, who was in the
+habit of paying nightly visits to a servant living in the castle, by
+means of a rope attached to her window, and who then admitted his
+companions, who were lying concealed in the moat.
+
+But, probably in consequence of his supposed connection with the legend
+of William Tell, the bailie to whom the name of Gessler has been given
+stands out more prominently in Swiss history than any other. Gessler's
+residence, according to tradition, was a strongly fortified castle built
+in the valley of Uri, near Altorf, and this he named Zwing Uri ("Uri's
+Restraint"). He used every means that cruelty or avarice could suggest
+in his conduct as governor, and incurred additional hatred from the
+methods he adopted to discover the members of a secret conspiracy he
+believed existed against him in the district. With this object in view,
+Gessler caused a pole, surmounted with the ducal cap of Austria, to be
+set up in the market-place at Altorf, before which emblem of authority
+he ordered every man to uncover and do reverence as he passed. The
+refusal of a peasant to obey this command, his arrest, trial, and
+condemnation to pierce with an arrow an apple placed on his own child's
+head, his dexterity in performing this feat, his escape from his
+enemies, his murder of the tyrant Gessler, the solemn compact sworn at
+Ruetli, and the revolutionary events that followed form the motive of
+the much-celebrated legend of William Tell.
+
+The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his
+person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and
+the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name
+has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse
+by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a
+noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular
+act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque
+representative of liberty has done much to mould the political life, if
+not also to write many pages of the history of the people, and that in
+spite of the questionable morality of the received narrative of his
+career, and its unquestionable untruth. The emergence of the Swiss from
+slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly
+a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the
+narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to
+have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies
+from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a
+possible substratum of actual fact.
+
+It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the
+illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge
+of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When,
+however, the naked truth can be discovered--and that is seldom the
+case--it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot
+receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of
+the former, not with the material of the latter.
+
+As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical
+foundation, and is more widely known and believed than are the many
+others related as the records of events happening at the period from
+which the Swiss date their independence, it may be as well to devote
+some little space to its consideration. All the local records that might
+possibly throw some light on the existence and career of Tell have now
+been thoroughly searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as
+well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that, till
+a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their deaths,
+not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending to prove the
+identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant Gessler. On the other
+hand, many local authorities, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth
+and sixteenth centuries, when the story was fully established, have gone
+out of their way to deny its truth and prove its entire falsity from
+their own researches. Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events
+that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies,
+whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the
+highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken
+so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly
+assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all
+contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and
+fifty or two hundred years--yet such is the case.
+
+William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds in or about
+the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474 are his acts recorded,
+when in a collection of the traditions of the Canton of Unterwalden,
+transcribed by a notary at Sarnen, an account is given of the apple
+episode and the subsequent escape of the famous archer, and his murder
+of Gessler, though nothing is said of his having taken part in a league
+to free his country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A
+little prior to the compilation of the _White Book of Sarnen_, as this
+collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a _Song of the Origin
+of the Confederation_, in which, although no reference is made to
+Gessler, the other details are related concerning William Tell shooting
+at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the expulsion of the bailies,
+and the formation of a patriotic league. It is, of course, quite
+possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was
+common enough at the time, but no member of that family--the records of
+which have now been most carefully traced--held any office under the
+Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all
+probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231.
+Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the
+castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been
+pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated
+Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly
+not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss
+hero.
+
+"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious case of
+confusion in identity. At least three totally different men seem to have
+been blended into one in the course of an attempt to reconcile the
+different versions of the three cantons. Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in
+1450, tells of a Hapsburg governor being on the little island of
+Schwanan, in the lake of Lowerz, who seduced a maid of Schwyz, and was
+killed by her brothers. Then there was another person, strictly
+historical, Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for
+the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his
+district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant
+bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler,
+writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These
+three persons were combined, and the result was named Gessler."
+
+Moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether the green plateau of the
+Ruetli below Seelisberg, and some six hundred and fifty feet above the
+lake, with its miraculous springs, ever witnessed the patriotic
+gathering of the thirty-three peasants who, tradition asserts, there
+formed the league against Austrian rule, or heard the solemn oath they
+and their leaders, Stauffacher, Fuerst, and Arnold, mutually swore.
+
+In all probability the legend of Tell and the apple originated in
+Scandinavia, and was brought by the Alemanni into Switzerland; as into
+other lands. Saxo Grammaticus, in the _Withina Saga_, places the scene
+of a very similar story in that country, some three hundred years before
+the appearance of the Swiss version, and tells of a certain Danish king
+named Harold, the counterpart of Gessler, and one Toki, who played the
+same _rôle_ enacted by Tell. Like legends are also related of Olaf,
+Eindridi, and an almost identical one to that of William Tell of Egil,
+who, being ordered by King Nidung to shoot an apple off the head of the
+son of the former, took two arrows from his quiver and prepared to obey.
+On the King asking why he had selected two arrows, Egil replied, "To
+shoot thee, tyrant, with the second, should the first fail."
+
+Neither are similar narratives absent from the legends of other
+countries. Thus Reginald Scott says: "Puncher shot a penny on his son's
+head, and made ready another arrow to have slain the Duke of Rengrave,
+who commanded it." So also similar incidents occur in the tales of Adam
+Bell, _Clym of the Clough_, and William of Claudeslie in the _Percy
+Ballads_, and in the legends of many places in Northern Europe. On this
+subject Sir Francis Adams mentions, in a note to his valuable book on
+the Swiss Confederation, that a well-known citizen of Berne, in answer
+to his inquiry as to whether Tell ever existed, replied: "Not in
+Switzerland. If you travel in the Hasli districts you will find a
+distinct race of men, who are of Scandinavian origin, and I believe that
+their ancestors brought the legend with them." To this it may be added
+that philologists have long since traced the rude dialect of Oberhasli
+to its Scandinavian sources, and the physical characteristics of the
+people mark them as of different racial origin from those around them.
+
+At the period these events were in progress, or, rather, about the time
+that the Austrian bailies were expelled, toward the close of the
+thirteenth century, the Emperor's[45] attention was too fully occupied
+conducting a war against the Bishop of Basel to allow him to enforce
+his authority among the revolted Waldstaette. He did not, however, allow
+the peasants for long to enjoy the fruits of their energetic and
+successful action, as some six months later he headed a large army with
+which he intended to enforce obedience. The expedition thus begun led to
+Albert's tragic death, and reared another step leading to the final
+independence of the Swiss. On reaching Baden, in the Aargau, a halt was
+made in order to deliberate on the best mode of punishing the rebels.
+Here a general council of nobles decided, after careful deliberation, on
+the route to be taken, and the nature of the measures best calculated to
+enforce Albert's authority. On May 1, 1308, the Emperor, with a few
+followers, returned to Rheinfelden, in order to visit the Empress
+Elizabeth, preparatory to marching against the Waldstaette. Shortly
+before this time Albert had had a violent quarrel with his nephew John,
+son of Duke Rudolph of Swabia, touching the youth's paternal
+inheritance, which he persistently declined to allow John to take
+possession of, and whom he had, moreover, publicly insulted by offering
+him a coronet of twigs as the only recompense for his just claims.
+
+In spite of this quarrel Albert allowed John and four of his fastest
+friends to occupy a place in his suite when he left Baden to visit his
+consort. Albert's disregard of his nephew's resentment was further shown
+when the party arrived on the bank of the Reuss, as he allowed him, with
+his friends, to accompany him in the boat in which he crossed the river.
+The passage was made in safety, but just as the Emperor was stepping on
+shore near the town of Windisch, John and three of his companions struck
+him down with their swords, and after inflicting a number of severe
+wounds left him for dead. The unhappy monarch expired a few minutes
+after in the arms of a passing peasant woman. All this bloody scene took
+place in full view of the Emperor's train on the opposite side of the
+river, though no one apparently was able to render him assistance,
+probably from the absence of boats and the suddenness of the tragedy.
+The murderers succeeded in making good their escape, though two of them
+were afterward captured and executed, as were also a number of innocent
+people believed to be participators in the conspiracy. John himself was
+more fortunate, for, disguised as a monk, he managed for many years to
+hide his identity, and, after wandering in Tuscany unsuspected,
+eventually died in a monastery at Pisa.
+
+Albert's daughter Agnes, Queen of Hungary, "a woman unacquainted with
+the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of
+devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable
+vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to
+have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and
+revenge. Aided by those in authority, who feared lest a widespread
+conspiracy had been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion,
+hundreds of innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity
+of a famished beast. Members of nearly a hundred noble families, and at
+least a thousand persons of lower rank, of every age and of both sexes,
+fell beneath her savage vengeance. She is said to have further whetted
+her appetite for horrors by wading, at Fahrwangen, in the blood of
+sixty-three innocent knights, exclaiming the while, "This day we bathe
+in May-dew." But at last, after several months, even the implacable
+bloodthirstiness of the Hungarian Queen was satisfied, and the massacre
+ceased. Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a
+monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of
+her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life,
+and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and
+here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried.
+Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and
+within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house of
+Austria.
+
+Strenuous efforts were made by Albert's widow to obtain the succession
+to the imperial throne for her son, Frederick, Duke of Austria, but the
+choice of the prince-electors, headed by the Archbishop of Mainz, fell
+on Count Henry of Luxemburg, a liberal-minded and generous noble, who
+was accordingly crowned, under the title of Henry VII. During the short
+reign of this monarch he proved himself a wise and generous friend to
+the Swiss, whose privileges he confirmed. He made no effort to reimpose
+local governors on the people of the Waldstaette, but, on the contrary,
+confirmed the charters of Schwyz and Uri, granted one to Unterwalden,
+and acknowledged jurisdiction. After Henry's death, in 1313, civil war
+once more divided the empire through the rival contentions of Ludwig
+(Louis) of Bavaria and Albert's son, Frederick of Austria. In this
+contest the powerful monastery of Einsiedeln sided with the Austrian
+candidate, and through its influence induced the Bishop of Constance to
+place the large portion of Switzerland supporting the Bavarian cause
+under a sentence of excommunication.
+
+Between Einsiedeln and the Waldstaette there had long existed a feeling
+of bitter hostility, the canons resenting the independent spirit
+displayed by the peasants, and the latter remembering the many acts of
+arbitrary oppression they and their ancestors had suffered at the
+instance of the abbey. Indeed, actual hostilities were only prevented by
+the friendly, though interested, mediation of the citizens of Zurich,
+who were most anxious to preserve tranquillity in the territories of
+both, in order to allow their trade with Italy over the St. Gothard
+being carried on. They also favored peace, because since the Hapsburgs
+had refused permission to the peasants to enter Lucerne, these had been
+in the habit of bringing their cattle and dairy produce through
+Einsiedeln to the monks of Zurich. The action of the monks, however, in
+bringing about the serious sentence of excommunication so roused the
+spirit of the mountaineers that, headed by their Landammann, Werner
+Stauffacher, they attacked and captured the abbey, ransacked the whole
+building from cellar to altar, and carried off the monks captive to the
+town of Schwyz. This daring and sacrilegious act led Frederick--the
+hereditary avoyer of the abbey--to place the Waldstaette under the
+further punishment of the "ban of the empire." Both these sentences were
+alike fruitless in bringing the peasants to submission to the house of
+Austria. Shortly after, on Ludwig ascending the throne, the "ban" was
+removed by the new monarch, and, with the aid of the Archbishop of
+Mainz, the Metropolitan of Constance in 1315, the excommunication was
+also revoked.
+
+The triumph of Ludwig's claims over those of Frederick began that long
+series of deadly conflicts between the Swiss and the house of Austria
+that led the two nations for so many years to regard each other as
+natural and implacable enemies. At this time Austria was governed by
+Duke Leopold, a man of arrogant, passionate temper, of unscrupulous
+ambition, and brutal cruelty, according to the Swiss chronicles, but
+who, from other accounts, does not appear specially to have deserved
+this character. His hatred of the Swiss was greatly increased by their
+action in opposing his brother, Frederick, in the late contest. No
+sooner, indeed, were the troubles of that contest over than he prepared
+to wreak his vengeance, and once for all crush the power and
+independence of the Forest States, and, as he declared, "trample the
+audacious rustics under his feet."
+
+Rapidly collecting his forces, Leopold soon found himself at the head of
+fifteen thousand or twenty thousand well-armed men, including a large
+body of heavily equipped cavalry. These latter were then looked upon as
+the main strength of an army. Most of the ancient nobility of Hapsburg,
+Kyburg, and Lenzburg rallied to his banners, besides many of the lesser
+nobles and a contingent from Zurich, the citizens of which, deserting
+their natural allies, had formed a treaty with Austria. Against this
+formidable array the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden were only able
+to muster some fourteen hundred men, who, however, made up for their
+want of weapons and discipline by the geographical advantages of the
+country, by their patriotism, unity, and determined bravery.
+
+Nothing now seemed to intervene between the Swiss and imminent
+destruction, when, viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days,
+the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of
+Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms,
+however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing
+came of these proposals.
+
+On November 3, 1315, Leopold's army reached Baden, where a council was
+held to determine upon the details of the campaign, a campaign having
+for its object, as the Duke openly declared, "the extirpation of the
+whole race of the people of Waldstaette." The difficulties of the
+enterprise now began to show themselves, as several of Leopold's
+followers, being well acquainted with the nature of the country and the
+characters of the inhabitants, pointed out that both would offer a
+determined resistance. Finally, relying upon their numbers and superior
+arms, it was settled to march on Schwyz, through the Sattel Pass by
+Morgarten, making Zug the base of operations; and while a false attack
+should be threatened on the side of Arth, Unterwalden should be attacked
+from Lucerne, as well as by a large force under the Count of Strasburg
+by way of the Bruenig. Leopold himself was to lead the main army and
+enter Schwyz through the pass. Had these operations remained secret, or
+been carried out successfully, the course of Swiss history would
+probably have been very different from what it was; but fortunately for
+the cause of freedom, the Austrian plans became known in time, and
+failed signally when put to the test. According to ancient chronicles,
+as the Confederates were hurrying to repel the feint from Arth, a
+friendly Austrian baron, named Henry of Huenenberg, shot an arrow amid
+them bearing the message, "Guard Morgarten on the eve of St. Othmar." Be
+this as it may, the Swiss collected their little band on the Sattel,
+between which mountain and the eastern shore of the Lake of Egeri is
+situated the ever-memorable Pass of Morgarten. Here, on the night of
+November 14th, they collected a number of loose bowlders and
+tree-trunks, and then, having offered up prayers for the preservation of
+their country, they awaited with resolution the coming struggle.
+
+With the first dawn of morning the Austrian army--the first that ever
+entered the country--made its appearance in the pass, headed by Duke
+Leopold and his formidable cavalry. Suddenly, when the whole narrow
+defile was blocked with horse and foot, thousands of heavy stones and
+trees were hurled among them from the neighboring heights, where the
+peasant band, forming the Swiss force, lay concealed. The suddenness and
+vigor of this unexpected attack quickly threw the first ranks of the
+invaders into confusion, and caused a panic to seize the horses, many of
+which in their fright turned and trampled down the men behind. Rapidly
+the panic increased as the showers of missiles came tearing down, and
+soon the whole army was in a state of wild terror and confusion--a
+condition greatly assisted by the slippery nature of the ground. Then,
+with wild shouts, and brandishing their iron-studded clubs and their
+formidable halberts and scythes, down the mountain-side rushed, with the
+fury of their native avalanche, the heroic Confederates; and falling on
+their foes literally slew them by thousands. Many hundreds of the
+Austrians perished in the lake, the men of Zurich alone making a stand,
+and falling each where he fought. Few succeeded in effecting their
+escape from what was little less than a general butchery.
+
+On that memorable day all the flower of Austria's nobility lay dead
+within the country they had hoped so easily to conquer. The Duke, with a
+handful of followers, alone survived, and even these were forced to
+undergo many perils before they eventually arrived in safety at
+Winterthur. Neither were the other attacks, under the Count of Strasburg
+and the forces from Lucerne, more successful for the invaders. Both
+armies were repulsed with enormous loss by the men of Unterwalden, who
+gave no quarter, many of their opponents being their own countrymen from
+the estates of the abbey of Interlaken. After these signal victories the
+Swiss, according to ancient custom, offered up a solemn thanksgiving to
+almighty God for their success and the overthrow of their enemies; and
+then, having laden themselves with the spoils of the dead, they returned
+to their humble occupations, whence the defence of their country and
+their lives had called them away. Among the Swiss, Morgarten has always
+taken the first place in the long record of heroic victories that since
+1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms second to none in Europe. This
+victory at once brought the Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and
+placed them in the front rank as powerful and respected states in
+Switzerland.
+
+Leopold, on his return to Austria, was so satisfied with the ability of
+the "audacious rustics" to defend themselves that he made no further
+attempt to enter their country.
+
+
+
+
+BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN
+
+A.D. 1314
+
+ANDREW LANG
+
+
+  After the submission of Scotland in 1303, at the end of
+  Wallace's heroic struggle, Edward I undertook to complete
+  the union of that kingdom with England. "But the great
+  difficulty," says a historian, "in dealing with the Scots
+  was that they never knew when they were conquered; and just
+  when Edward hoped that his scheme for union was carried out,
+  they rose in arms once more."
+
+  The Scottish leader now was Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale
+  and Earl of Carrick. He had acted with Wallace, but
+  afterward swore fealty to Edward. Still later he united with
+  William Lamberton, Bishop of St. Andrews, against the
+  English King. Edward heard of their compact while Bruce was
+  in London, and the Scot fled to Dumfries. There, 1306, in
+  the Church of the Gray Friars, he had an interview with John
+  Comyn, called the Red Comyn--Bruce's rival for the Scottish
+  throne--which ended in a violent altercation and the killing
+  of Comyn by Bruce with a dagger. Next to the Baliols, Bruce
+  was now nearest heir to the throne, and March 27, 1306, he
+  was crowned.
+
+  Edward now determined to take more vigorous measures than
+  ever against the Scots. He denounced as traitors all who had
+  participated in the murder of Comyn, and declared that all
+  persons taken in arms would be put to death. He made great
+  preparations for subduing Scotland, but while leading his
+  army into that country, 1307, he died at Burgh-on-the-Sands,
+  near Carlisle.
+
+  Meanwhile Bruce, who ranks with Wallace as a Scottish hero,
+  had suffered some reverses at the hands of the English.
+  Under the Earl of Pembroke, in 1306, they took Perth and
+  drove Bruce into the wilds of Athol. In the same year, at
+  Dairy, Bruce was defeated by Comyn's uncle, Macdougal, Lord
+  of Lorn, and escaped to Ireland. But in 1307 Bruce returned
+  to Scotland and carried on the war against Edward II. The
+  English were driven out of the strong places one by one; war
+  alternated with diplomacy through several years; and at last
+  came a crisis which roused the English government to a
+  supreme effort.
+
+  Stirling castle still held out, besieged by Edward Bruce,
+  Robert's brother, 1313, but its surrender was promised by
+  Mowbray, the governor, in the event of his not being
+  relieved before June 24, 1314. The relieving of Stirling
+  meant for the English a new invasion of Scotland. On both
+  sides the strongest efforts were made--on the one side to
+  relieve the castle, on the other to strengthen its
+  besiegers. The opposing forces met in battle at
+  Bannockburn, June 24, 1314, an action which has never been
+  better described than in this characteristic recital by
+  Professor Lang.
+
+Bannockburn, like the relief of Orleans, or Marathon, was one of the
+decisive battles of the world. History hinged upon it. If England had
+won, Scotland might have dwindled into the condition of Ireland--for
+Edward II was not likely to aim at a statesmanlike policy of union, in
+his father's manner. Could Scotland have accepted union at the first
+Edward's hands; could he have refrained from his mistreatment as we must
+think it of Baliol, the fortunes of the isle of Britain might have been
+happier. But had Scotland been trodden down at Bannockburn, the fortunes
+of the isle might well have been worse.
+
+The singular and certain fact is that Bannockburn was fought on a point
+of chivalry, on a rule in a game. England must "touch bar," relieve
+Stirling, as in some child's pastime. To the securing of the castle, the
+central gate of Scotland, north and south, England put forth her full
+strength. Bruce had no choice but to concentrate all the power of a now,
+at last, united realm, and stand just where he did stand. His enemies
+knew his purpose: by May 27th writs informed England that the Scots were
+gathering on heights and morasses inaccessible to cavalry. If ever
+Edward showed energy, it was in preparing for the appointed Midsummer
+Day of 1314. The _Rotuli Scotiæ_ contain several pages of his demands
+for men, horses, wines, hay, grain, provisions, and ships. Endless
+letters were sent to master mariners and magistrates of towns. The King
+appealed to his beloved Irish chiefs, O'Donnells, O'Flyns, O'Hanlens,
+MacMahons, M'Carthys, Kellys, O'Reillys, and O'Briens, and to _Hiberniæ
+Magnates, Anglico genere ortos_, Butlers, Blounts, De Lacys, Powers, and
+Russels. John of Argyll was made admiral of the western fleet, and was
+asked to conciliate the Islesmen, who, under Angus Og, were rallying to
+Bruce. The numbers of men engaged on either side in this war cannot be
+ascertained. Each kingdom had a year within which to muster and arm.
+
+  "Then all that worthy were to fight
+  Of Scotland, set all hale their might;"
+
+while Barbour makes Edward assemble not only
+
+        "His own chivalry
+  That was so great it was ferly,"
+
+but also knights of France and Hainault, Bretagne and Gascony, Wales,
+Ireland, and Aquitaine. The whole English force is said to have exceeded
+one hundred thousand, forty thousand of whom were cavalry, including
+three thousand horses "barded from counter to tail," armed against
+stroke of sword or point of spear. The baggage train was endless,
+bearing tents, harness, "and apparel of chamber and hall," wine, wax,
+and all the luxuries of Edward's manner of campaigning, including
+_animalia_, perhaps lions. Thus the English advanced from Berwick,
+
+  "Banners rightly fairly flaming,
+   And pencels to the wind waving."
+
+On June 23d Bruce heard that the English host had streamed out of
+Edinburgh, where the dismantled castle was no safe hold, and were
+advancing on Falkirk. Bruce had summoned Scotland to tryst in Torwood,
+whence he could retreat at pleasure, if, after all, retreat he must. The
+Fiery Cross, red with blood of a sacrificed goat, must have flown
+through the whole of the Celticland. Lanarkshire, Douglasdale, and
+Ettrick Forest were mustered under the banner of Douglas, the mullets
+not yet enriched with the royal heart. The men of Moray followed their
+new earl, Randolph, the adventurous knight who scaled the rock of the
+castle of the Maidens. Renfrewshire, Bute, and Ayr were under the _fesse
+chequy_ of young Walter Stewart. Bruce had gathered his own Carrick men,
+and Angus Og led the wild levies of the Isles. Of stout spearmen and
+fleet-footed clansmen Bruce had abundance; but what were his archers to
+the archers of England, or his five hundred horse under Keith the
+mareschal, to the rival knights of England, Hainault, Guienne, and
+Almayne?
+
+Battles, however, are won by heads, as well as by hearts and hands. The
+victor of Glen Trool and Cruachen and London Hill knew every move in the
+game, while Randolph and Douglas were experts in making one man do the
+work of five. Bruce, too, had choice of ground, and the ground suited
+him well.
+
+To reach Stirling the English must advance by their left, along the
+so-called German way, through the village of St. Nian's, or by their
+right, through the Carse, partly enclosed, and much broken, in drainless
+days, by reedy lochans. Bruce did not make his final dispositions till
+he learned that the English meant to march by the former route. He then
+chose ground where his front was defended, first by the little burn of
+Bannock, which at one point winds through a cleugh with steep banks, and
+next by two morasses, Halbert's bog and Milton bog. What is now arable
+ground may have been a loch in old days, and these two marshes were then
+impassable by a column of attack.
+
+Between Charter's Hall--where Edward had his head-quarters--and Park's
+Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in
+scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land.
+By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These
+approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and
+even by caltrops to maim the horses. He determined to fight on foot, the
+wooded country being difficult for horsemen, and the foe being
+infinitely superior in cavalry. His army was arranged in four "battles,"
+with Randolph to lead the vaward and watch against any attempt to throw
+cavalry into Stirling. Edward Bruce commanded the division on the right,
+next the Torwood. Walter Stewart, a lad, with Douglas led the third
+division. Bruce himself and Angus Og, with the men of Carrick and the
+Celts, were in the rear. Bruce had no mind to take the offensive, and as
+at the Battle of the Standard, to open the fight with a charge of
+impetuous mountaineers. On Sunday morning mass was said, and men shrived
+them.
+
+  "They thought to die in the mêlée,
+   Or else to set their country free."
+
+They ate but bread and water, for it was the vigil of St. John. News
+came that the English had moved out of Falkirk, and Douglas and the
+Steward brought tidings of the great and splendid host that was rolling
+north. Bruce bade them make little of it in the hearing of the army.
+
+Meanwhile Philip de Mowbray, who commanded in Stirling, had ridden
+forth to meet and counsel Edward. His advice was to come no nearer;
+perhaps a technical relief was held to have already been secured by the
+presence of the army.
+
+Mowbray was not heard--"the young men" would not listen. Gloucester,
+with the van, entered the park, where he was met, as we shall see, and
+Clifford, Beaumont, and Sir Thomas Grey, with three hundred horsemen,
+skirted the wood where Randolph was posted, a clear way lying before
+them to the castle of Stirling. Bruce had seen this movement, and told
+Randolph that "a rose of his chaplet was fallen," the phrase attesting
+the King's love of chivalrous romance. To pursue horsemen with infantry
+seemed vain enough; but Randolph moved out of cover, thinking perhaps
+that knights adventurous would refuse no chance to fight. If this was
+his thought, he reckoned well. Beaumont cried to his knights, "Give
+ground, leave them fair field." Grey hinted that the Scots were in too
+great force, and Beaumont answered, "If you fear, fly!" "Sir," said Sir
+Thomas, "for fear I fly not this day!" and so spurred in between
+Beaumont and D'Eyncourt and galloped on the spears. D'Eyncourt was
+slain, Grey was unhorsed and taken. The three hundred lances of Beaumont
+then circled Randolph's spearmen round about on every side, but the
+spears kept back the horses. Swords, maces, and knives were thrown; all
+was done as by the French cavalry against the British squares at
+Waterloo, and all as vainly. The hedge of steel was unbroken, and, in
+the hot sun of June, a mist of dust and heat brooded over the battle.
+
+          "Sic mirkness
+  In the air above them was"
+
+as when the sons of Thetis and the Dawn fought under the walls of windy
+Troy. Douglas beheld the distant cloud, and rode to Bruce, imploring
+leave to hurry to Randolph's aid. "I will not break my ranks for him,"
+said Bruce; yet Douglas had his will. But the English wavered, seeing
+his line advance, and thereon Douglas halted his men, lest Randolph
+should lose renown. Beholding this the spearmen of Randolph, in their
+turn, charged and drove the weary English horse and their disheartened
+riders.
+
+Meanwhile Edward had halted his main force to consider whether they
+should fight or rest. But Gloucester's party, knowing nothing of his
+halt, had advanced into the wooded park; and Bruce rode down to the
+right in his armor, and with a gold coronal on his basnet, but mounted
+on a mere palfrey. To the front of the English van, under Gloucester and
+Hereford, rode Sir Henry Bohun, a bow-shot beyond his company.
+Recognizing the King, who was arraying his ranks, Bohun sped down upon
+him, apparently hoping to take him.
+
+  "He thought that he should dwell lightly,
+   Win him, and have him at his will."
+
+But Bruce, in this fatal movement, when history hung on his hand and
+eye, uprose in his stirrups and clove Bohun's helmet, the axe breaking
+in that stroke. It was a desperate but a winning blow: Bruce's spears
+advanced, and the English van withdrew in half superstitious fear of the
+omen. His lords blamed Bruce, but
+
+  "The King has answer made them none,
+   But turned upon the axe-shaft, wha
+   Was with the stroke broken in twa."
+
+"_Initium malorum hoc_" ("This was the beginning of evil"), says the
+English chronicler.
+
+After this double success in the Quatre Bras of the Scottish Waterloo,
+Bruce, according to Barbour, offered to his men their choice of
+withdrawal or of standing it out. The great general might well be of
+doubtful mind--was to-morrow to bring a second and a more fatal Falkirk?
+The army of Scotland was protected, as Wallace's army at Falkirk had
+been, by difficult ground. But the English archers might again rain
+their blinding showers of shafts into the broad mark offered by the
+clumps of spears, and again the English knights might break through the
+shaken ranks. Bruce had but a few squadrons of horse--could they be
+trusted to scatter the bowmen of the English forests, and to escape a
+flank charge from the far heavier cavalry of Edward? On the whole, was
+not the old strategy best, the strategy of retreat? So Bruce may have
+pondered. He had brought his men to the ring, and they voted for
+dancing. Meanwhile the English rested on a marshy plain
+"_outre_-Bannockburn" in sore discomfiture, says Gray. He must mean south
+of Bannockburn, taking the point of view of his father, at that hour
+captive in Bruce's camp. He tells us that the Scots meant to retire
+"into the Lennox, a right strong country"--this confirms, in a way,
+Barbour's tale of Bruce suggesting retreat--when Sir Alexander Seton,
+deserting Edward's camp, advised Bruce of the English lack of spirit,
+and bade him face the foe next day. To retire, indeed, was Bruce's, as
+it had been Wallace's, natural policy. The English would soon be
+distressed for want of supplies; on the other hand, they had clearly
+made no arrangements for an orderly retreat if they lost the day; with
+Bruce this was a motive for fighting them. The advice of Seton
+prevailed; the Scots would stand their ground.
+
+The sun of Midsummer Day rose on the rite of the mass done in front of
+the Scottish lines. Men breakfasted, and Bruce knighted Douglas, the
+Steward, and other of his nobles. The host then moved out of the wood,
+and the standards rose above the spears of the soldiers. Edward Bruce
+held the right wing; Randolph the centre; the left, under Douglas and
+the Steward, rested of St. Ninian's. Bruce, as he had arranged, was in
+reserve with Carrick and the Isles. "Will these men fight?" asked
+Edward, and Sir Ingram assured him that such was their intent. He
+advised that the English should make a feigned retreat, when the Scots
+would certainly break their ranks--
+
+  "Then prick we on them hardily."
+
+Edward rejected his old ruse, which probably would not have beguiled the
+Scottish leader. The Scots then knelt for a moment of prayer, as the
+Abbot of Inchafray bore the crucifix along the line; but they did not
+kneel to Edward. His van, under Gloucester, fell on Edward Bruce's
+division, where there was hand-to-hand fighting, broken lances, dying
+chargers, the rear ranks of Gloucester pressing vainly on the front
+ranks, unable to deploy for the straitness of the ground.
+
+Meanwhile, Randolph's men moved forward slowly with extended spears, "as
+they were plunged in the sea" of charging knights. Douglas and the
+Steward were also engaged, and the "hideous shower" of arrows was ever
+raining from the bows of England. This must have been the crisis of the
+fight, according to Barbour, and Bruce bade Keith with his five hundred
+horse charge the English archers on the flank. The bowmen do not seem to
+have been defended by pikes; they fell beneath the lances of the
+mareschal, as the archers of Ettrick had fallen at Falkirk. The Scottish
+archers now took heart, and loosed into the crowded and reeling ranks of
+England, while the flying bowmen of the south clashed against and
+confused the English charge. Then Scottish archers took to their steel
+sparths--who ever loved to come to hand strokes--and hewed into the mass
+of the English, so that the field, whither Bruce brought up his reserves
+to support Edward Bruce on the right, was a mass of wild, confused
+fighting. In this mellay the great body of the English army could deal
+no stroke, swaying helplessly as southern knights or northern spears won
+some feet of ground. So, in the space between Halbert's bog and the
+burn, the mellay rang and wavered, the long spears of the Scottish ranks
+unbroken and pushing forward, the ground before them so covered with
+fallen men and horses that the English advance was clogged and crushed
+between the resistance in front and the pressure behind.
+
+"God will have a stroke in every fight," says the romance of Malory.
+While the discipline was lost, and England was trusting to sheer weight
+and "who will pound longest," a fresh force, banners displayed, was seen
+rushing down the Gillies' Hill, beyond the Scottish right. The English
+could deem no less than that this multitude were tardy levies from
+beyond the Spey, above all when the slogans rang out from the fresh
+advancing host. It was a body of yeomen, shepherds, and camp-followers,
+who could no longer remain and gaze when fighting and plunder were in
+sight. With blankets fastened to cut saplings for banner-poles, they ran
+down to the conflict. The King saw them, and well knew that the moment
+had come: he pealed his ensenye--called his battle-cry--faint hearts of
+England failed; men turned, trampling through the hardy warriors who
+still stood and died; the knights who rode at Edward's rein strove to
+draw him toward the castle of Stirling. But now the foremost knights of
+Edward Bruce's division, charging on foot, had fought their way to the
+English King and laid hands on the rich trappings of his horse. Edward
+cleared his way with strokes of his mace; his horse was stabbed, but a
+fresh mount was found for him. Even Sir Giles de Argentine, the best
+knight on ground, bade Edward fly to Stirling castle. "For me, I am not
+of custom to fly," he said, "nor shall I do so now. God keep you!"
+Thereon he spurred into the press, crying "Argentine!" and died among
+the spears.
+
+None held his ground for England. The burn was choked with fallen men
+and horses, so that folk might pass dry-shod over it. The country people
+fell on and slew. If Bruce had possessed more cavalry, not an Englishman
+would have reached the Tweed. Edward, as Argentine bade him, rode to
+Stirling, but Mowbray told him that there he would be but a captive
+king. He spurred south, with five hundred horse, Douglas following with
+sixty, so close that no Englishman might alight, but was slain or taken.
+Laurence de Abernethy, with eighty horse, was riding to join the
+English, but turned, and with Douglas, pursued them. Edward reached
+Dunbar, whence he took boat for Berwick. In his terror he vowed to build
+a college of Carmelites, students in theology. It is Oriel College
+to-day, with a Scot for provost. Among those who fell on the English
+side were the son of Comyn, Gloucester, Clifford, Harcourt, Courtenay,
+and seven hundred other gentlemen of coat-armor were slain. Hereford
+(later), with Angus, Umfraville, and Sir Thomas Grey, was among the
+prisoners. Stirling, of course, surrendered.
+
+The sun of Midsummer Day set on men wounded and weary, but victorious
+and free. The task of Wallace was accomplished. To many of the
+combatants not the least agreeable result of Bannockburn was the
+unprecedented abundance of the booty. When campaigning Edward denied
+himself nothing. His wardrobe and arms; his enormous and apparently
+well-supplied array of food wagons; his ecclesiastical vestments for the
+celebration of victory; his plate; his siege artillery; his military
+chests, with all the jewelry of his young minion knights, fell into the
+hands of the Scots. Down to Queen Mary's reign we read, in inventories,
+about costly vestments "from the fight at Bannockburn." In Scotland it
+rained ransoms. The _Rotuli Scotiæ_, in 1314 full of Edward's
+preparation for war, in 1315 are rich in safe-conducts for men going
+into Scotland to redeem prisoners. One of these, the brave Sir Marmaduke
+Twenge, renowned at Stirling bridge, hid in the woods on Midsummer's
+Night, and surrendered to Bruce next day. The King gave him gifts and
+set him free unransomed. Indeed, the clemency of Bruce after his success
+is courteously acknowledged by the English chroniclers.
+
+This victory was due to Edward's incompetence, as well as to the
+excellent dispositions and indomitable courage of Bruce, and to "the
+intolerable axes" of his men. No measures had been taken by Edward to
+secure a retreat. Only one rally, at "the Bloody Fauld," is reported.
+The English fought widely, their measures being laid on the strength of
+a confidence which, after the skirmishes of Sunday, June 23d, they no
+longer entertained. They suffered what, at Agincourt, Crécy, Poitiers,
+and Verneuil, their descendants were to inflict. Horses and banners, gay
+armor and chivalric trappings, were set at naught by the sperthes and
+spears of infantry acting on favorable ground. From the dust and reek of
+that burning day of June, Scotland emerged a people, firm in a glorious
+memory. Out of weakness she was made strong, being strangely led through
+paths of little promise since the day when Bruce's dagger-stroke at
+Dumfries closed from him the path of returning.
+
+
+
+
+EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS
+
+BURNING OF GRAND MASTER MOLAY
+
+A.D. 1314
+
+F. C. WOODHOUSE   H. H. MILMAN
+
+
+  The quarrel between Philip the Fair of France and Pope
+  Boniface VIII, concerning the taxation of the clergy, and
+  the right of nomination to vacant bishoprics within the
+  dominions of Philip, had far-reaching effects. It led, in
+  1302, to the convocation of the first properly so-called
+  Parliament in France, to offset the actions of the Pope, who
+  excommunicated the King; and also to an expedition into
+  Italy of a small body of French troops which made the Pope
+  prisoner at Agnani, but were subsequently expelled with
+  great loss of life. The Pope was reinstated, but died
+  shortly afterward from brain fever; he was succeeded by
+  Benedict XI, whom the King of France sought to placate, but
+  unsuccessfully. Within nine months Benedict died, presumably
+  from poison, and Philip, by his intrigues, was enabled to
+  secure the election to the pontificate of Bertrand de Goth,
+  who became pope as Clement V, and was pledged to the service
+  of the French King.
+
+  Philip, who had obstructed the operations of commerce by
+  debasing the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the
+  state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited
+  by the wealth of the order of Knights Templars, and,
+  emboldened by his successes over the spiritual power, he now
+  entered upon the career of intrigue which resulted in the
+  destruction and plunder of the order.
+
+  The famous Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, founded in 1118
+  by a small band of nine French knights, sworn to protect
+  Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre, had become, in
+  almost every kingdom of the West, a powerful, wealthy,
+  semimilitary, semimonastic republic, governed by its own
+  laws, animated by the closest corporate spirit, under the
+  severest internal discipline, an all-pervading organization,
+  independent alike of the civil power and of the spiritual
+  hierarchy.
+
+  During two centuries as crusaders, the knights fought
+  valiantly and shed their blood in defence of the Sepulchre
+  of our Lord, earning the devout admiration of Western
+  Christendom, and receiving splendid endowments of lands,
+  castles, and riches of all kinds as contributions to the
+  cause of the holy wars.
+
+  But despite their valor, Mahometan persistency prevailed,
+  and the total expulsion of the Templars, with the rest of
+  the Christian establishments from Palestine, followed the
+  downfall of Acre in 1291.
+
+
+F. C. WOODHOUSE
+
+The loss of Palestine led indirectly to the ruin of the order of the
+Templars. The record is one of the dark episodes of history, encompassed
+with contradictions, full of surprises, painful to contemplate, whatever
+view may be taken, whichever side espoused.
+
+It is difficult to understand how an order of men who for nearly two
+hundred years earned the thanks and praise of Christendom for their
+bravery and devotion; who had shed blood like water to defend the places
+dearest to all Christian hearts; who had been recruited from the noblest
+families in every country in Europe, and had had princes of royal blood
+in their ranks; who claimed to act upon the purest and most exalted
+Christian principles; and who proved the sincerity of their professions
+by their lives of self-sacrifice, and their deaths, for the cause they
+had taken up; who had been honored and favored and dowered with gifts
+and privileges, in gratitude for their exploits--should suddenly have
+fallen into the blackest crimes. So it is no less difficult to
+understand how public opinion should turn against them as it did, and
+how all Europe should set itself to disgrace and despoil, to malign and
+execrate, those who had so long been its favorites and its champions. It
+is not easy to understand this, and it is painful to read the story in
+its sad and miserable details.
+
+But there are other pages of history that more or less correspond with
+this; and there are well-known characteristics of human nature that
+explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been
+found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and
+powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible
+and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy
+members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and
+crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and
+prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation. Then, too,
+facts may be perverted, circumstances may be made to bear a meaning
+that does not really belong to them, and fear and torture may force the
+weak to say anything that they are required. And, finally, the evidence
+and the judgment of those who have everything to gain by the
+condemnation of those whom they accuse, must always be viewed with
+suspicion by sober and truth-loving minds. Moreover, in judging the
+Templars, we must not forget the lapse of time and the change of
+circumstances that separate our age from theirs.
+
+After the loss of Acre a chapter of the surviving Templars was gathered,
+and James de Molay, preceptor of England, was elected grand master. One
+more attempt was made to recover a footing in the Holy Land, but it was
+defeated with great loss to the order, and all hope of restoring the
+Latin kingdom in Palestine seems to have been abandoned. The occupation
+of the Templars was gone. They had been banded together to fight upon
+the sacred soil of Palestine, and to defend pilgrims, but now they had
+been driven out of the country, and they could no longer execute their
+mission or fulfil their vows. We soon hear of them being engaged in
+civil or international wars, which seems to be a violation of their oath
+not to draw sword upon any Christian. Thus we read of Templars fighting
+on the side of the King of England, in the battle of Falkirk, 1298, and
+similar occurrences are recorded in the French wars of the time. Those
+against whom the Templars fought would not be slow to complain of them.
+
+But the real cause of the downfall of the Templars was probably the
+enormous wealth of the order. There had not been wanting indications for
+some years of covetous eyes and itching hands turned toward the
+possession of the Knights. Sometimes complaints were made because the
+rents of their estates were all sent out of the country; sometimes the
+grievance alleged was that they were exempted from paying taxes and
+other levies, civil and ecclesiastical. Sometimes open acts of
+spoliation were committed upon their property, and that even by royal
+hands.
+
+But it was in France that the final attack was made. Philip the Fair was
+king at this time, a man of bad character and unscrupulous as to the
+means by which he attained his ends. The country was exhausted and the
+treasury empty, and the idea seems to have occurred to him, as it did
+later to Henry VIII of England under similar circumstances, that an easy
+way to fill his own purse was to put his hand into the purses of others.
+But even kings cannot appropriate the property of a religious order
+without offering some apology or justification to the world. And so it
+began to be whispered that the Holy Land would never have been lost to
+Christendom if its sworn defenders had not failed in their Christian
+character. The whole blame of the defeat of the crusades was laid upon
+the Templars. It was said they had treacherously betrayed the Christian
+cause, that they had treated with the enemy, and by their personal sins,
+especially by secret, unhallowed rites, had provoked the just wrath of
+God, and so brought about the ruin of the dominion of the Cross in the
+East.
+
+When Ahab has determined to put Naboth to death, that he may seize his
+coveted vineyard, it is not difficult to find witness that he is a
+blasphemer of God and a traitor to the King; and so Philip found his
+first tool in a man guilty of a multitude of crimes, who secured his own
+pardon by a denunciation of the Templars.
+
+But even a king could not ruin a great religious order without the aid
+of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Templars had always been favored
+and protected by the popes, and nothing was in itself so likely to evoke
+that protection again as an attack upon the order by the secular powers.
+But Philip was prepared for this. The Pope of the day, Clement V, had
+been a subject of his own. As bishop of Bordeaux, he owed his election
+to the pontificate to Philip's own intrigues, and had been easily
+induced to quit Rome and live in France, so as to be more completely
+under the dictation of the King. Moreover, the majority of the cardinals
+were also French and entirely devoted to the King's interests.
+
+Clement V was one of the worst of those miserable men who have from time
+to time disgraced the papal chair, and was guilty of almost every crime.
+There are, indeed, authorities worthy of credit who assert that before
+his election he had been made to promise to perform six favors to the
+King, and that the last was not to be divulged till the time for its
+execution came. This last was then found to be the suppression of the
+order of the Templars. There was no difficulty, under these
+circumstances, in getting the so-called sanction of the Church for an
+inquiry into the crimes of which the Templars were accused.
+
+Accordingly, in 1307, Philip issued letters to his officers throughout
+the kingdom, commanding them to seize all the Templars on a certain day,
+that they might be tried for crimes of which he and the Pope had
+satisfied themselves they were guilty. They had apostatized from the
+Christian religion, worshipped idols in their secret meetings, and had
+been guilty of horrible and shameful offences against God, the Church,
+the State, and humanity itself. Philip professed the most pious horror
+at what he had discovered; he lamented the grievous necessity laid upon
+him, and urged upon the guilty men the expediency of a full and
+immediate confession of their wicked doings as the only way to secure
+pardon and escape the just and extreme penalty of such outrageous
+wickedness.
+
+It was during the night of October 13, 1307, that the King's orders were
+executed. Every house of the Templars in the dominions of the King of
+France was suddenly surrounded by a strong force, and all the Knights
+and members of the order were simultaneously taken prisoners.
+
+At the same time a strenuous endeavor was made to arouse popular
+indignation against the order. The regular and secular clergy were
+commanded to preach against the Templars, and to describe the horrible
+enormities that were practised among them. It is incredible to us in
+these days that such charges should be made, and still more that they
+should actually be believed. It was said that the Templars worshipped
+some hideous idol in their secret assemblies, that they offered
+sacrifices to it of infants and young girls, and that although every one
+saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties,
+people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak
+intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene
+orgies.
+
+It was hoped that some confession of guilt might be readily obtained
+from some of the weaker brethren in order to receive the pardon which
+was promised by the King. But no such confession was made. All the
+prisoners denied the charges brought against them. Then the usual
+mediæval expedient was resorted to, and torture was used to extort
+acknowledgments of guilt. The unhappy Templars in Paris were handed over
+to the tender mercies of the tormentors with the usual results. One
+hundred and forty were subjected to trial by fire.
+
+The details preserved are almost too horrible to be related. The feet of
+some were fastened close to a hot fire till the very flesh and even the
+bones were consumed. Others were suspended by their limbs, and heavy
+weights attached to them to make the agony more intense. Others were
+deprived of their teeth; and every cruelty that a horrible ingenuity
+could invent was used.
+
+While this was going on, questions were asked, and offers of pardon were
+made if they would acknowledge themselves or others guilty of the
+monstrous wickednesses which were detailed to them. At the same time
+forged letters were read, purporting to come from the grand master
+himself, exhorting them to make a full confession, and declarations were
+made of the confessions which were said to have been already freely
+given by other members of the order.
+
+What wonder, then, that the usual consequences followed. Those who had
+strong will and indomitable courage stood firm and endured the slow
+martyrdom till death released them, maintaining to the last their own
+innocence, and the innocence of their order, of the crimes with which
+they were charged. But some weaker men broke down. In hope of release
+from the agony which they could not endure, they confessed anything and
+everything that was required of them, and these things were at once
+written down as grave facts and made matter of accusation of others.
+Often these unhappy men almost immediately recanted, and as soon as the
+torture ceased withdrew their confessions, and repeated their original
+denial of the accusations one and all.
+
+We have long ago ceased to set any value upon confessions extorted by
+torture, and the system has happily been abolished by all civilized
+nations, but in those days this was not understood; torture was relied
+upon as a means of extracting truth from unwilling witnesses when all
+other means failed; indeed, it was simpler and more expeditious than the
+calling of many witnesses, the testing of evidence by cross-examination,
+and other surer but slower methods; and especially when conviction, not
+truth, was the end in view, torture was a welcome and efficacious ally.
+
+All this was but too sadly exemplified in the proceedings against the
+Templars in France. No sooner were those who had made confessions of
+guilt while under torture released from their tormentors than they
+disavowed their forced admissions and proclaimed their innocence and the
+purity of their order, appealing to history and the testimony of their
+own day for evidence of their courage and devotion to the Catholic
+faith.
+
+Upon hearing of this Philip immediately ordered the rearrest of the
+Templars, and, proceeding against them as relapsed heretics, they were
+condemned to be burned alive. In Paris alone one hundred and thirteen
+suffered this terrible punishment, and many more were burned in other
+towns. In Spain, Portugal, and Germany, proceedings were taken against
+the order; their property was confiscated, and in some cases torture was
+used; but it is remarkable that it was only in France, and in those
+places where Philip's influence was powerful, that any Templar was
+actually put to death.
+
+Everywhere else the monstrous charges were declared to be unproved, and
+the order was declared innocent of heresy and sacrilegious rites.
+
+In October, 1311, a council was held at Vienna to dissolve the Order of
+the Temple, but the majority of the bishops were decidedly opposed to
+such a proceeding against so ancient and illustrious an order, till its
+members had been heard in their own defence in a fair and open trial.
+The Pope was furious at this and dismissed the council, and in the
+following year, 1312, by a papal brief, abolished the order and forbade
+its reconstitution. The property of the order in France was nominally
+made over to the Hospitallers, but Philip laid claim to an immense sum
+for the expenses of the prosecution, and by this and other means he
+obtained what he had all along desired--the greatest part of the
+possessions of the order. Similar proceedings took place in other
+countries. In some, new orders were founded in the place of the
+Templars, with the sovereign at their head, by which means the estates
+came into the possession of the Crown as completely as if they had
+been actually confiscated.
+
+In France the Templars who survived their torture and the horrors of
+their prisons were either executed or left to linger out a miserable
+existence in their dungeons till death released them. The grand master
+and a few other brethren of the highest rank were thus kept in prison
+for five years. They were then taken to Notre Dame in Paris, and
+required to give verbal assent to the confessions which had been
+extorted from them under torture. But the grand master, James de Molay,
+the grand preceptor, and some others seized the opportunity of declaring
+their innocence, and disowning the alleged confessions as forgeries. The
+old veterans stood up in the church before the assembled multitude, and,
+raising their chained hands to heaven, declared that whatever had been
+confessed to the detriment of the illustrious order was only forced from
+them by extreme agony and fear of death, and that they solemnly and
+finally repudiated and revoked all such admissions.
+
+On hearing of this, Philip ordered their immediate execution, and the
+same evening the last grand master of the Temple and his faithful
+comrades were burned to death at a slow fire.
+
+Impartial men had formed their own judgment, and a very strong feeling
+prevailed that justice had not been done. It was remarked that those who
+had been foremost in the proceedings against the Templars came to a
+speedy and miserable end. The Pope, the kings of France and of England,
+and others, all soon followed their victims and died violent or shameful
+deaths.
+
+We have somewhat anticipated the order of events, and must return to the
+earlier stage of the proceedings against the Templars. As soon as Philip
+had determined upon his own course of action, he desired to find
+countenance for it by stirring up other sovereigns to imitate it. He
+therefore wrote letters to the kings of other European states, informing
+them of his discovery of the guilt of the Templars, and urging them to
+adopt a similar course in their own dominions. The Pope, too, summoned
+the grand master to France, but with every mark of respect, and so got
+him into his power before the terrible proceedings against the members
+of his order were made public.
+
+The King of England, Edward II, acted with prudence. He expressed his
+unbounded astonishment at the contents of the French King's letter, and
+at the particulars detailed to him by an agent specially sent to him by
+Philip, but he would do no more at the time than promise that the matter
+should receive his serious attention in due course.
+
+He wrote at the same time to the kings of Portugal, Aragon, Castile, and
+Sicily, telling them of the extraordinary information he had received
+respecting the Templars, and declaring his unwillingness to believe the
+dreadful charges brought against them. He referred to the services
+rendered to Christendom by the order, and to its unblemished reputation
+ever since it was founded. He urged upon his fellow-sovereigns that
+nothing should be done in haste, but that inquiry should be made in due
+and solemn legal form, expressing his belief that the order was
+guiltless of the crimes alleged against it, and that the charges were
+merely the result of slander and envy and of a desire to appropriate the
+property of the order.
+
+At the same time Edward wrote to the Pope in similar terms. He declared
+that the Templars were universally respected by all classes throughout
+his dominions as pious and upright men, and begged the Pope to promote a
+just inquiry which should free the order from the unjust slander and
+injuries to which it was being subjected. But hardly was this letter
+despatched than Edward received another from the Pope, which had crossed
+his own on its way, calling upon him to imitate Philip, King of France,
+in proceeding against the Templars. The Pope professed great distress
+and astonishment that an order that had so long enjoyed the respect and
+gratitude of the Church for its worthy deeds in defence of the faith
+should have fallen into grievous and perfidious apostasy. He then
+narrated the commendable zeal of the King of France in rooting out the
+secrets of these men's hidden wickedness, and gave particulars of some
+of their confessions of the crimes with which they had been charged. He
+concluded by commanding the King of England to pursue a similar course,
+to seize and imprison all members of the order on one day, and to hold,
+in the Pope's name, all the property of the order till it should be
+determined how it was to be disposed of.
+
+King Edward, notwithstanding his recent declaration of confidence in the
+integrity of the Templars, yielded obedience to this missive of the
+Pope. Whether he was overawed by the authority of the Pontiff, and
+deferred his own opinion to that of so great a personage, or whether, as
+some suppose, he desired to give the Templars a fair and honorable
+trial, and the opportunity of clearing themselves; or whether he gave
+way to the evil counsels of those who whispered that the great wealth of
+the Templars would be useful to the Crown, and that he might avail
+himself of the opportunity of taking all--as his predecessors had taken
+some--of their treasure; whatever may have been his real motive, and the
+cause of his change of conduct, it is certain that he issued an order
+for the arrest of the Templars, and the seizure of all their estates,
+houses, and property.
+
+The greatest caution and secrecy were adopted. Instructions were sent to
+all the sheriffs throughout England to hold themselves in readiness to
+execute certain orders which would be given to them by trusty persons on
+that day. Similar arrangements were made in Scotland, Ireland, and
+Wales; and on January 8, 1308, every Templar was simultaneously
+arrested.
+
+It was not till October in the following year that any trial took place.
+All this time the Templars had been suffering the miseries of
+imprisonment. More than two hundred men of high rank, many of them
+veterans who had fought and bled in Palestine, and who were now grown
+old and feeble after a life of hardship and privation, maimed with
+wounds, bronzed with exposure to the Eastern sun, languished under the
+tender mercies of jailers, with no opportunity of defending themselves
+or of raising up friends to say a word for them. Some were foreigners
+who happened to be in England on the business of the order. A few
+managed to evade the vigilance of the King's emissaries, notwithstanding
+the secrecy and suddenness of the arrest, and escaped in various
+disguises to the wild and remote mountain districts of Scotland, Wales,
+and Ireland.
+
+The court appointed by the Pope commenced its proceedings in London, in
+October, 1309, under the presidency of the Bishop of London. Several
+French ecclesiastics had come over to take their seat upon the bench as
+judges--an ill omen for the English Templars. After the usual
+preliminaries, which were long and tedious, the articles of accusation
+were read. They stated that those who were received into the order of
+the Knights of the Temple did, at their reception, formally deny Jesus
+Christ and renounce all hope of salvation through him; that they
+trampled and spat upon the cross; that they worshipped a cat(!); that
+they denied the sacraments, and looked only to the grand master for
+absolution; that they possessed and worshipped various idols; that they
+practised a variety of cruel, degrading, and filthy customs and rites;
+that the grand master and many of the brethren had confessed to these
+things even before they had been arrested. Such is a brief summary of
+the accusation, the original documents of which have happily come down
+to us.
+
+It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity,
+profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a
+so-called court of justice in England as a state paper--a bill of
+indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order
+that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the
+defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless
+enemies. No writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a
+trial, and no one unacquainted with mediæval history would credit the
+record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such a document,
+and then set themselves to prove the truth of its monstrous allegations
+by the use of torture.
+
+Students of the Middle Ages know well that such things were done in
+those days. They remember Savonarola and Beatrice Cenci in Italy, Jeanne
+d'Arc in France, Abbot Whiting and others in England. They call to mind
+the cruelties and exactions practised so often upon the Jews in every
+country in Europe; and with the contemporary records in their hands,
+they do not hesitate to accept as undoubted historical fact what would
+otherwise be rejected as a slander upon humanity and an outrage upon
+common-sense.
+
+If the Templars had been accused of the crimes vulgarly supposed to
+attach themselves to religious orders; if they had been charged with
+falling into the sins to which poor human nature by its frailty is
+liable; if erring members had been denounced, men who had entered the
+order through disappointment, or from some other unworthy motive, men
+such as Sir Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de
+Bois Guilbert, in his novel, _Ivanhoe_, we might well believe that some
+at least of the accusations against them were true.
+
+It is singular that no such charges are alleged against the Templars,
+though they were freely brought, two hundred years later, against the
+regular monks by the commissioners of Henry VIII. This fact has been
+noticed by most thoughtful historians, and has been considered to tell
+strongly in the tribunal of equity in favor of the Templars. Instead of
+these probable or possible crimes, we find nothing but monstrous charges
+of sorcery, idolatry, apostasy, and such like, instances of which we
+know are to be found in those strange times; but which it seems
+altogether unlikely would infect a large body whose fundamental
+principle was close adherence to Christianity; a body which was spread
+all over the world, and which included in its ranks such a multitude and
+variety of men and of nationalities, among whom there must have been, to
+say the least, some sincere, upright, and godly men who would have set
+themselves to root out such miserable errors, or, if they were found to
+be ineradicable, would have left the order as no place for them.
+
+Even Voltaire acknowledges that such an indictment destroys itself. It
+recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing but their intense hatred of
+their victims and their total unfitness to sit as judges.
+
+When this extraordinary paper had been read, the prisoners were asked
+what they had to say to it, and, as might be expected, they at once and
+unanimously declared that they and their order were absolutely guiltless
+of the crimes of which they were accused. After this the prisoners were
+examined one by one.
+
+It would be tedious to follow the long and wearisome questionings and to
+record the replies given by the several brethren of the Temple during
+their trial in London. One and all agreed in denying the existence of
+the horrible and ridiculous rites which were said to be used at the
+reception of new members; and whether they had been received in England
+or abroad, detailed the ceremonies that were used, and showed that they
+were substantially the same everywhere. The candidate was asked what he
+desired, and on replying that he desired admission to the order of the
+Knights of the Temple, he was warned of the strict and severe life that
+was demanded of members of the order; of the three vows of poverty,
+chastity, and obedience; and, moreover, that he must be ready to go and
+fight the enemies of Christ even to the death.
+
+Others related details of the interior discipline and regulations of the
+order, which were stern and rigorous, as became a body that added to the
+strictness of the convent the order and system of a military
+organization. Many of the brethren had been nearly all their lives in
+the order, some more than forty years, a great part of which had been
+spent in active service in the East.
+
+The witnesses who were summoned were not members of the order, and had
+only hearsay evidence to give. They had _heard_ this and that report,
+they _suspected_ something else, they had been _told_ that certain
+things had been said or done. Nothing definite could be obtained, and
+there was no proof whatever of any of the extravagant and incredible
+charges. Similar proceedings took place in Lincoln and York, and also in
+Scotland and Ireland; and in all places the results were the same, and
+the matter dragged on till October, 1311.
+
+Hitherto torture had not been resorted to; but now, in accordance with
+the repeated solicitations of the Pope, King Edward gave orders that the
+imprisoned Templars should be subjected to the rack in order that they
+might be forced to give evidence of their guilt. Even then there seems
+to have been reluctance to resort to this cruel and shameful treatment,
+and a series of delays occurred, so that nothing was done till the
+beginning of the following year.
+
+The Templars, having been now three years in prison, chained,
+half-starved, threatened with greater miseries here, and with eternal
+damnation hereafter; separated from one another, without friend,
+adviser, or legal defence, were now removed to the various jails in
+London and elsewhere, and submitted to torture. We have no particular
+record of the horrible details, but some evidence was afterward adduced
+which was said to have been obtained from the unhappy victims during
+their agony. It was such as was desired; an admission of the truth of
+the monstrous accusations that were detailed to them, which had been
+obtained, for the most part, from their tortured brethren in France.
+
+In April, 1311, these depositions were read in the court, in the
+presence of the Templars, who were required to say what they could
+allege in their defence. They replied that they were ignorant of the
+processes of law, and that they were not permitted to have the aid of
+those whom they trusted and who could advise them, but that they would
+gladly make a statement of their faith and of the principles of their
+order. This they were permitted to do, and a very simple and touching
+paper was produced and signed by all the brethren. They declared
+themselves, one and all, good Christians and faithful members of the
+Church, and they claimed to be treated as such, and openly and fairly
+tried if there were any just cause of complaint against them. But their
+persecutors were by no means satisfied. Fresh tortures and cruelties
+were resorted to to force confessions of guilt from these worn-out and
+dying men. A few gave way, and said what they were told to say; and
+these unhappy men were produced in St. Paul's Cathedral shortly
+afterward, and made to recant their errors, and were then "reconciled to
+the Church." A similar scene was enacted at York.
+
+The property of the Templars in England was placed under the charge of a
+commission at the time that proceedings were commenced against them, and
+the King very soon treated it as if it were his own, giving away manors
+and convents at his pleasure. A great part of the possessions of the
+order was subsequently made over to the Hospitallers. The convent and
+church of the Temple in London were granted, in 1313, to Aymer de
+Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whose monument is in Westminster Abbey. Other
+property was pawned by the King to his creditors as security for payment
+of his debts; but constant litigation and disputes seem to have pursued
+the holders of the ill-gotten goods.
+
+Some of the surviving Templars retired to monasteries, others returned
+to the world and assumed secular habits, for which they incurred the
+censures of the Pope.
+
+
+HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+The tragedy of the Templars had not yet drawn to its close. The four
+great dignitaries of the order, the grand master Du Molay, Guy, the
+commander of Normandy, son of the Dauphin of Auvergne, the commander of
+Aquitaine, Godfrey de Gonaville, the great visitor of France, Hugues de
+Peraud, were still pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to
+determine on their fate. The King and the Pope were now equally
+interested in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So
+long as these men lived, uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not
+extinct. A commission was named: the Cardinal-Archbishop of Albi, with
+two other cardinals, two monks, the Cistercian Arnold Novelli, and
+Arnold de Fargis, nephew of Pope Clement, the Dominican Nicolas de
+Freveauville, akin to the house of Marigny, formerly the King's
+confessor. With these the Archbishop of Sens sat in judgment on the
+Knights' own former confessions. The grand master and the rest were
+found guilty, and were to be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.
+
+A scaffold was erected before the porch of Notre Dame. On one side
+appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four noble prisoners, in
+chains, under the custody of the Provost of Paris. Six years of dreary
+imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the
+most valiant had been burned alive; the recreants had purchased their
+lives by confession; the Pope, in a full council, had condemned and
+dissolved the order. If a human mind--a mind like that of Du
+Molay--could be broken by suffering and humiliation, it must have
+yielded to this long and crushing imprisonment. The Cardinal-Archbishop
+of Albi ascended a raised platform: he read the confessions of the
+Knights, the proceedings of the court; he enlarged on the criminality of
+the order, on the holy justice of the Pope, and the devout,
+self-sacrificing zeal of the King; he was proceeding to the final, the
+fatal sentence. At that instant the grand master advanced; his gesture
+implored silence; judges and people gazed in awestruck apprehension. In
+a calm, clear voice Du Molay spoke: "Before heaven and earth, on the
+verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable
+weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved death, not
+on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves or our order have
+been guilty, but because we have yielded, to save our lives, to the
+seductive words of the Pope and of the King; and so by our confessions
+brought shame and ruin on our blameless, holy, and orthodox
+brotherhood."
+
+The cardinals stood confounded; the people could not suppress their
+profound sympathy. The assembly was hastily broken up; the Provost was
+commanded to conduct the prisoners back to their dungeons. "To-morrow we
+will hold further counsel." But on the moment that the King heard these
+things, without a day's delay, without the least consultation with the
+ecclesiastical authorities, he ordered them to death as relapsed
+heretics. On the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of
+Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the
+Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised--two out of
+the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour
+of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned;
+they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily;
+the wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the
+tardiness was designed that the victims might have time, while the fire
+was still curling round their extremities, to recant their bold
+recantation. But there was no sign, no word of weakness. Du Molay
+implored that the image of the Mother of God might be held up before
+him, and his hands unchained, that he might clasp them in prayer. Both,
+as the smoke rose to their lips, as the fire crept up to their vital
+parts, continued solemnly to aver the innocence and the Catholic faith
+of the order. The King himself sat and beheld, it might seem without
+remorse, this hideous spectacle; the words of Du Molay might have
+reached his ears. But the people looked on with far other feelings.
+Stupor kindled into admiration; the execution was a martyrdom; friars
+gathered up their ashes and bones and carried them away, hardly by
+stealth, to consecrated ground; they became holy relics. The two who
+wanted courage to die pined away their miserable life in prison.
+
+The wonder and the pity of the times which immediately followed, arrayed
+Du Molay not only in the robes of the martyr, but gave him the terrible
+language of a prophet. "Clement, iniquitous and cruel judge, I summon
+thee within forty days to meet me before the throne of the Most High!"
+According to some accounts this fearful sentence included the King, by
+whom, if uttered, it might have been heard. The earliest allusion to
+this awful speech does not contain that striking particularity, which,
+if part of it, would be fatal to its credibility, _i.e._, the precise
+date of Clement's death. It was not till the year after that Clement and
+King Philip passed to their account. The fate of these two men during
+the next year might naturally so appal the popular imagination, as to
+approximate more closely the prophecy and its accomplishment. At all
+events it betrayed the deep and general feeling of the cruel wrong
+inflicted on the order; while the unlamented death of the Pope, the
+disastrous close of Philip's reign, and the disgraceful crimes which
+attainted the honor of his family seemed as declarations of heaven as to
+the innocence of their noble victims.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES VAN ARTEVELDE LEADS A
+FLEMISH REVOLT
+
+EDWARD III OF ENGLAND ASSUMES THE
+TITLE OF KING OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1337-1340
+
+FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT
+
+
+  Having defeated the Flemings at Mons-la-Puelle in 1304,
+  Philip the Fair of France found that they were unsubdued and
+  ready to renew their war against him. Therefore he very soon
+  acknowledged their independence under their count, Robert de
+  Béthune. But Philip continually violated the treaty he had
+  made, and just before his death (1314) he again began
+  hostilities against Flanders.
+
+  Little of historical importance occurred in that country
+  between the death of Philip the Fair and the accession of
+  Philip of Valois (1328). His first act was to take up the
+  cause of Louis de Nevers, then Count of Flanders, whom the
+  independent burghers of most of the chief cities had united
+  to deprive of his territories, leaving him only Ghent for a
+  refuge. In the first year of his reign Philip gained a
+  victory over the Flemish "weavers" at Cassel, and laid all
+  Flanders at the feet of its rejected count.
+
+  In 1338 began the Hundred Years' War, arising from the claim
+  of Edward III of England to the French throne. Edward's most
+  important measure in preparation for the war was the
+  securing of an alliance with the Flemish burghers, whose
+  French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their
+  affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which
+  confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to
+  Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by
+  various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and
+  industry of both Flanders and England.
+
+  At last, by prohibiting the exportation of wool to Flanders,
+  Edward reduced the Flemings to despair and forced them to
+  fling themselves into his arms. Many of them emigrated to
+  England, where they helped to lay the foundation of
+  manufactures. But the Flemish towns burst into insurrection
+  and proceeded to organized action in the manner here related
+  by Guizot, who draws largely upon the narrative of
+  Froissart.
+
+The Flemings bore the first brunt of that war which was to be so cruel
+and so long. It was a lamentable position for them; their industrial and
+commercial prosperity was being ruined; their security at home was going
+from them; their communal liberties were compromised; divisions set in
+among them; by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn toward
+England, but the Count, their lord, did all he could to turn them away
+from her, and many among them were loath to separate themselves entirely
+from France. "Burghers of Ghent, as they chatted in the thoroughfares
+and at the cross-roads, said one to another that they had heard much
+wisdom, to their mind, from a burgher who was called James van
+Artevelde, and who was a brewer of beer. They had heard him say that, if
+he could obtain a hearing and credit, he would in a little while restore
+Flanders to good estate, and they would recover all their gains without
+standing ill with the King of France or the King of England.
+
+"These sayings began to get spread abroad insomuch that a quarter or
+half the city was informed thereof, especially the small folk of the
+commonalty, whom the evil touched most nearly. They began to assemble in
+the streets, and it came to pass that one day, after dinner, several
+went from house to house calling for their comrades, and saying, 'Come
+and hear the wise man's counsel.' On December 26, 1337, they came to the
+house of the said James van Artevelde, and found him leaning against his
+door. Far off as they were when they first perceived him, they made him
+a deep obeisance, and 'Dear sir,' they said, 'we are come to you for
+counsel; for we are told that by your great and good sense you will
+restore the country of Flanders to good case. So tell us how.'
+
+"Then James van Artevelde came forward, and said: 'Sirs comrades, I am a
+native and burgher of this city, and here I have my means. Know that I
+would gladly aid you with all my power, you and all the country; if
+there were here a man who would be willing to take the lead, I would be
+willing to risk body and means at his side; and if the rest of ye be
+willing to be brethren, friends, and comrades to me, to abide in all
+matters at my side, notwithstanding that I am not worthy of it, I will
+undertake it willingly.' Then said all with one voice: 'We promise you
+faithfully to abide at your side in all matters and to therewith
+adventure body and means, for we know well that in the whole countship
+of Flanders there is not a man but you worthy so to do.'" Then Van
+Artevelde bound them to assemble on the next day but one in the
+grounds of the monastery of Biloke, which had received numerous benefits
+from the ancestors of Sohier of Courtrai, whose son-in-law Van Artevelde
+was.
+
+This bold burgher of Ghent, who was born about 1285, was sprung from a
+family the name of which had been for a long while inscribed in their
+city upon the register of industrial corporations. His father, John van
+Artevelde, a cloth-worker, had been several times over-sheriff of Ghent,
+and his mother, Mary van Groete, was great-aunt to the grandfather of
+the illustrious publicist called in history Grotius. James van Artevelde
+in his youth accompanied Count Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the
+Handsome, upon his adventurous expeditions in Italy, Sicily, and Greece,
+and to the island of Rhodes; and it had been close by the spots where
+the soldiers of Marathon and Salamis had beaten the armies of Darius and
+Xerxes that he had heard of the victory of the Flemish burghers and
+workmen attacked in 1302, at Courtrai, by the splendid army of Philip
+the Handsome.
+
+James van Artevelde, on returning to his country, had been busy with his
+manufactures,[46] his fields, the education of his children, and Flemish
+affairs up to the day when, at his invitation, the burghers of Ghent
+thronged to the meeting on December 28, 1337, in the grounds of the
+monastery of Biloke. There he delivered an eloquent speech, pointing out
+unhesitatingly but temperately the policy which he considered good for
+the country. "Forget not," he said, "the might and the glory of
+Flanders. Who, pray, shall forbid that we defend our interests by using
+our rights? Can the King of France prevent us from treating with the
+King of England? And may we not be certain that if we were to treat with
+the King of England, the King of France would not be the less urgent in
+seeking our alliance? Besides, have we not with us all the communes of
+Brabant, of Hainault, of Holland, and of Zealand?" The audience cheered
+these words; the commune of Ghent forthwith assembled, and on January 3,
+1337, reëstablished the offices of captains of parishes according to
+olden usage, when the city was exposed to any pressing danger.
+
+It was carried that one of these captains should have the chief
+government of the city; and James van Artevelde was at once invested
+with it. From that moment the conduct of Van Artevelde was ruled by one
+predominant idea: to secure free and fair commercial intercourse for
+Flanders with England, while observing a general neutrality in the war
+between the kings of England and France, and to combine so far all the
+communes of Flanders in one and the same policy. And he succeeded in
+this twofold purpose. On April 29, 1338, the representatives of all the
+communes of Flanders--the city of Bruges numbering among them a hundred
+and eight deputies--repaired to the castle of Mâle, a residence of Count
+Louis, and then James van Artevelde set before the Count what had been
+resolved upon among them. The Count submitted, and swore that he would
+thenceforth maintain the liberties of Flanders in the state in which
+they had hitherto existed. In the month of May following a deputation,
+consisting of James van Artevelde and other burghers appointed by the
+cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres scoured the whole of Flanders, from
+Bailleul to Termonde, and from Ninove to Dunkirk, "to reconcile the good
+folk of the communes to the Count of Flanders, as well for the Count's
+honor as for the peace of the country." Lastly, on June 10, 1338, a
+treaty was signed at Anvers between the deputies of the Flemish communes
+and the English ambassadors, the latter declaring: "We do all to wit
+that we have negotiated the way and substance of friendship with the
+good folk of the communes of Flanders, in form and manner hereinafter
+following:
+
+"First, they shall be able to go and buy the wools and other merchandise
+which have been exported from England to Holland, Zealand, or any other
+place whatsoever; and all traders of Flanders who shall repair to the
+ports of England shall there be safe and free in their persons and their
+goods, just as in any other place where their ventures might bring them
+together.
+
+"_Item_, we have agreed with the good folk and with all the common
+country of Flanders that they must not mix nor intermeddle in any way,
+by assistance in men or arms, in the wars of our lord the King and the
+noble Sir Philip of Valois (who holdeth himself for King of France)."
+
+Three articles following regulated in detail the principles laid down in
+the first two, and, by another charter, Edward III ordained that "all
+stuffs marked with the seal of the city of Ghent might travel freely in
+England without being subject according to ellage and quality to the
+control to which all foreign merchandise was subject."
+
+Van Artevelde was right in telling the Flemings that, if they treated
+with the King of England, the King of France would be only the more
+anxious for their alliance. Philip of Valois and even Count Louis of
+Flanders, when they got to know of the negotiations entered into between
+the Flemish communes and King Edward, redoubled their offers and
+promises to them. But when the passions of men have taken full
+possession of their souls, words of concession and attempts at
+accommodation are nothing more than postponements or lies. Philip, when
+he heard about the conclusion of a treaty between the Flemish communes
+and the King of England, sent word to Count Louis "that this James van
+Artevelde must not, on any account, be allowed to rule or even live, for
+if it were so for long, the Count would lose his land." The Count, very
+much disposed to accept such advice, repaired to Ghent and sent for Van
+Artevelde to come and see him at his hotel. He went, but with so large a
+following that the Count was not at the time at all in a position to
+resist him. He tried to persuade the Flemish burgher that "if he would
+keep a hand on the people so as to keep them to their love for the King
+of France, he having more authority than anyone else for such a purpose,
+much good would result to him; mingling, besides, with this address,
+some words of threatening import."
+
+Van Artevelde, who was not the least afraid of the threat, and who at
+heart was fond of the English, told the Count that he would do as he had
+promised the communes. "Hereupon he left the Count, who consulted his
+confidants as to what he was to do in this business, and they counselled
+him to let them go and assemble their people, saying that they would
+kill Van Artevelde secretly or otherwise. And, indeed, they did lay many
+traps and made many attempts against the captain; but it was of no
+avail, since all the commonalty was for him." When the rumor of these
+projects and these attempts was spread abroad in the city, the
+excitement was extreme, and all the burghers assumed white hoods, which
+was the mark peculiar to the members of the commune when they assembled
+under their flags; so that the Count found himself reduced to assuming
+one, for he was afraid of being kept captive at Ghent, and, on the
+pretext of a hunting-party, he lost no time in gaining his castle of
+Mâle.
+
+The burghers of Ghent had their minds still filled with their late alarm
+when they heard that by order, it was said, of the King of France--Count
+Louis had sent and beheaded at the castle of Rupelmonde, in the very bed
+in which he was confined by his infirmities, their fellow-citizen Sohier
+of Courtrai, Van Artevelde's father-in-law, who had been kept for many
+months in prison for his intimacy with the English. On the same day the
+Bishop of Senlis and the Abbot of St. Denis had arrived at Tournai, and
+had superintended the reading out in the market-place of a sentence of
+excommunication against the Ghentese.
+
+It was probably at this date that Van Artevelde in his vexation and
+disquietude assumed in Ghent an attitude threatening and despotic even
+to tyranny. "He had continually after him," says Froissart, "sixty or
+eighty armed varlets, among whom were two or three who knew some of his
+secrets. When he met a man whom he hated or had in suspicion, this man
+was at once killed, for Van Artevelde had given this order to his
+varlets: 'The moment I meet a man, and make such and such a sign to you,
+slay him without delay, however great he may be, without waiting for
+more speech.' In this way he had many great masters slain. And as soon
+as these sixty varlets had taken him home to his hotel, each went to
+dinner at his own house; and the moment dinner was over they returned
+and stood before his hotel and waited in the street until that he was
+minded to go and play and take his pastime in the city, and so they
+attended him to supper-time.
+
+"And know that each of these hirelings had _per diem_ four groschen of
+Flanders for their expenses and wages, and he had them regularly paid
+from week to week. And even in the case of all that were most powerful
+in Flanders, knights, esquires, and burghers of the good cities, whom he
+believed to be favorable to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from
+Flanders and levied half their revenues. He had levies made of rents,
+of dues on merchandise and all the revenues belonging to the Count,
+wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his will, and
+gave them away without rendering any account. And when he would borrow
+of any burghers on his word for payment, there was none that durst say
+him nay. In short there was never in Flanders, or in any other country,
+duke, count, prince, or other who can have had a country at his will as
+James van Artevelde had for a long time." It is possible that, as some
+historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers
+than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this
+portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events
+and passions into a demagogic tyrant.
+
+While the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted to excite an
+uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced, in order to escape
+from the people of Bruges, to mount his horse in hot haste, at night and
+barely armed, and to flee away to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward
+III were preparing on either side, for the war which they could see
+drawing near. Philip was vigorously at work on the Pope, the Emperor of
+Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to raise
+obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies. He ordered that
+short-lived meeting of the states-general about which we have no
+information left us, save that it voted the principle that "no talliage
+could be imposed on the people if urgent necessity or evident utility
+should not require it, and unless by concession of the estates."
+
+Philip, as chief of feudal society rather than of the nation which was
+forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked at Amiens all
+his vassals great and small, laic or cleric, placing all his strength in
+their coöperation, and not caring at all to associate the country itself
+in the affairs of his government. Edward, on the contrary, while
+equipping his fleet and amassing treasure at the expense of the Jews and
+Lombard usurers, was assembling his parliament, talking to it "of this
+important and costly war," for which he obtained large subsidies, and
+accepting, without making any difficulty, the vote of the commons'
+house, which expressed a desire "to consult their constituents upon this
+subject, and begged him to summon an early parliament, to which there
+should be elected, in each county, two knights taken from among the best
+landowners of their counties."
+
+The King set out for the Continent; the parliament met and considered
+the exigences of the war by land and sea, in Scotland and in France;
+traders, shipowners, and mariners were called and examined; and the
+forces determined to be necessary were voted. Edward took the field,
+pillaging, burning, and ravaging, "destroying all the country for twelve
+or fourteen leagues in extent," as he himself said in a letter to the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. When he set foot on French territory, Count
+William of Hainault, his brother-in-law and up to that time his ally,
+came to him and said that "he would ride with him no farther, for that
+his presence was prayed and required by his uncle the King of France, to
+whom he bore no hate, and whom he would go and serve in his own kingdom,
+as he had served King Edward on the territory of the Emperor, whose
+vicar he was," and Edward wished him "Godspeed!" Such was the binding
+nature of feudal ties that the same lord held himself bound to pass from
+one camp to another according as he found himself upon the domains of
+one or the other of his suzerains in a war one against the other.
+
+Edward continued his march toward St. Quentin, where Philip had at last
+arrived with his allies the kings of Bohemia, Navarre, and Scotland,
+"after delays which had given rise to great scandal and murmurs
+throughout the whole kingdom." The two armies, with a strength,
+according to Froissart, of a hundred thousand men on the French side,
+and forty-four thousand on the English, were soon facing one another,
+near Buironfosse, a large burgh of Picardy. A herald came from the
+English camp to tell the King of France that the King of England
+"demanded of him battle. To which demand," says Froissart, "the King of
+France gave willing assent and accepted the day which was fixed at first
+for Thursday the 21st, and afterward for Saturday the 25th of October,
+1339."
+
+To judge from the somewhat tangled accounts of the chroniclers and of
+Froissart himself, neither of the two kings was very anxious to come to
+blows. The forces of Edward were much inferior to those of Philip; and
+the former had accordingly taken up, as it appears, a position which
+rendered attack difficult for Philip. There was much division of
+opinion in the French camp. Independently of military grounds, a great
+deal was said about certain letters from Robert, King of Naples, "a
+mighty necromancer and full of mighty wisdom, it was reported, who,
+after having several times cast their horoscopes, had discovered, by
+astrology and from experience, that, if his cousin, the King of France,
+were to fight the King of England, the former would be worsted."
+
+"In thus disputing and debating," says Froissart, "the time passed till
+full mid-day. A little afterward a hare came leaping across the fields,
+and rushed among the French. Those who saw it began shouting and making
+a great halloo. Those who were behind thought that those who were in
+front were engaging in battle; and several put on their helmets and
+gripped their swords. Thereupon several knights were made; and the Count
+of Hainault himself made fourteen, who were thenceforth nicknamed
+Knights of the Hare."
+
+Whatever his motive may have been, Philip did not attack; and Edward
+promptly began a retreat. They both dismissed their allies; and during
+the early days of November Philip fell back upon St. Quentin, and Edward
+went and took up his winter-quarters at Brussels.
+
+For Edward it was a serious check not to have dared to attack the King
+whose kingdom he made a pretence of conquering; and he took it
+grievously to heart. At Brussels he had an interview with his allies and
+asked their counsel. Most of the princes of the Low Countries remained
+faithful to him and the Count of Hainault seemed inclined to go back to
+him; but all hesitated as to what he was to do to recover from the
+check. Van Artevelde showed more invention and more boldness. The
+Flemish communes had concentrated their forces not far from the spot
+where the two kings had kept their armies looking at one another; but
+they had maintained a strict neutrality, and at the invitation of the
+Count of Flanders, who promised them that the King of France would
+entertain all their claims, Artevelde and Breydel, the deputies from
+Ghent and Bruges, even repaired to Courtrai to make terms with him. But
+as they got there nothing but ambiguous engagements and evasive
+promises, they let the negotiation drop, and, while Count Louis was on
+his way to rejoin Philip at St. Quentin, Artevelde with the deputies
+from the Flemish communes started for Brussels.
+
+Edward, who was already living on very confidential terms with him, told
+him that "if the Flemings were minded to help him to keep up the war and
+go with him whithersoever he would take them, they should aid him to
+recover Lille, Douai, and Béthune, then occupied by the King of France.
+Artevelde, after consulting his colleagues, returned to Edward, and,
+'Dear sir,' said he, 'you have already made such requests to us, and
+verily, if we could do so while keeping our honor and faith, we would do
+as you demand: but we be bound, by faith and oath, and on a bond of two
+millions of florins entered into with the Pope, not to go to war with
+the King of France without incurring a debt to the amount of that sum
+and a sentence of excommunication; but if you do that which we are about
+to say to you, if you will be pleased to adopt the arms of France, and
+quarter them with those of England, and openly call yourself King of
+France, we will uphold you for the true King of France; you, as King of
+France, shall give us quittance of our faith; and then we will obey you
+as King of France, and will go whithersoever you shall ordain.'"
+
+This prospect pleased Edward mightily: but "it irked him to take the
+name and arms of that of which he had as yet won no title." He consulted
+his allies. Some of them hesitated; but "his most privy and especial
+friend," Robert d'Artois, strongly urged him to consent to the proposal.
+So a French prince and a Flemish burgher prevailed upon the King of
+England to pursue, as in assertion of his avowed rights, the conquest of
+the kingdom of France. King, prince, and burgher fixed Ghent as their
+place of meeting for the official conclusion of the alliance; and there,
+in January, 1340, the mutual engagement was signed and sealed. The King
+of England "assumed the arms of France quartered with those of England,"
+and thenceforth took the title of King of France.
+
+
+
+
+BATTLES OF SLUYS AND CRÉCY
+
+A.D. 1340-1346
+
+SIR JOHN FROISSART[47]
+
+
+  The sea fight of Sluys began the Hundred Years' War between
+  England and France. It is also memorable as England's first
+  great naval victory. The origin of the war lay in the Salic
+  Law, which excludes women from the throne of France. This
+  overruled the claims of Queen Isabella of England, and her
+  son Edward III in 1328, when the twelve peers and barons of
+  France unanimously gave the crown to Isabella's cousin,
+  Philip of Valois, who ascended the throne as Philip VI of
+  France.
+
+  Edward III ingeniously maintained that though the Salic Law
+  prevented his mother from filling the throne, it did not
+  destroy the rights of her male descendants, and he early
+  entertained the project of enforcing this contention; but it
+  was not until 1337 that he felt able to assert formally his
+  claim to the French crown and to assume the title of king of
+  France.
+
+  The following year, with a considerable body of troops to
+  support his presumed rights, he crossed to the Continent,
+  and passed the winter at Antwerp among the Flemings who had
+  taken up his cause, and with whom, as well as with the
+  Emperor-King of Germany, he effected aggressive alliances.
+  He made a formal declaration of war in 1339, beginning
+  hostilities which were prolonged into the Hundred Years'
+  War, and which as a contest of the English kings for the
+  sovereignty of France produced a series of important
+  revolutions in the fortunes of that country.
+
+  The first serious action of the war was a naval battle at
+  Sluys, near the Belgian frontier just northeast of Bruges,
+  June 23, 1340. King Edward and his entire navy sailed from
+  the Thames June 22, and made straight for Sluys. Sir Hugh
+  Quiriel and other French officers, with over one hundred and
+  twenty large vessels, were lying near Sluys for the purpose
+  of disputing the English King's passage. Froissart, with his
+  usual terseness, has graphically recorded the combat which
+  ensued.
+
+  A more important victory was that won in the land battle at
+  Crécy in 1346, which, however, simply paved the way to the
+  capture of Calais, for it was not until the battle of
+  Poitiers, ten years later, that Edward made any progress
+  toward the conquest of France. In 1346, after landing with a
+  force of troops at Cape La Hogue, Edward reduced Cherbourg,
+  Carentan, and Caen, and, with the intention of crossing the
+  Seine at Rouen, commenced his march on Calais, where he was
+  to be joined by his Flemish allies. Philip, making a rapid
+  march from Paris to Amiens, had posted detachments of
+  soldiers along the right bank of the river Somme, guarding
+  every ford, breaking down every bridge, and gradually
+  shutting up the invaders in the narrow space between the
+  Somme and the sea.
+
+  Edward sent out his marshals with their battalions to find a
+  passage, but they were unsuccessful, until a peasant led
+  them to the tidal ford of Blanchetaque. Although desperately
+  opposed by fully twelve thousand French, under the Norman
+  baron Sir Godémar du Fay, they effected a crossing, and,
+  marching on, encamped in the fields near Crécy. The King of
+  France with the main body of his troops had taken up his
+  quarters in Abbeville.
+
+
+BATTLE OF SLUYS
+
+When the King's fleet was almost got to Sluys, they saw so many masts
+standing before it that they looked like a wood. The King asked the
+commander of his ship what they could be, who answered that he imagined
+they must be that armament of Normans which the King of France kept at
+sea and which had so frequently done him much damage, had burned his
+good town of Southampton, and taken his large ship the Christopher. The
+King replied: "I have for a long time wished to meet with them, and now,
+please God and St. George, we will fight them; for, in truth, they have
+done me so much mischief that I will be revenged on them if it be
+possible."
+
+The King drew up all his vessels, placing the strongest in the front,
+and on the wings his archers. Between every two vessels with archers
+there was one of men-at-arms. He stationed some detached vessels as a
+reserve, full of archers, to assist and help such as might be damaged.
+There were in this fleet a great many ladies from England, countesses,
+baronesses, and knights' and gentlemen's wives, who were going to attend
+on the Queen at Ghent. These the King had guarded most carefully by
+three hundred men-at-arms and five hundred archers.
+
+When the King of England and his marshals had properly divided the
+fleet, they hoisted their sails to have the wind on their quarter, as
+the sun shone full in their faces, which they considered might be of
+disadvantage to them, and stretched out a little, so that at last they
+got the wind as they wished. The Normans, who saw them tack, could not
+help wondering why they did so, and said they took good care to turn
+about, for they were afraid of meddling with them. They perceived,
+however, by his banner, that the King was on board, which gave them
+great joy, as they were eager to fight with him; so they put their
+vessels in proper order, for they were expert and gallant men on the
+seas. They filled the Christopher, the large ship which they had taken
+the year before from the English, with trumpets and other warlike
+instruments, and ordered her to fall upon the English.
+
+The battle then began very fiercely; archers and cross-bowmen shot with
+all their might at each other, and the men-at-arms engaged hand to hand.
+In order to be more successful, they had large grapnels, and iron hooks
+with chains, which they flung from ship to ship, to moor them to each
+other. There were many valiant deeds performed, many prisoners made, and
+many rescues. The Christopher, which led the van, was recaptured by the
+English, and all in her taken or killed. There were then great shouts
+and cries, and the English manned her again with archers and sent her to
+fight against the Genoese.
+
+This battle was very murderous and horrible. Combats at sea are more
+destructive and obstinate than upon the land, for it is not possible to
+retreat or flee--everyone must abide his fortune and exert his prowess
+and valor. Sir Hugh Quiriel and his companions were bold and determined
+men, had done much mischief to the English at sea and destroyed many of
+their ships; this combat, therefore, lasted from early in the morning
+until noon, and the English were hard pressed, for their enemies were
+four to one, and the greater part men who had been used to the sea.
+
+The King, who was in the flower of his youth, showed himself on that day
+a gallant knight, as did the earls of Derby, Pembroke, Hereford,
+Huntingdon, Northampton, and Gloucester; the Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord
+Felton, Lord Bradestan, Sir Richard Stafford, the Lord Percy, Sir Walter
+Manny, Sir Henry de Flanders, Sir John Beauchamp, Sir John Chandos, the
+Lord Delaware, Lucie Lord Malton, and the Lord Robert d'Artois, now
+called Earl of Richmond.
+
+I cannot remember all the names of those who behaved so valiantly in the
+combat; but they did so well that, with some assistance from Bruges and
+those parts of the country, the French were completely defeated, and all
+the Normans and the others killed or drowned, so that not one of them
+escaped. This was soon known all over Flanders; and when it came to the
+two armies before Thin-l'Evêque, the Hainaulters were as much rejoiced
+as their enemies were dismayed.
+
+After the King had gained this victory, which was on the eve of St.
+John's Day, he remained all that night on board of his ship before
+Sluys, and there were great noises with trumpets and all kinds of other
+instruments. The Flemings came to wait on him, having heard of his
+arrival and what deeds he had performed. The King inquired of the
+citizens of Bruges after Jacob van Artevelde, and they told him he was
+gone to the aid of the Earl of Hainault with upward of sixty thousand
+men, against the Duke of Normandy. On the morrow, which was Midsummer
+Day, the King and his fleet entered the port. As soon as they were
+landed, the King, attended by crowds of knights, set out on foot on a
+pilgrimage to our Lady of Ardemburg, where he heard mass and dined. He
+then mounted his horse and went that day to Ghent, where the Queen was,
+who received him with great joy and kindness. The army and baggage, with
+the attendants of the King, followed him by degrees to the same place.
+
+
+BATTLE OF CRÉCY
+
+The two battalions of the marshals came, on Friday in the afternoon, to
+where the King was, and they fixed their quarters, all three together,
+near Crécy in Ponthieu. The King of England, who had been informed that
+the King of France was following him, in order to give him battle, said
+to his people: "Let us post ourselves here, for we will not go farther
+before we have seen our enemies. I have good reason to wait for them on
+this spot; as I am now upon the lawful inheritance of my lady mother,
+which was given her as her marriage portion, and I am resolved to defend
+it against my adversary, Philip de Valois." On account of his not having
+more than an eighth part of the forces which the King of France had, his
+marshals fixed upon the most advantageous situation, and the army went
+and took possession of it. He then sent his scouts toward Abbeville, to
+learn if the King of France meant to take the field this Friday,
+but they returned and said they saw no appearance of it; upon which he
+dismissed his men to their quarters with orders to be in readiness by
+times in the morning and to assemble in the same place. The King of
+France remained all Friday in Abbeville, waiting for more troops. He
+sent his marshals, the Lord of St. Venant and Lord Charles of
+Montmorency, out of Abbeville, to examine the country and get some
+certain intelligence of the English. They returned about vespers with
+information that the English were encamped on the plain. That night the
+King of France entertained at supper in Abbeville all the princes and
+chief lords. There was much conversation relative to war; and the King
+entreated them after supper that they would always remain in friendship
+with each other; that they would be friends without jealousy, and
+courteous without pride. The King was still expecting the Earl of Savoy,
+who ought to have been there with a thousand lances, as he had been well
+paid for them at Troyes in Champaign, three months in advance.
+
+The King of England encamped this Friday in the plain, for he found the
+country abounding in provisions, but, if they should have failed, he had
+plenty in the carriages which attended on him. The army set about
+furbishing and repairing their armor, and the King gave a supper that
+evening to the earls and barons of his army, where they made good cheer.
+On their taking leave the King remained alone with the lords of his
+bedchamber; he retired into his oratory, and, falling on his knees
+before the altar, prayed to God that if he should combat his enemies on
+the morrow, he might come off with honor. About midnight he went to bed
+and, rising early the next day, he and the Prince of Wales heard mass
+and communicated. The greater part of his army did the same, confessed,
+and made proper preparations. After mass, the King ordered his men to
+arm themselves, and assemble on the ground he had before fixed on. He
+had enclosed a large park near a wood, on the rear of his army, in which
+he placed all his baggage wagons and horses. This park had but one
+entrance; his men-at-arms and archers remained on foot.
+
+The King afterward ordered, through his constable and his two marshals,
+that the army should be divided into three battalions. In the first he
+placed the young Prince of Wales, and with him the earls of Warwick and
+Oxford, Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, the Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord Thomas
+Holland, Lord Stafford, Lord Mauley, the Lord Delaware, Sir John
+Chandos, Lord Bartholomew Burgherst, Lord Robert Neville, Lord Thomas
+Clifford, Lord Bourchier, Lord Latimer, and many other knights and
+squires. There might be, in this first division, about eight hundred
+men-at-arms, two thousand archers, and a thousand Welshmen. They
+advanced in regular order to their ground, each lord under his banner
+and pennon and in the centre of his men. In the second battalion were
+the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the lords Roos,
+Willoughby, Basset, St. Albans, Sir Lewis Tufton, Lord Multon, Lord
+Lascels, and many others; amounting, in the whole, to about eight
+hundred men-at-arms and twelve hundred archers. The third battalion was
+commanded by the King, and was composed of about seven hundred
+men-at-arms and two thousand archers.
+
+The King then mounted a small palfrey, having a white wand in his hand,
+and, attended by his two marshals on each side of him, he rode at a
+footpace through all the ranks, encouraging and entreating the army that
+they would guard his honor and defend his right. He spoke this so
+sweetly and with such a cheerful countenance that all who had been
+dispirited were directly comforted by seeing and hearing him. When he
+had thus visited all the battalions it was near ten o'clock; he retired
+to his own division, and ordered them all to eat heartily and drink a
+glass after. They ate and drank at their ease, and, having packed up
+pots, barrels, etc., in the carts they returned to their battalions
+according to the marshals' orders, and seated themselves on the ground,
+placing their helmets and bows before them, that they might be the
+fresher when their enemies should arrive.
+
+On Saturday the King of France rose betimes, and heard mass in the
+monastery of St. Peter's in Abbeville, where he was lodged; having
+ordered his army to do the same, he left that town after sunrise. When
+he had marched about two leagues from Abbeville, and was approaching the
+enemy, he was advised to form his army in order of battle and to let
+those on foot march forward that they might not be trampled on by the
+horses. The King, upon this, sent off four knights, Lord Moyne of
+Bastleberg, Lord of Noyers, Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord of Aubigny,
+who rode so near to the English that they could clearly distinguish
+their position. The English plainly perceived they were come to
+reconnoitre them; however, they took no notice of it, but suffered them
+to return unmolested. When the King of France saw them coming back, he
+halted his army; and the knights, pushing through the crowd, came near
+the King, who said to them, "My lords, what news?" They looked at each
+other, without opening their mouths, for neither chose to speak first.
+At last the King addressed himself to the Lord Moyne, who was attached
+to the King of Bohemia, and had performed very many gallant deeds, so
+that he was esteemed one of the most valiant knights in Christendom.
+Lord Moyne said: "Sir, I will speak, since it pleases you to order me,
+but under the correction of my companions. We have advanced far enough
+to reconnoitre your enemies. Know, then, that they are drawn up in three
+battalions, and are waiting for you. I would advise, for my
+part--submitting, however, to better counsel--that you halt your army
+here and quarter them for the night; for before the rear shall come up
+and the army be properly drawn out, it will be very late; your men will
+be tired and in disorder, while they will find your enemies fresh and
+properly arrayed. On the morrow you may draw up your army more at your
+ease and may reconnoitre at leisure on what part it will be most
+advantageous to begin the attack; for, be assured, they will wait for
+you." The King commanded that it should be so done, and the two marshals
+rode, one toward the front, and the other to the rear, crying out, "Halt
+banners, in the name of God and St. Denis." Those that were in the front
+halted, but those behind said they would not halt until they were as
+forward as the front. When the front perceived the rear pressing on they
+pushed forward, and neither the King nor the marshals could stop them,
+but they marched without any order until they came in sight of their
+enemies. As soon as the foremost rank saw them they fell back at once in
+great disorder, which alarmed those in the rear, who thought they had
+been fighting. There was then space and room enough for them to have
+passed forward, had they been willing so to do; some did so, but others
+remained shy. All the roads between Abbeville and Crécy were covered
+with common people, who, when they were come within three leagues of
+their enemies, drew their swords, bawling out, "Kill, kill," and with
+them were many great lords that were eager to make show of their
+courage. There is no man--unless he had been present--that can imagine
+or describe truly the confusion of that day; especially the bad
+management and disorder of the French, whose troops were out of number.
+
+The English were drawn up in three divisions and seated on the ground.
+On seeing their enemies advance they rose up and fell into their ranks.
+That of the Prince was the first to do so, whose archers were formed in
+the manner of a portcullis, or harrow, and the men-at-arms in the rear.
+The earls of Northampton and Arundel, who commanded the second division,
+had posted themselves in good order on his wing, to assist and succor
+the Prince if necessary. You must know that these kings, earls, barons,
+and lords of France did not advance in any regular order, but one after
+the other, or any way most pleasing to themselves. As soon as the King
+of France came in sight of the English his blood began to boil, and he
+cried out to his marshals, "Order the Genoese forward and begin the
+battle, in the name of God and St. Denis." There were about fifteen
+thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, but they were quite fatigued, having
+marched on foot that day six leagues, completely armed and with their
+cross-bows. They told the constable they were not in a fit condition to
+do any great things that day in battle. The Earl of Alençon, hearing
+this, said, "This is what one gets by employing such scoundrels, who
+fall off when there is any need for them." During this time a heavy rain
+fell, accompanied by thunder and a very terrible eclipse of the sun, and
+before this rain a great flight of crows hovered in the air over all
+those battalions, making a loud noise. Shortly afterward it cleared up
+and the sun shone very bright, but the Frenchmen had it on their faces
+and the English on their backs. When the Genoese were somewhat in order
+and approached the English they set up a loud shout[48] in order to
+frighten them, but they remained quite still and did not seem to attend
+to it. They then set up a second shout and advanced a little forward,
+but the English never moved.
+
+They hooted a third time, advancing with their cross-bows presented and
+began to shoot. The English archers then advanced one step forward and
+shot their arrows with such force and quickness that it seemed as if it
+snowed. When the Genoese felt these arrows, which pierced their arms,
+heads, and through their armor, some of them cut the strings of their
+cross-bows; others flung them on the ground and all turned about and
+retreated quite discomfited. The French had a large body of men-at-arms
+on horseback, richly dressed, to support the Genoese. The King of France
+seeing them thus fall back cried out, "Kill me those scoundrels, for
+they stop up our road without any reason." You would then have seen the
+above-mentioned men-at-arms lay about them, killing all they could of
+these runaways.
+
+The English continued shooting as vigorously and quickly as before; some
+of their arrows fell among the horsemen, who were sumptuously equipped,
+and, killing and wounding many, made them caper and fall among the
+Genoese, so that they were in such confusion they could never rally
+again. In the English army there were some Cornish and Welshmen on foot
+who had armed themselves with large knives. These, advancing through the
+ranks of the men-at-arms and archers, who made way for them, came upon
+the French when they were in this danger, and, falling upon earls,
+barons, knights, and squires, slew many; at which the King of England
+was afterward much exasperated. The valiant King of Bohemia was slain
+there. He was called Charles of Luxembourg, for he was the son of the
+gallant king and emperor Henry of Luxembourg. Having heard the order of
+the battle, he inquired where his son, Lord Charles, was. His attendants
+answered that they did not know, but believed he was fighting. The King
+said to them: "Gentlemen, you are all my people, my friends and
+brethren-at-arms this day; therefore, as I am blind,[49] I request of
+you to lead me so far into the engagement that I may strike one stroke
+with my sword." The knights replied that they would directly lead him
+forward, and, in order that they might not lose him in the crowd, they
+fastened all the reins of their horses together and put the King at
+their head, that he might gratify his wish and advance toward the enemy.
+Lord Charles of Bohemia--who already signed his name as King of Germany
+and bore the arms--had come in good order to the engagement, but when he
+perceived that it was likely to turn out against the French he departed.
+The King, his father, had rode in among the enemy, and made good use of
+his sword, for he and his companions had fought most gallantly. They had
+advanced so far that they were all slain, and on the morrow they were
+found on the ground, with their horses all tied together.
+
+The Earl of Alençon advanced in regular order upon the English, to fight
+with them; as did the Earl of Flanders in another part. These two lords,
+with their detachments--coasting, as it were, the archers--came to the
+Prince's battalion, where they fought valiantly for a length of time.
+The King of France was eager to march to the place were he saw their
+banners displayed, but there was a hedge of archers before him. He had
+that day made a present of a handsome black horse to Sir John of
+Hainault, who had mounted on it a knight called Sir John de Fusselles,
+that bore his banner. The horse ran off with him and forced its way
+through the English army, and, when about to return, stumbled and fell
+into a ditch and severely wounded him. He would have been dead if his
+page had not followed him round the battalions and found him unable to
+rise. He had not, however, any other hinderance than from his horse; for
+the English did not quit the ranks that day to make prisoners. The page
+alighted and raised him up, but he did not return the way he came, as he
+would have found it difficult from the crowd. This battle, which was
+fought on the Saturday, between La Broyes and Crécy, was very murderous
+and cruel, and many gallant deeds of arms were performed that were never
+known. Toward evening many knights and squires of the French had lost
+their masters. They wandered up and down the plain, attacking the
+English in small parties. They were soon destroyed, for the English had
+determined that day to give no quarter nor hear of ransom from anyone.
+
+Early in the day some French, Germans, and Savoyards had broken through
+the archers of the Prince's battalion and had engaged with the
+men-at-arms; upon which the second battalion came to his aid, otherwise
+he would have been hard pressed. The first division, seeing the danger
+they were in, sent a knight in great haste to the King of England, who
+was posted upon an eminence near a windmill. On the knight's arrival he
+said: "Sir, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Reginald Cobham, and the others
+who are about your son are vigorously attacked by the French. They
+entreat that you would come to their assistance with your battalion,
+for, if their numbers should increase, they fear he will have too much
+to do."
+
+The King replied, "Is my son dead, unhorsed, or so badly wounded that he
+cannot support himself?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort, thank God," rejoined the knight, "but he is in so
+hot an engagement that he has great need of your help." The King
+answered: "Now, Sir Thomas, return back to those that sent you, and tell
+them from me not to send again for me this day, or expect that I shall
+come, let what will happen, as long as my son has life; and say that I
+command them to let the boy win his spurs; for I am determined, if it
+please God, that all the glory and honor of this day shall be given to
+him and to those into whose care I have intrusted him." The knight
+returned to his lords, and related the King's answer, which mightily
+encouraged them and made them repent they had ever sent such a
+message.[50]
+
+It is a certain fact that Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, who was in the
+Prince's battalion, having been told by some of the English that they
+had seen the banner of his brother engaged in the battle against him,
+was exceedingly anxious to save him; but he was too late, for he was
+left dead on the field, and so was the Earl of Aumarle, his nephew. On
+the other hand, the earls of Alençon and of Flanders were fighting
+lustily under their banners and with their own people, but they could
+not resist the force of the English, and were slain, as well as many
+other knights and squires that were attending on or accompanying them.
+The Earl of Blois, nephew to the King of France, and the Duke of
+Lorraine, his brother-in-law, with their troops, made a gallant defence;
+but they were surrounded by a troop of English and Welsh and slain in
+spite of their prowess. The Earl of St. Pol and the Earl of Auxerre were
+also killed, as well as many others.
+
+Late after vespers, the King of France had not more about him than sixty
+men--every one included. Sir John of Hainault, who was of the number,
+had once remounted the King; for his horse had been killed under him by
+an arrow. He said to the King: "Sir, retreat while you have an
+opportunity and do not expose yourself so simply. If you have lost this
+battle, another time you will be the conqueror." After he had said this,
+he took the bridle of the King's horse and led him off by force, for he
+had before entreated him to retire. The King rode on until he came to
+the castle of La Broyes, where he found the gates shut, for it was very
+dark. The King ordered the governor of it to be summoned. He came upon
+the battlements and asked who it was that called at such an hour. The
+King answered: "Open, open, governor! It is the fortune of France!" The
+governor, hearing the King's voice, immediately descended, opened the
+gate and let down the bridge. The King and his company entered the
+castle, but he had only with him five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Lord
+Charles of Montmorency, Lord Beaujeu, Lord Aubigny, and Lord Montfort.
+The King would not bury himself in such a place as that, but, having
+taken some refreshments, set out again with his attendants about
+midnight, and rode on, under the direction of guides--who were well
+acquainted with the country--until about daybreak, when he came to
+Amiens, where he halted. The English never quitted their ranks in
+pursuit of anyone, but remained on the field, guarding their position
+and defending themselves against all who attacked them. The battle was
+ended at the hour of vespers.
+
+When, on Saturday night, the English heard no more hooting or shouting,
+nor any more crying out to particular lords or their banners, they
+looked upon the field as their own and their enemies as beaten. They
+made great fires, and lighted torches because of the obscurity of the
+night. King Edward then came down from his post, who all that day had
+not put on his helmet, and with his whole battalion advanced to the
+Prince of Wales, whom he embraced in his arms and kissed, and said:
+"Sweet son, God give you good perseverance; you are my son, for most
+loyally have you acquitted yourself this day. You are worthy to be a
+sovereign." The Prince bowed down very low and humbled himself, giving
+all the honor to the King, his father. The English, during the night,
+made frequent thanksgivings to the Lord for the happy issue of the day,
+and without rioting, for the King had forbidden all riot or noise. On
+Sunday morning there was so great a fog that one could scarcely see the
+distance of half an acre. The King ordered a detachment from the army,
+under the command of the two marshals--consisting of about five hundred
+lances and two thousand archers--to make an excursion and see if there
+were any bodies of French troops collected together. The quota of troops
+from Rouen and Beauvais had that morning left Abbeville and St. Ricquier
+in Ponthieu to join the French army, and were ignorant of the defeat of
+the preceding evening. They met this detachment, and, thinking they must
+be French, hastened to join them.
+
+As soon as the English found who they were, they fell upon them and
+there was a sharp engagement. The French soon turned their backs and
+fled in great disorder. There were slain in this flight in the open
+fields, under hedges and bushes, upward of seven thousand; and had it
+been clear weather, not one soul would have escaped.
+
+A little time afterward this same party fell in with the Archbishop of
+Rouen and the great Prior of France, who were also ignorant of the
+discomfiture of the French, for they had been informed that the King was
+not to fight before Sunday. Here began a fresh battle; for those two
+lords were well attended by good men-at-arms. However, they could not
+withstand the English, but were almost all slain, with the two chiefs
+who commanded them; very few escaping. In the morning the English found
+many Frenchmen who had lost their road on Saturday and had lain in the
+open fields, not knowing what was become of the King or their own
+leaders. The English put to the sword all they met; and it has been
+assured to me for fact that of foot soldiers, sent from the cities,
+towns, and municipalities, there were slain, this Sunday morning, four
+times as many as in the battle of Saturday.
+
+This detachment, which had been sent to look after the French, returned
+as the King was coming from mass, and related to him all that they had
+seen and met with. After he had been assured by them that there was not
+any likelihood of the French collecting another army, he sent to have
+the number and condition of the dead examined. He ordered on this
+business Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord Stafford, and three heralds to
+examine their arms, and two secretaries to write down all the names.
+They took much pains to examine all the dead, and were the whole day in
+the field of battle, not returning but just as the King was sitting down
+to supper. They made him a very circumstantial report of all they had
+observed, and said they had found eighty banners, the bodies of eleven
+princes, twelve hundred knights, and about thirty thousand common men.
+
+
+
+
+MODERN RECOGNITION OF SCENIC BEAUTY
+
+CROWNING OF PETRARCH AT ROME
+
+A.D. 1341
+
+JACOB BURCKHARDT
+
+
+  The beauty of nature, of natural scenery amid mountains,
+  fields, and lakes, seems to have passed unheeded during
+  early mediæval times. Even in the ancient days of classic
+  culture it apparently attracted very little notice, except
+  from an occasional poet. The present attitude of enthusiasm,
+  which leads thousands of tourists to flock to Switzerland or
+  to Niagara every year, is wholly a modern development. This
+  development of what is almost a new sense in man certainly
+  deserves notice. To fix an exact date for its beginning is,
+  of course, impossible, but it is generally regarded as a
+  product of the Italian Renaissance, and Burckhardt, seeking
+  for its slow unfolding, traces it back to Petrarch, who, in
+  his poetry, speaks of nature repeatedly.
+
+  Petrarch's poetry was so highly valued by the Italians that
+  they unanimously agreed to confer upon the author a laurel
+  crown. This was a revival of the old Greek method of
+  honoring poets, and as such it was felt by the Italians a
+  specially fitting way to proclaim their reviving interest in
+  art. So a great public gathering was arranged at Rome, and
+  the laurel was with elaborate ceremonies placed on
+  Petrarch's brow.
+
+  The recipient of this new and distinguished honor is
+  regarded as second only to Dante in Italian literature. In
+  addition to his world-famed sonnets to Laura, he wrote
+  much-admired Latin poems, and was a scholar of high repute.
+  His enthusiasm for the ancient Greek and Latin authors made
+  him the central figure in that revival of classic learning
+  which at this time began in Italy.
+
+Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
+great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to
+the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that
+he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavored by his voluminous
+historical and philosophical writings not to supplant, but to make
+known, the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises
+on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
+unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
+handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings
+would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and
+thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he
+would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in
+blotting them out from the memory of men.
+
+It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
+known of the _Decameron_ north of the Alps, he was famous all over
+Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
+geography, and biography. One of these, _de Genealogia Deorum_, contains
+in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he
+discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the
+age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to _poesia_, as
+closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity
+of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously
+combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but
+debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian
+fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers,
+to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it;
+finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly
+enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality.
+Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the
+ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the
+praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings
+which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity
+which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant.
+
+And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work, the
+writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
+The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
+fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ!--true
+religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church
+in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and
+study paganism almost (_fere_) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did
+not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
+partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
+and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a
+theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the
+name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up
+his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined
+to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
+the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter's able
+demonstration that humanism was reconcilable with religion.
+
+There was thus a new cause in the world, and a new class of men to
+maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
+short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
+and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
+conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind than that
+antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.
+
+There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of
+poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
+coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this
+system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony
+never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and
+visible expression of literary enthusiasm, and naturally its form was
+variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the sense
+of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the
+baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine
+children, he had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have
+anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it
+nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned. From the
+same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held
+to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The most recent
+source to which the practices could be referred is to be found in the
+Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists, founded by
+Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five years,
+which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
+Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante
+desired to do, the question arises, To whom did this office belong?
+Albertino Mussato was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the Bishop and the
+rector of the university.
+
+The University of Paris, the rector of which was then a Florentine,
+1341, and the municipal authorities of Rome competed for the honor of
+crowning Petrarch. His self-elected examiner, King Robert of Anjou,
+would gladly have performed the ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch
+preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This
+honor was long the highest object of ambition, and so it seemed to
+Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the
+Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of
+ambitious men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous
+ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the coronation of poets was a
+prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently was no less his
+own, he crowned, May 15, 1355, the Florentine scholar Zanobi della
+Strada at Pisa, to the annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that the
+barbarian laurel had dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian muses,
+and to the great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognize this
+_laurea Pisana_ as legitimate. Indeed, it might be fairly asked with
+what right this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in
+judgment on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the
+emperors crowned poets whenever they went on their travels; and in the
+fifteenth century the popes and other princes assumed the same right,
+till at last no regard whatever was paid to place or circumstances.
+
+Outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another way to
+draw near to nature. The Italians are the first among modern peoples by
+whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. The
+power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated
+development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a dim feeling
+of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in poetry and
+painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients,
+for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human
+interests before they turned to the representation of nature, and even
+then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet,
+from the time of Homer downward, the powerful impression made by nature
+upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The
+Germanic races which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman
+Empire were thoroughly and specially fitted to understand the spirit of
+natural scenery; and though Christianity compelled them for a while to
+see in the springs and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they had
+till then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional
+conception was soon outgrown.
+
+By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty
+enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found lively
+expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence
+of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature--spring
+with its flowers, the green fields, and the woods. But these pictures
+are all foreground, without perspective. Even the crusaders, who
+travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in these
+poems. The epic poetry, which describes armor and costumes so fully,
+does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and even the
+great Wolfram von Eschenbach scarcely anywhere gives us an adequate
+picture of the scene on which his heroes move. From these poems it would
+never be guessed that their noble authors in all countries inhabited or
+visited lofty castles, commanding distant prospects. Even in the Latin
+poems of the wandering clerks, we find no traces of a distant view--of
+landscape properly so called; but what lies near is sometimes described
+with a glow and splendor which none of the knightly minstrels can
+surpass.
+
+To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time lost its
+taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. St.
+Francis of Assisi, in his _Hymn to the Sun_, frankly praises the Lord
+for creating the heavenly bodies and the four elements.
+
+The unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human
+spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous
+lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the
+distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he
+makes the ascent of lofty peaks, _with_ the only possible object of
+enjoying the view--the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity
+who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how country
+scenery affected him; yet his pastoral romances show his imagination to
+have been filled with it.
+
+But the significance of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and
+clearly displayed by Petrarch--one of the first truly modern men. That
+clear soul--who first collected from the literature of all countries
+evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of natural beauty, and
+himself, in his _Ansichten der Natur_, achieved the noblest masterpiece
+of description--Alexander von Humboldt, has not done full justice to
+Petrarch; and, following in the steps of the great reaper, we may still
+hope to glean a few ears of interest and value.
+
+Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of Italy
+is said to have been drawn by his direction--and not only a reproducer
+of the sayings of the ancients, but felt himself the influence of
+natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the favorite
+accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the two that
+he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from
+time to time fled from the world and from his age. We should do him
+wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of describing
+natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture, for
+instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he
+inserts at the end of the sixth book of the _Africa_, for the reason
+that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it, is no more than a
+simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his friends of
+Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly lingered,
+are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also conscious of
+the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the
+picturesqueness from the utility of nature. During his stay among the
+woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected
+him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deepest
+impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of Mont Ventoux, near
+Avignon. An indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger and
+stronger in him, till at length the accidental sight of a passage in
+Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Haemus, decided
+him. He thought that what was not blamed in a gray-headed monarch might
+be well excused in a young man of private station.
+
+The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard of, and there
+could be no thought of the companionship of friends or acquaintances.
+Petrarch took with him only his younger brother and two country people
+from the last place where he halted. At the foot of the mountain an old
+herdsman besought him to turn back, saying that he himself had attempted
+to climb it fifty years before, and had brought home nothing but
+repentance, broken bones, and torn clothes, and that neither before nor
+after had anyone ventured to do the same. Nevertheless, they struggled
+forward and upward, till the clouds lay beneath their feet, and at last
+they reached the top. A description of the view from the summit would be
+looked for in vain, not because the poet was insensible to it, but, on
+the contrary, because the impression was too overwhelming. His whole
+past life, with all its follies, rose before his mind; he remembered
+that ten years ago that day he had quitted Bologna a young man, and
+turned a longing gaze toward his native country; he opened a book which
+then was his constant companion, the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine, and
+his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter, "and men go forth, and
+admire lofty mountains and broad seas and roaring torrents and the ocean
+and the course of the stars, and forget their own selves while doing
+so." His brother, to whom he read these words, could not understand why
+he closed the book and said no more.
+
+Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes, in his
+rhyming geography, the wide panorama from the mountains of Auvergne,
+with the interest, it is true, of the geographer and antiquarian only,
+but still showing clearly that he himself had seen it. He must, however,
+have ascended higher peaks, since he is familiar with facts which only
+occur at a height of ten thousand feet or more above the
+sea--mountain-sickness and its accompaniments--of which his imaginary
+comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in essence. The
+ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he speaks, are perhaps only
+fictions.
+
+In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish school,
+Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their
+landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavor to reflect the real
+world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain
+poetical meaning--in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of
+the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the
+Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the
+Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression.
+
+On this point, as in the scientific description of nature, Æneas Sylvius
+is again one of the most weighty voices of his time. Even if we grant
+the justice of all that has been said against his character, we must,
+nevertheless, admit that in few other men was the picture of the age and
+its culture so fully reflected, and that few came nearer to the normal
+type of the men of the early Renaissance. It may be added
+parenthetically that even in respect to his moral character he will not
+be fairly judged if we listen solely to the complaints of the German
+Church, which his fickleness helped to balk of the council it so
+ardently desired.
+
+He here claims our attention as the first who not only enjoyed the
+magnificence of the Italian landscape, but described it with enthusiasm
+down to its minutest details. The ecclesiastical state and the South of
+Tuscany--his native home--he knew thoroughly, and after he became pope
+he spent his leisure during the favorable season chiefly in excursions
+to the country. Then at last the gouty man was rich enough to have
+himself carried in a litter through the mountains and valleys; and when
+we compare his enjoyments with those of the popes who succeeded him,
+Pius, whose chief delight was in nature, antiquity, and simple but noble
+architecture, appears almost a saint. In the elegant and flowing Latin
+of his _Commentaries_ he freely tells us of his happiness.
+
+His eye seems as keen and practised as that of any modern observer. He
+enjoys with rapture the panoramic splendor of the view from the summit
+of the Alban hills--from the Monte Cavo--whence he could see the shores
+of St. Peter from Terracina and the promontory of Circe as far as Monte
+Argentaro, and the wide expanse of country round about, with the ruined
+cities of the past, and with the mountain chains of central Italy
+beyond; and then his eye would turn to the green woods in the hollows
+beneath, and the mountain lakes among them. He feels the beauty of the
+position of Todi, crowning the vineyards and olive-clad slopes, looking
+down upon distant woods and upon the valley of the Tiber, where towns
+and castles rise above the winding river. The lovely hills about Siena,
+with villas and monasteries on every height, are his own home, and his
+descriptions of them are touched with a peculiar feeling. Single
+picturesque glimpses charm him, too, like the little promontory of Capo
+di Monte that stretches out into the Lake of Bolsena. "Rocky steps," we
+read, "shaded by vines, descend to the water's edge, where the evergreen
+oaks stand between the cliffs, alive with the song of thrushes." On the
+path round the Lake of Nemi, beneath the chestnuts and fruit-trees, he
+feels that here, if anywhere, a poet's soul must awake--here in the
+hiding-place of Diana! He often held consistories or received
+ambassadors under huge old chestnut-trees, or beneath the olives on the
+greensward by some gurgling spring. A view like that of a narrowing
+gorge, with a bridge arched boldly over it, awakens at once his artistic
+sense. Even the smallest details give him delight through something
+beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic in them--the blue fields of
+waving flax, the yellow gorge which covers the hills, even tangled
+thickets, or single trees, or springs, which seem to him like wonders of
+nature.
+
+The height of his enthusiasm for natural beauty was reached during his
+stay on Monte Amiata, in the summer of 1462, when plague and heat made
+the lowlands uninhabitable. Half way up the mountain, in the old Lombard
+monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court took up their quarters.
+There, between the chestnuts which clothe the steep declivity, the eye
+may wander over all Southern Tuscany, with the towers of Siena in the
+distance. The ascent of the highest peak he left to his companions, who
+were joined by the Venetian envoy; they found at the top two vast blocks
+of stone one upon the other--perhaps the sacrificial altar of a
+prehistorical people--and fancied that in the far distance they saw
+Corsica and Sardinia rising above the sea.
+
+In the cool air of the hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, on the
+green meadows where there were no thorns to wound the feet and no snakes
+or insects to hurt or to annoy, the Pope passed days of unclouded
+happiness. For the _segnatura_, which took place on certain days of the
+week, he selected on each occasion some new shady retreat "_novas in
+convallibus fontes et novas inveniens umbras, quæ dubiam jacerent
+electionem_." At such times the dogs would perhaps start a great stag
+from his lair, who, after defending himself a while with hoofs and
+antlers, would fly at last up the mountain. In the evening the Pope was
+accustomed to sit before the monastery on the spot from which the whole
+valley of the Paglia was visible, holding lively conversations with the
+cardinals. The courtiers, who ventured down from the heights on their
+hunting expeditions, found the heat below intolerable, and the scorched
+plains like a very hell, while the monastery, with its cool, shady
+woods, seemed like an abode of the blessed.
+
+All this is genuine modern enjoyment, not a reflection of antiquity. As
+surely as the ancients themselves felt in the same manner, so surely,
+nevertheless, were the scanty expressions of the writers whom Pius knew
+insufficient to awaken in him such enthusiasm.
+
+The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of
+the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period,
+is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind.
+The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to
+convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are
+very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and
+the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. Bojardo and
+Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as briefly as possible, and with no
+effort to appeal by their descriptions to the feelings of the reader,
+which they endeavor to reach solely by their narrative and characters.
+
+Letter-writers and the authors of philosophical dialogues are, in fact,
+better evidences of the growing love of nature than the poets. The
+novelist Bandello, for example, observes rigorously the rules of his
+department of literature; he gives us in his novels themselves not a
+word more than is necessary on the natural scenery amid which the action
+of his tales takes place, but in the dedications which always precede
+them we meet with charming descriptions of nature as the setting for his
+dialogues and social pictures. Among letter-writers, Aretino
+unfortunately must be named as the first who has fully painted in words
+the splendid effect of light and shadow in an Italian sunset.
+
+We sometimes find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with
+tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the
+year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the dwelling of his mistress. We
+are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with
+weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much
+damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far
+off, the priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This
+is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment.
+
+It may be objected that the German painters at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these
+scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his
+engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought
+up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another
+thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is
+driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority in point
+of time is here, as in the descriptions of country life, on the side of
+the Italian poets.
+
+
+
+
+RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME
+
+A.D. 1347
+
+R. LODGE
+
+
+  When for nearly forty years Rome had been deserted by the
+  popes, who had betaken themselves in 1309 to a long
+  residence at Avignon, France, and when the Eternal City was
+  virtually without an imperial government--the Teutonic
+  emperors having likewise abandoned her--she fell back upon
+  the memories of her great past, recalling the glories of her
+  ancient supremacy and the means whereby it had been
+  established and maintained. Whatever might promise to
+  restore it she was ready to welcome.
+
+  At this time the real masters of Rome were the princes or
+  barons dwelling in their fortified castles outside or in
+  their strong palaces within the city. Over the northern
+  district, near the Quirinal, reigned the celebrated old
+  family of the Colonnas; while along the Tiber, from the
+  Campo-di-Fiore to the Church of St. Peter, extended the sway
+  of the new family of the Orsini. Other members of the
+  nobility, in the country, held their seats in small
+  fortified cities or castles. Under such domination Rome had
+  become almost deserted. "The population of the seven-hilled
+  city had come down to about thirty thousand souls." When at
+  peace with one another--which was rarely--the barons
+  exercised over the citizens and serfs a combined tyranny,
+  while the farmers, travellers, and pilgrims were made
+  victims of their plunder. At this period Petrarch--that
+  "first modern man"--wrote to Pope Clement VI that Rome had
+  become the abode of demons, the receptacle of all crimes, a
+  hell for the living.
+
+  "It was in these circumstances that a momentary revival of
+  order and liberty was effected by the most extraordinary
+  adventurer of an age that was prolific in adventurers." This
+  was Cola Di Rienzi, who was born in Rome about 1313, and who
+  is sometimes styled "an Italian patriot." In his ambitious
+  endeavor to reinstate the Cæsarean power in Italy he appears
+  alternately in the figure of a hero and the character of a
+  charlatan. Believing himself the founder of a new era, he
+  was inflamed by his successes, and ended in "mystical
+  extravagances and follies which could not fail to cause his
+  ruin."
+
+Cola Di Rienzi was born of humble parents, though he afterward tried to
+gratify his own vanity and to gain the ear of Charles IV by claiming to
+be the bastard son of Henry VII. A wrong which he could not venture to
+avenge excited his bitter hostility against the baronage, while the
+study of Livy and other classical writers inspired him with regretful
+admiration for the glories of ancient Rome.
+
+He succeeded in attracting notice by his personal beauty and by the
+rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent. In 1342 he took the
+most prominent part in an embassy from the citizens to Clement VI; and
+though he failed to induce the Pope to return to Rome, which at that
+time he seems to have regarded as the panacea for the evils of the time,
+he gained sufficient favor at Avignon to be appointed papal notary.
+
+From this time he deliberately set himself to raise the people to open
+resistance against their oppressors, while he disarmed the suspicions of
+the nobles by intentional buffoonery and extravagance of conduct. On May
+20, 1347, the first blow was struck. Rienzi, with a chosen band of
+conspirators, and accompanied by the papal vicar, who had every interest
+in weakening the baronage, proceeded to the Capitol, and, amid the
+applause of the mob, promulgated the laws of the _buono stato_.
+
+He himself took the title of tribune, in order to emphasize his
+championship of the lower classes. The most important of his laws were
+for the maintenance of order. Private garrisons and fortified houses
+were forbidden. Each of the thirteen districts was to maintain an armed
+force of a hundred infantry and twenty-five horsemen. Every port was
+provided with a cruiser for the protection of merchandise, and the trade
+on the Tiber was to be secured by a river police.
+
+The nobles watched the progress of this astonishing revolution with
+impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day,
+expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on
+his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the
+city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete,
+when the proudest nobles of Rome submitted and took an oath to support
+the new constitution. But the suddenness of his success was enough to
+turn a head which was never of the strongest.
+
+The Tribune began to dream of restoring to the Roman Republic its old
+supremacy. And for a moment even this dream seemed hardly chimerical.
+Europe was really dazzled by the revival of its ancient capital. Louis
+of Hungary and Joanna of Naples submitted their quarrel to Rienzi's
+arbitration. Thus encouraged, he set no bounds to his ambition. He
+called upon the Pope and cardinals to return at once to Rome. He
+summoned Louis and Charles, the two claimants to the Imperial dignity,
+to appear before his throne and submit to his tribunal.
+
+His arrogance was shown in the pretentious titles which he assumed and
+in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied on public and even on
+private occasions. On August 15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in
+which the emperor Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with
+seven crowns representing the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. His most
+loyal admirer prophesied disaster when the Tribune ventured on this
+occasion to blasphemously compare himself with Christ.
+
+Rienzi's government deteriorated with his personal character. It had at
+first been liberal and just; it became arbitrary and even treacherous.
+His personal timidity made him at once harsh and vacillating. The heads
+of the great families, whom he had invited to a banquet, were seized and
+condemned to death on a charge of conspiracy. But a sudden terror of the
+possible consequences of his action caused him to relent, and he
+released his victims just as they were preparing for execution. His
+leniency was as ill-timed as his previous severity. The nobles could no
+longer trust him, and their fear was diminished by the weakness which
+they despised while they profited by it. They retired from Rome and
+concerted measures for the overthrow of their enemy.
+
+The first attack, which was led by Stefano Colonna, was repulsed almost
+by accident; but Rienzi, who had shown more cowardice than generalship,
+disgusted his supporters by his indecent exultation over the bodies of
+the slain. And there was one fatal ambiguity in Rienzi's position. He
+had begun by announcing himself as the ally and champion of the papacy,
+and Clement VI had been willing enough to stand by and watch the
+destruction of the baronage. But the growing independence and the
+arrogant pretensions of the Tribune exasperated the Pope. A new legate
+was despatched to Italy to denounce and excommunicate Rienzi as a
+heretic. The latter had no longer any support to lean upon. When a new
+attack was threatened, the people sullenly refused to obey the call to
+arms. Rienzi had not sufficient courage to risk a final struggle. On
+December 15th he abdicated and retired in disguise from Rome. His rise
+to power, his dazzling triumph, and his downfall were all comprised
+within the brief period of seven months.
+
+For the next few years Rienzi disappeared from view. According to his
+own account he was concealed in a cave in the Apennines, where he
+associated with some of the wilder members of the sect of the Fraticelli
+and probably imbibed some of their tenets. Rome relapsed into anarchy,
+and men's minds were distracted from politics by the ravages of the
+black death. The great jubilee held in Rome in 1350 became a kind of
+thanksgiving service of those whom the plague had spared.
+
+It is said that Rienzi himself visited the scene of his exploits without
+detection among the crowds of pilgrims. But he was destined to reappear
+in a more public and disastrous manner. In his solitude his courage and
+his ambition revived, and he meditated new plans for restoring freedom
+to Rome and to Italy. The allegiance to the Church, which he had
+professed in 1347, was weakened by the conduct of Clement VI and by the
+influence of the Fraticelli, and he resolved in the future to ally
+himself with the secular rather than with the ecclesiastical power, with
+the Empire rather than with the papacy. In August, 1351, he appeared in
+disguise in Prague and demanded an audience of Charles IV. To him he
+proposed the far-reaching scheme which he had formed during his exile.
+
+The Pope and the whole body of clergy were to be deprived of their
+temporal power; the petty tyrants of Italy were to be driven out; and
+the Emperor was to fix his residence in Rome as the supreme ruler of
+Christendom. All this was to be accomplished by Rienzi himself at his
+own cost and trouble. Charles IV listened with some curiosity to a man
+whose career had excited such universal interest, but he was the last
+man to be carried away by such chimerical suggestions.
+
+The introduction into the political proposals of some of the religious
+and communistic ideas of the Fraticelli gave the Emperor a pretext for
+committing Rienzi to the Archbishop of Prague for correction and
+instruction. The Archbishop communicated with the Pope, and on the
+demand of Clement VI Charles agreed to hand Rienzi over to the papal
+court on condition that his life should be spared. In 1352 Rienzi was
+conveyed to Avignon and thrust into prison. He owed his life perhaps
+less to the Emperor's request than to the opportune death of Clement VI
+in this year.
+
+The new Pope, Innocent VI, was more independent of French control than
+his immediate predecessors. The French King was fully occupied with
+internal disorders and with the English war. Thus the Pope was able to
+give more attention to Italian politics, which were sufficiently
+pressing. The independence and anarchy of the Papal States constituted a
+serious problem, but the danger of their subjection to a foreign power
+was still more serious. In 1350 the important city of Bologna had been
+seized by the Visconti of Milan, and the progress of this powerful
+family threatened to absorb the whole of the Romagna. Innocent
+determined to resist their encroachments and at the same time to restore
+the papal authority, and in 1353 he intrusted this double task to
+Cardinal Albornoz.
+
+Albornoz, equally distinguished as a diplomatist and as a military
+commander, resolved to ally the cause of the papacy with that of
+liberty. His programme was to overthrow the tyrants as the enemies both
+of the people and of the popes, and to restore municipal self-government
+under papal protection. His attention was first directed to the city of
+Rome, which, after many vicissitudes since 1347, had fallen under the
+influence of a demagogue named Baroncelli.
+
+Baroncelli had revived to some extent the schemes of Rienzi, but had
+declared openly against papal rule. To oppose this new tribune, Albornoz
+conceived the project of using the influence of Rienzi, whose rule was
+now regretted by the populace that had previously deserted him. The Pope
+was persuaded to release Rienzi from prison and to send him to Rome,
+where the effect of his presence was almost magical. The Romans flocked
+to welcome their former liberator, and he was reinstalled in power with
+the title of senator, conferred upon him by the Pope. But his character
+was not improved by adversity, and his rule was more arbitrary and
+selfish than it had been before.
+
+The execution of the _condottiere_, Fra Moreale, was an act of
+ingratitude as well as of treachery. Popular favor was soon alienated
+from a ruler who could no longer command either affection or respect,
+and, in a mob rising, Rienzi was put to death, October 8, 1354. But his
+return had served the purpose of Albornoz. Rome was preserved to the
+papacy, and the cardinal could proceed in safety with his task of
+subduing the independent tyrants of Romagna.
+
+Central Italy had not yet witnessed the general introduction of
+mercenaries, and the native populations still fought their own battles.
+The policy of exciting revolts among the subject citizens was completely
+successful, and by 1360 almost the whole of Romagna had submitted to the
+papal legate. His triumph was crowned in this year, when, by skilful use
+of quarrels among the Visconti princes, he succeeded in recovering
+Bologna.
+
+
+
+
+BEGINNING AND PROGRESS OF THE RENAISSANCE
+
+FOURTEENTH TO SIXTEENTH CENTURY
+
+JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
+
+
+  The new birth or resurrection known as the "Renaissance" is
+  usually considered to have begun in Italy in the fourteenth
+  century, though some writers would date its origin from the
+  reign of Frederick II, 1215-1250; and by this Prince--the
+  most enlightened man of his age--it was at least
+  anticipated. Well versed in languages and science, he was a
+  patron of scholars, whom he gathered about him, from all
+  parts of the world, at his court in Palermo.
+
+  At all events the Renaissance was heralded through the
+  recovery by Italian scholars of Greek and Roman classical
+  literature. When the movement began, the civilization of
+  Greece and Rome had long been exerting a partial influence,
+  not only upon Italy, but on other parts of mediæval Europe
+  as well. But in Italy especially, when the wave of barbarism
+  had passed, the people began to feel a returning
+  consciousness of their ancient culture, and a desire to
+  reproduce it. To Italians the Latin language was easy, and
+  their country abounded in documents and monumental records
+  which symbolized past greatness.
+
+  The modern Italian spirit was produced through the
+  combination of various elements, among which were the
+  political institutions brought by the Lombards from Germany,
+  the influence of chivalry and other northern forms of
+  civilization, and the more immediate power of the Church.
+  That which was foreshadowed in the thirteenth century became
+  in the fourteenth a distinct national development, which, as
+  Symonds, its most discerning interpreter, shows us, was
+  constructing a model for the whole western world.
+
+The word "renaissance" has of late years received a more extended
+significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent--the
+"revival of learning." We use it to denote the whole transition from the
+Middle Ages to the modern world; and though it is possible to assign
+certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we
+cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say between this year and
+that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to
+name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended.
+Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer.
+
+The truth is that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The
+evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is
+progressive. As in the transformation scene of some pantomime, so here
+the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first
+shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the
+old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the
+new scene be finally set up?
+
+In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to
+any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one
+department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they
+mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution
+effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of
+antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see
+in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for
+antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a
+correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new
+systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the
+Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science
+will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and
+Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation
+of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point
+which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian,
+again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism,
+the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of
+monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority, and the
+erection of the papacy into an Italian kingdom, and in the last place
+the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in
+the Revolution: these are the aspects of the movement which engross his
+attention.
+
+Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the
+False Decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman code, and
+the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of modern
+iurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law.
+Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and
+inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will
+point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing
+and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by
+gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the
+instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the
+dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and
+perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.
+
+Yet neither any one of these answers, taken separately, nor indeed all
+of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. By the term
+"renaissance," or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be
+explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an
+effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the
+onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the
+Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature
+or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of
+self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European
+races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no
+restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the
+inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at
+the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of
+the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery
+which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the
+spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that
+moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues,
+vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.
+
+How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries
+after Christ, to speak roughly, humanity awoke as it were from slumber
+and began to live? That is a question which we can but imperfectly
+answer. The mystery of organic life defeats analysis. Whether the
+subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the
+commencement of a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or
+a new phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to
+state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point
+out what are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover, we must be
+careful not to be carried away by words of our own making. Renaissance,
+Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being
+isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we
+find it convenient to name; while history itself is one and continuous,
+so that our utmost endeavors to regard some portion of it, independently
+of the rest, will be defeated.
+
+A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after the
+dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there was no possibility
+of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had deluged
+Europe had to absorb their barbarism; the fragments of Roman
+civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated; the Germanic
+nations had to receive culture and religion from the effete people they
+had superseded. It was further necessary that the modern nationalities
+should be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that
+peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated, before
+the indispensable _milieu_ for a resurrection of the free spirit of
+humanity could exist. The first nation which fulfilled these conditions
+was the first to inaugurate the new era. The reason why Italy took the
+lead in the Renaissance was that Italy possessed a language, a favorable
+climate, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, at a time when
+other nations were still semibarbarous. Where the human spirit had been
+buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins
+of that Empire; and the papacy--called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead
+Roman Empire, seated, throned, and crowned, upon the ashes thereof--to
+some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.
+
+Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the
+Renaissance was intellectual--that it was the emancipation of the reason
+for the modern world--we may inquire how feudalism was related to it.
+The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration
+before the idols of the Church--dogma and authority and scholasticism.
+Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by
+the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the
+outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate,
+without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the
+traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter
+rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult
+hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved for humanity during
+the Middle Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was
+done unconsciously--that it was a gradual and instinctive process of
+becoming. The reason, in a word, was not awake; the mind of man was
+ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to
+think of the mediæval students poring over a single ill-translated
+sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole
+systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles
+more idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at
+Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle
+were alive, but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to
+bid them speak with voice intelligible to the modern mind. It is no less
+pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of humanity sweeping from
+all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but unavailing foam upon the
+shores of Palestine, whole nations laying life down for the chance of
+seeing the walls of Jerusalem, worshipping the sepulchre whence Christ
+had risen, loading their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the
+sacred earth, while all the time, within their breasts and brains, the
+spirit of the Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of
+freedom which ere long was destined to restore its birthright to the
+world.
+
+Meanwhile the Middle Age accomplished its own work. Slowly and
+obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations
+and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took
+shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters,
+and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed.
+The qualities which render modern society different from that of the
+ancient world were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity,
+by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further
+phase. After the nations had been moulded, their monarchies and
+dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into
+various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany
+numerous principalities sprang into preëminence; and though the nation
+was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was
+acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of
+which the king could say, "_L'état c'est moi_." England developed her
+complicated constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the
+same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of
+transformation. The papacy became more autocratic. Like the king the
+pope began to say, "_L'Église c'est moi_." This merging of the mediæval
+state and mediæval church in the personal supremacy of king and pope may
+be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism which
+preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary milieu was
+prepared. The organization of the five great nations, and the levelling
+of political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual
+despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the
+Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
+Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still
+evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.
+
+Meanwhile it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly
+upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms.
+Far from that, within the Middle Age itself, over and over again, the
+reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth
+century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and
+words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of
+the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that
+man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate
+between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his
+lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of
+the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three
+men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as
+an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
+emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs,
+especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were
+ready to resume their sway. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari,
+the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites--heretics in
+whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by
+the Church.
+
+We have to commemorate the vast conception of the emperor Frederick II,
+who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of
+Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance.
+He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly
+we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering
+her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not
+yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature
+and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoöphytic members of
+half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the
+birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans
+imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to
+keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles
+of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick;
+Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make
+way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the
+parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by
+sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with
+demoniac zeal--these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe.
+Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary
+and sterile.
+
+Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
+conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
+first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
+shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal of antique culture as
+the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
+his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
+speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
+Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
+Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
+freedom. His conception of human existence as a joy to be accepted with
+thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
+familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semipagan gladness
+that marked the real Renaissance.
+
+In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of
+intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;
+but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
+With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to
+create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius
+reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a
+splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of
+the world, the goodliness of youth, and strength and love and life,
+unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.
+
+It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had
+lost, indeed, the heroic spirit which we admire in her communes of the
+thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that
+repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last
+began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried
+the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of
+mediævalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were
+as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who
+were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted,
+their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of
+enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially
+preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fibre of the men who
+were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to
+delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their
+capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No
+generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them
+down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of
+thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses
+rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They
+yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the
+same time the period of satiety was still far off.
+
+Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single
+pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment
+when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are
+not blunted, nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first
+time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we
+may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing
+is more remarkable than the fulness of the life that throbbed in them.
+Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of
+sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of
+personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning has written of
+Sordello's temperament:
+
+            "A footfall there
+  Suffices to upturn to the warm air
+  Half-germinating spices, mere decay
+  Produces richer life, and day by day
+  New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
+  And still more labyrinthine buds the rose."
+
+During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not
+seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and
+turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like St. Bernard travelling
+along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the
+waters nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
+mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
+thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule--even like this
+monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
+sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not
+known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is
+a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost,
+death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven
+hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and
+submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of
+life--these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediæval Church. The
+Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which
+they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing
+the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the
+mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical
+humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make
+himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as
+destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a
+dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.
+
+An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
+spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
+the ancient mind, which followed upon what is called the Revival of
+Learning. The fall of the Greek empire in 1453, while it signalized the
+extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated
+forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under
+all manifestations was generated. Men found that in classical as well as
+biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and
+intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern
+genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the
+ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the
+exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to
+be one.
+
+The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the
+world and the discovery of man. Under these two formulas may be
+classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The
+discovery of the world divides itself into two branches--the exploration
+of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is
+in fact what we call science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the
+Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar
+system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain
+statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid
+what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is
+only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with
+the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude
+of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been
+added to civilization.
+
+In like manner, it is worth while to pause a moment and consider what is
+implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system.
+The world, regarded in old times as the centre of all things, the apple
+of God's eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars,
+suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant
+sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable
+suns, attended each by a _cortège_ of planets, and scattered--how, we
+know not--through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the
+old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up
+through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples?
+The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a
+blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by
+annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo
+for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that
+in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her
+most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology.
+
+Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and
+religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth God could not be
+worshipped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new
+meaning had been given to the words "God is a Spirit, and they that
+worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The reason of man
+was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a
+part, and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three
+centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized
+astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have
+since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious, but also
+incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life, and then
+considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten
+centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to
+estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued
+from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with
+the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has
+never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the
+first-born of the spirit of the modern world.
+
+Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the
+appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable
+world, and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know
+about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is
+possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations,
+illustrated by pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations,
+illustrated by biblical antiquity: these are the two regions, at first
+apparently distinct, afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the
+critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for
+investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at
+work--art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
+philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism--a
+frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without
+inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically
+connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which
+to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the
+worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond
+eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy;
+and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the
+natural forms he saw around him.
+
+But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose.
+Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy
+of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite
+devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost
+beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude;
+he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented
+attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of
+his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the
+altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way
+the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to
+earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by
+dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of
+beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the
+Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of
+physical perfection, and to introduce _un bel corpo ignudo_ into the
+composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations
+of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the
+host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it
+expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of
+progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly
+human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.
+
+Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church,
+diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of
+beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became
+the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final
+emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great
+age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the
+Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally
+religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on
+a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received
+into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown
+her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna
+Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother.
+Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing
+devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went
+further, and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with
+architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church
+by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.
+
+Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
+introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world
+a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the
+pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements
+within the tomb of the mediæval cloister. It was scholarship which
+revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human
+thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life
+regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the
+Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the
+prose of Boethius--and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually
+been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius,
+Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public
+the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the
+Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental
+learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic
+traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were
+for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison.
+With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous
+subject-matter of scholarship _Litteræ Humaniores_ ("the more human
+literature"), the literature that humanizes.
+
+There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
+Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring
+over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
+learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
+poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
+Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
+acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican
+Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a
+little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and
+convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek,
+who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from
+Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the
+heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of
+uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by
+these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by
+their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in
+this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of
+pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like
+odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed
+on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the
+indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet
+begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically
+bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho--absorbing to
+intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that
+kept pouring from those long buried amphoræ of inspiration.
+
+What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm
+which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture. Popes and
+princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the
+leaders of the _demi-monde_ alike became scholars. There is a story told
+by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular
+felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some
+Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the
+Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription
+"Julia, Daughter of Claudius," and inside the coffer lay the body of a
+most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents
+from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still
+upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long
+hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed--so goes the
+legend--to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all
+the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan world. In
+the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her beauty was beyond
+imagination or description. She was far fairer than any woman of the
+modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the
+orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia
+was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained
+in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by
+Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight
+variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another that it
+was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really
+have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the _mythus_
+as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age
+to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic
+world.
+
+Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
+philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
+had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
+their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
+There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
+dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared _thesauri_ of
+mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole
+mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato,
+Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be
+struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with
+printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and
+day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
+brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to
+accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond
+the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace
+of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in
+the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of
+these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for
+the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470,
+Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the
+inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
+expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
+endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to
+think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with
+emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus
+or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we
+owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of
+intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the
+future of human culture.
+
+This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship may be said
+to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed
+on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his
+_Adagia_ in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective
+spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength
+in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and
+sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the
+ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,
+comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of
+scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic culture
+was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was
+brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world,
+and emancipated from the thraldom of improved traditions. The force to
+judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in
+the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
+from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The
+minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediæval
+ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew
+to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This
+extravagance led of necessity to a reaction--in the North, of
+Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation
+effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity,
+that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
+imperilled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the
+other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially
+retarded by the reaction it produced.
+
+The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of
+man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom,
+is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage
+literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and
+encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom
+followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
+Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate
+the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to
+the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as
+yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and
+Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found
+philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the
+Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole
+movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the
+modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
+mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon, or as a
+mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits,
+in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the
+Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science--the
+recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of
+history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached
+chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection
+between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human
+spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is
+the true philosophy of history.
+
+The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its
+mediæval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church
+successfully combated in North Italy, in France, and in Bohemia were the
+precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth
+century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type--Reuchlin in
+Germany, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as
+a humanist--contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
+incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the
+necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity as
+distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the
+individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for
+himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between humanity and
+God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. The
+principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous.
+Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it
+opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other
+side with intolerance of mere authority, it led to what has since been
+named rationalism--the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with
+the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the
+conceptions of the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating
+the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national
+politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It
+was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism of the
+Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and
+introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This
+high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by
+criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the
+eighteenth century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work
+that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the
+organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.
+
+Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty--the
+spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of
+self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the
+body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in
+religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the
+principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the
+Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the
+Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how, through
+education, to render culture accessible to all--to break down that
+barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and
+which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and
+ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men
+shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be
+realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity,
+from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy
+the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between
+individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be
+impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will
+lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God
+has made him.
+
+It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which
+aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over
+and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various
+times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material
+resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according
+to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for
+the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in
+the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus
+to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to
+substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after
+numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an
+art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was
+first made of cotton in Europe about 1000 and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder
+entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the
+Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of
+which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The
+feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess
+of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry
+trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the
+cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory
+was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as
+indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property
+of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing
+cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to
+every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the
+inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious
+calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when
+we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.
+
+In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared.
+But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter of history, the true
+Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities
+which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediæval world
+were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture
+and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the
+European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of
+divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar
+vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in
+science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern
+intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England
+the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more
+for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the
+labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has collected,
+centralized, and diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But if
+we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a
+time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to
+organize the various elements of the modern spirit, and to set the
+fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and live.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE
+
+A.D. 1348
+
+J. F. C. HECKER[51]  GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
+
+
+  Different parts of the oriental world have been mentioned as
+  the probable locality of the first appearance of the plague
+  or pestilence known as the "black death," but its origin is
+  most generally referred to China, where, at all events, it
+  raged violently about 1333, when it was accompanied at its
+  outbreak by terrestrial and atmospheric phenomena of a
+  destructive character, such as are said to have attended the
+  first appearance of Asiatic cholera and other spreading and
+  deadly diseases; from which it has been conjectured that
+  through these convulsions deleterious foreign substances may
+  have been projected into the atmosphere.
+
+  But while for centuries the nature and causes of the black
+  death have been subjects of medical inquiry in all
+  countries, it remained for our own time to discover a more
+  scientific explanation than those previously advanced. The
+  malady is now identified by pathologists with the bubonic
+  plague, which at intervals still afflicts India and other
+  oriental lands, and has in recent years been a cause of
+  apprehension at more than one American seaport.
+
+  It is called _bubonic_--from the Greek _boubon_
+  ("groin")--because it attacks the lymphatic glands of the
+  groins, armpits, neck, and other parts of the body. Among
+  its leading symptoms are headache, fever, vertigo, vomiting,
+  prostration, etc., with dark purple spots or a mottled
+  appearance upon the skin. Death in severe cases usually
+  occurs within forty-eight hours. Bacteriologists are now
+  generally agreed that the disorder is due to a bacillus
+  identified by investigators both in India and in western
+  countries.
+
+  The first historic appearance of the black death in Europe
+  was at Constantinople, A.D. 543. But far more widespread and
+  terrible were its ravages in the fourteenth century, when
+  they were almost world-wide. Of the dreadful visitation in
+  Europe then, we are fortunate to have the striking account
+  of Dr. Hecker, which follows.
+
+  The name "black death" was given to the disease in the more
+  northern parts of Europe--from the dark spots on the skin
+  above mentioned--while in Italy it was called _la mortalega
+  grande_ ("the great mortality"). From Italy came almost the
+  only credible accounts of the manner of living, and of the
+  ruin caused among the people in their more private life,
+  during the pestilence; and the subjoined account of what was
+  seen in Florence is of special interest as being from no
+  less an eye-witness than Boccaccio.
+
+
+J. F. C. HECKER
+
+The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain
+intelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries of
+Asia. Here it showed itself as the oriental plague with inflammation of
+the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China--that
+is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion;
+a contagion that in ordinary pestilences requires immediate contact, and
+only under unfavorable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated
+by the mere approach to the sick.
+
+The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague over the
+whole earth was certainly very great; and the opinion that the black
+death might have been excluded from Western Europe, by good regulations,
+similar to those which are now in use, would have all the support of
+modern experience, provided it could be proved that this plague had been
+actually imported from the East; or that the oriental plague in general,
+whenever it appears in Europe, has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a
+proof, however, can by no means be produced so as to enforce conviction.
+The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by
+the bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground for
+supposing that it sprung up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude
+manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth; influences
+which peculiarly favor the origin of severe diseases. We need not go
+back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it had
+half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.
+
+If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that in
+countries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in a
+milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it had
+appeared for the last time, were particularly favorable to its
+unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in this
+eventful year also, the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe,
+which might be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations. Thus, at least
+in part, the black plague may have originated in Europe itself. The
+corruption of the atmosphere came from the East; but the disease itself
+came not upon the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increased
+by the atmosphere where it had previously existed.
+
+This source of the black plague was not, however, the only one; for, far
+more powerful than the excitement of the latent elements of the plague
+by atmospheric influences was the effect of the contagion communicated
+from one people to another, on the great roads, and in the harbors of
+the Mediterranean. From China, the route of the caravans lay to the
+north of the Caspian Sea, through Central Asia to Tauris. Here ships
+were ready to take the produce of the East to Constantinople, the
+capital of commerce and the medium of connection between Asia, Europe,
+and Africa. Other caravans went from India to Asia Minor, and touched at
+the cities south of the Caspian Sea, and lastly from Bagdad, through
+Arabia to Egypt; also the maritime communication on the Red Sea, from
+India to Arabia and Egypt, was not inconsiderable. In all these
+directions contagion made its way; and doubtless Constantinople and the
+harbors of Asia Minor are to be regarded as the _foci_ of infection;
+whence it radiated to the most distant seaports and islands.
+
+To Constantinople the plague had been brought from the northern coast of
+the Black Sea, after it had depopulated the countries between those
+routes of commerce and appeared as early as 1347, in Cyprus, Sicily,
+Marseilles, and some of the seaports of Italy. The remaining islands of
+the Mediterranean, particularly Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, were
+visited in succession. _Foci_ of contagion existed also in full activity
+along the whole southern coast of Europe, when, in January, 1348, the
+plague appeared in Avignon, and in other cities in the South of France
+and North of Italy, as well as in Spain.
+
+The precise days of its eruption in the individual towns are no longer
+to be ascertained; but it was not simultaneous; for in Florence the
+disease appeared in the beginning of April; in Cesena, the 1st of June;
+and place after place was attacked throughout the whole year; so that
+the plague, after it had passed through the whole of France and Germany,
+where, however, it did not make its ravages until the following year,
+did not break out till August in England; where it advanced so
+gradually that a period of three months elapsed before it reached
+London. The northern kingdoms were attacked by it in 1349; Sweden,
+indeed, not until November of that year, almost two years after its
+eruption in Avignon. Poland received the plague in 1349, probably from
+Germany, if not from the northern countries; but in Russia it did not
+make its appearance until 1351, more than three years after it had
+broken out in Constantinople. Instead of advancing in a northwesterly
+direction from Tauris and from the Caspian Sea, it had thus made the
+great circuit of the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, Southern and
+Central Europe, England, the northern kingdoms and Poland, before it
+reached the Russian territories; a phenomenon which has not again
+occurred with respect to more recent pestilences originating in Asia.
+
+We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages of the black
+plague. Let us go back for a moment to the fourteenth century. The
+people were yet but little civilized. Human life was little regarded;
+governments concerned not themselves about the numbers of their
+subjects, for whose welfare it was incumbent on them to provide. Thus,
+the first requisite for estimating the loss of human life--namely, a
+knowledge of the amount of the population--is altogether wanting.
+
+Cairo lost daily, when the plague was raging with its greatest violence,
+from ten thousand to fifteen thousand, being as many as, in modern
+times, great plagues have carried off during their whole course. In
+China, more than thirteen millions are said to have died; and this is in
+correspondence with the certainly exaggerated accounts from the rest of
+Asia. India was depopulated. Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak,
+Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds
+fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Cæsarea, none was left
+alive. On the roads, in the camps, in the caravansaries, unburied bodies
+were seen; and a few cities only remained, in an unaccountable manner,
+free. In Aleppo, five hundred died daily; twenty-two thousand people and
+most of the animals were carried off in Gaza within six weeks. Cyprus
+lost almost all its inhabitants; and ships without crews were often seen
+in the Mediterranean, as afterward in the North Sea, driving about and
+spreading the plague wherever they went on shore. It was reported to
+Pope Clement, at Avignon, that throughout the East, probably with the
+exception of China, twenty-three million eight hundred and forty
+thousand people had fallen victims to the plague.
+
+Lübeck, which could no longer contain the multitudes that flocked to it,
+was thrown into such consternation on the eruption of the plague that
+the citizens destroyed themselves, as if in frenzy. When the plague
+ceased, men thought they were still wandering among the dead, so
+appalling was the livid aspect of the survivors, in consequence of the
+anxiety they had undergone, and the unavoidable infection of the air.
+Many other cities probably presented a similar appearance; and small
+country towns and villages, estimated at two hundred thousand
+population, were bereft of all their inhabitants.
+
+In many places in France not more than two out of twenty of the
+inhabitants were left alive. Two queens, one bishop, and great numbers
+of other distinguished persons fell a sacrifice to it, and more than
+five hundred a day died in the Hôtel-Dieu, under the faithful care of
+the religious women, whose disinterested courage, in this age of horror,
+displayed the most beautiful traits of human virtue.
+
+The church-yards were soon unable to contain the dead, and many houses,
+left without inhabitants, fell to ruins. In Avignon, the Pope found it
+necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown into the
+river without delay, as the church-yards would no longer hold them.
+
+In Vienna, where for some time twelve hundred inhabitants died daily,
+the interment of corpses in the church-yards and within the churches was
+forthwith prohibited, and the dead were then arranged in layers, by
+thousands, in six large pits outside the city. In many places it was
+rumored that plague patients were buried alive, and thus the horror of
+the distressed people was everywhere increased. In Erfurt, after the
+church-yards were filled, twelve thousand corpses were thrown into
+eleven great pits; and the like might be stated with respect to all the
+larger cities. Funeral ceremonies, the last consolation of the
+survivors, were everywhere impracticable.
+
+In all Germany there seem to have died only one million two hundred and
+forty-four thousand four hundred and thirty-four inhabitants; this
+country, however, was more spared than others. Italy was most severely
+visited. It is said to have lost half its inhabitants; in Sardinia and
+Corsica, according to the account of John Villani, who was himself
+carried off by the black plague, scarcely a third part of the population
+remained alive; and the Venetians engaged ships at a high rate to
+retreat to the islands; so that, after the plague had carried off
+three-fourths of her inhabitants, their proud city was left forlorn and
+desolate. In Florence it was prohibited to publish the numbers of the
+dead and to toll the bells at their funerals, in order that the living
+might not abandon themselves to despair.
+
+In England most of the great cities suffered incredible losses; above
+all, Yarmouth, in which seven thousand and fifty-two died; Bristol,
+Oxford, Norwich, Leicester, York, and London, where, in one
+burial-ground alone, there were interred upward of fifty thousand
+corpses, arranged in layers, in large pits. It is said that in the whole
+country scarcely a tenth part remained alive. Morals were deteriorated
+everywhere, and public worship was, in a great measure, laid aside, in
+many places the churches being bereft of their priests. The instruction
+of the people was impeded, covetousness became general; and when
+tranquillity was restored, the great increase of lawyers was
+astonishing, to whom the endless disputes regarding inheritances offered
+a rich harvest. The want of priests, too, throughout the country,
+operated very detrimentally upon the people. The lower classes were most
+exposed to the ravages of the plague, while the houses of the nobility
+were, in proportion, much more spared. The sittings of parliament, of
+the king's bench, and of most of the other courts were suspended as long
+as the malady raged.
+
+Ireland was much less heavily visited than England. The disease seems to
+have scarcely reached the mountainous districts of that kingdom; and
+Scotland, too, would, perhaps, have remained free had not the Scots
+availed themselves of the misfortune of the English, to make an
+irruption into their territory, which terminated in the destruction of
+their army, by the plague and by the sword, and the extension of the
+pestilence, through those who escaped, over the whole country.
+
+In England the plague was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among the
+cattle. Of what nature this murrain may have been can no more be
+determined than whether it originated from communication with the plague
+patients or from other causes. There was everywhere a great rise in the
+price of food. For a whole year, until it terminated in August, 1349,
+the black plague prevailed and everywhere poisoned the springs of
+comfort and prosperity. In other countries it generally lasted only half
+a year, but returned frequently in individual places. Spain was
+uninterruptedly ravaged by the black plague till after the year 1350, to
+which the frequent internal feuds and the wars with the Moors not a
+little contributed. Alfonso XI, whose passion for war carried him too
+far, died of it at the siege of Gibraltar, March 26, 1350. He was the
+only king in Europe who fell a sacrifice to it. The mortality seems to
+have been less in Spain than in Italy, and about as considerable as in
+France.
+
+The whole period during which the black plague raged with destructive
+violence in Europe was, with the exception of Russia, from 1347 to 1350.
+The plagues which in the sequel often returned until 1383, we do not
+consider as belonging to the "great mortality."
+
+The premature celebration of the Jubilee, to which Clement VI cited the
+faithful to Rome 1350, during the great epidemic, caused a new eruption
+of the plague, from which it is said that scarcely one in a hundred of
+the pilgrims escaped. Italy was, in consequence, depopulated anew; and
+those who returned spread poison and corruption of morals in all
+directions.
+
+The changes which occurred about this period in the North of Europe are
+sufficiently memorable. In Sweden two princes died--Haken and Canute,
+half-brothers of King Magnus; and in Westgothland alone four hundred and
+sixty-six priests. The inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland found in the
+coldness of their inhospitable climate no protection against the
+southern enemy who had penetrated to them from happier countries. The
+plague wrought great havoc among them. In Denmark and Norway, however,
+people were so occupied with their own misery that the accustomed
+voyages to Greenland ceased.
+
+In Russia the black plague did not break out until 1351, after it had
+already passed through the South and North of Europe. The mortality was
+extraordinarily great. In Russia, too, the voice of nature was silenced
+by fear and horror. In the hour of danger, fathers and mothers deserted
+their children, and children their parents.
+
+Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe, the most
+probable is that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants were
+carried off. It may be assumed, without exaggeration, that Europe lost
+during the black death twenty-five million inhabitants.
+
+That her nations could so quickly recover from so fearful a visitation,
+and, without retrograding more than they actually did, could so develop
+their energies in the following century, is a most convincing proof of
+the indestructibility of human society as a whole. To assume, however,
+that it did not suffer any essential change internally, because in
+appearance everything remained as before, is inconsistent with a just
+view of cause and effect. Many historians seem to have adopted such an
+opinion; hence, most of them have touched but superficially on the
+"great mortality" of the fourteenth century. We for our part are
+convinced that in the history of the world the black death is one of the
+most important events which have prepared the way for the present state
+of Europe.
+
+He who studies the human mind with attention, and forms a deliberate
+judgment on the intellectual powers which set people and states in
+motion, may, perhaps, find some proofs of this assertion in the
+following observations. At that time the advancement of the hierarchy
+was, in most countries, extraordinary; for the Church acquired treasures
+and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the
+crusades; but experience has demonstrated that such a state of things is
+ruinous to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced on
+this occasion.
+
+After the cessation of the black plague, a greater fecundity in women
+was everywhere remarkable; marriages were prolific; and double and
+treble births were more frequent than at other times. After the "great
+mortality" the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before;
+at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers
+have felt surprise. Some writers of authority published their opinions
+on this subject. Others copied from them, without seeing for themselves,
+and thus the world believed in the miracle of an imperfection in the
+human body which had been caused by the black plague.
+
+The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings which they
+had undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten; and in the stirring
+vicissitudes of existence the world belonged to the living.
+
+The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the
+black plague is without parallel and beyond description. In the eyes of
+the timorous, danger was the certain harbinger of death; many fell
+victims to fear on the first appearance of the distemper, and the most
+stout-hearted lost their confidence. The pious closed their accounts
+with the world; their only remaining desire was for a participation in
+the consolations of religion. Repentance seized the transgressor,
+admonishing him to consecrate his remaining hours to the exercise of
+Christian virtues. Children were frequently seen, while laboring under
+the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayer and songs of
+thanksgiving. An awful sense of contrition seized Christians everywhere;
+they resolved to forsake their vices, to make restitution for past
+offences, before they were summoned hence, to seek reconciliation with
+their Maker, and to avert, by self-chastisement, the punishment due to
+their former sins.
+
+Human nature would be exalted could the countless noble actions which,
+in times of most imminent danger, were performed in secret, be recorded
+for future generations. They, however, have no influence on the course
+of worldly events. They are known only to silent eye-witnesses, and soon
+fall into oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad
+undaunted; they desecrate what is noble, they pervert what is divine, to
+the unholy purposes of selfishness; which hurries along every good
+feeling in the false excitement of the age. Thus it was in the years of
+this plague.
+
+In the fourteenth century the monastic system was still in its full
+vigor, the power of the religious orders and brotherhoods was revered by
+the people, and the hierarchy was still formidable to the temporal
+power. It was, therefore, in the natural constitution of society that
+bigoted zeal, which in such times makes a show of public acts of
+penance, should avail itself of the semblance of religion. But this took
+place in such a manner that unbridled, self-willed penitence degenerated
+into luke-warmness, renounced obedience to the hierarchy, and prepared a
+fearful opposition to the Church, paralyzed as it was by antiquated
+forms.
+
+While all countries were filled with lamentations and woe, there first
+arose in Hungary, and afterward in Germany, the Brotherhood of the
+Flagellants, called also the Brethren of the Cross, or Cross-bearers,
+who took upon themselves the repentance of the people for the sins they
+had committed, and offered prayers and supplications for the averting of
+this plague. This order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class,
+who were either actuated by sincere contrition or who joyfully availed
+themselves of this pretext for idleness and were hurried along with the
+tide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods gained in repute,
+and were welcomed by the people with veneration and enthusiasm, many
+nobles and ecclesiastics ranged themselves under their standard; and
+their bands were not unfrequently augmented by children, honorable
+women, and nuns.
+
+They marched through the cities with leaders and singers, their heads
+covered as far as the eyes, their look fixed on the ground, with every
+token of contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments,
+with red crosses on the breast, back, and cap, and bore triple scourges,
+tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers
+and magnificent banners of velvet and cloth of gold were carried before
+them; wherever they made their appearance they were welcomed by the
+ringing of bells, and the people flocked from all quarters to listen to
+their hymns and witness their penance.
+
+In 1349 two hundred Flagellants first entered Strasburg, where they were
+hospitably lodged by the citizens. Above a thousand joined the
+brotherhood, which now separated into two bodies, for the purpose of
+journeying to the north and to the south. Adults and children left their
+families to accompany them; till, at length, their sanctity was
+questioned and the doors of houses and churches were closed against
+them. At Spires two hundred boys, of twelve years of age and under,
+constituted themselves into a brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation of
+the children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at the
+instigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering the
+Holy Sepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were carried away by
+the delusion; they conducted the strangers to their houses with songs of
+thanksgiving, to regale them for the night. The women embroidered
+banners for them, and all were anxious to augment their pomp; and at
+every succeeding pilgrimage their influence and reputation increased.
+
+All Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders did homage
+to them; and they at length became as formidable to the secular as to
+the ecclesiastical power. The influence of this fanaticism was great and
+threatening. The appearance, in itself, was not novel. As far back as
+the eleventh century many believers in Asia and Southern Europe
+afflicted themselves with the punishment of flagellation.
+
+The author of the solemn processions of the Flagellants is said to have
+been St. Anthony of Padua (1231). In 1260 the Flagellants appeared in
+Italy as _Devoti_. "When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an
+unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians.
+The fear of Christ fell upon all; noble and lowly, old and young, and
+even children of five years of age marched through the streets with no
+covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of
+leathern thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and
+tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not
+only during the day, but even by night and in the severest winter, they
+traversed the cities with burning torches and banners, in thousands and
+tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves
+before the altars. The melancholy chant of the penitent alone was heard;
+enemies were reconciled; men and women vied with each other in splendid
+works of charity, as if they dreaded that divine omnipotence would
+pronounce on them the doom of annihilation."
+
+But at length the priests resisted this dangerous fanaticism, without
+being able to extirpate the illusion, which was advantageous to the
+hierarchy, as long as it submitted to its sway.
+
+The processions of the Brotherhood of the Cross undoubtedly promoted the
+spreading of the plague; and it is evident that the gloomy fanaticism
+which gave rise to them would infuse a new poison into the already
+desponding minds of the people.
+
+Still, however, all this was within the bounds of barbarous enthusiasm;
+but horrible were the persecutions of the Jews, which were committed in
+most countries with even greater exasperation than in the twelfth
+century, during the first crusades. In every destructive pestilence the
+common people at first attribute the mortality to poison. On whom, then,
+was vengeance so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the
+strangers who lived at enmity with the Christians? They were everywhere
+suspected of having poisoned the wells[52] or infected the air, and were
+pursued with merciless cruelty.
+
+These bloody scenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth century,
+are a counterpart to a similar mania of the age which was manifested in
+the persecutions of witches and sorcerers; and, like these, they prove
+that enthusiasm, associated with hatred and leagued with the baser
+passions, may work more powerfully upon whole nations than religion and
+legal order; nay, that it even knows how to profit by the authority of
+both, in order the more surely to satiate with blood the swords of
+long-suppressed revenge.
+
+The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October, 1348, at
+Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings
+were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by
+the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and
+in Freiburg, in 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the
+tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them;
+and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at
+Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince the world; and
+the persecution of the abhorred culprits thus appeared justifiable.
+
+Already in the autumn of 1348 a dreadful panic, caused by this supposed
+poisoning, seized all nations; in Germany, especially, the springs and
+wells were built over, that nobody might drink of them or employ their
+contents for culinary purposes; and for a long time the inhabitants of
+numerous towns and villages used only river and rain-water. The city
+gates were also guarded with the greatest caution: only confidential
+persons were admitted; and if medicine or any other article which might
+be supposed to be poisonous was found in the possession of a
+stranger--and it was natural that some should have these things by them
+for private use--he was forced to swallow a portion of it. By this
+trying state of privation, distrust, and suspicion the hatred against
+the supposed poisoners became greatly increased, and often broke out in
+popular commotions, which only served still further to infuriate the
+wildest passions.
+
+The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to
+extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their
+protectors, of whom the number was so small that throughout all Germany
+but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not
+regarded as outlaws and martyred and burned. Solemn summonses were
+issued from Bern to the towns of Basel, Freiburg in Breisgau, and
+Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as poisoners. The burgomasters and
+senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basel the populace
+obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews and to
+forbid persons of that community from entering their city for the space
+of two hundred years. Upon this, all the Jews in Basel, whose number
+could not have been inconsiderable, were enclosed in a wooden building,
+constructed for the purpose, and burned, together with it, upon the mere
+outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which, indeed, would
+have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place at
+Freiburg.
+
+A regular diet was held at Bennefeld, in Alsace, where the bishops,
+lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted
+how they should proceed with regard to the Jews; and when the deputies
+of Strasburg--not, indeed, the bishop of this town, who proved himself a
+violent fanatic--spoke in favor of the persecuted, as nothing criminal
+was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was
+vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed
+their buckets? A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the
+populace, who obeyed the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became
+but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burned they
+were at least banished; and so being compelled to wander about, they
+fell into the hands of the country people, who, without humanity and
+regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword.
+
+At Eslingen, the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their
+synagogue; and mothers were often seen throwing their children on the
+pile, to prevent their being baptized, and then precipitating themselves
+into the flames. In short, whatever deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice,
+and desperation, in fearful combination, could instigate mankind to
+perform, were executed in 1349, throughout Germany, Italy, and France,
+with impunity and in the eyes of all the world. It seemed as if the
+plague gave rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning
+and grief; and the greater part of those who, by their education and
+rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves led on
+the savage mob to murder and to plunder.
+
+The humanity and prudence of Clement VI must on this occasion also be
+mentioned to his honor. He not only protected the Jews at Avignon, as
+far as lay in his power, but also issued two bulls in which he declared
+them innocent, and he admonished all Christians, though without success,
+to cease from such groundless persecutions. The emperor Charles IV was
+also favorable to them, and sought to avert their destruction wherever
+he could; but he dared not draw the sword of justice, and even found
+himself obliged to yield to the selfishness of the Bohemian nobles, who
+were unwilling to forego so favorable an opportunity of releasing
+themselves from their Jewish creditors, under favor of an imperial
+mandate. Duke Albert of Austria burned and pillaged those of his cities
+which had persecuted the Jews--a vain and inhuman proceeding which,
+moreover, is not exempt from the suspicion of covetousness; yet he was
+unable, in his own fortress of Kyberg, to protect some hundreds of Jews,
+who had been received there, from being barbarously burned by the
+inhabitants.
+
+Several other princes and counts, among whom was Ruprecht of the
+Palatinate, took the Jews under their protection, on the payment of
+large sums; in consequence of which they were called "Jew-masters," and
+were in danger of being attacked by the populace and by their powerful
+neighbors. These persecuted and ill-used people--except, indeed, where
+humane individuals took compassion on them at their own peril, or when
+they could command riches to purchase protection--had no place of refuge
+left but the distant country of Lithuania, where Boleslav V, Duke of
+Poland, 1227-1279, had before granted them liberty of conscience; and
+King Casimir the Great, 1333-1370, yielding to the entreaties of Esther,
+a favorite Jewess, received them, and granted them further protection;
+on which account that country is still inhabited by a great number of
+Jews, who by their secluded habits have, more than any people in Europe,
+retained the manners of the Middle Ages.
+
+
+GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
+
+When the evil had become universal in Florence, the hearts of all the
+inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They fled from the sick
+and all that belonged to them, hoping by these means to save themselves.
+Others shut themselves up in their houses, with their wives, their
+children and households, living on the most costly food, but carefully
+avoiding all excess. None was allowed access to them; no intelligence of
+death or sickness was permitted to reach their ears; and they spent
+their time in singing and music and other pastimes.
+
+Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to excess,
+amusements of all descriptions, the indulgence of every gratification,
+and an indifference to what was passing around them as the best
+medicine, and acted accordingly. They wandered day and night from one
+tavern to another, and feasted without moderation or bounds. In this way
+they endeavored to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned their
+houses and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had already
+tolled.
+
+Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority of
+every law, human and divine, vanished. Most of those who were in office
+had been carried off by the plague, or lay sick, or had lost so many
+members of their families that they were unable to attend to their
+duties; so that thenceforth everyone acted as he thought proper. Others,
+in their mode of living, chose a middle course. They ate and drank what
+they pleased, and walked abroad; carrying odoriferous flowers, herbs, or
+spices, which they smelt at from time to time, in order to invigorate
+the brain and to avert the baneful influence of the air, infected by the
+sick and by the innumerable corpses of those who had died of the plague.
+Others carried their precaution still further, and thought the surest
+way to escape death was by flight. They therefore left the city; women
+as well as men abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and
+retiring into the country. But of these, also, many were carried off,
+most of them alone and deserted by all the world, themselves having
+previously set the example.
+
+Thus it was that one citizen fled from another--a neighbor from his
+neighbors--a relation from his relations; and in the end, so completely
+had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling that the brother forsook
+the brother, the sister the sister, the wife her husband, and at last
+even the parent his own offspring, and abandoned them, unvisited and
+unsoothed, to their fate. Those, therefore, that stood in need of
+assistance fell a prey to greedy attendants; who, for an exorbitant
+recompense, merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained
+with them in their last moments, and then not unfrequently became
+themselves victims to their avarice, and lived not to enjoy their
+extorted gain.
+
+Propriety and decorum were extinguished among the helpless sick. Females
+of rank seemed to forget their natural bashfulness, and committed the
+care of their persons, indiscriminately, to men and women of the lowest
+order. No longer were women, relatives or friends, found in the houses
+of mourning, to share the grief of the survivors; no longer was the
+corpse accompanied to the grave by neighbors and a numerous train of
+priests, carrying wax tapers and singing psalms, nor was it borne along
+by other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without a
+friend to comfort them in their last moments; and few indeed were they
+who departed amid the lamentations and tears of their friends and
+kindred.
+
+Instead of sorrow and mourning, appeared indifference, frivolity, and
+mirth; this being considered, especially by the females, as conducive to
+health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants;
+and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, hirelings of the lowest
+of the populace undertook the office for the sake of gain; and
+accompanied by only a few priests, and often without a single taper, it
+was borne to the very nearest church, and lowered into the first grave
+that was not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes,
+and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or
+negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings or in the
+immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended
+their lives in the streets by day and by night.
+
+The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their
+neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve
+themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the
+houses and laid before the doors, where the early morn found them in
+heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was no
+longer possible to have a bier for every corpse--three or four were
+generally laid together; husband and wife, father and mother, with two
+or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier;
+and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing
+the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals;
+so that instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment.
+
+
+
+
+FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN EUROPE
+
+TURKS SEIZE GALLIPOLI
+
+A.D. 1354
+
+JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL[53]
+
+
+  During the early years of the fourteenth century a new
+  Mahometan realm was established on the ruins of the
+  Seljukian and Byzantine power in Asia Minor. Osman,[54] or
+  Othman, the founder of this realm, which is regarded as the
+  original Ottoman empire, subdued a great part of Asia Minor,
+  and in the year of his death 1326, his son Orkhan captured
+  Prusa (now Brusa) and Nicomedia. In 1330 he took Nicæa--then
+  second only to Constantinople in the Greek or Byzantine
+  empire--and six years later he defeated the Turkish Prince
+  of Karasi, the ancient Mysia, and annexed his territory,
+  including the capital, Berghama, the ancient Pergamus, to
+  the Ottoman dominions, thus securing nearly the whole of
+  North-western Asia Minor.
+
+  During the reign of Orkhan the Ottomans made frequent
+  passages of the Hellespont for the purpose of extending
+  their power into Europe. After fifteen invasions without any
+  permanent conquest, in 1354 Orkhan and his son Suleiman
+  perceived an opportunity by which they prepared themselves
+  to profit--civil war was raging in the Byzantine empire,
+  where John Palæologus was striving to deprive the emperor
+  Cantacuzenus of his throne.
+
+  The plan whereby the Ottomans secured a foothold in Europe
+  which soon enabled them to establish a permanent sovereignty
+  on the peninsula of Gallipoli was executed by Suleiman with
+  a military skill which gave his name a conspicuous place in
+  Turkish history.
+
+On the meridional shore of the Sea of Marmora, at the entrance of the
+Hellespont, is perceived the peninsula of Kapoutaghi--the ancient,
+almost insular Cyzicus, a Milesian colony. At the neck of the isthmus,
+where it joins the mainland, there where are seen to-day the ruins of
+Aidindjik, formerly arose Cyzicus, a city celebrated in the history of
+Persia and of Rome, of ancient Greece and of the Byzantine empire. This
+port, one of the most commercial of the Asiatic coast, possessed, like
+Rhodes, Marseilles, and Carthage, two military arsenals and an immense
+granary, each placed under the special superintendence of an architect.
+The annals of this town have been enriched by the passage of the
+Argonauts and of the Goths, by the siege of Mithridates and by the
+assistance received from the Romans under the leadership of Lucullus.
+
+Granted its freedom by the latter as a reward for its fidelity, Cyzicus
+was shortly afterward deprived of its privileges for having neglected
+the service of the temple of Augustus. Under the Byzantines it became
+the capital of the province of Hellespont and the metropolitan see of
+Mysia and of all the territory of Troy. On Mount Dyndimos, at the gates
+of Cyzicus, arose the temple of the great mother, the goddess Ida, whose
+worship had been established by the Argonauts, and who was venerated at
+Cyzicus as at Pessinunte, in the form of an aërolite, a sacred stone,
+which under the reign of King Attalus was carried to Rome, and installed
+in the city by all the matrons, preceded by Scipio the Younger. The
+inhabitants of the peninsula adored also Cybele, Proserpine, and
+Jupiter, who, according to a fabulous tradition, had given the town of
+Cyzicus to the wife of Pluto, as dower. Emperor Hadrian embellished this
+town with the largest and the finest of the temples of paganism. The
+columns of this edifice, all of one piece, were four ells (fifteen and
+one-half feet) in circumference and fifty ells (one hundred and
+ninety-five feet) in height.
+
+In 1354 Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, Governor of ancient Mysia, a
+province recently conquered by the Turks, was seized with admiration by
+the aspect of the majestic ruins of Cyzicus. The broken columns, the
+marbles prone on the sward, recalled to him the ruins of the palace of
+the Queen of Saba Balkis, erected by the order of Solomon, the remains
+of Istakhr (Persepolis), and of Tadmor (Palmyra). One evening when
+seated by the sea-shore, he saw, by the light of the moon (Aidindjik,
+the crescent moon), the porticoes and peristyles reflected in the waves.
+Clouds passed along the surface of the sea, and he imagined that he saw
+these ruined palaces and temples arise from the deep, and a fleet
+navigate the waters. Around him arose mysterious voices whose sound
+mingled with the murmur of the waves, while the moon, which at this
+moment shone in the east, seemed to unite Asia and Europe by a silver
+ribbon. It was she who, emerging formerly from the bosom of Edebali,[55]
+had come to hide herself in that of Osman. The remembrance of the
+fantastic vision, which had presaged a universal domination to his
+ancestor, inflamed the courage of Suleiman, and made him resolve to
+unite Europe and Asia by transporting the Ottoman power from the shores
+of Asia Minor to the strands of the Greek empire, and thus to realize
+the dream of Osman.
+
+Suleiman consulted immediately with Adjebeg, Ghazi-Fazil, Ewrenos, and
+Hadji-Ilbeki, ancient vizier of the Prince of Karasi, who had been his
+assistants in the government of Mysia. All confirmed him in his
+resolution. Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil the same night went to Gouroudjouk
+and took ship to make a reconnaissance in the environs of Tzympe,
+situated a league and a half from Gallipoli, opposite Gouroudjouk. A
+Greek prisoner whom they brought with them to Asia informed Suleiman of
+the abandoned and unprepared state of the place, and offered himself as
+a guide to surprise the garrison. Suleiman immediately had two rafts
+constructed of trees united by thongs of bull skins, and made the
+attempt the following night, with thirty-nine of his most intrepid
+companions in arms. Arrived before the fortress, they scaled the walls
+by mounting on an immense dung-heap, and took possession of it easily,
+owing to the inhabitants being all absent in the fields engaged in
+harvesting. Suleiman then hastened to send to Asia all the ships which
+he found in the port, to transport soldiers to Tzympe; and three days
+after, the fortress contained a garrison of three thousand Ottomans.
+
+In the mean while Cantacuzenus, unable to resist any longer the forces
+assembled against him by his young rival, John Palæologus, asked the
+assistance of Orkhan. Orkhan sent him the conqueror of Tzympe, an
+auxiliary whose support later became more troublesome to the Emperor
+than it was useful against his enemy. Ten thousand Turkish cavaliers
+disembarked near Ainos, at the _embouchure_ of Maritza (Hebrus),
+defeated the auxiliary troops which John Palæologus had drawn from
+Moesia and from the Triballiens, ravaged Bulgaria, and repassed into
+Asia, loaded with spoil.
+
+Cantacuzenus, more at his ease after the departure of the conquering
+horde, negotiated with Suleiman the ransom of Tzympe. Scarcely had he
+sent the ten thousand ducats agreed upon, when a commissary of the
+Ottoman Prince arrived bringing him the keys; but at the same time a
+terrific earthquake devastated the towns on the Thracian coasts. The
+inhabitants who did not find death in the destruction of their dwellings
+went with the garrisons to seek refuge against the destroying scourge
+and the barbarity of the Turks in the towns and the castles which the
+catastrophe had spared. But torrents of rain, snow, and a glacial
+temperature killed the women and the children on the road. As to the
+men, they fell into the power of Orkhan's soldiers, who were awaiting
+their passage. Thus the Ottomans found a powerful auxiliary in the
+warring elements. From that time they believed that God himself favored
+their projects. Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil, whom Suleiman had left in front
+of Gallipoli, penetrated into that town by the large breaches that the
+earthquake had made in the walls, and took possession of it, owing to
+the confusion which reigned among the inhabitants.
+
+Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont, the commercial _entrepôt_ of the
+Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, is celebrated in history by the
+siege that it sustained against Philip of Macedon, and by the revolt of
+the Catalans or Mogabars who, half a century before the disaster, braved
+with impunity the power of the Greek Emperor and made it the centre of
+their piracies. The tombs of the two Ottoman chiefs are still seen
+to-day. These two mausoleums are much visited by Mussulman pilgrims, and
+the reason of this pious veneration is due to the fact that here in this
+sacred place lie the ashes of the two generations to whom the Ottoman
+empire owes the conquest of a town, the possession of which facilitated
+the passing of the Turks into Europe. For the same reason all the
+surrounding country, which, during the blockade of the town, Adjebeg and
+his lieutenant Ghazi-Fazil had put to fire and sword, received the name
+of Adje Owa. The two beys, taking advantage of the terror caused by so
+many disasters, penetrated into the deserted towns and established
+themselves.
+
+On the news of these conquests Suleiman, who then was at Bigha (Pegæ),
+refused to restore Tzympe, and, far from being contented with the
+peaceful possession of the territory invaded by his hordes, dreamed of
+extending the boundaries, and for this purpose sent over to Europe
+numerous colonies of Turks and Arabs. One of his first cares was to
+raise the walls of Gallipoli and other strong places devastated by the
+earthquake; among the number were Konour, whose commander, called
+Calaconia by the Ottoman historians, was hanged by order of Suleiman at
+the doors of the castle; the fort of Boulair, before which Suleiman
+received, as a presage of his future glory, the bonnet of a dervish
+Mewlewi; Malgara, renowned for its trade in honey; Ipsala (ancient
+Cypsella) on the Marizza; and lastly Rodosto, now Tekourtaghi, ancient
+residence of Besus, King of Thrace, and the place of exile where died in
+modern times the Hungarian Francis Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania, and
+his partisans. All these towns and strong places fell into the power of
+the Ottomans in the course of the year 1357; they served them as
+starting-bases for their excursions, which they pushed as far as
+Hireboli (Chariupolis) and Tschorli (Tzurulum).
+
+Cantacuzenus, too weak to stop the progress of the Turks, complained of
+this violation of the peace. Orkhan excused his son, saying that it was
+not force of arms which had opened the gates of the towns of the Greek
+empire, but the divine will manifested by the earthquake. The Emperor
+made representations that he was not agitating to know whether it was by
+the gates or by the breaches that Suleiman had penetrated into the
+places in question, but whether or not he possessed them legitimately.
+Orkhan then asked a delay for reflection, and subsequently promised that
+he would request his son to return the towns that he occupied, if
+Cantacuzenus, on his side, would engage to pay him a sum of forty
+thousand ducats. At the same time he invited him to an interview to meet
+Suleiman on the Gulf of Nicomedia. But the Sultan pretending to be ill,
+the Emperor returned to Byzantium, without having obtained anything.
+
+Orkhan now found himself in one of the happiest of political situations.
+The division of sovereign authority between Cantacuzenus and his pupil
+John Palæologus, and their continual wars, allowed him to address one or
+the other according as his interests and the circumstances demanded. It
+was thus that John Palæeologus, ally of the Genoese, undertook to
+deliver from captivity to Phoceus, the son of Orkhan, Khalil or Kasim,
+whom the governor Calothes surrendered for a ransom of one hundred
+thousand pieces of gold and the concession of the glorious title of
+Panhypersebastos ("very venerable"). The service that John had rendered
+did not prevent Orkhan from sending to Abydos a body of troops to rescue
+the son of Cantacuzenus, Mathias, then at war with the Bulgarians.
+
+From the epoch when the Ottomans made durable conquests in the Greek
+empire, Asia each spring threw new hordes into Europe, until the time
+when the successors of Orkhan had extended their domination from the
+shores of the Sea of Marmora to those of the Danube.
+
+The conquest of Gallipoli, which had opened the gate of the Greek empire
+and the whole of the European continent to the Ottomans, was announced
+by "letters of victory" to the neighboring princes of Orkhan, whose
+father had divided with Osman the heritage of the Seljukian sultans. The
+use of these "letters of victory" has been preserved to this day in
+Turkey, and their style, already so pompous in the days of Orkhan, has
+become so proudly emphatic that this kind of document to-day is not the
+least curious of those which belong to the annals of the Turkish nation.
+
+Orkhan left to his son, Suleiman Pacha, and Hadji-Ilbeki the charge of
+preserving the conquests made in Europe; Suleiman established his
+residence at Gallipoli, and Ilbeki at Konour. The first overran the
+country as far as Demitoka; the second as far as Tschorli and Hireboli.
+Adjebeg received in fief the valley which still bears his name.
+
+But Suleiman enjoyed for only a few years the fruits of his conquests.
+One day while hunting wild geese between Boulair and Sidi-Kawak, that is
+to say near the palatine of the Cid, and following at a gallop the
+flight of his falcon, he fell so violently from his horse (1359) as to
+be instantly killed. His body was deposited, not in the mausoleum of
+the Osman family at Prusa, where he had caused a mosque to be erected in
+the quarter of the confectioners, but near the mosque of Boulair, also
+founded by him. Orkhan, to perpetuate the exploits of his son, caused a
+tomb to be built to his memory on the shore of the Hellespont, the only
+one which, during more than a century, was erected in memory of an
+Ottoman prince on Greek soil. Of all the sepulchres of Turkish heroes
+which the national historians mention with holy respect, that of the
+founder of the Ottoman power in Europe is the most venerated and the
+most frequented by pilgrims. It is still to be seen to the north of the
+embouchure of the Hellespont.
+
+Tradition attributes yet another victory to Suleiman after his death. At
+the head of a troop of celestial heroes, mounted on white horses,
+encircled by a brilliant aureole, he is said to have vanquished an army
+of infidels. The love of the marvellous, so general among orientals, the
+leaning which all people have to make heaven intervene in the deeds
+relating to their origin, alone can explain this tradition, for it would
+be useless to seek any historic fact which could have given it birth.
+According to this tradition, thirty thousand Christians appeared in the
+Hellespont on a fleet of sixty-one vessels; one half disembarked at
+Touzla and the other at Sidi-Kawak; it was this latter body which was
+cut in pieces by the celestial troop led by Suleiman. The Ottoman
+historians who relate this miracle have evidently borrowed the
+apparition of these vessels from the First or the Second Crusade of the
+Europeans against the Turks, and have transported them from the waters
+of Smyrna to those of Gallipoli, for the greater glory of Suleiman
+Pacha. Neither the history of Byzantium nor that of the crusades offers
+the slightest trace of this event.
+
+
+
+
+CONSPIRACY AND DEATH OF MARINO
+FALIERI AT VENICE
+
+A.D. 1355
+
+MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT
+
+
+  Marino Falieri was born at Venice about 1278, and was
+  elected doge in 1354. For many years the government of the
+  republic, under an oligarchy, had been arbitrarily dominated
+  by the Council of Ten, an assembly that, after serving a
+  special purpose for which it was created, was declared
+  permanent in 1325 and became a formidable tribunal.
+  Professing to guard the republic the Ten in fact destroyed
+  its liberties, disposed of its finances, overruled the
+  constitutional legislators, suppressed and excluded the
+  popular element from all voice in public affairs, and
+  finally reduced the nominal prince--the doge--to a mere
+  puppet or an ornamental functionary, still called "head of
+  the state."
+
+  At the time when Falieri entered upon his dogeship the city
+  in all quarters was pervaded by the spies of this great
+  oligarchy, which seized and imprisoned citizens, and even
+  put them to death, secretly, without itself being answerable
+  to any authority. The most notable event in the annals of
+  this extraordinary Venetian government is that which forms
+  the story of Marino Falieri himself. His conspiracy with the
+  plebeians to assassinate the oligarchs and make himself
+  actual ruler of the state had the double motive of a
+  personal grievance and the sense of a political wrong.
+
+  The fate of this old man has been made the subject of
+  tragedies by Byron (1820), Casimir Delavigne (1829), and
+  Swinburne (1885). The novel, _Doge und Dogaressa_, by Ernst
+  Theodor Hoffmann, was inspired by the same dramatic figure.
+  Of historical accounts, the following--in Mrs. Oliphant's
+  best manner--is justly regarded as the most impressive which
+  has hitherto appeared in English.
+
+Marino Falieri had been an active servant of Venice through a long life.
+He had filled almost all the great offices which were intrusted to her
+nobles. He had governed her distant colonies, accompanied her armies in
+that position of _proveditore_, omnipotent civilian critic of all the
+movements of war, which so much disgusted the generals of the republic.
+He had been ambassador at the courts of both emperor and pope, and was
+serving his country in that capacity at Avignon when the news of his
+election reached him.
+
+It is thus evident that Falieri was not a man used to the position of a
+lay figure, although at seventy-six the dignified retirement of a
+throne, even when so encircled with restrictions, would seem not
+inappropriate. That he was of a haughty and hasty temper seems apparent.
+It is told of him that, after waiting long for a bishop to head a
+procession at Treviso where he was _podesta_ ("chief magistrate"), he
+astonished the tardy prelate by a box on the ear when he finally
+appeared, a punishment for keeping the authorities waiting.
+
+Old age to a statesman, however, is in many cases an advantage rather
+than a defect, and Falieri was young in vigor and character, and still
+full of life and strength. He was married a second time to presumably a
+beautiful wife much younger than himself, though the chroniclers are not
+agreed even on the subject of her name, whether she was a Gradenigo or a
+Contarini. The well-known story of young Steno's insult to this lady and
+to her old husband has found a place in all subsequent histories, but
+there is no trace of it in the unpublished documents of the state.
+
+The story goes that Michel Steno, one of those young and insubordinate
+gallants who are a danger to every aristocratic state, having been
+turned out of the presence of the Dogaressa for some unseemly freedom of
+behavior, wrote upon the chair of the Doge in boyish petulance an
+insulting taunt, such as might well rouse a high-tempered old man to
+fury. According to Sanudo, the young man, on being brought before the
+Forty,[56] confessed that he had thus avenged himself in a fit of
+passion; and regard having been had to his age and the "heat of love"
+which had been the cause of his original misdemeanor--a reason seldom
+taken into account by the tribunals of the state--he was condemned to
+prison for two months, and afterward to be banished for a year from
+Venice.
+
+The Doge took this light punishment greatly amiss, considering it,
+indeed, as a further insult.
+
+Sabellico says not a word of Michel Steno, or of this definite cause of
+offence, and Romanin quotes the contemporary records to show that though
+_Alcuni zovanelli fioli de gentiluomini di Venetia_ are supposed to have
+affronted the Doge, no such story finds a place in any of them. But the
+old man thus translated from active life and power, soon became bitterly
+sensible in his new position that he was _senza parentado_, with few
+relations, and flouted by the _giovinastri_, the dissolute young
+gentlemen who swaggered about the Broglio in their finery, strong in the
+support of fathers and uncles.
+
+That he found himself, at the same time, shelved in his new rank,
+powerless, and regarded as a nobody in the state where hitherto he had
+been a potent signior--mastered in every action by the secret tribunal,
+and presiding nominally in councils where his opinion was of little
+consequence--is evident. And a man so well acquainted, and so long, with
+all the proceedings of the state, who had seen consummated the shutting
+out of the people, and since had watched through election after election
+a gradual tightening of the bonds round the feet of the doge, would
+naturally have many thoughts when he found himself the wearer of that
+restricted and diminished crown.
+
+He could not be unconscious of how the stream was going, nor unaware of
+that gradual sapping of privilege and decreasing of power which even in
+his own case had gone further than with his predecessor. Perhaps he had
+noted with an indignant mind the new limits of the _promissione_, a
+narrower charter than ever, when he was called upon to sign it. He had
+no mind, we may well believe, to retire thus from the administration of
+affairs. And when these giovinastri, other people's boys, the scum of
+the gay world, flung their unsavory jests in the face of the old man who
+had no son to come after him, the silly insults so lightly uttered, so
+little thought of, the natural scoff of youth at old age, stung him to
+the quick.
+
+Old Falieri's heart burned within him at his own injuries and those of
+his old comrades. How he was induced to head the conspiracy, and put his
+crown, his life, and honor on the cast, there is no further information.
+His fierce temper, and the fact that he had no powerful house behind him
+to help to support his case, probably made him reckless. In April, 1355,
+six months after his arrival in Venice as doge, the smouldering fire
+broke out. Two of the conspirators were seized with compunction on the
+eve of the catastrophe and betrayed the plot--one with a merciful motive
+to serve a patrician he loved, the other with perhaps less noble
+intentions--and, without a blow struck, the conspiracy collapsed. There
+was no real heart in it, nothing to give it consistence; the hot passion
+of a few men insulted, the variable gaseous excitement of wronged
+commoners, and the ambition--if it was ambition--of one enraged and
+affronted old man, without an heir to follow him or anything that could
+make it worth his while to conquer.
+
+An enterprise more wild was never undertaken. It was the passionate
+stand of despair against force so overwhelming as to make mad the
+helpless, yet not submissive, victims. The Doge, who no doubt in former
+days had felt it to be a mere affair of the populace, a thing with which
+a noble ambassador and proveditore had nothing to do, a struggle beneath
+his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a
+fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to
+believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the
+forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real
+hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a
+man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his
+fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but
+feel in that passion of helpless age and unfriendedness, something of
+the terrible disappointment of one to whom the real situation of affairs
+had never been revealed before; who had come home triumphant to reign
+like the doges of old, and, only after the ducal cap was on his head and
+the palace of the state had become his home, found out that the
+doge--like the unconsidered plebeian--had been reduced to bondage; his
+judgment and experience put aside in favor of the deliberations of a
+secret tribunal, and the very boys, when they were nobles, at liberty to
+jeer at his declining years.
+
+The lesser conspirators, all men of the humbler sort--Calendario, the
+architect, who was then at work upon the palace, a number of seamen, and
+other little-known persons--were hanged; not like the greater criminals,
+beheaded between the columns, but strung up--a horrible fringe--along
+the side of the palazzo. The fate of Falieri himself is too generally
+known to demand description. Calmed by the tragic touch of fate, the
+Doge bore all the humiliations of his doom with dignity, and was
+beheaded at the head of the stairs where he had sworn the promissione on
+first assuming the office of doge.
+
+What a contrast was this from that triumphant day when probably he felt
+that his reward had come to him after the long and faithful service of
+years. Death stills disappointment as well as rage, and Falieri is said
+to have acknowledged the justice of his sentence. He had never made any
+attempt to justify or defend himself, but frankly and at once avowed his
+guilt and made no attempt to escape from its penalties. His body was
+conveyed privately to the Church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, the
+great "Zanipolo"--with which all visitors to Venice are familiar--and
+was buried in secrecy and silence in the _atrio_ of a little chapel
+behind the great church--where no doubt for centuries the pavement was
+worn by many feet with little thought of those who lay below. Even from
+that refuge his bones have been driven forth, but his name remains in
+the corner of the Hall of the Great Council, where--with a certain
+dramatic affectation--the painter-historians have painted a black veil
+across the vacant place. "This is the place of Marino Falieri, beheaded
+for his crimes," is all the record left of the Doge disgraced.
+
+Was it a crime? The question is one which it is difficult to discuss
+with any certainty. That Falieri desired to establish--as so many had
+done in other cities--an independent despotism in Venice, seems entirely
+unproved. It was the prevailing fear; the one suggestion which alarmed
+everybody and made sentiment unanimous. But one of the special points
+which are recorded by the chroniclers as working in him to madness, was
+that he was _senza parentado_--without any backing of relationship or
+allies--_i.e._, sonless, with no one to come after him. How little
+likely then was an old man to embark on such a desperate venture for
+self-aggrandizement merely. He had, indeed, a nephew who was involved in
+his fate, but apparently not so deeply as to expose him to the last
+penalty of the law.
+
+The incident altogether points more to a sudden outbreak of the rage and
+disappointment of an old public servant coming back from his weary
+labors for the state in triumph and satisfaction to what seemed the
+supreme reward; and finding himself no more than a puppet in the hands
+of remorseless masters, subject to the scoffs of the younger generation,
+with his eyes opened by his own suffering, perceiving for the first time
+what justice there was in the oft-repeated protest of the people, and
+how they and he alike were crushed under the iron heel of that oligarchy
+to which the power of the people and that of the Prince were equally
+obnoxious. The chroniclers of his time were so much at a loss to find
+any reason for such an attempt on the part of a man, _non abbiando alcum
+propinquo_, that they agree in attributing it to diabolical inspiration.
+
+It was more probably that fury which springs from a sense of wrong,
+which the sight of the wrongs of others raised to frenzy, and that
+intolerable impatience of the impotent which is more harsh in its
+hopelessness than the greatest hardihood. He could not but die for it,
+but there seems no more reason to characterize this impossible attempt
+as deliberate treason than to give the same name to many an alliance
+formed between prince and people in other regions--the king and commons
+of the early Stuarts, for example--against the intolerable exactions and
+cruelty of an aristocracy too powerful to be faced alone by either.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES IV OF GERMANY PUBLISHES
+HIS GOLDEN BULL
+
+A.D. 1356
+
+SIR ROBERT COMYN
+
+
+  The Golden Bull of Charles IV of Germany, Emperor of the
+  Holy Roman Empire, first published at the Diet of Nuremberg
+  in 1356, was a charter--sometimes called the "Magna Charta
+  of Germany"--regulating the election of the emperor. It was
+  called "golden" because the seal attached to the parchment
+  on which it was engrossed was of gold instead of the
+  customary lead. In a diet at Metz in the same year six
+  additional clauses were promulgated.
+
+  By some historians the origin of the imperial electoral
+  college is assigned to the year 1125, when at the election
+  of Lothair II certain of the nobles and church dignitaries
+  made a selection of candidates to be voted for. But until
+  the promulgation of the Golden Bull the constitution and
+  prerogatives of the college were never definitely
+  ascertained.
+
+  The personal traits and the languid reign of Charles IV have
+  been treated by historians with derision. He forgot the
+  general welfare of the empire in his eagerness to enrich his
+  own house and aggrandize his paternal kingdom of Bohemia.
+  The one remarkable law which emanated from him, and whereby
+  alone his reign is distinguished in the constitutional
+  history of the empire, is that embodied in the Golden Bull.
+  By this instrument the dignity of the electors was greatly
+  enhanced, and the disputes which had arisen between members
+  of the same house as to their right of suffrage were
+  terminated. The number of electors was absolutely restricted
+  to seven.
+
+After a solemn invocation of the Trinity, a reprobation of the seven
+deadly sins, and a pointed allusion to the seven candlesticks and the
+seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Golden Bull proceeds to the subject
+of the imperial election. It provides, in the first place, for the safe
+conduct of the seven electors to and from Frankfort-on-the-Main, which
+is fixed as the place of election; it directs the archbishop of Mainz to
+summon the electors upon the death of the emperor, and regulates the
+manner in which their proxies are to be appointed; it enjoins the
+citizens of Frankfort to protect the assembled electors; and forbids
+them to admit any stranger into the city during the election.
+
+It next prescribes the form of oath to be taken by the electors; and
+also forbids them to quit the city before the completion of the
+election; and after thirty days restricts their diet to bread and water.
+A majority of votes is to decide the election; and in case any elector
+obtain three votes, his own vote is to be taken in his favor.
+
+The precedence of the electors is thus settled: First, the archbishops
+of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves; then the King of Bohemia, the Count
+Palatine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The
+Elector of Treves is to vote first; then the Elector of Cologne; then
+the secular electors; and the Elector of Mainz is finally to collect the
+votes and deliver his own.
+
+The Elector of Cologne is to perform the coronation. At all feasts the
+Margrave of Brandenburg, as grand chamberlain, is to present the Emperor
+with water to wash; the King of Bohemia, as cup-bearer, is to offer the
+goblet of wine; the Count Palatine, as grand steward, is to set the
+first dish on the table; and the Duke of Saxony is to officiate as grand
+marshal.
+
+The Count Palatine and the Duke of Saxony are declared vicars of the
+empire during the vacancy of the throne. An exclusive jurisdiction is
+guaranteed to the electors; and their precedence over all other princes
+of Germany is enforced.
+
+The right of voting is vested in the eldest son of a deceased elector,
+provided he have attained the age of eighteen; and during the minority,
+the guardianship and vote are vested in the next kinsman of the
+deceased.
+
+If one of the lay electorates become vacant by default of heirs, it
+shall revert to the Emperor, and be by him disposed of--Bohemia
+excepted, where the vacancy is to be supplied by ancient mode of
+election.
+
+The electors are invested with the possession of all mines discovered
+within their respective territories. They are authorized to give refuge
+to the Jews, and to receive dues payable within their states. They are
+also privileged to coin money, and to purchase lands subject to the
+feudal rights of the sovereign.
+
+A yearly assembly of the electors, in one of the imperial cities, is
+enjoined.
+
+All privileges granted to any city or community prejudicial to the
+rights of the electors are revoked. All fraudulent resignations of fiefs
+by vassals, with intent to attack their lords, are declared void. All
+leagues, associations, and confederacies, not sanctioned by law, are
+made punishable by fine; and all burgesses and subjects of princes and
+nobles are to adhere to their original subjection, and not to claim any
+rights or exemptions as burgesses of any city unless actually domiciled
+therein.
+
+Challenges, with design of destroying another's property or committing
+any outrage, are prohibited; and all challenges are to be given three
+days before the onset.
+
+The forms of summoning electors, and of their delegation of proxies, are
+laid down. And the right of voting, as well as all other rights, is
+declared inseparably incident to the electoral principality.
+
+On grand occasions the Duke of Saxony is to carry the sword; the Count
+Palatine, the globe; the Margrave of Brandenburg, the sceptre. In
+celebrating mass before the Emperor, the benedictions are to be
+pronounced by the senior spiritual elector present.
+
+All persons conspiring against the lives of the electors are declared
+guilty of leze-majesty, and shall forfeit their lives and possessions.
+The lives of their sons, though justly forfeited, are spared only by the
+particular bounty of the Emperor; but they are declared incapable of
+holding any property, honor, or dignity, and doomed to perpetual
+poverty. The daughters are permitted to enjoy one-fourth of their
+mother's succession.
+
+The secular principalities, Bohemia, the Palatinate, the duchy of
+Saxony, and the margravate of Brandenburg, are declared indivisible and
+entire, descendible in the male line.
+
+On all the solemn occasions the electors shall attend the Emperor, and
+the arch-chancellors shall carry the seals. And the bull then proceeds
+minutely to point out the manner in which the electors are to exercise
+their ministerial functions at the imperial banquet; and regulates the
+order and disposition of the imperial and electoral tables.
+
+Frankfort is again declared as the place of election; Aix-la-Chapelle,
+of coronation; and Nuremberg, for holding the first royal court.
+
+The electors are exempted from all payments on receiving their fiefs
+from their sovereign. But other princes are to pay certain fees, etc.,
+to the imperial officers.
+
+Lastly, the secular electors are enjoined to instruct their sons in the
+Latin, Italian, and Slavonic tongues.
+
+At the final promulgation of the bull in the Diet of Metz the Emperor
+and Empress feasted, in the presence of the dauphin (Charles V) and the
+legate of Pope Innocent VI, with all the pageantry and ceremonies
+prescribed by the new ordinances. The imperial tables were spread in the
+grand square of the city; Rudolph, Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg, attended
+with a silver measure of oats, and marshalled the order of the company;
+Louis II, Margrave of Brandenburg, presented to the Emperor the golden
+basin, with water and fair napkins; Rupert, Count Palatine, placed the
+first dish upon the table; and the Emperor's brother, Wenceslaus,
+representing the King of Bohemia, officiated as cup-bearer. Lastly, the
+princes of Schwarzburg and the deputy huntsman came with three hounds
+amid the loud din of horns, and carried up a stag and a boar to the
+table of the Emperor.
+
+
+
+
+INSURRECTION OF THE JACQUERIE IN FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1358
+
+SIR JOHN FROISSART
+
+
+  The defeat of the French under King John II, at Poitiers, by
+  the British forces of Edward, the Black Prince, September
+  19, 1356, aroused great indignation among the common people
+  of France, with scorn of the nobility; for these leaders,
+  with an army of sixty thousand, had fled before an enemy
+  whom they outnumbered seven to one. In the next assembly of
+  the states-general the bourgeois obtained a preponderance so
+  intolerable to the nobles that they withdrew to their homes.
+  A little later the deputies of the clergy also retired,
+  leaving only the representatives of the cities--among whom
+  the supremacy of the members from Paris was generally
+  accepted--to deal with the affairs of the kingdom.
+
+  At this point appeared a man who in an age "so uncivilized
+  and sombre," says Pierre Robiquet, "by wonderful instinct
+  laid down and nearly succeeded in obtaining the adoption of
+  the essential principles on which modern society is
+  founded--the government of the country by elected
+  representatives, taxes voted by representatives of the
+  taxpayers, abolition of privileges founded upon right of
+  birth, extension of political rights to all citizens, and
+  subordination of traditional sovereignty to that of the
+  nation." This man was Étienne Marcel, provost of the
+  merchants of Paris--that is to say, mayor of the
+  municipality, whom eminent historians have called the
+  greatest personage of the fourteenth century. During a
+  career of three years his name dominates French history--a
+  brief ascendency, but of potent influence. His endeavor, in
+  Thierry's view, "was, as it were, a premature attempt at the
+  grand designs of Providence, and the mirror of the bloody
+  changes of fortune through which those designs were destined
+  to advance to their accomplishment under the impulse of
+  human passions."
+
+  After the disaster of Poitiers, Marcel finished the
+  fortifications of Paris and barricaded the streets, and in
+  the assembly there he presided over the bourgeois--the Third
+  Estate. In the growing conflict between the two other
+  estates--nobles and clergy--and the third, Marcel armed the
+  bourgeois and began an open revolution, thus organizing the
+  commune for carrying out his designs. The nobles were
+  meanwhile laying heavier miseries upon the peasantry, and in
+  the spring of 1358 occurred the rising of the Jacquerie,
+  here described by Froissart, whose brilliant narrative is to
+  be read in the light of modern critical judgment, which
+  regards it as an exaggeration both of the numbers of the
+  insurgents and their atrocities, while Froissart had no
+  capacity for understanding the conditions which explain, if
+  they do not also justify, the present revolt.
+
+  This outbreak, to which Marcel gave his support, was enough
+  to ruin his cause, and he died in a massacre, July 31, 1358,
+  having failed "because the time was not yet ripe," and
+  because the violence to which he lent his sanction was
+  overcome by stronger violence.
+
+A marvellous and great tribulation befell the kingdom of France, in
+Beauvoisis, Brie, upon the river Marne, in the Laonnois, and in the
+neighborhood of Soissons. Some of the inhabitants of the country towns
+assembled together in Beauvoisis, without any leader; they were not at
+first more than one hundred men. They said that the nobles of the
+kingdom of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that
+it would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all; to which
+proposition everyone assented, and added, shame befall him that should
+be the means of preventing the gentlemen from being wholly destroyed.
+They then, without further counsel, collected themselves in a body, and
+with no other arms than the staves shod with iron which some had, and
+others with knives, marched to the house of a knight who lived near,
+and, breaking it open, murdered the knight, his lady, and all the
+children, both great and small; they then burned the house.
+
+After this, their second expedition was to the strong castle of another
+knight, which they took, and, having tied him to a stake, many of them
+violated his wife and daughter before his eyes; they then murdered the
+lady, her daughter, and the other children, and last of all the knight
+himself, with much cruelty. They destroyed and burned his castle. They
+did the like to many castles and handsome houses; and their numbers
+increased so much that they were in a short time upward of six thousand.
+Wherever they went they received additions, for all of their rank in
+life followed them, while everyone else fled, carrying off with them
+their ladies, damsels, and children ten or twenty leagues distant, where
+they thought they could place them in security, leaving their houses,
+with all their riches in them.
+
+These wicked people, without leader and without arms, plundered and
+burned all the houses they came to, murdered every gentleman, and
+violated every lady and damsel they could find. He who committed the
+most atrocious actions, and such as no human creature would have
+imagined, was the most applauded and considered as the greatest man
+among them. I dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities
+they committed on the persons of the ladies.
+
+Among other infamous acts they murdered a knight, and, having fastened
+him to a spit, roasted him before the eyes of his wife and his children,
+and forced her to eat some of her husband's flesh, and then knocked her
+brains out. They had chosen a king among them, who came from Clermont in
+Beauvoisis. He was elected as the worst of the bad, and they denominated
+him "Jacques Bonhomme."[57]
+
+These wretches burned and destroyed in the county of Beauvoisis, and at
+Corbie, Amiens, and Montdidier, upward of sixty good houses and strong
+castles. By the acts of such traitors in the country of Brie and
+thereabout, it behooved every lady, knight, and squire, having the means
+of escape, to fly to Meaux, if they wished to preserve themselves from
+being insulted and afterward murdered. The Duchess of Normandy, the
+Duchess of Orleans, and many other ladies had adopted this course. These
+cursed people thus supported themselves in the countries between Paris,
+Noyon, and Soissons, and in all the territory of Coucy, in the County of
+Valois. In the bishoprics of Noyon, Laon, and Soissons there were upward
+of one hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed.
+
+When the gentlemen of Beauvoisis, Corbie, Vermandois, and of the lands
+where these wretches were associated, saw to what lengths their madness
+had extended, they sent for succor to their friends in Flanders,
+Hainault, and Bohemia; from which places numbers soon came and united
+themselves with the gentlemen of the country. They began therefore to
+kill and destroy these wretches wherever they met them, and hung them up
+by troops on the nearest trees. The King of Navarre even destroyed in
+one day, near Clermont in Beauvoisis, upward of three thousand; but
+they were by this time so much increased in numbers that, had they been
+all together, they would have amounted to more than one hundred
+thousand. When they were asked for what reason they acted so wickedly,
+they replied, they knew not, but they did so because they saw others do
+it, and they thought that by this means they should destroy all the
+nobles and gentlemen in the world.
+
+At this period the Duke of Normandy, suspecting the King of Navarre, the
+provost of merchants and those of his faction--for they were always
+unanimous in their sentiments--set out from Paris, and went to the
+bridge at Charenton-upon-Marne, where he issued a special summons for
+the attendance of the crown vassals, and sent a defiance to the provost
+of merchants and to all those who should support him. The provost, being
+fearful he would return in the night-time to Paris--which was then
+unenclosed--collected as many workmen as possible from all parts, and
+employed them to make ditches all around Paris. He also surrounded it by
+a wall with strong gates. For the space of one year there were three
+hundred workmen daily employed; the expense of which was equal to
+maintaining an army. I must say that to surround with a sufficient
+defence such a city as Paris was an act of greater utility than any
+provost of merchants had ever done before; for otherwise it would have
+been plundered and destroyed several times by the different factions.
+
+At the time these wicked men were overrunning the country, the Earl of
+Foix, and his cousin the Captal of Buch were returning from a crusade in
+Prussia. They were informed, on their entering France, of the distress
+the nobles were in; and they learned at the city of Chalons that the
+Duchess of Orleans and three hundred other ladies, under the protection
+of the Duke of Orleans, were fled to Meaux on account of these
+disturbances. The two knights resolved to go to the assistance of these
+ladies, and to reënforce them with all their might, notwithstanding the
+Captal was attached to the English; but at that time there was a truce
+between the two kings. They might have in their company about sixty
+lances.
+
+They were most cheerfully received, on their arrival at Meaux, by the
+ladies and damsels; for these Jacks and peasants of Brie had heard what
+number of ladies, married and unmarried, and young children of quality
+were in Meaux; they had united themselves with those of Valois and were
+on their road thither. On the other hand, those of Paris had also been
+informed of the treasures Meaux contained, and had set out from that
+place in crowds. Having met the others, they amounted together to nine
+thousand men. Their forces were augmenting every step they advanced.
+
+They came to the gates of the town, which the inhabitants opened to them
+and allowed them to enter; they did so in such numbers that all the
+streets were quite filled, as far as the market-place, which is
+tolerably strong, but it required to be guarded, though the river Marne
+nearly surrounds it. The noble dames who were lodged there, seeing such
+multitudes rushing toward them, were exceedingly frightened. On this,
+the two lords and their company advanced to the gate of the
+market-place, which they had opened, and, marching under the banners of
+the Earl of Foix and Duke of Orleans, and the pennon of the Captal of
+Buch, posted themselves in front of this peasantry, who were badly
+armed.
+
+When these banditti perceived such a troop of gentlemen, so well
+equipped, sally forth to guard the market-place, the foremost of them
+began to fall back. The gentlemen then followed them, using their lances
+and swords. When they felt the weight of their blows, they, through
+fear, turned about so fast they fell one over the other. All manner of
+armed persons then rushed out of the barriers, drove them before them,
+striking them down like beasts, and clearing the town of them; for they
+kept neither regularity nor order, slaying so many that they were tired.
+They flung them in great heaps into the river. In short, they killed
+upward of seven thousand. Not one would have escaped if they had chosen
+to pursue them farther.
+
+On the return of the men-at-arms, they set fire to the town of Meaux,
+burned it; and all the peasants they could find were shut up in it,
+because they had been of the party of the Jacks. Since this discomfiture
+which happened to them at Meaux, they never collected again in any great
+bodies; for the young Enguerrand de Coucy had plenty of gentlemen under
+his orders, who destroyed them, wherever they could be met with, without
+mercy.
+
+
+
+
+CONQUESTS OF TIMUR THE TARTAR
+
+A.D. 1370-1405
+
+EDWARD GIBBON
+
+
+  Timur, better known as Tamerlane ("Timur the Lame"), was
+  born in Central Asia--probably in the village of Sebzar,
+  near Samarkand, in Transoxiana (Turkestan). He is supposed
+  to have been descended from a follower of Genghis Khan,
+  founder of the Mongol empire; or, as some say, directly, by
+  the mother's side, from Genghis himself. He is the
+  Tamerlaine or Tamburlaine of Marlowe and other dramatists.
+  Gibbon introduces him in the _Decline and Fall_, apparently
+  because fascinated with the subject, although he gives as a
+  historical reason the fact that Timur's triumph in Asia
+  delayed the final fall of Constantinople--taken by the Turks
+  in 1453.
+
+  In early youth the future ruler of so vast an empire was
+  engaged in struggles for ascendency with the petty chiefs of
+  rival tribes. His boundless ambition early conceived the
+  conquest and monarchy of the world; his wish was "to live in
+  the memory and esteem of future ages." He was born in a
+  period of anarchy, when the crumbling kingdoms of the
+  Asiatic dynasties were no longer able to resist the
+  adventurous spirit determined to occupy the new field of
+  military triumph which opened before him. At the age of
+  twenty-five Timur was hailed as the deliverer of his
+  country. When he chose Samarkand as the capital of his
+  dominion, he declared his purpose to make that dominion
+  embrace the whole habitable earth; and at the height of his
+  power he ruled from the Great Wall of China to the centre of
+  Russia on the north, while his sovereignty extended to the
+  Mediterranean and the Nile on the west, and on the east to
+  the sources of the Ganges. In his own person he united
+  twenty-seven different sovereignties, and nine several
+  dynasties of kings gave place to the unparalleled conqueror,
+  who won by the sword a larger portion of the globe than
+  Cyrus or Alexander, Cæsar or Attila, Genghis Khan,
+  Charlemagne, or Napoleon.
+
+  It was believed in the family and empire of Timur that he
+  himself composed the _Commentaries_ of his life and the
+  _Institutions_ of his government, which, however, were
+  probably the work of his secretaries. These manuscripts have
+  been of great service to historians in their study of
+  Timur's career.
+
+At the age of thirty-four, and in a general diet, Timur was invested
+with imperial command, but he affected to revere the house of Genghis;
+and while the emir Timur reigned over Zagatai and the East, a nominal
+khan served as a private officer in the armies of his servant. Without
+expatiating on the victories of thirty-five campaigns, without
+describing the lines of march which he repeatedly traced over the
+continent of Asia, I shall briefly represent Timur's conquests in
+Persia, Tartary, and India, and from thence proceed to the more
+interesting narrative of his Ottoman war.
+
+No sooner had Timur reunited to the patrimony of Zagatai the dependent
+countries of Karizme and Kandahar than he turned his eyes toward the
+kingdoms of Iran or Persia. From the Oxus to the Tigris that extensive
+country was without a lawful sovereign. Peace and justice had been
+banished from the land above forty years; and the Mongol invader might
+seem to listen to the cries of an oppressed people. Their petty tyrants
+might have opposed him with confederate arms: they separately stood and
+successively fell; and the difference of their fate was only marked by
+the promptitude of submission or the obstinacy of resistance. Ibrahim,
+Prince of Shirwan or Albania, kissed the footstool of the imperial
+throne. His peace offerings of silks, horses, and jewels were composed,
+according to the Tartar fashion, each article of nine pieces; but a
+critical spectator observed that there were only eight slaves. "I myself
+am the ninth," replied Ibraham, who was prepared for the remark: and his
+flattery was rewarded by the smile of Timur.
+
+Shah Mansur, Prince of Fars, or the proper Persia, was one of the least
+powerful, but most dangerous, of his enemies. In a battle under the
+walls of Shiraz, he broke, with three or four thousand soldiers, the
+_coul_, or main body, of thirty thousand horse, where the Emperor fought
+in person. No more than fourteen or fifteen guards remained near the
+standard of Timur; he stood firm as a rock, and received on his helmet
+two weighty strokes of a cimeter; the Mongols rallied; the head of
+Mansur was thrown at his feet; and he declared his esteem of the valor
+of a foe by extirpating all the males of so intrepid a race. From Shiraz
+his troops advanced to the Persian Gulf; and the richness and weakness
+of Ormus were displayed in an annual tribute of six hundred thousand
+dinars of gold.
+
+Bagdad was no longer the city of peace, the seat of the caliphs; but the
+noblest conquest of Khulagu could not be overlooked by his ambitious
+successor. The whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the mouth
+to the sources of those rivers, was reduced to his obedience; he entered
+Edessa; and the Turcomans of the black sheep were chastised for the
+sacrilegious pillage of a caravan of Mecca. In the mountains of Georgia
+the native Christians still braved the law and the sword of Mahomet; by
+three expeditions he obtained the merit of the _gazie_, or holy war; and
+the Prince of Tiflis became his proselyte and friend.
+
+A just retaliation might be urged for the invasion of Turkestan, or the
+Eastern Tartary. The dignity of Timur could not endure the impunity of
+the Getes: he passed the Sihun, subdued the kingdom of Kashgar, and
+marched seven times into the heart of their country. His most distant
+camp was two months' journey to the northeast of Samarkand; and his
+emirs, who traversed the river Irtysh, engraved in the forests of
+Siberia a rude memorial of their exploits. The conquest of Kiptchak, or
+the Western Tartary, was founded on the double motive of aiding the
+distressed and chastising the ungrateful. Toctamish, a fugitive prince,
+was entertained and protected in his court; the ambassadors of Auruss
+Khan were dismissed with a haughty denial, and followed on the same day
+by the armies of Zagatai; and their success established Toctamish in the
+Mongol empire of the North.
+
+But, after a reign of ten years, the new Khan forgot the merits and the
+strength of his benefactor--the base usurper, as he deemed him, of the
+sacred rights of the house of Genghis. Through the gates of Derbent he
+entered Persia at the head of ninety thousand horse: with the
+innumerable forces of Kiptchak, Bulgaria, Circassia, and Russia, he
+passed the Sihun, burned the palaces of Timur, and compelled him, amid
+the winter snows, to contend for Samarkand and his life. After a mild
+expostulation and a glorious victory the Emperor resolved on revenge;
+and by the east and the west of the Caspian and the Volga he twice
+invaded Kiptchak with such mighty powers that thirteen miles were
+measured from his right to his left wing. In a march of five months they
+rarely beheld the footsteps of man; and their daily subsistence was
+often trusted to the fortune of the chase. At length the armies
+encountered each other; but the treachery of the standard-bearer, who,
+in the heat of action, reversed the imperial standard of Kiptchak,
+determined the victory of the Zagatais and Toctamish--I speak the
+language of the _Institutions_--gave the tribe of Toushi to the wind of
+desolation. He fled to the Christian Duke of Lithuania, again returned
+to the banks of the Volga, and, after fifteen battles with a domestic
+rival, at last perished in the wilds of Siberia.
+
+The pursuit of a flying enemy carried Timur into the tributary provinces
+of Russia; a duke of the reigning family was made prisoner amid the
+ruins of his capital; and Yelets, by the pride and ignorance of the
+orientals, might easily be confounded with the genuine metropolis of the
+nation. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar. Ambition and
+prudence recalled him to the south, the desolate country was exhausted,
+and the Mongol soldiers were enriched with an immense spoil of precious
+furs, of linen of Antioch, and of ingots of gold and silver. On the
+banks of the Don, or Tanais, he received a humble deputation from the
+consuls and merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay,
+who occupied the commerce and city of Tana, or Azov, at the mouth of the
+river. They offered their gifts, admired his magnificence, and trusted
+his royal word. But the peaceful visit of an emir, who explored the
+state of the magazines and harbor, was speedily followed by the
+destructive presence of the Tartars. The city of Tana was reduced to
+ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and dismissed; but all the Christians
+who had not fled to their ships were condemned either to death or
+slavery. Revenge prompted him to burn the cities of Sarai and Astrakhan,
+the monuments of rising civilization; and his vanity proclaimed that he
+had penetrated to the region of perpetual daylight, a strange
+phenomenon, which authorized his Mahometan doctors to dispense with the
+obligation of evening prayer.
+
+When Timur first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion of India
+or Hindustan, he was answered by a murmur of discontent: "The rivers!
+and the mountains and deserts! and the soldiers clad in armor! and the
+elephants, destroyers of men!" But the displeasure of the Emperor was
+more dreadful than all these terrors; and his superior reason was
+convinced that an enterprise of such tremendous aspect was safe and easy
+in the execution. He was informed by his spies of the weakness and
+anarchy of Hindustan: the _subahs_ of the provinces had erected the
+standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of Sultan Mahmud was
+despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mongol army moved in three
+great divisions, and Timur observes with pleasure that the ninety-two
+squadrons of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with the
+ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet.
+
+Between the Jihun and the Indus they crossed one of the ridges of
+mountains which are styled by the Arabian geographers the "Stony Girdles
+of the Earth." The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but
+great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the Emperor
+himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold--the ropes were
+one hundred and fifty cubits in length--and before he could reach the
+bottom, this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timur crossed
+the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attock, and successively traversed,
+in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab, or five rivers, that fall
+into the master stream. From Attock to Delhi the high road measures no
+more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the
+southeast; and the motive of Timur was to join his grandson, who had
+achieved by his command the conquest of Multan. On the eastern bank of
+the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and
+wept; the Mongol entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batnir, and
+stood in arms before the gates of Delhi, a great and flourishing city,
+which had subsisted three centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan
+kings.
+
+The siege, more especially of the castle, might have been a work of
+time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness, the Sultan Mahmud
+and his wazir to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers,
+forty thousand of his foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants,
+whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers.
+Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops,
+he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire and a
+ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught
+the Mongols to smile at their own fears; and as soon as these unwieldy
+animals were routed, the inferior species (the men of India) disappeared
+from the field. Timur made his triumphal entry into the capital of
+Hindustan, and admired, with a view to imitate, the architecture of the
+stately mosque; but the order or license of a general pillage and
+massacre polluted the festival of his victory. He resolved to purify his
+soldiers in the blood of the idolaters, or Gentoos, who still surpass,
+in the proportion of ten to one, the numbers of the Moslems. In this
+pious design he advanced one hundred miles to the northeast of Delhi,
+passed the Ganges, fought several battles by land and water, and
+penetrated to the famous rock of Cupele, the statue of the cow,[58] that
+_seems_ to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among
+the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern
+hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange
+foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would
+degenerate into a race of Hindus.
+
+It was on the banks of the Ganges that Timur was informed, by his speedy
+messengers, of the disturbances which had arisen on the confines of
+Georgia and Anatolia, of the revolt of the Christians, and the ambitious
+designs of the sultan Bajazet. His vigor of mind and body was not
+impaired by sixty-three years and innumerable fatigues; and, after
+enjoying some tranquil months in the palace of Samarkand, he proclaimed
+a new expedition of seven years into the western countries of Asia. To
+the soldiers who had served in the Indian war he granted the choice of
+remaining at home or following their prince; but the troops of all the
+provinces and kingdoms of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan
+and wait the arrival of the imperial standard. It was first directed
+against the Christians of Georgia, who were strong only in their rocks,
+their castles, and the winter season; but these obstacles were overcome
+by the zeal and perseverance of Timur: the rebels submitted to the
+tribute or the _Koran_; and if both religions boasted of their martyrs,
+that name is more justly due to the Christian prisoners, who were
+offered the choice of abjuration or death.
+
+On his descent from the hills the Emperor gave audience to the first
+ambassadors of Bajazet, and opened the hostile correspondence of
+complaints and menaces, which fermented two years before the final
+explosion. Between two jealous and haughty neighbors, the motives of
+quarrel will seldom be wanting. The Mongol and Ottoman conquests now
+touched each other in the neighborhood of Erzerum and the Euphrates; nor
+had the doubtful limit been ascertained by time and treaty. Each of
+these ambitious monarchs might accuse his rival of violating his
+territory, of threatening his vassals and protecting his rebels; and, by
+the name of rebels, each understood the fugitive princes, whose kingdoms
+he had usurped and whose life or liberty he implacably pursued. In their
+victorious career Timur was impatient of an equal, and Bajazet was
+ignorant of a superior.
+
+In his first expedition, Timur was satisfied with the siege and
+destruction of Sebaste, a strong city on the borders of Anatolia. He
+then turned aside to the invasion of Syria and Egypt, where the military
+republic of the mamelukes still reigned. The Syrian emirs were assembled
+at Aleppo to repel the invasion; they confided in the fame and
+discipline of the mamelukes, in the temper of their swords and lances of
+the purest steel of Damascus, in the strength of their walled cities,
+and in the populousness of sixty thousand villages; and instead of
+sustaining a siege, they threw open their gates and arrayed their forces
+in the plain. But these forces were not cemented by virtue and union,
+and some powerful emirs had been seduced to desert or betray their more
+loyal companions. Timur's front was covered with a line of Indian
+elephants, whose turrets were filled with archers and Greek fire; the
+rapid evolutions of his cavalry completed the dismay and disorder; the
+Syrian crowds fell back on each other; many thousands were stifled or
+slaughtered in the entrance of the great street; the Mongols entered
+with the fugitives; and after a short defence the impregnable citadel of
+Aleppo was surrendered by cowardice or treachery. Among the suppliants
+and captives, Timur distinguished the doctors of the law, whom he
+invited to the dangerous honor of a personal conference. The Mongol
+Prince was a zealous Mussulman; but his Persian schools had taught him
+to revere the memory of Ali and Hasan; and he had imbibed a deep
+prejudice against the Syrians as the enemies of the son of the daughter
+of the apostle of God. To these doctors he proposed a captious question,
+which the casuists of Samarkand and Herat were incapable of resolving.
+"Who are the true martyrs, of those who are slain on my side or on that
+of my enemies?" But he was silenced, or satisfied, by the dexterity of
+one of the cadis of Aleppo, who replied, in the words of Mahomet
+himself, that the motive, not the ensign, constitutes the martyr; and
+that the Moslems of either party who fight only for the glory of God may
+deserve that sacred appellation. The true succession of the caliphs was
+a controversy of a still more delicate nature; and the frankness of a
+doctor, too honest for his situation, provoked the Emperor to exclaim:
+"Ye are as false as those of Damascus: Moawiyah was a usurper, Yezid a
+tyrant, and Ali alone is the lawful successor of the Prophet." A prudent
+explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar
+topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty
+years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here,"
+continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the
+Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the
+Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my
+wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always
+been the authors of their own calamity." During this peaceful
+conversation the streets of Aleppo streamed with blood and reëchoed with
+the cries of mothers and children, with the shrieks of violated virgins.
+The rich plunder that was abandoned to his soldiers might stimulate
+their avarice; but their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command
+of producing an adequate number of heads, which, according to his
+custom, were curiously piled in columns and pyramids. The Mongols
+celebrated the feast of victory, while the surviving Moslems passed the
+night in tears and in chains.
+
+I shall not dwell on the march of the destroyer from Aleppo to Damascus,
+where he was rudely encountered, and almost overthrown, by the armies
+of Egypt. A retrograde motion was imputed to his distress and despair;
+one of his nephews deserted to the enemy; and Syria rejoiced in the tale
+of his defeat, when the Sultan was driven, by the revolt of the
+mamelukes, to escape with precipitation and shame to his palace of
+Cairo. Abandoned by their Prince, the inhabitants of Damascus still
+defended their walls; and Timur consented to raise the siege if they
+would adorn his retreat with a gift or ransom, each article of nine
+pieces. But no sooner had he introduced himself into the city, under
+color of a truce, than he perfidiously violated the treaty, imposed a
+contribution of ten millions of gold, and animated his troops to
+chastise the posterity of those Syrians who had executed, or approved,
+the murder of the grandson of Mahomet. After a period of seven centuries
+Damascus was reduced to ashes, because a Tartar was moved by religious
+zeal to avenge the blood of an Arab.
+
+The losses and fatigues of the campaign obliged Timur to renounce the
+conquest of Palestine and Egypt; but in his return to the Euphrates he
+delivered Aleppo to the flames and justified his pious motive by the
+pardon and reward of two thousand sectaries of Ali, who were desirous to
+visit the tomb of his son. I have expatiated on the personal anecdotes
+which mark the character of the Mongol hero, but I shall briefly mention
+that he erected, on the ruins of Bagdad, a pyramid of ninety thousand
+heads; again visited Georgia; encamped on the banks of the Araxes; and
+proclaimed his resolution of marching against the Ottoman Emperor.
+Conscious of the importance of the war, he collected his forces from
+every province; eight hundred thousand men were enrolled on his military
+list, but the splendid commands of five and ten thousand horse may be
+rather expressive of the rank and pension of the chiefs than of the
+genuine number of effective soldiers. In the pillage of Syria the
+Mongols had acquired immense riches; but the delivery of their pay and
+arrears for seven years more firmly attached them to the imperial
+standard.
+
+During this diversion of the Mongol arms, Bajazet had two years to
+collect his forces for a more serious encounter. They consisted of four
+hundred thousand horse and foot whose merit and fidelity were of an
+unequal complexion. We may discriminate the janizaries, who have been
+gradually raised to an establishment of forty thousand men; a national
+cavalry (the _spahis_ of modern times); twenty thousand cuirassiers of
+Europe, clad in black and impenetrable armor; the troops of Anatolia,
+whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timur: and a colony of
+Tartars, whom he had driven from Kiptchak, and to whom Bajazet had
+assigned a settlement in the plains of Adrianople. The fearless
+confidence of the Sultan urged him to meet his antagonist; and, as if he
+had chosen that spot for revenge, he displayed his banner near the ruins
+of the unfortunate Sebaste.
+
+In the mean while Timur moved from the Araxes through the countries of
+Armenia and Anatolia. His boldness was secured by the wisest
+precautions; his speed was guided by order and discipline; and the
+woods, the mountains, and the rivers were diligently explored by the
+flying squadrons, who marked his road and preceded his standard. Firm in
+his plan of fighting in the heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided
+their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Cæsarea,
+traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora;
+while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the
+Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of
+indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike
+impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a
+memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur and the
+shame of Bajazet.
+
+For this signal victory the Mongol Emperor was indebted to himself, to
+the genius of the moment, and the discipline of thirty years. He had
+improved the tactics, without violating the manners, of his nation,
+whose force still consisted in the missile weapons and rapid evolutions
+of a numerous cavalry. From a single troop to a great army, the mode of
+attack was the same; a foremost line first advanced to the charge, and
+was supported in a just order by the squadrons of the great vanguard.
+The general's eye watched over the field, and at his command the front
+and rear of the right and left wings successively moved forward in their
+several divisions, and in a direct or oblique line; the enemy was
+pressed by eighteen or twenty attacks; and each attack afforded a
+chance of victory. If they all proved fruitless or unsuccessful, the
+occasion was worthy of the Emperor himself, who gave the signal of
+advancing to the standard and main body, which he led in person. But in
+the battle of Angora, the main body itself was supported, on the flanks
+and in the rear, by the bravest squadrons of the reserve, commanded by
+the sons and grandsons of Timur. The conqueror of Hindustan
+ostentatiously showed a line of elephants, the trophies rather than the
+instruments of victory; the use of the Greek fire was familiar to the
+Mongols and Ottomans; but had they borrowed from Europe the recent
+invention of gunpowder and cannon, the artificial thunder, in the hands
+of either nation, must have turned the fortune of the day. In that day
+Bajazet displayed the qualities of a soldier and a chief; but his genius
+sunk under a stronger ascendant; and, from various motives, the greatest
+part of his troops failed him in the decisive moment. His rigor and
+avarice had provoked a mutiny among the Turks; and even his son Solyman
+too hastily withdrew from the field. The forces of Anatolia, loyal in
+their revolt, were drawn away to the banners of their lawful princes.
+His Tartar allies had been tempted by the letters and emissaries of
+Timur, who reproached their ignoble servitude under the slaves of their
+fathers; and offered to their hopes the dominion of their new, or the
+liberty of their ancient, country. In the right wing of Bajazet the
+cuirassiers of Europe charged with faithful hearts and irresistible
+arms; but these men of iron were soon broken by an artful flight and
+headlong pursuit; and the janizaries, alone, without cavalry or missile
+weapons, were encompassed by the circle of the Mongol hunters. Their
+valor was at length oppressed by heat, thirst, and the weight of
+numbers; and the unfortunate Sultan, afflicted with the gout in his
+hands and feet, was transported from the field on the fleetest of his
+horses. He was pursued and taken by the titular Khan of Zagatai; and,
+after his capture and the defeat of the Ottoman powers, the kingdom of
+Anatolia submitted to the conqueror, who planted his standard at
+Kiotahia, and dispersed on all sides the ministers of rapine and
+destruction. Mirza Mehemmed Sultan, the eldest and best beloved of his
+grandsons, was despatched to Bursa, with thirty thousand horse; and such
+was his youthful ardor that he arrived with only four thousand at the
+gates of the capital, after performing in five days a march of two
+hundred and thirty miles. Yet fear is still more rapid in its course;
+and Solyman, the son of Bajazet, had already passed over to Europe with
+the royal treasure. The spoil, however, of the palace and city was
+immense; the inhabitants had escaped; but the buildings, for the most
+part of wood, were reduced to ashes. From Bursa, the grandson of Timur
+advanced to Nice, even yet a fair and flourishing city; and the Mongol
+squadrons were only stopped by the waves of the Propontis. The same
+success attended the other mirzas and emirs in their excursions, and
+Smyrna, defended by the zeal and courage of the Rhodian knights, alone
+deserved the presence of the Emperor himself. After an obstinate
+defence, the place was taken by storm; all that breathed was put to the
+sword; and the heads of the Christian heroes were launched from the
+engines, on board of two caracks, or great ships of Europe, that rode at
+anchor in the harbor. The Moslems of Asia rejoiced in their deliverance
+from a dangerous and domestic foe and a parallel was drawn between the
+two rivals, by observing that Timur, in fourteen days, had reduced a
+fortress which had sustained seven years the siege, or at least the
+blockade, of Bajazet.
+
+The "iron cage" in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so
+often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the
+modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with
+confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which
+has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I
+shall collect and abridge, a more specious narrative of this memorable
+transaction. No sooner was Timur informed that the captive Ottoman was
+at the door of his tent than he graciously stepped forward to receive
+him, seated him by his side, and mingled with just reproaches a soothing
+pity for his rank and misfortune.
+
+"Alas!" said the Emperor, "the decree of fate is now accomplished by
+your own fault; it is the web which you have woven, the thorns of the
+tree which yourself have planted. I wished to spare, and even to assist,
+the champion of the Moslems. You braved our threats; you despised our
+friendship; you forced us to enter your kingdom with our invincible
+armies. Behold the event. Had you vanquished, I am not ignorant of the
+fate which you reserved for myself and my troops. But I disdain to
+retaliate; your life and honor are secure; and I shall express my
+gratitude to God by my clemency to man."
+
+The royal captive showed some signs of repentance, accepted the
+humiliation of a robe of honor, and embraced with tears his son Musa,
+who, at his request, was sought and found among the captives of the
+field. The Ottoman princes were lodged in a splendid pavilion; and the
+respect of the guards could be surpassed only by their vigilance. On the
+arrival of the harem from Bursa, Timur restored the queen Despina and
+her daughter to their father and husband; but he piously required that
+the Servian princess, who had hitherto been indulged in the profession
+of Christianity, should embrace, without delay, the religion of the
+Prophet. In the feast of victory, to which Bajazet was invited, the
+Mongol Emperor placed a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand,
+with a solemn assurance of restoring him with an increase of glory to
+the throne of his ancestors. But the effect of this promise was
+disappointed by the Sultan's untimely death. Amid the care of the most
+skilful physicians, he expired of an apoplexy, about nine months after
+his defeat. The victor dropped a tear over his grave; his body, with
+royal pomp, was conveyed to the mausoleum which he had erected at Bursa;
+and his son Musa, after receiving a rich present of gold and jewels, of
+horses and arms, was invested by a patent in red ink with the kingdom of
+Anatolia.
+
+Such is the portrait of a generous conqueror, which has been extracted
+from his own memorials and dedicated to his son and grandson, nineteen
+years after his decease; and, at a time when the truth was remembered by
+thousands, a manifest falsehood would have implied a satire on his real
+conduct. Weighty, indeed, is this evidence, adopted by all the Persian
+histories; yet flattery, more especially in the East, is base and
+audacious; and the harsh and ignominious treatment of Bajazet is
+attested by a chain of witnesses.
+
+I am satisfied that Sherefeddin Ali has faithfully described the first
+ostentatious interview, in which the conqueror, whose spirits were
+harmonized by success, affected the character of generosity. But his
+mind was insensibly alienated by the unseasonable arrogance of Bajazet;
+and Timur betrayed a design of leading his royal captive in triumph to
+Samarkand. An attempt to facilitate his escape, by digging a mine under
+the tent, provoked the Mongol Emperor to impose a harsher restraint; and
+in his perpetual marches, an iron cage on a wagon might be invented, not
+as a wanton insult, but as a rigorous precaution. But the strength of
+Bajazet's mind and body fainted under the trial, and his premature death
+might, without injustice, be ascribed to the severity of Timur.
+
+From the Irtysh and Volga to the Persian Gulf, and from the Ganges to
+Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in the hands of Timur; his armies
+were invincible, his ambition was boundless, and his zeal might aspire
+to conquer and convert the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already
+trembled at his name. He touched the utmost verge of the land; but an
+insuperable, though narrow, sea rolled between the two continents of
+Europe and Asia; and the lord of so many myriads of horse was not master
+of a single galley. The two passages of the Bosporus and Hellespont, of
+Constantinople and Gallipoli, were possessed, the one by the Christians,
+the other by the Turks. On this great occasion they forgot the
+difference of religion, to act with union and firmness in the common
+cause; the double straits were guarded with ships and fortifications;
+and they separately withheld the transports which Timur demanded of
+either nation, under the pretence of attacking their enemy. At the same
+time they soothed his pride with tributary gifts and suppliant
+embassies, and prudently tempted him to retreat with the honors of
+victory. Solyman, the son of Bajazet, implored his clemency for his
+father and himself; accepted, by a red patent, the investiture of the
+kingdom of Romania, which he already held by the sword; and reiterated
+his ardent wish of casting himself in person at the feet of the king of
+the world. The Greek Emperor--either John or Manuel--submitted to pay
+the same tribute which he had stipulated with the Turkish Sultan, and
+ratified the treaty by an oath of allegiance, from which he could
+absolve his conscience so soon as the Mongol arms had retired from
+Anatolia. But the fears and fancy of nations ascribed to the ambitious
+Tamerlane a new design of vast and romantic compass; a design of
+subduing Egypt and Africa, marching from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean,
+entering Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, after imposing his
+yoke on the kingdoms of Christendom, of returning home by the deserts of
+Russia and Tartary. This remote, and perhaps imaginary, danger was
+averted by the submission of the Sultan of Egypt, the honors of the
+prayer and the coin attested at Cairo the supremacy of Timur; and a rare
+gift of a giraffe, or camelopard, and nine ostriches, represented at
+Samarkand the tribute of the African world. Our imagination is not less
+astonished by the portrait of a Mongol, who, in his camp before Smyrna,
+meditates, and almost accomplishes, the invasion of the Chinese empire.
+Timur was urged to this enterprise by national honor and religious zeal.
+He received a perfect map and description of the unknown regions, from
+the source of Irtysh to the Wall of China. During the preparations, the
+Emperor achieved the final conquest of Georgia; passed the winter on the
+banks of the Araxes; appeased the troubles of Persia; and slowly
+returned to his capital, after a campaign of four years and nine months.
+
+On the throne of Samarkand he displayed, in a short repose, his
+magnificence and power; listened to the complaints of the people;
+distributed a just measure of rewards and punishments; employed his
+riches in the architecture of palaces and temples; and gave audience to
+the ambassadors of Egypt, Arabia, India, Tartary, Russia, and Spain, the
+last of whom presented a suit of tapestry which eclipsed the pencil of
+the oriental artists. A general indulgence was proclaimed; every law was
+relaxed, every pleasure was allowed; the people was free, the sovereign
+was idle; and the historian of Timur may remark that, after devoting
+fifty years to the attainment of empire, the only happy period of his
+life was the two months in which he ceased to exercise his power.
+
+But he soon awakened to the cares of government and war. The standard
+was unfurled for the invasion of China; the emirs made their report of
+two hundred thousand, the select and veteran soldiers of Iran and Turan;
+their baggage and provisions were transported by five hundred great
+wagons and an immense train of horses and camels; and the troops might
+prepare for a long absence, since more than six months were employed in
+the tranquil journey of a caravan from Samarkand to Peking. Neither age
+nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timur; he
+mounted on horseback, passed the Sihun on the ice, marched seventy-six
+parasangs (three hundred miles) from his capital, and pitched his last
+camp in the neighborhood of Otrar, where he was expected by the angel of
+death. Fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water accelerated the
+progress of his fever; and the conqueror of Asia expired in the
+seventieth year of his age, 1405, thirty-five years after he had
+ascended the throne of Zagatai. His designs were lost; his armies were
+disbanded; China was saved; and, fourteen years after his decease, the
+most powerful of his children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce
+to the court of Peking.
+
+The fame of Timur has pervaded the East and West; his posterity is still
+invested with the imperial title; and the admiration of his subjects,
+who revered him almost as a deity, may be justified in some degree by
+the praise or confession of his bitterest enemies. Although he was lame
+of a hand and foot, his form and stature were not unworthy of his rank;
+and his vigorous health, so essential to himself and to the world, was
+corroborated by temperance and exercise. In his familiar discourse he
+was grave and modest; and if he was ignorant of the Arabic language, he
+spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish idioms. It was
+his delight to converse with the learned on topics of history and
+science; and the amusement of his leisure hours was the game of chess,
+which he improved or corrupted with new refinements.
+
+In his religion he was a zealous, though not perhaps an orthodox,
+Mussulman; but his sound understanding may tempt us to believe that a
+superstitious reverence for omens and prophecies, for saints and
+astrologers, was only affected as an instrument of policy. In the
+government of a vast empire, he stood alone and absolute, without a
+rebel to oppose his power, a favorite to seduce his affections, or a
+minister to mislead his judgment.
+
+Timur might boast that at his accession to the throne Asia was the prey
+of anarchy and rapine, while under his prosperous monarchy a child,
+fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold from the East to the
+West. Such was his confidence of merit that from this reformation he
+derived an excuse for his victories and a title to universal dominion.
+The four following observations will serve to appreciate his claim to
+the public gratitude; and perhaps we shall conclude that the Mongol
+Emperor was rather the scourge than the benefactor of mankind. If some
+partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of
+Timur, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By their
+rapine, cruelty, and discord the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict
+their subjects; but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of
+the reformer. The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities
+was often marked by his abominable trophies--by columns, or pyramids of
+human heads. Astrakhan, Karizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo,
+Damascus, Bursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others were sacked or burned or
+utterly destroyed in his presence and by his troops; and perhaps his
+conscience would have been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared
+to number the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the
+establishment of peace and order. His most destructive wars were rather
+inroads than conquests. He invaded Turkestan, Kiptchak, Russia,
+Hindustan, Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and Georgia, without a hope or a
+desire of preserving those distant provinces. From thence he departed
+laden with spoil; but he left behind him neither troops to awe the
+contumacious nor magistrates to protect the obedient natives. When he
+had broken the fabric of their ancient government, he abandoned them in
+their evils which his invasion had aggravated or caused; nor were these
+evils compensated by any present or possible benefits. The kingdoms of
+Transoxiana and Persia were the proper field which he labored to
+cultivate and adorn as the perpetual inheritance of his family. But his
+peaceful labors were often interrupted, and sometimes blasted, by the
+absence of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the Volga or the Ganges,
+his servants, and even his sons, forgot their master and their duty. The
+public and private injuries were poorly redressed by the tardy rigor or
+inquiry and punishment; and we must be content to praise the
+_Institutions_ of Timur as the specious idea of a perfect monarchy.
+Whatsoever might be the blessings of his administration, they evaporated
+with his life. To reign, rather than to govern, was the ambition of his
+children and grandchildren--the enemies of each other and of the people.
+A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by Sharokh, his
+youngest son; but after his decease the scene was again involved in
+darkness and blood; and before the end of a century Transoxiana and
+Persia were trampled by the Usbegs from the north, and the Turcomans of
+the black and white sheep. The race of Timur would have been extinct if
+a hero, his descendant in the fifth degree, had not fled before the
+Usbeg arms to the conquest of Hindustan. His successors--the great
+Mongols--extended their sway from the mountains of Cashmere to Cape
+Comorin, and from Kandahar to the Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign of
+Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved; their treasures of Delhi
+have been rifled by a Persian robber; and the richest of their kingdoms
+is now possessed by a company of Christian merchants, of a remote island
+in the Northern Ocean.
+
+
+
+
+DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES
+
+A.D. 1374
+
+J. F. C. Hecker[59]
+
+
+  The black death, which originated in Central China about
+  1333, appeared on the Mediterranean littoral in 1347,
+  ravaged the island of Cyprus, made the circuit of the
+  Mediterranean countries, spread throughout Europe northward
+  as far as Iceland, and in 1357 appeared in Russia, where it
+  seems to have been checked by the barrier of the Caucasus.
+
+  Scarce had its effects subsided, and the graves of its
+  25,000,000 victims were hardly closed, when it was followed
+  by an epidemic of the dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which
+  like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and
+  spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring
+  countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping,
+  furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to
+  the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity.
+
+  The epidemic was not confined to particular localities, but
+  was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, and for over
+  two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries.
+  The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy
+  the disease became known as _tarantism_, it being supposed
+  to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous
+  spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism
+  spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a
+  wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to
+  furnish magical means for exorcising the malady of the
+  patients.
+
+  The epidemic subsided in Central Europe in the seventeenth
+  century, but diseases approximating to the original dancing
+  mania have occurred at various periods in many parts of
+  Europe, Africa, and the United States. Nathaniel Pearce, an
+  eye-witness, who resided nine years in Abyssinia early in
+  the nineteenth century, gives a graphic account of a similar
+  epidemic there, called _tigretier_, from the Tigré district,
+  in which it was most prevalent. In France, from 1727 to
+  1790, an epidemic prevailed among the Convulsionnaires, who
+  received relief from brethren in the faith known as
+  Secourists, very much after the rough methods administered
+  to the St. John's dancers and to the _tarantati_. About the
+  same period nervous epidemics of a similar character,
+  largely propagated by sympathy, were very prevalent in the
+  Shetland Islands and in various parts of Scotland, but were
+  for the most part eradicated by cold-water immersion.
+
+  An epidemic of _chorea sancti Viti_, recorded by Felix
+  Robertson of Tennessee (Philadelphia, 1805), found vent in
+  an unparalleled blaze of enthusiastic religion, which spread
+  with lightning-like rapidity in almost every part of
+  Tennessee and Kentucky, and in various parts of Virginia, in
+  1800, being distinguished by uncontrollable and infectious
+  muscular contractions, gesticulations, crying, laughing,
+  shouting, and singing. To similar epidemics are attributed
+  the uncontrollable acts which, till late in the nineteenth
+  century, were a feature of North American camp meetings for
+  divine service in the open air, and which exhibited the same
+  form of mental disturbance as did the St. Vitus' dance in
+  mediæval Europe.
+
+So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at
+Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one
+common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the
+churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in
+hand, and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses,
+continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in
+wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of
+exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as
+if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound
+tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and
+remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of
+swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these
+spasmodic ravings, but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a
+less artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts
+affected. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to
+external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions,
+their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and
+some of them afterward asserted that they felt as if they had been
+immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high.
+Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour
+enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of
+the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.
+
+Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with
+epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless,
+panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly
+springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady
+doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by
+temporary or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but
+imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were to
+confound their observation of natural events with their notions of the
+world of spirits.
+
+It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from
+Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighboring
+Netherlands. In Liège, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns of Belgium
+the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists girt
+with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive
+immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. This bandage was, by the
+insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight. Many, however, obtained more
+relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers of persons ready
+to administer; for, wherever the dancers appeared, the people assembled
+in crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At
+length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety
+than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages they
+took possession of the religious houses; processions were everywhere
+instituted on their account and masses were said and hymns were sung,
+while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one
+entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror.
+In Liège the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavored, by every
+means in their power, to allay an evil which threatened so much danger
+to themselves; for the possessed, assembling in multitudes, frequently
+poured forth imprecations against them and menaced their destruction.
+They intimidated the people also to such a degree that there was an
+express ordinance issued that no one should make any but square-toed
+shoes, because these fanatics had manifested a morbid dislike to the
+pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediately after the "great
+mortality," in 1350. They were still more irritated at the sight of red
+colors, the influence of which on the disordered nerves might lead us to
+imagine an extraordinary accordance between this spasmodic malady and
+the condition of infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this
+excitement was probably connected with apparitions consequent upon their
+convulsions. There were likewise some of them who were unable to
+endure the sight of persons weeping. The clergy seemed to become daily
+more and more confirmed in their belief that those who were affected
+were a kind of sectarians, and on this account they hastened their
+exorcisms as much as possible, in order that the evil might not spread
+among the higher classes, for hitherto scarcely any but the poor had
+been attacked, and the few people of respectability among the laity and
+clergy who were to be found among them were persons whose natural
+frivolity was unable to withstand the excitement of novelty, even though
+it proceeded from a demoniacal influence. Some of the affected had
+indeed themselves declared, when under the influence of priestly forms
+of exorcism, that, if the demons had been allowed only a few weeks more
+time, they would have entered the bodies of the nobility and princes,
+and through these have destroyed the clergy. Assertions of this sort,
+which those possessed uttered while in a state which may be compared
+with that of magnetic sleep, obtained general belief, and passed from
+mouth to mouth with wonderful additions. The priesthood were, on this
+account, so much the more zealous in their endeavors to anticipate every
+dangerous excitement of the people, as if the existing order of things
+could have been seriously threatened by such incoherent ravings. Their
+exertions were effectual, for exorcism was a powerful remedy in the
+fourteenth century; or it might perhaps be that this wild infatuation
+terminated in consequence of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from
+it; at all events, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's
+dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The
+evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such
+feeble attacks.
+
+A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those
+possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at
+Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with
+eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their
+workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels,
+and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous
+disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found
+opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by
+vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a
+temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants
+their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and
+greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Gangs of idle
+vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and
+convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking
+maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this
+disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind
+the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the
+reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous
+guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests
+and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after
+four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these
+impostors, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the
+mean time, when once called into existence, the plague crept on, and
+found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the
+fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree,
+throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder
+of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose inhabitants it was
+a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable.
+
+Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague, or St. Vitus' dance,[60] in
+the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there
+as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at
+the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their
+confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the
+swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the
+streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by
+innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added
+anxious parents and relations, who came to look after those among the
+misguided multitude who belonged to their respective families. Imposture
+and profligacy played their part in this city also, but the morbid
+delusion itself seems to have predominated. On this account religion
+could only bring provisional aid, and therefore the town council
+benevolently took an interest in the afflicted. They divided them into
+separate parties, to each of which they appointed responsible
+superintendents to protect them from harm and perhaps also to restrain
+their turbulence. They were thus conducted on foot and in carriages to
+the chapels of St. Vitus, near Zabern and Rotestein, where priests were
+in attendance to work upon their misguided minds by masses and other
+religious ceremonies. After divine worship was completed, they were led
+in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering
+of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence
+of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable
+aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing
+mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him
+alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition
+a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of human skill. The
+personal history of St. Vitus is by no means unimportant in this matter.
+He was a Sicilian youth, who, together with Modestus and Crescentia,
+suffered martyrdom at the time of the persecution of the Christians,
+under Diocletian, in the year 303. The legends respecting him are
+obscure, and he would certainly have been passed over without notice
+among the innumerable apocryphal martyrs of the first centuries, had not
+the transfer of his body to St. Denis, and thence, in the year 836, to
+Corvey, raised him to a higher rank. From this time forth, it may be
+supposed that many miracles were manifested at his new sepulchre, which
+were of essential service in confirming the Roman faith among the
+Germans, and St. Vitus was soon ranked among the fourteen saintly
+helpers (_Nothhelfer_ or _Apotheker_). His altars were multiplied, and
+the people had recourse to them in all kinds of distresses, and revered
+him as a powerful intercessor. As the worship of these saints was,
+however, at that time stripped of all historical connections, which were
+purposely obliterated by the priesthood, a legend was invented at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, or perhaps even so early as the
+fourteenth, that St. Vitus had, just before he bent his neck to the
+sword, prayed to God that he might protect from the dancing mania all
+those who should solemnize the day of his commemoration, and fast upon
+its eve, and that thereupon a voice from heaven was heard, saying,
+"Vitus, thy prayer is accepted." Thus St. Vitus became the patron saint
+of those afflicted with the dancing plague, as St. Martin of Tours was
+at one time the succorer of persons in smallpox.
+
+The connection which John the Baptist had with the dancing mania of the
+fourteenth century was of a totally different character. He was
+originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked,
+or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered
+as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was
+worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its
+development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the
+fourth century, St. John's Day was solemnized with all sorts of strange
+and rude customs, of which the originally mystical meaning was variously
+disfigured among different nations by super-added relics of heathenism.
+Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St. John's Day an
+ancient heathen usage, the kindling of the _Nodfyr_, which was forbidden
+them by St. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day
+that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their
+smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as
+if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have
+originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth,
+and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant
+accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the
+period of which we are treating, however, the Germans were not the only
+people who gave way to the ebullitions of fanaticism in keeping the
+festival of St. John the Baptist. Similar customs were also to be found
+among the nations of Southern Europe and of Asia,[61] and it is more
+than probable that the Greeks transferred to the festival of John the
+Baptist, who is also held in high esteem among the Mahometans, a part of
+their Bacchanalian mysteries, an absurdity of a kind which it but too
+frequently met with in human affairs. How far a remembrance of the
+history of St. John's death may have had an influence on this occasion
+we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is of importance here
+to add only that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe,
+where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity
+against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint
+of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of
+the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not
+to be found.
+
+When we observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle
+appeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths, the conjecture is
+probable that the wild revels of St. John's Day, A.D. 1374, gave rise to
+this mental plague, which thenceforth has visited so many thousands with
+incurable aberration of mind and disgusting distortions of body.
+
+This is rendered so much the more probable because some months
+previously the districts in the neighborhood of the Rhine and the Maine
+had met with great disasters. So early as February both these rivers had
+overflowed their banks to a great extent; the walls of the town of
+Cologne, on the side next the Rhine, had fallen down, and a great many
+villages had been reduced to the utmost distress. To this was added the
+miserable condition of Western and Southern Germany. Neither law nor
+edict could suppress the incessant feuds of the barons, and in Franconia
+especially the ancient times of club law appeared to be revived.
+Security of property there was none; arbitrary will everywhere
+prevailed; corruption of morals and rude power rarely met with even a
+feeble opposition; whence it arose that the cruel, but lucrative,
+persecutions of the Jews were in many places still practised, through
+the whole of this century, with their wonted ferocity. Thus, throughout
+the western parts of Germany, and especially in the districts bordering
+on the Rhine, there was a wretched and oppressed populace; and if we
+take into consideration that among their numerous bands many wandered
+about whose consciences were tormented with the recollection of the
+crimes which they had committed during the prevalence of the black
+plague, we shall comprehend how their despair sought relief in the
+intoxication of an artificial delirium. There is hence good ground for
+supposing that the frantic celebration of the festival of St. John, A.D.
+1374, only served to bring to a crisis a malady which had been long
+impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless
+usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition,
+could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account
+the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences of
+wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by
+hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were
+attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the
+intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of the
+disorder which is well worth consideration.
+
+The dancing mania of the year 1374 was, in fact, no new disease, but a
+phenomenon well known in the Middle Ages, of which many wondrous stories
+were traditionally current among the people. In the year 1237, upward of
+a hundred children were said to have been suddenly seized with this
+disease at Erfurt, and to have proceeded dancing and jumping along the
+road to Arnstadt. When they arrived at that place they fell exhausted
+to the ground, and, according to an account of an old chronicle, many of
+them, after they were taken home by their parents, died, and the rest
+remained affected to the end of their lives with the permanent tremor.
+Another occurrence was related to have taken place on the Mosel bridge
+at Utrecht, on June 17, 1278, when two hundred fanatics began to dance,
+and would not desist until a priest passed who was carrying the host to
+a person that was sick, upon which, as if in punishment of their crime,
+the bridge gave way, and they were all drowned. A similar event also
+occurred, so early as the year 1027, near the convent church of Kolbig,
+not far from Bernburg. According to an oft-repeated tradition, eighteen
+peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have
+disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the
+church-yard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon
+them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without
+ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that
+the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into the earth, and
+remained the whole time without nourishment, until they were finally
+released by the intercession of two pious bishops. It is said that upon
+this they fell into a deep sleep, which lasted three days, and that four
+of them died; the rest continuing to suffer all their lives from a
+trembling of their limbs.[62] It is not worth while to separate what may
+have been true and what the addition of crafty priests in this strangely
+distorted story. It is sufficient that it was believed, and related with
+astonishment and horror, throughout the Middle Ages, so that, when there
+was any exciting cause for this delirious raving, and wild rage for
+dancing, it failed not to produce its effects upon men whose thoughts
+were given up to a belief in wonders and apparitions.
+
+This disposition of mind, altogether so peculiar to the Middle Ages, and
+which, happily for mankind, has yielded to an improved state of
+civilization and the diffusion of popular instruction, accounts for the
+origin and long duration of this extraordinary mental disorder. The good
+sense of the people recoiled with horror and aversion from this heavy
+plague, which, whenever malevolent persons wished to curse their
+bitterest enemies and adversaries, was long after used as a
+malediction.[63] The indignation also that was felt by the people at
+large against the immorality of the age was proved by their ascribing
+this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste
+priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after years,
+for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We
+have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands
+incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavored to hasten their
+reconciliation with the irritated and at that time very degenerate
+people by exorcisms, which, with some, procured them greater respect
+than ever, because they thus visibly restored thousands of those who
+were affected. In general, however, there prevailed a want of confidence
+in their efficacy, and then the sacred rites had as little power in
+arresting the progress of this deeply rooted malady as the prayers and
+holy services subsequently had at the altars of the greatly revered
+martyr St. Vitus. We may, therefore, ascribe it to accident merely, and
+to a certain aversion to this demoniacal disease, which seemed to lie
+beyond the reach of human skill, that we meet with but few and imperfect
+notices of the St. Vitus' dance in the second half of the fifteenth
+century. The highly colored descriptions of the sixteenth century
+contradict the notion that this mental plague had in any degree
+diminished in its severity, and not a single fact is to be found which
+supports the opinion that any one of the essential symptoms of the
+disease, not even excepting the tympany, had disappeared, or that the
+disorder itself had become milder in its attacks. The physicians never,
+as it seems, throughout the whole of the fifteenth century, undertook
+the treatment of the dancing mania, which, according to the prevailing
+notions, appertained exclusively to the servants of the Church. Against
+demoniacal disorders they had no remedies, and though some at first did
+promulgate the opinion that the malady had its origin in natural
+circumstances, such as a hot temperament, and other causes named in the
+phraseology of the schools, yet these opinions were the less examined,
+as it did not appear worth while to divide with a jealous priesthood the
+care of a host of fanatical vagabonds and beggars.
+
+It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that the St.
+Vitus' dance was made the subject of medical research, and stripped of
+its unhallowed character as a work of demons. This was effected by
+Paracelsus, that mighty, but as yet scarcely comprehended, reformer of
+medicine, whose aim it was to withdraw diseases from the pale of
+miraculous interpositions and saintly influences, and explain their
+causes upon principles deduced from his knowledge of the human frame.
+"We will not, however, admit that the saints have power to inflict
+diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many
+there are who in their theology lay great stress on this supposition,
+ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We
+dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but
+only by faith, a thing which is not human, whereon the gods themselves
+set no value."
+
+Such were the words which Paracelsus addressed to his contemporaries,
+who were as yet incapable of appreciating doctrines of this sort; for
+the belief in enchantment still remained everywhere unshaken, and faith
+in the world of spirits still held men's minds in so close a bondage
+that thousands were, according to their own conviction, given up as a
+prey to the devil; while, at the command of religion as well as of law,
+countless piles were lighted, by the flames of which human society was
+to be purified.
+
+Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus' dance into three kinds: First, that
+which arises from imagination (_Vitista_, _chorea imaginativa_,
+_æstimativa_), by which the original dancing plague is to be understood;
+secondly, that which arises from sensual desires, depending on the will
+(_chorea lasciva_); thirdly, that which arises from corporeal causes
+(_chorea naturalis_, _coacta_), which, according to a strange notion of
+his own, he explained by maintaining that in certain vessels which are
+susceptible of an internal pruriency, and thence produce laughter, the
+blood is set in commotion, in consequence of an alteration in the vital
+spirits, whereby involuntary fits of intoxicating joy, and a propensity
+to dance, are occasioned. To this notion he was, no doubt, led from
+having observed a milder form of St. Vitus' dance, not uncommon in his
+time, which was accompanied by involuntary laughter, and which bore a
+resemblance to the hysterical laughter of the moderns, except that it
+was characterized by more pleasurable sensations, and by an extravagant
+propensity to dance. There was no howling, screaming, and jumping, as in
+the severer form; neither was the disposition to dance by any means
+insuperable. Patients thus affected, although they had not a complete
+control over their understandings, yet were sufficiently self-possessed,
+during the attack, to obey the directions which they received. There
+were even some among them who did not dance at all, but only felt an
+involuntary impulse to allay the internal sense of disquietude, which is
+the usual forerunner of an attack of this kind, by laughter, and quick
+walking carried to the extent of producing fatigue. This disorder, so
+different from the original type, evidently approximates to the modern
+chorea, or rather is in perfect accordance with it, even to the less
+essential symptom of laughter. A mitigation in the form of the dancing
+mania had thus clearly taken place at the commencement of the sixteenth
+century.
+
+On the communication of the St. Vitus' dance by sympathy, Paracelsus, in
+his peculiar language, expresses himself with great spirit, and shows a
+profound knowledge of the nature of sensual impressions, which find
+their way to the heart--the seat of joys and emotions--which overpower
+the opposition of reason; and while "all other qualities and natures"
+are subdued, incessantly impel the patient, in consequence of his
+original compliance, and his all-conquering imagination, to imitate what
+he has seen. On his treatment of the disease we cannot bestow any great
+praise, but must be content with the remark that it was in conformity
+with the notions of the age in which he lived. For the first kind, which
+often originated in passionate excitement, he had a mental remedy, the
+efficacy of which is not to be despised, if we estimate its value in
+connection with the prevalent opinions of those times. The patient was
+to make an image of himself in wax or resin, and by an effort of thought
+to concentrate all his blasphemies and sins in it. "Without the
+intervention of any other person, to set his whole mind and thoughts
+concerning these oaths in the image;" and when he had succeeded in this,
+he was to burn the image, so that not a particle of it should
+remain.[64] In all this there was no mention made of St. Vitus, or any
+of the other mediatory saints, which is accounted for by the
+circumstance, that, at this time, an open rebellion against the Romish
+Church had begun, and the worship of saints was by many rejected as
+idolatrous. For the second kind of St. Vitus' dance, Paracelsus
+recommended harsh treatment and strict fasting. He directed that the
+patients should be deprived of their liberty, placed in solitary
+confinement, and made to sit in an uncomfortable place, until their
+misery brought them to their senses and to a feeling of penitence. He
+then permitted them gradually to return to their accustomed habits.
+Severe corporal chastisement was not omitted; but, on the other hand,
+angry resistance on the part of the patient was to be sedulously
+avoided, on the ground that it might increase his malady, or even
+destroy him; moreover, where it seemed proper, Paracelsus allayed the
+excitement of the nerves by immersion in cold water. On the treatment of
+the third kind we shall not here enlarge. It was to be effected by all
+sorts of wonderful remedies, composed of the quintessences; and it would
+require, to render it intelligible, a more extended exposition of
+peculiar principles than suits our present purpose.
+
+About this time the St. Vitus' dance began to decline, so that milder
+forms of it appeared more frequently, while the severer cases became
+more rare; and even in these, some of the important symptoms gradually
+disappeared. Paracelsus makes no mention of the tympanites as taking
+place after the attacks, although it may occasionally have occurred; and
+Schenck von Graffenberg, a celebrated physician of the latter half of
+the sixteenth century, speaks of this disease as having been frequent
+only in the time of his forefathers.
+
+
+
+
+ELECTION OF ANTIPOPE CLEMENT VII
+
+Beginning of the Great Schism
+
+A.D. 1378
+
+HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+
+  In 1308 Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, under the influence of
+  King Philip the Fair, of France, transferred the papal chair
+  from Rome to Avignon, a possession of the holy see beyond
+  the Alps, in Philip's dominions. The sojourn there of
+  Clement and his successors, which continued until 1376, is
+  known as the "Babylonish captivity" of the popes.
+
+  Rome, from the first, was angry at this loss of supremacy,
+  and aimed at recovering her prestige; and throughout the
+  Christian world--France alone excepted--it was regarded as a
+  scandal that the chair of St. Peter should rest on any soil
+  but that of the Eternal City; but the French kings, and the
+  cardinals of France--outnumbering all others in the sacred
+  college--were determined to retain the pontifical seat in
+  their own territory.
+
+  During the pontificate of Gregory XI (1371-1378) Italy was
+  torn by civil dissensions; the "free companies"--bands of
+  organized marauders--ravaged the country with fire and
+  sword, plundering Guelf and Ghibelline alike. Gregory's
+  legates in the government of the ecclesiastical states
+  rendered themselves so odious to the people by their
+  immorality and rapacity that a league of the more powerful
+  political factions was formed for throwing off the yoke of
+  the "absentee" papal rulers. This was the beginning of the
+  War of Liberation (1375) that was to shake the papal power
+  in Italy to its very foundations.
+
+  Gregory saw that, in order to preserve even a vestige of
+  temporal power in the Italian states, he must act with
+  crushing vigor. He therefore sent the cardinal legate,
+  Robert, of Geneva--afterward Antipope Clement VII--into
+  Italy with a company of Breton adventurers dreaded for their
+  ferocity, and trained to plunder in the terrible wars of
+  France. In spite of the atrocities committed by Robert and
+  his hirelings, the revolt continued with unabated fury, and
+  at last Gregory was constrained to return in person to Italy
+  with the purpose of pacifying the turbulent forces. He
+  entered Rome, January 17, 1377; but after a year of futile
+  effort he died, leaving the confusion worse than he found
+  it.
+
+  Since, according to ecclesiastical law, the election of a
+  new pope must be held at the place of the last pontiff's
+  decease, great clamor arose among the Romans, whose demands
+  were seconded throughout Europe, for the election of a
+  Roman pope and the ending of the "Babylonish captivity." The
+  history of the Great Schism and election of the rival
+  pontiffs is nowhere to be found in better form of narrative
+  than that of Milman, which here follows.
+
+Gregory XI had hardly expired when Rome burst out into a furious tumult.
+A Roman pope, at least an Italian pope, was the universal outcry. The
+conclave must be overawed; the hateful domination of a foreign, a French
+pontiff, must be broken up, and forever. This was not unforeseen. Before
+his death Gregory XI had issued a bull conferring the amplest powers on
+the cardinals to choose, according to their wisdom, the time and the
+place for the election. It manifestly contemplated their retreat from
+the turbulent streets of Rome to some place where their deliberations
+would not be overborne, and the predominant French interest would
+maintain its superiority. On the other hand there were serious and not
+groundless apprehensions that the fierce Breton and Gascon bands, at the
+command of the French cardinals, might dictate to the conclave. The
+Romans not only armed their civic troops, but sent to Tivoli, Velletri,
+and the neighboring cities; a strong force was mustered to keep the
+foreigners in check.
+
+Throughout the interval between the funeral of Gregory and the opening
+of the conclave, the cardinals were either too jealously watched, or
+thought it imprudent to attempt flight. Sixteen cardinals were present
+at Rome, one Spaniard, eleven French, four Italians. The ordinary
+measures were taken for opening the conclave in the palace near St.
+Peter's. Five Romans, two ecclesiastics and three laymen, and three
+Frenchmen were appointed to wait upon and to guard the conclave. The
+Bishop of Marseilles represented the great chamberlain, who holds the
+supreme authority during the vacancy of the popedom. The chamberlain,
+the Archbishop of Arles, brother of the Cardinal of Limoges, had
+withdrawn into the castle of St. Angelo, to secure his own person and to
+occupy that important fortress.
+
+The nine solemn days fully elapsed, on the 7th of April they assembled
+for the conclave. At that instant (inauspicious omen!) a terrible flash
+of lightning, followed by a stunning peal of thunder, struck through the
+hall, burning and splitting some of the furniture. The hall of conclave
+was crowded by a fierce rabble, who refused to retire. After about an
+hour's strife, the Bishop of Marseilles, by threats, by persuasion, or
+by entreaty, had expelled all but about forty wild men, armed to the
+teeth. These ruffians rudely and insolently searched the whole building;
+they looked under the beds, they examined the places of retreat. They
+would satisfy themselves whether any armed men were concealed, whether
+there was any hole, or even drain through which the cardinals could
+escape. All the time they shouted: "A Roman pope! we will have a Roman
+pope!" Those without echoed back the savage yell. Before long appeared
+two ecclesiastics, announcing themselves as delegated by the commonalty
+of Rome; they demanded to speak with the cardinals. The cardinals dared
+not refuse. The Romans represented, in firm but not disrespectful
+language, that for seventy years the holy Roman people had been without
+their pastor, the supreme head of Christendom. In Rome were many noble
+and wise ecclesiastics equal to govern the Church: if not in Rome, there
+were such men in Italy.
+
+They intimated that so great were the fury and determination of the
+people that, if the conclave should resist, there might be a general
+massacre, in which probably they themselves, assuredly the cardinals,
+would perish. The cardinals might hear from every quarter around them
+the cry: "A Roman pope! if not a Roman, an Italian!" The cardinals
+replied, that such aged and reverend men must know the rules of the
+conclave; that no election could be by requisition, favor, fear, or
+tumult, but by the interposition of the Holy Ghost. To reiterated
+persuasions and menaces they only said: "We are in your power; you may
+kill us, but we must act according to God's ordinance. To-morrow we
+celebrate the mass for the descent of the Holy Ghost; as the Holy Ghost
+directs, so shall we do." Some of the French uttered words which sounded
+like defiance. The populace cried: "If ye persist to do despite to
+Christ, if we have not a Roman pope, we will hew these cardinals and
+Frenchmen in pieces."
+
+At length the Bishop of Marseilles was able to entirely clear the hall.
+The cardinals sat down to a plentiful repast; the doors were finally
+closed. But all the night through they heard in the streets the
+unceasing clamor: "A Roman pope, a Roman pope!" Toward the morning the
+tumult became more fierce and dense. Strange men had burst into the
+belfry of St. Peter's; the clanging bells tolled as if all Rome was on
+fire.
+
+Within the conclave, the tumult, if less loud and clamorous, was hardly
+less general. The confusion without and terror within did not allay the
+angry rivalry, or suspend that subtle play of policy peculiar to the
+form of election. The French interest was divided; within this circle
+there was another circle. The single diocese of Limoges, favored as it
+had been by more than one pope, had almost strength to dictate to the
+conclave. The Limousins put forward the Cardinal de St. Eustache.
+Against these the leader was the Cardinal Robert of Geneva, whose fierce
+and haughty demeanor and sanguinary acts as legate had brought so much
+of its unpopularity on the administration of Gregory XI. With Robert
+were the four Italians and three French cardinals. Rather than a
+Limousin, Robert would even consent to an Italian. They on the one side,
+the Limousins on the other, had met secretly before the conclave: the
+eight had sworn not on any account to submit to the election of a
+traitorous Limousin.
+
+All the sleepless night the cardinals might hear the din at the gate,
+the yells of the people, the tolling of the bells. There was constant
+passing and repassing from each other's chamber, intrigues,
+altercations, manoeuvres, proposals advanced and rejected, promises of
+support given and withdrawn. Many names were put up. Of the Romans
+within the conclave two only were named, the old Cardinal of St.
+Peter's, the Cardinal Jacobo Orsini. The Limousins advanced in turn
+almost every one of their faction; no one but himself thought of Robert
+of Geneva.
+
+In the morning the disturbance without waxed more terrible. A vain
+attempt was made to address the populace by the three cardinal priors;
+they were driven from the windows with loud derisive shouts, "A Roman! A
+Roman!" For now the alternative of an Italian had been abandoned; a
+Roman, none but a Roman, would content the people. The madness of
+intoxication was added to the madness of popular fury. The rabble had
+broken open the Pope's cellar and drunk his rich wines. In the conclave
+the wildest projects were started. The Cardinal Orsini was to dress up
+a Minorite friar (probably a Spiritual) in the papal robes, to show him
+to the people, and so for themselves to effect their escape to some safe
+place and proceed to a legitimate election. The cardinals, from honor or
+from fear, shrunk from this trick.
+
+At length both parties seemed to concur. Each claimed credit for first
+advancing the name--which most afterward repudiated--of the Archbishop
+of Bari, a man of repute for theologic and legal erudition, an Italian,
+but a subject of the Queen of Naples, who was also Countess of Provence.
+They came to the nomination. The Cardinal of Florence proposed the
+Cardinal of St. Peter's. The Cardinal of Limoges arose: "The Cardinal of
+St. Peter's is too old. The Cardinal of Florence is of a city at war
+with the holy see. I reject the Cardinal of Milan as the subject of the
+Visconti, the most deadly enemy of the Church. The Cardinal Orsini is
+too young, and we must not yield to the clamor of the Romans. I vote for
+Bartholomew Prignani, Archbishop of Bari." All was acclamation; Orsini
+alone stood out; he aspired to be the pope of the Romans.
+
+But it was too late; the mob was thundering at the gates, menacing death
+to the cardinals, if they had not immediately a Roman pontiff. The
+feeble defences sounded as if they were shattering down; the tramp of
+the populace was almost heard within the hall. They forced or persuaded
+the aged Cardinal of St. Peter's to make a desperate effort to save
+their lives. He appeared at the window, hastily attired in what either
+was or seemed to be the papal stole and mitre. There was a jubilant and
+triumphant cry: "We have a Roman pope, the Cardinal of St. Peter's. Long
+live Rome! Long live St. Peter!" The populace became even more frantic
+with joy than before with wrath. One band hastened to the Cardinal's
+palace, and, according to the strange usage, broke in, threw the
+furniture into the streets, and sacked it from top to bottom. Those
+around the hall of conclave, aided by the connivance of some of the
+cardinals' servants within, or by more violent efforts of their own,
+burst in in all quarters. The supposed pope was surrounded by eager
+adorers; they were at his feet; they pressed his swollen, gouty hands
+till he shrieked from pain, and began to protest, in the strongest
+language, that he was not the pope.
+
+The indignation of the populace at this disappointment was aggravated by
+an unlucky confusion of names. The Archbishop was mistaken for John of
+Bari, of the bedchamber of the late pope, a man of harsh manners and
+dissolute life, an object of general hatred. Five of the cardinals,
+Robert of Geneva, Acquasparta, Viviers, Poitou, and De Verny, were
+seized in their attempt to steal away, and driven back, amid
+contemptuous hootings, by personal violence. Night came on again; the
+populace, having pillaged all the provisions in the conclave, grew weary
+of their own excesses. The cardinals fled on all sides. Four left the
+city; Orsini and St. Eustache escaped to Vicovaro, Robert of Geneva to
+Zagarolo, St. Angelo to Guardia; six, Limoges, D'Aigrefeuille, Poitou,
+Viviers, Brittany, and Marmoutiers, to the castle of St. Angelo;
+Florence, Milan, Montmayeur, Glandève, and Luna, to their own strong
+fortresses.
+
+The Pope lay concealed in the Vatican. In the morning the five cardinals
+in Rome were assembled round him. A message was sent to the bannerets of
+Rome, announcing his election. The six cardinals in St. Angelo were
+summoned; they were hardly persuaded to leave their place of security;
+but without their presence the Archbishop would not declare his assent
+to his elevation. The Cardinal of Florence, as dean, presented the
+Pope-elect to the sacred college, and discoursed on the text, "Such
+ought he to be, an undefiled high-priest." The Archbishop began a long
+harangue, "Fear and trembling have come upon me, the horror of great
+darkness." The Cardinal of Florence cut short the ill-timed sermon,
+demanding whether he accepted the pontificate. The Archbishop gave his
+assent; he took the name of Urban VI. _Te Deum_ was intoned; he was
+lifted to the throne. The fugitives returned to Rome. Urban VI was
+crowned on Easter Day, in the Church of St. John Lateran. All the
+cardinals were present at the august ceremony. They announced the
+election of Urban VI to their brethren who had remained in Avignon.
+Urban himself addressed the usual encyclic letters, proclaiming his
+elevation, to all the prelates in Christendom.
+
+None could determine how far the nomination of the Archbishop of Bari
+was free and uncontrolled by the terrors of the raging populace; but the
+acknowledgment of Urban VI by all the cardinals, at his inauguration in
+the holy office--their assistance at his coronation without protest,
+when some at least might have been safe beyond the walls of Rome--their
+acceptance of honors, as by the cardinals of Limoges, Poitou, and
+Aigrefeuille--the homage of all--might seem to annul all possible
+irregularity in the election, to confirm irrefragably the legitimacy of
+his title.
+
+Not many days had passed, when the cardinals began to look with dismay
+and bitter repentance on their own work. "In Urban VI," said a writer of
+these times (on the side of Urban as rightful pontiff), "was verified
+the proverb--None is so insolent as a low man suddenly raised to power."
+The high-born, haughty, luxurious prelates, both French and Italian,
+found that they had set over themselves a master resolved not only to
+redress the flagrant and inveterate abuses of the college and of the
+hierarchy, but also to force on his reforms in the most hasty and
+insulting way. He did the harshest things in the harshest manner.
+
+The Archbishop of Bari, of mean birth, had risen by the virtues of a
+monk. He was studious, austere, humble, a diligent reader of the Bible,
+master of the canon law, rigid in his fasts; he wore haircloth next his
+skin. His time was divided between study, prayer, and business, for
+which he had great aptitude. From the poor bishopric of Acherontia he
+had been promoted to the archbishopric of Bari, and had presided over
+the papal chancery in Avignon. The monk broke out at once on his
+elevation in the utmost rudeness and rigor, but the humility changed to
+the most offensive haughtiness. Almost his first act was a public rebuke
+in his chapel to all the bishops present for their desertion of their
+dioceses. He called them perjured traitors. The Bishop of Pampeluna
+boldly repelled the charge; he was at Rome, he said, on the affairs of
+his see. In the full consistory Urban preached on the text, "I am the
+Good Shepherd," and inveighed in a manner not to be mistaken against the
+wealth and luxury of the cardinals. Their voluptuous banquets were
+notorious--Petrarch had declaimed against them. The Pope threatened a
+sumptuary law that they should have but one dish at their table: it was
+the rule of his own order. He was determined to extirpate simony. A
+cardinal who should receive presents he menaced with excommunication.
+He affected to despise wealth. "Thy money perish with thee!" he said to
+a collector of the papal revenue. He disdained to conceal the most
+unpopular schemes; he declared his intention not to leave Rome. To the
+petition of the bannerets of Rome for a promotion of cardinals, he
+openly avowed his design to make so large a nomination that the Italians
+should resume their ascendency over the Ultramontanes. The Cardinal of
+Geneva turned pale and left the consistory. Urban declared himself
+determined to do equal justice between man and man, between the kings of
+France and England. The French cardinals, and those in the pay of
+France, heard this with great indignation.
+
+The manners of Urban were even more offensive than his acts. "Hold your
+tongue!" "You have talked long enough!" were his common phrases to his
+mitred counsellors. He called the Cardinal Orsini a fool. He charged the
+Cardinal of St. Marcellus of Amiens, on his return from his legation in
+Tuscany, with having robbed the treasures of the Church. The charge was
+not less insulting for its justice. The Cardinal of Amiens, instead of
+allaying the feuds of France and England, which it was his holy mission
+to allay, had inflamed them in order to glut his own insatiable avarice
+by draining the wealth of both countries in the Pope's name. "As
+Archbishop of Bari, you lie," was the reply of the high-born Frenchman.
+On one occasion such high words passed with the Cardinal of Limoges that
+but for the interposition of another cardinal the Pope would have rushed
+on him, and there had been a personal conflict.
+
+Such were among the stories of the time. Friends and foes agree in
+attributing the schism, at least the immediate schism, to the imprudent
+zeal, the imperiousness, the ungovernable temper of Pope Urban. The
+cardinals among themselves talked of him as mad; they began to murmur
+that it was a compulsory, therefore invalid, election.
+
+The French cardinals were now at Anagni: they were joined by the
+Cardinal of Amiens, who had taken no part in the election, but who was
+burning under the insulting words of the Pope, perhaps not too eager to
+render an account of his legation. The Pope retired to Tivoli; he
+summoned the cardinals to that city. They answered that they had gone
+to large expenses in laying in provisions and making preparations for
+their residence in Anagni; they had no means to supply a second sojourn
+in Tivoli. The Pope, with his four Italian cardinals, passed two
+important acts as sovereign pontiff. He confirmed the election of
+Wenceslaus, son of Charles IV, to the empire; he completed the treaty
+with Florence by which the republic paid a large sum to the see of Rome.
+The amount was seventy thousand florins in the course of the year, one
+hundred and eighty thousand in four years, for the expenses of the war.
+They were relieved from ecclesiastical censures, under which this
+enlightened republic, though Italian, trembled, even from a pope of
+doubtful title. Their awe showed perhaps the weakness and dissensions in
+Florence rather than the papal power.
+
+The cardinals at Anagni sent a summons to their brethren inviting them
+to share in their counsels concerning the compulsory election of the
+successor to Gregory XI. Already the opinions of great legists had been
+taken; some of them, that of the famous Baldus, may still be read. He
+was in favor of the validity of the election.
+
+But grave legal arguments and ecclesiastical logic were not to decide a
+contest which had stirred so deeply the passions and interests of two
+great factions. France and Italy were at strife for the popedom. The
+Ultramontane cardinals would not tamely abandon a power which had given
+them rank, wealth, luxury, virtually the spiritual supremacy of the
+world, for seventy years. Italy, Rome, would not forego the golden
+opportunity of resuming the long-lost authority. On the 9th of August
+the cardinals at Anagni publicly declared, they announced in encyclic
+letters addressed to the faithful in all Christendom, that the election
+of Urban VI was carried by force and the fear of death; that through the
+same force and fear he had been inaugurated, enthroned, and crowned;
+that he was an apostate, an accursed antichrist. They pronounced him a
+tyrannical usurper of the popedom, a wolf that had stolen into the fold.
+They called upon him to descend at once from the throne which he
+occupied without canonical title; if repentant, he might find mercy; if
+he persisted he would provoke the indignation of God, of the apostles
+St. Peter and St. Paul, and all of the saints, for his violation of the
+Spouse of Christ, the common Mother of the Faithful. It was signed by
+thirteen cardinals. The more pious and devout were shocked at this
+avowal of cowardice; cardinals who would not be martyrs in the cause of
+truth and of spiritual freedom condemned themselves.
+
+But letters and appeals to the judgment of the world, and awful
+maledictions, were not their only resources. The fierce Breton bands
+were used to march and to be indulged in their worst excesses under the
+banner of the Cardinal of Geneva. As Ultramontanists it was their
+interest, their inclination, to espouse the Ultramontane cause. They
+arrayed themselves to advance and join the cardinals at Anagni. The
+Romans rose to oppose them; a fight took place near the Ponte Salario,
+three hundred Romans lay dead on the field.
+
+Urban VI was as blind to cautious temporal as to cautious ecclesiastical
+policy. Every act of the Pope raised him up new enemies. Joanna, Queen
+of Naples, had hailed the elevation of her subject the Archbishop of
+Bari. Naples had been brilliantly illuminated. Shiploads of fruit and
+wines, and the more solid gift of twenty thousand florins, had been her
+oblations to the Pope. Her husband, Otho of Brunswick, had gone to Rome
+to pay his personal homage. His object was to determine in his own favor
+the succession to the realm. The reception of Otho was cold and
+repulsive; he returned in disgust. The Queen eagerly listened to
+suspicions, skilfully awakened, that Urban meditated the resumption of
+the fief of Naples, and its grant to the rival house of Hungary. She
+became the sworn ally of the cardinals at Anagni. Honorato Gaetani,
+Count of Fondi, one of the most turbulent barons of the land, demanded
+of the Pontiff twenty thousand florins advanced on loan to Gregory XI.
+Urban not only rejected the claim, declaring it a personal debt of the
+late Pope, not of the holy see, he also deprived Gaetani of his fief,
+and granted it to his mortal enemy, the Count San Severino. Gaetani
+began immediately to seize the adjacent castles in Campania, and invited
+the cardinals to his stronghold at Fondi. The Archbishop of Arles,
+chamberlain of the late Pope, leaving the castle of St. Angelo under the
+guard of a commander who long refused all orders from Pope Urban,
+brought to Anagni the jewels and ornaments of the papacy, which had been
+carried for security to St. Angelo. The prefect of the city, De Vico,
+Lord of Viterbo, had been won over by the Cardinal of Amiens.
+
+The four Italian cardinals still adhered to Pope Urban. They labored
+hard to mediate between the conflicting parties. Conferences were held
+at Zagarolo and other places; when the French cardinals had retired to
+Fondi, the Italians took up their quarters at Subiaco. The Cardinal of
+St. Peter's, worn out with age and trouble, withdrew to Rome, and soon
+after died. He left a testamentary document declaring the validity of
+the election of Urban. The French cardinals had declared the election
+void; they were debating the next step. Some suggested the appointment
+of a coadjutor. They were now sure of the support of the King of France,
+who would not easily surrender his influence over a pope at Avignon, and
+of the Queen of Naples, estranged by the pride of Urban, and secretly
+stimulated by the Cardinal Orsini, who had not forgiven his own loss of
+the tiara. Yet even now they seemed to shrink from the creation of an
+antipope. Urban precipitated and made inevitable this disastrous event.
+He was now alone; the Cardinal of St. Peter's was dead; Florence, Milan,
+and the Orsini stood aloof; they seemed only to wait to be thrown off by
+Urban, to join the adverse faction. Urban at first declared his
+intention to create nine cardinals; he proceeded at once, and without
+warning, to create twenty-six.[65] By this step the French and Italian
+cardinals together were now but an insignificant minority. They were
+instantly one. All must be risked or all lost.
+
+On September 20th, at Fondi, Robert of Geneva was elected pope in the
+presence of all the cardinals (except St. Peter's) who had chosen,
+inaugurated, enthroned, and for a time obeyed Urban VI. The Italians
+refused to give their suffrages, but entered no protest. They retired
+into their castles and remained aloof from the schism. Orsini died
+before long at Tagliacozzo. The qualifications which, according to his
+partial biographer, recommended the Cardinal of Geneva, were rather
+those of a successor to John Hawkwood or to a duke of Milan, than of the
+apostles. Extraordinary activity of body and endurance of fatigue,
+courage which would hazard his life to put down the intrusive pope,
+sagacity and experience in the temporal affairs of the Church; high
+birth, through which he was allied with most of the royal and princely
+houses of Europe; of austerity, devotion, learning, holiness, charity,
+not a word. He took the name of Clement VII; the Italians bitterly
+taunted the mockery of this name, assumed by the captain of the Breton
+Free Companies--by the author, it was believed, of the massacre at
+Cesena.
+
+So began the schism which divided Western Christendom for thirty-eight
+years. Italy, excepting the kingdom of Joanna of Naples, adhered to her
+native pontiff; Germany and Bohemia to the pontiff who had recognized
+King Wenceslaus as emperor; England to the pontiff hostile to
+France;[66] Hungary to the pontiff who might support her pretentions to
+Naples; Poland and the Northern kingdoms, with Portugal, espoused the
+same cause. France at first stood almost alone in support of her
+subject, of a pope at Avignon instead of at Rome. Scotland only was with
+Clement, because England was with Urban. So Flanders was with Urban
+because France was with Clement. The uncommon abilities of Peter di
+Luna, the Spanish cardinal (afterward better known under a higher
+title), detached successively the Spanish kingdoms, Castile, Aragon, and
+Navarre, from allegiance to Pope Urban.
+
+
+
+
+GENOESE SURRENDER TO VENETIANS
+
+A.D. 1380
+
+HENRY HALLAM
+
+
+  Prolonged commercial rivalry between Genoa and Venice
+  brought them to a state of bitter jealousy which led to
+  furious wars. In the second half of the twelfth century
+  Genoa established her power on the Black Sea, and aimed at a
+  commercial monopoly in that region. This aroused the
+  Venetians to anger and led to open hostilities. The first
+  war growing out of these antagonisms between the two
+  republics began in 1257, and throughout the rest of the
+  thirteenth century hostilities were almost continuous.
+
+  In 1351 the Venetians formed an alliance against Genoa with
+  the Greeks and Aragonese, and, in the ensuing war, the
+  advantage gained by Genoa was confirmed by a treaty of peace
+  in 1355. But this peace lasted only until 1378, when a
+  dispute arose between Genoa and Venice in relation to the
+  island of Tenedos, in the Ægean Sea, of which the Venetians
+  had taken possession.
+
+  The Venetians, having denounced Genoa as false to all its
+  oaths and obligations, formally declared war in April, after
+  several acts of hostility had occurred in the Levant. Of all
+  the wars between the rival states, this was the most
+  remarkable and led to the most important consequences.
+
+Genoa did not stand alone in this war. A formidable confederacy was
+raised against Venice, which had given provocation to many enemies. Of
+this Francis Carrara, seignior of Padua, and the King of Hungary were
+the leaders. But the principal struggle was, as usual, upon the waves.
+During the winter of 1378 a Genoese fleet kept the sea, and ravaged the
+shores of Dalmatia. The Venetian armament had been weakened by an
+epidemic disease, and when Vittor Pisani, their admiral, gave battle to
+the enemy, he was compelled to fight with a hasty conscription of
+landsmen against the best sailors in the world.
+
+Entirely defeated, and taking refuge at Venice with only seven galleys,
+Pisani was cast into prison, as if his ill-fortune had been his crime.
+Meanwhile the Genoese fleet, augmented by a strong reënforcement, rode
+before the long natural ramparts that separate the lagunes of Venice
+from the Adriatic. Six passages intersect the islands which constitute
+this barrier, besides the broader outlets of Brondolo and Fossone,
+through which the waters of the Brenta and the Adige are discharged. The
+Lagoon itself, as is well known, consists of extremely shallow water,
+unnavigable for any vessel except along the course of artificial and
+intricate passages.
+
+Notwithstanding the apparent difficulties of such an enterprise, Pietro
+Doria, the Genoese admiral, determined to reduce the city. His first
+successes gave him reason to hope. He forced the passage, and stormed
+the little town of Chioggia, built upon the inside of the isle bearing
+that name, about twenty-five miles south of Venice. Nearly four thousand
+prisoners fell here into his hands--an augury, as it seemed, of a more
+splendid triumph.
+
+In the consternation this misfortune inspired at Venice, the first
+impulse was to ask for peace. The ambassadors carried with them seven
+Genoese prisoners, as a sort of peace-offering to the admiral, and were
+empowered to make large and humiliating concessions, reserving nothing
+but the liberty of Venice. Francis Carrara strongly urged his allies to
+treat for peace. But the Genoese were stimulated by long hatred, and
+intoxicated by this unexpected opportunity of revenge. Doria, calling
+the ambassadors into council, thus addressed them: "Ye shall obtain no
+peace from us, I swear to you, nor from the lord of Padua, till first we
+have put a curb in the mouths of those wild horses that stand upon the
+place of St. Mark. When they are bridled you shall have enough of peace.
+Take back with you your Genoese captives, for I am coming within a few
+days to release both them and their companions from your prisons."
+
+When this answer was reported to the senate, they prepared to defend
+themselves with the characteristic firmness of their government. Every
+eye was turned toward a great man unjustly punished, their admiral,
+Vittor Pisani. He was called out of prison to defend his country amid
+general acclamations. Under his vigorous command the canals were
+fortified or occupied by large vessels armed with artillery; thirty-four
+galleys were equipped; every citizen contributed according to his power;
+in the entire want of commercial resources--for Venice had not a
+merchant-ship during this war--private plate was melted; and the senate
+held out the promise of ennobling thirty families who should be most
+forward in this strife of patriotism.
+
+The new fleet was so ill-provided with seamen that for some months the
+admiral employed them only in manoeuvring along the canals. From some
+unaccountable supineness, or more probably from the insuperable
+difficulties of the undertaking, the Genoese made no assault upon the
+city. They had, indeed, fair grounds to hope its reduction by famine or
+despair. Every access to the Continent was cut off by the troops of
+Padua; and the King of Hungary had mastered almost all the Venetian
+towns in Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. The doge Contarini,
+taking the chief command, appeared at length with his fleet near
+Chioggia, before the Genoese were aware. They were still less aware of
+his secret design. He pushed one of the large round vessels, then called
+_cocche_, into the narrow passage of Chioggia which connects the Lagoon
+with the sea, and, mooring her athwart the channel, interrupted that
+communication. Attacked with fury by the enemy, this vessel went down on
+the spot, and the Doge improved his advantage by sinking loads of stones
+until the passage became absolutely unnavigable.
+
+It was still possible for the Genoese fleet to follow the principal
+canal of the Lagoon toward Venice and the northern passages, or to sail
+out of it by the harbor of Brondolo; but, whether from confusion or from
+miscalculating the dangers of their position, they suffered the
+Venetians to close the canal upon them by the same means they had used
+at Chioggia, and even to place their fleet in the entrance of Brondolo
+so near to the Lagoon that the Genoese could not form their ships in
+line of battle. The circumstances of the two combatants were thus
+entirely changed. But the Genoese fleet, though besieged in Chioggia,
+was impregnable, and their command of the land secured them from famine.
+
+Venice, notwithstanding her unexpected success, was still very far from
+secure; it was difficult for the Doge to keep his position through the
+winter; and if the enemy could appear in open sea, the risks of combat
+were extremely hazardous. It is said that the senate deliberated upon
+transporting the seat of their liberty to Candia, and that the Doge had
+announced his intention to raise the siege of Chioggia, if expected
+succors did not arrive by January 1, 1380. On that very day Carlo Zeno,
+an admiral who, ignorant of the dangers of his country, had been
+supporting the honor of her flag in the Levant and on the coast of
+Liguria, appeared with a reënforcement of eighteen galleys and a store
+of provisions.
+
+From that moment the confidence of Venice revived. The fleet, now
+superior in strength to the enemy, began to attack them with vivacity.
+After several months of obstinate resistance, the Genoese--whom their
+republic had ineffectually attempted to relieve by a fresh
+armament--blocked up in the town of Chioggia, and pressed by hunger,
+were obliged to surrender. Nineteen galleys only, out of forty-eight,
+were in good condition; and the crews were equally diminished in the ten
+months of their occupation of Chioggia. The pride of Genoa was deemed to
+be justly humbled; and even her own historian confesses that God would
+not suffer so noble a city as Venice to become the spoil of a conqueror.
+
+Though the capture of Chioggia did not terminate the war, both parties
+were exhausted, and willing, next year, to accept the mediation of the
+Duke of Savoy. By the peace of Turin, Venice surrendered most of her
+territorial possessions to the King of Hungary. That Prince and Francis
+Carrara were the only gainers. Genoa obtained the isle of Tenedos, one
+of the original subjects of dispute--a poor indemnity for her losses.
+Though, upon a hasty view, the result of this war appears more
+unfavorable to Venice, yet in fact it is the epoch of the decline of
+Genoa. From this time she never commanded the ocean with such navies as
+before; her commerce gradually went into decay; and the fifteenth
+century--the most splendid in the annals of Venice--is, till recent
+times, the most ignominious in those of Genoa. But this was partly owing
+to internal dissensions, by which her liberty, as well as glory, was for
+a while suspended.
+
+
+
+
+REBELLION OF WAT TYLER
+
+A.D. 1381
+
+JOHN LINGARD
+
+
+  Richard II, of England, at eleven years of age, succeeded to
+  a heritage of foreign complications and wars, which were a
+  legacy from the reign of his grandfather, Edward III.
+
+  At the request of the commons, the lords, in the King's
+  name, appointed nine persons to be a permanent council, and
+  it was resolved that during the King's minority the
+  appointment of all the chief officers of the crown should be
+  with the parliament. The administration was conducted in the
+  King's name, and the whole system was for some years kept
+  together by the secret authority of the King's uncles,
+  especially of the Duke of Lancaster, who was in reality the
+  regent.
+
+  France, Scotland, and Castile continued their hostilities
+  against England, and during the first two years of Richard's
+  reign the ministers had no difficulty in obtaining ample
+  grants of money to carry on the wars. In the third year the
+  expense of the campaign in Brittany compelled them to
+  solicit yet additional aid.
+
+  Various methods of taxation failing to raise the amount
+  required, the commons, in great discontent, demanded
+  alterations in the council, and after long debate
+  reluctantly consented to the imposition of a new and unusual
+  tax of three groats[67] on every person, male and female,
+  above fifteen years of age. For the relief of the poor it
+  was provided that in the cities and towns the aggregate
+  amount should be divided among the inhabitants according to
+  their abilities, so that no individual should pay less than
+  one groat, or more than sixty groats for himself and his
+  wife. Parliament thereupon was dismissed; but the collection
+  of the tax gave rise to an insurrection which threatened the
+  life of the King and the existence of the government.
+
+At this period [1381] a secret ferment seems to have pervaded the mass
+of the people in many nations of Europe. Men were no longer willing to
+submit to the impositions of their rulers, or to wear the chains which
+had been thrown round the necks of their fathers by a warlike and
+haughty aristocracy. We may trace this awakening spirit of independence
+to a variety of causes, operating in the same direction; to the
+progressive improvement of society, the gradual diffusion of knowledge,
+the increasing pressure of taxation, and above all to the numerous and
+lasting wars by which Europe had lately been convulsed. Necessity had
+often compelled both the sovereigns and nobles to court the good-will of
+the people; the burghers in the towns and inferior tenants in the
+country had learned, from the repeated demands made upon them, to form
+notions of their own importance; and the archers and foot-soldiers, who
+had served for years in the wars, were, at their return home, unwilling
+to sit down in the humble station of bondmen to their former lords. In
+Flanders the commons had risen against their Count Louis, and had driven
+him out of his dominions; in France the populace had taken possession of
+Paris and Rouen, and massacred the collectors of the revenue. In England
+a spirit of discontent agitated the whole body of the villeins, who
+remained in almost the same situation in which we left them at the
+Norman Conquest. They were still attached to the soil, talliable at the
+will of the lord, and bound to pay the fines for the marriage of their
+females, to perform customary labor, and to render the other servile
+prestations incident to their condition. It is true that in the course
+of time many had obtained the rights of freemen. Occasionally the king
+or the lord would liberate at once all the bondmen on some particular
+domain, in return for a fixed rent to be yearly assessed on the
+inhabitants.
+
+But the progress of emancipation was slow; the improved condition of
+their former fellows served only to embitter the discontent of those who
+still wore the fetters of servitude; and in many places the villeins
+formed associations for their mutual support, and availed themselves of
+every expedient in their power to free themselves from the control of
+their lords. In the first year of Richard's reign a complaint was laid
+before parliament that in many districts they had purchased
+exemplifications out of the _Domesday Book_ in the king's court, and
+under a false interpretation of that record had pretended to be
+discharged of all manner of servitude both as to their bodies and their
+tenures, and would not suffer the officers of their lords either to levy
+distress or to do justice upon them. It was in vain that such
+exemplifications were declared of no force, and that commissions were
+ordered for the punishment of the rebellious. The villeins, by their
+union and perseverance, contrived to intimidate their lords, and set at
+defiance the severity of the law. To this resistance they were
+encouraged by the diffusion of the doctrines so recently taught by
+Wycliffe, that the right of property was founded in grace, and that no
+man, who was by sin a traitor to God, could be entitled to the services
+of others; at the same time itinerant preachers sedulously inculcated
+the natural equality of mankind, and the tyranny of artificial
+distinctions; and the poorer classes, still smarting under the exactions
+of the late reign, were by the impositions of the new tax wound up to a
+pitch of madness. Thus the materials had been prepared; it required but
+a spark to set the whole country in a blaze.
+
+It was soon discovered that the receipts of the treasury would fall
+short of the expected amount; and commissions were issued to different
+persons to inquire into the conduct of the collectors, and to compel
+payment from those who had been favored or overlooked. One of these
+commissioners, Thomas de Bampton, sat at Brentwood in Essex; but the men
+of Fobbings refused to answer before him; and when the chief justice of
+the common pleas attempted to punish their contumacy, they compelled him
+to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission, and, carrying
+their heads upon poles, claimed the support of the nearest townships. In
+a few days all the commons of Essex were in a state of insurrection,
+under the command of a profligate priest, who had assumed the name of
+Jack Straw.
+
+The men of Kent were not long behind their neighbors in Essex. At
+Dartford one of the collectors had demanded the tax for a young girl,
+the daughter of a tyler. Her mother maintained that she was under the
+age required by the statute; and the officer was proceeding to ascertain
+the fact by an indecent exposure of her person, when her father, who had
+just returned from work, with a stroke of his hammer beat out the
+offender's brains. His courage was applauded by his neighbors. They
+swore that they would protect him from punishment, and by threats and
+promises secured the coöperation of all the villages in the western
+division of Kent.
+
+A third party of insurgents was formed by the men of Gravesend,
+irritated at the conduct of Sir Simon Burley. He had claimed one of the
+burghers as his bondman, refused to grant him his freedom at a less
+price than three hundred pounds, and sent him a prisoner to the castle
+of Rochester. With the aid of a body of insurgents from Essex, the
+castle was taken and the captive liberated. At Maidstone they appointed
+Wat the tyler, of that town, leader of the commons of Kent, and took
+with them an itinerant preacher of the name of John Ball, who for his
+seditious and heterodox harangues had been confined by order of the
+archbishop. The mayor and aldermen of Canterbury were compelled to swear
+fidelity to the good cause; several of the citizens were slain; and five
+hundred joined them in their intended march toward London. When they
+reached Blackheath their numbers are said to have amounted to one
+hundred thousand men. To this lawless and tumultuous multitude Ball was
+appointed preacher, and assumed for the text of his first sermon the
+following lines:
+
+  "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+   Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+He told them that by nature all men were born equal; that the
+distinction of bondage and freedom was the invention of their
+oppressors, and contrary to the views of their Creator; that God now
+offered them the means of recovering their liberty, and that, if they
+continued slaves, the blame must rest with themselves; that it was
+necessary to dispose of the archbishop, the earls and barons, the
+judges, lawyers, and questmongers; and that when the distinction of
+ranks was abolished, all would be free, because all would be of the same
+nobility and of equal authority. His discourse was received with shouts
+of applause by his infatuated hearers, who promised to make him, in
+defiance of his own doctrines, archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor
+of the realm.
+
+By letters and messengers the knowledge of these proceedings was
+carefully propagated through the neighboring counties. Everywhere the
+people had been prepared; and in a few days the flame spread from the
+southern coast of Kent to the right bank of the Humber. In all places
+the insurgents regularly pursued the same course. They pillaged the
+manors of their lords, demolished the houses, and burned the court
+rolls; cut off the heads of every justice and lawyer and juror who fell
+into their hands; and swore all others to be true to King Richard and
+the commons; to admit of no king of the name of John; and to oppose all
+taxes but fifteenths, the ancient tallage paid by their fathers. The
+members of the council saw, with astonishment, the sudden rise and rapid
+spread of the insurrection; and, bewildered by their fears and
+ignorance, knew not whom to trust or what measures to pursue.
+
+The first who encountered the rabble on Blackheath was the Princess of
+Wales, the King's mother, on her return from a pilgrimage to Canterbury.
+She liberated herself from danger by her own address; and a few kisses
+from "the fair maid of Kent" purchased the protection of the leaders,
+and secured the respect of their followers. She was permitted to join
+her son, who, with his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby, Simon, Archbishop of
+Canterbury and Chancellor, Sir Robert Hales, master of the Knights of
+St. John and treasurer, and about one hundred sergeants and knights had
+left the castle of Windsor, and repaired for greater security to the
+Tower of London. The next morning the King in his barge descended the
+river to receive the petitions of the insurgents. To the number of ten
+thousand, with two banners of St. George, and sixty pennons, they waited
+his arrival at Rotherhithe; but their horrid yells and uncouth
+appearance so intimidated his attendants, that instead of permitting him
+to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned with
+precipitation. Tyler and Straw, irritated by this disappointment, led
+their men into Southwark, where they demolished the houses belonging to
+the Marshalsea and the king's bench, while another party forced their
+way into the palace of the Archbishop at Lambeth, and burned the
+furniture with the records belonging to the chancery.
+
+The next morning they were allowed to pass in small companies, according
+to their different townships, over the bridge into the city. The
+populace joined them; and as soon as they had regaled themselves at the
+cost of the richer inhabitants, the work of devastation commenced. They
+demolished Newgate, and liberated the prisoners; plundered and destroyed
+the magnificent palace of the Savoy, belonging to the Duke of Lancaster;
+burned the temple with the books and records; and despatched a party to
+set fire to the house of the Knights Hospitallers at Clerkenwell,
+which had been lately built by Sir Robert Hales. To prove, however, that
+they had no views of private emolument, a proclamation was issued
+forbidding any one to secrete part of the plunder; and so severely was
+the prohibition enforced that the plate was hammered and cut into small
+pieces, the precious stones were beaten to powder, and one of the
+rioters, who had concealed a silver cup in his bosom, was immediately
+thrown, with his prize, into the river. To every man whom they met they
+put the question, "With whom holdest thou?" and unless he gave the
+proper answer, "With King Richard and the commons," he was instantly
+beheaded. But the principal objects of their cruelty were the natives of
+Flanders. They dragged thirteen Flemings out of one church, seventeen
+out of another, and thirty-two out of the Vintry, and struck off their
+heads with shouts of triumph and exultation. In the evening, wearied
+with the labor of the day, they dispersed through the streets, and
+indulged in every kind of debauchery.
+
+During this night of suspense and terror, the Princess of Wales held a
+council with the ministers in the Tower. The King's uncles were absent;
+the garrison, though perhaps able to defend the place, was too weak to
+put down the insurgents; and a resolution was taken to try the influence
+of promises and concession. In the morning the Tower Hill was seen
+covered with an immense multitude, who prohibited the introduction of
+provisions, and with loud cries demanded the heads of the chancellor and
+treasurer. In return, a herald ordered them, by proclamation, to retire
+to Mile End, where the King would assent to all their demands.
+Immediately the gates were thrown open. Richard with a few unarmed
+attendants rode forward; the best intentioned of the crowd followed him,
+and at Mile End he saw himself surrounded with sixty thousand
+petitioners. Their demands were reduced to four: the abolition of
+slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence the acre; the
+free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a
+general pardon for past offences. A charter to that effect was engrossed
+for each parish and township; during the night thirty clerks were
+employed in transcribing a sufficient number of copies; they were sealed
+and delivered in the morning; and the whole body, consisting chiefly of
+the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, retired, bearing the King's banner
+as a token that they were under his protection.
+
+But Tyler and Straw had formed other and more ambitious designs. The
+moment the King was gone, they rushed, at the head of four hundred men,
+into the Tower. The Archbishop, who had just celebrated mass, Sir Robert
+Hales, William Apuldore, the King's confessor, Legge, the farmer of the
+tax, and three of his associates, were seized, and led to immediate
+execution.[68] As no opposition was offered, they searched every part of
+the Tower, burst into the private apartment of the Princess, and probed
+her bed with their swords. She fainted, and was carried by her ladies to
+the river, which she crossed in a covered barge. The royal wardrobe, a
+house in Carter Lane, was selected for her residence.
+
+The King joined his mother at the wardrobe; and the next morning, as he
+rode through Smithfield with sixty horsemen, encountered Tyler at the
+head of twenty thousand insurgents. Three different charters had been
+sent to that demagogue, who contemptuously refused them all. As soon as
+he saw Richard, he made a sign to his followers to halt, and boldly rode
+up to the King. A conversation immediately began. Tyler, as he talked,
+affected to play with his dagger; at last he laid his hand on the bridle
+of his sovereign; but at the instant Walworth, the Lord Mayor, jealous
+of his design, plunged a short sword into his throat. He spurred his
+horse, rode about a dozen yards, fell to the ground, and was despatched
+by Robert Standish, one of the King's esquires. The insurgents, who
+witnessed the transaction, drew their bows to revenge the fall of their
+leader, and Richard would inevitably have lost his life had he not been
+saved by his own intrepidity. Galloping up to the archers he exclaimed:
+"What are ye doing, my lieges? Tyler was a traitor. Come with me, and I
+will be your leader." Wavering and disconcerted, they followed him into
+the fields of Islington, whither a force of one thousand men-at-arms,
+which had been collected by the Lord Mayor and Sir Robert Knowles,
+hastened to protect the young King; and the insurgents, falling on their
+knees, begged for mercy. Many of the royalists demanded permission to
+punish them for their past excesses; but Richard firmly refused, ordered
+the suppliants to return to their homes, and by proclamation forbade,
+under pain of death, any stranger to pass the night in the city.
+
+On the southern coast the excesses of the insurgents reached as far as
+Winchester; on the eastern, to Beverley and Scarborough; and, if we
+reflect that in every place they rose about the same time, and uniformly
+pursued the same system, we may discover reason to suspect that they
+acted under the direction of some acknowledged though invisible leader.
+The nobility and gentry, intimidated by the hostility of their tenants,
+and distressed by contradictory reports, sought security within the
+fortifications of their castles. The only man who behaved with
+promptitude and resolution was Henry Spenser, the young and warlike
+Bishop of Norwich. In the counties of Norfolk, Cambridge, and Huntington
+tranquillity was restored and preserved by this singular prelate, who
+successively exercised the offices of general, judge, and priest. In
+complete armor he always led his followers to the attack; after the
+battle he sat in judgment on his prisoners; and before execution he
+administered to them the aids of religion. But as soon as the death of
+Tyler and the dispersion of the men of Kent and Essex were known,
+thousands became eager to display their loyalty; and knights and
+esquires from every quarter poured into London to offer their services
+to the King. At the head of forty thousand horse he published
+proclamations, revoking the charters of manumission which he had
+granted, commanding the villeins to perform their usual services, and
+prohibiting illegal assemblies and associations. In several parts the
+commons threatened to renew the horrors of the late tumult in defence of
+their liberties; but the approach of the royal army dismayed the
+disaffected in Kent; the loss of five hundred men induced the insurgents
+of Essex to sue for pardon; and numerous executions in different
+counties effectually crushed the spirit of resistance. Among the
+sufferers were Lister and Westbroom, who had assumed the title and
+authority of kings in Norfolk and Suffolk; and Straw and Ball, the
+itinerant preachers, who have been already mentioned, and whose sermons
+were supposed to have kindled and nourished the insurrection.[69]
+
+When the parliament met, the two houses were informed by the Chancellor,
+that the King had revoked the charters of emancipation, which he had
+been compelled to grant to the villeins, but at the same time wished to
+submit to their consideration whether it might not be wise to abolish
+the state of bondage altogether. The minds of the great proprietors were
+not, however, prepared for the adoption of so liberal a measure; and
+both lords and commons unanimously replied that no man could deprive
+them of the services of their villeins without their consent; that they
+had never given that consent, and never would be induced to give it,
+either through persuasion or violence. The King yielded to their
+obstinacy; and the charters were repealed by authority of parliament.
+The commons next deliberated, and presented their petitions. They
+attributed the insurrection to the grievances suffered by the people
+from: 1. The purveyors, who were said to have exceeded all their
+predecessors in insolence and extortion; 2. From the rapacity of the
+royal officers in the chancery and exchequer, and the courts of king's
+bench and common pleas; 3. From the banditti, called maintainers, who,
+in different counties, supported themselves by plunder, and, arming in
+defence of each other, set at defiance all the provisions of the law;
+and 4. From the repeated aids and taxes, which had impoverished the
+people and proved of no service to the nation. To silence these
+complaints, a commission of inquiry was appointed; the courts of law
+and the King's household were subjected to regulations of reform, and
+severe orders were published for the immediate suppression of illegal
+associations. But the demand of a supply produced a very interesting
+altercation. The commons refused, on the ground that the imposition of a
+new tax would goad the people to a second insurrection. They found it,
+however, necessary to request of the King a general pardon for all
+illegal acts committed in the suppression of the insurgents, and
+received for answer that it was customary for the commons to make their
+grants before the King bestowed his favors. When the subsidy was again
+pressed on their attention they replied that they should take time to
+consider it, but were told that the King would also take time to
+consider of their petition. At last they yielded; the tax upon wool,
+wool-fells, and leather was continued for five years, and in return a
+general pardon was granted for all loyal subjects, who had acted
+illegally in opposing the rebels, and for the great body of the
+insurgents, who had been misled by the declamations of the demagogues.
+
+
+
+
+WYCLIFFE TRANSLATES THE BIBLE INTO
+ENGLISH
+
+A.D. 1382
+
+J. PATERSON SMYTH
+
+
+  It may safely be said that no greater service has been
+  rendered at once to religion and to literature than the
+  translation of the Bible into the English tongue. This
+  achievement did not indeed, like that of Luther's German
+  translation, come as it were by a single stroke. Luther's
+  Bible caused him to be regarded as the founder of the
+  present literary language of Germany--New High German--which
+  his translation permanently established. The English Bible,
+  on the other hand, was the growth of centuries. But to the
+  contributions of able hands through many generations, during
+  which the English language itself passed through a wonderful
+  formative development, the incomparable beauty of King
+  James' version owes its existence, and our literature its
+  greatest ornaments.
+
+  It is impossible to say when the first translation of any
+  part of the Bible into English was made. No English Bible of
+  earlier date than the fourteenth century has ever been
+  found. But translations, even of the whole Bible, older than
+  Wcyliffe's are, by at least two eminent witnesses, said to
+  have existed. "As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe's
+  time," says Sir Thomas More, "they remain lawful and be in
+  some folkes handes." "The hole byble," he declares
+  (_Dyalogues_, p. 138, ed. 1530), "was long before Wycliffe's
+  days, by vertuous and well learned men, translated into the
+  English tong." And Cranmer, in his prologue to the second
+  edition of the "Great Bible," bears testimony equally
+  explicit to the translation of Scripture "in the Saxons
+  tongue." And when that language "waxed olde and out of
+  common usage," he says, the Bible "was again translated into
+  the newer language." There has never been any means of
+  testing these statements, which were probably due to some
+  inexplicable error. Abundant evidence exists relating to
+  many Saxon and later translations of various parts of the
+  Bible before the time of Wycliffe. Among the most notable of
+  the early translators were the Venerable Bede and Alfred the
+  Great. Some portions of Scripture were likewise translated
+  into Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century. Some of the
+  early fragments are still preserved in English libraries.
+
+  Three versions of the Psalter in English, from the early
+  years of the fourteenth century, still exist, one of which
+  was by Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire hermit, who also
+  translated the New Testament.
+
+  But so far as known, the first complete Bible in English was
+  the work of John Wycliffe, assisted by Nicholas de
+  Hereford--whom some would name first in this partnership,
+  though the product of their joint labors is known as
+  "Wycliffe's Bible."
+
+  John Wycliffe, the "Morning Star of the Reformation," was
+  born near Richmond, Yorkshire, about 1324. He became a
+  fellow, and later master of Balliol College, Oxford,
+  afterward held several rectorships--the last being that of
+  Lutterworth, upon which he entered in 1374. For opposing the
+  papacy and certain church doctrines and practices, he was
+  condemned by the university, and his followers--known as
+  Lollards--were persecuted. Something of his life in
+  connection with these matters is fitly dealt with by Smyth
+  in connection with his account of the famous translation.
+
+After the early Anglo-Saxon versions comes a long pause in the history
+of Bible translation. Amid the disturbance resulting from the Danish
+invasion there was little time for thinking of translations and
+manuscripts; and before the land had fully regained its quiet the fatal
+battle of Hastings had been fought, and England lay helpless at the
+Normans' feet. The higher Saxon clergy were replaced by the priests of
+Normandy, who had little sympathy with the people over whom they came,
+and the Saxon manuscripts were contemptuously flung aside as relics of a
+rude barbarism. The contempt shown to the language of the defeated race
+quite destroyed the impulse to English translation, and the Norman
+clergy had no sympathy with the desire for spreading the knowledge of
+the Scriptures among the people, so that for centuries those Scriptures
+remained in England a "spring shut up, a fountain sealed."
+
+Yet this time must not be considered altogether lost, for during those
+centuries England was becoming fitted for an English Bible. The future
+language of the nation was being formed; the Saxon and Norman French
+were struggling side by side; gradually the old Saxon grew
+unintelligible to the people; gradually the French became a foreign
+tongue, and with the fusion of the two races a language grew up which
+was the language of united England.
+
+Passing, then, from the quiet death-beds of Alfred and of Bede, we
+transfer ourselves to the great hall of the Blackfriars' monastery,
+London, on a dull, warm May day in 1378, amid purple robes and gowns of
+satin and damask, amid monks and abbots, and bishops and doctors of the
+Church, assembled for the trial of John Wycliffe, the parish priest of
+Lutterworth.
+
+The great hall, crowded to its heavy oaken doors, witnesses to the
+interest that is centred in the trial, and all eyes are fixed on the
+pale, stern old man who stands before the dais silently facing his
+judges. He is quite alone, and his thoughts go back, with some
+bitterness, to his previous trial, when the people crowded the doors
+shouting for their favorite, and John of Gaunt and the Lord Marshal of
+England were standing by his side. He has learned since then not to put
+his trust in princes. The power of his enemies has rapidly grown; even
+the young King (Richard II) has been won over to their cause, and
+patrons and friends have drawn back from his side, whom the Church has
+resolved to crush.
+
+The judges have taken their seats, and the accused stands awaiting the
+charges to be read, when suddenly there is a quick cry of terror. A
+strange rumbling sound fills the air, and the walls of the judgment hall
+are trembling to their base--the monastery and the city of London are
+being shaken by an earthquake! Friar and prelate grow pale with
+superstitious awe. Twice already has this arraignment of Wycliffe been
+strangely interrupted. Are the elements in league with this enemy of the
+Church? Shall they give up the trial?
+
+"No!" thunders Archbishop Courtenay, rising in his place. "We shall not
+give up the trial. This earthquake but portends the purging of the
+kingdom; for as there are in the bowels of the earth noxious vapors
+which only by a violent earthquake can be purged away, so are these
+evils brought by such men upon this land which only by a very earthquake
+can ever be removed. Let the trial go forward!"
+
+What think you, reader, were the evils which this pale ascetic had
+wrought, needing a very earthquake to cleanse them from the land? Had he
+falsified the divine message to the people in his charge? Was he turning
+men's hearts from the worship of God? Was his priestly office disgraced
+by carelessness or drunkenness or impurity of life?
+
+Oh, no. Such faults could be gently judged at the tribunal in the
+Blackfriars' hall. Wycliffe's was a far more serious crime. He had dared
+to attack the corruptions of the Church, and especially the enormities
+of the begging friars; he had indignantly denounced pardons and
+indulgences and masses for the soul as part of a system of gigantic
+fraud; and worst of all, he had filled up the cup of his iniquity by
+translating the Scriptures into the English tongue; "making it," as one
+of the chroniclers angrily complains, "common and more open to laymen
+and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well learned and of good
+understanding. So that the pearl of the Gospel is trodden under foot of
+swine."
+
+The feeling of his opponents will be better understood if we notice the
+position of the Church in England at the time. The meridian of her power
+had been already passed. Her clergy as a class were ignorant and
+corrupt. Her people were neglected, except for the money to be extorted
+by masses and pardons, "as if," to quote the words of an old writer,
+"God had given his sheep, not to be pastured, but to be shaven and
+shorn." This state of things had gone on for centuries, and the people
+like dumb, driven cattle had submitted. But those who could discern the
+signs of the times must have seen now that it could not go on much
+longer. The spread of education was rapidly increasing, several new
+colleges having been founded in Oxford during Wycliffe's lifetime. A
+strong spirit of independence, too, was rising among the people. Already
+Edward III and his parliament had indignantly refused the Pope's demand
+for the annual tribute to be sent to Rome. It was evident that a crisis
+was near. And, as if to hasten the crisis, the famous schism of the
+papacy had placed two popes at the head of the Church, and all
+Christendom was scandalized by the sight of the rival "vicars of Jesus
+Christ" anathematizing each other from Rome and Avignon, raising armies
+and slaughtering helpless women and children, each for the aggrandizing
+of himself.
+
+The minds of men in England were greatly agitated, and Wycliffe felt
+that at such a time the firmest charter of the Church would be the open
+Bible in her children's hands; the best exposure of the selfish policy
+of her rulers, the exhibiting to the people the beautiful,
+self-forgetting life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels. "The
+sacred Scriptures," he said, "are the property of the people, and one
+which no one should be allowed to wrest from them. Christ and his
+apostles converted the world by making known the Scriptures to men in a
+form familiar to them, and I pray with all my heart that through doing
+the things contained in this book we may all together come to the
+everlasting life." This Bible translation he placed far the first in
+importance of all his attempts to reform the English Church, and he
+pursued his object with a vigor and against an opposition that remind
+one of the old monk of Bethlehem and his Bible a thousand years before.
+
+The result of the Blackfriars' synod was that after three days'
+deliberation Wycliffe's teaching was condemned, and at a subsequent
+meeting he himself was excommunicated. He returned to his quiet
+parsonage at Lutterworth--for his enemies dared not yet proceed to
+extremities--and there, with his pile of old Latin manuscripts and
+commentaries, he labored on at the great work of his life, till the
+whole Bible was translated into the "modir tongue," and England received
+for the first time in her history a complete version of the Scriptures
+in the language of the people.
+
+And scarce was his task well finished when, like his great predecessor
+Bede, the brave old priest laid down his life. He himself had expected
+that a violent death would have finished his course. His enemies were
+many and powerful; the Primate, the King, and the Pope were against
+him--with the friars, whom he had so often and so fiercely defied; so
+that his destruction seemed but a mere question of time. But while his
+enemies were preparing to strike, the old man "was not, for God took
+him."
+
+It was the close of the old year, the last Sunday of 1384, and his
+little flock at Lutterworth were kneeling in hushed reverence before the
+altar, when suddenly, at the time of the elevation of the sacrament, he
+fell to the ground in a violent fit of the palsy, and never spoke again
+until his death on the last day of the year.
+
+In him England lost one of her best and greatest sons, a patriot sternly
+resenting all dishonor to his country, a reformer who ventured his life
+for the purity of the Church and the freedom of the Bible--an earnest,
+faithful "parson of a country town," standing out conspicuously among
+the clergy of the time.
+
+  "For Cristè's lore and his apostles twelve
+   He taughte--and first he folwede it himselve."
+
+Here is a choice specimen from one of the monkish writers of the time
+describing his death: "On the feast of the passion of St. Thomas of
+Canterbury, John Wycliffe, the organ of the devil, the enemy of the
+Church, the idol of heretics, the image of hypocrites, the restorer of
+schism, the storehouse of lies, the sink of flattery, being struck by
+the horrible judgment of God, was seized with the palsy throughout his
+whole body, and that mouth which was to have spoken huge things against
+God and his saints, and holy Church, was miserably drawn aside, and
+afforded a frightful spectacle to beholders; his tongue was speechless
+and his head shook, showing painfully plainly that the curse which God
+had thundered forth against Cain was also inflicted on him."
+
+Some time after his death a petition was presented to the Pope, which to
+his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe's body to be taken
+out of consecrated ground and buried in a dunghill. But forty years
+after, by a decree of the Council of Constance, the old reformer's bones
+were dug up and burned, and the ashes flung into the little river Swift
+which "runneth hard by his church at Lutterworth." And so, in the
+often-quoted words of old Fuller, "as the Swift bear them into the
+Severn, and the Severn into the narrow seas, and they again into the
+ocean, thus the ashes of Wycliffe is an emblem of his doctrine, which is
+now dispersed all over the world."
+
+But it is with his Bible translation that we are specially concerned. As
+far as we can learn, the whole Bible was not translated by the reformer.
+About half the Old Testament is ascribed to Nicholas de Hereford, one of
+the Oxford leaders of the Lollards; the remainder, with the whole of the
+New Testament, being done by Wycliffe himself. About eight years after
+its completion the whole was revised by Richard Purvey, his curate and
+intimate friend, whose manuscript is still in the library of Trinity
+College, Dublin. Purvey's preface is a most interesting old document,
+and shows not only that he was deeply in earnest about his work, but
+that he thoroughly understood the intellectual and moral conditions
+necessary for its success.
+
+"A simpel creature," he says, "hath translated the Scripture out of
+Latin into Englische. First, this simpel creature had much travayle
+with divers fellows and helpers to gather many old Bibles and other
+doctors and glosses to make one Latin Bible. Some deal true and then to
+study it anew the texte and any other help he might get, especially Lyra
+on the Old Testament, which helped him much with this work. The third
+time to counsel with olde grammarians and old divines of hard words and
+hard sentences how they might best be understood and translated, the
+fourth time to translate as clearly as he could to the sense, and to
+have many good fellows and cunnying at the correcting of the
+translacioun. A translator hath great nede to studie well the sense both
+before and after, and then also he hath nede to live a clene life and be
+full devout in preiers, and have not his wit occupied about worldli
+things that the Holy Spyrit author of all wisdom and cunnynge and truthe
+dresse him for his work and suffer him not to err." And he concludes
+with the prayer, "God grant to us all grace to ken well and to kepe well
+Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the laste."
+
+Like all the earlier English translations, Wycliffe's Bible was based on
+the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome; and this is the great defect in his
+work, as compared with the versions that followed. He was not capable of
+consulting the original Greek and Hebrew even if he had access to
+them--in fact, there was probably no man in England at the time capable
+of doing so; and therefore, though he represents the Latin faithfully
+and well, he of course handed on its errors as faithfully as its
+perfections. But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of
+fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for
+nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those
+for whom he wrote--plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its
+homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that
+they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions,
+such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith
+himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our
+present Bible originated with him; _e.g._, "the beame and the mote,"
+"the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye,"
+"no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing which we
+blessen," etc.
+
+Here is a specimen from Wycliffe's Gospels:
+
+  In thilke dayes came Joon Baptist prechynge in the
+  desert of Jude, saying, Do ye penaunce: for the kyngdom
+  of heuens shall neigh. Forsothe this is he of whom
+  it is said by Ysaye the prophete, A voice of a cryinge in
+  desert, make ye redy the wayes of the Lord, make ye
+  rightful the pathes of hym. Forsothe that like Joon hadde
+  cloth of the beeris of cameylis and a girdil of skyn about
+  his leendis; sothely his mete weren locustis and hony of
+  the wode. Thanne Jerusalem wente out to hym, and al
+  Jude, and al the cuntre aboute Jordan, and thei weren
+  crystened of hym in in Jordon, knowlechynge there synnes.
+
+It is somewhere recorded that at a meeting in Yorkshire recently a long
+passage of Wycliffe's Bible was read, which was quite intelligible
+throughout to those who heard.
+
+It will be seen that this specimen (Matt. iii. 1-6) is not divided into
+verses. Verse division belongs to a much later period, and, though
+convenient for reference, it sometimes a good deal spoils the sense. The
+division into chapters appears in Wycliffe's as in our own Bibles. This
+chapter division had shortly before been made by a cardinal Hugo, for
+the purpose of a Latin concordance, and its convenience brought it
+quickly into use. But, like the verse division, it is often very badly
+done, the object aimed at seeming to be uniformity of length rather than
+any natural division of the subject. Sometimes a chapter breaks off in
+the middle of a narrative or an argument, and, especially in St. Paul's
+epistles, the incorrect division often becomes misleading. The removal
+as far as possible of these divisions is one of the advantages of the
+Revised Version to be noticed later on.
+
+The book had a very wide circulation. While the Anglo-Saxon versions
+were confined for the most part to the few religious houses where they
+were written, Wycliffe's Bible, in spite of its disadvantage of being
+only manuscript, was circulated largely through the kingdom; and, though
+the cost a good deal restricted its possession to the wealthier classes,
+those who could not hope to possess it gained access to it too, as well
+through their own efforts as through the ministrations of Wycliffe's
+"pore priestes." A considerable sum was paid for even a few sheets of
+the manuscript, a load of hay was given for permission to read it for a
+certain period one hour a day,[70] and those who could not afford even
+such expenses adopted what means they could. It is touching to read such
+incidents as that of one Alice Collins, sent for to the little
+gatherings "to recite the Ten Commandments and parts of the epistles of
+SS. Paul and Peter, which she knew by heart." "Certes," says old John
+Foxe in his _Book of Martyrs_, "the zeal of those Christian days seems
+much superior to this of our day, and to see the travail of them may
+well shame our careless times."
+
+But it was at a terrible risk such study was carried on. The appearance
+of Wycliffe's Bible aroused at once fierce opposition. A bill was
+brought into parliament to forbid the circulation of the Scriptures in
+English; but the sturdy John of Gaunt vigorously asserted the right of
+the people to have the Word of God in their own tongue; "for why," said
+he, "are we to be the dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the
+Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At
+length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate,
+complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son
+of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his
+iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly
+after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade such translations, under
+penalty of the major excommunication.
+
+"God grant us," runs the prayer in the old Bible preface, "to ken and to
+kepe well Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the
+laste." What a meaning that prayer must have gained when the readers of
+the book were burned with the copies round their necks, when men and
+women were executed for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer and
+Ten Commandments in English, when husbands were made to witness against
+their wives, and children forced to light the death-fires of their
+parents, and possessors of the banned Wycliffe Bible were hunted down as
+if they were wild beasts!
+
+Thus did Wycliffe, in his effort for the spread of the Gospel of Peace,
+bring, like his Master fourteen centuries before, "not peace, but a
+sword." Every bold attempt to let in the light on long-standing darkness
+seems to result first in a fierce opposition from the evil creatures
+that delight in the darkness, and the weak creatures weakened by
+dwelling in it so long. It is not till the driving back of the evil and
+the strengthening of the weak, as the light gradually wins its way, that
+the true results can be seen. It is, to use a simile of a graceful
+modern writer,[71] "As when you raise with your staff an old flat stone,
+with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, around it as it lies.
+Beneath it, what a revelation! Blades of grass flattened down,
+colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed;
+hideous crawling things; black crickets with their long filaments
+sticking out on all sides; motionless, slug-like creatures; young larvæ,
+perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than in the infernal
+wriggle of maturity. But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome
+light of day let in on this compressed and blinded community of creeping
+things than all of them that have legs rush blindly about, butting
+against each other and everything else in their way, and end in a
+general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by
+sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green
+where the stone lay--the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle
+had his hole--the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the
+broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the
+rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified
+being.
+
+"The stone is ancient error, the grass is human nature borne down and
+bleached of all its color by it, the shapes that are found beneath are
+the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness, and the weak
+organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone is whosoever
+puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, whether he do it with
+a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming
+time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in
+its full stature and native lines in the sunshine. Then shall God's
+minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then
+shall beauty--divinity taking outline and color--light upon the souls of
+men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the
+dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have
+found wings unless that stone had been lifted."
+
+
+
+
+THE SWISS WIN THEIR INDEPENDENCE
+
+BATTLE OF SEMPACH
+
+A.D. 1386-1389
+
+F. Grenfell Baker
+
+
+  For two generations after the victory of the Swiss over the
+  Austrians at Morgarten (1315), which was followed by the
+  renewal of the Swiss Confederation of 1291, the leagued
+  cantons were favored with growth and internal development.
+  To the original cantons--Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden--were
+  added (1332-1353) Lucerne, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern.
+  The Confederation acknowledged no superior but the Emperor
+  of Germany.
+
+  In 1375 there was an irruption into Switzerland of a horde
+  of irregular soldiers under Enguerrand de Courcy, son-in-law
+  of Edward III of England. The mother of De Courcy was a
+  daughter of Leopold I, Duke of Austria, and through her De
+  Courcy claimed several Swiss towns. As the present Austrian
+  Duke, Leopold II, who held nominal suzerainty over
+  Switzerland, refused to give them up, De Courcy invaded
+  Swiss territory with a large force and a fury which at first
+  threw the country into panic. But at last the Swiss
+  recovered their old spirit of bravery, and in many severe
+  encounters they either killed or chased out of the country
+  the whole ruthless host of invaders.
+
+  This war is known in Swiss chronicles as the _Guglerkrieg_,
+  either from the pointed spikes on the helmets of the Swiss
+  soldiers or from the cowls which many of them wore. It is
+  also called the "English War," although De Courcy's men were
+  nearly all from the Continent and Wales.
+
+  The Swiss soon had need of their old military prowess, which
+  this defence of their country against foreign invaders had
+  freshly put to the proof. By the victory of Sempach, July 9,
+  1386, their independence was practically won, and by later
+  acts of valor and statesmanship they made it secure for many
+  years.
+
+Austria's conduct soon began once more to disturb the Swiss, and to
+threaten a renewal of hostilities. Her first act of importance was the
+conquest of the Tyrol, after which, under pretence of benefiting the
+pilgrims to Einsiedeln,[72] but in reality to separate Glarus from
+Zurich, she built a bridge across the lake at Rapperschwyl. The
+possession of this bridge by Austria acted as a perpetual hinderance to
+Zurich's trade with the South, and was accordingly greatly resented by
+the city. Austria's position, as ruler in so many burghs that, from
+their situation and the nationality of their inhabitants, were
+essentially Swiss, also acted as a never-ending source of trouble. Her
+rule was both harsh and unjust, and, as a result, her local governors
+were extremely unpopular. In 1386 the anti-Austrian feeling in
+Switzerland had grown to such a pitch that popular outbreaks against her
+authority were, in many centres, of frequent occurrence, and war
+appeared inevitable.
+
+From Lucerne came the final troubles that precipitated the country again
+into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the actual declaration of war,
+constant collisions in the neighborhood of Lucerne had for some time
+past taken place, with all the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a
+body of men from Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of
+Rothenburg, the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch
+and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted against her
+Austrian rulers, expelled the bailies, and entered into alliances with
+the city. Lucerne herself commenced extending her territories by the
+purchase of Wiggis, and--contrary to her treaty stipulations--admitted a
+number of Austrian subjects into the privileges of citizenship. Austria
+retaliated by attacking Richensee, a small Lucerne town containing a
+garrison of some two hundred soldiers. This she carried by assault and
+destroyed, massacring the inhabitants of all ages and of both sexes.
+
+Other reprisals on both sides followed in quick succession, in which
+immense numbers of victims perished. Soon both the Duke, Leopold II, and
+the Confederates were fully prepared, and the former took the field with
+a large army. After menacing Zurich, the Duke, accompanied by many
+nobles from Germany, France, and North Italy, headed some six thousand
+picked men, and marched upon Lucerne. On his way he burned Willisau and
+several smaller towns, where his troops committed every form of excess.
+On July 9th a portion of his forces appeared before the walls of
+Sempach, while another division menaced Zurich. At Sempach the
+Confederates mustered to the help of Lucerne, but were only able to
+bring about sixteen hundred men, taken chiefly from the Forest States.
+In spite of their disparity in numbers, the Confederates determined to
+risk an encounter.
+
+The decisive and brilliant battle of Sempach, the second of the long
+roll of victories that mark the prowess of the Swiss, is thus described
+by an old writer: "The Swiss order of battle was angular, one soldier
+followed by two, these by four, and so on. The Swiss were all on foot,
+badly armed, having only their long swords and their halberds, and
+boards on their left arms with which to parry the blows of their
+adversaries, and they could at first make no impression on the close
+ranks of the Austrians, all bristling with spears. But Anthony zer Pot,
+of Uri, cried to his men to strike with their halberds on the shafts of
+the spears, which he knew were made hollow to render them lighter, and,
+at the same time, Arnold von Winkelried, a knight from Unterwalden,
+devoting himself for his country, cried out: 'I'll open a way for you,
+Confederates!' and, seizing as many spears as he could grasp in his
+arms, dragged them down with his whole weight and strength upon his own
+bosom, and thus made an opening for his countrymen to penetrate the
+Austrian ranks.
+
+"This act of heroism decided the victory. The Swiss rushed into the gap
+made by Winkelried, and, having now come to close quarters with their
+enemies, their bodily strength and the lightness of their equipment gave
+them a great advantage over the heavily armed Austrians, who were
+already fainting under the heat of a July sun. The very closeness of the
+array of the Austrian men-at-arms rendered them incapable either of
+advancing or falling back, and, the grooms who held their horses having
+taken flight, panic seized them, they broke their ranks, and were hewed
+down by the Swiss halberds in frightful numbers. Duke Leopold was urged
+by those around him to save his life, but he scorned the advice, and,
+seeing the banner of Austria in danger, rushed to save it, and was
+killed in the attempt. The rout then became general, but the Swiss had
+the humanity, or the policy, not to pursue their enemies, of whom
+otherwise not one, perhaps, would have escaped. The loss of the
+Austrians amounted to two thousand men, including six hundred and
+seventy-six noblemen, three hundred and fifty of whom wore coroneted
+helmets. Most of them were buried at Koenigsfelden, with their leader
+Leopold. The Swiss lost two hundred men in this memorable battle, the
+second in which they had defeated a duke of Austria at the head of his
+chivalry."
+
+After Sempach the men of Glarus set about making themselves a free
+people. One of their first acts was the capture of Wesen and the
+expulsion of its Austrian soldiers. This was followed by a truce, which
+lasted till 1388, when Leopold's sons recommenced the war with fresh
+fury. Wesen was recaptured by the admission of a number of soldiers in
+disguise, who opened the gates to their comrades without and massacred
+all the chief Swiss leaders. Some months later the men of Glarus
+inflicted a severe defeat on the Austrians at the little town of
+Naefels, within their state. In this important combat three hundred and
+fifty men of Glarus, together with fifty from Schwyz, posted themselves
+on the heights above the town, and, as the Austrians advanced, suddenly
+hurled down masses of stones that soon caused a panic. Then, following
+the successful tactics employed at Morgarten, the Swiss rushed down on
+the disordered mass--said to consist of fifteen thousand soldiers, but
+probably about half that number--and dealt death on every side. A
+precipitate flight of the invaders followed, but they were met near
+Wesen by a fresh body of seven hundred Glarus peasants, who completed
+the victory.
+
+Though Bern took no part in the battle of Sempach, after that victory
+she entered actively into the war, and overran the Austrian dependencies
+in Freiburg and Valengrin. She drove the Duke's followers out of
+Rapperschwyl, annexed Nidau and Bueren, and conquered the upper
+Simmenthal.
+
+At length, both sides being weary of war and carnage, a peace was signed
+for seven years in 1389, with the condition that Bern should restore
+Nidau and Bueren. This peace was in 1394 further prolonged for twenty
+years. These treaties brought great benefits to Switzerland in many
+ways. Glarus and Zug obtained their formal freedom from Austrian rule in
+payment of a moderate sum of money; Schwyz received the town and abbey
+of Einsiedeln (1397); Lucerne purchased Sempach and Entlibuch from the
+Duke, as also other towns; but chief of all, the political power of the
+Hapsburgs came to an end in Switzerland.
+
+An important feature of this period was the lessened influence of the
+Emperor of Germany in Swiss affairs, and the gradual withdrawal of the
+Swiss from the position they so long occupied as subject-vassals of the
+empire. This was especially seen toward the close of the fourteenth
+century, when the Emperor, being pressed for money, sold his rights over
+several important Swiss districts to their inhabitants, and thus
+forfeited all authority over them.
+
+But chief of all the memorable events of this time was the close it
+brought to the long and bloody struggle between Austria and Switzerland.
+At length the heroism and persevering patriotism of the Swiss effected
+the liberation of their country from Austrian rule, and henceforth the
+dukes ceased to attempt to enforce their claims, and tacitly
+acknowledged their defeat. The Swiss states from this period, moreover,
+began to be known, not as an unimportant portion of the German empire,
+but as a separate country, Die Schweiz, from the prominent part taken by
+Schwyz in initiating the freedom of the land.
+
+
+
+
+UNION OF DENMARK, SWEDEN, AND NORWAY
+
+A.D. 1397
+
+PAUL C. SINDING
+
+
+  Canute the Great, King of England and Denmark, by successful
+  wars added almost the whole of Norway to his dominions. At
+  his death in 1035 his kingdoms were divided, and fell into
+  anarchy and discord for two centuries, until the tyrant
+  Black Geert, who had driven out Christopher II, and been for
+  fourteen years the virtual sovereign of Denmark, was
+  assassinated by the Danish patriot Niels Ebbeson.
+
+  Christopher's third son, Waldemar, surnamed Atterdag,
+  because he used to say when a misfortune happened,
+  "To-morrow it is again day," was recalled from Bavaria and
+  crowned king as Waldemar IV. He commenced at once with vigor
+  and marked success the improvement of the internal
+  conditions of the country, and strove to encompass his chief
+  ambition, the reunion of the ancient Danish possessions.
+
+  By marrying his daughter Margaret to Hakon VI, King of
+  Norway and son of Magnus Smek, King of Sweden, Waldemar laid
+  a basis for a junction of the three great Scandinavian
+  kingdoms. The union was realized under the administration of
+  his illustrious and sagacious daughter, Margaret, known as
+  the "Semiramis of the North."
+
+Waldemar Atterdag left no direct male issue. But his two grandsons,
+Albert the Younger, of Mecklenburg, a son of Ingeborg, Waldemar's eldest
+daughter, and of Henry of Mecklenburg; and Olaf, a son of Margaret, his
+younger daughter, and of Hakon VI of Norway, were now claiming the
+hereditary succession to the throne. One party declared for Olaf, but,
+as he was the son of the younger daughter, his claim was very doubtful.
+But because the house of Mecklenburg had acted with hostility toward
+Denmark, and Olaf had expectation of Norway and claims to the crown of
+Sweden, as a grandson of Magnus Smek, Denmark was, by his election, in
+hopes of one day seeing the three crowns united on the same head. It was
+therefore not long before this important affair was determined. The
+preference was given Olaf, who, although only six years of age, was,
+under the name of Olaf V, elected king of Denmark, under the
+guardianship of Margaret his mother; and after the death of his father
+Hakon VI, he became also king of Norway, the two kingdoms thus being
+united. This union, till the expiration of four hundred and thirty-four
+years, was not dissolved. When Olaf V, seven years after, died in
+Falsterbo, both kingdoms elected Margaret their queen, though custom had
+not yet authorized the election of a female.
+
+During the reign of this great Princess, who deservedly has been called
+the "Semiramis of the North," Denmark and Norway exercised in Europe an
+influence the effects of which were long felt throughout the
+Scandinavian countries with their vast extent and rival races. She
+united wisdom and policy with courage and determination, had strength of
+mind to preserve her rectitude without deviation, and her efforts were
+crowned by divine Providence with success. She is justly considered one
+of the most illustrious female rulers in history. Her renown even
+reached the Byzantine emperor Emanuel Palæologus, who called her _Regina
+sine exemplo maxima_. But under her successors--destitute of her high
+sense of duty, great ability, and consistent virtue--her triumphs proved
+a snare instead of a blessing. The great union she created dissolved in
+a short time, and its downfall was as sudden as its elevation had been
+extraordinary. She was born in 1353. Her father was, as we have seen,
+Waldemar Atterdag, her mother Queen Hedevig, and she became queen of
+Denmark and Norway in 1387. She was no sooner elected queen of Denmark,
+and homaged on the hill of Sliparehog, near Lund, in Ringsted, Odensee,
+and Wiborg, than she sailed to Norway to receive their homage. But a
+remarkable occurrence is mentioned by historians as occurring about this
+time. A report prevailed that King Olaf, the Queen's son, was not dead;
+it was propagated by the nobility, and very likely set on foot by them,
+in order to punish Margaret for her liberality to the clergy. An
+impostor claimed the crown of Denmark and Norway, and gained credit
+every day by making discoveries which could only be known to Olaf and
+his mother. Margaret, however, proved him to be a son of Olaf's nurse.
+Olaf had a large wart between his shoulders--a mark which did not appear
+on the impostor. The false Olaf was seized, broken on the wheel, and
+publicly burned at a place between Falsterbo and Skanor, in Sweden, and
+Margaret continued uninterruptedly her regency.
+
+But the Queen, not wishing to contract a new marriage, and comprehending
+the importance of having a successor elected to the throne, proposed her
+nephew, Eric, Duke of Pomerania. This proposal the clergy and nobility
+approved, and they elected him to be king of Denmark and Norway after
+Margaret's death. Meanwhile Albert, King of Sweden, having, on account
+of his preference given to German favorites, incurred the hatred of his
+people, the Swedes requested Margaret to assist them against him, which
+she promised to do if they in return would make her queen of Sweden.
+Moreover, Albert had highly offended the Danish Queen; had, though
+hardly able to govern his own kingdom, assumed the title "king of
+Denmark," and laid claim to Norway, too; and when she blamed him for it
+he had answered her disdainfully. In a letter he had used foul and
+abusive language, calling her "a king without breeches," and the
+"abbot's concubine" (_abbedfrillen_), on account of her particular
+attachment to a certain abbot of Soro, who was her spiritual director.
+It is, however, true, that her intimacy with this monk gave room for
+some suspicion that her privacies with him were not all employed about
+the care of her soul. Afterward, to ridicule her yet more, King Albert
+sent her a hone to sharpen her needles, and swore not to put on his
+nightcap until she had yielded to him. But under perilous circumstances
+Margaret was never at a loss how to act. She acted here with the utmost
+prudence, trying first to gain the favor of the peers of the state, and
+solemnly promising to rule according to the Swedish laws. War now broke
+out between Albert and Margaret, whose army was commanded by Jvar Lykke.
+The encounter of the two armies--about twelve thousand men on each
+side--took place at Falkoping, September 21, 1388. A furious battle was
+fought, in which the victory for a long while hung in suspense. But
+Margaret's good fortune prevailed; Albert was routed and his army cut to
+pieces, and Margaret was now mistress of Sweden.
+
+While this was passing, the Queen tarried in Wordingborg Sjelland,
+ardently desiring to learn the result. But no sooner did she hear that
+the victory was gained, and the Swedish King and his son Eric taken
+prisoners, than she hastened to Bahus, in Sweden, where the King and his
+son were brought before her. Lost in joy and amazement at having her
+enemy in her power, the Queen now retorted upon King Albert with
+revilings, and she made him wear a large nightcap of paper--a
+retaliation proportioned to his offensive words. He and his son were
+thereupon brought to Lindholm, a castle in Skane, where they were kept
+prisoners for seven years. When they entered the castle, a dark, square
+room was assigned them, and when the King said, "I hope that this
+torture against a crowned head will only last a few days," the jailer
+replied: "I grieve to say that the Queen's orders are to the contrary;
+anger not the Queen by any bravado, else you will be placed in the
+irons, and if these fail we can have recourse to sharper means." To the
+excessive self-love, intemperance, conceitedness, and want of foresight
+which had characterized all his actions, the unhappy Albert had to
+ascribe his present situation.
+
+The year following, the Queen stormed the important city of Calmar, yet
+siding with the imprisoned King. She made several wise alliances with
+Richard II of England, and other potentates, and concluded a truce for
+two years with the princes of Mecklenburg, and the cities of Rostock and
+Wismar, which had begun to raise fresh levies in favor of the
+unfortunate Albert. This period expired, she laid siege to Stockholm and
+other fortified places, of which John, Duke of Mecklenburg, and other
+friends of the imprisoned King had become masters. But the cause of
+Albert was little forwarded, and Margaret gained ground every day. She
+compelled the capital to surrender to her and do homage to her as its
+sovereign; whereafter a peremptory peace was concluded on Good Friday,
+which restored tranquillity to the three kingdoms. The imprisoned King
+and his son were delivered up to the Hanseatic towns, and they obtained
+their liberty for sixty thousand ounces of silver, upon condition that
+they should resign all claims to Sweden if the amount were not paid
+within three years. As soon as the King and his son were delivered to
+the deputies, they solemnly swore to a strict observance of this
+article, the Hanse towns engaging themselves to guarantee the treaty.
+The money, however, not being paid by the stipulated time, Margaret
+became undisputed sovereign of Sweden, the third Scandinavian kingdom.
+
+About this time the "Victuals Brethren," so called because they brought
+victuals from the Hanse towns to Stockholm while besieged, began to
+imperil Denmark, plundering the Danish and Norwegian coasts, and
+destroying all commercial business along the Baltic. But Margaret
+ordered the harbors of the maritime towns to be blockaded, thus putting
+a quick stop to their cruelties and piracies. The Queen's principal care
+was now to visit the different provinces, to administer justice and
+redress grievances of every kind. Among other salutary regulations, the
+affairs of commerce were not forgotten. It was, for instance, decreed
+that all manner of assistance should be given to foreign merchants and
+sailors, particularly in case of misfortune and shipwreck, without
+expectation of reward; and that all pirates should be treated with the
+greatest rigor.
+
+Eric of Pomerania was, as we have said, elected to be king of Denmark
+and Norway after Margaret's death. But wishing to have him also elected
+her successor to the Swedish throne, Margaret brought him to Sweden, and
+introduced him to the deputies, one by one, whom she requested to
+confirm his election to the succession. The majesty of the Queen's
+person, the strength of her arguments, and the sweetness of her
+eloquence gained over the deputies, who, on July 22, 1396, elected him
+at Morastone by Upsala, to succeed her also in Sweden. But Margaret,
+soon discovering his inability and impetuousness, took pains to remedy
+these defects, as much as possible, by procuring for him as a wife the
+intelligent and virtuous princess Philippa, a daughter of Henry V of
+England, and shortly after had got Catharine, her niece and Eric's
+sister, married to Prince John, a son of the German emperor Ruprecht;
+John being promised the Scandinavian crowns if Eric of Pomerania should
+die childless. Thus having strengthened and consolidated her power by
+influential connections and relationships, the Queen, upon whose head
+the three northern crowns were actually united, now proceeded to realize
+the great plan she had long cherished--to get a fundamental law
+established for a perpetual union of the three large Scandinavian
+kingdoms. The realization of this purpose immortalized her, securing for
+her the admiration of the world, whose most eminent historians do not
+hesitate to surname her the "Great," and to compare her with the
+loftiest Greek and Roman heroes and statesmen.
+
+On June 17, 1397, Margaret summoned to an assembly at Calmar, in the
+province of Smaland, Sweden, the clergy and the nobility of Denmark,
+Norway, and Sweden, and established, by their aid and consent, a
+fundamental law. This was the law so celebrated in the North under the
+name of the "Union of Calmar," and which afterward gave birth to wars
+between Sweden and Denmark that lasted a whole century. It consisted of
+three articles. The first provided that the three kingdoms should
+thenceforward have but one and the same king, who was to be chosen
+successively by each of the kingdoms. The second article imposed upon
+the sovereign the obligation of dividing his time equally between the
+three kingdoms. The third, and most important, decreed that each kingdom
+should retain its own laws, customs, senate, and privileges of every
+kind; that the highest officers should be natives; that any alliance
+concluded with foreign potentates should be obligatory upon all three
+kingdoms when approved by the council of one kingdom; and that, after
+the death of the King, his eldest son, or, if the King died childless,
+then another wise, intelligent, and able prince, should be chosen common
+monarch; and if anyone, because of high treason, was banished from one
+kingdom, then he should be banished from them all. A month after, on the
+Queen's birthday, July 13th, a legitimate charter was drawn up, to which
+the Queen subscribed and put her seal; on which occasion Eric of
+Pomerania was anointed and crowned by the archbishops of Upsala and Lund
+as king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The _Te Deum_ was sung in the
+churches of Calmar, the assembly crying out: "_Hæcce unio esto perpetua!
+Longe, longe, longe, vivat Margarethe, regina Daniæ, Norvegiæ et
+Sveciæ!_"
+
+This strict union of the three large states became a potent bulwark for
+their security, and made them, in more than one century, the arbiter of
+the European system; the three nations of the northern peninsula
+presenting a compact and united front, that could bid defiance to any
+foreign aggression.
+
+Although Eric of Pomerania was elected king, and in 1407 passed his
+minority, Margaret continued governing until the day of her death. "You
+have done all well," wrote the people to her, "and we value your
+services so highly that we would gladly grant you everything." The union
+of the three Scandinavian kingdoms having been established in Calmar,
+all her efforts were now aimed at regaining the duchy of Schleswig,
+which circumstances had compelled her to resign to Gerhard IV, Count of
+Holstein. For such a reunion with Schleswig a favorable opportunity
+appeared, when Gerhard was killed in an expedition against the
+Ditmarshers, leaving behind three sons in minority. Elizabeth, Gerhard's
+widow, fled to Margaret for succor against her violent brother-in-law,
+Bishop Henry of Osnabrueck. Margaret, fond of fishing in foul water, was
+very willing to help her, but availed herself of the opportunity to
+annex successively different parts of Schleswig.
+
+The dethroned Swedish King, Albert, never able to forget his anger
+toward Margaret or her severity against him, and continually cherishing
+a hope of reascending the Swedish throne, and considering the Union of
+Calmar a breach of peace, contrived to make the Swedish people
+displeased with her, and thought it a suitable time to revolt from her
+dominion. He established a strong camp before Visby, the capital of the
+island of Gulland, having six thousand foot and, at some distance, nine
+thousand horse. Determined to engage before their junction could take
+place, the Queen's commander-in-chief, Abraham Broder, immediately
+advanced until in sight of the enemy, and then endeavored to gain
+possession of Visby and the ground near by. In this he was so far
+successful that Albert and his army had to leave the camp and conclude a
+truce. But nevertheless he did not till after a lapse of seven years
+give up his hope of remounting the throne of Sweden, making a final
+peace with Margaret, and henceforward living in Gadebush, Mecklenburg,
+where in 1412 he closed his inglorious life.
+
+Soon after, October 27th, Queen Margaret died on board a ship in the
+harbor of Flensburg, at the age of fifty-nine, after an active and
+notable reign of thirty-seven years. Her funeral was attended with the
+greatest solemnity, and her corpse was brought to the Cathedral of
+Roeskilde, where Eric of Pomerania, her successor, in 1423, caused her
+likeness to be carved in alabaster. Her acts show her character. She
+displayed judiciousness united with circumspection; wisdom in devising
+plans, and perseverance in executing them; skill in gaining the
+confidence of the clergy and peasantry, and thereby counterbalancing the
+imperious nobility. On the whole she applied herself to the civilization
+of her three kingdoms, and to their improvement by excellent laws, the
+great aim of which was to undermine the nobility. She pursued the plan
+of her great father to recall all rights to the crown lands, which
+during the reign of her weak and inefficient predecessors had been
+granted to the nobility. The prosecution of this plan for the perfect
+subversion of the feudal aristocracy was unfortunately interrupted by
+her death; her imprudent and weak successor having no power to restrain
+the turbulent spirit of a factious nobility.
+
+
+
+
+DEPOSITION OF RICHARD II
+
+HENRY IV BEGINS THE LINE OF LANCASTER
+
+A.D. 1399
+
+JOHN LINGARD
+
+
+  Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince, succeeded his
+  grandfather, Edward III, on the throne of England in 1377,
+  when Richard was but ten years old. During his minority the
+  government was intrusted to a council of twelve, but for
+  some years it was mainly controlled by Richard's uncles,
+  John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas of Woodstock,
+  Duke of Gloucester. War with France, then in progress,
+  entailed great expenditures, which were increased by court
+  extravagance, and at length burdensome taxes led to popular
+  uprisings. These became most serious in the great revolt of
+  the peasants led by Wat Tyler, in 1381. Richard appeared
+  among the insurgents and granted them concessions.
+
+  From this time the King became more active in his
+  government, and in 1386 John of Gaunt withdrew to the
+  Continent. About the same time the Duke of Gloucester headed
+  a coalition of the baronial party in opposition to the
+  sovereign; but in 1389 Richard suddenly declared himself of
+  age and gave a check to their designs. For eight years he
+  ruled with moderation as a constitutional monarch.
+
+  But in 1396 Richard married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI
+  of France, and henceforth seems to have adopted French
+  ideas, and to have made pretensions in the direction of
+  absolutism. He proceeded to arbitrary prosecutions which led
+  to the violent death of several leading nobles. Richard also
+  quarrelled with Henry, son of John of Gaunt, whom as Duke of
+  Lancaster he succeeded in 1399. The year before, Richard had
+  banished Henry for ten years--fearing him as a possible
+  rival. The history of the remaining months of Richard's
+  reign is crowded with the events which rapidly led to the
+  ending of the direct line of the Plantagenets and the
+  beginning of the line of Lancaster.
+
+  In Shakespeare's _Richard II_--the first of his historical
+  plays--the poet, following Holinshed's chronicle, presents
+  not only a skilful dramatic construction of the recorded
+  incidents of the reign, but also a finely discriminated
+  portrait of Richard's much debated character as man and
+  monarch.
+
+Richard now saw himself triumphant over all his opponents. Even his
+uncles, through affection or fear, seconded all his measures. He had
+attained what seems for some time to have been the great object of his
+policy. He had placed himself above the control of the law. By the
+grant of a subsidy for life he was relieved from the necessity of
+meeting his parliament; with the aid of his committee, the members of
+which proved the obsequious ministers of his will, he could issue what
+new ordinances he pleased; and a former declaration by the two houses,
+that he was as free as any of his predecessors, was conveniently
+interpreted to release him from the obligations of those statutes which
+he deemed hostile to the royal prerogative. But he had forfeited all
+that popularity which he had earned during the last ten years; and the
+security in which he indulged hurried him on to other acts of despotism,
+which inevitably led to his ruin. He raised money by forced loans; he
+compelled the judges to expound the law according to his own prejudices
+or caprice; he required the former adherents of Gloucester to purchase
+and repurchase charters of pardon; and, that he might obtain a more
+plentiful harvest of fines and amercements, put at once seventeen
+counties out of the protection of the law, under the pretence that they
+had favored his enemies.
+
+The Duke of Lancaster did not survive the banishment of his son more
+than three months; and the exile expected to succeed by his attorneys to
+the ample estates of his father. But Richard now discovered that his
+banishment, like an outlawry, had rendered him incapable of inheriting
+property. At a great council, including the committee of parliament, it
+was held that the patents granted, both to him and his antagonist, were
+illegal, and therefore void; and all the members present were sworn to
+support that determination. Henry Bowet, who had procured the patent for
+the duke of Hereford, was even condemned, for that imaginary offence, to
+suffer the punishment of treason; though, on account of his character,
+his life was spared on condition that he should abjure the kingdom
+forever.
+
+This iniquitous proceeding seems to have exhausted the patience of the
+nation. Henry--on the death of his father he had assumed the title of
+duke of Lancaster--had long been the idol of the people; and the
+voluntary assemblage of thousands to attend him on his last departure
+from London might have warned Richard of the approaching danger. The
+feeling of their own wrongs had awakened among them a spirit of
+resistance; the new injury offered to their favorite pointed him out to
+them as their leader. Consultations were held; plans were formed; the
+dispositions of the great lords were sounded; and the whole nation
+appeared in a ferment. Yet it was in this moment, so pregnant with
+danger, that the infatuated monarch determined to leave his kingdom. His
+cousin and heir, the Earl of March, had been surprised and slain by a
+party of Irish; and, in his eagerness to revenge the loss of a relation,
+he despised the advice of his friends, and wilfully shut his eyes to the
+designs of his enemies.
+
+Having appointed his uncle, the Duke of York, regent during his absence,
+the King assisted at a solemn mass at Windsor, chanted a collect
+himself, and made his offering. At the door of the Church he took wine
+and spices with his young Queen; and, lifting her up in his arms,
+repeatedly kissed her, saying, "Adieu, madam, adieu till we meet again."
+From Windsor, accompanied by several noblemen, he proceeded to Bristol,
+where the report of plots and conspiracies reached him, and was received
+with contempt. At Milford Haven he joined his army, and, embarking in a
+fleet of two hundred sail, arrived in a few days in the port of
+Waterford. His cousin the Duke of Albemarle had been ordered to follow
+with a hundred more; and three weeks were consumed in waiting for that
+nobleman, whose delay was afterward attributed to a secret understanding
+with the King's enemies.
+
+At length Richard led his forces from Kilkenny against the Irish.
+Several of the inferior chiefs hastened barefoot and with halters round
+their necks to implore his mercy; but M'Murchad spurned the idea of
+submission, and boasted that he would extirpate the invaders. He dared
+not indeed meet them in open combat; but it was his policy to flee
+before them, and draw them into woods and morasses, where they could
+neither fight with advantage nor procure subsistence. The want of
+provisions and the clamor of the soldiers compelled the King to give up
+the pursuit, and to direct his march toward Dublin; and M'Murchad, when
+he could no longer impede their progress, solicited and obtained a
+parley with the Earl of Gloucester, the commander of the rear-guard. The
+chieftain was an athletic man; he came to the conference mounted on a
+gray charger, which had cost him four hundred head of cattle, and
+brandished with ease and dexterity a heavy spear in his hand. He seemed
+willing to become the nominal vassal of the King of England, but refused
+to submit to any conditions. Richard set a price on his head, proceeded
+to Dublin, and at the expiration of a fortnight was joined by the Duke
+of Albemarle with men and provisions. This seasonable supply enabled him
+to recommence the pursuit of M'Murchad; but while he was thus occupied
+with objects of inferior interest in Ireland, a revolution had occurred
+in England, which eventually deprived him both of his crown and his
+life.
+
+When the King sailed to Ireland, Henry of Bolingbroke, the new Duke of
+Lancaster, resided in Paris, where he was hospitably entertained, but at
+the same time narrowly watched, by the French monarch. About Christmas
+he offered his hand to Marie, one of the daughters of the Duke of Berry.
+The jealousy of Richard was alarmed; the Earl of Salisbury hastened to
+Paris to remonstrate against the marriage of a daughter of France with
+an English "traitor," and, suiting his conduct to his words, the envoy,
+having accomplished his object, returned without deigning to speak to
+the exile. While Henry was brooding over these injuries, the late
+Primate, or nominal Bishop of St. Andrews, secretly left his house at
+Cologne, and in the disguise of a friar procured an interview with the
+Duke at the Hotel de Vinchester. The result of their meeting was a
+determination to return to England during the King's absence. To elude
+the suspicions of the French ministers, Henry procured permission to
+visit the Duke of Bretagne; and, on his arrival at Nantes, hired three
+small vessels, with which he sailed from Vannes to seek his fortune in
+England. His whole retinue consisted only of the Archbishop, the son of
+the late Earl of Arundel, fifteen lances, and a few servants. After
+hovering for some days on the eastern coast, he landed at Ravenspur in
+Yorkshire, and was immediately joined by the two powerful earls of
+Northumberland and Westmoreland; before whom, in the White Friars at
+Doncaster, he declared upon oath that his only object was to recover the
+honors and estates which had belonged to his father, and bound himself
+not to advance any claim to the crown.
+
+The Duke of York, to whom the King had intrusted the government during
+his absence, was accurately informed of his motions, and had summoned
+the retainers of the crown to join the royal standard at St. Albans.
+There is, however, reason to believe that he was not hearty in the cause
+which it was his duty to support. He must have viewed with pity the
+unmerited misfortunes of one nephew, and have condemned the violent and
+thoughtless career of the other; and from the fate of his brother
+Gloucester, and the cruel and unjust treatment of the only son of his
+brother, John of Gaunt, he could not draw any very flattering conclusion
+with respect to the stability of his own family. Whether it was from
+suspicion of his fidelity, or from the disinclination of the chief
+barons to draw the sword against one who demanded nothing more than his
+right, the favorites of Richard became alarmed for their own safety.
+
+The Earl of Wiltshire, with Bussy and Greene, members of the committee
+of parliament, had been appointed to wait on the young Queen at
+Wallingford; but they suddenly abandoned their charge, and fled with
+precipitation to Bristol. York himself followed with the army in the
+same direction. It might be that, to relieve himself from
+responsibility, he wished to be in readiness to deliver up the command
+on the expected arrival of Richard from Ireland; but at the same time he
+left open the road from Yorkshire to the metropolis, and allowed the
+adventurer to pursue his object without impediment. Henry was already on
+his march. The snowball increased as it rolled along, and the small
+number of forty followers, with whom he had landed, swelled by the time
+that he had reached St. Albans to sixty thousand men. He was preceded by
+his messengers and letters, stating not only his own wrongs, but also
+the grievances of the people, and affirming that the revenue of the
+kingdom had been let out to farm to the rapacity of Scrope, Bussy, and
+Greene. In all those lordships which had been the inheritance of his
+family he was received with enthusiasm; in London by a procession of the
+clergy and people, with addresses of congratulation, and presents, and
+offers of service.
+
+His stay in the capital was short. Having flattered the citizens, and
+confirmed them in their attachment to his person, he turned to the west,
+and entered Evesham, on the same day on which York reached Berkeley.
+After an interchange of messages they met in the church of the castle;
+and, before they separated, the doom of Richard was sealed. That the
+regent consented to the actual deposition of his nephew does not
+necessarily follow; he might only have sought his reformation by putting
+it out of his power to govern amiss; but he betrayed the trust which had
+been reposed to him, united his force with that of Henry, and commanded
+Sir Peter Courtenay, who held the castle of Bristol for the King, to
+open its gates. That officer, protesting that he acknowledged no
+authority in the Duke of Lancaster, obeyed the mandate of the regent.
+The next morning the three fugitives, the Earl of Wiltshire, Bussy, and
+Greene, were executed by order of the constable and marshal of the host.
+The Duke of York remained at Bristol; Henry with his own forces
+proceeded to Chester to secure that city, and awe the men of Cheshire,
+the most devoted adherents of the King.
+
+We may now return to Richard in Ireland. It must appear strange, but
+Henry had been in England a fortnight before the King, in consequence,
+it was said, of the tempestuous weather, had heard of his landing. The
+intelligence appears to have provoked indignation as much as alarm.
+"Ha!" he exclaimed, "fair uncle of Lancaster, God reward your soul! Had
+I believed you, this man would not have injured me. Thrice have I
+pardoned him; this is his fourth offence." But he referred the matter to
+his council, and was advised to cross over to England immediately with
+the ships which had brought the reënforcement under the Duke of
+Albemarle. That nobleman, however, insidiously, as it was afterward
+pretended, diverted him from this intention. The Earl of Salisbury
+received orders to sail immediately with his own retainers, a body of
+one hundred men, and to summon to the royal standard the natives of
+Wales. Richard promised to follow in the fleet from Waterford in the
+course of six days. The Earl obeyed; the men of Wales and Cheshire
+answered the call; and a gallant host collected at Conway.
+
+But Richard appeared not according to his promise; distressing reports
+were circulated among the troops; and the royalists, having waited for
+him almost a fortnight, disbanded in spite of the fears and entreaties
+of their commander. At last, on the eighteenth day, the King arrived in
+Milford Haven with the dukes of Albemarle, Exeter, and Surrey, the Earl
+of Worcester, the bishops of London, Lincoln, and Carlisle, and
+several thousands of the troops who had accompanied him to Ireland. With
+such a force, had it been faithful, he might have made a stand against
+his antagonist; but on the second morning, when he arose, he observed
+from his window that the greater part had disappeared. A council was
+immediately summoned, and a proposal made that the King should flee by
+sea to Bordeaux; but the Duke of Exeter objected that to quit the
+kingdom in such circumstances was to abdicate the throne. Let them
+proceed to the army at Conway. There they might bid defiance to the
+enemy; or at all events, as the sea would still be open, might thence
+set sail to Guienne. His opinion prevailed; and at nightfall the King,
+in the disguise of a Franciscan friar, his two brothers of Exeter and
+Surrey, the Earl of Gloucester, the Bishop of Carlisle, Sir Stephen
+Scrope, and Sir William Feriby, with eight others, stole away from the
+army, and directed their route toward Conway. Their flight was soon
+known. The royal treasure, which Richard left behind him, was plundered;
+Albemarle, Worcester, and most of the leaders hastened to pay their
+court to Henry; the rest attempted in small bodies to make their way to
+their own counties, but were in most instances plundered and ill-treated
+by the Welsh.
+
+The royal party with some difficulty, but without any accident, reached
+Conway, where, to their utter disappointment, instead of a numerous
+force, they found only the Earl of Salisbury with a hundred men. In this
+emergency the King's brothers undertook to visit Henry at Chester, and
+to sound his intentions; and during their absence Richard, with the Earl
+of Salisbury, examined the castles of Beaumaris and Carnarvon; but
+finding them without garrisons or provisions, the disconsolate wanderers
+returned to their former quarters.
+
+When the two dukes were admitted into the presence of Henry, they bent
+the knee and acquainted him with their message from the King. He took
+little notice of Surrey, whom he afterward confined in the castle, but,
+leading Exeter aside, spoke with him in private, and gave him, instead
+of the hart, the King's livery, his own badge of the rose. But no
+entreaties could induce him to allow them to return. Exeter was observed
+to drop a tear when the Duke of Albemarle said to him tauntingly: "Fair
+cousin, be not angry. If it please God, things shall go well."
+
+The immediate object of Henry was to secure the royal person. He was
+gratified to learn from the envoys the place of Richard's retreat, and
+detained them at Chester, that the King, instead of making his escape,
+might await their return. His first care was to take possession of the
+treasure which the King had deposited in the strong castle of Holt; his
+next, to despatch the Earl of Northumberland at the head of four hundred
+men-at-arms and a thousand archers to Conway, with instructions not to
+display his force, lest the King should put to sea, but by artful
+speeches and promises to draw him out of the fortress and then make him
+prisoner. The Earl took possession in his journey of the castles of
+Flint and Rhuddlan, and a few miles beyond the latter, placing his men
+in concealment under a rock, rode forward with only five attendants to
+Conway.
+
+He was readily admitted, and, to the King's anxious inquiries about his
+brothers, replied that he had left them well at Chester, and had brought
+a letter from the Duke of Exeter. In it that nobleman said, or rather
+was made to say, that full credit might be given to the offers of the
+bearer. These offers were, that Richard should promise to govern and
+judge his people by law; that the dukes of Exeter and Surrey, the Earl
+of Salisbury, the Bishop of Carlisle, and Maudelin, the King's chaplain,
+should submit to a trial in parliament, on the charge of having advised
+the assassination of Gloucester; that Henry should be made grand
+justiciary of the kingdom, as his ancestors had been for a hundred
+years; and that, on the concession of these terms, the Duke should come
+to Flint, ask the King's pardon on his knees, and accompany or follow
+him to London. Richard consulted his friends apart. He expressed his
+approbation of the articles, but bade them secretly be assured that no
+consideration should induce him to abandon them on their trial, and that
+he would grasp the first opportunity of being revenged on his and their
+enemies--"for there were some among them whom he would flay alive; whom
+he would never spare for all the gold in the land." Northumberland was
+then sworn to the observance of the conditions. He took his oath on the
+host; and, "like Judas," says the writer, "perjured himself on the body
+of our Lord."
+
+As Northumberland departed to make arrangements for the interview at
+Flint, the King said to him: "I rely, my lord, on your faith. Remember
+your oath, and the God who heard it." Soon afterward he followed with
+his friends and their servants, to the number of twenty-two. They came
+to a steep declivity, to the left of which was the sea, and on the right
+a lofty rock overhanging the road. The King dismounted, and was
+descending on foot, when he suddenly exclaimed: "I am betrayed. God of
+Paradise, assist me! Do you not see banners and pennons in the valley?"
+Northumberland with eleven others met them at the moment and affected to
+be ignorant of the circumstance. "Earl of Northumberland," said the
+King, "if I thought you capable of betraying me, it is not too late to
+return." "You cannot return," the Earl replied, seizing the King's
+bridle; "I have promised to conduct you to the Duke of Lancaster." By
+this time he was joined by a hundred lances, and two hundred archers on
+horseback; and Richard, seeing it impossible to escape, exclaimed: "May
+the God, on whom you laid your hand, reward you and your accomplices at
+the last day!" and then, turning to his friends, added: "We are
+betrayed; but remember that our Lord was also sold and delivered into
+the hands of his enemies."
+
+They dined at Rhuddlan, and reached Flint in the evening. The King, as
+soon as he was left with his friends, abandoned himself to the
+reflections which his melancholy situation inspired. He frequently
+upbraided himself with his past indulgence to his present opponent:
+"Fool that I was!" he exclaimed: "thrice did I save the life of this
+Henry of Lancaster. Once my dear uncle his father, on whom the Lord have
+mercy! would have put him to death for his treason and villany. God of
+Paradise! I rode all night to save him; and his father delivered him to
+me, to do with him as I pleased. How true is the saying that we have no
+greater enemy than the man whom we have preserved from the gallows!
+Another time he drew his sword on me, in the chamber of the Queen, on
+whom God have mercy! He was also the accomplice of the Duke of
+Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel; he consented to my murder, to that
+of his father, and of all my council. By St. John, I forgave him all;
+nor would I believe his father, who more than once pronounced him
+deserving of death."
+
+The unfortunate King rose after a sleepless night, heard mass, and
+ascended the tower to watch the arrival of his opponent. At length he
+saw the army, amounting to eighty thousand men, winding along the beach
+till it reached the castle and surrounded it from sea to sea. He
+shuddered and wept, and cursed the Earl of Northumberland, but was
+called down by the arrival of Archbishop Arundel, the Duke of Albemarle,
+and the Earl of Worcester. They knelt to Richard, who, drawing the
+prelate apart, held a long conversation with him. After their departure
+he again mounted the tower, and, surveying the host of his enemies,
+exclaimed: "Good Lord God! I commend myself into thy holy keeping, and
+cry thee mercy, that thou wouldst pardon all my sins. If they put me to
+death I will take it patiently, as thou didst for us all."
+Northumberland had ordered dinner, and the Earl of Salisbury, the Bishop
+and the two knights, Sir Stephen Scrope and Sir William Feriby, sat with
+the King at the same table by his order; for since they were all
+companions in misfortune, he would allow no distinction among them.
+While he was eating, unknown persons entered the hall, insulting him
+with sarcasms and threats. As soon as he rose, he was summoned into the
+court to receive the Duke of Lancaster. Henry came forward in complete
+armor, with the exception of his helmet. As soon as he saw the King he
+bent his knee, and, advancing a few paces, he repeated his obeisance
+with his cap in his hand.
+
+"Fair cousin of Lancaster," said Richard, uncovering himself, "you are
+right welcome." "My lord," answered the Duke, "I am come before my time.
+But I will show you the reason. Your people complain that for the space
+of twenty or two-and-twenty years you have ruled them rigorously; but,
+if it please God, I will help you to govern better." The King replied,
+"Fair cousin, since it pleaseth you, it pleaseth us well." Henry then
+addressed himself successively to the Bishop and to the knights, but
+refused to notice the Earl. The King's horses were immediately ordered;
+and two lean and miserable animals were brought out, on which Richard
+and Salisbury mounted, and amid the flourish of trumpets and shouts of
+triumph followed the Duke into Chester.
+
+At Chester writs were issued in the King's name for the meeting of
+parliament and the preservation of the peace. Henry dismissed the
+greater part of his army, and prepared to conduct his prisoner to the
+capital. At Lichfield Richard seized a favorable moment to let himself
+down from his window, but was retaken in the garden, and from that
+moment was constantly guarded by ten or twelve armed men. In the
+neighborhood of London they separated. Henry, accompanied by the mayor
+and principal citizens, proceeded to St. Paul's, prayed before the high
+altar, and wept a few minutes over the tomb of his father. The King was
+sent to Westminster, and thence on the following day to the Tower, and,
+as he went along, was greeted with curses and the appellation of "the
+bastard," a word of ominous import, and prophetic of his approaching
+degradation.
+
+When the Duke first landed in England, he had sworn on the Gospels that
+his only object was to vindicate his right to the honors and possessions
+of the house of Lancaster. If this was the truth, his ambition had grown
+with his good-fortune. He now aspired to exchange the coronet of a duke
+for the crown of a king. Can we believe that he would meet with
+opposition from his associates, the Percy family? Yet so we are assured.
+They, however, by their perfidy, had given themselves a master. Their
+retainers had been already dismissed; and the friends of Richard
+abhorred them as the worst of traitors. They had therefore no resource
+but to submit, and to second the design of Lancaster. After several
+consultations it was resolved to combine a solemn renunciation of the
+royal authority on the part of Richard with an act of deposition on the
+part of the two houses of parliament, in the hope that those whose
+scruples should not be satisfied with the one, might acquiesce in the
+other. To obtain the first, the royal captive was assailed with promises
+and threats. Generally he abandoned himself to lamentation and despair;
+occasionally he exerted that spirit which he had formerly displayed.
+"Why am I thus guarded?" he asked one day. "Am I your king or your
+prisoner?" "You are my king, sir," replied the Duke with coolness; "but
+the council of your realm has thought proper to place a guard about
+you."
+
+  [Illustration: Richard II resigns the crown of England to
+  Henry, Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at London.
+
+  Painting by Sir John Gilbert.]
+
+On the day before the meeting of parliament a deputation of prelates,
+barons, knights, and lawyers waited on the captive in the Tower, and
+reminded him that in the castle of Conway, while he was perfectly his
+own master, he had promised to resign the crown on account of his own
+incompetency to govern. On his reply that he was ready to perform his
+promise, a paper was given him to read, in which he was made to absolve
+all his subjects from their fealty and allegiance, to renounce of his
+own accord all kingly authority, to acknowledge himself incapable of
+reigning, and worthy for his past demerits to be deposed, and to swear
+by the holy Gospels that he would never act, nor, as far as in him lay,
+suffer any other person to act, in opposition to this resignation. He
+then added, as from himself, that if it were in his power to name his
+successor, he would choose his cousin of Lancaster, who was present, and
+to whom he gave his ring, which he took from his own finger.
+
+Such is the account of this transaction inserted by the order of Henry
+in the rolls of parliament; an account the accuracy of which is liable
+to strong suspicion. It is difficult to believe that Richard had so much
+command over his feelings as to behave with that cheerfulness which is
+repeatedly noticed in the record; and the assertion that he had promised
+to resign the crown when he saw Northumberland in the castle of Conway,
+is not only contradictory to the statement of the two eye-witnesses, but
+also in itself highly improbable. From the fate of Edward II, with which
+he had so often been threatened, he must have known that it was better
+to flee to his transmarine dominions, which were still open to him, than
+to resign his crown and remain a prisoner in the custody of his
+successor.
+
+The next day the two houses met amid a great concourse of people in
+Westminster hall. The Duke occupied his usual seat near the throne,
+which was empty and covered with cloth of gold. The resignation of the
+King was read; each member, standing in his place, signified his
+acceptance of it aloud; and the people with repeated shouts expressed
+their approbation. Henry now proceeded to the second part of his plan,
+the act of deposition. For this purpose the coronation oath was first
+read; thirty-three articles of impeachment followed, in which it was
+contended that Richard had violated that oath; and thence it was
+concluded that he had by his misconduct forfeited his title to the
+throne. Of the articles, those which bear the hardest on the King are:
+the part which he was supposed to have had in the death of the Duke of
+Gloucester, his revocation of the pardons formerly granted to that
+Prince and his adherents, and his despotic conduct since the dissolution
+of parliament. Of the remainder, some are frivolous; many might, with
+equal reason, have been objected to each of his predecessors; and the
+others rest on the unsupported assertion of men whose interest it was to
+paint him in the blackest colors.
+
+No opposition had been anticipated, nor is any mentioned on the rolls;
+but we are told that the Bishop of Carlisle, to the astonishment of the
+Lancastrians, rose and demanded for Richard what ought not to be refused
+to the meanest criminal, the right of being confronted with his
+accusers; and for parliament what it might justly claim, the opportunity
+of learning from the King's own mouth whether the resignation of the
+crown, which had been attributed to him, were his own spontaneous act.
+If Merks actually made such a speech, he must have stood alone; no one
+was found to second it; the house voted the deposition of Richard; and
+eight commissioners, ascending a tribunal erected before the throne,
+pronounced him degraded from the state and authority of king, on the
+ground that he notoriously deserved such punishment, and had
+acknowledged it under his hand and seal on the preceding day. Sir
+William Thirnyng, chief justice, was appointed to notify the sentence to
+the captive, who meekly replied that he looked not after the royal
+authority, but hoped his cousin would be good lord to him.
+
+The rightful possessor was now removed from the throne. But, supposing
+it to be vacant, what pretensions could Henry of Lancaster advance to
+it? By the law of succession it belonged to the descendants of Lionel,
+the third son of Edward III; and their claim, it is said, had been
+formally recognized in parliament. All waited in anxious suspense till
+the Duke, rising from his seat, and forming with great solemnity the
+sign of the cross on his forehead and breast, pronounced the following
+words: "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of
+Lancaster, challenge this realm of England, and the crown, with all the
+members and appurtenances, as that I am descended by right line of
+blood, coming from the good lord King Henry III, and through that right
+that God, of his grace, hath sent me with help of my kin and of my
+friends to recover it; the which realm was in point to be undone for
+default of governance and undoing of good laws."
+
+In these extraordinary terms did Lancaster advance his pretensions,
+artfully intermixing an undefined claim of inheritance[73] with those of
+conquest and expediency, and rather hinting at each than insisting on
+either. But, however difficult it might be to understand the ground, the
+object of his challenge was perfectly intelligible. Both houses admitted
+it unanimously; and, as a confirmation, Henry produced the ring and seal
+which Richard had previously delivered to him. The Archbishop of
+Canterbury now took him by the hand, and led him to the throne. He knelt
+for a few minutes in prayer on the steps, arose, and was seated in it by
+the two archbishops. As soon as the acclamations had subsided, the
+Primate, stepping forward, made a short harangue, in which he undertook
+to prove that a monarch in the vigor of manhood was a blessing, a young
+and inexperienced prince was a curse to a people. At the conclusion the
+King rose. "Sirs," said he, "I thank God, and you, spiritual and
+temporal, and all estates of the land; and do you to wit, it is not my
+will that no man think that by way of conquest I would disinherit any
+man of his heritage, franchises, or other rights that him ought to have,
+nor put him out of that that he has and has had by the good laws and
+customs of the realm; except those persons that have been against the
+good purpose and the common profit of the realm."
+
+With the authority of Richard had expired that of the parliament and of
+the royal officers. Henry immediately summoned the same parliament to
+meet again in six days, appointed new officers of the crown, and as soon
+as he had received their oaths retired in state to the royal apartments.
+Thus ended this eventful day, with the deposition of Richard of
+Bordeaux, and the succession of his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke.
+
+
+
+
+DISCOVERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS
+AND THE AFRICAN COAST
+
+BEGINNING OF NEGRO SLAVE TRADE
+
+A.D. 1402
+
+SIR ARTHUR HELPS
+
+
+  The Canary Islands--the "Elysian Fields" and "Fortunate
+  Islands" of antiquity--have perhaps figured in fabulous lore
+  more extensively than any others, and have been discovered,
+  invaded, and conquered more frequently than any country in
+  the world. There has scarcely been a nation of any maritime
+  enterprise that has not had to do with them, and in one
+  manner or another made its appearance in them.
+
+  During the period following the death of ancient empires,
+  the Canary Islands lay hidden in the general darkness which
+  fell upon the world. With the modern revival came new and
+  greater mariners, and the islands were once more discovered.
+  It is well to note the connection between these modern
+  rediscoveries and the origin of negro slavery.
+
+  In Europe the old pagan slavery existed in many nations, and
+  in the early Christian centuries underwent many
+  modifications through the advance of the new religion and
+  civilization. The modern form of slavery began with the
+  first importation of negroes into Europe, as shown in the
+  following account, from which it appears that the history of
+  modern slavery begins with the history of African discovery.
+
+Petrarch is referred to by Viera to prove that the Genoese sent out an
+expedition to the Canary Islands. Las Casas mentions that an English or
+French vessel bound from France or England to Spain was driven by
+contrary winds to these Islands, and on its return spread abroad in
+France an account of the voyage. The information thus obtained--or
+perhaps in other ways of which there is no record--stimulated Don Luis
+de la Cerda, Count of Clermont, great-grandson of Don Alonzo the Wise of
+Castile, to seek for the investiture of the crown of the Canaries, which
+was given to him with much pomp by Clement VI, at Avignon, in 1344,
+Petrarch being present. This sceptre proved a barren one. The affairs of
+France, with which state the new King of the Canaries was connected,
+drew off his attention; and he died without having visited his
+dominions. The next authentic information that we have of the Canary
+Islands is that, in the times of Don Juan I of Castile, and of Don
+Enrique, his son, these islands were much visited by the Spaniards. In
+1399, we are told, certain Andalusians, Biscayans, Guipuzcoans, with the
+consent of Don Enrique, fitted out an expedition of five vessels, and
+making a descent on the island of Lanzarote, one of the Canaries, took
+captive the King and Queen, and one hundred and seventy of the
+islanders.
+
+Hitherto there had been nothing but discoveries, rediscoveries, and
+invasions of these islands; but at last a colonist appears upon the
+scene. This was Juan de Béthencourt, a great Norman baron, lord of St.
+Martin le Gaillard in the County of Eu, of Béthencourt, of Granville, of
+Sancerre, and other places in Normandy, and chamberlain to Charles VI of
+France. Those who are at all familiar with the history of that period,
+and with the mean and cowardly barbarity which characterized the
+long-continued contests between the rival factions of Orleans and
+Burgundy, may well imagine that any Frenchman would then be very glad to
+find a career in some other country. Whatever was the motive of Juan de
+Béthencourt, he carried out his purpose in the most resolute manner.
+Leaving his young wife, and selling part of his estate, he embarked at
+Rochelle in 1402, with men and means for the purpose of conquering, and
+establishing himself in, the Canary Islands. It is not requisite to give
+a minute description of this expedition. Suffice it to say that
+Béthencourt met with fully the usual difficulties, distresses,
+treacheries, and disasters that attach themselves to this race of
+enterprising men. After his arrival at the Canaries, finding his means
+insufficient, he repaired to the court of Castile, did acts of homage to
+the King, Enrique III, and afterward renewed them to his son Juan II,
+thereby much strengthening the claim which the Spanish monarchs already
+made to the dominion of these islands. Béthencourt, returning to the
+islands with renewed resources, made himself master of the greater part
+of them, reduced several of the natives to slavery, introduced the
+Christian faith, built churches, and established vassalage.
+
+On the occasion of quitting his colony in A.D. 1405, he called all his
+vassals together, and represented to them that he had named for his
+lieutenant and governor Maciot de Béthencourt, his relation; that he
+himself was going to Spain and to Rome to seek for a bishop for them;
+and he concluded his oration with these words: "My loved vassals, great
+or small, plebeians or nobles, if you have anything to ask me or to
+inform me of, if you find in my conduct anything to complain of, do not
+fear to speak; I desire to do favor and justice to all the world." The
+assembly he was addressing contained none of the slaves he had made. We
+are told, however, and that by eye-witnesses, that the poor natives
+themselves bitterly regretted his departure, and, wading through the
+water, followed his vessel as far as they could. After his visit to
+Spain and to Rome, he returned to his paternal domains in Normandy,
+where, while meditating another voyage to his colony, he died in 1425.
+
+Maciot de Béthencourt ruled for some time successfully; but afterward,
+falling into disputes with the Bishop, and his affairs generally not
+prospering, he sold his rights to Prince Henry of Portugal--also, as it
+strangely appears, to another person--and afterward settled in Madeira.
+The claims to the government of the Canaries were, for many years, in a
+most entangled state; and the right to the sovereignty over these
+islands was a constant ground of dispute between the crowns of Spain and
+Portugal.
+
+Thus ended the enterprise of Juan de Béthencourt, which, though it
+cannot be said to have led to any very large or lasting results, yet, as
+it was the first modern attempt of the kind, deserves to be chronicled
+before commencing with Prince Henry of Portugal's long-continued and
+connected efforts in the same direction. The events also which preceded
+and accompanied Béthencourt's enterprise need to be recorded, in order
+to show the part which many nations, especially the Spaniards, had in
+the first discoveries on the coast of Africa.
+
+We now turn to the history of the discoveries made, or rather caused to
+be made, by Prince Henry of Portugal. This Prince was born in 1394. He
+was the third son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the daughter of
+John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. That good Plantagenet blood on the
+mother's side was, doubtless, not without avail to a man whose life was
+to be spent in continuous and insatiate efforts to work out a great
+idea. Prince Henry was with his father at the memorable capture of
+Ceuta, the ancient Septem, in 1415. This town, which lies opposite to
+Gibraltar, was of great magnificence, and one of the principal marts in
+that age for the productions of the East. It was here that the
+Portuguese nation first planted a firm foot in Africa; and the date of
+this town's capture may, perhaps, be taken as that from which Prince
+Henry began to meditate further and far greater conquests. His aims,
+however, were directed to a point long beyond the range of the mere
+conquering soldier. He was especially learned, for that age of the
+world, being skilled in mathematical and geographical knowledge. And it
+may be noticed here that the greatest geographical discoveries have been
+made by men conversant with the book knowledge of their own time. A
+work, for instance, often seen in the hands of Columbus, which his son
+mentions as having had much influence with him, was the learned treatise
+of Cardinal Petro de Aliaco (Pierre d'Ailly), the _Imago Mundi_.
+
+But to return to Prince Henry of Portugal. We learn that he had
+conversed much with those who had made voyages in different parts of the
+world, and particularly with Moors from Fez and Morocco, so that he came
+to hear of the Azeneghis, a people bordering on the country of the
+negroes of Jalof. Such was the scanty information of a positive kind
+which the Prince had to guide his endeavors. Then there were the
+suggestions and the inducements which to a willing mind were to be found
+in the shrewd conjectures of learned men, the fables of chivalry, and,
+perhaps, in the confused records of forgotten knowledge once possessed
+by Arabic geographers. The story of Prister John, which had spread over
+Europe since the crusades, was well known to the Portuguese Prince. A
+mysterious voyage of a certain wandering saint, called St. Brendan, was
+not without its influence upon an enthusiastic mind. Moreover, there
+were many sound motives urging the Prince to maritime discovery; among
+which, a desire to fathom the power of the Moors, a wish to find a new
+outlet for traffic, and a longing to spread the blessings of the faith
+may be enumerated. The especial reason which impelled Prince Henry to
+take the burden of discovery on himself was that neither mariner nor
+merchant would be likely to adopt an enterprise in which there was no
+clear hope of profit. It belonged, therefore, to great men and princes,
+and among such he knew of no one but himself who was inclined to it.
+
+The map of the world being before us, let us reduce it to the
+proportions it filled in Prince Henry's time: let us look at our infant
+world. First, take away those two continents, for so we may almost call
+them, each much larger than a Europe, to the far west. Then cancel that
+square, massive-looking piece to the extreme southeast; happily there
+are no penal settlements there yet. Then turn to Africa: instead of that
+form of inverted cone which it presents, and which we now know there are
+physical reasons for its presenting, make a cimetar shape of it, by
+running a slightly curved line from Juba on the eastern side to Cape Nam
+on the western. Declare all below that line unknown. Hitherto, we have
+only been doing the work of destruction; but now scatter emblems of
+hippogriffs and anthropophagi on the outskirts of what is left in the
+map, obeying a maxim, not confined to the ancient geographers
+only--where you know nothing, place terrors. Looking at the map thus
+completed, we can hardly help thinking to ourselves, with a smile, what
+a small space, comparatively speaking, the known history of the world
+has been transacted in, up to the last four hundred years. The idea of
+the universality of the Roman dominions shrinks a little; and we begin
+to fancy that Ovid might have escaped his tyrant. The ascertained
+confines of the world were now, however, to be more than doubled in the
+course of one century; and to Prince Henry of Portugal, as to the first
+promoter of these vast discoveries, our attention must be directed.
+
+This Prince, having once the well-grounded idea in his mind that Africa
+did not end where it was commonly supposed, namely, at Cape Nam (Not),
+but that there was a world beyond that forbidding negative, seems never
+to have rested until he had made known that quarter of the globe to his
+own. He fixed his abode upon the promontory of Sagres, at the southern
+part of Portugal, whence, for many a year, he could watch for the rising
+specks of white sail bringing back his captains to tell him of new
+countries and new men. We may wonder that he never went himself; but he
+may have thought that he served the cause better by remaining at home
+and forming a centre whence the electric energy of enterprise was
+communicated to many discoverers, and then again collected from them.
+Moreover, he was much engaged in the public affairs of his country. In
+the course of his life he was three times in Africa, carrying on war
+against the Moors; and at home, besides the care and trouble which the
+state of the Portuguese court and government must have given him, he was
+occupied in promoting science and encouraging education.
+
+In 1415, as before noticed, he was at Ceuta. In 1418 he was settled on
+the promontory of Sagres. One night in that year he is thought to have
+had a dream of promise, for on the ensuing morning he suddenly ordered
+two vessels to be got ready forthwith, and to be placed under the
+command of two gentlemen of his household, Joham Gonçalvez Zarco and
+Tristam Vaz, whom he ordered to proceed down the Barbary coast on a
+voyage of discovery.
+
+A contemporary chronicler, Azurara, whose work has recently been
+discovered and published, tells the story more simply, and merely states
+that these captains were young men, who, after the ending of the Ceuta
+campaign, were as eager for employment as the Prince for discovery; and
+that they were ordered on a voyage having for its object the general
+molestation of the Moors, as well as that of making discoveries beyond
+Cape Nam. The Portuguese mariners had a proverb about this cape--"He who
+would pass Cape Not, either will return or not"; intimating that, if he
+did not turn before passing the cape, he would never return at all. On
+the present occasion it was not destined to be passed; for these
+captains, Joham Gonçalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz, were driven out of
+their course by storms, and accidentally discovered a little island,
+where they took refuge, and from that circumstance called the island
+Porto Santo. "They found there a race of people living in no settled
+polity, but not altogether barbarous or savage, and possessing a kindly
+and most fertile soil."
+
+I give this description of the first land discovered by Prince Henry's
+captains, thinking it would well apply to many other lands about to be
+found out by his captains and by other discoverers. Joham Gonçalvez
+Zarco and Tristam Vaz returned. Their master was delighted with the news
+they brought him, more on account of its promise than its substance. In
+the same year he sent them out again, together with a third captain,
+named Bartholomew Perestrelo, assigning a ship to each captain. His
+object was not only to discover more lands, but also to improve those
+which had been discovered. He sent, therefore, various seeds and animals
+to Porto Santo. This seems to have been a man worthy to direct
+discovery. Unfortunately, however, among the animals some rabbits were
+introduced into the new island; and they conquered it, not for the
+Prince, but for themselves. Hereafter, we shall find that they gave his
+people much trouble, and caused no little reproach to him.
+
+We come now to the year 1419. Perestrelo, for some unknown cause,
+returned to Portugal at that time. After his departure, Joham Gonçalvez
+Zarco and Tristam Vaz, seeing from Porto Santo something that seemed
+like a cloud, but yet different--the origin of so much discovery, noting
+the difference in the likeness--built two boats, and, making for this
+cloud, soon found themselves alongside a beautiful island, abounding in
+many things, but most of all in trees, on which account they gave it the
+name of "Madeira" (Wood). The two discoverers entered the island at
+different parts. The Prince, their master, afterward rewarded them with
+the captaincies of those parts. To Perestrelo he gave the island of
+Porto Santo to colonize it. Perestrelo, however, did not make much of
+his captaincy, but after a strenuous contest with the rabbits, having
+killed an army of them, died himself. This captain has a place in
+history as being the father-in-law of Columbus, who, indeed, lived at
+Porto Santo for some time, and here, on new-found land, meditated far
+bolder discoveries.
+
+Joham Gonçalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz began the cultivation of their
+island of Madeira, but met with an untoward event at first. In clearing
+the wood, they kindled a fire among it, which burned for seven years, we
+are told; and in the end, that which had given its name to the island,
+and which, in the words of the historian, overshadowed the whole land,
+became the most deficient commodity. The captains founded churches in
+the island; and the King of Portugal, Don Duarte, gave the temporalities
+to Prince Henry, and all the spiritualities to the Knights of Christ.
+
+While these things were occurring at Madeira and at Porto Santo, Prince
+Henry had been prosecuting his general scheme of discovery, sending out
+two or three vessels each year, with orders to go down the coast from
+Cape Nam, and make what discoveries they could; but these did not amount
+to much, for the captains never advanced beyond Cape Bojador, which is
+situated seventy leagues to the south of Cape Nam. This Cape Bojador was
+formidable in itself, being terminated by a ridge of rocks with fierce
+currents running round them, but was much more formidable from the
+fancies which the mariners had formed of the sea and land beyond it. "It
+is clear," they were wont to say, "that beyond this cape there is no
+people whatever; the land is as bare as Libya--no water, no trees, no
+grass in it; the sea so shallow that at a league from the land it is
+only a fathom deep; the currents so fierce that the ship which passes
+that cape will never return;" and thus their theories were brought in to
+justify their fears. This outstretcher--for such is the meaning of the
+word _bojador_--was, therefore, as a bar drawn across that advance in
+maritime discovery which had for so long a time been the first object of
+Prince Henry's life.
+
+The Prince had now been working at his discoveries for twelve years,
+with little approbation from the generality of persons; the discovery of
+these islands, Porto Santo and Madeira, serving to whet his appetite for
+further enterprise, but not winning the common voice in favor of
+prosecuting discoveries on the coast of Africa. The people at home,
+improving upon the reports of the sailors, said that "the land which the
+Prince sought after was merely some sandy place like the deserts of
+Libya; that princes had possessed the empires of the world, and yet had
+not undertaken such designs as his, nor shown such anxiety to find new
+kingdoms; that the men who arrived in those foreign parts--if they did
+arrive--turned from white into black men; that the King Don John, the
+Prince's father, had endowed foreigners with land in his kingdom, to
+break it up and cultivate it--a thing very different from taking the
+people out of Portugal, which had need of them, to bring them among
+savages to be eaten, and to place them upon lands of which the mother
+country had no need; that the Author of the world had provided these
+islands solely for the habitation of wild beasts, of which an additional
+proof was that those rabbits the discoverers themselves had introduced
+were now dispossessing them of the island."
+
+There is much here of the usual captiousness to be found in the
+criticism of bystanders upon action, mixed with a great deal of false
+assertion and premature knowledge of the ways of Providence. Still, it
+were to be wished that most criticism upon action was as wise; for that
+part of the common talk which spoke of keeping their own population to
+bring out their own resources had a wisdom in it which the men of future
+centuries were yet to discover throughout the peninsula. Prince Henry,
+as may be seen by his perseverance up to this time, was not a man to
+have his purposes diverted by such criticism, much of which must have
+been, in his eyes, worthless and inconsequent in the extreme.
+Nevertheless, he had his own misgivings. His captains came back one
+after another with no good tidings of discovery, but with petty plunder
+gained, as they returned from incursions on the Moorish coast.
+
+The Prince concealed from them his chagrin at the fruitless nature of
+their attempts, but probably did not feel it less on that account. He
+began to think: Was it for him to hope to discover that land which had
+been hidden from so many princes? Still, he felt within himself the
+incitement of "a virtuous obstinacy," which would not let him rest.
+Would it not, he thought, be ingratitude to God, who thus moved his mind
+to these attempts, if he were to desist from his work, or be negligent
+in it? He resolved, therefore, to send out again Gil Eannes, one of his
+household, who had been sent the year before, but had returned, like the
+rest, having discovered nothing. He had been driven to the Canary
+Islands, and had seized upon some of the natives there, whom he brought
+back. With this transaction the Prince had shown himself dissatisfied;
+and Gil Eannes, now intrusted again with command, resolved to meet all
+dangers rather than to disappoint the wishes of his master. Before his
+departure, the Prince called him aside and said: "You cannot meet with
+such peril that the hope of your reward shall not be much greater; and
+in truth, I wonder what imagination this is that you have all taken
+up--in a matter, too, of so little certainty; for if these things which
+are reported had any authority, however little, I would not blame you so
+much. But you quote to me the opinions of four mariners, who, as they
+were driven out of their way to Frandes or to some other ports to which
+they commonly navigated, had not, and could not have used, the needle
+and the chart; but do you go, however, and make your voyage without
+regard to their opinion,--and, by the grace of God, you will not bring
+out of it anything but honor and profit."
+
+We may well imagine that these stirring words of the Prince must have
+confirmed Gil Eannes in his resolve to efface the stain of his former
+misadventure. And he succeeded in doing so; for he passed the dreaded
+Cape Bojador--a great event in the history of African discovery, and one
+that in that day was considered equal to a labor of Hercules. Gil Eannes
+returned to a grateful and most delighted master. He informed the Prince
+that he had landed, and that the soil appeared to him unworked and
+fruitful; and, like a prudent man, he could not tell of foreign plants,
+but had brought some of them home with him in a barrel of the new-found
+earth--plants much like those which bear in Portugal the roses of Santa
+Maria. The Prince rejoiced to see them, and gave thanks to God, "as if
+they had been the fruit and sign of the promised land; and besought Our
+Lady, whose name the plants bore, that she would guide and set forth the
+doings in this discovery to the praise and glory of God and to the
+increase of his holy faith."
+
+After passing the Cape of Bojador there was a lull in Portuguese
+discovery, the period from 1434 to 1441 being spent in enterprises of
+very little distinctness or importance. Indeed, during the latter part
+of this period, the Prince was fully occupied with the affairs of
+Portugal. In 1437 he accompanied the unfortunate expedition to Tangier,
+in which his brother Ferdinand was taken prisoner, who afterward ended
+his days in slavery to the Moor. In 1438, King Duarte dying, the
+troubles of the regency occupied Prince Henry's attention. In 1441,
+however, there was a voyage which led to very important consequences. In
+that year Antonio Gonçalvez, master of the robes to Prince Henry, was
+sent out with a vessel to load it with skins of "sea-wolves," a number
+of them having been seen, during a former voyage, in the mouth of a
+river about fifty-four leagues beyond Cape Bojador. Gonçalvez resolved
+to signalize his voyage by a feat that should gratify his master more
+than the capture of sea-wolves; and he accordingly planned and executed
+successfully an expedition for capturing some Azeneghi Moors, in order,
+as he told his companions, to take home "some of the language of that
+country." Nuño Tristam, another of Prince Henry's captains, afterward
+falling in with Gonçalvez, a further capture of Moors was made, and
+Gonçalvez returned to Portugal with his spoil.
+
+In the same year Prince Henry applied to Pope Martin V, praying that his
+holiness would grant to the Portuguese crown all that it could conquer,
+from Cape Bojador to the Indies, together with plenary indulgence for
+those who should die while engaged in such conquests. The Pope granted
+these requests. "And now," says a Portuguese historian, "with this
+apostolic grace, with the breath of royal favor, and already with the
+applause of the people, the Prince pursued his purpose with more courage
+and with greater outlay."
+
+In 1442 the Moors whom Antonio Gonçalvez had captured in the previous
+year promised to give black slaves in ransom for themselves if he would
+take them back to their own country; and the Prince, approving of this,
+ordered Gonçalvez to set sail immediately, "insisting as the foundation
+of the matter, that if Gonçalvez should not be able to obtain so many
+negroes (as had been mentioned) in exchange for the three Moors, yet
+that he should take them; for whatever number he should get, he would
+gain souls, because the negroes might be converted to the faith, which
+could not be managed with the Moors." Gonçalvez obtained ten black
+slaves, some gold-dust, a target of buffalo-hide, and some ostrich eggs
+in exchange for two of the Moors, and, returning with his cargo, excited
+general wonderment on account of the color of the slaves. These, then,
+we may presume, were the first black slaves that had made their
+appearance in the peninsula since the extinction of the old slavery.
+
+I am not ignorant that there are reasons for alleging that negroes had
+before this era been seized and carried to Seville. The _Ecclesiastical
+and Secular Annals_ of that city, under the date 1474, record that negro
+slaves abounded there, and that the fifths levied on them produced
+considerable gains to the royal revenue; it is also mentioned that there
+had been traffic of this kind in the days of Don Enrique III, about
+1399, but that it had since then fallen into the hands of the
+Portuguese. The chronicler states that the negroes of Seville were
+treated very kindly from the time of King Enrique, being allowed to keep
+their dances and festivals; and that one of them was named _mayoral_ of
+the rest, who protected them against their masters and before the courts
+of law, and also settled their own private quarrels. There is a letter
+from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474 to a celebrated negro, Juan
+de Valladolid, commonly called the "Negro Count," nominating him to this
+office of mayoral of the negroes, which runs thus: "For the many good,
+loyal, and signal services which you have done us, and do each day, and
+because we know your sufficiency, ability, and good disposition, we
+constitute you mayoral and judge of all the negroes and mulattoes, free
+or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble city of Seville, and
+throughout the whole archbishopric thereof, and that the said negroes
+and mulattoes may not hold any festivals nor pleadings among themselves,
+except before you, Juan de Valladolid, negro, our judge and mayoral of
+the said negroes and mulattoes; and we command that you, and you only,
+should take cognizance of the disputes, pleadings, marriages, and other
+things which may take place among them, forasmuch as you are a person
+sufficient for that office, and deserving of your power, and you know
+the laws and ordinances which ought to be kept, and we are informed that
+you are of noble lineage among the said negroes."
+
+But the above merely shows that in the year 1474 there were many negroes
+in Seville, and that laws and ordinances had been made about them. These
+negroes might all, however, have been imported into Seville since the
+Portuguese discoveries. True it is that in the times of Don Enrique III,
+and during Béthencourt's occupation of the Canary Islands, slaves from
+thence had been brought to France and Spain; but these islanders were
+not negroes, and it certainly may be doubted whether any negroes were
+imported into Seville previous to 1443.
+
+Returning to the course of Portuguese affairs, a historian of that
+nation informs us that the gold obtained by Gonçalvez "awakened, as it
+always does, covetousness"; and there is no doubt that it proved an
+important stimulus to further discovery. The next year Nuño Tristam went
+farther down the African coast; and, off Adeget, one of the Arguim
+Islands, captured eighty natives, whom he brought to Portugal. These,
+however, were not negroes, but Azeneghis.
+
+The tide of popular opinion was now not merely turned, but was rushing
+in full flow, in favor of Prince Henry and his discoveries. The
+discoverers were found to come back rich in slaves and other
+commodities; whereas it was remembered that, in former wars and
+undertakings, those who had been engaged in them had generally returned
+in great distress. Strangers, too, now came from afar, scenting the
+prey. A new mode of life, as the Portuguese said, had been found out;
+and "the greater part of the kingdom was moved with a sudden desire to
+follow this way to Guinea."
+
+In 1444 a company was formed at Lagos, who received permission from the
+Prince to undertake discovery along the coast of Africa, paying him a
+certain portion of any gains which they might make. This has been
+considered as a company founded for carrying on the slave trade; but the
+evidence is by no means sufficient to show that its founders meant such
+to be its purpose. It might rather be compared to an expedition sent
+out, as we should say in modern times, with letters of marque, in which,
+however, the prizes chiefly hoped for were not ships nor merchandise,
+but men. The only thing of any moment, however, which the expedition
+accomplished was to attack successfully the inhabitants of the islands
+Nar and Tider, and to bring back about two hundred slaves. I grieve to
+say that there is no evidence of Prince Henry's putting a check to any
+of these proceedings; but, on the contrary, it appears that he rewarded
+with large honors Lançarote, one of the principal men of this
+expedition, and received his own fifth of the slaves. Yet I have
+scarcely a doubt that the words of the historian are substantially
+true--that discovery, not gain, was still the Prince's leading idea. We
+have an account from an eye-witness of the partition of the slaves
+brought back by Lançarote, which, as it is the first transaction of the
+kind on record, is worthy of notice, more especially as it may enable
+the reader to understand the motives of the Prince and of other men of
+those times. It is to be found in the _Chronicle_, before referred to,
+of Azurara. The merciful chronicler is smitten to the heart at the
+sorrow he witnesses, but still believes it to be for good, and that he
+must not let his mere earthly commiseration get the better of his piety.
+
+"O thou heavenly Father," he exclaims, "who, with thy powerful hand,
+without movement of thy divine essence, governest all the infinite
+company of thy holy city, and who drawest together all the axles of the
+upper worlds, divided into nine spheres, moving the times of their long
+and short periods as it pleases thee! I implore thee that my tears may
+not condemn my conscience, for not its law, but our common humanity,
+constrains my humanity to lament piteously the sufferings of these
+people (slaves). And if the brute animals, with their mere bestial
+sentiments, by a natural instinct, recognize the misfortunes of their
+like, what must this by human nature do, seeing thus before my eyes this
+wretched company, remembering that I myself am of the generation of the
+sons of Adam! The other day, which was the eighth of August, very early
+in the morning, by reason of the heat, the mariners began to bring to
+their vessels, and, as they had been commanded, to draw forth those
+captives to take them out of the vessel: whom, placed together on that
+plain, it was a marvellous sight to behold; for among them there were
+some of a reasonable degree of whiteness, handsome and well made; others
+less white, resembling leopards in their color; others as black as
+Ethiopians, and so ill-formed, as well in their faces as their bodies,
+that it seemed to the beholders as if they saw the forms of a lower
+hemisphere.
+
+"But what heart was that, how hard soever, which was not pierced with
+sorrow, seeing that company: for some had sunken cheeks, and their faces
+bathed in tears, looking at each other; others were groaning very
+dolorously, looking at the heights of the heavens, fixing their eyes
+upon them, crying out loudly, as if they were asking succor from the
+Father of nature; others struck their faces with their hands, throwing
+themselves on the earth; others made their lamentations in songs,
+according to the customs of their country, which, although we could not
+understand their language, we saw corresponded well to the height of
+their sorrow. But now, for the increase of their grief, came those who
+had the charge of the distribution, and they began to put them apart one
+from the other, in order to equalize the portions, wherefore it was
+necessary to part children and parents, husbands and wives, and
+brethren from each other. Neither in the partition of friends and
+relations was any law kept, only each fell where the lot took him. O
+powerful Fortune! who goest hither and thither with thy wheels,
+compassing the things of the world as it pleaseth thee, if thou canst,
+place before the eyes of this miserable nation some knowledge of the
+things that are to come after them, that they may receive some
+consolation in the midst of their great sadness! and you others who have
+the business of this partition, look with pity on such great misery, and
+consider how can those be parted whom you cannot disunite! Who will be
+able to make this partition without great difficulty? for while they
+were placing in one part the children that saw their parents in another,
+the children sprang up perseveringly and fled to them; the mothers
+enclosed their children in their arms and threw themselves with them on
+the ground, receiving wounds with little pity for their own flesh, so
+that their offspring might not be torn from them!
+
+"And so, with labor and difficulty, they concluded the partition, for,
+besides the trouble they had with the captives, the plain was full of
+people, as well of the place as of the villages and neighborhood around,
+who in that day gave rest to their hands, the mainstay of their
+livelihood, only to see this novelty. And as they looked upon these
+things, some deploring, some reasoning upon them, they made such a
+riotous noise as greatly to disturb those who had the management of this
+distribution. The Infante was there upon a powerful horse, accompanied
+by his people, looking out his share, but as a man who for his part did
+not care for gain, for, of the forty-six souls which fell to his fifth,
+he speedily made his choice, as all his principal riches were in his
+contentment, considering with great delight the salvation of those souls
+which before were lost. And certainly his thought was not vain, for as
+soon as they had knowledge of our language they readily became
+Christians; and I, who have made this history in this volume, have seen
+in the town of Lagos young men and young women, the sons and grandsons
+of those very captives, born in this land, as good and as true
+Christians as if they had lineally descended, since the commencement of
+the law of Christ, from those who were first baptized."
+
+The good Azurara wished that these captives might have some foresight
+of the things to happen after their death. I do not think, however, that
+it would have proved much consolation to them to have foreseen that they
+were almost the first of many millions to be dealt with as they had
+been; for, in this year 1444, Europe may be said to have made a distinct
+beginning in the slave trade, henceforth to spread on all sides, like
+the waves upon stirred water, and not, like them, to become fainter and
+fainter as the circles widen.
+
+In 1445 an expedition was fitted out by Prince Henry himself, and the
+command given to Gonsalvo de Cintra, who was unsuccessful in an attack
+on the natives near Cape Blanco. He and some other of the principal men
+of the expedition lost their lives. These were the first Portuguese who
+died in battle on that coast. In the same year the Prince sent out three
+other vessels. The captains received orders from the Infante, Don Pedro,
+who was then Regent of Portugal, to enter the river D'Oro, and make all
+endeavors to convert the natives to the faith, and even, if they should
+not receive baptism, to make peace and alliance with them. This did not
+succeed. It is probable that the captains found negotiation of any kind
+exceedingly tame and apparently profitless in comparison with the
+pleasant forays made by their predecessors. The attempt, however, shows
+much intelligence and humanity on the part of those in power in
+Portugal. That the instructions were sincere is proved by the fact of
+this expedition returning with only one negro, gained in ransom, and a
+Moor who came of his own accord to see the Christian country.
+
+This same year 1445 is signalized by a great event in the progress of
+discovery along the African coast. Dinis Dyaz, called by Barros and the
+historians who followed him Dinis Fernandez, sought employment from the
+Infante, and, being intrusted by him with the command of a vessel,
+pushed boldly down the coast, and passed the river Sanaga (Senegal),
+which divides the Azeneghis--whom the first discoverers always called
+Moors--from the negroes of Jalof. The inhabitants were much astonished
+at the presence of the Portuguese vessel on their coasts, and at first
+took it for a fish or a bird or a phantasm; but when in their rude
+boats--hollowed logs--they neared it, and saw that there were men in it,
+judiciously concluding that it was a more dangerous thing than fish or
+bird or phantasm, they fled. Dinis Fernandez, however, captured four of
+them off that coast, but as his object was discovery, not slave-hunting,
+he went on till he discovered Cape Verd, and then returned to his
+country, to be received with much honor and favor by Prince Henry. These
+four negroes taken by Dinis Fernandez were the first taken in their own
+country by the Portuguese. That the Prince was still engaged in high
+thoughts of discovery and conversion we may conclude from observing that
+he rewarded and honored Dinis Fernandez as much as if he had brought him
+large booty; for the Prince "thought little of whatever he could do for
+those who came to him with these signs and tokens of another greater
+hope which he entertained."
+
+In this case, as in others, we should do great injustice if we supposed
+that Prince Henry had any of the pleasure of a slave-dealer in obtaining
+these negroes: it is far more probable that he valued them as persons
+capable of furnishing intelligence, and, perhaps, of becoming
+interpreters, for his future expeditions. Not that, without these
+especial motives, he would have thought it anything but great gain for a
+man to be made a slave, if it were the means of bringing him into
+communion with the Church.
+
+After this, several expeditions, which did not lead to much, occupied
+the Prince's time till 1447. In that year a fleet, large for those
+times, of fourteen vessels, was fitted out at Lagos by the people there,
+and the command given by Prince Henry to Lançarote. The object seems to
+have been, from a speech that is recorded of Lançarote's, to make war
+upon the Azeneghi Moors, and especially to take revenge for the defeat
+before mentioned which Gonsalvo de Cintra suffered in 1445 near Cape
+Blanco. That purpose effected, Lançarote went southward, extending the
+discovery of the coast to the Gambia. In the course of his proceedings
+on that coast we find again that Prince Henry's instructions insisted
+much upon the maintenance of peace with the natives. Another instance of
+the same disposition on his part deserves to be especially recorded. The
+expedition had been received in a friendly manner at Gomera, one of the
+Canary Islands. Notwithstanding this kind reception, some of the natives
+were taken prisoners. On their being brought to Portugal, Prince Henry
+had them clothed and afterward set at liberty in the place from which
+they had been taken.
+
+This expedition under Lançarote had no great result. The Portuguese went
+a little farther down the coast than they had ever been before, but they
+did not succeed in making friends of the natives, who had already been
+treated in a hostile manner by some Portuguese from Madeira. Neither did
+the expedition make great spoil of any kind. They had got into feuds
+with the natives, and were preparing to attack them, when a storm
+dissipated their fleet and caused them to return home.
+
+It appears, I think, from the general course of proceedings of the
+Portuguese in those times, that they considered there was always war
+between them and the Azeneghi Moors--that is, in the territory from
+Ceuta as far as the Senegal River; but that they had no declared
+hostility against the negroes of Jalof, or of any country farther south,
+though skirmishes would be sure to happen from ill-understood attempts
+at friendship on the one side, and just or needless fears on the other.
+
+The last public enterprise of which Prince Henry had the direction was
+worthy to close his administration of the affairs relating to Portuguese
+discovery. He caused two ambassadors to be despatched to the King of the
+Cape Verd territory, to treat of peace and to introduce the Christian
+faith. One of the ambassadors, a Danish gentleman, was treacherously
+killed by the natives, and upon that the other returned, having
+accomplished nothing.
+
+Don Alfonso V, the nephew of Prince Henry, now took the reins of
+government, and the future expeditions along the coast of Africa
+proceeded in his name. Still it does not appear that Prince Henry ceased
+to have power and influence in the management of African affairs; and
+the first thing that the King did in them was to enact that no one
+should pass Cape Bojador without a license from Prince Henry. Some time
+between 1448 and 1454 a fortress was built in one of the islands of
+Arguim, which islands had already become a place of bargain for gold and
+negro slaves. This was the first Portuguese establishment on the coast
+of Africa. It seems that a system of trade was now established between
+the Portuguese and the negroes.
+
+
+
+
+COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
+
+A.D. 1414
+
+RICHARD LODGE
+
+
+  During the forty years of the second great schism in the
+  Roman Catholic Church, 1378-1417, different parties adhered
+  to different popes, of whom there were sometimes two or more
+  simultaneously in office. The French cardinals preferred
+  Avignon--to which the holy see had been removed in 1309--as
+  the seat of the pope, the Italian cardinals preferred Rome,
+  and two lines of popes were consequently chosen. This
+  division proved extremely injurious to the papal power and
+  authority.
+
+  Meanwhile there were various efforts for reform in the
+  Church, among the most notable movements being those led by
+  John Wycliffe in England and John Huss on the Continent. At
+  last a council was called to decide who was the rightful
+  claimant to the papal throne. The council assembled at Pisa,
+  Italy, in 1409, but recognized neither of the then rival
+  popes--Gregory XII and Benedict XIII--Alexander V being
+  elected in their stead. The deposed popes, however, would
+  not give up their rule, and so the action of the council
+  added to the difficulty, since there were now three popes
+  instead of two.
+
+  Alexander V died ten months after his election, and the
+  cardinals chose as his successor Cardinal Cossa, who took
+  the name of John XXIII. The Church remained as much divided
+  as before. In 1412 Pope John, who was a shrewd and politic
+  man, opened at Rome a council for the reformation of the
+  Church, but there seems to have been little serious purpose
+  either on the part of John himself or of the ecclesiastics
+  who assembled; and practically nothing was done.
+
+  John was more concerned about his political relations with
+  various sovereigns. He was at war with Ladislaus, King of
+  Naples, who soon drove him from Rome. John fled to Florence,
+  and appealed to Sigismund, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
+  for assistance. But the Emperor would aid him only on
+  condition that the Pope should summon a new council to some
+  German city, in order to end the schism. At last John issued
+  a formal summons for a council to meet at Constance on
+  November 1, 1414. Before it assembled, Ladislaus died, and
+  Sigismund determined to conduct the council in the interest
+  of his imperial dignity and that of the German kingship,
+  which he also held.
+
+The Council of Constance, like that of Pisa, had two very obvious
+questions to consider: (1) The restoration of unity; and (2), if the
+reforming party could have its way, the reform of the Church in its head
+and members. But circumstances forced the council to consider a third
+question, which had never been even touched in the discussions at Pisa.
+This was reformation in its widest sense; not merely a constitutional
+change in the relations of pope and hierarchy, but a vital change in
+dogma and ritual. This question was brought to the front by the
+so-called Hussite movement in Bohemia. The fundamental issues involved
+were those which have been at the bottom of most subsequent disputes in
+the Christian Church.
+
+How far was the Christianity of the day unlike the Christianity to be
+found in the record of Christ and his apostles? And the difference, if
+any, was it a real and necessary difference consequent on the
+development of society, or was it the result of abuses and innovations
+introduced by fallible men? The orthodox took their stand upon the unity
+and authority of the Church. The Church was the true foundation of
+Christ and the inheritor of his spirit. Therefore what the Church
+believed and taught, that alone was the true Christian doctrine; and the
+forms and ceremonies of the Church were the necessary aids to faith. The
+reformers, on the other hand, looked to Scripture for the fundamental
+rules of life and conduct. Any deviation from these rules, no matter on
+what authority, must be superfluous and might very probably be harmful.
+
+The Council of Constance is one of the most notable assemblies in the
+history of the world. In the number and fame of its members, in the
+importance of its objects, and, above all, in the dramatic interest of
+its records, it has few rivals. It is like the meeting of two worlds,
+the old and the new, the mediæval and the modern. We find there
+represented views which have hardly yet been fully accepted, which have
+occupied the best minds of succeeding centuries; at the same time, the
+council itself and its ceremonial carry us back to the times of the
+Roman Empire, when church and state were scarcely yet dual, and when
+Christianity was coextensive with one united empire. At Constance all
+the ideas, religious and political, of the Middle Ages seem to be put
+upon their trial. If that trial had ended in condemnation, there could
+be no fitter point to mark the division between mediæval and modern
+history. But the verdict was acquittal, or at least a partial aquittal;
+and the old system was allowed, under modified conditions, a lease of
+life for another century. It must not be forgotten that there were
+great secular as well as ecclestiasical interests involved in the
+council. Princes and nobles were present as well as cardinals and
+prelates. The council may be regarded not only as a great assembly of
+the Church, but also as a great diet of the mediæval empire.
+
+The man who had done more than anyone to procure the summons of the
+council, and whose interests were most closely bound up in its success,
+was Sigismund, King of the Romans and potential Emperor. He was eager to
+terminate the schism, and to bring about such a reform in the Church as
+would prevent the recurrence of similar scandals. But his motive in this
+was not merely disinterested devotion to the interests of the Church. He
+wished to revive the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire, and to gratify
+his own personal vanity by posing as the secular head of Christendom and
+the arbiter of its disputes. More especially he wished to restore the
+authority of the monarchy in Germany, and to put an end to that anarchic
+independence of the princes of which the recent schism was both the
+illustration and the result.
+
+In pursuing this aim he was confronted by the champions of "liberty" and
+princely interests, who were represented at Constance by the Archbishop
+of Mainz and Frederick of Hapsburg, Count of Tyrol. The Archbishop, John
+of Nassau, had been prominent in effecting and prolonging the schism in
+the Empire. He was a firm supporter of John XXIII, and had no interest
+in attending the council except to thwart the designs of the King, whom
+he had been the last to accept. Frederick of Tyrol was the youngest son
+of that duke Leopold who had fallen at Sempach in the war with the
+Swiss. Of his father's possessions Frederick had inherited Tyrol and the
+Swabian lands, and the propinquity of his territories made him a
+powerful personage at Constance. His family was the chief rival of the
+house of Luxemburg for ascendency in Eastern Germany, and he himself
+seems to have cherished a personal grudge against Sigismund. To these
+enemies Sigismund could oppose two loyal allies, the elector palatine
+Lewis, who had completely abandoned the anti-Luxemburg policy pursued by
+his father, Rupert, and Frederick of Hohenzollern, the most prominent
+representative of national sentiment in Germany, who had already given
+in Brandenburg an example of that restoration of order which he wished
+Sigismund to effect throughout his dominions.
+
+Of the clerical members of the council the most prominent at the
+commencement was the pope John XXIII. He had been forced by his
+difficulties in Italy to issue the summons, but as the time for the
+meeting approached he felt more and more misgiving. His object was to
+maintain himself in office; but he was conscious that neither Sigismund
+nor the cardinals would hesitate to throw him over if he stood in the
+way of the restoration of unity. He therefore allied himself with
+Sigismund's opponents, the Elector of Mainz and Frederick of Tyrol, and
+spared no pains to bring about dissension between Sigismund and the
+council.
+
+The assembled clergy may be divided roughly into two parties, the
+reformers, and the conservative or ultramontane party. The reformers
+were not in favor of any radical change in the Church. They were, if
+anything, more vehemently opposed than their antagonists to the
+doctrines of Wycliffe and Huss. Such reform as they desired was
+aristocratic rather than democratic. They had no intention of weakening
+the authority of the Church; but within the Church they desired to
+remove gross abuses, and to strengthen the hierarchy as against the
+papacy. Their chief contention was that a general council has supreme
+authority, even over the pope, and they wished such councils to meet at
+regular intervals. By this means papal absolutism would be limited by a
+sort of oligarchical parliament within the Church. The conservatives, on
+the other hand, consisting chiefly of the cardinals and Italian
+prelates, had no wish to alter a system under which they enjoyed
+material advantages. Their object, as it had been at Pisa, was to
+restore the union of the Church, but to defeat, or at any rate postpone,
+any schemes of reform.
+
+The council was opened on November 5th, but the meeting was only formal,
+and no real business was transacted for a month. Meanwhile Huss had been
+followed to Constance by the representatives of the orthodox party in
+Bohemia, who brought a formidable list of charges against the reformer.
+John XXIII at once saw in this an opportunity for embroiling the council
+with Sigismund. Adroitly keeping himself in the background, he allowed
+the cardinals to take the lead in the matter. They summoned Huss to
+appear before them, and in spite of his protest that he was only
+answerable to the whole council, they committed him to prison. The news
+that his safe-conduct had been so insultingly disregarded reached
+Sigismund as he was starting for Constance after the coronation ceremony
+at Aachen.
+
+He arrived on Christmas Day, and at once demanded that Huss should be
+released. The Pope excused himself, and threw the blame on the
+cardinals. To the King's right to protect his subject the cardinals
+opposed their duty to suppress heresy. In high dudgeon, Sigismund
+declared that he would leave the council to its fate, and actually set
+out on his return journey. The Pope was jubilant at the success of his
+wiles. But Sigismund's friends, and especially Frederick of
+Hohenzollern, urged him not to sacrifice the interests of Germany and of
+Christendom for the sake of a heretic. This advice, and the feeling that
+his personal reputation was staked on the success of the council,
+triumphed. Sigismund returned to Constance, and Huss remained a
+prisoner. From this moment John XXIII began to despair.
+
+The Pope's position became worse when the council, copying the procedure
+of the universities, began to discuss matters, not in a general
+assembly, but each nation separately. This deprived John of the
+advantage which he hoped to gain from the numerical majority of Italian
+prelates attending the council. Four nations organized themselves:
+Italians, French, Germans, and English. Over the last three John XXIII
+had no hold whatever. To his disgust they treated him, not as the
+legitimate pope, whose authority was to be vindicated against his
+rivals, but as one of three schismatic popes, whose retirement was a
+necessary condition of the restoration of unity. When he tried to evade
+their demand, they brought unanswerable charges against his personal
+character and threatened to depose him.
+
+He tried to disarm hostility by declaring his readiness to resign if the
+other popes would do the same. His promise was welcomed with enthusiasm,
+but neither Sigismund nor his supporters were softened by it. In spite
+of the vehement protests of the Elector of Mainz that he would obey no
+pope but John XXIII, the proposal was made to proceed to a new
+election. John had to fall back upon his last expedient. If he departed
+from Constance he might throw the council into fatal confusion; at the
+worst he could maintain himself as an antipope, as Gregory and Benedict
+had done against the Council of Pisa. His ally Frederick of Tyrol was
+prepared to assist him. Frederick arranged a tournament outside the
+walls; and while this absorbed public interest, the Pope escaped from
+Constance in the disguise of a groom, and made his way to Schaffhausen,
+a strong castle of the Hapsburg Count.
+
+For the moment John XXIII seemed not unlikely to gain his end. Constance
+was thrown into confusion by the news of his flight. The mob rushed to
+pillage the papal residence. The Italian and Austrian prelates prepared
+to leave the city, and the council was on the verge of dissolution. But
+Sigismund's zeal and energy succeeded in averting such a disaster. He
+restored order in the city, persuaded the prelates to remain, and took
+prompt measures to punish his rebellious vassal. An armed force under
+Frederick of Hohenzollern succeeded in capturing not only John XXIII,
+but also Frederick of Tyrol. The latter was compelled to undergo public
+humiliation, and to hand over his territories to his suzerain on
+condition that his life should be spared. No such exercise of imperial
+power had been witnessed in Germany since the days of the Hohenstaufen,
+and Sigismund chose this auspicious moment to secure a powerful
+supporter within the electoral college by handing over the electorate of
+Brandenburg to Frederick of Nuremberg, April 30, 1415. He thus
+established a dynasty which was destined to play a great part in German
+history, and ultimately to create a new German empire.
+
+The unsuccessful flight of John XXIII not only enabled Sigismund to
+assume a more authoritative position in the council and in Germany; it
+also sealed his own fate. The council had no longer any hesitation in
+proceeding to the formal deposition of the Pope May 29, 1415. As the two
+popes who had been deposed at Pisa had never been recognized at
+Constance, the Church was now without a head. But instead of hastening
+to fill the vacancy, the council turned aside to the suppression of
+heresy and the trial of Huss. On three occasions, the 5th, 7th, and 8th
+of June, Huss was heard before a general session. No point in his
+teaching excited greater animadversion than his contention that a
+priest, whether pope or prelate, forfeited his office by the commission
+of mortal sin. With great cunning his accusers drew him on to extend
+this doctrine to temporal princes. This was enough to complete the
+alienation of Sigismund, and after the third day's trial he was the
+first to pronounce in favor of condemnation. The last obstacle in the
+way of the prosecution was thus removed, and Huss was burned in a meadow
+outside the city walls on July 6, 1415.
+
+With the death of Huss ends the first and most eventful period of the
+Council of Constance. Within these seven or eight months Sigismund and
+the reforming party, thanks to the division of the council into nations,
+seemed to have gained a signal success. Sigismund had purchased his
+triumph by breaking his pledge to Huss, and for this he was to pay a
+heavy penalty in the subsequent disturbances in Bohemia. But for the
+moment these were not foreseen, and Sigismund was jubilantly eager to
+prosecute his scheme. Warned by the experience of its predecessor at
+Pisa, the Council of Constance was careful not to put too much trust in
+paper decrees. John XXIII was not only deposed, but a prisoner. Gregory
+XII had given a conditional promise of resignation, and had so few
+supporters as to be of slight importance. But Benedict XIII was still
+strong in the allegiance of the Spanish kingdoms, and unless they could
+be detached from his cause there was little prospect of ending the
+schism.
+
+This task Sigismund volunteered to undertake, and he also proposed to
+avert the impending war between England and France, to reconcile the
+Burgundian and Armagnac parties in the latter country, and to negotiate
+peace between the King of Poland and the Teutonic Knights. It would,
+indeed, be a revival of the imperial idea if its representative could
+thus act as a general mediator in European quarrels. The council
+welcomed the offer with enthusiasm, and showed their loyalty to
+Sigismund by deciding to postpone all important questions till his
+return. And this decision was actually adhered to. During the sixteen
+months of Sigismund's absence--July 15, 1415, to January 27, 1417--only
+two prominent subjects were considered by the council. One was the trial
+of Jerome of Prague, which was a mere corollary of that of Huss, and
+ended in a similar sentence. The other was the thorny question raised by
+the proposed condemnation of the writings of Jean Petit, a Burgundian
+partisan who had defended the murder of the Duke of Orleans. The leader
+of the attack upon Jean Petit was Gerson, the learned and eloquent
+chancellor of the University of Paris. But so completely had the matter
+become a party question, and so great was the influence of the Duke of
+Burgundy, that the council could not be induced to go further than a
+general condemnation of the doctrine of lawful tyrannicide; and Gerson's
+activity in the matter provoked such ill-will that after the close of
+the council he could not venture to return to France, which was then
+completely under Burgundian and English domination.
+
+It is impossible to narrate here the story of Sigismund's journey,
+though it abounds with illustrations of his impulsive character and of
+the attitude of the western states toward the imperial pretensions. It
+furnished conclusive proofs, if any were needed, that however the
+council, for its own ends, might welcome the authority of a secular
+head, national sentiment was far too strongly developed to give any
+chance of success to a projected revival of the mediæval empire. As
+regards his immediate object, Sigismund was able to achieve some
+results. He failed to induce Benedict XIII to abdicate, but the quibbles
+of the veteran intriguer exhausted the patience of his supporters, and
+at a conference at Narbonne the Spanish kings agreed to desert him and
+to adhere to the Council of Constance, December, 1415. But Sigismund's
+more ambitious schemes came to nothing. So far from preventing a war
+between England and France, he only forwarded an alliance between Henry
+V and the Duke of Burgundy; and though he may have done this in the hope
+of forcing peace upon France, the result was to make the war more
+disastrous and prolonged.
+
+When Sigismund reappeared in Constance, January 27, 1417, he found that
+the state of affairs both in Germany and in the council had altered for
+the worse. Frederick of Tyrol had returned to his dominions and had been
+welcomed by his subjects.
+
+The Archbishop of Mainz had renewed his intrigues, and an attempt had
+even been made to release John XXIII. With the Elector Palatine,
+formerly his loyal supporter, Sigismund had quarrelled on money matters,
+and it seemed possible that the four Rhenish electors would form a
+league against Sigismund as they had done against Wenceslaus in 1400.
+Still more galling was his loss of influence in the council. The
+adhesion of the Spanish kingdoms had been followed by the arrival of
+Spanish prelates, who formed a fifth nation and strengthened the party
+opposed to reform. The war between England and France had created a
+quarrel between the two nations at Constance, and the French deserted
+the cause they had once championed rather than vote with their enemies.
+
+Sigismund could only rely upon the English and the Germans; and the
+question which agitated the council was one of vital importance. Which
+was to come first, the election of a new pope or the adoption of a
+scheme of ecclesiastical reform? The conservatives contended that the
+Church could hardly be said to exist without its head; that no reform
+would be valid until the normal constitution of the Church was restored.
+On the other hand, it was urged that no reform was possible unless the
+supremacy of a general council was fully recognized; that certain
+questions could be more easily discussed and settled during a vacancy;
+that if the reforms were agreed upon, a new pope could be pledged to
+accept them, whereas a pope elected at once could prevent all reform.
+Party spirit ran extremely high, and it seemed almost impossible to
+effect an agreement. Sigismund was openly denounced as a heretic, while
+he in turn threatened to imprison the cardinals for contumacy.
+
+But gradually the balance turned against the reformers. Some of the
+leading German bishops were bribed to change their votes. The head of
+the English representatives, Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury, died at
+the critical moment, and the influence of Henry Beaufort, the future
+cardinal, induced the English nation to support an immediate election.
+It was agreed that a new pope should be chosen at once, and that the
+council should then proceed to the work of reform. But the only
+preliminary concession that Sigismund and his party could obtain was the
+issue of a decree in October, 1417, that another council should meet
+within five years, a second within seven years, and that afterward a
+council should be regularly held every ten years.
+
+For the new election it was decided that the twenty-three cardinals
+should be joined by thirty delegates of the council, six from each
+nation. The conclave met on November 8th, and three days later their
+choice fell upon Cardinal Oddo Colonna, who took the name of Martin V.
+Even the defeated party could not refrain from sharing in the general
+enthusiasm at the restoration of unity after forty years of schism. But
+their fears as to the ultimate fate of the cause of reform were fully
+justified. Soon after his election Martin declared that it was impious
+to appeal to a council against a papal decision. Such a declaration, as
+Gerson said, nullified the acts of the councils of Pisa and Constance,
+including the election of the Pope himself. In their indignation the
+members made a strong appeal to the Pope to fulfil the conditions agreed
+upon before his election. But Martin had a weapon to hand which had been
+furnished by the council itself.
+
+It was the division into nations that had led to the fall of John XXIII,
+and it was the same division into nations that had ruined the prospects
+of reform. The Pope now drew up a few scanty articles of reform, which
+he offered as separate concordats to the French, Germans, and English.
+It was a dangerous expedient for a pope to adopt, because it seemed to
+imply the separate existence of national churches; but it answered its
+immediate purpose. Martin could contend that there was no longer any
+work for the council to do, and he dissolved it in May, 1418.
+
+He set out for Italy, where a difficult task awaited him. Papal
+authority in Rome had ceased with the flight of John XXIII in 1414.
+Sigismund offered the Pope a residence in some Germany city, but Martin
+wisely refused. The support of his own family, the Colonnas, enabled him
+to reënter Rome in 1421. By that time almost all traces of the schism
+had disappeared. Gregory XII was dead; John XXIII had recently died in
+Florence; Benedict XIII still held out in his fortress of Peniscola, but
+was impotent in his isolation.
+
+
+
+
+TRIAL AND BURNING OF JOHN HUSS
+
+THE HUSSITE WARS
+
+A.D. 1415
+
+RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
+
+
+  Among the heralds of the Reformation, John Wycliffe, the
+  English Protestant who antedated Protestantism by a century
+  and a half, holds the first position in order of time. For
+  many years after the death of Wycliffe the movement which he
+  began continued to be, as it was at first, confined to
+  England; but at length it was to acquire a wider
+  significance and to enter upon its European extension.
+
+  Not long after his own day the spirit of Wycliffe--even
+  before knowledge of his work had crossed the Channel--had
+  come to a new birth on the Continent. And when some sparks
+  of Wycliffe's own fire were blown over the half of
+  Europe--even as far as Bohemia--the kindred fires which had
+  long burned in spite of all suppression were quickened into
+  a living and a spreading flame.
+
+  While then there was a direct and vital influence from the
+  work of the English reformer which gave to his teachings
+  partial identity with those of his Bohemian successors, the
+  movement led by these was still quite independent and
+  national.
+
+  The central figure of the Bohemian Reformation was John
+  Huss, or Hus, the son of a peasant. He was born in 1369 at
+  Husinetz--of which his own name is a contraction--in
+  Southern Bohemia. The principal events of his life, from the
+  time that he took his degree at the University of Prague
+  until his death at the stake, July 6, 1415, will be found in
+  Trench's sympathetic but discriminating narrative.
+
+If we look for the proper forerunners of Huss, his true spiritual
+ancestors, we shall find them in his own land, in a succession of
+earnest and faithful preachers--among these Militz (d. 1374) and Janow
+(d. 1394) stand out the most prominently--who had sown seed which could
+hardly have failed to bear fruit sooner or later, though no line of
+Wycliffe's writings had ever found its way to Bohemia. This land, not
+German, however it may have been early drawn into the circle of German
+interests, with a population Slavonic in the main, had first received
+the faith through the preaching of Greek monks. The Bohemian Church
+probably owed to this fact that, though incorporated from the first with
+the churches of the West, uses and customs prevailed in it--as the
+preaching in the mother tongue, the marriage of the clergy, communion in
+both kinds--which it only slowly and unwillingly relinquished. It was
+not till the fourteenth century that its lines were drawn throughout in
+exact conformity with those of Rome. All this deserves to be kept in
+mind; for it helps to account for the kindly reception which the seed
+sown by the later Bohemian reformers found, falling as this did in a
+soil to which it was not altogether strange.
+
+John Huss took in the year 1394 his degree as bachelor of theology in
+that University of Prague upon the fortunes of which he was destined to
+exercise so lasting an influence; and four years later, in 1398, he
+began to deliver lectures there. Huss had early taken his degree in a
+school higher than any school of man's. He himself has told us how he
+was once careless and disobedient, how the word of the Cross had taken
+hold of him with strength, and penetrated him through and through as
+with a mighty purifying fire. What he had learned in the school of
+Christ he could not keep to himself. Holding, in addition to his
+academical position, a lectureship founded by two pious laymen for the
+preaching of the Word in the Bohemian tongue (1401), he soon signalized
+himself by his diligence in breaking the bread of life to hungering
+souls, and his boldness in rebuking vice in high places as in low. So
+long as he confined himself to reproving the sins of the laity, he found
+little opposition, nay, rather support and applause. But when he brought
+the clergy and monks also within the circle of his condemnation, and
+began to upbraid them for their covetousness, their ambition, their
+luxury, their sloth, and for other vices, they turned resentfully upon
+him, and sought to undermine his authority, everywhere spreading reports
+of the unsoundness of his teaching.
+
+Let us see on what side he mainly exposed himself to charges such as
+these. Many things had recently wrought together to bring into nearness
+countries geographically so remote from one another as Bohemia and
+England. Anne, wife of our second Richard, was a sister of Wenceslaus,
+King of Bohemia. The two flourishing universities of Oxford and Prague
+were bound together by their common zeal for Realism. This may seem to
+us but a slight and fantastic bond; it was in those days a very strong
+one indeed. Young English scholars studied at Prague, young Bohemian at
+Oxford. Now, Oxford, long after Wycliffe's death, was full of interest
+for his doctrine; and among the many strangers sojourning there, it
+could hardly fail that some should imbibe opinions and bring back with
+them books of one whom they had there learned to know and to honor. Thus
+Jerome, called of Prague, on his return from the English university,
+gave a new impulse to the study of Wycliffe's writings, bearer as he was
+of several among these which had not hitherto travelled so far.
+
+This man, whose fortunes were so tragically bound up with those of Huss,
+who should share with him in the same fiery doom, was his junior by
+several years; his superior in eloquence, in talents, in gifts--for
+certainly Huss was not a theologian of the first order; speculative
+theologian he was not at all--but notably his inferior in moderation and
+practical good-sense. Huss never shared in his friend's indiscriminate
+admiration of Wycliffe. When, in 1403, some forty-five theses, which
+either were or professed to be drawn from the writings of the English
+reformer, were brought before the university, that they might be
+condemned as heretical, Huss expressed himself with extreme caution and
+reserve. Many of these, he affirmed, were true when a man took them
+aright; but he could not say this of all. Not first at the Council of
+Constance, but long before, he had refused to undertake the
+responsibility of Wycliffe's teaching on the holy eucharist. But he did
+not conceal what he had learned from Wycliffe's writings. By these there
+had been opened to him a deeper glimpse into the corruptions of the
+Church, and its need of reformation in the head and in the members, than
+ever he had before obtained. His preaching, with the new accesses of
+insight which now were his, more than ever exasperated his foes.
+
+While matters were in this strained condition, events took place at
+Prague which are too closely connected with the story that we are
+telling, exercised too great an influence in bringing about the issues
+that lie before us, to allow us to pass them by, even though they may
+prove somewhat long to relate. The University of Prague, though recently
+founded--it only dated back to the year 1348--was now, next after those
+of Paris and Oxford, the most illustrious in Europe. Saying this I say
+much; for we must not measure the influence and authority of a
+university at that day by the influence and authority, great as these
+are, which it may now possess. This university, like that of Paris, on
+the pattern of which it had been modelled, was divided into four
+"nations"--four groups, that is, or families of scholars--each of these
+having in academical affairs a single collective vote. These nations
+were the Bavarian, the Saxon, the Polish, and the Bohemian. This does
+not appear at first an unfair division--two German and two Slavonic; but
+in practical working the Polish was so largely recruited from Silesia
+and other German or half-German lands that its vote was in fact German
+also.
+
+The Teutonic votes were thus as three to one, and the Bohemians, in
+their own land and in their own university, on every important matter
+hopelessly outvoted. When, by aid of this preponderance, the university
+was made to condemn the teaching of Wycliffe in those forty-five points,
+matters came to a crisis. Urged by Huss--who as a stout patriot, and an
+earnest lover of the Bohemian language and literature, had more than a
+theological interest in the matter--by Jerome, by a large number of the
+Bohemian nobility, King Wenceslaus published an edict whereby the
+relations of natives and foreigners were completely reversed. There
+should be henceforth three votes for the Bohemian nation, and only one
+for the three others. Such a shifting of the weight certainly appears as
+a redressing of one inequality by creating another. At all events it was
+so earnestly resented by the Germans, by professors and students alike,
+that they quitted the university in a body, some say of five thousand
+and some of thirty thousand, and founded the rival University of
+Leipsic, leaving no more than two thousand students at Prague. Full of
+indignation against Huss, whom they regarded as the prime author of this
+affront and wrong, they spread throughout Germany the most unfavorable
+reports of him and of his teaching.
+
+This exodus of the foreigners had left Huss, who was now rector of the
+university, with a freer field than before. But church matters at Prague
+did not mend; they became more confused and threatening every day,
+until presently Huss stood in open opposition with the hierarchy of his
+time. Pope John XXIII, having a quarrel with the King of Naples,
+proclaimed a crusade against him, with what had become a constant
+accompaniment of this--indulgences to the crusaders. But to denounce
+indulgences, as Huss with fierce indignation did now, was to wound Pope
+John in a most sensitive part. He was excommunicated at once, and every
+place which should harbor him stricken with an interdict. While matters
+were in this frame the Council of Constance was opened, which should
+appease all the troubles of Christendom and correct whatever was amiss.
+The Bohemian difficulty could not be omitted, and Huss was summoned to
+make answer at Constance for himself.
+
+He had not been there four weeks when he was required to appear before
+the Pope and cardinals, November 18, 1414. After a brief informal
+hearing he was committed to harsh durance, from which he never issued as
+a free man again. Sigismund, the German King and Emperor-elect, who had
+furnished Huss with a safe-conduct which should protect him, "going to
+the Council, tarrying at the Council, returning from the Council," was
+absent from Constance at the time, and heard with real displeasure how
+lightly regarded this promise and pledge of his had been.
+
+Some big words, too, he spoke, threatening to come himself and release
+the prisoner by force; but, being waited on by a deputation from the
+council, who represented to him that he, as a layman, in giving such a
+safe-conduct had exceeded his powers, and intruded into a region which
+was not his, Sigismund was convinced, or affected to be convinced.
+Doubtless the temptations to be convinced were strong. Had he insisted
+on the liberation of Huss, the danger was imminent that the council, for
+which he had labored so earnestly, would be broken up on the plea that
+its rightful freedom was denied it. He did not choose to run this risk,
+preferring to leave an everlasting blot upon his name.
+
+Some modern sophists assure us that this safe-conduct--or free pass, as
+they prefer to call it--engaged the imperial word for Huss' safety in
+going to the council, but for nothing more--a most perfidious document,
+if this is all which it undertook; for the words--I quote the more
+important of them in the original Latin--are as follows: "_ut ei
+transire, stare, morari, redire permittatis_." But the treachery was not
+in the document, and nobody at the time attempted to find it there. If
+this had not engaged the honor of the Emperor, what cause of complaint
+would he have had against the cardinals as having entangled him in a
+breach of his word? what need of their solemn ambassage to him? Untrue
+also is the assertion that this was so little regarded by Huss himself
+as a safe-conduct covering the whole period during which he should be
+exposed to the malice of his enemies that he never appealed to it or
+claimed protection from it. He did so appeal at this second formal
+hearing, June 7th, the first at which Sigismund was present. "I am
+here," he there said, "under the King's promise that I should return to
+Bohemia in safety"; while at his last, by a look and by a few like
+words, he brought the royal word-breaker to a blush, evident to all
+present, July 6th.
+
+But to return a little. More than seven months elapsed before Huss could
+obtain a hearing before the council. This was granted to him at last.
+Thrice heard, June 5, 7, 8, 1415--if, indeed, such tumultuary sittings,
+where the man speaking for his life, and for much more than his life,
+was continually interrupted and overborne by hostile voices, by loud
+cries of "Recant, recant!" may be reckoned as hearings at all--he bore
+himself, by the confession of all, with courage, meekness, and dignity.
+The charges brought against him were various; some so far-fetched as
+that urged by a Nominalist from the University of Paris--for Paris was
+Nominalist now--namely, that as a Realist he could not be sound on the
+doctrine of the eucharist. Others were vague enough, as that he had sown
+discord between the church and the state. Nor were accusations wanting
+which touched a really weak point in his teaching, namely, the
+subjective aspect which undoubtedly some aspects of it wore; as when he
+taught that not the baptized, but the predestinated to life, constituted
+the Church. Beset as he was by the most accomplished theologians of the
+age, the best or the worst advantage was sure to be made of any
+vulnerable side which he exposed.
+
+But there were charges against him with more in them of danger than
+these. The point which was really at issue between him and his
+adversaries concerned the relative authority of the Church and of
+Scripture. What they demanded of him was a retractation of all the
+articles brought against him, with an unconditional submission to the
+council. Some of the articles, he replied, charged him with teaching
+things which he had never taught, and he could not by this formal act of
+retractation admit that he had taught them. Let any doctrine of his be
+shown to be contrary to God's holy Word, and he would retract it; but
+such unconditional submission he could not yield.
+
+His fate was now sealed--that is, unless he could be induced to recant;
+in which event, though he did not know it, his sentence would have been
+degradation from the priesthood and a lifelong imprisonment. Many
+efforts up to the last moment were made by friend and foe to persuade
+him to this, but in vain. And now once more, July 6th, he is brought
+before the council, but this time for sentence and for doom. The
+sentence passed, his suffering begins. The long list of his heresies,
+among which they are not ashamed to include many which he has distinctly
+repudiated, is read out in his hearing. He is clothed with priestly
+garments, that these, piece by piece, and each with an appropriate
+insult malediction, may be stripped from him again. The sacred vessels
+are placed in his hands, that from him, "accursed Judas that he is,"
+they may be taken again. There is some difficulty in erasing his
+tonsure; but this difficulty with a little violence and cruelty is
+overcome. A tall paper cap, painted over with flames and devils, and
+inscribed "Heresiarch," is placed upon his head. This done, and his soul
+having been duly delivered to Satan, his body is surrendered to the
+secular arm. One last touch is not wanting. As men bind him to the
+stake, attention is called to the fact that his face is turned to the
+east. This honor must not be his, upon whom no sun of righteousness
+shall ever rise. He is unfastened, and refastened anew. All is borne
+with perfect meekness, in the thought and in the strength of Him who had
+borne so much more for sinners, the Just for the unjust; and so, in his
+fire-chariot of a painful martyrdom, Huss passes from our sight.
+
+Some may wonder that he, a reformer, should have been so treated by a
+council, itself also reforming, and with a man like Gerson--_Doctor
+Christianissimus_ was the title he bore--virtually at its head. But a
+little consideration will dispel this surprise, and lead us to the
+conclusion that a council less earnestly bent on reforms of its own
+would probably have dealt more mildly with him. His position and theirs,
+however we may ascribe alike to him and to them a desire to reform the
+Church, were fundamentally different. They, when they deposed a pope,
+where they proclaimed the general superiority of councils over popes,
+had no intention of diminishing one jot the Church's authority in
+matters of faith, but only of changing the seat of that authority,
+substituting an ecclesiastical aristocracy for an ecclesiastical
+monarchy--or despotism, as long since it had grown to be. And thus the
+more earnest the council was to carry out a reformation in discipline,
+the more eager was it also to make evident to all the world that it did
+not intend to touch doctrine, but would uphold this as it had received
+it. It is not then uncharitable to suspect that the leading men of the
+council--like those reformers at Geneva who a century and a half later,
+1553, sent Servetus to the stake--were not sorry to be able to give so
+signal an evidence of their zeal for the maintenance of the faith which
+they had received, as thus, in the condemnation of Huss, they had the
+opportunity of doing. Nor may we leave altogether out of account that
+the German element must of necessity have been strong in a council held
+on the shores of the Bodensee; while in his vindication of Bohemian
+nationality, perhaps an excessive vindication, Huss had offended and
+embittered the Germans to the uttermost.
+
+If any had flattered themselves that with the death of Huss the
+Reformation in Bohemia had also received its death-blow, they had not
+long to wait for a painful undeception. Words fail to describe the
+tempest of passionate indignation with which the tidings of his
+execution, followed within a year by that of Jerome, were received
+there. Both were honored as martyrs, and already, in the fierce
+exasperation of men's spirits against the authors of their doom, there
+was a prophecy of the unutterable woes which were even at the door. Some
+watchword by which his followers could know and be known--this
+watchword, if possible, a spell of power like that which Luther had
+found in the doctrine of justification by faith--was still wanting.
+One, however, was soon found; which indeed had this drawback, that it
+concerned a matter disciplinary rather than doctrinal, yet having a real
+value as a visible witness for the rights of the laity in the Church of
+Christ. So far as we know, Huss had not himself laid any special stress
+on communion under both kinds; but in 1414--he was then already at
+Constance--the subject had come to the forefront at Prague; and, being
+consulted, Huss had entirely approved of such communion as most
+conformable to the original institution and to the practice of the
+primitive Church. On the other hand, the council, learning the agitation
+of men's spirits in this direction, had declared what is called the
+"Concomitance"--that is, that wherever one kind was present, there was
+also the other, which being so, nothing was, indeed, withholden from the
+communicant through the withholding of the cup. At the same time the
+council had solemnly condemned as a heretic everyone who refused to
+submit himself to the decision of the Church in this matter, June 15,
+1415.
+
+But there was no temper of submission in Bohemia--least of all when the
+University of Prague gave its voice in favor of this demand. Wenceslaus,
+the well-intentioned but poor-spirited King, was quite unable to keep
+peace between the rival factions, and could only slip out of his
+difficulties by dying, August 16, 1419. Sigismund, his brother, was also
+his successor; but of one thing the Bohemians were at this time
+resolved; namely, that the royal betrayer of his word should not reign
+over them. And thus a condition of miserable anarchy followed, and, in
+the end, of open war; which, lasting for eleven years, could be matched
+by few wars in the cruelties and atrocities by which on both sides it
+was disgraced. In Ziska, their blind chief, the Hussites had a leader
+with a born genius for war. It was he who invented the movable
+wagon-fortress whereof we hear so much, against which the German
+chivalry would break as idle waves upon a rock. Three times crusading
+armies--for this name they bore, thinking with no serious opposition to
+enforce the decrees of the council--invaded Bohemia, to be thrice driven
+back with utter defeat, disgrace, and loss; the Hussites, who for a long
+while were content with merely repelling the invaders, after a while,
+and as the only way of conquering a peace, turning the tables, and
+wasting with fire and sword all neighboring German lands.
+
+A conflict so hideous could not long be waged without a rapid
+deterioration of all who were engaged in it. The spirit of Huss more and
+more departed from those who called themselves by his name. Intestine
+strifes devoured their strength. There were first the
+Moderates--Calixtines, Utraquists, or "Those of Prague," they were
+called--who, weary of the long struggle, were willing to return to the
+bosom of the Church if only the cup (_calix_), and thus communion under
+both kinds (_sub utraque_), were guaranteed to them, with two or three
+secondary matters. Not so the Taborites, who drew their name from a
+mountain fastness which they fortified and called Mount Tabor. These,
+the Ultras, the democratic radical party, separating themselves off as
+early as 1419, had left Huss and his teaching very far behind. Ignoring
+the whole historical development of Christianity, they demanded that a
+clean sweep should be made of everything in the Church's practice for
+which an express and literal warrant in Scripture could not be found.
+When at the Council of Basel an agreement was patched up with the
+Calixtines on the footing which I have just named, 1433, a few further
+promises being thrown in which might mean anything and, as the issue
+proved, did mean nothing, the Taborites would not listen to the
+compromise. Again they appealed to arms: but now their old comrades and
+allies had passed to the other side; and, defeated in battle, 1434,
+their stronghold taken and destroyed, 1453, their political power
+forever broken, they, too, as so many before and since, were doomed to
+learn that violence is weakness in disguise, and that the wrath of man
+worketh not the righteousness of God.
+
+Whether the Church of Rome made the concessions to the Calixtines which
+she did, with the intention of retracting them at the first opportunity,
+it is impossible to say. This, however, is certain, that half a dozen
+years had scarcely elapsed before these concessions were brought into
+question and dispute; while, in less than thirty, Pope Pius II formally
+withdrew altogether the papal recognition of them, 1462; though a
+struggle for their maintenance, not always unsuccessful, lasted on into
+the century ensuing.
+
+It was in truth a melancholy close of a movement so hopefully begun. And
+yet not altogether the close; for, indeed, nothing, in which any
+elements of true heroism are mingled, so disappears as to leave no
+traces of itself behind. If it does no more, it serves to feed the high
+tradition of the world--that most precious of all bequests to the
+present age from the ages which are behind it. But there was more than
+this. If much was consumed, yet not all. Something--and that the best
+worth the saving--was saved from the fires, having first been purified
+in them. The stormy zealots, as many as had taken the sword, had for the
+most part perished by the sword.
+
+But there were some who made for themselves a better future than the
+sword could have ever made. A feeble remnant, extricating themselves
+from the wreck and ruin of their party, and having been taught of God in
+his severest school, pious Calixtines, too, that were little content
+with the Compacts of Basel, a few stray Waldensians mingling with them,
+all these, drawing together in an evil time, refashioned and
+reconstituted themselves in humblest guise, though not in guise so
+humble that they could escape the cruel attentions of Rome. Seeking to
+build on a true scriptural foundation, with a scheme of doctrine, it may
+be, dogmatically incomplete--even as that of Huss himself had been--with
+their episcopate lost and never since recovered, the Unitas Fratrum, the
+Moravian Brethren, trampled and trodden down, but overcoming now, not by
+weapons of carnal warfare, but by the blood of the Cross, lived on to
+hail the breaking of a fairer dawn, and to be themselves greeted as
+witnesses for God, who in a dark and gloomy day, and having but a little
+strength, had kept his word, and not denied his name.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF HOHENZOLLERN ESTABLISHED
+IN BRANDENBURG
+
+A.D. 1415
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+
+  The German princely family of Hohenzollern, which ruled over
+  Brandenburg from 1415, has furnished the kings of Prussia
+  since 1701, and since 1871 those kings have also been German
+  emperors. The Hohenzollerns were originally owners of a
+  castle on the Upper Danube, at no great distance from the
+  ancestral seat of the Hapsburg family. They acquired
+  influence at the court of Swabia, and in 1192 had
+  established themselves in Nuremberg, where in that year
+  Frederick I became burggraf. When Rudolph I, founder of the
+  house of Hapsburg, finally defeated his rival, Ottocar of
+  Bohemia (1278), his cause was saved by the assistance of a
+  Hohenzollern--Frederick of Nuremberg.
+
+  The Hohenzollerns made fortunate marriages and shrewd
+  purchases and the descendants of Frederick I, succeeding to
+  his burggravate, in the course of time acquired great
+  estates in Franconia, Moravia, and Burgundy. Through their
+  increasing wealth--whereby in the fifteenth century they had
+  gained a position similar to that of the present
+  Rothschilds--and by use of their political abilities, they
+  attained commanding influence in the councils of the German
+  princes.
+
+  Such was the eminence of this powerful family at the time
+  when they acquired the electorate of Brandenburg, the
+  nucleus of the present kingdom of Prussia. Brandenburg was a
+  district formerly inhabited by the Wends, a Slavic people,
+  from whom it was taken in 926 by Henry the Fowler, King of
+  Germany, of which kingdom it afterward became a margravate.
+  Its first margrave was Albert the Bear, under whom, about
+  1150, it was made an electorate; from Albert's line it
+  passed to Louis the Bavarian, in 1319; and in 1371 it was
+  transferred to Charles (Karl) IV. On the death of Charles,
+  his son and successor Wenzel (Wenceslaus) relinquished
+  Brandenburg to his brothers, as told by Carlyle, who in his
+  own pictorial manner describes the subsequent complications
+  which finally resulted in giving that possession to the
+  ancestors of the present ruling house of Germany.
+
+Karl[74] left three young sons, Wenzel, Sigismund, Johann; and also a
+certain nephew much older; all of whom now more or less concern us in
+this unfortunate history.
+
+Wenzel, the eldest son, heritable Kurfuerst of Brandenburg as well as
+King of Bohemia, was as yet only seventeen, who nevertheless got to be
+kaiser--and went widely astray, poor soul. The nephew was no other than
+Margrave Jobst of Moravia, now in the vigor of his years and a stirring
+man: to him, for a time, the chief management in Brandenburg fell, in
+these circumstances. Wenzel, still a minor, and already Kaiser and King
+of Bohemia, gave up Brandenburg to his two younger brothers, most of it
+to Sigismund, with a cutting for Johann, to help their appanages; and
+applied his own powers to govern the Holy Roman Empire, at that early
+stage of life.
+
+To govern the Holy Roman Empire, poor soul--or rather "to drink beer and
+dance with the girls"; in which, if defective in other things, Wenzel
+had an eminent talent. He was one of the worst kaisers and the least
+victorious on record. He would attend to nothing in the Reich; "the Prag
+white beer, and girls" of various complexion, being much preferable, as
+he was heard to say. He had to fling his poor Queen's Confessor into the
+river Moldau--Johann of Nepomuk, Saint so called, if he is not a fable
+altogether; whose Statue stands on Bridges ever since, in those parts.
+Wenzel's Bohemians revolted against him; put him in jail; and he broke
+prison, a boatman's daughter helping him out, with adventures. His
+Germans were disgusted with him; deposed him from the kaisership; chose
+Rupert of the Pfalz; and then, after Rupert's death, chose Wenzel's own
+brother Sigismund in his stead--left Wenzel to jumble about in his
+native Bohemian element, as king there, for nineteen years longer, still
+breaking pots to a ruinous extent.
+
+He ended by apoplexy, or sudden spasm of the heart; terrible Ziska,[75]
+as it were, killing him at second hand. For Ziska, stout and furious,
+blind of one eye and at last of both, a kind of human rhinoceros driven
+mad, had risen out of the ashes of murdered Huss, and other bad papistic
+doings, in the interim; and was tearing up the world at a huge rate.
+Rhinoceros Ziska was on the Weissenberg, or a still nearer hill of Prag
+since called Ziska-berg (Ziska Hill); and none durst whisper of it to
+the King. A servant waiting at dinner inadvertently let slip the word:
+"Ziska there? Deny it, slave!" cried Wenzel, frantic. Slave durst not
+deny. Wenzel drew his sword to run at him, but fell down dead: that was
+the last pot broken by Wenzel. The hapless royal ex-imperial phantasm
+self-broken in this manner. Poor soul, he came to the kaisership too
+early; was a thin violent creature, sensible to the charms and horrors
+of created objects; and had terrible rhinoceros ziskas and unruly horned
+cattle to drive. He was one of the worst kaisers ever known--could have
+done Opera Singing much better--and a sad sight to Bohemia. Let us leave
+him there: he was never actual Elector of Brandenburg, having given it
+up in time; never did any ill to that poor country.
+
+The real Kurfürst of Brandenburg all this while was Sigismund, Wenzel's
+next brother, under tutelage of cousin Jobst or otherwise--a real and
+yet imaginary, for he never himself governed, but always had Jobst of
+Mähren or some other in his place there. Sigismund was to have married a
+daughter of Burggraf Friedrich V;[76] and he was himself, as was the
+young lady, well inclined to this arrangement. But the old people being
+dead, and some offer of a king's daughter turning up for Sigismund,
+Sigismund broke off; and took the king's daughter, King of
+Hungary's--not without regret then and afterward, as is believed. At any
+rate, the Hungarian charmer proved a wife of small merit, and a
+Hungarian successor she had was a wife of light conduct even; Hungarian
+charmers, and Hungarian affairs, were much other than a comfort to
+Sigismund.
+
+As for the disappointed princess, Burggraf Friedrich's daughter, she
+said nothing that we hear; silently became a Nun, an Abbess: and through
+a long life looked out, with her thoughts to herself, upon the loud
+whirlwind of things, where Sigismund (oftenest an imponderous rag of
+conspicuous color) was riding and tossing. Her two brothers also, joint
+Burggraves after their father's death, seemed to have reconciled
+themselves without difficulty. The elder of them was already Sigismund's
+brother-in-law; married to Sigismund's and Wenzel's sister--by such
+predestination as we saw. Burggraf Johann III was the name of this one;
+a stout fighter and manager for many years; much liked, and looked to,
+by Sigismund, as indeed were both the brothers, for that matter; always,
+together or in succession, a kind of right hand to Sigismund. Frederick
+(Friedrich), the younger Burggraf, and ultimately the survivor and
+inheritor (Johann having left no sons), is the famed Burggraf Friedrich
+VI the last and notablest of all the Burggraves--a man of distinguished
+importance, extrinsic and intrinsic; chief or among the very chief of
+German public men in his time; and memorable to Posterity, and to this
+history, on still other grounds! But let us not anticipate.
+
+Sigismund, if appanaged with Brandenburg alone, and wedded to his first
+love, not a king's daughter, might have done tolerably well there;
+better than Wenzel, with the empire and Bohemia, did. But delusive
+Fortune threw her golden apple at Sigismund too; and he, in the wide
+high world, had to play strange pranks. His father-in-law died in
+Hungary, Sigismund's first wife his only child. Father-in-law bequeathed
+Hungary to Sigismund, who plunged into a strange sea thereby; got
+troubles without number, beatings not a few, and had even to take boat,
+and sail for his life down to Constantinople, at one time. In which sad
+adventure Burggraf Johann escorted him, and as it were tore him out by
+the hair of the head. These troubles and adventures lasted many years;
+in the course of which, Sigismund, trying all manner of friends and
+expedients, found in the Burggraves of Nuremberg, Johann and Friedrich,
+with their talents, possessions, and resources, the main or almost only
+sure support he got.
+
+No end of troubles to Sigismund, and to Brandenburg through him, from
+this sublime Hungarian legacy. Like a remote fabulous golden fleece,
+which you have to go and conquer first, and which is worth little when
+conquered. Before ever setting out (1387), Sigismund saw too clearly
+that he would have cash to raise: an operation he had never done with,
+all his life afterward. He pawned Brandenburg to cousin Jobst of Mähren;
+got "twenty thousand Bohemian gulden"--I guess, a most slender sum, if
+Dryasdust would but interpret it. This was the beginning of pawnings to
+Brandenburg; of which when will the end be? Jobst thereby came into
+Brandenburg on his own right for the time, not as tutor or guardian,
+which he had hitherto been. Into Brandenburg; and there was no chance of
+repayment to get him out again.
+
+Jobst tried at first to do some governing; but finding all very
+anarchic, grew unhopeful; took to making matters easy for himself. Took,
+in fact, to turning a penny on his pawn-ticket; alienating crown
+domains, winking hard at robber barons, and the like--and after a few
+years, went home to Moravia, leaving Brandenburg to shift for itself,
+under a Statthalter (Viceregent, more like a hungry land-steward), whom
+nobody took the trouble of respecting. Robber castles flourished; all
+else decayed. No highway not unsafe; many a Turpin with sixteen
+quarters, and styling himself Edle Herr (noble gentleman), took to
+"living from the saddle": what are Hamburg pedlers made for but to be
+robbed?
+
+The towns suffered much; any trade they might have had, going to wreck
+in this manner. Not to speak of private feuds, which abounded _ad
+libitum_. Neighboring potentates, Archbishop of Magdeburg and others,
+struck in also at discretion, as they had gradually got accustomed to
+do, and snapped away some convenient bit of territory, or, more
+legitimately, they came across to coerce, at their own hand, this or the
+other Edle Herr of the Turpin sort, whom there was no other way of
+getting at, when he carried matters quite too high. "Droves of six
+hundred swine"--I have seen (by reading in those old books) certain
+noble gentlemen, "of Putlitz," I think, driving them openly, captured by
+the stronger hand; and have heard the short querulous squeak of the
+bristly creatures: "What is the use of being a pig at all, if I am to be
+stolen in this way, and surreptitiously made into ham?" Pigs do continue
+to be bred in Brandenburg: but it is under such discouragements.
+Agriculture, trade, well-being and well-doing of any kind, it is not
+encouragement they are meeting here. Probably few countries, not even
+Ireland, have a worse outlook, unless help come.
+
+Jobst came back in 1398, after eight years' absence; but no help came
+with Jobst. The Neumark of Brandenburg, which was brother Johann's
+portion, had fallen home to Sigismund, brother Johann having died; but
+Sigismund, far from redeeming old pawn-tickets with the Neumark, pawned
+the Neumark too--the second pawnage of Brandenburg. Pawned the Neumark
+to the Teutsch Ritters "for sixty-three thousand Hungarian gulden" (I
+think, about thirty thousand pounds), and gave no part of it to Jobst;
+had not nearly enough for himself and his Hungarian occasions.
+
+Seeing which, and hearing such squeak of pigs surreptitiously driven,
+with little but discordant sights and sounds everywhere, Jobst became
+disgusted with the matter; and resolved to wash his hands of it, at
+least to have his money out of it again. Having sold what of the domains
+he could to persons of quality, at an uncommonly easy rate, and so
+pocketed what ready cash there was among them, he made over his
+pawn-ticket, or properly he himself repawned Brandenburg to the Saxon
+potentate, a speculative moneyed man, Markgraf of Meissen, "Wilhelm the
+Rich," so called. Pawned it to Wilhelm the Rich--sum not named; and went
+home to Moravia, there to wait events. This is the third Brandenburg
+pawning: let us hope there may be a fourth and last.
+
+And so we have now reached that point in Brandenburg history when, if
+some help does not come, Brandenburg will not long be a country, but
+will either get dissipated in pieces and stuck to the edge of others
+where some government is, or else go waste again and fall to the bisons
+and wild bears.
+
+Who now is Kurfürst of Brandenburg, might be a question. "I
+unquestionably!" Sigismund would answer, with astonishment. "Soft, your
+Hungarian Majesty," thinks Jobst: "till my cash is paid may it not
+probably be another?" This question has its interest: the Electors just
+now (1400) are about deposing Wenzel; must choose some better Kaiser. If
+they wanted another scion of the house of Luxemburg--a mature old
+gentleman of sixty; full of plans, plausibilities, pretensions--Jobst is
+their man. Jobst and Sigismund were of one mind as to Wenzel's going; at
+least Sigismund voted clearly so, and Jobst said nothing counter: but
+the Kurfürsts did not think of Jobst for successor. After some
+stumbling, they fixed upon Rupert Kur-Pfalz (Elector Palatine, Ruprecht
+von der Pfalz) as Kaiser.
+
+Rupert of the Pfalz proved a highly respectable Kaiser; lasted for ten
+years (1400-10), with honor to himself and the Reich. A strong heart,
+strong head, but short of means. He chastised petty mutiny with vigor,
+could not bring down the Milanese Visconti, who had perched themselves
+so high on money paid to Wenzel; could not heal the schism of the
+Church (double or triple Pope, Rome-Avignon affair), or awaken the
+Reich to a sense of its old dignity and present loose condition. In the
+late loose times, as antiquaries remark, most members of the Empire,
+petty princes even and imperial towns, had been struggling to set up for
+themselves; and were now concerned chiefly to become sovereign in their
+own territories. And Schilter informs us it was about this period that
+most of them attained such rather unblessed consummation; Rupert of
+himself not able to help it, with all his willingness. The people called
+him "Rupert Klemm (Rupert Smith's-vise)," from his resolute ways; which
+nickname--given him not in hatred, but partly in satirical good-will--is
+itself a kind of history. From historians of the Reich he deserves
+honorable regretful mention.
+
+He had for Empress a sister of Burggraf Friedrich's; which high lady,
+unknown to us otherwise, except by her tomb at Heidelberg, we remember
+for her brother's sake. Kaiser Rupert--great-grandson of that Kur-Pfalz
+who was Kaiser Ludwig's elder brother--is the culminating point of the
+Electors Palatine; the highest that Heidelberg produced. Ancestor of
+those famed Protestant "Palatines"; of all the Palatines or Pfalzes that
+reign in these late centuries. Ancestor of the present Bavarian Majesty;
+Kaiser Ludwig's race having died out. Ancestor of the unfortunate
+Winterkönig, Friedrich, King of Bohemia, who is too well known in
+English history--ancestor also of Charles XII of Sweden, a highly
+creditable fact of the kind to him. Fact indisputable: a cadet of
+Pfalz-Zweibrück (Deux-Ponts), direct from Rupert, went to serve in
+Sweden in his soldier business; distinguished himself in soldiering; had
+a sister of the great Gustaf Adolf to wife; and from her a renowned son,
+Karl Gustaf (Christiana's cousin), who succeeded as King; who again had
+a grandson made in his own likeness, only still more of iron in his
+composition. Enough now of Rupert Smith's-vise; who died in 1410, and
+left the Reich again vacant.
+
+Rupert's funeral is hardly done, when, over in Preussen, far off in the
+Memel region, place called Tannenberg, where there is still "a
+church-yard to be seen," if little more, the Teutsch Ritters had,
+unexpectedly, a terrible defeat; consummation of their Polish
+miscellaneous quarrels of long standing; and the end of their high
+courses in this world. A ruined Teutsch Ritterdom, as good as ruined,
+ever henceforth. Kaiser Rupert died May 18th; and on July 15th, within
+two months, was fought that dreadful "Battle of Tannenburg," Poland and
+Polish King, with miscellany of savage Tartars and revolted Prussians,
+versus Teutsch Ritterdom; all in a very high mood of mutual rage; the
+very elements, "wild thunder, tempest and rain deluges," playing chorus
+to them on the occasion. Ritterdom fought lion-like, but with
+insufficient strategic and other wisdom, and was driven nearly
+distracted to see its pride tripped into the ditch by such a set. Vacant
+Reich could not in the least attend to it; nor can we further at
+present.
+
+Jobst and Sigismund were competitors for the Kaisership; Wenzel, too,
+striking in with claims for reinstatement: the house of Luxemburg
+divided against itself. Wenzel, finding reinstatement not to be thought
+of, threw his weight, such as it was, into the scale of cousin Jobst.
+The contest was vehement, and like to be lengthy. Jobst, though he had
+made over his pawn-ticket, claimed to be Elector of Brandenburg; and
+voted for himself. The like, with still more emphasis, did Sigismund, or
+Burggraf Friedrich acting for him: "Sigismund, sure, is Kur-Brandenburg,
+though under pawn!" argued Friedrich--and, I almost guess, though that
+is not said, produced from his own purse, at some stage of the business,
+the actual money for Jobst, to close his Brandenburg pretension.
+
+Both were elected (majority contested in this manner); and old Jobst,
+then above seventy, was like to have given much trouble; but happily in
+three months he died; and Sigismund became indisputable. In his day
+Jobst made much noise in the world, but did little or no good in it. He
+was thought "a great man," says one satirical old Chronicler; and there
+"was nothing great about him but the beard."
+
+"The cause of Sigismund's success with the Electors," says Kohler, "or
+of his having any party among them, was the faithful and unwearied
+diligence which had been used for him by the above-named Burggraf
+Friedrich VI of Nuremberg, who took extreme pains to forward Sigismund
+to the Empire; pleading that Sigismund and Wenzel would be sure to agree
+well henceforth, and that Sigismund, having already such extensive
+territories (Hungary, Brandenburg, and so forth) by inheritance, would
+not be so exact about the Reichs-tolls and other imperial incomes. This
+same Friedrich also, when the election fell out doubtful, was
+Sigismund's best support in Germany, nay almost his right hand, through
+whom he did whatever was done."
+
+Sigismund is Kaiser, then, in spite of Wenzel. King of Hungary, after
+unheard-of troubles and adventures, ending some years ago in a kind of
+peace and conquest, he has long been. King of Bohemia, too, he at last
+became; having survived Wenzel, who was childless. Kaiser of the Holy
+Roman Empire, and so much else: is not Sigismund now a great man? Truly
+the loom he weaves upon, in this world, is very large. But the weaver
+was of headlong, high-pacing, flimsy nature; and both warp and woof were
+gone dreadfully entangled!
+
+This is the Kaiser Sigismund who held the Council of Constance; and
+"blushed visibly," when Huss, about to die, alluded to the letter of
+safe-conduct granted him, which was issuing in such fashion. Sigismund
+blushed; but could not conveniently mend the matter--so many matters
+pressing on him just now. As they perpetually did, and had done. An
+always-hoping, never-resting, unsuccessful, vain and empty Kaiser.
+Specious, speculative; given to eloquence, diplomacy, and the windy
+instead of the solid arts; always short of money for one thing. He
+roamed about, and talked eloquently; aiming high, and generally missing.
+Hungary and even the Reich have at length become his, but have brought
+small triumph in any kind; and instead of ready money, debt on debt. His
+Majesty has no money, and his Majesty's occasions need it more and more.
+
+He is now (1414) holding this Council of Constance, by way of healing
+the Church, which is sick of three simultaneous popes and of much else.
+He finds the problem difficult; finds he will have to run into Spain, to
+persuade a refractory pope there, if eloquence can (as it cannot): all
+which requires money, money. At opening of the council, he "officiated
+as deacon"; actually did some kind of litanying "with a surplice over
+him," though Kaiser and King of the Romans. But this passage of his
+opening speech is what I recollect best of him there: "Right reverend
+Fathers, _date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur_," exclaims
+Sigismund, intent on having the Bohemian schism well dealt with--which
+he reckons to be of the feminine gender. To which a cardinal mildly
+remarking, "_Domine, schisma est generis neutrius_ (schisma is neuter,
+your Majesty)," Sigismund loftily replies: "_Ego sum Rex Romanus et
+super grammaticam_ (I am King of the Romans, and above Grammar)!" For
+which reason I call him in my note-books Sigismund Super Grammaticam, to
+distinguish him in the imbroglio of kaisers.
+
+How Jobst's pawn-ticket was settled I never clearly heard; but can guess
+it was by Burggraf Friedrich's advancing the money, in the pinch above
+indicated, or paying it afterward to Jobst's heirs whoever they were.
+Thus much is certain: Burggraf Friedrich, these three years and more
+(ever since July 8, 1411) holds Sigismund's deed of acknowledgment "for
+one hundred thousand gulden lent at various times"; and has likewise got
+the Electorate of Brandenburg in pledge for that sum; and does himself
+administer the said Electorate till he be paid. This is the important
+news; but this is not all.
+
+The new journey into Spain requires new money; this council itself, with
+such a pomp as suited Sigismund, has cost him endless money.
+Brandenburg, torn to ruins in the way we saw, is a sorrowful matter;
+and, except the title of it, as a feather in one's cap, is worth nothing
+to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why
+could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying,
+he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of
+ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too,
+amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church.
+"Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund;
+"and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more
+ever needed, especially for this grand Spanish journey!" these were his
+sad thoughts. "Advance me, in a round sum, two hundred and fifty
+thousand more," said he to Burggraf Friedrich, "two hundred and fifty
+thousand more, for my manifold occasions in this time--that will be four
+hundred thousand in whole--and take the Electorate of Brandenburg to
+yourself, Land, Titles, Sovereign, Electorship and all, and make me rid
+of it!" That was the settlement adopted, in Sigismund's apartment at
+Constance, on April 30, 1415; signed, sealed, and ratified--and the
+money paid. A very notable event in World-History; virtually completed
+on the day we mention.
+
+The ceremony of investiture did not take place till two years afterward,
+when the Spanish journey had proved fruitless, when much else of
+fruitless had come and gone and Kaiser and council were probably more at
+leisure for such a thing. Done at length it was by Kaiser Sigismund in
+almost gala, with the Grandees of the Empire assisting, and august
+members of the council and world in general looking on; in the big
+square or market-place of Constance, April 17, 1417; is to be found
+described in Rentsch, from Nauclerus and the old news-mongers of the
+times. Very grand indeed: much processioning on horseback, under
+powerful trumpet-peals and flourishes; much stately kneeling, stately
+rising, stepping backward (done well, _zierlich_, on the Kurfürst's
+part); liberal expenditure of cloth and pomp; in short, "above one
+hundred thousand people looking on from roofs and windows," and Kaiser
+Sigismund in all his glory. He was on a high platform in the
+market-place, with stairs to it; the illustrious Kaiser--red as a
+flamingo, "with scarlet mantle and crown of gold,"--a treat to the eyes
+of simple mankind.
+
+What sum of modern money, in real purchasing power, this "four hundred
+thousand Hungarian Gold Gulden" is, I have inquired in the likely
+quarters without result; and it is probable no man exactly knows. The
+latest existing representative of the ancient gold gulden is the ducat,
+worth generally a half-sovereign in English. Taking the sum at that
+latest rate, it amounts to two hundred thousand pounds; and the reader
+can use that as a note of memory for the sale-price of Brandenburg with
+all its lands and honors--multiplying it perhaps by four or six to bring
+out its effective amount in current coin. Dog cheap, it must be owned,
+for size and capability; but in the most waste condition, full of
+mutiny, injustice, anarchy, and highway robbery; a purchase that might
+have proved dear enough to another man than Burggraf Friedrich.
+
+But so, at any rate, moribund Brandenburg has got its Hohenzollern
+Kurfürst, and started on a new career it little dreamt of; and we can
+now, right willingly, quit Sigismund and the Reichs-History, leave
+Kaiser Sigismund to sink or swim at his own will henceforth. His grand
+feat in life, the wonder of his generation, was this same Council of
+Constance; which proved entirely a failure; one of the largest wind-eggs
+ever dropped with noise and travail in this world. Two hundred thousand
+human creatures, reckoned and reckoning themselves the elixir of the
+intellect and dignity of Europe. Two hundred thousand--nay some,
+counting the lower menials and numerous unfortunate females, say four
+hundred thousand--were got congregated into that little Swiss town; and
+there as an Ecumenic Council, or solemnly distilled elixir of what pious
+intellect and valor could be scraped together in the world, they labored
+with all their select might for four years' space. That was the Council
+of Constance. And except this transfer of Brandenburg to Friedrich of
+Hohenzollern, resulting from said council, in the quite reverse and
+involuntary way, one sees not what good result it had.
+
+They did, indeed, burn Huss; but that could not be called a beneficial
+incident; that seemed to Sigismund and the council a most small and
+insignificant one. And it kindled Bohemia, and kindled Rhinoceros Ziska,
+into never-imagined flame of vengeance; brought mere disaster, disgrace,
+and defeat on defeat to Sigismund, and kept his hands full for the rest
+of his life, however small he had thought it. As for the sublime four
+years' deliberations and debates of this Sanhedrim of the
+Universe--eloquent debates, conducted, we may say, under such extent of
+wig as was never seen before or since--they have fallen wholly to the
+domain of Dryasdust; and amount, for mankind at this time, to zero plus
+the burning of Huss. On the whole, Burggraf Friedrich's Electorship, and
+the first Hohenzollern to Brandenburg, is the one good result.
+
+Burggraf Friedrich, on his first coming to Brandenburg, found but a cool
+reception as Statthalter. He came as the representative of law and rule;
+and there had been many helping themselves by a ruleless life, of late.
+Industry was at a low ebb, violence was rife; plunder, disorder,
+everywhere; too much the habit for baronial gentlemen to "live by the
+saddle," as they termed it, that is, by highway robbery in modern
+phrase.
+
+The towns, harried and plundered to skin and bone, were glad to see a
+Statthalter, and did homage to him with all their heart. But the
+baronage or squirearchy of the country were of another mind. These, in
+the late anarchies, had set up for a kind of kings in their own right.
+They had their feuds; made war, made peace, levied tolls, transit dues;
+lived much at their own discretion in these solitary countries; rushing
+out from their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any
+herd of "six hundred swine," and convoy of Lübeck or Hamburg merchant
+goods, that had not contented them in passing. What were pedlers and
+mechanic fellows made for, if not to be plundered when needful?
+Arbitrary rule, on the part of these noble robber lords! And then much
+of the crown domains had gone to the chief of them--pawned (and the
+pawn-ticket lost, so to speak), or sold for what trifle of ready money
+was to be had, in Jobst and Company's time. To these gentlemen a
+Statthalter coming to inquire into matters was no welcome phenomenon.
+Your Edle Herr (noble lord) of Putlitz, noble lords of Quitzow, Rochow,
+Maltitz, and others, supreme in their grassy solitudes this long while,
+and accustomed to nothing greater than themselves in Brandenburg, how
+should they obey a Statthalter?
+
+Such was more or less the universal humor in the squirearchy of
+Brandenburg; not of good omen to Burggraf Friedrich. But the chief seat
+of contumacy seemed to be among the Quitzows, Putlitzes, above spoken
+of; big squires in the district they call the Priegnitz, in the country
+of the sluggish Havel River, northwest from Berlin a forty or fifty
+miles. These refused homage, very many of them; said they were
+"incorporated with Böhmen"; said this and that; much disinclined to
+homage; and would not do it. Stiff, surly fellows, much deficient in
+discernment of what is above them and what is not: a thick-skinned set;
+bodies clad in buff leather; minds also cased in ill habits of long
+continuance.
+
+Friedrich was very patient with them; hoped to prevail by gentle
+methods. He "invited them to dinner"; "had them often at dinner for a
+year or more:" but could make no progress in that way. "Who is this we
+have got for a Governor?" said the noble lords privately to each other:
+"A Nuremberger Tand" (Nuremberg plaything--wooden image, such as they
+make at Nuremberg), said they, grinning, in a thick-skinned way: "If it
+rained Burggraves all the year round, none of them would come to luck in
+this country;" and continued their feuds, toll-levyings, plunderings,
+and other contumacies.
+
+Seeing matters come to this pass after above a year, Burggraf Friedrich
+gathered his Frankish men-at-arms; quietly made league with the
+neighboring Potentates, Thüringen and others; got some munitions, some
+artillery together--especially one huge gun, the biggest ever seen, "a
+twenty-four pounder," no less; to which the peasants, dragging her with
+difficulty through the clayey roads, gave the name of Faule Grete (Lazy
+or Heavy Peg); a remarkable piece of ordnance. Lazy Peg he had got from
+the Landgraf of Thüringen, on loan merely; but he turned her to
+excellent account of his own. I have often inquired after Lazy Peg's
+fate in subsequent times; but could never learn anything distinct; the
+German Dryasdust is a dull dog, and seldom carries anything human in
+those big wallets of his!
+
+Equipped in this way, Burggraf Friedrich (he was not yet Kurfürst, only
+coming to be) marches for the Havel Country (early days of 1414); makes
+his appearance before Quitzow's strong house of Friesack, walls fourteen
+feet thick: "You, Dietrich von Quitzow, are you prepared to live as a
+peaceable subject henceforth? to do homage to the laws and me?" "Never!"
+answered Quitzow, and pulled up his drawbridge. Whereupon Heavy Peg
+opened upon him, Heavy Peg and other guns; and, in some eight-and-forty
+hours, shook Quitzow's impregnable Friesack about his ears. This was in
+the month of February, 1414, day not given: Friesack was the name of the
+impregnable castle (still discoverable in our time); and it ought to be
+memorable and venerable to every Prussian man. Burggraf Friedrich VI,
+not yet quite become Kurfürst Friedrich I, but in a year's space to
+become so, he in person was the beneficent operator; Heavy Peg and
+steady human insight, these were clearly the chief implements.
+
+Quitzow being settled--for the country is in military occupation of
+Friedrich and his allies, and except in some stone castle a man has no
+chance--straightway Putlitz or another mutineer, with his drawbridge up,
+was battered to pieces, and his drawbridge brought slamming down. After
+this manner, in an incredibly short period, mutiny was quenched; and it
+became apparent to noble lords, and to all men, that here at length was
+a man come who would have the laws obeyed again, and could and would
+keep mutiny down.
+
+
+
+
+BATTLE OF AGINCOURT
+
+ENGLISH CONQUEST OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1415-1420
+
+JAMES GAIRDNER
+
+
+  King Henry V of England, son of Henry IV, was born in 1387,
+  and two years later was made prince of Wales. In 1401-1408
+  he was engaged against the Welsh rebels under Owen
+  Glendower, and in 1410 became captain of Calais. His
+  youthful period is represented--probably with much
+  exaggeration, to which Shakespeare, in _Henry IV_,
+  contributed--as full of wild and dissolute conduct, but as
+  king he was distinguished for his courage, ability, and
+  enterprise.
+
+  Henry was crowned in 1413, about seventy-five years after
+  the beginning of the Hundred Years' War between England and
+  France, which arose from the claim of Edward III to the
+  French throne. For some years a feud had been raging in
+  France between the houses of Burgundy and Orleans, the rival
+  parties being known as Burgundians and Armagnacs. Led by
+  Simonet Caboche, a butcher, adherents of the Armagnacs rose
+  with great fury against the Burgundians. This was in the
+  first year of Henry's reign, and to him and other rulers
+  Charles VI of France appealed in order to prevent them from
+  aiding the outbreak, which was soon quelled by the princes
+  of the blood and the University of Paris. Order in France
+  was restored by the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of
+  Burgundy withdrew to Flanders. But war between the two
+  factions was soon after renewed, and both sides sought the
+  alliance of England.
+
+  In these contentions and appeals for his interference Henry
+  saw an opportunity for pressing his designs to recover what
+  he claimed as the French inheritance of his predecessors. In
+  1414, as the heir of Isabella, mother of his
+  great-grandfather Edward, he formally demanded the crown of
+  France. The French princes refused to consider his claim.
+  Henry modified his demands, but after several months of
+  negotiation, with no promise of success, he prepared for
+  renewal of the ancient war.
+
+The claim made by Edward III to the French crown had been questionable
+enough. That of Henry was certainly most unreasonable. Edward had
+maintained that though the Salic Law, which governed the succession in
+France, excluded females from the throne, it did not exclude their male
+descendants. On this theory Edward himself was doubtless the true heir
+to the French monarchy. But even admitting the claims of Edward, his
+rights had certainly not descended to Henry V, seeing that even in
+England neither he nor his father was true to the throne by lineal
+right. A war with France, however, was sure to be popular with his
+subjects, and the weakness of that country from civil discord seemed a
+favorable opportunity for urging the most extreme pretensions.
+
+To give a show of fairness and moderation the English ambassadors at
+Paris lessened their demands more than once, and appeared willing for
+some time to renew negotiations after their terms had been rejected. But
+in the end they still insisted on a claim which in point of equity was
+altogether preposterous, and rejected a compromise which would have put
+Henry in possession of the whole of Guienne and given him the hand of
+the French King's daughter Catharine with a marriage portion of eight
+hundred thousand crowns. Meanwhile Henry was making active preparations
+for war, and at the same time carried on secret negotiations with the
+Duke of Burgundy, trusting to have him for an ally in the invasion of
+France.
+
+At length, in the summer of 1415, the King had collected an army and was
+ready to embark at Southampton. But on the eve of his departure a
+conspiracy was discovered, the object of which was to dethrone the King
+and set aside the house of Lancaster. The conspirators were Richard,
+Earl of Cambridge, Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, and a knight of
+Northumberland named Sir Thomas Grey. The Earl of Cambridge was the
+King's cousin-german, and had been recently raised to that dignity by
+Henry himself. Lord Scrope was, to all appearance, the King's most
+intimate friend and counsellor. The design seems to have been formed
+upon the model of similar projects in the preceding reign. Richard II
+was to be proclaimed once more, as if he had been still alive; but the
+real intention was to procure the crown for Edmund Mortimer, Earl of
+March, the true heir of Richard, whom Henry IV had set aside.
+
+At the same time the Earl of March himself seems hardly to have
+countenanced the attempt; but the Earl of Cambridge, who had married his
+sister, wished, doubtless, to secure the succession for his son Richard,
+as the Earl of March had no children. Evidently it was the impression
+of some persons that the house of Lancaster was not even yet firmly
+seated upon the throne. Perhaps it was not even yet apparent that the
+young man who had so recently been a gamesome reveller was capable of
+ruling with a firm hand a king.
+
+But all doubt on this point was soon terminated. The commissioners were
+tried by a commission hastily issued, and were summarily condemned and
+put to death. The Earl of March, it is said, revealed the plot to the
+King, sat as one of the judges of his two brother peers, and was taken
+into the King's favor. The Earl of Cambridge made a confession of his
+guilt. Lord Scrope, though he repudiated the imputation of disloyalty,
+admitted having had a guilty knowledge of the plot, which he said it had
+been his purpose to defeat. The one nobleman, in consideration of his
+royal blood, was simply beheaded; the other was drawn and quartered. We
+hear of no more attempts of the kind during Henry's reign.
+
+With a fleet of one thousand five hundred sail Henry crossed the sea and
+landed without opposition at Chef de Caux, near Harfleur, at the mouth
+of the Seine. The force that he brought with him was about thirty
+thousand men, and he immediately employed it in laying siege to
+Harfleur. The place was strong, so far as walls and bulwarks could make
+it, but it was not well victualled, and after a five-weeks' siege it was
+obliged to capitulate. But the forces of the besieged were thinned by
+disease as well as actual fighting. Dysentery had broken out in the
+camp, and, though it was only September, they suffered bitterly from the
+coldness of the nights; so that, when the town had been won and
+garrisoned, the force available for further operations amounted to less
+than half the original strength of the invading army.
+
+Under the circumstances it was hopeless to expect to do much before the
+winter set in, and many counselled the King to return to England. But
+Henry could not tolerate the idea of retreat or even of apparent
+inaction. He sent a challenge to the Dauphin, offering to refer their
+differences to single combat; and when no notice was taken of this
+proposal, he determined to cut his way, if possible, through the country
+to Calais, along with the remainder of his forces.
+
+It was a difficult and hazardous march. Hunger, dysentery, and fever had
+already reduced the little band to less than nine thousand men, or, as
+good authorities say, to little more than six thousand. The country
+people were unfriendly, their supplies were cut off on all sides, and
+the scanty stock of provisions with which they set out was soon
+exhausted. For want of bread, many were driven to feed on nuts, while
+the enemy harassed them upon the way and broke down the bridges in
+advance of them. On one or two occasions, having repulsed an attack from
+a garrison town, Henry demanded and obtained from the governor a
+safe-conduct and a certain quantity of bread and wine, under threat of
+setting fire to the place if refused.
+
+In this manner he and his army gradually approached the river Somme at
+Blanche Tache, where there was a ford by which King Edward III had
+crossed before the battle of Crécy. But while yet some distance from it,
+they received information from a prisoner that the ford was guarded by
+six thousand fighting men, and, though the intelligence was untrue, it
+deterred him from attempting the passage. They accordingly turned to the
+right and went up the river as far as Amiens, but were still unable to
+cross, till, after following the course of the river about fifty miles
+farther, they fortunately came upon an undefended ford and passed over
+before their enemies were aware.
+
+Hitherto their progress had not been without adventures and skirmishes
+in many places. But the main army of the French only overtook them when
+they had arrived within about forty-five miles of Calais. On the night
+of October 24th they were posted at the village of Maisoncelles, with an
+enemy before them five or six times their number, who had resolved to
+stop their further progress. Both sides prepared for battle on the
+following morning. The English, besides being so much inferior in
+numbers, were wasted by disease and famine, while their adversaries were
+fresh and vigorous, with a plentiful commissariat. But the latter were
+overconfident. They spent the evening in dice-playing and making wagers
+about the prisoners they should take; while the English, on the
+contrary, confessed themselves and received the sacrament.
+
+Heavy rain fell during the night, from which both armies suffered; but
+Henry availed himself of a brief period of moonlight to have the
+ground thoroughly surveyed. His position was an admirable one. His
+forces occupied a narrow field hemmed in on either side by hedges and
+thickets, so that they could only be attacked in front, and were in no
+fear of being surrounded. Early on the following morning Henry arose and
+heard mass; but the two armies stood facing each other for some hours,
+each waiting for the other to begin. The English archers were drawn up
+in front in form of a wedge, and each man was provided with a stake shod
+with iron at both ends, which being fixed into the ground before him,
+the whole line formed a kind of hedge bristling with sharp points, to
+defend them from being ridden down by the enemy's cavalry.
+
+At length, however, Henry gave orders to commence the attack, and the
+archers advanced, leaving their stakes behind them fixed in the ground.
+The French cavalry on either side endeavored to close them in, but were
+soon obliged to retire before the thick showers of arrows poured in upon
+them, which destroyed four-fifths of their numbers. Their horses then
+became unmanageable, being plagued with a multitude of wounds, and the
+whole army was thrown into confusion. Never was a more brilliant victory
+won against more overwhelming odds.
+
+One sad piece of cruelty alone tarnished the glory of that day's action,
+but it seems to have been dictated by fear as a means of
+self-preservation. After the enemy had been completely routed in front,
+and a multitude of prisoners taken, the King, hearing that some
+detachments had got round to his rear, and were endeavoring to plunder
+his baggage, gave orders to the whole army to put their prisoners to
+death. The order was executed in the most relentless fashion. One or two
+distinguished prisoners afterward were taken from under heaps of slain,
+among whom were the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon. Altogether, the
+slaughter of the French was enormous. There is a general agreement that
+it was upward of ten thousand men, and among them were the flower of the
+French nobility. That of the English was disproportionately small. Their
+own writers reckon it not more than one hundred altogether, some
+absurdly stating it as low as twenty or thirty, while the French
+authorities estimate it variously from three hundred to one thousand six
+hundred.
+
+Henry called his victory the battle of Agincourt, from the name of a
+neighboring castle. The army proceeded in excellent order to Calais,
+where they were triumphantly received, and after resting there awhile
+recrossed to England. The news of such a splendid victory caused them to
+be welcomed with an enthusiasm that knew no bounds. At Dover the people
+rushed into the sea to meet the conquerors, and carried the King in
+their arms in triumph from his vessel to the shore. From thence to
+London his progress was like one continued triumphal procession, and the
+capital itself received him with every demonstration of joy.
+
+The progress of the English arms in France did not, for a long time,
+induce the rival factions in that country to suspend the civil war among
+themselves. But at length some feeble efforts were made toward a
+reconciliation. The Council of Constance having healed the divisions in
+the Church by the election of Martin V as pope in place of the three
+rival popes deposed, the new Pontiff despatched two cardinals to France
+to aid in this important object. By their mediation a treaty was
+concluded between the Queen, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Dauphin; but
+it was no sooner published than the Count of Armagnac and his partisans
+made a vehement protest against it and accused of treason all who had
+promoted it.
+
+On this, Paris rose in anger, took part with the Burgundians, fell upon
+all the leading Armagnacs, put them in prison, and destroyed their
+houses. The Dauphin was only saved by one of Armagnac's principal
+adherents, Tannegui du Châtel, who carried him to the Bastille. The
+Bastille, however, was a few days after stormed by the populace, and Du
+Châtel was forced to withdraw his charge to Melun. The Armagnac party,
+except those in prison, were entirely driven out of Paris. But even this
+did not satisfy the rage of the multitude. Riots continued from day to
+day, and, a report being spread that the King was willing to ransom the
+captives, the people broke open the prisons and massacred every one of
+the prisoners. The Count of Armagnac, his chancellor, and several
+bishops and officers of state were the principal victims; but no one,
+man or woman, was spared. State prisoners, criminals, and debtors, even
+women great with child, perished in this indiscriminate slaughter.
+
+Almost the whole of Normandy was by this time in possession of the
+English; but Rouen, the capital of the duchy, still held out. It was a
+large city, strongly fortified, but Henry closed it in on every side
+until it was reduced to capitulate by hunger. At the beginning of the
+siege the authorities took measures to expel the destitute class of the
+inhabitants, and several thousands of poor people were thus thrown into
+the hands of the besiegers, who endeavored to drive them back into the
+town. But the gates being absolutely shut against them, they remained
+between the walls and the trenches, pitifully crying for help and
+perishing for want of food and shelter, until, on Christmas Day, when
+the siege had continued nearly five months, Henry ordered food to be
+distributed to them "in the honor of Christ's nativity."
+
+Those within the town, meanwhile, were reduced to no less extremities.
+Enormous prices were given for bread and even for the bodies of dogs,
+cats, and rats. The garrison at length were induced to offer terms, but
+Henry for some time insisted on their surrendering at discretion.
+Hearing, however, that a desperate project was entertained of
+undermining the wall and suddenly rushing out upon the besiegers, he
+consented to grant them conditions, and the city capitulated on January
+19th. The few places that remained unconquered in Normandy then opened
+their gates to Henry; others in Maine and the Isle of France did the
+same, and the English troops entered Picardy on a further career of
+conquest.
+
+Both the rival factions were now seriously anxious to stop the progress
+of the English, either by coming at once to terms with Henry or by
+uniting together against him; and each in turn first tried the former
+course. The Dauphin offered to treat with the King of England; but Henry
+demanding the whole of those large possessions in the north and south of
+France which had been secured to Edward III by the treaty of Bretigni,
+he felt that it was impossible to prolong the negotiation. The Duke of
+Burgundy then arranged a personal interview at Meulan between Henry on
+the one side and himself and the French Queen on behalf of Charles, at
+which terms of peace were to be adjusted. The Queen brought with her the
+princess Catharine, her daughter, whose hand Henry himself had formerly
+demanded as one of the conditions on which he would have consented to
+forbear from invading France. It was now hoped that if he would take her
+in marriage he would moderate his other demands. But Henry, for his
+part, was altogether unyielding. He insisted on the terms of the treaty
+of Bretigni, and on keeping his own conquests besides, with Anjou,
+Maine, Touraine, and the sovereignty over Brittany.
+
+Demands so exorbitant the Duke of Burgundy did not dare to accept, and
+as a last resource he and the Dauphin agreed to be reconciled and to
+unite in defence of their country against the enemy. They held a
+personal interview, embraced each other, and signed a treaty by which
+they promised each to love the other as a brother, and to offer a joint
+resistance to the invaders. A further meeting was arranged to take place
+about seven weeks later to complete matters and to consider their future
+policy. France was delighted at the prospect of internal harmony and the
+hope of deliverance from her enemies. But at the second interview an
+event occurred which marred all her prospects once more. The meeting had
+been appointed to take place at Montereau, where the river Yonne falls
+into the Seine.
+
+The Duke, remembering doubtless how he had perfidiously murdered the
+Duke of Orleans, allowed the day originally appointed to pass by, and
+came to the place at last after considerable misgivings, which appear to
+have been overcome by the exhortations of treacherous friends.
+
+When he arrived he found a place railed in with barriers for the
+meeting. He nevertheless advanced, accompanied by ten attendants, and,
+being told that the Dauphin waited for him, he came within the barriers,
+which were immediately closed behind him. The Dauphin was accompanied by
+one or two gentlemen, among whom was his devoted servant, Tannegui du
+Châtel, who had saved him from the Parisian massacre. This Tannegui had
+been formerly a servant of Louis, Duke of Orleans, whose murder he had
+been eagerly seeking an opportunity to revenge; and as the Duke of
+Burgundy knelt before the Dauphin, he struck him a violent blow on the
+head with a battle-axe. The attack was immediately followed up by two or
+three others, who, before the Duke was able to draw his sword, had
+closed in around him and despatched him with a multitude of wounds.
+
+The effect of this crime was what might have been anticipated. Nothing
+could have been more favorable to the aggressive designs of Henry, or
+more ruinous to the party of the Dauphin, with whose complicity it had
+been too evidently committed. Philip, the son and heir of the murdered
+Duke of Burgundy, at once sought means to revenge his father's death.
+The people of Paris became more than ever enraged against the Armagnacs,
+and entered into negotiations with the King of England. The new Duke
+Philip and Queen Isabel did the same, the latter being no less eager
+than the former for the punishment of her own son. Within less than
+three months they made up their minds to waive every scruple as to the
+acceptance of Henry's most exorbitant demands. He was to have the
+princess Catharine in marriage, and, the Dauphin being disinherited, to
+succeed to the crown of France on her father's death. He was also to be
+regent during King Charles' life; and all who held honors or offices of
+any kind in France were at once to swear allegiance to him as their
+future sovereign. Henry, for his part, was to use his utmost power to
+reduce to obedience those towns and places within the realm which
+adhered to the Dauphin or the Armagnacs.
+
+A treaty on this basis was at length concluded at Troyes in Champagne on
+May 21, 1420, and on Trinity Sunday, June 2d, Henry was married to the
+princess Catharine. Shortly afterward the treaty was formally registered
+by the states of the realm at Paris, when the Dauphin was condemned and
+attainted as guilty of the murder of the Duke of Burgundy and declared
+incapable of succeeding to the crown. But the state of affairs left
+Henry no time for honeymoon festivities. On the Tuesday after his
+wedding he again put himself at the head of his army, and marched with
+Philip of Burgundy to lay siege to Sens, which in a few days
+capitulated. Montereau and Melun were next besieged in succession, and
+each, after some resistance, was compelled to surrender. The latter
+siege lasted nearly four months, and during its continuance Henry fought
+a single combat with the governor in the mines, each combatant having
+his vizor down and being unknown to the other. The governor's name was
+Barbason, and he was one of those accused of complicity in the murder of
+the Duke of Orleans; but in consequence of this incident, Henry saved
+him from the capital punishment which he would otherwise have incurred
+on his capture.
+
+Toward the end of the year Henry entered Paris in triumph with the
+French King and the Duke of Burgundy. He there kept Christmas, and
+shortly afterward moved with his Queen into Normandy on his return into
+England. He held a parliament at Rouen to confirm his authority in the
+duchy, after which he passed through Picardy and Calais, and, crossing
+the sea, came by Dover and Canterbury to London. By his own subjects,
+and especially in the capital, he and his bride were received with
+profuse demonstrations of joy. The Queen was crowned at Westminster with
+great magnificence, and afterward Henry went a progress with her through
+the country, making pilgrimages to several of the more famous shrines in
+England.
+
+But while he was thus employed, a great calamity befell the English
+power in France, which, when the news arrived in England, made it
+apparent that the King's presence was again much needed across the
+Channel. His brother, the Duke of Clarence, whom he had left as his
+lieutenant, was defeated and slain at Beaugé in Anjou by an army of
+French and Scots, a number of English noblemen being also slain or taken
+prisoners. This was the first important advantage the Dauphin had
+gained, and the credit of the victory was mainly due to his Scotch
+allies. For the Duke of Albany, who was regent of Scotland, though it is
+commonly supposed that he was unwilling to give needless offence to
+England lest Henry should terminate his power by setting the Scotch King
+at liberty, had been compelled by the general sympathy of the Scots with
+France to send a force under his son the Earl of Buchan to serve against
+the English. The service which they did in that battle was so great that
+the Earl of Buchan was created, by the Dauphin, constable of France.
+
+Again Henry crossed the sea with a new army, having borrowed large sums
+for the expenses of the expedition. Before he left England he made a
+private treaty with his prisoner King James of Scotland, promising to
+let him return to his country after the campaign in France on certain
+specified conditions, among which it was agreed that he should take the
+command of a body of troops in aid of the English. James had accompanied
+him in his last campaign, and Henry had endeavored to make use of his
+authority to forbid the Scots in France from taking part in the war, but
+they had refused to acknowledge themselves bound to a king who was a
+captive.
+
+By this agreement, however, Henry obtained real assistance and
+coöperation from his prisoner, whom he employed, in concert with the
+Duke of Gloucester, in the siege of Dreux, which very soon surrendered.
+He himself meanwhile marched toward the Loire to meet the Dauphin, and
+took Beaugency; then, returning northward, first reduced Villeneuve on
+the Yonne, and afterward laid siege to Meaux on the Marne. The latter
+place held out for seven months, and while Henry lay before it he
+received intelligence that his Queen had borne him a son at Windsor, who
+was christened Henry.
+
+The city of Meaux surrendered on May 10, 1422. The Governor, a man who
+had been guilty of great cruelties, was beheaded, and his head and body
+were suspended from a tree on which he himself had caused a number of
+people to be hanged as adherents of the Duke of Burgundy. Henry was now
+master of the greater part of the North of France, and his Queen came
+over from England to join him, with reënforcements under his brother the
+Duke of Bedford. But he was not permitted to rest; for the Dauphin,
+having taken from his ally the Duke of Burgundy the town of La Charté on
+the Loire, proceeded to lay siege to Côsne, and, Philip having applied
+to Henry for assistance, he sent forward the Duke of Bedford with his
+army, intending shortly to follow himself. This demonstration was
+sufficient. The Dauphin felt that he was too weak to contend with the
+united English and Burgundian forces, and he withdrew from the siege.
+
+Henry, however, was disabled from joining the army by a severe attack of
+dysentery; and though he had at first hoped that he might be carried in
+a litter to head-quarters, he soon found that his illness was far too
+serious to permit him to carry out his intention. He was accordingly
+conveyed back to Vincennes, near Paris, where he grew so rapidly worse
+that it was evident his end was near. In a few brief words to those
+about him he declared his will touching the government of England and
+France after his death, until his infant son should be of age. The
+regency of France he committed to the Duke of Bedford, in case it
+should be declined by the Duke of Burgundy. That of England he gave to
+his other brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. To his two uncles,
+Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of
+Exeter, he intrusted the guardianship of his child. He besought all
+parties to maintain the alliance with Burgundy, and never to release the
+Duke of Orleans and the other prisoners of Agincourt during his son's
+minority. Having given these instructions he expired, on the last day of
+August, 1422.
+
+His death was bewailed both in England and France with no ordinary
+regret. The great achievements of his reign made him naturally a popular
+hero; nor was the regard felt for his memory diminished when, under the
+feeble reign of his son, all that he had gained was irrecoverably lost
+again, so that nothing remained of all his conquests except the story of
+how they had been won. Those past glories, indeed, must have seemed all
+the brighter when contrasted with a present which knew but disaster
+abroad and civil dissension at home. The early death of Henry also
+contributed to the popular estimate of his greatness. It was seen that
+in a very few years he had subdued a large part of the territory of
+France. It was not seen that in the nature of things this advantage
+could not be maintained, and that even the greatest military talents
+would not have succeeded in preserving the English conquests.
+
+Nor can it be said that Henry's success, extraordinary as it was, was
+altogether owing to his own abilities. That he exhibited great qualities
+as a general cannot be denied; but these would have availed him little
+if the rival factions in France had not been far more bitterly opposed
+to each other than to him. Indeed, it is difficult after all to justify,
+even as a matter of policy, his interference in French affairs, except
+as a means of diverting public attention from the fact that he inherited
+from his father but an indifferent title even to the throne of England.
+And though success attended his efforts beyond all expectation, he most
+wilfully endangered the safety not only of himself, but of his gallant
+army, when he determined to march with reduced forces through the
+enemy's country from Harfleur to Calais. It was a rashness nothing less
+than culpable, but in his own interests rashness was good policy.
+Unless he could succeed in desperate enterprises against tremendous
+odds and so make himself a military hero and a favorite of the
+multitude, his throne was insecure. He succeeded; but it was only by
+staking everything upon the venture--his own safety and that of his
+army, which, if the French had exercised but a little more discretion,
+would inevitably have been cut to pieces or made prisoners to a man.
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC'S VICTORY AT ORLEANS
+
+A.D. 1429
+
+Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy
+
+
+  In the Hundred Years' War between England and France, a
+  critical period was reached when Henry V, in 1415, won the
+  battle of Agincourt, and five years later, by the treaty of
+  Troyes, secured the succession to the French throne on the
+  death of Charles VI. Both monarchs dying in 1422, Charles
+  VII was proclaimed King of France, and Henry's son--Henry
+  VI--succeeded to his father's throne.
+
+  France now realized that her condition was wellnigh
+  hopeless, for the greater part of her territory was in the
+  hands of her enemies. When the English began the siege of
+  Orleans the extinction of French independence seemed to be
+  inevitable. The chivalry of France had been wasted in
+  terrible wars, and the spirits of her soldiers were daunted
+  by repeated disaster. The English king had been proclaimed
+  in Paris, and the "native prince was a dissolute trifler,
+  stained with the assassination of the most powerful noble of
+  the land."[77] Anarchy and brigandage everywhere prevailed,
+  and the condition of the peasantry was too wretched to be
+  described.
+
+  "Such," says Lamartine, "was the state of the nation when
+  Providence showed it a savior in a child." This child was
+  Jeanne d'Arc, called _La Pucelle_ ("the Maid"--more fully,
+  "the Maid of Orleans"), whose character and services to her
+  country made her, perhaps, the most illustrious heroine of
+  history. She was born at Domremy, in the northeast part of
+  France, January 6, 1412. All that is essential concerning
+  her personality and life prior to the great achievement
+  recorded here will be found in Creasy's own introduction to
+  his spirited account of the victory at Orleans.
+
+Orleans was looked upon as the last stronghold of the French national
+party. If the English could once obtain possession of it, their
+victorious progress through the residue of the kingdom seemed free from
+any serious obstacle. Accordingly, the Earl of Salisbury, one of the
+bravest and most experienced of the English generals, who had been
+trained under Henry V, marched to the attack of the all-important city;
+and, after reducing several places of inferior consequence in the
+neighborhood, appeared with his army before its walls on the 12th of
+October, 1428.
+
+The city of Orleans itself was on the north side of the Loire, but its
+suburbs extended far on the southern side, and a strong bridge connected
+them with the town. A fortification, which in modern military phrase
+would be termed a _tête-du-pont_, defended the bridge head on the
+southern side, and two towers, called the _Tourelles_, were built on the
+bridge itself, at a little distance from the tête-du-pont. Indeed, the
+solid masonry of the bridge terminated at the Tourelles; and the
+communication thence with the tête-du-pont and the southern shore was by
+means of a drawbridge. The Tourelles and the tête-du-pont formed
+together a strong-fortified post, capable of containing a garrison of
+considerable strength; and so long as this was in possession of the
+Orleannais, they could communicate freely with the southern provinces,
+the inhabitants of which, like the Orleannais themselves, supported the
+cause of their dauphin against the foreigners.
+
+Lord Salisbury rightly judged the capture of the Tourelles to be the
+most material step toward the reduction of the city itself. Accordingly,
+he directed his principal operations against this post, and after some
+severe repulses he carried the Tourelles by storm on the 23d of October.
+The French, however, broke down the arches of the bridge that were
+nearest to the north bank, and thus rendered a direct assault from the
+Tourelles upon the city impossible. But the possession of this post
+enabled the English to distress the town greatly by a battery of cannon
+which they planted there, and which commanded some of the principal
+streets.
+
+It has been observed by Hume that this is the first siege in which any
+important use appears to have been made of artillery. And even at
+Orleans both besiegers and besieged seem to have employed their cannons
+merely as instruments of destruction against their enemy's _men_, and
+not to have trusted to them as engines of demolition against their
+enemy's walls and works. The efficacy of cannon in breaching solid
+masonry was taught Europe by the Turks a few years afterward, at the
+memorable siege of Constantinople.
+
+In our French wars, as in the wars of the classic nations, famine was
+looked on as the surest weapon to compel the submission of a well-walled
+town; and the great object of the besiegers was to effect a complete
+circumvallation. The great ambit of the walls of Orleans, and the
+facilities which the river gave for obtaining succors and supplies,
+rendered the capture of the town by this process a matter of great
+difficulty. Nevertheless, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Suffolk, who
+succeeded him in command of the English after his death by a
+cannon-ball, carried on the necessary works with great skill and
+resolution. Six strongly-fortified posts, called _bastilles_, were
+formed at certain intervals round the town, and the purpose of the
+English engineers was to draw strong lines between them. During the
+winter, little progress was made with the intrenchments, but when the
+spring of 1429 came, the English resumed their work with activity; the
+communications between the city and the country became more difficult,
+and the approach of want began already to be felt in Orleans.
+
+The besieging force also fared hardly for stores and provisions, until
+relieved by the effects of a brilliant victory which Sir John Fastolf,
+one of the best English generals, gained at Rouvrai, near Orleans, a few
+days after Ash Wednesday, 1429. With only sixteen hundred fighting men,
+Sir John completely defeated an army of French and Scots, four thousand
+strong, which had been collected for the purpose of aiding the
+Orleannais and harassing the besiegers. After this encounter, which
+seemed decisively to confirm the superiority of the English in battle
+over their adversaries, Fastolf escorted large supplies of stores and
+food to Suffolk's camp, and the spirits of the English rose to the
+highest pitch at the prospect of the speedy capture of the city before
+them, and the consequent subjection of all France beneath their arms.
+
+The Orleannais now, in their distress, offered to surrender the city
+into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, who, though the ally of the
+English, was yet one of their native princes. The regent Bedford refused
+these terms, and the speedy submission of the city to the English seemed
+inevitable. The dauphin Charles, who was now at Chinon with his remnant
+of a court, despaired of continuing any longer the struggle for his
+crown, and was only prevented from abandoning the country by the more
+masculine spirits of his mistress and his Queen. Yet neither they nor
+the boldest of Charles' captains could have shown him where to find
+resources for prolonging war; and least of all could any human skill
+have predicted the quarter whence rescue was to come to Orleans and to
+France.
+
+In the village of Domremy, on the borders of Lorraine, there was a poor
+peasant of the name of Jacques d'Arc, respected in his station of life,
+and who had reared a family in virtuous habits and in the practice of
+the strictest devotion. His eldest daughter was named by her parents
+Jeannette, but she was called Jeanne by the French, which was Latinized
+into Johanna, and Anglicized into Joan.
+
+At the time when Jeanne first attracted attention, she was about
+eighteen years of age. She was naturally of a susceptible disposition,
+which diligent attention to the legends of saints and tales of fairies,
+aided by the dreamy loneliness of her life while tending her father's
+flocks, had made peculiarly prone to enthusiastic fervor. At the same
+time, she was eminent for piety and purity of soul, and for her
+compassionate gentleness to the sick and the distressed.
+
+The district where she dwelt had escaped comparatively free from the
+ravages of war, but the approach of roving bands of Burgundian or
+English troops frequently spread terror through Domremy. Once the
+village had been plundered by some of these marauders, and Jeanne and
+her family had been driven from their home, and forced to seek refuge
+for a time at Neufchâteau. The peasantry in Domremy were principally
+attached to the house of Orleans and the Dauphin, and all the miseries
+which France endured were there imputed to the Burgundian faction and
+their allies, the English, who were seeking to enslave unhappy France.
+
+Thus, from infancy to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes
+of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it
+caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The
+deliverance of France from the English was the subject of her reveries
+by day and her dreams by night. Blended with these aspirations were
+recollections of the miraculous interpositions of heaven in favor of
+the oppressed, which she had learned from the legends of her Church.
+Her faith was undoubting; her prayers were fervent. "She feared no
+danger, for she felt no sin," and at length she believed herself to have
+received the supernatural inspiration which she sought.
+
+According to her own narrative, delivered by her to her merciless
+inquisitors in the time of her captivity and approaching death, she was
+about thirteen years old when her revelations commenced. Her own words
+describe them best. "At the age of thirteen, a voice from God came to
+her to help her in ruling herself, and that voice came to her about the
+hour of noon, in summer-time, while she was in her father's garden. And
+she had fasted the day before. And she heard the voice on her right, in
+the direction of the church; and when she heard the voice, she saw also
+a bright light."
+
+Afterward St. Michael and St. Margaret and St. Catharine appeared to
+her. They were always in a halo of glory; she could see that their heads
+were crowned with jewels; and she heard their voices, which were sweet
+and mild. She did not distinguish their arms or limbs. She heard them
+more frequently than she saw them; and the usual time when she heard
+them was when the church bells were sounding for prayer. And if she was
+in the woods when she heard them, she could plainly distinguish their
+voices drawing near to her. When she thought that she discerned the
+heavenly voices, she knelt down, and bowed herself to the ground. Their
+presence gladdened her even to tears, and after they departed she wept
+because they had not taken her with them back to paradise. They always
+spoke soothingly to her. They told her that France would be saved, and
+that she was to save it.
+
+Such were the visions and the voices that moved the spirit of the girl
+of thirteen; and as she grew older, they became more frequent and more
+clear. At last the tidings of the siege of Orleans reached Domremy.
+Jeanne heard her parents and neighbors talk of the sufferings of its
+population, of the ruin which its capture would bring on their lawful
+sovereign, and of the distress of the Dauphin and his court. Jeanne's
+heart was sorely troubled at the thought of the fate of Orleans; and her
+"voices" now ordered her to leave her home, and warned her that she was
+the instrument chosen by heaven for driving away the English from that
+city, and for taking the Dauphin to be anointed king at Rheims. At
+length she informed her parents of her divine mission, and told them
+that she must go to the Sire de Baudricourt, who commanded at
+Vaucouleurs, and who was the appointed person to bring her into the
+presence of the King, whom she was to save.
+
+Neither the anger nor the grief of her parents, who said that they would
+rather see her drowned than exposed to the contamination of the camp,
+could move her from her purpose. One of her uncles consented to take her
+to Vaucouleurs, where De Baudricourt at first thought her mad, and
+derided her, but by degrees was led to believe, if not in her
+inspiration, at least in her enthusiasm, and in its possible utility to
+the Dauphin's cause.
+
+The inhabitants of Vaucouleurs were completely won over to her side by
+the piety and devoutness which she displayed, and by her firm assurance
+in the truth of her mission. She told them that it was God's will that
+she should go to the King, and that no one but her could save the
+kingdom of France. She said that she herself would rather remain with
+her poor mother and spin; but the Lord had ordered her forth.
+
+The fame of "the Maid," as she was termed, the renown of her holiness
+and of her mission, spread far and wide. Baudricourt sent her with an
+escort to Chinon, where the dauphin Charles was dallying away his time.
+Her "voices" had bidden her assume the arms and the apparel of a knight;
+and the wealthiest inhabitants of Vaucouleurs had vied with each other
+in equipping her with war-horse, armor, and sword. On reaching Chinon,
+she was, after some delay, admitted into the presence of the Dauphin.
+Charles designedly dressed himself far less richly than many of his
+courtiers were apparelled, and mingled with them, when Jeanne was
+introduced, in order to see if the holy Maid would address her
+exhortations to the wrong person. But she instantly singled him out,
+and, kneeling before him, said:
+
+"Most noble Dauphin, the King of Heaven announces to you by me that you
+shall be anointed and crowned king in the city of Rheims, and that you
+shall be his vicegerent in France."
+
+His features may probably have been seen by her previously in
+portraits, or have been described to her by others; but she herself
+believed that her "voices" inspired her when she addressed the King, and
+the report soon spread abroad that the holy Maid had found the King by a
+miracle; and this, with many other similar rumors, augmented the renown
+and influence that she now rapidly acquired.
+
+The state of public feeling in France was now favorable to an
+enthusiastic belief in a divine interposition in favor of the party that
+had hitherto been unsuccessful and oppressed. The humiliations which had
+befallen the French royal family and nobility were looked on as the just
+judgments of God upon them for their vice and impiety. The misfortunes
+that had come upon France as a nation were believed to have been drawn
+down by national sins. The English, who had been the instruments of
+heaven's wrath against France, seemed now, by their pride and cruelty,
+to be fitting objects of it themselves.
+
+France in that age was a profoundly religious country. There was
+ignorance, there was superstition, there was bigotry; but there was
+_faith_--a faith that itself worked true miracles, even while it
+believed in unreal ones. At this time, also, one of those devotional
+movements began among the clergy in France, which from time to time
+occur in national churches, without it being possible for the historian
+to assign any adequate human cause for their immediate date or
+extension. Numberless friars and priests traversed the rural districts
+and towns of France, preaching to the people that they must seek from
+heaven a deliverance from the pillages of the soldiery and the insolence
+of the foreign oppressors.
+
+The idea of a providence that works only by general laws was wholly
+alien to the feelings of the age. Every political event, as well as
+every natural phenomenon, was believed to be the immediate result of a
+special mandate of God. This led to the belief that his holy angels and
+saints were constantly employed in executing his commands and mingling
+in the affairs of men. The Church encouraged these feelings, and at the
+same time sanctioned the concurrent popular belief that hosts of evil
+spirits were also ever actively interposing in the current of earthly
+events, with whom sorcerers and wizards could league themselves, and
+thereby obtain the exercise of supernatural power.
+
+Thus all things favored the influence which Jeanne obtained both over
+friends and foes. The French nation, as well as the English and the
+Burgundians, readily admitted that superhuman beings inspired her; the
+only question was whether these beings were good or evil angels; whether
+she brought with her "airs from heaven or blasts from hell." This
+question seemed to her countrymen to be decisively settled in her favor
+by the austere sanctity of her life, by the holiness of her
+conversation, but still more by her exemplary attention to all the
+services and rites of the Church. The Dauphin at first feared the injury
+that might be done to his cause if he laid himself open to the charge of
+having leagued himself with a sorceress. Every imaginable test,
+therefore, was resorted to in order to set Jeanne's orthodoxy and purity
+beyond suspicion. At last Charles and his advisers felt safe in
+accepting her services as those of a true and virtuous Christian
+daughter of the holy Church.
+
+It is, indeed, probable that Charles himself and some of his counsellors
+may have suspected Jeanne of being a mere enthusiast, and it is certain
+that Dunois and others of the best generals took considerable latitude
+in obeying or deviating from the military orders that she gave. But over
+the mass of the people and the soldiery her influence was unbounded.
+While Charles and his doctors of theology, and court ladies, had been
+deliberating as to recognizing or dismissing the Maid, a considerable
+period had passed away during which a small army, the last gleanings, as
+it seemed, of the English sword, had been assembled at Blois, under
+Dunois, La Hire, Xaintrailles, and other chiefs, who to their natural
+valor were now beginning to unite the wisdom that is taught by
+misfortune. It was resolved to send Jeanne with this force and a convoy
+of provisions to Orleans. The distress of that city had now become
+urgent. But the communication with the open country was not entirely cut
+off: the Orleannais had heard of the holy Maid whom Providence had
+raised up for their deliverance, and their messengers earnestly implored
+the Dauphin to send her to them without delay.
+
+Jeanne appeared at the camp at Blois, clad in a new suit of brilliant
+white armor, mounted on a stately black war-horse, and with a lance in
+her right hand, which she had learned to wield with skill and grace. Her
+head was unhelmeted, so that all could behold her fair and expressive
+features, her deep-set and earnest eyes, and her long black hair, which
+was parted across her forehead, and bound by a ribbon behind her back.
+She wore at her side a small battle-axe, and the consecrated sword,
+marked on the blade with five crosses, which had at her bidding been
+taken for her from the shrine of St. Catharine at Fierbois. A page
+carried her banner, which she had caused to be made and embroidered as
+her voices enjoined. It was white satin, strewn with _fleurs-de-lis_,
+and on it were the words
+
+  "JHESUS MARIA,"
+
+and the representation of the Saviour in his glory. Jeanne afterward
+generally bore her banner herself in battle; she said that though she
+loved her sword much, she loved her banner forty times as much; and she
+loved to carry it, because it could not kill anyone.
+
+Thus accoutred, she came to lead the troops of France, who looked with
+soldierly admiration on her well-proportioned and upright figure, the
+skill with which she managed her war-horse, and the easy grace with
+which she handled her weapons. Her military education had been short,
+but she had availed herself of it well. She had also the good sense to
+interfere little with the manoeuvres of the troops, leaving these
+things to Dunois and others whom she had the discernment to recognize as
+the best officers in the camp.
+
+Her tactics in action were simple enough. As she herself described it,
+"I used to say to them, 'Go boldly in among the English,' and then I
+used to go boldly in myself." Such, as she told her inquisitors, was the
+only spell she used, and it was one of power. But, while interfering
+little with the military discipline of the troops, in all matters of
+moral discipline she was inflexibly strict. All the abandoned followers
+of the camp were driven away. She compelled both generals and soldiers
+to attend regularly at confessional. Her chaplain and other priests
+marched with the army under her orders; and at every halt, an altar was
+set up and the sacrament administered. No oath or foul language passed
+without punishment or censure. Even the roughest and most hardened
+veterans obeyed her. They had put off for a time the bestial coarseness
+which had grown on them during a life of bloodshed and rapine; they
+felt that they must go forth in a new spirit to a new career, and
+acknowledged the beauty of the holiness in which the heaven-sent Maid
+was leading them to certain victory.
+
+Jeanne marched from Blois on the 25th of April with a convoy of
+provisions for Orleans, accompanied by Dunois, La Hire, and the other
+chief captains of the French, and on the evening of the 28th they
+approached the town. In the words of the old chronicler Hall: "The
+Englishmen, perceiving that thei within could not long continue for
+faute of vitaile and pouder, kepte not their watche so diligently as
+thei were accustomed, nor scoured now the countrey environed as thei
+before had ordained. Whiche negligence the citizens shut in perceiving,
+sent worde thereof to the French captaines, which, with Pucelle, in the
+dedde tyme of the nighte, and in a greate rayne and thundere, with all
+their vitaile and artillery, entered into the citie."
+
+When it was day, the Maid rode in solemn procession through the city,
+clad in complete armor, and mounted on a white horse. Dunois was by her
+side, and all the bravest knights of her army and of the garrison
+followed in her train. The whole population thronged around her; and
+men, women, and children strove to touch her garments or her banner or
+her charger. They poured forth blessings on her, whom they already
+considered their deliverer. In the words used by two of them afterward
+before the tribunal which reversed the sentence, but could not restore
+the life of the virgin-martyr of France, "the people of Orleans, when
+they first saw her in their city, thought that it was an angel from
+heaven that had come down to save them."
+
+Jeanne spoke gently in reply to their acclamations and addresses. She
+told them to fear God, and trust in him for safety from the fury of
+their enemies. She first went to the principal church, where _Te Deum_
+was chanted; and then she took up her abode at the house of Jacques
+Bourgier, one of the principal citizens, and whose wife was a matron of
+good repute. She refused to attend a splendid banquet which had been
+provided for her, and passed nearly all her time in prayer.
+
+When it was known by the English that the Maid was in Orleans, their
+minds were not less occupied about her than were the minds of those in
+the city; but it was in a very different spirit. The English believed
+in her supernatural mission as firmly as the French did, but they
+thought her a sorceress who had come to overthrow them by her
+enchantments. An old prophecy, which told that a damsel from Lorraine
+was to save France, had long been current, and it was known and applied
+to Jeanne by foreigners as well as by the natives. For months the
+English had heard of the coming Maid, and the tales of miracles which
+she was said to have wrought had been listened to by the rough yeomen of
+the English camp with anxious curiosity and secret awe. She had sent a
+herald to the English generals before she marched for Orleans, and he
+had summoned the English generals in the name of the most High to give
+up to the Maid, who was sent by heaven, the keys of the French cities
+which they had wrongfully taken; and he also solemnly adjured the
+English troops, whether archers or men of the companies of war or
+gentlemen or others, who were before the city of Orleans, to depart
+thence to their homes, under peril of being visited by the judgment of
+God.
+
+On her arrival in Orleans, Jeanne sent another similar message; but the
+English scoffed at her from their towers, and threatened to burn her
+heralds. She determined, before she shed the blood of the besiegers, to
+repeat the warning with her own voice; and accordingly she mounted one
+of the boulevards of the town, which was within hearing of the
+Tourelles, and thence she spoke to the English, and bade them depart,
+otherwise they would meet with shame and woe.
+
+Sir William Gladsdale--whom the French call "Glacidas"--commanded the
+English post at the Tourelles, and he and another English officer
+replied by bidding her go home and keep her cows, and by ribald jests
+that brought tears of shame and indignation into her eyes. But, though
+the English leaders vaunted aloud, the effect produced on their army by
+Jeanne's presence in Orleans was proved four days after her arrival,
+when, on the approach of reënforcements and stores to the town, Jeanne
+and La Hire marched out to meet them, and escorted the long train of
+provision wagons safely into Orleans, between the bastiles of the
+English, who cowered behind their walls instead of charging fiercely and
+fearlessly, as had been their wont, on any French band that dared to
+show itself within reach.
+
+Thus far she had prevailed without striking a blow; but the time was now
+come to test her courage amid the horrors of actual slaughter. On the
+afternoon of the day on which she had escorted the reënforcements into
+the city, while she was resting fatigued at home, Dunois had seized an
+advantageous opportunity of attacking the English bastile of St. Loup,
+and a fierce assault of the Orleannais had been made on it, which the
+English garrison of the fort stubbornly resisted. Jeanne was roused by a
+sound which she believed to be that of her heavenly voices; she called
+for her arms and horse, and, quickly equipping herself, she mounted to
+ride off to where the fight was raging. In her haste she had forgotten
+her banner; she rode back, and, without dismounting, had it given to her
+from the window, and then she galloped to the gate whence the sally had
+been made.
+
+On her way she met some of the wounded French who had been carried back
+from the fight. "Ha!" she exclaimed, "I never can see French blood flow
+without my hair standing on end." She rode out of the gate, and met the
+tide of her countrymen, who had been repulsed from the English fort, and
+were flying back to Orleans in confusion. At the sight of the holy Maid
+and her banner they rallied and renewed the assault, Jeanne rode forward
+at their head, waving her banner and cheering them on. The English
+quailed at what they believed to be the charge of hell; St. Loup was
+stormed, and its defenders put to the sword, except some few, whom
+Jeanne succeeded in saving. All her woman's gentleness returned when the
+combat was over. It was the first time that she had ever seen a
+battlefield. She wept at the sight of so many bleeding corpses; and her
+tears flowed doubly when she reflected that they were the bodies of
+Christian men who had died without confession.
+
+The next day was Ascension Day, and it was passed by Jeanne in prayer.
+But on the following morrow it was resolved by the chiefs of the
+garrison to attack the English forts on the south of the river. For this
+purpose they crossed the river in boats, and after some severe fighting,
+in which the Maid was wounded in the heel, both the English bastiles of
+the Augustins and St. Jean de Blanc were captured. The Tourelles were
+now the only posts which the besiegers held on the south of the river.
+But that post was formidably strong, and by its command of the bridge
+it was the key to the deliverance of Orleans. It was known that a fresh
+English army was approaching under Fastolfe to reënforce the besiegers,
+and, should that army arrive while the Tourelles were yet in the
+possession of their comrades, there was great peril of all the
+advantages which the French had gained being nullified, and of the siege
+being again actively carried on.
+
+It was resolved, therefore, by the French to assail the Tourelles at
+once, while the enthusiasm which the presence and the heroic valor of
+the Maid had created was at its height. But the enterprise was
+difficult. The rampart of the tête-du-pont, or landward bulwark, of the
+Tourelles was steep and high, and Sir John Gladsdale occupied this
+all-important fort with five hundred archers and men-at-arms, who were
+the very flower of the English army.
+
+Early in the morning of the 7th of May some thousands of the best French
+troops in Orleans heard mass and attended the confessional by Jeanne's
+orders, and then crossing the river in boats, as on the preceding day,
+they assailed the bulwark of the Tourelles "with light hearts and heavy
+hands." But Gladsdale's men, encouraged by their bold and skilful
+leader, made a resolute and able defence. The Maid planted her banner on
+the edge of the fosse, and then, springing down into the ditch, she
+placed the first ladder against the wall and began to mount. An English
+archer sent an arrow at her, which pierced her corselet and wounded her
+severely between the neck and shoulder. She fell bleeding from the
+ladder; and the English were leaping down from the wall to capture her,
+but her followers bore her off. She was carried to the rear and laid
+upon the grass; her armor was taken off, and the anguish of her wound
+and the sight of her blood made her at first tremble and weep.
+
+But her confidence in her celestial mission soon returned: her patron
+saints seemed to stand before her and reassure her. She sat up and drew
+the arrow out with her own hands. Some of the soldiers who stood by
+wished to stanch the blood by saying a charm over the wound; but she
+forbade them, saying that she did not wish to be cured by unhallowed
+means. She had the wound dressed with a little oil, and then, bidding
+her confessor come to her, she betook herself to prayer.
+
+In the mean while the English in the bulwark of the Tourelles had
+repulsed the oft-renewed efforts of the French to scale the wall.
+Dunois, who commanded the assailants, was at last discouraged, and gave
+orders for a retreat to be sounded. Jeanne sent for him and the other
+generals, and implored them not to despair.
+
+"By my God," she said to them, "you shall soon enter in there. Do not
+doubt it. When you see my banner wave again up to the wall, to your arms
+again! the fort is yours. For the present, rest a little and take some
+food and drink."
+
+"They did so," says the old chronicler of the siege, "for they obeyed
+her marvellously."
+
+The faintness caused by her wound had now passed off, and she headed the
+French in another rush against the bulwark. The English, who had thought
+her slain, were alarmed at her reappearance, while the French pressed
+furiously and fanatically forward. A Biscayan soldier was carrying
+Jeanne's banner. She had told the troops that directly the banner
+touched the wall they should enter. The Biscayan waved the banner
+forward from the edge of the fosse, and touched the wall with it, and
+then all the French host swarmed madly up the ladders that now were
+raised in all directions against the English fort. At this crisis the
+efforts of the English garrison were distracted by an attack from
+another quarter. The French troops who had been left in Orleans had
+placed some planks over the broken arch of the bridge, and advanced
+across them to the assault of the Tourelles on the northern side.
+
+Gladsdale resolved to withdraw his men from the landward bulwark, and
+concentrate his whole force in the Tourelles themselves. He was passing
+for this purpose across the drawbridge that connected the Tourelles and
+the tête-du-pont, when Jeanne, who by this time had scaled the wall of
+the bulwark, called out to him, "Surrender! surrender to the King of
+Heaven! Ah, Glacidas, you have foully wronged me with your words, but I
+have great pity on your soul and the souls of your men." The Englishman,
+disdainful of her summons, was striding on across the drawbridge, when a
+cannon-shot from the town carried it away, and Gladsdale perished in the
+water that ran beneath. After his fall, the remnant of the English
+abandoned all further resistance. Three hundred of them had been killed
+in the battle and two hundred were made prisoners.
+
+The broken arch was speedily repaired by the exulting Orleannais, and
+Jeanne made her triumphal reëntry into the city by the bridge that had
+so long been closed. Every church in Orleans rang out its gratulating
+peal; and throughout the night the sounds of rejoicing echoed, and the
+bonfires blazed up from the city. But in the lines and forts which the
+besiegers yet retained on the northern shore, there was anxious watching
+of the generals, and there was desponding gloom among the soldiery. Even
+Talbot now counselled retreat. On the following morning the Orleannais,
+from their walls, saw the great forts called "London" and "St. Lawrence"
+in flames, and witnessed their invaders busy in destroying the stores
+and munitions which had been relied on for the destruction of Orleans.
+
+Slowly and sullenly the English army retired; and not before it had
+drawn up in battle array opposite to the city, as if to challenge the
+garrison to an encounter. The French troops were eager to go out and
+attack, but Jeanne forbade it. The day was Sunday.
+
+"In the name of God," she said, "let them depart, and let us return
+thanks to God."
+
+She led the soldiers and citizens forth from Orleans, but not for the
+shedding of blood. They passed in solemn procession round the city
+walls, and then, while their retiring enemies were yet in sight, they
+knelt in thanksgiving to God for the deliverance which he had vouchsafed
+them.
+
+Within three months from the time of her first interview with the
+Dauphin, Jeanne had fulfilled the first part of her promise, the raising
+of the siege of Orleans. Within three months more she had fulfilled the
+second part also, and had stood with her banner in her hand by the high
+altar at Rheims, while he was anointed and crowned as king Charles VII
+of France. In the interval she had taken Jargeau, Troyes, and other
+strong places, and she had defeated an English army in a fair field at
+Patay. The enthusiasm of her countrymen knew no bounds; but the
+importance of her services, and especially of her primary achievement at
+Orleans, may perhaps be best proved by the testimony of her enemies.
+There is extant a fragment of a letter from the regent Bedford to his
+royal nephew, Henry VI, in which he bewails the turn that the war has
+taken, and especially attributes it to the raising of the siege of
+Orleans by Jeanne. Bedford's own words, which are preserved in Rymer,
+are as follows:
+
+"And alle thing there prospered for you til the tyme of the Siege of
+Orleans taken in hand God knoweth by what advis. At the whiche tyme,
+after the adventure fallen to the persone of my cousin of Salisbury,
+whom God assoille, there felle, by the hand of God as it seemeth, a
+great strook upon your peuple that was assembled there in grete nombre,
+caused in grete partie, as y trowe, of lakke of sadde beleve, and of
+unlevefulle doubte, that thei hadde of a disciple and lyme of the
+Feende, called the Pucelle, that used fals enchantments and sorcerie.
+
+"The whiche strooke and discomfiture nott oonly lessed in grete partie
+the nombre of your peuple there, but as well withdrewe the courage of
+the remenant in merveillous wyse, and couraiged your adverse partie and
+ennemys to assemble them forthwith in grete nombre."
+
+When Charles had been anointed king of France, Jeanne believed that her
+mission was accomplished. And in truth the deliverance of France from
+the English, though not completed for many years afterward, was then
+insured. The ceremony of a royal coronation and anointment was not in
+those days regarded as a mere costly formality. It was believed to
+confer the sanction and the grace of heaven upon the prince, who had
+previously ruled with mere human authority. Thenceforth he was the
+Lord's Anointed. Moreover, one of the difficulties that had previously
+lain in the way of many Frenchmen when called on to support Charles VII
+was now removed. He had been publicly stigmatized, even by his own
+parents, as no true son of the royal race of France. The queen-mother,
+the English, and the partisans of Burgundy called him the "Pretender to
+the title of Dauphin"; but those who had been led to doubt his
+legitimacy were cured of their scepticism by the victories of the holy
+Maid and by the fulfilment of her pledges. They thought that heaven had
+now declared itself in favor of Charles as the true heir of the crown of
+St. Louis, and the tales about his being spurious were thenceforth
+regarded as mere English calumnies.
+
+With this strong tide of national feeling in his favor, with victorious
+generals and soldiers round him, and a dispirited and divided enemy
+before him, he could not fail to conquer, though his own imprudence and
+misconduct, and the stubborn valor which the English still from time to
+time displayed, prolonged the war in France until the civil Wars of the
+Roses broke out in England, and left France to peace and repose.
+
+
+
+
+TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF JEANNE D'ARC
+
+A.D. 1431
+
+Jules Michelet
+
+
+  After her victory at Orleans (1429), Jeanne d'Arc "knelt
+  before the French King in the cathedral of Rheims, and shed
+  tears of joy." She felt that she had fulfilled her mission,
+  and she desired to return to her home at Domremy. But King
+  Charles VII persuaded her to remain with the army. "She
+  still heard her heavenly voices, but she now no longer
+  thought herself the appointed minister of heaven to lead her
+  countrymen to certain victory." She expected but one year
+  more of life; but she still bravely faced the future with
+  its perils.
+
+  The Maid took part in the capture of Laon, Soissons,
+  Compiègne, and other places, and, in the attack on Paris,
+  September, 1429, which she prematurely urged, was severely
+  wounded. In a sally from Compiègne, where she was besieged
+  by Burgundians, she was taken prisoner May 24, 1430, and
+  held until November, when for a large payment in money she
+  was surrendered to the English, who took her to Rouen, their
+  real capital in France.
+
+  On January 3, 1431, by order of King Henry VI of England,
+  Jeanne was placed in the hands of Peter Cauchon, Bishop of
+  Beauvais, who had already moved to have her delivered up to
+  the Inquisition of France, as demanded by the University of
+  Paris. The Bishop proceeded to form at Rouen a "court of
+  justice" for her trial, and on February 21st the Maid was
+  brought before her judges--"Norman priests and doctors of
+  Paris"--in the chapel of Rouen castle. The trial lasted
+  until May 30th, forty sittings being held--some of them in
+  Jeanne's prison, where for a time she was kept in an iron
+  cage.
+
+  Commanded to take "an oath to tell the truth about
+  everything as to which she should be questioned," she
+  replied: "Perchance you may ask me things I would not tell
+  you. I do not like to take an oath to tell the truth save as
+  to matters which concern the faith." She fearlessly tried to
+  guard against violation of what she considered her right to
+  be silent.
+
+  In "this odious and shameful trial," says Guizot, "the
+  judges' prejudiced servility and scientific subtlety were
+  employed for three months to wear out the courage or
+  overreach the understanding of a young girl of nineteen, who
+  made no defence beyond holding her tongue or appealing to
+  God, who had dictated to her that which she had done."
+  Formal accusation was made under twelve heads or articles,
+  based on the preliminary examination, and the trial
+  proceeded to its merciless end.
+
+In Passion Week, Jeanne d'Arc fell sick. Her temptation began, no doubt,
+on Palm Sunday. A country girl, born on the skirts of a forest, and
+having ever lived in the open air of heaven, she was compelled to pass
+this fine Palm Sunday in the depths of a dungeon. The grand "succor"
+which the Church invokes came not for her; the "doors did not open."
+
+They were opened on the Tuesday, but it was to lead the accused to the
+great hall of the castle, before her judges. They read to her the
+articles which had been founded on her answers, and the Bishop
+previously represented to her "that these doctors were all churchmen,
+clerks, and well read in law, divine and human; that they were all
+tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed mildly, seeking neither
+vengeance nor corporal punishment, but solely wishing to enlighten her,
+and put her in the way of truth and of salvation; and that, as she was
+not sufficiently informed in such high matters, the Bishop and the
+Inquisitor offered her the choice of one or more of the assessors to act
+as her counsel." The accused, in presence of this assembly, in which she
+did not descry a single friendly face, mildly answered: "For what you
+admonish me as to my good, and concerning our faith, I thank you; as to
+the counsel you offer me, I have no intention to forsake the counsel of
+our Lord."
+
+The first article touched the capital point, submission. She replied:
+"Well do I believe that our holy Father, the bishops, and others of the
+Church are to guard the Christian faith and punish those who are found
+wanting. As to my deeds, I submit myself only to the Church in heaven,
+to God and the Virgin, to the sainted men and women in paradise. I have
+not been wanting in regard to the Christian faith, and trust I never
+shall be." And, shortly afterward, "I would rather die than recall what
+I have done by our Lord's command."
+
+What illustrates the time, the uninformed mind of these doctors, and
+their blind attachment to the letter without regard to the spirit is
+that no point seemed graver to them than the sin of having assumed male
+attire. They represented to her that, according to the canons, those who
+thus change the habit of their sex are abominable in the sight of God.
+At first she would not give a direct answer, and begged for a respite
+till the next day, but her judges insisted on her discarding the dress;
+she replied "that she was not empowered to say when she could quit it."
+
+"But if you should be deprived of the privilege of hearing mass?"
+
+"Well, our Lord can grant me to hear it without you."
+
+"Will you put on a woman's dress, in order to receive your Saviour at
+Easter?"
+
+"No; I cannot quit this dress; it matters not to me in what dress I
+receive my Saviour."
+
+After this she seems shaken, asks to be at least allowed to hear mass,
+adding, "I won't say but if you were to give me a gown such as the
+daughters of the burghers wear, a very _long gown_."
+
+It is clear she shrank, through modesty, from explaining herself. The
+poor girl durst not explain her position in prison or the constant
+danger she was in. The truth is that three soldiers slept in her room,
+three of the brigand ruffians called _houspilleurs_;[78] that she was
+chained to a beam by a large iron chain, almost wholly at their mercy;
+the man's dress they wished to compel her to discontinue was all her
+safeguard. What are we to think of the imbecility of the judge, or of
+his horrible connivance?
+
+Besides being kept under the eyes of these wretches, and exposed to
+their insults and mockery, she was subjected to espial from without.
+Winchester,[79] the Inquisitor, and Cauchon had each a key to the tower,
+and watched her hourly through a hole in the wall. Each stone of this
+infernal dungeon had eyes.
+
+Her only consolation was that she was at first allowed interviews with a
+priest, who told her that he was a prisoner and attached to Charles
+VII's cause. Loyseleur, so he was named, was a tool of the English. He
+had won Jeanne's confidence, who used to confess herself to him; and, at
+such times, her confessions were taken down by notaries concealed on
+purpose to overhear her. It is said that Loyseleur encouraged her to
+hold out, in order to insure her destruction.
+
+The deplorable state of the prisoner's health was aggravated by her
+being deprived of the consolations of religion during Passion Week. On
+the Thursday, the sacrament was withheld from her; on that selfsame day
+on which Christ is universal host, on which he invites the poor and all
+those who suffer, she seemed to be forgotten.
+
+On Good Friday, that day of deep silence, on which we all hear no other
+sound than the beating of one's own heart, it seems as if the hearts of
+the judges smote them, and that some feeling of humanity and of religion
+had been awakened in their aged scholastic souls; at least it is certain
+that, whereas thirty-five of them took their seats on the Wednesday, no
+more than nine were present at the examination on Saturday; the rest, no
+doubt, alleged the devotions of the day as their excuse.
+
+On the contrary, her courage had revived. Likening her own sufferings to
+those of Christ, the thought had roused her from her despondency. She
+agreed to "defer to the Church militant, provided it commanded nothing
+impossible."
+
+"Do you think, then, that you are not subject to the Church which is
+upon earth, to our holy father the Pope, to the cardinals, archbishops,
+bishops, and prelates?"
+
+"Yes, certainly, our Lord served."
+
+"Do your voices forbid your submitting to the Church militant?"
+
+"They do not forbid it, our Lord being served _first_."
+
+This firmness did not desert her once on the Saturday; but on the next
+day, the Sunday, Easter Sunday! what must her feelings have been? What
+must have passed in that poor heart when, the sounds of the universal
+holiday enlivening the city, Rouen's five hundred bells ringing out with
+their joyous peals on the air, and the whole Christian world coming to
+life with the Saviour, she remained with death! Could she who, with all
+her inner life of visions and revelations, had not the less docilely
+obeyed the commands of the Church; could she, who till now had believed
+herself in her simplicity "a good girl," as she said, a girl altogether
+submissive to the Church--could she without terror see the Church
+against her?
+
+After all, what, who was she, to undertake to gainsay these prelates,
+these doctors? How dared she speak before so many able men--men who had
+studied? Was there not presumption and damnable pride in an ignorant
+girl's opposing herself to the learned--a poor, simple girl, to men in
+authority? Undoubtedly fears of the kind agitated her mind.
+
+On the other hand, this opposition is not Jeanne's, but that of the
+saints and angels who have dictated her answers to her, and, up to this
+time, sustained her. Wherefore, alas! do they come no more in this
+pressing need of hers? Wherefore is the so long promised deliverance
+delayed? Doubtless the prisoner has put these questions to herself over
+and over again.
+
+There was one means of escaping; this was, without expressly disavowing,
+to forbear affirming, and to say, "It seems to me." The lawyers thought
+it easy for her to pronounce these few simple words; but in her mind, to
+use so doubtful an expression was in reality equivalent to a denial; it
+was abjuring her beautiful dream of heavenly friendships, betraying her
+sweet sisters on high. Better to die. And indeed, the unfortunate,
+rejected by the visible, abandoned by the invisible, by the Church, by
+the world, and by her own heart, was sinking. And the body was following
+the sinking soul.
+
+It so happened that on that very day she had eaten part of a fish which
+the charitable Bishop of Beauvais had sent her, and might have imagined
+herself poisoned. The bishop had an interest in her death; it would have
+put an end to this embarrassing trial, would have got the judge out of
+the scrape; but this was not what the English reckoned upon. The Earl of
+Warwick, in his alarm, said: "The King would not have her by any means
+die a natural death. The King has bought her dear. She must die by
+justice and be burned. See and cure her."
+
+All attention, indeed, was paid her; she was visited and bled, but was
+none the better for it, remaining weak and nearly dying. Whether through
+fear that she should escape thus and die without retracting, or that her
+bodily weakness inspired hopes that her mind would be more easily dealt
+with, the judges made an attempt while she was lying in this state,
+April 18th. They visited her in her chamber, and represented to her that
+she would be in great danger if she did not reconsider, and follow the
+advice of the Church. "It seems to me, indeed," she said, "seeing my
+sickness, that I am in great danger of death. If so, God's will be done;
+I should like to confess, receive my Saviour, and be laid in holy
+ground."
+
+"If you desire the sacraments of the Church, you must do as good
+Catholics do, and submit yourself to it." She made no reply. But, on the
+judge's repeating his words, she said: "If the body die in prison, I
+hope that you will lay it in holy ground; if you do not, I appeal to our
+Lord."
+
+Already, in the course of these examinations, she had expressed one of
+her last wishes. _Question_: "You say that you wear a man's dress by
+God's command, and yet, in case you die, you want a woman's shift?"
+_Answer_: "All I want is to have a long one." This touching answer was
+ample proof that, in this extremity, she was much less occupied with
+care about life than with the fears of modesty.
+
+The doctors preached to their patient for a long time; and he who had
+taken on himself the especial care of exhorting her, Master Nicolas
+Midy, a scholastic of Paris, closed the scene by saying bitterly to her,
+"If you don't obey the Church, you will be abandoned for a Saracen."
+
+"I am a good Christian," she replied meekly; "I was properly baptized,
+and will die like a good Christian."
+
+The slowness of these proceedings drove the English wild with
+impatience. Winchester had hoped to bring the trial to an end before the
+campaign; to have forced a confession from the prisoner, and have
+dishonored King Charles. This blow struck, he would recover Louviers,
+secure Normandy and the Seine, and then repair to Basel to begin another
+war--a theological war--to sit there as arbiter of Christendom, and make
+and unmake popes. At the very moment he had these high designs in view,
+he was compelled to cool his heels, waiting upon what it might please
+this girl to say.
+
+The unlucky Cauchon happened at this precise juncture to have offended
+the chapter of Rouen, from which he was soliciting a decision against
+the Pucelle; he had allowed himself to be addressed beforehand as "My
+lord the Archbishop." Winchester determined to disregard the delays of
+these Normans, and to refer at once to the great theological tribunal,
+the University of Paris.
+
+While waiting for the answer, new attempts were made to overcome the
+resistance of the accused; and both stratagem and terror were brought
+into play. In the course of a second admonition, May 2d, the preacher,
+Master Châtillon, proposed to her to submit the question of the truth of
+her visions to persons of her own party. She did not give in to the
+snare. "As to this," she said, "I depend on my Judge, the King of heaven
+and earth." She did not say this time, as before, "On God and the Pope."
+
+"Well, the Church will give you up, and you will be in danger of fire,
+both soul and body. You will not do what we tell you until you suffer
+body and soul."
+
+They did not stop at vague threats. On the third admonition, which took
+place in her chamber, May 11th, the executioner was sent for, and she
+was told that the torture was ready. But the manoeuvre failed. On the
+contrary, it was found that she had resumed all, and more than all, her
+courage. Raised up after temptation, she seemed to have mounted a step
+nearer the source of grace. "The angel Gabriel," she said, "has appeared
+to strengthen me; it was he--my saints have assured me so. God has been
+ever my master in what I have done; the devil has never had power over
+me. Though you should tear off my limbs and pluck my soul from my body,
+I would say nothing else." The spirit was so visibly manifested in her
+that her last adversary, the preacher Châtillon, was touched, and became
+her defender, declaring that a trial so conducted seemed to him null.
+Cauchon, beside himself with rage, compelled him to silence.
+
+The reply of the University arrived at last. The decision to which it
+came on the twelve articles was that this girl was wholly the devil's;
+was impious in regard to her parents; thirsted for Christian blood, etc.
+This was the opinion given by the faculty of theology. That of law was
+more moderate, declaring her to be deserving of punishment, but with two
+reservations: (1) In case she persisted in her nonsubmission; (2) if
+she were in her right senses.
+
+At the same time the university wrote to the Pope, to the cardinals, and
+to the King of England, lauding the Bishop of Beauvais and setting
+forth, "there seemed to it to have been great gravity observed, and a
+holy and just way of proceeding, which ought to be most satisfactory to
+all."
+
+Armed with this response, some of the assessors[80] were for burning her
+without further delay; which would have been sufficient satisfaction for
+the doctors, whose authority she rejected, but not for the English, who
+required a retraction that should defame King Charles. They had recourse
+to a new admonition and a new preacher, Master Pierre Morice, which was
+attended by no better result. It was in vain that he dwelt upon the
+authority of the University of Paris, "which is the light of all
+science."
+
+"Though I should see the executioner and the fire there," she exclaimed,
+"though I were in the fire, I could only say what I have said."
+
+It was by this time the 23d of May, the day after Pentecost; Winchester
+could remain no longer at Rouen, and it behooved to make an end of the
+business. Therefore it was resolved to get up a great and terrible
+public scene, which should either terrify the recusant into submission,
+or, at the least, blind the people. Loyseleur, Châtillon, and Morice
+were sent to visit her the evening before, to promise her that, if she
+would submit and quit her man's dress, she should be delivered out of
+the hands of the English, and placed in those of the Church.
+
+This fearful farce was enacted in the cemetery of St. Ouen, behind the
+beautifully severe monastic church so called, and which had by that day
+assumed its present appearance. On a scaffolding raised for the purpose
+sat Cardinal Winchester, the two judges, and thirty-three assessors, of
+whom many had their scribes seated at their feet. On another scaffold,
+in the midst of _huissiers_[81] and torturers, was Jeanne, in male
+attire, and also notaries to take down her confessions, and a preacher
+to admonish her; and, at its foot, among the crowd, was remarked a
+strange auditor, the executioner upon his cart, ready to bear her off as
+soon as she should be adjudged his.
+
+The preacher on this day, a famous doctor, Guillaume Erard, conceived
+himself bound, on so fine an opportunity, to give the reins to his
+eloquence; and by his zeal he spoiled all. "O noble house of France," he
+exclaimed, "which wast ever wont to be protectress of the faith, how
+hast thou been abused to ally thyself with a heretic and schismatic!" So
+far the accused had listened patiently; but when the preacher, turning
+toward her, said to her, raising his finger: "It is to thee, Jeanne,
+that I address myself; and I tell thee that thy King is a heretic and
+schismatic," the admirable girl, forgetting all her danger, burst forth
+with, "On my faith, sir, with all due respect, I undertake to tell you,
+and to swear, on pain of my life, that he is the noblest Christian of
+all Christians, the sincerest lover of the faith and of the Church, and
+not what you call him."
+
+"Silence her," called out Cauchon.
+
+The accused adhered to what she had said. All they could obtain from her
+was her consent to submit herself to the Pope. Cauchon replied, "The
+Pope is too far off." He then began to read the sentence of
+condemnation, which had been drawn up beforehand, and in which, among
+other things, it was specified: "And furthermore, you have obstinately
+persisted, in refusing to submit yourself to the holy Father and to the
+council," etc. Meanwhile, Loyseleur and Erard conjured her to have pity
+on herself; on which the Bishop, catching at a shadow of hope,
+discontinued his reading. This drove the English mad; and one of
+Winchester's secretaries told Cauchon it was clear that he favored the
+girl--a charge repeated by the Cardinal's chaplain. "Thou art a liar,"
+exclaimed the Bishop. "And thou," was the retort, "art a traitor to the
+King." These grave personages seemed to be on the point of going to
+cuffs on the judgment-seat.
+
+Erard, not discouraged, threatened, prayed. One while he said, "Jeanne,
+we pity you so!" and another, "Abjure or be burned!" All present evinced
+an interest in the matter, down even to a worthy catchpole (huissier),
+who, touched with compassion, besought her to give way, assuring her
+that she should be taken out of the hands of the English and placed in
+those of the Church. "Well, then," she said, "I will sign." On this
+Cauchon, turning to the Cardinal, respectfully inquired what was to be
+done next. "Admit her to do penance," replied the ecclesiastical prince.
+
+Winchester's secretary drew out of his sleeve a brief revocation, only
+six lines long--that which was given to the world took up six pages--and
+put a pen in her hand, but she could not sign. She smiled and drew a
+circle: the secretary took her hand and guided it to make a cross.
+
+The sentence of grace was a most severe one: "Jeanne, we condemn you,
+out of our grace and moderation, to pass the rest of your days in
+prison, on the bread of grief and water of anguish, and so to mourn your
+sins."
+
+She was admitted by the ecclesiastical judge to do penance, no doubt,
+nowhere save in the prisons of the Church. The ecclesiastic _in pace_,
+however severe it might be, would at the least withdraw her from the
+hands of the English, place her under shelter from their insults, save
+her honor. Judge of her surprise and despair when the Bishop coldly
+said, "Take her back whence you brought her."
+
+Nothing was done; deceived on this wise, she could not fail to retract
+her retractation. Yet, though she had abided by it, the English in their
+fury would not have allowed her to escape. They had come to St. Ouen in
+the hope of at last burning the sorceress, had waited panting and
+breathless to this end; and now they were to be dismissed on this
+fashion, paid with a slip of parchment, a signature, a grimace. At the
+very moment the Bishop discontinued reading the sentence of
+condemnation, stones flew upon the scaffolding without any respect for
+the Cardinal. The doctors were in peril of their lives as they came down
+from their seats into the public place; swords were in all directions
+pointed at their throats. The more moderate among the English confined
+themselves to insulting language--"Priests, you are not earning the
+King's money." The doctors, making off in all haste, said tremblingly,
+"Do not be uneasy, we shall soon have her again."
+
+And it was not the soldiery alone, not the English mob, always so
+ferocious, which displayed this thirst for blood. The better born, the
+great, the lords, were no less sanguinary. The King's man, his tutor,
+the Earl of Warwick, said like the soldiers: "The King's business goes
+on badly; the girl will not be burned."
+
+According to English notions, Warwick was the mirror of worthiness, the
+accomplished Englishman, the perfect gentleman. Brave and devout, like
+his master, Henry V, and the zealous champion of the Established Church,
+he had performed the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as well as many other
+chivalrous expeditions. With all his chivalry, Warwick was not the less
+savagely eager for the death of a woman, and one who was, too, a
+prisoner of war. The best and the most looked-up-to of the English was
+as little deterred by honorable scruples as the rest of his countrymen
+from putting to death on the award of priests, and by fire, her who had
+humbled them by the sword.
+
+The Jews never exhibited the rage against Jesus which the English did
+against the Pucelle. It must be owned that she had wounded them cruelly
+in the most sensible part--in the simple but deep esteem they have for
+themselves. At Orleans the invincible men-at-arms, the famous archers,
+Talbot at their head, had shown their backs; at Jargeau, sheltered by
+the good walls of a fortified town, they had suffered themselves to be
+taken; at Patay they had fled as fast as their legs would carry them,
+fled before a girl. This was hard to be borne, and these taciturn
+English were forever pondering over the disgrace. They had been afraid
+of a girl, and it was not very certain but that, chained as she was,
+they felt fear of her still, though, seemingly, not of her, but of the
+devil, whose agent she was. At least, they endeavored both to believe
+and to have it believed so.
+
+But there was an obstacle in the way of this, for she was said to be a
+virgin; and it was a notorious and well-ascertained fact that the devil
+could not make a compact with a virgin. The coolest head among the
+English, Bedford,[82] the regent, resolved to have the point cleared up;
+and his wife, the Duchess, intrusted the matter to some matrons, who
+declared Jeanne to be a maid; a favorable declaration which turned
+against her by giving rise to another superstitious notion; to wit, that
+her virginity constituted her strength, her power, and that to deprive
+her of it was to disarm her, was to break the charm, and lower her to
+the level of other women.
+
+The poor girl's only defence against such a danger had been wearing male
+attire; though, strange to say, no one had ever seemed able to
+understand her motive for wearing it. All, both friends and enemies,
+were scandalized by it. At the outset, she had been obliged to explain
+her reasons to the woman of Poitiers; and when made prisoner, and under
+the care of the ladies of Luxemburg, those excellent persons prayed her
+to clothe herself as honest girls were wont to do. Above all, the
+English ladies, who have always made a parade of chastity and modesty,
+must have considered her so disguising herself monstrous and
+insufferably indecent. The Duchess of Bedford sent her female attire;
+but by whom? By a man, a tailor. The fellow, with impudent familiarity,
+was about to pass it over her head, and, when she pushed him away, laid
+his unmannnerly hand upon her--his tailor's hand on that hand which had
+borne the flag of France. She boxed his ears.
+
+If women could not understand this feminine question, how much less
+could priests! They quoted the text of a council held in the fourth
+century, which anathematized such changes of dress; not seeing that the
+prohibition specially applied to a period when manners had been barely
+retrieved from pagan impurities. The doctors belonging to the party of
+Charles VII, the apologists of the Pucelle, find exceeding difficulty in
+justifying her on this head. One of them--thought to be Gerson--makes
+the gratuitous supposition that the moment she dismounted from her
+horse, she was in the habit of resuming woman's apparel; confessing that
+Esther and Judith had had recourse to more natural and feminine means
+for their triumphs over the enemies of God's people. Entirely
+preoccupied with the soul, these theologians seem to have held the body
+cheap; provided the letter, the written law, be followed, the soul will
+be saved; the flesh may take its chance. A poor and simple girl may be
+pardoned her inability to distinguish so clearly.
+
+On the Friday and the Saturday the unfortunate prisoner, despoiled of
+her man's dress, had much to fear. Brutality, furious hatred, vengeance,
+might severally incite the cowards to degrade her before she perished,
+to sully what they were about to burn. Besides, they might be tempted to
+varnish their infamy by a "reason of state," according to the notions of
+the day--by depriving her of her virginity they would undoubtedly
+destroy that secret power of which the English entertained such great
+dread, who perhaps might recover their courage when they knew that,
+after all, she was but a woman. According to her confessor, to whom she
+divulged the fact, an Englishman, not a common soldier, but a
+_gentleman_, a lord, patriotically devoted himself to this
+execution--bravely undertook to violate a girl laden with fetters, and,
+being unable to effect his wishes, rained blows upon her.
+
+"On the Sunday morning, Trinity Sunday, when it was time for her to
+rise--as she told him who speaks--she said to her English guards, 'Leave
+me, that I may get up.' One of them took off her woman's dress, emptied
+the bag in which was the man's apparel, and said to her, 'Get up.'
+'Gentlemen,' she said, 'you know that dress is forbidden me; excuse me,
+I will not put it on.' The point was contested till noon; when, being
+compelled to go out for some bodily want, she put it on. When she came
+back, they would give her no other, despite her entreaties."
+
+In reality, it was not to the interest of the English that she should
+resume her man's dress, and so make null and void a retractation
+obtained with such difficulty. But at this moment, their rage no longer
+knew any bounds. Saintrailles had just made a bold attempt upon Rouen.
+It would have been a lucky hit to have swept off the judges from the
+judgment seat, and have carried Winchester and Bedford to Poitiers; the
+latter was, subsequently, all but taken on his return, between Rouen and
+Paris. As long as this accursed girl lived, who beyond a doubt continued
+in prison to practise her sorceries, there was no safety for the
+English; perish she must.
+
+The assessors, who had notice instantly given them of her change of
+dress, found some hundred English in the court to obstruct their
+passage; who, thinking that if these doctors entered they might spoil
+all, threatened them with their axes and swords, and chased them out,
+calling them "traitors of Armagnacs." Cauchon, introduced with much
+difficulty, assumed an air of gayety to pay his court to Warwick, and
+said with a laugh, "She is caught."
+
+On the Monday he returned, along with the Inquisitor and eight
+assessors, to question the Pucelle, and ask her why she had resumed that
+dress. She made no excuse, but, bravely facing the danger, said that the
+dress was fitter for her as long as she was guarded by men, and that
+faith had not been kept with her. Her saints, too, had told her "that it
+was great pity she had abjured to save her life." Still, she did not
+refuse to resume woman's dress. "Put me in a seemly and safe prison,"
+she said; "I will be good, and do whatever the Church shall wish."
+
+On leaving her the Bishop encountered Warwick and a crowd of English;
+and to show himself a good Englishman he said in their tongue,
+"Farewell, farewell." This joyous adieu was about synonymous with "Good
+evening, good evening; all's over."
+
+On the Tuesday, the judges got up at the Archbishop's palace a court of
+assessors as they best might; some of them had assisted at the first
+sittings only, others at none; in fact, composed of men of all sorts,
+priests, legists, and even three physicians. The judges recapitulated to
+them what had taken place, and asked their opinion. This opinion, quite
+different from what was expected, was that the prisoner should be
+summoned, and her act of abjuration be read over to her. Whether this
+was in the power of the judges is doubtful. In the midst of the fury and
+swords of a raging soldiery, there was in reality no judge, and no
+possibility of judgment. Blood was the one thing wanted; and that of the
+judges was, perhaps, not far from flowing. They hastily drew up a
+summons, to be served the next morning at eight o'clock; she was not to
+appear, save to be burned.
+
+Cauchon sent her a confessor in the morning, brother Martin l'Advenu,
+"to prepare her for her death, and persuade her to repentance. And when
+he apprised her of the death she was to die that day, she began to cry
+out grievously, to give way, and tear her hair: 'Alas! am I to be
+treated so horribly and cruelly? must my body, pure as from birth, and
+which was never contaminated, be this day consumed and reduced to ashes?
+Ha! ha! I would rather be beheaded seven times over than be burned on
+this wise! Oh! I make my appeal to God, the great judge of the wrongs
+and grievances done me!'"
+
+After this burst of grief, she recovered herself and confessed; she then
+asked to communicate. The brother was embarrassed; but, consulting the
+Bishop, the latter told him to administer the sacrament, "and whatever
+else she might ask." Thus, at the very moment he condemned her as a
+relapsed heretic, and cut her off from the Church, he gave her all that
+the Church gives to her faithful. Perhaps a last sentiment of humanity
+awoke in the heart of the wicked judge; he considered it enough to burn
+the poor creature, without driving her to despair, and damning her.
+Besides, it was attempted to do it privately, and the eucharist was
+brought without stole and light. But the monk complained, and the Church
+of Rouen, duly warned, was delighted to show what it thought of the
+judgment pronounced by Cauchon; it sent along with the body of Christ
+numerous torches and a large escort of priests, who sang litanies, and,
+as they passed through the streets, told the kneeling people, "Pray for
+her."
+
+After partaking of the communion, which she received with abundance of
+tears, she perceived the Bishop, and addressed him with the words,
+"Bishop, I die through you." And, again, "Had you put me in the prisons
+of the Church, and given me ghostly keepers, this would not have
+happened. And for this I summon you to answer before God."
+
+Then, seeing among the bystanders Pierre Morice, one of the preachers by
+whom she had been addressed, she said to him, "Ah, Master Pierre, where
+shall I be this evening?"
+
+"Have you not good hope in the Lord?"
+
+"Oh! yes; God to aid, I shall be in paradise."
+
+It was nine o'clock: she was dressed in female attire, and placed on a
+cart. On one side of her was brother Martin l'Advenu; the constable,
+Massieu, was on the other. The Augustine monk, Brother Isambart, who had
+already displayed much charity and courage, would not quit her.
+
+Up to this moment the Pucelle had never despaired, with the exception,
+perhaps, of her temptation in the Passion Week. While saying, as she at
+times would say, "These English will kill me," she in reality did not
+think so. She did not imagine that she could ever be deserted. She had
+faith in her King, in the good people of France. She had said expressly:
+"There will be some disturbance, either in prison or at the trial, by
+which I shall be delivered, greatly, victoriously delivered." But though
+King and people deserted her, she had another source of aid, and a far
+more powerful and certain one from her friends above, her kind and dear
+saints. When she was assaulting St. Pierre, and deserted by her
+followers, her saints sent an invisible army to her aid. How could they
+abandon their obedient girl, they who had so often promised her "safety
+and deliverance"?
+
+What then must her thoughts have been when she saw that she must die;
+when, carried in a cart, she passed through a trembling crowd, under the
+guard of eight hundred Englishmen armed with sword and lance? She wept
+and bemoaned herself, yet reproached neither her King nor her saints.
+She was only heard to utter, "O Rouen, Rouen! must I then die here?"
+
+The term of her sad journey was the old market-place, the fish-market.
+Three scaffolds had been raised; on one was the episcopal and royal
+chair, the throne of the Cardinal of England, surrounded by the stalls
+of his prelates; on another were to figure the principal personages of
+the mournful drama, the preacher, the judges, and the bailiff, and,
+lastly, the condemned one; apart was a large scaffolding of plaster,
+groaning under a weight of wood--nothing had been grudged the stake,
+which struck terror by its height alone. This was not only to add to the
+solemnity of the execution, but was done with the intent that, from the
+height to which it was reared, the executioner might not get at it save
+at the base, and that to light it only, so that he would be unable to
+cut short the torments and relieve the sufferer, as he did with others,
+sparing them the flames.
+
+On this occasion the important point was that justice should not be
+defrauded of her due or a dead body be committed to the flames; they
+desired that she should be really burned alive, and that, placed on the
+summit of this mountain of wood, and commanding the circle of lances and
+of swords, she might be seen from every part of the market-place. There
+was reason to suppose that being slowly, tediously burned, before the
+eyes of a curious crowd, she might at last be surprised into some
+weakness, that something might escape her which could be set down as a
+disavowal, at the least some confused words which might be interpreted
+at pleasure, perhaps low prayers, humiliating cries for mercy, such as
+proceed from a woman in despair.
+
+The frightful ceremony began with a sermon. Master Nicolas Midy, one of
+the lights of the University of Paris, preached upon the edifying text:
+"When one limb of the Church is sick, the whole Church is sick." He
+wound up with the formula: "Jeanne, go in peace; the Church can no
+longer defend thee."
+
+The ecclesiastical judge, the Bishop of Beauvais, then benignly
+exhorted her to take care of her soul and to recall all her misdeeds, in
+order that she might awaken to true repentance. The assessors had ruled
+that it was the law to read over her abjuration to her; the Bishop did
+nothing of the sort. He feared her denials, her disclaimers. But the
+poor girl had no thought of so chicaning away life; her mind was fixed
+on far other subjects. Even before she was exhorted to repentance, she
+had knelt down and invoked God, the Virgin, St. Michael, and St.
+Catharine, pardoning all and asking pardon, saying to the bystanders,
+"Pray for me!" In particular, she besought the priests to say each a
+mass for her soul. And all this so devoutly, humbly, and touchingly
+that, sympathy becoming contagious, no one could any longer contain
+himself; the Bishop of Beauvais melted into tears, the Bishop of
+Boulogne sobbed, and the very English cried and wept as well, Winchester
+with the rest.
+
+Might it be in this moment of universal tenderness, of tears, of
+contagious weakness, that the unhappy girl, softened, and relapsing into
+the mere woman, confessed that she saw clearly she had erred, and that,
+apparently, she had been deceived when promised deliverance? This is a
+point on which we cannot implicitly rely on the interested testimony of
+the English. Nevertheless, it would betray scant knowledge of human
+nature to doubt, with her hopes so frustrated, her having wavered in her
+faith. Whether she confessed to this effect in words is uncertain; but I
+will confidently affirm that she owned it in thought.
+
+Meanwhile the judges, for a moment put out of countenance, had recovered
+their usual bearing, and the Bishop of Beauvais, drying his eyes, began
+to read the act of condemnation. He reminded the guilty one of all her
+crimes, of her schism, idolatry, invocation of demons, how she had been
+admitted to repentance, and how, "seduced by the Prince of Lies, she had
+fallen, O grief! 'like the dog which returns to his vomit.' Therefore,
+we pronounce you to be a rotten limb, and, as such, to be lopped off
+from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power, praying it at
+the same time to relax its sentence and to spare you death and the
+mutilation of your members."
+
+Deserted thus by the Church, she put her whole trust in God. She asked
+for the cross. An Englishman handed her a cross which he made out of a
+stick; she took it, rudely fashioned as it was, with not less devotion,
+kissed it, and placed it under her garments, next to her skin. But what
+she desired was the crucifix belonging to the Church, to have it before
+her eyes till she breathed her last. The good huissier Massieu and
+Brother Isambart interfered with such effect that it was brought her
+from St. Sauveur's. While she was embracing this crucifix, and Brother
+Isambart was encouraging her, the English began to think all this
+exceedingly tedious; it was now noon at least; the soldiers grumbled,
+and the captains called out: "What's this, priest; do you mean us to
+dine here?"
+
+Then, losing patience, and without waiting for the order from the
+bailiff, who alone had authority to dismiss her to death, they sent two
+constables to take her out of the hands of the priests. She was seized
+at the foot of the tribunal by the men-at-arms, who dragged her to the
+executioner with the words, "Do thy office." The fury of the soldiery
+filled all present with horror; and many there, even of the judges, fled
+the spot, that they might see no more.
+
+When she found herself brought down to the market-place, surrounded by
+English, laying rude hands on her, nature asserted her rights and the
+flesh was troubled. Again she cried out, "O Rouen, thou art then to be
+my last abode!" She said no more, and, in this hour of fear and trouble,
+did not sin with her lips.
+
+She accused neither her King nor her holy ones. But when she set foot on
+the top of the pile, on viewing this great city, this motionless and
+silent crowd, she could not refrain from exclaiming, "Ah! Rouen, Rouen,
+much do I fear you will suffer from my death!" She who had saved the
+people, and whom that people deserted, gave voice to no other sentiment
+when dying--admirable sweetness of soul!--than that of compassion for
+it.
+
+She was made fast under the infamous placard, mitred with a mitre on
+which was read, "Heretic, relapser, apostate, idolater."
+
+And then the executioner set fire to the pile. She saw this from above
+and uttered a cry. Then, as the brother who was exhorting her paid no
+attention to the fire, forgetting herself in her fear for him, she
+insisted on his descending.
+
+The proof that up to this period she had made no express recantation is,
+that the unhappy Cauchon was obliged--no doubt by the high satanic will
+which presided over the whole--to proceed to the foot of the pile,
+obliged to face his victim to endeavor to extract some admission from
+her. All that he obtained was a few words, enough to rack his soul. She
+said to him mildly what she had already said: "Bishop, I die through
+you. If you had put me into the Church prisons, this would not have
+happened." No doubt hopes had been entertained that, on finding herself
+abandoned by her King, she would at last accuse and defame him. To the
+last, she defended him: "Whether I have done well or ill, my King is
+faultless; it was not he who counselled me."
+
+Meanwhile the flames rose. When they first seized her, the unhappy girl
+shrieked for holy _water_--this must have been the cry of fear. But,
+soon recovering, she called only on God, on her angels and her saints.
+She bore witness to them, "Yes, my voices were from God, my voices have
+not deceived me." The fact that all her doubts vanished at this trying
+moment must be taken as a proof that she accepted death as the promised
+deliverance; that she no longer understood her salvation in the Judaic
+and material sense, as until now she had done, that at length she saw
+clearly; and that, rising above all shadows, her gifts of illumination
+and of sanctity were at the final hour made perfect unto her.
+
+The great testimony she thus bore is attested by the sworn and compelled
+witness of her death, by the Dominican who mounted the pile with her,
+whom she forced to descend, but who spoke to her from its foot, listened
+to her, and held out to her the crucifix.
+
+There is yet another witness of this sainted death, a most grave
+witness, who must himself have been a saint. This witness, whose name
+history ought to preserve, was the Augustine monk already mentioned,
+Brother Isambart de la Pierre. During the trial he had hazarded his life
+by counselling the Pucelle, and yet, though so clearly pointed out to
+the hate of the English, he persisted in accompanying her in the cart,
+procured the parish crucifix for her, and comforted her in the midst of
+the raging multitude, both on the scaffold where she was interrogated
+and at the stake.
+
+Twenty years afterward, the two venerable friars, simple monks, vowed to
+poverty and having nothing to hope or fear in this world, bear witness
+to the scene we have just described: "We heard her," they say, "in the
+midst of the flames invoke her saints, her archangel; several times she
+called on her Saviour. At the last, as her head sunk on her bosom, she
+shrieked, 'Jesus!'"
+
+"Ten thousand men wept. A few of the English alone laughed, or
+endeavored to laugh. One of the most furious among them had sworn that
+he would throw a fagot on the pile. Just as he brought it she breathed
+her last. He was taken ill. His comrades led him to a tavern to recruit
+his spirits by drink, but he was beyond recovery. 'I saw,' he exclaimed,
+in his frantic despair, 'I saw a dove fly out of her mouth with her last
+sigh.' Others had read in the flames the word 'Jesus,' which she so
+often repeated. The executioner repaired in the evening to Brother
+Isambart, full of consternation, and confessed himself; he felt
+persuaded that God would never pardon him. One of the English King's
+secretaries said aloud, on returning from the dismal scene: 'We are
+lost; we have burned a saint.'"
+
+Though these words fell from an enemy's mouth, they are not the less
+important, and will live, uncontradicted by the future. Yes, whether
+considered religiously or patriotically, Jeanne d'Arc was a saint.
+
+Where find a finer legend than this true history? Still, let us beware
+of converting it into a legend; let us piously preserve its every trait,
+even such as are most akin to human nature, and respect its terrible and
+touching reality.[83]
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES VII ISSUES HIS PRAGMATIC SANCTION
+
+EMANCIPATION OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH
+
+A.D. 1438
+
+W. H. JERVIS R. F. ROHRBACHER
+
+
+  "No two words," says Smedley, "convey less distinct meaning
+  to English ears than 'pragmatic sanction.' Perhaps 'a
+  well-considered ordinance' may in some degree represent
+  them, _i.e._, an ordinance which has been fully discussed by
+  men practised in state affairs." Carlyle defines "pragmatic
+  sanction" as "the received title for ordinances of a very
+  irrevocable nature, which a sovereign makes in affairs that
+  belong wholly to himself, or what he reckons his own
+  rights." A dictionary definition calls it "an imperial edict
+  operating as a fundamental law." The term was probably first
+  applied to certain decrees of the Byzantine emperors for
+  regulating their provinces and towns, and later it was given
+  to imperial decrees in the West. In the present case it is
+  applied to the limitations set to the power of the pope in
+  France.
+
+  In the Council of Constance, 1414-1418, at which decrees
+  were passed subordinating the pope as well as the whole
+  Church to the authority of a general council, Gallican or
+  French opinion on this subject won its first great victory.
+  But this triumph introduced into the Western Church an
+  element of strife which resulted in calamities scarcely less
+  grave than those of the Great Schism of 1378-1417, during
+  which different parties adhered to rival popes. From the
+  Council of Constance may be dated the formal divergence of
+  the Gallican from the Ultramontane or strictly Roman church
+  government.
+
+  Pope Martin V, who was elected by the Council of Constance
+  after it had deposed John XXIII, Gregory XII, and Benedict
+  XIII, is generally considered to have assented to all its
+  decrees. In 1431, on the death of Martin V, Eugenius IV
+  succeeded to the papal throne. A council had been convened
+  at Pavia in 1423. After a few weeks it was transferred to
+  Siena, and subsequently to Basel. Fearing that it would
+  follow the policy of Constance, Eugenius (1431) attempted to
+  dissolve it and to have it reconvened at Bologna under his
+  own eye. A rupture followed between Pope and council,
+  resulting in years of confused strife.
+
+  In all this confusion our historians, Jervis and Rohrbacher,
+  distinguish the leading events, the most significant of
+  which was the issuing of the Pragmatic Sanction by Charles
+  VII of France. This ordinance is known, from the place of
+  its promulgation, as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, and
+  is sometimes called the "Palladium of France," also the
+  "Magna Charta of the Gallican Church."
+
+
+W. HENLEY JERVIS
+
+The position assumed by the Gallican Church at this junction was
+peculiar and in some respects questionable. It declared decidedly in
+favor of the Council of Basel; many French prelates repaired thither,
+and ambassadors were sent by the King, Charles VII, to Pope Eugenius, to
+beseech him to support the authority of the synod, and to protest
+against its dissolution. The fathers stood firm at their posts,
+appealing to the principles solemnly asserted at Constance, that the
+pope is bound in certain specified cases to submit to an ecumenical
+council, and that the latter cannot be translated, prorogued, or
+dissolved without its own consent. The gift of infallibility, they
+affirmed, resides in the collective Church. It does not belong to the
+popes, several of whom have erred concerning the faith. The Church alone
+has authority to enact laws which are binding on the whole body of the
+faithful.
+
+Now, the authority of general councils is identical with that of the
+Church. This was expressly determined by the Council of Constance, and
+acknowledged by Pope Martin V. The pope is the ministerial head of the
+Church, but he is not its absolute sovereign; on the contrary, facts
+prove that he is subject to the jurisdiction of the Church; for
+well-known instances are on record of popes being deposed on the score
+of erroneous doctrine and immoral life, whereas no pope has ever
+attempted to condemn or excommunicate the Church. Both the pope and the
+Church have received authority to bind and loose; but the Church has
+practically exerted that authority against the pope, whereas the latter
+has never ventured to take any such step against the Church. In fine,
+the words of Christ himself are decisive of the question--"If any man
+neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto you as a heathen man and a
+publican." This injunction was addressed to St. Peter equally with the
+rest of the disciples.
+
+The council proceeded to cite Eugenius by a formal monition to appear in
+person at Basel; and on his failing to comply, they signified that on
+the expiration of a further interval of sixty days ulterior means would
+be put in force against him. Their firmness, added to the pressing
+solicitations of the emperor Sigismund, at length induced the Pope to
+yield. He reconciled himself with the council in December, 1433;
+acknowledged that it had been legitimately convoked; approved its
+proceedings up to that date; and cancelled the act by which he had
+pronounced its dissolution.
+
+Elated by their triumph, the Basilian fathers commenced in earnest the
+task of Church reform, and passed several decrees of a character
+vexatious to the Pope, particularly one for the total abolition of
+annates. A second breach was the consequence. Eugenius, under pretence
+of furthering the negotiation then pending for the reunion of the Greek
+and Latin branches of the Church, published in 1437 a bull dissolving
+the Council of Basel, and summoning another to meet at Ferrara. The
+assembly at Basel retorted by declaring the Pope contumacious, and
+suspending him from the exercise of all authority. Both parties
+proceeded eventually to the last extremities. The council, after
+proclaiming afresh, as "Catholic verities," that a general council has
+power over the pope, and cannot be transferred or dissolved but by its
+own act, passed a definitive sentence in its thirty-fourth session, June
+25, 1439, deposing Eugenius from the papal throne. The Pope retaliated
+by stigmatizing the Fathers of Basel as schismatical and heretical,
+cancelling their acts, and excommunicating their president, the Cardinal
+Archbishop of Arles.
+
+Meanwhile an energetic and independent line of action was adopted by the
+Government in France. The Crown, in concert with the heads of the
+Church, availed itself of a train of events, which had so seriously
+damaged the prestige of the papacy to make a decisive advance in the
+path of practical reform and to establish the long-cherished Gallican
+privileges on a secure basis. For this purpose Charles VII assembled a
+great national council at Bourges, in July, 1438, at which he presided
+in person, surrounded by the princes of his family and by all the most
+eminent dignitaries spiritual and temporal; and here was promulgated the
+memorable ordinance known as the "Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges."
+
+The French Church, it must be observed, did not recognize the deposition
+of Pope Eugenius, but adhered to his obedience, rejecting Felix V, whom
+the Council of Basel elected to succeed him, as a pretender. It
+continued, nevertheless, to support the council and to assert its
+supreme legislative authority. Hence there arises a considerable
+difficulty _in limine_ as to the character of the proceedings at
+Bourges. For the deposition of Eugenius was either a rightful and valid
+exercise of conciliar authority or it was not. If it was not--if the
+council had wrongfully or uncanonically condemned the successor of
+Peter--how could it be infallible? and when should its legislation in
+any other particulars be indisputable? On the other hand, if the
+deposition was a valid one, with what consistency could the French
+continue to regard Eugenius as their legitimate pastor? It was a knotty
+dilemma.
+
+The position, however, though logically open to objections, was not
+without its practical advantages. For, since France maintained a good
+understanding with both the contending parties, both found it conducive
+to their interests to send deputations to the Council of Bourges: Pope
+Eugenius, with a view to obtain its support for the rival council which
+he had opened at Ferrara; the Fathers of Basel, in order to make known
+their decrees, which, as agreeing with the received doctrine of Gallican
+theologians, would, it was hoped, meet with a cordial welcome throughout
+France. The assembly at Bourges did not fail to profit by these
+exceptional circumstances. It accepted the decrees of Basel, yet not
+absolutely, but after critical examination and with certain
+modification; a course which, by implication, asserted a right to
+legislate for the concerns of the French Church even independently of a
+general council acknowledged to be orthodox. The following explanation
+of this proceeding was inserted in the preamble of the celebrated
+statute agreed upon by the authorities at Bourges. It is there stated
+that this policy was adopted, "not from any hesitation as to the
+authority of the Council of Basel to enact ecclesiastical decrees, but
+because it was judged advisable, under the circumstances and
+requirements of the French realm and nation." So that it appears, on the
+whole, that while the French professed great zeal on this occasion for
+the dogma of the superiority of a general council over the pope, the
+principle practically illustrated at Bourges was that of a supremacy of
+a national council over every other ecclesiastical authority. Such were
+the anomalies which arose out of the strange necessities of the time.
+
+The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges embraces twenty-three articles. The
+first treats of the authority of general councils, and of the time and
+manner of convening and celebrating them. The second relates to
+ecclesiastical elections, which are enjoined to be made hereafter in
+strict accordance with the canons, by the cathedral, collegiate, and
+conventual chapters. Reserves, annates, and "expective graces" are
+abolished; the rights of patrons are to be respected, provided their
+nominees be graduates of the universities and otherwise well qualified.
+The pope retains only a veto in case of unfitness or uncanonical
+election, and the nominations to benefices "_in curia vacantia_,"
+_i.e._, of which the incumbents may happen to die at Rome or within two
+days' journey of the pontifical residence. The king and other princes
+may occasionally _recommend_ or _request_ the promotion of persons of
+special merit, but without threats or violent pressure of any kind.
+
+Other articles regulate the order of ecclesiastical appeals, which, with
+the exception of the "_causa majores_" specified by law, and those
+relating to the elections in cathedral and conventual churches, are
+henceforth to be decided on the spot by the ordinary judges; appeals are
+to be carried in all cases to the court immediately superior; no case to
+be referred to the pope "_omisso medio_," _i.e._, without passing
+through the intermediate tribunals. The remaining clauses consist of
+regulations for the performance of divine service, and various matters
+of discipline. The reader will remember that Pope Eugenius, on the
+occasion of his temporary reconciliation with the Council of Basel in
+1433, expressed his approbation of all its synodal acts up to that date;
+and this sanction of their validity is held by Gallicans to extend to
+the period of the second and final rupture in 1437. It follows that the
+provisions of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, so far as they coincide
+with the decrees of Basel prior to 1437, were authorized by the holy
+see; and this includes them all, with two exceptions.
+
+The Pragmatic Sanction was registered by the Parliament of Paris on
+July 13, 1439; becoming thereby part of the statute law of France. Its
+publication caused universal satisfaction throughout the kingdom. At
+Rome, on the other hand, it was indignantly censured and resolutely
+opposed. Eugenius IV vainly strove to obtain the King's consent to an
+alteration of some of its details. Nicholas V protested against it
+without effect; but the superior genius and subtle measures of Pius II
+were more successful. This Pontiff denounced the Pragmatic at the
+Council of Mantua in 1460 as "a blot which disfigured the Church of
+France; a decree which no ecumenical council would have passed nor any
+pope have confirmed; a principle of confusion in the ecclesiastical
+hierarchy. Since it had been in force, the laity had become the masters
+and judges of the clergy; the power of the spiritual sword could no
+longer be exerted except at the good pleasure of the secular authority.
+The Roman pontiff, whose diocese embraced the world, whose jurisdiction
+is not bounded even by the ocean, possessed only such extent of power in
+France as the parliament might see fit to allow him." The ambassadors of
+Charles VII, however, reminded his holiness that the Pragmatic Sanction
+was founded on the canons of Constance and Basel, which had been
+ratified by his predecessors; and when the Pope proceeded to threaten
+France with the interdict, and to prohibit all appeal from his decisions
+to a future council, the King caused his procureur-general, Jean Dauvet,
+to publish an official protest against these acts of violence,
+concluding with a solemn appeal to the judgment of the Church Catholic
+assembled by the representation. While awaiting that event, Charles
+declared himself resolved to uphold the laws and regulations which had
+been sanctioned by previous councils.
+
+Louis XI, urged by alternate menaces, entreaties, and flattery from
+Rome, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction shortly after his accession. This
+step accorded well with his own arbitrary temper; for he could not
+endure the privilege of free election by the cathedral and monastic
+chapters; nor was he less jealous of the influence exerted, under the
+shelter of that privilege, by the high feudal nobility in the disposal
+of church preferment. He seems to have expected, moreover, that while
+ostensibly conceding the right of patronage to the apostolic see, he
+should be able to retain the real power in his own hands. The event
+disappointed his calculations. No sooner was the decree of Bourges
+rescinded than the Pope resumed and enforced his claim to the provision
+of benefices in France. Simony and the whole train of concomitant abuses
+reappeared more scandalously than ever; and Louis found himself despised
+by his subjects as the dupe of papal artifice.
+
+The parliamentary courts, meanwhile, assumed a determined attitude in
+defence of the right of election guaranteed by the Pragmatic Sanction.
+They pronounced the abolition of that act illegal, and treated it as
+null and void; they insisted on their own authority in entertaining
+appeals against ecclesiastical abuses; they eagerly supported anyone who
+showed a disposition to withstand the pretensions of Rome in the matter
+of patronage. The King, smarting under the trickery of the Pope, made no
+attempt to restrain them in this line of conduct; and the result was
+that the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction was never fully executed,
+having never been legalized by the forms of the constitution. On the
+other hand, the popes so far maintained the advantage they had extorted
+from Louis that the ancient franchise of the Church as to elections
+became virtually extinct in France.
+
+Things remained in this unsettled state during the reigns of Louis XI,
+Charles VIII, and Louis XII. The latter Prince, on coming to the throne,
+published an edict reëstablishing the Pragmatic Sanction; and this step,
+added to his ambitious enterprises in Italy, brought him into hostile
+collision with Pope Julius II. The King, unwilling to make war on the
+head of the Church without some semblance of ecclesiastical sanction,
+convoked a council at Tours in September, 1510, and consulted the clergy
+on a series of questions arising out of the disturbed state of his
+relations with Rome. They decided, in accordance with the known views
+and wishes of the sovereign, that it is lawful for an independent
+prince, if unjustly attacked, to defend himself against the pope by
+force of arms; to withdraw for a time from his obedience; to take
+possession of the territory of the Church, not with the purpose of
+retaining it, but as a temporary measure of self-protection; and to
+resist the pretensions of the pontiff to powers not rightfully belonging
+to him. Citations to appear in Rome might, under such circumstances, be
+safely disregarded; as also papal censures, which would be null and
+void. If the emergency should arise, the council added, the king ought
+to be governed by the ancient principles of ecclesiastical law, as
+confirmed and reënacted by the Pragmatic Sanction.
+
+The Gallican clergy sent a deputation to Pope Julius on this occasion to
+entreat him to adopt a more conciliatory policy toward the princes of
+Christendom; and they determined, in case their advice should be
+fruitless, to demand the convocation of a general council to take
+cognizance of the Pope's conduct, and prescribe the measures necessary
+for the guidance and welfare of the Church. An ecclesiastical congress,
+calling itself a council-general, but altogether unworthy of that august
+title, was held, in fact, in the following year at Pisa, under the
+auspices of the King of France and the emperor Maximilian. The Pope
+refused to appear there, and convoked a rival synod at Rome, summoning
+the cardinals who had authorized the meeting at Pisa to present
+themselves at his court within sixty days. On the expiration of this
+term he publicly excommunicated them, degraded them from their dignity,
+and deprived them of their preferments.
+
+Thus the Western Church once more exhibited the spectacle of a "house
+divided against itself," as during the scandalous strife between the
+synods of Basel and Florence; and for some time a formal schism appeared
+imminent. The so-called Council of Pisa consisted of the four rebellious
+cardinals, twenty Gallican prelates, several abbots and other
+dignitaries, the envoys of the King of France, deputies from some of the
+French universities, and a considerable number of doctors of the Faculty
+of Paris. This assembly justified its position on the ground that there
+are extraordinary cases in which a council may be called without the
+intervention of the pope; and that, since the present Pontiff had
+neglected to obey the decree of the Council of Constance which enjoined
+a similar celebration at the interval of every ten years, the cardinals
+were bound to take the initiative in the matter, according to a solemn
+engagement which they had made in the conclave when Julius was elected.
+After repeating the stereotyped formula concerning the supreme authority
+of general councils, and the imperative necessity of a reformation of
+the Church in its head and in its members, the fathers addressed
+themselves professedly to the herculean task thus indicated; but little
+or nothing was effected of any practical importance.
+
+
+RENÉ FRANÇOIS ROHRBACHER[84]
+
+Charles held an assembly at Bourges in the month of July, 1438. He
+attended this himself, with the Dauphin, his son, afterward Louis XI,
+many princes of the blood, and other nobles, with a great number of
+bishops and doctors of the Church. The deputies of Pope Eugenius IV and
+those of the prelates of Basel were heard one after another.
+
+The result of this Assembly of Bourges was an ordinance and twenty-three
+articles which were called the "Pragmatic Sanction," a name introduced
+under the ancient emperors. In this were adopted, sometimes with
+modifications, most of the decrees of Basel. Among them the first was
+conceived in these terms: "General councils shall be held every ten
+years, and the pope, according to the opinion of the council which is
+closing, shall designate the place of the next council, which cannot be
+changed except for most important reasons and by the advice of the
+cardinals. As to the authority of the general council, the decrees
+published at Constance are renewed, by which it is said that the general
+council holds its power immediately from Jesus Christ; that all persons,
+even of papal dignity, are subject to it in that which regards the
+faith, the extirpation of schism, and the reformation of the Church in
+the head and in the members; and that all must obey it, even the pope,
+who is punishable if he transgresses it. Consequently, the Council of
+Basel states that it is legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, and
+that no one, not even the pope, can dissolve, transfer, nor prolong it,
+without the consent of the fathers of the council."
+
+The other articles may be reduced principally to the following
+propositions: Canonical elections shall be held, and the pope shall not
+reserve the bishoprics and other elective benefices. Expectant pardons
+shall be abolished. Graduates shall be preferred to others in the
+conferring of benefices, and for this reason they shall suggest their
+degrees during Lent. All ecclesiastical causes of the provinces at a
+distance of four days' journey from Rome shall be tried in the place
+where they arise, except major causes and those of churches which are
+immediately dependent on the holy see. In the case of appeals, the order
+of the tribunals shall be preserved. No one shall ever appeal to the
+pope without passing previously through the intermediate tribunal. If
+anyone, believing himself injured by an intermediate tribunal subject to
+the pope, makes an appeal to the holy see, the pope shall name the
+judges from the same places, unless there should be important reasons
+for bringing the cause directly to Rome. Frivolous appeals are punished.
+The celebration of divine service is regulated and spectacles in
+churches are forbidden. The abuse of ecclesiastical censures is
+repressed, and it is declared that no one is obliged to shun
+excommunicated persons, unless they have been proclaimed by name, or
+else that the censure shall be so notorious that it cannot be denied or
+excused. Such are the principal matters of the Pragmatic Sanction of
+Bourges. It was registered at the Parliament of Paris, July 13, 1439;
+but the King ordered its execution from the day of its date, 1438.
+
+The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had a little defect; it was radically
+null; for every contract is null which is not consented to by both of
+the contracting parties. Now the Pragmatic Sanction was a contract
+between the churches of France and the pope to regulate their mutual
+relations. The consent of the pope to it was therefore absolutely
+necessary, the more especially as he was the superior. For if one must
+admit that a general council is superior to the pope, the Assembly of
+Bourges was certainly not a general council. Moreover, the first use
+that it made of its Pragmatic Sanction was to break it--and happily. In
+its first articles, it had recognized the Council of Basel as ecumenical
+and as superior to Pope Eugenius IV, with obligation to everyone to obey
+its decrees. Now, the following year, 1439, the Council of Basel deposes
+Eugenius IV, and substitutes for him Felix V, with obligation to
+everyone, under penalty of anathema, to reject the first and submit to
+the second. Nevertheless France does neither the one nor the other; she
+continues to recognize Eugenius IV, and derides the pope of Ripaille and
+of Basel, as she will declare in a new assembly of Bourges in 1440.
+Above certain laws which men write on sheets of paper, with a
+goose-quill and ink, they bear in themselves another law, written by
+the hand of God, and which is good sense. Happy the nations which never
+depart from this living and general law, or which, at least, know enough
+to return to it promptly!
+
+Accordingly, September 2, 1440, in the new Assembly of Bourges, King
+Charles VII published a declaration by which he commanded all his
+subjects to yield obedience to Pope Eugenius, with prohibition to
+recognize another pope or to circulate among the public any letters or
+despatches bearing the name of any other one whomsoever who pretended to
+the pontificate. Nevertheless, Monsieur de Savoie, for so Charles VII
+called the antipope, was united to him by ties of blood. This
+declaration of the King and of the Assembly of Bourges was religiously
+observed in all France, except in the University of Paris, where they
+declared openly enough for the antipope. The reason of this is very
+simple: the doctors of the Church in Paris dominated in the mob of
+Basel, the antipope was of their own creation, and their colleagues of
+Paris could not fail to recognize him.
+
+As for King Charles VII, at the close of the year 1441 he sent an
+embassy to Pope Eugenius to ask the convocation of a general council
+which should put an end to the troubles of Christendom. The principal
+orator was the Bishop of Meaux, Pierre de Versailles, formerly Bishop of
+Digne, and originally a monk of the Abbey of St. Denis. He had an
+audience in full consistory December 16th, and he spoke to the Pope in
+the following terms:
+
+"The most Christian King, our master, implores your assistance, most
+holy Father, or rather it is the entire people of the faithful who
+address to you these words of Scripture: '_Be our leader and our
+prince._' Not that any one among us doubts that you have not the
+princedom in the Church; for we know that the state of the Church was
+constituted monarchical by Jesus Christ himself; but we ask you to be
+_our prince_ by functions of zeal and by considerateness. We pray you to
+manage wisely the boat of St. Peter, in the midst of the tempests by
+which it is buffeted. The princes of the Church, most holy Father, ought
+not to resemble those of the nations. The latter have frequently no
+other rule of government than their own will; on the contrary, the
+princes of the Church ought to temper the use of their authority; and it
+is for that that the holy fathers have established laws and canons.
+Now, here is the source of the ills which afflict the Church. There are
+two extremes: one consists in exercising ecclesiastical authority as the
+princes of the nations exercise theirs, without rule and without
+measure; the other is the enterprise of those who, in order to correct
+its abuses, have desired to annihilate authority, who have denied that
+supreme power rests in the Church, who have given this power to the
+multitude, who have changed the entire ecclesiastical order in
+destroying the monarchy which God placed there, to substitute for it
+democracy or aristocracy, who have arrived, not only with respect to the
+leader but also with respect to doctrine, at the point of causing an
+execrable schism among the faithful.
+
+"These considerations, most holy Father, have touched the most Christian
+King; and to mitigate these two extremes, he has resolved to solicit the
+convocation of a general council. That of Basel pushed the second
+extreme too far when it undertook to suppress the truth as to the
+supreme power in one alone. That of Florence, which you are now holding,
+has well elucidated this truth, as may be seen in the decree concerning
+the Greeks; but it has determined upon nothing to temper the use of this
+power. This has caused many to believe it too near to the first
+extremity. A third will be able, therefore, to take the just mean and
+restore everything to order.
+
+"I shall be told, no doubt, that there is no more need of general
+councils; that there have been enough of them up to this time; that the
+Roman Church suffices to terminate all controversies; that a prince does
+not willingly intrust his rights to the multitude; that we would be
+again exposed, by the convocation of another council, to the movements
+which agitated the assembly at Basel; but, in order to answer that, it
+is sufficient to cast our eyes upon the present state of the Church.
+There should rest in you, most holy Father, and in all other prelates,
+two kinds of authority; one of divine power and institution, the other
+of confidence in the people and of good reputation. The first, although
+it cannot fail you, has, however, to be amenable to the second, and you
+will obtain this by means of a general council, not such a one as that
+of Basel, but such as the most Christian King asks; that is to say, a
+council which shall be held at your order, and which shall be regulated
+according to the decrees of the holy fathers. Such an assembly will not
+be a confused multitude; and your monarchical power, which comes from
+heaven, which is attested by the Gospel, which is recognized by the
+saints and by the universal Church, will not be exposed to any danger."
+
+The orator then shows how dangerous it is to refuse the convocation of
+this council, dwelling long upon the enterprises of the prelates of
+Basel, whom he emphatically blames, even to the extent of saying that,
+from their practice and their maxims, there is no more peace possible in
+the Church, and that a great many are asking if this schism be not that
+great apostasy of which St. Paul spoke to the Thessalonians, and which
+should open the door to the Antichrist. He finishes the address by this
+declaration: "I have desired to say all this in public, most holy
+Father, in order to make known to you the upright intentions of the King
+my master in the present affair. He does not attach himself to flesh and
+blood, but he hears the voice of the celestial Father. From this source
+he learns to recognize you and to revere you as the sovereign pontiff
+and the head of all Christians, the vicar of Jesus Christ, conformably
+with the doctrine of the saints and of the whole Church. And because he
+sees that these truths are obscured to-day, he asks for the call of the
+general council. In this he equally manifests his justice and his piety.
+
+"As for your person, most holy Father, he has sentiments for you which
+pass the limits of ordinary filial affection. He always speaks of you
+with consideration. He does not like to have others speak otherwise. He
+conceives the most favorable hopes of you. He counts upon it that, after
+having reconciled all the orientals to the Roman Church, you will also
+reëstablish the affairs of the Occident."
+
+This discourse certainly did honor to the good sense of France. In spite
+of the intrigues of the learned doctors of the university, the King and
+the episcopacy early and clearly remarked the revolutionary and
+anarchistic tendency of Basel. As for the amicably regulating relation
+of the churches of France with the holy see to remedy certain abuses,
+the thing was not difficult. It would have been sufficient to send some
+more bishops to Florence like the Bishop of Meaux. All would have been
+very quickly arranged, to the satisfaction of everybody, and the
+example of France would have drawn the rest of the Occident. But to
+desire a third council was not of the same wisdom. Thus the Pope took
+good care not to consent to it.
+
+In 1444 Eugenius IV created the Dauphin of France, who was afterward
+King Louis XI, grand gonfalonier of the Roman Church, granting him a
+pension of fifteen thousand florins, to be taken annually from the
+apostolic chamber. The Dauphin made an expedition to the gates of Basel,
+where he overcame a corps of Swiss and spread consternation among those
+who were still at the pretended council. This expedition was followed by
+a long truce between France and England; an event which was considered
+as the prelude to a good peace. In order to obtain from God this good,
+so necessary and so much desired, there were public fêtes at Paris,
+among others a solemn procession in which were carried all the holy
+relics of the city.
+
+In November, 1446, King Charles VII, being at Tours, made with his
+council a plan of accommodation between the two parties that divided the
+Church. It arranged that all the censures published on one side and the
+other should be revoked; that Pope Eugenius should be recognized by all
+as before the schism; that Monsieur de Savoie, called Felix by his
+adherents, should renounce the popedom; that he should hold the highest
+rank in the Church, next to the person of the Pope, and that his
+partisans should be also maintained in their dignities, grades, and
+benefices.
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGY OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY
+
+EMBRACING THE PERIOD COVERED IN THIS VOLUME
+
+A.D. 1301-1438
+
+JOHN RUDD, LL.D
+
+Events treated at length are here indicated in large type; the numerals
+following give volume and page.
+
+Separate chronologies of the various nations, and of the careers of
+famous persons, will be found in the INDEX VOLUME, with volume and page
+references showing where the several events are fully treated.
+
+A.D.
+
+1301. In Hungary the crown becomes elective; end of the Arpad dynasty.
+
+Dante begins writing his _Divine Comedy_, See "DANTE COMPOSES THE DIVINA
+COMMEDIA," vii, 1.
+
+1302. Philip the Fair convenes the first meeting of the States-General
+of France. See "THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE," vii,
+17.
+
+Dante and his party banished from Florence. See "DANTE COMPOSES THE
+DIVINA COMMEDIA," vii, 1.
+
+Comyn is appointed regent by the Scots, who make another effort to
+regain their independence.
+
+Pope Boniface VIII issues a bull against Philip the Fair, who burns it,
+accuses him of simony and heresy, and refuses to acknowledge him as
+pope.
+
+Battle of Courtrai; the Flemings defeat the French. See "WAR OF THE
+FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE FAIR OF FRANCE," vii, 23.
+
+1303. Pope Boniface VIII is surprised at Anagni by William de Nogaret,
+King Philip's adviser; after being kept for some days a prisoner he is
+rescued and allowed to return to Rome, where he dies.
+
+Scotland submits to Edward I of England.
+
+Andronicus Palæologus, the Byzantine Emperor, engages the Catalan Grand
+Company to aid him against the Turks.[85]
+
+1304. Roger di Flor defeats the Mongols, enters Philadelphia, and
+stations himself at Ephesus.
+
+1305. Wallace, "Hero of Scotland," is executed. See "EXPLOITS AND DEATH
+OF WILLIAM WALLACE, THE HERO OF SCOTLAND," vi, 369.
+
+Beginning of the so-called Babylonish Captivity, being the establishment
+of the papal court at Lyons, France.
+
+1306. A grandson of the first claimant, Robert Bruce, is crowned King of
+Scotland; he dispossesses the English of a great part of Scotland.
+
+On complaint of the nobility and gentry the use of sea-coal is
+prohibited in London.
+
+1307. Death of Edward I; his son, Edward II, succeeds to the English
+throne.
+
+Charges against the Knights Templars. See "EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF
+KNIGHTS TEMPLARS," vii, 51.
+
+1308. Albert of Austria assassinated by his nephew; Henry VII, Count of
+Luxemburg, elected emperor of Germany.
+
+Origin of the Swiss confederations according to common traditions.[86]
+See "FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY," vii, 28.
+
+1309. Pope Clement V removes the papal court from Rome to Avignon,
+France.
+
+Rhodes captured from the Turks by the Knights of St. John.
+
+1310. Fifty Knights Templars are burned in Paris.
+
+Expedition of Henry VII of Germany into Italy to restore the imperial
+authority. He obtains the throne of Bohemia for his son John,
+inaugurating the Luxemburg dynasty.
+
+1311. Fifteenth general council (Council of Vienne); it suppresses the
+order of Knights Templars, and condemns the Beghards (Beguins), a
+begging order of monks and nuns.
+
+Matteo Visconti secures the sovereignty of Milan.
+
+Walter de Brienne quarrels with the Catalans and is defeated and slain
+by them; they conquer the duchy of Athens and appoint Roger Deslau grand
+duke.
+
+1312. Henry VII unsuccessful in an attempt on Florence.
+
+Gaveston, a foreigner and favorite of the King, and who for some years
+had made himself obnoxious to the barons and people of England, is made
+prisoner and beheaded; peace ensues between Edward II and his barons.
+
+Robert, King of Naples, seizes the principal forts in Rome; Henry VII
+is, notwithstanding, crowned emperor in the Lateran Church by three
+cardinals.
+
+1313. In conjunction with the Genoese and Sicilians, Emperor Henry VII
+prepares to attack Robert of Naples, but dies suddenly.
+
+Birth of Boccaccio.
+
+1314. Defeat of the English by the Scots under Robert Bruce. See "BATTLE
+OF BANNOCKBURN," vii, 41.
+
+Louis of Bavaria and Frederick, son of the late Albert of Austria, are
+elected by opposite parties to the crown of Germany; they make war on
+each other.
+
+Ireland invaded by Edward Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, and a younger
+brother of Robert Bruce.
+
+Louis X succeeds his father, Philip IV, in France.
+
+Molay, grand master of the Knights Templars, is burned at the stake in
+Paris. See "EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS," vii, 51.
+
+1315. Louis Hutin, King of France, emancipates all serfs within the
+royal domains on payment of a just surrender charge.
+
+A great victory achieved by the Swiss over the Austrians, under Leopold
+(brother of Frederick the Handsome) at Morgarten.
+
+1316. Edward Bruce crowned king of Ireland.
+
+Establishment of the Salic law excluding females and their descendants
+from the throne of France.
+
+A predominance of French cardinals, created by Pope Clement V, secures
+the election of another French pope, and the continuance of the papal
+see at Avignon. The new pope, John XXII, appoints eight more cardinals,
+of whom seven are French.
+
+1317. Birger, King of the Swedes, murders his two brothers and causes a
+rebellion of his people.
+
+1318. Battle of Dundalk; Edward Bruce defeated and slain by Lord
+Birmingham; end of the war in Ireland.
+
+Giotto, a friend of Dante, famous in Italy; he was the first painter of
+portraits from life.
+
+1319. Pope John XXII excommunicates Robert Bruce of Scotland; the Scotch
+Parliament resists all papal interference in its affairs.
+
+1320.[87] The Old English poem _Cursor Mundi_ composed. It was founded
+on Cædmon's paraphrase of the book of Genesis.
+
+1321. Death of Dante while in exile at Ravenna.
+
+1322. Philip V dies; he is succeeded by his brother, Charles IV, on the
+throne of France.
+
+Louis the Bavarian triumphs over his rival Frederick of Austria, who is
+captured.
+
+Queen Isabella, while resident in the Tower of London, first sees
+Mortimer, who is brought there a prisoner.
+
+Sir John Mandeville, an English exile in France, sets out on his eastern
+travels.
+
+1323. Louis of Bavaria invests his son with the margraviate of
+Brandenburg.
+
+1324. Commencement of Queen Isabella's guilty intimacy with Mortimer.
+
+Birth of Wycliffe.[88]
+
+Pope John XXII excommunicates Louis the Bavarian.
+
+1325. Birth of John Gower, poet, and friend of Chaucer.
+
+1326. Burgesses are first admitted into the Scotch Parliament.
+
+Isabella, Queen of Edward II, and Earl Mortimer invade England; the King
+is captured and imprisoned in Kenilworth castle.
+
+1327. King Edward II is deposed by parliament; Edward III, his son,
+succeeds. Edward II is brutally murdered by his keepers.
+
+Louis V, the Bavarian, of Germany heads an expedition into Italy; he
+proclaims the deposition of Pope John XXII; he is forced to retreat
+after being crowned in Rome.
+
+1328. Independence of Scotland recognized by Edward III of England.
+
+Accession of Philip VI of France, the first of the house of Valois.
+
+Birth of Chaucer.[88]
+
+1329. Death of Robert Bruce; his infant son, David, succeeds to the
+Scotch throne.
+
+1330. Orkham, Sultan of the Turks, captures Nicæa.
+
+Queen Isabella and Mortimer are surprised in Nottingham castle[89]; he
+is executed at Tyburn; Isabella is confined during her life at Castle
+Rising.
+
+1331. John Kempe takes his servants and apprentices from Flanders to
+join the weaving colony already founded at Norwich, England.
+
+1332. Edward Balliol claims the crown of Scotland; he invades that
+country with an English army. The young King, David, takes refuge in
+France.
+
+Lucerne joins the Swiss confederacy.
+
+1333. Edward III of England invades Scotland; he defeats the Scotch at
+Halidon Hill and captures Berwick, which is annexed to England.
+
+Casimir the Great, last king of the Piast line, succeeds to the throne
+of Poland.
+
+1334. Denmark in a state of anarchy; Gerard, Count of Holstein,
+exercises a disputed power as regent.
+
+1335. The house of Austria becomes possessed of Carinthia.
+
+1336. Birth of Timur (Tamerlane) the Tartar.
+
+1337. Edward III of England obtains the support of Van Artevelde; he
+obtains money by grants from parliament and confiscating the wealth of
+the Lombard merchants. See "JAMES VAN ARTEVELDE LEADS A FLEMISH REVOLT,"
+vii, 68.
+
+Birth of Froissart, the chronicler, at Valenciennes.
+
+1338. Beginning of the wars of Edward III against France; he sails with
+a fleet of five hundred ships; lands his army at Antwerp. See "BATTLE OF
+SLUYS AND CRÉCY," vii, 78.
+
+Declaration of the Electors at Rense that Germany is an independent
+empire over which the Pope has no jurisdiction; the diet at Frankfort
+ratifies the manifesto.
+
+1339. France invaded by Edward III of England; beginning of the Hundred
+Years' War.
+
+Genoa elects its first doge, Simone Boccanera.
+
+A body of disbanded mercenaries form themselves into the first
+_condottiere_ company known in Italy. The word means a captain or
+leader, the _condottieri_ those under the leader. They were free lances,
+open to serve under any flag.
+
+1340. Edward destroys a large French fleet at Sluys; beginning of
+England's naval power. See "BATTLE OF SLUYS AND CRÉCY," vii, 78.
+
+War between the Hanseatic League and Denmark; the Danes defeated.
+
+1341. Death of John III of Brittany; his brother, John of Montfort, and
+his niece, Jeanne de Penthièvre, wife of Charles of Blois, contest the
+succession; England supports the former, France the latter.
+
+Edward Balliol retires on the return of David II to Scotland.
+
+Petrarch is crowned with laurel at Rome. See "MODERN RECOGNITION OF
+SCENIC BEAUTY," vii, 93.
+
+1342. Edward III pursues his campaign in Brittany; he relieves
+Hennebonne, besieged by the French.
+
+Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, becomes sovereign lord of Florence.
+
+Accession of Louis, called the Great, to the throne of Hungary, on the
+death of King Charles Robert, his father.
+
+1343. Expulsion from Florence of the Duke of Athens; popular government
+restored.
+
+A truce of three years arranged between England and France by the
+mediation of the papal legates.
+
+1344. Breach of the truce between England and France; Earl Derby defeats
+Count de Lisle and reduces a great part of Perigord.
+
+A Turkish fleet is destroyed at Pallene by the Knights of Rhodes, who
+assist in the capture of Smyrna by the Venetians and the King of Cyprus.
+
+Masham, an Englishman, first discovers the Madeira Islands.
+
+In England, parliament, by the Statute of Provisors, forbids the
+interference of the pope in bestowing benefices and livings in England.
+
+1345. Fall and death of James Van Artevelde at Ghent.
+
+1346. Battle of Crécy; cannon said to have been first used by the
+English. See "BATTLES OF SLUYS AND CRÉCY," vii, 78.
+
+At the instance of Pope Clement VI, Charles of Luxemburg (Charles IV) is
+elected emperor of Germany in opposition to Louis the Bavarian.
+
+David Bruce invades England; he is vanquished and made prisoner at
+Neville's Cross.
+
+Servia at the zenith of her power; the ruler, Stephen Dushan, assumes
+the imperial title.
+
+1347. Calais captured by Edward III.
+
+Death of Louis the Bavarian; he is succeeded by Charles IV, whose title
+is disputed until 1349.
+
+Queen Joanna I of Naples has her dominions invaded by Louis the Great of
+Hungary to avenge the murder of her husband, Andrew, brother of Louis,
+supposedly at her instigation. See "RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME," vii,
+104.
+
+1348. About this time begins the Renaissance in Italy. See "BEGINNING
+AND PROGRESS OF THE RENAISSANCE," vii, 110.
+
+Founding of the University of Prague, the first in Germany.
+
+Pope Clement VI purchases Avignon from Queen Joanna I of Naples.
+
+The plague stalks in Europe. See "THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE," vii,
+130.
+
+1349. Institution (or revival, see A.D. 1192) of the Order of the Garter
+in England.
+
+Dauphiny annexed to France on condition that the King's eldest son
+should be called the dauphin.
+
+1350. Death of Philip VI; his son, John the Good, succeeds to the French
+throne.
+
+1351. Zurich joins the Swiss confederation.
+
+Paganino Doria, commanding the Genoese fleet, plunders many Venetian
+towns on the Adriatic.
+
+1352. A statute of præmunire still further limits the papal power in
+England.
+
+Naval battle in the Bosporus between the Genoese, under Paganino Doria,
+and the Venetians, Byzantines, and Catalans under Niccola Pisano; the
+latter are defeated, and concede the entire command of the Black Sea to
+the Genoese.
+
+1353. Alliance of Genoa with Louis of Hungary; their fleet, under
+Antonino Grinaldi, defeated; in despair the Genoese place themselves
+under the protection of John Visconte.
+
+Bern joins the league of Swiss cantons.
+
+1354. Downfall and death of Rienzi. See "RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME,"
+vii, 104.
+
+Paganino Doria captures or destroys the Venetian fleet in the Morea;
+their admiral, Pisano, is captured.
+
+Beginning of Turkish dominion in Europe. See "FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN
+EUROPE," vii, 136.
+
+1355. King Charles of Navarre is treacherously seized and imprisoned in
+France; his brother Philip, and Geoffry d'Harcourt, make an alliance
+with Edward III; the war is renewed.
+
+Marino Falieri, Doge of Venice, beheaded. See "CONSPIRACY AND DEATH OF
+MARINO FALIERI AT VENICE," vii, 154.
+
+1356. Battle of Poitiers; John II, King of France, taken prisoner by
+Edward, the Black Prince; the Dauphin, Charles, escapes and assumes the
+government of France during his father's captivity.
+
+Emperor Charles defines the duties of the electors of Germany. See
+"CHARLES IV OF GERMANY PUBLISHES HIS GOLDEN BULL," vii, 160.
+
+Wycliffe publishes his _Last Age of the Court_.
+
+1357. London enthusiastically welcomes the Prince of Wales (the Black
+Prince) on his return with his prisoners; King Edward III concludes a
+treaty with the captive French King, which the Dauphin rejects.
+
+Popular movement in Paris under Stephen Marcel; meeting of the
+States-general of France.
+
+1358. Violent commotions in France. See "INSURRECTION OF THE JACQUERIE
+IN FRANCE," vii, 164.
+
+By a treaty of peace the Venetians resign Dalmatia and Istria to the
+King of Hungary; they agree to style their doge Duke of Venice only.
+
+1359. Edward III again invades France, his terms of peace not being
+accepted.
+
+1360. England and France conclude the treaty of Bretigny; King John II
+is set at liberty on payment of a heavy ransom.
+
+Outbreak of the Children's Plague in England.
+
+1361. End of the first ducal house of Burgundy.
+
+Adrianople is conquered by Sultan Amurath I of Turkey.
+
+All military operations in Europe suspended by the virulence of the
+plague.
+
+1362. Edward III grants Aquitaine to his son, the Black Prince; he also
+celebrates his fiftieth birthday by a general amnesty and a confirmation
+of Magna Charta.
+
+Conjectured beginning of Langland's _Vision of Piers Plowman_, a noted
+allegorical and satirical poem.[90]
+
+1363. Disbanded English soldiers enter the service of the Pisans, and
+obtain a victory for them over the Florentines.
+
+1364. Death of King John the Good of France, in Savoy palace, London;
+his son, Charles V, succeeds; Du Guesclin, his general, defeats the
+English and the army of Charles the Bad at Cocherel. Du Guesclin is
+afterward defeated and captured by the English, under Sir John Chandos;
+besides the capture of Du Guesclin, Charles of Blois is slain. The house
+of Montfort secures Brittany.
+
+Treaty of union between Bohemia and Austria.
+
+Chaucer writes his _Canterbury Tales_.
+
+1365. Pedro the Cruel, the epithet "cruel" being given him mainly for
+the murder of his brother, Don Fadrique, becomes so odious to his
+subjects that Henry of Trastamare, his brother, revives his claim to the
+throne of Leon and Castile; Du Guesclin takes command of his forces.
+
+University of Vienna founded.
+
+1366. Pedro the Cruel driven from his throne.
+
+Pope Urban V claims the tribute which had previously been paid by
+England; an act of parliament resists the demand; it further declares
+the concessions made by King John to be illegal and invalid.
+
+Tamerlane (Timur the Tartar), reviver of the great Mongol empire,
+inaugurates his conquests.
+
+1367. Edward the Black Prince, having espoused the cause of Pedro the
+Cruel, attacks and dethrones Henry of Trastamare; Pedro is restored to
+the throne, but refuses the stipulated pay to his allies, who leave him
+to his fate.
+
+Passage of the Kilkenny Statute; it forbade any Englishman to use an
+Irish name, to speak the Irish language, to adopt the Irish dress, or to
+allow the cattle of an Irishman to graze on his lands; it also made it
+high treason to marry a native.
+
+1369. King Charles V breaks the Anglo-French treaty; the Hundred Years'
+War reopened.
+
+1370. End of the Piast dynasty, Poland, caused by the death of Casimir
+the Great; Louis the Great, King of Hungary, succeeds.
+
+Timur the Tartar extends his domains. See "CONQUESTS OF TIMUR THE
+TARTAR," vii, 169.
+
+1371. Robert II ascends the throne and founds the Stuart dynasty in
+Scotland, on the death of David Bruce.[91]
+
+A petition of the English Parliament to the King that he employ no
+churchmen in any office of the state, and threatening to resist by force
+the oppressions of papal authority.
+
+1373. Henry of Castile invades Portugal, besieges Lisbon, and compels
+Ferdinand to sign a treaty of peace.
+
+Birth of John Huss.[92]
+
+1374. A strange plague, the dancing mania, appears in Europe. See
+"DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES," vii, 187.
+
+Wycliffe is appointed one of the seven ambassadors to represent to the
+Pope the grievances of the Church of England.
+
+1375. A general council of citizens of Florence declares "liberty
+paramount to every other consideration"; it appoints the "Seven Saints
+of War," which effectually resist aggression.
+
+1376. Death of Edward the Black Prince. Gregory XI abandons Avignon as
+the papal residence.
+
+1377. Rome again becomes the home of the papal court.
+
+Gregory XI orders proceedings against Wycliffe, the English reformer.
+
+Death of Edward III; his grandson, Richard II, succeeds to the English
+throne.
+
+1378. Wenceslaus becomes emperor of Germany on the death of his father,
+Charles IV.
+
+Rival popes elected. See "ELECTION OF ANTIPOPE CLEMENT VII: BEGINNING OF
+THE GREAT SCHISM," vii, 201.
+
+1379. Pietro Doria, at the head of the Genoese fleet, defeats the
+Venetian fleet off Pola; Chioggia is captured and Venice threatened.
+
+A poll-tax imposed on the people of England; this led directly to a
+revolution.
+
+War of the rival papal factions in Rome.
+
+Revolt of the White Hoods (_Les Chaperons blancs_) in Flanders; the
+workmen of Ghent, when they revolted against the Duke of Burgundy,
+adopted a white hood as their badge.
+
+1380. Establishment in Germany of post messengers.
+
+Surrender of the Genoese fleet and army at Chioggia. See "GENOESE
+SURRENDER TO VENETIANS," vii, 213.
+
+1381. Overthrow of Joanna I of Naples by Charles Durazzo (Charles the
+Little).
+
+An act of parliament surreptitiously obtained against heretics in
+England.
+
+Exasperated by the poll-tax the people of England revolt. See "REBELLION
+OF WAT TYLER," vii, 217.
+
+Insurrection of the Maillotins against the new tax on bread in Paris.
+They were so called because they armed themselves with _maillets de fer_
+("iron malls") when they attacked the arsenal, put to death the
+officers, and set the prisoners at large.
+
+Philip van Artevelde rises to power in Flanders.
+
+1382. Queen Joanna I of Naples is put to death in prison.
+
+"WYCLIFFE TRANSLATES THE BIBLE INTO ENGLISH." See vii, 227.
+
+Led by Philip van Artevelde the people of Ghent triumph over their
+ruler, Count Louis II; Bruges is captured and looted by them; Artevelde
+is acclaimed governor; a French army advances and defeats the forces of
+Artevelde, who is slain, and Louis is restored.
+
+1384. Flanders is incorporated in the dukedom of Burgundy; Artois and
+Franche Comté are also acquired by Philip the Bold of Burgundy.
+
+1385. Scotland fruitlessly invaded by Richard II of England.
+
+John the Great ascends the throne of Portugal; he defeats the Castilians
+at Aljubarota.
+
+1386. Victory of the Swiss over the Austrians at Sempach. See "THE SWISS
+WIN THEIR INDEPENDENCE," vii, 238.
+
+Hedvige, Queen of Poland, marries Duke of Jagellon, of Lithuania,
+uniting the states and establishing the Jagellon dynasty; as sovereign
+of Poland he is styled Ladislaus II. The Lithuanians abandon paganism.
+
+Founding of the University of Heidelberg.
+
+A regency, that of the Duke of Gloucester, is imposed upon Richard II of
+England.
+
+1387. Consultation of Richard II at Nottingham with the judges; the
+regency commission is declared a criminal act.
+
+A brother of Emperor Wenceslaus, Sigismund, becomes king of Hungary.
+
+Birth of Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietri), the great friar-painter.
+
+1388. Battle of Otterburne (Chevy Chase); an English-Scotch encounter
+in a private feud, not a national quarrel; the Earl of Douglas slain;
+Henry Percy captured by the Scots.
+
+At Naefels the Austrians are defeated by the Swiss.
+
+1389. Bulgaria and Servia conquered by the Turks under Amurath I at the
+decisive battle of Kosovo; he is slain.
+
+Death of Pope Urban VI; Boniface succeeds; the schism continues.
+
+Albert, King of Sweden, defeated and made prisoner by Queen Margaret,
+who reigns over the three Scandinavian kingdoms.
+
+1390. War of Florence with Milan.
+
+Robert III ascends the throne of Scotland.
+
+1392. Fits of insanity seize the young King of France, Charles VI; cards
+are invented, or introduced, to amuse him during his lucid intervals.
+
+1394. Birth of Prince Henry of Portugal, known as the "Navigator."
+
+1395. Milan is created a hereditary duchy by Emperor Wenceslaus for
+Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti.
+
+1396. Battle of Nicopolis; the Christian defenders of Hungary suffer a
+great defeat at the hands of the Turkish sultan Bajazet I.
+
+1397. Scandinavia united under one crown. See "UNION OF DENMARK, SWEDEN,
+AND NORWAY," vii, 243.
+
+1398. Mortimer, Earl of March, presumptive heir to the English throne
+and governor of Ireland, slain by a rebel force in that island.
+
+Froissart writes his _Chronicles_.
+
+1399. Deposition of Richard II of England; Henry Bolingbroke founds the
+house of Lancaster. See "DEPOSITION OF RICHARD II," vii, 251.
+
+After a long struggle for the possession of Naples between Ladislaus and
+Louis II of Anjou, it ends in the triumph of Ladislaus.
+
+1400. A great revolt of the Welsh is headed by Owen Glendower.
+
+Emperor Wenceslaus is deposed.
+
+Rupert of the Palatinate elected to the throne of Germany.
+
+1401. Parliament ordains the burning of Lollards in England. Barcelona
+bank (earliest existing bank) established.
+
+1402. Battle of Homildon Hill; victory of the Percys, a noble northern
+English family, over the Scots.
+
+License by royal letters-patent given to the "_Confrerie de la Passion_"
+to exhibit sacred dramas, or _Mysteries_, in France.
+
+"DISCOVERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS AND THE AFRICAN COAST." See vii, 266.
+
+Tamerlane (Timur the Tartar) defeats and captures Bajazet at Angora.
+
+1403. Battle of Shrewsbury; Henry IV defeats the Percys, who had allied
+themselves with Glendower to place the Earl of March on the English
+throne; Harry Percy (Hotspur) slain.
+
+1404. Queen Margaret of Sweden claims Schleswig and Holstein on the
+death of Gerard VI.
+
+1405. Pisa sold to Florence by the Visconti.
+
+An English act of parliament prohibits anyone not possessing twenty
+shillings a year in land from apprenticing his sons to any trade.
+
+Venice conquers Verona and Padua.
+
+Prince James Stuart, afterward James I, heir to the crown of Scotland,
+captured by the English.
+
+1406. Pisa compelled to submit to Florence after a year of war.
+
+Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, proposes a general
+council to terminate the schism in the Church.[93]
+
+1407. France distracted by the animosities of her leading families;
+Louis, Duke of Orleans, is assassinated by John the Fearless, Duke of
+Burgundy.
+
+1408. Valentina, widow of the Duke of Orleans, demands justice on her
+husband's assassins; the Duke of Burgundy declared an enemy of the
+state; he occupies Paris and drives out the royal court.
+
+1409. Council of Pisa; both popes refuse to appear; they are deposed and
+Alexander V is elected.
+
+University of Leipsic founded.
+
+1410. Death of Rupert of the Palatinate, Emperor of Germany.
+
+Jagellon (Ladislaus II), King of Poland, vanquishes the Teutonic
+Knights.
+
+1411. Battle of Harlow; defeat of the Scotch Lord of the Isles and the
+highland clans.
+
+Sigismund elected emperor of Germany.
+
+John Huss excommunicated and forbidden to preach.
+
+University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, founded.
+
+1412. For insulting the chief justice of England the Prince of Wales is
+committed to prison.
+
+Birth of Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
+
+1413. Death of Henry IV; Henry V ascends the English throne; he discards
+his dissolute associates and reforms his conduct.
+
+Ladislaus takes forcible possession of Rome and most of the papal
+states.
+
+1414. The Seventeenth general council. See "COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE," vii,
+284.
+
+Joanna II succeeds her brother Ladislaus of Naples on his death.
+
+1415. "TRIAL AND BURNING OF JOHN HUSS." See vii, 294.
+
+John the Great of Portugal conquers Ceuta; he discards the use of the
+Julian period and introduces the computation of time from the Christian
+era.
+
+Brandenburg is acquired by the house of Hohenzollern. See "THE HOUSE OF
+HOHENZOLLERN ESTABLISHED IN BRANDENBURG," vii, 305.
+
+"BATTLE OF AGINCOURT." See vii, 320.
+
+1416. Jerome of Prague burned.
+
+Alfonso the Wise, so called for his patronage of letters, ascends the
+throne of Aragon on the death of his father, Ferdinand the Just.
+
+1417. Pope Martin V elected by the Council of Constance; end of the
+schism.
+
+Sir John Oldcastle, the "Good Lord Cobham," after four years' hiding is
+captured and burned as a heretic in London.
+
+Gypsies appear in Transylvania; they are believed to have been low-caste
+Hindus expelled by Timur in the fourteenth century.
+
+1418. Close of the Council of Constance. See "COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE,"
+vii, 284.
+
+A great massacre in Paris of the Armagnacs by the populace, the
+partisans of John the Fearless of Burgundy; the Dauphin and his
+adherents transfer their seat of government to Poitiers.
+
+1419. Surrender of Rouen to the English.
+
+John the Fearless, beguiled by a treaty, meets the Dauphin, who has him
+assassinated.
+
+Storming of the town-hall of Prague by the Hussites; outbreak of the
+Hussite wars.
+
+Madeira first reached by the Portuguese, who sail under the command of
+Henry the Navigator.
+
+1420. Henry V, King of England, made successor to the French throne. See
+"BATTLE OF AGINCOURT," vii, 320.
+
+Sigismund besieges the Hussites in Prague; he is defeated by them, led
+by John Ziska.
+
+Joanna II of Naples, who summons to her aid Alfonso V of Aragon, is
+attacked by Louis III of Anjou.
+
+1421. Second crusade against the Bohemian Hussites.
+
+1422. Death of Henry V of England and Charles VI of France; the former
+is succeeded by his infant son; he is proclaimed King of England and
+France; his uncles, the Duke of Gloucester, regent in England, and the
+Duke of Bedford in France; Charles VII, son of Charles VI, is proclaimed
+by the French.
+
+Constantinople besieged by Amurath II, Sultan of Turkey.
+
+1423. Frederick the Warlike, Margrave of Misnia, assumes the electorate
+of Saxony and establishes the house of Wettin.
+
+1424. James I of Scotland, released after a captivity of nineteen years,
+marries a daughter of the Earl of Somerset; he assumes the government of
+Scotland.
+
+John Ziska is succeeded by Procopius the Great as head of the Taborites,
+a division of the Hussites.
+
+1425. Accession of John Palæologus II as emperor of Byzantium.
+
+John and Hulbert van Eyck, masters of the early Flemish school, invent
+painting in oil.
+
+1426. Lübeck and the Baltic Hanse Towns support the Duke of Holstein
+against Eric XIII of Sweden.
+
+Great Hussite victory at Aussig.
+
+1427. The Hussites extend their conquests in Saxony and Meissen; they
+gain a victory at Mies.
+
+1428. Orleans, France, besieged by the English.
+
+Death of John de' Medici, founder of the illustrious family at Florence.
+
+1429. Coronation of Charles VII of France at Rheims.
+
+Jeanne d'Arc relieves Orleans. See "JEANNE D'ARC'S VICTORY AT ORLEANS,"
+vii, 333.
+
+Refusal of the Hussites to treat for peace with Emperor Sigismund.
+
+Antipope Clement VIII abdicates and ends the Great Schism.
+
+1430. Institution of the Golden Fleece by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, on
+his marriage with Isabella, daughter of King John of Portugal, and in
+commemoration of the manufacturing prosperity of the Netherlands.
+
+1431. Jeanne d'Arc dishonorably and inhumanly burned at Rouen. See
+"TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF JEANNE D'ARC," vii, 350.
+
+Council of Basel. Pope Martin V succeeded by Eugenius IV.
+
+1432. Prince Henry's navigators discover and take possession of the
+Azores for the Portuguese.
+
+Opening of the trade of the north to the English and Dutch by the wars
+of the Hanse Towns, and Holstein, with Denmark.
+
+1433. Treaty of the Council of Basel with the section of the Hussites
+called Calixtines; this satisfies them and they secede from the Hussite
+league.
+
+1434. Cosmo de' Medici recalled to Florence; his party triumphant.
+
+Organization of the national church (Utraquist) in Bohemia.
+
+First exploration of the west coast of Africa by the Portuguese.
+
+The Calixtines join the imperial army and defeat the Taborites at
+Bohmisch-Brod.
+
+1435. Treaty of Arras between France and Burgundy; the latter withdraws
+from the English party.
+
+Death of the Duke of Bedford.
+
+1436. A settlement effected between Emperor Sigismund and the Hussites
+by the treaty of Iglau; he is recognized as king of Bohemia.
+
+Charles VII, the French King, recovers Paris from the English.
+
+Eric, by a treaty of peace, relinquishes the greater part of Schleswig
+to the Duke of Holstein and makes concessions at Stockholm which restore
+tranquillity in Sweden.
+
+1437. Death of Emperor Sigismund; election of Albert of Austria to the
+throne of Hungary.
+
+Murder of James I; his son, James II, succeeds him on the throne of
+Scotland.
+
+Pope Eugenius IV is summoned to appear before the Council of Basel to
+answer various charges brought against him; he issues a bull dissolving
+the council; he calls another at Ferrara, whither he invites the Greek
+Emperor to attend and arrange for the union of the two churches.
+
+1438. Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII; it secures the liberty of the
+Gallican Church. See "CHARLES VII ISSUES HIS PRAGMATIC SANCTION," vii,
+370.
+
+Coronation of Albert II, King of Hungary; recognized by the Diet of
+Frankfort.
+
+     [1] See _Dante Composes the Divina Commedia_, page 1.
+
+     [2] See _Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars_,
+         page 51.
+
+     [3] See _The Third Estate Joins in the Government of
+         France_, page 17.
+
+     [4] See _War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair_, page
+         23.
+
+     [5] See _First Swiss Struggle for Liberty_, page 28.
+
+     [6] See _The Swiss Win Their Independence_, page 238.
+
+     [7] See _Battle of Bannockburn_, page 41.
+
+     [8] See _Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance_, page
+         110.
+
+     [9] See _Crowning of Petrarch at Rome_, page 93.
+
+     [10] See _Rienzi's Revolution in Rome_, page 104.
+
+     [11] See _Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at
+          Venice_, page 154.
+
+     [12] See _Genoese Surrender to Venetians_, page 213.
+
+     [13] See _Rise of the Hanseatic League_, vol. vi, page
+          214.
+
+     [14] See _Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway_, page
+          243.
+
+     [15] See _Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden
+          Bull_, page 160.
+
+     [16] See _The Black Death Ravages Europe_, page 130.
+
+     [17] See _Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages_, page 187.
+
+     [18] See _James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt_,
+          page 68.
+
+     [19] See _Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King
+          of France_, page 68.
+
+     [20] See _Battles of Sluys and Crécy_, page 78.
+
+     [21] See _Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France_, page
+          164.
+
+     [22] See _Rebellion of Wat Tyler_, page 217.
+
+     [23] See _Turks Seize Gallipoli_, page 147.
+
+     [24] See _Conquests of Timur the Tartar_, page 169.
+
+     [25] See _Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English_,
+          page 227.
+
+     [26] See _Election of Antipope Clement VII_, page 201.
+
+     [27] See _Trial and Burning of John Huss_, page 294.
+
+     [28] See _Council of Constance_, page 284.
+
+     [29] See _The Hussite Wars_, page 294.
+
+     [30] See _The House of Hohenzollern Established in
+          Brandenburg_, page 305.
+
+     [31] See _Deposition of Richard II_, page 251.
+
+     [32] See _Battle of Agincourt_, page 320.
+
+     [33] See _English Conquest of France_, page 320.
+
+     [34] See _Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans_, page 333.
+
+     [35] See _Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc_, page 350.
+
+     [36] See _Charles VII Issues his Pragmatic Sanction_,
+          page 370.
+
+     [37] See _Discovery of the Canary Islands: Beginning of
+          Negro Slave Trade_, page 266.
+
+     [38] "I am not going to lose the men for the old women."
+
+     [39] "The coward who the great refusal made."
+
+     [40] "The beams on the low shores now lost and dead."
+
+     [41] "A death-like shade--Like that beneath black boughs
+          and foliage green O'er the cold stream in Alpine
+          glens display'd."
+
+     [42] "O'er all the sandy desert falling slow, Were
+          shower'd dilated flakes of fire, like snow On Alpine
+          summits, when the wind is low."
+
+     [43] "So will a greater fame redound to thee, To have
+          formed a party by thyself alone."
+
+     [44] Translated by Charles Leonard-Stuart.
+
+     [45] This Emperor was Albert I, son of Rudolph I.
+
+     [46] James van Artevelde was called "the Brewer of
+          Ghent," because, although born an aristocrat, he was
+          enrolled in the Guild of Brewers.
+
+     [47] Translated from the French by Thomas Johnes.
+
+     [48] Lord Berners' account of the advance of the Genoese
+          is somewhat different from this; he describes them
+          as _leaping_ forward with a _fell_ cry. The whole
+          passage is so spirited and graphic that we give it
+          entire:
+
+          "Whan the genowayes were assembled toguyder and
+          beganne to aproche, they made a great leape and crye
+          to abasshe thenglysshmen, but they stode styll and
+          styredde nat for all that. Than the genowayes agayne
+          the seconde tyme made another leape and a fell crye
+          and stepped forwarde a lytell, and thenglysshmen
+          remeued nat one fote; thirdly agayne they leapt and
+          cryed, and went forthe tyll they came within shotte;
+          than they shotte feersly with their crosbowes. Than
+          thenglysshe archers stept forthe one pase and lette
+          fly their arowes so hotly and so thycke that it
+          semed snowe. Whan the genowayes felte the arowes
+          persynge through heedes, armes, and brestes, many of
+          them cast downe their crosbowes and did cutte their
+          strynges and retourned dysconfited. Whan the frenche
+          kynge sawe them flye away, he said, Slee these
+          rascals, for they shall lette and trouble us without
+          reason; than you shoulde haue sene the men of armes
+          dasshe in among them and kylled a great nombre of
+          them; and euerstyll the englysshmen shot where as
+          they sawe thyckest preace, the sharpe arowes ranne
+          into the men of armes and into their horses, and
+          many fell horse and men amonge the genowayes, and
+          whan they were downe they coude nat relyne agayne;
+          the preace was so thycke that one ouerthrewe a
+          nother. And also amonge the englysshemen there were
+          certayne rascalles that went a fote with great
+          knyues, and they went in among the men of armes and
+          slewe and murdredde many as they lay on the grounde,
+          both erles, barownes, knyghts, and squyers, whereof
+          the kyng of Englande was after dyspleased, for he
+          had rather they had been taken prisoners."
+
+     [49] His blindness was supposed to be caused by poison,
+          which was given to him when engaged in the wars of
+          Italy.
+
+     [50] The following is Lord Berners' version of this
+          narration: "In the mornyng the day of the batayle
+          certayne frenchemen and almaygnes perforce opyned
+          the archers of the princes batayle, and came and
+          fought with the men at armes hande to hande. Than
+          the second batayle of thenglyshe men came to socour
+          the prince's batayle, the whiche was tyme, for they
+          had as than moche ado, and they with the prince sent
+          a messangar to the kynge who was on a lytell
+          wyndmill hill. Than the knyght sayd to the kyng, Sir
+          therle of Warwyke and therle of Cafort [Stafford]
+          Sir Reynolde Cobham and other such as be about the
+          prince your sonne are feersly fought with all, and
+          are sore handled, wherefore they desire you that you
+          and your batayle woll come and ayde them, for if the
+          frenchemen encrease as they dout they woll your
+          sonne and they shall have moche a do. Than the kynge
+          sayde, is my sonne deed or hurt or on the yerthe
+          felled? No, sir, quoth the knight, but he is hardely
+          matched wherfore he hath nede of your ayde. Well
+          sayde the kyng, retourne to hym and to them that
+          sent you hyther, and say to them that they sende no
+          more to me for any adventure that falleth as long as
+          my sonne is alyve; and also say to them that they
+          suffer hym this day to wynne his spurres, for if God
+          be pleased, I woll this iourney be his and the
+          honoure therof and to them that be aboute hym. Than
+          the knyght retourned agayn to them and shewed the
+          kynges wordes, the which greatly encouraged them,
+          and repoyned in that they had sende to the kynge as
+          they dyd."
+
+     [51] Translated from the German by B. G. Babington.
+
+     [52] Thucydides, in his account of the earlier plague in
+          Athens, B.C. 430, says, "It was supposed that the
+          Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns."
+
+     [53] Translated from the French by Charles
+          Leonard-Stuart.
+
+     [54] Osman is the real Turkish name, which has been
+          corrupted into Othman. The descendants of his
+          subjects style themselves Osmanlis--corrupted into
+          Ottoman.
+
+     [55] Edebali, a Mussulman prophet and saint, whose
+          daughter Osman married.
+
+     [56] A criminal tribunal, of which Steno himself was
+          president.
+
+     [57] "Jacques Bonhomme." Froissart takes this for the
+          name of an individual, but it is the common
+          nickname--like "Hodge" or "Giles"--of the French
+          peasantry. It is said that the term was applied by
+          the lords of the manor to their villeins or serfs,
+          in derision of their awkwardness and patient
+          endurance of their lot. The "King who came from
+          Clermont"--the leader of the Jacquerie--was William
+          Karl or Callet.
+
+     [58] A most wonderful scene. The B'hagiratha or Ganges
+          issues from under a very low arch at the foot of the
+          grand snow-bed. The illiterate mountaineers compare
+          the pendent icicles to Mahodeva's hair. Hindoos of
+          research may formerly have been here; and if so, one
+          cannot think of any place to which they might more
+          aptly give the name of a cow's mouth than to this
+          extraordinary _débouché_.
+
+     [59] Translated from the German by B. G. Babington.
+
+     [60] "Chorus Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus' dance; the
+          lascivious dance, Paracelsus calls it, because they
+          that are taken with it can do nothing but dance till
+          they be dead or cured. It is so called for that the
+          parties so troubled were wont to go to St. Vitus for
+          help; and, after they had danced there awhile, they
+          were certainly freed. 'Tis strange to hear how long
+          they will dance, and in what manner, over stools,
+          forms, and tables. One in red clothes they cannot
+          abide. Musick above all things they love; and
+          therefore magistrates in Germany will hire musicians
+          to play to them, and some lusty, sturdy companions
+          to dance with them. This disease hath been very
+          common in Germany, as appears by those relations of
+          Schenkius, and Paracelsus in his book of madness,
+          who brags how many several persons he hath cured of
+          it. Felix Platerus (_de Mentis Alienat._ cap. 3)
+          reports of a woman in Basel whom he saw, that danced
+          a whole month together. The Arabians call it a kind
+          of palsie. Bodine, in his fifth book, speaks of this
+          infirmity; Monavius, in his last epistle to
+          Scoltizius, and in another to Dudithus, where you
+          may read more of it."--_Burton's Anatomy of
+          Melancholy._
+
+     [61] The Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus in Syria states that,
+          at the festival of St. John, large fires were
+          annually kindled in several towns, through which
+          men, women, and children jumped; and that young
+          children were carried through by their mothers. He
+          considered this custom as an ancient Asiatic
+          ceremony of purification, similar to that recorded
+          of Ahaz, in II Kings, xvi. 3. Zonaras, Balsamon, and
+          Photius speak of the St. John's fires in
+          Constantinople, and the first looks upon them as the
+          remains of an old Grecian custom. Even in modern
+          times fires are still lighted on St. John's Day in
+          Brittany and other remote parts of Continental
+          Europe, through the smoke of which the cattle are
+          driven in the belief that they will thus be
+          protected from contagious and other diseases, and in
+          these practices protective fumigation originated.
+          That such different nations should have had the same
+          idea of fixing the purification by fire on St.
+          John's Day is a remarkable coincidence, which
+          perhaps can be accounted for only by its analogy to
+          baptism.
+
+     [62] Beckmann makes many other observations on this
+          well-known circumstance. The priest named is the
+          same who is still known in the nursery tales of
+          children as the _Knecht Ruprecht_.
+
+     [63] _Dass dir Sanct Veitstanz ankomme_ ("May you be
+          seized with St. Vitus' dance").
+
+     [64] "This proceeding was, however, no invention of his,
+          but an imitation of a usual mode of enchantment by
+          means of wax figures (_peri cunculas_). The witches
+          made a wax image of the person who was to be
+          bewitched; and in order to torment him, they stuck
+          it full of pins, or melted it before the fire. The
+          books on magic, of the Middle Ages, are full of such
+          things; though the reader who may wish to obtain
+          information on this subject need not go so far back.
+          Only eighty years since, the learned and celebrated
+          Storch, of the school of Stahl, published a treatise
+          on witchcraft, worthy of the fourteenth
+          century."--_Treatise on the Diseases of Children._
+
+     [65] Some authorities give twenty-nine.
+
+     [66] Selden, in his _Table Talk_, says: "There was once,
+          I am sure, a parliamentary pope. Pope Urban was made
+          pope in England by act of parliament, against Pope
+          Clement: the act is not in the _Book of Statutes_,
+          either because he that compiled the book would not
+          have the name of the Pope there, or else he would
+          not let it appear that they meddled with any such
+          thing; but it is upon the rolls."
+
+     [67] A groat equalled fourpence, or eight cents.
+
+     [68] In Walsingham may be seen a long account of the
+          death of the Archbishop, page 250. His head was
+          carried in triumph through the streets on the point
+          of a lance, and fixed on London bridge. That it
+          might be the better known, the hat or bonnet worn by
+          him was nailed to the skull.
+
+     [69] When Tresilian, one of the judges, tried the
+          insurgents at St. Alban's, he impanelled three
+          juries of twelve men each. The first was ordered to
+          present all whom they knew to be the chiefs of the
+          tumult, the second gave their opinion on the
+          presentation of the first, and the third pronounced
+          the verdict of guilty or not guilty. It does not
+          appear that witnesses were examined. The juries
+          spoke from their personal knowledge. Thus each
+          convict was condemned on the oaths of thirty-six
+          men. At first, on account of the multitude of
+          executions, the condemned were beheaded: afterward
+          they were hanged and left on the gibbet as objects
+          of terror; but as their bodies were removed by their
+          friends, the King ordered them to be hanged in
+          chains, the first instance in which express mention
+          of the practice is made. According to Holinshed the
+          executions amounted to fifteen hundred.
+
+     [70] The readers, as might be expected, often
+          surreptitiously copied portions of special interest.
+          One is reminded of the story in ancient Irish
+          history of a curious decision arising out of an
+          incident of this kind nearly a thousand years
+          before, which seems to have influenced the history
+          of Christianity in Britain. St. Columb, on a visit
+          to the aged St. Finian in Ulster, had permission to
+          read in the Psalter belonging to his host. But every
+          night while the good old saint was sleeping, the
+          young one was busy in the chapel writing by a
+          miraculous light till he had completed a copy of the
+          whole Psalter. The owner of the Psalter, discovering
+          this, demanded that it should be given up, as it had
+          been copied unlawfully from his book; while the
+          copyist insisted that, the materials of labor being
+          his, he was entitled to what he had written. The
+          dispute was referred to Diarmad, the King at Tara,
+          and his decision (genuinely Irish) was given in St.
+          Finian's favor. "To every book," said he, "belongs
+          its son-book [copy], as to every cow belongs her
+          calf." Columb complained of the decision as unjust,
+          and the dispute is said to have been one of the
+          causes of his leaving Ireland for Iona.
+
+     [71] Oliver Wendell Holmes: _Autocrat of the
+          Breakfast-table._
+
+     [72] A town in Schwyz. The name means a "hermitage." St.
+          Meinrad, according to legend, lived there (ninth
+          century) as a hermit. It is a celebrated pilgrim
+          resort.--ED.
+
+     [73] He descended from Henry III both by father and
+          mother. But he could not claim by the father's side,
+          because the young Earl of March was sprung from the
+          Duke of Clarence, the elder brother of John of
+          Gaunt; nor by the mother's side, because she was
+          sprung from Edmund of Lancaster, a younger brother
+          of Edward I. It was pretended that Edmund was the
+          elder brother, but deformed in body, and therefore
+          set aside with his own consent. If we may believe
+          Hardyng, Henry on September 21st produced in council
+          a document to prove the seniority of Edmund over
+          Edward, but that the contrary was shown by a number
+          of unanswerable authorities.
+
+     [74] Charles IV.
+
+     [75] Allusion to John Ziska, leader of the Hussites, who
+          waged a fierce war against Wenzel and the empire.
+
+     [76] Head of the House of Hohenzollern, Burggraves of
+          Nuremberg.
+
+     [77] This was the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII, whose
+          brother Jean, Duke of Burgundy, had, in 1407,
+          procured the murder of the Duke of Orleans.
+
+     [78] To _houspiller_ is to maul, pull about, abuse,
+          "worry like a dog"; hence the name _houspilleur_.
+
+     [79] The English cardinal, most powerful ecclesiastic of
+          the time.
+
+     [80] Assistant judges.
+
+     [81] Tipstaffs, constables.
+
+     [82] The Duke of Bedford (John of Lancaster), third son
+          of Henry IV of England, was regent of England and
+          France, which office he assumed on the death of
+          Henry V, in 1422.
+
+     [83] The memory of Jeanne d'Arc was long and shamefully
+          traduced by descendants of those enemies of France
+          whom she baffled. Even Shakespeare (_Henry VI_) is
+          so unjust to her--refining upon the brutal calumnies
+          of the historians--as to grieve his most loving
+          critics. It remained for the opening years of the
+          twentieth century to see the Maid canonized by the
+          Church which, as the agent of her country's foes,
+          was instrumental in her destruction.--ED.
+
+     [84] Translated by Chauncey C. Starkweather, M.A., LL.B.
+
+     [85] The Catalan Grand Company was a formidable body of
+          mercenary soldiers; it arose in Sicily during the
+          wars that followed the Sicilian Vespers.
+
+     [86] See 1291.
+
+     [87] Date uncertain.
+
+     [88] Date uncertain.
+
+     [89] A specimen of an early speaking-tube exists,
+          connecting the room said to have been occupied by
+          Isabella with the old brewhouse, now a tavern, by
+          means of which Mortimer was wont to communicate with
+          his mistress. The castle stands upon a mount of 280
+          feet, sheer rock, and the brewhouse is at its base.
+          A peculiarity of the tube, bored through the live
+          rock, is an elbow-joint, which is a puzzle to
+          scientists.
+
+     [90] Date uncertain.
+
+     [91] Often erroneously given as 1370, neglecting the fact
+          that, by the old manner of reckoning, the year began
+          on March 25th.
+
+     [92] Date uncertain.
+
+     [93] By the French it is claimed that Jean Charlier de
+          Gerson was the author of _de Imitatione Christi_,
+          usually attributed to Thomas à Kempis.
+
+
+     END OF VOLUME VII
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
+Volume 07, by Various
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
+Volume 07, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Rossiter Johnson
+        Charles Horne
+        John Rudd
+
+Release Date: December 18, 2008 [EBook #27562]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EVENTS, VOLUME 07 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="frontispiece" id="frontispiece" /><img src=
+"images/img1a.jpg" width="500" height="761" alt=
+"Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand,
+during the coronation of Charles
+VII before the high altar at Rheims." title="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src=
+"images/img2a.jpg" width="500" height="1143" alt=
+"Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand,
+during the coronation of Charles
+VII before the high altar at Rheims." title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>THE GREAT EVENTS</h1>
+
+<h5>BY</h5>
+
+<h2>FAMOUS HISTORIANS</h2>
+
+<div class="box">
+A COMPREHENSIVE AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S
+HISTORY, EMPHASIZING THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND PRESENTING
+THESE AS COMPLETE NARRATIVES IN THE MASTER-WORDS
+OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS
+</div>
+<p class="indent">&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="85%" summary="heading" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">NON-SECTARIAN</td>
+<td class="middle">NON-PARTISAN</td>
+<td class="right">NON-SECTIONAL</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="indent">&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="box">
+ON THE PLAN EVOLVED FROM A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS GATHERED
+FROM THE MOST DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF AMERICA
+AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS BY SPECIALISTS
+TO CONNECT AND EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED NARRATIVES, ARRANGED
+CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH THOROUGH INDICES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES,
+CHRONOLOGIES, AND COURSES OF READING
+</div>
+
+<h4>EDITOR-IN-CHIEF</h4>
+
+<h3>ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.</h3>
+
+<h4>ASSOCIATE EDITORS</h4>
+
+<h3>CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.<br />
+JOHN RUDD, LL.D.</h3>
+
+<h4><i>With a staff of specialists</i></h4>
+
+<h3><i>VOLUME VII</i></h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;"><img src=
+"images/ornament.png" class="noborder" width="100" height="41" alt=
+"ornament." title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h3><b>The National Alumni</b></h3>
+
+<h4><small>COPYRIGHT, 1905,</small><br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> THE NATIONAL ALUMNI</h4>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">v</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<h4>VOLUME VII</h4>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="rightc" colspan="3"><span class="smcap"><small>page</small></span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><i>An Outline Narrative of the Great Events</i>,</td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_xiii">xiii</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">CHARLES F. HORNE</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Dante Composes the</i> Divina Commedia <i>(<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1300-1318)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Third Estate Joins in the Government of France (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span>
+1302)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">HENRI MARTIN</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair of France
+(<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1302)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">EYRE EVANS CROWE</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>First Swiss Struggle for Liberty (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1308)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">F. GRENFELL BAKER</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Battle of Bannockburn (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1314)</i>,,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">ANDREW LANG</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Burning of Grand Master Molay (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1314)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">F. C. WOODHOUSE<br />HENRY HART MILMAN</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King of
+France,(<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1337-1340)</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">FRAN&Ccedil;OIS P. G. GUIZOT</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Battles of Sluys and Cr&eacute;cy (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1340-1346)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">SIR JOHN FROISSART</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">vi</a></span><p class="indent"><i>Modern Recognition of Scenic Beauty</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Crowning of Petrarch at Rome (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1341)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JACOB BURCKHARDT</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Rienzi's Revolution in Rome (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1347)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">RICHARD LODGE</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance (Fourteenth
+to Sixteenth Century)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>The Black Death Ravages Europe (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1348)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">J. F. C. HECKER<br />GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>First Turkish Dominion in Europe
+Turks Seize Gallipoli (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1354)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at Venice
+(<span class="smcap">d.d.</span> 1355)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull
+(<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1356)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_160">160</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">SIR ROBERT COMYN</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1358)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">SIR JOHN FROISSART</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Conquests of Timur the Tartar (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1370-1405)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">EDWARD GIBBON</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1374)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">J. F. C. HECKER</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Election of Antipope Clement VII</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Beginning of the Great Schism (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1378)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">HENRY HART MILMAN</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Genoese Surrender to Venetians (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1380)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">HENRY HALLAM</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">vii</a></span><p class="indent"><i>Rebellion of Wat Tyler (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1381)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JOHN LINGARD</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English (<span class="smcap">A.D.</span>
+1382)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">J. PATERSON SMYTH</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>The Swiss Win Their Independence
+Battle of Sempach (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1386-1389)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">F. GRENFELL BAKER</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span>
+1397)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">PAUL C. SINDING</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Discovery of the Canary Islands and the African
+Coast</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Beginning of Negro Slave Trade (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1402)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">SIR ARTHUR HELPS</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Council of Constance (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1414)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_284">284</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">RICHARD LODGE</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Trial and Burning of John Huss</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>The Hussite Wars (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1415)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_294">294</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>The House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg
+(<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1415)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">THOMAS CARLYLE</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Battle of Agincourt</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>English Conquest of France (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1415)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_320">320</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JAMES GAIRDNER</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1429)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">SIR EDWARD S. CREASY</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">viii</a></span><p class="indent"><i>Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1431)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_350">350</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JULES MICHELET</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Charles VII Issues His Pragmatic Sanction</i></p></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Emancipation of the Gallican Church (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1438)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_370">370</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">W. HENLEY JERVIS<br />REN&Eacute; F. ROHRBACHER</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Universal Chronology (<span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1301-1438)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Page_385">385</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec"><span class="smcap2">JOHN RUDD</span></td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">ix<br />x<br />xi<br /></a>xii</span></p>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<h4>VOLUME VII</h4>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="illustrations" border="0">
+
+<tr>
+<td class="rightc" colspan="3"><span class="smcap"><small>page</small></span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during the
+coronation of Charles VII, before the high altar
+at Rheims (page 347)</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#frontispiece">Frontispiece</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec">Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.</td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc" colspan="2"><p class="indent"><i>Richard II resigns the crown of England to Henry,
+Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at
+London</i>,</p></td>
+<td class="rightc"><a href="#Richard_II">262</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="leftc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="middlec">Painting by Sir John Gilbert.</td>
+<td class="rightc">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">xiii</a></span></p>
+<h2>AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE</h2>
+
+<h5>TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS,<br />
+AND CONSEQUENCES OF</h5>
+
+<h1>THE GREAT EVENTS</h1>
+
+<h5>(FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)</h5>
+
+<h3>CHARLES F. HORNE</h3>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/ill_f.png" class=
+"floatLeft" alt="F" />IFTY years ago the term "renaissance" had
+a very definite meaning to scholars as representing
+an exact period toward the close of
+the fourteenth century when the world suddenly
+reawoke to the beauty of the arts of
+Greece and Rome, to the charm of their
+gayer life, the splendor of their intellect.
+We know now that there was no such sudden reawakening, that
+Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long centuries,
+and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer side
+of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with
+their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer
+period, and there has been a constant tendency to push the date
+of its beginning ever backward, as we detect more and more the
+dimly dawning light amid the darkness of earlier ages. Of late,
+writers have fallen into the way of calling Dante the "morning
+star of the Renaissance"; and the period of the great poet's work,
+the first decade of the fourteenth century, has certainly the advantage
+of being characterized by three or four peculiarly striking
+events which serve to typify the tendencies of the coming
+age.</p>
+
+<p>In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic,
+by a political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">xiv</a></span>
+it, he descended into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings
+in exile which ended only with his life, and which stirred in
+him the deeps that found expression in his mighty poem, the
+<i>Divina Commedia</i>.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">1</a> Throughout his masterpiece he speaks with
+eager respect of the old Roman writers, and of such Greeks as
+he knew&mdash;so we have admiration of the ancient intellect. He
+also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other more
+earthly tyrants&mdash;so we have the dawnings of democracy and of
+religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's
+self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.</p>
+
+<p>More important even than these in its immediate results,
+Dante, while he began his poem in Latin, the learned language
+of the time, soon transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted
+Latin of his commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his
+daily life. That is, he wrote not for scholars like himself, but for
+a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work
+in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a
+new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant intellects
+which, with their growing and vigorous vitality, were to
+supersede the old.</p>
+
+
+<p>In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto
+was at work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was
+building the famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his
+still more famous bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening
+enough.</p>
+
+<p>If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another
+scene tragically expressive of the changing times. The
+French King, Philip the Fair, so called from his appearance, not
+his dealings, had bitter cause of quarrel with the same Pope
+Boniface VIII who had held the great jubilee of 1300. Philip's
+soldiers, forcing their way into the little town of Anagni, to which
+the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon his holiness.
+If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So few
+were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of towns-folk
+in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from
+the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck&mdash;beaten,
+say not wholly reliable authorities&mdash;and so insulted that
+rage and shame drove him mad, and he died.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">xv</a></span>
+Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge
+the martyr. Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but
+the next Pope, venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died
+within a few months under strong probabilities of poison; and
+the next Pope, Clement V, became the obedient servant of the
+French King. He even removed the seat of papal authority from
+Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years the
+popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power
+of the Church was sudden, terrible, complete.</p>
+
+<h4>INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE</h4>
+
+<p>Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked
+the mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious
+orders of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in
+Jerusalem. The Templars, having found their warfare hopeless,
+had abandoned the Holy Land and had dwelt for a generation
+inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized the leading members
+of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and confiscated
+all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles throughout
+France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the extermination
+of the entire order and the torture and execution of
+its chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not,
+their helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low
+ebb to which knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the
+monarchs. The day of feudalism was past.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">2</a></p>
+
+<p>We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this
+cruel, crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against
+the Pope, he called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of
+his people; and, following the example already established in
+England, he gave a voice in this assembly to the "Third Estate,"
+the common folk or "citizens," as well as to the nobles and the
+clergy. So even in France we find the people acquiring
+power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but a timid
+and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by
+its money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one
+day be strong enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant
+overlords.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">3</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">xvi</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took
+place farther northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish
+cities Ghent, Li&egrave;ge, and Bruges had grown to be the great
+centres of the commercial world, so wealthy and so populous
+that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish burghers had
+not always been subject to France&mdash;else they had been less well
+to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and rebelled.
+Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad
+knights; and the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better
+defence than stout leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the
+battle of Courtrai the knights charged into an unsuspected
+ditch, and as they fell the burghers with huge clubs beat out
+such brains as they could find within the helmets. It was subtlety
+against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness asserting itself
+along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself a fresh
+nobility to replenish his depleted stock.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">4</a></p>
+
+<p>The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign
+will in itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most
+important state in Europe. This, however, was due less to
+French strength than to the weakness of the empire, where rival
+rulers were being constantly elected and wasting their strength
+against one another. If Courtrai had given the first hint that
+these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war, it was soon
+followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among themselves
+a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in
+1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">5</a>
+The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival
+claimants for the title of emperor, and was much too busy to
+attend personally to the chastisement of these presumptuous
+boors. The army which he sent to do the work for him was met
+by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain passes, overwhelmed
+with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce charge
+of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years
+to forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second
+army into the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss
+liberty was established on an unarguable basis.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">6</a></p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">xvii</a></span>A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under
+Bruce, the Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the
+English.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">7</a> Courtrai, Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new
+force was growing up over all Europe, and a new spirit among
+men. Knighthood, which had lost its power over kings, seemed
+like to lose its military repute as well.</p>
+
+<p>The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in
+Italy, where democracy had first asserted itself. In its train
+came intellectual ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth
+century Italy was in the full swing of the intellectual renaissance.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">8</a>
+In 1341 Petrarch, recognized by all his contemporary
+countrymen as their leading scholar and poet, was crowned with
+a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. This was
+the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for intellectual
+worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of the
+beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In
+reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our
+own, with a friend who understands.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">9</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>THE PERIOD OF DISASTER</h4>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too
+intense, too frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic
+in Rome and talked of the restoration of the city's ancient
+rule. But he governed like a madman or an inflated fool, and
+was slain in a riot of the streets.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">10</a> Scarce one of the famous cities
+succeeded in retaining its republican form. Milan became a
+duchy. Florence fell under the sway of the Medici. In Venice a
+few rich families seized all authority, and while the fame and territory
+of the republic were extended, its dogeship became a mere
+figurehead. All real power was lodged in the dread and secret
+council of three.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">11</a> Genoa was defeated and crushed in a great
+naval contest with her rival, Venice.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">12</a> Everywhere tyrannies
+stood out triumphant. The first modern age of representative
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">xviii</a></span>government was a failure. The cities had proved unable to protect
+themselves against the selfish ambitions of their leaders.</p>
+
+
+<p>In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we
+have seen, slower of development.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">13</a> Hence for these Northern
+cities the period of decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth
+century marks the zenith of their power. Their great
+trading league, the Hansa, was now fully established, and
+through the hands of its members passed all the wealth of Northern
+Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of
+Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark,
+Norway, and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance
+of the Hansa, until, toward the end of the century, Queen
+Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis of the North," united the
+three countries under her sway, and partly at least upraised
+them from their sorry plight.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">14</a></p>
+
+<p>On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look
+back with pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of
+its wrangling rulers, Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an
+established government lay at the root of all the disorder, tried
+to mend matters by publishing his "Golden Bull," which exactly
+regulated the rules and formul&aelig; to be gone through in
+choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were
+to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested
+elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty.
+The Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">15</a></p>
+
+<p>Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all
+the repeated plagues under which the centuries previous to our
+own have suffered, began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken
+Europe.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">16</a> It has been estimated that during the three
+years of this awful visitation one-third of the people of Europe
+perished. Whole cities were wiped out. In the despair and desolation
+of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became
+hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances
+of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its
+height. Men and women wandered from town to town, espe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">xix</a></span>cially
+in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion
+they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on
+them to enable them to stop.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">17</a></p>
+
+
+<p>France and England were also in desolation. The long
+"Hundred Years' War" between them began in 1340. France
+was not averse to it. In fact, her King, Philip of Valois, rather
+welcomed the opportunity of wresting away Guienne, the last
+remaining French fief of the English kings. France, as we have
+seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe. England was
+thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman
+dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised
+and deprived of half their territories by their overlord. To be
+sure, France was having much trouble with her Flemish cities,
+which were in revolt again under the noted brewer-nobleman,
+Van Artevelde,<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">18</a> yet it seemed presumption for England to attack
+her&mdash;England, so feeble that she had been unable to avenge her
+own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at Bannockburn.</p>
+
+<p>But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves
+as had the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not
+been in that strife against the Scots, a brave and impoverished
+people struggling for freedom. But hearts and pockets, too,
+welcomed the quarrel with France, overbearing France, that
+plundered their ships when they traded with their friends the
+Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a main
+source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom
+ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the
+brewer Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him
+at Ghent, and presently Flemings and English were allied in a
+defiance of France. By asserting a vague ancestral claim to the
+French throne, Edward eased the consciences of his allies, who
+had sworn loyalty to France; and King Philip had on his hands
+a far more serious quarrel than he realized.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">19</a></p>
+
+<p>In England's first great naval victory, Edward destroyed the
+French fleet at Sluys and so started his country on its wonderful
+career of ocean dominance. Moreover, his success established
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">xx</a></span>from the start that the war should be fought out in France and
+not in England.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">20</a> Then, in 1346, he won his famous victory of
+Cr&eacute;cy against overwhelming numbers of his enemies. It has
+been said that cannon were effectively used for the first time at
+Cr&eacute;cy, and it was certainly about this time that gunpowder began
+to assume a definite though as yet subordinate importance
+in warfare. But we need not go so far afield to explain the English
+victory. It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through
+a century and a half of freedom, England had been building up
+a class of sturdy yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived
+healthy, hearty, independent lives. France relied only on her nobles;
+her common folk were as yet a helpless herd of much shorn
+sheep. The French knights charged as they had charged at
+Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English peasants,
+instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly
+accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized
+mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed
+what the English yeomen had begun.</p>
+
+
+<p>Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what
+with the Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible
+English ravaging at will, France sank into an abyss of misery
+worse even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy
+peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt,
+avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings
+and burnings of the rich ch&acirc;teaux.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">21</a> A partial peace with England
+was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary
+soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had
+now come to take their pleasure in the French carnival of crime,
+and so the plundering and burning went on until the fair land
+was wellnigh a wilderness, and the English troops caught disease
+from their victims and perished in the desolation they had
+helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles with them
+and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won
+back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380,
+the English power in France had fallen again almost to where it
+stood at the beginning of the war.</p>
+
+<p>Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">xxi</a></span>great triumph. His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the
+falsity of Frenchmen. England also had gone through the
+great tragedy of the Black Death and her people, like those of
+France, had been driven to the point of rebellion&mdash;though with
+them this meant no more than that they felt themselves over-taxed.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">22</a></p>
+
+<p>The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be
+regarded as a period of depression in European civilization, of
+retrograde movement during which the wheels of progress had
+turned back. It even seemed as though Asia would once more
+and perhaps with final success reassert her dominion over helpless
+Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in 1291, had conquered
+Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land, had lost
+their power; but a new family of the Turkish race, the one that
+dwells in Europe to-day, the Osmanlis, had built up an empire
+by conquest over their fellows, and had begun to wrest province
+after province from the feeble Empire of the East. In 1354 their
+advance brought them across the Bosporus and they seized
+their first European territory.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">23</a> Soon they had spread over most
+of modern Turkey. Only the strong-walled Constantinople held
+out, while its people cried frantically to the West for help. The
+invaders ravaged Hungary. A crusade was preached against
+them; but in 1396 the entire crusading army, united with all the
+forces of Hungary, was overthrown, almost exterminated in the
+battle of Nicopolis.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was only a direct providence that saved Europe.
+Another Tartar conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine, had
+risen in the Far East.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">24</a> Like Attila and Genghis Khan he swept
+westward asserting sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled
+all his armies from Europe to meet this mightier and more
+insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which vague rumor has measured
+in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and slain, was
+fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and subjugated
+by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no
+real unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations
+reasserted their independence. Yet Europe was granted a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">xxii</a></span>considerable breathing space before the Turks once more felt
+able to push their aggressions westward.</p>
+
+
+
+<h4>THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE</h4>
+
+<p>Toward the close of this unlucky fourteenth century a marked
+religious revival extended over Europe. Perhaps men's sufferings
+had caused it. Many sects of reformers appeared, protesting
+sometimes against the discipline, sometimes the doctrines,
+of the Church. In Germany Nicholas of Basel established the
+"Friends of God." In England Wycliffe wrote the earliest
+translation of the Bible into any of our modern tongues.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">25</a> The
+Avignon popes shook off their long submission to France and
+returned to Italy, to a Rome so desolate that they tell us not ten
+thousand people remained to dwell amid its stupendous ruins.
+Unfortunately this return only led the papacy into still deeper
+troubles. Several of the cardinals refused to recognize the Roman
+Pope and elected another, who returned to Avignon. This
+was the beginning of the "Great Schism" in the Church.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">26</a> For
+forty years there were two, sometimes three, claimants to the
+papal chair. The effect of their struggles was naturally to lessen
+still further that solemn veneration with which men had once
+looked up to the accepted vicegerent of God on earth. Hitherto
+the revolt against the popes had only assailed their political supremacy;
+but now heresies that included complete denial of the
+religious authority of the Church began everywhere to arise. In
+England Wycliffe's preachings and pamphlets grew more and
+more opposed to Roman doctrine. In Bohemia John Huss not
+only said, as all men did, that the Church needed reform, but, going
+further, he refused obedience to papal commands.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">27</a> In short,
+the reformers, finding themselves unable to purify the Roman
+Church according to their views, began to deny its sacredness
+and defy its power.</p>
+
+
+<p>At length an unusually energetic though not oversuccessful
+emperor, Sigismund, the same whom the Turks had defeated at
+Nicopolis, persuaded the leaders of the Church to unite with him
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">xxiii</a></span>in calling a grand council at Constance.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">28</a> This council ended the
+great schism and restored order to the Church by securing the rule
+of a single pope. It also burned John Huss as a heretic, and
+thereby left on Sigismund's hands a fierce rebellion among the
+reformer's Bohemian followers. The war lasted for a generation,
+and during its course all the armies of Germany were repeatedly
+defeated by the fanatic Hussites.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">29</a></p>
+
+<p>Another interesting performance of the Emperor Sigismund
+was that, being deep in debt, he sold his "electorate" of Brandenburg
+to a friend, a Hohenzollern, and thus established as one
+of the four chief families of the empire those Hohenzollerns who
+rose to be kings of Prussia and have in our own day supplanted
+the Hapsburgs as emperors of Germany.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">30</a> Also worth noting of
+Sigismund is the fact that during the sitting of his Council of
+Constance he made a tour of Europe to persuade all the princes
+and various potentates to join it. When he reached England he
+was met by a band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand
+whether by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy
+over England. Sigismund assured them he did not,
+and was allowed to land. We may look to this English parade of
+independence as our last reminder of the old medi&aelig;val conception
+of the Emperor as being at least in theory the overlord of
+the whole of Europe.</p>
+
+
+<h4>LATTER HALF OE THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR</h4>
+
+<p>By this time England had in fact recovered from her period
+of temporary disorder and depression. King Richard II, the
+feeble son of the Black Prince, had been deposed in 1399,<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">31</a> and a
+new and vigorous line of rulers, the Lancastrians, reached their
+culmination in Henry V (1415-1422). Henry revived the French
+quarrel, and paralleled Cr&eacute;cy and Poitiers with a similar victory
+at Agincourt.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">32</a> The French King was a madman, and, aided by
+a civil war among the French nobility, Henry soon had his neighbor's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">xxiv</a></span>
+kingdom seemingly helpless at his feet. By the treaty of
+Troyes he was declared the heir to the French throne, married
+the mad King's daughter, and dwelt in Paris as regent of the
+kingdom.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">33</a></p>
+
+
+<p>The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a
+similar English conquest of France. But the chances of fate are
+many. Both Henry and his insane father-in-law died in the
+same year, and while Henry left only a tiny babe to succeed to
+his claims, the French King left a full-grown though rather worthless
+son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to deny the
+English authority, from a safe distance in Southern France.
+He made, however, no effort to assert himself or retrieve his fortunes;
+and the English captains in the name of their baby King
+took possession of one fortress after another, till, in 1429, Orleans
+was the only French city of rank still barring their way from
+Charles and the far south.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">34</a></p>
+
+<p>Then came the sudden, wonderful arousing of the French
+under their peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture
+and execution.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">35</a> At last even the French peasantry were
+roused; and the French nobles forgot their private quarrels and
+turned a united front against the invaders. The leaderless English
+lost battle after battle, until of all France they retained only
+Edward III's first conquest, the city of Calais.</p>
+
+<p>France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the
+Council of Constance, and, remembering how long she had held
+the papacy within her own borders, asserted at least a qualified
+independence of the Romans by the "Pragmatic Sanction"
+which established the Gallican Church.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">36</a></p>
+
+<p>This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King
+Charles, who, in fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the
+power which his good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won.
+Among other innovations he established a "standing army,"
+the first permanent body of government troops in Teutonic Europe.
+By this step he did much to alter the medi&aelig;val into the
+modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxv" id="Page_xxv">xxv</a></span>kings over both nobles and people which continued in France
+and more or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries
+to follow.</p>
+
+
+<p>Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era
+is to be seen in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic
+coast of Africa by the Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement
+of the Canary Isles. As a first product of their voyages
+the explorers introduced negro slavery into Europe<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">37</a>&mdash;a grim
+hint that the next age with increasing power was to face increasing
+responsibilities as well.</p>
+
+<p>An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering
+into light. In that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic
+Sanction (1438), though yet unknown to warring princes and
+wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a little German workshop,
+had evolved the idea of movable types, that is, of modern
+printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii,
+education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies
+and slaveries impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and
+which may one day do as much for standing armies.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+<h2>DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1300-1318</h6>
+
+<h3>RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Out of what may be called the civil and religious storm-and-stress
+period through which the Middle passed into the modern age, there
+came a great literary foregleam of the new life upon which the world was
+about to enter. From Italy, where the European ferment, both in its
+political and its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy
+of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible world"&mdash;Dante's <i>Divina
+Commedia</i>&mdash;wherein also the deeper history of the visible world of
+man was both embodied from the past and in a measure predetermined
+for the human race.</p>
+
+<p>Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was
+not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine."
+It is in three parts&mdash;<i>Inferno</i> (hell), <i>Purgatorio</i> (purgatory), and <i>Paradiso</i>
+(paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical
+translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent
+prose version (<i>Inferno</i>) of John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas
+Carlyle.</p>
+
+<p>Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in May,
+1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the <i>Divina Commedia</i>
+and his other great work, the <i>Vita Nuova</i> (the new life), narrate
+the love&mdash;either romantic or passionate&mdash;with which he was inspired by
+Beatrice Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and
+Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed to have
+been determined by this ideal attachment. But an equally noteworthy
+fact of his literary career is that his works were produced in the midst of
+party strifes wherein the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the
+bitter feuds of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of failure,
+persecution, and exile. But above all these trials rose his heroic
+spirit and the sublime voice of his poems, which became a quickening
+prophecy, realized in the birth of Italian and of European literature, in
+the whole movement of the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development
+of the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life of Dante,
+and of the history-making <i>Commedia</i>, attest the importance of including
+the poet and his work in this record of Great Events.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>
+<img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE <i>Divina Commedia</i> is one of the landmarks of history.
+More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning
+of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than
+the inspirer of art and the glory of a great people, it is one of
+those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power which
+measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably
+and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by grander
+divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent
+of all who come after. It stands with the <i>Iliad</i> and Shakespeare's
+plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the
+<i>Novum Organon</i> and the <i>Principia</i>, with Justinian's Code, with
+the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and
+it opens European literature, as the <i>Iliad</i> did that of Greece and
+Rome. And, like the <i>Iliad</i>, it has never become out of date; it accompanies
+in undiminished freshness the literature which it began.</p>
+
+<p>We approach the history of such works, in which genius
+seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their
+bursting out from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance
+and shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They
+come too near the fount of being to be followed up without our
+feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear,
+cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
+world&mdash;as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes
+of nature, so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which
+he has added permanently one more great feature to the world,
+and created a new power which is to act on mankind to the end.
+The mystery of the inventive and creative faculty, the subtle
+and incalculable combinations by which it was led to its work,
+and carried through it, are out of reach of investigating thought.
+Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result; by
+how little the world might have lost one of its ornaments&mdash;by
+one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among
+the countless accidents among which man runs his course.
+And then the solemn recollection supervenes that powers were
+formed, and life preserved, and circumstances arranged, and
+actions controlled, and thus it should be; and the work which
+man has brooded over, and at last created, is the foster-child
+too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end to end, strongly
+and sweetly disposing of all things."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some
+cases and to a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed,
+the sight of the particular accidents among which it was developed&mdash;which
+belong perhaps to a heterogeneous and wildly
+discordant order of things, which are out of proportion and out
+of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which have, as it
+seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to bear on
+its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we
+feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on
+which its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with
+which they had to conspire&mdash;affects the imagination even more
+than cases where we see nothing. We are tempted less to
+musing and wonder by the <i>Iliad</i>, a work without a history, cut
+off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of its age, unexplained
+in its origin and perfection, than by the <i>Divina Commedia</i>,
+destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
+yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly
+from its chance incidents.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Divina Commedia</i> is singular among the great works
+with which it ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character
+and history. In general we associate little more than the name&mdash;not
+the life&mdash;of a great poet with his works; personal interest
+belongs more usually to greatness in its active than its
+creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of the <i>Commedia</i>,
+as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined by
+Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim
+and flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's
+own life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot
+of all things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins
+and perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and
+the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local
+factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the
+poet's own day; and in that awful company to which he leads
+us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of
+himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems
+as if the poem which was to hold such a place in Christian literature
+hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather than the
+deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as generally,
+is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose&mdash;the
+man conscious of power and intending to use it&mdash;and
+then the accidents among which he worked; but how the current
+of purpose threaded its way among them, how it was thrown
+back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot learn from history.</p>
+
+<p>It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of
+quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream
+of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams
+of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise,
+and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing
+work of fiction&mdash;quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical
+conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of
+genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly
+as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution
+of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory
+of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a
+great work. But a prosaic change seems to come over his half-ideal
+character. The lover becomes the student&mdash;the student
+of the thirteenth century&mdash;struggling painfully against difficulties,
+eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and
+stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine,
+but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in
+premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the
+refinements of half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the
+Proven&ccedil;als.</p>
+
+<p>Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within
+his reach are accepted as the consolation of his human griefs;
+he is filled with the passion of universal knowledge, and the
+desire to communicate it. Philosophy has become the lady of
+his soul&mdash;to write allegorical poems in her honor, and to comment
+on them with all the apparatus of his learning in prose,
+his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it is said,
+not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by
+discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before
+her death. He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence,
+the father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate,
+a partisan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the day.</p>
+
+<p>Beatrice reappears&mdash;shadowy, melting at times into symbol<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>
+and figure&mdash;but far too living and real, addressed with too intense
+and natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything.
+The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished.
+The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been;
+and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping
+the student's formalities and abstractions, reverted in
+sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and brooded once more
+on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory had once
+been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him
+and that stable country "where the angels are in peace."
+Round her image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing
+love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and
+effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him;
+round her image it arranged itself in awful order&mdash;and that
+image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory,
+freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing
+vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari&mdash;no figment of imagination,
+but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated
+by heavy sorrow&mdash;a boyish resolution, made in a
+moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous
+to say, in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly
+studies, gave the idea and suggested the form of the "sacred
+poem of earth and heaven."</p>
+
+<p>And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic
+gift, of this passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest,
+boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European
+song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of
+poetical inspiration&mdash;the political life. The boy had sensibility,
+high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature;
+the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of
+language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man.
+But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great
+poet.</p>
+
+<p>The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given
+to the Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not
+undeserving in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character
+and contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay
+claim, amid the social phenomena, so far grander in scale and
+purpose and more felicitous in issue, of other western nations.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>
+It is remarkable for keeping up an antique phase, which, in
+spite of modern arrangements, it has not yet lost. It is a history
+of cities. In ancient history all that is most memorable and
+instructive gathers round cities; civilization and empire were
+concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind to
+conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers
+larger than might be collected in a single market-place.
+The Roman Empire, indeed, aimed at being one in its administration
+and law; and it was not a nation nor were its provinces
+nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it prepared them for
+becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were
+uniting and union was becoming organization&mdash;and neither
+geographical remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local
+interests and differences were untractable obstacles to that
+spirit of fusion which was at once the ambition of the few and
+the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most powerful,
+had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces,
+knots in the political network&mdash;while this was going on more
+or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the
+ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness
+and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The
+history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one&mdash;the
+history of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but
+Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history
+of separate and independent cities&mdash;points of reciprocal and
+indestructible repulsion, and within, theatres of action where
+the blind tendencies and traditions of classes and parties
+weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and citizens
+could watch and measure and study one another with the
+minuteness of private life.</p>
+
+<p>Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not
+less from the custom of the day than from his own purpose a
+public man. He took his place among his fellow-citizens; he
+went out to war with them; he fought, it is said, among the
+skirmishers at the great Guelf victory at Campaldino; to qualify
+himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled himself in one
+of the guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the "art"
+of the apothecaries; he served the state as its agent abroad; he
+went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>according
+to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen
+distinct embassies, even to Hungary and France. In the memorable
+year of jubilee, 1300, he was one of the priors of the
+Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and co&ouml;peration
+and conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place
+and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by
+itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of
+men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched
+and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the
+stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound
+emotion as in the miraculous page of Vergil; and no scholar
+ever read Vergil with such feeling&mdash;no astronomer ever watched
+the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man
+opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul
+and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with
+free and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious
+purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate objects,
+moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and
+hard field where man is placed to labor and love, to be exercised,
+proved, and judged.</p>
+
+<p>The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known
+that it is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines
+we know not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued
+in parties, and the parties took names; they borrowed them
+from two rival factions in a neighboring town, Pistoia, whose
+feud was imported into Florence; and the Guelfs became divided
+into the Black Guelfs, who were led by the Donati, and the
+White Guelfs, who sided with Cerchi. It is still professed to be
+but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but they were
+too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the
+whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on,
+and for a time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great
+men; but it grew evident that one party must crush the other
+and become dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi
+and their White adherents were less formidable to the democracy
+than the unscrupulous and overbearing Donati, with their
+military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely of being
+nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the
+martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>
+cause. The Cerchi, with less character and less zeal, but rich,
+liberal, and showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar
+good-nature for the common people, were more popular in
+Guelf Florence than the <i>Parte Guelfa</i>; and, of course, the Ghibellines
+wished them well.</p>
+
+<p>Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to
+think that they might have been the governors and guides of
+the Republic&mdash;if they had chosen, and had known how;
+and both, though condemning the two parties equally, seem
+to have thought that this would have been the best result
+for the state. But the accounts of both, though they are very
+different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White
+Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded;
+and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they
+were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was
+in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might,
+they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate
+men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government,
+and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank
+from their fortune, "more from cowardice than from goodness,
+because they exceedingly feared their adversaries." Boniface
+VIII had no prepossessions in Florence, except for energy and
+an open hand; the side which was most popular he would have
+accepted and backed. But he said, "<i>Io non voglio perdere gli
+uomini perle femminelle</i>."<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">38</a> If the Black party furnished types
+for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's
+hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture
+of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd
+who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled
+with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful,
+but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is
+singled out in the <i>setta dei cattivi</i>, for deeper and special scorn&mdash;he,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Che fece per vilta il gran rifinto,"<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">39</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>
+general character. He acted for a time in concert with the
+expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back
+to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair; but
+he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home
+for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his
+death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his
+writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do
+but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and
+there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered
+by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near
+Florence, planning with the Cerchi and the White party an
+attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val
+di Magra, making peace between its small potentates; in another,
+as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions
+of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a
+ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
+recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy
+form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant
+court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the
+other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona.
+Rumor brings him to the West&mdash;with probability to Paris, more
+doubtfully to Oxford. But little that is certain can be made
+out about the places where he was honored and admired,
+and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him
+sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of
+Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel,
+built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that
+mother of little love," asked for his bones, but rightly asked in
+vain. His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken
+streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by the last relics
+of the Roman Empire&mdash;the mausoleum of the children of
+Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian&mdash;than among the assembled
+dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa
+Maria del Fiore.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Commedia</i>, at the first glance, shows the traces of its
+author's life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in
+which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous,
+and full of change. It is more than a working out of that
+touching phraseology of the Middle Ages in which "the way"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
+was the technical theological expression for this mortal life; and
+"viator" meant man in his state of trial, as "comprehensor"
+meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly
+country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is
+full of the recollections and definite images of his various journeys.
+The permanent scenery of the <i>inferno</i> and <i>purgatorio</i>,
+very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The
+descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred
+Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes&mdash;one who had
+climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the
+brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from
+the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and
+precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The
+severed rocks of the Adige Valley&mdash;the waterfall of St. Benedetto;
+the crags of Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the
+plains of Lucca and Ravenna; the "fair river" that flows among
+the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri; the marble quarries
+of Carrara; the "rough and desert ways between Lerici and
+Turbia," and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea
+at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty years
+ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished
+that picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and
+gradually climbing above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and
+the sun's orb appear faintly through them; and issuing at last
+into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of sunset
+was lost already on the shores below:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Ai raggi, morti gia' bassi lidi,"<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">40</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath
+the Alpine fir:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i3">"Un' ombra smorta</span>
+<span class="i0">Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri</span>
+<span class="i0">Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta;"<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">41</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i2">"d'un cader lento</span>
+<span class="i0">Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde</span>
+<span class="i0">Come di neve in Alpe senza vento."<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">42</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the <i>Divina
+Commedia</i> was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's
+life of Dante, told with some detail, implies, indeed, that it was
+begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in
+Florence&mdash;begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it&mdash;continued
+afterward in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed,
+the germ and presage of it may be traced in the <i>Vita Nuova</i>.
+The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and
+noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul.
+She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She
+already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the <i>envoye</i>
+of the <i>Vita Nuova</i> is the promise of the <i>Commedia</i>. "After this
+sonnet" (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere
+of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling
+by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)&mdash;"After this sonnet
+there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things
+which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one
+until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily of
+her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power,
+as she truly knows. So that it shall be the pleasure of Him,
+by whom all things live, that my life continue for some years,
+I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of any
+woman. And afterward, may it please him, who is the Lord
+of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory of her lady,
+that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the
+countenance of Him, <i>qui est per omnia secula benedictus</i>." It
+would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a
+great life to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was
+ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what
+he was promising, what he was pledging himself to&mdash;through
+what years of toil and anguish he would have to seek the light
+and the power he had asked; in what form his high venture
+should be realized.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
+But the <i>Commedia</i> is the work of no light resolve, and we
+need not be surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at
+the outset of the poet's life. We may freely accept the key
+supplied by the words of the <i>Vita Nuova</i>. The spell of boyhood
+is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His
+course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous.
+From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work,
+the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the
+grape was ripe." It may assume various changes&mdash;an image
+of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world,
+a type of heavenly wisdom and joy&mdash;but still it holds, in self-imposed
+and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and
+tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and
+strong a mind to fade and come to naught&mdash;to be other than
+the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all
+faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt
+whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was
+done by the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have
+been sung in grand though barbarous Latin to the <i>literati</i> of the
+fourteenth century; or a poem of new beauty might have fixed
+the language and opened the literature of modern Italy; but it
+could hardly have been the <i>Commedia</i>. That belongs, in its
+date and its greatness, to the time when sorrow had become the
+poet's daily portion and the condition of his life.</p>
+
+<p>But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise.
+Dante was alone&mdash;except in his visionary world, solitary
+and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng
+of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of
+his daughters; Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage;
+Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany to applaud.
+Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already
+in the region of spirits, and meet him there&mdash;Casella, Forese;
+Guido Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world
+he thinks and writes as a friendless man&mdash;to whom all that he
+had held dearest was either lost or imbittered; he thinks and
+writes for himself.</p>
+
+<p>So comprehensive in interest is the <i>Commedia</i>. Any attempt
+to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy,
+the moral life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>ology
+strikes the keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical
+science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the harmony,
+independent, yet ministering to the whole. If from the poem
+itself we could be for a single moment in doubt of the reality
+and dominant place of religion in it, the plain-spoken prose of
+the <i>Convito</i> would show how he placed "the Divine Science, full
+of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and sophisms,
+for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," is single
+perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon
+speaks, but queens or concubines or maidens; but she is the
+'Dove,' and the 'perfect one'&mdash;'Dove,' because without stain
+of strife; 'perfect,' because perfectly she makes us behold the
+truth, in which our soul stills itself and is at rest." But the
+same passage shows likewise how he viewed all human knowledge
+and human interests, as holding their due place in the
+hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's perfection.
+No account of the <i>Commedia</i> will prove sufficient which does
+not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep
+spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide
+liberty of materials and means which the poet allowed himself
+in working out his design.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great
+Ghibelline poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his
+strong political opinions, and the importance he attached to
+them, there can be no doubt. And he meant his poem to be the
+vehicle of them, and the record to all ages of the folly and
+selfishness with which he saw men governed. That he should
+take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part of
+his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he
+subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements
+of his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow
+limits. Yet this has been done by men of mark and ability, by
+Italians, by men who read the <i>Commedia</i> in their own mother
+tongue. It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it&mdash;maintained
+with great labor and pertinacious ingenuity&mdash;that
+Dante meant nothing more by his poem than the conflicts and
+ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred cantos of that
+vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the Ghibelline
+propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span>
+scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and
+Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the
+jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians
+write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a
+depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen
+and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of
+Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is
+hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or
+infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience,
+and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father
+Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism,
+produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but
+a poor excuse for such perverse blindness.</p>
+
+<p>Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition
+of an imperial power. Historically he did not belong
+to the Ghibelline party. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs,
+with whom he had been brought up, and that the White Guelfs,
+with whom he was expelled from Florence, were at length
+merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with
+them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in
+which he disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company,"
+and claims his independence&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i2">"A te fia bello</span>
+<span class="i0">Averti fatto parte per te stesso."<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">43</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dante, by the <i>Divina Commedia</i>, was the restorer of seriousness
+in literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions
+of his work, and by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke
+through the prescription which had confined great works to the
+Latin, and the faithless prejudices which, in the language of
+society, could see powers fitted for no higher task than that of
+expressing, in curiously diversified forms, its most ordinary
+feelings. But he did much more. Literature was going astray
+in its tone, while growing in importance; the <i>Commedia</i> checked
+it. The Proven&ccedil;al and Italian poetry was, with the exception
+of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively amatory,
+in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
+had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was
+trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something
+worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it,
+but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual
+distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The
+brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was, was deeply mined
+by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds
+against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely
+into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the idea
+of infidelity&mdash;not heresy, but infidelity&mdash;was quite a familiar one;
+and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura,
+there was working among those who influenced fashion
+and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom
+learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion
+almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in
+Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the
+great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but
+not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the
+language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian
+<i>Commedia</i> had not seized on all minds. It would have been
+an evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the
+siren tales of the <i>Decameron</i> had not been the first to occupy
+the ears with the charms of a new language.</p>
+
+
+<p>Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to
+open the grand procession of modern poets. He had chosen his
+subject in a region remote from popular thought&mdash;too awful for
+it, too abstruse. He had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits
+of the Church, and thrown himself with even enthusiastic
+faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so undoubting&mdash;her
+spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the
+unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides
+and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical
+writers. But with his mind full of the deep and intricate
+questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste
+always owing allegiance to Vergil, Ovid, and Statius&mdash;keen
+and subtle as a schoolman&mdash;as much an idolater of old heathen
+art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance&mdash;his eye
+is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of
+external nature, to the wonders of the physical world&mdash;his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
+interest in them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as
+sharp and distinct, his rendering of them as free and true and
+forcible, as little weakened or confused by imitation or by conventional
+words, his language as elastic and as completely under
+his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and
+original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own
+such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real
+in feeling and image&mdash;as if he had never felt the attractions of a
+crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow
+grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was
+not yet come when the classics could be really understood and
+appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring
+them with a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that
+he had caught their spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His
+poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the
+poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase
+of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he
+showed that those images and associations did not lose their
+poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span></p>
+<h2>THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT
+OF FRANCE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1302</h6>
+
+<h3>HENRI MARTIN<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">44</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the power of
+Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at its height, contentions
+arose between him and Pope Boniface VIII over the taxation of
+the clergy, and the right of nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices
+within the dominions of the French King.</p>
+
+<p>Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the county of Melgueil,
+which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in fief from the holy see.
+Boniface provoked Philip by a chiding bull, and added to the provocation
+by sending to the King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de
+Saisset, whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created Bishop of
+Pamiers.</p>
+
+<p>This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant attitude, and
+afterward spoke of the King, who received him in sombre silence, as "that
+debaser of coinage, that proud and dumb image that knows nothing but
+to stare at people without saying anything."</p>
+
+<p>Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him arrested and
+imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of treason, heresy, and blasphemy,
+and sent his chancellor, Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to
+the Pope, to demand the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his
+see.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta, fili,"
+bull, received Philip's ambassadors, but their interview was marked by a
+violent scene: "My power!" exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power
+embraces and includes the temporal power!"</p>
+
+<p>"So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that of the
+King, real."</p>
+
+<p>To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he deemed the
+King guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior clergy of France to an
+assembly at Rome.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_p.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="P" />HILIP and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its
+own weapons, to enlist public opinion on their side, and to
+shelter themselves behind a great national manifestation; the
+three estates of France were convoked at Notre Dame in Paris,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>the 10th of April, 1302, to take cognizance of the differences
+between the King and the Pope. For the first time since the
+establishment of the kingdom of France, the town deputies
+were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside of
+prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment
+of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested
+that henceforth the villages, the towns, the communities
+formed a collective entity, a political order.</p>
+
+
+<p>It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked
+by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and
+that he had the idea to seek in them moral power and support.</p>
+
+<p>The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little
+popular as Philip the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing,
+and knew it; the feudality did not possess sufficient union, the
+people did not have enough force to profit on this occasion
+against the Crown. Besides, the Pope was more unpopular
+than the King, and had been so for a much longer time; the
+nobility, which, since the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced to
+resist clerical jurisdiction, had not changed in sentiment; as to
+the people, filled with the remembrance of St. Louis, they
+loved the King still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the
+oppressions of Philip, and besides it was easy to foresee that the
+mayors, consuls, aldermen, jurats or magistrates, who were to
+represent their cities in the great assembly at Paris, dazzled
+with the unaccustomed <i>r&ocirc;le</i> to which they were called, and
+desirous to please the King in their personal interest or in that
+of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit lawyers
+who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the
+debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been
+known, might well have produced in many respects a contrary
+effect to the wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface
+touching the debasement of the coinage and the royal exactions,
+reproaches which so irritated Philip, might have met with other
+sentiments from the townsmen. The chancellor, Peter Flotte,
+foresaw this; he distributed among the public, instead of the
+original bull, a species of <i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i> in which he had assembled, in
+a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant pretensions
+of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which
+touched on the troubles of the nation against the King.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip,
+King of the French; fear God and observe his commandments.
+We want you to know that you are subject to us temporarily as
+well as spiritually; that the collation of the benefices and the
+prebends&mdash;revenues attached to the canonical positions&mdash;do not
+belong to you in any way; that if you have care of the vacant
+benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their successors; that
+if you have misapplied any of these benefices, we declare that
+collation invalid and revoke it, declaring as heretics all those
+who think otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>"Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."</p>
+
+<p>At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended
+answer to the pretended bull:</p>
+
+<p>"Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface,
+who gives out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations!
+May your very great Fatuity know that we are subject
+to no one as regards temporal power: that the collation of
+vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by Royal Right;
+that the incomes belong to us; that the collations made and to
+be made by us are valid in the past and in the future, and that
+we will manfully protect their possessors toward and against all.
+Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."</p>
+
+<p>This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address,
+but to abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the
+Pope, in the eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people
+must have been greatly changed if this end could be thus
+attained by a means which formerly would have drawn universal
+indignation on the head of the sacrilegious monarch.</p>
+
+<p>The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual.
+The prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute,
+neutralized by the difficulties of their position between
+the King and the Pope; the lords and the townsmen hastened
+thither irritated against the bull, heated by the violence of the
+royal answer. The members of the assembly were influenced
+each by the other according to their arrival; the pungent and
+wily eloquence of Peter Flotte did the rest. The chancellor, as
+the first of the great crown officers and the king's chief justice,
+opened the states by a long harangue in which, speaking in
+the name of Philip, he exposed with much force and ingenuity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span>
+the enterprises of the court of Rome and its wrongs toward the
+kingdom and the Church.</p>
+
+<p>"The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers
+and unknown individuals who never become residents.
+The prelates no longer have benefices to give to nobles whose
+ancestors founded the churches, and to other lettered persons;
+from which results also that gifts are no longer given to the
+churches. The Pope imposes on the churches and benefices
+pensions, subsidies, exactions of all kinds. The bishops are
+kept from their ministry, being obliged to go to the holy see to
+carry presents&mdash;always presents. All these abuses have done
+nothing but increase under the actual pontificate, and increase
+every day&mdash;conditions that can no longer be tolerated. That
+is why I command you as your master and pray you as your
+friend to give me counsel and help."</p>
+
+<p>The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his
+own initiative, to remedy the encroachments that his officers had
+made on the rights of the Church, and would have done so sooner
+had he not feared the appearance of submitting to the menaces
+and orders of the Pope, who pretended to reduce to a condition
+of vassalage the most noble kingdom of France, which had never
+been raised but from God. Peter Flotte dwelt especially on this
+latter argument, and appealed in turn to the interests of the
+nobility and of the clergy, and to national pride. The fiery
+Count of Artois arose, and exclaimed that even if the King submitted
+to the encroachments of the Pope, the nobility would
+not suffer them, and that the gentry would never acknowledge
+any temporal superior other than the King. The nobility and
+the Third Estate confirmed these words by their acclamations,
+and swore to sacrifice their properties and lives to defend the
+temporal independence of the kingdom. A Norman advocate,
+named Dubosc, procurator of the commune of Coutances,
+accused the Pope, in writing, of heresy for having wanted to
+despoil the King of the independence of the crown which he
+held from God. The embarrassment of the clergy was extreme;
+the members of the Church, fearing to be crushed in the crash
+between King and Pope, asked time for deliberation; their
+declaration in the assembly then being held, was insisted upon;
+already cries arose around them that whoever did not subscribe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
+to the oath would be held as an enemy of the State; they acquiesced,
+satisfied apparently by an appearance of violence which
+would serve them for an excuse at Rome. They acknowledged
+themselves obliged, in common with the other orders, to defend
+the rights of the King and of the kingdom, whether they held
+estates from the King or not; then they prayed the King to be
+allowed to go to the council convoked by the Pope; the King
+and the barons declared themselves formally opposed.</p>
+
+<p>The three orders then separated, so as to write to the court at
+Rome each its own side of the affair; the letters of the nobility
+and of the Third Estate&mdash;which as may be imagined were all
+prepared in advance by the agents of the King, and were only
+subscribed to and sealed by the assistants&mdash;were addressed,
+not to the Pope, but to the college of cardinals. The despatch
+of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and unreasonable
+enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and government
+of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the
+universities nor the people require correction or imposition of
+any trouble, whether by the authority of the Pope or anyone
+else&mdash;unless it be from their sire, the King. This letter is
+signed, not only by the principal lords of the kingdom, but also
+by several great barons of the empire.</p>
+
+<p>The epistle of the mayors, aldermen, jurats, consuls, universities,
+communes, and communities of the towns of the kingdom
+of France has not been preserved. It is known only, by
+the answer that the cardinals made, that it was conceived in
+the same spirit as the letter of the barons. The letter of the
+clergy is quite in another style: the clerks address their very
+holy father and very holy sire, the Pope; expose to him the
+complaints of the King and of the nobility; the necessity in
+which they find themselves engaged to defend the King's rights,
+and the anger of the laity; the imminent rupture of France
+with the Roman Church&mdash;and even of the people with the
+clergy in general&mdash;and conjure the highest prudence of the
+Pope to conserve the ancient union by revoking the convocation
+of the ecclesiastical council.</p>
+
+<p>The states-general were dissolved immediately after the
+unique <i>s&eacute;ance</i> which had so well responded to the desires of the
+King. The means employed to attain this result were not entirely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span>tirely
+loyal, nor was public opinion altogether free; it was but
+slightly enlightened on the grave debates that the authorities
+affected to submit to it. Nevertheless it was an important matter,
+this call to the French nation, and it must be acknowledged
+that the genius of France responded in proclaiming national
+independence, and in repelling the intervention of the court of
+Rome in the internal politics of the country.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span></p>
+<h2>WAR OF THE FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE
+FAIR OF FRANCE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1302</h6>
+
+<h3>EYRE EVANS CROWE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century the people of Flanders,
+whose country had been for centuries a feudal dependency of France,
+were considerably advanced in wealth and importance. They had become
+restive under the French rule, and their discontent ripened into
+settled hostility. Common commercial interests drew them into friendship
+with England, and in the quarrel between Philip the Fair and Edward
+I, 1295, concerning Edward's rule in Guienne (Aquitaine) the Flemings
+allied themselves with the English King.</p>
+
+<p>In 1297 Philip invaded Flanders and gained several successes against
+the Flemings, who were feebly aided by King Edward. In 1299 the two
+kings settled their quarrel, and the Flemings were left to the vengeance
+of Philip, for in the pacification the court of Flanders was not included.
+A French army entered the Flemish territory, inflicted two defeats upon
+the Count's troops, and received the submission of the Count. Philip
+annexed Flanders to his crown and appointed a governor over the Flemings.
+In less than two years they rose in furious revolt. The insurrection
+began at Bruges, May 18, 1302, when over three thousand Frenchmen
+in that city were massacred by the insurgents. This massacre was
+called the "Bruges Matins." Such an outrage upon the French crown
+could not but bring upon the Flemings all the forces that Philip was able
+to muster. The two leading actions of the ensuing war&mdash;that at Courtrai,
+known as the "Battle of the Spurs," on account of the number of
+gilt spurs captured by the Flemings, and the engagement at Mons-la-Puelle&mdash;are
+described in the course of the narrative which follows. As
+a result of the battle of Courtrai the French nobility were nearly destroyed,
+and Philip found it necessary to recreate his titled bodies.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE Flemings prepared to resist the storm. They chose
+Guy of Juliers, grandson of the Count of Flanders, to be
+their commander. Though a cleric, he did not hesitate to obey
+the call, in order to avenge his family, so cruelly betrayed by the
+French King. His brother, made prisoner at Furnes by the
+Count d'Artois, had perished in that rude Prince's keeping.
+His first attempt was to induce the people of Ghent to join the
+insurrection, but its rich burgesses preferred French rule to
+that of the Count of Flanders. Bruges, however, was supported<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>
+by all the lesser and maritime towns of Flanders. Guy of Namur,
+a son of the Count, who had escaped to Germany, also
+returned with a body of soldiers from that country, and reassured
+the Flemings. These surprised one of the ducal manors, in
+which were five hundred French, and then took Courtrai, occupying
+the town, but not the castle. It was immediately besieged,
+as well as that of Cassel, the people of Ypres rallying to the
+French cause. The French garrison of the town of Courtrai
+sent pressing messengers for aid, and Robert of Artois marched
+with seven thousand knights and forty thousand foot, of which
+one-fourth were archers. The Flemish were but twenty thousand,
+of which none but the chiefs had horses. Neither was
+their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the latter being
+a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with iron,
+and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers
+and Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads
+from Courtrai to Ghent, behind a canal that communicated
+with the river Lys. A priest came with the host, but, there being
+no time to receive the communion, each man took some earth
+in his mouth. The counts then knighted Pierre Konig and the
+chiefs of bands, and took their station on foot with the rest.</p>
+
+<p>The French had nine battalions or divisions, their archers
+or light troops being Lombards or Navarrese and Proven&ccedil;als.
+These the constable placed foremost, to commence the fight and
+harass the Flemings by their missiles. But the Count d'Artois
+overruled this man&oelig;uvre, and called it a Lombard trick, reproaching
+the Constable de Nesle with appreciating the Flemings
+too highly because of his connection with them. (He had
+married a daughter of the Count of Flanders.) "If you advance
+as far as I shall," replied the Count, "you will go far enough, I
+warrant." So saying he put spurs to his horse and led on his
+knights; on which the Count d'Artois and the French squadrons
+charged also. This formidable cavalry could not reach
+the Flemings, but fell one over the other into the canal, which
+they had not perceived, and which was five fathoms wide and
+three deep. The Flemish counts, seeing the disorder, instantly
+passed the canal on either side to take advantage of it, and fell
+on the discomfited French. The battle was but a massacre.
+Numbers of the French nobles perished&mdash;the Count d'Artois,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
+Godfrey of Brabant and his son, the counts of Eu and of Albemarle,
+the Constable and his brother, De Tanquerville, Pierre
+Flotte, the Chancellor, and Jacques de St. Pol&mdash;in all some
+six thousand knights. Louis of Clermont and one or two others
+escaped, to the damage of their reputation. This battle of Courtrai
+was fought on July 11, 1302.</p>
+
+<p>Had the war not been one exclusively of defence on the part
+of the Flemings, or had they had ambitious and adventurous
+chiefs, such a disaster might have endangered the throne of
+France. It was the Flemish democracy which had conquered,
+and its chiefs contented themselves with reducing the remaining
+cities, and expelling the gentry and rich citizens as of French
+inclinations. This reaction extended from Flanders into Brabant
+and Hainault. Philip in the mean time exerted all his
+activities and resources. Had he been an English king he
+would have called his parliament together, and have found
+national support and national supplies. The French King preferred
+having recourse to a recoinage. In 1294 he had forbidden
+any persons to keep plate unless they possessed an annual
+revenue of six thousand livres. He now ordered his bailies to
+deliver up their plate, and all non-functionaries to send half of
+theirs. Those who did so received payment in the new coin,
+and lost one-half thereby. A tax of one-fifth, or 20 per cent.,
+of the annual revenue was levied on the land, and a twentieth
+was levied on the movable property. In the following
+year the King found it more advantageous to order that all
+prelates and barons should, for every five hundred livres of
+yearly revenue in land, furnish an armed and mounted gentleman
+for five months' service, while the non-noble was to furnish
+and keep up six infantry soldiers (<i>sergens de pied</i>) for every
+hundred hearths. This decree was a return to feudal military
+service, occasioned, no doubt, by the general disaffection caused
+by the raising of the war supplies in money. As if to recompense
+all classes for the severity of the exaction, Philip published
+an <i>ordonnance</i> of reform for the protection of both laymen
+and ecclesiastics from the arbitrary encroachments or interference
+of his officers.</p>
+
+<p>Having thus set his realm in order, and collected an army of
+seventy thousand men at Arras, the King marched to meet the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>
+Flemings, who in equal force had mustered in the vicinity of
+Dovai. They kept, as at Courtrai, on the defensive; and the
+King of France, too cautious to attack them, allowed the whole
+autumn to pass, and returned to France after a campaign as
+inefficient as inglorious.</p>
+
+<p>Philip had been long involved in a controversy with Pope
+Boniface VIII, and the quarrel still continued. It was not till
+some time after the battle of Courtrai that the King at last,
+delivered from the menacing hostility of Rome, had leisure to
+turn his mind and efforts again toward Flanders. During the
+year 1303 he had sought to keep the Flemings at bay by bodies
+of Lombard and Tuscan infantry, whom his Florentine banker
+persuaded him to hire, and by Amadeus V, Duke of Savoy, who
+brought soldiers of that country to his aid. Although the long
+lances and more perfect armor of these troops gave them some
+advantage over the Flemings, the latter took and burned Therouanne,
+overran Artois, and laid siege to Tournai. Amadeus of
+Savoy, unable to overcome the Flemings by arms, recommended
+Philip to do so by treaty, and the King accordingly concluded
+a pacification, one condition of which was that the Count of
+Flanders should be released from prison to negotiate terms of
+fresh accommodation. The Flemings received the aged Count
+with respect; but he brought no terms which they were willing
+to accept; and he returned, as he had pledged his word, to captivity
+at Compi&egrave;gne, where he soon after died.</p>
+
+<p>For the campaign of the following year Philip, in lieu of Italian
+infantry, took sixteen Genoese galleys into his pay, commanded
+by Rainier de Grimaldi. This admiral passed through
+the Straits of Gibraltar and assailed the maritime towns and
+shipping of Flanders. Guy of Namur mustered to oppose them
+a fleet of greater numbers; but the Genoese, accustomed to
+naval warfare, defeated the Flemings and took Guy of Namur
+prisoner. Philip, at the same time, assembled a large army at
+Tournai, and marched to Mons-la-Puelle, near Lille, where the
+Flemings, to the number of seventy thousand, were encamped
+within a circumvallation of cars and chariots. There was no
+Robert of Artois on this occasion to precipitate a rash onslaught,
+and by Philip's order the southern light troops harassed the
+Flemings all day with arrows and missiles, allowing them no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
+repose. Toward the evening many of the French withdrew to
+refresh themselves and take off their armor; the King himself
+was of this number; the Flemings, perceiving this slackness,
+and divining the cause, poured forth from their encampment
+in three divisions, which at first drove all before them, and
+reached as far as the King's tent, then in full preparation for
+supper. The monarch himself, without armor or helmet, was
+fortunately not recognized; his secretary, De Boville, and two
+Parisians of the name of Gentien, whom Philip had always about
+his person, were slain before his eyes. The King withdrew,
+but it was to arm, mount on horseback, and cry out to his followers
+to stand their ground. He himself, says Villani, "one
+of the strongest and best made men of his time," fought valiantly
+until his brother Charles and most of the barons, recovering from
+the first panic, came to his rescue, and the Flemings were finally
+repulsed and put to the rout. William of Juliers fell on the side
+of the Flemings; the son of the Duke of Burgundy and many
+others on that of the French. Philip immediately laid siege to
+Lille, deeming the Flemings totally discomfited. They had,
+however, rallied, obtained re&euml;nforcements at Bruges and at
+Ghent, and in three weeks appeared to the number of fifty
+thousand before the King's camp at Lille, crying for battle.
+Philip called a council, and observed that "even a victory would
+be dearly purchased over a party so desperate."</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of Brabant and the Count of Savoy therefore
+undertook to negotiate with the Flemings, and Philip consented
+to grant them fair terms. He recognized their independent
+rights, agreed to liberate Robert, eldest son of Guido, Count of
+Flanders, as well as all those in captivity. He granted Robert
+and his son the fiefs which belonged to him in France, especially
+that of Nevers, and promised to give him investiture of the
+County of Flanders. The Flemings, on their side, consented to
+pay two hundred thousand livres, and to leave the King of
+France in possession of the three towns of Lille, Douai, and
+B&eacute;thune, that part of Flanders in which French was spoken. It
+was thus, at least, that the French interpreted the treaty, while
+the Flemings afterward alleged that French Flanders was merely
+a pledge for the payment of the money, not an alienation to the
+crown of France.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span></p>
+<h2>FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1308</h6>
+
+<h3>F. GRENFELL BAKER</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Owing to the fact that the house of Hapsburg had its origin in Switzerland,
+the accession of Rudolph I, founder of the Hapsburg dynasty, to
+the throne of Germany (1273), with the virtual headship of the Holy
+Roman Empire, was an event of great importance in the history of the
+Swiss cantons. To this day the paternal domains whence the Hapsburg
+family takes its name are a part of Swiss territory. The local administration,
+as well as such imperial offices as still remained in the free communities
+of Switzerland, were largely in the hands of this family long
+before it gave sovereigns to the empire itself. Its chiefs were the chosen
+champions or advocates of the district.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Swiss communities Uri seems to have first established its freedom
+within the empire, and in that canton liberty was most completely
+preserved from the perils that always threatened Switzerland in this
+period. Under Rudolph it was at first the policy of the empire to secure
+the attachment of the Swiss by making the two other cantons, Schwyz
+and Unterwalden, similarly independent. But toward the end of his
+reign the policy of Rudolph was so influenced by ambition for territorial
+expansion that the Swiss began to feel an encroachment upon their independence.
+In 1291, the year of Rudolph's death, the three cantons, fearing
+danger to their interests in the new settlement of the crown, formed
+a league for mutual protection and co&ouml;peration. The very parchment on
+which the terms of this union were written "has been preserved as a
+testimony to the early independence of the Forest Cantons, the Magna
+Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded
+as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great
+struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and
+legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, are romantically
+blended.</p>
+
+<p>The empire passed out of the Hapsburg control when Rudolph died,
+but the family again got possession of it in 1298, when Rudolph's son
+Albert was elected German king. In the following account the relations
+of Switzerland and Austria, under the renewed Hapsburg sovereignty, are
+circumstantially set forth.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HERE can be little doubt that most of the many stories
+related by the Swiss of the cruelty and extortion of the
+Austrian bailies are wholly or in great part devoid of a historical
+basis of truth, as are the dates given for their occurrence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>
+They doubtless sprang from the very natural feelings of hatred
+the mountaineers of the Forest State felt against a foreign
+master, who was probably only too ready to punish them for
+the part they took against him in the struggle for the imperial
+throne. Indeed, it was not till about two centuries after this
+period that any reference to the alleged cruelties of the Austrians
+can be found in the local records, though legends about
+them have been plentiful.</p>
+
+<p>Many and various are the stories that have come down to
+our times of the oppression and licentiousness of the bailies,
+most of which have probably gained much color by constant
+repetition, even if they were not wholly created by imagination
+and hatred of the Austrian rule. According to these accounts,
+the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for trivial offences,
+and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be tried by
+Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and
+imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most
+merciless manner; they openly violated the liberties of the
+people, and chose every occasion to insult and degrade them.
+An oft-quoted instance of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie
+named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living
+in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined
+an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a
+yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger
+jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if
+he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he
+wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, being
+only a vile peasant. To this insult Henry's son Arnold responded
+by attacking the messenger and breaking his fingers,
+and then, fearing lest his act should bring down some serious
+punishment, fled to the mountains, and left his aged father
+to Landenburg's vengeance. The bailie confiscated his little
+property, imposed a heavy fine, and finally burned out both his
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The hot irons used in this barbarous punishment, the Swiss
+are fond of saying, went deeper than the tyrant intended, and
+penetrated to the hearts and aroused the sympathies of their
+ancestors to perform such acts of heroism that tyranny fled
+in fear from the land. The conduct of Arnold, however, can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>
+hardly at this period of his life warrant the eulogies bestowed
+upon his memory, though he subsequently figures as one of the
+"Men of Ruetli."</p>
+
+<p>Landenburg lived in a castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden,
+where his imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his
+debaucheries aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the
+peasants, that culminated in his expulsion and the destruction
+of his stronghold. The latter is popularly believed to have
+occurred on January 1, 1308. As the bailie left his castle to
+attend mass, some forty determined peasants, who had already
+bound themselves by oath to free their country at a solemn
+meeting on the steep promontory over the Lake of Lucerne
+known as the Ruetli, appeared before him carrying sheep, fowls,
+and other customary presents, and thus gained admission to
+the castle. No sooner were they past the gates than, drawing
+the weapons they had till then concealed beneath their clothes,
+they disarmed the guard and took possession of the fortress.
+Other conspirators were admitted, and the people at once rose
+in revolt. Landenburg, hearing while still at church of what had
+occurred, managed to effect his escape, and fled to Lucerne. Of
+the other bailies, Gessler and Wolfenschiess are believed to have
+excited even more hatred than their colleague Landenburg, and to
+have exceeded him in acts of savage cruelty and vicious living.</p>
+
+<p>One example out of many similar ones will show the spirit
+in which the Swiss traditions have treated the memory of Wolfenschiess.
+On a certain day, finding that a peasant named Conrad,
+of Baumgarten, whose wife he had frequently tried in
+vain to seduce, was absent from home, Wolfenschiess entered
+Conrad's house and ordered his wife to prepare him a bath, at
+the same time renewing with ardor his former proposals. With
+the cunning of her sex, the wife feigned to be willing to accede
+to his wishes, and on the pretence of retiring to another room
+to undress sped to her husband, who quickly returned and slew
+Wolfenschiess while he was still in the bath. After this exploit
+an entrance was effected into the bailies' castle of Rotzberg by
+one of the conspirators, who was in the habit of paying nightly
+visits to a servant living in the castle, by means of a rope attached
+to her window, and who then admitted his companions, who were
+lying concealed in the moat.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But, probably in consequence of his supposed connection
+with the legend of William Tell, the bailie to whom the name
+of Gessler has been given stands out more prominently in Swiss
+history than any other. Gessler's residence, according to tradition,
+was a strongly fortified castle built in the valley of Uri,
+near Altorf, and this he named Zwing Uri ("Uri's Restraint").
+He used every means that cruelty or avarice could suggest in
+his conduct as governor, and incurred additional hatred from
+the methods he adopted to discover the members of a secret
+conspiracy he believed existed against him in the district.
+With this object in view, Gessler caused a pole, surmounted
+with the ducal cap of Austria, to be set up in the market-place
+at Altorf, before which emblem of authority he ordered every
+man to uncover and do reverence as he passed. The refusal of
+a peasant to obey this command, his arrest, trial, and condemnation
+to pierce with an arrow an apple placed on his own child's
+head, his dexterity in performing this feat, his escape from his
+enemies, his murder of the tyrant Gessler, the solemn compact
+sworn at Ruetli, and the revolutionary events that followed form
+the motive of the much-celebrated legend of William Tell.</p>
+
+<p>The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied
+in his person the virtues of the typical avenger of the
+wrongs of the poor and the oppressed against the tyranny of the
+rich and the powerful; his name has been honored and his
+manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse by thousands
+in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a
+noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a
+popular act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this
+picturesque representative of liberty has done much to mould
+the political life, if not also to write many pages of the history of
+the people, and that in spite of the questionable morality of the
+received narrative of his career, and its unquestionable untruth.
+The emergence of the Swiss from slavery to freedom,
+as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly a gradual
+process, and there is now every reason for believing that the
+narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are
+said to have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the
+Austrian bailies from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely
+apocryphal, with a possible substratum of actual fact.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to
+lose the illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to
+the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious
+adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered&mdash;and
+that is seldom the case&mdash;it must be faced; if the national
+or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the
+immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with the material
+of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical
+foundation, and is more widely known and believed
+than are the many others related as the records of events happening
+at the period from which the Swiss date their independence,
+it may be as well to devote some little space to its consideration.
+All the local records that might possibly throw some
+light on the existence and career of Tell have now been thoroughly
+searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as
+well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that,
+till a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their
+deaths, not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending
+to prove the identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant
+Gessler. On the other hand, many local authorities, as early as
+the beginning of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the
+story was fully established, have gone out of their way to deny
+its truth and prove its entire falsity from their own researches.
+Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events that befell the
+Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies, whom they
+succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the
+highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived
+and taken so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom
+as is popularly assigned to them, they should have been
+entirely ignored by all contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent
+ones, for a hundred and fifty or two hundred years&mdash;yet
+such is the case.</p>
+
+<p>William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds
+in or about the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474
+are his acts recorded, when in a collection of the traditions of
+the Canton of Unterwalden, transcribed by a notary at Sarnen,
+an account is given of the apple episode and the subsequent
+escape of the famous archer, and his murder of Gessler, though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span>
+nothing is said of his having taken part in a league to free his
+country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A
+little prior to the compilation of the <i>White Book of Sarnen</i>, as this
+collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a <i>Song of the
+Origin of the Confederation</i>, in which, although no reference is
+made to Gessler, the other details are related concerning William
+Tell shooting at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the
+expulsion of the bailies, and the formation of a patriotic league.
+It is, of course, quite possible that a Gessler was killed by the
+peasants, as the name was common enough at the time, but no
+member of that family&mdash;the records of which have now been
+most carefully traced&mdash;held any office under the Austrians at
+that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all probable that
+Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231. Neither
+is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the
+castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been
+pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the
+celebrated Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach,
+was certainly not built to commemorate the exploits of
+Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss hero.</p>
+
+<p>"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious
+case of confusion in identity. At least three totally different
+men seem to have been blended into one in the course of an
+attempt to reconcile the different versions of the three cantons.
+Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in 1450, tells of a Hapsburg governor
+being on the little island of Schwanan, in the lake of
+Lowerz, who seduced a maid of Schwyz, and was killed by her
+brothers. Then there was another person, strictly historical,
+Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for the
+Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his
+district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was
+the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the
+way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the
+Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and
+the result was named Gessler."</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether the green plateau
+of the Ruetli below Seelisberg, and some six hundred and
+fifty feet above the lake, with its miraculous springs, ever witnessed
+the patriotic gathering of the thirty-three peasants who,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>
+tradition asserts, there formed the league against Austrian rule,
+or heard the solemn oath they and their leaders, Stauffacher,
+Fuerst, and Arnold, mutually swore.</p>
+
+<p>In all probability the legend of Tell and the apple originated
+in Scandinavia, and was brought by the Alemanni into Switzerland;
+as into other lands. Saxo Grammaticus, in the <i>Withina
+Saga</i>, places the scene of a very similar story in that country,
+some three hundred years before the appearance of the Swiss
+version, and tells of a certain Danish king named Harold, the
+counterpart of Gessler, and one Toki, who played the same <i>r&ocirc;le</i>
+enacted by Tell. Like legends are also related of Olaf, Eindridi,
+and an almost identical one to that of William Tell of
+Egil, who, being ordered by King Nidung to shoot an apple off
+the head of the son of the former, took two arrows from his
+quiver and prepared to obey. On the King asking why he had
+selected two arrows, Egil replied, "To shoot thee, tyrant, with
+the second, should the first fail."</p>
+
+<p>Neither are similar narratives absent from the legends of
+other countries. Thus Reginald Scott says: "Puncher shot a
+penny on his son's head, and made ready another arrow to have
+slain the Duke of Rengrave, who commanded it." So also similar
+incidents occur in the tales of Adam Bell, <i>Clym of the Clough</i>,
+and William of Claudeslie in the <i>Percy Ballads</i>, and in the
+legends of many places in Northern Europe. On this subject
+Sir Francis Adams mentions, in a note to his valuable book on
+the Swiss Confederation, that a well-known citizen of Berne, in
+answer to his inquiry as to whether Tell ever existed, replied:
+"Not in Switzerland. If you travel in the Hasli districts you
+will find a distinct race of men, who are of Scandinavian origin,
+and I believe that their ancestors brought the legend with them."
+To this it may be added that philologists have long since traced
+the rude dialect of Oberhasli to its Scandinavian sources, and
+the physical characteristics of the people mark them as of different
+racial origin from those around them.</p>
+
+<p>At the period these events were in progress, or, rather, about
+the time that the Austrian bailies were expelled, toward the
+close of the thirteenth century, the Emperor's<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">45</a> attention was too
+fully occupied conducting a war against the Bishop of Basel to</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span></p>
+<p>allow him to enforce his authority among the revolted Waldstaette.
+He did not, however, allow the peasants for long to
+enjoy the fruits of their energetic and successful action, as some
+six months later he headed a large army with which he intended
+to enforce obedience. The expedition thus begun led to Albert's
+tragic death, and reared another step leading to the final
+independence of the Swiss. On reaching Baden, in the Aargau,
+a halt was made in order to deliberate on the best mode of punishing
+the rebels. Here a general council of nobles decided,
+after careful deliberation, on the route to be taken, and the
+nature of the measures best calculated to enforce Albert's
+authority. On May 1, 1308, the Emperor, with a few followers,
+returned to Rheinfelden, in order to visit the Empress Elizabeth,
+preparatory to marching against the Waldstaette. Shortly before
+this time Albert had had a violent quarrel with his nephew John,
+son of Duke Rudolph of Swabia, touching the youth's paternal
+inheritance, which he persistently declined to allow John to take
+possession of, and whom he had, moreover, publicly insulted by
+offering him a coronet of twigs as the only recompense for his
+just claims.</p>
+
+
+<p>In spite of this quarrel Albert allowed John and four of his
+fastest friends to occupy a place in his suite when he left Baden
+to visit his consort. Albert's disregard of his nephew's resentment
+was further shown when the party arrived on the bank of
+the Reuss, as he allowed him, with his friends, to accompany
+him in the boat in which he crossed the river. The passage was
+made in safety, but just as the Emperor was stepping on shore
+near the town of Windisch, John and three of his companions
+struck him down with their swords, and after inflicting a number
+of severe wounds left him for dead. The unhappy monarch
+expired a few minutes after in the arms of a passing peasant
+woman. All this bloody scene took place in full view of the
+Emperor's train on the opposite side of the river, though no one
+apparently was able to render him assistance, probably from the
+absence of boats and the suddenness of the tragedy. The murderers
+succeeded in making good their escape, though two of
+them were afterward captured and executed, as were also a
+number of innocent people believed to be participators in the
+conspiracy. John himself was more fortunate, for, disguised as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
+a monk, he managed for many years to hide his identity, and,
+after wandering in Tuscany unsuspected, eventually died in a
+monastery at Pisa.</p>
+
+<p>Albert's daughter Agnes, Queen of Hungary, "a woman
+unacquainted with the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to
+a certain sort of devotional habits and practices by no means
+inconsistent with implacable vindictiveness," fearfully avenged
+his murder. This woman appears to have been seized with a
+perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and revenge. Aided by
+those in authority, who feared lest a widespread conspiracy had
+been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion, hundreds of
+innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity of
+a famished beast. Members of nearly a hundred noble families,
+and at least a thousand persons of lower rank, of every age and
+of both sexes, fell beneath her savage vengeance. She is said to
+have further whetted her appetite for horrors by wading, at
+Fahrwangen, in the blood of sixty-three innocent knights, exclaiming
+the while, "This day we bathe in May-dew." But at
+last, after several months, even the implacable bloodthirstiness
+of the Hungarian Queen was satisfied, and the massacre ceased.
+Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a monastery;
+she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the
+spoils of her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder
+of her life, and for nearly fifty years practised the most
+rigid asceticism, and here, by the side of her parents, she was
+eventually buried. Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel
+to Baden and Zurich, and within sight of the castle of Hapsburg,
+the cradle of the house of Austria.</p>
+
+<p>Strenuous efforts were made by Albert's widow to obtain the
+succession to the imperial throne for her son, Frederick, Duke
+of Austria, but the choice of the prince-electors, headed by
+the Archbishop of Mainz, fell on Count Henry of Luxemburg,
+a liberal-minded and generous noble, who was accordingly
+crowned, under the title of Henry VII. During the short reign of
+this monarch he proved himself a wise and generous friend to
+the Swiss, whose privileges he confirmed. He made no effort to
+reimpose local governors on the people of the Waldstaette, but,
+on the contrary, confirmed the charters of Schwyz and Uri,
+granted one to Unterwalden, and acknowledged jurisdiction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>
+After Henry's death, in 1313, civil war once more divided the
+empire through the rival contentions of Ludwig (Louis) of
+Bavaria and Albert's son, Frederick of Austria. In this contest
+the powerful monastery of Einsiedeln sided with the Austrian
+candidate, and through its influence induced the Bishop of Constance
+to place the large portion of Switzerland supporting the
+Bavarian cause under a sentence of excommunication.</p>
+
+<p>Between Einsiedeln and the Waldstaette there had long existed
+a feeling of bitter hostility, the canons resenting the independent
+spirit displayed by the peasants, and the latter remembering
+the many acts of arbitrary oppression they and their
+ancestors had suffered at the instance of the abbey. Indeed,
+actual hostilities were only prevented by the friendly, though
+interested, mediation of the citizens of Zurich, who were most
+anxious to preserve tranquillity in the territories of both, in
+order to allow their trade with Italy over the St. Gothard being
+carried on. They also favored peace, because since the Hapsburgs
+had refused permission to the peasants to enter Lucerne,
+these had been in the habit of bringing their cattle and dairy
+produce through Einsiedeln to the monks of Zurich. The action
+of the monks, however, in bringing about the serious sentence
+of excommunication so roused the spirit of the mountaineers
+that, headed by their Landammann, Werner Stauffacher, they
+attacked and captured the abbey, ransacked the whole building
+from cellar to altar, and carried off the monks captive to the
+town of Schwyz. This daring and sacrilegious act led Frederick&mdash;the
+hereditary avoyer of the abbey&mdash;to place the Waldstaette
+under the further punishment of the "ban of the empire." Both
+these sentences were alike fruitless in bringing the peasants to
+submission to the house of Austria. Shortly after, on Ludwig
+ascending the throne, the "ban" was removed by the new
+monarch, and, with the aid of the Archbishop of Mainz, the
+Metropolitan of Constance in 1315, the excommunication was
+also revoked.</p>
+
+<p>The triumph of Ludwig's claims over those of Frederick
+began that long series of deadly conflicts between the Swiss and
+the house of Austria that led the two nations for so many years
+to regard each other as natural and implacable enemies. At
+this time Austria was governed by Duke Leopold, a man of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>
+arrogant, passionate temper, of unscrupulous ambition, and
+brutal cruelty, according to the Swiss chronicles, but who, from
+other accounts, does not appear specially to have deserved this
+character. His hatred of the Swiss was greatly increased by
+their action in opposing his brother, Frederick, in the late
+contest. No sooner, indeed, were the troubles of that contest
+over than he prepared to wreak his vengeance, and once for all
+crush the power and independence of the Forest States, and, as
+he declared, "trample the audacious rustics under his feet."</p>
+
+<p>Rapidly collecting his forces, Leopold soon found himself at
+the head of fifteen thousand or twenty thousand well-armed
+men, including a large body of heavily equipped cavalry. These
+latter were then looked upon as the main strength of an army.
+Most of the ancient nobility of Hapsburg, Kyburg, and Lenzburg
+rallied to his banners, besides many of the lesser nobles
+and a contingent from Zurich, the citizens of which, deserting
+their natural allies, had formed a treaty with Austria. Against
+this formidable array the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden
+were only able to muster some fourteen hundred men,
+who, however, made up for their want of weapons and discipline
+by the geographical advantages of the country, by their patriotism,
+unity, and determined bravery.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing now seemed to intervene between the Swiss and
+imminent destruction, when, viewing with a compassion, most
+rare in those days, the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers,
+the powerful Count of Toggenborg tried to negotiate a
+peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms, however, were so humiliating
+and evidently so insincere that nothing came of these
+proposals.</p>
+
+<p>On November 3, 1315, Leopold's army reached Baden, where
+a council was held to determine upon the details of the campaign,
+a campaign having for its object, as the Duke openly declared,
+"the extirpation of the whole race of the people of Waldstaette."
+The difficulties of the enterprise now began to show themselves,
+as several of Leopold's followers, being well acquainted with the
+nature of the country and the characters of the inhabitants,
+pointed out that both would offer a determined resistance. Finally,
+relying upon their numbers and superior arms, it was
+settled to march on Schwyz, through the Sattel Pass by Morgarten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span>,
+making Zug the base of operations; and while a false
+attack should be threatened on the side of Arth, Unterwalden
+should be attacked from Lucerne, as well as by a large force
+under the Count of Strasburg by way of the Bruenig. Leopold
+himself was to lead the main army and enter Schwyz through
+the pass. Had these operations remained secret, or been carried
+out successfully, the course of Swiss history would probably
+have been very different from what it was; but fortunately for
+the cause of freedom, the Austrian plans became known in time,
+and failed signally when put to the test. According to ancient
+chronicles, as the Confederates were hurrying to repel the feint
+from Arth, a friendly Austrian baron, named Henry of Huenenberg,
+shot an arrow amid them bearing the message, "Guard
+Morgarten on the eve of St. Othmar." Be this as it may, the
+Swiss collected their little band on the Sattel, between which
+mountain and the eastern shore of the Lake of Egeri is situated
+the ever-memorable Pass of Morgarten. Here, on the night of
+November 14th, they collected a number of loose bowlders and
+tree-trunks, and then, having offered up prayers for the preservation
+of their country, they awaited with resolution the coming
+struggle.</p>
+
+<p>With the first dawn of morning the Austrian army&mdash;the first
+that ever entered the country&mdash;made its appearance in the pass,
+headed by Duke Leopold and his formidable cavalry. Suddenly,
+when the whole narrow defile was blocked with horse and foot,
+thousands of heavy stones and trees were hurled among them
+from the neighboring heights, where the peasant band, forming
+the Swiss force, lay concealed. The suddenness and vigor of this
+unexpected attack quickly threw the first ranks of the invaders
+into confusion, and caused a panic to seize the horses, many of
+which in their fright turned and trampled down the men behind.
+Rapidly the panic increased as the showers of missiles
+came tearing down, and soon the whole army was in a state of
+wild terror and confusion&mdash;a condition greatly assisted by the
+slippery nature of the ground. Then, with wild shouts, and brandishing
+their iron-studded clubs and their formidable halberts
+and scythes, down the mountain-side rushed, with the
+fury of their native avalanche, the heroic Confederates; and falling
+on their foes literally slew them by thousands. Many hundreds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>
+of the Austrians perished in the lake, the men of Zurich
+alone making a stand, and falling each where he fought. Few
+succeeded in effecting their escape from what was little less than
+a general butchery.</p>
+
+<p>On that memorable day all the flower of Austria's nobility
+lay dead within the country they had hoped so easily to conquer.
+The Duke, with a handful of followers, alone survived,
+and even these were forced to undergo many perils before they
+eventually arrived in safety at Winterthur. Neither were the
+other attacks, under the Count of Strasburg and the forces from
+Lucerne, more successful for the invaders. Both armies were
+repulsed with enormous loss by the men of Unterwalden, who
+gave no quarter, many of their opponents being their own
+countrymen from the estates of the abbey of Interlaken. After
+these signal victories the Swiss, according to ancient custom,
+offered up a solemn thanksgiving to almighty God for their
+success and the overthrow of their enemies; and then, having
+laden themselves with the spoils of the dead, they returned to
+their humble occupations, whence the defence of their country
+and their lives had called them away. Among the Swiss, Morgarten
+has always taken the first place in the long record of
+heroic victories that since 1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms
+second to none in Europe. This victory at once brought the
+Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and placed them in the
+front rank as powerful and respected states in Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>Leopold, on his return to Austria, was so satisfied with the
+ability of the "audacious rustics" to defend themselves that
+he made no further attempt to enter their country.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span></p>
+<h2>BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1314</h6>
+
+<h3>ANDREW LANG</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>After the submission of Scotland in 1303, at the end of Wallace's
+heroic struggle, Edward I undertook to complete the union of that kingdom
+with England. "But the great difficulty," says a historian, "in dealing
+with the Scots was that they never knew when they were conquered;
+and just when Edward hoped that his scheme for union was carried
+out, they rose in arms once more."</p>
+
+<p>The Scottish leader now was Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale and
+Earl of Carrick. He had acted with Wallace, but afterward swore fealty
+to Edward. Still later he united with William Lamberton, Bishop of St.
+Andrews, against the English King. Edward heard of their compact
+while Bruce was in London, and the Scot fled to Dumfries. There,
+1306, in the Church of the Gray Friars, he had an interview with John
+Comyn, called the Red Comyn&mdash;Bruce's rival for the Scottish throne&mdash;which
+ended in a violent altercation and the killing of Comyn by Bruce
+with a dagger. Next to the Baliols, Bruce was now nearest heir to the
+throne, and March 27, 1306, he was crowned.</p>
+
+<p>Edward now determined to take more vigorous measures than ever
+against the Scots. He denounced as traitors all who had participated in
+the murder of Comyn, and declared that all persons taken in arms would
+be put to death. He made great preparations for subduing Scotland, but
+while leading his army into that country, 1307, he died at Burgh-on-the-Sands,
+near Carlisle.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Bruce, who ranks with Wallace as a Scottish hero, had
+suffered some reverses at the hands of the English. Under the Earl of
+Pembroke, in 1306, they took Perth and drove Bruce into the wilds of
+Athol. In the same year, at Dairy, Bruce was defeated by Comyn's uncle,
+Macdougal, Lord of Lorn, and escaped to Ireland. But in 1307
+Bruce returned to Scotland and carried on the war against Edward II.
+The English were driven out of the strong places one by one; war alternated
+with diplomacy through several years; and at last came a crisis
+which roused the English government to a supreme effort.</p>
+
+<p>Stirling castle still held out, besieged by Edward Bruce, Robert's
+brother, 1313, but its surrender was promised by Mowbray, the governor,
+in the event of his not being relieved before June 24, 1314. The
+relieving of Stirling meant for the English a new invasion of Scotland.
+On both sides the strongest efforts were made&mdash;on the one side to relieve
+the castle, on the other to strengthen its besiegers. The opposing forces
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>met in battle at Bannockburn, June 24, 1314, an action which has never
+been better described than in this characteristic recital by Professor
+Lang.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_b.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="B" />ANNOCKBURN, like the relief of Orleans, or Marathon,
+was one of the decisive battles of the world. History
+hinged upon it. If England had won, Scotland might have
+dwindled into the condition of Ireland&mdash;for Edward II was not
+likely to aim at a statesmanlike policy of union, in his father's
+manner. Could Scotland have accepted union at the first
+Edward's hands; could he have refrained from his mistreatment
+as we must think it of Baliol, the fortunes of the isle of
+Britain might have been happier. But had Scotland been trodden
+down at Bannockburn, the fortunes of the isle might well
+have been worse.</p>
+
+<p>The singular and certain fact is that Bannockburn was
+fought on a point of chivalry, on a rule in a game. England
+must "touch bar," relieve Stirling, as in some child's pastime.
+To the securing of the castle, the central gate of Scotland, north
+and south, England put forth her full strength. Bruce had no
+choice but to concentrate all the power of a now, at last, united
+realm, and stand just where he did stand. His enemies knew
+his purpose: by May 27th writs informed England that the
+Scots were gathering on heights and morasses inaccessible to
+cavalry. If ever Edward showed energy, it was in preparing
+for the appointed Midsummer Day of 1314. The <i>Rotuli Scoti&aelig;</i>
+contain several pages of his demands for men, horses, wines,
+hay, grain, provisions, and ships. Endless letters were sent to
+master mariners and magistrates of towns. The King appealed
+to his beloved Irish chiefs, O'Donnells, O'Flyns, O'Hanlens,
+MacMahons, M'Carthys, Kellys, O'Reillys, and O'Briens, and
+to <i>Hiberni&aelig; Magnates, Anglico genere ortos</i>, Butlers, Blounts,
+De Lacys, Powers, and Russels. John of Argyll was made
+admiral of the western fleet, and was asked to conciliate the
+Islesmen, who, under Angus Og, were rallying to Bruce. The
+numbers of men engaged on either side in this war cannot be
+ascertained. Each kingdom had a year within which to muster
+and arm.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Then all that worthy were to fight</span>
+<span class="i0">Of Scotland, set all hale their might;"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>while Barbour makes Edward assemble not only</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i3">"His own chivalry</span>
+<span class="i0">That was so great it was ferly,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>but also knights of France and Hainault, Bretagne and Gascony,
+Wales, Ireland, and Aquitaine. The whole English force is
+said to have exceeded one hundred thousand, forty thousand of
+whom were cavalry, including three thousand horses "barded
+from counter to tail," armed against stroke of sword or point of
+spear. The baggage train was endless, bearing tents, harness,
+"and apparel of chamber and hall," wine, wax, and all the
+luxuries of Edward's manner of campaigning, including <i>animalia</i>,
+perhaps lions. Thus the English advanced from Berwick,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Banners rightly fairly flaming,</span>
+<span class="i0">And pencels to the wind waving."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>On June 23d Bruce heard that the English host had streamed
+out of Edinburgh, where the dismantled castle was no safe hold,
+and were advancing on Falkirk. Bruce had summoned Scotland
+to tryst in Torwood, whence he could retreat at pleasure,
+if, after all, retreat he must. The Fiery Cross, red with blood
+of a sacrificed goat, must have flown through the whole of
+the Celticland. Lanarkshire, Douglasdale, and Ettrick Forest
+were mustered under the banner of Douglas, the mullets not yet
+enriched with the royal heart. The men of Moray followed
+their new earl, Randolph, the adventurous knight who scaled
+the rock of the castle of the Maidens. Renfrewshire, Bute, and
+Ayr were under the <i>fesse chequy</i> of young Walter Stewart.
+Bruce had gathered his own Carrick men, and Angus Og led
+the wild levies of the Isles. Of stout spearmen and fleet-footed
+clansmen Bruce had abundance; but what were his archers to
+the archers of England, or his five hundred horse under Keith
+the mareschal, to the rival knights of England, Hainault, Guienne,
+and Almayne?</p>
+
+<p>Battles, however, are won by heads, as well as by hearts and
+hands. The victor of Glen Trool and Cruachen and London
+Hill knew every move in the game, while Randolph and Douglas
+were experts in making one man do the work of five. Bruce,
+too, had choice of ground, and the ground suited him well.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To reach Stirling the English must advance by their left,
+along the so-called German way, through the village of St.
+Nian's, or by their right, through the Carse, partly enclosed,
+and much broken, in drainless days, by reedy lochans. Bruce
+did not make his final dispositions till he learned that the
+English meant to march by the former route. He then chose
+ground where his front was defended, first by the little burn of
+Bannock, which at one point winds through a cleugh with
+steep banks, and next by two morasses, Halbert's bog and
+Milton bog. What is now arable ground may have been a loch
+in old days, and these two marshes were then impassable by a
+column of attack.</p>
+
+<p>Between Charter's Hall&mdash;where Edward had his head-quarters&mdash;and
+Park's Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which
+a column could pass, in scrubby country, and between the
+bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land. By these two avenues
+the English might assail the Scottish lines. These approaches
+Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and even by
+caltrops to maim the horses. He determined to fight on foot,
+the wooded country being difficult for horsemen, and the foe
+being infinitely superior in cavalry. His army was arranged
+in four "battles," with Randolph to lead the vaward and watch
+against any attempt to throw cavalry into Stirling. Edward
+Bruce commanded the division on the right, next the Torwood.
+Walter Stewart, a lad, with Douglas led the third division.
+Bruce himself and Angus Og, with the men of Carrick and the
+Celts, were in the rear. Bruce had no mind to take the offensive,
+and as at the Battle of the Standard, to open the fight with a
+charge of impetuous mountaineers. On Sunday morning mass
+was said, and men shrived them.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"They thought to die in the m&ecirc;l&eacute;e,</span>
+<span class="i0">Or else to set their country free."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>They ate but bread and water, for it was the vigil of St. John.
+News came that the English had moved out of Falkirk, and
+Douglas and the Steward brought tidings of the great and splendid
+host that was rolling north. Bruce bade them make little
+of it in the hearing of the army.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Philip de Mowbray, who commanded in Stirling,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
+had ridden forth to meet and counsel Edward. His advice was
+to come no nearer; perhaps a technical relief was held to have
+already been secured by the presence of the army.</p>
+
+<p>Mowbray was not heard&mdash;"the young men" would not
+listen. Gloucester, with the van, entered the park, where he
+was met, as we shall see, and Clifford, Beaumont, and Sir
+Thomas Grey, with three hundred horsemen, skirted the wood
+where Randolph was posted, a clear way lying before them to
+the castle of Stirling. Bruce had seen this movement, and told
+Randolph that "a rose of his chaplet was fallen," the phrase
+attesting the King's love of chivalrous romance. To pursue
+horsemen with infantry seemed vain enough; but Randolph
+moved out of cover, thinking perhaps that knights adventurous
+would refuse no chance to fight. If this was his thought, he
+reckoned well. Beaumont cried to his knights, "Give ground,
+leave them fair field." Grey hinted that the Scots were in too
+great force, and Beaumont answered, "If you fear, fly!" "Sir,"
+said Sir Thomas, "for fear I fly not this day!" and so spurred
+in between Beaumont and D'Eyncourt and galloped on the
+spears. D'Eyncourt was slain, Grey was unhorsed and taken.
+The three hundred lances of Beaumont then circled Randolph's
+spearmen round about on every side, but the spears kept back
+the horses. Swords, maces, and knives were thrown; all was
+done as by the French cavalry against the British squares at
+Waterloo, and all as vainly. The hedge of steel was unbroken,
+and, in the hot sun of June, a mist of dust and heat brooded
+over the battle.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i4">"Sic mirkness</span>
+<span class="i0">In the air above them was"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>as when the sons of Thetis and the Dawn fought under the walls
+of windy Troy. Douglas beheld the distant cloud, and rode
+to Bruce, imploring leave to hurry to Randolph's aid. "I will
+not break my ranks for him," said Bruce; yet Douglas had his
+will. But the English wavered, seeing his line advance, and
+thereon Douglas halted his men, lest Randolph should lose
+renown. Beholding this the spearmen of Randolph, in their
+turn, charged and drove the weary English horse and their disheartened
+riders.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>Meanwhile Edward had halted his main force to consider
+whether they should fight or rest. But Gloucester's party,
+knowing nothing of his halt, had advanced into the wooded park;
+and Bruce rode down to the right in his armor, and with a gold
+coronal on his basnet, but mounted on a mere palfrey. To the
+front of the English van, under Gloucester and Hereford, rode
+Sir Henry Bohun, a bow-shot beyond his company. Recognizing
+the King, who was arraying his ranks, Bohun sped down
+upon him, apparently hoping to take him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"He thought that he should dwell lightly,</span>
+<span class="i0">Win him, and have him at his will."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But Bruce, in this fatal movement, when history hung on his
+hand and eye, uprose in his stirrups and clove Bohun's helmet,
+the axe breaking in that stroke. It was a desperate but a winning
+blow: Bruce's spears advanced, and the English van withdrew
+in half superstitious fear of the omen. His lords blamed
+Bruce, but</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"The King has answer made them none,</span>
+<span class="i0">But turned upon the axe-shaft, wha</span>
+<span class="i0">Was with the stroke broken in twa."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>"<i>Initium malorum hoc</i>" ("This was the beginning of evil"), says
+the English chronicler.</p>
+
+<p>After this double success in the Quatre Bras of the Scottish
+Waterloo, Bruce, according to Barbour, offered to his men their
+choice of withdrawal or of standing it out. The great general
+might well be of doubtful mind&mdash;was to-morrow to bring a
+second and a more fatal Falkirk? The army of Scotland was
+protected, as Wallace's army at Falkirk had been, by difficult
+ground. But the English archers might again rain their blinding
+showers of shafts into the broad mark offered by the clumps
+of spears, and again the English knights might break through
+the shaken ranks. Bruce had but a few squadrons of horse&mdash;could
+they be trusted to scatter the bowmen of the English
+forests, and to escape a flank charge from the far heavier cavalry
+of Edward? On the whole, was not the old strategy best, the
+strategy of retreat? So Bruce may have pondered. He had
+brought his men to the ring, and they voted for dancing. Meanwhile<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
+the English rested on a marshy plain "<i>outre</i>-Bannockburn"
+in sore discomfiture, says Gray. He must mean south of
+Bannockburn, taking the point of view of his father, at that hour
+captive in Bruce's camp. He tells us that the Scots meant to
+retire "into the Lennox, a right strong country"&mdash;this confirms,
+in a way, Barbour's tale of Bruce suggesting retreat&mdash;when
+Sir Alexander Seton, deserting Edward's camp, advised
+Bruce of the English lack of spirit, and bade him face the foe
+next day. To retire, indeed, was Bruce's, as it had been Wallace's,
+natural policy. The English would soon be distressed
+for want of supplies; on the other hand, they had clearly made
+no arrangements for an orderly retreat if they lost the day;
+with Bruce this was a motive for fighting them. The advice of
+Seton prevailed; the Scots would stand their ground.</p>
+
+<p>The sun of Midsummer Day rose on the rite of the mass
+done in front of the Scottish lines. Men breakfasted, and
+Bruce knighted Douglas, the Steward, and other of his nobles.
+The host then moved out of the wood, and the standards
+rose above the spears of the soldiers. Edward Bruce held the
+right wing; Randolph the centre; the left, under Douglas and
+the Steward, rested of St. Ninian's. Bruce, as he had arranged,
+was in reserve with Carrick and the Isles. "Will these men
+fight?" asked Edward, and Sir Ingram assured him that such
+was their intent. He advised that the English should make
+a feigned retreat, when the Scots would certainly break their
+ranks&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Then prick we on them hardily."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Edward rejected his old ruse, which probably would not have
+beguiled the Scottish leader. The Scots then knelt for a moment
+of prayer, as the Abbot of Inchafray bore the crucifix along
+the line; but they did not kneel to Edward. His van, under
+Gloucester, fell on Edward Bruce's division, where there was
+hand-to-hand fighting, broken lances, dying chargers, the rear
+ranks of Gloucester pressing vainly on the front ranks, unable
+to deploy for the straitness of the ground.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Randolph's men moved forward slowly with extended
+spears, "as they were plunged in the sea" of charging
+knights. Douglas and the Steward were also engaged, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>
+"hideous shower" of arrows was ever raining from the bows of
+England. This must have been the crisis of the fight, according
+to Barbour, and Bruce bade Keith with his five hundred horse
+charge the English archers on the flank. The bowmen do not
+seem to have been defended by pikes; they fell beneath the
+lances of the mareschal, as the archers of Ettrick had fallen at
+Falkirk. The Scottish archers now took heart, and loosed
+into the crowded and reeling ranks of England, while the flying
+bowmen of the south clashed against and confused the English
+charge. Then Scottish archers took to their steel sparths&mdash;who
+ever loved to come to hand strokes&mdash;and hewed into the mass
+of the English, so that the field, whither Bruce brought up his
+reserves to support Edward Bruce on the right, was a mass of
+wild, confused fighting. In this mellay the great body of the
+English army could deal no stroke, swaying helplessly as southern
+knights or northern spears won some feet of ground. So,
+in the space between Halbert's bog and the burn, the mellay
+rang and wavered, the long spears of the Scottish ranks unbroken
+and pushing forward, the ground before them so covered
+with fallen men and horses that the English advance was
+clogged and crushed between the resistance in front and the
+pressure behind.</p>
+
+<p>"God will have a stroke in every fight," says the romance
+of Malory. While the discipline was lost, and England was
+trusting to sheer weight and "who will pound longest," a fresh
+force, banners displayed, was seen rushing down the Gillies'
+Hill, beyond the Scottish right. The English could deem no
+less than that this multitude were tardy levies from beyond the
+Spey, above all when the slogans rang out from the fresh advancing
+host. It was a body of yeomen, shepherds, and camp-followers,
+who could no longer remain and gaze when fighting
+and plunder were in sight. With blankets fastened to cut
+saplings for banner-poles, they ran down to the conflict. The
+King saw them, and well knew that the moment had come: he
+pealed his ensenye&mdash;called his battle-cry&mdash;faint hearts of England
+failed; men turned, trampling through the hardy warriors
+who still stood and died; the knights who rode at Edward's
+rein strove to draw him toward the castle of Stirling.
+But now the foremost knights of Edward Bruce's division,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>
+charging on foot, had fought their way to the English King and
+laid hands on the rich trappings of his horse. Edward cleared
+his way with strokes of his mace; his horse was stabbed, but
+a fresh mount was found for him. Even Sir Giles de Argentine,
+the best knight on ground, bade Edward fly to Stirling castle.
+"For me, I am not of custom to fly," he said, "nor shall I do so
+now. God keep you!" Thereon he spurred into the press, crying
+"Argentine!" and died among the spears.</p>
+
+<p>None held his ground for England. The burn was choked
+with fallen men and horses, so that folk might pass dry-shod
+over it. The country people fell on and slew. If Bruce had
+possessed more cavalry, not an Englishman would have reached
+the Tweed. Edward, as Argentine bade him, rode to Stirling,
+but Mowbray told him that there he would be but a captive
+king. He spurred south, with five hundred horse, Douglas
+following with sixty, so close that no Englishman might alight,
+but was slain or taken. Laurence de Abernethy, with eighty
+horse, was riding to join the English, but turned, and with
+Douglas, pursued them. Edward reached Dunbar, whence
+he took boat for Berwick. In his terror he vowed to build a
+college of Carmelites, students in theology. It is Oriel College
+to-day, with a Scot for provost. Among those who fell on the
+English side were the son of Comyn, Gloucester, Clifford, Harcourt,
+Courtenay, and seven hundred other gentlemen of coat-armor
+were slain. Hereford (later), with Angus, Umfraville,
+and Sir Thomas Grey, was among the prisoners. Stirling, of
+course, surrendered.</p>
+
+<p>The sun of Midsummer Day set on men wounded and weary,
+but victorious and free. The task of Wallace was accomplished.
+To many of the combatants not the least agreeable result of
+Bannockburn was the unprecedented abundance of the booty.
+When campaigning Edward denied himself nothing. His wardrobe
+and arms; his enormous and apparently well-supplied
+array of food wagons; his ecclesiastical vestments for the celebration
+of victory; his plate; his siege artillery; his military
+chests, with all the jewelry of his young minion knights, fell into
+the hands of the Scots. Down to Queen Mary's reign we read,
+in inventories, about costly vestments "from the fight at Bannockburn."
+In Scotland it rained ransoms. The <i>Rotuli Scoti&aelig;</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
+in 1314 full of Edward's preparation for war, in 1315 are rich in
+safe-conducts for men going into Scotland to redeem prisoners.
+One of these, the brave Sir Marmaduke Twenge, renowned at
+Stirling bridge, hid in the woods on Midsummer's Night, and
+surrendered to Bruce next day. The King gave him gifts and
+set him free unransomed. Indeed, the clemency of Bruce after
+his success is courteously acknowledged by the English chroniclers.</p>
+
+<p>This victory was due to Edward's incompetence, as well as
+to the excellent dispositions and indomitable courage of Bruce,
+and to "the intolerable axes" of his men. No measures had
+been taken by Edward to secure a retreat. Only one rally, at
+"the Bloody Fauld," is reported. The English fought widely,
+their measures being laid on the strength of a confidence which,
+after the skirmishes of Sunday, June 23d, they no longer entertained.
+They suffered what, at Agincourt, Cr&eacute;cy, Poitiers, and
+Verneuil, their descendants were to inflict. Horses and banners,
+gay armor and chivalric trappings, were set at naught by the
+sperthes and spears of infantry acting on favorable ground.
+From the dust and reek of that burning day of June, Scotland
+emerged a people, firm in a glorious memory. Out of weakness
+she was made strong, being strangely led through paths of little
+promise since the day when Bruce's dagger-stroke at Dumfries
+closed from him the path of returning.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span></p>
+<h2>EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS
+TEMPLARS</h2>
+
+<h3>BURNING OF GRAND MASTER MOLAY</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1314</h6>
+
+
+<h3>F. C. WOODHOUSE&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;H. H. MILMAN</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The quarrel between Philip the Fair of France and Pope Boniface
+VIII, concerning the taxation of the clergy, and the right of nomination
+to vacant bishoprics within the dominions of Philip, had far-reaching
+effects. It led, in 1302, to the convocation of the first properly so-called
+Parliament in France, to offset the actions of the Pope, who excommunicated
+the King; and also to an expedition into Italy of a small body of
+French troops which made the Pope prisoner at Agnani, but were subsequently
+expelled with great loss of life. The Pope was reinstated, but
+died shortly afterward from brain fever; he was succeeded by Benedict
+XI, whom the King of France sought to placate, but unsuccessfully.
+Within nine months Benedict died, presumably from poison, and Philip,
+by his intrigues, was enabled to secure the election to the pontificate of
+Bertrand de Goth, who became pope as Clement V, and was pledged to
+the service of the French King.</p>
+
+<p>Philip, who had obstructed the operations of commerce by debasing
+the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the state, was always in
+want of money. His cupidity was excited by the wealth of the order of
+Knights Templars, and, emboldened by his successes over the spiritual
+power, he now entered upon the career of intrigue which resulted in the
+destruction and plunder of the order.</p>
+
+<p>The famous Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, founded in 1118 by a
+small band of nine French knights, sworn to protect Christian pilgrims to
+the Holy Sepulchre, had become, in almost every kingdom of the West,
+a powerful, wealthy, semimilitary, semimonastic republic, governed by
+its own laws, animated by the closest corporate spirit, under the severest
+internal discipline, an all-pervading organization, independent alike of the
+civil power and of the spiritual hierarchy.</p>
+
+<p>During two centuries as crusaders, the knights fought valiantly and
+shed their blood in defence of the Sepulchre of our Lord, earning the
+devout admiration of Western Christendom, and receiving splendid endowments
+of lands, castles, and riches of all kinds as contributions to
+the cause of the holy wars.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>
+But despite their valor, Mahometan persistency prevailed, and the
+total expulsion of the Templars, with the rest of the Christian establishments
+from Palestine, followed the downfall of Acre in 1291.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>F. C. WOODHOUSE</h4>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE loss of Palestine led indirectly to the ruin of the order
+of the Templars. The record is one of the dark episodes
+of history, encompassed with contradictions, full of surprises,
+painful to contemplate, whatever view may be taken, whichever
+side espoused.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to understand how an order of men who for
+nearly two hundred years earned the thanks and praise of
+Christendom for their bravery and devotion; who had shed
+blood like water to defend the places dearest to all Christian
+hearts; who had been recruited from the noblest families in
+every country in Europe, and had had princes of royal blood in
+their ranks; who claimed to act upon the purest and most exalted
+Christian principles; and who proved the sincerity of their
+professions by their lives of self-sacrifice, and their deaths, for
+the cause they had taken up; who had been honored and favored
+and dowered with gifts and privileges, in gratitude for
+their exploits&mdash;should suddenly have fallen into the blackest
+crimes. So it is no less difficult to understand how public opinion
+should turn against them as it did, and how all Europe
+should set itself to disgrace and despoil, to malign and execrate,
+those who had so long been its favorites and its champions. It
+is not easy to understand this, and it is painful to read the story
+in its sad and miserable details.</p>
+
+<p>But there are other pages of history that more or less correspond
+with this; and there are well-known characteristics of
+human nature that explain how such revulsions of feeling come
+about. It has never been found difficult to get up a case against
+those whom the great and powerful have made up their minds to
+destroy. The best men are fallible and have their weak side.
+Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy members. A
+long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and crimes.
+No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and
+prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation.
+Then, too, facts may be perverted, circumstances may be made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>
+to bear a meaning that does not really belong to them, and fear
+and torture may force the weak to say anything that they are
+required. And, finally, the evidence and the judgment of those
+who have everything to gain by the condemnation of those whom
+they accuse, must always be viewed with suspicion by sober and
+truth-loving minds. Moreover, in judging the Templars, we
+must not forget the lapse of time and the change of circumstances
+that separate our age from theirs.</p>
+
+<p>After the loss of Acre a chapter of the surviving Templars
+was gathered, and James de Molay, preceptor of England, was
+elected grand master. One more attempt was made to recover a
+footing in the Holy Land, but it was defeated with great loss to
+the order, and all hope of restoring the Latin kingdom in Palestine
+seems to have been abandoned. The occupation of the
+Templars was gone. They had been banded together to fight
+upon the sacred soil of Palestine, and to defend pilgrims, but
+now they had been driven out of the country, and they could no
+longer execute their mission or fulfil their vows. We soon hear
+of them being engaged in civil or international wars, which seems
+to be a violation of their oath not to draw sword upon any
+Christian. Thus we read of Templars fighting on the side of
+the King of England, in the battle of Falkirk, 1298, and similar
+occurrences are recorded in the French wars of the time. Those
+against whom the Templars fought would not be slow to complain
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>But the real cause of the downfall of the Templars was
+probably the enormous wealth of the order. There had not
+been wanting indications for some years of covetous eyes and
+itching hands turned toward the possession of the Knights.
+Sometimes complaints were made because the rents of their
+estates were all sent out of the country; sometimes the grievance
+alleged was that they were exempted from paying taxes
+and other levies, civil and ecclesiastical. Sometimes open acts
+of spoliation were committed upon their property, and that even
+by royal hands.</p>
+
+<p>But it was in France that the final attack was made. Philip
+the Fair was king at this time, a man of bad character and unscrupulous
+as to the means by which he attained his ends. The
+country was exhausted and the treasury empty, and the idea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
+seems to have occurred to him, as it did later to Henry VIII of
+England under similar circumstances, that an easy way to fill his
+own purse was to put his hand into the purses of others. But
+even kings cannot appropriate the property of a religious order
+without offering some apology or justification to the world.
+And so it began to be whispered that the Holy Land would never
+have been lost to Christendom if its sworn defenders had not
+failed in their Christian character. The whole blame of the defeat
+of the crusades was laid upon the Templars. It was said
+they had treacherously betrayed the Christian cause, that they
+had treated with the enemy, and by their personal sins, especially
+by secret, unhallowed rites, had provoked the just wrath
+of God, and so brought about the ruin of the dominion of the
+Cross in the East.</p>
+
+<p>When Ahab has determined to put Naboth to death, that
+he may seize his coveted vineyard, it is not difficult to find witness
+that he is a blasphemer of God and a traitor to the King;
+and so Philip found his first tool in a man guilty of a multitude
+of crimes, who secured his own pardon by a denunciation of the
+Templars.</p>
+
+<p>But even a king could not ruin a great religious order without
+the aid of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Templars had
+always been favored and protected by the popes, and nothing
+was in itself so likely to evoke that protection again as an
+attack upon the order by the secular powers. But Philip was
+prepared for this. The Pope of the day, Clement V, had been
+a subject of his own. As bishop of Bordeaux, he owed his election
+to the pontificate to Philip's own intrigues, and had been
+easily induced to quit Rome and live in France, so as to be
+more completely under the dictation of the King. Moreover,
+the majority of the cardinals were also French and entirely devoted
+to the King's interests.</p>
+
+<p>Clement V was one of the worst of those miserable men
+who have from time to time disgraced the papal chair, and was
+guilty of almost every crime. There are, indeed, authorities
+worthy of credit who assert that before his election he had been
+made to promise to perform six favors to the King, and that
+the last was not to be divulged till the time for its execution
+came. This last was then found to be the suppression of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>
+order of the Templars. There was no difficulty, under these
+circumstances, in getting the so-called sanction of the Church
+for an inquiry into the crimes of which the Templars were
+accused.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, in 1307, Philip issued letters to his officers
+throughout the kingdom, commanding them to seize all the
+Templars on a certain day, that they might be tried for crimes
+of which he and the Pope had satisfied themselves they were
+guilty. They had apostatized from the Christian religion, worshipped
+idols in their secret meetings, and had been guilty of
+horrible and shameful offences against God, the Church, the
+State, and humanity itself. Philip professed the most pious
+horror at what he had discovered; he lamented the grievous
+necessity laid upon him, and urged upon the guilty men the
+expediency of a full and immediate confession of their wicked
+doings as the only way to secure pardon and escape the just
+and extreme penalty of such outrageous wickedness.</p>
+
+<p>It was during the night of October 13, 1307, that the King's
+orders were executed. Every house of the Templars in the
+dominions of the King of France was suddenly surrounded by a
+strong force, and all the Knights and members of the order were
+simultaneously taken prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time a strenuous endeavor was made to arouse
+popular indignation against the order. The regular and secular
+clergy were commanded to preach against the Templars, and
+to describe the horrible enormities that were practised among
+them. It is incredible to us in these days that such charges
+should be made, and still more that they should actually be
+believed. It was said that the Templars worshipped some
+hideous idol in their secret assemblies, that they offered sacrifices
+to it of infants and young girls, and that although every
+one saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious
+duties, people were not to be misled by these things, for this was
+only a cloak intended to deceive the world and conceal their
+secret rites and obscene orgies.</p>
+
+<p>It was hoped that some confession of guilt might be readily
+obtained from some of the weaker brethren in order to receive
+the pardon which was promised by the King. But no such confession
+was made. All the prisoners denied the charges brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
+against them. Then the usual medi&aelig;val expedient was resorted
+to, and torture was used to extort acknowledgments of guilt.
+The unhappy Templars in Paris were handed over to the tender
+mercies of the tormentors with the usual results. One hundred
+and forty were subjected to trial by fire.</p>
+
+<p>The details preserved are almost too horrible to be related.
+The feet of some were fastened close to a hot fire till the very
+flesh and even the bones were consumed. Others were suspended
+by their limbs, and heavy weights attached to them to
+make the agony more intense. Others were deprived of their
+teeth; and every cruelty that a horrible ingenuity could invent
+was used.</p>
+
+<p>While this was going on, questions were asked, and offers of
+pardon were made if they would acknowledge themselves or
+others guilty of the monstrous wickednesses which were detailed
+to them. At the same time forged letters were read, purporting
+to come from the grand master himself, exhorting them to make
+a full confession, and declarations were made of the confessions
+which were said to have been already freely given by other members
+of the order.</p>
+
+<p>What wonder, then, that the usual consequences followed.
+Those who had strong will and indomitable courage stood firm
+and endured the slow martyrdom till death released them,
+maintaining to the last their own innocence, and the innocence
+of their order, of the crimes with which they were charged.
+But some weaker men broke down. In hope of release from the
+agony which they could not endure, they confessed anything and
+everything that was required of them, and these things were at
+once written down as grave facts and made matter of accusation
+of others. Often these unhappy men almost immediately recanted,
+and as soon as the torture ceased withdrew their confessions,
+and repeated their original denial of the accusations
+one and all.</p>
+
+<p>We have long ago ceased to set any value upon confessions
+extorted by torture, and the system has happily been abolished
+by all civilized nations, but in those days this was not understood;
+torture was relied upon as a means of extracting truth
+from unwilling witnesses when all other means failed; indeed, it
+was simpler and more expeditious than the calling of many witnesses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>
+the testing of evidence by cross-examination, and other
+surer but slower methods; and especially when conviction, not
+truth, was the end in view, torture was a welcome and efficacious
+ally.</p>
+
+<p>All this was but too sadly exemplified in the proceedings
+against the Templars in France. No sooner were those who
+had made confessions of guilt while under torture released from
+their tormentors than they disavowed their forced admissions
+and proclaimed their innocence and the purity of their order,
+appealing to history and the testimony of their own day for
+evidence of their courage and devotion to the Catholic faith.</p>
+
+<p>Upon hearing of this Philip immediately ordered the rearrest
+of the Templars, and, proceeding against them as relapsed
+heretics, they were condemned to be burned alive. In Paris
+alone one hundred and thirteen suffered this terrible punishment,
+and many more were burned in other towns. In Spain,
+Portugal, and Germany, proceedings were taken against the
+order; their property was confiscated, and in some cases torture
+was used; but it is remarkable that it was only in France,
+and in those places where Philip's influence was powerful, that
+any Templar was actually put to death.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere else the monstrous charges were declared to be
+unproved, and the order was declared innocent of heresy and
+sacrilegious rites.</p>
+
+<p>In October, 1311, a council was held at Vienna to dissolve
+the Order of the Temple, but the majority of the bishops were
+decidedly opposed to such a proceeding against so ancient and
+illustrious an order, till its members had been heard in their
+own defence in a fair and open trial. The Pope was furious at
+this and dismissed the council, and in the following year, 1312,
+by a papal brief, abolished the order and forbade its reconstitution.
+The property of the order in France was nominally
+made over to the Hospitallers, but Philip laid claim to an immense
+sum for the expenses of the prosecution, and by this and
+other means he obtained what he had all along desired&mdash;the
+greatest part of the possessions of the order. Similar proceedings
+took place in other countries. In some, new orders were
+founded in the place of the Templars, with the sovereign at
+their head, by which means the estates came into the possession<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>
+of the Crown as completely as if they had been actually
+confiscated.</p>
+
+<p>In France the Templars who survived their torture and the
+horrors of their prisons were either executed or left to linger out
+a miserable existence in their dungeons till death released them.
+The grand master and a few other brethren of the highest rank
+were thus kept in prison for five years. They were then taken
+to Notre Dame in Paris, and required to give verbal assent to
+the confessions which had been extorted from them under torture.
+But the grand master, James de Molay, the grand preceptor,
+and some others seized the opportunity of declaring
+their innocence, and disowning the alleged confessions as forgeries.
+The old veterans stood up in the church before the assembled
+multitude, and, raising their chained hands to heaven,
+declared that whatever had been confessed to the detriment of
+the illustrious order was only forced from them by extreme agony
+and fear of death, and that they solemnly and finally repudiated
+and revoked all such admissions.</p>
+
+<p>On hearing of this, Philip ordered their immediate execution,
+and the same evening the last grand master of the Temple and
+his faithful comrades were burned to death at a slow fire.</p>
+
+<p>Impartial men had formed their own judgment, and a very
+strong feeling prevailed that justice had not been done. It was
+remarked that those who had been foremost in the proceedings
+against the Templars came to a speedy and miserable
+end. The Pope, the kings of France and of England, and others,
+all soon followed their victims and died violent or shameful
+deaths.</p>
+
+<p>We have somewhat anticipated the order of events, and
+must return to the earlier stage of the proceedings against the
+Templars. As soon as Philip had determined upon his own
+course of action, he desired to find countenance for it by stirring
+up other sovereigns to imitate it. He therefore wrote letters to
+the kings of other European states, informing them of his discovery
+of the guilt of the Templars, and urging them to adopt a
+similar course in their own dominions. The Pope, too, summoned
+the grand master to France, but with every mark of
+respect, and so got him into his power before the terrible proceedings
+against the members of his order were made public.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The King of England, Edward II, acted with prudence.
+He expressed his unbounded astonishment at the contents of
+the French King's letter, and at the particulars detailed to him
+by an agent specially sent to him by Philip, but he would do no
+more at the time than promise that the matter should receive
+his serious attention in due course.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote at the same time to the kings of Portugal, Aragon,
+Castile, and Sicily, telling them of the extraordinary information
+he had received respecting the Templars, and declaring his
+unwillingness to believe the dreadful charges brought against
+them. He referred to the services rendered to Christendom by
+the order, and to its unblemished reputation ever since it was
+founded. He urged upon his fellow-sovereigns that nothing
+should be done in haste, but that inquiry should be made in due
+and solemn legal form, expressing his belief that the order was
+guiltless of the crimes alleged against it, and that the charges
+were merely the result of slander and envy and of a desire to
+appropriate the property of the order.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time Edward wrote to the Pope in similar terms.
+He declared that the Templars were universally respected by all
+classes throughout his dominions as pious and upright men, and
+begged the Pope to promote a just inquiry which should free the
+order from the unjust slander and injuries to which it was being
+subjected. But hardly was this letter despatched than Edward
+received another from the Pope, which had crossed his own on
+its way, calling upon him to imitate Philip, King of France, in
+proceeding against the Templars. The Pope professed great
+distress and astonishment that an order that had so long enjoyed
+the respect and gratitude of the Church for its worthy
+deeds in defence of the faith should have fallen into grievous
+and perfidious apostasy. He then narrated the commendable
+zeal of the King of France in rooting out the secrets of these
+men's hidden wickedness, and gave particulars of some of their
+confessions of the crimes with which they had been charged.
+He concluded by commanding the King of England to pursue
+a similar course, to seize and imprison all members of the order
+on one day, and to hold, in the Pope's name, all the property
+of the order till it should be determined how it was to be disposed
+of.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>King Edward, notwithstanding his recent declaration of confidence
+in the integrity of the Templars, yielded obedience to
+this missive of the Pope. Whether he was overawed by the
+authority of the Pontiff, and deferred his own opinion to that of
+so great a personage, or whether, as some suppose, he desired to
+give the Templars a fair and honorable trial, and the opportunity
+of clearing themselves; or whether he gave way to the evil
+counsels of those who whispered that the great wealth of the
+Templars would be useful to the Crown, and that he might
+avail himself of the opportunity of taking all&mdash;as his predecessors
+had taken some&mdash;of their treasure; whatever may have
+been his real motive, and the cause of his change of conduct, it
+is certain that he issued an order for the arrest of the Templars,
+and the seizure of all their estates, houses, and property.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest caution and secrecy were adopted. Instructions
+were sent to all the sheriffs throughout England to hold themselves
+in readiness to execute certain orders which would be
+given to them by trusty persons on that day. Similar arrangements
+were made in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; and on January
+8, 1308, every Templar was simultaneously arrested.</p>
+
+<p>It was not till October in the following year that any trial took
+place. All this time the Templars had been suffering the miseries
+of imprisonment. More than two hundred men of high
+rank, many of them veterans who had fought and bled in Palestine,
+and who were now grown old and feeble after a life of
+hardship and privation, maimed with wounds, bronzed with exposure
+to the Eastern sun, languished under the tender mercies
+of jailers, with no opportunity of defending themselves or of
+raising up friends to say a word for them. Some were foreigners
+who happened to be in England on the business of the order.
+A few managed to evade the vigilance of the King's emissaries,
+notwithstanding the secrecy and suddenness of the arrest, and
+escaped in various disguises to the wild and remote mountain
+districts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>The court appointed by the Pope commenced its proceedings
+in London, in October, 1309, under the presidency of the
+Bishop of London. Several French ecclesiastics had come over
+to take their seat upon the bench as judges&mdash;an ill omen for the
+English Templars. After the usual preliminaries, which were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>
+long and tedious, the articles of accusation were read. They
+stated that those who were received into the order of the Knights
+of the Temple did, at their reception, formally deny Jesus Christ
+and renounce all hope of salvation through him; that they
+trampled and spat upon the cross; that they worshipped a cat(!);
+that they denied the sacraments, and looked only to the grand
+master for absolution; that they possessed and worshipped
+various idols; that they practised a variety of cruel, degrading,
+and filthy customs and rites; that the grand master and many of
+the brethren had confessed to these things even before they had
+been arrested. Such is a brief summary of the accusation, the
+original documents of which have happily come down to us.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago
+of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been
+gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a
+state paper&mdash;a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen
+and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years
+had been the right arm of the Church and the defender of Christianity
+against its most dangerous and ruthless enemies. No
+writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a trial,
+and no one unacquainted with medi&aelig;val history would credit
+the record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such
+a document, and then set themselves to prove the truth of its
+monstrous allegations by the use of torture.</p>
+
+<p>Students of the Middle Ages know well that such things were
+done in those days. They remember Savonarola and Beatrice
+Cenci in Italy, Jeanne d'Arc in France, Abbot Whiting and
+others in England. They call to mind the cruelties and exactions
+practised so often upon the Jews in every country in
+Europe; and with the contemporary records in their hands, they
+do not hesitate to accept as undoubted historical fact what
+would otherwise be rejected as a slander upon humanity and an
+outrage upon common-sense.</p>
+
+<p>If the Templars had been accused of the crimes vulgarly
+supposed to attach themselves to religious orders; if they had
+been charged with falling into the sins to which poor human
+nature by its frailty is liable; if erring members had been denounced,
+men who had entered the order through disappointment,
+or from some other unworthy motive, men such as Sir<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>
+Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de Bois
+Guilbert, in his novel, <i>Ivanhoe</i>, we might well believe that some
+at least of the accusations against them were true.</p>
+
+<p>It is singular that no such charges are alleged against the
+Templars, though they were freely brought, two hundred years
+later, against the regular monks by the commissioners of Henry
+VIII. This fact has been noticed by most thoughtful historians,
+and has been considered to tell strongly in the tribunal of equity
+in favor of the Templars. Instead of these probable or possible
+crimes, we find nothing but monstrous charges of sorcery, idolatry,
+apostasy, and such like, instances of which we know are to
+be found in those strange times; but which it seems altogether
+unlikely would infect a large body whose fundamental principle
+was close adherence to Christianity; a body which was spread
+all over the world, and which included in its ranks such a multitude
+and variety of men and of nationalities, among whom
+there must have been, to say the least, some sincere, upright,
+and godly men who would have set themselves to root out such
+miserable errors, or, if they were found to be ineradicable, would
+have left the order as no place for them.</p>
+
+<p>Even Voltaire acknowledges that such an indictment destroys
+itself. It recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing
+but their intense hatred of their victims and their total unfitness
+to sit as judges.</p>
+
+<p>When this extraordinary paper had been read, the prisoners
+were asked what they had to say to it, and, as might be expected,
+they at once and unanimously declared that they and their
+order were absolutely guiltless of the crimes of which they were
+accused. After this the prisoners were examined one by one.</p>
+
+<p>It would be tedious to follow the long and wearisome questionings
+and to record the replies given by the several brethren
+of the Temple during their trial in London. One and all agreed
+in denying the existence of the horrible and ridiculous rites
+which were said to be used at the reception of new members;
+and whether they had been received in England or abroad, detailed
+the ceremonies that were used, and showed that they were
+substantially the same everywhere. The candidate was asked
+what he desired, and on replying that he desired admission to
+the order of the Knights of the Temple, he was warned of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>
+strict and severe life that was demanded of members of the
+order; of the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience;
+and, moreover, that he must be ready to go and fight the enemies
+of Christ even to the death.</p>
+
+<p>Others related details of the interior discipline and regulations
+of the order, which were stern and rigorous, as became a
+body that added to the strictness of the convent the order and
+system of a military organization. Many of the brethren had been
+nearly all their lives in the order, some more than forty years, a
+great part of which had been spent in active service in the East.</p>
+
+<p>The witnesses who were summoned were not members of
+the order, and had only hearsay evidence to give. They had
+<i>heard</i> this and that report, they <i>suspected</i> something else, they
+had been <i>told</i> that certain things had been said or done. Nothing
+definite could be obtained, and there was no proof whatever
+of any of the extravagant and incredible charges. Similar proceedings
+took place in Lincoln and York, and also in Scotland
+and Ireland; and in all places the results were the same, and the
+matter dragged on till October, 1311.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto torture had not been resorted to; but now, in accordance
+with the repeated solicitations of the Pope, King Edward
+gave orders that the imprisoned Templars should be subjected
+to the rack in order that they might be forced to give
+evidence of their guilt. Even then there seems to have been
+reluctance to resort to this cruel and shameful treatment, and a
+series of delays occurred, so that nothing was done till the beginning
+of the following year.</p>
+
+<p>The Templars, having been now three years in prison,
+chained, half-starved, threatened with greater miseries here,
+and with eternal damnation hereafter; separated from one
+another, without friend, adviser, or legal defence, were now
+removed to the various jails in London and elsewhere, and
+submitted to torture. We have no particular record of the horrible
+details, but some evidence was afterward adduced which
+was said to have been obtained from the unhappy victims during
+their agony. It was such as was desired; an admission of
+the truth of the monstrous accusations that were detailed to
+them, which had been obtained, for the most part, from their
+tortured brethren in France.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span>In April, 1311, these depositions were read in the court, in
+the presence of the Templars, who were required to say what
+they could allege in their defence. They replied that they were
+ignorant of the processes of law, and that they were not permitted
+to have the aid of those whom they trusted and who
+could advise them, but that they would gladly make a statement
+of their faith and of the principles of their order. This they
+were permitted to do, and a very simple and touching paper was
+produced and signed by all the brethren. They declared themselves,
+one and all, good Christians and faithful members of the
+Church, and they claimed to be treated as such, and openly and
+fairly tried if there were any just cause of complaint against
+them. But their persecutors were by no means satisfied. Fresh
+tortures and cruelties were resorted to to force confessions of
+guilt from these worn-out and dying men. A few gave way, and
+said what they were told to say; and these unhappy men were
+produced in St. Paul's Cathedral shortly afterward, and made
+to recant their errors, and were then "reconciled to the Church."
+A similar scene was enacted at York.</p>
+
+<p>The property of the Templars in England was placed under
+the charge of a commission at the time that proceedings were
+commenced against them, and the King very soon treated it as
+if it were his own, giving away manors and convents at his
+pleasure. A great part of the possessions of the order was
+subsequently made over to the Hospitallers. The convent and
+church of the Temple in London were granted, in 1313, to Aymer
+de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whose monument is in
+Westminster Abbey. Other property was pawned by the King
+to his creditors as security for payment of his debts; but constant
+litigation and disputes seem to have pursued the holders
+of the ill-gotten goods.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the surviving Templars retired to monasteries, others
+returned to the world and assumed secular habits, for which
+they incurred the censures of the Pope.</p>
+
+
+<h4>HENRY HART MILMAN</h4>
+
+<p>The tragedy of the Templars had not yet drawn to its close.
+The four great dignitaries of the order, the grand master Du
+Molay, Guy, the commander of Normandy, son of the Dauphin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>
+of Auvergne, the commander of Aquitaine, Godfrey de Gonaville,
+the great visitor of France, Hugues de Peraud, were still
+pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to determine on
+their fate. The King and the Pope were now equally interested
+in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So long as
+these men lived, uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not
+extinct. A commission was named: the Cardinal-Archbishop
+of Albi, with two other cardinals, two monks, the Cistercian
+Arnold Novelli, and Arnold de Fargis, nephew of Pope Clement,
+the Dominican Nicolas de Freveauville, akin to the house of
+Marigny, formerly the King's confessor. With these the Archbishop
+of Sens sat in judgment on the Knights' own former confessions.
+The grand master and the rest were found guilty,
+and were to be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p>A scaffold was erected before the porch of Notre Dame.
+On one side appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four
+noble prisoners, in chains, under the custody of the Provost of
+Paris. Six years of dreary imprisonment had passed over their
+heads; of their valiant brethren the most valiant had been burned
+alive; the recreants had purchased their lives by confession; the
+Pope, in a full council, had condemned and dissolved the order.
+If a human mind&mdash;a mind like that of Du Molay&mdash;could be
+broken by suffering and humiliation, it must have yielded to
+this long and crushing imprisonment. The Cardinal-Archbishop
+of Albi ascended a raised platform: he read the confessions
+of the Knights, the proceedings of the court; he enlarged
+on the criminality of the order, on the holy justice of the Pope,
+and the devout, self-sacrificing zeal of the King; he was proceeding
+to the final, the fatal sentence. At that instant the
+grand master advanced; his gesture implored silence; judges
+and people gazed in awestruck apprehension. In a calm, clear
+voice Du Molay spoke: "Before heaven and earth, on the
+verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable
+weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved
+death, not on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves
+or our order have been guilty, but because we have
+yielded, to save our lives, to the seductive words of the Pope and
+of the King; and so by our confessions brought shame and ruin
+on our blameless, holy, and orthodox brotherhood."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>The cardinals stood confounded; the people could not suppress
+their profound sympathy. The assembly was hastily
+broken up; the Provost was commanded to conduct the prisoners
+back to their dungeons. "To-morrow we will hold further
+counsel." But on the moment that the King heard these things,
+without a day's delay, without the least consultation with the
+ecclesiastical authorities, he ordered them to death as relapsed
+heretics. On the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue
+of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the
+convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres
+were raised&mdash;two out of the four had shrunk back into their
+ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two
+aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied
+each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the
+wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the
+tardiness was designed that the victims might have time, while
+the fire was still curling round their extremities, to recant their
+bold recantation. But there was no sign, no word of weakness.
+Du Molay implored that the image of the Mother of God might
+be held up before him, and his hands unchained, that he might
+clasp them in prayer. Both, as the smoke rose to their lips, as
+the fire crept up to their vital parts, continued solemnly to aver
+the innocence and the Catholic faith of the order. The King
+himself sat and beheld, it might seem without remorse, this
+hideous spectacle; the words of Du Molay might have reached
+his ears. But the people looked on with far other feelings.
+Stupor kindled into admiration; the execution was a martyrdom;
+friars gathered up their ashes and bones and carried them
+away, hardly by stealth, to consecrated ground; they became
+holy relics. The two who wanted courage to die pined away
+their miserable life in prison.</p>
+
+<p>The wonder and the pity of the times which immediately
+followed, arrayed Du Molay not only in the robes of the martyr,
+but gave him the terrible language of a prophet. "Clement,
+iniquitous and cruel judge, I summon thee within forty days to
+meet me before the throne of the Most High!" According to
+some accounts this fearful sentence included the King, by whom,
+if uttered, it might have been heard. The earliest allusion to
+this awful speech does not contain that striking particularity,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>
+which, if part of it, would be fatal to its credibility, <i>i.e.</i>, the precise
+date of Clement's death. It was not till the year after that
+Clement and King Philip passed to their account. The fate of
+these two men during the next year might naturally so appal the
+popular imagination, as to approximate more closely the prophecy
+and its accomplishment. At all events it betrayed the deep
+and general feeling of the cruel wrong inflicted on the order;
+while the unlamented death of the Pope, the disastrous close of
+Philip's reign, and the disgraceful crimes which attainted the
+honor of his family seemed as declarations of heaven as to the
+innocence of their noble victims.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span></p>
+<h2>JAMES VAN ARTEVELDE LEADS A
+FLEMISH REVOLT</h2>
+
+<h3>EDWARD III OF ENGLAND ASSUMES THE
+TITLE OF KING OF FRANCE</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1337-1340</h6>
+
+<h3>FRAN&Ccedil;OIS P. G. GUIZOT</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Having defeated the Flemings at Mons-la-Puelle in 1304, Philip the
+Fair of France found that they were unsubdued and ready to renew their
+war against him. Therefore he very soon acknowledged their independence
+under their count, Robert de B&eacute;thune. But Philip continually
+violated the treaty he had made, and just before his death (1314) he again
+began hostilities against Flanders.</p>
+
+<p>Little of historical importance occurred in that country between the
+death of Philip the Fair and the accession of Philip of Valois (1328).
+His first act was to take up the cause of Louis de Nevers, then Count of
+Flanders, whom the independent burghers of most of the chief cities had
+united to deprive of his territories, leaving him only Ghent for a refuge.
+In the first year of his reign Philip gained a victory over the Flemish
+"weavers" at Cassel, and laid all Flanders at the feet of its rejected count.</p>
+
+<p>In 1338 began the Hundred Years' War, arising from the claim of
+Edward III of England to the French throne. Edward's most important
+measure in preparation for the war was the securing of an alliance
+with the Flemish burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had
+gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which
+confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as
+well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered
+with the commerce and industry of both Flanders and England.</p>
+
+<p>At last, by prohibiting the exportation of wool to Flanders, Edward
+reduced the Flemings to despair and forced them to fling themselves into
+his arms. Many of them emigrated to England, where they helped to
+lay the foundation of manufactures. But the Flemish towns burst into
+insurrection and proceeded to organized action in the manner here related
+by Guizot, who draws largely upon the narrative of Froissart.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE Flemings bore the first brunt of that war which was to
+be so cruel and so long. It was a lamentable position for
+them; their industrial and commercial prosperity was being
+ruined; their security at home was going from them; their communal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span>
+liberties were compromised; divisions set in among them;
+by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn toward
+England, but the Count, their lord, did all he could to turn them
+away from her, and many among them were loath to separate
+themselves entirely from France. "Burghers of Ghent, as they
+chatted in the thoroughfares and at the cross-roads, said one to
+another that they had heard much wisdom, to their mind, from
+a burgher who was called James van Artevelde, and who was a
+brewer of beer. They had heard him say that, if he could
+obtain a hearing and credit, he would in a little while restore
+Flanders to good estate, and they would recover all their gains
+without standing ill with the King of France or the King of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>"These sayings began to get spread abroad insomuch that a
+quarter or half the city was informed thereof, especially the small
+folk of the commonalty, whom the evil touched most nearly.
+They began to assemble in the streets, and it came to pass that
+one day, after dinner, several went from house to house calling
+for their comrades, and saying, 'Come and hear the wise man's
+counsel.' On December 26, 1337, they came to the house of the
+said James van Artevelde, and found him leaning against his
+door. Far off as they were when they first perceived him, they
+made him a deep obeisance, and 'Dear sir,' they said, 'we are
+come to you for counsel; for we are told that by your great and
+good sense you will restore the country of Flanders to good case.
+So tell us how.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then James van Artevelde came forward, and said: 'Sirs
+comrades, I am a native and burgher of this city, and here I
+have my means. Know that I would gladly aid you with all
+my power, you and all the country; if there were here a man who
+would be willing to take the lead, I would be willing to risk body
+and means at his side; and if the rest of ye be willing to be
+brethren, friends, and comrades to me, to abide in all matters
+at my side, notwithstanding that I am not worthy of it, I will
+undertake it willingly.' Then said all with one voice: 'We
+promise you faithfully to abide at your side in all matters and to
+therewith adventure body and means, for we know well that in
+the whole countship of Flanders there is not a man but you
+worthy so to do.'" Then Van Artevelde bound them to assemble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span>
+on the next day but one in the grounds of the monastery
+of Biloke, which had received numerous benefits from the ancestors
+of Sohier of Courtrai, whose son-in-law Van Artevelde was.</p>
+
+<p>This bold burgher of Ghent, who was born about 1285, was
+sprung from a family the name of which had been for a long
+while inscribed in their city upon the register of industrial
+corporations. His father, John van Artevelde, a cloth-worker,
+had been several times over-sheriff of Ghent, and his mother,
+Mary van Groete, was great-aunt to the grandfather of the
+illustrious publicist called in history Grotius. James van
+Artevelde in his youth accompanied Count Charles of Valois,
+brother of Philip the Handsome, upon his adventurous expeditions
+in Italy, Sicily, and Greece, and to the island of Rhodes;
+and it had been close by the spots where the soldiers of Marathon
+and Salamis had beaten the armies of Darius and Xerxes that
+he had heard of the victory of the Flemish burghers and workmen
+attacked in 1302, at Courtrai, by the splendid army of
+Philip the Handsome.</p>
+
+<p>James van Artevelde, on returning to his country, had been
+busy with his manufactures,<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">46</a> his fields, the education of his
+children, and Flemish affairs up to the day when, at his invitation,
+the burghers of Ghent thronged to the meeting on December 28,
+1337, in the grounds of the monastery of Biloke. There he
+delivered an eloquent speech, pointing out unhesitatingly but
+temperately the policy which he considered good for the country.
+"Forget not," he said, "the might and the glory of Flanders.
+Who, pray, shall forbid that we defend our interests by using our
+rights? Can the King of France prevent us from treating with
+the King of England? And may we not be certain that if we
+were to treat with the King of England, the King of France
+would not be the less urgent in seeking our alliance? Besides,
+have we not with us all the communes of Brabant, of Hainault,
+of Holland, and of Zealand?" The audience cheered these
+words; the commune of Ghent forthwith assembled, and on January
+3, 1337, re&euml;stablished the offices of captains of parishes according
+to olden usage, when the city was exposed to any pressing
+danger.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was carried that one of these captains should have the
+chief government of the city; and James van Artevelde was at
+once invested with it. From that moment the conduct of Van
+Artevelde was ruled by one predominant idea: to secure free
+and fair commercial intercourse for Flanders with England,
+while observing a general neutrality in the war between the kings
+of England and France, and to combine so far all the communes
+of Flanders in one and the same policy. And he succeeded
+in this twofold purpose. On April 29, 1338, the representatives
+of all the communes of Flanders&mdash;the city of Bruges
+numbering among them a hundred and eight deputies&mdash;repaired
+to the castle of M&acirc;le, a residence of Count Louis, and then
+James van Artevelde set before the Count what had been resolved
+upon among them. The Count submitted, and swore that he
+would thenceforth maintain the liberties of Flanders in the state
+in which they had hitherto existed. In the month of May
+following a deputation, consisting of James van Artevelde and
+other burghers appointed by the cities of Ghent, Bruges, and
+Ypres scoured the whole of Flanders, from Bailleul to Termonde,
+and from Ninove to Dunkirk, "to reconcile the good
+folk of the communes to the Count of Flanders, as well for the
+Count's honor as for the peace of the country." Lastly, on
+June 10, 1338, a treaty was signed at Anvers between the deputies
+of the Flemish communes and the English ambassadors,
+the latter declaring: "We do all to wit that we have negotiated
+the way and substance of friendship with the good folk of the
+communes of Flanders, in form and manner hereinafter following:</p>
+
+<p>"First, they shall be able to go and buy the wools and other
+merchandise which have been exported from England to Holland,
+Zealand, or any other place whatsoever; and all traders
+of Flanders who shall repair to the ports of England shall there
+be safe and free in their persons and their goods, just as in any
+other place where their ventures might bring them together.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Item</i>, we have agreed with the good folk and with all the
+common country of Flanders that they must not mix nor intermeddle
+in any way, by assistance in men or arms, in the wars
+of our lord the King and the noble Sir Philip of Valois (who
+holdeth himself for King of France)."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span>Three articles following regulated in detail the principles laid
+down in the first two, and, by another charter, Edward III
+ordained that "all stuffs marked with the seal of the city of
+Ghent might travel freely in England without being subject
+according to ellage and quality to the control to which all foreign
+merchandise was subject."</p>
+
+<p>Van Artevelde was right in telling the Flemings that, if they
+treated with the King of England, the King of France would be
+only the more anxious for their alliance. Philip of Valois and
+even Count Louis of Flanders, when they got to know of the
+negotiations entered into between the Flemish communes and
+King Edward, redoubled their offers and promises to them.
+But when the passions of men have taken full possession of
+their souls, words of concession and attempts at accommodation
+are nothing more than postponements or lies. Philip,
+when he heard about the conclusion of a treaty between the
+Flemish communes and the King of England, sent word to
+Count Louis "that this James van Artevelde must not, on any
+account, be allowed to rule or even live, for if it were so for long,
+the Count would lose his land." The Count, very much disposed
+to accept such advice, repaired to Ghent and sent for
+Van Artevelde to come and see him at his hotel. He went, but
+with so large a following that the Count was not at the time at
+all in a position to resist him. He tried to persuade the Flemish
+burgher that "if he would keep a hand on the people so as
+to keep them to their love for the King of France, he having
+more authority than anyone else for such a purpose, much
+good would result to him; mingling, besides, with this address,
+some words of threatening import."</p>
+
+<p>Van Artevelde, who was not the least afraid of the threat, and
+who at heart was fond of the English, told the Count that he
+would do as he had promised the communes. "Hereupon he
+left the Count, who consulted his confidants as to what he was to
+do in this business, and they counselled him to let them go and
+assemble their people, saying that they would kill Van Artevelde
+secretly or otherwise. And, indeed, they did lay many traps and
+made many attempts against the captain; but it was of no avail,
+since all the commonalty was for him." When the rumor of
+these projects and these attempts was spread abroad in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
+city, the excitement was extreme, and all the burghers assumed
+white hoods, which was the mark peculiar to the members of
+the commune when they assembled under their flags; so that
+the Count found himself reduced to assuming one, for he was
+afraid of being kept captive at Ghent, and, on the pretext of a
+hunting-party, he lost no time in gaining his castle of M&acirc;le.</p>
+
+<p>The burghers of Ghent had their minds still filled with their
+late alarm when they heard that by order, it was said, of the
+King of France&mdash;Count Louis had sent and beheaded at the
+castle of Rupelmonde, in the very bed in which he was confined
+by his infirmities, their fellow-citizen Sohier of Courtrai,
+Van Artevelde's father-in-law, who had been kept for many
+months in prison for his intimacy with the English. On the
+same day the Bishop of Senlis and the Abbot of St. Denis had
+arrived at Tournai, and had superintended the reading out in
+the market-place of a sentence of excommunication against the
+Ghentese.</p>
+
+<p>It was probably at this date that Van Artevelde in his vexation
+and disquietude assumed in Ghent an attitude threatening and
+despotic even to tyranny. "He had continually after him,"
+says Froissart, "sixty or eighty armed varlets, among whom
+were two or three who knew some of his secrets. When he met
+a man whom he hated or had in suspicion, this man was at once
+killed, for Van Artevelde had given this order to his varlets:
+'The moment I meet a man, and make such and such a sign to
+you, slay him without delay, however great he may be, without
+waiting for more speech.' In this way he had many great
+masters slain. And as soon as these sixty varlets had taken
+him home to his hotel, each went to dinner at his own house;
+and the moment dinner was over they returned and stood before
+his hotel and waited in the street until that he was minded
+to go and play and take his pastime in the city, and so they
+attended him to supper-time.</p>
+
+<p>"And know that each of these hirelings had <i>per diem</i> four
+groschen of Flanders for their expenses and wages, and he had
+them regularly paid from week to week. And even in the case
+of all that were most powerful in Flanders, knights, esquires, and
+burghers of the good cities, whom he believed to be favorable
+to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from Flanders and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
+levied half their revenues. He had levies made of rents, of dues
+on merchandise and all the revenues belonging to the Count,
+wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his
+will, and gave them away without rendering any account. And
+when he would borrow of any burghers on his word for payment,
+there was none that durst say him nay. In short there
+was never in Flanders, or in any other country, duke, count,
+prince, or other who can have had a country at his will as James
+van Artevelde had for a long time." It is possible that, as some
+historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers
+than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in
+this portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force
+of events and passions into a demagogic tyrant.</p>
+
+<p>While the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted
+to excite an uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced,
+in order to escape from the people of Bruges, to mount his
+horse in hot haste, at night and barely armed, and to flee away
+to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward III were preparing
+on either side, for the war which they could see drawing near.
+Philip was vigorously at work on the Pope, the Emperor of
+Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to
+raise obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies. He
+ordered that short-lived meeting of the states-general about
+which we have no information left us, save that it voted the
+principle that "no talliage could be imposed on the people if
+urgent necessity or evident utility should not require it, and
+unless by concession of the estates."</p>
+
+<p>Philip, as chief of feudal society rather than of the nation
+which was forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked
+at Amiens all his vassals great and small, laic or cleric, placing all
+his strength in their co&ouml;peration, and not caring at all to associate
+the country itself in the affairs of his government. Edward, on
+the contrary, while equipping his fleet and amassing treasure at
+the expense of the Jews and Lombard usurers, was assembling
+his parliament, talking to it "of this important and costly war,"
+for which he obtained large subsidies, and accepting, without
+making any difficulty, the vote of the commons' house, which
+expressed a desire "to consult their constituents upon this subject,
+and begged him to summon an early parliament, to which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>
+there should be elected, in each county, two knights taken from
+among the best landowners of their counties."</p>
+
+<p>The King set out for the Continent; the parliament met
+and considered the exigences of the war by land and sea, in
+Scotland and in France; traders, shipowners, and mariners
+were called and examined; and the forces determined to be
+necessary were voted. Edward took the field, pillaging, burning,
+and ravaging, "destroying all the country for twelve or
+fourteen leagues in extent," as he himself said in a letter to the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. When he set foot on French territory,
+Count William of Hainault, his brother-in-law and up to
+that time his ally, came to him and said that "he would ride
+with him no farther, for that his presence was prayed and required
+by his uncle the King of France, to whom he bore no
+hate, and whom he would go and serve in his own kingdom,
+as he had served King Edward on the territory of the Emperor,
+whose vicar he was," and Edward wished him "Godspeed!"
+Such was the binding nature of feudal ties that the same lord
+held himself bound to pass from one camp to another according
+as he found himself upon the domains of one or the other
+of his suzerains in a war one against the other.</p>
+
+<p>Edward continued his march toward St. Quentin, where
+Philip had at last arrived with his allies the kings of Bohemia,
+Navarre, and Scotland, "after delays which had given rise to
+great scandal and murmurs throughout the whole kingdom."
+The two armies, with a strength, according to Froissart, of a
+hundred thousand men on the French side, and forty-four
+thousand on the English, were soon facing one another, near
+Buironfosse, a large burgh of Picardy. A herald came from the
+English camp to tell the King of France that the King of England
+"demanded of him battle. To which demand," says Froissart,
+"the King of France gave willing assent and accepted the day
+which was fixed at first for Thursday the 21st, and afterward
+for Saturday the 25th of October, 1339."</p>
+
+<p>To judge from the somewhat tangled accounts of the chroniclers
+and of Froissart himself, neither of the two kings was very
+anxious to come to blows. The forces of Edward were much
+inferior to those of Philip; and the former had accordingly
+taken up, as it appears, a position which rendered attack difficult<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>
+for Philip. There was much division of opinion in the French
+camp. Independently of military grounds, a great deal was
+said about certain letters from Robert, King of Naples, "a
+mighty necromancer and full of mighty wisdom, it was reported,
+who, after having several times cast their horoscopes, had discovered,
+by astrology and from experience, that, if his cousin, the
+King of France, were to fight the King of England, the former
+would be worsted."</p>
+
+<p>"In thus disputing and debating," says Froissart, "the time
+passed till full mid-day. A little afterward a hare came leaping
+across the fields, and rushed among the French. Those who
+saw it began shouting and making a great halloo. Those who
+were behind thought that those who were in front were engaging
+in battle; and several put on their helmets and gripped their
+swords. Thereupon several knights were made; and the Count
+of Hainault himself made fourteen, who were thenceforth nicknamed
+Knights of the Hare."</p>
+
+<p>Whatever his motive may have been, Philip did not attack;
+and Edward promptly began a retreat. They both dismissed
+their allies; and during the early days of November Philip fell
+back upon St. Quentin, and Edward went and took up his winter-quarters
+at Brussels.</p>
+
+<p>For Edward it was a serious check not to have dared to
+attack the King whose kingdom he made a pretence of conquering;
+and he took it grievously to heart. At Brussels he
+had an interview with his allies and asked their counsel. Most
+of the princes of the Low Countries remained faithful to him
+and the Count of Hainault seemed inclined to go back to him;
+but all hesitated as to what he was to do to recover from the
+check. Van Artevelde showed more invention and more boldness.
+The Flemish communes had concentrated their forces
+not far from the spot where the two kings had kept their armies
+looking at one another; but they had maintained a strict neutrality,
+and at the invitation of the Count of Flanders, who promised
+them that the King of France would entertain all their
+claims, Artevelde and Breydel, the deputies from Ghent and
+Bruges, even repaired to Courtrai to make terms with him. But
+as they got there nothing but ambiguous engagements and
+evasive promises, they let the negotiation drop, and, while Count<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
+Louis was on his way to rejoin Philip at St. Quentin, Artevelde
+with the deputies from the Flemish communes started for
+Brussels.</p>
+
+<p>Edward, who was already living on very confidential terms
+with him, told him that "if the Flemings were minded to help
+him to keep up the war and go with him whithersoever he would
+take them, they should aid him to recover Lille, Douai, and
+B&eacute;thune, then occupied by the King of France. Artevelde,
+after consulting his colleagues, returned to Edward, and, 'Dear
+sir,' said he, 'you have already made such requests to us, and
+verily, if we could do so while keeping our honor and faith, we
+would do as you demand: but we be bound, by faith and oath,
+and on a bond of two millions of florins entered into with the
+Pope, not to go to war with the King of France without incurring
+a debt to the amount of that sum and a sentence of excommunication;
+but if you do that which we are about to say to you, if
+you will be pleased to adopt the arms of France, and quarter
+them with those of England, and openly call yourself King of
+France, we will uphold you for the true King of France; you,
+as King of France, shall give us quittance of our faith; and then
+we will obey you as King of France, and will go whithersoever
+you shall ordain."</p>
+
+<p>This prospect pleased Edward mightily: but "it irked him
+to take the name and arms of that of which he had as yet won
+no title." He consulted his allies. Some of them hesitated;
+but "his most privy and especial friend," Robert d'Artois,
+strongly urged him to consent to the proposal. So a French
+prince and a Flemish burgher prevailed upon the King of England
+to pursue, as in assertion of his avowed rights, the conquest of
+the kingdom of France. King, prince, and burgher fixed Ghent
+as their place of meeting for the official conclusion of the alliance;
+and there, in January, 1340, the mutual engagement was signed
+and sealed. The King of England "assumed the arms of
+France quartered with those of England," and thenceforth took
+the title of King of France.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span></p>
+<h2>BATTLES OF SLUYS AND CR&Eacute;CY</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1340-1346</h6>
+
+<h3>SIR JOHN FROISSART<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">47</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The sea fight of Sluys began the Hundred Years' War between England
+and France. It is also memorable as England's first great naval
+victory. The origin of the war lay in the Salic Law, which excludes
+women from the throne of France. This overruled the claims of Queen
+Isabella of England, and her son Edward III in 1328, when the twelve
+peers and barons of France unanimously gave the crown to Isabella's
+cousin, Philip of Valois, who ascended the throne as Philip VI of
+France.</p>
+
+<p>Edward III ingeniously maintained that though the Salic Law prevented
+his mother from filling the throne, it did not destroy the rights of
+her male descendants, and he early entertained the project of enforcing
+this contention; but it was not until 1337 that he felt able to assert formally
+his claim to the French crown and to assume the title of king of
+France.</p>
+
+<p>The following year, with a considerable body of troops to support his
+presumed rights, he crossed to the Continent, and passed the winter at
+Antwerp among the Flemings who had taken up his cause, and with
+whom, as well as with the Emperor-King of Germany, he effected aggressive
+alliances. He made a formal declaration of war in 1339, beginning
+hostilities which were prolonged into the Hundred Years' War, and
+which as a contest of the English kings for the sovereignty of France
+produced a series of important revolutions in the fortunes of that country.</p>
+
+<p>The first serious action of the war was a naval battle at Sluys, near
+the Belgian frontier just northeast of Bruges, June 23, 1340. King Edward
+and his entire navy sailed from the Thames June 22, and made
+straight for Sluys. Sir Hugh Quiriel and other French officers, with
+over one hundred and twenty large vessels, were lying near Sluys for the
+purpose of disputing the English King's passage. Froissart, with his
+usual terseness, has graphically recorded the combat which ensued.</p>
+
+<p>A more important victory was that won in the land battle at Cr&eacute;cy in
+1346, which, however, simply paved the way to the capture of Calais, for
+it was not until the battle of Poitiers, ten years later, that Edward made
+any progress toward the conquest of France. In 1346, after landing with
+a force of troops at Cape La Hogue, Edward reduced Cherbourg, Carentan,
+and Caen, and, with the intention of crossing the Seine at Rouen,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span>commenced his march on Calais, where he was to be joined by his Flemish
+allies. Philip, making a rapid march from Paris to Amiens, had
+posted detachments of soldiers along the right bank of the river Somme,
+guarding every ford, breaking down every bridge, and gradually shutting
+up the invaders in the narrow space between the Somme and the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Edward sent out his marshals with their battalions to find a passage,
+but they were unsuccessful, until a peasant led them to the tidal ford of
+Blanchetaque. Although desperately opposed by fully twelve thousand
+French, under the Norman baron Sir God&eacute;mar du Fay, they effected a
+crossing, and, marching on, encamped in the fields near Cr&eacute;cy. The King
+of France with the main body of his troops had taken up his quarters in
+Abbeville.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>BATTLE OF SLUYS</h4>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_w.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="W" />HEN the King's fleet was almost got to Sluys, they saw so
+many masts standing before it that they looked like a
+wood. The King asked the commander of his ship what they
+could be, who answered that he imagined they must be that
+armament of Normans which the King of France kept at sea
+and which had so frequently done him much damage, had burned
+his good town of Southampton, and taken his large ship the
+Christopher. The King replied: "I have for a long time wished
+to meet with them, and now, please God and St. George, we
+will fight them; for, in truth, they have done me so much mischief
+that I will be revenged on them if it be possible."</p>
+
+<p>The King drew up all his vessels, placing the strongest in the
+front, and on the wings his archers. Between every two vessels
+with archers there was one of men-at-arms. He stationed some
+detached vessels as a reserve, full of archers, to assist and help
+such as might be damaged. There were in this fleet a great many
+ladies from England, countesses, baronesses, and knights' and
+gentlemen's wives, who were going to attend on the Queen at
+Ghent. These the King had guarded most carefully by three
+hundred men-at-arms and five hundred archers.</p>
+
+<p>When the King of England and his marshals had properly
+divided the fleet, they hoisted their sails to have the wind on
+their quarter, as the sun shone full in their faces, which they
+considered might be of disadvantage to them, and stretched out
+a little, so that at last they got the wind as they wished. The
+Normans, who saw them tack, could not help wondering why
+they did so, and said they took good care to turn about, for they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
+were afraid of meddling with them. They perceived, however,
+by his banner, that the King was on board, which gave them
+great joy, as they were eager to fight with him; so they put their
+vessels in proper order, for they were expert and gallant men on
+the seas. They filled the Christopher, the large ship which they
+had taken the year before from the English, with trumpets and
+other warlike instruments, and ordered her to fall upon the English.</p>
+
+<p>The battle then began very fiercely; archers and cross-bowmen
+shot with all their might at each other, and the men-at-arms
+engaged hand to hand. In order to be more successful,
+they had large grapnels, and iron hooks with chains, which they
+flung from ship to ship, to moor them to each other. There were
+many valiant deeds performed, many prisoners made, and many
+rescues. The Christopher, which led the van, was recaptured
+by the English, and all in her taken or killed. There were then
+great shouts and cries, and the English manned her again with
+archers and sent her to fight against the Genoese.</p>
+
+<p>This battle was very murderous and horrible. Combats at
+sea are more destructive and obstinate than upon the land, for
+it is not possible to retreat or flee&mdash;everyone must abide his fortune
+and exert his prowess and valor. Sir Hugh Quiriel and
+his companions were bold and determined men, had done much
+mischief to the English at sea and destroyed many of their ships;
+this combat, therefore, lasted from early in the morning until
+noon, and the English were hard pressed, for their enemies were
+four to one, and the greater part men who had been used to the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>The King, who was in the flower of his youth, showed himself
+on that day a gallant knight, as did the earls of Derby, Pembroke,
+Hereford, Huntingdon, Northampton, and Gloucester;
+the Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord Felton, Lord Bradestan, Sir
+Richard Stafford, the Lord Percy, Sir Walter Manny, Sir Henry
+de Flanders, Sir John Beauchamp, Sir John Chandos, the Lord
+Delaware, Lucie Lord Malton, and the Lord Robert d'Artois,
+now called Earl of Richmond.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot remember all the names of those who behaved so
+valiantly in the combat; but they did so well that, with some
+assistance from Bruges and those parts of the country, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>
+French were completely defeated, and all the Normans and the
+others killed or drowned, so that not one of them escaped. This
+was soon known all over Flanders; and when it came to the two
+armies before Thin-l'Ev&ecirc;que, the Hainaulters were as much rejoiced
+as their enemies were dismayed.</p>
+
+<p>After the King had gained this victory, which was on the eve
+of St. John's Day, he remained all that night on board of his ship
+before Sluys, and there were great noises with trumpets and all
+kinds of other instruments. The Flemings came to wait on him,
+having heard of his arrival and what deeds he had performed.
+The King inquired of the citizens of Bruges after Jacob van
+Artevelde, and they told him he was gone to the aid of the Earl
+of Hainault with upward of sixty thousand men, against the
+Duke of Normandy. On the morrow, which was Midsummer
+Day, the King and his fleet entered the port. As soon as they
+were landed, the King, attended by crowds of knights, set out
+on foot on a pilgrimage to our Lady of Ardemburg, where he
+heard mass and dined. He then mounted his horse and went
+that day to Ghent, where the Queen was, who received him
+with great joy and kindness. The army and baggage, with the
+attendants of the King, followed him by degrees to the same
+place.</p>
+
+
+<h4>BATTLE OF CR&Eacute;CY</h4>
+
+<p>The two battalions of the marshals came, on Friday in the
+afternoon, to where the King was, and they fixed their quarters,
+all three together, near Cr&eacute;cy in Ponthieu. The King of England,
+who had been informed that the King of France was following
+him, in order to give him battle, said to his people:
+"Let us post ourselves here, for we will not go farther before we
+have seen our enemies. I have good reason to wait for them on
+this spot; as I am now upon the lawful inheritance of my lady
+mother, which was given her as her marriage portion, and I am
+resolved to defend it against my adversary, Philip de Valois."
+On account of his not having more than an eighth part of the
+forces which the King of France had, his marshals fixed upon
+the most advantageous situation, and the army went and took
+possession of it. He then sent his scouts toward Abbeville, to
+learn if the King of France meant to take the field this Friday,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>
+but they returned and said they saw no appearance of it; upon
+which he dismissed his men to their quarters with orders to be
+in readiness by times in the morning and to assemble in the
+same place. The King of France remained all Friday in Abbeville,
+waiting for more troops. He sent his marshals, the Lord
+of St. Venant and Lord Charles of Montmorency, out of Abbeville,
+to examine the country and get some certain intelligence
+of the English. They returned about vespers with information
+that the English were encamped on the plain. That night the
+King of France entertained at supper in Abbeville all the princes
+and chief lords. There was much conversation relative to war;
+and the King entreated them after supper that they would always
+remain in friendship with each other; that they would
+be friends without jealousy, and courteous without pride. The
+King was still expecting the Earl of Savoy, who ought to have
+been there with a thousand lances, as he had been well paid for
+them at Troyes in Champaign, three months in advance.</p>
+
+<p>The King of England encamped this Friday in the plain,
+for he found the country abounding in provisions, but, if they
+should have failed, he had plenty in the carriages which attended
+on him. The army set about furbishing and repairing their
+armor, and the King gave a supper that evening to the earls and
+barons of his army, where they made good cheer. On their
+taking leave the King remained alone with the lords of his bedchamber;
+he retired into his oratory, and, falling on his knees
+before the altar, prayed to God that if he should combat his
+enemies on the morrow, he might come off with honor. About
+midnight he went to bed and, rising early the next day, he
+and the Prince of Wales heard mass and communicated. The
+greater part of his army did the same, confessed, and made
+proper preparations. After mass, the King ordered his men to
+arm themselves, and assemble on the ground he had before fixed
+on. He had enclosed a large park near a wood, on the rear of his
+army, in which he placed all his baggage wagons and horses.
+This park had but one entrance; his men-at-arms and archers
+remained on foot.</p>
+
+<p>The King afterward ordered, through his constable and his
+two marshals, that the army should be divided into three battalions.
+In the first he placed the young Prince of Wales, and with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>
+him the earls of Warwick and Oxford, Sir Godfrey de Harcourt,
+the Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord Thomas Holland, Lord
+Stafford, Lord Mauley, the Lord Delaware, Sir John Chandos,
+Lord Bartholomew Burgherst, Lord Robert Neville, Lord
+Thomas Clifford, Lord Bourchier, Lord Latimer, and many
+other knights and squires. There might be, in this first division,
+about eight hundred men-at-arms, two thousand archers, and a
+thousand Welshmen. They advanced in regular order to their
+ground, each lord under his banner and pennon and in the
+centre of his men. In the second battalion were the Earl of
+Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the lords Roos, Willoughby,
+Basset, St. Albans, Sir Lewis Tufton, Lord Multon, Lord Lascels,
+and many others; amounting, in the whole, to about eight
+hundred men-at-arms and twelve hundred archers. The third
+battalion was commanded by the King, and was composed of
+about seven hundred men-at-arms and two thousand archers.</p>
+
+<p>The King then mounted a small palfrey, having a white
+wand in his hand, and, attended by his two marshals on each side
+of him, he rode at a footpace through all the ranks, encouraging
+and entreating the army that they would guard his honor and
+defend his right. He spoke this so sweetly and with such a
+cheerful countenance that all who had been dispirited were
+directly comforted by seeing and hearing him. When he had
+thus visited all the battalions it was near ten o'clock; he retired
+to his own division, and ordered them all to eat heartily and drink
+a glass after. They ate and drank at their ease, and, having
+packed up pots, barrels, etc., in the carts they returned to their
+battalions according to the marshals' orders, and seated themselves
+on the ground, placing their helmets and bows before
+them, that they might be the fresher when their enemies should
+arrive.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday the King of France rose betimes, and heard
+mass in the monastery of St. Peter's in Abbeville, where he was
+lodged; having ordered his army to do the same, he left that
+town after sunrise. When he had marched about two leagues
+from Abbeville, and was approaching the enemy, he was advised
+to form his army in order of battle and to let those on foot march
+forward that they might not be trampled on by the horses. The
+King, upon this, sent off four knights, Lord Moyne of Bastleberg,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>
+Lord of Noyers, Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord of Aubigny,
+who rode so near to the English that they could clearly distinguish
+their position. The English plainly perceived they were
+come to reconnoitre them; however, they took no notice of it,
+but suffered them to return unmolested. When the King of
+France saw them coming back, he halted his army; and the
+knights, pushing through the crowd, came near the King, who
+said to them, "My lords, what news?" They looked at each
+other, without opening their mouths, for neither chose to speak
+first. At last the King addressed himself to the Lord Moyne,
+who was attached to the King of Bohemia, and had performed
+very many gallant deeds, so that he was esteemed one of the
+most valiant knights in Christendom. Lord Moyne said: "Sir,
+I will speak, since it pleases you to order me, but under the correction
+of my companions. We have advanced far enough to
+reconnoitre your enemies. Know, then, that they are drawn up
+in three battalions, and are waiting for you. I would advise, for
+my part&mdash;submitting, however, to better counsel&mdash;that you halt
+your army here and quarter them for the night; for before the
+rear shall come up and the army be properly drawn out, it will
+be very late; your men will be tired and in disorder, while they
+will find your enemies fresh and properly arrayed. On the
+morrow you may draw up your army more at your ease and may
+reconnoitre at leisure on what part it will be most advantageous
+to begin the attack; for, be assured, they will wait for you."
+The King commanded that it should be so done, and the two
+marshals rode, one toward the front, and the other to the rear,
+crying out, "Halt banners, in the name of God and St. Denis."
+Those that were in the front halted, but those behind said they
+would not halt until they were as forward as the front. When
+the front perceived the rear pressing on they pushed forward, and
+neither the King nor the marshals could stop them, but they
+marched without any order until they came in sight of their
+enemies. As soon as the foremost rank saw them they fell back
+at once in great disorder, which alarmed those in the rear, who
+thought they had been fighting. There was then space and
+room enough for them to have passed forward, had they been
+willing so to do; some did so, but others remained shy. All the
+roads between Abbeville and Cr&eacute;cy were covered with common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+people, who, when they were come within three leagues of their
+enemies, drew their swords, bawling out, "Kill, kill," and with
+them were many great lords that were eager to make show of
+their courage. There is no man&mdash;unless he had been present&mdash;that
+can imagine or describe truly the confusion of that day;
+especially the bad management and disorder of the French,
+whose troops were out of number.</p>
+
+<p>The English were drawn up in three divisions and seated on
+the ground. On seeing their enemies advance they rose up and
+fell into their ranks. That of the Prince was the first to do so,
+whose archers were formed in the manner of a portcullis, or
+harrow, and the men-at-arms in the rear. The earls of Northampton
+and Arundel, who commanded the second division, had
+posted themselves in good order on his wing, to assist and succor
+the Prince if necessary. You must know that these kings, earls,
+barons, and lords of France did not advance in any regular
+order, but one after the other, or any way most pleasing to themselves.
+As soon as the King of France came in sight of the
+English his blood began to boil, and he cried out to his marshals,
+"Order the Genoese forward and begin the battle, in the name
+of God and St. Denis." There were about fifteen thousand
+Genoese cross-bowmen, but they were quite fatigued, having
+marched on foot that day six leagues, completely armed and with
+their cross-bows. They told the constable they were not in a fit
+condition to do any great things that day in battle. The Earl of
+Alen&ccedil;on, hearing this, said, "This is what one gets by employing
+such scoundrels, who fall off when there is any need for
+them." During this time a heavy rain fell, accompanied by
+thunder and a very terrible eclipse of the sun, and before this
+rain a great flight of crows hovered in the air over all those battalions,
+making a loud noise. Shortly afterward it cleared up
+and the sun shone very bright, but the Frenchmen had it on
+their faces and the English on their backs. When the Genoese
+were somewhat in order and approached the English they set
+up a loud shout<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">48</a> in order to frighten them, but they remained
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>quite still and did not seem to attend to it. They then set up a
+second shout and advanced a little forward, but the English
+never moved.</p>
+
+
+<p>They hooted a third time, advancing with their cross-bows
+presented and began to shoot. The English archers then advanced
+one step forward and shot their arrows with such force
+and quickness that it seemed as if it snowed. When the Genoese
+felt these arrows, which pierced their arms, heads, and
+through their armor, some of them cut the strings of their cross-bows;
+others flung them on the ground and all turned about
+and retreated quite discomfited. The French had a large body
+of men-at-arms on horseback, richly dressed, to support the
+Genoese. The King of France seeing them thus fall back cried
+out, "Kill me those scoundrels, for they stop up our road without
+any reason." You would then have seen the above-mentioned
+men-at-arms lay about them, killing all they could of
+these runaways.</p>
+
+<p>The English continued shooting as vigorously and quickly
+as before; some of their arrows fell among the horsemen, who
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>were sumptuously equipped, and, killing and wounding many,
+made them caper and fall among the Genoese, so that they were
+in such confusion they could never rally again. In the English
+army there were some Cornish and Welshmen on foot who had
+armed themselves with large knives. These, advancing through
+the ranks of the men-at-arms and archers, who made way for
+them, came upon the French when they were in this danger, and,
+falling upon earls, barons, knights, and squires, slew many; at
+which the King of England was afterward much exasperated.
+The valiant King of Bohemia was slain there. He was called
+Charles of Luxembourg, for he was the son of the gallant king
+and emperor Henry of Luxembourg. Having heard the order
+of the battle, he inquired where his son, Lord Charles, was.
+His attendants answered that they did not know, but believed
+he was fighting. The King said to them: "Gentlemen, you are
+all my people, my friends and brethren-at-arms this day; therefore,
+as I am blind,<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">49</a> I request of you to lead me so far into the
+engagement that I may strike one stroke with my sword." The
+knights replied that they would directly lead him forward, and,
+in order that they might not lose him in the crowd, they fastened
+all the reins of their horses together and put the King at their
+head, that he might gratify his wish and advance toward the
+enemy. Lord Charles of Bohemia&mdash;who already signed his
+name as King of Germany and bore the arms&mdash;had come in
+good order to the engagement, but when he perceived that it was
+likely to turn out against the French he departed. The King,
+his father, had rode in among the enemy, and made good use of
+his sword, for he and his companions had fought most gallantly.
+They had advanced so far that they were all slain, and on the
+morrow they were found on the ground, with their horses all tied
+together.</p>
+
+<p>The Earl of Alen&ccedil;on advanced in regular order upon the
+English, to fight with them; as did the Earl of Flanders in
+another part. These two lords, with their detachments&mdash;coasting,
+as it were, the archers&mdash;came to the Prince's battalion,
+where they fought valiantly for a length of time. The King of
+France was eager to march to the place were he saw their ban<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>ners
+displayed, but there was a hedge of archers before him.
+He had that day made a present of a handsome black horse to
+Sir John of Hainault, who had mounted on it a knight called Sir
+John de Fusselles, that bore his banner. The horse ran off with
+him and forced its way through the English army, and, when
+about to return, stumbled and fell into a ditch and severely
+wounded him. He would have been dead if his page had not
+followed him round the battalions and found him unable to rise.
+He had not, however, any other hinderance than from his horse;
+for the English did not quit the ranks that day to make prisoners.
+The page alighted and raised him up, but he did not return
+the way he came, as he would have found it difficult from the
+crowd. This battle, which was fought on the Saturday, between
+La Broyes and Cr&eacute;cy, was very murderous and cruel, and many
+gallant deeds of arms were performed that were never known.
+Toward evening many knights and squires of the French had
+lost their masters. They wandered up and down the plain,
+attacking the English in small parties. They were soon destroyed,
+for the English had determined that day to give no quarter
+nor hear of ransom from anyone.</p>
+
+
+<p>Early in the day some French, Germans, and Savoyards
+had broken through the archers of the Prince's battalion and
+had engaged with the men-at-arms; upon which the second
+battalion came to his aid, otherwise he would have been hard
+pressed. The first division, seeing the danger they were in, sent
+a knight in great haste to the King of England, who was posted
+upon an eminence near a windmill. On the knight's arrival
+he said: "Sir, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Reginald Cobham,
+and the others who are about your son are vigorously attacked
+by the French. They entreat that you would come to their assistance
+with your battalion, for, if their numbers should increase,
+they fear he will have too much to do."</p>
+
+<p>The King replied, "Is my son dead, unhorsed, or so badly
+wounded that he cannot support himself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing of the sort, thank God," rejoined the knight, "but
+he is in so hot an engagement that he has great need of your
+help." The King answered: "Now, Sir Thomas, return back
+to those that sent you, and tell them from me not to send again
+for me this day, or expect that I shall come, let what will happen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>
+as long as my son has life; and say that I command them to let
+the boy win his spurs; for I am determined, if it please God,
+that all the glory and honor of this day shall be given to him
+and to those into whose care I have intrusted him." The
+knight returned to his lords, and related the King's answer,
+which mightily encouraged them and made them repent they
+had ever sent such a message.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">50</a></p>
+
+<p>It is a certain fact that Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, who was
+in the Prince's battalion, having been told by some of the English
+that they had seen the banner of his brother engaged in the
+battle against him, was exceedingly anxious to save him; but he
+was too late, for he was left dead on the field, and so was the
+Earl of Aumarle, his nephew. On the other hand, the earls of
+Alen&ccedil;on and of Flanders were fighting lustily under their banners
+and with their own people, but they could not resist the
+force of the English, and were slain, as well as many other
+knights and squires that were attending on or accompanying
+them. The Earl of Blois, nephew to the King of France, and
+the Duke of Lorraine, his brother-in-law, with their troops,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>made a gallant defence; but they were surrounded by a troop
+of English and Welsh and slain in spite of their prowess. The
+Earl of St. Pol and the Earl of Auxerre were also killed, as well
+as many others.</p>
+
+
+<p>Late after vespers, the King of France had not more about
+him than sixty men&mdash;every one included. Sir John of Hainault,
+who was of the number, had once remounted the King; for
+his horse had been killed under him by an arrow. He said to the
+King: "Sir, retreat while you have an opportunity and do not
+expose yourself so simply. If you have lost this battle, another
+time you will be the conqueror." After he had said this, he took
+the bridle of the King's horse and led him off by force, for he had
+before entreated him to retire. The King rode on until he came
+to the castle of La Broyes, where he found the gates shut, for it
+was very dark. The King ordered the governor of it to be summoned.
+He came upon the battlements and asked who it was
+that called at such an hour. The King answered: "Open,
+open, governor! It is the fortune of France!" The governor,
+hearing the King's voice, immediately descended, opened the
+gate and let down the bridge. The King and his company
+entered the castle, but he had only with him five barons, Sir
+John of Hainault, Lord Charles of Montmorency, Lord Beaujeu,
+Lord Aubigny, and Lord Montfort. The King would not
+bury himself in such a place as that, but, having taken some
+refreshments, set out again with his attendants about midnight,
+and rode on, under the direction of guides&mdash;who were well
+acquainted with the country&mdash;until about daybreak, when he
+came to Amiens, where he halted. The English never quitted
+their ranks in pursuit of anyone, but remained on the field,
+guarding their position and defending themselves against all
+who attacked them. The battle was ended at the hour of vespers.</p>
+
+<p>When, on Saturday night, the English heard no more hooting
+or shouting, nor any more crying out to particular lords or
+their banners, they looked upon the field as their own and their
+enemies as beaten. They made great fires, and lighted torches
+because of the obscurity of the night. King Edward then came
+down from his post, who all that day had not put on his helmet,
+and with his whole battalion advanced to the Prince of Wales,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>
+whom he embraced in his arms and kissed, and said: "Sweet
+son, God give you good perseverance; you are my son, for most
+loyally have you acquitted yourself this day. You are worthy
+to be a sovereign." The Prince bowed down very low and humbled
+himself, giving all the honor to the King, his father. The
+English, during the night, made frequent thanksgivings to the
+Lord for the happy issue of the day, and without rioting, for the
+King had forbidden all riot or noise. On Sunday morning there
+was so great a fog that one could scarcely see the distance of half
+an acre. The King ordered a detachment from the army, under
+the command of the two marshals&mdash;consisting of about five
+hundred lances and two thousand archers&mdash;to make an excursion
+and see if there were any bodies of French troops collected
+together. The quota of troops from Rouen and Beauvais had
+that morning left Abbeville and St. Ricquier in Ponthieu to join
+the French army, and were ignorant of the defeat of the preceding
+evening. They met this detachment, and, thinking they must
+be French, hastened to join them.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the English found who they were, they fell upon
+them and there was a sharp engagement. The French soon
+turned their backs and fled in great disorder. There were slain
+in this flight in the open fields, under hedges and bushes, upward
+of seven thousand; and had it been clear weather, not one
+soul would have escaped.</p>
+
+<p>A little time afterward this same party fell in with the
+Archbishop of Rouen and the great Prior of France, who were
+also ignorant of the discomfiture of the French, for they had
+been informed that the King was not to fight before Sunday.
+Here began a fresh battle; for those two lords were well attended
+by good men-at-arms. However, they could not withstand
+the English, but were almost all slain, with the two chiefs
+who commanded them; very few escaping. In the morning the
+English found many Frenchmen who had lost their road on
+Saturday and had lain in the open fields, not knowing what was
+become of the King or their own leaders. The English put to
+the sword all they met; and it has been assured to me for fact
+that of foot soldiers, sent from the cities, towns, and municipalities,
+there were slain, this Sunday morning, four times as
+many as in the battle of Saturday.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>This detachment, which had been sent to look after the
+French, returned as the King was coming from mass, and related
+to him all that they had seen and met with. After he had been
+assured by them that there was not any likelihood of the French
+collecting another army, he sent to have the number and condition
+of the dead examined. He ordered on this business Lord
+Reginald Cobham, Lord Stafford, and three heralds to examine
+their arms, and two secretaries to write down all the names.
+They took much pains to examine all the dead, and were the
+whole day in the field of battle, not returning but just as the King
+was sitting down to supper. They made him a very circumstantial
+report of all they had observed, and said they had found
+eighty banners, the bodies of eleven princes, twelve hundred
+knights, and about thirty thousand common men.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span></p>
+<h2>MODERN RECOGNITION OF SCENIC BEAUTY</h2>
+
+<h3>CROWNING OF PETRARCH AT ROME</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1341</h6>
+
+<h3>JACOB BURCKHARDT</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The beauty of nature, of natural scenery amid mountains, fields, and
+lakes, seems to have passed unheeded during early medi&aelig;val times.
+Even in the ancient days of classic culture it apparently attracted very
+little notice, except from an occasional poet. The present attitude of enthusiasm,
+which leads thousands of tourists to flock to Switzerland or to
+Niagara every year, is wholly a modern development. This development
+of what is almost a new sense in man certainly deserves notice. To fix
+an exact date for its beginning is, of course, impossible, but it is generally
+regarded as a product of the Italian Renaissance, and Burckhardt,
+seeking for its slow unfolding, traces it back to Petrarch, who, in his poetry,
+speaks of nature repeatedly.</p>
+
+<p>Petrarch's poetry was so highly valued by the Italians that they unanimously
+agreed to confer upon the author a laurel crown. This was a
+revival of the old Greek method of honoring poets, and as such it was
+felt by the Italians a specially fitting way to proclaim their reviving interest
+in art. So a great public gathering was arranged at Rome, and the
+laurel was with elaborate ceremonies placed on Petrarch's brow.</p>
+
+<p>The recipient of this new and distinguished honor is regarded as second
+only to Dante in Italian literature. In addition to his world-famed
+sonnets to Laura, he wrote much-admired Latin poems, and was a scholar
+of high repute. His enthusiasm for the ancient Greek and Latin authors
+made him the central figure in that revival of classic learning which at
+this time began in Italy.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_p.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="P" />ETRARCH, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays
+chiefly as a great Italian poet, owed his fame among his
+contemporaries far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living
+representative of antiquity, that he imitated all styles of Latin
+poetry, endeavored by his voluminous historical and philosophical
+writings not to supplant, but to make known, the works of
+the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on matters of
+antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is unintelligible,
+but which was natural enough in an age without hand-books.
+Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
+writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries and
+with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems that, as
+he often tells us, he would gladly have destroyed them if he
+could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from the
+memory of men.</p>
+
+<p>It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when
+but little was known of the <i>Decameron</i> north of the Alps, he was
+famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations
+on mythology, geography, and biography. One of these,
+<i>de Genealogia Deorum</i>, contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+books a remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position
+of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age. We
+must not be misled by his exclusive references to <i>poesia</i>, as
+closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental
+activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so
+vigorously combats&mdash;the frivolous ignoramuses who have no
+soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to
+whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo
+were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity,
+since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant
+friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who
+made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then
+follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the
+ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious,
+the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical
+meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated
+obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of
+the ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work,
+the writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
+The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the
+Early Church had to fight its way among the heathen. Now&mdash;praised
+be Jesus Christ!&mdash;true religion was strengthened, paganism
+destroyed, and the victorious Church in possession of the
+hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and study paganism
+almost (<i>fere</i>) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did not hold
+this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
+partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
+and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>
+in a theologian. To these reasons must be added the
+warning given him in the name of the dead Pietro Petroni by
+the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up his pagan studies under
+pain of early death. He accordingly determined to abandon
+them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
+the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter's able demonstration
+that humanism was reconcilable with religion.</p>
+
+<p>There was thus a new cause in the world, and a new class of
+men to maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to
+have stopped short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself
+deliberately, and conceded the first place to purely national
+elements of culture. No conviction was more firmly rooted in
+the popular mind than that antiquity was the highest title to
+glory which Italy possessed.</p>
+
+<p>There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation
+of poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it&mdash;the
+coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin
+of this system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of
+the ceremony never became fixed. It was a public demonstration,
+an outward and visible expression of literary enthusiasm,
+and naturally its form was variable. Dante, for instance, seems
+to have understood it in the sense of a half-religious consecration;
+he desired to assume the wreath in the baptistery of San
+Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine children, he
+had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have anywhere
+received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it nowhere
+but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned.
+From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon,
+and was held to be inherited by the ancient Romans
+from the Greeks. The most recent source to which the practices
+could be referred is to be found in the Capitoline contests
+of musicians, poets, and other artists, founded by Domitian in
+imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five years, which
+may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
+Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves,
+as Dante desired to do, the question arises, To whom did
+this office belong? Albertino Mussato was crowned at Padua
+in 1310 by the Bishop and the rector of the university.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>The University of Paris, the rector of which was then a Florentine,
+1341, and the municipal authorities of Rome competed
+for the honor of crowning Petrarch. His self-elected examiner,
+King Robert of Anjou, would gladly have performed the ceremony
+at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the
+Capitol by the senator of Rome. This honor was long the highest
+object of ambition, and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an
+illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the Italian journey
+of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious
+men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous
+ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the coronation of
+poets was a prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently
+was no less his own, he crowned, May 15, 1355, the
+Florentine scholar Zanobi della Strada at Pisa, to the annoyance
+of Petrarch, who complained that the barbarian laurel had
+dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian muses, and to the
+great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognize this <i>laurea
+Pisana</i> as legitimate. Indeed, it might be fairly asked with what
+right this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgment
+on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the
+emperors crowned poets whenever they went on their travels;
+and in the fifteenth century the popes and other princes assumed
+the same right, till at last no regard whatever was paid to place
+or circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another
+way to draw near to nature. The Italians are the first
+among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen
+and felt as something beautiful. The power to do so is always
+the result of a long and complicated development, and its origin
+is not easily detected, since a dim feeling of this kind may exist
+long before it shows itself in poetry and painting, and thereby
+becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients, for example,
+art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human interests
+before they turned to the representation of nature, and
+even then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place.
+And yet, from the time of Homer downward, the powerful impression
+made by nature upon man is shown by countless verses
+and chance expressions. The Germanic races which founded
+their states on the ruins of the Roman Empire were thoroughly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
+and specially fitted to understand the spirit of natural scenery;
+and though Christianity compelled them for a while to see in
+the springs and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they
+had till then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional
+conception was soon outgrown.</p>
+
+<p>By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine,
+hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence,
+and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different
+nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the
+simple phenomena of nature&mdash;spring with its flowers, the green
+fields, and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground,
+without perspective. Even the crusaders, who travelled so far
+and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in these poems.
+The epic poetry, which describes armor and costumes so fully,
+does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and
+even the great Wolfram von Eschenbach scarcely anywhere
+gives us an adequate picture of the scene on which his heroes
+move. From these poems it would never be guessed that their
+noble authors in all countries inhabited or visited lofty castles,
+commanding distant prospects. Even in the Latin poems of the
+wandering clerks, we find no traces of a distant view&mdash;of landscape
+properly so called; but what lies near is sometimes described
+with a glow and splendor which none of the knightly
+minstrels can surpass.</p>
+
+<p>To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time
+lost its taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal
+powers. St. Francis of Assisi, in his <i>Hymn to the Sun</i>, frankly
+praises the Lord for creating the heavenly bodies and the four
+elements.</p>
+
+<p>The unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on
+the human spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken
+in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning airs and
+the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of
+the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks,
+<i>with</i> the only possible object of enjoying the view&mdash;the first man,
+perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so. In Boccaccio
+we can do little more than infer how country scenery affected
+him; yet his pastoral romances show his imagination to have
+been filled with it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>But the significance of nature for a receptive spirit is fully
+and clearly displayed by Petrarch&mdash;one of the first truly modern
+men. That clear soul&mdash;who first collected from the literature of
+all countries evidence of the origin and progress of the sense
+of natural beauty, and himself, in his <i>Ansichten der Natur</i>,
+achieved the noblest masterpiece of description&mdash;Alexander von
+Humboldt, has not done full justice to Petrarch; and, following
+in the steps of the great reaper, we may still hope to glean a
+few ears of interest and value.</p>
+
+<p>Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer&mdash;the first
+map of Italy is said to have been drawn by his direction&mdash;and
+not only a reproducer of the sayings of the ancients, but felt
+himself the influence of natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature
+is, for him, the favorite accompaniment of intellectual pursuits;
+it was to combine the two that he lived in learned retirement
+at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from time to time fled
+from the world and from his age. We should do him wrong by
+inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of describing
+natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture, for
+instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which
+he inserts at the end of the sixth book of the <i>Africa</i>, for the reason
+that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it, is no more
+than a simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his
+friends of Rome, Naples, and other Italian, cities in which he
+willingly lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject.
+Petrarch is also conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is
+perfectly able to distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility
+of nature. During his stay among the woods of Reggio, the sudden
+sight of an impressive landscape so affected him that he resumed
+a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deepest
+impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of Mont
+Ventoux, near Avignon. An indefinable longing for a distant
+panorama grew stronger and stronger in him, till at length the
+accidental sight of a passage in Livy, where King Philip, the
+enemy of Rome, ascends the Haemus, decided him. He thought
+that what was not blamed in a gray-headed monarch might be
+well excused in a young man of private station.</p>
+
+<p>The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard of,
+and there could be no thought of the companionship of friends<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
+or acquaintances. Petrarch took with him only his younger
+brother and two country people from the last place where he
+halted. At the foot of the mountain an old herdsman besought
+him to turn back, saying that he himself had attempted to climb
+it fifty years before, and had brought home nothing but repentance,
+broken bones, and torn clothes, and that neither before nor
+after had anyone ventured to do the same. Nevertheless, they
+struggled forward and upward, till the clouds lay beneath their
+feet, and at last they reached the top. A description of the view
+from the summit would be looked for in vain, not because the
+poet was insensible to it, but, on the contrary, because the impression
+was too overwhelming. His whole past life, with all its
+follies, rose before his mind; he remembered that ten years ago
+that day he had quitted Bologna a young man, and turned a
+longing gaze toward his native country; he opened a book which
+then was his constant companion, the <i>Confessions</i> of St. Augustine,
+and his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter, "and
+men go forth, and admire lofty mountains and broad seas and
+roaring torrents and the ocean and the course of the stars, and
+forget their own selves while doing so." His brother, to whom
+he read these words, could not understand why he closed the
+book and said no more.</p>
+
+<p>Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes,
+in his rhyming geography, the wide panorama from the mountains
+of Auvergne, with the interest, it is true, of the geographer
+and antiquarian only, but still showing clearly that he himself
+had seen it. He must, however, have ascended higher peaks,
+since he is familiar with facts which only occur at a height of
+ten thousand feet or more above the sea&mdash;mountain-sickness
+and its accompaniments&mdash;of which his imaginary comrade Solinus
+tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in essence. The
+ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he speaks, are perhaps
+only fictions.</p>
+
+<p>In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish
+school, Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil
+from nature. Their landscapes are not merely the fruit of an
+endeavor to reflect the real world in art, but have, even if expressed
+conventionally, a certain poetical meaning&mdash;in short, a
+soul. Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>
+and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians, but
+without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian eye
+for nature from finding its own expression.</p>
+
+<p>On this point, as in the scientific description of nature,
+&AElig;neas Sylvius is again one of the most weighty voices of his
+time. Even if we grant the justice of all that has been said
+against his character, we must, nevertheless, admit that in few
+other men was the picture of the age and its culture so fully reflected,
+and that few came nearer to the normal type of the men
+of the early Renaissance. It may be added parenthetically that
+even in respect to his moral character he will not be fairly
+judged if we listen solely to the complaints of the German
+Church, which his fickleness helped to balk of the council it so
+ardently desired.</p>
+
+<p>He here claims our attention as the first who not only enjoyed
+the magnificence of the Italian landscape, but described it
+with enthusiasm down to its minutest details. The ecclesiastical
+state and the South of Tuscany&mdash;his native home&mdash;he knew
+thoroughly, and after he became pope he spent his leisure during
+the favorable season chiefly in excursions to the country.
+Then at last the gouty man was rich enough to have himself
+carried in a litter through the mountains and valleys; and when
+we compare his enjoyments with those of the popes who succeeded
+him, Pius, whose chief delight was in nature, antiquity,
+and simple but noble architecture, appears almost a saint. In
+the elegant and flowing Latin of his <i>Commentaries</i> he freely tells
+us of his happiness.</p>
+
+<p>His eye seems as keen and practised as that of any modern
+observer. He enjoys with rapture the panoramic splendor of the
+view from the summit of the Alban hills&mdash;from the Monte Cavo&mdash;whence
+he could see the shores of St. Peter from Terracina
+and the promontory of Circe as far as Monte Argentaro, and the
+wide expanse of country round about, with the ruined cities of
+the past, and with the mountain chains of central Italy beyond;
+and then his eye would turn to the green woods in the hollows
+beneath, and the mountain lakes among them. He feels the
+beauty of the position of Todi, crowning the vineyards and olive-clad
+slopes, looking down upon distant woods and upon the valley
+of the Tiber, where towns and castles rise above the winding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span>
+river. The lovely hills about Siena, with villas and monasteries
+on every height, are his own home, and his descriptions of them
+are touched with a peculiar feeling. Single picturesque glimpses
+charm him, too, like the little promontory of Capo di Monte
+that stretches out into the Lake of Bolsena. "Rocky steps," we
+read, "shaded by vines, descend to the water's edge, where the
+evergreen oaks stand between the cliffs, alive with the song of
+thrushes." On the path round the Lake of Nemi, beneath the
+chestnuts and fruit-trees, he feels that here, if anywhere, a poet's
+soul must awake&mdash;here in the hiding-place of Diana! He often
+held consistories or received ambassadors under huge old chestnut-trees,
+or beneath the olives on the greensward by some
+gurgling spring. A view like that of a narrowing gorge, with a
+bridge arched boldly over it, awakens at once his artistic sense.
+Even the smallest details give him delight through something
+beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic in them&mdash;the blue fields
+of waving flax, the yellow gorge which covers the hills, even tangled
+thickets, or single trees, or springs, which seem to him like
+wonders of nature.</p>
+
+<p>The height of his enthusiasm for natural beauty was reached
+during his stay on Monte Amiata, in the summer of 1462, when
+plague and heat made the lowlands uninhabitable. Half way
+up the mountain, in the old Lombard monastery of San Salvatore,
+he and his court took up their quarters. There, between
+the chestnuts which clothe the steep declivity, the eye may wander
+over all Southern Tuscany, with the towers of Siena in the
+distance. The ascent of the highest peak he left to his companions,
+who were joined by the Venetian envoy; they found at
+the top two vast blocks of stone one upon the other&mdash;perhaps the
+sacrificial altar of a prehistorical people&mdash;and fancied that in
+the far distance they saw Corsica and Sardinia rising above the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>In the cool air of the hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts,
+on the green meadows where there were no thorns to wound the
+feet and no snakes or insects to hurt or to annoy, the Pope passed
+days of unclouded happiness. For the <i>segnatura</i>, which took
+place on certain days of the week, he selected on each occasion
+some new shady retreat "<i>novas in convallibus fontes et novas inveniens
+umbras, qu&aelig; dubiam jacerent electionem</i>." At such times<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>
+the dogs would perhaps start a great stag from his lair, who,
+after defending himself a while with hoofs and antlers, would fly
+at last up the mountain. In the evening the Pope was accustomed
+to sit before the monastery on the spot from which the
+whole valley of the Paglia was visible, holding lively conversations
+with the cardinals. The courtiers, who ventured down
+from the heights on their hunting expeditions, found the heat
+below intolerable, and the scorched plains like a very hell, while
+the monastery, with its cool, shady woods, seemed like an abode
+of the blessed.</p>
+
+<p>All this is genuine modern enjoyment, not a reflection of antiquity.
+As surely as the ancients themselves felt in the same
+manner, so surely, nevertheless, were the scanty expressions of
+the writers whom Pius knew insufficient to awaken in him such
+enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed at
+the end of the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of
+the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature
+on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that
+time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true,
+of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic
+age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something
+else to deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously,
+but as briefly as possible, and with no effort to appeal by their
+descriptions to the feelings of the reader, which they endeavor
+to reach solely by their narrative and characters.</p>
+
+<p>Letter-writers and the authors of philosophical dialogues
+are, in fact, better evidences of the growing love of nature than
+the poets. The novelist Bandello, for example, observes rigorously
+the rules of his department of literature; he gives us in
+his novels themselves not a word more than is necessary on the
+natural scenery amid which the action of his tales takes place,
+but in the dedications which always precede them we meet with
+charming descriptions of nature as the setting for his dialogues
+and social pictures. Among letter-writers, Aretino unfortunately
+must be named as the first who has fully painted in words the
+splendid effect of light and shadow in an Italian sunset.</p>
+
+<p>We sometimes find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching
+itself with tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>
+Strozza, about the year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the
+dwelling of his mistress. We are shown an old ivy-clad house,
+half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather-stained frescoes
+of the saints, and near it a chapel, much damaged by the violence
+of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far off, the
+priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This
+is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>It may be objected that the German painters at the beginning
+of the sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect
+mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht
+Durer, in his engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing
+if a painter, brought up in a school of realism, introduces such
+scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed to an
+ideal or mythological framework, is driven by inward impulse
+into realism. Besides which, priority in point of time is here,
+as in the descriptions of country life, on the side of the Italian
+poets.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span></p>
+<h2>RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1347</h6>
+
+<h3>R. LODGE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When for nearly forty years Rome had been deserted by the popes,
+who had betaken themselves in 1309 to a long residence at Avignon,
+France, and when the Eternal City was virtually without an imperial
+government&mdash;the Teutonic emperors having likewise abandoned her&mdash;she
+fell back upon the memories of her great past, recalling the glories of
+her ancient supremacy and the means whereby it had been established
+and maintained. Whatever might promise to restore it she was ready to
+welcome.</p>
+
+<p>At this time the real masters of Rome were the princes or barons
+dwelling in their fortified castles outside or in their strong palaces within
+the city. Over the northern district, near the Quirinal, reigned the celebrated
+old family of the Colonnas; while along the Tiber, from the Campo-di-Fiore
+to the Church of St. Peter, extended the sway of the new
+family of the Orsini. Other members of the nobility, in the country,
+held their seats in small fortified cities or castles. Under such domination
+Rome had become almost deserted. "The population of the seven-hilled
+city had come down to about thirty thousand souls." When at
+peace with one another&mdash;which was rarely&mdash;the barons exercised over
+the citizens and serfs a combined tyranny, while the farmers, travellers,
+and pilgrims were made victims of their plunder. At this period Petrarch&mdash;that
+"first modern man"&mdash;wrote to Pope Clement VI that
+Rome had become the abode of demons, the receptacle of all crimes, a
+hell for the living.</p>
+
+<p>"It was in these circumstances that a momentary revival of order and
+liberty was effected by the most extraordinary adventurer of an age that
+was prolific in adventurers." This was Cola Di Rienzi, who was born in
+Rome about 1313, and who is sometimes styled "an Italian patriot." In
+his ambitious endeavor to reinstate the C&aelig;sarean power in Italy he appears
+alternately in the figure of a hero and the character of a charlatan.
+Believing himself the founder of a new era, he was inflamed by his successes,
+and ended in "mystical extravagances and follies which could
+not fail to cause his ruin."</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_c.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="C" />OLA DI RIENZI was born of humble parents, though he
+afterward tried to gratify his own vanity and to gain the
+ear of Charles IV by claiming to be the bastard son of Henry
+VII. A wrong which he could not venture to avenge excited<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>
+his bitter hostility against the baronage, while the study of Livy
+and other classical writers inspired him with regretful admiration
+for the glories of ancient Rome.</p>
+
+<p>He succeeded in attracting notice by his personal beauty
+and by the rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent.
+In 1342 he took the most prominent part in an embassy from
+the citizens to Clement VI; and though he failed to induce the
+Pope to return to Rome, which at that time he seems to have
+regarded as the panacea for the evils of the time, he gained sufficient
+favor at Avignon to be appointed papal notary.</p>
+
+<p>From this time he deliberately set himself to raise the people
+to open resistance against their oppressors, while he disarmed
+the suspicions of the nobles by intentional buffoonery and extravagance
+of conduct. On May 20, 1347, the first blow was
+struck. Rienzi, with a chosen band of conspirators, and accompanied
+by the papal vicar, who had every interest in weakening
+the baronage, proceeded to the Capitol, and, amid the applause
+of the mob, promulgated the laws of the <i>buono stato</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He himself took the title of tribune, in order to emphasize
+his championship of the lower classes. The most important of
+his laws were for the maintenance of order. Private garrisons
+and fortified houses were forbidden. Each of the thirteen districts
+was to maintain an armed force of a hundred infantry
+and twenty-five horsemen. Every port was provided with a
+cruiser for the protection of merchandise, and the trade on the
+Tiber was to be secured by a river police.</p>
+
+<p>The nobles watched the progress of this astonishing revolution
+with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent
+on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their
+leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of
+his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen
+days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete, when the
+proudest nobles of Rome submitted and took an oath to support
+the new constitution. But the suddenness of his success was
+enough to turn a head which was never of the strongest.</p>
+
+<p>The Tribune began to dream of restoring to the Roman Republic
+its old supremacy. And for a moment even this dream
+seemed hardly chimerical. Europe was really dazzled by the
+revival of its ancient capital. Louis of Hungary and Joanna of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>
+Naples submitted their quarrel to Rienzi's arbitration. Thus
+encouraged, he set no bounds to his ambition. He called upon
+the Pope and cardinals to return at once to Rome. He summoned
+Louis and Charles, the two claimants to the Imperial dignity,
+to appear before his throne and submit to his tribunal.</p>
+
+<p>His arrogance was shown in the pretentious titles which he
+assumed and in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied
+on public and even on private occasions. On August
+15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in which the emperor
+Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with seven
+crowns representing the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. His most
+loyal admirer prophesied disaster when the Tribune ventured on
+this occasion to blasphemously compare himself with Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Rienzi's government deteriorated with his personal character.
+It had at first been liberal and just; it became arbitrary and even
+treacherous. His personal timidity made him at once harsh and
+vacillating. The heads of the great families, whom he had invited
+to a banquet, were seized and condemned to death on a
+charge of conspiracy. But a sudden terror of the possible consequences
+of his action caused him to relent, and he released his
+victims just as they were preparing for execution. His leniency
+was as ill-timed as his previous severity. The nobles could no
+longer trust him, and their fear was diminished by the weakness
+which they despised while they profited by it. They retired
+from Rome and concerted measures for the overthrow of their
+enemy.</p>
+
+<p>The first attack, which was led by Stefano Colonna, was
+repulsed almost by accident; but Rienzi, who had shown more
+cowardice than generalship, disgusted his supporters by his
+indecent exultation over the bodies of the slain. And there was
+one fatal ambiguity in Rienzi's position. He had begun by
+announcing himself as the ally and champion of the papacy, and
+Clement VI had been willing enough to stand by and watch the
+destruction of the baronage. But the growing independence
+and the arrogant pretensions of the Tribune exasperated the
+Pope. A new legate was despatched to Italy to denounce and
+excommunicate Rienzi as a heretic. The latter had no longer
+any support to lean upon. When a new attack was threatened,
+the people sullenly refused to obey the call to arms. Rienzi had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>
+not sufficient courage to risk a final struggle. On December
+15th he abdicated and retired in disguise from Rome. His rise
+to power, his dazzling triumph, and his downfall were all comprised
+within the brief period of seven months.</p>
+
+<p>For the next few years Rienzi disappeared from view. According
+to his own account he was concealed in a cave in the
+Apennines, where he associated with some of the wilder members
+of the sect of the Fraticelli and probably imbibed some of their
+tenets. Rome relapsed into anarchy, and men's minds were
+distracted from politics by the ravages of the black death. The
+great jubilee held in Rome in 1350 became a kind of thanksgiving
+service of those whom the plague had spared.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that Rienzi himself visited the scene of his exploits
+without detection among the crowds of pilgrims. But he was
+destined to reappear in a more public and disastrous manner.
+In his solitude his courage and his ambition revived, and he
+meditated new plans for restoring freedom to Rome and to Italy.
+The allegiance to the Church, which he had professed in 1347,
+was weakened by the conduct of Clement VI and by the influence
+of the Fraticelli, and he resolved in the future to ally himself
+with the secular rather than with the ecclesiastical power, with
+the Empire rather than with the papacy. In August, 1351, he
+appeared in disguise in Prague and demanded an audience
+of Charles IV. To him he proposed the far-reaching scheme
+which he had formed during his exile.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope and the whole body of clergy were to be deprived
+of their temporal power; the petty tyrants of Italy were to be
+driven out; and the Emperor was to fix his residence in Rome
+as the supreme ruler of Christendom. All this was to be accomplished
+by Rienzi himself at his own cost and trouble.
+Charles IV listened with some curiosity to a man whose career
+had excited such universal interest, but he was the last man to be
+carried away by such chimerical suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>The introduction into the political proposals of some of the
+religious and communistic ideas of the Fraticelli gave the Emperor
+a pretext for committing Rienzi to the Archbishop of
+Prague for correction and instruction. The Archbishop communicated
+with the Pope, and on the demand of Clement VI
+Charles agreed to hand Rienzi over to the papal court on condition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>dition
+that his life should be spared. In 1352 Rienzi was conveyed
+to Avignon and thrust into prison. He owed his life
+perhaps less to the Emperor's request than to the opportune
+death of Clement VI in this year.</p>
+
+<p>The new Pope, Innocent VI, was more independent of French
+control than his immediate predecessors. The French King
+was fully occupied with internal disorders and with the English
+war. Thus the Pope was able to give more attention to
+Italian politics, which were sufficiently pressing. The independence
+and anarchy of the Papal States constituted a serious problem,
+but the danger of their subjection to a foreign power was
+still more serious. In 1350 the important city of Bologna had
+been seized by the Visconti of Milan, and the progress of this
+powerful family threatened to absorb the whole of the Romagna.
+Innocent determined to resist their encroachments and at the
+same time to restore the papal authority, and in 1353 he intrusted
+this double task to Cardinal Albornoz.</p>
+
+<p>Albornoz, equally distinguished as a diplomatist and as a
+military commander, resolved to ally the cause of the papacy
+with that of liberty. His programme was to overthrow the tyrants
+as the enemies both of the people and of the popes, and
+to restore municipal self-government under papal protection.
+His attention was first directed to the city of Rome, which, after
+many vicissitudes since 1347, had fallen under the influence of
+a demagogue named Baroncelli.</p>
+
+<p>Baroncelli had revived to some extent the schemes of Rienzi,
+but had declared openly against papal rule. To oppose this new
+tribune, Albornoz conceived the project of using the influence
+of Rienzi, whose rule was now regretted by the populace that had
+previously deserted him. The Pope was persuaded to release
+Rienzi from prison and to send him to Rome, where the effect
+of his presence was almost magical. The Romans flocked to
+welcome their former liberator, and he was reinstalled in power
+with the title of senator, conferred upon him by the Pope. But
+his character was not improved by adversity, and his rule was
+more arbitrary and selfish than it had been before.</p>
+
+<p>The execution of the <i>condottiere</i>, Fra Moreale, was an act of
+ingratitude as well as of treachery. Popular favor was soon
+alienated from a ruler who could no longer command either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span>
+affection or respect, and, in a mob rising, Rienzi was put to death,
+October 8, 1354. But his return had served the purpose of Albornoz.
+Rome was preserved to the papacy, and the cardinal
+could proceed in safety with his task of subduing the independent
+tyrants of Romagna.</p>
+
+<p>Central Italy had not yet witnessed the general introduction
+of mercenaries, and the native populations still fought their own
+battles. The policy of exciting revolts among the subject citizens
+was completely successful, and by 1360 almost the whole of Romagna
+had submitted to the papal legate. His triumph was
+crowned in this year, when, by skilful use of quarrels among the
+Visconti princes, he succeeded in recovering Bologna.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span></p>
+<h2>BEGINNING AND PROGRESS OF THE RENAISSANCE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century</span></h6>
+
+<h3>JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The new birth or resurrection known as the "Renaissance" is usually
+considered to have begun in Italy in the fourteenth century, though some
+writers would date its origin from the reign of Frederick II, 1215-1250;
+and by this Prince&mdash;the most enlightened man of his age&mdash;it was at least
+anticipated. Well versed in languages and science, he was a patron of
+scholars, whom he gathered about him, from all parts of the world, at
+his court in Palermo.</p>
+
+<p>At all events the Renaissance was heralded through the recovery by
+Italian scholars of Greek and Roman classical literature. When the
+movement began, the civilization of Greece and Rome had long been
+exerting a partial influence, not only upon Italy, but on other parts of
+medi&aelig;val Europe as well. But in Italy especially, when the wave of barbarism
+had passed, the people began to feel a returning consciousness of
+their ancient culture, and a desire to reproduce it. To Italians the Latin
+language was easy, and their country abounded in documents and monumental
+records which symbolized past greatness.</p>
+
+<p>The modern Italian spirit was produced through the combination of
+various elements, among which were the political institutions brought by
+the Lombards from Germany, the influence of chivalry and other northern
+forms of civilization, and the more immediate power of the Church.
+That which was foreshadowed in the thirteenth century became in the
+fourteenth a distinct national development, which, as Symonds, its most
+discerning interpreter, shows us, was constructing a model for the whole
+western world.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE word "renaissance" has of late years received a more
+extended significance than that which is implied in our
+English equivalent&mdash;the "revival of learning." We use it to denote
+the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the modern
+world; and though it is possible to assign certain limits to the
+period during which this transition took place, we cannot fix on
+any dates so positively as to say between this year and that the
+movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
+name the days on which spring in any particular season began
+and ended. Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and
+from summer.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance.
+The evolution has not been completed. The new life is
+our own and is progressive. As in the transformation scene of
+some pantomime, so here the waning and the waxing shapes are
+mingled; the new forms, at first shadowy and filmy, gain upon
+the old; and now both blend; and now the old scene fades into
+the background; still, who shall say whether the new scene be
+finally set up?</p>
+
+<p>In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the
+Renaissance to any one cause or circumstance, or limit them
+within the field of any one department of human knowledge.
+If we ask the students of art what they mean by the Renaissance,
+they will reply that it was the revolution effected in architecture,
+painting, and sculpture by the recovery of antique
+monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology
+see in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion
+for antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism,
+which led to a correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste
+in poetry, to new systems of thought, to more accurate analysis,
+and finally to the Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the
+conscience. Men of science will discourse about the discovery
+of the solar system by Copernicus and Galileo, the anatomy of
+Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood.
+The origination of a truly scientific method is the point which
+interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian,
+again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of
+feudalism, the development of the great nationalities of Europe,
+the growth of monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority,
+and the erection of the papacy into an Italian kingdom,
+and in the last place the gradual emergence of that sense
+of popular freedom which exploded in the Revolution: these are
+the aspects of the movement which engross his attention.</p>
+
+<p>Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based
+upon the False Decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the
+Roman code, and the attempt to introduce a rational method
+into the theory of modern iurisprudence, as well as to commence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
+the study of international law. Men whose attention
+has been turned to the history of discoveries and inventions will
+relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to
+the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing
+and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and
+by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance
+all the instruments of mechanical utility started into
+existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must
+perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.</p>
+
+<p>Yet neither any one of these answers, taken separately, nor
+indeed all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem.
+By the term "renaissance," or new birth, is indicated a natural
+movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic,
+but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which at length
+the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still
+participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history
+of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations. It is
+the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the
+human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere
+political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of
+classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the
+knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at the
+time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores
+of the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not
+their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the
+intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence,
+which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them.
+The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in
+the spirit of the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen
+centuries after Christ, to speak roughly, humanity awoke as it
+were from slumber and began to live? That is a question which
+we can but imperfectly answer. The mystery of organic life defeats
+analysis. Whether the subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell,
+or a phenomenon so complex as the commencement of
+a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or a new
+phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to
+state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>
+point out what are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover,
+we must be careful not to be carried away by words of our own
+making. Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution are not
+separate things, capable of being isolated; they are moments in
+the history of the human race which we find it convenient to
+name; while history itself is one and continuous, so that our utmost
+endeavors to regard some portion of it, independently of
+the rest, will be defeated.</p>
+
+<p>A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that,
+after the dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there
+was no possibility of any intellectual revival. The barbarous
+races which had deluged Europe had to absorb their barbarism;
+the fragments of Roman civilization had either to be destroyed
+or assimilated; the Germanic nations had to receive culture
+and religion from the effete people they had superseded.
+It was further necessary that the modern nationalities should
+be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that
+peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated,
+before the indispensable <i>milieu</i> for a resurrection of the
+free spirit of humanity could exist. The first nation which fulfilled
+these conditions was the first to inaugurate the new era.
+The reason why Italy took the lead in the Renaissance was that
+Italy possessed a language, a favorable climate, political freedom,
+and commercial prosperity, at a time when other nations
+Were still semibarbarous. Where the human spirit had been
+buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon
+the ruins of that Empire; and the papacy&mdash;- called by Hobbes the
+ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated, throned, and crowned,
+upon the ashes thereof&mdash;to some extent bridged over the gulf between
+the two periods.</p>
+
+<p>Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of
+the Renaissance was intellectual&mdash;that it was the emancipation
+of the reason for the modern world&mdash;we may inquire how
+feudalism was related to it. The mental condition of the Middle
+Ages was one of ignorant prostration before the idols of
+the Church&mdash;dogma and authority and scholasticism. Again,
+the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down
+by the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power
+over the outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+communicate, without the ease of life which wealth and plenty
+secure, without the traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly
+from a state of utter rawness, each nation could barely do more
+than gain and keep a difficult hold upon existence. To depreciate
+the work achieved for humanity during the Middle Ages
+would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was done
+unconsciously&mdash;that it was a gradual and instinctive process of
+becoming. The reason, in a word, was not awake; the mind
+of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities.
+It is pathetic to think of the medi&aelig;val students poring over a
+single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract
+from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing
+their brains about puzzles more idle than the dilemma
+of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople and
+at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle were alive,
+but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to bid
+them speak with voice intelligible to the modern mind. It is no
+less pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of humanity
+sweeping from all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but
+unavailing foam upon the shores of Palestine, whole nations
+laying life down for the chance of seeing the walls of Jerusalem,
+worshipping the sepulchre whence Christ had risen, loading
+their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the sacred earth, while
+all the time, within their breasts and brains, the spirit of the
+Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of freedom
+which ere long was destined to restore its birthright to the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Middle Age accomplished its own work.
+Slowly and obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being
+forged the nations and the languages of Europe. Italy, France,
+Spain, England, Germany took shape. The actors of the future
+drama acquired their several characters, and formed the tongues
+whereby their personalities should be expressed. The qualities
+which render modern society different from that of the ancient
+world were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity,
+by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a
+further phase. After the nations had been moulded, their monarchies
+and dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by
+slow degrees into various forms of more or less defined autocracy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>
+In Italy and Germany numerous principalities sprang into
+pre&euml;minence; and though the nation was not united under one
+head, the monarchical principle was acknowledged. France
+and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of which the king
+could say, "<i>L'&eacute;tat c'est moi</i>." England developed her complicated
+constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At
+the same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of
+transformation. The papacy became more autocratic. Like
+the king the pope began to say, "<i>L'&Eacute;glise c'est moi</i>." This
+merging of the medi&aelig;val state and medi&aelig;val church in the
+personal supremacy of king and pope may be termed the special
+feature of the last age of feudalism which preceded the Renaissance.
+It was thus that the necessary milieu was prepared.
+The organization of the five great nations, and the levelling of
+political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual despots,
+formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the
+Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
+Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are
+still evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile it must not be imagined that the Renaissance
+burst suddenly upon the world in the fifteenth century without
+premonitory symptoms. Far from that, within the Middle Age
+itself, over and over again, the reason strove to break loose
+from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth century, tried to prove
+that the interminable dispute about entities and words was
+founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning
+of the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed
+that man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim
+of Flora, intermediate between the two, drank one drop of the
+cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that "the gospel of
+the Father was past, the gospel of the Son was passing, the
+gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three men, each in his
+own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an
+analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
+emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting
+signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Ph&oelig;bus
+and the Graces were ready to resume their sway. We have,
+moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Franticelli,
+the Albigenses, the Hussites&mdash;heretics in whom the new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>
+light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by the
+Church.</p>
+
+<p>We have to commemorate the vast conception of the emperor
+Frederick II, who strove to found a new society of humane
+culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent
+of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were
+exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly we may say with
+Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her
+books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was
+not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world
+were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and
+zo&ouml;phytic members of half-moulded humanity which, in the
+vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man.
+The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger
+Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep
+secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated
+nobles of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened
+Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical
+literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or
+selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by
+superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk
+in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal&mdash;these still ruled
+the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations
+of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious
+art, conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern
+tongue, was the first true sign that Italy, the leader of the
+nations of the West, had shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed.
+His ideal of antique culture as the everlasting solace
+and the universal education of the human race, his lifelong effort
+to recover the classical harmony of thought and speech, gave a
+direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the Renaissance&mdash;its
+passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
+Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream
+of freedom. His conception of human existence as a joy to be
+accepted with thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified
+by suffering, familiarized the fourteenth century with that form
+of semipagan gladness that marked the real Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>
+of intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance
+had not yet arrived; but their achievement rendered its appearance
+in due season certain. With Dante the genius of the modern
+world dared to stand alone and to create confidently after
+its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius reached forth
+across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a splendid
+past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty
+of the world, the goodliness of youth, and strength and love and
+life, unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending
+death.</p>
+
+<p>It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when
+Italy had lost, indeed, the heroic spirit which we admire in
+her communes of the thirteenth, but had gained instead ease,
+wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long
+prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it
+were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of
+the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of medi&aelig;valism,
+intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet
+but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations
+who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was
+unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired.
+No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor,
+of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had
+sapped the fibre of the men who were about to inaugurate the
+modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living,
+these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity
+for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No
+generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod
+them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism,
+the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh
+and unperverted senses rendered them keenly alive to what was
+beautiful and natural. They yearned for magnificence and instinctively
+comprehended splendor. At the same time the period
+of satiety was still far off.</p>
+
+<p>Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had
+a single pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were,
+at the moment when desires and faculties are evenly balanced,
+when the perceptions are not blunted, nor the senses cloyed,
+opening their eyes for the first time on a world of wonder, these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
+men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we may term the first
+transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing is more
+remarkable than the fulness of the life that throbbed in them.
+Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of
+sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play
+of personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning
+has written of Sordello's temperament:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i5">"A football there</span>
+<span class="i0">Suffices to upturn to the warm air</span>
+<span class="i0">Half-germinating spices, mere decay</span>
+<span class="i0">Produces richer life, and day by day</span>
+<span class="i0">New pollen on the lily-petal grows,</span>
+<span class="i0">And still more labyrinthine buds the rose."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl.
+He had not seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to
+cross himself, and turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like
+St. Bernard travelling along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing
+neither the azure of the waters nor the luxuriance of the
+vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun
+and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead over the
+neck of his mule&mdash;even like this monk, humanity had passed, a
+careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment,
+along the highways of the world, and had not known that
+they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is a
+snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and
+lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting,
+heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as
+a proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification
+are the only safe rules of life&mdash;these were the fixed ideas of the
+ascetic medi&aelig;val Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed
+them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between
+the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the
+light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature.
+For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture
+in the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby
+man strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which
+it is his privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was
+the liberation of humanity from a dungeon, the double discovery
+of the outer and the inner world.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span>An external event determined the direction which this outburst
+of the spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact
+of the modern with the ancient mind, which followed upon
+what is called the Revival of Learning. The fall of the Greek
+empire in 1453, while it signalized the extinction of the old
+order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated forces of the
+new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under all manifestations
+was generated. Men found that in classical as well
+as biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral
+and intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The
+modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned
+what the ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients
+stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history
+seemed once more to be one.</p>
+
+<p>The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery
+of the world and the discovery of man. Under these two
+formulas may be classified all the phenomena which properly
+belong to this period. The discovery of the world divides itself
+into two branches&mdash;the exploration of the globe, and that systematic
+exploration of the universe which is in fact what we call
+science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the Portuguese
+rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar
+system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this
+plain statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous
+import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would
+be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries
+which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have
+ensued that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance
+movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been added
+to civilization.</p>
+
+<p>In like manner, it is worth while to pause a moment and
+consider what is implied in the substitution of the Copernican
+for the Ptolemaic system. The world, regarded in old times as
+the centre of all things, the apple of God's eye, for the sake of
+which were created sun and moon and stars, suddenly was
+found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere
+of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable
+suns, attended each by a <i>cort&eacute;ge</i> of planets, and scattered&mdash;how,
+we know not&mdash;through infinity. What has become of that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
+brazen seat of the old gods, that paradise to which an ascending
+Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment
+from the eyes of his disciples? The demonstration of the
+simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends
+that were most significant to the early Christians by annihilating
+their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo
+for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived
+that in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility
+to her most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her
+mythology.</p>
+
+<p>Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism
+and religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth
+God could not be worshipped under the forms and idols of a
+sacerdotal fancy; a new meaning had been given to the words
+"God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him
+in spirit and in truth." The reason of man was at last able to
+study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a part, and to
+ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three centuries
+and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized
+astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge
+we have since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious,
+but also incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life,
+and then considering how much ground of this kind was acquired
+in the ten centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that
+we are at all able to estimate the expansive force which was
+then generated. Science, rescued from the hands of astrology,
+geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance.
+Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has never ceased
+to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the
+first-born of the spirit of the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand
+the appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the
+habitable world, and on the other the conquest by science of all
+that we now know about the nature of the universe. In the
+discovery of man, again, it is possible to trace a twofold process.
+Man in his temporal relations, illustrated by pagan antiquity,
+and man in his spiritual relations, illustrated by biblical antiquity:
+these are the two regions, at first apparently distinct,
+afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the critical and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>
+inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation.
+In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work&mdash;art
+and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
+philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism&mdash;a
+frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically
+and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures
+became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the
+people, formulas from which to deviate would be impious in the
+artist and confusing to the worshipper. Superstitious reverence
+bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the
+saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been
+otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms he
+saw around him.</p>
+
+<p>But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the
+arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble
+in itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist
+then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred
+legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation.
+He studied from the nude; he drew the body in every
+posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes, and adapted
+the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the
+subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces
+and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this
+way the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought
+heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like
+living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they
+silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual
+life for the principles of the Church. The saint or angel became
+an occasion for the display of physical perfection, and to introduce
+<i>un bel corpo ignudo</i> into the composition was of more moment
+to them than to represent the macerations of the Magdalen.
+Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the
+host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which
+gave it expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid
+this work of progress, a new world of thought and fancy,
+divinely charming, wholly human, was revealed to their astonished
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of
+the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>
+legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the
+religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and
+splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art
+from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of
+Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the
+Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally
+religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly
+human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's
+"Virgin Received into Heaven," soaring midway between the
+archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who
+yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis
+of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout
+the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing
+devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It
+went further, and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters
+combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection
+with the Church by introducing a spirit and a sentiment
+alien to Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas
+which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought
+for the modern world a real resurrection of the body which, since
+the destruction of the pagan civilization, had lain swathed up
+in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the medi&aelig;val
+cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth
+of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of
+human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a
+thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle
+Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and
+the prose of Boethius&mdash;and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia,
+had actually been honored as saints&mdash;together with fragments
+of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance
+opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses
+of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the
+Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental
+learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic
+traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic
+revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a
+critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance
+named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>
+<i>Litter&aelig; Humaniores</i> ("the more human literature"), the literature
+that humanizes.</p>
+
+<p>There are three stages in the history of scholarship during
+the Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch
+poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio
+in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might
+drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of
+this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique
+culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries.
+Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo
+de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a little earlier,
+and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents
+of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of
+Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from
+Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are
+the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation,
+of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were
+worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land
+had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of
+the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient
+knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were
+valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous
+flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the
+eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent
+received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet
+begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures,
+frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of
+Sappho&mdash;absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous
+thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those long
+buried amphor&aelig; of inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the
+enthusiasm which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture.
+Popes and princes, captains of adventure and peasants,
+noble ladies and the leaders of the <i>demi-monde</i> alike became
+scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates
+the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18,
+1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen
+had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the
+Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
+"Julia, Daughter of Claudius," and inside the coffer
+lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved
+by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time.
+The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her
+eyes and mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her
+shoulders. She was instantly removed&mdash;so goes the legend&mdash;to
+the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all
+the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan
+world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her
+beauty was beyond imagination or description. She was far
+fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be.
+At last Innocent VIII feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer
+by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly
+and at night by his direction, and naught remained in
+the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told
+by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with
+slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another
+that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for
+the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned.
+Let us rather use the <i>mythus</i> as a parable of the ecstatic devotion
+which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of
+unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the third age of scholarship&mdash;the age of the
+critics, philologers, and printers. What had been collected by
+Poggio and Aurispa had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano,
+and Erasmus. They began their task by digesting and
+arranging the contents of the libraries. There were then no
+short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries
+of antiquities, no carefully prepared <i>thesauri</i> of mythology
+and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole
+mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer,
+Plato, Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek
+type had to be struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris
+groaned with printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and
+Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars,
+men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it
+was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate,
+to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond the
+reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>
+solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent
+achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance
+beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm,
+and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their
+titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle
+in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable
+heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious expenditure
+of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
+endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we
+are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms
+and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius
+or of Henricus Stephanus or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we
+surely ought to do; for to them we owe in a great measure the
+freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our
+command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.</p>
+
+<p>This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship
+may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this
+time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern
+nations. The publication of his <i>Adagia</i> in 1500 marks the advent
+of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward
+has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind.
+Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one
+of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients;
+and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,
+comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the
+growth of scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of
+classic culture was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect.
+The modern world was brought into close contact with the free
+virility of the ancient world, and emancipated from the thraldom
+of improved traditions. The force to judge and the desire
+to create were generated. The immediate result in the sixteenth
+century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
+from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity.
+The minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their
+hatred of medi&aelig;val ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and
+cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme, and affected the manner
+of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity
+to a reaction&mdash;in the North, of Puritanism; in the South, to what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>
+has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected under Spanish
+influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that
+most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
+imperilled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance;
+nor, on the other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the
+reason materially retarded by the reaction it produced.</p>
+
+<p>The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery
+of man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own
+spiritual freedom, is natural. Not only did scholarship restore
+the classics and encourage literary criticism; it also restored the
+text of the Bible, and encouraged theological criticism. In the
+wake of theological freedom followed a free philosophy, no
+longer subject to the dogmas of the Church. To purge the
+Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience
+from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason,
+has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work
+as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes
+and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance,
+champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other
+side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found
+religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation
+is a phase in that accelerated action of the modern mind
+which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
+mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon,
+or as a mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation
+exhibits, in the region of religious thought and national
+politics, what the Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture,
+art, and science&mdash;the recovered energy and freedom of humanity.
+We are too apt to treat of history in parcels, and to
+attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the biography
+of the human race. To observe the connection between
+the several stages of a progressive movement of the human
+spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is
+the true philosophy of history.</p>
+
+<p>The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture,
+had its medi&aelig;val anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics
+whom the Church successfully combated in North Italy,
+in France, and in Bohemia were the precursors of Luther. The
+scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth century. Teachers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span>
+of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type&mdash;Reuchlin in Germany,
+Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus
+as a humanist&mdash;contribute each a definite momentum. Luther,
+for his part, incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical
+authority, urges the necessity of a return to the essential truth of
+Christianity as distinguished from the idols of the Church, and
+asserts the right of the individual to judge, interpret, criticise,
+and construct opinion for himself. The veil which the Church
+had interposed between humanity and God was broken down.
+The freedom of the conscience was established. The principles
+involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous.
+Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of
+texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected
+on the other side with intolerance of mere authority, it
+led to what has since been named rationalism&mdash;the attempt to
+reconcile the religious tradition with the reason, and to define
+the logical ideas that underlie the conceptions of the popular
+religious conscience. Again, by promulgating the doctrine of
+personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national politics,
+the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution.
+It was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism
+of the Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional
+liberty and introduced in America the general principle
+of the equality of men. This high political abstraction, latent
+in Christianity, evolved by criticism, and promulgated as a gospel
+in the second half of the eighteenth century, was externalized
+in the French Revolution. The work that yet remains to
+be accomplished for the modern world is the organization of
+society in harmony with democratic principles.</p>
+
+<p>Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth
+to liberty&mdash;the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and
+the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the
+outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason
+in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the
+intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.
+The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. Culture
+was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance.
+The problem for the present and the future is how, through
+education, to render culture accessible to all&mdash;to break down that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
+barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and
+layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between
+the intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia
+of a modern world in which all men shall enjoy the same social,
+political, and intellectual advantages be realized or not, we cannot
+doubt that the whole movement of humanity, from the Renaissance
+onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy the
+distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between
+individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always
+be impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no
+civilized man will lack the opportunity of being physically and
+mentally the best that God has made him.</p>
+
+<p>It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions
+which aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern
+age. Discovered over and over again, and offered at intervals
+to the human race at various times and on divers soils, no
+effective use was made of these material resources until the fifteenth
+century. The compass, discovered according to tradition
+by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for the
+voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians
+in the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in
+1250, helped Copernicus to prove the revolution of the earth in
+1530, and Galileo to substantiate his theory of the planetary
+system. Printing, after numerous useless revelations to the
+world of its resources, became an art in 1438; and paper,
+which had long been known to the Chinese, was first made of
+cotton in Europe about 1000 and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder
+entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the
+Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by
+means of which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized
+the art of war. The feudal castle, the armor of the knight and
+his battle-horse, the prowess of one man against a hundred, and
+the pride of aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-armed militia,
+were annihilated by the flashes of the cannon. Courage
+became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory was
+delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established,
+as indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common
+property of everyone, all thought; while paper has made
+the work of printing cheap. Such reflections as these, however,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+are trite and must occur to every mind. It is far more to the
+purpose to repeat that not the inventions, but the intelligence
+that used them, the conscious calculating spirit of the modern
+world, should rivet our attention when we direct it to the phenomena
+of the Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe
+shared. But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter
+of history, the true Renaissance began in Italy. It was there
+that the essential qualities which distinguish the modern from
+the ancient and the medi&aelig;val world were developed. Italy
+created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture and of intellectual
+freedom which has been the life-breath of the European
+races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people
+of divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen
+and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In
+art, in scholarship, in science, in the mediation between antique
+culture and the modern intellect, they took the lead,
+handing to Germany and France and England the restored
+humanities complete. Spain and England have since done
+more for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany
+achieved the labor of the Reformation almost single-handed.
+France has collected, centralized, and diffused intelligence
+with irresistible energy. But if we return to the first
+origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a time when the rest
+of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to organize the
+various elements of the modern spirit, and to set the fashion
+whereby the other great nations should learn and live.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1348</h6>
+
+<h3>J. F. C. HECKER<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">51</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Different parts of the oriental world have been mentioned as the
+probable locality of the first appearance of the plague or pestilence
+known as the "black death," but its origin is most generally referred to
+China, where, at all events, it raged violently about 1333, when it was accompanied
+at its outbreak by terrestrial and atmospheric phenomena of
+a destructive character, such as are said to have attended the first appearance
+of Asiatic cholera and other spreading and deadly diseases;
+from which it has been conjectured that through these convulsions deleterious
+foreign substances may have been projected into the atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>But while for centuries the nature and causes of the black death have
+been subjects of medical inquiry in all countries, it remained for our own
+time to discover a more scientific explanation than those previously advanced.
+The malady is now identified by pathologists with the bubonic
+plague, which at intervals still afflicts India and other oriental lands, and
+has in recent years been a cause of apprehension at more than one American
+seaport.</p>
+
+<p>It is called <i>bubonic</i>&mdash;from the Greek <i>boubon</i> ("groin")&mdash;because it
+attacks the lymphatic glands of the groins, armpits, neck, and other parts
+of the body. Among its leading symptoms are headache, fever, vertigo,
+vomiting, prostration, etc., with dark purple spots or a mottled appearance
+upon the skin. Death in severe cases usually occurs within forty-eight
+hours. Bacteriologists are now generally agreed that the disorder
+is due to a bacillus identified by investigators both in India and in western
+countries.</p>
+
+<p>The first historic appearance of the black death in Europe was at
+Constantinople, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 543. But far more widespread and terrible were its
+ravages in the fourteenth century, when they were almost world-wide.
+Of the dreadful visitation in Europe then, we are fortunate to have the
+striking account of Dr. Hecker, which follows.</p>
+
+<p>The name "black death" was given to the disease in the more northern
+parts of Europe&mdash;from the dark spots on the skin above mentioned&mdash;while
+in Italy it was called <i>la mortalega grande</i> ("the great mortality").
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>From Italy came almost the only credible accounts of the manner of
+living, and of the ruin caused among the people in their more private
+life, during the pestilence; and the subjoined account of what was seen
+in Florence is of special interest as being from no less an eye-witness
+than Boccaccio.</p></div>
+
+<h4>J. F. C. HECKER</h4>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We
+have no certain intelligence of the disease until it entered
+the western countries of Asia. Here it showed itself as the
+oriental plague with inflammation of the lungs; in which form
+it probably also may have begun in China&mdash;that is to say, as a
+malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion; a
+contagion that in ordinary pestilences requires immediate contact,
+and only under unfavorable circumstances of rare occurrence
+is communicated by the mere approach to the sick.</p>
+
+<p>The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague
+over the whole earth was certainly very great; and the opinion
+that the black death might have been excluded from Western
+Europe, by good regulations, similar to those which are now in
+use, would have all the support of modern experience, provided
+it could be proved that this plague had been actually imported
+from the East; or that the oriental plague in general, whenever
+it appears in Europe, has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a
+proof, however, can by no means be produced so as to enforce
+conviction. The plague was, however, known in Europe before
+nations were united by the bonds of commerce and social
+intercourse; hence there is ground for supposing that it sprung
+up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude manner of living
+and the uncultivated state of the earth; influences which peculiarly
+favor the origin of severe diseases. We need not go back
+to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it had
+half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.</p>
+
+<p>If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague,
+that in countries which it has once visited it remains for a long
+time in a milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342,
+when it had appeared for the last time, were particularly favorable
+to its unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the
+notion that in this eventful year also, the germs of plague existed
+in Southern Europe, which might be vivified by atmospherical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>
+deteriorations. Thus, at least in part, the black plague may
+have originated in Europe itself. The corruption of the atmosphere
+came from the East; but the disease itself came not upon
+the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increased by the
+atmosphere where it had previously existed.</p>
+
+<p>This source of the black plague was not, however, the only
+one; for, far more powerful than the excitement of the latent
+elements of the plague by atmospheric influences was the effect
+of the contagion communicated from one people to another,
+on the great roads, and in the harbors of the Mediterranean.
+From China, the route of the caravans lay to the north of the
+Caspian Sea, through Central Asia to Tauris. Here ships were
+ready to take the produce of the East to Constantinople, the
+capital of commerce and the medium of connection between
+Asia, Europe, and Africa. Other caravans went from India to
+Asia Minor, and touched at the cities south of the Caspian Sea,
+and lastly from Bagdad, through Arabia to Egypt; also the
+maritime communication on the Red Sea, from India to Arabia
+and Egypt, was not inconsiderable. In all these directions
+contagion made its way; and doubtless Constantinople and the
+harbors of Asia Minor are to be regarded as the <i>foci</i> of infection;
+whence it radiated to the most distant seaports and islands.</p>
+
+<p>To Constantinople the plague had been brought from the
+northern coast of the Black Sea, after it had depopulated the
+countries between those routes of commerce and appeared as
+early as 1347, in Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles, and some of the seaports
+of Italy. The remaining islands of the Mediterranean,
+particularly Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, were visited in succession.
+<i>Foci</i> of contagion existed also in full activity along
+the whole southern coast of Europe; when, in January, 1348, the
+plague appeared in Avignon, and in other cities in the South of
+France and North of Italy, as well as in Spain.</p>
+
+<p>The precise days of its eruption in the individual towns are
+no longer to be ascertained; but it was not simultaneous; for
+in Florence the disease appeared in the beginning of April; in
+Cesena, the 1st of June; and place after place was attacked
+throughout the whole year; so that the plague, after it had passed
+through the whole of France and Germany, where, however, it
+did not make its ravages until the following year, did not break<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
+out till August in England; where it advanced so gradually that
+a period of three months elapsed before it reached London. The
+northern kingdoms were attacked by it in 1349; Sweden, indeed,
+not until November of that year, almost two years after
+its eruption in Avignon. Poland received the plague in 1349,
+probably from Germany, if not from the northern countries;
+but in Russia it did not make its appearance until 1351, more
+than three years after it had broken out in Constantinople.
+Instead of advancing in a northwesterly direction from Tauris
+and from the Caspian Sea, it had thus made the great circuit of
+the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, Southern and Central
+Europe, England, the northern kingdoms and Poland, before it
+reached the Russian territories; a phenomenon which has not
+again occurred with respect to more recent pestilences originating
+in Asia.</p>
+
+<p>We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages
+of the black plague. Let us go back for a moment to the fourteenth
+century. The people were yet but little civilized. Human
+life was little regarded; governments concerned not themselves
+about the numbers of their subjects, for whose welfare it was
+incumbent on them to provide. Thus, the first requisite for
+estimating the loss of human life&mdash;namely, a knowledge of the
+amount of the population&mdash;is altogether wanting.</p>
+
+<p>Cairo lost daily, when the plague was raging with its greatest
+violence, from ten thousand to fifteen thousand, being as many
+as, in modern times, great plagues have carried off during their
+whole course. In China, more than thirteen millions are said
+to have died; and this is in correspondence with the certainly
+exaggerated accounts from the rest of Asia. India was depopulated.
+Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak, Mesopotamia,
+Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds
+fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and C&aelig;sarea,
+none was left alive. On the roads, in the camps, in the caravansaries,
+unburied bodies were seen; and a few cities only
+remained, in an unaccountable manner, free. In Aleppo, five
+hundred died daily; twenty-two thousand people and most of
+the animals were carried off in Gaza within six weeks. Cyprus
+lost almost all its inhabitants; and ships without crews were
+often seen in the Mediterranean, as afterward in the North Sea,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
+driving about and spreading the plague wherever they went on
+shore. It was reported to Pope Clement, at Avignon, that
+throughout the East, probably with the exception of China,
+twenty-three million eight hundred and forty thousand people
+had fallen victims to the plague.</p>
+
+<p>Lubeck, which could no longer contain the multitudes that
+flocked to it, was thrown into such consternation on the eruption
+of the plague that the citizens destroyed themselves, as if in
+frenzy. When the plague ceased, men thought they were still
+wandering among the dead, so appalling was the livid aspect
+of the survivors, in consequence of the anxiety they had undergone,
+and the unavoidable infection of the air. Many other
+cities probably presented a similar appearance; and small country
+towns and villages, estimated at two hundred thousand population,
+were bereft of all their inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>In many places in France not more than two out of twenty
+of the inhabitants were left alive. Two queens, one bishop, and
+great numbers of other distinguished persons fell a sacrifice to
+it, and more than five hundred a day died in the H&ocirc;tel-Dieu,
+under the faithful care of the religious women, whose disinterested
+courage, in this age of horror, displayed the most beautiful
+traits of human virtue.</p>
+
+<p>The church-yards were soon unable to contain the dead, and
+many houses, left without inhabitants, fell to ruins. In Avignon,
+the Pope found it necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies
+might be thrown into the river without delay, as the church-yards
+would no longer hold them.</p>
+
+<p>In Vienna, where for some time twelve hundred inhabitants
+died daily, the interment of corpses in the church-yards
+and within the churches as forthwith prohibited, and the
+dead were then arranged in layers, by thousands, in six large
+pits outside the city. In many places it was rumored that
+plague patients were buried alive, and thus the horror of the
+distressed people was everywhere increased. In Erfurt, after
+the church-yards were filled, twelve thousand corpses were
+thrown into eleven great pits; and the like might be stated with
+respect to all the larger cities. Funeral ceremonies, the last consolation
+of the survivors, were everywhere impracticable.</p>
+
+<p>In all Germany there seem to have died only one million<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>
+two hundred and forty-four thousand four hundred and thirty-four
+inhabitants; this country, however, was more spared than
+others. Italy was most severely visited. It is said to have lost
+half its inhabitants; in Sardinia and Corsica, according to the
+account of John Villani, who was himself carried off by the
+black plague, scarcely a third part of the population remained
+alive; and the Venetians engaged ships at a high rate to retreat
+to the islands; so that, after the plague had carried off three-fourths
+of her inhabitants, their proud city was left forlorn and
+desolate. In Florence it was prohibited to publish the numbers
+of the dead and to toll the bells at their funerals, in order that
+the living might not abandon themselves to despair.</p>
+
+<p>In England most of the great cities suffered incredible losses;
+above all, Yarmouth, in which seven thousand and fifty-two
+died; Bristol, Oxford, Norwich, Leicester, York, and London,
+where, in one burial-ground alone, there were interred upward
+of fifty thousand corpses, arranged in layers, in large pits. It
+is said that in the whole country scarcely a tenth part remained
+alive. Morals were deteriorated everywhere, and public worship
+was, in a great measure, laid aside, in many places the
+churches being bereft of their priests. The instruction of the
+people was impeded, covetousness became general; and when
+tranquillity was restored, the great increase of lawyers was
+astonishing, to whom the endless disputes regarding inheritances
+offered a rich harvest. The want of priests, too, throughout the
+country, operated very detrimentally upon the people. The
+lower classes were most exposed to the ravages of the plague,
+while the houses of the nobility were, in proportion, much more
+spared. The sittings of parliament, of the king's bench, and of
+most of the other courts were suspended as long as the malady
+raged.</p>
+
+<p>Ireland was much less heavily visited than England. The
+disease seems to have scarcely reached the mountainous districts
+of that kingdom; and Scotland, too, would, perhaps, have
+remained free had not the Scots availed themselves of the misfortune
+of the English, to make an irruption into their territory,
+which terminated in the destruction of their army, by the plague
+and by the sword, and the extension of the pestilence, through
+those who escaped, over the whole country.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span>In England the plague was soon accompanied by a fatal
+murrain among the cattle. Of what nature this murrain may
+have been can no more be determined than whether it originated
+from communication with the plague patients or from
+other causes. There was everywhere a great rise in the price
+of food. For a whole year, until it terminated in August,
+1349, the black plague prevailed and everywhere poisoned the
+springs of comfort and prosperity. In other countries it generally
+lasted only half a year, but returned frequently in individual
+places. Spain was uninterruptedly ravaged by the black
+plague till after the year 1350, to which the frequent internal
+feuds and the wars with the Moors not a little contributed.
+Alfonso XI, whose passion for war carried him too far, died of
+it at the siege of Gibraltar, March 26, 1350. He was the only
+king in Europe who fell a sacrifice to it. The mortality seems
+to have been less in Spain than in Italy, and about as considerable
+as in France.</p>
+
+<p>The whole period during which the black plague raged with
+destructive violence in Europe was, with the exception of Russia,
+from 1347 to 1350. The plagues which in the sequel often
+returned until 1383, we do not consider as belonging to the
+"great mortality."</p>
+
+<p>The premature celebration of the Jubilee, to which Clement
+VI cited the faithful to Rome 1350, during the great epidemic,
+caused a new eruption of the plague, from which it is said that
+scarcely one in a hundred of the pilgrims escaped. Italy was,
+in consequence, depopulated anew; and those who returned
+spread poison and corruption of morals in all directions.</p>
+
+<p>The changes which occurred about this period in the North
+of Europe are sufficiently memorable. In Sweden two princes
+died&mdash;Haken and Canute, half-brothers of King Magnus; and
+in Westgothland alone four hundred and sixty-six priests. The
+inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland found in the coldness of
+their inhospitable climate no protection against the southern
+enemy who had penetrated to them from happier countries.
+The plague wrought great havoc among them. In Denmark
+and Norway, however, people were so occupied with their own
+misery that the accustomed voyages to Greenland ceased.</p>
+
+<p>In Russia the black plague did not break out until 1351,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
+after it had already passed through the South and North of Europe.
+The mortality was extraordinarily great. In Russia, too,
+the voice of nature was silenced by fear and horror. In the
+hour of danger, fathers and mothers deserted their children,
+and children their parents.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe,
+the most probable is that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants
+were carried off. It may be assumed, without exaggeration,
+that Europe lost during the black death twenty-five million inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>That her nations could so quickly recover from so fearful a
+visitation, and, without retrograding more than they actually did,
+could so develop their energies in the following century, is a
+most convincing proof of the indestructibility of human society
+as a whole. To assume, however, that it did not suffer any
+essential change internally, because in appearance everything
+remained as before, is inconsistent with a just view of cause and
+effect. Many historians seem to have adopted such an opinion;
+hence, most of them have touched but superficially on the
+"great mortality" of the fourteenth century. We for our part
+are convinced that in the history of the world the black death is
+one of the most important events which have prepared the way
+for the present state of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>He who studies the human mind with attention, and forms
+a deliberate judgment on the intellectual powers which set people
+and states in motion, may, perhaps, find some proofs of this
+assertion in the following observations. At that time the advancement
+of the hierarchy was, in most countries, extraordinary;
+for the Church acquired treasures and large properties in
+land, even to a greater extent than after the crusades; but experience
+has demonstrated that such a state of things is ruinous
+to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced on
+this occasion.</p>
+
+<p>After the cessation of the black plague, a greater fecundity
+in women was everywhere remarkable; marriages were prolific;
+and double and treble births were more frequent than at other
+times. After the "great mortality" the children were said to
+have got fewer teeth than before; at which contemporaries
+were mightily shocked, and even later writers have felt surprise.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span>
+Some writers of authority published their opinions on this subject.
+Others copied from them, without seeing for themselves,
+and thus the world believed in the miracle of an imperfection in
+the human body which had been caused by the black plague.</p>
+
+<p>The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings
+which they had undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten;
+and in the stirring vicissitudes of existence the world belonged
+to the living.</p>
+
+<p>The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence
+of the black plague is without parallel and beyond description.
+In the eyes of the timorous, danger was the certain
+harbinger of death; many fell victims to fear on the first appearance
+of the distemper, and the most stout-hearted lost their confidence.
+The pious closed their accounts with the world; their
+only remaining desire was for a participation in the consolations
+of religion. Repentance seized the transgressor, admonishing
+him to consecrate his remaining hours to the exercise of Christian
+virtues. Children were frequently seen, while laboring under
+the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayer and songs of
+thanksgiving. An awful sense of contrition seized Christians
+everywhere; they resolved to forsake their vices, to make restitution
+for past offences, before they were summoned hence, to seek
+reconciliation with their Maker, and to avert, by self-chastisement,
+the punishment due to their former sins.</p>
+
+<p>Human nature would be exalted could the countless noble
+actions which, in times of most imminent danger, were performed
+in secret, be recorded for future generations. They,
+however, have no influence on the course of worldly events.
+They are known only to silent eye-witnesses, and soon fall into
+oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad
+undaunted; they desecrate what is noble, they pervert what is
+divine, to the unholy purposes of selfishness; which hurries along
+every good feeling in the false excitement of the age. Thus
+it was in the years of this plague.</p>
+
+<p>In the fourteenth century the monastic system was still in
+its full vigor, the power of the religious orders and brotherhoods
+was revered by the people, and the hierarchy was still formidable
+to the temporal power. It was, therefore, in the natural
+constitution of society that bigoted zeal, which in such times<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span>
+makes a show of public acts of penance, should avail itself of the
+semblance of religion. But this took place in such a manner
+that unbridled, self-willed penitence degenerated into luke-warmness,
+renounced obedience to the hierarchy, and prepared a fearful
+opposition to the Church, paralyzed as it was by antiquated
+forms.</p>
+
+<p>While all countries were filled with lamentations and woe,
+there first arose in Hungary, and afterward in Germany, the
+Brotherhood of the Flagellants, called also the Brethren of the
+Cross, or Cross-bearers, who took upon themselves the repentance
+of the people for the sins they had committed, and offered
+prayers and supplications for the averting of this plague. This
+order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class, who were
+either actuated by sincere contrition or who joyfully availed
+themselves of this pretext for idleness and were hurried along
+with the tide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods
+gained in repute, and were welcomed by the people with veneration
+and enthusiasm, many nobles and ecclesiastics ranged
+themselves under their standard; and their bands were not unfrequently
+augmented by children, honorable women, and nuns.</p>
+
+<p>They marched through the cities with leaders and singers,
+their heads covered as far as the eyes, their look fixed on the
+ground, with every token of contrition and mourning. They
+were robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast,
+back, and cap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four
+knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers and magnificent
+banners of velvet and cloth of gold were carried before
+them; wherever they made their appearance they were welcomed
+by the ringing of bells, and the people flocked from all
+quarters to listen to their hymns and witness their penance.</p>
+
+<p>In 1349 two hundred Flagellants first entered Strasburg,
+where they were hospitably lodged by the citizens. Above a
+thousand joined the brotherhood, which now separated into two
+bodies, for the purpose of journeying to the north and to the
+south. Adults and children left their families to accompany
+them; till, at length, their sanctity was questioned and the doors
+of houses and churches were closed against them. At Spires
+two hundred boys, of twelve years of age and under, constituted
+themselves into a brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span>
+children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at the
+instigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering
+the Holy Sepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were
+carried away by the delusion; they conducted the strangers to
+their houses with songs of thanksgiving, to regale them for the
+night. The women embroidered banners for them, and all were
+anxious to augment their pomp; and at every succeeding pilgrimage
+their influence and reputation increased.</p>
+
+<p>All Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders
+did homage to them; and they at length became as formidable
+to the secular as to the ecclesiastical power. The influence
+of this fanaticism was great and threatening. The appearance,
+in itself, was not novel. As far back as the eleventh century
+many believers in Asia and Southern Europe afflicted themselves
+with the punishment of flagellation.</p>
+
+<p>The author of the solemn processions of the Flagellants is
+said to have been St. Anthony of Padua (1231). In 1260 the
+Flagellants appeared in Italy as <i>Devoti</i>. "When the land was
+polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse
+suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ
+fell upon all; noble and lowly, old and young, and even children
+of five years of age marched through the streets with no covering
+but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge
+of leathern thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs
+and tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the
+wounds. Not only during the day, but even by night and in the
+severest winter, they traversed the cities with burning torches and
+banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their
+priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. The melancholy
+chant of the penitent alone was heard; enemies were reconciled;
+men and women vied with each other in splendid works
+of charity, as if they dreaded that divine omnipotence would
+pronounce on them the doom of annihilation."</p>
+
+<p>But at length the priests resisted this dangerous fanaticism,
+without being able to extirpate the illusion, which was advantageous
+to the hierarchy, as long as it submitted to its
+sway.</p>
+
+<p>The processions of the Brotherhood of the Cross undoubtedly
+promoted the spreading of the plague; and it is evident that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>
+the gloomy fanaticism which gave rise to them would infuse a
+new poison into the already desponding minds of the people.</p>
+
+<p>Still, however, all this was within the bounds of barbarous
+enthusiasm; but horrible were the persecutions of the Jews,
+which were committed in most countries with even greater exasperation
+than in the twelfth century, during the first crusades.
+In every destructive pestilence the common people at first attribute
+the mortality to poison. On whom, then, was vengeance
+so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the strangers
+who lived at enmity with the Christians? They were everywhere
+suspected of having poisoned the wells<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">52</a> or infected the
+air, and were pursued with merciless cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>These bloody scenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth
+century, are a counterpart to a similar mania of the age
+which was manifested in the persecutions of witches and sorcerers;
+and, like these, they prove that enthusiasm, associated with
+hatred and leagued with the baser passions, may work more
+powerfully upon whole nations than religion and legal order;
+nay, that it even knows how to profit by the authority of both,
+in order the more surely to satiate with blood the swords of long-suppressed
+revenge.</p>
+
+<p>The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and
+October, 1348, at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the
+first criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after
+they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning
+the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and in Freiburg, in
+1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured
+Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to
+them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found
+in a well at Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince
+the world; and the persecution of the abhorred culprits
+thus appeared justifiable.</p>
+
+<p>Already in the autumn of 1348 a dreadful panic, caused by
+this supposed poisoning, seized all nations; in Germany, especially,
+the springs and wells were built over, that nobody might
+drink of them or employ their contents for culinary purposes;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>and for a long time the inhabitants of numerous towns and
+villages used only river-and rain-water. The city gates were
+also guarded with the greatest caution: only confidential persons
+were admitted; and if medicine or any other article which
+might be supposed to be poisonous was found in the possession
+of a stranger&mdash;and it was natural that some should have these
+things by them for private use&mdash;he was forced to swallow a portion
+of it. By this trying state of privation, distrust, and suspicion
+the hatred against the supposed poisoners became greatly
+increased, and often broke out in popular commotions, which
+only served still further to infuriate the wildest passions.</p>
+
+
+<p>The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an
+oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch
+them from their protectors, of whom the number was so small
+that throughout all Germany but few places can be mentioned
+where these unfortunate people were not regarded as outlaws
+and martyred and burned. Solemn summonses were issued
+from Bern to the towns of Basel, Freiburg in Breisgau, and
+Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as poisoners. The burgomasters
+and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basel the
+populace obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn
+the Jews and to forbid persons of that community from entering
+their city for the space of two hundred years. Upon this, all
+the Jews in Basel, whose number could not have been inconsiderable,
+were enclosed in a wooden building, constructed for
+the purpose, and burned, together with it, upon the mere outcry
+of the people, without sentence or trial, which, indeed, would
+have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place
+at Freiburg.</p>
+
+<p>A regular diet was held at Bennefeld, in Alsace, where the
+bishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and
+towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the
+Jews; and when the deputies of Strasburg&mdash;not, indeed, the
+bishop of this town, who proved himself a violent fanatic&mdash;spoke
+in favor of the persecuted, as nothing criminal was substantiated
+against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was
+vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and
+removed their buckets? A sanguinary decree was resolved
+upon, of which the populace, who obeyed the call of the nobles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
+and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners.
+Wherever the Jews were not burned they were at least banished;
+and so being compelled to wander about, they fell into the hands
+of the country people, who, without humanity and regardless of
+all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword.</p>
+
+<p>At Eslingen, the whole Jewish community burned themselves
+in their synagogue; and mothers were often seen throwing their
+children on the pile, to prevent their being baptized, and then
+precipitating themselves into the flames. In short, whatever
+deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice, and desperation, in fearful
+combination, could instigate mankind to perform, were executed
+in 1349, throughout Germany, Italy, and France, with impunity
+and in the eyes of all the world. It seemed as if the plague gave
+rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning and
+grief; and the greater part of those who, by their education and
+rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves
+led on the savage mob to murder and to plunder.</p>
+
+<p>The humanity and prudence of Clement VI must on this occasion
+also be mentioned to his honor. He not only protected
+the Jews at Avignon, as far as lay in his power, but also issued
+two bulls in which he declared them innocent, and he admonished
+all Christians, though without success, to cease from such
+groundless persecutions. The emperor Charles IV was also favorable
+to them, and sought to avert their destruction wherever
+he could; but he dared not draw the sword of justice, and even
+found himself obliged to yield to the selfishness of the Bohemian
+nobles, who were unwilling to forego so favorable an opportunity
+of releasing themselves from their Jewish creditors, under favor
+of an imperial mandate. Duke Albert of Austria burned and
+pillaged those of his cities which had persecuted the Jews&mdash;a
+vain and inhuman proceeding which, moreover, is not exempt
+from the suspicion of covetousness; yet he was unable, in his
+own fortress of Kyberg, to protect some hundreds of Jews, who
+had been received there, from being barbarously burned by the
+inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>Several other princes and counts, among whom was Ruprecht
+of the Palatinate, took the Jews under their protection, on the
+payment of large sums; in consequence of which they were
+called "Jew-masters," and were in danger of being attacked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>
+by the populace and by their powerful neighbors. These persecuted
+and ill-used people&mdash;except, indeed, where humane individuals
+took compassion on them at their own peril, or when
+they could command riches to purchase protection&mdash;had no
+place of refuge left but the distant country of Lithuania, where
+Boleslav V, Duke of Poland, 1227-1279, had before granted
+them liberty of conscience; and King Casimir the Great, 1333-1370,
+yielding to the entreaties of Esther, a favorite Jewess,
+received them, and granted them further protection; on which
+account that country is still inhabited by a great number of
+Jews, who by their secluded habits have, more than any people
+in Europe, retained the manners of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+
+<h4>GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO</h4>
+
+<p>When the evil had become universal in Florence, the hearts
+of all the inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They
+fled from the sick and all that belonged to them, hoping by these
+means to save themselves. Others shut themselves up in their
+houses, with their wives, their children and households, living
+on the most costly food, but carefully avoiding all excess. None
+was allowed access to them; no intelligence of death or sickness
+was permitted to reach their ears; and they spent their time in
+singing and music and other pastimes.</p>
+
+<p>Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to
+excess, amusements of all descriptions, the indulgence of every
+gratification, and an indifference to what was passing around
+them as the best medicine, and acted accordingly. They wandered
+day and night from one tavern to another, and feasted
+without moderation or bounds. In this way they endeavored
+to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned their houses
+and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had already
+tolled.</p>
+
+<p>Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and
+authority of every law, human and divine, vanished. Most of
+those who were in office had been carried off by the plague, or
+lay sick, or had lost so many members of their families that
+they were unable to attend to their duties; so that thenceforth
+everyone acted as he thought proper. Others, in their mode
+of living, chose a middle course. They ate and drank what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>
+they pleased, and walked abroad; carrying odoriferous flowers,
+herbs, or spices, which they smelt at from time to time, in order
+to invigorate the brain and to avert the baneful influence of the
+air, infected by the sick and by the innumerable corpses of those
+who had died of the plague. Others carried their precaution
+still further, and thought the surest way to escape death was by
+flight. They therefore left the city; women as well as men
+abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and retiring into
+the country. But of these, also, many were carried off, most of
+them alone and deserted by all the world, themselves having
+previously set the example.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that one citizen fled from another&mdash;a neighbor
+from his neighbors&mdash;a relation from his relations; and in the
+end, so completely had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling
+that the brother forsook the brother, the sister the sister,
+the wife her husband, and at last even the parent his own offspring,
+and abandoned them, unvisited and unsoothed, to their
+fate. Those, therefore, that stood in need of assistance fell a
+prey to greedy attendants; who, for an exorbitant recompense,
+merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained with
+them in their last moments, and then not unfrequently became
+themselves victims to their avarice, and lived not to enjoy their
+extorted gain.</p>
+
+<p>Propriety and decorum were extinguished among the helpless
+sick. Females of rank seemed to forget their natural bashfulness,
+and committed the care of their persons, indiscriminately,
+to men and women of the lowest order. No longer were women,
+relatives or friends, found in the houses of mourning, to share
+the grief of the survivors; no longer was the corpse accompanied
+to the grave by neighbors and a numerous train of priests, carrying
+wax tapers and singing psalms, nor was it borne along by
+other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without
+a friend to comfort them in their last moments; and few indeed
+were they who departed amid the lamentations and tears of their
+friends and kindred.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of sorrow and mourning, appeared indifference, frivolity,
+and mirth; this being considered, especially by the females,
+as conducive to health. Seldom was the body followed
+by even ten or twelve attendants; and instead of the usual bearers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span>
+and sextons, hirelings of the lowest of the populace undertook
+the office for the sake of gain; and accompanied by only a
+few priests, and often without a single taper, it was borne to the
+very nearest church, and lowered into the first grave that was
+not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes,
+and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater.
+Poverty or negligence induced most of these to remain in their
+dwellings or in the immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell
+by thousands; and many ended their lives in the streets by day
+and by night.</p>
+
+<p>The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication
+to their neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors,
+to preserve themselves from infection, generally had the
+bodies taken out of the houses and laid before the doors, where
+the early morn found them in heaps, exposed to the affrighted
+gaze of the passing stranger. It was no longer possible to have
+a bier for every corpse&mdash;three or four were generally laid together;
+husband and wife, father and mother, with two or three
+children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier;
+and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin,
+bearing the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several
+other funerals; so that instead of one, there were five or six
+bodies for interment.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span></p>
+<h2>FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN EUROPE</h2>
+
+<h3>TURKS SEIZE GALLIPOLI</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1354</h6>
+
+<h3>JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">53</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>During the early years of the fourteenth century a new Mahometan
+realm was established on the ruins of the Seljukian and Byzantine power
+in Asia Minor. Osman,<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">54</a> or Othman, the founder of this realm, which is
+regarded as the original Ottoman empire, subdued a great part of Asia
+Minor, and in the year of his death 1326, his son Orkhan captured Prusa
+(now Brusa) and Nicomedia. In 1330 he took Nic&aelig;a&mdash;then second only
+to Constantinople in the Greek or Byzantine empire&mdash;and six years later
+he defeated the Turkish Prince of Karasi, the ancient Mysia, and annexed
+his territory, including the capital, Berghama, the ancient Pergamus,
+to the Ottoman dominions, thus securing nearly the whole of North-western
+Asia Minor.</p>
+
+<p>During the reign of Orkhan the Ottomans made frequent passages of
+the Hellespont for the purpose of extending their power into Europe.
+After fifteen invasions without any permanent conquest, in 1354 Orkhan
+and his son Suleiman perceived an opportunity by which they prepared
+themselves to profit&mdash;civil war was raging in the Byzantine empire,
+where John Pal&aelig;ologus was striving to deprive the emperor Cantacuzenus
+of his throne.</p>
+
+<p>The plan whereby the Ottomans secured a foothold in Europe which
+soon enabled them to establish a permanent sovereignty on the peninsula
+of Gallipoli was executed by Suleiman with a military skill which gave
+his name a conspicuous place in Turkish history.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_o.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="O" />N the meridional shore of the Sea of Marmora, at the entrance
+of the Hellespont, is perceived the peninsula of Kapoutaghi&mdash;the
+ancient, almost insular Cyzicus, a Milesian colony.
+At the neck of the isthmus, where it joins the mainland,
+there where are seen to-day the ruins of Aidindjik, formerly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>arose Cyzicus, a city celebrated in the history of Persia and of
+Rome, of ancient Greece and of the Byzantine empire. This
+port, one of the most commercial of the Asiatic coast, possessed,
+like Rhodes, Marseilles, and Carthage, two military arsenals
+and an immense granary, each placed under the special superintendence
+of an architect. The annals of this town have been
+enriched by the passage of the Argonauts and of the Goths, by
+the siege of Mithridates and by the assistance received from the
+Romans under the leadership of Lucullus.</p>
+
+
+<p>Granted its freedom by the latter as a reward for its fidelity,
+Cyzicus was shortly afterward deprived of its privileges for having
+neglected the service of the temple of Augustus. Under the
+Byzantines it became the capital of the province of Hellespont
+and the metropolitan see of Mysia and of all the territory of
+Troy. On Mount Dyndimos, at the gates of Cyzicus, arose the
+temple of the great mother, the goddess Ida, whose worship had
+been established by the Argonauts, and who was venerated
+at Cyzicus as at Pessinunte, in the form of an a&euml;rolite, a sacred
+stone, which under the reign of King Attalus was carried to
+Rome, and installed in the city by all the matrons, preceded by
+Scipio the Younger. The inhabitants of the peninsula adored
+also Cybele, Proserpine, and Jupiter, who, according to a fabulous
+tradition, had given the town of Cyzicus to the wife of
+Pluto, as dower. Emperor Hadrian embellished this town with
+the largest and the finest of the temples of paganism. The
+columns of this edifice, all of one piece, were four ells (fifteen and
+one-half feet) in circumference and fifty ells (one hundred and
+ninety-five feet) in height.</p>
+
+<p>In 1354 Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, Governor of ancient
+Mysia, a province recently conquered by the Turks, was seized
+with admiration by the aspect of the majestic ruins of Cyzicus.
+The broken columns, the marbles prone on the sward, recalled
+to him the ruins of the palace of the Queen of Saba Balkis,
+erected by the order of Solomon, the remains of Istakhr (Persepolis),
+and of Tadmor (Palmyra). One evening when seated
+by the sea-shore, he saw, by the light of the moon (Aidindjik,
+the crescent moon), the porticoes and peristyles reflected in the
+waves. Clouds passed along the surface of the sea, and he
+imagined that he saw these ruined palaces and temples arise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>
+from the deep, and a fleet navigate the waters. Around him
+arose mysterious voices whose sound mingled with the murmur
+of the waves, while the moon, which at this moment shone in the
+east, seemed to unite Asia and Europe by a silver ribbon. It
+was she who, emerging formerly from the bosom of Edebali,<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">55</a>
+had come to hide herself in that of Osman. The remembrance
+of the fantastic vision, which had presaged a universal domination
+to his ancestor, inflamed the courage of Suleiman, and
+made him resolve to unite Europe and Asia by transporting the
+Ottoman power from the shores of Asia Minor to the strands
+of the Greek empire, and thus to realize the dream of Osman.</p>
+
+<p>Suleiman consulted immediately with Adjebeg, Ghazi-Fazil,
+Ewrenos, and Hadji-Ilbeki, ancient vizier of the Prince of Karasi,
+who had been his assistants in the government of Mysia. All
+confirmed him in his resolution. Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil
+the same night went to Gouroudjouk and took ship to make a
+reconnaissance in the environs of Tzympe, situated a league
+and a half from Gallipoli, opposite Gouroudjouk. A Greek
+prisoner whom they brought with them to Asia informed Suleiman
+of the abandoned and unprepared state of the place, and
+offered himself as a guide to surprise the garrison. Suleiman
+immediately had two rafts constructed of trees united by thongs
+of bull skins, and made the attempt the following night, with
+thirty-nine of his most intrepid companions in arms. Arrived
+before the fortress, they scaled the walls by mounting on an
+immense dung-heap, and took possession of it easily, owing to
+the inhabitants being all absent in the fields engaged in harvesting.
+Suleiman then hastened to send to Asia all the ships
+which he found in the port, to transport soldiers to Tzympe;
+and three days after, the fortress contained a garrison of three
+thousand Ottomans.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean while Cantacuzenus, unable to resist any longer
+the forces assembled against him by his young rival, John Pal&aelig;ologus,
+asked the assistance of Orkhan. Orkhan sent him
+the conqueror of Tzympe, an auxiliary whose support later
+became more troublesome to the Emperor than it was useful
+against his enemy. Ten thousand Turkish cavaliers disem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>barked
+near Ainos, at the <i>embouchure</i> of Maritza (Hebrus),
+defeated the auxiliary troops which John Pal&aelig;ologus had drawn
+from M&oelig;sia and from the Triballiens, ravaged Bulgaria, and
+repassed into Asia, loaded with spoil.</p>
+
+
+<p>Cantacuzenus, more at his ease after the departure of the
+conquering horde, negotiated with Suleiman the ransom of
+Tzympe. Scarcely had he sent the ten thousand ducats agreed
+upon, when a commissary of the Ottoman Prince arrived bringing
+him the keys; but at the same time a terrific earthquake
+devastated the towns on the Thracian coasts. The inhabitants
+who did not find death in the destruction of their dwellings went
+with the garrisons to seek refuge against the destroying scourge
+and the barbarity of the Turks in the towns and the castles
+which the catastrophe had spared. But torrents of rain, snow,
+and a glacial temperature killed the women and the children
+on the road. As to the men, they fell into the power of Orkhan's
+soldiers, who were awaiting their passage. Thus the Ottomans
+found a powerful auxiliary in the warring elements. From that
+time they believed that God himself favored their projects.
+Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil, whom Suleiman had left in front of
+Gallipoli, penetrated into that town by the large breaches that
+the earthquake had made in the walls, and took possession of it,
+owing to the confusion which reigned among the inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont, the commercial <i>entrep&ocirc;t</i>
+of the Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, is celebrated in
+history by the siege that it sustained against Philip of Macedon,
+and by the revolt of the Catalans or Mogabars who, half a
+century before the disaster, braved with impunity the power of
+the Greek Emperor and made it the centre of their piracies.
+The tombs of the two Ottoman chiefs are still seen to-day.
+These two mausoleums are much visited by Mussulman pilgrims,
+and the reason of this pious veneration is due to the fact
+that here in this sacred place lie the ashes of the two generations
+to whom the Ottoman empire owes the conquest of a town, the
+possession of which facilitated the passing of the Turks into
+Europe. For the same reason all the surrounding country, which,
+during the blockade of the town, Adjebeg and his lieutenant
+Ghazi-Fazil had put to fire and sword, received the name of
+Adje Owa. The two beys, taking advantage of the terror caused<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>
+by so many disasters, penetrated into the deserted towns and established
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>On the news of these conquests Suleiman, who then was at
+Bigha (Peg&aelig;), refused to restore Tzympe, and, far from being
+contented with the peaceful possession of the territory invaded
+by his hordes, dreamed of extending the boundaries, and for
+this purpose sent over to Europe numerous colonies of Turks
+and Arabs. One of his first cares was to raise the walls of
+Gallipoli and other strong places devastated by the earthquake;
+among the number were Konour, whose commander, called
+Calaconia by the Ottoman historians, was hanged by order of
+Suleiman at the doors of the castle; the fort of Boulair, before
+which Suleiman received, as a presage of his future glory, the
+bonnet of a dervish Mewlewi; Malgara, renowned for its trade
+in honey; Ipsala (ancient Cypsella) on the Marizza; and lastly
+Rodosto, now Tekourtaghi, ancient residence of Besus, King
+of Thrace, and the place of exile where died in modern times
+the Hungarian Francis Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania, and
+his partisans. All these towns and strong places fell into the
+power of the Ottomans in the course of the year 1357; they
+served them as starting-bases for their excursions, which they
+pushed as far as Hireboli (Chariupolis) and Tschorli (Tzurulum).</p>
+
+<p>Cantacuzenus, too weak to stop the progress of the Turks,
+complained of this violation of the peace. Orkhan excused his
+son, saying that it was not force of arms which had opened the
+gates of the towns of the Greek empire, but the divine will
+manifested by the earthquake. The Emperor made representations
+that he was not agitating to know whether it was by the
+gates or by the breaches that Suleiman had penetrated into the
+places in question, but whether or not he possessed them legitimately.
+Orkhan then asked a delay for reflection, and subsequently
+promised that he would request his son to return the
+towns that he occupied, if Cantacuzenus, on his side, would
+engage to pay him a sum of forty thousand ducats. At the
+same time he invited him to an interview to meet Suleiman on
+the Gulf of Nicomedia. But the Sultan pretending to be ill, the
+Emperor returned to Byzantium, without having obtained anything.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span>Orkhan now found himself in one of the happiest of political
+situations. The division of sovereign authority between Cantacuzenus
+and his pupil John Pal&aelig;ologus, and their continual
+wars, allowed him to address one or the other according as his
+interests and the circumstances demanded. It was thus that
+John Pal&aelig;eologus, ally of the Genoese, undertook to deliver from
+captivity to Phoceus, the son of Orkhan, Khalil or Kasim, whom
+the governor Calothes surrendered for a ransom of one hundred
+thousand pieces of gold and the concession of the glorious title
+of Panhypersebastos ("very venerable"). The service that John
+had rendered did not prevent Orkhan from sending to Abydos
+a body of troops to rescue the son of Cantacuzenus, Mathias,
+then at war with the Bulgarians.</p>
+
+<p>From the epoch when the Ottomans made durable conquests
+in the Greek empire, Asia each spring threw new hordes into
+Europe, until the time when the successors of Orkhan had extended
+their domination from the shores of the Sea of Marmora
+to those of the Danube.</p>
+
+<p>The conquest of Gallipoli, which had opened the gate of the
+Greek empire and the whole of the European continent to the
+Ottomans, was announced by "letters of victory" to the neighboring
+princes of Orkhan, whose father had divided with Osman
+the heritage of the Seljukian sultans. The use of these "letters
+of victory" has been preserved to this day in Turkey, and their
+style, already so pompous in the days of Orkhan, has become
+so proudly emphatic that this kind of document to-day is not
+the least curious of those which belong to the annals of the Turkish
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>Orkhan left to his son, Suleiman Pacha, and Hadji-Ilbeki
+the charge of preserving the conquests made in Europe; Suleiman
+established his residence at Gallipoli, and Ilbeki at Konour.
+The first overran the country as far as Demitoka; the second as
+far as Tschorli and Hireboli. Adjebeg received in fief the valley
+which still bears his name.</p>
+
+<p>But Suleiman enjoyed for only a few years the fruits of his
+conquests. One day while hunting wild geese between Boulair
+and Sidi-Kawak, that is to say near the palatine of the
+Cid, and following at a gallop the flight of his falcon, he fell
+so violently from his horse (1359) as to be instantly killed. His<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>
+body was deposited, not in the mausoleum of the Osman family
+at Prusa, where he had caused a mosque to be erected in the
+quarter of the confectioners, but near the mosque of Boulair,
+also founded by him. Orkhan, to perpetuate the exploits of his
+son, caused a tomb to be built to his memory on the shore of the
+Hellespont, the only one which, during more than a century,
+was erected in memory of an Ottoman prince on Greek soil.
+Of all the sepulchres of Turkish heroes which the national
+historians mention with holy respect, that of the founder of
+the Ottoman power in Europe is the most venerated and the
+most frequented by pilgrims. It is still to be seen to the north
+of the embouchure of the Hellespont.</p>
+
+<p>Tradition attributes yet another victory to Suleiman after
+his death. At the head of a troop of celestial heroes, mounted on
+white horses, encircled by a brilliant aureole, he is said to have
+vanquished an army of infidels. The love of the marvellous,
+so general among orientals, the leaning which all people have
+to make heaven intervene in the deeds relating to their origin,
+alone can explain this tradition, for it would be useless to seek
+any historic fact which could have given it birth. According
+to this tradition, thirty thousand Christians appeared in the
+Hellespont on a fleet of sixty-one vessels; one half disembarked
+at Touzla and the other at Sidi-Kawak; it was this latter body
+which was cut in pieces by the celestial troop led by Suleiman.
+The Ottoman historians who relate this miracle have evidently
+borrowed the apparition of these vessels from the First or the
+Second Crusade of the Europeans against the Turks, and have
+transported them from the waters of Smyrna to those of Gallipoli,
+for the greater glory of Suleiman Pacha. Neither the history
+of Byzantium nor that of the crusades offers the slightest trace
+of this event.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONSPIRACY AND DEATH OF MARINO
+FALIERI AT VENICE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1355</h6>
+
+<h3>MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Marino Falieri was born at Venice about 1278, and was elected doge
+in 1354. For many years the government of the republic, under an oligarchy,
+had been arbitrarily dominated by the Council of Ten, an assembly
+that, after serving a special purpose for which it was created, was
+declared permanent in 1325 and became a formidable tribunal. Professing
+to guard the republic the Ten in fact destroyed its liberties, disposed
+of its finances, overruled the constitutional legislators, suppressed
+and excluded the popular element from all voice in public affairs, and
+finally reduced the nominal prince&mdash;the doge&mdash;to a mere puppet or an ornamental
+functionary, still called "head of the state."</p>
+
+<p>At the time when Falieri entered upon his dogeship the city in all
+quarters was pervaded by the spies of this great oligarchy, which seized
+and imprisoned citizens, and even put them to death, secretly, without
+itself being answerable to any authority. The most notable event in the
+annals of this extraordinary Venetian government is that which forms
+the story of Marino Falieri himself. His conspiracy with the plebeians
+to assassinate the oligarchs and make himself actual ruler of the state had
+the double motive of a personal grievance and the sense of a political
+wrong.</p>
+
+<p>The fate of this old man has been made the subject of tragedies by
+Byron (1820), Casimir Delavigne (1829), and Swinburne (1885). The novel,
+<i>Doge und Dogaressa</i>, by Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, was inspired by the
+same dramatic figure. Of historical accounts, the following&mdash;in Mrs.
+Oliphant's best manner&mdash;is justly regarded as the most impressive which
+has hitherto appeared in English.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_m.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="M" />ARINO FALIERI had been an active servant of Venice
+through a long life. He had filled almost all the great
+offices which were intrusted to her nobles. He had governed
+her distant colonies, accompanied her armies in that position of
+<i>proveditore</i>, omnipotent civilian critic of all the movements of
+war, which so much disgusted the generals of the republic. He
+had been ambassador at the courts of both emperor and pope,
+and was serving his country in that capacity at Avignon when
+the news of his election reached him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span>It is thus evident that Falieri was not a man used to the
+position of a lay figure, although at seventy-six the dignified
+retirement of a throne, even when so encircled with restrictions,
+would seem not inappropriate. That he was of a haughty and
+hasty temper seems apparent. It is told of him that, after
+waiting long for a bishop to head a procession at Treviso where
+he was <i>podesta</i> ("chief magistrate"), he astonished the tardy
+prelate by a box on the ear when he finally appeared, a punishment
+for keeping the authorities waiting.</p>
+
+<p>Old age to a statesman, however, is in many cases an advantage
+rather than a defect, and Falieri was young in vigor and
+character, and still full of life and strength. He was married
+a second time to presumably a beautiful wife much younger
+than himself, though the chroniclers are not agreed even on the
+subject of her name, whether she was a Gradenigo or a Contarini.
+The well-known story of young Steno's insult to this lady and
+to her old husband has found a place in all subsequent histories,
+but there is no trace of it in the unpublished documents of the
+state.</p>
+
+<p>The story goes that Michel Steno, one of those young and
+insubordinate gallants who are a danger to every aristocratic
+state, having been turned out of the presence of the Dogaressa
+for some unseemly freedom of behavior, wrote upon the chair
+of the Doge in boyish petulance an insulting taunt, such as
+might well rouse a high-tempered old man to fury. According
+to Sanudo, the young man, on being brought before the Forty,<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">56</a>
+confessed that he had thus avenged himself in a fit of passion;
+and regard having been had to his age and the "heat of love"
+which had been the cause of his original misdemeanor&mdash;a reason
+seldom taken into account by the tribunals of the state&mdash;he
+was condemned to prison for two months, and afterward to
+be banished for a year from Venice.</p>
+
+<p>The Doge took this light punishment greatly amiss, considering
+it, indeed, as a further insult.</p>
+
+<p>Sabellico says not a word of Michel Steno, or of this definite
+cause of offence, and Romanin quotes the contemporary records
+to show that though <i>Alcuni zovanelli fioli de gentiluomini di
+Venetia</i> are supposed to have affronted the Doge, no such story
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span>finds a place in any of them. But the old man thus translated
+from active life and power, soon became bitterly sensible in his
+new position that he was <i>senza parentado</i>, with few relations, and
+flouted by the <i>giovinastri</i>, the dissolute young gentlemen who
+swaggered about the Broglio in their finery, strong in the support
+of fathers and uncles.</p>
+
+<p>That he found himself, at the same time, shelved in his new
+rank, powerless, and regarded as a nobody in the state where
+hitherto he had been a potent signior&mdash;mastered in every action
+by the secret tribunal, and presiding nominally in councils
+where his opinion was of little consequence&mdash;is evident. And
+a man so well acquainted, and so long, with all the proceedings
+of the state, who had seen consummated the shutting out of the
+people, and since had watched through election after election
+a gradual tightening of the bonds round the feet of the doge,
+would naturally have many thoughts when he found himself the
+wearer of that restricted and diminished crown.</p>
+
+<p>He could not be unconscious of how the stream was going,
+nor unaware of that gradual sapping of privilege and decreasing
+of power which even in his own case had gone further than with
+his predecessor. Perhaps he had noted with an indignant mind
+the new limits of the <i>promissione</i>, a narrower charter than ever,
+when he was called upon to sign it. He had no mind, we may
+well believe, to retire thus from the administration of affairs.
+And when these giovinastri, other people's boys, the scum of
+the gay world, flung their unsavory jests in the face of the old
+man who had no son to come after him, the silly insults so lightly
+uttered, so little thought of, the natural scoff of youth at old age,
+stung him to the quick.</p>
+
+<p>Old Falieri's heart burned within him at his own injuries
+and those of his old comrades. How he was induced to head
+the conspiracy, and put his crown, his life, and honor on the
+cast, there is no further information. His fierce temper, and
+the fact that he had no powerful house behind him to help to
+support his case, probably made him reckless. In April, 1355,
+six months after his arrival in Venice as doge, the smouldering
+fire broke out. Two of the conspirators were seized with compunction
+on the eve of the catastrophe and betrayed the plot&mdash;one
+with a merciful motive to serve a patrician he loved, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>
+other with perhaps less noble intentions&mdash;and, without a blow
+struck, the conspiracy collapsed. There was no real heart in it,
+nothing to give it consistence; the hot passion of a few men
+insulted, the variable gaseous excitement of wronged commoners,
+and the ambition&mdash;if it was ambition&mdash;of one enraged and
+affronted old man, without an heir to follow him or anything
+that could make it worth his while to conquer.</p>
+
+<p>An enterprise more wild was never undertaken. It was
+the passionate stand of despair against force so overwhelming
+as to make mad the helpless, yet not submissive, victims.
+The Doge, who no doubt in former days had felt it
+to be a mere affair of the populace, a thing with which a noble
+ambassador and proveditore had nothing to do, a struggle beneath
+his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement,
+to be a fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There
+seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the
+remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful
+and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own
+supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by
+passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt
+to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but feel in
+that passion of helpless age and unfriendedness, something of
+the terrible disappointment of one to whom the real situation
+of affairs had never been revealed before; who had come home
+triumphant to reign like the doges of old, and, only after the
+ducal cap was on his head and the palace of the state had become
+his home, found out that the doge&mdash;like the unconsidered
+plebeian&mdash;had been reduced to bondage; his judgment and experience
+put aside in favor of the deliberations of a secret tribunal,
+and the very boys, when they were nobles, at liberty to
+jeer at his declining years.</p>
+
+<p>The lesser conspirators, all men of the humbler sort&mdash;Calendario,
+the architect, who was then at work upon the palace,
+a number of seamen, and other little-known persons&mdash;were
+hanged; not like the greater criminals, beheaded between the
+columns, but strung up&mdash;a horrible fringe&mdash;along the side of
+the palazzo. The fate of Falieri himself is too generally known
+to demand description. Calmed by the tragic touch of fate,
+the Doge bore all the humiliations of his doom with dignity,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
+and was beheaded at the head of the stairs where he had sworn
+the promissione on first assuming the office of doge.</p>
+
+<p>What a contrast was this from that triumphant day when
+probably he felt that his reward had come to him after the long
+and faithful service of years. Death stills disappointment as
+well as rage, and Falieri is said to have acknowledged the justice
+of his sentence. He had never made any attempt to justify or
+defend himself, but frankly and at once avowed his guilt and
+made no attempt to escape from its penalties. His body was
+conveyed privately to the Church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo,
+the great "Zanipolo"&mdash;with which all visitors to Venice are
+familiar&mdash;and was buried in secrecy and silence in the <i>atrio</i> of
+a little chapel behind the great church&mdash;where no doubt for centuries
+the pavement was worn by many feet with little thought
+of those who lay below. Even from that refuge his bones have
+been driven forth, but his name remains in the corner of the
+Hall of the Great Council, where&mdash;with a certain dramatic affectation&mdash;the
+painter-historians have painted a black veil
+across the vacant place. "This is the place of Marino Falieri,
+beheaded for his crimes," is all the record left of the Doge disgraced.</p>
+
+<p>Was it a crime? The question is one which it is difficult
+to discuss with any certainty. That Falieri desired to establish&mdash;as
+so many had done in other cities&mdash;an independent
+despotism in Venice, seems entirely unproved. It was the prevailing
+fear; the one suggestion which alarmed everybody and
+made sentiment unanimous. But one of the special points
+which are recorded by the chroniclers as working in him to
+madness, was that he was <i>senza parentado</i>&mdash;without any backing
+of relationship or allies&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, sonless, with no one to come
+after him. How little likely then was an old man to embark on
+such a desperate venture for self-aggrandizement merely. He
+had, indeed, a nephew who was involved in his fate, but apparently
+not so deeply as to expose him to the last penalty of the law.</p>
+
+<p>The incident altogether points more to a sudden outbreak
+of the rage and disappointment of an old public servant coming
+back from his weary labors for the state in triumph and satisfaction
+to what seemed the supreme reward; and finding himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
+no more than a puppet in the hands of remorseless masters,
+subject to the scoffs of the younger generation, with his eyes
+opened by his own suffering, perceiving for the first time what
+justice there was in the oft-repeated protest of the people, and
+how they and he alike were crushed under the iron heel of that
+oligarchy to which the power of the people and that of the Prince
+were equally obnoxious. The chroniclers of his time were so
+much at a loss to find any reason for such an attempt on the part
+of a man, <i>non abbiando alcum propinquo</i>, that they agree in attributing
+it to diabolical inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>It was more probably that fury which springs from a sense of
+wrong, which the sight of the wrongs of others raised to frenzy,
+and that intolerable impatience of the impotent which is more
+harsh in its hopelessness than the greatest hardihood. He could
+not but die for it, but there seems no more reason to characterize
+this impossible attempt as deliberate treason than to give the
+same name to many an alliance formed between prince and people
+in other regions&mdash;the king and commons of the early Stuarts,
+for example&mdash;against the intolerable exactions and cruelty
+of an aristocracy too powerful to be faced alone by either.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHARLES IV OF GERMANY PUBLISHES
+HIS GOLDEN BULL</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1356</h6>
+
+<h3>SIR ROBERT COMYN</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Golden Bull of Charles IV of Germany, Emperor of the Holy
+Roman Empire, first published at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1356, was a
+charter&mdash;sometimes called the "Magna Charta of Germany"&mdash;regulating
+the election of the emperor. It was called "golden" because the seal attached
+to the parchment on which it was engrossed was of gold instead
+of the customary lead. In a diet at Metz in the same year six additional
+clauses were promulgated.</p>
+
+<p>By some historians the origin of the imperial electoral college is assigned
+to the year 1125, when at the election of Lothair II certain of the
+nobles and church dignitaries made a selection of candidates to be voted
+for. But until the promulgation of the Golden Bull the constitution and
+prerogatives of the college were never definitely ascertained.</p>
+
+<p>The personal traits and the languid reign of Charles IV have been
+treated by historians with derision. He forgot the general welfare of the
+empire in his eagerness to enrich his own house and aggrandize his paternal
+kingdom of Bohemia. The one remarkable law which emanated from
+him, and whereby alone his reign is distinguished in the constitutional
+history of the empire, is that embodied in the Golden Bull. By this instrument
+the dignity of the electors was greatly enhanced, and the disputes
+which had arisen between members of the same house as to their
+right of suffrage were terminated. The number of electors was absolutely
+restricted to seven.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_a.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="A" />FTER a solemn invocation of the Trinity, a reprobation of
+the seven deadly sins, and a pointed allusion to the seven
+candlesticks and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Golden
+Bull proceeds to the subject of the imperial election. It provides,
+in the first place, for the safe conduct of the seven electors
+to and from Frankfort-on-the-Main, which is fixed as the place
+of election; it directs the archbishop of Mainz to summon the
+electors upon the death of the emperor, and regulates the manner
+in which their proxies are to be appointed; it enjoins the
+citizens of Frankfort to protect the assembled electors; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
+forbids them to admit any stranger into the city during the
+election.</p>
+
+<p>It next prescribes the form of oath to be taken by the electors;
+and also forbids them to quit the city before the completion
+of the election; and after thirty days restricts their diet to bread
+and water. A majority of votes is to decide the election; and
+in case any elector obtain three votes, his own vote is to be taken
+in his favor.</p>
+
+<p>The precedence of the electors is thus settled: First, the
+archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves; then the King of
+Bohemia, the Count Palatine, the Duke of Saxony, and the
+Margrave of Brandenburg. The Elector of Treves is to vote
+first; then the Elector of Cologne; then the secular electors;
+and the Elector of Mainz is finally to collect the votes and deliver
+his own.</p>
+
+<p>The Elector of Cologne is to perform the coronation. At all
+feasts the Margrave of Brandenburg, as grand chamberlain, is
+to present the Emperor with water to wash; the King of Bohemia,
+as cup-bearer, is to offer the goblet of wine; the Count
+Palatine, as grand steward, is to set the first dish on the table;
+and the Duke of Saxony is to officiate as grand marshal.</p>
+
+<p>The Count Palatine and the Duke of Saxony are declared
+vicars of the empire during the vacancy of the throne. An exclusive
+jurisdiction is guaranteed to the electors; and their precedence
+over all other princes of Germany is enforced.</p>
+
+<p>The right of voting is vested in the eldest son of a deceased
+elector, provided he have attained the age of eighteen; and
+during the minority, the guardianship and vote are vested in
+the next kinsman of the deceased.</p>
+
+<p>If one of the lay electorates become vacant by default of
+heirs, it shall revert to the Emperor, and be by him disposed
+of&mdash;Bohemia excepted, where the vacancy is to be supplied by
+ancient mode of election.</p>
+
+<p>The electors are invested with the possession of all mines
+discovered within their respective territories. They are authorized
+to give refuge to the Jews, and to receive dues payable
+within their states. They are also privileged to coin money,
+and to purchase lands subject to the feudal rights of the sovereign.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>A yearly assembly of the electors, in one of the imperial
+cities, is enjoined.</p>
+
+<p>All privileges granted to any city or community prejudicial
+to the rights of the electors are revoked. All fraudulent resignations
+of fiefs by vassals, with intent to attack their lords, are
+declared void. All leagues, associations, and confederacies,
+not sanctioned by law, are made punishable by fine; and all
+burgesses and subjects of princes and nobles are to adhere to
+their original subjection, and not to claim any rights or exemptions
+as burgesses of any city unless actually domiciled
+therein.</p>
+
+<p>Challenges, with design of destroying another's property or
+committing any outrage, are prohibited; and all challenges are
+to be given three days before the onset.</p>
+
+<p>The forms of summoning electors, and of their delegation
+of proxies, are laid down. And the right of voting, as well as
+all other rights, is declared inseparably incident to the electoral
+principality.</p>
+
+<p>On grand occasions the Duke of Saxony is to carry the
+sword; the Count Palatine, the globe; the Margrave of Brandenburg,
+the sceptre. In celebrating mass before the Emperor,
+the benedictions are to be pronounced by the senior spiritual
+elector present.</p>
+
+<p>All persons conspiring against the lives of the electors are
+declared guilty of leze-majesty, and shall forfeit their lives and
+possessions. The lives of their sons, though justly forfeited,
+are spared only by the particular bounty of the Emperor; but
+they are declared incapable of holding any property, honor, or
+dignity, and doomed to perpetual poverty. The daughters are
+permitted to enjoy one-fourth of their mother's succession.</p>
+
+<p>The secular principalities, Bohemia, the Palatinate, the
+duchy of Saxony, and the margravate of Brandenburg, are
+declared indivisible and entire, descendible in the male line.</p>
+
+<p>On all the solemn occasions the electors shall attend the
+Emperor, and the arch-chancellors shall carry the seals. And
+the bull then proceeds minutely to point out the manner in
+which the electors are to exercise their ministerial functions at
+the imperial banquet; and regulates the order and disposition
+of the imperial and electoral tables.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>Frankfort is again declared as the place of election; Aix-la-Chapelle,
+of coronation; and Nuremberg, for holding the first
+royal court.</p>
+
+<p>The electors are exempted from all payments on receiving
+their fiefs from their sovereign. But other princes are to pay
+certain fees, etc., to the imperial officers.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, the secular electors are enjoined to instruct their sons
+in the Latin, Italian, and Slavonic tongues.</p>
+
+<p>At the final promulgation of the bull in the Diet of Metz the
+Emperor and Empress feasted, in the presence of the dauphin
+(Charles V) and the legate of Pope Innocent VI, with all the
+pageantry and ceremonies prescribed by the new ordinances.
+The imperial tables were spread in the grand square of the city;
+Rudolph, Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg, attended with a silver
+measure of oats, and marshalled the order of the company;
+Louis II, Margrave of Brandenburg, presented to the Emperor
+the golden basin, with water and fair napkins; Rupert, Count
+Palatine, placed the first dish upon the table; and the Emperor's
+brother, Wenceslaus, representing the King of Bohemia, officiated
+as cup-bearer. Lastly, the princes of Schwarzburg and
+the deputy huntsman came with three hounds amid the loud
+din of horns, and carried up a stag and a boar to the table of the
+Emperor.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span></p>
+<h2>INSURRECTION OF THE JACQUERIE IN
+FRANCE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1358</h6>
+
+<h3>SIR JOHN FROISSART</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The defeat of the French under King John II, at Poitiers, by the
+British forces of Edward, the Black Prince, September 19, 1356, aroused
+great indignation among the common people of France, with scorn of the
+nobility; for these leaders, with an army of sixty thousand, had fled before
+an enemy whom they outnumbered seven to one. In the next assembly
+of the states-general the bourgeois obtained a preponderance so
+intolerable to the nobles that they withdrew to their homes. A little
+later the deputies of the clergy also retired, leaving only the representatives
+of the cities&mdash;among whom the supremacy of the members from
+Paris was generally accepted&mdash;to deal with the affairs of the kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>At this point appeared a man who in an age "so uncivilized and sombre,"
+says Pierre Robiquet, "by wonderful instinct laid down and nearly
+succeeded in obtaining the adoption of the essential principles on which
+modern society is founded&mdash;the government of the country by elected
+representatives, taxes voted by representatives of the taxpayers, abolition
+of privileges founded upon right of birth, extension of political rights to
+all citizens, and subordination of traditional sovereignty to that of the
+nation." This man was &Eacute;tienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of
+Paris&mdash;that is to say, mayor of the municipality, whom eminent historians
+have called the greatest personage of the fourteenth century. During
+a career of three years his name dominates French history&mdash;a brief
+ascendency, but of potent influence. His endeavor, in Thierry's view,
+"was, as it were, a premature attempt at the grand designs of Providence,
+and the mirror of the bloody changes of fortune through which
+those designs were destined to advance to their accomplishment under
+the impulse of human passions."</p>
+
+<p>After the disaster of Poitiers, Marcel finished the fortifications of
+Paris and barricaded the streets, and in the assembly there he presided
+over the bourgeois&mdash;the Third Estate. In the growing conflict between
+the two other estates&mdash;nobles and clergy&mdash;and the third, Marcel armed
+the bourgeois and began an open revolution, thus organizing the commune
+for carrying out his designs. The nobles were meanwhile laying
+heavier miseries upon the peasantry, and in the spring of 1358 occurred
+the rising of the Jacquerie, here described by Froissart, whose brilliant
+narrative is to be read in the light of modern critical judgment, which re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>gards
+it as an exaggeration both of the numbers of the insurgents and
+their atrocities, while Froissart had no capacity for understanding the
+conditions which explain, if they do not also justify, the present revolt.</p>
+
+<p>This outbreak, to which Marcel gave his support, was enough to ruin
+his cause, and he died in a massacre, July 31, 1358, having failed "because
+the time was not yet ripe," and because the violence to which he
+lent his sanction was overcome by stronger violence.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_a.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="A" /> MARVELLOUS and great tribulation befell the kingdom
+of France, in Beauvoisis, Brie, upon the river Marne, in
+the Laonnois, and in the neighborhood of Soissons. Some of
+the inhabitants of the country towns assembled together in
+Beauvoisis, without any leader; they were not at first more than
+one hundred men. They said that the nobles of the kingdom
+of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that it
+would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all; to which
+proposition everyone assented, and added, shame befall him
+that should be the means of preventing the gentlemen from being
+wholly destroyed. They then, without further counsel, collected
+themselves in a body, and with no other arms than the staves
+shod with iron which some had, and others with knives, marched
+to the house of a knight who lived near, and, breaking it open,
+murdered the knight, his lady, and all the children, both great
+and small; they then burned the house.</p>
+
+<p>After this, their second expedition was to the strong castle of
+another knight, which they took, and, having tied him to a stake,
+many of them violated his wife and daughter before his eyes;
+they then murdered the lady, her daughter, and the other children,
+and last of all the knight himself, with much cruelty. They
+destroyed and burned his castle. They did the like to many
+castles and handsome houses; and their numbers increased so
+much that they were in a short time upward of six thousand.
+Wherever they went they received additions, for all of their
+rank in life followed them, while everyone else fled, carrying off
+with them their ladies, damsels, and children ten or twenty
+leagues distant, where they thought they could place them in security,
+leaving their houses, with all their riches in them.</p>
+
+<p>These wicked people, without leader and without arms,
+plundered and burned all the houses they came to, murdered
+every gentleman, and violated every lady and damsel they could
+find. He who committed the most atrocious actions, and such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+as no human creature would have imagined, was the most applauded
+and considered as the greatest man among them. I
+dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities they
+committed on the persons of the ladies.</p>
+
+<p>Among other infamous acts they murdered a knight, and,
+having fastened him to a spit, roasted him before the eyes of his
+wife and his children, and forced her to eat some of her husband's
+flesh, and then knocked her brains out. They had chosen a
+king among them, who came from Clermont in Beauvoisis. He
+was elected as the worst of the bad, and they denominated him
+"Jacques Bonhomme."<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">57</a></p>
+
+<p>These wretches burned and destroyed in the county of
+Beauvoisis, and at Corbie, Amiens, and Montdidier, upward
+of sixty good houses and strong castles. By the acts of such
+traitors in the country of Brie and thereabout, it behooved every
+lady, knight, and squire, having the means of escape, to fly to
+Meaux, if they wished to preserve themselves from being insulted
+and afterward murdered. The Duchess of Normandy, the
+Duchess of Orleans, and many other ladies had adopted this
+course. These cursed people thus supported themselves in the
+countries between Paris, Noyon, and Soissons, and in all the
+territory of Coucy, in the County of Valois. In the bishoprics
+of Noyon, Laon, and Soissons there were upward of one hundred
+castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>When the gentlemen of Beauvoisis, Corbie, Vermandois,
+and of the lands where these wretches were associated, saw
+to what lengths their madness had extended, they sent for succor
+to their friends in Flanders, Hainault, and Bohemia; from
+which places numbers soon came and united themselves with
+the gentlemen of the country. They began therefore to kill and
+destroy these wretches wherever they met them, and hung them
+up by troops on the nearest trees. The King of Navarre even
+destroyed in one day, near Clermont in Beauvoisis, upward of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>three thousand; but they were by this time so much increased
+in numbers that, had they been all together, they would have
+amounted to more than one hundred thousand. When they
+were asked for what reason they acted so wickedly, they replied,
+they knew not, but they did so because they saw others do it, and
+they thought that by this means they should destroy all the nobles
+and gentlemen in the world.</p>
+
+<p>At this period the Duke of Normandy, suspecting the King
+of Navarre, the provost of merchants and those of his faction&mdash;for
+they were always unanimous in their sentiments&mdash;set out
+from Paris, and went to the bridge at Charenton-upon-Marne,
+where he issued a special summons for the attendance of the
+crown vassals, and sent a defiance to the provost of merchants
+and to all those who should support him. The provost, being
+fearful he would return in the night-time to Paris&mdash;which was
+then unenclosed&mdash;collected as many workmen as possible from
+all parts, and employed them to make ditches all around Paris.
+He also surrounded it by a wall with strong gates. For the
+space of one year there were three hundred workmen daily
+employed; the expense of which was equal to maintaining an
+army. I must say that to surround with a sufficient defence
+such a city as Paris was an act of greater utility than any provost
+of merchants had ever done before; for otherwise it would have
+been plundered and destroyed several times by the different factions.</p>
+
+<p>At the time these wicked men were overrunning the country,
+the Earl of Foix, and his cousin the Captal of Buch were returning
+from a crusade in Prussia. They were informed, on their
+entering France, of the distress the nobles were in; and they
+learned at the city of Chalons that the Duchess of Orleans and
+three hundred other ladies, under the protection of the Duke
+of Orleans, were fled to Meaux on account of these disturbances.
+The two knights resolved to go to the assistance of these ladies,
+and to re&euml;nforce them with all their might, notwithstanding the
+Captal was attached to the English; but at that time there was a
+truce between the two kings. They might have in their company
+about sixty lances.</p>
+
+<p>They were most cheerfully received, on their arrival at Meaux,
+by the ladies and damsels; for these Jacks and peasants of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
+Brie had heard what number of ladies, married and unmarried,
+and young children of quality were in Meaux; they had united
+themselves with those of Valois and were on their road thither.
+On the other hand, those of Paris had also been informed of the
+treasures Meaux contained, and had set out from that place in
+crowds. Having met the others, they amounted together to
+nine thousand men. Their forces were augmenting every step
+they advanced.</p>
+
+<p>They came to the gates of the town, which the inhabitants
+opened to them and allowed them to enter; they did so in such
+numbers that all the streets were quite filled, as far as the market-place,
+which is tolerably strong, but it required to be guarded,
+though the river Marne nearly surrounds it. The noble dames
+who were lodged there, seeing such multitudes rushing toward
+them, were exceedingly frightened. On this, the two lords and
+their company advanced to the gate of the market-place, which
+they had opened, and, marching under the banners of the Earl
+of Foix and Duke of Orleans, and the pennon of the Captal of
+Buch, posted themselves in front of this peasantry, who were
+badly armed.</p>
+
+<p>When these banditti perceived such a troop of gentlemen, so
+well equipped, sally forth to guard the market-place, the foremost
+of them began to fall back. The gentlemen then followed
+them, using their lances and swords. When they felt the weight
+of their blows, they, through fear, turned about so fast they fell
+one over the other. All manner of armed persons then rushed
+out of the barriers, drove them before them, striking them down
+like beasts, and clearing the town of them; for they kept neither
+regularity nor order, slaying so many that they were tired.
+They flung them in great heaps into the river. In short, they
+killed upward of seven thousand. Not one would have escaped
+if they had chosen to pursue them farther.</p>
+
+<p>On the return of the men-at-arms, they set fire to the town of
+Meaux, burned it; and all the peasants they could find were shut
+up in it, because they had been of the party of the Jacks. Since
+this discomfiture which happened to them at Meaux, they never
+collected again in any great bodies; for the young Enguerrand
+de Coucy had plenty of gentlemen under his orders, who destroyed
+them, wherever they could be met with, without mercy.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONQUESTS OF TIMUR THE TARTAR</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1370-1405</h6>
+
+<h3>EDWARD GIBBON</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Timur, better known as Tamerlane ("Timur the Lame"), was born in
+Central Asia&mdash;probably in the village of Sebzar, near Samarkand, in
+Transoxiana (Turkestan). He is supposed to have been descended from
+a follower of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol empire; or, as some
+say, directly, by the mother's side, from Genghis himself. He is the
+Tamerlaine or Tamburlaine of Marlowe and other dramatists. Gibbon
+introduces him in the <i>Decline and Fall</i>, apparently because fascinated
+with the subject, although he gives as a historical reason the fact that
+Timur's triumph in Asia delayed the final fall of Constantinople&mdash;taken
+by the Turks in 1453.</p>
+
+<p>In early youth the future ruler of so vast an empire was engaged in
+struggles for ascendency with the petty chiefs of rival tribes. His boundless
+ambition early conceived the conquest and monarchy of the world;
+his wish was "to live in the memory and esteem of future ages." He
+was born in a period of anarchy, when the crumbling kingdoms of the
+Asiatic dynasties were no longer able to resist the adventurous spirit
+determined to occupy the new field of military triumph which opened before
+him. At the age of twenty-five Timur was hailed as the deliverer of
+his country. When he chose Samarkand as the capital of his dominion,
+he declared his purpose to make that dominion embrace the whole habitable
+earth; and at the height of his power he ruled from the Great Wall
+of China to the centre of Russia on the north, while his sovereignty extended
+to the Mediterranean and the Nile on the west, and on the east to
+the sources of the Ganges. In his own person he united twenty-seven
+different sovereignties, and nine several dynasties of kings gave place to
+the unparalleled conqueror, who won by the sword a larger portion of the
+globe than Cyrus or Alexander, C&aelig;sar or Attila, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne,
+or Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p>It was believed in the family and empire of Timur that he himself
+composed the <i>Commentaries</i> of his life and the <i>Institutions</i> of his government,
+which, however, were probably the work of his secretaries. These
+manuscripts have been of great service to historians in their study of
+Timur's career.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_a.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="A" />T the age of thirty-four, and in a general diet, Timur was
+invested with imperial command, but he affected to revere
+the house of Genghis; and while the emir Timur reigned over
+Zagatai and the East, a nominal khan served as a private officer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>
+in the armies of his servant. Without expatiating on the victories
+of thirty-five campaigns, without describing the lines of march
+which he repeatedly traced over the continent of Asia, I shall
+briefly represent Timur's conquests in Persia, Tartary, and India,
+and from thence proceed to the more interesting narrative
+of his Ottoman war.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner had Timur reunited to the patrimony of Zagatai
+the dependent countries of Karizme and Kandahar than he
+turned his eyes toward the kingdoms of Iran or Persia. From
+the Oxus to the Tigris that extensive country was without a
+lawful sovereign. Peace and justice had been banished from
+the land above forty years; and the Mongol invader might
+seem to listen to the cries of an oppressed people. Their petty
+tyrants might have opposed him with confederate arms: they
+separately stood and successively fell; and the difference of
+their fate was only marked by the promptitude of submission
+or the obstinacy of resistance. Ibrahim, Prince of Shirwan or
+Albania, kissed the footstool of the imperial throne. His
+peace offerings of silks, horses, and jewels were composed,
+according to the Tartar fashion, each article of nine pieces; but
+a critical spectator observed that there were only eight slaves.
+"I myself am the ninth," replied Ibraham, who was prepared
+for the remark: and his flattery was rewarded by the smile of
+Timur.</p>
+
+<p>Shah Mansur, Prince of Fars, or the proper Persia, was one
+of the least powerful, but most dangerous, of his enemies. In
+a battle under the walls of Shiraz, he broke, with three or four
+thousand soldiers, the <i>coul</i>, or main body, of thirty thousand
+horse, where the Emperor fought in person. No more than
+fourteen or fifteen guards remained near the standard of Timur;
+he stood firm as a rock, and received on his helmet two weighty
+strokes of a cimeter; the Mongols rallied; the head of Mansur
+was thrown at his feet; and he declared his esteem of the valor
+of a foe by extirpating all the males of so intrepid a race. From
+Shiraz his troops advanced to the Persian Gulf; and the richness
+and weakness of Ormus were displayed in an annual tribute
+of six hundred thousand dinars of gold.</p>
+
+<p>Bagdad was no longer the city of peace, the seat of the caliphs;
+but the noblest conquest of Khulagu could not be overlooked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>
+by his ambitious successor. The whole course of the Tigris and
+Euphrates, from the mouth to the sources of those rivers, was
+reduced to his obedience; he entered Edessa; and the Turcomans
+of the black sheep were chastised for the sacrilegious
+pillage of a caravan of Mecca. In the mountains of Georgia
+the native Christians still braved the law and the sword of
+Mahomet; by three expeditions he obtained the merit of the
+<i>gazie</i>, or holy war; and the Prince of Tiflis became his proselyte
+and friend.</p>
+
+<p>A just retaliation might be urged for the invasion of Turkestan,
+or the Eastern Tartary. The dignity of Timur could
+not endure the impunity of the Getes: he passed the Sihun,
+subdued the kingdom of Kashgar, and marched seven times
+into the heart of their country. His most distant camp was two
+months' journey to the northeast of Samarkand; and his emirs,
+who traversed the river Irtysh, engraved in the forests of Siberia
+a rude memorial of their exploits. The conquest of Kiptchak,
+or the Western Tartary, was founded on the double motive
+of aiding the distressed and chastising the ungrateful. Toctamish,
+a fugitive prince, was entertained and protected in his
+court; the ambassadors of Auruss Khan were dismissed with a
+haughty denial, and followed on the same day by the armies of
+Zagatai; and their success established Toctamish in the Mongol
+empire of the North.</p>
+
+<p>But, after a reign of ten years, the new Khan forgot the merits
+and the strength of his benefactor&mdash;the base usurper, as he
+deemed him, of the sacred rights of the house of Genghis.
+Through the gates of Derbent he entered Persia at the head of
+ninety thousand horse: with the innumerable forces of Kiptchak,
+Bulgaria, Circassia, and Russia, he passed the Sihun, burned
+the palaces of Timur, and compelled him, amid the winter
+snows, to contend for Samarkand and his life. After a mild
+expostulation and a glorious victory the Emperor resolved on
+revenge; and by the east and the west of the Caspian and the
+Volga he twice invaded Kiptchak with such mighty powers
+that thirteen miles were measured from his right to his left
+wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps
+of man; and their daily subsistence was often trusted to the
+fortune of the chase. At length the armies encountered each<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span>
+other; but the treachery of the standard-bearer, who, in the
+heat of action, reversed the imperial standard of Kiptchak,
+determined the victory of the Zagatais and Toctamish&mdash;I speak
+the language of the <i>Institutions</i>&mdash;gave the tribe of Toushi to the
+wind of desolation. He fled to the Christian Duke of Lithuania,
+again returned to the banks of the Volga, and, after fifteen
+battles with a domestic rival, at last perished in the wilds of
+Siberia.</p>
+
+<p>The pursuit of a flying enemy carried Timur into the tributary
+provinces of Russia; a duke of the reigning family was
+made prisoner amid the ruins of his capital; and Yelets, by
+the pride and ignorance of the orientals, might easily be confounded
+with the genuine metropolis of the nation. Moscow
+trembled at the approach of the Tartar. Ambition and prudence
+recalled him to the south, the desolate country was exhausted,
+and the Mongol soldiers were enriched with an immense
+spoil of precious furs, of linen of Antioch, and of ingots
+of gold and silver. On the banks of the Don, or Tanais, he
+received a humble deputation from the consuls and merchants
+of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay, who occupied
+the commerce and city of Tana, or Azov, at the mouth of the
+river. They offered their gifts, admired his magnificence, and
+trusted his royal word. But the peaceful visit of an emir, who
+explored the state of the magazines and harbor, was speedily
+followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars. The city
+of Tana was reduced to ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and
+dismissed; but all the Christians who had not fled to their
+ships were condemned either to death or slavery. Revenge
+prompted him to burn the cities of Sarai and Astrakhan, the
+monuments of rising civilization; and his vanity proclaimed
+that he had penetrated to the region of perpetual daylight, a
+strange phenomenon, which authorized his Mahometan doctors
+to dispense with the obligation of evening prayer.</p>
+
+<p>When Timur first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion
+of India or Hindustan, he was answered by a murmur
+of discontent: "The rivers! and the mountains and deserts!
+and the soldiers clad in armor! and the elephants, destroyers
+of men!" But the displeasure of the Emperor was more
+dreadful than all these terrors; and his superior reason was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span>
+convinced that an enterprise of such tremendous aspect was
+safe and easy in the execution. He was informed by his spies
+of the weakness and anarchy of Hindustan: the <i>subahs</i> of the
+provinces had erected the standard of rebellion; and the perpetual
+infancy of Sultan Mahmud was despised even in the
+harem of Delhi. The Mongol army moved in three great divisions,
+and Timur observes with pleasure that the ninety-two squadrons
+of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with
+the ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet.</p>
+
+<p>Between the Jihun and the Indus they crossed one of the
+ridges of mountains which are styled by the Arabian geographers
+the "Stony Girdles of the Earth." The highland robbers
+were subdued or extirpated; but great numbers of men and
+horses perished in the snow; the Emperor himself was let down
+a precipice on a portable scaffold&mdash;the ropes were one hundred
+and fifty cubits in length&mdash;and before he could reach the bottom,
+this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timur
+crossed the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attock, and successively
+traversed, in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab,
+or five rivers, that fall into the master stream. From Attock
+to Delhi the high road measures no more than six hundred
+miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the southeast; and the
+motive of Timur was to join his grandson, who had achieved
+by his command the conquest of Multan. On the eastern bank
+of the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian
+hero halted and wept; the Mongol entered the desert, reduced
+the fortress of Batnir, and stood in arms before the gates of
+Delhi, a great and flourishing city, which had subsisted three
+centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan kings.</p>
+
+<p>The siege, more especially of the castle, might have been a
+work of time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness,
+the Sultan Mahmud and his wazir to descend into the plain,
+with ten thousand cuirassiers, forty thousand of his foot-guards,
+and one hundred and twenty elephants, whose tusks are said
+to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers. Against
+these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops,
+he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire
+and a ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the
+event taught the Mongols to smile at their own fears; and as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span>
+soon as these unwieldy animals were routed, the inferior species
+(the men of India) disappeared from the field. Timur made his
+triumphal entry into the capital of Hindustan, and admired,
+with a view to imitate, the architecture of the stately mosque;
+but the order or license of a general pillage and massacre polluted
+the festival of his victory. He resolved to purify his
+soldiers in the blood of the idolaters, or Gentoos, who still surpass,
+in the proportion of ten to one, the numbers of the Moslems.
+In this pious design he advanced one hundred miles
+to the northeast of Delhi, passed the Ganges, fought several
+battles by land and water, and penetrated to the famous rock
+of Cupele, the statue of the cow,<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">58</a> that <i>seems</i> to discharge the
+mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains
+of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills;
+nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange
+foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate
+would degenerate into a race of Hindus.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the banks of the Ganges that Timur was informed,
+by his speedy messengers, of the disturbances which had arisen
+on the confines of Georgia and Anatolia, of the revolt of the
+Christians, and the ambitious designs of the sultan Bajazet.
+His vigor of mind and body was not impaired by sixty-three
+years and innumerable fatigues; and, after enjoying some
+tranquil months in the palace of Samarkand, he proclaimed a
+new expedition of seven years into the western countries of Asia.
+To the soldiers who had served in the Indian war he granted
+the choice of remaining at home or following their prince;
+but the troops of all the provinces and kingdoms of Persia were
+commanded to assemble at Ispahan and wait the arrival of the
+imperial standard. It was first directed against the Christians
+of Georgia, who were strong only in their rocks, their castles,
+and the winter season; but these obstacles were overcome
+by the zeal and perseverance of Timur: the rebels submitted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>to the tribute or the <i>Koran</i>; and if both religions boasted of their
+martyrs, that name is more justly due to the Christian prisoners,
+who were offered the choice of abjuration or death.</p>
+
+
+<p>On his descent from the hills the Emperor gave audience
+to the first ambassadors of Bajazet, and opened the hostile correspondence
+of complaints and menaces, which fermented two
+years before the final explosion. Between two jealous and
+haughty neighbors, the motives of quarrel will seldom be wanting.
+The Mongol and Ottoman conquests now touched each
+other in the neighborhood of Erzerum and the Euphrates; nor
+had the doubtful limit been ascertained by time and treaty.
+Each of these ambitious monarchs might accuse his rival of
+violating his territory, of threatening his vassals and protecting
+his rebels; and, by the name of rebels, each understood the
+fugitive princes, whose kingdoms he had usurped and whose
+life or liberty he implacably pursued. In their victorious career
+Timur was impatient of an equal, and Bajazet was ignorant of a
+superior.</p>
+
+<p>In his first expedition, Timur was satisfied with the siege
+and destruction of Sebaste, a strong city on the borders of
+Anatolia. He then turned aside to the invasion of Syria and
+Egypt, where the military republic of the mamelukes still
+reigned. The Syrian emirs were assembled at Aleppo to repel
+the invasion; they confided in the fame and discipline of the
+mamelukes, in the temper of their swords and lances of the
+purest steel of Damascus, in the strength of their walled cities,
+and in the populousness of sixty thousand villages; and instead
+of sustaining a siege, they threw open their gates and arrayed
+their forces in the plain. But these forces were not cemented
+by virtue and union, and some powerful emirs had been seduced
+to desert or betray their more loyal companions. Timur's
+front was covered with a line of Indian elephants, whose turrets
+were filled with archers and Greek fire; the rapid evolutions
+of his cavalry completed the dismay and disorder; the Syrian
+crowds fell back on each other; many thousands were stifled
+or slaughtered in the entrance of the great street; the Mongols
+entered with the fugitives; and after a short defence the impregnable
+citadel of Aleppo was surrendered by cowardice or
+treachery. Among the suppliants and captives, Timur distinguished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span>
+the doctors of the law, whom he invited to the dangerous
+honor of a personal conference. The Mongol Prince was
+a zealous Mussulman; but his Persian schools had taught him
+to revere the memory of Ali and Hasan; and he had imbibed
+a deep prejudice against the Syrians as the enemies of the
+son of the daughter of the apostle of God. To these doctors
+he proposed a captious question, which the casuists of
+Samarkand and Herat were incapable of resolving. "Who are
+the true martyrs, of those who are slain on my side or on
+that of my enemies?" But he was silenced, or satisfied, by the
+dexterity of one of the cadis of Aleppo, who replied, in the words
+of Mahomet himself, that the motive, not the ensign, constitutes
+the martyr; and that the Moslems of either party who fight
+only for the glory of God may deserve that sacred appellation.
+The true succession of the caliphs was a controversy of a still
+more delicate nature; and the frankness of a doctor, too honest
+for his situation, provoked the Emperor to exclaim: "Ye are
+as false as those of Damascus: Moawiyah was a usurper, Yezid
+a tyrant, and Ali alone is the lawful successor of the Prophet."
+A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed
+to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?"
+said he to the cadi. "Fifty years." "It would be the age of
+my eldest son: you see me here," continued Timur, "a poor,
+lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the Almighty
+been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the
+Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that
+in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my
+enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity."
+During this peaceful conversation the streets of Aleppo streamed
+with blood and re&euml;choed with the cries of mothers and children,
+with the shrieks of violated virgins. The rich plunder that
+was abandoned to his soldiers might stimulate their avarice;
+but their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command
+of producing an adequate number of heads, which, according
+to his custom, were curiously piled in columns and pyramids.
+The Mongols celebrated the feast of victory, while the surviving
+Moslems passed the night in tears and in chains.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not dwell on the march of the destroyer from Aleppo
+to Damascus, where he was rudely encountered, and almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
+overthrown, by the armies of Egypt. A retrograde motion was
+imputed to his distress and despair; one of his nephews deserted
+to the enemy; and Syria rejoiced in the tale of his defeat, when
+the Sultan was driven, by the revolt of the mamelukes, to escape
+with precipitation and shame to his palace of Cairo. Abandoned
+by their Prince, the inhabitants of Damascus still defended
+their walls; and Timur consented to raise the siege if they
+would adorn his retreat with a gift or ransom, each article of
+nine pieces. But no sooner had he introduced himself into
+the city, under color of a truce, than he perfidiously violated
+the treaty, imposed a contribution of ten millions of gold, and
+animated his troops to chastise the posterity of those Syrians
+who had executed, or approved, the murder of the grandson of
+Mahomet. After a period of seven centuries Damascus was reduced
+to ashes, because a Tartar was moved by religious zeal
+to avenge the blood of an Arab.</p>
+
+<p>The losses and fatigues of the campaign obliged Timur to
+renounce the conquest of Palestine and Egypt; but in his
+return to the Euphrates he delivered Aleppo to the flames
+and justified his pious motive by the pardon and reward of
+two thousand sectaries of Ali, who were desirous to visit the
+tomb of his son. I have expatiated on the personal anecdotes
+which mark the character of the Mongol hero, but I shall
+briefly mention that he erected, on the ruins of Bagdad, a pyramid
+of ninety thousand heads; again visited Georgia; encamped
+on the banks of the Araxes; and proclaimed his resolution of
+marching against the Ottoman Emperor. Conscious of the importance
+of the war, he collected his forces from every province;
+eight hundred thousand men were enrolled on his military
+list, but the splendid commands of five and ten thousand horse
+may be rather expressive of the rank and pension of the chiefs
+than of the genuine number of effective soldiers. In the pillage
+of Syria the Mongols had acquired immense riches; but
+the delivery of their pay and arrears for seven years more firmly
+attached them to the imperial standard.</p>
+
+<p>During this diversion of the Mongol arms, Bajazet had
+two years to collect his forces for a more serious encounter.
+They consisted of four hundred thousand horse and foot whose
+merit and fidelity were of an unequal complexion. We may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>
+discriminate the janizaries, who have been gradually raised to
+an establishment of forty thousand men; a national cavalry (the
+<i>spahis</i> of modern times); twenty thousand cuirassiers of Europe,
+clad in black and impenetrable armor; the troops of Anatolia,
+whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timur:
+and a colony of Tartars, whom he had driven from Kiptchak,
+and to whom Bajazet had assigned a settlement in the plains
+of Adrianople. The fearless confidence of the Sultan urged him
+to meet his antagonist; and, as if he had chosen that spot for
+revenge, he displayed his banner near the ruins of the unfortunate
+Sebaste.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean while Timur moved from the Araxes through
+the countries of Armenia and Anatolia. His boldness was
+secured by the wisest precautions; his speed was guided by
+order and discipline; and the woods, the mountains, and the
+rivers were diligently explored by the flying squadrons, who
+marked his road and preceded his standard. Firm in his plan
+of fighting in the heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided
+their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied C&aelig;sarea,
+traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested
+Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post,
+compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He
+returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora;
+and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains
+round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which
+has immortalized the glory of Timur and the shame of Bajazet.</p>
+
+<p>For this signal victory the Mongol Emperor was indebted
+to himself, to the genius of the moment, and the discipline of
+thirty years. He had improved the tactics, without violating
+the manners, of his nation, whose force still consisted in the
+missile weapons and rapid evolutions of a numerous cavalry.
+From a single troop to a great army, the mode of attack was
+the same; a foremost line first advanced to the charge, and was
+supported in a just order by the squadrons of the great vanguard.
+The general's eye watched over the field, and at his command
+the front and rear of the right and left wings successively
+moved forward in their several divisions, and in a direct or
+oblique line; the enemy was pressed by eighteen or twenty attacks;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>
+and each attack afforded a chance of victory. If they
+all proved fruitless or unsuccessful, the occasion was worthy of
+the Emperor himself, who gave the signal of advancing to the
+standard and main body, which he led in person. But in the
+battle of Angora, the main body itself was supported, on the
+flanks and in the rear, by the bravest squadrons of the reserve,
+commanded by the sons and grandsons of Timur. The conqueror
+of Hindustan ostentatiously showed a line of elephants,
+the trophies rather than the instruments of victory; the use of the
+Greek fire was familiar to the Mongols and Ottomans; but had
+they borrowed from Europe the recent invention of gunpowder
+and cannon, the artificial thunder, in the hands of either nation,
+must have turned the fortune of the day. In that day Bajazet
+displayed the qualities of a soldier and a chief; but his genius
+sunk under a stronger ascendant; and, from various motives, the
+greatest part of his troops failed him in the decisive moment.
+His rigor and avarice had provoked a mutiny among the Turks;
+and even his son Solyman too hastily withdrew from the field.
+The forces of Anatolia, loyal in their revolt, were drawn away
+to the banners of their lawful princes. His Tartar allies had
+been tempted by the letters and emissaries of Timur, who
+reproached their ignoble servitude under the slaves of their
+fathers; and offered to their hopes the dominion of their new,
+or the liberty of their ancient, country. In the right wing of
+Bajazet the cuirassiers of Europe charged with faithful hearts
+and irresistible arms; but these men of iron were soon broken
+by an artful flight and headlong pursuit; and the janizaries,
+alone, without cavalry or missile weapons, were encompassed
+by the circle of the Mongol hunters. Their valor was at length
+oppressed by heat, thirst, and the weight of numbers; and the
+unfortunate Sultan, afflicted with the gout in his hands and
+feet, was transported from the field on the fleetest of his horses.
+He was pursued and taken by the titular Khan of Zagatai;
+and, after his capture and the defeat of the Ottoman powers,
+the kingdom of Anatolia submitted to the conqueror, who
+planted his standard at Kiotahia, and dispersed on all sides
+the ministers of rapine and destruction. Mirza Mehemmed
+Sultan, the eldest and best beloved of his grandsons, was
+despatched to Bursa, with thirty thousand horse; and such was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span>
+his youthful ardor that he arrived with only four thousand at
+the gates of the capital, after performing in five days a march
+of two hundred and thirty miles. Yet fear is still more rapid
+in its course; and Solyman, the son of Bajazet, had already
+passed over to Europe with the royal treasure. The spoil, however,
+of the palace and city was immense; the inhabitants had
+escaped; but the buildings, for the most part of wood, were
+reduced to ashes. From Bursa, the grandson of Timur advanced
+to Nice, even yet a fair and flourishing city; and the
+Mongol squadrons were only stopped by the waves of the Propontis.
+The same success attended the other mirzas and emirs
+in their excursions, and Smyrna, defended by the zeal and
+courage of the Rhodian knights, alone deserved the presence
+of the Emperor himself. After an obstinate defence, the place
+was taken by storm; all that breathed was put to the sword; and
+the heads of the Christian heroes were launched from the engines,
+on board of two caracks, or great ships of Europe, that rode at
+anchor in the harbor. The Moslems of Asia rejoiced in their
+deliverance from a dangerous and domestic foe and a parallel
+was drawn between the two rivals, by observing that Timur,
+in fourteen days, had reduced a fortress which had sustained
+seven years the siege, or at least the blockade, of Bajazet.</p>
+
+<p>The "iron cage" in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur,
+so long and so often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected
+as a fable by the modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity.
+They appeal with confidence to the Persian history of
+Sherefeddin Ali, according to which has been given to our curiosity
+in a French version, and from which I shall collect and
+abridge, a more specious narrative of this memorable transaction.
+No sooner was Timur informed that the captive Ottoman
+was at the door of his tent than he graciously stepped
+forward to receive him, seated him by his side, and mingled
+with just reproaches a soothing pity for his rank and misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>"Alas!" said the Emperor, "the decree of fate is now accomplished
+by your own fault; it is the web which you have
+woven, the thorns of the tree which yourself have planted. I
+wished to spare, and even to assist, the champion of the Moslems.
+You braved our threats; you despised our friendship;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>
+you forced us to enter your kingdom with our invincible armies.
+Behold the event. Had you vanquished, I am not ignorant of
+the fate which you reserved for myself and my troops. But I
+disdain to retaliate; your life and honor are secure; and I shall
+express my gratitude to God by my clemency to man."</p>
+
+<p>The royal captive showed some signs of repentance, accepted
+the humiliation of a robe of honor, and embraced with tears
+his son Musa, who, at his request, was sought and found among
+the captives of the field. The Ottoman princes were lodged in a
+splendid pavilion; and the respect of the guards could be surpassed
+only by their vigilance. On the arrival of the harem
+from Bursa, Timur restored the queen Despina and her daughter
+to their father and husband; but he piously required that the
+Servian princess, who had hitherto been indulged in the profession
+of Christianity, should embrace, without delay, the religion
+of the Prophet. In the feast of victory, to which Bajazet was
+invited, the Mongol Emperor placed a crown on his head and
+a sceptre in his hand, with a solemn assurance of restoring him
+with an increase of glory to the throne of his ancestors. But
+the effect of this promise was disappointed by the Sultan's
+untimely death. Amid the care of the most skilful physicians,
+he expired of an apoplexy, about nine months after his defeat.
+The victor dropped a tear over his grave; his body, with royal
+pomp, was conveyed to the mausoleum which he had erected
+at Bursa; and his son Musa, after receiving a rich present of
+gold and jewels, of horses and arms, was invested by a patent
+in red ink with the kingdom of Anatolia.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the portrait of a generous conqueror, which has
+been extracted from his own memorials and dedicated to his
+son and grandson, nineteen years after his decease; and, at a
+time when the truth was remembered by thousands, a manifest
+falsehood would have implied a satire on his real conduct.
+Weighty, indeed, is this evidence, adopted by all the Persian
+histories; yet flattery, more especially in the East, is base and
+audacious; and the harsh and ignominious treatment of Bajazet
+is attested by a chain of witnesses.</p>
+
+<p>I am satisfied that Sherefeddin Ali has faithfully described
+the first ostentatious interview, in which the conqueror, whose
+spirits were harmonized by success, affected the character of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>
+generosity. But his mind was insensibly alienated by the unseasonable
+arrogance of Bajazet; and Timur betrayed a design
+of leading his royal captive in triumph to Samarkand. An attempt
+to facilitate his escape, by digging a mine under the
+tent, provoked the Mongol Emperor to impose a harsher restraint;
+and in his perpetual marches, an iron cage on a wagon
+might be invented, not as a wanton insult, but as a rigorous
+precaution. But the strength of Bajazet's mind and body fainted
+under the trial, and his premature death might, without injustice,
+be ascribed to the severity of Timur.</p>
+
+<p>From the Irtysh and Volga to the Persian Gulf, and from
+the Ganges to Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in
+the hands of Timur; his armies were invincible, his ambition
+was boundless, and his zeal might aspire to conquer and convert
+the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already trembled
+at his name. He touched the utmost verge of the land; but an
+insuperable, though narrow, sea rolled between the two continents
+of Europe and Asia; and the lord of so many myriads
+of horse was not master of a single galley. The two passages
+of the Bosporus and Hellespont, of Constantinople and Gallipoli,
+were possessed, the one by the Christians, the other by the Turks.
+On this great occasion they forgot the difference of religion,
+to act with union and firmness in the common cause; the
+double straits were guarded with ships and fortifications; and
+they separately withheld the transports which Timur demanded
+of either nation, under the pretence of attacking their enemy.
+At the same time they soothed his pride with tributary gifts
+and suppliant embassies, and prudently tempted him to retreat
+with the honors of victory. Solyman, the son of Bajazet, implored
+his clemency for his father and himself; accepted, by a
+red patent, the investiture of the kingdom of Romania, which
+he already held by the sword; and reiterated his ardent wish of
+casting himself in person at the feet of the king of the world.
+The Greek Emperor&mdash;either John or Manuel&mdash;submitted to pay
+the same tribute which he had stipulated with the Turkish
+Sultan, and ratified the treaty by an oath of allegiance, from
+which he could absolve his conscience so soon as the Mongol
+arms had retired from Anatolia. But the fears and fancy of
+nations ascribed to the ambitious Tamerlane a new design of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span>
+vast and romantic compass; a design of subduing Egypt and
+Africa, marching from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean, entering
+Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, after imposing his yoke
+on the kingdoms of Christendom, of returning home by the
+deserts of Russia and Tartary. This remote, and perhaps
+imaginary, danger was averted by the submission of the Sultan
+of Egypt, the honors of the prayer and the coin attested at
+Cairo the supremacy of Timur; and a rare gift of a giraffe, or camelopard,
+and nine ostriches, represented at Samarkand the
+tribute of the African world. Our imagination is not less
+astonished by the portrait of a Mongol, who, in his camp before
+Smyrna, meditates, and almost accomplishes, the invasion of
+the Chinese empire. Timur was urged to this enterprise by
+national honor and religious zeal. He received a perfect map
+and description of the unknown regions, from the source of
+Irtysh to the Wall of China. During the preparations, the
+Emperor achieved the final conquest of Georgia; passed the
+winter on the banks of the Araxes; appeased the troubles of
+Persia; and slowly returned to his capital, after a campaign
+of four years and nine months.</p>
+
+<p>On the throne of Samarkand he displayed, in a short repose,
+his magnificence and power; listened to the complaints of the
+people; distributed a just measure of rewards and punishments;
+employed his riches in the architecture of palaces and temples;
+and gave audience to the ambassadors of Egypt, Arabia, India,
+Tartary, Russia, and Spain, the last of whom presented a
+suit of tapestry which eclipsed the pencil of the oriental artists.
+A general indulgence was proclaimed; every law was relaxed,
+every pleasure was allowed; the people was free, the sovereign
+was idle; and the historian of Timur may remark that, after
+devoting fifty years to the attainment of empire, the only happy
+period of his life was the two months in which he ceased to
+exercise his power.</p>
+
+<p>But he soon awakened to the cares of government and war.
+The standard was unfurled for the invasion of China; the emirs
+made their report of two hundred thousand, the select and
+veteran soldiers of Iran and Turan; their baggage and provisions
+were transported by five hundred great wagons and an
+immense train of horses and camels; and the troops might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span>
+prepare for a long absence, since more than six months were
+employed in the tranquil journey of a caravan from Samarkand
+to Peking. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could
+retard the impatience of Timur; he mounted on horseback,
+passed the Sihun on the ice, marched seventy-six parasangs
+(three hundred miles) from his capital, and pitched his last camp
+in the neighborhood of Otrar, where he was expected by the
+angel of death. Fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water
+accelerated the progress of his fever; and the conqueror of
+Asia expired in the seventieth year of his age, 1405, thirty-five
+years after he had ascended the throne of Zagatai. His
+designs were lost; his armies were disbanded; China was saved;
+and, fourteen years after his decease, the most powerful of his
+children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce to the
+court of Peking.</p>
+
+<p>The fame of Timur has pervaded the East and West; his
+posterity is still invested with the imperial title; and the admiration
+of his subjects, who revered him almost as a deity, may be
+justified in some degree by the praise or confession of his bitterest
+enemies. Although he was lame of a hand and foot, his form
+and stature were not unworthy of his rank; and his vigorous
+health, so essential to himself and to the world, was corroborated
+by temperance and exercise. In his familiar discourse he was
+grave and modest; and if he was ignorant of the Arabic language,
+he spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish
+idioms. It was his delight to converse with the learned on
+topics of history and science; and the amusement of his leisure
+hours was the game of chess, which he improved or corrupted
+with new refinements.</p>
+
+<p>In his religion he was a zealous, though not perhaps an orthodox,
+Mussulman; but his sound understanding may tempt
+us to believe that a superstitious reverence for omens and prophecies,
+for saints and astrologers, was only affected as an instrument
+of policy. In the government of a vast empire, he stood
+alone and absolute, without a rebel to oppose his power, a favorite
+to seduce his affections, or a minister to mislead his judgment.</p>
+
+<p>Timur might boast that at his accession to the throne Asia
+was the prey of anarchy and rapine, while under his prosperous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
+monarchy a child, fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse
+of gold from the East to the West. Such was his confidence
+of merit that from this reformation he derived an excuse for
+his victories and a title to universal dominion. The four following
+observations will serve to appreciate his claim to the
+public gratitude; and perhaps we shall conclude that the Mongol
+Emperor was rather the scourge than the benefactor of
+mankind. If some partial disorders, some local oppressions,
+were healed by the sword of Timur, the remedy was far more
+pernicious than the disease. By their rapine, cruelty, and discord
+the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict their subjects;
+but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of the reformer.
+The ground which had been occupied by flourishing
+cities was often marked by his abominable trophies&mdash;by columns,
+or pyramids of human heads. Astrakhan, Karizme, Delhi,
+Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Bursa, Smyrna, and a
+thousand others were sacked or burned or utterly destroyed
+in his presence and by his troops; and perhaps his conscience
+would have been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared to
+number the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the
+establishment of peace and order. His most destructive wars
+were rather inroads than conquests. He invaded Turkestan,
+Kiptchak, Russia, Hindustan, Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and
+Georgia, without a hope or a desire of preserving those distant
+provinces. From thence he departed laden with spoil; but he
+left behind him neither troops to awe the contumacious nor
+magistrates to protect the obedient natives. When he had
+broken the fabric of their ancient government, he abandoned
+them in their evils which his invasion had aggravated or caused;
+nor were these evils compensated by any present or possible
+benefits. The kingdoms of Transoxiana and Persia were the
+proper field which he labored to cultivate and adorn as the
+perpetual inheritance of his family. But his peaceful labors
+were often interrupted, and sometimes blasted, by the absence
+of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the Volga or the
+Ganges, his servants, and even his sons, forgot their master
+and their duty. The public and private injuries were poorly
+redressed by the tardy rigor or inquiry and punishment; and
+we must be content to praise the <i>Institutions</i> of Timur as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>
+specious idea of a perfect monarchy. Whatsoever might be the
+blessings of his administration, they evaporated with his life.
+To reign, rather than to govern, was the ambition of his children
+and grandchildren&mdash;the enemies of each other and of the people.
+A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by Sharokh,
+his youngest son; but after his decease the scene was again involved
+in darkness and blood; and before the end of a century
+Transoxiana and Persia were trampled by the Usbegs from the
+north, and the Turcomans of the black and white sheep.
+The race of Timur would have been extinct if a hero, his descendant
+in the fifth degree, had not fled before the Usbeg arms
+to the conquest of Hindustan. His successors&mdash;the great Mongols&mdash;extended
+their sway from the mountains of Cashmere to
+Cape Comorin, and from Kandahar to the Gulf of Bengal.
+Since the reign of Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved;
+their treasures of Delhi have been rifled by a Persian robber;
+and the richest of their kingdoms is now possessed by a company
+of Christian merchants, of a remote island in the Northern
+Ocean.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span></p>
+<h2>DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1374</h6>
+
+<h3>J. F. C. HECKER<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">59</a></h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The black death, which originated in Central China about 1333, appeared
+on the Mediterranean littoral in 1347, ravaged the island of Cyprus,
+made the circuit of the Mediterranean countries, spread throughout Europe
+northward as far as Iceland, and in 1357 appeared in Russia, where
+it seems to have been checked by the barrier of the Caucasus.</p>
+
+<p>Scarce had its effects subsided, and the graves of its 25,000,000 victims
+were hardly closed, when it was followed by an epidemic of the
+dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which like a demoniacal plague appeared
+in Germany in 1347, and spread over the whole empire and throughout
+the neighboring countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping,
+furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to the individuals
+affected all the appearance of insanity.</p>
+
+<p>The epidemic was not confined to particular localities, but was propagated
+by the sight of the sufferers, and for over two centuries excited the
+astonishment of contemporaries. The Netherlands and France were
+equally affected; in Italy the disease became known as <i>tarantism</i>, it
+being supposed to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous
+spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism spread by sympathy,
+increasing in severity as it took a wider range; the chief cure was
+music, which seemed to furnish magical means for exorcising the malady
+of the patients.</p>
+
+<p>The epidemic subsided in Central Europe in the seventeenth century,
+but diseases approximating to the original dancing mania have occurred
+at various periods in many parts of Europe, Africa, and the United
+States. Nathaniel Pearce, an eye-witness, who resided nine years in
+Abyssinia early in the nineteenth century, gives a graphic account of a
+similar epidemic there, called <i>tigretier</i>, from the Tigr&eacute; district, in which
+it was most prevalent. In France, from 1727 to 1790, an epidemic prevailed
+among the Convulsionnaires, who received relief from brethren in
+the faith known as Secourists, very much after the rough methods administered
+to the St. John's dancers and to the <i>tarantati</i>. About the
+same period nervous epidemics of a similar character, largely propagated
+by sympathy, were very prevalent in the Shetland Islands and in various
+parts of Scotland, but were for the most part eradicated by cold-water
+immersion.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span>
+An epidemic of <i>chorea sancti Viti</i>, recorded by Felix Robertson of
+Tennessee (Philadelphia, 1805), found vent in an unparalleled blaze of
+enthusiastic religion, which spread with lightning-like rapidity in almost
+every part of Tennessee and Kentucky, and in various parts of Virginia,
+in 1800, being distinguished by uncontrollable and infectious muscular
+contractions, gesticulations, crying, laughing, shouting, and singing. To
+similar epidemics are attributed the uncontrollable acts which, till late in
+the nineteenth century, were a feature of North American camp meetings
+for divine service in the open air, and which exhibited the same form of
+mental disturbance as did the St. Vitus' dance in medi&aelig;val Europe.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_s.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="S" />O early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women
+were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany,
+and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to
+the public both in the streets and in the churches the following
+strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and, appearing
+to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing,
+regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in wild
+delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion.
+They then complained of extreme oppression, and
+groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in
+cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again
+recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.
+This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of
+the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings, but the
+bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner,
+by thumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While
+dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external
+impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions,
+their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked
+out; and some of them afterward asserted that they felt as if
+they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged
+them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the
+heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary,
+according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and
+variously reflected in their imaginations.</p>
+
+<p>Where the disease was completely developed, the attack
+commenced with epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to
+the ground senseless, panting and laboring for breath. They
+foamed at the mouth, and suddenly springing up began their
+dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady doubtless made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
+its appearance very variously, and was modified by temporary
+or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but
+imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they
+were to confound their observation of natural events with their
+notions of the world of spirits.</p>
+
+<p>It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had
+spread from Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over
+the neighboring Netherlands. In Li&egrave;ge, Utrecht, Tongres, and
+many other towns of Belgium the dancers appeared with garlands
+in their hair, and their waists girt with cloths, that they
+might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive immediate
+relief on the attack of the tympany. This bandage was, by the
+insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight. Many, however, obtained
+more relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers
+of persons ready to administer; for, wherever the dancers
+appeared, the people assembled in crowds to gratify their curiosity
+with the frightful spectacle. At length the increasing number
+of the affected excited no less anxiety than the attention that
+was paid to them. In towns and villages they took possession of
+the religious houses; processions were everywhere instituted on
+their account and masses were said and hymns were sung, while
+the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one entertained
+the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and
+horror. In Li&egrave;ge the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavored,
+by every means in their power, to allay an evil which
+threatened so much danger to themselves; for the possessed,
+assembling in multitudes, frequently poured forth imprecations
+against them and menaced their destruction. They intimidated
+the people also to such a degree that there was an express ordinance
+issued that no one should make any but square-toed
+shoes, because these fanatics had manifested a morbid dislike to
+the pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediately
+after the "great mortality," in 1350. They were still more irritated
+at the sight of red colors, the influence of which on the disordered
+nerves might lead us to imagine an extraordinary accordance
+between this spasmodic malady and the condition of
+infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this excitement
+was probably connected with apparitions consequent upon their
+convulsions. There were likewise some of them who were unable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>
+to endure the sight of persons weeping. The clergy seemed
+to become daily more and more confirmed in their belief that
+those who were affected were a kind of sectarians, and on this
+account they hastened their exorcisms as much as possible, in
+order that the evil might not spread among the higher classes,
+for hitherto scarcely any but the poor had been attacked, and
+the few people of respectability among the laity and clergy who
+were to be found among them were persons whose natural frivolity
+was unable to withstand the excitement of novelty, even
+though it proceeded from a demoniacal influence. Some of the
+affected had indeed themselves declared, when under the influence
+of priestly forms of exorcism, that, if the demons had been
+allowed only a few weeks more time, they would have entered
+the bodies of the nobility and princes, and through these have
+destroyed the clergy. Assertions of this sort, which those possessed
+uttered while in a state which may be compared with that
+of magnetic sleep, obtained general belief, and passed from
+mouth to mouth with wonderful additions. The priesthood
+were, on this account, so much the more zealous in their endeavors
+to anticipate every dangerous excitement of the people, as if
+the existing order of things could have been seriously threatened
+by such incoherent ravings. Their exertions were effectual, for
+exorcism was a powerful remedy in the fourteenth century; or
+it might perhaps be that this wild infatuation terminated in consequence
+of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from it; at
+all events, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's
+dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium.
+The evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way
+altogether to such feeble attacks.</p>
+
+<p>A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance
+at Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the
+number of those possessed amounted to more than five hundred,
+and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which place are
+said to have been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants
+left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their
+domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial
+city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires
+were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild
+enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>
+availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary
+livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and
+servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those
+possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection.
+Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the
+life the gestures and convulsions of those really affected, roved
+from place to place seeking maintenance and adventures, and
+thus, wherever they went, spreading this disgusting spasmodic
+disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind the susceptible
+are infected as easily by the appearance as by the reality. At last
+it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous guests,
+who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests and
+the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after
+four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these
+impostors, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil.
+In the mean time, when once called into existence, the plague
+crept on, and found abundant food in the tone of thought which
+prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even,
+though in a minor degree, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth,
+causing a permanent disorder of the mind, and exhibiting,
+in those cities to whose inhabitants it was a novelty, scenes
+as strange as they were detestable.</p>
+
+<p>Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague, or St. Vitus'
+dance,<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">60</a> in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span>the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower
+Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected,
+excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior,
+and then by their constantly following the swarms of
+dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the
+streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by
+innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were
+added anxious parents and relations, who came to look after
+those among the misguided multitude who belonged to their
+respective families. Imposture and profligacy played their part
+in this city also, but the morbid delusion itself seems to have
+predominated. On this account religion could only bring provisional
+aid, and therefore the town council benevolently took an
+interest in the afflicted. They divided them into separate parties,
+to each of which they appointed responsible superintendents
+to protect them from harm and perhaps also to restrain their
+turbulence. They were thus conducted on foot and in carriages
+to the chapels of St. Vitus, hear Zabern and Rotestein, where
+priests were in attendance to work upon their misguided minds
+by masses and other religious ceremonies. After divine worship
+was completed, they were led in solemn procession to the altar,
+where they made some small offering of alms, and where it is
+probable that many were, through the influence of devotion
+and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable aberration.
+It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing mania
+did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him
+alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition
+a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of
+human skill. The personal history of St. Vitus is by no means
+unimportant in this matter. He was a Sicilian youth, who, together
+with Modestus and Crescentia, suffered martyrdom at
+the time of the persecution of the Christians, under Diocletian,
+in the year 303. The legends respecting him are obscure, and
+he would certainly have been passed over without notice among
+the innumerable apocryphal martyrs of the first centuries, had
+not the transfer of his body to St. Denis, and thence, in the year
+836, to Corvey, raised him to a higher rank. From this time
+forth, it may be supposed that many miracles were manifested
+at his new sepulchre, which were of essential service in confirming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span>
+the Roman faith among the Germans, and St. Vitus was
+soon ranked among the fourteen saintly helpers (<i>Nothhelfer</i> or
+<i>Apotheker</i>). His altars were multiplied, and the people had recourse
+to them in all kinds of distresses, and revered him as a
+powerful intercessor. As the worship of these saints was, however,
+at that time stripped of all historical connections, which
+were purposely obliterated by the priesthood, a legend was invented
+at the beginning of the fifteenth century, or perhaps even
+so early as the fourteenth, that St. Vitus had, just before he bent
+his neck to the sword, prayed to God that he might protect from
+the dancing mania all those who should solemnize the day of
+his commemoration, and fast upon its eve, and that thereupon
+a voice from heaven was heard, saying, "Vitus, thy prayer is
+accepted." Thus St. Vitus became the patron saint of those
+afflicted with the dancing plague, as St. Martin of Tours was at
+one time the succorer of persons in smallpox.</p>
+
+
+<p>The connection which John the Baptist had with the dancing
+mania of the fourteenth century was of a totally different
+character. He was originally far from being a protecting saint
+to those who were attacked, or one who would be likely to give
+them relief from a malady considered as the work of the devil.
+On the contrary, the manner in which he was worshipped afforded
+an important and very evident cause for its development.
+From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the
+fourth century, St. John's Day was solemnized with all sorts of
+strange and rude customs, of which the originally mystical meaning
+was variously disfigured among different nations by super-added
+relics of heathenism. Thus the Germans transferred to
+the festival of St. John's Day an ancient heathen usage, the kindling
+of the <i>Nodfyr</i>, which was forbidden them by St. Boniface,
+and the belief subsists even to the present day that people and
+animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke,
+are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as
+if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have
+originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the
+earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were
+the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian
+festival. At the period of which we are treating, however,
+the Germans were not the only people who gave way to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>
+ebullitions of fanaticism in keeping the festival of St. John the
+Baptist. Similar customs were also to be found among the nations
+of Southern Europe and of Asia,<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">61</a> and it is more than probable
+that the Greeks transferred to the festival of John the Baptist,
+who is also held in high esteem among the Mahometans, a
+part of their Bacchanalian mysteries, an absurdity of a kind
+which it but too frequently met with in human affairs. How far
+a remembrance of the history of St. John's death may have had
+an influence on this occasion we would leave learned theologians
+to decide. It is of importance here to add only that in
+Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe, where
+Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity
+against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting
+saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady.
+In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition,
+historical connection is not to be found.</p>
+
+<p>When we observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle
+appeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths,
+the conjecture is probable that the wild revels of St. John's Day,
+<span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1374, gave rise to this mental plague, which thenceforth
+has visited so many thousands with incurable aberration of mind
+and disgusting distortions of body.</p>
+
+<p>This is rendered so much the more probable because some
+months previously the districts in the neighborhood of the Rhine
+and the Maine had met with great disasters. So early as February
+both these rivers had overflowed their banks to a great
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span>extent; the walls of the town of Cologne, on the side next the
+Rhine, had fallen down, and a great many villages had been
+reduced to the utmost distress. To this was added the miserable
+condition of Western and Southern Germany. Neither law nor
+edict could suppress the incessant feuds of the barons, and in
+Franconia especially the ancient times of club law appeared to
+be revived. Security of property there was none; arbitrary will
+everywhere prevailed; corruption of morals and rude power
+rarely met with even a feeble opposition; whence it arose that
+the cruel, but lucrative, persecutions of the Jews were in many
+places still practised, through the whole of this century, with
+their wonted ferocity. Thus, throughout the western parts of
+Germany, and especially in the districts bordering on the Rhine,
+there was a wretched and oppressed populace; and if we take
+into consideration that among their numerous bands many
+wandered about whose consciences were tormented with the
+recollection of the crimes which they had committed during the
+prevalence of the black plague, we shall comprehend how their
+despair sought relief in the intoxication of an artificial delirium.
+There is hence good ground for supposing that the frantic celebration
+of the festival of St. John, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1374, only served to
+bring to a crisis a malady which had been long impending; and
+if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless usage,
+which like many others had but served to keep up superstition,
+could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into
+account the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences
+of wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many
+were debilitated by hunger and bad food, were precisely the
+parts which in most cases were attacked with excruciating pain,
+and the tympanitic state of the intestines points out to the intelligent
+physician an origin of the disorder which is well worth
+consideration.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>The dancing mania of the year 1374 was, in fact, no new disease,
+but a phenomenon well known in the Middle Ages, of which
+many wondrous stories were traditionally current among the
+people. In the year 1237, upward of a hundred children were
+said to have been suddenly seized with this disease at Erfurt,
+and to have proceeded dancing and jumping along the road to
+Arnstadt. When they arrived at that place they fell exhausted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>
+to the ground, and, according to an account of an old chronicle,
+many of them, after they were taken home by their parents,
+died, and the rest remained affected to the end of their lives
+with the permanent tremor. Another occurrence was related
+to have taken place on the Mosel bridge at Utrecht, on June
+17, 1278, when two hundred fanatics began to dance, and would
+not desist until a priest passed who was carrying the host to a
+person that was sick, upon which, as if in punishment of their
+crime, the bridge gave way, and they were all drowned. A similar
+event also occurred, so early as the year 1027, near the convent
+church of Kolbig, not far from Bernburg. According to an
+oft-repeated tradition, eighteen peasants, some of whose names
+are still preserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on
+Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the church-yard,
+whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them,
+that they should dance and scream for a whole year without
+ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled,
+so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into
+the earth, and remained the whole time without nourishment,
+until they were finally released by the intercession of two pious
+bishops. It is said that upon this they fell into a deep sleep,
+which lasted three days, and that four of them died; the rest
+continuing to suffer all their lives from a trembling of their limbs.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">62</a>
+It is not worth while to separate what may have been true and
+what the addition of crafty priests in this strangely distorted
+story. It is sufficient that it was believed, and related with astonishment
+and horror, throughout the Middle Ages, so that,
+when there was any exciting cause for this delirious raving, and
+wild rage for dancing, it failed not to produce its effects upon
+men whose thoughts were given up to a belief in wonders and
+apparitions.</p>
+
+<p>This disposition of mind, altogether so peculiar to the
+Middle Ages, and which, happily for mankind, has yielded to
+an improved state of civilization and the diffusion of popular
+instruction, accounts for the origin and long duration of this
+extraordinary mental disorder. The good sense of the people
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span>recoiled with horror and aversion from this heavy plague, which,
+whenever malevolent persons wished to curse their bitterest
+enemies and adversaries, was long after used as a malediction.<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">63</a>
+The indignation also that was felt by the people at large against
+the immorality of the age was proved by their ascribing this
+frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste
+priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after
+years, for this desecration of the sacrament administered by
+unholy hands. We have already mentioned what perils the
+priests in the Netherlands incurred from this belief. They now,
+indeed, endeavored to hasten their reconciliation with the irritated
+and at that time very degenerate people by exorcisms,
+which, with some, procured them greater respect than ever, because
+they thus visibly restored thousands of those who were
+affected. In general, however, there prevailed a want of confidence
+in their efficacy, and then the sacred rites had as little
+power in arresting the progress of this deeply rooted malady as
+the prayers and holy services subsequently had at the altars of
+the greatly revered martyr St. Vitus. We may, therefore, ascribe
+it to accident merely, and to a certain aversion to this demoniacal
+disease, which seemed to lie beyond the reach of human
+skill, that we meet with but few and imperfect notices of
+the St. Vitus' dance in the second half of the fifteenth century.
+The highly colored descriptions of the sixteenth century contradict
+the notion that this mental plague had in any degree diminished
+in its severity, and not a single fact is to be found which
+supports the opinion that any one of the essential symptoms of
+the disease, not even excepting the tympany, had disappeared,
+or that the disorder itself had become milder in its attacks. The
+physicians never, as it seems, throughout the whole of the fifteenth
+century, undertook the treatment of the dancing mania,
+which, according to the prevailing notions, appertained exclusively
+to the servants of the Church. Against demoniacal disorders
+they had no remedies, and though some at first did promulgate
+the opinion that the malady had its origin in natural
+circumstances, such as a hot temperament, and other causes
+named in the phraseology of the schools, yet these opinions were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>
+the less examined, as it did not appear worth while to divide
+with a jealous priesthood the care of a host of fanatical vagabonds
+and beggars.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that
+the St. Vitus' dance was made the subject of medical research,
+and stripped of its unhallowed character as a work of demons.
+This was effected by Paracelsus, that mighty, but as yet scarcely
+comprehended, reformer of medicine, whose aim it was to withdraw
+diseases from the pale of miraculous interpositions and
+saintly influences, and explain their causes upon principles deduced
+from his knowledge of the human frame. "We will not,
+however, admit that the saints have power to inflict diseases, and
+that these ought to be named after them, although many there
+are who in their theology lay great stress on this supposition,
+ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle
+talk. We dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported
+by symptoms, but only by faith, a thing which is not human,
+whereon the gods themselves set no value."</p>
+
+<p>Such were the words which Paracelsus addressed to his contemporaries,
+who were as yet incapable of appreciating doctrines
+of this sort; for the belief in enchantment still remained everywhere
+unshaken, and faith in the world of spirits still held men's
+minds in so close a bondage that thousands were, according to
+their own conviction, given up as a prey to the devil; while, at
+the command of religion as well as of law, countless piles were
+lighted, by the flames of which human society was to be purified.</p>
+
+<p>Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus' dance into three kinds:
+First, that which arises from imagination (<i>Vitista</i>, <i>chorea imaginativa</i>,
+<i>&aelig;stimativa</i>), by which the original dancing plague is to
+be understood; secondly, that which arises from sensual desires,
+depending on the will (<i>chorea lasciva</i>); thirdly, that which
+arises from corporeal causes (<i>chorea naturalis</i>, <i>coacta</i>), which,
+according to a strange notion of his own, he explained by maintaining
+that in certain vessels which are susceptible of an internal
+pruriency, and thence produce laughter, the blood is set in
+commotion, in consequence of an alteration in the vital spirits,
+whereby involuntary fits of intoxicating joy, and a propensity to
+dance, are occasioned. To this notion he was, no doubt, led
+from having observed a milder form of St. Vitus' dance, not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>
+uncommon in his time, which was accompanied by involuntary
+laughter, and which bore a resemblance to the hysterical laughter
+of the moderns, except that it was characterized by more
+pleasurable sensations, and by an extravagant propensity to
+dance. There was no howling, screaming, and jumping, as in
+the severer form; neither was the disposition to dance by any
+means insuperable. Patients thus affected, although they had
+not a complete control over their understandings, yet were sufficiently
+self-possessed, during the attack, to obey the directions
+which they received. There were even some among them who
+did not dance at all, but only felt an involuntary impulse to allay
+the internal sense of disquietude, which is the usual forerunner
+of an attack of this kind, by laughter, and quick walking carried
+to the extent of producing fatigue. This disorder, so different
+from the original type, evidently approximates to the modern
+chorea, or rather is in perfect accordance with it, even to the
+less essential symptom of laughter. A mitigation in the form of
+the dancing mania had thus clearly taken place at the commencement
+of the sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>On the communication of the St. Vitus' dance by sympathy,
+Paracelsus, in his peculiar language, expresses himself with great
+spirit, and shows a profound knowledge of the nature of sensual
+impressions, which find their way to the heart&mdash;the seat of joys
+and emotions&mdash;which overpower the opposition of reason; and
+while "all other qualities and natures" are subdued, incessantly
+impel the patient, in consequence of his original compliance,
+and his all-conquering imagination, to imitate what he has seen.
+On his treatment of the disease we cannot bestow any great
+praise, but must be content with the remark that it was in conformity
+with the notions of the age in which he lived. For the
+first kind, which often originated in passionate excitement, he
+had a mental remedy, the efficacy of which is not to be despised,
+if we estimate its value in connection with the prevalent opinions
+of those times. The patient was to make an image of himself
+in wax or resin, and by an effort of thought to concentrate all
+his blasphemies and sins in it. "Without the intervention of
+any other person, to set his whole mind and thoughts concerning
+these oaths in the image;" and when he had succeeded in
+this, he was to burn the image, so that not a particle of it should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
+remain.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">64</a> In all this there was no mention made of St. Vitus, or
+any of the other mediatory saints, which is accounted for by the
+circumstance, that, at this time, an open rebellion against the
+Romish Church had begun, and the worship of saints was by
+many rejected as idolatrous. For the second kind of St. Vitus'
+dance, Paracelsus recommended harsh treatment and strict
+fasting. He directed that the patients should be deprived of
+their liberty, placed in solitary confinement, and made to sit in
+an uncomfortable place, until their misery brought them to their
+senses and to a feeling of penitence. He then permitted them
+gradually to return to their accustomed habits. Severe corporal
+chastisement was not omitted; but, on the other hand, angry
+resistance on the part of the patient was to be sedulously avoided,
+on the ground that it might increase his malady, or even destroy
+him; moreover, where it seemed proper, Paracelsus allayed the
+excitement of the nerves by immersion in cold water. On the
+treatment of the third kind we shall not here enlarge. It was to
+be effected by all sorts of wonderful remedies, composed of the
+quintessences; and it would require, to render it intelligible, a
+more extended exposition of peculiar principles than suits our
+present purpose.</p>
+
+<p>About this time the St. Vitus' dance began to decline, so
+that milder forms of it appeared more frequently, while the severer
+cases became more rare; and even in these, some of the
+important symptoms gradually disappeared. Paracelsus makes
+no mention of the tympanites as taking place after the attacks,
+although it may occasionally have occurred; and Schenck von
+Graffenberg, a celebrated physician of the latter half of the sixteenth
+century, speaks of this disease as having been frequent
+only in the time of his forefathers.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span></p>
+<h2>ELECTION OF ANTIPOPE CLEMENT VII</h2>
+
+<h3>BEGINNING OF THE GREAT SCHISM</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1378</h6>
+
+<h3>HENRY HART MILMAN</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In 1308 Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, under the influence of King
+Philip the Fair, of France, transferred the papal chair from Rome to
+Avignon, a possession of the holy see beyond the Alps, in Philip's dominions.
+The sojourn there of Clement and his successors, which continued
+until 1376, is known as the "Babylonish captivity" of the popes.</p>
+
+<p>Rome, from the first, was angry at this loss of supremacy, and aimed
+at recovering her prestige; and throughout the Christian world&mdash;France
+alone excepted&mdash;it was regarded as a scandal that the chair of St. Peter
+should rest on any soil but that of the Eternal City; but the French
+kings, and the cardinals of France&mdash;outnumbering all others in the sacred
+college&mdash;were determined to retain the pontifical seat in their own territory.</p>
+
+<p>During the pontificate of Gregory XI (1371-1378) Italy was torn by civil
+dissensions; the "free companies"&mdash;bands of organized marauders&mdash;ravaged
+the country with fire and sword, plundering Guelf and Ghibelline
+alike. Gregory's legates in the government of the ecclesiastical
+states rendered themselves so odious to the people by their immorality
+and rapacity that a league of the more powerful political factions was
+formed for throwing off the yoke of the "absentee" papal rulers. This
+was the beginning of the War of Liberation (1375) that was to shake the
+papal power in Italy to its very foundations.</p>
+
+<p>Gregory saw that, in order to preserve even a vestige of temporal
+power in the Italian states, he must act with crushing vigor. He therefore
+sent the cardinal legate, Robert, of Geneva&mdash;afterward Antipope
+Clement VII&mdash;into Italy with a company of Breton adventurers dreaded
+for their ferocity, and trained to plunder in the terrible wars of France.
+In spite of the atrocities committed by Robert and his hirelings, the revolt
+continued with unabated fury, and at last Gregory was constrained
+to return in person to Italy with the purpose of pacifying the turbulent
+forces. He entered Rome, January 17, 1377; but after a year of futile
+effort he died, leaving the confusion worse than he found it.</p>
+
+<p>Since, according to ecclesiastical law, the election of a new pope must
+be held at the place of the last pontiff's decease, great clamor arose
+among the Romans, whose demands were seconded throughout Europe,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>for the election of a Roman pope and the ending of the "Babylonish captivity."
+The history of the Great Schism and election of the rival pontiffs
+is nowhere to be found in better form of narrative than that of
+Milman, which here follows.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_g.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="G" />REGORY XI had hardly expired when Rome burst out
+into a furious tumult. A Roman pope, at least an Italian
+pope, was the universal outcry. The conclave must be overawed;
+the hateful domination of a foreign, a French pontiff,
+must be broken up, and forever. This was not unforeseen. Before
+his death Gregory XI had issued a bull conferring the amplest
+powers on the cardinals to choose, according to their wisdom,
+the time and the place for the election. It manifestly
+contemplated their retreat from the turbulent streets of Rome to
+some place where their deliberations would not be overborne,
+and the predominant French interest would maintain its superiority.
+On the other hand there were serious and not groundless
+apprehensions that the fierce Breton and Gascon bands, at the
+command of the French cardinals, might dictate to the conclave.
+The Romans not only armed their civic troops, but sent to Tivoli,
+Velletri, and the neighboring cities; a strong force was mustered
+to keep the foreigners in check.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the interval between the funeral of Gregory
+and the opening of the conclave, the cardinals were either too
+jealously watched, or thought it imprudent to attempt flight.
+Sixteen cardinals were present at Rome, one Spaniard, eleven
+French, four Italians. The ordinary measures were taken for
+opening the conclave in the palace near St. Peter's. Five Romans,
+two ecclesiastics and three laymen, and three Frenchmen
+were appointed to wait upon and to guard the conclave. The
+Bishop of Marseilles represented the great chamberlain, who
+holds the supreme authority during the vacancy of the popedom.
+The chamberlain, the Archbishop of Arles, brother of the Cardinal
+of Limoges, had withdrawn into the castle of St. Angelo,
+to secure his own person and to occupy that important fortress.</p>
+
+<p>The nine solemn days fully elapsed, on the 7th of April they
+assembled for the conclave. At that instant (inauspicious
+omen!) a terrible flash of lightning, followed by a stunning peal
+of thunder, struck through the hall, burning and splitting some
+of the furniture. The hall of conclave was crowded by a fierce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
+rabble, who refused to retire. After about an hour's strife, the
+Bishop of Marseilles, by threats, by persuasion, or by entreaty,
+had expelled all but about forty wild men, armed to the teeth.
+These ruffians rudely and insolently searched the whole building;
+they looked under the beds, they examined the places of
+retreat. They would satisfy themselves whether any armed men
+were concealed, whether there was any hole, or even drain
+through which the cardinals could escape. All the time they
+shouted: "A Roman pope! we will have a Roman pope!"
+Those without echoed back the savage yell. Before long appeared
+two ecclesiastics, announcing themselves as delegated by
+the commonalty of Rome; they demanded to speak with the
+cardinals. The cardinals dared not refuse. The Romans represented,
+in firm but not disrespectful language, that for seventy
+years the holy Roman people had been without their pastor, the
+supreme head of Christendom. In Rome were many noble and
+wise ecclesiastics equal to govern the Church: if not in Rome,
+there were such men in Italy.</p>
+
+<p>They intimated that so great were the fury and determination
+of the people that, if the conclave should resist, there might be a
+general massacre, in which probably they themselves, assuredly
+the cardinals, would perish. The cardinals might hear from
+every quarter around them the cry: "A Roman pope! if not a
+Roman, an Italian!" The cardinals replied, that such aged and
+reverend men must know the rules of the conclave; that no
+election could be by requisition, favor, fear, or tumult, but by
+the interposition of the Holy Ghost. To reiterated persuasions
+and menaces they only said: "We are in your power; you may
+kill us, but we must act according to God's ordinance. To-morrow
+we celebrate the mass for the descent of the Holy Ghost; as
+the Holy Ghost directs, so shall we do." Some of the French
+uttered words which sounded like defiance. The populace
+cried: "If ye persist to do despite to Christ, if we have not a
+Roman pope, we will hew these cardinals and Frenchmen in
+pieces."</p>
+
+<p>At length the Bishop of Marseilles was able to entirely clear
+the hall. The cardinals sat down to a plentiful repast; the
+doors were finally closed. But all the night through they heard
+in the streets the unceasing clamor: "A Roman pope, a Roman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>
+pope!" Toward the morning the tumult became more fierce and
+dense. Strange men had burst into the belfry of St. Peter's;
+the clanging bells tolled as if all Rome was on fire.</p>
+
+<p>Within the conclave, the tumult, if less loud and clamorous,
+was hardly less general. The confusion without and terror
+within did not allay the angry rivalry, or suspend that subtle
+play of policy peculiar to the form of election. The French interest
+was divided; within this circle there was another circle.
+The single diocese of Limoges, favored as it had been by more
+than one pope, had almost strength to dictate to the conclave.
+The Limousins put forward the Cardinal de St. Eustache.
+Against these the leader was the Cardinal Robert of Geneva,
+whose fierce and haughty demeanor and sanguinary acts as
+legate had brought so much of its unpopularity on the administration
+of Gregory XI. With Robert were the four Italians and
+three French cardinals. Rather than a Limousin, Robert would
+even consent to an Italian. They on the one side, the Limousins
+on the other, had met secretly before the conclave: the eight
+had sworn not on any account to submit to the election of a
+traitorous Limousin.</p>
+
+<p>All the sleepless night the cardinals might hear the din at the
+gate, the yells of the people, the tolling of the bells. There was
+constant passing and repassing from each other's chamber,
+intrigues, altercations, man&oelig;uvres, proposals advanced and
+rejected, promises of support given and withdrawn. Many
+names were put up. Of the Romans within the conclave two
+only were named, the old Cardinal of St. Peter's, the Cardinal
+Jacobo Orsini. The Limousins advanced in turn almost every
+one of their faction; no one but himself thought of Robert of
+Geneva.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning the disturbance without waxed more terrible.
+A vain attempt was made to address the populace by the three
+cardinal priors; they were driven from the windows with loud
+derisive shouts, "A Roman! A Roman!" For now the alternative
+of an Italian had been abandoned; a Roman, none but a
+Roman, would content the people. The madness of intoxication
+was added to the madness of popular fury. The rabble had
+broken open the Pope's cellar and drunk his rich wines. In the
+conclave the wildest projects were started. The Cardinal Orsini<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span>
+was to dress up a Minorite friar (probably a Spiritual) in the
+papal robes, to show him to the people, and so for themselves to
+effect their escape to some safe place and proceed to a legitimate
+election. The cardinals, from honor or from fear, shrunk from
+this trick.</p>
+
+<p>At length both parties seemed to concur. Each claimed
+credit for first advancing the name&mdash;which most afterward
+repudiated&mdash;of the Archbishop of Bari, a man of repute for
+theologic and legal erudition, an Italian, but a subject of the
+Queen of Naples, who was also Countess of Provence. They
+came to the nomination. The Cardinal of Florence proposed
+the Cardinal of St. Peter's. The Cardinal of Limoges arose:
+"The Cardinal of St. Peter's is too old. The Cardinal of Florence
+is of a city at war with the holy see. I reject the Cardinal
+of Milan as the subject of the Visconti, the most deadly enemy
+of the Church. The Cardinal Orsini is too young, and we must
+not yield to the clamor of the Romans. I vote for Bartholomew
+Prignani, Archbishop of Bari." All was acclamation; Orsini
+alone stood out; he aspired to be the pope of the Romans.</p>
+
+<p>But it was too late; the mob was thundering at the gates,
+menacing death to the cardinals, if they had not immediately a
+Roman pontiff. The feeble defences sounded as if they were
+shattering down; the tramp of the populace was almost heard
+within the hall. They forced or persuaded the aged Cardinal of
+St. Peter's to make a desperate effort to save their lives. He
+appeared at the window, hastily attired in what either was or
+seemed to be the papal stole and mitre. There was a jubilant
+and triumphant cry: "We have a Roman pope, the Cardinal of
+St. Peter's. Long live Rome! Long live St. Peter!" The populace
+became even more frantic with joy than before with wrath.
+One band hastened to the Cardinal's palace, and, according to
+the strange usage, broke in, threw the furniture into the streets,
+and sacked it from top to bottom. Those around the hall of
+conclave, aided by the connivance of some of the cardinals' servants
+within, or by more violent efforts of their own, burst in in
+all quarters. The supposed pope was surrounded by eager adorers;
+they were at his feet; they pressed his swollen, gouty hands
+till he shrieked from pain, and began to protest, in the strongest
+language, that he was not the pope.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>The indignation of the populace at this disappointment was
+aggravated by an unlucky confusion of names. The Archbishop
+was mistaken for John of Bari, of the bedchamber of the late
+pope, a man of harsh manners and dissolute life, an object of
+general hatred. Five of the cardinals, Robert of Geneva, Acquasparta,
+Viviers, Poitou, and De Verny, were seized in their
+attempt to steal away, and driven back, amid contemptuous
+hootings, by personal violence. Night came on again; the populace,
+having pillaged all the provisions in the conclave, grew
+weary of their own excesses. The cardinals fled on all sides.
+Four left the city; Orsini and St. Eustache escaped to Vicovaro,
+Robert of Geneva to Zagarolo, St. Angelo to Guardia; six,
+Limoges, D'Aigrefeuille, Poitou, Viviers, Brittany, and Marmoutiers,
+to the castle of St. Angelo; Florence, Milan, Montmayeur,
+Gland&egrave;ve, and Luna, to their own strong fortresses.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope lay concealed in the Vatican. In the morning the
+five cardinals in Rome were assembled round him. A message
+was sent to the bannerets of Rome, announcing his election.
+The six cardinals in St. Angelo were summoned; they were
+hardly persuaded to leave their place of security; but without
+their presence the Archbishop would not declare his assent to
+his elevation. The Cardinal of Florence, as dean, presented the
+Pope-elect to the sacred college, and discoursed on the text,
+"Such ought he to be, an undefiled high-priest." The Archbishop
+began a long harangue, "Fear and trembling have come
+upon me, the horror of great darkness." The Cardinal of Florence
+cut short the ill-timed sermon, demanding whether he
+accepted the pontificate. The Archbishop gave his assent; he
+took the name of Urban VI. <i>Te Deum</i> was intoned; he was
+lifted to the throne. The fugitives returned to Rome. Urban
+VI was crowned on Easter Day, in the Church of St. John
+Lateran. All the cardinals were present at the august ceremony.
+They announced the election of Urban VI to their brethren who
+had remained in Avignon. Urban himself addressed the usual
+encyclic letters, proclaiming his elevation, to all the prelates in
+Christendom.</p>
+
+<p>None could determine how far the nomination of the Archbishop
+of Bari was free and uncontrolled by the terrors of the
+raging populace; but the acknowledgment of Urban VI by all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>
+the cardinals, at his inauguration in the holy office&mdash;their assistance
+at his coronation without protest, when some at least might
+have been safe beyond the walls of Rome&mdash;their acceptance of
+honors, as by the cardinals of Limoges, Poitou, and Aigrefeuille&mdash;the
+homage of all&mdash;might seem to annul all possible irregularity
+in the election, to confirm irrefragably the legitimacy
+of his title.</p>
+
+<p>Not many days had passed, when the cardinals began to
+look with dismay and bitter repentance on their own work. "In
+Urban VI," said a writer of these times (on the side of Urban as
+rightful pontiff), "was verified the proverb&mdash;None is so insolent
+as a low man suddenly raised to power." The high-born,
+haughty, luxurious prelates, both French and Italian, found that
+they had set over themselves a master resolved not only to redress
+the flagrant and inveterate abuses of the college and of the
+hierarchy, but also to force on his reforms in the most hasty and
+insulting way. He did the harshest things in the harshest
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>The Archbishop of Bari, of mean birth, had risen by the
+virtues of a monk. He was studious, austere, humble, a diligent
+reader of the Bible, master of the canon law, rigid in his fasts;
+he wore haircloth next his skin. His time was divided between
+study, prayer, and business, for which he had great aptitude.
+From the poor bishopric of Acherontia he had been promoted
+to the archbishopric of Bari, and had presided over the papal
+chancery in Avignon. The monk broke out at once on his elevation
+in the utmost rudeness and rigor, but the humility
+changed to the most offensive haughtiness. Almost his first act
+was a public rebuke in his chapel to all the bishops present for
+their desertion of their dioceses. He called them perjured
+traitors. The Bishop of Pampeluna boldly repelled the charge;
+he was at Rome, he said, on the affairs of his see. In the full
+consistory Urban preached on the text, "I am the Good Shepherd,"
+and inveighed in a manner not to be mistaken against the
+wealth and luxury of the cardinals. Their voluptuous banquets
+were notorious&mdash;Petrarch had declaimed against them. The
+Pope threatened a sumptuary law that they should have but
+one dish at their table: it was the rule of his own order. He
+was determined to extirpate simony. A cardinal who should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span>
+receive presents he menaced with excommunication. He affected
+to despise wealth. "Thy money perish with thee!" he
+said to a collector of the papal revenue. He disdained to conceal
+the most unpopular schemes; he declared his intention not
+to leave Rome. To the petition of the bannerets of Rome for a
+promotion of cardinals, he openly avowed his design to make so
+large a nomination that the Italians should resume their ascendency
+over the Ultramontanes. The Cardinal of Geneva turned
+pale and left the consistory. Urban declared himself determined
+to do equal justice between man and man, between the
+kings of France and England. The French cardinals, and those
+in the pay of France, heard this with great indignation.</p>
+
+<p>The manners of Urban were even more offensive than his
+acts. "Hold your tongue!" "You have talked long enough!"
+were his common phrases to his mitred counsellors. He called
+the Cardinal Orsini a fool. He charged the Cardinal of St.
+Marcellus of Amiens, on his return from his legation in Tuscany,
+with having robbed the treasures of the Church. The
+charge was not less insulting for its justice. The Cardinal
+of Amiens, instead of allaying the feuds of France and England,
+which it was his holy mission to allay, had inflamed them
+in order to glut his own insatiable avarice by draining the
+wealth of both countries in the Pope's name. "As Archbishop
+of Bari, you lie," was the reply of the high-born Frenchman.
+On one occasion such high words passed with the Cardinal of
+Limoges that but for the interposition of another cardinal the
+Pope would have rushed on him, and there had been a personal
+conflict.</p>
+
+<p>Such were among the stories of the time. Friends and foes
+agree in attributing the schism, at least the immediate schism,
+to the imprudent zeal, the imperiousness, the ungovernable
+temper of Pope Urban. The cardinals among themselves talked
+of him as mad; they began to murmur that it was a compulsory,
+therefore invalid, election.</p>
+
+<p>The French cardinals were now at Anagni: they were
+joined by the Cardinal of Amiens, who had taken no part in the
+election, but who was burning under the insulting words of the
+Pope, perhaps not too eager to render an account of his legation.
+The Pope retired to Tivoli; he summoned the cardinals to that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span>
+city. They answered that they had gone to large expenses
+in laying in provisions and making preparations for their residence
+in Anagni; they had no means to supply a second sojourn
+in Tivoli. The Pope, with his four Italian cardinals,
+passed two important acts as sovereign pontiff. He confirmed
+the election of Wenceslaus, son of Charles IV, to the empire;
+he completed the treaty with Florence by which the republic
+paid a large sum to the see of Rome. The amount was seventy
+thousand florins in the course of the year, one hundred and
+eighty thousand in four years, for the expenses of the war.
+They were relieved from ecclesiastical censures, under which
+this enlightened republic, though Italian, trembled, even from a
+pope of doubtful title. Their awe showed perhaps the weakness
+and dissensions in Florence rather than the papal power.</p>
+
+<p>The cardinals at Anagni sent a summons to their brethren
+inviting them to share in their counsels concerning the compulsory
+election of the successor to Gregory XI. Already the
+opinions of great legists had been taken; some of them, that of
+the famous Baldus, may still be read. He was in favor of the
+validity of the election.</p>
+
+<p>But grave legal arguments and ecclesiastical logic were not
+to decide a contest which had stirred so deeply the passions and
+interests of two great factions. France and Italy were at strife for
+the popedom. The Ultramontane cardinals would not tamely
+abandon a power which had given them rank, wealth, luxury,
+virtually the spiritual supremacy of the world, for seventy years.
+Italy, Rome, would not forego the golden opportunity of resuming
+the long-lost authority. On the 9th of August the cardinals
+at Anagni publicly declared, they announced in encyclic letters
+addressed to the faithful in all Christendom, that the election
+of Urban VI was carried by force and the fear of death; that
+through the same force and fear he had been inaugurated, enthroned,
+and crowned; that he was an apostate, an accursed
+antichrist. They pronounced him a tyrannical usurper of the
+popedom, a wolf that had stolen into the fold. They called upon
+him to descend at once from the throne which he occupied without
+canonical title; if repentant, he might find mercy; if he persisted
+he would provoke the indignation of God, of the apostles
+St. Peter and St. Paul, and all of the saints, for his violation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span>
+the Spouse of Christ, the common Mother of the Faithful. It was
+signed by thirteen cardinals. The more pious and devout were
+shocked at this avowal of cowardice; cardinals who would not
+be martyrs in the cause of truth and of spiritual freedom condemned
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>But letters and appeals to the judgment of the world, and
+awful maledictions, were not their only resources. The fierce
+Breton bands were used to march and to be indulged in their
+worst excesses under the banner of the Cardinal of Geneva. As
+Ultramontanists it was their interest, their inclination, to espouse
+the Ultramontane cause. They arrayed themselves to advance
+and join the cardinals at Anagni. The Romans rose to oppose
+them; a fight took place near the Ponte Salario, three hundred
+Romans lay dead on the field.</p>
+
+<p>Urban VI was as blind to cautious temporal as to cautious
+ecclesiastical policy. Every act of the Pope raised him up new
+enemies. Joanna, Queen of Naples, had hailed the elevation of
+her subject the Archbishop of Bari. Naples had been brilliantly
+illuminated. Shiploads of fruit and wines, and the more solid
+gift of twenty thousand florins, had been her oblations to the
+Pope. Her husband, Otho of Brunswick, had gone to Rome to
+pay his personal homage. His object was to determine in his own
+favor the succession to the realm. The reception of Otho was
+cold and repulsive; he returned in disgust. The Queen eagerly
+listened to suspicions, skilfully awakened, that Urban meditated
+the resumption of the fief of Naples, and its grant to the rival
+house of Hungary. She became the sworn ally of the cardinals
+at Anagni. Honorato Gaetani, Count of Fondi, one of the most
+turbulent barons of the land, demanded of the Pontiff twenty
+thousand florins advanced on loan to Gregory XI. Urban not
+only rejected the claim, declaring it a personal debt of the late
+Pope, not of the holy see, he also deprived Gaetani of his fief, and
+granted it to his mortal enemy, the Count San Severino. Gaetani
+began immediately so seize the adjacent castles in Campania,
+and invited the cardinals to his stronghold at Fondi. The Archbishop
+of Arles, chamberlain of the late Pope, leaving the castle
+of St. Angelo under the guard of a commander who long refused
+all orders from Pope Urban, brought to Anagni the jewels and
+ornaments of the papacy, which had been carried for security<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span>
+to St. Angelo. The prefect of the city, De Vico, Lord of Viterbo,
+had been won over by the Cardinal of Amiens.</p>
+
+<p>The four Italian cardinals still adhered to Pope Urban.
+They labored hard to mediate between the conflicting parties.
+Conferences were held at Zagarolo and other places; when the
+French cardinals had retired to Fondi, the Italians took up their
+quarters at Subiaco. The Cardinal of St. Peter's, worn out with
+age and trouble, withdrew to Rome, and soon after died. He
+left a testamentary document declaring the validity of the election
+of Urban. The French cardinals had declared the election
+void; they were debating the next step. Some suggested the
+appointment of a coadjutor. They were now sure of the support
+of the King of France, who would not easily surrender his
+influence over a pope at Avignon, and of the Queen of Naples,
+estranged by the pride of Urban, and secretly stimulated by the
+Cardinal Orsini, who had not forgiven his own loss of the tiara.
+Yet even now they seemed to shrink from the creation of an
+antipope. Urban precipitated and made inevitable this disastrous
+event. He was now alone; the Cardinal of St. Peter's was
+dead; Florence, Milan, and the Orsini stood aloof; they seemed
+only to wait to be thrown off by Urban, to join the adverse faction.
+Urban at first declared his intention to create nine cardinals;
+he proceeded at once, and without warning, to create
+twenty-six.<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">65</a> By this step the French and Italian cardinals together
+were now but an insignificant minority. They were instantly
+one. All must be risked or all lost.</p>
+
+<p>On September 20th, at Fondi, Robert of Geneva was elected
+pope in the presence of all the cardinals (except St. Peter's) who
+had chosen, inaugurated, enthroned, and for a time obeyed
+Urban VI. The Italians refused to give their suffrages, but entered
+no protest. They retired into their castles and remained
+aloof from the schism. Orsini died before long at Tagliacozzo.
+The qualifications which, according to his partial biographer,
+recommended the Cardinal of Geneva, were rather those of a
+successor to John Hawkwood or to a duke of Milan, than of the
+apostles. Extraordinary activity of body and endurance of fatigue,
+courage which would hazard his life to put down the
+intrusive pope, sagacity and experience in the temporal affairs
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>of the Church; high birth, through which he was allied with most
+of the royal and princely houses of Europe; of austerity, devotion,
+learning, holiness, charity, not a word. He took the name
+of Clement VII; the Italians bitterly taunted the mockery of
+this name, assumed by the captain of the Breton Free Companies&mdash;by
+the author, it was believed, of the massacre at Cesena.</p>
+
+
+<p>So began the schism which divided Western Christendom for
+thirty-eight years. Italy, excepting the kingdom of Joanna of
+Naples, adhered to her native pontiff; Germany and Bohemia
+to the pontiff who had recognized King Wenceslaus as emperor;
+England to the pontiff hostile to France;<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">66</a> Hungary to the pontiff
+who might support her pretentions to Naples; Poland and
+the Northern kingdoms, with Portugal, espoused the same cause.
+France at first stood almost alone in support of her subject, of a
+pope at Avignon instead of at Rome. Scotland only was with
+Clement, because England was with Urban. So Flanders was
+with Urban because France was with Clement. The uncommon
+abilities of Peter di Luna, the Spanish cardinal (afterward better
+known under a higher title), detached successively the Spanish
+kingdoms, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, from allegiance to
+Pope Urban.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span></p>
+<h2>GENOESE SURRENDER TO VENETIANS</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1380</h6>
+
+<h3>HENRY HALLAM</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Prolonged commercial rivalry between Genoa and Venice brought
+them to a state of bitter jealousy which led to furious wars. In the second
+half of the twelfth century Genoa established her power on the Black
+Sea, and aimed at a commercial monopoly in that region. This aroused
+the Venetians to anger and led to open hostilities. The first war growing
+out of these antagonisms between the two republics began in 1257, and
+throughout the rest of the thirteenth century hostilities were almost continuous.</p>
+
+<p>In 1351 the Venetians formed an alliance against Genoa with the
+Greeks and Aragonese, and, in the ensuing war, the advantage gained by
+Genoa was confirmed by a treaty of peace in 1355. But this peace lasted
+only until 1378, when a dispute arose between Genoa and Venice in relation
+to the island of Tenedos, in the &AElig;gean Sea, of which the Venetians
+had taken possession.</p>
+
+<p>The Venetians, having denounced Genoa as false to all its oaths and
+obligations, formally declared war in April, after several acts of hostility
+had occurred in the Levant. Of all the wars between the rival states, this
+was the most remarkable and led to the most important consequences.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_g.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="G" />ENOA did not stand alone in this war. A formidable confederacy
+was raised against Venice, which had given provocation
+to many enemies. Of this Francis Carrara, seignior
+of Padua, and the King of Hungary were the leaders. But the
+principal struggle was, as usual, upon the waves. During the
+winter of 1378 a Genoese fleet kept the sea, and ravaged the
+shores of Dalmatia. The Venetian armament had been weakened
+by an epidemic disease, and when Vittor Pisani, their
+admiral, gave battle to the enemy, he was compelled to fight
+with a hasty conscription of landsmen against the best sailors
+in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Entirely defeated, and taking refuge at Venice with only seven
+galleys, Pisani was cast into prison, as if his ill-fortune had been
+his crime. Meanwhile the Genoese fleet, augmented by a strong
+re&euml;nforcement, rode before the long natural ramparts that separate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>
+the lagunes of Venice from the Adriatic. Six passages intersect
+the islands which constitute this barrier, besides the
+broader outlets of Brondolo and Fossone, through which the
+waters of the Brenta and the Adige are discharged. The Lagoon
+itself, as is well known, consists of extremely shallow water,
+unnavigable for any vessel except along the course of artificial
+and intricate passages.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the apparent difficulties of such an enterprise,
+Pietro Doria, the Genoese admiral, determined to reduce
+the city. His first successes gave him reason to hope. He forced
+the passage, and stormed the little town of Chioggia, built
+upon the inside of the isle bearing that name, about twenty-five
+miles south of Venice. Nearly four thousand prisoners fell
+here into his hands&mdash;an augury, as it seemed, of a more splendid
+triumph.</p>
+
+<p>In the consternation this misfortune inspired at Venice, the
+first impulse was to ask for peace. The ambassadors carried
+with them seven Genoese prisoners, as a sort of peace-offering
+to the admiral, and were empowered to make large and humiliating
+concessions, reserving nothing but the liberty of Venice.
+Francis Carrara strongly urged his allies to treat for peace. But
+the Genoese were stimulated by long hatred, and intoxicated by
+this unexpected opportunity of revenge. Doria, calling the
+ambassadors into council, thus addressed them: "Ye shall
+obtain no peace from us, I swear to you, nor from the lord of
+Padua, till first we have put a curb in the mouths of those wild
+horses that stand upon the place of St. Mark. When they are
+bridled you shall have enough of peace. Take back with you
+your Genoese captives, for I am coming within a few days to
+release both them and their companions from your prisons."</p>
+
+<p>When this answer was reported to the senate, they prepared
+to defend themselves with the characteristic firmness of their
+government. Every eye was turned toward a great man unjustly
+punished, their admiral, Vittor Pisani. He was called out of
+prison to defend his country amid general acclamations. Under
+his vigorous command the canals were fortified or occupied
+by large vessels armed with artillery; thirty-four galleys were
+equipped; every citizen contributed according to his power; in
+the entire want of commercial resources&mdash;for Venice had not a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>
+merchant-ship during this war&mdash;private plate was melted; and
+the senate held out the promise of ennobling thirty families who
+should be most forward in this strife of patriotism.</p>
+
+<p>The new fleet was so ill-provided with seamen that for some
+months the admiral employed them only in man&oelig;uvring along
+the canals. From some unaccountable supineness, or more
+probably from the insuperable difficulties of the undertaking,
+the Genoese made no assault upon the city. They had, indeed,
+fair grounds to hope its reduction by famine or despair. Every
+access to the Continent was cut off by the troops of Padua; and
+the King of Hungary had mastered almost all the Venetian
+towns in Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. The doge
+Contarini, taking the chief command, appeared at length with
+his fleet near Chioggia, before the Genoese were aware. They
+were still less aware of his secret design. He pushed one of the
+large round vessels, then called <i>cocche</i>, into the narrow passage
+of Chioggia which connects the Lagoon with the sea, and, mooring
+her athwart the channel, interrupted that communication.
+Attacked with fury by the enemy, this vessel went down on the
+spot, and the Doge improved his advantage by sinking loads of
+stones until the passage became absolutely unnavigable.</p>
+
+<p>It was still possible for the Genoese fleet to follow the principal
+canal of the Lagoon toward Venice and the northern passages,
+or to sail out of it by the harbor of Brondolo; but, whether
+from confusion or from miscalculating the dangers of their position,
+they suffered the Venetians to close the canal upon them
+by the same means they had used at Chioggia, and even to place
+their fleet in the entrance of Brondolo so near to the Lagoon
+that the Genoese could not form their ships in line of battle.
+The circumstances of the two combatants were thus entirely
+changed. But the Genoese fleet, though besieged in Chioggia,
+was impregnable, and their command of the land secured them
+from famine.</p>
+
+<p>Venice, notwithstanding her unexpected success, was still
+very far from secure; it was difficult for the Doge to keep his
+position through the winter; and if the enemy could appear in
+open sea, the risks of combat were extremely hazardous. It is
+said that the senate deliberated upon transporting the seat of
+their liberty to Candia, and that the Doge had announced his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>
+intention to raise the siege of Chioggia, if expected succors did
+not arrive by January 1, 1380. On that very day Carlo Zeno,
+an admiral who, ignorant of the dangers of his country, had
+been supporting the honor of her flag in the Levant and on the
+coast of Liguria, appeared with a re&euml;nforcement of eighteen
+galleys and a store of provisions.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment the confidence of Venice revived. The
+fleet, now superior in strength to the enemy, began to attack
+them with vivacity. After several months of obstinate resistance,
+the Genoese&mdash;whom their republic had ineffectually
+attempted to relieve by a fresh armament&mdash;blocked up in the
+town of Chioggia, and pressed by hunger, were obliged to surrender.
+Nineteen galleys only, out of forty-eight, were in good
+condition; and the crews were equally diminished in the ten
+months of their occupation of Chioggia. The pride of Genoa
+was deemed to be justly humbled; and even her own historian
+confesses that God would not suffer so noble a city as Venice to
+become the spoil of a conqueror.</p>
+
+<p>Though the capture of Chioggia did not terminate the war,
+both parties were exhausted, and willing, next year, to accept
+the mediation of the Duke of Savoy. By the peace of Turin,
+Venice surrendered most of her territorial possessions to the
+King of Hungary. That Prince and Francis Carrara were the
+only gainers. Genoa obtained the isle of Tenedos, one of the
+original subjects of dispute&mdash;a poor indemnity for her losses.
+Though, upon a hasty view, the result of this war appears more
+unfavorable to Venice, yet in fact it is the epoch of the decline
+of Genoa. From this time she never commanded the ocean with
+such navies as before; her commerce gradually went into decay;
+and the fifteenth century&mdash;the most splendid in the annals
+of Venice&mdash;is, till recent times, the most ignominious in
+those of Genoa. But this was partly owing to internal dissensions,
+by which her liberty, as well as glory, was for a while
+suspended.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span></p>
+<h2>REBELLION OF WAT TYLER</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1381</h6>
+
+<h3>JOHN LINGARD</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Richard II, of England, at eleven years of age, succeeded to a heritage
+of foreign complications and wars, which were a legacy from the
+reign of his grandfather, Edward III.</p>
+
+<p>At the request of the commons, the lords, in the King's name, appointed
+nine persons to be a permanent council, and it was resolved that
+during the King's minority the appointment of all the chief officers of
+the crown should be with the parliament. The administration was conducted
+in the King's name, and the whole system was for some years kept
+together by the secret authority of the King's uncles, especially of the
+Duke of Lancaster, who was in reality the regent.</p>
+
+<p>France, Scotland, and Castile continued their hostilities against England,
+and during the first two years of Richard's reign the ministers had
+no difficulty in obtaining ample grants of money to carry on the wars. In
+the third year the expense of the campaign in Brittany compelled them
+to solicit yet additional aid.</p>
+
+<p>Various methods of taxation failing to raise the amount required, the
+commons, in great discontent, demanded alterations in the council, and
+after long debate reluctantly consented to the imposition of a new and
+unusual tax of three groats<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">67</a> on every person, male and female, above fifteen
+years of age. For the relief of the poor it was provided that in the
+cities and towns the aggregate amount should be divided among the inhabitants
+according to their abilities, so that no individual should pay
+less than one groat, or more than sixty groats for himself and his wife.
+Parliament thereupon was dismissed; but the collection of the tax gave
+rise to an insurrection which threatened the life of the King and the existence
+of the government.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_a.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="A" />T this period [1381] a secret ferment seems to have pervaded
+the mass of the people in many nations of Europe. Men
+were no longer willing to submit to the impositions of their
+rulers, or to wear the chains which had been thrown round the
+necks of their fathers by a warlike and haughty aristocracy.
+We may trace this awakening spirit of independence to a variety
+of causes, operating in the same direction; to the progressive
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span>improvement of society, the gradual diffusion of knowledge, the
+increasing pressure of taxation, and above all to the numerous
+and lasting wars by which Europe had lately been convulsed.
+Necessity had often compelled both the sovereigns and nobles to
+court the good-will of the people; the burghers in the towns and
+inferior tenants in the country had learned, from the repeated
+demands made upon them, to form notions of their own importance;
+and the archers and foot-soldiers, who had served for
+years in the wars, were, at their return home, unwilling to sit
+down in the humble station of bondmen to their former lords.
+In Flanders the commons had risen against their Count Louis,
+and had driven him out of his dominions; in France the populace
+had taken possession of Paris and Rouen, and massacred
+the collectors of the revenue. In England a spirit of discontent
+agitated the whole body of the villeins, who remained in almost
+the same situation in which we left them at the Norman Conquest.
+They were still attached to the soil, talliable at the will
+of the lord, and bound to pay the fines for the marriage of their
+females, to perform customary labor, and to render the other
+servile prestations incident to their condition. It is true that in
+the course of time many had obtained the rights of freemen.
+Occasionally the king or the lord would liberate at once all the
+bondmen on some particular domain, in return for a fixed rent
+to be yearly assessed on the inhabitants.</p>
+
+
+<p>But the progress of emancipation was slow; the improved
+condition of their former fellows served only to embitter the
+discontent of those who still wore the fetters of servitude; and
+in many places the villeins formed associations for their mutual
+support, and availed themselves of every expedient in their
+power to free themselves from the control of their lords. In the
+first year of Richard's reign a complaint was laid before parliament
+that in many districts they had purchased exemplifications
+out of the <i>Domesday Book</i> in the king's court, and under
+a false interpretation of that record had pretended to be discharged
+of all manner of servitude both as to their bodies and
+their tenures, and would not suffer the officers of their lords
+either to levy distress or to do justice upon them. It was in vain
+that such exemplifications were declared of no force, and that
+commissions were ordered for the punishment of the rebellious.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">219</a></span>
+The villeins, by their union and perseverance, contrived to intimidate
+their lords, and set at defiance the severity of the law. To
+this resistance they were encouraged by the diffusion of the doctrines
+so recently taught by Wycliffe, that the right of property
+was founded in grace, and that no man, who was by sin a
+traitor to God, could be entitled to the services of others; at the
+same time itinerant preachers sedulously inculcated the natural
+equality of mankind, and the tyranny of artificial distinctions;
+and the poorer classes, still smarting under the exactions of the
+late reign, were by the impositions of the new tax wound up to
+a pitch of madness. Thus the materials had been prepared; it
+required but a spark to set the whole country in a blaze.</p>
+
+<p>It was soon discovered that the receipts of the treasury would
+fall short of the expected amount; and commissions were issued
+to different persons to inquire into the conduct of the collectors,
+and to compel payment from those who had been favored or
+overlooked. One of these commissioners, Thomas de Bampton,
+sat at Brentwood in Essex; but the men of Fobbings refused
+to answer before him; and when the chief justice of the
+common pleas attempted to punish their contumacy, they compelled
+him to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission,
+and, carrying their heads upon poles, claimed the support
+of the nearest townships. In a few days all the commons
+of Essex were in a state of insurrection, under the command of
+a profligate priest, who had assumed the name of Jack Straw.</p>
+
+<p>The men of Kent were not long behind their neighbors in
+Essex. At Dartford one of the collectors had demanded the tax
+for a young girl, the daughter of a tyler. Her mother maintained
+that she was under the age required by the statute; and
+the officer was proceeding to ascertain the fact by an indecent
+exposure of her person, when her father, who had just returned
+from work, with a stroke of his hammer beat out the offender's
+brains. His courage was applauded by his neighbors. They
+swore that they would protect him from punishment, and by
+threats and promises secured the cooperation of all the villages
+in the western division of Kent.</p>
+
+<p>A third party of insurgents was formed by the men of
+Gravesend, irritated at the conduct of Sir Simon Burley. He
+had claimed one of the burghers as his bondman, refused to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>
+grant him his freedom at a less price than three hundred pounds,
+and sent him a prisoner to the castle of Rochester. With the
+aid of a body of insurgents from Essex, the castle was taken and
+the captive liberated. At Maidstone they appointed Wat the
+tyler, of that town, leader of the commons of Kent, and took
+with them an itinerant preacher of the name of John Ball, who
+for his seditious and heterodox harangues had been confined by
+order of the archbishop. The mayor and aldermen of Canterbury
+were compelled to swear fidelity to the good cause; several
+of the citizens were slain; and five hundred joined them in their
+intended march toward London. When they reached Blackheath
+their numbers are said to have amounted to one hundred
+thousand men. To this lawless and tumultuous multitude Ball
+was appointed preacher, and assumed for the text of his first
+sermon the following lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"When Adam delved and Eve span,</span>
+<span class="i0">Who was then the gentleman?"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He told them that by nature all men were born equal; that
+the distinction of bondage and freedom was the invention of
+their oppressors, and contrary to the views of their Creator; that
+God now offered them the means of recovering their liberty, and
+that, if they continued slaves, the blame must rest with themselves;
+that it was necessary to dispose of the archbishop, the
+earls and barons, the judges, lawyers, and questmongers; and
+that when the distinction of ranks was abolished, all would be
+free, because all would be of the same nobility and of equal
+authority. His discourse was received with shouts of applause
+by his infatuated hearers, who promised to make him, in defiance
+of his own doctrines, archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor
+of the realm.</p>
+
+<p>By letters and messengers the knowledge of these proceedings
+was carefully propagated through the neighboring counties.
+Everywhere the people had been prepared; and in a few
+days the flame spread from the southern coast of Kent to the
+right bank of the Humber. In all places the insurgents regularly
+pursued the same course. They pillaged the manors of
+their lords, demolished the houses, and burned the court rolls;
+cut off the heads of every justice and lawyer and juror who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>
+fell into their hands; and swore all others to be true to King
+Richard and the commons; to admit of no king of the name of
+John; and to oppose all taxes but fifteenths, the ancient tallage
+paid by their fathers. The members of the council saw, with
+astonishment, the sudden rise and rapid spread of the insurrection;
+and, bewildered by their fears and ignorance, knew not
+whom to trust or what measures to pursue.</p>
+
+<p>The first who encountered the rabble on Blackheath was the
+Princess of Wales, the King's mother, on her return from a pilgrimage
+to Canterbury. She liberated herself from danger by
+her own address; and a few kisses from "the fair maid of Kent"
+purchased the protection of the leaders, and secured the respect
+of their followers. She was permitted to join her son, who, with
+his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby, Simon, Archbishop of Canterbury
+and Chancellor, Sir Robert Hales, master of the Knights
+of St. John and treasurer, and about one hundred sergeants
+and knights had left the castle of Windsor, and repaired for
+greater security to the Tower of London. The next morning
+the King in his barge descended the river to receive the petitions
+of the insurgents. To the number of ten thousand, with
+two banners of St. George, and sixty pennons, they waited his
+arrival at Rotherhithe; but their horrid yells and uncouth appearance
+so intimidated his attendants, that instead of permitting
+him to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned
+with precipitation. Tyler and Straw, irritated by this disappointment,
+led their men into Southwark, where they demolished
+the houses belonging to the Marshalsea and the king's
+bench, while another party forced their way into the palace of
+the Archbishop at Lambeth, and burned the furniture with the
+records belonging to the chancery.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning they were allowed to pass in small companies,
+according to their different townships, over the bridge
+into the city. The populace joined them; and as soon as they
+had regaled themselves at the cost of the richer inhabitants, the
+work of devastation commenced. They demolished Newgate,
+and liberated the prisoners; plundered and destroyed the magnificent
+palace of the Savoy, belonging to the Duke of Lancaster;
+burned the temple with the books and records; and despatched
+a party to set fire to the house of the Knights Hospitallers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>
+at Clerkenwell, which had been lately built by Sir
+Robert Hales. To prove, however, that they had no views of
+private emolument, a proclamation was issued forbidding any
+one to secrete part of the plunder; and so severely was the prohibition
+enforced that the plate was hammered and cut into
+small pieces, the precious stones were beaten to powder, and
+one of the rioters, who had concealed a silver cup in his bosom,
+was immediately thrown, with his prize, into the river. To every
+man whom they met they put the question, "With whom holdest
+thou?" and unless he gave the proper answer, "With King
+Richard and the commons," he was instantly beheaded. But
+the principal objects of their cruelty were the natives of Flanders.
+They dragged thirteen Flemings out of one church, seventeen
+out of another, and thirty-two out of the Vintry, and
+struck off their heads with shouts of triumph and exultation.
+In the evening, wearied with the labor of the day, they dispersed
+through the streets, and indulged in every kind of debauchery.</p>
+
+<p>During this night of suspense and terror, the Princess of
+Wales held a council with the ministers in the Tower. The
+King's uncles were absent; the garrison, though perhaps able
+to defend the place, was too weak to put down the insurgents;
+and a resolution was taken to try the influence of promises and
+concession. In the morning the Tower Hill was seen covered
+with an immense multitude, who prohibited the introduction of
+provisions, and with loud cries demanded the heads of the
+chancellor and treasurer. In return, a herald ordered them,
+by proclamation, to retire to Mile End, where the King would
+assent to all their demands. Immediately the gates were thrown
+open. Richard with a few unarmed attendants rode forward;
+the best intentioned of the crowd followed him, and at Mile End
+he saw himself surrounded with sixty thousand petitioners.
+Their demands were reduced to four: the abolition of slavery;
+the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence the acre; the free
+liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a
+general pardon for past offences. A charter to that effect was
+engrossed for each parish and township; during the night thirty
+clerks were employed in transcribing a sufficient number of
+copies; they were sealed and delivered in the morning; and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>
+whole body, consisting chiefly of the men of Essex and Hertfordshire,
+retired, bearing the King's banner as a token that they
+were under his protection.</p>
+
+<p>But Tyler and Straw had formed other and more ambitious
+designs. The moment the King was gone, they rushed, at the
+head of four hundred men, into the Tower. The Archbishop,
+who had just celebrated mass, Sir Robert Hales, William Apuldore,
+the King's confessor, Legge, the farmer of the tax, and
+three of his associates, were seized, and led to immediate execution.<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">68</a>
+As no opposition was offered, they searched every part
+of the Tower, burst into the private apartment of the Princess,
+and probed her bed with their swords. She fainted, and was
+carried by her ladies to the river, which she crossed in a covered
+barge. The royal wardrobe, a house in Carter Lane, was selected
+for her residence.</p>
+
+<p>The King joined his mother at the wardrobe; and the next
+morning, as he rode through Smithfield with sixty horsemen,
+encountered Tyler at the head of twenty thousand insurgents.
+Three different charters had been sent to that demagogue, who
+contemptuously refused them all. As soon as he saw Richard,
+he made a sign to his followers to halt, and boldly rode up to the
+King. A conversation immediately began. Tyler, as he talked,
+affected to play with his dagger; at last he laid his hand on the
+bridle of his sovereign; but at the instant Walworth, the Lord
+Mayor, jealous of his design, plunged a short sword into his
+throat. He spurred his horse, rode about a dozen yards, fell to
+the ground, and was despatched by Robert Standish, one of the
+King's esquires. The insurgents, who witnessed the transaction,
+drew their bows to revenge the fall of their leader, and Richard
+would inevitably have lost his life had he not been saved by his
+own intrepidity. Galloping up to the archers he exclaimed:
+"What are ye doing, my lieges? Tyler was a traitor. Come
+with me, and I will be your leader." Wavering and disconcerted,
+they followed him into the fields of Islington, whither a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span>force of one thousand men-at-arms, which had been collected
+by the Lord Mayor and Sir Robert Knowles, hastened to protect
+the young King; and the insurgents, falling on their knees, begged
+for mercy. Many of the royalists demanded permission to punish
+them for their past excesses; but Richard firmly refused,
+ordered the suppliants to return to their homes, and by proclamation
+forbade, under pain of death, any stranger to pass the
+night in the city.</p>
+
+<p>On the southern coast the excesses of the insurgents reached
+as far as Winchester; on the eastern, to Beverley and Scarborough;
+and, if we reflect that in every place they rose about the
+same time, and uniformly pursued the same system, we may
+discover reason to suspect that they acted under the direction
+of some acknowledged though invisible leader. The nobility
+and gentry, intimidated by the hostility of their tenants, and distressed
+by contradictory reports, sought security within the fortifications
+of their castles. The only man who behaved with
+promptitude and resolution was Henry Spenser, the young and
+warlike Bishop of Norwich. In the counties of Norfolk, Cambridge,
+and Huntington tranquillity was restored and preserved
+by this singular prelate, who successively exercised the offices
+of general, judge, and priest. In complete armor he always led
+his followers to the attack; after the battle he sat in judgment
+on his prisoners; and before execution he administered to them
+the aids of religion. But as soon as the death of Tyler and the
+dispersion of the men of Kent and Essex were known, thousands
+became eager to display their loyalty; and knights and
+esquires from every quarter poured into London to offer their
+services to the King. At the head of forty thousand horse he
+published proclamations, revoking the charters of manumission
+which he had granted, commanding the villeins to perform
+their usual services, and prohibiting illegal assemblies and associations.
+In several parts the commons threatened to renew
+the horrors of the late tumult in defence of their liberties; but
+the approach of the royal army dismayed the disaffected in
+Kent; the loss of five hundred men induced the insurgents of
+Essex to sue for pardon; and numerous executions in different
+counties effectually crushed the spirit of resistance. Among the
+sufferers were Lister and Westbroom, who had assumed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span>
+title and authority of kings in Norfolk and Suffolk; and Straw
+and Ball, the itinerant preachers, who have been already mentioned,
+and whose sermons were supposed to have kindled and
+nourished the insurrection.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">69</a></p>
+
+<p>When the parliament met, the two houses were informed by
+the Chancellor, that the King had revoked the charters of emancipation,
+which he had been compelled to grant to the villeins,
+but at the same time wished to submit to their consideration
+whether it might not be wise to abolish the state of bondage
+altogether. The minds of the great proprietors were not, however,
+prepared for the adoption of so liberal a measure; and
+both lords and commons unanimously replied that no man
+could deprive them of the services of their villeins without their
+consent; that they had never given that consent, and never
+would be induced to give it, either through persuasion or violence.
+The King yielded to their obstinacy; and the charters
+were repealed by authority of parliament. The commons next
+deliberated, and presented their petitions. They attributed the
+insurrection to the grievances suffered by the people from: 1.
+The purveyors, who were said to have exceeded all their predecessors
+in insolence and extortion; 2. From the rapacity of the
+royal officers in the chancery and exchequer, and the courts of
+king's bench and common pleas; 3. From the banditti, called
+maintainers, who, in different counties, supported themselves
+by plunder, and, arming in defence of each other, set at defiance
+all the provisions of the law; and 4. From the repeated aids
+and taxes, which had impoverished the people and proved of no
+service to the nation. To silence these complaints, a commis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">226</a></span>sion
+of inquiry was appointed; the courts of law and the King's
+household were subjected to regulations of reform, and severe
+orders were published for the immediate suppression of illegal
+associations. But the demand of a supply produced a very interesting
+altercation. The commons refused, on the ground
+that the imposition of a new tax would goad the people to a second
+insurrection. They found it, however, necessary to request
+of the King a general pardon for all illegal acts committed in the
+suppression of the insurgents, and received for answer that it
+was customary for the commons to make their grants before
+the King bestowed his favors. When the subsidy was again
+pressed on their attention they replied that they should take
+time to consider it, but were told that the King would also take
+time to consider of their petition. At last they yielded; the tax
+upon wool, wool-fells, and leather was continued for five years,
+and in return a general pardon was granted for all loyal subjects,
+who had acted illegally in opposing the rebels, and for the great
+body of the insurgents, who had been misled by the declamations
+of the demagogues.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span></p>
+<h2>WYCLIFFE TRANSLATES THE BIBLE INTO
+ENGLISH</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1382</h6>
+
+<h3>J. PATERSON SMYTH</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It may safely be said that no greater service has been rendered at
+once to religion and to literature than the translation of the Bible into the
+English tongue. This achievement did not indeed, like that of Luther's
+German translation, come as it were by a single stroke. Luther's Bible
+caused him to be regarded as the founder of the present literary language
+of Germany&mdash;New High German&mdash;which his translation permanently established.
+The English Bible, on the other hand, was the growth of
+centuries. But to the contributions of able hands through many generations,
+during which the English language itself passed through a wonderful
+formative development, the incomparable beauty of King James'
+version owes its existence, and our literature its greatest ornaments.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to say when the first translation of any part of the
+Bible into English was made. No English Bible of earlier date than the
+fourteenth century has ever been found. But translations, even of the
+whole Bible, older than Wcyliffe's are, by at least two eminent witnesses,
+said to have existed. "As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe's
+time," says Sir Thomas More, "they remain lawful and be in some folkes
+handes." "The hole byble," he declares (<i>Dyalogues</i>, p. 138, ed. 1530),
+"was long before Wycliffe's days, by vertuous and well learned men,
+translated into the English tong." And Cranmer, in his prologue to the
+second edition of the "Great Bible," bears testimony equally explicit to
+the translation of Scripture "in the Saxons tongue." And when that language
+"waxed olde and out of common usage," he says, the Bible "was
+again translated into the newer language." There has never been any
+means of testing these statements, which were probably due to some inexplicable
+error. Abundant evidence exists relating to many Saxon and
+later translations of various parts of the Bible before the time of Wycliffe.
+Among the most notable of the early translators were the Venerable Bede
+and Alfred the Great. Some portions of Scripture were likewise translated
+into Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century. Some of the early
+fragments are still preserved in English libraries.</p>
+
+<p>Three versions of the Psalter in English, from the early years of the
+fourteenth century, still exist, one of which was by Richard Rolle, the
+Yorkshire hermit, who also translated the New Testament.</p>
+
+<p>But so far as known, the first complete Bible in English was the work
+of John Wycliffe, assisted by Nicholas de Hereford&mdash;whom some would
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span>name first in this partnership, though the product of their joint labors is
+known as "Wycliffe's Bible."</p>
+
+<p>John Wycliffe, the "Morning Star of the Reformation," was born
+near Richmond, Yorkshire, about 1324. He became a fellow, and later
+master of Balliol College, Oxford, afterward held several rectorships&mdash;the
+last being that of Lutterworth, upon which he entered in 1374. For
+opposing the papacy and certain church doctrines and practices, he was
+condemned by the university, and his followers&mdash;known as Lollards&mdash;were
+persecuted. Something of his life in connection with these matters
+is fitly dealt with by Smyth in connection with his account of the famous
+translation.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_a.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="A" />FTER the early Anglo-Saxon versions comes a long pause in
+the history of Bible translation. Amid the disturbance resulting
+from the Danish invasion there was little time for thinking
+of translations and manuscripts; and before the land had
+fully regained its quiet the fatal battle of Hastings had been
+fought, and England lay helpless at the Normans' feet. The
+higher Saxon clergy were replaced by the priests of Normandy,
+who had little sympathy with the people over whom they came,
+and the Saxon manuscripts were contemptuously flung aside as
+relics of a rude barbarism. The contempt shown to the language
+of the defeated race quite destroyed the impulse to English
+translation, and the Norman clergy had no sympathy with
+the desire for spreading the knowledge of the Scriptures among
+the people, so that for centuries those Scriptures remained in
+England a "spring shut up, a fountain sealed."</p>
+
+<p>Yet this time must not be considered altogether lost, for during
+those centuries England was becoming fitted for an English
+Bible. The future language of the nation was being formed;
+the Saxon and Norman French were struggling side by side;
+gradually the old Saxon grew unintelligible to the people; gradually
+the French became a foreign tongue, and with the fusion
+of the two races a language grew up which was the language of
+united England.</p>
+
+<p>Passing, then, from the quiet death-beds of Alfred and of
+Bede, we transfer ourselves to the great hall of the Blackfriars'
+monastery, London, on a dull, warm May day in 1378, amid
+purple robes and gowns of satin and damask, amid monks and
+abbots, and bishops and doctors of the Church, assembled for
+the trial of John Wycliffe, the parish priest of Lutterworth.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span>The great hall, crowded to its heavy oaken doors, witnesses
+to the interest that is centred in the trial, and all eyes are fixed
+on the pale, stern old man who stands before the dais silently
+facing his judges. He is quite alone, and his thoughts go back,
+with some bitterness, to his previous trial, when the people
+crowded the doors shouting for their favorite, and John of
+Gaunt and the Lord Marshal of England were standing by his
+side. He has learned since then not to put his trust in princes.
+The power of his enemies has rapidly grown; even the young
+King (Richard II) has been won over to their cause, and patrons
+and friends have drawn back from his side, whom the
+Church has resolved to crush.</p>
+
+<p>The judges have taken their seats, and the accused stands
+awaiting the charges to be read, when suddenly there is a quick
+cry of terror. A strange rumbling sound fills the air, and the
+walls of the judgment hall are trembling to their base&mdash;the monastery
+and the city of London are being shaken by an earthquake!
+Friar and prelate grow pale with superstitious awe.
+Twice already has this arraignment of Wycliffe been strangely
+interrupted. Are the elements in league with this enemy of the
+Church? Shall they give up the trial?</p>
+
+<p>"No!" thunders Archbishop Courtenay, rising in his place.
+"We shall not give up the trial. This earthquake but portends
+the purging of the kingdom; for as there are in the bowels of
+the earth noxious vapors which only by a violent earthquake
+can be purged away, so are these evils brought by such men
+upon this land which only by a very earthquake can ever be
+removed. Let the trial go forward!"</p>
+
+<p>What think you, reader, were the evils which this pale ascetic
+had wrought, needing a very earthquake to cleanse them
+from the land? Had he falsified the divine message to the people
+in his charge? Was he turning men's hearts from the worship
+of God? Was his priestly office disgraced by carelessness
+or drunkenness or impurity of life?</p>
+
+<p>Oh, no. Such faults could be gently judged at the tribunal
+in the Blackfriars' hall. Wycliffe's was a far more serious
+crime. He had dared to attack the corruptions of the Church,
+and especially the enormities of the begging friars; he had indignantly
+denounced pardons and indulgences and masses for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span>
+the soul as part of a system of gigantic fraud; and worst of all,
+he had filled up the cup of his iniquity by translating the Scriptures
+into the English tongue; "making it," as one of the chroniclers
+angrily complains, "common and more open to laymen
+and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well learned and
+of good understanding. So that the pearl of the Gospel is trodden
+under foot of swine."</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of his opponents will be better understood if we
+notice the position of the Church in England at the time. The
+meridian of her power had been already passed. Her clergy as
+a class were ignorant and corrupt. Her people were neglected,
+except for the money to be extorted by masses and pardons, "as
+if," to quote the words of an old writer, "God had given his
+sheep, not to be pastured, but to be shaven and shorn." This
+state of things had gone on for centuries, and the people like
+dumb, driven cattle had submitted. But those who could discern
+the signs of the times must have seen now that it could not
+go on much longer. The spread of education was rapidly increasing,
+several new colleges having been founded in Oxford
+during Wycliffe's lifetime. A strong spirit of independence, too,
+was rising among the people. Already Edward III and his
+parliament had indignantly refused the Pope's demand for the
+annual tribute to be sent to Rome. It was evident that a crisis
+was near. And, as if to hasten the crisis, the famous schism of
+the papacy had placed two popes at the head of the Church, and
+all Christendom was scandalized by the sight of the rival "vicars
+of Jesus Christ" anathematizing each other from Rome and
+Avignon, raising armies and slaughtering helpless women and
+children, each for the aggrandizing of himself.</p>
+
+<p>The minds of men in England were greatly agitated, and Wycliffe
+felt that at such a time the firmest charter of the Church
+would be the open Bible in her children's hands; the best exposure
+of the selfish policy of her rulers, the exhibiting to the
+people the beautiful, self-forgetting life of Jesus Christ as recorded
+in the Gospels. "The sacred Scriptures," he said, "are
+the property of the people, and one which no one should be
+allowed to wrest from them. Christ and his apostles converted
+the world by making known the Scriptures to men in a form
+familiar to them, and I pray with all my heart that through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span>
+doing the things contained in this book we may all together
+come to the everlasting life." This Bible translation he placed
+far the first in importance of all his attempts to reform the English
+Church, and he pursued his object with a vigor and against
+an opposition that remind one of the old monk of Bethlehem
+and his Bible a thousand years before.</p>
+
+<p>The result of the Blackfriars' synod was that after three
+days' deliberation Wycliffe's teaching was condemned, and at a
+subsequent meeting he himself was excommunicated. He returned
+to his quiet parsonage at Lutterworth&mdash;for his enemies
+dared not yet proceed to extremities&mdash;and there, with his pile of
+old Latin manuscripts and commentaries, he labored on at the
+great work of his life, till the whole Bible was translated into
+the "modir tongue," and England received for the first time in
+her history a complete version of the Scriptures in the language
+of the people.</p>
+
+<p>And scarce was his task well finished when, like his great
+predecessor Bede, the brave old priest laid down his life. He
+himself had expected that a violent death would have finished
+his course. His enemies were many and powerful; the Primate,
+the King, and the Pope were against him&mdash;with the friars,
+whom he had so often and so fiercely defied; so that his destruction
+seemed but a mere question of time. But while his enemies
+were preparing to strike, the old man "was not, for God
+took him."</p>
+
+<p>It was the close of the old year, the last Sunday of 1384, and
+his little flock at Lutterworth were kneeling in hushed reverence
+before the altar, when suddenly, at the time of the elevation
+of the sacrament, he fell to the ground in a violent fit of the
+palsy, and never spoke again until his death on the last day of
+the year.</p>
+
+<p>In him England lost one of her best and greatest sons, a
+patriot sternly resenting all dishonor to his country, a reformer
+who ventured his life for the purity of the Church and the
+freedom of the Bible&mdash;an earnest, faithful "parson of a country
+town," standing out conspicuously among the clergy of the
+time.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"For Crist&egrave;'s lore and his apostles twelve</span>
+<span class="i0">He taughte&mdash;and first he folwede it himselve."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span>Here is a choice specimen from one of the monkish writers
+of the time describing his death: "On the feast of the passion of
+St. Thomas of Canterbury, John Wycliffe, the organ of the
+devil, the enemy of the Church, the idol of heretics, the image
+of hypocrites, the restorer of schism, the storehouse of lies, the
+sink of flattery, being struck by the horrible judgment of God,
+was seized with the palsy throughout his whole body, and that
+mouth which was to have spoken huge things against God and
+his saints, and holy Church, was miserably drawn aside, and
+afforded a frightful spectacle to beholders; his tongue was
+speechless and his head shook, showing painfully plainly that
+the curse which God had thundered forth against Cain was also
+inflicted on him."</p>
+
+<p>Some time after his death a petition was presented to the
+Pope, which to his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe's
+body to be taken out of consecrated ground and buried
+in a dunghill. But forty years after, by a decree of the Council
+of Constance, the old reformer's bones were dug up and burned,
+and the ashes flung into the little river Swift which "runneth
+hard by his church at Lutterworth." And so, in the often-quoted
+words of old Fuller, "as the Swift bear them into the
+Severn, and the Severn into the narrow seas, and they again
+into the ocean, thus the ashes of Wycliffe is an emblem of his
+doctrine, which is now dispersed all over the world."</p>
+
+<p>But it is with his Bible translation that we are specially concerned.
+As far as we can learn, the whole Bible was not translated
+by the reformer. About half the Old Testament is ascribed
+to Nicholas de Hereford, one of the Oxford leaders of
+the Lollards; the remainder, with the whole of the New Testament,
+being done by Wycliffe himself. About eight years
+after its completion the whole was revised by Richard Purvey,
+his curate and intimate friend, whose manuscript is still
+in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Purvey's preface
+is a most interesting old document, and shows not only that
+he was deeply in earnest about his work, but that he
+thoroughly understood the intellectual and moral conditions
+necessary for its success.</p>
+
+<p>"A simpel creature," he says, "hath translated the Scripture
+out of Latin into Englische. First, this simpel creature had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span>
+much travayle with divers fellows and helpers to gather many old
+Bibles and other doctors and glosses to make one Latin Bible.
+Some deal true and then to study it anew the texte and any
+other help he might get, especially Lyra on the Old Testament,
+which helped him much with this work. The third time to
+counsel with olde grammarians and old divines of hard words
+and hard sentences how they might best be understood and
+translated, the fourth time to translate as clearly as he could to
+the sense, and to have many good fellows and cunnying at the
+correcting of the translacioun. A translator hath great nede to
+studie well the sense both before and after, and then also he hath
+nede to live a clene life and be full devout in preiers, and have
+not his wit occupied about worldli things that the Holy Spyrit
+author of all wisdom and cunnynge and truthe dresse him for
+his work and suffer him not to err." And he concludes with
+the prayer, "God grant to us all grace to ken well and to kepe
+well Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the
+laste."</p>
+
+<p>Like all the earlier English translations, Wycliffe's Bible
+was based on the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome; and this is the
+great defect in his work, as compared with the versions that
+followed. He was not capable of consulting the original Greek
+and Hebrew even if he had access to them&mdash;in fact, there was
+probably no man in England at the time capable of doing so;
+and therefore, though he represents the Latin faithfully and
+well, he of course handed on its errors as faithfully as its perfections.
+But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of fourteenth-century
+English. He translated not for scholars or for nobles,
+but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those
+for whom he wrote&mdash;plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all
+its homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made
+men feel that they were reading no ordinary book. He uses
+many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man
+holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli
+nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our present
+Bible originated with him; <i>e.g.</i>, "the beame and the mote,"
+"the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the
+waye," "no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of
+blessing which we blessen," etc.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span><a href="images/gospel.png">Here is a specimen from Wycliffe's Gospels:</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>In thilke dayes came Joon Baptist prechynge in the
+desert of Jude, saying, Do ye penaunce: for the kyngdom
+of heuens shall neigh. Forsothe this is he of whom
+it is said by Ysaye the prophete, A voice of a cryinge in
+desert, make ye redy the wayes of the Lord, make ye
+rightful the pathes of hym. Forsothe that like Joon hadde
+cloth of the beeris of cameylis and a girdil of skyn about
+his leendis; sothely his mete weren Iocustis and hony of
+the wode. Thanne Jerusalem wente out to hym, and al
+Jude, and al the cuntre aboute Jordan, and thei weren
+crystened of hym in in Jordon, knowlechynge there synnes.</b></p></div>
+
+<p>It is somewhere recorded that at a meeting in Yorkshire
+recently a long passage of Wycliffe's Bible was read, which was
+quite intelligible throughout to those who heard.</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that this specimen (Matt. iii. 1-6) is not divided
+into verses. Verse division belongs to a much later period,
+and, though convenient for reference, it sometimes a good deal
+spoils the sense. The division into chapters appears in Wycliffe's
+as in our own Bibles. This chapter division had shortly
+before been made by a cardinal Hugo, for the purpose of a
+Latin concordance, and its convenience brought it quickly into
+use. But, like the verse division, it is often very badly done, the
+object aimed at seeming to be uniformity of length rather than
+any natural division of the subject. Sometimes a chapter
+breaks off in the middle of a narrative or an argument, and,
+especially in St. Paul's epistles, the incorrect division often
+becomes misleading. The removal as far as possible of these
+divisions is one of the advantages of the Revised Version to be
+noticed later on.</p>
+
+<p>The book had a very wide circulation. While the Anglo-Saxon
+versions were confined for the most part to the few religious
+houses where they were written, Wycliffe's Bible, in spite
+of its disadvantage of being only manuscript, was circulated
+largely through the kingdom; and, though the cost a good deal
+restricted its possession to the wealthier classes, those who could
+not hope to possess it gained access to it too, as well through
+their own efforts as through the ministrations of Wycliffe's
+"pore priestes." A considerable sum was paid for even a few
+sheets of the manuscript, a load of hay was given for permission<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">235</a></span>
+to read it for a certain period one hour a day,<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">70</a> and those who
+could not afford even such expenses adopted what means they
+could. It is touching to read such incidents as that of one Alice
+Collins, sent for to the little gatherings "to recite the Ten Commandments
+and parts of the epistles of SS. Paul and Peter,
+which she knew by heart." "Certes," says old John Foxe in his
+<i>Book of Martyrs</i>, "the zeal of those Christian days seems much
+superior to this of our day, and to see the travail of them may
+well shame our careless times."</p>
+
+<p>But it was at a terrible risk such study was carried on. The
+appearance of Wycliffe's Bible aroused at once fierce opposition.
+A bill was brought into parliament to forbid the circulation
+of the Scriptures in English; but the sturdy John of Gaunt
+vigorously asserted the right of the people to have the Word of
+God in their own tongue; "for why," said he, "are we to be
+the dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the Church
+grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At
+length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate,
+complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John
+Wycliffe, the son of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist,
+who had completed his iniquity by inventing a new
+translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly after, the Convocation
+of Canterbury forbade such translations, under penalty of
+the major excommunication.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>"God grant us," runs the prayer in the old Bible preface,
+"to ken and to kepe well Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some
+paine for it at the laste." What a meaning that prayer must
+have gained when the readers of the book were burned with the
+copies round their necks, when men and women were executed
+for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer and Ten Commandments
+in English, when husbands were made to witness
+against their wives, and children forced to light the death-fires
+of their parents, and possessors of the banned Wycliffe Bible
+were hunted down as if they were wild beasts!</p>
+
+<p>Thus did Wycliffe, in his effort for the spread of the Gospel
+of Peace, bring, like his Master fourteen centuries before, "not
+peace, but a sword." Every bold attempt to let in the light on
+long-standing darkness seems to result first in a fierce opposition
+from the evil creatures that delight in the darkness, and the
+weak creatures weakened by dwelling in it so long. It is not till
+the driving back of the evil and the strengthening of the weak,
+as the light gradually wins its way, that the true results can be
+seen. It is, to use a simile of a graceful modern writer,<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">71</a> "As
+when you raise with your staff an old flat stone, with the grass
+forming a little hedge, as it were, around it as it lies. Beneath
+it, what a revelation! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless,
+matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed;
+hideous crawling things; black crickets with their long filaments
+sticking out on all sides; motionless, slug-like creatures;
+young larv&aelig;, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than
+in the infernal wriggle of maturity. But no sooner is the stone
+turned and the wholesome light of day let in on this compressed
+and blinded community of creeping things than all of them that
+have legs rush blindly about, butting against each other and
+everything else in their way, and end in a general stampede to
+underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine.
+Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where
+the stone lay&mdash;the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle
+had his hole&mdash;the dandelion and the buttercup are growing
+there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over
+their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness
+pulsate through their glorified being.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span>"The stone is ancient error, the grass is human nature borne
+down and bleached of all its color by it, the shapes that are
+found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness,
+and the weak organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns
+the stone is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying
+incubus, whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one.
+The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature
+which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature
+and native lines in the sunshine. Then shall God's minstrels
+build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then
+shall beauty&mdash;divinity taking outline and color&mdash;light upon the
+souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising
+from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which
+would never have found wings unless that stone had been
+lifted."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">238</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE SWISS WIN THEIR INDEPENDENCE</h2>
+
+<h3>BATTLE OF SEMPACH</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1386-1389</h6>
+
+<h3>F. Grenfell Baker</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For two generations after the victory of the Swiss over the Austrians
+at Morgarten (1315), which was followed by the renewal of the Swiss Confederation
+of 1291, the leagued cantons were favored with growth and internal
+development. To the original cantons&mdash;Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden&mdash;were
+added (1332-1353) Lucerne, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern.
+The Confederation acknowledged no superior but the Emperor of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>In 1375 there was an irruption into Switzerland of a horde of irregular
+soldiers under Enguerrand de Courcy, son-in-law of Edward III of
+England. The mother of De Courcy was a daughter of Leopold I,
+Duke of Austria, and through her De Courcy claimed several Swiss
+towns. As the present Austrian Duke, Leopold II, who held nominal
+suzerainty over Switzerland, refused to give them up, De Courcy invaded
+Swiss territory with a large force and a fury which at first threw the
+country into panic. But at last the Swiss recovered their old spirit of
+bravery, and in many severe encounters they either killed or chased out
+of the country the whole ruthless host of invaders.</p>
+
+<p>This war is known in Swiss chronicles as the <i>Guglerkrieg</i>, either from
+the pointed spikes on the helmets of the Swiss soldiers or from the cowls
+which many of them wore. It is also called the "English War," although
+De Courcy's men were nearly all from the Continent and Wales.</p>
+
+<p>The Swiss soon had need of their old military prowess, which this
+defence of their country against foreign invaders had freshly put to the
+proof. By the victory of Sempach, July 9, 1386, their independence was
+practically won, and by later acts of valor and statesmanship they made
+it secure for many years.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_a.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="A" />USTRIA'S conduct soon began once more to disturb the
+Swiss, and to threaten a renewal of hostilities. Her first
+act of importance was the conquest of the Tyrol, after which,
+under pretence of benefiting the pilgrims to Einsiedeln,<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">72</a> but in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span>reality to separate Glarus from Zurich, she built a bridge across
+the lake at Rapperschwyl. The possession of this bridge by
+Austria acted as a perpetual hinderance to Zurich's trade with the
+South, and was accordingly greatly resented by the city. Austria's
+position, as ruler in so many burghs that, from their situation
+and the nationality of their inhabitants, were essentially
+Swiss, also acted as a never-ending source of trouble. Her rule
+was both harsh and unjust, and, as a result, her local governors
+were extremely unpopular. In 1386 the anti-Austrian feeling
+in Switzerland had grown to such a pitch that popular outbreaks
+against her authority were, in many centres, of frequent
+occurrence, and war appeared inevitable.</p>
+
+
+<p>From Lucerne came the final troubles that precipitated the
+country again into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the
+actual declaration of war, constant collisions in the neighborhood
+of Lucerne had for some time past taken place, with all
+the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a body of men from
+Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of Rothenburg,
+the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch
+and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted against
+her Austrian rulers, expelled the bailies, and entered into alliances
+with the city. Lucerne herself commenced extending her
+territories by the purchase of Wiggis, and&mdash;contrary to her
+treaty stipulations&mdash;admitted a number of Austrian subjects
+into the privileges of citizenship. Austria retaliated by attacking
+Richensee, a small Lucerne town containing a garrison of
+some two hundred soldiers. This she carried by assault and
+destroyed, massacring the inhabitants of all ages and of both
+sexes.</p>
+
+<p>Other reprisals on both sides followed in quick succession,
+in which immense numbers of victims perished. Soon both the
+Duke, Leopold II, and the Confederates were fully prepared,
+and the former took the field with a large army. After menacing
+Zurich, the Duke, accompanied by many nobles from
+Germany, France, and North Italy, headed some six thousand
+picked men, and marched upon Lucerne. On his way he burned
+Willisau and several smaller towns, where his troops committed
+every form of excess. On July 9th a portion of his forces appeared
+before the walls of Sempach, while another division<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span>
+menaced Zurich. At Sempach the Confederates mustered to
+the help of Lucerne, but were only able to bring about sixteen
+hundred men, taken chiefly from the Forest States. In spite of
+their disparity in numbers, the Confederates determined to risk
+an encounter.</p>
+
+<p>The decisive and brilliant battle of Sempach, the second of
+the long roll of victories that mark the prowess of the Swiss, is
+thus described by an old writer: "The Swiss order of battle
+was angular, one soldier followed by two, these by four, and so
+on. The Swiss were all on foot, badly armed, having only their
+long swords and their halberds, and boards on their left arms
+with which to parry the blows of their adversaries, and they
+could at first make no impression on the close ranks of the Austrians,
+all bristling with spears. But Anthony zer Pot, of Uri,
+cried to his men to strike with their halberds on the shafts of the
+spears, which he knew were made hollow to render them lighter,
+and, at the same time, Arnold von Winkelried, a knight from
+Unterwalden, devoting himself for his country, cried out: 'I'll
+open a way for you, Confederates!' and, seizing as many spears
+as he could grasp in his arms, dragged them down with his whole
+weight and strength upon his own bosom, and thus made an
+opening for his countrymen to penetrate the Austrian ranks.</p>
+
+<p>"This act of heroism decided the victory. The Swiss rushed
+into the gap made by Winkelried, and, having now come to
+close quarters with their enemies, their bodily strength and the
+lightness of their equipment gave them a great advantage over
+the heavily armed Austrians, who were already fainting under
+the heat of a July sun. The very closeness of the array of the
+Austrian men-at-arms rendered them incapable either of advancing
+or falling back, and, the grooms who held their horses
+having taken flight, panic seized them, they broke their ranks,
+and were hewed down by the Swiss halberds in frightful numbers.
+Duke Leopold was urged by those around him to save his
+life, but he scorned the advice, and, seeing the banner of Austria
+in danger, rushed to save it, and was killed in the attempt. The
+rout then became general, but the Swiss had the humanity, or
+the policy, not to pursue their enemies, of whom otherwise not
+one, perhaps, would have escaped. The loss of the Austrians
+amounted to two thousand men, including six hundred and seventy-six<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span>
+noblemen, three hundred and fifty of whom wore coroneted
+helmets. Most of them were buried at Koenigsfelden,
+with their leader Leopold. The Swiss lost two hundred men in
+this memorable battle, the second in which they had defeated
+a duke of Austria at the head of his chivalry."</p>
+
+<p>After Sempach the men of Glarus set about making themselves
+a free people. One of their first acts was the capture of
+Wesen and the expulsion of its Austrian soldiers. This was followed
+by a truce, which lasted till 1388, when Leopold's sons
+recommenced the war with fresh fury. Wesen was recaptured
+by the admission of a number of soldiers in disguise, who
+opened the gates to their comrades without and massacred all
+the chief Swiss leaders. Some months later the men of Glarus
+inflicted a severe defeat on the Austrians at the little town of
+Naefels, within their state. In this important combat three hundred
+and fifty men of Glarus, together with fifty from Schwyz,
+posted themselves on the heights above the town, and, as the
+Austrians advanced, suddenly hurled down masses of stones
+that soon caused a panic. Then, following the successful tactics
+employed at Morgarten, the Swiss rushed down on the disordered
+mass&mdash;said to consist of fifteen thousand soldiers, but
+probably about half that number&mdash;and dealt death on every
+side. A precipitate flight of the invaders followed, but they
+were met near Wesen by a fresh body of seven hundred Glarus
+peasants, who completed the victory.</p>
+
+<p>Though Bern took no part in the battle of Sempach, after
+that victory she entered actively into the war, and overran the
+Austrian dependencies in Freiburg and Valengrin. She drove
+the Duke's followers out of Rapperschwyl, annexed Nidau and
+Bueren, and conquered the upper Simmenthal.</p>
+
+<p>At length, both sides being weary of war and carnage, a
+peace was signed for seven years in 1389, with the condition that
+Bern should restore Nidau and Bueren. This peace was in 1394
+further prolonged for twenty years. These treaties brought
+great benefits to Switzerland in many ways. Glarus and Zug
+obtained their formal freedom from Austrian rule in payment of
+a moderate sum of money; Schwyz received the town and abbey
+of Einsiedeln (1397); Lucerne purchased Sempach and Entlibuch
+from the Duke, as also other towns; but chief of all, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span>
+political power of the Hapsburgs came to an end in Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>An important feature of this period was the lessened influence
+of the Emperor of Germany in Swiss affairs, and the gradual
+withdrawal of the Swiss from the position they so long occupied
+as subject-vassals of the empire. This was especially seen toward
+the close of the fourteenth century, when the Emperor, being
+pressed for money, sold his rights over several important
+Swiss districts to their inhabitants, and thus forfeited all authority
+over them.</p>
+
+<p>But chief of all the memorable events of this time was the
+close it brought to the long and bloody struggle between Austria
+and Switzerland. At length the heroism and persevering patriotism
+of the Swiss effected the liberation of their country from
+Austrian rule, and henceforth the dukes ceased to attempt to
+enforce their claims, and tacitly acknowledged their defeat.
+The Swiss states from this period, moreover, began to be known,
+not as an unimportant portion of the German empire, but as a
+separate country, Die Schweiz, from the prominent part taken
+by Schwyz in initiating the freedom of the land.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span></p>
+<h2>UNION OF DENMARK, SWEDEN, AND
+NORWAY</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1397</h6>
+
+<h3>PAUL C. SINDING</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Canute the Great, King of England and Denmark, by successful wars
+added almost the whole of Norway to his dominions. At his death in
+1035 his kingdoms were divided, and fell into anarchy and discord for
+two centuries, until the tyrant Black Geert, who had driven out Christopher
+II, and been for fourteen years the virtual sovereign of Denmark,
+was assassinated by the Danish patriot Niels Ebbeson.</p>
+
+<p>Christopher's third son, Waldemar, surnamed Atterdag, because he
+used to say when a misfortune happened, "To-morrow it is again day,"
+was recalled from Bavaria and crowned king as Waldemar IV. He commenced
+at once with vigor and marked success the improvement of the
+internal conditions of the country, and strove to encompass his chief ambition,
+the reunion of the ancient Danish possessions.</p>
+
+<p>By marrying his daughter Margaret to Hakon VI, King of Norway
+and son of Magnus Smek, King of Sweden, Waldemar laid a basis for a
+junction of the three great Scandinavian kingdoms. The union was realized
+under the administration of his illustrious and sagacious daughter,
+Margaret, known as the "Semiramis of the North."</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_w.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="W" />ALDEMAR ATTERDAG left no direct male issue. But
+his two grandsons, Albert the Younger, of Mecklenburg,
+a son of Ingeborg, Waldemar's eldest daughter, and of Henry
+of Mecklenburg; and Olaf, a son of Margaret, his younger
+daughter, and of Hakon VI of Norway, were now claiming
+the hereditary succession to the throne. One party declared
+for Olaf, but, as he was the son of the younger daughter, his
+claim was very doubtful. But because the house of Mecklenburg
+had acted with hostility toward Denmark, and Olaf
+had expectation of Norway and claims to the crown of Sweden,
+as a grandson of Magnus Smek, Denmark was, by his
+election, in hopes of one day seeing the three crowns united on
+the same head. It was therefore not long before this important
+affair was determined. The preference was given Olaf, who,
+although only six years of age, was, under the name of Olaf V,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span>
+elected king of Denmark, under the guardianship of Margaret
+his mother; and after the death of his father Hakon VI, he
+became also king of Norway, the two kingdoms thus being
+united. This union, till the expiration of four hundred and
+thirty-four years, was not dissolved. When Olaf V, seven
+years after, died in Falsterbo, both kingdoms elected Margaret
+their queen, though custom had not yet authorized the election
+of a female.</p>
+
+<p>During the reign of this great Princess, who deservedly has
+been called the "Semiramis of the North," Denmark and Norway
+exercised in Europe an influence the effects of which were
+long felt throughout the Scandinavian countries with their vast
+extent and rival races. She united wisdom and policy with
+courage and determination, had strength of mind to preserve
+her rectitude without deviation, and her efforts were crowned
+by divine Providence with success. She is justly considered one
+of the most illustrious female rulers in history. Her renown
+even reached the Byzantine emperor Emanuel Pal&aelig;ologus, who
+called her <i>Regina sine exemplo maxima</i>. But under her successors&mdash;destitute
+of her high sense of duty, great ability, and
+consistent virtue&mdash;her triumphs proved a snare instead of a
+blessing. The great union she created dissolved in a short time,
+and its downfall was as sudden as its elevation had been extraordinary.
+She was born in 1353. Her father was, as we have
+seen, Waldemar Atterdag, her mother Queen Hedevig, and she
+became queen of Denmark and Norway in 1387. She was no
+sooner elected queen of Denmark, and homaged on the hill of
+Sliparehog, near Lund, in Ringsted, Odensee, and Wiborg, than
+she sailed to Norway to receive their homage. But a remarkable
+occurrence is mentioned by historians as occurring about this
+time. A report prevailed that King Olaf, the Queen's son, was
+not dead; it was propagated by the nobility, and very likely set
+on foot by them, in order to punish Margaret for her liberality
+to the clergy. An impostor claimed the crown of Denmark and
+Norway, and gained credit every day by making discoveries
+which could only be known to Olaf and his mother. Margaret,
+however, proved him to be a son of Olaf's nurse. Olaf had a
+large wart between his shoulders&mdash;a mark which did not appear
+on the impostor. The false Olaf was seized, broken on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span>
+wheel, and publicly burned at a place between Falsterbo and
+Skanor, in Sweden, and Margaret continued uninterruptedly her
+regency.</p>
+
+<p>But the Queen, not wishing to contract a new marriage, and
+comprehending the importance of having a successor elected to
+the throne, proposed her nephew, Eric, Duke of Pomerania.
+This proposal the clergy and nobility approved, and they
+elected him to be king of Denmark and Norway after Margaret's
+death. Meanwhile Albert, King of Sweden, having, on account
+of his preference given to German favorites, incurred the
+hatred of his people, the Swedes requested Margaret to assist
+them against him, which she promised to do if they in return
+would make her queen of Sweden. Moreover, Albert had
+highly offended the Danish Queen; had, though hardly able
+to govern his own kingdom, assumed the title "king of Denmark,"
+and laid claim to Norway, too; and when she blamed him
+for it he had answered her disdainfully. In a letter he had used
+foul and abusive language, calling her "a king without breeches,"
+and the "abbot's concubine" (<i>abbedfrillen</i>), on account of
+her particular attachment to a certain abbot of Soro, who was
+her spiritual director. It is, however, true, that her intimacy
+with this monk gave room for some suspicion that her privacies
+with him were not all employed about the care of her soul. Afterward,
+to ridicule her yet more, King Albert sent her a hone to
+sharpen her needles, and swore not to put on his nightcap until
+she had yielded to him. But under perilous circumstances Margaret
+was never at a loss how to act. She acted here with the
+utmost prudence, trying first to gain the favor of the peers of the
+state, and solemnly promising to rule according to the Swedish
+laws. War now broke out between Albert and Margaret, whose
+army was commanded by Jvar Lykke. The encounter of the
+two armies&mdash;about twelve thousand men on each side&mdash;took
+place at Falkoping, September 21, 1388. A furious battle was
+fought, in which the victory for a long while hung in suspense.
+But Margaret's good fortune prevailed; Albert was routed and
+his army cut to pieces, and Margaret was now mistress of Sweden.</p>
+
+<p>While this was passing, the Queen tarried in Wordingborg
+Sjelland, ardently desiring to learn the result. But no sooner did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span>
+she hear that the victory was gained, and the Swedish King and
+his son Eric taken prisoners, than she hastened to Bahus, in
+Sweden, where the King and his son were brought before her.
+Lost in joy and amazement at having her enemy in her power,
+the Queen now retorted upon King Albert with revilings, and
+she made him wear a large nightcap of paper&mdash;a retaliation
+proportioned to his offensive words. He and his son were thereupon
+brought to Lindholm, a castle in Skane, where they were
+kept prisoners for seven years. When they entered the castle, a
+dark, square room was assigned them, and when the King said,
+"I hope that this torture against a crowned head will only last a
+few days," the jailer replied: "I grieve to say that the Queen's
+orders are to the contrary; anger not the Queen by any bravado,
+else you will be placed in the irons, and if these fail we can have
+recourse to sharper means." To the excessive self-love, intemperance,
+conceitedness, and want of foresight which had characterized
+all his actions, the unhappy Albert had to ascribe his
+present situation.</p>
+
+<p>The year following, the Queen stormed the important city of
+Calmar, yet siding with the imprisoned King. She made several
+wise alliances with Richard II of England, and other potentates,
+and concluded a truce for two years with the princes of
+Mecklenburg, and the cities of Rostock and Wismar, which had
+begun to raise fresh levies in favor of the unfortunate Albert.
+This period expired, she laid siege to Stockholm and other fortified
+places, of which John, Duke of Mecklenburg, and other
+friends of the imprisoned King had become masters. But the
+cause of Albert was little forwarded, and Margaret gained ground
+every day. She compelled the capital to surrender to her and do
+homage to her as its sovereign; whereafter a peremptory peace
+was concluded on Good Friday, which restored tranquillity to
+the three kingdoms. The imprisoned King and his son were delivered
+up to the Hanseatic towns, and they obtained their liberty
+for sixty thousand ounces of silver, upon condition that they
+should resign all claims to Sweden if the amount were not paid
+within three years. As soon as the King and his son were delivered
+to the deputies, they solemnly swore to a strict observance
+of this article, the Hanse towns engaging themselves to guarantee
+the treaty. The money, however, not being paid by the stipulated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">247</a></span>
+time, Margaret became undisputed sovereign of Sweden,
+the third Scandinavian kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>About this time the "Victuals Brethren," so called because
+they brought victuals from the Hanse towns to Stockholm while
+besieged, began to imperil Denmark, plundering the Danish and
+Norwegian coasts, and destroying all commercial business along
+the Baltic. But Margaret ordered the harbors of the maritime
+towns to be blockaded, thus putting a quick stop to their cruelties
+and piracies. The Queen's principal care was now to visit
+the different provinces, to administer justice and redress grievances
+of every kind. Among other salutary regulations, the affairs
+of commerce were not forgotten. It was, for instance, decreed
+that all manner of assistance should be given to foreign
+merchants and sailors, particularly in case of misfortune and
+shipwreck, without expectation of reward; and that all pirates
+should be treated with the greatest rigor.</p>
+
+<p>Eric of Pomerania was, as we have said, elected to be king
+of Denmark and Norway after Margaret's death. But wishing
+to have him also elected her successor to the Swedish throne,
+Margaret brought him to Sweden, and introduced him to the
+deputies, one by one, whom she requested to confirm his election
+to the succession. The majesty of the Queen's person, the
+strength of her arguments, and the sweetness of her eloquence
+gained over the deputies, who, on July 22, 1396, elected him at
+Morastone by Upsala, to succeed her also in Sweden. But Margaret,
+soon discovering his inability and impetuousness, took
+pains to remedy these defects, as much as possible, by procuring
+for him as a wife the intelligent and virtuous princess Philippa,
+a daughter of Henry V of England, and shortly after had
+got Catharine, her niece and Eric's sister, married to Prince John,
+a son of the German emperor Ruprecht; John being promised
+the Scandinavian crowns if Eric of Pomerania should die childless.
+Thus having strengthened and consolidated her power by
+influential connections and relationships, the Queen, upon whose
+head the three northern crowns were actually united, now proceeded
+to realize the great plan she had long cherished&mdash;to get a
+fundamental law established for a perpetual union of the three
+large Scandinavian kingdoms. The realization of this purpose
+immortalized her, securing for her the admiration of the world,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">248</a></span>
+whose most eminent historians do not hesitate to surname her
+the "Great," and to compare her with the loftiest Greek and Roman
+heroes and statesmen.</p>
+
+<p>On June 17, 1397, Margaret summoned to an assembly at
+Calmar, in the province of Smaland, Sweden, the clergy and the
+nobility of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and established, by
+their aid and consent, a fundamental law. This was the law so
+celebrated in the North under the name of the "Union of Calmar,"
+and which afterward gave birth to wars between Sweden
+and Denmark that lasted a whole century. It consisted of
+three articles. The first provided that the three kingdoms should
+thenceforward have but one and the same king, who was to be
+chosen successively by each of the kingdoms. The second article
+imposed upon the sovereign the obligation of dividing his time
+equally between the three kingdoms. The third, and most important,
+decreed that each kingdom should retain its own laws,
+customs, senate, and privileges of every kind; that the highest
+officers should be natives; that any alliance concluded with foreign
+potentates should be obligatory upon all three kingdoms
+when approved by the council of one kingdom; and that, after
+the death of the King, his eldest son, or, if the King died childless,
+then another wise, intelligent, and able prince, should be
+chosen common monarch; and if anyone, because of high treason,
+was banished from one kingdom, then he should be banished
+from them all. A month after, on the Queen's birthday,
+July 13th, a legitimate charter was drawn up, to which the
+Queen subscribed and put her seal; on which occasion Eric of
+Pomerania was anointed and crowned by the archbishops of
+Upsala and Lund as king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
+The <i>Te Deum</i> was sung in the churches of Calmar, the assembly
+crying out: "<i>H&aelig;cce unio esto perpetua! Longe, longe, longe,
+vivat Margarethe, regina Dani&aelig;, Norvegi&aelig; et Sveci&aelig;!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>This strict union of the three large states became a potent
+bulwark for their security, and made them, in more than one
+century, the arbiter of the European system; the three nations of
+the northern peninsula presenting a compact and united front,
+that could bid defiance to any foreign aggression.</p>
+
+<p>Although Eric of Pomerania was elected king, and in 1407
+passed his minority, Margaret continued governing until the day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span>
+of her death. "You have done all well," wrote the people to
+her, "and we value your services so highly that we would gladly
+grant you everything." The union of the three Scandinavian
+kingdoms having been established in Calmar, all her efforts were
+now aimed at regaining the duchy of Schleswig, which circumstances
+had compelled her to resign to Gerhard IV, Count of
+Holstein. For such a reunion with Schleswig a favorable opportunity
+appeared, when Gerhard was killed in an expedition
+against the Ditmarshers, leaving behind three sons in minority.
+Elizabeth, Gerhard's widow, fled to Margaret for succor against
+her violent brother-in-law, Bishop Henry of Osnabrueck. Margaret,
+fond of fishing in foul water, was very willing to help her,
+but availed herself of the opportunity to annex successively different
+parts of Schleswig.</p>
+
+<p>The dethroned Swedish King, Albert, never able to forget
+his anger toward Margaret or her severity against him, and continually
+cherishing a hope of reascending the Swedish throne,
+and considering the Union of Calmar a breach of peace, contrived
+to make the Swedish people displeased with her, and
+thought it a suitable time to revolt from her dominion. He established
+a strong camp before Visby, the capital of the island of Gulland,
+having six thousand foot and, at some distance, nine thousand
+horse. Determined to engage before their junction could
+take place, the Queen's commander-in-chief, Abraham Broder,
+immediately advanced until in sight of the enemy, and then endeavored
+to gain possession of Visby and the ground near by. In
+this he was so far successful that Albert and his army had to
+leave the camp and conclude a truce. But nevertheless he did
+not till after a lapse of seven years give up his hope of remounting
+the throne of Sweden, making a final peace with Margaret, and
+henceforward living in Gadebush, Mecklenburg, where in 1412
+he closed his inglorious life.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after, October 27th, Queen Margaret died on board a
+ship in the harbor of Flensburg, at the age of fifty-nine, after an
+active and notable reign of thirty-seven years. Her funeral was
+attended with the greatest solemnity, and her corpse was brought
+to the Cathedral of Roeskilde, where Eric of Pomerania, her successor,
+in 1423, caused her likeness to be carved in alabaster.
+Her acts show her character. She displayed judiciousness united<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span>
+with circumspection; wisdom in devising plans, and perseverance
+in executing them; skill in gaining the confidence of the
+clergy and peasantry, and thereby counterbalancing the imperious
+nobility. On the whole she applied herself to the civilization
+of her three kingdoms, and to their improvement by excellent
+laws, the great aim of which was to undermine the nobility. She
+pursued the plan of her great father to recall all rights to the
+crown lands, which during the reign of her weak and inefficient
+predecessors had been granted to the nobility. The prosecution
+of this plan for the perfect subversion of the feudal aristocracy
+was unfortunately interrupted by her death; her imprudent and
+weak successor having no power to restrain the turbulent spirit
+of a factious nobility.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span></p>
+<h2>DEPOSITION OF RICHARD II</h2>
+
+<h3>HENRY IV BEGINS THE LINE OF LANCASTER</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1399</h6>
+
+<h3>JOHN LINGARD</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince, succeeded his grandfather,
+Edward III, on the throne of England in 1377, when Richard was
+but ten years old. During his minority the government was intrusted to
+a council of twelve, but for some years it was mainly controlled by Richard's
+uncles, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas of Woodstock,
+Duke of Gloucester. War with France, then in progress, entailed
+great expenditures, which were increased by court extravagance, and at
+length burdensome taxes led to popular uprisings. These became most
+serious in the great revolt of the peasants led by Wat Tyler, in 1381.
+Richard appeared among the insurgents and granted them concessions.</p>
+
+<p>From this time the King became more active in his government, and
+in 1386 John of Gaunt withdrew to the Continent. About the same time
+the Duke of Gloucester headed a coalition of the baronial party in opposition
+to the sovereign; but in 1389 Richard suddenly declared himself
+of age and gave a check to their designs. For eight years he ruled with
+moderation as a constitutional monarch.</p>
+
+<p>But in 1396 Richard married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of
+France, and henceforth seems to have adopted French ideas, and to have
+made pretensions in the direction of absolutism. He proceeded to arbitrary
+prosecutions which led to the violent death of several leading
+nobles. Richard also quarrelled with Henry, son of John of Gaunt,
+whom as Duke of Lancaster he succeeded in 1399. The year before,
+Richard had banished Henry for ten years&mdash;fearing him as a possible
+rival. The history of the remaining months of Richard's reign is crowded
+with the events which rapidly led to the ending of the direct line of the
+Plantagenets and the beginning of the line of Lancaster.</p>
+
+<p>In Shakespeare's <i>Richard II</i>&mdash;the first of his historical plays&mdash;the
+poet, following Holinshed's chronicle, presents not only a skilful dramatic
+construction of the recorded incidents of the reign, but also a finely
+discriminated portrait of Richard's much debated character as man and
+monarch.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_r.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="R" />ICHARD now saw himself triumphant over all his opponents.
+Even his uncles, through affection or fear, seconded all his
+measures. He had attained what seems for some time to have
+been the great object of his policy. He had placed himself above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">252</a></span>
+the control of the law. By the grant of a subsidy for life he was
+relieved from the necessity of meeting his parliament; with the
+aid of his committee, the members of which proved the obsequious
+ministers of his will, he could issue what new ordinances he
+pleased; and a former declaration by the two houses, that he was
+as free as any of his predecessors, was conveniently interpreted
+to release him from the obligations of those statutes which
+he deemed hostile to the royal prerogative. But he had forfeited
+all that popularity which he had earned during the last
+ten years; and the security in which he indulged hurried him
+on to other acts of despotism, which inevitably led to his ruin.
+He raised money by forced loans; he compelled the judges to
+expound the law according to his own prejudices or caprice;
+he required the former adherents of Gloucester to purchase
+and repurchase charters of pardon; and, that he might obtain
+a more plentiful harvest of fines and amercements, put at once
+seventeen counties out of the protection of the law, under the pretence
+that they had favored his enemies.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of Lancaster did not survive the banishment of
+his son more than three months; and the exile expected to succeed
+by his attorneys to the ample estates of his father. But
+Richard now discovered that his banishment, like an outlawry,
+had rendered him incapable of inheriting property. At a great
+council, including the committee of parliament, it was held that
+the patents granted, both to him and his antagonist, were illegal,
+and therefore void; and all the members present were sworn to
+support that determination. Henry Bowet, who had procured
+the patent for the duke of Hereford, was even condemned, for that
+imaginary offence, to suffer the punishment of treason; though,
+on account of his character, his life was spared on condition that
+he should abjure the kingdom forever.</p>
+
+<p>This iniquitous proceeding seems to have exhausted the
+patience of the nation. Henry&mdash;on the death of his father he
+had assumed the title of duke of Lancaster&mdash;had long been the
+idol of the people; and the voluntary assemblage of thousands
+to attend him on his last departure from London might have
+warned Richard of the approaching danger. The feeling of
+their own wrongs had awakened among them a spirit of resistance;
+the new injury offered to their favorite pointed him out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span>
+to them as their leader. Consultations were held; plans were
+formed; the dispositions of the great lords were sounded; and
+the whole nation appeared in a ferment. Yet it was in this
+moment, so pregnant with danger, that the infatuated monarch
+determined to leave his kingdom. His cousin and heir, the
+Earl of March, had been surprised and slain by a party of Irish;
+and, in his eagerness to revenge the loss of a relation, he despised
+the advice of his friends, and wilfully shut his eyes to the designs
+of his enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Having appointed his uncle, the Duke of York, regent during
+his absence, the King assisted at a solemn mass at Windsor,
+chanted a collect himself, and made his offering. At the door
+of the Church he took wine and spices with his young Queen;
+and, lifting her up in his arms, repeatedly kissed her, saying,
+"Adieu, madam, adieu till we meet again." From Windsor, accompanied
+by several noblemen, he proceeded to Bristol, where
+the report of plots and conspiracies reached him, and was received
+with contempt. At Milford Haven he joined his army,
+and, embarking in a fleet of two hundred sail, arrived in a few
+days in the port of Waterford. His cousin the Duke of Albemarle
+had been ordered to follow with a hundred more; and
+three weeks were consumed in waiting for that nobleman, whose
+delay was afterward attributed to a secret understanding with
+the King's enemies.</p>
+
+<p>At length Richard led his forces from Kilkenny against the
+Irish. Several of the inferior chiefs hastened barefoot and with
+halters round their necks to implore his mercy; but M'Murchad
+spurned the idea of submission, and boasted that he would extirpate
+the invaders. He dared not indeed meet them in open
+combat; but it was his policy to flee before them, and draw them
+into woods and morasses, where they could neither fight with
+advantage nor procure subsistence. The want of provisions
+and the clamor of the soldiers compelled the King to give up the
+pursuit, and to direct his march toward Dublin; and M'Murchad,
+when he could no longer impede their progress, solicited and obtained
+a parley with the Earl of Gloucester, the commander of
+the rear-guard. The chieftain was an athletic man; he came
+to the conference mounted on a gray charger, which had cost
+him four hundred head of cattle, and brandished with ease and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span>
+dexterity a heavy spear in his hand. He seemed willing to become
+the nominal vassal of the King of England, but refused
+to submit to any conditions. Richard set a price on his head,
+proceeded to Dublin, and at the expiration of a fortnight was
+joined by the Duke of Albemarle with men and provisions. This
+seasonable supply enabled him to recommence the pursuit of
+M'Murchad; but while he was thus occupied with objects of
+inferior interest in Ireland, a revolution had occurred in England,
+which eventually deprived him both of his crown and his life.</p>
+
+<p>When the King sailed to Ireland, Henry of Bolingbroke, the
+new Duke of Lancaster, resided in Paris, where he was hospitably
+entertained, but at the same time narrowly watched, by the
+French monarch. About Christmas he offered his hand to
+Marie, one of the daughters of the Duke of Berry. The jealousy
+of Richard was alarmed; the Earl of Salisbury hastened to
+Paris to remonstrate against the marriage of a daughter of
+France with an English "traitor," and, suiting his conduct to his
+words, the envoy, having accomplished his object, returned
+without deigning to speak to the exile. While Henry was brooding
+over these injuries, the late Primate, or nominal Bishop of
+St. Andrews, secretly left his house at Cologne, and in the disguise
+of a friar procured an interview with the Duke at the Hotel
+de Vinchester. The result of their meeting was a determination
+to return to England during the King's absence. To elude the
+suspicions of the French ministers, Henry procured permission
+to visit the Duke of Bretagne; and, on his arrival at Nantes,
+hired three small vessels, with which he sailed from Vannes to
+seek his fortune in England. His whole retinue consisted only
+of the Archbishop, the son of the late Earl of Arundel, fifteen
+lances, and a few servants. After hovering for some days on
+the eastern coast, he landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire, and was
+immediately joined by the two powerful earls of Northumberland
+and Westmoreland; before whom, in the White Friars
+at Doncaster, he declared upon oath that his only object
+was to recover the honors and estates which had belonged
+to his father, and bound himself not to advance any claim to
+the crown.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of York, to whom the King had intrusted the
+government during his absence, was accurately informed of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">255</a></span>
+motions, and had summoned the retainers of the crown to join
+the royal standard at St. Albans. There is, however, reason to
+believe that he was not hearty in the cause which it was his duty
+to support. He must have viewed with pity the unmerited misfortunes
+of one nephew, and have condemned the violent and
+thoughtless career of the other; and from the fate of his brother
+Gloucester, and the cruel and unjust treatment of the only son
+of his brother, John of Gaunt, he could not draw any very flattering
+conclusion with respect to the stability of his own family.
+Whether it was from suspicion of his fidelity, or from the disinclination
+of the chief barons to draw the sword against one who
+demanded nothing more than his right, the favorites of Richard
+became alarmed for their own safety.</p>
+
+<p>The Earl of Wiltshire, with Bussy and Greene, members of
+the committee of parliament, had been appointed to wait on the
+young Queen at Wallingford; but they suddenly abandoned
+their charge, and fled with precipitation to Bristol. York himself
+followed with the army in the same direction. It might be
+that, to relieve himself from responsibility, he wished to be in
+readiness to deliver up the command on the expected arrival
+of Richard from Ireland; but at the same time he left open the
+road from Yorkshire to the metropolis, and allowed the adventurer
+to pursue his object without impediment. Henry was
+already on his march. The snowball increased as it rolled
+along, and the small number of forty followers, with whom he
+had landed, swelled by the time that he had reached St. Albans
+to sixty thousand men. He was preceded by his messengers
+and letters, stating not only his own wrongs, but also the grievances
+of the people, and affirming that the revenue of the kingdom
+had been let out to farm to the rapacity of Scrope, Bussy,
+and Greene. In all those lordships which had been the inheritance
+of his family he was received with enthusiasm; in London
+by a procession of the clergy and people, with addresses of congratulation,
+and presents, and offers of service.</p>
+
+<p>His stay in the capital was short. Having flattered the citizens,
+and confirmed them in their attachment to his person,
+he turned to the west, and entered Evesham, on the same day
+on which York reached Berkeley. After an interchange of
+messages they met in the church of the castle; and, before they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span>
+separated, the doom of Richard was sealed. That the regent
+consented to the actual deposition of his nephew does not
+necessarily follow; he might only have sought his reformation by
+putting it out of his power to govern amiss; but he betrayed the
+trust which had been reposed to him, united his force with that
+of Henry, and commanded Sir Peter Courtenay, who held the
+castle of Bristol for the King, to open its gates. That officer,
+protesting that he acknowledged no authority in the Duke of
+Lancaster, obeyed the mandate of the regent. The next morning
+the three fugitives, the Earl of Wiltshire, Bussy, and Greene,
+were executed by order of the constable and marshal of the host.
+The Duke of York remained at Bristol; Henry with his own
+forces proceeded to Chester to secure that city, and awe the men
+of Cheshire, the most devoted adherents of the King.</p>
+
+<p>We may now return to Richard in Ireland. It must appear
+strange, but Henry had been in England a fortnight before
+the King, in consequence, it was said, of the tempestuous
+weather, had heard of his landing. The intelligence appears
+to have provoked indignation as much as alarm. "Ha!" he
+exclaimed, "fair uncle of Lancaster, God reward your soul!
+Had I believed you, this man would not have injured me.
+Thrice have I pardoned him; this is his fourth offence." But
+he referred the matter to his council, and was advised to cross
+over to England immediately with the ships which had brought
+the re&euml;nforcement under the Duke of Albemarle. That nobleman,
+however, insidiously, as it was afterward pretended,
+diverted him from this intention. The Earl of Salisbury received
+orders to sail immediately with his own retainers, a body
+of one hundred men, and to summon to the royal standard the
+natives of Wales. Richard promised to follow in the fleet from
+Waterford in the course of six days. The Earl obeyed; the
+men of Wales and Cheshire answered the call; and a gallant
+host collected at Conway.</p>
+
+<p>But Richard appeared not according to his promise; distressing
+reports were circulated among the troops; and the
+royalists, having waited for him almost a fortnight, disbanded
+in spite of the fears and entreaties of their commander. At last,
+on the eighteenth day, the King arrived in Milford Haven with
+the dukes of Albemarle, Exeter, and Surrey, the Earl of Worcester,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span>
+the bishops of London, Lincoln, and Carlisle, and several
+thousands of the troops who had accompanied him to Ireland.
+With such a force, had it been faithful, he might have made a
+stand against his antagonist; but on the second morning, when
+he arose, he observed from his window that the greater part had
+disappeared. A council was immediately summoned, and a
+proposal made that the King should flee by sea to Bordeaux;
+but the Duke of Exeter objected that to quit the kingdom in
+such circumstances was to abdicate the throne. Let them
+proceed to the army at Conway. There they might bid defiance
+to the enemy; or at all events, as the sea would still be open,
+might thence set sail to Guienne. His opinion prevailed; and
+at nightfall the King, in the disguise of a Franciscan friar, his
+two brothers of Exeter and Surrey, the Earl of Gloucester, the
+Bishop of Carlisle, Sir Stephen Scrope, and Sir William Feriby,
+with eight others, stole away from the army, and directed their
+route toward Conway. Their flight was soon known. The
+royal treasure, which Richard left behind him, was plundered;
+Albemarle, Worcester, and most of the leaders hastened to pay
+their court to Henry; the rest attempted in small bodies to make
+their way to their own counties, but were in most instances
+plundered and ill-treated by the Welsh.</p>
+
+<p>The royal party with some difficulty, but without any accident,
+reached Conway, where, to their utter disappointment,
+instead of a numerous force, they found only the Earl of Salisbury
+with a hundred men. In this emergency the King's brothers
+undertook to visit Henry at Chester, and to sound his intentions;
+and during their absence Richard, with the Earl of Salisbury,
+examined the castles of Beaumaris and Carnarvon; but
+finding them without garrisons or provisions, the disconsolate
+wanderers returned to their former quarters.</p>
+
+<p>When the two dukes were admitted into the presence of
+Henry, they bent the knee and acquainted him with their message
+from the King. He took little notice of Surrey, whom
+he afterward confined in the castle, but, leading Exeter aside,
+spoke with him in private, and gave him, instead of the hart,
+the King's livery, his own badge of the rose. But no entreaties
+could induce him to allow them to return. Exeter was observed
+to drop a tear when the Duke of Albemarle said to him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span>
+tauntingly: "Fair cousin, be not angry. If it please God, things
+shall go well."</p>
+
+<p>The immediate object of Henry was to secure the royal person.
+He was gratified to learn from the envoys the place of
+Richard's retreat, and detained them at Chester, that the King,
+instead of making his escape, might await their return. His
+first care was to take possession of the treasure which the King
+had deposited in the strong castle of Holt; his next, to despatch
+the Earl of Northumberland at the head of four hundred men-at-arms
+and a thousand archers to Conway, with instructions
+not to display his force, lest the King should put to sea, but
+by artful speeches and promises to draw him out of the
+fortress and then make him prisoner. The Earl took possession
+in his journey of the castles of Flint and Rhuddlan,
+and a few miles beyond the latter, placing his men in concealment
+under a rock, rode forward with only five attendants to
+Conway.</p>
+
+<p>He was readily admitted, and, to the King's anxious inquiries
+about his brothers, replied that he had left them well at
+Chester, and had brought a letter from the Duke of Exeter. In
+it that nobleman said, or rather was made to say, that full
+credit might be given to the offers of the bearer. These offers
+were, that Richard should promise to govern and judge his
+people by law; that the dukes of Exeter and Surrey, the Earl
+of Salisbury, the Bishop of Carlisle, and Maudelin, the King's
+chaplain, should submit to a trial in parliament, on the charge
+of having advised the assassination of Gloucester; that Henry
+should be made grand justiciary of the kingdom, as his ancestors
+had been for a hundred years; and that, on the concession
+of these terms, the Duke should come to Flint, ask the
+King's pardon on his knees, and accompany or follow him to
+London. Richard consulted his friends apart. He expressed
+his approbation of the articles, but bade them secretly be assured
+that no consideration should induce him to abandon
+them on their trial, and that he would grasp the first opportunity
+of being revenged on his and their enemies&mdash;"for there were
+some among them whom he would flay alive; whom he would
+never spare for all the gold in the land." Northumberland
+was then sworn to the observance of the conditions. He took<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">259</a></span>
+his oath on the host; and, "like Judas," says the writer, "perjured
+himself on the body of our Lord."</p>
+
+<p>As Northumberland departed to make arrangements for the
+interview at Flint, the King said to him: "I rely, my lord, on
+your faith. Remember your oath, and the God who heard it."
+Soon afterward he followed with his friends and their servants,
+to the number of twenty-two. They came to a steep declivity,
+to the left of which was the sea, and on the right a lofty rock
+overhanging the road. The King dismounted, and was descending
+on foot, when he suddenly exclaimed: "I am betrayed.
+God of Paradise, assist me! Do you not see banners and pennons
+in the valley?" Northumberland with eleven others met
+them at the moment and affected to be ignorant of the circumstance.
+"Earl of Northumberland," said the King, "if I
+thought you capable of betraying me, it is not too late to return."
+"You cannot return," the Earl replied, seizing the King's bridle;
+"I have promised to conduct you to the Duke of Lancaster."
+By this time he was joined by a hundred lances, and
+two hundred archers on horseback; and Richard, seeing it
+impossible to escape, exclaimed: "May the God, on whom you
+laid your hand, reward you and your accomplices at the last
+day!" and then, turning to his friends, added: "We are betrayed;
+but remember that our Lord was also sold and delivered
+into the hands of his enemies."</p>
+
+<p>They dined at Rhuddlan, and reached Flint in the evening.
+The King, as soon as he was left with his friends, abandoned
+himself to the reflections which his melancholy situation inspired.
+He frequently upbraided himself with his past indulgence
+to his present opponent: "Fool that I was!" he exclaimed:
+"thrice did I save the life of this Henry of Lancaster.
+Once my dear uncle his father, on whom the Lord have mercy!
+would have put him to death for his treason and villany. God
+of Paradise! I rode all night to save him; and his father delivered
+him to me, to do with him as I pleased. How true is
+the saying that we have no greater enemy than the man whom
+we have preserved from the gallows! Another time he drew
+his sword on me, in the chamber of the Queen, on whom God
+have mercy! He was also the accomplice of the Duke of Gloucester
+and the Earl of Arundel; he consented to my murder,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span>
+to that of his father, and of all my council. By St. John, I forgave
+him all; nor would I believe his father, who more than
+once pronounced him deserving of death."</p>
+
+<p>The unfortunate King rose after a sleepless night, heard
+mass, and ascended the tower to watch the arrival of his opponent.
+At length he saw the army, amounting to eighty
+thousand men, winding along the beach till it reached the castle
+and surrounded it from sea to sea. He shuddered and wept,
+and cursed the Earl of Northumberland, but was called down
+by the arrival of Archbishop Arundel, the Duke of Albemarle,
+and the Earl of Worcester. They knelt to Richard, who, drawing
+the prelate apart, held a long conversation with him. After
+their departure he again mounted the tower, and, surveying
+the host of his enemies, exclaimed: "Good Lord God! I
+commend myself into thy holy keeping, and cry thee mercy,
+that thou wouldst pardon all my sins. If they put me to death
+I will take it patiently, as thou didst for us all." Northumberland
+had ordered dinner, and the Earl of Salisbury, the Bishop
+and the two knights, Sir Stephen Scrope and Sir William Feriby,
+sat with the King at the same table by his order; for since
+they were all companions in misfortune, he would allow no
+distinction among them. While he was eating, unknown persons
+entered the hall, insulting him with sarcasms and threats.
+As soon as he rose, he was summoned into the court to receive
+the Duke of Lancaster. Henry came forward in complete armor,
+with the exception of his helmet. As soon as he saw
+the King he bent his knee, and, advancing a few paces, he repeated
+his obeisance with his cap in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Fair cousin of Lancaster," said Richard, uncovering himself,
+"you are right welcome." "My lord," answered the Duke,
+"I am come before my time. But I will show you the reason.
+Your people complain that for the space of twenty or two-and-twenty
+years you have ruled them rigorously; but, if it please
+God, I will help you to govern better." The King replied,
+"Fair cousin, since it pleaseth you, it pleaseth us well." Henry
+then addressed himself successively to the Bishop and to the
+knights, but refused to notice the Earl. The King's horses
+were immediately ordered; and two lean and miserable animals
+were brought out, on which Richard and Salisbury mounted,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span>
+and amid the flourish of trumpets and shouts of triumph followed
+the Duke into Chester.</p>
+
+<p>At Chester writs were issued in the King's name for the
+meeting of parliament and the preservation of the peace.
+Henry dismissed the greater part of his army, and prepared to
+conduct his prisoner to the capital. At Lichfield Richard
+seized a favorable moment to let himself down from his window,
+but was retaken in the garden, and from that moment was constantly
+guarded by ten or twelve armed men. In the neighborhood
+of London they separated. Henry, accompanied by the
+mayor and principal citizens, proceeded to St. Paul's, prayed
+before the high altar, and wept a few minutes over the tomb of
+his father. The King was sent to Westminster, and thence on
+the following day to the Tower, and, as he went along, was
+greeted with curses and the appellation of "the bastard," a
+word of ominous import, and prophetic of his approaching degradation.</p>
+
+<p>When the Duke first landed in England, he had sworn on the
+Gospels that his only object was to vindicate his right to the
+honors and possessions of the house of Lancaster. If this was
+the truth, his ambition had grown with his good-fortune. He
+now aspired to exchange the coronet of a duke for the crown
+of a king. Can we believe that he would meet with opposition
+from his associates, the Percy family? Yet so we are assured.
+They, however, by their perfidy, had given themselves a master.
+Their retainers had been already dismissed; and the friends of
+Richard abhorred them as the worst of traitors. They had
+therefore no resource but to submit, and to second the design
+of Lancaster. After several consultations it was resolved to
+combine a solemn renunciation of the royal authority on the
+part of Richard with an act of deposition on the part of the
+two houses of parliament, in the hope that those whose scruples
+should not be satisfied with the one, might acquiesce in the
+other. To obtain the first, the royal captive was assailed with
+promises and threats. Generally he abandoned himself to lamentation
+and despair; occasionally he exerted that spirit which
+he had formerly displayed. "Why am I thus guarded?" he
+asked one day. "Am I your king or your prisoner?" "You
+are my king, sir," replied the Duke with coolness; "but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">262</a></span>
+council of your realm has thought proper to place a guard about
+you."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="Richard_II" id="Richard_II"></a><img src=
+"images/img4a.jpg" width="500" height="757" alt=
+"Richard II resigns the crown of England
+to Henry, Duke of Lancaster,
+son of John of Gaunt,
+at London." title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src=
+"images/img3a.jpg" width="500" height="819" alt=
+"Richard II resigns the crown of England
+to Henry, Duke of Lancaster,
+son of John of Gaunt,
+at London." title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>On the day before the meeting of parliament a deputation
+of prelates, barons, knights, and lawyers waited on the captive
+in the Tower, and reminded him that in the castle of Conway,
+while he was perfectly his own master, he had promised to resign
+the crown on account of his own incompetency to govern.
+On his reply that he was ready to perform his promise, a paper
+was given him to read, in which he was made to absolve all his
+subjects from their fealty and allegiance, to renounce of his own
+accord all kingly authority, to acknowledge himself incapable
+of reigning, and worthy for his past demerits to be deposed,
+and to swear by the holy Gospels that he would never act, nor,
+as far as in him lay, suffer any other person to act, in opposition
+to this resignation. He then added, as from himself, that if it
+were in his power to name his successor, he would choose his
+cousin of Lancaster, who was present, and to whom he gave his
+ring, which he took from his own finger.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the account of this transaction inserted by the order
+of Henry in the rolls of parliament; an account the accuracy
+of which is liable to strong suspicion. It is difficult to believe
+that Richard had so much command over his feelings as to
+behave with that cheerfulness which is repeatedly noticed in
+the record; and the assertion that he had promised to resign
+the crown when he saw Northumberland in the castle
+of Conway, is not only contradictory to the statement of the
+two eye-witnesses, but also in itself highly improbable. From
+the fate of Edward II, with which he had so often been threatened,
+he must have known that it was better to flee to his transmarine
+dominions, which were still open to him, than to resign
+his crown and remain a prisoner in the custody of his successor.</p>
+
+<p>The next day the two houses met amid a great concourse
+of people in Westminster hall. The Duke occupied his usual
+seat near the throne, which was empty and covered with cloth
+of gold. The resignation of the King was read; each member,
+standing in his place, signified his acceptance of it aloud; and
+the people with repeated shouts expressed their approbation.
+Henry now proceeded to the second part of his plan, the act of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span>
+deposition. For this purpose the coronation oath was first
+read; thirty-three articles of impeachment followed, in which
+it was contended that Richard had violated that oath; and
+thence it was concluded that he had by his misconduct forfeited
+his title to the throne. Of the articles, those which bear the
+hardest on the King are: the part which he was supposed to
+have had in the death of the Duke of Gloucester, his revocation
+of the pardons formerly granted to that Prince and his adherents,
+and his despotic conduct since the dissolution of parliament.
+Of the remainder, some are frivolous; many might,
+with equal reason, have been objected to each of his predecessors;
+and the others rest on the unsupported assertion of men
+whose interest it was to paint him in the blackest colors.</p>
+
+<p>No opposition had been anticipated, nor is any mentioned
+on the rolls; but we are told that the Bishop of Carlisle, to the
+astonishment of the Lancastrians, rose and demanded for Richard
+what ought not to be refused to the meanest criminal,
+the right of being confronted with his accusers; and for parliament
+what it might justly claim, the opportunity of learning
+from the King's own mouth whether the resignation of the
+crown, which had been attributed to him, were his own spontaneous
+act. If Merks actually made such a speech, he must
+have stood alone; no one was found to second it; the house
+voted the deposition of Richard; and eight commissioners, ascending
+a tribunal erected before the throne, pronounced him
+degraded from the state and authority of king, on the ground
+that he notoriously deserved such punishment, and had acknowledged
+it under his hand and seal on the preceding day. Sir
+William Thirnyng, chief justice, was appointed to notify the
+sentence to the captive, who meekly replied that he looked not
+after the royal authority, but hoped his cousin would be good
+lord to him.</p>
+
+<p>The rightful possessor was now removed from the throne.
+But, supposing it to be vacant, what pretensions could Henry
+of Lancaster advance to it? By the law of succession it belonged
+to the descendants of Lionel, the third son of Edward
+III; and their claim, it is said, had been formally recognized
+in parliament. All waited in anxious suspense till the Duke,
+rising from his seat, and forming with great solemnity the sign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">264</a></span>
+of the cross on his forehead and breast, pronounced the following
+words: "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
+I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this realm of England, and
+the crown, with all the members and appurtenances, as that I
+am descended by right line of blood, coming from the good lord
+King Henry III, and through that right that God, of his grace,
+hath sent me with help of my kin and of my friends to recover
+it; the which realm was in point to be undone for default of governance
+and undoing of good laws."</p>
+
+<p>In these extraordinary terms did Lancaster advance his
+pretensions, artfully intermixing an undefined claim of inheritance<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">73</a>
+with those of conquest and expediency, and rather hinting
+at each than insisting on either. But, however difficult it
+might be to understand the ground, the object of his challenge
+was perfectly intelligible. Both houses admitted it unanimously;
+and, as a confirmation, Henry produced the ring and
+seal which Richard had previously delivered to him. The
+Archbishop of Canterbury now took him by the hand, and led
+him to the throne. He knelt for a few minutes in prayer on the
+steps, arose, and was seated in it by the two archbishops. As
+soon as the acclamations had subsided, the Primate, stepping
+forward, made a short harangue, in which he undertook to
+prove that a monarch in the vigor of manhood was a blessing,
+a young and inexperienced prince was a curse to a people. At
+the conclusion the King rose. "Sirs," said he, "I thank God,
+and you, spiritual and temporal, and all estates of the land; and
+do you to wit, it is not my will that no man think that by way of
+conquest I would disinherit any man of his heritage, franchises,
+or other rights that him ought to have, nor put him out of that
+that he has and has had by the good laws and customs of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span>realm; except those persons that have been against the good purpose
+and the common profit of the realm."</p>
+
+
+<p>With the authority of Richard had expired that of the parliament
+and of the royal officers. Henry immediately summoned
+the same parliament to meet again in six days, appointed new
+officers of the crown, and as soon as he had received their oaths
+retired in state to the royal apartments. Thus ended this
+eventful day, with the deposition of Richard of Bordeaux, and
+the succession of his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span></p>
+<h2>DISCOVERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS
+AND THE AFRICAN COAST</h2>
+
+<h3>BEGINNING OF NEGRO SLAVE TRADE</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1402</h6>
+
+<h3>SIR ARTHUR HELPS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Canary Islands&mdash;the "Elysian Fields" and "Fortunate Islands"
+of antiquity&mdash;have perhaps figured in fabulous lore more extensively than
+any others, and have been discovered, invaded, and conquered more frequently
+than any country in the world. There has scarcely been a nation
+of any maritime enterprise that has not had to do with them, and in one
+manner or another made its appearance in them.</p>
+
+<p>During the period following the death of ancient empires, the Canary
+Islands lay hidden in the general darkness which fell upon the world.
+With the modern revival came new and greater mariners, and the islands
+were once more discovered. It is well to note the connection between
+these modern rediscoveries and the origin of negro slavery.</p>
+
+<p>In Europe the old pagan slavery existed in many nations, and in the
+early Christian centuries underwent many modifications through the advance
+of the new religion and civilization. The modern form of slavery
+began with the first importation of negroes into Europe, as shown in the
+following account, from which it appears that the history of modern slavery
+begins with the history of African discovery.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_p.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="P" />ETRARCH is referred to by Viera to prove that the Genoese
+sent out an expedition to the Canary Islands. Las Casas
+mentions that an English or French vessel bound from France
+or England to Spain was driven by contrary winds to these Islands,
+and on its return spread abroad in France an account of the
+voyage. The information thus obtained&mdash;or perhaps in other
+ways of which there is no record&mdash;stimulated Don Luis de la
+Cerda, Count of Clermont, great-grandson of Don Alonzo the
+Wise of Castile, to seek for the investiture of the crown of the
+Canaries, which was given to him with much pomp by Clement
+VI, at Avignon, in 1344, Petrarch being present. This sceptre
+proved a barren one. The affairs of France, with which state
+the new King of the Canaries was connected, drew off his attention;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span>
+and he died without having visited his dominions. The
+next authentic information that we have of the Canary Islands
+is that, in the times of Don Juan I of Castile, and of Don Enrique,
+his son, these islands were much visited by the Spaniards.
+In 1399, we are told, certain Andalusians, Biscayans, Guipuzcoans,
+with the consent of Don Enrique, fitted out an expedition
+of five vessels, and making a descent on the island of Lanzarote,
+one of the Canaries, took captive the King and Queen, and one
+hundred and seventy of the islanders.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto there had been nothing but discoveries, rediscoveries,
+and invasions of these islands; but at last a colonist appears
+upon the scene. This was Juan de B&eacute;thencourt, a great
+Norman baron, lord of St. Martin le Gaillard in the County of
+Eu, of B&eacute;thencourt, of Granville, of Sancerre, and other places
+in Normandy, and chamberlain to Charles VI of France. Those
+who are at all familiar with the history of that period, and with
+the mean and cowardly barbarity which characterized the long-continued
+contests between the rival factions of Orleans and
+Burgundy, may well imagine that any Frenchman would then
+be very glad to find a career in some other country. Whatever
+was the motive of Juan de B&eacute;thencourt, he carried out his purpose
+in the most resolute manner. Leaving his young wife, and
+selling part of his estate, he embarked at Rochelle in 1402, with
+men and means for the purpose of conquering, and establishing
+himself in, the Canary Islands. It is not requisite to give a minute
+description of this expedition. Suffice it to say that B&eacute;thencourt
+met with fully the usual difficulties, distresses, treacheries,
+and disasters that attach themselves to this race of enterprising
+men. After his arrival at the Canaries, finding his means insufficient,
+he repaired to the court of Castile, did acts of homage to
+the King, Enrique III, and afterward renewed them to his son
+Juan II, thereby much strengthening the claim which the Spanish
+monarchs already made to the dominion of these islands.
+B&eacute;thencourt, returning to the islands with renewed resources,
+made himself master of the greater part of them, reduced several
+of the natives to slavery, introduced the Christian faith, built
+churches, and established vassalage.</p>
+
+<p>On the occasion of quitting his colony in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1405, he called
+all his vassals together, and represented to them that he had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">268</a></span>
+named for his lieutenant and governor Maciot de B&eacute;thencourt,
+his relation; that he himself was going to Spain and to Rome to
+seek for a bishop for them; and he concluded his oration with
+these words: "My loved vassals, great or small, plebeians or nobles,
+if you have anything to ask me or to inform me of, if you
+find in my conduct anything to complain of, do not fear to
+speak; I desire to do favor and justice to all the world." The
+assembly he was addressing contained none of the slaves he had
+made. We are told, however, and that by eye-witnesses, that
+the poor natives themselves bitterly regretted his departure, and,
+wading through the water, followed his vessel as far as they
+could. After his visit to Spain and to Rome, he returned to his
+paternal domains in Normandy, where, while meditating another
+voyage to his colony, he died in 1425.</p>
+
+<p>Maciot de B&eacute;thencourt ruled for some time successfully;
+but afterward, falling into disputes with the Bishop, and his
+affairs generally not prospering, he sold his rights to Prince
+Henry of Portugal&mdash;also, as it strangely appears, to another person&mdash;and
+afterward settled in Madeira. The claims to the government
+of the Canaries were, for many years, in a most entangled
+state; and the right to the sovereignty over these islands
+was a constant ground of dispute between the crowns of Spain
+and Portugal.</p>
+
+<p>Thus ended the enterprise of Juan de B&eacute;thencourt, which,
+though it cannot be said to have led to any very large or lasting
+results, yet, as it was the first modern attempt of the kind, deserves
+to be chronicled before commencing with Prince Henry of
+Portugal's long-continued and connected efforts in the same direction.
+The events also which preceded and accompanied
+B&eacute;thencourt's enterprise need to be recorded, in order to show
+the part which many nations, especially the Spaniards, had in
+the first discoveries on the coast of Africa.</p>
+
+<p>We now turn to the history of the discoveries made, or rather
+caused to be made, by Prince Henry of Portugal. This Prince
+was born in 1394. He was the third son of John I of Portugal
+and Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
+That good Plantagenet blood on the mother's side was,
+doubtless, not without avail to a man whose life was to be spent
+in continuous and insatiate efforts to work out a great idea.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">269</a></span>
+Prince Henry was with his father at the memorable capture of
+Ceuta, the ancient Septem, in 1415. This town, which lies opposite
+to Gibraltar, was of great magnificence, and one of the
+principal marts in that age for the productions of the East. It
+was here that the Portuguese nation first planted a firm foot in
+Africa; and the date of this town's capture may, perhaps, be
+taken as that from which Prince Henry began to meditate further
+and far greater conquests. His aims, however, were directed
+to a point long beyond the range of the mere conquering
+soldier. He was especially learned, for that age of the world,
+being skilled in mathematical and geographical knowledge. And
+it may be noticed here that the greatest geographical discoveries
+have been made by men conversant with the book knowledge of
+their own time. A work, for instance, often seen in the hands of
+Columbus, which his son mentions as having had much influence
+with him, was the learned treatise of Cardinal Petro de
+Aliaco (Pierre d'Ailly), the <i>Imago Mundi</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to Prince Henry of Portugal. We learn that
+he had conversed much with those who had made voyages in
+different parts of the world, and particularly with Moors from
+Fez and Morocco, so that he came to hear of the Azeneghis, a
+people bordering on the country of the negroes of Jalof. Such
+was the scanty information of a positive kind which the Prince
+had to guide his endeavors. Then there were the suggestions
+and the inducements which to a willing mind were to be found
+in the shrewd conjectures of learned men, the fables of chivalry,
+and, perhaps, in the confused records of forgotten knowledge
+once possessed by Arabic geographers. The story of Prister
+John, which had spread over Europe since the crusades, was
+well known to the Portuguese Prince. A mysterious voyage of a
+certain wandering saint, called St. Brendan, was not without
+its influence upon an enthusiastic mind. Moreover, there were
+many sound motives urging the Prince to maritime discovery;
+among which, a desire to fathom the power of the Moors, a wish
+to find a new outlet for traffic, and a longing to spread the
+blessings of the faith may be enumerated. The especial reason
+which impelled Prince Henry to take the burden of discovery on
+himself was that neither mariner nor merchant would be likely
+to adopt an enterprise in which there was no clear hope of profit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span>
+It belonged, therefore, to great men and princes, and among such
+he knew of no one but himself who was inclined to it.</p>
+
+<p>The map of the world being before us, let us reduce it to the
+proportions it filled in Prince Henry's time: let us look at our
+infant world. First, take away those two continents, for so we
+may almost call them, each much larger than a Europe, to the
+far west. Then cancel that square, massive-looking piece to the
+extreme southeast; happily there are no penal settlements there
+yet. Then turn to Africa: instead of that form of inverted cone
+which it presents, and which we now know there are physical
+reasons for its presenting, make a cimetar shape of it, by running
+a slightly curved line from Juba on the eastern side to Cape
+Nam on the western. Declare all below that line unknown.
+Hitherto, we have only been doing the work of destruction; but
+now scatter emblems of hippogriffs and anthropophagi on the
+outskirts of what is left in the map, obeying a maxim, not confined
+to the ancient geographers only&mdash;where you know nothing,
+place terrors. Looking at the map thus completed, we can hardly
+help thinking to ourselves, with a smile, what a small space,
+comparatively speaking, the known history of the world has been
+transacted in, up to the last four hundred years. The idea of the
+universality of the Roman dominions shrinks a little; and we begin
+to fancy that Ovid might have escaped his tyrant. The ascertained
+confines of the world were now, however, to be more than
+doubled in the course of one century; and to Prince Henry of
+Portugal, as to the first promoter of these vast discoveries, our
+attention must be directed.</p>
+
+<p>This Prince, having once the well-grounded idea in his mind
+that Africa did not end where it was commonly supposed,
+namely, at Cape Nam (Not), but that there was a world beyond
+that forbidding negative, seems never to have rested until he had
+made known that quarter of the globe to his own. He fixed his
+abode upon the promontory of Sagres, at the southern part of
+Portugal, whence, for many a year, he could watch for the rising
+specks of white sail bringing back his captains to tell him of new
+countries and new men. We may wonder that he never went
+himself; but he may have thought that he served the cause better
+by remaining at home and forming a centre whence the electric
+energy of enterprise was communicated to many discoverers, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span>
+then again collected from them. Moreover, he was much engaged
+in the public affairs of his country. In the course of his
+life he was three times in Africa, carrying on war against the
+Moors; and at home, besides the care and trouble which the
+state of the Portuguese court and government must have given
+him, he was occupied in promoting science and encouraging education.</p>
+
+<p>In 1415, as before noticed, he was at Ceuta. In 1418 he was
+settled on the promontory of Sagres. One night in that year he
+is thought to have had a dream of promise, for on the ensuing
+morning he suddenly ordered two vessels to be got ready forthwith,
+and to be placed under the command of two gentlemen of
+his household, Joham Gon&ccedil;alvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz, whom
+he ordered to proceed down the Barbary coast on a voyage of
+discovery.</p>
+
+<p>A contemporary chronicler, Azurara, whose work has recently
+been discovered and published, tells the story more simply,
+and merely states that these captains were young men, who,
+after the ending of the Ceuta campaign, were as eager for employment
+as the Prince for discovery; and that they were ordered
+on a voyage having for its object the general molestation of the
+Moors, as well as that of making discoveries beyond Cape Nam.
+The Portuguese mariners had a proverb about this cape&mdash;"He
+who would pass Cape Not, either will return or not"; intimating
+that, if he did not turn before passing the cape, he would
+never return at all. On the present occasion it was not destined
+to be passed; for these captains, Joham Gon&ccedil;alvez Zarco and
+Tristam Vaz, were driven out of their course by storms, and
+accidentally discovered a little island, where they took refuge,
+and from that circumstance called the island Porto Santo.
+"They found there a race of people living in no settled polity,
+but not altogether barbarous or savage, and possessing a kindly
+and most fertile soil."</p>
+
+<p>I give this description of the first land discovered by Prince
+Henry's captains, thinking it would well apply to many other
+lands about to be found out by his captains and by other discoverers.
+Joham Gon&ccedil;alvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz returned.
+Their master was delighted with the news they brought him,
+more on account of its promise than its substance. In the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span>
+year he sent them out again, together with a third captain,
+named Bartholomew Perestrelo, assigning a ship to each captain.
+His object was not only to discover more lands, but also
+to improve those which had been discovered. He sent, therefore,
+various seeds and animals to Porto Santo. This seems to
+have been a man worthy to direct discovery. Unfortunately,
+however, among the animals some rabbits were introduced into
+the new island; and they conquered it, not for the Prince, but
+for themselves. Hereafter, we shall find that they gave his people
+much trouble, and caused no little reproach to him.</p>
+
+<p>We come now to the year 1419. Perestrelo, for some unknown
+cause, returned to Portugal at that time. After his departure,
+Joham Gon&ccedil;alvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz, seeing from
+Porto Santo something that seemed like a cloud, but yet different&mdash;the
+origin of so much discovery, noting the difference in
+the likeness&mdash;built two boats, and, making for this cloud, soon
+found themselves alongside a beautiful island, abounding in
+many things, but most of all in trees, on which account they gave
+it the name of "Madeira" (Wood). The two discoverers entered
+the island at different parts. The Prince, their master, afterward
+rewarded them with the captaincies of those parts. To
+Perestrelo he gave the island of Porto Santo to colonize it. Perestrelo,
+however, did not make much of his captaincy, but after
+a strenuous contest with the rabbits, having killed an army of
+them, died himself. This captain has a place in history as being
+the father-in-law of Columbus, who, indeed, lived at Porto Santo
+for some time, and here, on new-found land, meditated far
+bolder discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>Joham Gon&ccedil;alvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz began the cultivation
+of their island of Madeira, but met with an untoward
+event at first. In clearing the wood, they kindled a fire among
+it, which burned for seven years, we are told; and in the end,
+that which had given its name to the island, and which, in the
+words of the historian, overshadowed the whole land, became
+the most deficient commodity. The captains founded churches
+in the island; and the King of Portugal, Don Duarte, gave the
+temporalities to Prince Henry, and all the spiritualities to the
+Knights of Christ.</p>
+
+<p>While these things were occurring at Madeira and at Porto<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span>
+Santo, Prince Henry had been prosecuting his general scheme
+of discovery, sending out two or three vessels each year, with
+orders to go down the coast from Cape Nam, and make what
+discoveries they could; but these did not amount to much, for
+the captains never advanced beyond Cape Bojador, which is situated
+seventy leagues to the south of Cape Nam. This Cape
+Bojador was formidable in itself, being terminated by a ridge of
+rocks with fierce currents running round them, but was much
+more formidable from the fancies which the mariners had
+formed of the sea and land beyond it. "It is clear," they were
+wont to say, "that beyond this cape there is no people whatever;
+the land is as bare as Libya&mdash;no water, no trees, no grass
+in it; the sea so shallow that at a league from the land it is
+only a fathom deep; the currents so fierce that the ship which
+passes that cape will never return;" and thus their theories were
+brought in to justify their fears. This outstretcher&mdash;for such is
+the meaning of the word <i>bojador</i>&mdash;was, therefore, as a bar
+drawn across that advance in maritime discovery which had for
+so long a time been the first object of Prince Henry's life.</p>
+
+<p>The Prince had now been working at his discoveries for
+twelve years, with little approbation from the generality of persons;
+the discovery of these islands, Porto Santo and Madeira,
+serving to whet his appetite for further enterprise, but not winning
+the common voice in favor of prosecuting discoveries on the
+coast of Africa. The people at home, improving upon the reports
+of the sailors, said that "the land which the Prince sought
+after was merely some sandy place like the deserts of Libya;
+that princes had possessed the empires of the world, and yet had
+not undertaken such designs as his, nor shown such anxiety to
+find new kingdoms; that the men who arrived in those foreign
+parts&mdash;if they did arrive&mdash;turned from white into black men;
+that the King Don John, the Prince's father, had endowed foreigners
+with land in his kingdom, to break it up and cultivate
+it&mdash;a thing very different from taking the people out of Portugal,
+which had need of them, to bring them among savages to be
+eaten, and to place them upon lands of which the mother country
+had no need; that the Author of the world had provided
+these islands solely for the habitation of wild beasts, of which an
+additional proof was that those rabbits the discoverers themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span>
+had introduced were now dispossessing them of the island.</p>
+
+<p>There is much here of the usual captiousness to be found in
+the criticism of bystanders upon action, mixed with a great deal
+of false assertion and premature knowledge of the ways of Providence.
+Still, it were to be wished that most criticism upon action
+was as wise; for that part of the common talk which spoke
+of keeping their own population to bring out their own resources
+had a wisdom in it which the men of future centuries
+were yet to discover throughout the peninsula. Prince Henry,
+as may be seen by his perseverance up to this time, was not a
+man to have his purposes diverted by such criticism, much of
+which must have been, in his eyes, worthless and inconsequent
+in the extreme. Nevertheless, he had his own misgivings. His
+captains came back one after another with no good tidings of
+discovery, but with petty plunder gained, as they returned from
+incursions on the Moorish coast.</p>
+
+<p>The Prince concealed from them his chagrin at the fruitless
+nature of their attempts, but probably did not feel it less on that
+account. He began to think: Was it for him to hope to discover
+that land which had been hidden from so many princes? Still,
+he felt within himself the incitement of "a virtuous obstinacy,"
+which would not let him rest. Would it not, he thought, be ingratitude
+to God, who thus moved his mind to these attempts,
+if he were to desist from his work, or be negligent in it? He resolved,
+therefore, to send out again Gil Eannes, one of his household,
+who had been sent the year before, but had returned, like
+the rest, having discovered nothing. He had been driven to
+the Canary Islands, and had seized upon some of the natives
+there, whom he brought back. With this transaction the Prince
+had shown himself dissatisfied; and Gil Eannes, now intrusted
+again with command, resolved to meet all dangers rather than
+to disappoint the wishes of his master. Before his departure,
+the Prince called him aside and said: "You cannot meet with
+such peril that the hope of your reward shall not be much
+greater; and in truth, I wonder what imagination this is that you
+have all taken up&mdash;in a matter, too, of so little certainty; for if
+these things which are reported had any authority, however little,
+I would not blame you so much. But you quote to me the opinions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span>
+of four mariners, who, as they were driven out of their way
+to Frandes or to some other ports to which they commonly navigated,
+had not, and could not have used, the needle and the
+chart; but do you go, however, and make your voyage without
+regard to their opinion,&mdash;and, by the grace of God, you will not
+bring out of it anything but honor and profit."</p>
+
+<p>We may well imagine that these stirring words of the Prince
+must have confirmed Gil Eannes in his resolve to efface the
+stain of his former misadventure. And he succeeded in doing so;
+for he passed the dreaded Cape Bojador&mdash;a great event in the
+history of African discovery, and one that in that day was considered
+equal to a labor of Hercules. Gil Eannes returned to a
+grateful and most delighted master. He informed the Prince
+that he had landed, and that the soil appeared to him unworked
+and fruitful; and, like a prudent man, he could not tell of foreign
+plants, but had brought some of them home with him in a
+barrel of the new-found earth&mdash;plants much like those which bear
+in Portugal the roses of Santa Maria. The Prince rejoiced to
+see them, and gave thanks to God, "as if they had been the
+fruit and sign of the promised land; and besought Our Lady,
+whose name the plants bore, that she would guide and set forth
+the doings in this discovery to the praise and glory of God and to
+the increase of his holy faith."</p>
+
+<p>After passing the Cape of Bojador there was a lull in Portuguese
+discovery, the period from 1434 to 1441 being spent in
+enterprises of very little distinctness or importance. Indeed,
+during the latter part of this period, the Prince was fully occupied
+with the affairs of Portugal. In 1437 he accompanied the
+unfortunate expedition to Tangier, in which his brother Ferdinand
+was taken prisoner, who afterward ended his days in slavery
+to the Moor. In 1438, King Duarte dying, the troubles of
+the regency occupied Prince Henry's attention. In 1441, however,
+there was a voyage which led to very important consequences.
+In that year Antonio Gon&ccedil;alvez, master of the robes
+to Prince Henry, was sent out with a vessel to load it with skins
+of "sea-wolves," a number of them having been seen, during a
+former voyage, in the mouth of a river about fifty-four leagues
+beyond Cape Bojador. Gon&ccedil;alvez resolved to signalize his
+voyage by a feat that should gratify his master more than the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span>
+capture of sea-wolves; and he accordingly planned and executed
+successfully an expedition for capturing some Azeneghi
+Moors, in order, as he told his companions, to take home "some
+of the language of that country." Nu&ntilde;o Tristam, another of
+Prince Henry's captains, afterward falling in with Gon&ccedil;alvez, a
+further capture of Moors was made, and Gon&ccedil;alvez returned to
+Portugal with his spoil.</p>
+
+<p>In the same year Prince Henry applied to Pope Martin V,
+praying that his holiness would grant to the Portuguese crown
+all that it could conquer, from Cape Bojador to the Indies, together
+with plenary indulgence for those who should die while
+engaged in such conquests. The Pope granted these requests.
+"And now," says a Portuguese historian, "with this apostolic
+grace, with the breath of royal favor, and already with the applause
+of the people, the Prince pursued his purpose with more
+courage and with greater outlay."</p>
+
+<p>In 1442 the Moors whom Antonio Gon&ccedil;alvez had captured
+in the previous year promised to give black slaves in ransom for
+themselves if he would take them back to their own country;
+and the Prince, approving of this, ordered Gon&ccedil;alvez to set sail
+immediately, "insisting as the foundation of the matter, that if
+Gon&ccedil;alvez should not be able to obtain so many negroes (as had
+been mentioned) in exchange for the three Moors, yet that he
+should take them; for whatever number he should get, he would
+gain souls, because the negroes might be converted to the faith,
+which could not be managed with the Moors." Gon&ccedil;alvez obtained
+ten black slaves, some gold-dust, a target of buffalo-hide,
+and some ostrich eggs in exchange for two of the Moors, and,
+returning with his cargo, excited general wonderment on account
+of the color of the slaves. These, then, we may presume, were
+the first black slaves that had made their appearance in the peninsula
+since the extinction of the old slavery.</p>
+
+<p>I am not ignorant that there are reasons for alleging that
+negroes had before this era been seized and carried to Seville.
+The <i>Ecclesiastical and Secular Annals</i> of that city, under the date
+1474, record that negro slaves abounded there, and that the
+fifths levied on them produced considerable gains to the royal
+revenue; it is also mentioned that there had been traffic of this
+kind in the days of Don Enrique III, about 1399, but that it had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span>
+since then fallen into the hands of the Portuguese. The chronicler
+states that the negroes of Seville were treated very kindly
+from the time of King Enrique, being allowed to keep their
+dances and festivals; and that one of them was named <i>mayoral</i>
+of the rest, who protected them against their masters and before
+the courts of law, and also settled their own private quarrels.
+There is a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474
+to a celebrated negro, Juan de Valladolid, commonly called the
+"Negro Count," nominating him to this office of mayoral of the
+negroes, which runs thus: "For the many good, loyal, and signal
+services which you have done us, and do each day, and because
+we know your sufficiency, ability, and good disposition,
+we constitute you mayoral and judge of all the negroes and mulattoes,
+free or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble city
+of Seville, and throughout the whole archbishopric thereof, and
+that the said negroes and mulattoes may not hold any festivals
+nor pleadings among themselves, except before you, Juan de
+Valladolid, negro, our judge and mayoral of the said negroes
+and mulattoes; and we command that you, and you only, should
+take cognizance of the disputes, pleadings, marriages, and other
+things which may take place among them, forasmuch as you are
+a person sufficient for that office, and deserving of your power,
+and you know the laws and ordinances which ought to be kept,
+and we are informed that you are of noble lineage among the said
+negroes."</p>
+
+<p>But the above merely shows that in the year 1474 there were
+many negroes in Seville, and that laws and ordinances had been
+made about them. These negroes might all, however, have been
+imported into Seville since the Portuguese discoveries. True it
+is that in the times of Don Enrique III, and during B&eacute;thencourt's
+occupation of the Canary Islands, slaves from thence
+had been brought to France and Spain; but these islanders were
+not negroes, and it certainly may be doubted whether any negroes
+were imported into Seville previous to 1443.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the course of Portuguese affairs, a historian of
+that nation informs us that the gold obtained by Gon&ccedil;alvez
+"awakened, as it always does, covetousness"; and there is no
+doubt that it proved an important stimulus to further discovery.
+The next year Nu&ntilde;o Tristam went farther down the African<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span>
+coast; and, off Adeget, one of the Arguim Islands, captured
+eighty natives, whom he brought to Portugal. These, however,
+were not negroes, but Azeneghis.</p>
+
+<p>The tide of popular opinion was now not merely turned, but
+was rushing in full flow, in favor of Prince Henry and his discoveries.
+The discoverers were found to come back rich in
+slaves and other commodities; whereas it was remembered that,
+in former wars and undertakings, those who had been engaged
+in them had generally returned in great distress. Strangers, too,
+now came from afar, scenting the prey. A new mode of life, as
+the Portuguese said, had been found out; and "the greater part
+of the kingdom was moved with a sudden desire to follow this
+way to Guinea."</p>
+
+<p>In 1444 a company was formed at Lagos, who received permission
+from the Prince to undertake discovery along the coast
+of Africa, paying him a certain portion of any gains which they
+might make. This has been considered as a company founded
+for carrying on the slave trade; but the evidence is by no means
+sufficient to show that its founders meant such to be its purpose.
+It might rather be compared to an expedition sent out, as we
+should say in modern times, with letters of marque, in which,
+however, the prizes chiefly hoped for were not ships nor merchandise,
+but men. The only thing of any moment, however,
+which the expedition accomplished was to attack successfully
+the inhabitants of the islands Nar and Tider, and to bring back
+about two hundred slaves. I grieve to say that there is no evidence
+of Prince Henry's putting a check to any of these proceedings;
+but, on the contrary, it appears that he rewarded with
+large honors Lan&ccedil;arote, one of the principal men of this expedition,
+and received his own fifth of the slaves. Yet I have
+scarcely a doubt that the words of the historian are substantially
+true&mdash;that discovery, not gain, was still the Prince's leading
+idea. We have an account from an eye-witness of the partition
+of the slaves brought back by Lan&ccedil;arote, which, as it is the first
+transaction of the kind on record, is worthy of notice, more especially
+as it may enable the reader to understand the motives of
+the Prince and of other men of those times. It is to be found in
+the <i>Chronicle</i>, before referred to, of Azurara. The merciful
+chronicler is smitten to the heart at the sorrow he witnesses, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">279</a></span>
+still believes it to be for good, and that he must not let his mere
+earthly commiseration get the better of his piety.</p>
+
+<p>"O thou heavenly Father," he exclaims, "who, with thy
+powerful hand, without movement of thy divine essence, governest
+all the infinite company of thy holy city, and who drawest
+together all the axles of the upper worlds, divided into nine
+spheres, moving the times of their long and short periods as it
+pleases thee! I implore thee that my tears may not condemn my
+conscience, for not its law, but our common humanity, constrains
+my humanity to lament piteously the sufferings of these
+people (slaves). And if the brute animals, with their mere bestial
+sentiments, by a natural instinct, recognize the misfortunes
+of their like, what must this by human nature do, seeing thus
+before my eyes this wretched company, remembering that I myself
+am of the generation of the sons of Adam! The other day,
+which was the eighth of August, very early in the morning, by
+reason of the heat, the mariners began to bring to their vessels,
+and, as they had been commanded, to draw forth those captives
+to take them out of the vessel: whom, placed together on
+that plain, it was a marvellous sight to behold; for among them
+there were some of a reasonable degree of whiteness, handsome
+and well made; others less white, resembling leopards in their
+color; others as black as Ethiopians, and so ill-formed, as well
+in their faces as their bodies, that it seemed to the beholders as
+if they saw the forms of a lower hemisphere.</p>
+
+<p>"But what heart was that, how hard soever, which was not
+pierced with sorrow, seeing that company: for some had sunken
+cheeks, and their faces bathed in tears, looking at each other;
+others were groaning very dolorously, looking at the heights of
+the heavens, fixing their eyes upon them, crying out loudly, as if
+they were asking succor from the Father of nature; others
+struck their faces with their hands, throwing themselves on the
+earth; others made their lamentations in songs, according to
+the customs of their country, which, although we could not understand
+their language, we saw corresponded well to the height
+of their sorrow. But now, for the increase of their grief, came
+those who had the charge of the distribution, and they began to
+put them apart one from the other, in order to equalize the portions,
+wherefore it was necessary to part children and parents,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">280</a></span>
+husbands and wives, and brethren from each other. Neither in
+the partition of friends and relations was any law kept, only each
+fell where the lot took him. O powerful Fortune! who goest
+hither and thither with thy wheels, compassing the things of the
+world as it pleaseth thee, if thou canst, place before the eyes of
+this miserable nation some knowledge of the things that are to
+come after them, that they may receive some consolation in the
+midst of their great sadness! and you others who have the business
+of this partition, look with pity on such great misery, and
+consider how can those be parted whom you cannot disunite!
+Who will be able to make this partition without great difficulty?
+for while they were placing in one part the children that saw
+their parents in another, the children sprang up perseveringly
+and fled to them; the mothers enclosed their children in their
+arms and threw themselves with them on the ground, receiving
+wounds with little pity for their own flesh, so that their offspring
+might not be torn from them!</p>
+
+<p>"And so, with labor and difficulty, they concluded the partition,
+for, besides the trouble they had with the captives, the
+plain was full of people, as well of the place as of the villages
+and neighborhood around, who in that day gave rest to their
+hands, the mainstay of their livelihood, only to see this novelty.
+And as they looked upon these things, some deploring,
+some reasoning upon them, they made such a riotous noise as
+greatly to disturb those who had the management of this distribution.
+The Infante was there upon a powerful horse, accompanied
+by his people, looking out his share, but as a man
+who for his part did not care for gain, for, of the forty-six souls
+which fell to his fifth, he speedily made his choice, as all his
+principal riches were in his contentment, considering with great
+delight the salvation of those souls which before were lost. And
+certainly his thought was not vain, for as soon as they had knowledge
+of our language they readily became Christians; and I, who
+have made this history in this volume, have seen in the town of
+Lagos young men and young women, the sons and grandsons of
+those very captives, born in this land, as good and as true Christians
+as if they had lineally descended, since the commencement
+of the law of Christ, from those who were first baptized."</p>
+
+<p>The good Azurara wished that these captives might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span>
+some foresight of the things to happen after their death. I do
+not think, however, that it would have proved much consolation
+to them to have foreseen that they were almost the first of many
+millions to be dealt with as they had been; for, in this year 1444,
+Europe may be said to have made a distinct beginning in the
+slave trade, henceforth to spread on all sides, like the waves
+upon stirred water, and not, like them, to become fainter and
+fainter as the circles widen.</p>
+
+<p>In 1445 an expedition was fitted out by Prince Henry himself,
+and the command given to Gonsalvo de Cintra, who was
+unsuccessful in an attack on the natives near Cape Blanco. He
+and some other of the principal men of the expedition lost their
+lives. These were the first Portuguese who died in battle on
+that coast. In the same year the Prince sent out three other
+vessels. The captains received orders from the Infante, Don
+Pedro, who was then Regent of Portugal, to enter the river
+D'Oro, and make all endeavors to convert the natives to the
+faith, and even, if they should not receive baptism, to make peace
+and alliance with them. This did not succeed. It is probable
+that the captains found negotiation of any kind exceedingly
+tame and apparently profitless in comparison with the pleasant
+forays made by their predecessors. The attempt, however,
+shows much intelligence and humanity on the part of those in
+power in Portugal. That the instructions were sincere is proved
+by the fact of this expedition returning with only one negro,
+gained in ransom, and a Moor who came of his own accord to
+see the Christian country.</p>
+
+<p>This same year 1445 is signalized by a great event in the
+progress of discovery along the African coast. Dinis Dyaz, called
+by Barros and the historians who followed him Dinis Fernandez,
+sought employment from the Infante, and, being intrusted by
+him with the command of a vessel, pushed boldly down the
+coast, and passed the river Sanaga (Senegal), which divides the
+Azeneghis&mdash;whom the first discoverers always called Moors&mdash;from
+the negroes of Jalof. The inhabitants were much astonished
+at the presence of the Portuguese vessel on their coasts,
+and at first took it for a fish or a bird or a phantasm; but when
+in their rude boats&mdash;hollowed logs&mdash;they neared it, and saw
+that there were men in it, judiciously concluding that it was a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">282</a></span>
+more dangerous thing than fish or bird or phantasm, they fled.
+Dinis Fernandez, however, captured four of them off that
+coast, but as his object was discovery, not slave-hunting, he went
+on till he discovered Cape Verd, and then returned to his
+country, to be received with much honor and favor by Prince
+Henry. These four negroes taken by Dinis Fernandez were
+the first taken in their own country by the Portuguese. That
+the Prince was still engaged in high thoughts of discovery and
+conversion we may conclude from observing that he rewarded
+and honored Dinis Fernandez as much as if he had brought
+him large booty; for the Prince "thought little of whatever he
+could do for those who came to him with these signs and tokens
+of another greater hope which he entertained."</p>
+
+<p>In this case, as in others, we should do great injustice if we
+supposed that Prince Henry had any of the pleasure of a slave-dealer
+in obtaining these negroes: it is far more probable that he
+valued them as persons capable of furnishing intelligence, and,
+perhaps, of becoming interpreters, for his future expeditions.
+Not that, without these especial motives, he would have thought
+it anything but great gain for a man to be made a slave, if
+it were the means of bringing him into communion with the
+Church.</p>
+
+<p>After this, several expeditions, which did not lead to much,
+occupied the Prince's time till 1447. In that year a fleet, large
+for those times, of fourteen vessels, was fitted out at Lagos by
+the people there, and the command given by Prince Henry to
+Lan&ccedil;arote. The object seems to have been, from a speech that
+is recorded of Lan&ccedil;arote's, to make war upon the Azeneghi
+Moors, and especially to take revenge for the defeat before mentioned
+which Gonsalvo de Cintra suffered in 1445 near Cape
+Blanco. That purpose effected, Lan&ccedil;arote went southward, extending
+the discovery of the coast to the Gambia. In the course
+of his proceedings on that coast we find again that Prince
+Henry's instructions insisted much upon the maintenance of
+peace with the natives. Another instance of the same disposition
+on his part deserves to be especially recorded. The expedition
+had been received in a friendly manner at Gomera, one of
+the Canary Islands. Notwithstanding this kind reception, some
+of the natives were taken prisoners. On their being brought to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">283</a></span>
+Portugal, Prince Henry had them clothed and afterward set at
+liberty in the place from which they had been taken.</p>
+
+<p>This expedition under Lan&ccedil;arote had no great result. The
+Portuguese went a little farther down the coast than they had
+ever been before, but they did not succeed in making friends of
+the natives, who had already been treated in a hostile manner
+by some Portuguese from Madeira. Neither did the expedition
+make great spoil of any kind. They had got into feuds with the
+natives, and were preparing to attack them, when a storm dissipated
+their fleet and caused them to return home.</p>
+
+<p>It appears, I think, from the general course of proceedings
+of the Portuguese in those times, that they considered there was
+always war between them and the Azeneghi Moors&mdash;that is, in
+the territory from Ceuta as far as the Senegal River; but that
+they had no declared hostility against the negroes of Jalof, or of
+any country farther south, though skirmishes would be sure to
+happen from ill-understood attempts at friendship on the one
+side, and just or needless fears on the other.</p>
+
+<p>The last public enterprise of which Prince Henry had the
+direction was worthy to close his administration of the affairs
+relating to Portuguese discovery. He caused two ambassadors
+to be despatched to the King of the Cape Verd territory, to
+treat of peace and to introduce the Christian faith. One of the
+ambassadors, a Danish gentleman, was treacherously killed by
+the natives, and upon that the other returned, having accomplished
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Don Alfonso V, the nephew of Prince Henry, now took the
+reins of government, and the future expeditions along the coast
+of Africa proceeded in his name. Still it does not appear that
+Prince Henry ceased to have power and influence in the management
+of African affairs; and the first thing that the King did
+in them was to enact that no one should pass Cape Bojador
+without a license from Prince Henry. Some time between 1448
+and 1454 a fortress was built in one of the islands of Arguim,
+which islands had already become a place of bargain for gold
+and negro slaves. This was the first Portuguese establishment
+on the coast of Africa. It seems that a system of trade was now
+established between the Portuguese and the negroes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">284</a></span></p>
+<h2>COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1414</h6>
+
+<h3>RICHARD LODGE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>During the forty years of the second great schism in the Roman
+Catholic Church, 1378-1417, different parties adhered to different popes,
+of whom there were sometimes two or more simultaneously in office.
+The French cardinals preferred Avignon&mdash;to which the holy see had been
+removed in 1309&mdash;as the seat of the pope, the Italian cardinals preferred
+Rome, and two lines of popes were consequently chosen. This division
+proved extremely injurious to the papal power and authority.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile there were various efforts for reform in the Church, among
+the most notable movements being those led by John Wycliffe in England
+and John Huss on the Continent. At last a council was called to
+decide who was the rightful claimant to the papal throne. The council
+assembled at Pisa, Italy, in 1409, but recognized neither of the then rival
+popes&mdash;Gregory XII and Benedict XIII&mdash;Alexander V being elected in
+their stead. The deposed popes, however, would not give up their rule,
+and so the action of the council added to the difficulty, since there were
+now three popes instead of two.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander V died ten months after his election, and the cardinals
+chose as his successor Cardinal Cossa, who took the name of John
+XXIII. The Church remained as much divided as before. In 1412
+Pope John, who was a shrewd and politic man, opened at Rome a council
+for the reformation of the Church, but there seems to have been little
+serious purpose either on the part of John himself or of the ecclesiastics
+who assembled; and practically nothing was done.</p>
+
+<p>John was more concerned about his political relations with various
+sovereigns. He was at war with Ladislaus, King of Naples, who soon
+drove him from Rome. John fled to Florence, and appealed to Sigismund,
+Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, for assistance. But the
+Emperor would aid him only on condition that the Pope should summon
+a new council to some German city, in order to end the schism. At last
+John issued a formal summons for a council to meet at Constance on
+November 1, 1414. Before it assembled, Ladislaus died, and Sigismund
+determined to conduct the council in the interest of his imperial dignity
+and that of the German kingship, which he also held.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE Council of Constance, like that of Pisa, had two very obvious
+questions to consider: (1) The restoration of unity;
+and (2), if the reforming party could have its way, the reform
+of the Church in its head and members. But circumstances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">285</a></span>
+forced the council to consider a third question, which had never
+been even touched in the discussions at Pisa. This was reformation
+in its widest sense; not merely a constitutional change
+in the relations of pope and hierarchy, but a vital change
+in dogma and ritual. This question was brought to the front
+by the so-called Hussite movement in Bohemia. The fundamental
+issues involved were those which have been at the bottom
+of most subsequent disputes in the Christian Church.</p>
+
+<p>How far was the Christianity of the day unlike the Christianity
+to be found in the record of Christ and his apostles? And
+the difference, if any, was it a real and necessary difference consequent
+on the development of society, or was it the result of
+abuses and innovations introduced by fallible men? The orthodox
+took their stand upon the unity and authority of the Church.
+The Church was the true foundation of Christ and the inheritor
+of his spirit. Therefore what the Church believed and taught,
+that alone was the true Christian doctrine; and the forms and
+ceremonies of the Church were the necessary aids to faith. The
+reformers, on the other hand, looked to Scripture for the fundamental
+rules of life and conduct. Any deviation from these rules,
+no matter on what authority, must be superfluous and might very
+probably be harmful.</p>
+
+<p>The Council of Constance is one of the most notable assemblies
+in the history of the world. In the number and fame of
+its members, in the importance of its objects, and, above all,
+in the dramatic interest of its records, it has few rivals. It is like
+the meeting of two worlds, the old and the new, the medi&aelig;val
+and the modern. We find there represented views which have
+hardly yet been fully accepted, which have occupied the best
+minds of succeeding centuries; at the same time, the council
+itself and its ceremonial carry us back to the times of the Roman
+Empire, when church and state were scarcely yet dual, and when
+Christianity was coextensive with one united empire. At Constance
+all the ideas, religious and political, of the Middle Ages
+seem to be put upon their trial. If that trial had ended in condemnation,
+there could be no fitter point to mark the division
+between medi&aelig;val and modern history. But the verdict was
+acquittal, or at least a partial aquittal; and the old system was
+allowed, under modified conditions, a lease of life for another<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">286</a></span>
+century. It must not be forgotten that there were great secular
+as well as ecclestiasical interests involved in the council. Princes
+and nobles were present as well as cardinals and prelates. The
+council may be regarded not only as a great assembly of the
+Church, but also as a great diet of the medi&aelig;val empire.</p>
+
+<p>The man who had done more than anyone to procure the
+summons of the council, and whose interests were most closely
+bound up in its success, was Sigismund, King of the Romans
+and potential Emperor. He was eager to terminate the schism,
+and to bring about such a reform in the Church as would prevent
+the recurrence of similar scandals. But his motive in this was
+not merely disinterested devotion to the interests of the Church.
+He wished to revive the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire, and
+to gratify his own personal vanity by posing as the secular head
+of Christendom and the arbiter of its disputes. More especially
+he wished to restore the authority of the monarchy in Germany,
+and to put an end to that anarchic independence of the princes
+of which the recent schism was both the illustration and the result.</p>
+
+<p>In pursuing this aim he was confronted by the champions of
+"liberty" and princely interests, who were represented at Constance
+by the Archbishop of Mainz and Frederick of Hapsburg,
+Count of Tyrol. The Archbishop, John of Nassau, had been
+prominent in effecting and prolonging the schism in the Empire.
+He was a firm supporter of John XXIII, and had no interest in
+attending the council except to thwart the designs of the King,
+whom he had been the last to accept. Frederick of Tyrol was
+the youngest son of that duke Leopold who had fallen at Sempach
+in the war with the Swiss. Of his father's possessions Frederick
+had inherited Tyrol and the Swabian lands, and the propinquity
+of his territories made him a powerful personage at Constance.
+His family was the chief rival of the house of Luxemburg for
+ascendency in Eastern Germany, and he himself seems to have
+cherished a personal grudge against Sigismund. To these enemies
+Sigismund could oppose two loyal allies, the elector palatine
+Lewis, who had completely abandoned the anti-Luxemburg
+policy pursued by his father, Rupert, and Frederick of
+Hohenzollern, the most prominent representative of national
+sentiment in Germany, who had already given in Brandenburg<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">287</a></span>
+an example of that restoration of order which he wished Sigismund
+to effect throughout his dominions.</p>
+
+<p>Of the clerical members of the council the most prominent
+at the commencement was the pope John XXIII. He had been
+forced by his difficulties in Italy to issue the summons, but
+as the time for the meeting approached he felt more and more
+misgiving. His object was to maintain himself in office; but he
+was conscious that neither Sigismund nor the cardinals would
+hesitate to throw him over if he stood in the way of the restoration
+of unity. He therefore allied himself with Sigismund's opponents,
+the Elector of Mainz and Frederick of Tyrol, and spared
+no pains to bring about dissension between Sigismund and the
+council.</p>
+
+<p>The assembled clergy may be divided roughly into two parties,
+the reformers, and the conservative or ultramontane party.
+The reformers were not in favor of any radical change in the
+Church. They were, if anything, more vehemently opposed
+than their antagonists to the doctrines of Wycliffe and Huss.
+Such reform as they desired was aristocratic rather than democratic.
+They had no intention of weakening the authority of the
+Church; but within the Church they desired to remove gross
+abuses, and to strengthen the hierarchy as against the papacy.
+Their chief contention was that a general council has supreme
+authority, even over the pope, and they wished such councils to
+meet at regular intervals. By this means papal absolutism
+would be limited by a sort of oligarchical parliament within
+the Church. The conservatives, on the other hand, consisting
+chiefly of the cardinals and Italian prelates, had no wish to alter
+a system under which they enjoyed material advantages. Their
+object, as it had been at Pisa, was to restore the union of the
+Church, but to defeat, or at any rate postpone, any schemes of
+reform.</p>
+
+<p>The council was opened on November 5th, but the meeting
+was only formal, and no real business was transacted for a
+month. Meanwhile Huss had been followed to Constance by
+the representatives of the-orthodox party in Bohemia, who
+brought a formidable list of charges against the reformer. John
+XXIII at once saw in this an opportunity for embroiling the
+council with Sigismund. Adroitly keeping himself in the background,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">288</a></span>
+he allowed the cardinals to take the lead in the matter.
+They summoned Huss to appear before them, and in spite of his
+protest that he was only answerable to the whole council, they
+committed him to prison. The news that his safe-conduct had
+been so insultingly disregarded reached Sigismund as he was starting
+for Constance after the coronation ceremony at Aachen.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived on Christmas Day, and at once demanded that
+Huss should be released. The Pope excused himself, and threw
+the blame on the cardinals. To the King's right to protect his
+subject the cardinals opposed their duty to suppress heresy.
+In high dudgeon, Sigismund declared that he would leave the
+council to its fate, and actually set out on his return journey.
+The Pope was jubilant at the success of his wiles. But Sigismund's
+friends, and especially Frederick of Hohenzollern, urged
+him not to sacrifice the interests of Germany and of Christendom
+for the sake of a heretic. This advice, and the feeling
+that his personal reputation was staked on the success of the
+council, triumphed. Sigismund returned to Constance, and
+Huss remained a prisoner. From this moment John XXIII began
+to despair.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope's position became worse when the council, copying
+the procedure of the universities, began to discuss matters,
+not in a general assembly, but each nation separately. This
+deprived John of the advantage which he hoped to gain from the
+numerical majority of Italian prelates attending the council.
+Four nations organized themselves: Italians, French, Germans,
+and English. Over the last three John XXIII had no hold whatever.
+To his disgust they treated him, not as the legitimate
+pope, whose authority was to be vindicated against his rivals,
+but as one of three schismatic popes, whose retirement was a
+necessary condition of the restoration of unity. When he tried
+to evade their demand, they brought unanswerable charges against
+his personal character and threatened to depose him.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to disarm hostility by declaring his readiness to
+resign if the other popes would do the same. His promise was
+welcomed with enthusiasm, but neither Sigismund nor his supporters
+were softened by it. In spite of the vehement protests
+of the Elector of Mainz that he would obey no pope but John
+XXIII, the proposal was made to proceed to a new election.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">289</a></span>
+John had to fall back upon his last expedient. If he departed
+from Constance he might throw the council into fatal confusion;
+at the worst he could maintain himself as an antipope, as Gregory
+and Benedict had done against the Council of Pisa. His
+ally Frederick of Tyrol was prepared to assist him. Frederick
+arranged a tournament outside the walls; and while this absorbed
+public interest, the Pope escaped from Constance in the
+disguise of a groom, and made his way to Schaffhausen, a strong
+castle of the Hapsburg Count.</p>
+
+<p>For the moment John XXIII seemed not unlikely to gain his
+end. Constance was thrown into confusion by the news of his
+flight. The mob rushed to pillage the papal residence. The
+Italian and Austrian prelates prepared to leave the city, and the
+council was on the verge of dissolution. But Sigismund's zeal
+and energy succeeded in averting such a disaster. He restored
+order in the city, persuaded the prelates to remain, and took
+prompt measures to punish his rebellious vassal. An armed
+force under Frederick of Hohenzollern succeeded in capturing
+not only John XXIII, but also Frederick of Tyrol. The latter
+was compelled to undergo public humiliation, and to hand over
+his territories to his suzerain on condition that his life should
+be spared. No such exercise of imperial power had been witnessed
+in Germany since the days of the Hohenstaufen, and
+Sigismund chose this auspicious moment to secure a powerful
+supporter within the electoral college by handing over the electorate
+of Brandenburg to Frederick of Nuremberg, April 30,
+1415. He thus established a dynasty which was destined to
+play a great part in German history, and ultimately to create
+a new German empire.</p>
+
+<p>The unsuccessful flight of John XXIII not only enabled Sigismund
+to assume a more authoritative position in the council
+and in Germany; it also sealed his own fate. The council had
+no longer any hesitation in proceeding to the formal deposition
+of the Pope May 29, 1415. As the two popes who had been
+deposed at Pisa had never been recognized at Constance, the
+Church was now without a head. But instead of hastening to
+fill the vacancy, the council turned aside to the suppression of
+heresy and the trial of Huss. On three occasions, the 5th, 7th,
+and 8th of June, Huss was heard before a general session. No<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">290</a></span>
+point in his teaching excited greater animadversion than his
+contention that a priest, whether pope or prelate, forfeited his
+office by the commission of mortal sin. With great cunning
+his accusers drew him on to extend this doctrine to temporal
+princes. This was enough to complete the alienation of Sigismund,
+and after the third day's trial he was the first to pronounce
+in favor of condemnation. The last obstacle in the way of the
+prosecution was thus removed, and Huss was burned in a meadow
+outside the city walls on July 6, 1415.</p>
+
+<p>With the death of Huss ends the first and most eventful period
+of the Council of Constance. Within these seven or eight
+months Sigismund and the reforming party, thanks to the
+division of the council into nations, seemed to have gained a
+signal success. Sigismund had purchased his triumph by breaking
+his pledge to Huss, and for this he was to pay a heavy
+penalty in the subsequent disturbances in Bohemia. But for
+the moment these were not foreseen, and Sigismund was jubilantly
+eager to prosecute his scheme. Warned by the experience
+of its predecessor at Pisa, the Council of Constance was careful
+not to put too much trust in paper decrees. John XXIII was
+not only deposed, but a prisoner. Gregory XII had given a
+conditional promise of resignation, and had so few supporters
+as to be of slight importance. But Benedict XIII was still strong
+in the allegiance of the Spanish kingdoms, and unless they could
+be detached from his cause there was little prospect of ending the
+schism.</p>
+
+<p>This task Sigismund volunteered to undertake, and he also
+proposed to avert the impending war between England and
+France, to reconcile the Burgundian and Armagnac parties in
+the latter country, and to negotiate peace between the King
+of Poland and the Teutonic Knights. It would, indeed, be a
+revival of the imperial idea if its representative could thus act
+as a general mediator in European quarrels. The council
+welcomed the offer with enthusiasm, and showed their loyalty
+to Sigismund by deciding to postpone all important questions
+till his return. And this decision was actually adhered to.
+During the sixteen months of Sigismund's absence&mdash;July 15,
+1415, to January 27, 1417&mdash;only two prominent subjects were
+considered by the council. One was the trial of Jerome of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">291</a></span>
+Prague, which was a mere corollary of that of Huss, and ended
+in a similar sentence. The other was the thorny question raised
+by the proposed condemnation of the writings of Jean Petit, a
+Burgundian partisan who had defended the murder of the Duke
+of Orleans. The leader of the attack upon Jean Petit was Gerson,
+the learned and eloquent chancellor of the University of
+Paris. But so completely had the matter become a party question,
+and so great was the influence of the Duke of Burgundy,
+that the council could not be induced to go further than a general
+condemnation of the doctrine of lawful tyrannicide; and Gerson's
+activity in the matter provoked such ill-will that after the
+close of the council he could not venture to return to France,
+which was then completely under Burgundian and English domination.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to narrate here the story of Sigismund's
+journey, though it abounds with illustrations of his impulsive
+character and of the attitude of the western states toward the
+imperial pretensions. It furnished conclusive proofs, if any
+were needed, that however the council, for its own ends, might
+welcome the authority of a secular head, national sentiment was
+far too strongly developed to give any chance of success to a projected
+revival of the medi&aelig;val empire. As regards his immediate
+object, Sigismund was able to achieve some results. He failed
+to induce Benedict XIII to abdicate, but the quibbles of the
+veteran intriguer exhausted the patience of his supporters, and
+at a conference at Narbonne the Spanish kings agreed to desert
+him and to adhere to the Council of Constance, December, 1415.
+But Sigismund's more ambitious schemes came to nothing. So
+far from preventing a war between England and France, he only
+forwarded an alliance between Henry V and the Duke of Burgundy;
+and though he may have done this in the hope of forcing
+peace upon France, the result was to make the war more disastrous
+and prolonged.</p>
+
+<p>When Sigismund reappeared in Constance, January 27, 1417,
+he found that the state of affairs both in Germany and in the
+council had altered for the worse. Frederick of Tyrol had returned
+to his dominions and had been welcomed by his subjects.</p>
+
+<p>The Archbishop of Mainz had renewed his intrigues, and an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">292</a></span>
+attempt had even been made to release John XXIII. With the
+Elector Palatine, formerly his loyal supporter, Sigismund had
+quarrelled on money matters, and it seemed possible that the
+four Rhenish electors would form a league against Sigismund
+as they had done against Wenceslaus in 1400. Still more galling
+was his loss of influence in the council. The adhesion of the
+Spanish kingdoms had been followed by the arrival of Spanish
+prelates, who formed a fifth nation and strengthened the party
+opposed to reform. The war between England and France had
+created a quarrel between the two nations at Constance, and
+the French deserted the cause they had once championed rather
+than vote with their enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Sigismund could only rely upon the English and the Germans;
+and the question which agitated the council was one of vital importance.
+Which was to come first, the election of a new pope
+or the adoption of a scheme of ecclesiastical reform? The conservatives
+contended that the Church could hardly be said to
+exist without its head; that no reform would be valid until the
+normal constitution of the Church was restored. On the other
+hand, it was urged that no reform was possible unless the supremacy
+of a general council was fully recognized; that certain
+questions could be more easily discussed and settled during a
+vacancy; that if the reforms were agreed upon, a new pope
+could be pledged to accept them, whereas a pope elected at once
+could prevent all reform. Party spirit ran extremely high, and
+it seemed almost impossible to effect an agreement. Sigismund
+was openly denounced as a heretic, while he in turn threatened
+to imprison the cardinals for contumacy.</p>
+
+<p>But gradually the balance turned against the reformers.
+Some of the leading German bishops were bribed to change their
+votes. The head of the English representatives, Robert Hallam,
+Bishop of Salisbury, died at the critical moment, and the influence
+of Henry Beaufort, the future cardinal, induced the English
+nation to support an immediate election. It was agreed
+that a new pope should be chosen at once, and that the council
+should then proceed to the work of reform. But the only preliminary
+concession that Sigismund and his party could obtain
+was the issue of a decree in October, 1417, that another council
+should meet within five years, a second within seven years,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">293</a></span>
+and that afterward a council should be regularly held every ten
+years.</p>
+
+<p>For the new election it was decided that the twenty-three
+cardinals should be joined by thirty delegates of the council, six
+from each nation. The conclave met on November 8th, and
+three days later their choice fell upon Cardinal Oddo Colonna,
+who took the name of Martin V. Even the defeated party could
+not refrain from sharing in the general enthusiasm at the restoration
+of unity after forty years of schism. But their fears
+as to the ultimate fate of the cause of reform were fully justified.
+Soon after his election Martin declared that it was impious to
+appeal to a council against a papal decision. Such a declaration,
+as Gerson said, nullified the acts of the councils of Pisa and
+Constance, including the election of the Pope himself. In their
+indignation the members made a strong appeal to the Pope to
+fulfil the conditions agreed upon before his election. But Martin
+had a weapon to hand which had been furnished by the council
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>It was the division into nations that had led to the fall of
+John XXIII, and it was the same division into nations that had
+ruined the prospects of reform. The Pope now drew up a few
+scanty articles of reform, which he offered as separate concordats
+to the French, Germans, and English. It was a dangerous
+expedient for a pope to adopt, because it seemed to
+imply the separate existence of national churches; but it answered
+its immediate purpose. Martin could contend that there
+was no longer any work for the council to do, and he dissolved
+it in May, 1418.</p>
+
+<p>He set out for Italy, where a difficult task awaited him. Papal
+authority in Rome had ceased with the flight of John XXIII
+in 1414. Sigismund offered the Pope a residence in some
+Germany city, but Martin wisely refused. The support of his
+own family, the Colonnas, enabled him to re&euml;nter Rome in 1421.
+By that time almost all traces of the schism had disappeared.
+Gregory XII was dead; John XXIII had recently died in Florence;
+Benedict XIII still held out in his fortress of Peniscola,
+but was impotent in his isolation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">294</a></span></p>
+<h2>TRIAL AND BURNING OF JOHN HUSS</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HUSSITE WARS</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1415</h6>
+
+<h3>RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Among the heralds of the Reformation, John Wycliffe, the English
+Protestant who antedated Protestantism by a century and a half, holds
+the first position in order of time. For many years after the death of
+Wycliffe the movement which he began continued to be, as it was at first,
+confined to England; but at length it was to acquire a wider significance
+and to enter upon its European extension.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after his own day the spirit of Wycliffe&mdash;even before knowledge
+of his work had crossed the Channel&mdash;had come to a new birth on
+the Continent. And when some sparks of Wycliffe's own fire were blown
+over the half of Europe&mdash;even as far as Bohemia&mdash;the kindred fires which
+had long burned in spite of all suppression were quickened into a living
+and a spreading flame.</p>
+
+<p>While then there was a direct and vital influence from the work of the
+English reformer which gave to his teachings partial identity with those
+of his Bohemian successors, the movement led by these was still quite independent
+and national.</p>
+
+<p>The central figure of the Bohemian Reformation was John Huss, or
+Hus, the son of a peasant. He was born in 1369 at Husinetz&mdash;of which
+his own name is a contraction&mdash;in Southern Bohemia. The principal
+events of his life, from the time that he took his degree at the University
+of Prague until his death at the stake, July 6, 1415, will be found in
+Trench's sympathetic but discriminating narrative.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_i.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="I" />F we look for the proper forerunners of Huss, his true spiritual
+ancestors, we shall find them in his own land, in a succession
+of earnest and faithful preachers&mdash;among these Militz (d. 1374)
+and Janow (d. 1394) stand out the most prominently&mdash;who had
+sown seed which could hardly have failed to bear fruit sooner
+or later, though no line of Wycliffe's writings had ever found its
+way to Bohemia. This land, not German, however it may
+have been early drawn into the circle of German interests, with
+a population Slavonic in the main, had first received the faith
+through the preaching of Greek monks. The Bohemian Church<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">295</a></span>
+probably owed to this fact that, though incorporated from the
+first with the churches of the West, uses and customs prevailed
+in it&mdash;as the preaching in the mother tongue, the marriage of the
+clergy, communion in both kinds&mdash;which it only slowly and unwillingly
+relinquished. It was not till the fourteenth century
+that its lines were drawn throughout in exact conformity with
+those of Rome. All this deserves to be kept in mind; for it
+helps to account for the kindly reception which the seed sown
+by the later Bohemian reformers found, falling as this did in a
+soil to which it was not altogether strange.</p>
+
+<p>John Huss took in the year 1394 his degree as bachelor of
+theology in that University of Prague upon the fortunes of which
+he was destined to exercise so lasting an influence; and four
+years later, in 1398, he began to deliver lectures there. Huss
+had early taken his degree in a school higher than any school of
+man's. He himself has told us how he was once careless and
+disobedient, how the word of the Cross had taken hold of him
+with strength, and penetrated him through and through as with
+a mighty purifying fire. What he had learned in the school
+of Christ he could not keep to himself. Holding, in addition
+to his academical position, a lectureship founded by two pious
+laymen for the preaching of the Word in the Bohemian tongue
+(1401), he soon signalized himself by his diligence in breaking
+the bread of life to hungering souls, and his boldness in rebuking
+vice in high places as in low. So long as he confined himself
+to reproving the sins of the laity, he found little opposition, nay,
+rather support and applause. But when he brought the clergy
+and monks also within the circle of his condemnation, and began
+to upbraid them for their covetousness, their ambition,
+their luxury, their sloth, and for other vices, they turned resentfully
+upon him, and sought to undermine his authority, everywhere
+spreading reports of the unsoundness of his teaching.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see on what side he mainly exposed himself to charges
+such as these. Many things had recently wrought together to
+bring into nearness countries geographically so remote from
+one another as Bohemia and England. Anne, wife of our second
+Richard, was a sister of Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia. The
+two flourishing universities of Oxford and Prague were bound
+together by their common zeal for Realism. This may seem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">296</a></span>
+to us but a slight and fantastic bond; it was in those days a
+very strong one indeed. Young English scholars studied at
+Prague, young Bohemian at Oxford. Now, Oxford, long after
+Wycliffe's death, was full of interest for his doctrine; and among
+the many strangers sojourning there, it could hardly fail that
+some should imbibe opinions and bring back with them books
+of one whom they had there learned to know and to honor.
+Thus Jerome, called of Prague, on his return from the English
+university, gave a new impulse to the study of Wycliffe's writings,
+bearer as he was of several among these which had not hitherto
+travelled so far.</p>
+
+<p>This man, whose fortunes were so tragically bound up with
+those of Huss, who should share with him in the same fiery
+doom, was his junior by several years; his superior in eloquence,
+in talents, in gifts&mdash;for certainly Huss was not a theologian
+of the first order; speculative theologian he was not at
+all&mdash;but notably his inferior in moderation and practical good-sense.
+Huss never shared in his friend's indiscriminate admiration
+of Wycliffe. When, in 1403, some forty-five theses, which
+either were or professed to be drawn from the writings of the
+English reformer, were brought before the university, that they
+might be condemned as heretical, Huss expressed himself with
+extreme caution and reserve. Many of these, he affirmed, were
+true when a man took them aright; but he could not say this
+of all. Not first at the Council of Constance, but long before,
+he had refused to undertake the responsibility of Wycliffe's
+teaching on the holy eucharist. But he did not conceal what
+he had learned from Wycliffe's writings. By these there had
+been opened to him a deeper glimpse into the corruptions of the
+Church, and its need of reformation in the head and in the members,
+than ever he had before obtained. His preaching, with
+the new accesses of insight which now were his, more than ever
+exasperated his foes.</p>
+
+<p>While matters were in this strained condition, events took
+place at Prague which are too closely connected with the story
+that we are telling, exercised too great an influence in bringing
+about the issues that lie before us, to allow us to pass them by,
+even though they may prove somewhat long to relate. The
+University of Prague, though recently founded&mdash;it only dated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">297</a></span>
+back to the year 1348&mdash;was now, next after those of Paris and
+Oxford, the most illustrious in Europe. Saying this I say much;
+for we must not measure the influence and authority of a university
+at that day by the influence and authority, great as these
+are, which it may now possess. This university, like that of
+Paris, on the pattern of which it had been modelled, was divided
+into four "nations"&mdash;four groups, that is, or families of scholars&mdash;each
+of these having in academical affairs a single collective
+vote. These nations were the Bavarian, the Saxon, the Polish,
+and the Bohemian. This does not appear at first an unfair
+division&mdash;two German and two Slavonic; but in practical
+working the Polish was so largely recruited from Silesia and
+other German or half-German lands that its vote was in fact
+German also.</p>
+
+<p>The Teutonic votes were thus as three to one, and the Bohemians,
+in their own land and in their own university, on every
+important matter hopelessly outvoted. When, by aid of this
+preponderance, the university was made to condemn the teaching
+of Wycliffe in those forty-five points, matters came to a
+crisis. Urged by Huss&mdash;who as a stout patriot, and an earnest
+lover of the Bohemian language and literature, had more than a
+theological interest in the matter&mdash;by Jerome, by a large number
+of the Bohemian nobility, King Wenceslaus published an
+edict whereby the relations of natives and foreigners were completely
+reversed. There should be henceforth three votes for
+the Bohemian nation, and only one for the three others. Such
+a shifting of the weight certainly appears as a redressing of one
+inequality by creating another. At all events it was so earnestly
+resented by the Germans, by professors and students alike, that
+they quitted the university in a body, some say of five thousand
+and some of thirty thousand, and founded the rival University of
+Leipsic, leaving no more than two thousand students at Prague.
+Full of indignation against Huss, whom they regarded as the
+prime author of this affront and wrong, they spread throughout
+Germany the most unfavorable reports of him and of his teaching.</p>
+
+<p>This exodus of the foreigners had left Huss, who was now
+rector of the university, with a freer field than before. But
+church matters at Prague did not mend; they became more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">298</a></span>
+confused and threatening every day, until presently Huss stood
+in open opposition with the hierarchy of his time. Pope John
+XXIII, having a quarrel with the King of Naples, proclaimed
+a crusade against him, with what had become a constant accompaniment
+of this&mdash;indulgences to the crusaders. But to
+denounce indulgences, as Huss with fierce indignation did now,
+was to wound Pope John in a most sensitive part. He was excommunicated
+at once, and every place which should harbor
+him stricken with an interdict. While matters were in this
+frame the Council of Constance was opened, which should appease
+all the troubles of Christendom and correct whatever was
+amiss. The Bohemian difficulty could not be omitted, and Huss
+was summoned to make answer at Constance for himself.</p>
+
+<p>He had not been there four weeks when he was required to
+appear before the Pope and cardinals, November 18, 1414. After
+a brief informal hearing he was committed to harsh durance,
+from which he never issued as a free man again. Sigismund,
+the German King and Emperor-elect, who had furnished
+Huss with a safe-conduct which should protect him, "going to
+the Council, tarrying at the Council, returning from the Council,"
+was absent from Constance at the time, and heard with real
+displeasure how lightly regarded this promise and pledge of his
+had been.</p>
+
+<p>Some big words, too, he spoke, threatening to come himself
+and release the prisoner by force; but, being waited on by a
+deputation from the council, who represented to him that he, as a
+layman, in giving such a safe-conduct had exceeded his powers,
+and intruded into a region which was not his, Sigismund was
+convinced, or affected to be convinced. Doubtless the temptations
+to be convinced were strong. Had he insisted on the
+liberation of Huss, the danger was imminent that the council,
+for which he had labored so earnestly, would be broken up on
+the plea that its rightful freedom was denied it. He did not
+choose to run this risk, preferring to leave an everlasting blot
+upon his name.</p>
+
+<p>Some modern sophists assure us that this safe-conduct&mdash;or
+free pass, as they prefer to call it&mdash;engaged the imperial word
+for Huss' safety in going to the council, but for nothing more&mdash;a
+most perfidious document, if this is all which it undertook;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">299</a></span>
+for the words&mdash;I quote the more important of them in the original
+Latin&mdash;are as follows: "<i>ut ei transire, stare, morari, redire
+permittatis</i>." But the treachery was not in the document, and
+nobody at the time attempted to find it there. If this had not
+engaged the honor of the Emperor, what cause of complaint
+would he have had against the cardinals as having entangled him
+in a breach of his word? what need of their solemn ambassage
+to him? Untrue also is the assertion that this was so little regarded
+by Huss himself as a safe-conduct covering the whole
+period during which he should be exposed to the malice of his
+enemies that he never appealed to it or claimed protection from
+it. He did so appeal at this second formal hearing, June 7th,
+the first at which Sigismund was present. "I am here," he
+there said, "under the King's promise that I should return to
+Bohemia in safety"; while at his last, by a look and by a few like
+words, he brought the royal word-breaker to a blush, evident to
+all present, July 6th.</p>
+
+<p>But to return a little. More than seven months elapsed
+before Huss could obtain a hearing before the council. This
+was granted to him at last. Thrice heard, June 5, 7, 8, 1415&mdash;if,
+indeed, such tumultuary sittings, where the man speaking
+for his life, and for much more than his life, was continually
+interrupted and overborne by hostile voices, by loud
+cries of "Recant, recant!" may be reckoned as hearings at all&mdash;he
+bore himself, by the confession of all, with courage, meekness,
+and dignity. The charges brought against him were various;
+some so far-fetched as that urged by a Nominalist from the
+University of Paris&mdash;for Paris was Nominalist now&mdash;namely,
+that as a Realist he could not be sound on the doctrine of the
+eucharist. Others were vague enough, as that he had sown
+discord between the church and the state. Nor were accusations
+wanting which touched a really weak point in his teaching,
+namely, the subjective aspect which undoubtedly some aspects
+of it wore; as when he taught that not the baptized, but the
+predestinated to life, constituted the Church. Beset as he was
+by the most accomplished theologians of the age, the best or
+the worst advantage was sure to be made of any vulnerable side
+which he exposed.</p>
+
+<p>But there were charges against him with more in them of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">300</a></span>
+danger than these. The point which was really at issue between
+him and his adversaries concerned the relative authority
+of the Church and of Scripture. What they demanded of him
+was a retractation of all the articles brought against him, with
+an unconditional submission to the council. Some of the articles,
+he replied, charged him with teaching things which he had never
+taught, and he could not by this formal act of retractation admit
+that he had taught them. Let any doctrine of his be shown
+to be contrary to God's holy Word, and he would retract it; but
+such unconditional submission he could not yield.</p>
+
+<p>His fate was now sealed&mdash;that is, unless he could be induced
+to recant; in which event, though he did not know it, his sentence
+would have been degradation from the priesthood and a
+lifelong imprisonment. Many efforts up to the last moment
+were made by friend and foe to persuade him to this, but in vain.
+And now once more, July 6th, he is brought before the council,
+but this time for sentence and for doom. The sentence passed,
+his suffering begins. The long list of his heresies, among which
+they are not ashamed to include many which he has distinctly
+repudiated, is read out in his hearing. He is clothed with
+priestly garments, that these, piece by piece, and each with an
+appropriate insult malediction, may be stripped from him again.
+The sacred vessels are placed in his hands, that from him,
+"accursed Judas that he is," they may be taken again. There
+is some difficulty in erasing his tonsure; but this difficulty with
+a little violence and cruelty is overcome. A tall paper cap,
+painted over with flames and devils, and inscribed "Heresiarch,"
+is placed upon his head. This done, and his soul having
+been duly delivered to Satan, his body is surrendered to the
+secular arm. One last touch is not wanting. As men bind him
+to the stake, attention is called to the fact that his face is turned
+to the east. This honor must not be his, upon whom no sun of
+righteousness shall ever rise. He is unfastened, and refastened
+anew. All is borne with perfect meekness, in the thought and
+in the strength of Him who had borne so much more for sinners,
+the Just for the unjust; and so, in his fire-chariot of a painful
+martyrdom, Huss passes from our sight.</p>
+
+<p>Some may wonder that he, a reformer, should have been so
+treated by a council, itself also reforming, and with a man like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">301</a></span>
+Gerson&mdash;<i>Doctor Christianissimus</i> was the title he bore&mdash;virtually
+at its head. But a little consideration will dispel this surprise,
+and lead us to the conclusion that a council less earnestly bent
+on reforms of its own would probably have dealt more mildly
+with him. His position and theirs, however we may ascribe
+alike to him and to them a desire to reform the Church, were
+fundamentally different. They, when they deposed a pope,
+where they proclaimed the general superiority of councils over
+popes, had no intention of diminishing one jot the Church's
+authority in matters of faith, but only of changing the seat of
+that authority, substituting an ecclesiastical aristocracy for an
+ecclesiastical monarchy&mdash;or despotism, as long since it had
+grown to be. And thus the more earnest the council was to
+carry out a reformation in discipline, the more eager was it also
+to make evident to all the world that it did not intend to touch
+doctrine, but would uphold this as it had received it. It is not
+then uncharitable to suspect that the leading men of the council&mdash;like
+those reformers at Geneva who a century and a half later,
+1553, sent Servetus to the stake&mdash;were not sorry to be able to
+give so signal an evidence of their zeal for the maintenance of the
+faith which they had received, as thus, in the condemnation of
+Huss, they had the opportunity of doing. Nor may we leave
+altogether out of account that the German element must of necessity
+have been strong in a council held on the shores of the
+Bodensee; while in his vindication of Bohemian nationality,
+perhaps an excessive vindication, Huss had offended and embittered
+the Germans to the uttermost.</p>
+
+<p>If any had flattered themselves that with the death of Huss
+the Reformation in Bohemia had also received its death-blow,
+they had not long to wait for a painful undeception. Words
+fail to describe the tempest of passionate indignation with which
+the tidings of his execution, followed within a year by that of
+Jerome, were received there. Both were honored as martyrs,
+and already, in the fierce exasperation of men's spirits against
+the authors of their doom, there was a prophecy of the unutterable
+woes which were even at the door. Some watchword by
+which his followers could know and be known&mdash;this watchword,
+if possible, a spell of power like that which Luther had found in
+the doctrine of justification by faith&mdash;was still wanting. One,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">302</a></span>
+however, was soon found; which indeed had this drawback,
+that it concerned a matter disciplinary rather than doctrinal,
+yet having a real value as a visible witness for the rights of the
+laity in the Church of Christ. So far as we know, Huss had not
+himself laid any special stress on communion under both kinds;
+but in 1414&mdash;he was then already at Constance&mdash;the subject
+had come to the forefront at Prague; and, being consulted,
+Huss had entirely approved of such communion as most conformable
+to the original institution and to the practice of the
+primitive Church. On the other hand, the council, learning
+the agitation of men's spirits in this direction, had declared what
+is called the "Concomitance"&mdash;that is, that wherever one kind
+was present, there was also the other, which being so, nothing
+was, indeed, withholden from the communicant through the
+withholding of the cup. At the same time the council had
+solemnly condemned as a heretic everyone who refused to submit
+himself to the decision of the Church in this matter, June
+15, 1415.</p>
+
+<p>But there was no temper of submission in Bohemia&mdash;least
+of all when the University of Prague gave its voice in favor of
+this demand. Wenceslaus, the well-intentioned but poor-spirited
+King, was quite unable to keep peace between the rival
+factions, and could only slip out of his difficulties by dying,
+August 16, 1419. Sigismund, his brother, was also his successor;
+but of one thing the Bohemians were at this time resolved;
+namely, that the royal betrayer of his word should not reign
+over them. And thus a condition of miserable anarchy followed,
+and, in the end, of open war; which, lasting for eleven years,
+could be matched by few wars in the cruelties and atrocities
+by which on both sides it was disgraced. In Ziska, their blind
+chief, the Hussites had a leader with a born genius for war. It
+was he who invented the movable wagon-fortress whereof we
+hear so much, against which the German chivalry would break
+as idle waves upon a rock. Three times crusading armies&mdash;for
+this name they bore, thinking with no serious opposition to
+enforce the decrees of the council&mdash;invaded Bohemia, to be
+thrice driven back with utter defeat, disgrace, and loss; the
+Hussites, who for a long while were content with merely repelling
+the invaders, after a while, and as the only way of conquering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">303</a></span>
+a peace, turning the tables, and wasting with fire and
+sword all neighboring German lands.</p>
+
+<p>A conflict so hideous could not long be waged without a
+rapid deterioration of all who were engaged in it. The spirit
+of Huss more and more departed from those who called themselves
+by his name. Intestine strifes devoured their strength.
+There were first the Moderates&mdash;Calixtines, Utraquists, or
+"Those of Prague," they were called&mdash;who, weary of the long
+struggle, were willing to return to the bosom of the Church if
+only the cup (<i>calix</i>), and thus communion under both kinds (<i>sub
+utraque</i>), were guaranteed to them, with two or three secondary
+matters. Not so the Taborites, who drew their name from a
+mountain fastness which they fortified and called Mount Tabor.
+These, the Ultras, the democratic radical party, separating
+themselves off as early as 1419, had left Huss and his teaching
+very far behind. Ignoring the whole historical development
+of Christianity, they demanded that a clean sweep should be
+made of everything in the Church's practice for which an express
+and literal warrant in Scripture could not be found.
+When at the Council of Basel an agreement was patched up
+with the Calixtines on the footing which I have just named, 1433,
+a few further promises being thrown in which might mean anything
+and, as the issue proved, did mean nothing, the Taborites
+would not listen to the compromise. Again they appealed to
+arms: but now their old comrades and allies had passed to the
+other side; and, defeated in battle, 1434, their stronghold taken
+and destroyed, 1453, their political power forever broken, they,
+too, as so many before and since, were doomed to learn that violence
+is weakness in disguise, and that the wrath of man worketh
+not the righteousness of God.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the Church of Rome made the concessions to the
+Calixtines which she did, with the intention of retracting them
+at the first opportunity, it is impossible to say. This, however, is
+certain, that half a dozen years had scarcely elapsed before these
+concessions were brought into question and dispute; while, in
+less than thirty, Pope Pius II formally withdrew altogether the
+papal recognition of them, 1462; though a struggle for their
+maintenance, not always unsuccessful, lasted on into the century
+ensuing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">304</a></span>It was in truth a melancholy close of a movement so hopefully
+begun. And yet not altogether the close; for, indeed, nothing,
+in which any elements of true heroism are mingled, so disappears
+as to leave no traces of itself behind. If it does no
+more, it serves to feed the high tradition of the world&mdash;that
+most precious of all bequests to the present age from the ages
+which are behind it. But there was more than this. If much
+was consumed, yet not all. Something&mdash;and that the best worth
+the saving&mdash;was saved from the fires, having first been purified
+in them. The stormy zealots, as many as had taken the sword,
+had for the most part perished by the sword.</p>
+
+<p>But there were some who made for themselves a better future
+than the sword could have ever made. A feeble remnant,
+extricating themselves from the wreck and ruin of their party,
+and having been taught of God in his severest school, pious
+Calixtines, too, that were little content with the Compacts of
+Basel, a few stray Waldensians mingling with them, all these,
+drawing together in an evil time, refashioned and reconstituted
+themselves in humblest guise, though not in guise so humble
+that they could escape the cruel attentions of Rome. Seeking
+to build on a true scriptural foundation, with a scheme of doctrine,
+it may be, dogmatically incomplete&mdash;even as that of Huss
+himself had been&mdash;with their episcopate lost and never since
+recovered, the Unitas Fratrum, the Moravian Brethren, trampled
+and trodden down, but overcoming now, not by weapons of
+carnal warfare, but by the blood of the Cross, lived on to hail
+the breaking of a fairer dawn, and to be themselves greeted as
+witnesses for God, who in a dark and gloomy day, and having
+but a little strength, had kept his word, and not denied his
+name.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">305</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE HOUSE OF HOHENZOLLERN ESTABLISHED
+IN BRANDENBURG</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1415</h6>
+
+<h3>THOMAS CARLYLE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The German princely family of Hohenzollern, which ruled over Brandenburg
+from 1415, has furnished the kings of Prussia since 1701, and
+since 1871 those kings have also been German emperors. The Hohenzollerns
+were originally owners of a castle on the Upper Danube, at no
+great distance from the ancestral seat of the Hapsburg family. They acquired
+influence at the court of Swabia, and in 1192 had established themselves
+in Nuremberg, where in that year Frederick I became burggraf.
+When Rudolph I, founder of the house of Hapsburg, finally defeated his
+rival, Ottocar of Bohemia (1278), his cause was saved by the assistance
+of a Hohenzollern&mdash;Frederick of Nuremberg.</p>
+
+<p>The Hohenzollerns made fortunate marriages and shrewd purchases
+and the descendants of Frederick I, succeeding to his burggravate, in the
+course of time acquired great estates in Franconia, Moravia, and Burgundy.
+Through their increasing wealth&mdash;whereby in the fifteenth century
+they had gained a position similar to that of the present Rothschilds&mdash;and
+by use of their political abilities, they attained commanding influence
+in the councils of the German princes.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the eminence of this powerful family at the time when they
+acquired the electorate of Brandenburg, the nucleus of the present kingdom
+of Prussia. Brandenburg was a district formerly inhabited by the
+Wends, a Slavic people, from whom it was taken in 926 by Henry the
+Fowler, King of Germany, of which kingdom it afterward became a margravate.
+Its first margrave was Albert the Bear, under whom, about
+1150, it was made an electorate; from Albert's line it passed to Louis the
+Bavarian, in 1319; and in 1371 it was transferred to Charles (Karl) IV.
+On the death of Charles, his son and successor Wenzel (Wenceslaus)
+relinquished Brandenburg to his brothers, as told by Carlyle, who in
+his own pictorial manner describes the subsequent complications which
+finally resulted in giving that possession to the ancestors of the present
+ruling house of Germany.</p></div>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_k.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="K" />ARL<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">74</a> left three young sons, Wenzel, Sigismund, Johann;
+and also a certain nephew much older; all of whom now
+more or less concern us in this unfortunate history.</p>
+
+<p>Wenzel, the eldest son, heritable Kurfuerst of Brandenburg
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">306</a></span>as well as King of Bohemia, was as yet only seventeen, who nevertheless
+got to be kaiser&mdash;and went widely astray, poor soul.
+The nephew was no other than Margrave Jobst of Moravia, now
+in the vigor of his years and a stirring man: to him, for a time,
+the chief management in Brandenburg fell, in these circumstances.
+Wenzel, still a minor, and already Kaiser and King of
+Bohemia, gave up Brandenburg to his two younger brothers,
+most of it to Sigismund, with a cutting for Johann, to help their
+appanages; and applied his own powers to govern the Holy Roman
+Empire, at that early stage of life.</p>
+
+<p>To govern the Holy Roman Empire, poor soul&mdash;or rather
+"to drink beer and dance with the girls"; in which, if defective
+in other things, Wenzel had an eminent talent. He was one of
+the worst kaisers and the least victorious on record. He would
+attend to nothing in the Reich; "the Prag white beer, and girls"
+of various complexion, being much preferable, as he was heard
+to say. He had to fling his poor Queen's Confessor into the
+river Moldau&mdash;Johann of Nepomuk, Saint so called, if he is not
+a fable altogether; whose Statue stands on Bridges ever since,
+in those parts. Wenzel's Bohemians revolted against him; put
+him in jail; and he broke prison, a boatman's daughter helping
+him out, with adventures. His Germans were disgusted with
+him; deposed him from the kaisership; chose Rupert of the
+Pfalz; and then, after Rupert's death, chose Wenzel's own
+brother Sigismund in his stead&mdash;left Wenzel to jumble about
+in his native Bohemian element, as king there, for nineteen years
+longer, still breaking pots to a ruinous extent.</p>
+
+<p>He ended by apoplexy, or sudden spasm of the heart; terrible
+Ziska,<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">75</a> as it were, killing him at second hand. For Ziska,
+stout and furious, blind of one eye and at last of both, a kind of
+human rhinoceros driven mad, had risen out of the ashes of murdered
+Huss, and other bad papistic doings, in the interim; and
+was tearing up the world at a huge rate. Rhinoceros Ziska was
+on the Weissenberg, or a still nearer hill of Prag since called
+Ziska-berg (Ziska Hill); and none durst whisper of it to the
+King. A servant waiting at dinner inadvertently let slip the
+word: "Ziska there? Deny it, slave!" cried Wenzel, frantic.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">307</a></span>Slave durst not deny. Wenzel drew his sword to run at him,
+but fell down dead: that was the last pot broken by Wenzel.
+The hapless royal ex-imperial phantasm self-broken in this
+manner. Poor soul, he came to the kaisership too early; was a
+thin violent creature, sensible to the charms and horrors of created
+objects; and had terrible rhinoceros ziskas and unruly
+horned cattle to drive. He was one of the worst kaisers ever
+known&mdash;could have done Opera Singing much better&mdash;and a sad
+sight to Bohemia. Let us leave him there: he was never actual
+Elector of Brandenburg, having given it up in time; never did
+any ill to that poor country.</p>
+
+
+<p>The real Kurf&uuml;rst of Brandenburg all this while was Sigismund,
+Wenzel's next brother, under tutelage of cousin Jobst or
+otherwise&mdash;a real and yet imaginary, for he never himself governed,
+but always had Jobst of M&auml;hren or some other in his place
+there. Sigismund was to have married a daughter of Burggraf
+Friedrich V;<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">76</a> and he was himself, as was the young lady, well
+inclined to this arrangement. But the old people being dead,
+and some offer of a king's daughter turning up for Sigismund,
+Sigismund broke off; and took the king's daughter, King of
+Hungary's&mdash;not without regret then and afterward, as is believed.
+At any rate, the Hungarian charmer proved a wife of
+small merit, and a Hungarian successor she had was a wife of
+light conduct even; Hungarian charmers, and Hungarian affairs,
+were much other than a comfort to Sigismund.</p>
+
+<p>As for the disappointed princess, Burggraf Friedrich's daughter,
+she said nothing that we hear; silently became a Nun, an
+Abbess: and through a long life looked out, with her thoughts
+to herself, upon the loud whirlwind of things, where Sigismund
+(oftenest an imponderous rag of conspicuous color) was riding
+and tossing. Her two brothers also, joint Burggraves after their
+father's death, seemed to have reconciled themselves without
+difficulty. The elder of them was already Sigismund's brother-in-law;
+married to Sigismund's and Wenzel's sister&mdash;by such
+predestination as we saw. Burggraf Johann III was the name
+of this one; a stout fighter and manager for many years; much
+liked, and looked to, by Sigismund, as indeed were both the
+brothers, for that matter; always, together or in succession, a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">308</a></span>kind of right hand to Sigismund. Frederick (Friedrich), the
+younger Burggraf, and ultimately the survivor and inheritor
+(Johann having left no sons), is the famed Burggraf Friedrich
+VI the last and notablest of all the Burggraves&mdash;a man of distinguished
+importance, extrinsic and intrinsic; chief or among
+the very chief of German public men in his time; and memorable
+to Posterity, and to this history, on still other grounds!
+But let us not anticipate.</p>
+
+
+<p>Sigismund, if appanaged with Brandenburg alone, and wedded
+to his first love, not a king's daughter, might have done
+tolerably well there; better than Wenzel, with the empire and
+Bohemia, did. But delusive Fortune threw her golden apple at
+Sigismund too; and he, in the wide high world, had to play
+strange pranks. His father-in-law died in Hungary, Sigismund's
+first wife his only child. Father-in-law bequeathed
+Hungary to Sigismund, who plunged into a strange sea thereby;
+got troubles without number, beatings not a few, and had even
+to take boat, and sail for his life down to Constantinople, at one
+time. In which sad adventure Burggraf Johann escorted him,
+and as it were tore him out by the hair of the head. These troubles
+and adventures lasted many years; in the course of which,
+Sigismund, trying all manner of friends and expedients, found
+in the Burggraves of Nuremberg, Johann and Friedrich, with
+their talents, possessions, and resources, the main or almost only
+sure support he got.</p>
+
+<p>No end of troubles to Sigismund, and to Brandenburg through
+him, from this sublime Hungarian legacy. Like a remote
+fabulous golden fleece, which you have to go and conquer first,
+and which is worth little when conquered. Before ever setting
+out (1387), Sigismund saw too clearly that he would have
+cash to raise: an operation he had never done with, all his life
+afterward. He pawned Brandenburg to cousin Jobst of M&auml;hren;
+got "twenty thousand Bohemian gulden"&mdash;I guess, a most
+slender sum, if Dryasdust would but interpret it. This was the
+beginning of pawnings to Brandenburg; of which when will the
+end be? Jobst thereby came into Brandenburg on his own
+right for the time, not as tutor or guardian, which he had hitherto
+been. Into Brandenburg; and there was no chance of repayment
+to get him out again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">309</a></span>Jobst tried at first to do some governing; but finding all very
+anarchic, grew unhopeful; took to making matters easy for
+himself. Took, in fact, to turning a penny on his pawn-ticket;
+alienating crown domains, winking hard at robber barons, and
+the like&mdash;and after a few years, went home to Moravia, leaving
+Brandenburg to shift for itself, under a Statthalter (Viceregent,
+more like a hungry land-steward), whom nobody took the trouble
+of respecting. Robber castles flourished; all else decayed. No
+highway not unsafe; many a Turpin with sixteen quarters, and
+styling himself Edle Herr (noble gentleman), took to "living from
+the saddle": what are Hamburg pedlers made for but to be
+robbed?</p>
+
+<p>The towns suffered much; any trade they might have had,
+going to wreck in this manner. Not to speak of private feuds,
+which abounded <i>ad libitum</i>. Neighboring potentates, Archbishop
+of Magdeburg and others, struck in also at discretion, as
+they had gradually got accustomed to do, and snapped away
+some convenient bit of territory, or, more legitimately, they
+came across to coerce, at their own hand, this or the other Edle
+Herr of the Turpin sort, whom there was no other way of getting
+at, when he carried matters quite too high. "Droves of six hundred
+swine"&mdash;I have seen (by reading in those old books) certain
+noble gentlemen, "of Putlitz," I think, driving them openly,
+captured by the stronger hand; and have heard the short querulous
+squeak of the bristly creatures: "What is the use of being a
+pig at all, if I am to be stolen in this way, and surreptitiously
+made into ham?" Pigs do continue to be bred in Brandenburg:
+but it is under such discouragements. Agriculture, trade, well-being
+and well-doing of any kind, it is not encouragement they
+are meeting here. Probably few countries, not even Ireland,
+have a worse outlook, unless help come.</p>
+
+<p>Jobst came back in 1398, after eight years' absence; but no
+help came with Jobst. The Neumark of Brandenburg, which
+was brother Johann's portion, had fallen home to Sigismund,
+brother Johann having died; but Sigismund, far from redeeming
+old pawn-tickets with the Neumark, pawned the Neumark
+too&mdash;the second pawnage of Brandenburg. Pawned the
+Neumark to the Teutsch Ritters "for sixty-three thousand Hungarian
+gulden" (I think, about thirty thousand pounds), and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">310</a></span>
+gave no part of it to Jobst; had not nearly enough for himself
+and his Hungarian occasions.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing which, and hearing such squeak of pigs surreptitiously
+driven, with little but discordant sights and sounds everywhere,
+Jobst became disgusted with the matter; and resolved to wash his
+hands of it, at least to have his money out of it again. Having
+sold what of the domains he could to persons of quality, at an
+uncommonly easy rate, and so pocketed what ready cash there
+was among them, he made over his pawn-ticket, or properly
+he himself repawned Brandenburg to the Saxon potentate, a
+speculative moneyed man, Markgraf of Meissen, "Wilhelm
+the Rich," so called. Pawned it to Wilhelm the Rich&mdash;sum not
+named; and went home to Moravia, there to wait events. This
+is the third Brandenburg pawning: let us hope there may be a
+fourth and last.</p>
+
+<p>And so we have now reached that point in Brandenburg history
+when, if some help does not come, Brandenburg will not
+long be a country, but will either get dissipated in pieces and
+stuck to the edge of others where some government is, or else go
+waste again and fall to the bisons and wild bears.</p>
+
+<p>Who now is Kurf&uuml;rst of Brandenburg, might be a question.
+"I unquestionably!" Sigismund would answer, with astonishment.
+"Soft, your Hungarian Majesty," thinks Jobst: "till my
+cash is paid may it not probably be another?" This question
+has its interest: the Electors just now (1400) are about deposing
+Wenzel; must choose some better Kaiser. If they wanted another
+scion of the house of Luxemburg&mdash;a mature old gentleman
+of sixty; full of plans, plausibilities, pretensions&mdash;Jobst is their
+man. Jobst and Sigismund were of one mind as to Wenzel's
+going; at least Sigismund voted clearly so, and Jobst said nothing
+counter: but the Kurf&uuml;rsts did not think of Jobst for successor.
+After some stumbling, they fixed upon Rupert Kur-Pfalz
+(Elector Palatine, Ruprecht von der Pfalz) as Kaiser.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert of the Pfalz proved a highly respectable Kaiser;
+lasted for ten years (1400-10), with honor to himself and the
+Reich. A strong heart, strong head, but short of means. He
+chastised petty mutiny with vigor, could not bring down the
+Milanese Visconti, who had perched themselves so high on
+money paid to Wenzel; could not heal the schism of the Church<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">311</a></span>
+(double or triple Pope, Rome-Avignon affair), or awaken the
+Reich to a sense of its old dignity and present loose condition.
+In the late loose times, as antiquaries remark, most members of
+the Empire, petty princes even and imperial towns, had been
+struggling to set up for themselves; and were now concerned
+chiefly to become sovereign in their own territories. And Schilter
+informs us it was about this period that most of them attained
+such rather unblessed consummation; Rupert of himself not
+able to help it, with all his willingness. The people called him
+"Rupert Klemm (Rupert Smith's-vise)," from his resolute
+ways; which nickname&mdash;given him not in hatred, but partly in
+satirical good-will&mdash;is itself a kind of history. From historians
+of the Reich he deserves honorable regretful mention.</p>
+
+<p>He had for Empress a sister of Burggraf Friedrich's; which
+high lady, unknown to us otherwise, except by her tomb at
+Heidelberg, we remember for her brother's sake. Kaiser Rupert&mdash;great-grandson
+of that Kur-Pfalz who was Kaiser Ludwig's
+elder brother&mdash;is the culminating point of the Electors
+Palatine; the highest that Heidelberg produced. Ancestor of
+those famed Protestant "Palatines"; of all the Palatines or
+Pfalzes that reign in these late centuries. Ancestor of the present
+Bavarian Majesty; Kaiser Ludwig's race having died out.
+Ancestor of the unfortunate Winterk&ouml;nig, Friedrich, King of
+Bohemia, who is too well known in English history&mdash;ancestor
+also of Charles XII of Sweden, a highly creditable fact of the
+kind to him. Fact indisputable: a cadet of Pfalz-Zweibr&uuml;ck
+(Deux-Ponts), direct from Rupert, went to serve in Sweden in
+his soldier business; distinguished himself in soldiering; had a
+sister of the great Gustaf Adolf to wife; and from her a renowned
+son, Karl Gustaf (Christiana's cousin), who succeeded
+as King; who again had a grandson made in his own likeness,
+only still more of iron in his composition. Enough now of Rupert
+Smith's-vise; who died in 1410, and left the Reich again
+vacant.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert's funeral is hardly done, when, over in Preussen, far
+off in the Memel region, place called Tannenberg, where there
+is still "a church-yard to be seen," if little more, the Teutsch
+Ritters had, unexpectedly, a terrible defeat; consummation of
+their Polish miscellaneous quarrels of long standing; and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">312</a></span>
+end of their high courses in this world. A ruined Teutsch Ritterdom,
+as good as ruined, ever henceforth. Kaiser Rupert died
+May 18th; and on July 15th, within two months, was fought
+that dreadful "Battle of Tannenburg," Poland and Polish King,
+with miscellany of savage Tartars and revolted Prussians, versus
+Teutsch Ritterdom; all in a very high mood of mutual rage;
+the very elements, "wild thunder, tempest and rain deluges,"
+playing chorus to them on the occasion. Ritterdom fought lion-like,
+but with insufficient strategic and other wisdom, and was
+driven nearly distracted to see its pride tripped into the ditch by
+such a set. Vacant Reich could not in the least attend to it; nor
+can we further at present.</p>
+
+<p>Jobst and Sigismund were competitors for the Kaisership;
+Wenzel, too, striking in with claims for reinstatement: the
+house of Luxemburg divided against itself. Wenzel, finding reinstatement
+not to be thought of, threw his weight, such as it
+was, into the scale of cousin Jobst. The contest was vehement,
+and like to be lengthy. Jobst, though he had made over his
+pawn-ticket, claimed to be Elector of Brandenburg; and voted
+for himself. The like, with still more emphasis, did Sigismund,
+or Burggraf Friedrich acting for him: "Sigismund, sure, is Kur-Brandenburg,
+though under pawn!" argued Friedrich&mdash;and,
+I almost guess, though that is not said, produced from his own
+purse, at some stage of the business, the actual money for Jobst,
+to close his Brandenburg pretension.</p>
+
+<p>Both were elected (majority contested in this manner); and
+old Jobst, then above seventy, was like to have given much
+trouble; but happily in three months he died; and Sigismund
+became indisputable. In his day Jobst made much noise in the
+world, but did little or no good in it. He was thought "a great
+man," says one satirical old Chronicler; and there "was nothing
+great about him but the beard."</p>
+
+<p>"The cause of Sigismund's success with the Electors," says
+Kohler, "or of his having any party among them, was the faithful
+and unwearied diligence which had been used for him by the
+above-named Burggraf Friedrich VI of Nuremberg, who took
+extreme pains to forward Sigismund to the Empire; pleading
+that Sigismund and Wenzel would be sure to agree well henceforth,
+and that Sigismund, having already such extensive territories<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">313</a></span>
+(Hungary, Brandenburg, and so forth) by inheritance,
+would not be so exact about the Reichs-tolls and other imperial
+incomes. This same Friedrich also, when the election
+fell out doubtful, was Sigismund's best support in Germany,
+nay almost his right hand, through whom he did whatever was
+done."</p>
+
+<p>Sigismund is Kaiser, then, in spite of Wenzel. King of Hungary,
+after unheard-of troubles and adventures, ending some
+years ago in a kind of peace and conquest, he has long been.
+King of Bohemia, too, he at last became; having survived Wenzel,
+who was childless. Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire, and
+so much else: is not Sigismund now a great man? Truly the
+loom he weaves upon, in this world, is very large. But the
+weaver was of headlong, high-pacing, flimsy nature; and both
+warp and woof were gone dreadfully entangled!</p>
+
+<p>This is the Kaiser Sigismund who held the Council of Constance;
+and "blushed visibly," when Huss, about to die, alluded
+to the letter of safe-conduct granted him, which was issuing in
+such fashion. Sigismund blushed; but could not conveniently
+mend the matter&mdash;so many matters pressing on him just now.
+As they perpetually did, and had done. An always-hoping, never-resting,
+unsuccessful, vain and empty Kaiser. Specious, speculative;
+given to eloquence, diplomacy, and the windy instead of
+the solid arts; always short of money for one thing. He roamed
+about, and talked eloquently; aiming high, and generally missing.
+Hungary and even the Reich have at length become his,
+but have brought small triumph in any kind; and instead of
+ready money, debt on debt. His Majesty has no money, and his
+Majesty's occasions need it more and more.</p>
+
+<p>He is now (1414) holding this Council of Constance, by way
+of healing the Church, which is sick of three simultaneous popes
+and of much else. He finds the problem difficult; finds he will
+have to run into Spain, to persuade a refractory pope there, if
+eloquence can (as it cannot): all which requires money, money.
+At opening of the council, he "officiated as deacon"; actually
+did some kind of litanying "with a surplice over him," though
+Kaiser and King of the Romans. But this passage of his opening
+speech is what I recollect best of him there: "Right reverend
+Fathers, <i>date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur</i>,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">314</a></span>
+exclaims Sigismund, intent on having the Bohemian schism well
+dealt with&mdash;which he reckons to be of the feminine gender. To
+which a cardinal mildly remarking, "<i>Domine, schisma est generis
+neutrius</i> (schisma is neuter, your Majesty)," Sigismund loftily
+replies: "<i>Ego sum Rex Romanus et super grammaticam</i> (I am
+King of the Romans, and above Grammar)!" For which reason
+I call him in my note-books Sigismund Super Grammaticam, to
+distinguish him in the imbroglio of kaisers.</p>
+
+<p>How Jobst's pawn-ticket was settled I never clearly heard;
+but can guess it was by Burggraf Friedrich's advancing the
+money, in the pinch above indicated, or paying it afterward to
+Jobst's heirs whoever they were. Thus much is certain: Burggraf
+Friedrich, these three years and more (ever since July 8,
+1411) holds Sigismund's deed of acknowledgment "for one hundred
+thousand gulden lent at various times"; and has likewise
+got the Electorate of Brandenburg in pledge for that sum; and
+does himself administer the said Electorate till he be paid. This
+is the important news; but this is not all.</p>
+
+<p>The new journey into Spain requires new money; this
+council itself, with such a pomp as suited Sigismund, has cost
+him endless money. Brandenburg, torn to ruins in the way we
+saw, is a sorrowful matter; and, except the title of it, as a feather
+in one's cap, is worth nothing to Sigismund. And he is still short
+of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up
+Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still
+making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of
+ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad
+thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to
+heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden,"
+sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed
+since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially
+for this grand Spanish journey!" these were his sad
+thoughts. "Advance me, in a round sum, two hundred and fifty
+thousand more," said he to Burggraf Friedrich, "two hundred
+and fifty thousand more, for my manifold occasions in this time&mdash;that
+will be four hundred thousand in whole&mdash;and take the
+Electorate of Brandenburg to yourself, Land, Titles, Sovereign,
+Electorship and all, and make me rid of it!" That was the settlement
+adopted, in Sigismund's apartment at Constance, on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">315</a></span>
+April 30, 1415; signed, sealed, and ratified&mdash;and the money paid.
+A very notable event in World-History; virtually completed on
+the day we mention.</p>
+
+<p>The ceremony of investiture did not take place till two years
+afterward, when the Spanish journey had proved fruitless,
+when much else of fruitless had come and gone and Kaiser and
+council were probably more at leisure for such a thing. Done at
+length it was by Kaiser Sigismund in almost gala, with the
+Grandees of the Empire assisting, and august members of the
+council and world in general looking on; in the big square or
+market-place of Constance, April 17, 1417; is to be found described
+in Rentsch, from Nauclerus and the old news-mongers
+of the times. Very grand indeed: much processioning on
+horseback, under powerful trumpet-peals and flourishes; much
+stately kneeling, stately rising, stepping backward (done well,
+<i>zierlich</i>, on the Kurf&uuml;rst's part); liberal expenditure of cloth
+and pomp; in short, "above one hundred thousand people
+looking on from roofs and windows," and Kaiser Sigismund in
+all his glory. He was on a high platform in the market-place,
+with stairs to it; the illustrious Kaiser&mdash;red as a flamingo, "with
+scarlet mantle and crown of gold,"&mdash;a treat to the eyes of simple
+mankind.</p>
+
+<p>What sum of modern money, in real purchasing power, this
+"four hundred thousand Hungarian Gold Gulden" is, I have
+inquired in the likely quarters without result; and it is probable
+no man exactly knows. The latest existing representative of the
+ancient gold gulden is the ducat, worth generally a half-sovereign
+in English. Taking the sum at that latest rate, it amounts
+to two hundred thousand pounds; and the reader can use that
+as a note of memory for the sale-price of Brandenburg with all
+its lands and honors&mdash;multiplying it perhaps by four or six to
+bring out its effective amount in current coin. Dog cheap, it
+must be owned, for size and capability; but in the most waste
+condition, full of mutiny, injustice, anarchy, and highway robbery;
+a purchase that might have proved dear enough to another
+man than Burggraf Friedrich.</p>
+
+<p>But so, at any rate, moribund Brandenburg has got its Hohenzollern
+Kurf&uuml;rst, and started on a new career it little dreamt
+of; and we can now, right willingly, quit Sigismund and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">316</a></span>
+Reichs-History, leave Kaiser Sigismund to sink or swim at his
+own will henceforth. His grand feat in life, the wonder of his
+generation, was this same Council of Constance; which proved
+entirely a failure; one of the largest wind-eggs ever dropped
+with noise and travail in this world. Two hundred thousand
+human creatures, reckoned and reckoning themselves the elixir
+of the intellect and dignity of Europe. Two hundred thousand&mdash;nay
+some, counting the lower menials and numerous unfortunate
+females, say four hundred thousand&mdash;were got congregated
+into that little Swiss town; and there as an Ecumenic
+Council, or solemnly distilled elixir of what pious intellect and
+valor could be scraped together in the world, they labored with
+all their select might for four years' space. That was the Council
+of Constance. And except this transfer of Brandenburg to
+Friedrich of Hohenzollern, resulting from said council, in the
+quite reverse and involuntary way, one sees not what good result
+it had.</p>
+
+<p>They did, indeed, burn Huss; but that could not be called a
+beneficial incident; that seemed to Sigismund and the council
+a most small and insignificant one. And it kindled Bohemia,
+and kindled Rhinoceros Ziska, into never-imagined flame of
+vengeance; brought mere disaster, disgrace, and defeat on defeat
+to Sigismund, and kept his hands full for the rest of his life,
+however small he had thought it. As for the sublime four years'
+deliberations and debates of this Sanhedrim of the Universe&mdash;eloquent
+debates, conducted, we may say, under such extent of
+wig as was never seen before or since&mdash;they have fallen wholly
+to the domain of Dryasdust; and amount, for mankind at this
+time, to zero plus the burning of Huss. On the whole, Burggraf
+Friedrich's Electorship, and the first Hohenzollern to Brandenburg,
+is the one good result.</p>
+
+<p>Burggraf Friedrich, on his first coming to Brandenburg,
+found but a cool reception as Statthalter. He came as the representative
+of law and rule; and there had been many helping
+themselves by a ruleless life, of late. Industry was at a low
+ebb, violence was rife; plunder, disorder, everywhere; too
+much the habit for baronial gentlemen to "live by the saddle,"
+as they termed it, that is, by highway robbery in modern
+phrase.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">317</a></span>The towns, harried and plundered to skin and bone, were
+glad to see a Statthalter, and did homage to him with all their
+heart. But the baronage or squirearchy of the country were of
+another mind. These, in the late anarchies, had set up for a
+kind of kings in their own right. They had their feuds; made
+war, made peace, levied tolls, transit dues; lived much at their
+own discretion in these solitary countries; rushing out from
+their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any
+herd of "six hundred swine," and convoy of L&uuml;beck or Hamburg
+merchant goods, that had not contented them in passing.
+What were pedlers and mechanic fellows made for, if not to be
+plundered when needful? Arbitrary rule, on the part of these
+noble robber lords! And then much of the crown domains had
+gone to the chief of them&mdash;pawned (and the pawn-ticket lost, so
+to speak), or sold for what trifle of ready money was to be had,
+in Jobst and Company's time. To these gentlemen a Statthalter
+coming to inquire into matters was no welcome phenomenon.
+Your Edle Herr (noble lord) of Putlitz, noble lords of
+Quitzow, Rochow, Maltitz, and others, supreme in their grassy
+solitudes this long while, and accustomed to nothing greater
+than themselves in Brandenburg, how should they obey a Statthalter?</p>
+
+<p>Such was more or less the universal humor in the squirearchy
+of Brandenburg; not of good omen to Burggraf Friedrich.
+But the chief seat of contumacy seemed to be among the
+Quitzows, Putlitzes, above spoken of; big squires in the district
+they call the Priegnitz, in the country of the sluggish Havel
+River, northwest from Berlin a forty or fifty miles. These refused
+homage, very many of them; said they were "incorporated
+with B&ouml;hmen"; said this and that; much disinclined to
+homage; and would not do it. Stiff, surly fellows, much deficient
+in discernment of what is above them and what is not: a
+thick-skinned set; bodies clad in buff leather; minds also cased
+in ill habits of long continuance.</p>
+
+<p>Friedrich was very patient with them; hoped to prevail by
+gentle methods. He "invited them to dinner"; "had them
+often at dinner for a year or more:" but could make no progress
+in that way. "Who is this we have got for a Governor?" said
+the noble lords privately to each other: "A Nuremberger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">318</a></span>
+Tand" (Nuremberg plaything&mdash;wooden image, such as they
+make at Nuremberg), said they, grinning, in a thick-skinned
+way: "If it rained Burggraves all the year round, none of them
+would come to luck in this country;" and continued their feuds,
+toll-levyings, plunderings, and other contumacies.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing matters come to this pass after above a year, Burggraf
+Friedrich gathered his Frankish men-at-arms; quietly made
+league with the neighboring Potentates, Th&uuml;ringen and others;
+got some munitions, some artillery together&mdash;especially one
+huge gun, the biggest ever seen, "a twenty-four pounder," no
+less; to which the peasants, dragging her with difficulty through
+the clayey roads, gave the name of Faule Grete (Lazy or Heavy
+Peg); a remarkable piece of ordnance. Lazy Peg he had got
+from the Landgraf of Th&uuml;ringen, on loan merely; but he turned
+her to excellent account of his own. I have often inquired after
+Lazy Peg's fate in subsequent times; but could never learn anything
+distinct; the German Dryasdust is a dull dog, and seldom
+carries anything human in those big wallets of his!</p>
+
+<p>Equipped in this way, Burggraf Friedrich (he was not yet
+Kurf&uuml;rst, only coming to be) marches for the Havel Country
+(early days of 1414); makes his appearance before Quitzow's
+strong house of Friesack, walls fourteen feet thick: "You, Dietrich
+von Quitzow, are you prepared to live as a peaceable subject
+henceforth? to do homage to the laws and me?" "Never!"
+answered Quitzow, and pulled up his drawbridge. Whereupon
+Heavy Peg opened upon him, Heavy Peg and other guns;
+and, in some eight-and-forty hours, shook Quitzow's impregnable
+Friesack about his ears. This was in the month of February,
+1414, day not given: Friesack was the name of the impregnable
+castle (still discoverable in our time); and it ought to
+be memorable and venerable to every Prussian man. Burggraf
+Friedrich VI, not yet quite become Kurf&uuml;rst Friedrich I,
+but in a year's space to become so, he in person was the beneficent
+operator; Heavy Peg and steady human insight, these were
+clearly the chief implements.</p>
+
+<p>Quitzow being settled&mdash;for the country is in military occupation
+of Friedrich and his allies, and except in some stone
+castle a man has no chance&mdash;straightway Putlitz or another mutineer,
+with his drawbridge up, was battered to pieces, and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">319</a></span>
+drawbridge brought slamming down. After this manner, in an
+incredibly short period, mutiny was quenched; and it became
+apparent to noble lords, and to all men, that here at length was
+a man come who would have the laws obeyed again, and could
+and would keep mutiny down.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">320</a></span></p>
+<h2>BATTLE OF AGINCOURT</h2>
+
+<h3>ENGLISH CONQUEST OF FRANCE</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1415-1420</h6>
+
+
+<h3>JAMES GAIRDNER</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>King Henry V of England, son of Henry IV, was born in 1387, and
+two years later was made prince of Wales. In 1401-1408 he was engaged
+against the Welsh rebels under Owen Glendower, and in 1410 became
+captain of Calais. His youthful period is represented&mdash;probably with
+much exaggeration, to which Shakespeare, in <i>Henry IV</i>, contributed&mdash;as
+full of wild and dissolute conduct, but as king he was distinguished
+for his courage, ability, and enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>Henry was crowned in 1413, about seventy-five years after the beginning
+of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, which
+arose from the claim of Edward III to the French throne. For some
+years a feud had been raging in France between the houses of Burgundy
+and Orleans, the rival parties being known as Burgundians and Armagnacs.
+Led by Simonet Caboche, a butcher, adherents of the Armagnacs
+rose with great fury against the Burgundians. This was in the first year
+of Henry's reign, and to him and other rulers Charles VI of France appealed
+in order to prevent them from aiding the outbreak, which was
+soon quelled by the princes of the blood and the University of Paris.
+Order in France was restored by the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of
+Burgundy withdrew to Flanders. But war between the two factions was
+soon after renewed, and both sides sought the alliance of England.</p>
+
+<p>In these contentions and appeals for his interference Henry saw an
+opportunity for pressing his designs to recover what he claimed as the
+French inheritance of his predecessors. In 1414, as the heir of Isabella,
+mother of his great-grandfather Edward, he formally demanded the
+crown of France. The French princes refused to consider his claim.
+Henry modified his demands, but after several months of negotiation,
+with no promise of success, he prepared for renewal of the ancient war.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE claim made by Edward III to the French crown had been
+questionable enough. That of Henry was certainly most
+unreasonable. Edward had maintained that though the Salic
+Law, which governed the succession in France, excluded females
+from the throne, it did not exclude their male descendants. On
+this theory Edward himself was doubtless the true heir to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">321</a></span>
+French monarchy. But even admitting the claims of Edward,
+his rights had certainly not descended to Henry V, seeing that
+even in England neither he nor his father was true to the throne
+by lineal right. A war with France, however, was sure to be
+popular with his subjects, and the weakness of that country
+from civil discord seemed a favorable opportunity for urging the
+most extreme pretensions.</p>
+
+<p>To give a show of fairness and moderation the English ambassadors
+at Paris lessened their demands more than once, and
+appeared willing for some time to renew negotiations after their
+terms had been rejected. But in the end they still insisted on a
+claim which in point of equity was altogether preposterous, and
+rejected a compromise which would have put Henry in possession
+of the whole of Guienne and given him the hand of the French
+King's daughter Catharine with a marriage portion of eight
+hundred thousand crowns. Meanwhile Henry was making active
+preparations for war, and at the same time carried on secret
+negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, trusting to have him
+for an ally in the invasion of France.</p>
+
+<p>At length, in the summer of 1415, the King had collected
+an army and was ready to embark at Southampton. But on
+the eve of his departure a conspiracy was discovered, the object
+of which was to dethrone the King and set aside the house
+of Lancaster. The conspirators were Richard, Earl of Cambridge,
+Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, and a knight of Northumberland
+named Sir Thomas Grey. The Earl of Cambridge
+was the King's cousin-german, and had been recently raised
+to that dignity by Henry himself. Lord Scrope was, to all
+appearance, the King's most intimate friend and counsellor.
+The design seems to have been formed upon the model of similar
+projects in the preceding reign. Richard II was to be proclaimed
+once more, as if he had been still alive; but the real intention
+was to procure the crown for Edmund Mortimer, Earl
+of March, the true heir of Richard, whom Henry IV had set
+aside.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time the Earl of March himself seems hardly
+to have countenanced the attempt; but the Earl of Cambridge,
+who had married his sister, wished, doubtless, to secure the
+succession for his son Richard, as the Earl of March had no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">322</a></span>
+children. Evidently it was the impression of some persons that
+the house of Lancaster was not even yet firmly seated upon the
+throne. Perhaps it was not even yet apparent that the young
+man who had so recently been a gamesome reveller was capable
+of ruling with a firm hand a king.</p>
+
+<p>But all doubt on this point was soon terminated. The commissioners
+were tried by a commission hastily issued, and were
+summarily condemned and put to death. The Earl of March,
+it is said, revealed the plot to the King, sat as one of the judges
+of his two brother peers, and was taken into the King's favor.
+The Earl of Cambridge made a confession of his guilt. Lord
+Scrope, though he repudiated the imputation of disloyalty, admitted
+having had a guilty knowledge of the plot, which he
+said it had been his purpose to defeat. The one nobleman, in
+consideration of his royal blood, was simply beheaded; the
+other was drawn and quartered. We hear of no more attempts
+of the kind during Henry's reign.</p>
+
+<p>With a fleet of one thousand five hundred sail Henry crossed
+the sea and landed without opposition at Chef de Caux, near
+Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine. The force that he brought
+with him was about thirty thousand men, and he immediately
+employed it in laying siege to Harfleur. The place was
+strong, so far as walls and bulwarks could make it, but it was
+not well victualled, and after a five-weeks' siege it was obliged to
+capitulate. But the forces of the besieged were thinned by
+disease as well as actual fighting. Dysentery had broken out
+in the camp, and, though it was only September, they suffered
+bitterly from the coldness of the nights; so that, when the town
+had been won and garrisoned, the force available for further
+operations amounted to less than half the original strength of
+the invading army.</p>
+
+<p>Under the circumstances it was hopeless to expect to do
+much before the winter set in, and many counselled the King to
+return to England. But Henry could not tolerate the idea of
+retreat or even of apparent inaction. He sent a challenge to the
+Dauphin, offering to refer their differences to single combat; and
+when no notice was taken of this proposal, he determined to
+cut his way, if possible, through the country to Calais, along
+with the remainder of his forces.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">323</a></span>It was a difficult and hazardous march. Hunger, dysentery,
+and fever had already reduced the little band to less than nine
+thousand men, or, as good authorities say, to little more than six
+thousand. The country people were unfriendly, their supplies
+were cut off on all sides, and the scanty stock of provisions with
+which they set out was soon exhausted. For want of bread,
+many were driven to feed on nuts, while the enemy harassed
+them upon the way and broke down the bridges in advance of
+them. On one or two occasions, having repulsed an attack
+from a garrison town, Henry demanded and obtained from the
+governor a safe-conduct and a certain quantity of bread and
+wine, under threat of setting fire to the place if refused.</p>
+
+<p>In this manner he and his army gradually approached the
+river Somme at Blanche Tache, where there was a ford by which
+King Edward III had crossed before the battle of Cr&eacute;cy. But
+while yet some distance from it, they received information from
+a prisoner that the ford was guarded by six thousand fighting
+men, and, though the intelligence was untrue, it deterred him
+from attempting the passage. They accordingly turned to the
+right and went up the river as far as Amiens, but were still unable
+to cross, till, after following the course of the river about fifty
+miles farther, they fortunately came upon an undefended ford
+and passed over before their enemies were aware.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto their progress had not been without adventures and
+skirmishes in many places. But the main army of the French
+only overtook them when they had arrived within about forty-five
+miles of Calais. On the night of October 24th they were
+posted at the village of Maisoncelles, with an enemy before
+them five or six times their number, who had resolved to stop
+their further progress. Both sides prepared for battle on the
+following morning. The English, besides being so much inferior
+in numbers, were wasted by disease and famine, while
+their adversaries were fresh and vigorous, with a plentiful commissariat.
+But the latter were overconfident. They spent the
+evening in dice-playing and making wagers about the prisoners
+they should take; while the English, on the contrary, confessed
+themselves and received the sacrament.</p>
+
+<p>Heavy rain fell during the night, from which both armies
+suffered; but Henry availed himself of a brief period of moonlight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">324</a></span>
+to have the ground thoroughly surveyed. His position
+was an admirable one. His forces occupied a narrow field
+hemmed in on either side by hedges and thickets, so that they
+could only be attacked in front, and were in no fear of being
+surrounded. Early on the following morning Henry arose and
+heard mass; but the two armies stood facing each other for
+some hours, each waiting for the other to begin. The English
+archers were drawn up in front in form of a wedge, and each
+man was provided with a stake shod with iron at both ends,
+which being fixed into the ground before him, the whole line
+formed a kind of hedge bristling with sharp points, to defend
+them from being ridden down by the enemy's cavalry.</p>
+
+<p>At length, however, Henry gave orders to commence the
+attack, and the archers advanced, leaving their stakes behind
+them fixed in the ground. The French cavalry on either side
+endeavored to close them in, but were soon obliged to retire
+before the thick showers of arrows poured in upon them, which
+destroyed four-fifths of their numbers. Their horses then became
+unmanageable, being plagued with a multitude of wounds,
+and the whole army was thrown into confusion. Never was a
+more brilliant victory won against more overwhelming odds.</p>
+
+<p>One sad piece of cruelty alone tarnished the glory of that
+day's action, but it seems to have been dictated by fear as a
+means of self-preservation. After the enemy had been completely
+routed in front, and a multitude of prisoners taken, the
+King, hearing that some detachments had got round to his rear,
+and were endeavoring to plunder his baggage, gave orders to
+the whole army to put their prisoners to death. The order was
+executed in the most relentless fashion. One or two distinguished
+prisoners afterward were taken from under heaps of slain,
+among whom were the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon. Altogether,
+the slaughter of the French was enormous. There is a
+general agreement that it was upward of ten thousand men,
+and among them were the flower of the French nobility. That of
+the English was disproportionately small. Their own writers
+reckon it not more than one hundred altogether, some absurdly
+stating it as low as twenty or thirty, while the French authorities
+estimate it variously from three hundred to one thousand six
+hundred.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">325</a></span>Henry called his victory the battle of Agincourt, from the
+name of a neighboring castle. The army proceeded in excellent
+order to Calais, where they were triumphantly received, and
+after resting there awhile recrossed to England. The news
+of such a splendid victory caused them to be welcomed with an
+enthusiasm that knew no bounds. At Dover the people rushed
+into the sea to meet the conquerors, and carried the King in their
+arms in triumph from his vessel to the shore. From thence to
+London his progress was like one continued triumphal procession,
+and the capital itself received him with every demonstration
+of joy.</p>
+
+<p>The progress of the English arms in France did not, for a
+long time, induce the rival factions in that country to suspend
+the civil war among themselves. But at length some feeble
+efforts were made toward a reconciliation. The Council of
+Constance having healed the divisions in the Church by the
+election of Martin V as pope in place of the three rival popes
+deposed, the new Pontiff despatched two cardinals to France to
+aid in this important object. By their mediation a treaty was
+concluded between the Queen, the Duke of Burgundy, and the
+Dauphin; but it was no sooner published than the Count of
+Armagnac and his partisans made a vehement protest against it
+and accused of treason all who had promoted it.</p>
+
+<p>On this, Paris rose in anger, took part with the Burgundians,
+fell upon all the leading Armagnacs, put them in prison, and
+destroyed their houses. The Dauphin was only saved by one
+of Armagnac's principal adherents, Tannegui du Ch&acirc;tel, who
+carried him to the Bastille. The Bastille, however, was a few
+days after stormed by the populace, and Du Ch&acirc;tel was forced
+to withdraw his charge to Melun. The Armagnac party, except
+those in prison, were entirely driven out of Paris. But
+even this did not satisfy the rage of the multitude. Riots continued
+from day to day, and, a report being spread that the King
+was willing to ransom the captives, the people broke open the
+prisons and massacred every one of the prisoners. The Count
+of Armagnac, his chancellor, and several bishops and officers
+of state were the principal victims; but no one, man or woman,
+was spared. State prisoners, criminals, and debtors, even women
+great with child, perished in this indiscriminate slaughter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">326</a></span>Almost the whole of Normandy was by this time in possession
+of the English; but Rouen, the capital of the duchy, still held
+out. It was a large city, strongly fortified, but Henry closed it
+in on every side until it was reduced to capitulate by hunger.
+At the beginning of the siege the authorities took measures to
+expel the destitute class of the inhabitants, and several thousands
+of poor people were thus thrown into the hands of the besiegers,
+who endeavored to drive them back into the town. But the
+gates being absolutely shut against them, they remained between
+the walls and the trenches, pitifully crying for help and perishing
+for want of food and shelter, until, on Christmas Day, when the
+siege had continued nearly five months, Henry ordered food to
+be distributed to them "in the honor of Christ's nativity."</p>
+
+<p>Those within the town, meanwhile, were reduced to no less
+extremities. Enormous prices were given for bread and even
+for the bodies of dogs, cats, and rats. The garrison at length
+were induced to offer terms, but Henry for some time insisted
+on their surrendering at discretion. Hearing, however, that a
+desperate project was entertained of undermining the wall and
+suddenly rushing out upon the besiegers, he consented to grant
+them conditions, and the city capitulated on January 19th.
+The few places that remained unconquered in Normandy then
+opened their gates to Henry; others in Maine and the Isle of
+France did the same, and the English troops entered Picardy on
+a further career of conquest.</p>
+
+<p>Both the rival factions were now seriously anxious to stop the
+progress of the English, either by coming at once to terms with
+Henry or by uniting together against him; and each in turn
+first tried the former course. The Dauphin offered to treat with
+the King of England; but Henry demanding the whole of those
+large possessions in the north and south of France which had
+been secured to Edward III by the treaty of Bretigni, he felt
+that it was impossible to prolong the negotiation. The Duke
+of Burgundy then arranged a personal interview at Meulan between
+Henry on the one side and himself and the French Queen
+on behalf of Charles, at which terms of peace were to be adjusted.
+The Queen brought with her the princess Catharine,
+her daughter, whose hand Henry himself had formerly demanded
+as one of the conditions on which he would have consented to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">327</a></span>
+forbear from invading France. It was now hoped that if he
+would take her in marriage he would moderate his other demands.
+But Henry, for his part, was altogether unyielding.
+He insisted on the terms of the treaty of Bretigni, and on keeping
+his own conquests besides, with Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and
+the sovereignty over Brittany.</p>
+
+<p>Demands so exorbitant the Duke of Burgundy did not dare
+to accept, and as a last resource he and the Dauphin agreed to be
+reconciled and to unite in defence of their country against the
+enemy. They held a personal interview, embraced each other,
+and signed a treaty by which they promised each to love the
+other as a brother, and to offer a joint resistance to the invaders.
+A further meeting was arranged to take place about seven weeks
+later to complete matters and to consider their future policy.
+France was delighted at the prospect of internal harmony and the
+hope of deliverance from her enemies. But at the second interview
+an event occurred which marred all her prospects once
+more. The meeting had been appointed to take place at Montereau,
+where the river Yonne falls into the Seine.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke, remembering doubtless how he had perfidiously
+murdered the Duke of Orleans, allowed the day originally appointed
+to pass by, and came to the place at last after considerable
+misgivings, which appear to have been overcome by the exhortations
+of treacherous friends.</p>
+
+<p>When he arrived he found a place railed in with barriers for
+the meeting. He nevertheless advanced, accompanied by ten
+attendants, and, being told that the Dauphin waited for him,
+he came within the barriers, which were immediately closed
+behind him. The Dauphin was accompanied by one or two
+gentlemen, among whom was his devoted servant, Tannegui
+du Ch&acirc;tel, who had saved him from the Parisian massacre.
+This Tannegui had been formerly a servant of Louis, Duke of
+Orleans, whose murder he had been eagerly seeking an opportunity
+to revenge; and as the Duke of Burgundy knelt before the
+Dauphin, he struck him a violent blow on the head with a battle-axe.
+The attack was immediately followed up by two or three
+others, who, before the Duke was able to draw his sword, had
+closed in around him and despatched him with a multitude of
+wounds.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">328</a></span>The effect of this crime was what might have been anticipated.
+Nothing could have been more favorable to the aggressive designs
+of Henry, or more ruinous to the party of the Dauphin,
+with whose complicity it had been too evidently committed.
+Philip, the son and heir of the murdered Duke of Burgundy,
+at once sought means to revenge his father's death. The people
+of Paris became more than ever enraged against the Armagnacs,
+and entered into negotiations with the King of England. The
+new Duke Philip and Queen Isabel did the same, the latter
+being no less eager than the former for the punishment of her
+own son. Within less than three months they made up their
+minds to waive every scruple as to the acceptance of Henry's
+most exorbitant demands. He was to have the princess Catharine
+in marriage, and, the Dauphin being disinherited, to succeed
+to the crown of France on her father's death. He was
+also to be regent during King Charles' life; and all who held
+honors or offices of any kind in France were at once to swear
+allegiance to him as their future sovereign. Henry, for his part,
+was to use his utmost power to reduce to obedience those towns
+and places within the realm which adhered to the Dauphin or the
+Armagnacs.</p>
+
+<p>A treaty on this basis was at length concluded at Troyes in
+Champagne on May 21, 1420, and on Trinity Sunday, June 2d,
+Henry was married to the princess Catharine. Shortly afterward
+the treaty was formally registered by the states of the
+realm at Paris, when the Dauphin was condemned and attainted
+as guilty of the murder of the Duke of Burgundy and declared
+incapable of succeeding to the crown. But the state of affairs
+left Henry no time for honeymoon festivities. On the Tuesday
+after his wedding he again put himself at the head of his army,
+and marched with Philip of Burgundy to lay siege to Sens, which
+in a few days capitulated. Montereau and Melun were next
+besieged in succession, and each, after some resistance, was
+compelled to surrender. The latter siege lasted nearly four
+months, and during its continuance Henry fought a single combat
+with the governor in the mines, each combatant having his
+vizor down and being unknown to the other. The governor's
+name was Barbason, and he was one of those accused of complicity
+in the murder of the Duke of Orleans; but in consequence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">329</a></span>
+of this incident, Henry saved him from the capital punishment
+which he would otherwise have incurred on his capture.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the end of the year Henry entered Paris in triumph
+with the French King and the Duke of Burgundy. He there
+kept Christmas, and shortly afterward removed with his Queen
+into Normandy on his return into England. He held a parliament
+at Rouen to confirm his authority in the duchy, after which
+he passed through Picardy and Calais, and, crossing the sea,
+came by Dover and Canterbury to London. By his own subjects,
+and especially in the capital, he and his bride were received
+with profuse demonstrations of joy. The Queen was crowned
+at Westminster with great magnificence, and afterward Henry
+went a progress with her through the country, making pilgrimages
+to several of the more famous shrines in England.</p>
+
+<p>But while he was thus employed, a great calamity befell the
+English power in France, which, when the news arrived in
+England, made it apparent that the King's presence was again
+much needed across the Channel. His brother, the Duke of
+Clarence, whom he had left as his lieutenant, was defeated and
+slain at Beaug&eacute; in Anjou by an army of French and Scots, a
+number of English noblemen being also slain or taken prisoners.
+This was the first important advantage the Dauphin had gained,
+and the credit of the victory was mainly due to his Scotch allies.
+For the Duke of Albany, who was regent of Scotland, though
+it is commonly supposed that he was unwilling to give needless
+offence to England lest Henry should terminate his power by
+setting the Scotch King at liberty, had been compelled by the
+general sympathy of the Scots with France to send a force under
+his son the Earl of Buchan to serve against the English. The
+service which they did in that battle was so great that the Earl
+of Buchan was created, by the Dauphin, constable of France.</p>
+
+<p>Again Henry crossed the sea with a new army, having borrowed
+large sums for the expenses of the expedition. Before
+he left England he made a private treaty with his prisoner King
+James of Scotland, promising to let him return to his country
+after the campaign in France on certain specified conditions,
+among which it was agreed that he should take the command
+of a body of troops in aid of the English. James had accompanied
+him in his last campaign, and Henry had endeavored<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">330</a></span>
+to make use of his authority to forbid the Scots in France from
+taking part in the war, but they had refused to acknowledge
+themselves bound to a king who was a captive.</p>
+
+<p>By this agreement, however, Henry obtained real assistance
+and co&ouml;peration from his prisoner, whom he employed, in concert
+with the Duke of Gloucester, in the siege of Dreux, which
+very soon surrendered. He himself meanwhile marched toward
+the Loire to meet the Dauphin, and took Beaugency; then,
+returning northward, first reduced Villeneuve on the Yonne,
+and afterward laid siege to Meaux on the Marne. The latter
+place held out for seven months, and while Henry lay before it
+he received intelligence that his Queen had borne him a son at
+Windsor, who was christened Henry.</p>
+
+<p>The city of Meaux surrendered on May 10, 1422. The Governor,
+a man who had been guilty of great cruelties, was beheaded,
+and his head and body were suspended from a tree on
+which he himself had caused a number of people to be hanged
+as adherents of the Duke of Burgundy. Henry was now master
+of the greater part of the North of France, and his Queen came
+over from England to join him, with re&euml;nforcements under his
+brother the Duke of Bedford. But he was not permitted to
+rest; for the Dauphin, having taken from his ally the Duke of
+Burgundy the town of La Chart&eacute; on the Loire, proceeded to lay
+siege to C&ocirc;sne, and, Philip having applied to Henry for assistance,
+he sent forward the Duke of Bedford with his army, intending
+shortly to follow himself. This demonstration was
+sufficient. The Dauphin felt that he was too weak to contend
+with the united English and Burgundian forces, and he withdrew
+from the siege.</p>
+
+<p>Henry, however, was disabled from joining the army by a
+severe attack of dysentery; and though he had at first hoped
+that he might be carried in a litter to head-quarters, he soon
+found that his illness was far too serious to permit him to carry
+out his intention. He was accordingly conveyed back to Vincennes,
+near Paris, where he grew so rapidly worse that it was
+evident his end was near. In a few brief words to those about
+him he declared his will touching the government of England
+and France after his death, until his infant son should be of age.
+The regency of France he committed to the Duke of Bedford,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">331</a></span>
+in case it should be declined by the Duke of Burgundy. That
+of England he gave to his other brother, Humphrey, Duke of
+Gloucester. To his two uncles, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of
+Winchester, and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, he intrusted
+the guardianship of his child. He besought all parties to maintain
+the alliance with Burgundy, and never to release the Duke
+of Orleans and the other prisoners of Agincourt during his son's
+minority. Having given these instructions he expired, on the
+last day of August, 1422.</p>
+
+<p>His death was bewailed both in England and France with no
+ordinary regret. The great achievements of his reign made him
+naturally a popular hero; nor was the regard felt for his memory
+diminished when, under the feeble reign of his son, all that he
+had gained was irrecoverably lost again, so that nothing remained
+of all his conquests except the story of how they had been won.
+Those past glories, indeed, must have seemed all the brighter
+when contrasted with a present which knew but disaster abroad
+and civil dissension at home. The early death of Henry also
+contributed to the popular estimate of his greatness. It was
+seen that in a very few years he had subdued a large part of the
+territory of France. It was not seen that in the nature of things
+this advantage could not be maintained, and that even the greatest
+military talents would not have succeeded in preserving the
+English conquests.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can it be said that Henry's success, extraordinary as it
+was, was altogether owing to his own abilities. That he exhibited
+great qualities as a general cannot be denied; but these
+would have availed him little if the rival factions in France
+had not been far more bitterly opposed to each other than to
+him. Indeed, it is difficult after all to justify, even as a matter
+of policy, his interference in French affairs, except as a means
+of diverting public attention from the fact that he inherited
+from his father but an indifferent title even to the throne of
+England. And though success attended his efforts beyond all
+expectation, he most wilfully endangered the safety not only
+of himself, but of his gallant army, when he determined to
+march with reduced forces through the enemy's country from
+Harfleur to Calais. It was a rashness nothing less than culpable,
+but in his own interests rashness was good policy. Unless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">332</a></span>
+he could succeed in desperate enterprises against tremendous
+odds and so make himself a military hero and a favorite
+of the multitude, his throne was insecure. He succeeded; but
+it was only by staking everything upon the venture&mdash;his own
+safety and that of his army, which, if the French had exercised
+but a little more discretion, would inevitably have been cut to
+pieces or made prisoners to a man.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">333</a></span></p>
+<h2>JEANNE D'ARCS VICTORY AT ORLEANS</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1429</h6>
+
+<h3>Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the Hundred Years' War between England and France, a critical
+period was reached when Henry V, in 1415, won the battle of Agincourt,
+and five years later, by the treaty of Troyes, secured the succession to
+the French throne on the death of Charles VI. Both monarchs dying in
+1422, Charles VII was proclaimed King of France, and Henry's son&mdash;Henry
+VI&mdash;succeeded to his father's throne.</p>
+
+<p>France now realized that her condition was wellnigh hopeless, for the
+greater part of her territory was in the hands of her enemies. When the
+English began the siege of Orleans the extinction of French independence
+seemed to be inevitable. The chivalry of France had been wasted in terrible
+wars, and the spirits of her soldiers were daunted by repeated disaster.
+The English king had been proclaimed in Paris, and the "native
+prince was a dissolute trifler, stained with the assassination of the most
+powerful noble of the land."<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">77</a> Anarchy and brigandage everywhere prevailed,
+and the condition of the peasantry was too wretched to be described.</p>
+
+<p>"Such," says Lamartine, "was the state of the nation when Providence
+showed it a savior in a child." This child was Jeanne d'Arc,
+called <i>La Pucelle</i> ("the Maid"&mdash;more fully, "the Maid of Orleans"),
+whose character and services to her country made her, perhaps, the most
+illustrious heroine of history. She was born at Domremy, in the northeast
+part of France, January 6, 1412. All that is essential concerning her
+personality and life prior to the great achievement recorded here will be
+found in Creasy's own introduction to his spirited account of the victory
+at Orleans.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_o.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="O" />RLEANS was looked upon as the last stronghold of the
+French national party. If the English could once obtain
+possession of it, their victorious progress through the residue of the
+kingdom seemed free from any serious obstacle. Accordingly,
+the Earl of Salisbury, one of the bravest and most experienced
+of the English generals, who had been trained under Henry V,
+marched to the attack of the all-important city; and, after re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">334</a></span>ducing
+several places of inferior consequence in the neighborhood,
+appeared with his army before its walls on the 12th of October,
+1428.</p>
+
+
+<p>The city of Orleans itself was on the north side of the Loire,
+but its suburbs extended far on the southern side, and a strong
+bridge connected them with the town. A fortification, which in
+modern military phrase would be termed a <i>t&ecirc;te-du-pont</i>, defended
+the bridge head on the southern side, and two towers,
+called the <i>Tourelles</i>, were built on the bridge itself, at a little distance
+from the t&ecirc;te-du-pont. Indeed, the solid masonry of the
+bridge terminated at the Tourelles; and the communication
+thence with the t&ecirc;te-du-pont and the southern shore was by
+means of a drawbridge. The Tourelles and the t&ecirc;te-du-pont
+formed together a strong-fortified post, capable of containing a
+garrison of considerable strength; and so long as this was in
+possession of the Orleannais, they could communicate freely
+with the southern provinces, the inhabitants of which, like the
+Orleannais themselves, supported the cause of their dauphin
+against the foreigners.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Salisbury rightly judged the capture of the Tourelles
+to be the most material step toward the reduction of the city itself.
+Accordingly, he directed his principal operations against
+this post, and after some severe repulses he carried the Tourelles
+by storm on the 23d of October. The French, however,
+broke down the arches of the bridge that were nearest to the
+north bank, and thus rendered a direct assault from the Tourelles
+upon the city impossible. But the possession of this post
+enabled the English to distress the town greatly by a battery of
+cannon which they planted there, and which commanded some
+of the principal streets.</p>
+
+<p>It has been observed by Hume that this is the first siege in
+which any important use appears to have been made of artillery.
+And even at Orleans both besiegers and besieged seem to have
+employed their cannons merely as instruments of destruction
+against their enemy's <i>men</i>, and not to have trusted to them as
+engines of demolition against their enemy's walls and works.
+The efficacy of cannon in breaching solid masonry was taught
+Europe by the Turks a few years afterward, at the memorable
+siege of Constantinople.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">335</a></span>In our French wars, as in the wars of the classic nations, famine
+was looked on as the surest weapon to compel the submission
+of a well-walled town; and the great object of the besiegers was
+to effect a complete circumvallation. The great ambit of the
+walls of Orleans, and the facilities which the river gave for obtaining
+succors and supplies, rendered the capture of the town
+by this process a matter of great difficulty. Nevertheless, Lord
+Salisbury, and Lord Suffolk, who succeeded him in command
+of the English after his death by a cannon-ball, carried on the
+necessary works with great skill and resolution. Six strongly-fortified
+posts, called <i>bastilles</i>, were formed at certain intervals
+round the town, and the purpose of the English engineers was
+to draw strong lines between them. During the winter, little
+progress was made with the intrenchments, but when the spring
+of 1429 came, the English resumed their work with activity; the
+communications between the city and the country became more
+difficult, and the approach of want began already to be felt in
+Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>The besieging force also fared hardly for stores and provisions,
+until relieved by the effects of a brilliant victory which
+Sir John Fastolf, one of the best English generals, gained at
+Rouvrai, near Orleans, a few days after Ash Wednesday, 1429.
+With only sixteen hundred fighting men, Sir John completely
+defeated an army of French and Scots, four thousand strong,
+which had been collected for the purpose of aiding the Orleannais
+and harassing the besiegers. After this encounter, which
+seemed decisively to confirm the superiority of the English in
+battle over their adversaries, Fastolf escorted large supplies of
+stores and food to Suffolk's camp, and the spirits of the English
+rose to the highest pitch at the prospect of the speedy capture
+of the city before them, and the consequent subjection of all
+France beneath their arms.</p>
+
+<p>The Orleannais now, in their distress, offered to surrender
+the city into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, who, though
+the ally of the English, was yet one of their native princes. The
+regent Bedford refused these terms, and the speedy submission
+of the city to the English seemed inevitable. The dauphin
+Charles, who was now at Chinon with his remnant of a court,
+despaired of continuing any longer the struggle for his crown,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">336</a></span>
+and was only prevented from abandoning the country by the
+more masculine spirits of his mistress and his Queen. Yet neither
+they nor the boldest of Charles' captains could have shown him
+where to find resources for prolonging war; and least of all could
+any human skill have predicted the quarter whence rescue was
+to come to Orleans and to France.</p>
+
+<p>In the village of Domremy, on the borders of Lorraine, there
+was a poor peasant of the name of Jacques d'Arc, respected in
+his station of life, and who had reared a family in virtuous habits
+and in the practice of the strictest devotion. His eldest daughter
+was named by her parents Jeannette, but she was called Jeanne
+by the French, which was Latinized into Johanna, and Anglicized
+into Joan.</p>
+
+<p>At the time when Jeanne first attracted attention, she was
+about eighteen years of age. She was naturally of a susceptible
+disposition, which diligent attention to the legends of saints and
+tales of fairies, aided by the dreamy loneliness of her life while
+tending her father's flocks, had made peculiarly prone to enthusiastic
+fervor. At the same time, she was eminent for piety and
+purity of soul, and for her compassionate gentleness to the sick
+and the distressed.</p>
+
+<p>The district where she dwelt had escaped comparatively free
+from the ravages of war, but the approach of roving bands of
+Burgundian or English troops frequently spread terror through
+Domremy. Once the village had been plundered by some of
+these marauders, and Jeanne and her family had been driven
+from their home, and forced to seek refuge for a time at Neufch&acirc;teau.
+The peasantry in Domremy were principally attached
+to the house of Orleans and the Dauphin, and all the miseries
+which France endured were there imputed to the Burgundian
+faction and their allies, the English, who were seeking to enslave
+unhappy France.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, from infancy to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually
+of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of
+the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism
+grew in her with her growth. The deliverance of France from
+the English was the subject of her reveries by day and her
+dreams by night. Blended with these aspirations were recollections
+of the miraculous interpositions of heaven in favor of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">337</a></span>
+oppressed, which she had learned from the legends of her Church.
+Her faith was undoubting; her prayers were fervent. "She
+feared no danger, for she felt no sin," and at length she believed
+herself to have received the supernatural inspiration which she
+sought.</p>
+
+<p>According to her own narrative, delivered by her to her
+merciless inquisitors in the time of her captivity and approaching
+death, she was about thirteen years old when her revelations
+commenced. Her own words describe them best. "At the age
+of thirteen, a voice from God came to her to help her in ruling
+herself, and that voice came to her about the hour of noon, in
+summer-time, while she was in her father's garden. And she
+had fasted the day before. And she heard the voice on her right,
+in the direction of the church; and when she heard the voice,
+she saw also a bright light."</p>
+
+<p>Afterward St. Michael and St. Margaret and St. Catharine
+appeared to her. They were always in a halo of glory; she could
+see that their heads were crowned with jewels; and she heard
+their voices, which were sweet and mild. She did not distinguish
+their arms or limbs. She heard them more frequently than
+she saw them; and the usual time when she heard them was
+when the church bells were sounding for prayer. And if she was
+in the woods when she heard them, she could plainly distinguish
+their voices drawing near to her. When she thought that she
+discerned the heavenly voices, she knelt down, and bowed herself
+to the ground. Their presence gladdened her even to tears,
+and after they departed she wept because they had not taken
+her with them back to paradise. They always spoke soothingly
+to her. They told her that France would be saved, and that she
+was to save it.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the visions and the voices that moved the spirit of
+the girl of thirteen; and as she grew older, they became more
+frequent and more clear. At last the tidings of the siege of Orleans
+reached Domremy. Jeanne heard her parents and neighbors
+talk of the sufferings of its population, of the ruin which its
+capture would bring on their lawful sovereign, and of the distress
+of the Dauphin and his court. Jeanne's heart was sorely troubled
+at the thought of the fate of Orleans; and her "voices" now
+ordered her to leave her home, and warned her that she was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">338</a></span>
+instrument chosen by heaven for driving away the English from
+that city, and for taking the Dauphin to be anointed king at
+Rheims. At length she informed her parents of her divine mission,
+and told them that she must go to the Sire de Baudricourt,
+who commanded at Vaucouleurs, and who was the appointed
+person to bring her into the presence of the King, whom she was
+to save.</p>
+
+<p>Neither the anger nor the grief of her parents, who said that
+they would rather see her drowned than exposed to the contamination
+of the camp, could move her from her purpose. One of
+her uncles consented to take her to Vaucouleurs, where De
+Baudricourt at first thought her mad, and derided her, but by
+degrees was led to believe, if not in her inspiration, at least in her
+enthusiasm, and in its possible utility to the Dauphin's cause.</p>
+
+<p>The inhabitants of Vaucouleurs were completely won over
+to her side by the piety and devoutness which she displayed, and
+by her firm assurance in the truth of her mission. She told them
+that it was God's will that she should go to the King, and that no
+one but her could save the kingdom of France. She said that she
+herself would rather remain with her poor mother and spin; but
+the Lord had ordered her forth.</p>
+
+<p>The fame of "the Maid," as she was termed, the renown of
+her holiness and of her mission, spread far and wide. Baudricourt
+sent her with an escort to Chinon, where the dauphin
+Charles was dallying away his time. Her "voices" had bidden
+her assume the arms and the apparel of a knight; and the
+wealthiest inhabitants of Vaucouleurs had vied with each other
+in equipping her with war-horse, armor, and sword. On reaching
+Chinon, she was, after some delay, admitted into the presence
+of the Dauphin. Charles designedly dressed himself far
+less richly than many of his courtiers were apparelled, and mingled
+with them, when Jeanne was introduced, in order to see if
+the holy Maid would address her exhortations to the wrong person.
+But she instantly singled him out, and, kneeling before
+him, said:</p>
+
+<p>"Most noble Dauphin, the King of Heaven announces to you
+by me that you shall be anointed and crowned king in the city of
+Rheims, and that you shall be his vicegerent in France."</p>
+
+<p>His features may probably have been seen by her previously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">339</a></span>
+in portraits, or have been described to her by others; but she
+herself believed that her "voices" inspired her when she addressed
+the King, and the report soon spread abroad that the
+holy Maid had found the King by a miracle; and this, with
+many other similar rumors, augmented the renown and influence
+that she now rapidly acquired.</p>
+
+<p>The state of public feeling in France was now favorable to
+an enthusiastic belief in a divine interposition in favor of the
+party that had hitherto been unsuccessful and oppressed. The
+humiliations which had befallen the French royal family and
+nobility were looked on as the just judgments of God upon them
+for their vice and impiety. The misfortunes that had come upon
+France as a nation were believed to have been drawn down by
+national sins. The English, who had been the instruments of
+heaven's wrath against France, seemed now, by their pride and
+cruelty, to be fitting objects of it themselves.</p>
+
+<p>France in that age was a profoundly religious country. There
+was ignorance, there was superstition, there was bigotry; but
+there was <i>faith</i>&mdash;a faith that itself worked true miracles, even
+while it believed in unreal ones. At this time, also, one of those
+devotional movements began among the clergy in France, which
+from time to time occur in national churches, without it being
+possible for the historian to assign any adequate human cause
+for their immediate date or extension. Numberless friars and
+priests traversed the rural districts and towns of France, preaching
+to the people that they must seek from heaven a deliverance
+from the pillages of the soldiery and the insolence of the foreign
+oppressors.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of a providence that works only by general laws
+was wholly alien to the feelings of the age. Every political event,
+as well as every natural phenomenon, was believed to be the
+immediate result of a special mandate of God. This led to
+the belief that his holy angels and saints were constantly employed
+in executing his commands and mingling in the affairs of
+men. The Church encouraged these feelings, and at the same
+time sanctioned the concurrent popular belief that hosts of evil
+spirits were also ever actively interposing in the current of earthly
+events, with whom sorcerers and wizards could league themselves,
+and thereby obtain the exercise of supernatural power.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">340</a></span>Thus all things favored the influence which Jeanne obtained
+both over friends and foes. The French nation, as well as the
+English and the Burgundians, readily admitted that superhuman
+beings inspired her; the only question was whether these
+beings were good or evil angels; whether she brought with her
+"airs from heaven or blasts from hell." This question seemed
+to her countrymen to be decisively settled in her favor by the
+austere sanctity of her life, by the holiness of her conversation,
+but still more by her exemplary attention to all the services and
+rites of the Church. The Dauphin at first feared the injury that
+might be done to his cause if he laid himself open to the charge
+of having leagued himself with a sorceress. Every imaginable
+test, therefore, was resorted to in order to set Jeanne's orthodoxy
+and purity beyond suspicion. At last Charles and his advisers
+felt safe in accepting her services as those of a true and virtuous
+Christian daughter of the holy Church.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, probable that Charles himself and some of his
+counsellors may have suspected Jeanne of being a mere enthusiast,
+and it is certain that Dunois and others of the best generals
+took considerable latitude in obeying or deviating from the
+military orders that she gave. But over the mass of the people
+and the soldiery her influence was unbounded. While Charles
+and his doctors of theology, and court ladies, had been deliberating
+as to recognizing or dismissing the Maid, a considerable period
+had passed away during which a small army, the last gleanings,
+as it seemed, of the English sword, had been assembled at
+Blois, under Dunois, La Hire, Xaintrailles, and other chiefs,
+who to their natural valor were now beginning to unite the wisdom
+that is taught by misfortune. It was resolved to send
+Jeanne with this force and a convoy of provisions to Orleans.
+The distress of that city had now become urgent. But the communication
+with the open country was not entirely cut off: the
+Orleannais had heard of the holy Maid whom Providence had
+raised up for their deliverance, and their messengers earnestly
+implored the Dauphin to send her to them without delay.</p>
+
+<p>Jeanne appeared at the camp at Blois, clad in a new suit of
+brilliant white armor, mounted on a stately black war-horse,
+and with a lance in her right hand, which she had learned to
+wield with skill and grace. Her head was unhelmeted, so that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">341</a></span>
+all could behold her fair and expressive features, her deep-set
+and earnest eyes, and her long black hair, which was parted
+across her forehead, and bound by a ribbon behind her back.
+She wore at her side a small battle-axe, and the consecrated
+sword, marked on the blade with five crosses, which had at her
+bidding been taken for her from the shrine of St. Catharine at
+Fierbois. A page carried her banner, which she had caused to
+be made and embroidered as her voices enjoined. It was white
+satin, strewn with <i>fleurs-de-lis</i>, and on it were the words</p>
+
+<div class="center">"<span class="smcap">Jhesus Maria</span>,"</div>
+
+<p>and the representation of the Saviour in his glory. Jeanne afterward
+generally bore her banner herself in battle; she said that
+though she loved her sword much, she loved her banner forty
+times as much; and she loved to carry it, because it could not kill
+anyone.</p>
+
+<p>Thus accoutred, she came to lead the troops of France, who
+looked with soldierly admiration on her well-proportioned and
+upright figure, the skill with which she managed her war-horse,
+and the easy grace with which she handled her weapons. Her
+military education had been short, but she had availed herself
+of it well. She had also the good sense to interfere little with the
+man&oelig;uvres of the troops, leaving these things to Dunois and
+others whom she had the discernment to recognize as the best
+officers in the camp.</p>
+
+<p>Her tactics in action were simple enough. As she herself
+described it, "I used to say to them, 'Go boldly in among the
+English,' and then I used to go boldly in myself." Such, as
+she told her inquisitors, was the only spell she used, and it
+was one of power. But, while interfering little with the military
+discipline of the troops, in all matters of moral discipline
+she was inflexibly strict. All the abandoned followers of
+the camp were driven away. She compelled both generals and
+soldiers to attend regularly at confessional. Her chaplain and
+other priests marched with the army under her orders; and at
+every halt, an altar was set up and the sacrament administered.
+No oath or foul language passed without punishment or censure.
+Even the roughest and most hardened veterans obeyed her.
+They had put off for a time the bestial coarseness which had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">342</a></span>
+grown on them during a life of bloodshed and rapine; they felt
+that they must go forth in a new spirit to a new career, and acknowledged
+the beauty of the holiness in which the heaven-sent
+Maid was leading them to certain victory.</p>
+
+<p>Jeanne marched from Blois on the 25th of April with a convoy
+of provisions for Orleans, accompanied by Dunois, La Hire,
+and the other chief captains of the French, and on the evening
+of the 28th they approached the town. In the words of the old
+chronicler Hall: "The Englishmen, perceiving that thei within
+could not long continue for faute of vitaile and pouder, kepte not
+their watche so diligently as thei were accustomed, nor scoured
+now the countrey environed as thei before had ordained. Whiche
+negligence the citizens shut in perceiving, sent worde thereof to
+the French captaines, which, with Pucelle, in the dedde tyme of
+the nighte, and in a greate rayne and thundere, with all their vitaile
+and artillery, entered into the citie."</p>
+
+<p>When it was day, the Maid rode in solemn procession through
+the city, clad in complete armor, and mounted on a white horse.
+Dunois was by her side, and all the bravest knights of her army
+and of the garrison followed in her train. The whole population
+thronged around her; and men, women, and children strove to
+touch her garments or her banner or her charger. They poured
+forth blessings on her, whom they already considered their deliverer.
+In the words used by two of them afterward before the
+tribunal which reversed the sentence, but could not restore the
+life of the virgin-martyr of France, "the people of Orleans, when
+they first saw her in their city, thought that it was an angel from
+heaven that had come down to save them."</p>
+
+<p>Jeanne spoke gently in reply to their acclamations and addresses.
+She told them to fear God, and trust in him for safety
+from the fury of their enemies. She first went to the principal
+church, where <i>Te Deum</i> was chanted; and then she took up her
+abode at the house of Jacques Bourgier, one of the principal citizens,
+and whose wife was a matron of good repute. She refused
+to attend a splendid banquet which had been provided for her,
+and passed nearly all her time in prayer.</p>
+
+<p>When it was known by the English that the Maid was in Orleans,
+their minds were not less occupied about her than were
+the minds of those in the city; but it was in a very different spirit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">343</a></span>
+The English believed in her supernatural mission as firmly as
+the French did, but they thought her a sorceress who had come
+to overthrow them by her enchantments. An old prophecy,
+which told that a damsel from Lorraine was to save France, had
+long been current, and it was known and applied to Jeanne by
+foreigners as well as by the natives. For months the English had
+heard of the coming Maid, and the tales of miracles which she
+was said to have wrought had been listened to by the rough yeomen
+of the English camp with anxious curiosity and secret awe.
+She had sent a herald to the English generals before she marched
+for Orleans, and he had summoned the English generals in the
+name of the most High to give up to the Maid, who was sent by
+heaven, the keys of the French cities which they had wrongfully
+taken; and he also solemnly adjured the English troops,
+whether archers or men of the companies of war or gentlemen
+or others, who were before the city of Orleans, to depart thence
+to their homes, under peril of being visited by the judgment of
+God.</p>
+
+<p>On her arrival in Orleans, Jeanne sent another similar message;
+but the English scoffed at her from their towers, and
+threatened to burn her heralds. She determined, before she
+shed the blood of the besiegers, to repeat the warning with her
+own voice; and accordingly she mounted one of the boulevards
+of the town, which was within hearing of the Tourelles, and
+thence she spoke to the English, and bade them depart, otherwise
+they would meet with shame and woe.</p>
+
+<p>Sir William Gladsdale&mdash;whom the French call "Glacidas"&mdash;commanded
+the English post at the Tourelles, and he and another
+English officer replied by bidding her go home and keep
+her cows, and by ribald jests that brought tears of shame and
+indignation into her eyes. But, though the English leaders
+vaunted aloud, the effect produced on their army by Jeanne's
+presence in Orleans was proved four days after her arrival, when,
+on the approach of re&euml;nforcements and stores to the town, Jeanne
+and La Hire marched out to meet them, and escorted the long
+train of provision wagons safely into Orleans, between the bastiles
+of the English, who cowered behind their walls instead of
+charging fiercely and fearlessly, as had been their wont, on any
+French band that dared to show itself within reach.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">344</a></span>Thus far she had prevailed without striking a blow; but the
+time was now come to test her courage amid the horrors of actual
+slaughter. On the afternoon of the day on which she had escorted
+the re&euml;nforcements into the city, while she was resting
+fatigued at home, Dunois had seized an advantageous opportunity
+of attacking the English bastile of St. Loup, and a fierce
+assault of the Orleannais had been made on it, which the English
+garrison of the fort stubbornly resisted. Jeanne was roused
+by a sound which she believed to be that of her heavenly voices;
+she called for her arms and horse, and, quickly equipping herself,
+she mounted to ride off to where the fight was raging. In
+her haste she had forgotten her banner; she rode back, and,
+without dismounting, had it given to her from the window,
+and then she galloped to the gate whence the sally had been
+made.</p>
+
+<p>On her way she met some of the wounded French who had
+been carried back from the fight. "Ha!" she exclaimed, "I
+never can see French blood flow without my hair standing on
+end." She rode out of the gate, and met the tide of her countrymen,
+who had been repulsed from the English fort, and were
+flying back to Orleans in confusion. At the sight of the holy
+Maid and her banner they rallied and renewed the assault,
+Jeanne rode forward at their head, waving her banner and cheering
+them on. The English quailed at what they believed to be
+the charge of hell; St. Loup was stormed, and its defenders
+put to the sword, except some few, whom Jeanne succeeded in
+saving. All her woman's gentleness returned when the combat
+was over. It was the first time that she had ever seen a battlefield.
+She wept at the sight of so many bleeding corpses; and
+her tears flowed doubly when she reflected that they were the
+bodies of Christian men who had died without confession.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was Ascension Day, and it was passed by Jeanne
+in prayer. But on the following morrow it was resolved by the
+chiefs of the garrison to attack the English forts on the south of
+the river. For this purpose they crossed the river in boats, and
+after some severe fighting, in which the Maid was wounded in
+the heel, both the English bastiles of the Augustins and St. Jean
+de Blanc were captured. The Tourelles were now the only posts
+which the besiegers held on the south of the river. But that post<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">345</a></span>
+was formidably strong, and by its command of the bridge it was
+the key to the deliverance of Orleans. It was known that a fresh
+English army was approaching under Fastolfe to re&euml;nforce the
+besiegers, and, should that army arrive while the Tourelles were
+yet in the possession of their comrades, there was great peril of
+all the advantages which the French had gained being nullified,
+and of the siege being again actively carried on.</p>
+
+<p>It was resolved, therefore, by the French to assail the Tourelles
+at once, while the enthusiasm which the presence and the
+heroic valor of the Maid had created was at its height. But the
+enterprise was difficult. The rampart of the t&ecirc;te-du-pont, or
+landward bulwark, of the Tourelles was steep and high, and Sir
+John Gladsdale occupied this all-important fort with five hundred
+archers and men-at-arms, who were the very flower of the
+English army.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the morning of the 7th of May some thousands of
+the best French troops in Orleans heard mass and attended the
+confessional by Jeanne's orders, and then crossing the river in
+boats, as on the preceding day, they assailed the bulwark of the
+Tourelles "with light hearts and heavy hands." But Gladsdale's
+men, encouraged by their bold and skilful leader, made a
+resolute and able defence. The Maid planted her banner on the
+edge of the fosse, and then, springing down into the ditch, she
+placed the first ladder against the wall and began to mount.
+An English archer sent an arrow at her, which pierced her corselet
+and wounded her severely between the neck and shoulder.
+She fell bleeding from the ladder; and the English were leaping
+down from the wall to capture her, but her followers bore her
+off. She was carried to the rear and laid upon the grass; her
+armor was taken off, and the anguish of her wound and the sight
+of her blood made her at first tremble and weep.</p>
+
+<p>But her confidence in her celestial mission soon returned:
+her patron saints seemed to stand before her and reassure her.
+She sat up and drew the arrow out with her own hands. Some
+of the soldiers who stood by wished to stanch the blood by saying
+a charm over the wound; but she forbade them, saying that
+she did not wish to be cured by unhallowed means. She had the
+wound dressed with a little oil, and then, bidding her confessor
+come to her, she betook herself to prayer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">346</a></span>In the mean while the English in the bulwark of the Tourelles
+had repulsed the oft-renewed efforts of the French to scale
+the wall. Dunois, who commanded the assailants, was at last
+discouraged, and gave orders for a retreat to be sounded. Jeanne
+sent for him and the other generals, and implored them not to
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>"By my God," she said to them, "you shall soon enter in
+there. Do not doubt it. When you see my banner wave again
+up to the wall, to your arms again! the fort is yours. For the
+present, rest a little and take some food and drink."</p>
+
+<p>"They did so," says the old chronicler of the siege, "for they
+obeyed her marvellously."</p>
+
+<p>The faintness caused by her wound had now passed off, and
+she headed the French in another rush against the bulwark.
+The English, who had thought her slain, were alarmed at her
+reappearance, while the French pressed furiously and fanatically
+forward. A Biscayan soldier was carrying Jeanne's banner.
+She had told the troops that directly the banner touched the wall
+they should enter. The Biscayan waved the banner forward
+from the edge of the fosse, and touched the wall with it, and then
+all the French host swarmed madly up the ladders that now were
+raised in all directions against the English fort. At this crisis
+the efforts of the English garrison were distracted by an attack
+from another quarter. The French troops who had been left in
+Orleans had placed some planks over the broken arch of the
+bridge, and advanced across them to the assault of the Tourelles
+on the northern side.</p>
+
+<p>Gladsdale resolved to withdraw his men from the landward
+bulwark, and concentrate his whole force in the Tourelles themselves.
+He was passing for this purpose across the drawbridge
+that connected the Tourelles and the t&ecirc;te-du-pont, when Jeanne,
+who by this time had scaled the wall of the bulwark, called out
+to him, "Surrender! surrender to the King of Heaven! Ah,
+Glacidas, you have foully wronged me with your words, but I
+have great pity on your soul and the souls of your men." The
+Englishman, disdainful of her summons, was striding on across
+the drawbridge, when a cannon-shot from the town carried it
+away, and Gladsdale perished in the water that ran beneath.
+After his fall, the remnant of the English abandoned all further<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">347</a></span>
+resistance. Three hundred of them had been killed in the battle
+and two hundred were made prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The broken arch was speedily repaired by the exulting Orleannais,
+and Jeanne made her triumphal re&euml;ntry into the city
+by the bridge that had so long been closed. Every church in
+Orleans rang out its gratulating peal; and throughout the night
+the sounds of rejoicing echoed, and the bonfires blazed up from
+the city. But in the lines and forts which the besiegers yet retained
+on the northern shore, there was anxious watching of the
+generals, and there was desponding gloom among the soldiery.
+Even Talbot now counselled retreat. On the following morning
+the Orleannais, from their walls, saw the great forts called
+"London" and "St. Lawrence" in flames, and witnessed their
+invaders busy in destroying the stores and munitions which had
+been relied on for the destruction of Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly and sullenly the English army retired; and not before
+it had drawn up in battle array opposite to the city, as if to challenge
+the garrison to an encounter. The French troops were
+eager to go out and attack, but Jeanne forbade it. The day was
+Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>"In the name of God," she said, "let them depart, and let
+us return thanks to God."</p>
+
+<p>She led the soldiers and citizens forth from Orleans, but not
+for the shedding of blood. They passed in solemn procession
+round the city walls, and then, while their retiring enemies were
+yet in sight, they knelt in thanksgiving to God for the deliverance
+which he had vouchsafed them.</p>
+
+<p>Within three months from the time of her first interview
+with the Dauphin, Jeanne had fulfilled the first part of her promise,
+the raising of the siege of Orleans. Within three months
+more she had fulfilled the second part also, and had stood with
+her banner in her hand by the high altar at Rheims, while he
+was anointed and crowned as king Charles VII of France. In
+the interval she had taken Jargeau, Troyes, and other strong
+places, and she had defeated an English army in a fair field at
+Patay. The enthusiasm of her countrymen knew no bounds;
+but the importance of her services, and especially of her primary
+achievement at Orleans, may perhaps be best proved by the testimony
+of her enemies. There is extant a fragment of a letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">348</a></span>
+from the regent Bedford to his royal nephew, Henry VI, in
+which he bewails the turn that the war has taken, and especially
+attributes it to the raising of the siege of Orleans by Jeanne.
+Bedford's own words, which are preserved in Rymer, are as follows:</p>
+
+<p>"And alle thing there prospered for you til the tyme of the
+Siege of Orleans taken in hand God knoweth by what advis. At
+the whiche tyme, after the adventure fallen to the persone of my
+cousin of Salisbury, whom God assoille, there felle, by the hand
+of God as it seemeth, a great strook upon your peuple that was
+assembled there in grete nombre, caused in grete partie, as y
+trowe, of lakke of sadde beleve, and of unlevefulle doubte, that
+thei hadde of a disciple and lyme of the Feende, called the Pucelle,
+that used fals enchantments and sorcerie.</p>
+
+<p>"The whiche strooke and discomfiture nott oonly lessed in
+grete partie the nombre of your peuple there, but as well withdrewe
+the courage of the remenant in merveillous wyse, and
+couraiged your adverse partie and ennemys to assemble them
+forthwith in grete nombre."</p>
+
+<p>When Charles had been anointed king of France, Jeanne
+believed that her mission was accomplished. And in truth the
+deliverance of France from the English, though not completed
+for many years afterward, was then insured. The ceremony of
+a royal coronation and anointment was not in those days regarded
+as a mere costly formality. It was believed to confer the
+sanction and the grace of heaven upon the prince, who had previously
+ruled with mere human authority. Thenceforth he was
+the Lord's Anointed. Moreover, one of the difficulties that had
+previously lain in the way of many Frenchmen when called on to
+support Charles VII was now removed. He had been publicly
+stigmatized, even by his own parents, as no true son of the royal
+race of France. The queen-mother, the English, and the partisans
+of Burgundy called him the "Pretender to the title of Dauphin";
+but those who had been led to doubt his legitimacy were
+cured of their scepticism by the victories of the holy Maid and
+by the fulfilment of her pledges. They thought that heaven
+had now declared itself in favor of Charles as the true heir of the
+crown of St. Louis, and the tales about his being spurious were
+thenceforth regarded as mere English calumnies.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">349</a></span>With this strong tide of national feeling in his favor, with
+victorious generals and soldiers round him, and a dispirited and
+divided enemy before him, he could not fail to conquer, though
+his own imprudence and misconduct, and the stubborn valor
+which the English still from time to time displayed, prolonged
+the war in France until the civil Wars of the Roses broke out in
+England, and left France to peace and repose.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">350</a></span></p>
+<h2>TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF JEANNE
+D'ARC</h2>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1431</h6>
+
+<h3>Jules Michelet</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>After her victory at Orleans (1429), Jeanne d'Arc "knelt before the
+French King in the cathedral of Rheims, and shed tears of joy." She
+felt that she had fulfilled her mission, and she desired to return to her
+home at Domremy. But King Charles VII persuaded her to remain with
+the army. "She still heard her heavenly voices, but she now no longer
+thought herself the appointed minister of heaven to lead her countrymen
+to certain victory." She expected but one year more of life; but she
+still bravely faced the future with its perils.</p>
+
+<p>The Maid took part in the capture of Laon, Soissons, Compi&egrave;gne,
+and other places, and, in the attack on Paris, September, 1429, which she
+prematurely urged, was severely wounded. In a sally from Compi&egrave;gne,
+where she was besieged by Burgundians, she was taken prisoner May 24,
+1430, and held until November, when for a large payment in money she
+was surrendered to the English, who took her to Rouen, their real capital
+in France.</p>
+
+<p>On January 3, 1431, by order of King Henry VI of England, Jeanne
+was placed in the hands of Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had
+already moved to have her delivered up to the Inquisition of France, as
+demanded by the University of Paris. The Bishop proceeded to form at
+Rouen a "court of justice" for her trial, and on February 21st the Maid
+was brought before her judges&mdash;"Norman priests and doctors of Paris"&mdash;in
+the chapel of Rouen castle. The trial lasted until May 30th, forty
+sittings being held&mdash;some of them in Jeanne's prison, where for a time
+she was kept in an iron cage.</p>
+
+<p>Commanded to take "an oath to tell the truth about everything as to
+which she should be questioned," she replied: "Perchance you may ask
+me things I would not tell you. I do not like to take an oath to tell the
+truth save as to matters which concern the faith." She fearlessly tried
+to guard against violation of what she considered her right to be silent.</p>
+
+<p>In "this odious and shameful trial," says Guizot, "the judges' prejudiced
+servility and scientific subtlety were employed for three months to
+wear out the courage or overreach the understanding of a young girl of
+nineteen, who made no defence beyond holding her tongue or appealing
+to God, who had dictated to her that which she had done." Formal accusation
+was made under twelve heads or articles, based on the preliminary
+examination, and the trial proceeded to its merciless end.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">351</a></span></p>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_i.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="I" />N Passion Week, Jeanne d'Arc fell sick. Her temptation began,
+no doubt, on Palm Sunday. A country girl, born on the
+skirts of a forest, and having ever lived in the open air of heaven,
+she was compelled to pass this fine Palm Sunday in the depths
+of a dungeon. The grand "succor" which the Church invokes
+came not for her; the "doors did not open."</p>
+
+<p>They were opened on the Tuesday, but it was to lead the
+accused to the great hall of the castle, before her judges. They
+read to her the articles which had been founded on her answers,
+and the Bishop previously represented to her "that these doctors
+were all churchmen, clerks, and well read in law, divine and
+human; that they were all tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed
+mildly, seeking neither vengeance nor corporal punishment,
+but solely wishing to enlighten her, and put her in the way of
+truth and of salvation; and that, as she was not sufficiently informed
+in such high matters, the Bishop and the Inquisitor offered
+her the choice of one or more of the assessors to act as her
+counsel." The accused, in presence of this assembly, in which
+she did not descry a single friendly face, mildly answered: "For
+what you admonish me as to my good, and concerning our faith,
+I thank you; as to the counsel you offer me, I have no intention
+to forsake the counsel of our Lord."</p>
+
+<p>The first article touched the capital point, submission. She
+replied: "Well do I believe that our holy Father, the bishops,
+and others of the Church are to guard the Christian faith
+and punish those who are found wanting. As to my deeds,
+I submit myself only to the Church in heaven, to God and the
+Virgin, to the sainted men and women in paradise. I have not
+been wanting in regard to the Christian faith, and trust I never
+shall be." And, shortly afterward, "I would rather die than
+recall what I have done by our Lord's command."</p>
+
+<p>What illustrates the time, the uninformed mind of these
+doctors, and their blind attachment to the letter without regard
+to the spirit is that no point seemed graver to them than the sin
+of having assumed male attire. They represented to her that,
+according to the canons, those who thus change the habit of
+their sex are abominable in the sight of God. At first she would
+not give a direct answer, and begged for a respite till the next
+day, but her judges insisted on her discarding the dress; she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">352</a></span>
+replied "that she was not empowered to say when she could quit
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you should be deprived of the privilege of hearing
+mass?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, our Lord can grant me to hear it without you."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you put on a woman's dress, in order to receive your
+Saviour at Easter?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I cannot quit this dress; it matters not to me in what
+dress I receive my Saviour."</p>
+
+<p>After this she seems shaken, asks to be at least allowed to hear
+mass, adding, "I won't say but if you were to give me a gown
+such as the daughters of the burghers wear, a very <i>long gown</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It is clear she shrank, through modesty, from explaining herself.
+The poor girl durst not explain her position in prison or
+the constant danger she was in. The truth is that three soldiers
+slept in her room, three of the brigand ruffians called <i>houspilleurs</i>;<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">78</a>
+that she was chained to a beam by a large iron chain,
+almost wholly at their mercy; the man's dress they wished to
+compel her to discontinue was all her safeguard. What are we
+to think of the imbecility of the judge, or of his horrible connivance?</p>
+
+<p>Besides being kept under the eyes of these wretches, and exposed
+to their insults and mockery, she was subjected to espial
+from without. Winchester,<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">79</a> the Inquisitor, and Cauchon had
+each a key to the tower, and watched her hourly through a hole
+in the wall. Each stone of this infernal dungeon had eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Her only consolation was that she was at first allowed interviews
+with a priest, who told her that he was a prisoner and attached
+to Charles VII's cause. Loyseleur, so he was named, was
+a tool of the English. He had won Jeanne's confidence, who
+used to confess herself to him; and, at such times, her confessions
+were taken down by notaries concealed on purpose to
+overhear her. It is said that Loyseleur encouraged her to hold
+out, in order to insure her destruction.</p>
+
+
+<p>The deplorable state of the prisoner's health was aggravated
+by her being deprived of the consolations of religion during
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">353</a></span>Passion Week. On the Thursday, the sacrament was withheld
+from her; on that selfsame day on which Christ is universal
+host, on which he invites the poor and all those who suffer, she
+seemed to be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>On Good Friday, that day of deep silence, on which we all
+hear no other sound than the beating of one's own heart, it seems
+as if the hearts of the judges smote them, and that some feeling
+of humanity and of religion had been awakened in their aged
+scholastic souls; at least it is certain that, whereas thirty-five of
+them took their seats on the Wednesday, no more than nine were
+present at the examination on Saturday; the rest, no doubt, alleged
+the devotions of the day as their excuse.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, her courage had revived. Likening her
+own sufferings to those of Christ, the thought had roused her
+from her despondency. She agreed to "defer to the Church
+militant, provided it commanded nothing impossible."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think, then, that you are not subject to the Church
+which is upon earth, to our holy father the Pope, to the cardinals,
+archbishops, bishops, and prelates?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, certainly, our Lord served."</p>
+
+<p>"Do your voices forbid your submitting to the Church militant?"</p>
+
+<p>"They do not forbid it, our Lord being served <i>first</i>."</p>
+
+<p>This firmness did not desert her once on the Saturday; but
+on the next day, the Sunday, Easter Sunday! what must her
+feelings have been? What must have passed in that poor heart
+when, the sounds of the universal holiday enlivening the city,
+Rouen's five hundred bells ringing out with their joyous peals
+on the air, and the whole Christian world coming to life with the
+Saviour, she remained with death! Could she who, with all her
+inner life of visions and revelations, had not the less docilely
+obeyed the commands of the Church; could she, who till now
+had believed herself in her simplicity "a good girl," as she
+said, a girl altogether submissive to the Church&mdash;could she without
+terror see the Church against her?</p>
+
+<p>After all, what, who was she, to undertake to gainsay these
+prelates, these doctors? How dared she speak before so many
+able men&mdash;men who had studied? Was there not presumption
+and damnable pride in an ignorant girl's opposing herself to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">354</a></span>
+learned&mdash;a poor, simple girl, to men in authority? Undoubtedly
+fears of the kind agitated her mind.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, this opposition is not Jeanne's, but that
+of the saints and angels who have dictated her answers to her,
+and, up to this time, sustained her. Wherefore, alas! do they
+come no more in this pressing need of hers? Wherefore is the
+so long promised deliverance delayed? Doubtless the prisoner
+has put these questions to herself over and over again.</p>
+
+<p>There was one means of escaping; this was, without expressly
+disavowing, to forbear affirming, and to say, "It seems
+to me." The lawyers thought it easy for her to pronounce these
+few simple words; but in her mind, to use so doubtful an expression
+was in reality equivalent to a denial; it was abjuring
+her beautiful dream of heavenly friendships, betraying her sweet
+sisters on high. Better to die. And indeed, the unfortunate, rejected
+by the visible, abandoned by the invisible, by the Church,
+by the world, and by her own heart, was sinking. And the body
+was following the sinking soul.</p>
+
+<p>It so happened that on that very day she had eaten part of a
+fish which the charitable Bishop of Beauvais had sent her, and
+might have imagined herself poisoned. The bishop had an interest
+in her death; it would have put an end to this embarrassing
+trial, would have got the judge out of the scrape; but this
+was not what the English reckoned upon. The Earl of Warwick,
+in his alarm, said: "The King would not have her by any
+means die a natural death. The King has bought her dear.
+She must die by justice and be burned. See and cure her."</p>
+
+<p>All attention, indeed, was paid her; she was visited and bled,
+but was none the better for it, remaining weak and nearly dying.
+Whether through fear that she should escape thus and die without
+retracting, or that her bodily weakness inspired hopes that
+her mind would be more easily dealt with, the judges made an
+attempt while she was lying in this state, April 18th. They
+visited her in her chamber, and represented to her that she
+would be in great danger if she did not reconsider, and follow the
+advice of the Church. "It seems to me, indeed," she said,
+"seeing my sickness, that I am in great danger of death. If so,
+God's will be done; I should like to confess, receive my Saviour,
+and be laid in holy ground."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">355</a></span>"If you desire the sacraments of the Church, you must do
+as good Catholics do, and submit yourself to it." She made no
+reply. But, on the judge's repeating his words, she said: "If
+the body die in prison, I hope that you will lay it in holy ground;
+if you do not, I appeal to our Lord."</p>
+
+<p>Already, in the course of these examinations, she had expressed
+one of her last wishes. <i>Question</i>: "You say that you
+wear a man's dress by God's command, and yet, in case you die,
+you want a woman's shift?" <i>Answer</i>: "All I want is to have
+a long one." This touching answer was ample proof that, in
+this extremity, she was much less occupied with care about life
+than with the fears of modesty.</p>
+
+<p>The doctors preached to their patient for a long time; and
+he who had taken on himself the especial care of exhorting her,
+Master Nicolas Midy, a scholastic of Paris, closed the scene by
+saying bitterly to her, "If you don't obey the Church, you will
+be abandoned for a Saracen."</p>
+
+<p>"I am a good Christian," she replied meekly; "I was properly
+baptized, and will die like a good Christian."</p>
+
+<p>The slowness of these proceedings drove the English wild
+with impatience. Winchester had hoped to bring the trial to
+an end before the campaign; to have forced a confession from
+the prisoner, and have dishonored King Charles. This blow
+struck, he would recover Louviers, secure Normandy and the
+Seine, and then repair to Basel to begin another war&mdash;a theological
+war&mdash;to sit there as arbiter of Christendom, and make and
+unmake popes. At the very moment he had these high designs
+in view, he was compelled to cool his heels, waiting upon what
+it might please this girl to say.</p>
+
+<p>The unlucky Cauchon happened at this precise juncture to
+have offended the chapter of Rouen, from which he was soliciting
+a decision against the Pucelle; he had allowed himself to
+be addressed beforehand as "My lord the Archbishop." Winchester
+determined to disregard the delays of these Normans,
+and to refer at once to the great theological tribunal, the University
+of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>While waiting for the answer, new attempts were made to
+overcome the resistance of the accused; and both stratagem
+and terror were brought into play. In the course of a second<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">356</a></span>
+admonition, May 2d, the preacher, Master Ch&acirc;tillon, proposed
+to her to submit the question of the truth of her visions to persons
+of her own party. She did not give in to the snare. "As to
+this," she said, "I depend on my Judge, the King of heaven and
+earth." She did not say this time, as before, "On God and the
+Pope."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the Church will give you up, and you will be in danger
+of fire, both soul and body. You will not do what we tell you
+until you suffer body and soul."</p>
+
+<p>They did not stop at vague threats. On the third admonition,
+which took place in her chamber, May 11th, the executioner
+was sent for, and she was told that the torture was ready.
+But the man&oelig;uvre failed. On the contrary, it was found that
+she had resumed all, and more than all, her courage. Raised up
+after temptation, she seemed to have mounted a step nearer the
+source of grace. "The angel Gabriel," she said, "has appeared
+to strengthen me; it was he&mdash;my saints have assured me so.
+God has been ever my master in what I have done; the devil
+has never had power over me. Though you should tear off my
+limbs and pluck my soul from my body, I would say nothing
+else." The spirit was so visibly manifested in her that her last
+adversary, the preacher Ch&acirc;tillon, was touched, and became her
+defender, declaring that a trial so conducted seemed to him null.
+Cauchon, beside himself with rage, compelled him to silence.</p>
+
+<p>The reply of the University arrived at last. The decision
+to which it came on the twelve articles was that this girl was
+wholly the devil's; was impious in regard to her parents; thirsted
+for Christian blood, etc. This was the opinion given by the
+faculty of theology. That of law was more moderate, declaring
+her to be deserving of punishment, but with two reservations:
+(80) In case she persisted in her nonsubmission; (2) if she were
+in her right senses.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time the university wrote to the Pope, to the
+cardinals, and to the King of England, lauding the Bishop of
+Beauvais and setting forth, "there seemed to it to have been
+great gravity observed, and a holy and just way of proceeding,
+which ought to be most satisfactory to all."</p>
+
+
+<p>Armed with this response, some of the assessors<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">80</a> were for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">357</a></span> burning her without further delay; which would have been
+sufficient satisfaction for the doctors, whose authority she rejected,
+but not for the English, who required a retraction that
+should defame King Charles. They had recourse to a new
+admonition and a new preacher, Master Pierre Morice, which
+was attended by no better result. It was in vain that he dwelt
+upon the authority of the University of Paris, "which is the
+light of all science."</p>
+
+<p>"Though I should see the executioner and the fire there,"
+she exclaimed, "though I were in the fire, I could only say what
+I have said."</p>
+
+<p>It was by this time the 23d of May, the day after Pentecost;
+Winchester could remain no longer at Rouen, and it behooved
+to make an end of the business. Therefore it was resolved to
+get up a great and terrible public scene, which should either
+terrify the recusant into submission, or, at the least, blind the
+people. Loyseleur, Ch&acirc;tillon, and Morice were sent to visit
+her the evening before, to promise her that, if she would submit
+and quit her man's dress, she should be delivered out of the
+hands of the English, and placed in those of the Church.</p>
+
+<p>This fearful farce was enacted in the cemetery of St. Ouen,
+behind the beautifully severe monastic church so called, and
+which had by that day assumed its present appearance. On a
+scaffolding raised for the purpose sat Cardinal Winchester, the
+two judges, and thirty-three assessors, of whom many had their
+scribes seated at their feet. On another scaffold, in the midst
+of <i>huissiers</i><a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">81</a> and torturers, was Jeanne, in male attire, and also
+notaries to take down her confessions, and a preacher to admonish
+her; and, at its foot, among the crowd, was remarked a strange
+auditor, the executioner upon his cart, ready to bear her off as
+soon as she should be adjudged his.</p>
+
+
+<p>The preacher on this day, a famous doctor, Guillaume Erard,
+conceived himself bound, on so fine an opportunity, to give the
+reins to his eloquence; and by his zeal he spoiled all. "O
+noble house of France," he exclaimed, "which wast ever wont
+to be protectress of the faith, how hast thou been abused to ally
+thyself with a heretic and schismatic!" So far the accused had
+listened patiently; but when the preacher, turning toward her,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">358</a></span>said to her, raising his finger: "It is to thee, Jeanne, that I address
+myself; and I tell thee that thy King is a heretic and schismatic,"
+the admirable girl, forgetting all her danger, burst forth with,
+"On my faith, sir, with all due respect, I undertake to tell you,
+and to swear, on pain of my life, that he is the noblest Christian
+of all Christians, the sincerest lover of the faith and of the Church,
+and not what you call him."</p>
+
+<p>"Silence her," called out Cauchon.</p>
+
+<p>The accused adhered to what she had said. All they could
+obtain from her was her consent to submit herself to the Pope.
+Cauchon replied, "The Pope is too far off." He then began to
+read the sentence of condemnation, which had been drawn up
+beforehand, and in which, among other things, it was specified:
+"And furthermore, you have obstinately persisted, in refusing
+to submit yourself to the holy Father and to the council," etc.
+Meanwhile, Loyseleur and Erard conjured her to have pity on
+herself; on which the Bishop, catching at a shadow of hope,
+discontinued his reading. This drove the English mad; and
+one of Winchester's secretaries told Cauchon it was clear that
+he favored the girl&mdash;a charge repeated by the Cardinal's chaplain.
+"Thou art a liar," exclaimed the Bishop. "And thou,"
+was the retort, "art a traitor to the King." These grave personages
+seemed to be on the point of going to cuffs on the judgment-seat.</p>
+
+<p>Erard, not discouraged, threatened, prayed. One while he
+said, "Jeanne, we pity you so!" and another, "Abjure or be
+burned!" All present evinced an interest in the matter, down
+even to a worthy catchpole (huissier), who, touched with compassion,
+besought her to give way, assuring her that she should
+be taken out of the hands of the English and placed in those of
+the Church. "Well, then," she said, "I will sign." On this
+Cauchon, turning to the Cardinal, respectfully inquired what
+was to be done next. "Admit her to do penance," replied the
+ecclesiastical prince.</p>
+
+<p>Winchester's secretary drew out of his sleeve a brief revocation,
+only six lines long&mdash;that which was given to the world took
+up six pages&mdash;and put a pen in her hand, but she could not
+sign. She smiled and drew a circle: the secretary took her hand
+and guided it to make a cross.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">359</a></span>The sentence of grace was a most severe one: "Jeanne, we
+condemn you, out of our grace and moderation, to pass the rest
+of your days in prison, on the bread of grief and water of anguish,
+and so to mourn your sins."</p>
+
+<p>She was admitted by the ecclesiastical judge to do penance,
+no doubt, nowhere save in the prisons of the Church. The
+ecclesiastic <i>in pace</i>, however severe it might be, would at the least
+withdraw her from the hands of the English, place her under
+shelter from their insults, save her honor. Judge of her surprise
+and despair when the Bishop coldly said, "Take her back
+whence you brought her."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing was done; deceived on this wise, she could not fail
+to retract her retractation. Yet, though she had abided by it,
+the English in their fury would not have allowed her to escape.
+They had come to St. Ouen in the hope of at last burning the
+sorceress, had waited panting and breathless to this end; and
+now they were to be dismissed on this fashion, paid with a slip
+of parchment, a signature, a grimace. At the very moment the
+Bishop discontinued reading the sentence of condemnation,
+stones flew upon the scaffolding without any respect for the
+Cardinal. The doctors were in peril of their lives as they came
+down from their seats into the public place; swords were in all
+directions pointed at their throats. The more moderate among
+the English confined themselves to insulting language&mdash;"Priests,
+you are not earning the King's money." The doctors, making
+off in all haste, said tremblingly, "Do not be uneasy, we shall
+soon have her again."</p>
+
+<p>And it was not the soldiery alone, not the English mob, always
+so ferocious, which displayed this thirst for blood. The
+better born, the great, the lords, were no less sanguinary. The
+King's man, his tutor, the Earl of Warwick, said like the soldiers:
+"The King's business goes on badly; the girl will not be
+burned."</p>
+
+<p>According to English notions, Warwick was the mirror of
+worthiness, the accomplished Englishman, the perfect gentleman.
+Brave and devout, like his master, Henry V, and the
+zealous champion of the Established Church, he had performed
+the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as well as many other chivalrous
+expeditions. With all his chivalry, Warwick was not the less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">360</a></span>
+savagely eager for the death of a woman, and one who was, too,
+a prisoner of war. The best and the most looked-up-to of the
+English was as little deterred by honorable scruples as the rest of
+his countrymen from putting to death on the award of priests,
+and by fire, her who had humbled them by the sword.</p>
+
+<p>The Jews never exhibited the rage against Jesus which the
+English did against the Pucelle. It must be owned that she had
+wounded them cruelly in the most sensible part&mdash;in the simple
+but deep esteem they have for themselves. At Orleans the invincible
+men-at-arms, the famous archers, Talbot at their head,
+had shown their backs; at Jargeau, sheltered by the good walls
+of a fortified town, they had suffered themselves to be taken;
+at Patay they had fled as fast as their legs would carry them,
+fled before a girl. This was hard to be borne, and these taciturn
+English were forever pondering over the disgrace. They had
+been afraid of a girl, and it was not very certain but that, chained
+as she was, they felt fear of her still, though, seemingly, not of
+her, but of the devil, whose agent she was. At least, they endeavored
+both to believe and to have it believed so.</p>
+
+<p>But there was an obstacle in the way of this, for she was said
+to be a virgin; and it was a notorious and well-ascertained fact
+that the devil could not make a compact with a virgin. The
+coolest head among the English, Bedford,<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">82</a> the regent, resolved
+to have the point cleared up; and his wife, the Duchess, intrusted
+the matter to some matrons, who declared Jeanne to be a maid;
+a favorable declaration which turned against her by giving rise
+to another superstitious notion; to wit, that her virginity constituted
+her strength, her power, and that to deprive her of it was
+to disarm her, was to break the charm, and lower her to the level
+of other women.</p>
+
+<p>The poor girl's only defence against such a danger had been
+wearing male attire; though, strange to say, no one had ever
+seemed able to understand her motive for wearing it. All, both
+friends and enemies, were scandalized by it. At the outset,
+she had been obliged to explain her reasons to the woman of
+Poitiers; and when made prisoner, and under the care of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">361</a></span>ladies of Luxemburg, those excellent persons prayed her to
+clothe herself as honest girls were wont to do. Above all, the
+English ladies, who have always made a parade of chastity and
+modesty, must have considered her so disguising herself monstrous
+and insufferably indecent. The Duchess of Bedford
+sent her female attire; but by whom? By a man, a tailor. The
+fellow, with impudent familiarity, was about to pass it over her
+head, and, when she pushed him away, laid his unmannnerly
+hand upon her&mdash;his tailor's hand on that hand which had borne
+the flag of France. She boxed his ears.</p>
+
+
+<p>If women could not understand this feminine question, how
+much less could priests! They quoted the text of a council held
+in the fourth century, which anathematized such changes of
+dress; not seeing that the prohibition specially applied to a
+period when manners had been barely retrieved from pagan
+impurities. The doctors belonging to the party of Charles VII,
+the apologists of the Pucelle, find exceeding difficulty in justifying
+her on this head. One of them&mdash;thought to be Gerson&mdash;- makes
+the gratuitous supposition that the moment she dismounted
+from her horse, she was in the habit of resuming
+woman's apparel; confessing that Esther and Judith had had
+recourse to more natural and feminine means for their triumphs
+over the enemies of God's people. Entirely preoccupied with
+the soul, these theologians seem to have held the body cheap;
+provided the letter, the written law, be followed, the soul will be
+saved; the flesh may take its chance. A poor and simple girl
+may be pardoned her inability to distinguish so clearly.</p>
+
+<p>On the Friday and the Saturday the unfortunate prisoner,
+despoiled of her man's dress, had much to fear. Brutality,
+furious hatred, vengeance, might severally incite the cowards
+to degrade her before she perished, to sully what they were about
+to burn. Besides, they might be tempted to varnish their infamy
+by a "reason of state," according to the notions of the day&mdash;by
+depriving her of her virginity they would undoubtedly destroy
+that secret power of which the English entertained such
+great dread, who perhaps might recover their courage when
+they knew that, after all, she was but a woman. According
+to her confessor, to whom she divulged the fact, an Englishman,
+not a common soldier, but a <i>gentleman</i>, a lord, patriotically<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">362</a></span>
+devoted himself to this execution&mdash;bravely undertook to
+violate a girl laden with fetters, and, being unable to effect his
+wishes, rained blows upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"On the Sunday morning, Trinity Sunday, when it was time
+for her to rise&mdash;as she told him who speaks&mdash;she said to her
+English guards, 'Leave me, that I may get up.' One of them
+took off her woman's dress, emptied the bag in which was the
+man's apparel, and said to her, 'Get up.' 'Gentlemen,' she
+said, 'you know that dress is forbidden me; excuse me, I will
+not put it on.' The point was contested till noon; when, being
+compelled to go out for some bodily want, she put it on. When
+she came back, they would give her no other, despite her entreaties."</p>
+
+<p>In reality, it was not to the interest of the English that she
+should resume her man's dress, and so make null and void a
+retractation obtained with such difficulty. But at this moment,
+their rage no longer knew any bounds. Saintrailles had just
+made a bold attempt upon Rouen. It would have been a lucky
+hit to have swept off the judges from the judgment seat, and
+have carried Winchester and Bedford to Poitiers; the latter was,
+subsequently, all but taken on his return, between Rouen and
+Paris. As long as this accursed girl lived, who beyond a doubt
+continued in prison to practise her sorceries, there was no safety
+for the English; perish she must.</p>
+
+<p>The assessors, who had notice instantly given them of her
+change of dress, found some hundred English in the court to
+obstruct their passage; who, thinking that if these doctors
+entered they might spoil all, threatened them with their axes
+and swords, and chased them out, calling them "traitors of Armagnacs."
+Cauchon, introduced with much difficulty, assumed
+an air of gayety to pay his court to Warwick, and said with a
+laugh, "She is caught."</p>
+
+<p>On the Monday he returned, along with the Inquisitor and
+eight assessors, to question the Pucelle, and ask her why she had
+resumed that dress. She made no excuse, but, bravely facing
+the danger, said that the dress was fitter for her as long as she
+was guarded by men, and that faith had not been kept with her.
+Her saints, too, had told her "that it was great pity she had
+abjured to save her life." Still, she did not refuse to resume<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">363</a></span>
+woman's dress. "Put me in a seemly and safe prison," she
+said; "I will be good, and do whatever the Church shall wish."</p>
+
+<p>On leaving her the Bishop encountered Warwick and a
+crowd of English; and to show himself a good Englishman he
+said in their tongue, "Farewell, farewell." This joyous adieu
+was about synonymous with "Good evening, good evening; all's
+over."</p>
+
+<p>On the Tuesday, the judges got up at the Archbishop's
+palace a court of assessors as they best might; some of them had
+assisted at the first sittings only, others at none; in fact, composed
+of men of all sorts, priests, legists, and even three physicians.
+The judges recapitulated to them what had taken place,
+and asked their opinion. This opinion, quite different from
+what was expected, was that the prisoner should be summoned,
+and her act of abjuration be read over to her. Whether this
+was in the power of the judges is doubtful. In the midst of the
+fury and swords of a raging soldiery, there was in reality no
+judge, and no possibility of judgment. Blood was the one thing
+wanted; and that of the judges was, perhaps, not far from flowing.
+They hastily drew up a summons, to be served the next
+morning at eight o'clock; she was not to appear, save to be
+burned.</p>
+
+<p>Cauchon sent her a confessor in the morning, brother Martin
+l'Advenu, "to prepare her for her death, and persuade her to
+repentance. And when he apprised her of the death she was
+to die that day, she began to cry out grievously, to give way,
+and tear her hair: 'Alas! am I to be treated so horribly and
+cruelly? must my body, pure as from birth, and which was never
+contaminated, be this day consumed and reduced to ashes?
+Ha! ha! I would rather be beheaded seven times over than be
+burned on this wise! Oh! I make my appeal to God, the great
+judge of the wrongs and grievances done me!'"</p>
+
+<p>After this burst of grief, she recovered herself and confessed;
+she then asked to communicate. The brother was embarrassed;
+but, consulting the Bishop, the latter told him to administer the
+sacrament, "and whatever else she might ask." Thus, at the
+very moment he condemned her as a relapsed heretic, and cut
+her off from the Church, he gave her all that the Church gives to
+her faithful. Perhaps a last sentiment of humanity awoke in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">364</a></span>
+heart of the wicked judge; he considered it enough to burn the
+poor creature, without driving her to despair, and damning her.
+Besides, it was attempted to do it privately, and the eucharist
+was brought without stole and light. But the monk complained,
+and the Church of Rouen, duly warned, was delighted to show
+what it thought of the judgment pronounced by Cauchon; it
+sent along with the body of Christ numerous torches and a large
+escort of priests, who sang litanies, and, as they passed through
+the streets, told the kneeling people, "Pray for her."</p>
+
+<p>After partaking of the communion, which she received with
+abundance of tears, she perceived the Bishop, and addressed him
+with the words, "Bishop, I die through you." And, again,
+"Had you put me in the prisons of the Church, and given me
+ghostly keepers, this would not have happened. And for this
+I summon you to answer before God."</p>
+
+<p>Then, seeing among the bystanders Pierre Morice, one of
+the preachers by whom she had been addressed, she said to him,
+"Ah, Master Pierre, where shall I be this evening?"</p>
+
+<p>"Have you not good hope in the Lord?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! yes; God to aid, I shall be in paradise."</p>
+
+<p>It was nine o'clock: she was dressed in female attire, and
+placed on a cart. On one side of her was brother Martin
+l'Advenu; the constable, Massieu, was on the other. The Augustine
+monk, Brother Isambart, who had already displayed
+much charity and courage, would not quit her.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this moment the Pucelle had never despaired, with the
+exception, perhaps, of her temptation in the Passion Week.
+While saying, as she at times would say, "These English will
+kill me," she in reality did not think so. She did not imagine that
+she could ever be deserted. She had faith in her King, in the
+good people of France. She had said expressly: "There will be
+some disturbance, either in prison or at the trial, by which I shall
+be delivered, greatly, victoriously delivered." But though King
+and people deserted her, she had another source of aid, and a
+far more powerful and certain one from her friends above, her
+kind and dear saints. When she was assaulting St. Pierre, and
+deserted by her followers, her saints sent an invisible army to
+her aid. How could they abandon their obedient girl, they who
+had so often promised her "safety and deliverance"?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">365</a></span>What then must her thoughts have been when she saw that
+she must die; when, carried in a cart, she passed through a
+trembling crowd, under the guard of eight hundred Englishmen
+armed with sword and lance? She wept and bemoaned herself,
+yet reproached neither her King nor her saints. She was
+only heard to utter, "O Rouen, Rouen! must I then die here?"</p>
+
+<p>The term of her sad journey was the old market-place, the
+fish-market. Three scaffolds had been raised; on one was the
+episcopal and royal chair, the throne of the Cardinal of England,
+surrounded by the stalls of his prelates; on another were
+to figure the principal personages of the mournful drama, the
+preacher, the judges, and the bailiff, and, lastly, the condemned
+one; apart was a large scaffolding of plaster, groaning under a
+weight of wood&mdash;nothing had been grudged the stake, which
+struck terror by its height alone. This was not only to add to
+the solemnity of the execution, but was done with the intent that,
+from the height to which it was reared, the executioner might
+not get at it save at the base, and that to light it only, so that he
+would be unable to cut short the torments and relieve the sufferer,
+as he did with others, sparing them the flames.</p>
+
+<p>On this occasion the important point was that justice should
+not be defrauded of her due or a dead body be committed to the
+flames; they desired that she should be really burned alive, and
+that, placed on the summit of this mountain of wood, and commanding
+the circle of lances and of swords, she might be seen
+from every part of the market-place. There was reason to
+suppose that being slowly, tediously burned, before the eyes of a
+curious crowd, she might at last be surprised into some weakness,
+that something might escape her which could be set down as a
+disavowal, at the least some confused words which might be interpreted
+at pleasure, perhaps low prayers, humiliating cries for
+mercy, such as proceed from a woman in despair.</p>
+
+<p>The frightful ceremony began with a sermon. Master Nicolas
+Midy, one of the lights of the University of Paris, preached
+upon the edifying text: "When one limb of the Church is
+sick, the whole Church is sick." He wound up with the formula:
+"Jeanne, go in peace; the Church can no longer defend
+thee."</p>
+
+<p>The ecclesiastical judge, the Bishop of Beauvais, then benignly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">366</a></span>
+exhorted her to take care of her soul and to recall all her
+misdeeds, in order that she might awaken to true repentance.
+The assessors had ruled that it was the law to read over her abjuration
+to her; the Bishop did nothing of the sort. He feared
+her denials, her disclaimers. But the poor girl had no thought
+of so chicaning away life; her mind was fixed on far other
+subjects. Even before she was exhorted to repentance, she had
+knelt down and invoked God, the Virgin, St. Michael, and St.
+Catharine, pardoning all and asking pardon, saying to the bystanders,
+"Pray for me!" In particular, she besought the
+priests to say each a mass for her soul. And all this so devoutly,
+humbly, and touchingly that, sympathy becoming contagious,
+no one could any longer contain himself; the Bishop of Beauvais
+melted into tears, the Bishop of Boulogne sobbed, and the
+very English cried and wept as well, Winchester with the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Might it be in this moment of universal tenderness, of tears,
+of contagious weakness, that the unhappy girl, softened, and
+relapsing into the mere woman, confessed that she saw clearly
+she had erred, and that, apparently, she had been deceived
+when promised deliverance? This is a point on which we cannot
+implicitly rely on the interested testimony of the English.
+Nevertheless, it would betray scant knowledge of human nature
+to doubt, with her hopes so frustrated, her having wavered in
+her faith. Whether she confessed to this effect in words is
+uncertain; but I will confidently affirm that she owned it in
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the judges, for a moment put out of countenance,
+had recovered their usual bearing, and the Bishop of Beauvais,
+drying his eyes, began to read the act of condemnation. He reminded
+the guilty one of all her crimes, of her schism, idolatry,
+invocation of demons, how she had been admitted to repentance,
+and how, "seduced by the Prince of Lies, she had fallen, O grief!
+'like the dog which returns to his vomit.' Therefore, we pronounce
+you to be a rotten limb, and, as such, to be lopped off
+from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power,
+praying it at the same time to relax its sentence and to spare you
+death and the mutilation of your members."</p>
+
+<p>Deserted thus by the Church, she put her whole trust in God.
+She asked for the cross. An Englishman handed her a cross<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">367</a></span>
+which he made out of a stick; she took it, rudely fashioned as it
+was, with not less devotion, kissed it, and placed it under her
+garments, next to her skin. But what she desired was the crucifix
+belonging to the Church, to have it before her eyes till she
+breathed her last. The good huissier Massieu and Brother
+Isambart interfered with such effect that it was brought her
+from St. Sauveur's. While she was embracing this crucifix,
+and Brother Isambart was encouraging her, the English began
+to think all this exceedingly tedious; it was now noon at least;
+the soldiers grumbled, and the captains called out: "What's this,
+priest; do you mean us to dine here?"</p>
+
+<p>Then, losing patience, and without waiting for the order
+from the bailiff, who alone had authority to dismiss her to death,
+they sent two constables to take her out of the hands of the
+priests. She was seized at the foot of the tribunal by the men-at-arms,
+who dragged her to the executioner with the words,
+"Do thy office." The fury of the soldiery filled all present with
+horror; and many there, even of the judges, fled the spot, that
+they might see no more.</p>
+
+<p>When she found herself brought down to the market-place,
+surrounded by English, laying rude hands on her, nature asserted
+her rights and the flesh was troubled. Again she cried
+out, "O Rouen, thou art then to be my last abode!" She said
+no more, and, in this hour of fear and trouble, did not sin with
+her lips.</p>
+
+<p>She accused neither her King nor her holy ones. But
+when she set foot on the top of the pile, on viewing this great
+city, this motionless and silent crowd, she could not refrain from
+exclaiming, "Ah! Rouen, Rouen, much do I fear you will suffer
+from my death!" She who had saved the people, and whom
+that people deserted, gave voice to no other sentiment when
+dying&mdash;admirable sweetness of soul!&mdash;than that of compassion
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>She was made fast under the infamous placard, mitred with a
+mitre on which was read, "Heretic, relapser, apostate, idolater."</p>
+
+<p>And then the executioner set fire to the pile. She saw this
+from above and uttered a cry. Then, as the brother who was
+exhorting her paid no attention to the fire, forgetting herself in
+her fear for him, she insisted on his descending.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">368</a></span>The proof that up to this period she had made no express
+recantation is, that the unhappy Cauchon was obliged&mdash;no
+doubt by the high satanic will which presided over the whole&mdash;to
+proceed to the foot of the pile, obliged to face his victim to
+endeavor to extract some admission from her. All that he
+obtained was a few words, enough to rack his soul. She said to
+him mildly what she had already said: "Bishop, I die through
+you. If you had put me into the Church prisons, this would not
+have happened." No doubt hopes had been entertained that, on
+finding herself abandoned by her King, she would at last accuse
+and defame him. To the last, she defended him: "Whether I
+have done well or ill, my King is faultless; it was not he who
+counselled me."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the flames rose. When they first seized her, the
+unhappy girl shrieked for holy <i>water</i>&mdash;this must have been the
+cry of fear. But, soon recovering, she called only on God, on
+her angels and her saints. She bore witness to them, "Yes,
+my voices were from God, my voices have not deceived me."
+The fact that all her doubts vanished at this trying moment must
+be taken as a proof that she accepted death as the promised
+deliverance; that she no longer understood her salvation in the
+Judaic and material sense, as until now she had done, that at
+length she saw clearly; and that, rising above all shadows, her
+gifts of illumination and of sanctity were at the final hour made
+perfect unto her.</p>
+
+<p>The great testimony she thus bore is attested by the sworn and
+compelled witness of her death, by the Dominican who mounted
+the pile with her, whom she forced to descend, but who spoke to
+her from its foot, listened to her, and held out to her the crucifix.</p>
+
+<p>There is yet another witness of this sainted death, a most
+grave witness, who must himself have been a saint. This witness,
+whose name history ought to preserve, was the Augustine
+monk already mentioned, Brother Isambart de la Pierre. During
+the trial he had hazarded his life by counselling the Pucelle,
+and yet, though so clearly pointed out to the hate of the English,
+he persisted in accompanying her in the cart, procured the parish
+crucifix for her, and comforted her in the midst of the raging
+multitude, both on the scaffold where she was interrogated and
+at the stake.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">369</a></span>Twenty years afterward, the two venerable friars, simple
+monks, vowed to poverty and having nothing to hope or fear
+in this world, bear witness to the scene we have just described:
+"We heard her," they say, "in the midst of the flames invoke
+her saints, her archangel; several times she called on her Saviour.
+At the last, as her head sunk on her bosom, she shrieked,
+'Jesus!'"</p>
+
+<p>"Ten thousand men wept. A few of the English alone
+laughed, or endeavored to laugh. One of the most furious
+among them had sworn that he would throw a fagot on the pile.
+Just as he brought it she breathed her last. He was taken ill.
+His comrades led him to a tavern to recruit his spirits by drink,
+but he was beyond recovery. 'I saw,' he exclaimed, in his
+frantic despair, 'I saw a dove fly out of her mouth with her last
+sigh.' Others had read in the flames the word 'Jesus,' which
+she so often repeated. The executioner repaired in the evening
+to Brother Isambart, full of consternation, and confessed himself;
+he felt persuaded that God would never pardon him. One
+of the English King's secretaries said aloud, on returning from
+the dismal scene: 'We are lost; we have burned a saint.'"</p>
+
+<p>Though these words fell from an enemy's mouth, they are
+not the less important, and will live, uncontradicted by the future.
+Yes, whether considered religiously or patriotically, Jeanne
+d'Arc was a saint.</p>
+
+<p>Where find a finer legend than this true history? Still, let
+us beware of converting it into a legend; let us piously preserve
+its every trait, even such as are most akin to human nature, and
+respect its terrible and touching reality.<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">83</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">370</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHARLES VII ISSUES HIS PRAGMATIC
+SANCTION</h2>
+
+<h3>EMANCIPATION OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH</h3>
+
+<h6><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1438</h6>
+
+<h3>W. H. JERVIS&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;R. F. ROHRBACHER</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"No two words," says Smedley, "convey less distinct meaning to English
+ears than 'pragmatic sanction.' Perhaps 'a well-considered ordinance'
+may in some degree represent them, <i>i.e.</i>, an ordinance which has
+been fully discussed by men practised in state affairs." Carlyle defines
+"pragmatic sanction" as "the received title for ordinances of a very irrevocable
+nature, which a sovereign makes in affairs that belong wholly to
+himself, or what he reckons his own rights." A dictionary definition
+calls it "an imperial edict operating as a fundamental law." The term
+was probably first applied to certain decrees of the Byzantine emperors
+for regulating their provinces and towns, and later it was given to imperial
+decrees in the West. In the present case it is applied to the limitations
+set to the power of the pope in France.</p>
+
+<p>In the Council of Constance, 1414-1418, at which decrees were passed
+subordinating the pope as well as the whole Church to the authority of a
+general council, Gallican or French opinion on this subject won its first
+great victory. But this triumph introduced into the Western Church an
+element of strife which resulted in calamities scarcely less grave than those
+of the Great Schism of 1378-1417, during which different parties adhered
+to rival popes. From the Council of Constance may be dated the formal
+divergence of the Gallican from the Ultramontane or strictly Roman
+church government.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Martin V, who was elected by the Council of Constance after it
+had deposed John XXIII, Gregory XII, and Benedict XIII, is generally
+considered to have assented to all its decrees. In 1431, on the death of
+Martin V, Eugenius IV succeeded to the papal throne. A council had
+been convened at Pavia in 1423. After a few weeks it was transferred to
+Siena, and subsequently to Basel. Fearing that it would follow the policy
+of Constance, Eugenius (1431) attempted to dissolve it and to have it
+reconvened at Bologna under his own eye. A rupture followed between
+Pope and council, resulting in years of confused strife.</p>
+
+<p>In all this confusion our historians, Jervis and Rohrbacher, distinguish
+the leading events, the most significant of which was the issuing
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">371</a></span>of the Pragmatic Sanction by Charles VII of France. This ordinance is
+known, from the place of its promulgation, as the Pragmatic Sanction of
+Bourges, and is sometimes called the "Palladium of France," also the
+"Magna Charta of the Gallican Church."</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>W. HENLEY JERVIS</h4>
+
+<p><img src="images/cap_t.png" class=
+"floatLeft2" alt="T" />HE position assumed by the Gallican Church at this junction
+was peculiar and in some respects questionable. It
+declared decidedly in favor of the Council of Basel; many
+French prelates repaired thither, and ambassadors were sent by
+the King, Charles VII, to Pope Eugenius, to beseech him to support
+the authority of the synod, and to protest against its dissolution.
+The fathers stood firm at their posts, appealing to the
+principles solemnly asserted at Constance, that the pope is
+bound in certain specified cases to submit to an ecumenical
+council, and that the latter cannot be translated, prorogued, or
+dissolved without its own consent. The gift of infallibility, they
+affirmed, resides in the collective Church. It does not belong to
+the popes, several of whom have erred concerning the faith. The
+Church alone has authority to enact laws which are binding on
+the whole body of the faithful.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the authority of general councils is identical with that
+of the Church. This was expressly determined by the Council
+of Constance, and acknowledged by Pope Martin V. The pope
+is the ministerial head of the Church, but he is not its absolute
+sovereign; on the contrary, facts prove that he is subject to
+the jurisdiction of the Church; for well-known instances are on
+record of popes being deposed on the score of erroneous doctrine
+and immoral life, whereas no pope has ever attempted to
+condemn or excommunicate the Church. Both the pope and
+the Church have received authority to bind and loose; but the
+Church has practically exerted that authority against the pope,
+whereas the latter has never ventured to take any such step
+against the Church. In fine, the words of Christ himself are decisive
+of the question&mdash;"If any man neglect to hear the Church,
+let him be unto you as a heathen man and a publican." This
+injunction was addressed to St. Peter equally with the rest of
+the disciples.</p>
+
+<p>The council proceeded to cite Eugenius by a formal monition
+to appear in person at Basel; and on his failing to comply, they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">372</a></span>
+signified that on the expiration of a further interval of sixty days
+ulterior means would be put in force against him. Their firmness,
+added to the pressing solicitations of the emperor Sigismund,
+at length induced the Pope to yield. He reconciled himself
+with the council in December, 1433; acknowledged that it
+had been legitimately convoked; approved its proceedings up to
+that date; and cancelled the act by which he had pronounced its
+dissolution.</p>
+
+<p>Elated by their triumph, the Basilian fathers commenced in
+earnest the task of Church reform, and passed several decrees of
+a character vexatious to the Pope, particularly one for the total
+abolition of annates. A second breach was the consequence.
+Eugenius, under pretence of furthering the negotiation then
+pending for the reunion of the Greek and Latin branches of the
+Church, published in 1437 a bull dissolving the Council of Basel,
+and summoning another to meet at Ferrara. The assembly
+at Basel retorted by declaring the Pope contumacious, and suspending
+him from the exercise of all authority. Both parties
+proceeded eventually to the last extremities. The council, after
+proclaiming afresh, as "Catholic verities," that a general council
+has power over the pope, and cannot be transferred or dissolved
+but by its own act, passed a definitive sentence in its
+thirty-fourth session, June 25, 1439, deposing Eugenius from
+the papal throne. The Pope retaliated by stigmatizing the
+Fathers of Basel as schismatical and heretical, cancelling their
+acts, and excommunicating their president, the Cardinal Archbishop
+of Arles.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile an energetic and independent line of action was
+adopted by the Government in France. The Crown, in concert
+with the heads of the Church, availed itself of a train of events,
+which had so seriously damaged the prestige of the papacy to
+make a decisive advance in the path of practical reform and to
+establish the long-cherished Gallican privileges on a secure basis.
+For this purpose Charles VII assembled a great national council
+at Bourges, in July, 1438, at which he presided in person,
+surrounded by the princes of his family and by all the most
+eminent dignitaries spiritual and temporal; and here was promulgated
+the memorable ordinance known as the "Pragmatic
+Sanction of Bourges."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">373</a></span>The French Church, it must be observed, did not recognize
+the deposition of Pope Eugenius, but adhered to his obedience,
+rejecting Felix V, whom the Council of Basel elected to succeed
+him, as a pretender. It continued, nevertheless, to support the
+council and to assert its supreme legislative authority. Hence
+there arises a considerable difficulty <i>in limine</i> as to the character
+of the proceedings at Bourges. For the deposition of Eugenius
+was either a rightful and valid exercise of conciliar authority or
+it was not. If it was not&mdash;if the council had wrongfully or uncanonically
+condemned the successor of Peter&mdash;how could it be
+infallible? and when should its legislation in any other particulars
+be indisputable? On the other hand, if the deposition was a
+valid one, with what consistency could the French continue to
+regard Eugenius as their legitimate pastor? It was a knotty dilemma.</p>
+
+<p>The position, however, though logically open to objections,
+was not without its practical advantages. For, since France
+maintained a good understanding with both the contending parties,
+both found it conducive to their interests to send deputations
+to the Council of Bourges: Pope Eugenius, with a view to
+obtain its support for the rival council which he had opened at
+Ferrara; the Fathers of Basel, in order to make known their
+decrees, which, as agreeing with the received doctrine of Gallican
+theologians, would, it was hoped, meet with a cordial welcome
+throughout France. The assembly at Bourges did not
+fail to profit by these exceptional circumstances. It accepted the
+decrees of Basel, yet not absolutely, but after critical examination
+and with certain modification; a course which, by implication,
+asserted a right to legislate for the concerns of the
+French Church even independently of a general council acknowledged
+to be orthodox. The following explanation of this
+proceeding was inserted in the preamble of the celebrated statute
+agreed upon by the authorities at Bourges. It is there stated
+that this policy was adopted, "not from any hesitation as to
+the authority of the Council of Basel to enact ecclesiastical decrees,
+but because it was judged advisable, under the circumstances
+and requirements of the French realm and nation." So
+that it appears, on the whole, that while the French professed
+great zeal on this occasion for the dogma of the superiority of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">374</a></span>
+general council over the pope, the principle practically illustrated
+at Bourges was that of a supremacy of a national council
+over every other ecclesiastical authority. Such were the anomalies
+which arose out of the strange necessities of the time.</p>
+
+<p>The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges embraces twenty-three
+articles. The first treats of the authority of general councils,
+and of the time and manner of convening and celebrating them.
+The second relates to ecclesiastical elections, which are enjoined
+to be made hereafter in strict accordance with the canons, by the
+cathedral, collegiate, and conventual chapters. Reserves, annates,
+and "expective graces" are abolished; the rights of patrons
+are to be respected, provided their nominees be graduates
+of the universities and otherwise well qualified. The pope retains
+only a veto in case of unfitness or uncanonical election, and
+the nominations to benefices "<i>in curia vacantia</i>," <i>i.e.</i>, of which
+the incumbents may happen to die at Rome or within two days'
+journey of the pontifical residence. The king and other princes
+may occasionally <i>recommend</i> or <i>request</i> the promotion of persons
+of special merit, but without threats or violent pressure of any
+kind.</p>
+
+<p>Other articles regulate the order of ecclesiastical appeals,
+which, with the exception of the "<i>causa majores</i>" specified by
+law, and those relating to the elections in cathedral and conventual
+churches, are henceforth to be decided on the spot by
+the ordinary judges; appeals are to be carried in all cases to the
+court immediately superior; no case to be referred to the pope
+"<i>omisso medio</i>," <i>i.e.</i>, without passing through the intermediate
+tribunals. The remaining clauses consist of regulations for the
+performance of divine service, and various matters of discipline.
+The reader will remember that Pope Eugenius, on the occasion
+of his temporary reconciliation with the Council of Basel in
+1433, expressed his approbation of all its synodal acts up to
+that date; and this sanction of their validity is held by Gallicans
+to extend to the period of the second and final rupture in 1437.
+It follows that the provisions of the Pragmatic Sanction of
+Bourges, so far as they coincide with the decrees of Basel prior
+to 1437, were authorized by the holy see; and this includes them
+all, with two exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>The Pragmatic Sanction was registered by the Parliament of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">375</a></span>
+Paris on July 13, 1439; becoming thereby part of the statute
+law of France. Its publication caused universal satisfaction
+throughout the kingdom. At Rome, on the other hand, it was
+indignantly censured and resolutely opposed. Eugenius IV
+vainly strove to obtain the King's consent to an alteration of
+some of its details. Nicholas V protested against it without
+effect; but the superior genius and subtle measures of Pius II
+were more successful. This Pontiff denounced the Pragmatic
+at the Council of Mantua in 1460 as "a blot which disfigured
+the Church of France; a decree which no ecumenical council
+would have passed nor any pope have confirmed; a principle of
+confusion in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Since it had been in
+force, the laity had become the masters and judges of the clergy;
+the power of the spiritual sword could no longer be exerted except
+at the good pleasure of the secular authority. The Roman
+pontiff, whose diocese embraced the world, whose jurisdiction
+is not bounded even by the ocean, possessed only such extent of
+power in France as the parliament might see fit to allow him."
+The ambassadors of Charles VII, however, reminded his holiness
+that the Pragmatic Sanction was founded on the canons of
+Constance and Basel, which had been ratified by his predecessors;
+and when the Pope proceeded to threaten France with the
+interdict, and to prohibit all appeal from his decisions to a future
+council, the King caused his procureur-general, Jean Dauvet,
+to publish an official protest against these acts of violence,
+concluding with a solemn appeal to the judgment of the Church
+Catholic assembled by the representation. While awaiting that
+event, Charles declared himself resolved to uphold the laws and
+regulations which had been sanctioned by previous councils.</p>
+
+<p>Louis XI, urged by alternate menaces, entreaties, and flattery
+from Rome, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction shortly after
+his accession. This step accorded well with his own arbitrary
+temper; for he could not endure the privilege of free election by
+the cathedral and monastic chapters; nor was he less jealous of
+the influence exerted, under the shelter of that privilege, by the
+high feudal nobility in the disposal of church preferment. He
+seems to have expected, moreover, that while ostensibly conceding
+the right of patronage to the apostolic see, he should be
+able to retain the real power in his own hands. The event disappointed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">376</a></span>
+his calculations. No sooner was the decree of Bourges
+rescinded than the Pope resumed and enforced his claim to
+the provision of benefices in France. Simony and the whole
+train of concomitant abuses reappeared more scandalously than
+ever; and Louis found himself despised by his subjects as the
+dupe of papal artifice.</p>
+
+<p>The parliamentary courts, meanwhile, assumed a determined
+attitude in defence of the right of election guaranteed by
+the Pragmatic Sanction. They pronounced the abolition of
+that act illegal, and treated it as null and void; they insisted on
+their own authority in entertaining appeals against ecclesiastical
+abuses; they eagerly supported anyone who showed a disposition
+to withstand the pretensions of Rome in the matter of
+patronage. The King, smarting under the trickery of the Pope,
+made no attempt to restrain them in this line of conduct; and
+the result was that the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction was
+never fully executed, having never been legalized by the forms
+of the constitution. On the other hand, the popes so far maintained
+the advantage they had extorted from Louis that the
+ancient franchise of the Church as to elections became virtually
+extinct in France.</p>
+
+<p>Things remained in this unsettled state during the reigns of
+Louis XI, Charles VIII, and Louis XII. The latter Prince, on
+coming to the throne, published an edict re&euml;stablishing the
+Pragmatic Sanction; and this step, added to his ambitious enterprises
+in Italy, brought him into hostile collision with Pope
+Julius II. The King, unwilling to make war on the head of the
+Church without some semblance of ecclesiastical sanction, convoked
+a council at Tours in September, 1510, and consulted the
+clergy on a series of questions arising out of the disturbed state
+of his relations with Rome. They decided, in accordance with
+the known views and wishes of the sovereign, that it is lawful for
+an independent prince, if unjustly attacked, to defend himself
+against the pope by force of arms; to withdraw for a time from
+his obedience; to take possession of the territory of the Church,
+not with the purpose of retaining it, but as a temporary measure
+of self-protection; and to resist the pretensions of the pontiff to
+powers not rightfully belonging to him. Citations to appear in
+Rome might, under such circumstances, be safely disregarded;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">377</a></span>
+as also papal censures, which would be null and void. If the
+emergency should arise, the council added, the king ought to be
+governed by the ancient principles of ecclesiastical law, as confirmed
+and re&euml;nacted by the Pragmatic Sanction.</p>
+
+<p>The Gallican clergy sent a deputation to Pope Julius on this
+occasion to entreat him to adopt a more conciliatory policy
+toward the princes of Christendom; and they determined, in
+case their advice should be fruitless, to demand the convocation
+of a general council to take cognizance of the Pope's conduct,
+and prescribe the measures necessary for the guidance and welfare
+of the Church. An ecclesiastical congress, calling itself a
+council-general, but altogether unworthy of that august title,
+was held, in fact, in the following year at Pisa, under the auspices
+of the King of France and the emperor Maximilian. The Pope
+refused to appear there, and convoked a rival synod at Rome,
+summoning the cardinals who had authorized the meeting at
+Pisa to present themselves at his court within sixty days. On
+the expiration of this term he publicly excommunicated them,
+degraded them from their dignity, and deprived them of their
+preferments.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the Western Church once more exhibited the spectacle
+of a "house divided against itself," as during the scandalous
+strife between the synods of Basel and Florence; and for some
+time a formal schism appeared imminent. The so-called Council
+of Pisa consisted of the four rebellious cardinals, twenty Gallican
+prelates, several abbots and other dignitaries, the envoys
+of the King of France, deputies from some of the French universities,
+and a considerable number of doctors of the Faculty
+of Paris. This assembly justified its position on the ground that
+there are extraordinary cases in which a council may be called
+without the intervention of the pope; and that, since the present
+Pontiff had neglected to obey the decree of the Council of
+Constance which enjoined a similar celebration at the interval
+of every ten years, the cardinals were bound to take the initiative
+in the matter, according to a solemn engagement which they had
+made in the conclave when Julius was elected. After repeating
+the stereotyped formula concerning the supreme authority of
+general councils, and the imperative necessity of a reformation
+of the Church in its head and in its members, the fathers addressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">378</a></span>
+themselves professedly to the herculean task thus indicated;
+but little or nothing was effected of any practical importance.</p>
+
+
+<h4>REN&Eacute; FRAN&Ccedil;OIS ROHRBACHER<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">84</a></h4>
+
+<p>Charles held an assembly at Bourges in the month of July,
+1438. He attended this himself, with the Dauphin, his son, afterward
+Louis XI, many princes of the blood, and other nobles,
+with a great number of bishops and doctors of the Church. The
+deputies of Pope Eugenius IV and those of the prelates of Basel
+were heard one after another.</p>
+
+<p>The result of this Assembly of Bourges was an ordinance and
+twenty-three articles which were called the "Pragmatic Sanction,"
+a name introduced under the ancient emperors. In this
+were adopted, sometimes with modifications, most of the decrees
+of Basel. Among them the first was conceived in these
+terms: "General councils shall be held every ten years, and the
+pope, according to the opinion of the council which is closing,
+shall designate the place of the next council, which cannot be
+changed except for most important reasons and by the advice of
+the cardinals. As to the authority of the general council, the
+decrees published at Constance are renewed, by which it is said
+that the general council holds its power immediately from Jesus
+Christ; that all persons, even of papal dignity, are subject to it
+in that which regards the faith, the extirpation of schism, and
+the reformation of the Church in the head and in the members;
+and that all must obey it, even the pope, who is punishable if he
+transgresses it. Consequently, the Council of Basel states that
+it is legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, and that no one,
+not even the pope, can dissolve, transfer, nor prolong it, without
+the consent of the fathers of the council."</p>
+
+
+<p>The other articles may be reduced principally to the following
+propositions: Canonical elections shall be held, and the pope
+shall not reserve the bishoprics and other elective benefices.
+Expectant pardons shall be abolished. Graduates shall be preferred
+to others in the conferring of benefices, and for this reason
+they shall suggest their degrees during Lent. All ecclesiastical
+causes of the provinces at a distance of four days' journey
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">379</a></span>from Rome shall be tried in the place where they arise, except
+major causes and those of churches which are immediately dependent
+on the holy see. In the case of appeals, the order of the
+tribunals shall be preserved. No one shall ever appeal to the
+pope without passing previously through the intermediate tribunal.
+If anyone, believing himself injured by an intermediate
+tribunal subject to the pope, makes an appeal to the holy see,
+the pope shall name the judges from the same places, unless there
+should be important reasons for bringing the cause directly to
+Rome. Frivolous appeals are punished. The celebration of divine
+service is regulated and spectacles in churches are forbidden. The
+abuse of ecclesiastical censures is repressed, and it is declared
+that no one is obliged to shun excommunicated persons, unless
+they have been proclaimed by name, or else that the censure
+shall be so notorious that it cannot be denied or excused. Such
+are the principal matters of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges.
+It was registered at the Parliament of Paris, July 13, 1439; but
+the King ordered its execution from the day of its date, 1438.</p>
+
+<p>The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had a little defect; it
+was radically null; for every contract is null which is not consented
+to by both of the contracting parties. Now the Pragmatic
+Sanction was a contract between the churches of France and the
+pope to regulate their mutual relations. The consent of the pope
+to it was therefore absolutely necessary, the more especially as
+he was the superior. For if one must admit that a general council
+is superior to the pope, the Assembly of Bourges was certainly
+not a general council. Moreover, the first use that it made of its
+Pragmatic Sanction was to break it&mdash;and happily. In its first
+articles, it had recognized the Council of Basel as ecumenical
+and as superior to Pope Eugenius IV, with obligation to everyone
+to obey its decrees. Now, the following year, 1439, the
+Council of Basel deposes Eugenius IV, and substitutes for him
+Felix V, with obligation to everyone, under penalty of anathema,
+to reject the first and submit to the second. Nevertheless
+France does neither the one nor the other; she continues to recognize
+Eugenius IV, and derides the pope of Ripaille and of
+Basel, as she will declare in a new assembly of Bourges in 1440.
+Above certain laws which men write on sheets of paper, with a
+goose-quill and ink, they bear in themselves another law, written<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">380</a></span>
+by the hand of God, and which is good sense. Happy the nations
+which never depart from this living and general law, or
+which, at least, know enough to return to it promptly!</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, September 2, 1440, in the new Assembly of
+Bourges, King Charles VII published a declaration by which he
+commanded all his subjects to yield obedience to Pope Eugenius,
+with prohibition to recognize another pope or to circulate
+among the public any letters or despatches bearing the name of
+any other one whomsoever who pretended to the pontificate.
+Nevertheless, Monsieur de Savoie, for so Charles VII called the
+antipope, was united to him by ties of blood. This declaration
+of the King and of the Assembly of Bourges was religiously observed
+in all France, except in the University of Paris, where
+they declared openly enough for the antipope. The reason of
+this is very simple: the doctors of the Church in Paris dominated
+in the mob of Basel, the antipope was of their own creation, and
+their colleagues of Paris could not fail to recognize him.</p>
+
+<p>As for King Charles VII, at the close of the year 1441 he sent
+an embassy to Pope Eugenius to ask the convocation of a general
+council which should put an end to the troubles of Christendom.
+The principal orator was the Bishop of Meaux, Pierre de
+Versailles, formerly Bishop of Digne, and originally a monk of
+the Abbey of St. Denis. He had an audience in full consistory
+December 16th, and he spoke to the Pope in the following
+terms:</p>
+
+<p>"The most Christian King, our master, implores your assistance,
+most holy Father, or rather it is the entire people of the
+faithful who address to you these words of Scripture: '<i>Be our
+leader and our prince.</i>' Not that any one among us doubts that
+you have not the princedom in the Church; for we know that
+the state of the Church was constituted monarchical by Jesus
+Christ himself; but we ask you to be <i>our prince</i> by functions of
+zeal and by considerateness. We pray you to manage wisely the
+boat of St. Peter, in the midst of the tempests by which it is buffeted.
+The princes of the Church, most holy Father, ought not
+to resemble those of the nations. The latter have frequently no
+other rule of government than their own will; on the contrary, the
+princes of the Church ought to temper the use of their authority;
+and it is for that that the holy fathers have established<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">381</a></span>
+laws and canons. Now, here is the source of the ills which afflict
+the Church. There are two extremes: one consists in exercising
+ecclesiastical authority as the princes of the nations exercise
+theirs, without rule and without measure; the other is the enterprise
+of those who, in order to correct its abuses, have desired to
+annihilate authority, who have denied that supreme power rests
+in the Church, who have given this power to the multitude, who
+have changed the entire ecclesiastical order in destroying the
+monarchy which God placed there, to substitute for it democracy
+or aristocracy, who have arrived, not only with respect to
+the leader but also with respect to doctrine, at the point of causing
+an execrable schism among the faithful.</p>
+
+<p>"These considerations, most holy Father, have touched the
+most Christian King; and to mitigate these two extremes, he
+has resolved to solicit the convocation of a general council.
+That of Basel pushed the second extreme too far when it undertook
+to suppress the truth as to the supreme power in one alone.
+That of Florence, which you are now holding, has well elucidated
+this truth, as may be seen in the decree concerning the
+Greeks; but it has determined upon nothing to temper the use
+of this power. This has caused many to believe it too near to
+the first extremity. A third will be able, therefore, to take the
+just mean and restore everything to order.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be told, no doubt, that there is no more need of general
+councils; that there have been enough of them up to this
+time; that the Roman Church suffices to terminate all controversies;
+that a prince does not willingly intrust his rights to the
+multitude; that we would be again exposed, by the convocation
+of another council, to the movements which agitated the assembly
+at Basel; but, in order to answer that, it is sufficient to cast
+our eyes upon the present state of the Church. There should
+rest in you, most holy Father, and in all other prelates, two
+kinds of authority; one of divine power and institution, the
+other of confidence in the people and of good reputation. The
+first, although it cannot fail you, has, however, to be amenable
+to the second, and you will obtain this by means of a general
+council, not such a one as that of Basel, but such as the most
+Christian King asks; that is to say, a council which shall be
+held at your order, and which shall be regulated according to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">382</a></span>
+the decrees of the holy fathers. Such an assembly will not be
+a confused multitude; and your monarchical power, which
+comes from heaven, which is attested by the Gospel, which is
+recognized by the saints and by the universal Church, will not
+be exposed to any danger."</p>
+
+<p>The orator then shows how dangerous it is to refuse the convocation
+of this council, dwelling long upon the enterprises of
+the prelates of Basel, whom he emphatically blames, even to the
+extent of saying that, from their practice and their maxims, there
+is no more peace possible in the Church, and that a great many
+are asking if this schism be not that great apostasy of which St.
+Paul spoke to the Thessalonians, and which should open the
+door to the Antichrist. He finishes the address by this declaration:
+"I have desired to say all this in public, most holy Father,
+in order to make known to you the upright intentions of the King
+my master in the present affair. He does not attach himself to
+flesh and blood, but he hears the voice of the celestial Father.
+From this source he learns to recognize you and to revere you
+as the sovereign pontiff and the head of all Christians, the vicar
+of Jesus Christ, conformably with the doctrine of the saints and
+of the whole Church. And because he sees that these truths are
+obscured to-day, he asks for the call of the general council. In
+this he equally manifests his justice and his piety.</p>
+
+<p>"As for your person, most holy Father, he has sentiments
+for you which pass the limits of ordinary filial affection. He always
+speaks of you with consideration. He does not like to have
+others speak otherwise. He conceives the most favorable hopes
+of you. He counts upon it that, after having reconciled all the
+orientals to the Roman Church, you will also re&euml;stablish the
+affairs of the Occident."</p>
+
+<p>This discourse certainly did honor to the good sense of
+France. In spite of the intrigues of the learned doctors of the
+university, the King and the episcopacy early and clearly remarked
+the revolutionary and anarchistic tendency of Basel.
+As for the amicably regulating relation of the churches of France
+with the holy see to remedy certain abuses, the thing was not difficult.
+It would have been sufficient to send some more bishops
+to Florence like the Bishop of Meaux. All would have been
+very quickly arranged, to the satisfaction of everybody, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">383</a></span>
+example of France would have drawn the rest of the Occident.
+But to desire a third council was not of the same wisdom. Thus
+the Pope took good care not to consent to it.</p>
+
+<p>In 1444 Eugenius IV created the Dauphin of France, who
+was afterward King Louis XI, grand gonfalonier of the Roman
+Church, granting him a pension of fifteen thousand florins, to
+be taken annually from the apostolic chamber. The Dauphin
+made an expedition to the gates of Basel, where he overcame a
+corps of Swiss and spread consternation among those who were
+still at the pretended council. This expedition was followed by
+a long truce between France and England; an event which was
+considered as the prelude to a good peace. In order to obtain
+from God this good, so necessary and so much desired, there
+were public f&ecirc;tes at Paris, among others a solemn procession in
+which were carried all the holy relics of the city.</p>
+
+<p>In November, 1446, King Charles VII, being at Tours, made
+with his council a plan of accommodation between the two
+parties that divided the Church. It arranged that all the censures
+published on one side and the other should be revoked;
+that Pope Eugenius should be recognized by all as before the
+schism; that Monsieur de Savoie, called Felix by his adherents,
+should renounce the popedom; that he should hold the highest
+rank in the Church, next to the person of the Pope, and that his
+partisans should be also maintained in their dignities, grades,
+and benefices.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">384<br />385<br />386<br />387</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHRONOLOGY OF UNIVERSAL
+HISTORY</h2>
+
+<h4>EMBRACING THE PERIOD COVERED IN THIS VOLUME</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1301-1438</h4>
+
+<h3>JOHN RUDD, LL.D.</h3>
+
+<p>Events treated at length are here indicated in large
+type; the numerals following give volume and page.</p>
+
+<p>Separate chronologies of the various nations, and of
+the careers of famous persons, will be found in the <span class="smcap">Index
+Volume</span>, with volume and page references showing where
+the several events are fully treated.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A.D.</p>
+
+<p>1301. In Hungary the crown becomes elective; end of the Arpad dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>Dante begins writing his <i>Divine Comedy</i>, See "<span class="smcap">Dante Composes
+the Divina Commedia</span>," <a href="#Page_vii">vii, 1.</a></p>
+
+<p>1302. Philip the Fair convenes the first meeting of the States-General
+of France. See "<span class="smcap">Third Estate Joins in the Government Of
+France</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_17">17.</a></p>
+
+<p>Dante and his party banished from Florence. See "<span class="smcap">Dante Composes
+the Divina Commedia</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_1">1.</a></p>
+
+<p>Comyn is appointed regent by the Scots, who make another effort to
+regain their independence.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Boniface VIII issues a bull against Philip the Fair, who burns
+it, accuses him of simony and heresy, and refuses to acknowledge him as
+pope.</p>
+
+<p>Battle of Courtrai; the Flemings defeat the French. See "<span class="smcap">War of
+the Flemings with Philip the Fair of France</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_23">23.</a></p>
+
+<p>1303. Pope Boniface VIII is surprised at Anagni by William de
+Nogaret, King Philip's adviser; after being kept for some days a prisoner
+he is rescued and allowed to return to Rome, where he dies.</p>
+
+<p>Scotland submits to Edward I of England.</p>
+
+<p>Andronicus Pal&aelig;ologus, the Byzantine Emperor, engages the Catalan
+Grand Company to aid him against the Turks.<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">85</a></p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">388</a></span>1304. Roger di Flor defeats the Mongols, enters Philadelphia, and
+stations himself at Ephesus.</p>
+
+<p>1305. Wallace, "Hero of Scotland," is executed. See "<span class="smcap">Exploits and
+Death of William Wallace, the Hero of Scotland</span>," <a href="#Page_vi">vi</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369.</a></p>
+
+<p>Beginning of the so-called Babylonish Captivity, being the establishment
+of the papal court at Lyons, France.</p>
+
+<p>1306. A grandson of the first claimant, Robert Bruce, is crowned
+King of Scotland; he dispossesses the English of a great part of Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>On complaint of the nobility and gentry the use of sea-coal is prohibited
+in London.</p>
+
+<p>1307. Death of Edward I; his son, Edward II, succeeds to the English
+throne.</p>
+
+<p>Charges against the Knights Templars. See "<span class="smcap">Extinction of the
+Order of Knights Templars</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_51">51.</a></p>
+
+<p>1308. Albert of Austria assassinated by his nephew; Henry VII,
+Count of Luxemburg, elected emperor of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>Origin of the Swiss confederations according to common traditions.<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">86</a>
+See "<span class="smcap">First Swiss Struggle for Liberty</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_28">28.</a></p>
+
+<p>1309. Pope Clement V removes the papal court from Rome to Avignon,
+France.</p>
+
+<p>Rhodes captured from the Turks by the Knights of St. John.</p>
+
+<p>1310. Fifty Knights Templars are burned in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Expedition of Henry VII of Germany into Italy to restore the imperial
+authority. He obtains the throne of Bohemia for his son John, inaugurating
+the Luxemburg dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>1311. Fifteenth general council (Council of Vienne); it suppresses
+the order of Knights Templars, and condemns the Beghards (Beguins),
+a begging order of monks and nuns.</p>
+
+<p>Matteo Visconti secures the sovereignty of Milan.</p>
+
+<p>Walter de Brienne quarrels with the Catalans and is defeated and
+slain by them; they conquer the duchy of Athens and appoint Roger
+Deslau grand duke.</p>
+
+<p>1312. Henry VII unsuccessful in an attempt on Florence.</p>
+
+<p>Gaveston, a foreigner and favorite of the King, and who for some
+years had made himself obnoxious to the barons and people of England,
+is made prisoner and beheaded; peace ensues between Edward II and
+his barons.</p>
+
+<p>Robert, King of Naples, seizes the principal forts in Rome; Henry
+VII is, notwithstanding, crowned emperor in the Lateran Church by
+three cardinals.</p>
+
+<p>1313. In conjunction with the Genoese and Sicilians, Emperor
+Henry VII prepares to attack Robert of Naples, but dies suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>Birth of Boccaccio.</p>
+
+<p>1314. Defeat of the English by the Scots under Robert Bruce. See
+"<span class="smcap">Battle of Bannockburn</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_41">41.</a></p>
+
+
+<p>Louis of Bavaria and Frederick, son of the late Albert of Austria, are
+elected by opposite parties to the crown of Germany; they make war on
+each other.</p>
+
+<p>Ireland invaded by Edward Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, and a
+younger brother of Robert Bruce.</p>
+
+<p>Louis X succeeds his father, Philip IV, in France.</p>
+
+<p>Molay, grand master of the Knights Templars, is burned at the
+stake in Paris. See "<span class="smcap">Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars</span>,"
+vii, <a href="#Page_51">51.</a></p>
+
+<p>1315. Louis Hutin, King of France, emancipates all serfs within the
+royal domains on payment of a just surrender charge.</p>
+
+<p>A great victory achieved by the Swiss over the Austrians, under Leopold
+(brother of Frederick the Handsome) at Morgarten.</p>
+
+<p>1316. Edward Bruce crowned king of Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>Establishment of the Salic law excluding females and their descendants
+from the throne of France.</p>
+
+<p>A predominance of French cardinals, created by Pope Clement V,
+secures the election of another French pope, and the continuance of the
+papal see at Avignon. The new pope, John XXII, appoints eight more
+cardinals, of whom seven are French.</p>
+
+<p>1317. Birger, King of the Swedes, murders his two brothers and causes
+a rebellion of his people.</p>
+
+<p>1318. Battle of Dundalk; Edward Bruce defeated and slain by Lord
+Birmingham; end of the war in Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>Giotto, a friend of Dante, famous in Italy; he was the first painter of
+portraits from life.</p>
+
+<p>1319. Pope John XXII excommunicates Robert Bruce of Scotland;
+the Scotch Parliament resists all papal interference in its affairs.</p>
+
+<p>1320.<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">87</a> The Old English poem <i>Cursor Mundi</i> composed. It was
+founded on C&aelig;dmon's paraphrase of the book of Genesis.</p>
+
+<p>1321. Death of Dante while in exile at Ravenna.</p>
+
+<p>1322. Philip V dies; he is succeeded by his brother, Charles IV, on
+the throne of France.</p>
+
+<p>Louis the Bavarian triumphs over his rival Frederick of Austria, who
+is captured.</p>
+
+<p>Queen Isabella, while resident in the Tower of London, first sees
+Mortimer, who is brought there a prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Mandeville, an English exile in France, sets out on his eastern
+travels.</p>
+
+<p>1323. Louis of Bavaria invests his son with the margraviate of Brandenburg.</p>
+
+<p>1324. Commencement of Queen Isabella's guilty intimacy with Mortimer.</p>
+
+<p>Birth of Wycliffe.<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">88</a></p>
+
+<p>Pope John XXII excommunicates Louis the Bavarian.</p>
+
+<p>1325. Birth of John Gower, poet, and friend of Chaucer.</p>
+
+
+<p>1326. Burgesses are first admitted into the Scotch Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Isabella, Queen of Edward II, and Earl Mortimer invade England;
+the King is captured and imprisoned in Kenilworth castle.</p>
+
+<p>1327. King Edward II is deposed by parliament; Edward III, his
+son, succeeds. Edward II is brutally murdered by his keepers.</p>
+
+<p>Louis V, the Bavarian, of Germany heads an expedition into Italy;
+he proclaims the deposition of Pope John XXII; he is forced to retreat
+after being crowned in Rome.</p>
+
+<p>1328. Independence of Scotland recognized by Edward III of England.</p>
+
+<p>Accession of Philip VI of France, the first of the house of Valois.</p>
+
+<p>Birth of Chaucer.[88]</p>
+
+<p>1329. Death of Robert Bruce; his infant son, David, succeeds to the
+Scotch throne.</p>
+
+<p>1330. Orkham, Sultan of the Turks, captures Nic&aelig;a.</p>
+
+<p>Queen Isabella and Mortimer are surprised in Nottingham castle<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">89</a>; he
+is executed at Tyburn; Isabella is confined during her life at Castle Rising.</p>
+
+<p>1331. John Kempe takes his servants and apprentices from Flanders
+to join the weaving colony already founded at Norwich, England.</p>
+
+<p>1332. Edward Balliol claims the crown of Scotland; he invades that
+country with an English army. The young King, David, takes refuge in
+France.</p>
+
+<p>Lucerne joins the Swiss confederacy.</p>
+
+<p>1333. Edward III of England invades Scotland; he defeats the
+Scotch at Halidon Hill and captures Berwick, which is annexed to England.</p>
+
+<p>Casimir the Great, last king of the Piast line, succeeds to the throne
+of Poland.</p>
+
+<p>1334. Denmark in a state of anarchy; Gerard, Count of Holstein, exercises
+a disputed power as regent.</p>
+
+<p>1335. The house of Austria becomes possessed of Carinthia.</p>
+
+<p>1336. Birth of Timur (Tamerlane) the Tartar.</p>
+
+<p>1337. Edward III of England obtains the support of Van Artevelde;
+he obtains money by grants from parliament and confiscating the wealth
+of the Lombard merchants. See "<span class="smcap">James van Artevelde Leads a
+Flemish Revolt</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_68">68.</a></p>
+
+<p>Birth of Froissart, the chronicler, at Valenciennes.</p>
+
+<p>1338. Beginning of the wars of Edward III against France; he sails
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">389</a></span>with a fleet of five hundred ships; lands his army at Antwerp. See
+"<span class="smcap">Battle of Sluys and Cr&eacute;cy</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_78">78.</a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>Declaration of the Electors at Rense that Germany is an independent
+empire over which the Pope has no jurisdiction; the diet at Frankfort ratifies
+the manifesto.</p>
+
+<p>1339. France invaded by Edward III of England; beginning of the
+Hundred Years' War.</p>
+
+<p>Genoa elects its first doge, Simone Boccanera.</p>
+
+<p>A body of disbanded mercenaries form themselves into the first <i>condottiere</i>
+company known in Italy. The word means a captain or leader,
+the <i>condottieri</i> those under the leader. They were free lances, open to
+serve under any flag.</p>
+
+<p>1340. Edward destroys a large French fleet at Sluys; beginning of
+England's naval power. See "<span class="smcap">Battle of Sluys and Cr&eacute;cy</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_78">78.</a></p>
+
+<p>War between the Hanseatic League and Denmark; the Danes defeated.</p>
+
+<p>1341. Death of John III of Brittany; his brother, John of Montfort,
+and his niece, Jeanne de Penthi&egrave;vre, wife of Charles of Blois, contest the
+succession; England supports the former, France the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Edward Balliol retires on the return of David II to Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>Petrarch is crowned with laurel at Rome. See "<span class="smcap">Modern Recognition
+Of Scenic Beauty</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_93">93.</a></p>
+
+<p>1342. Edward III pursues his campaign in Brittany; he relieves
+Hennebonne, besieged by the French.</p>
+
+<p>Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, becomes sovereign lord of Florence.</p>
+
+<p>Accession of Louis, called the Great, to the throne of Hungary, on the
+death of King Charles Robert, his father.</p>
+
+<p>1343. Expulsion from Florence of the Duke of Athens; popular government
+restored.</p>
+
+<p>A truce of three years arranged between England and France by the
+mediation of the papal legates.</p>
+
+<p>1344. Breach of the truce between England and France; Earl Derby
+defeats Count de Lisle and reduces a great part of Perigord.</p>
+
+<p>A Turkish fleet is destroyed at Pallene by the Knights of Rhodes,
+who assist in the capture of Smyrna by the Venetians and the King of
+Cyprus.</p>
+
+<p>Masham, an Englishman, first discovers the Madeira Islands.</p>
+
+<p>In England, parliament, by the Statute of Provisors, forbids the interference
+of the pope in bestowing benefices and livings in England.</p>
+
+<p>1345. Fall and death of James Van Artevelde at Ghent.</p>
+
+<p>1346. Battle of Cr&eacute;cy; cannon said to have been first used by the
+English. See "<span class="smcap">Battles of Sluys and Cr&eacute;cy</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_78">78.</a></p>
+
+<p>At the instance of Pope Clement VI, Charles of Luxemburg (Charles
+IV) is elected emperor of Germany in opposition to Louis the Bavarian.</p>
+
+<p>David Bruce invades England; he is vanquished and made prisoner
+at Neville's Cross.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">390</a></span></p>
+<p>Servia at the zenith of her power; the ruler, Stephen Dushan, assumes
+the imperial title.</p>
+
+<p>1347. Calais captured by Edward III.</p>
+
+<p>Death of Louis the Bavarian; he is succeeded by Charles IV, whose
+title is disputed until 1349.</p>
+
+<p>Queen Joanna I of Naples has her dominions invaded by Louis the
+Great of Hungary to avenge the murder of her husband, Andrew, brother
+of Louis, supposedly at her instigation. See "<span class="smcap">Rienzi's Revolution
+in Rome</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_104">104.</a></p>
+
+<p>1348. About this time begins the Renaissance in Italy. See "<span class="smcap">Beginning
+and Progress of the Renaissance</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_110">110.</a></p>
+
+<p>Founding of the University of Prague, the first in Germany.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Clement VI purchases Avignon from Queen Joanna I of
+Naples.</p>
+
+<p>The plague stalks in Europe. See "<span class="smcap">The Black Death Ravages
+Europe</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_130">130.</a></p>
+
+<p>1349. Institution (or revival, see <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1192) of the Order of the Garter
+in England.</p>
+
+<p>Dauphiny annexed to France on condition that the King's eldest son
+should be called the dauphin.</p>
+
+<p>1350. Death of Philip VI; his son, John the Good, succeeds to the
+French throne.</p>
+
+<p>1351. Zurich joins the Swiss confederation.</p>
+
+<p>Paganino Doria, commanding the Genoese fleet, plunders many Venetian
+towns on the Adriatic.</p>
+
+<p>1352. A statute of pr&aelig;munire still further limits the papal power in
+England.</p>
+
+<p>Naval battle in the Bosporus between the Genoese, under Paganino
+Doria, and the Venetians, Byzantines, and Catalans under Niccola
+Pisano; the latter are defeated, and concede the entire command of the
+Black Sea to the Genoese.</p>
+
+<p>1353. Alliance of Genoa with Louis of Hungary; their fleet, under
+Antonino Grinaldi, defeated; in despair the Genoese place themselves
+under the protection of John Visconte.</p>
+
+<p>Bern joins the league of Swiss cantons.</p>
+
+<p>1354. Downfall and death of Rienzi. See "<span class="smcap">Rienzi's Revolution
+in Rome</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_194">104.</a></p>
+
+<p>Paganino Doria captures or destroys the Venetian fleet in the Morea;
+their admiral, Pisano, is captured.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning of Turkish dominion in Europe. See "<span class="smcap">First Turkish
+Dominion in Europe</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_136">136.</a></p>
+
+<p>1355. King Charles of Navarre is treacherously seized and imprisoned
+in France; his brother Philip, and Geoffry d'Harcourt, make an alliance
+with Edward III; the war is renewed.</p>
+
+<p>Marino Falieri, Doge of Venice, beheaded. See "<span class="smcap">Conspiracy and
+Death of Marino Falieri at Venice</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_154">154.</a></p>
+
+<p>1356. Battle of Poitiers; John II, King of France, taken prisoner by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">391</a></span>Edward, the Black Prince; the Dauphin, Charles, escapes and assumes
+the government of France during his father's captivity.</p>
+
+<p>Emperor Charles defines the duties of the electors of Germany. See
+"<span class="smcap">Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_160">160.</a></p>
+
+<p>Wycliffe publishes his <i>Last Age of the Court</i>.</p>
+
+<p>1357. London enthusiastically welcomes the Prince of Wales (the
+Black Prince) on his return with his prisoners; King Edward III concludes
+a treaty with the captive French King, which the Dauphin
+rejects.</p>
+
+<p>Popular movement in Paris under Stephen Marcel; meeting of the
+States-general of France.</p>
+
+<p>1358. Violent commotions in France. See "<span class="smcap">Insurrection of the
+Jacquerie in France</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_164">164.</a></p>
+
+<p>By a treaty of peace the Venetians resign Dalmatia and Istria to the
+King of Hungary; they agree to style their doge Duke of Venice only.</p>
+
+<p>1359. Edward III again invades France, his terms of peace not being
+accepted.</p>
+
+<p>1360. England and France conclude the treaty of Bretigny; King
+John II is set at liberty on payment of a heavy ransom.</p>
+
+<p>Outbreak of the Children's Plague in England.</p>
+
+<p>1361. End of the first ducal house of Burgundy.</p>
+
+<p>Adrianople is conquered by Sultan Amurath I of Turkey.</p>
+
+<p>All military operations in Europe suspended by the virulence of the
+plague.</p>
+
+<p>1362. Edward III grants Aquitaine to his son, the Black Prince; he
+also celebrates his fiftieth birthday by a general amnesty and a confirmation
+of Magna Charta.</p>
+
+<p>Conjectured beginning of Langland's <i>Vision of Piers Plowman</i>, a
+noted allegorical and satirical poem.<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">90</a></p>
+
+<p>1363. Disbanded English soldiers enter the service of the Pisans, and
+obtain a victory for them over the Florentines.</p>
+
+<p>1364. Death of King John the Good of France, in Savoy palace, London;
+his son, Charles V, succeeds; Du Guesclin, his general, defeats
+the English and the army of Charles the Bad at Cocherel. Du Guesclin
+is afterward defeated and captured by the English, under Sir John Chandos;
+besides the capture of Du Guesclin, Charles of Blois is slain. The
+house of Montfort secures Brittany.</p>
+
+<p>Treaty of union between Bohemia and Austria.</p>
+
+<p>Chaucer writes his <i>Canterbury Tales</i>.</p>
+
+<p>1365. Pedro the Cruel, the epithet "cruel" being given him mainly for
+the murder of his brother, Don Fadrique, becomes so odious to his subjects
+that Henry of Trastamare, his brother, revives his claim to the
+throne of Leon and Castile; Du Guesclin takes command of his forces.</p>
+
+<p>University of Vienna founded.</p>
+
+<p>1366. Pedro the Cruel driven from his throne.</p>
+
+
+<p>Pope Urban V claims the tribute which had previously been paid by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">392</a></span>England; an act of parliament resists the demand; it further declares
+the concessions made by King John to be illegal and invalid.</p>
+
+<p>Tamerlane (Timur the Tartar), reviver of the great Mongol empire,
+inaugurates his conquests.</p>
+
+<p>1367. Edward the Black Prince, having espoused the cause of Pedro
+the Cruel, attacks and dethrones Henry of Trastamare; Pedro is restored
+to the throne, but refuses the stipulated pay to his allies, who leave him
+to his fate.</p>
+
+<p>Passage of the Kilkenny Statute; it forbade any Englishman to use an
+Irish name, to speak the Irish language, to adopt the Irish dress, or to
+allow the cattle of an Irishman to graze on his lands; it also made it high
+treason to marry a native.</p>
+
+<p>1369. King Charles V breaks the Anglo-French treaty; the Hundred
+Years' War reopened.</p>
+
+<p>1370. End of the Piast dynasty, Poland, caused by the death of Casimir
+the Great; Louis the Great, King of Hungary, succeeds.</p>
+
+<p>Timur the Tartar extends his domains. See "<span class="smcap">Conquests of Timur
+the Tartar</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_169">169.</a></p>
+
+<p>1371. Robert II ascends the throne and founds the Stuart dynasty in
+Scotland, on the death of David Bruce.<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">91</a></p>
+
+<p>A petition of the English Parliament to the King that he employ no
+churchmen in any office of the state, and threatening to resist by force the
+oppressions of papal authority.</p>
+
+<p>1373. Henry of Castile invades Portugal, besieges Lisbon, and compels
+Ferdinand to sign a treaty of peace.</p>
+
+<p>Birth of John Huss.<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">92</a></p>
+
+<p>1374. A strange plague, the dancing mania, appears in Europe. See
+"<span class="smcap">Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_187">187.</a></p>
+
+<p>Wycliffe is appointed one of the seven ambassadors to represent to
+the Pope the grievances of the Church of England.</p>
+
+<p>1375. A general council of citizens of Florence declares "liberty paramount
+to every other consideration"; it appoints the "Seven Saints of
+War," which effectually resist aggression.</p>
+
+<p>1376. Death of Edward the Black Prince. Gregory XI abandons Avignon
+as the papal residence.</p>
+
+<p>1377. Rome again becomes the home of the papal court.</p>
+
+<p>Gregory XI orders proceedings against Wycliffe, the English reformer.</p>
+
+<p>Death of Edward III; his grandson, Richard II, succeeds to the English
+throne.</p>
+
+<p>1378. Wenceslaus becomes emperor of Germany on the death of his
+father, Charles IV.</p>
+
+<p>Rival popes elected. See "<span class="smcap">Election of Antipope Clement VII:
+Beginning of the Great Schism</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_201">201.</a></p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">393</a></span></p>
+<p>1379. Pietro Doria, at the head of the Genoese fleet, defeats the Venetian
+fleet off Pola; Chioggia is captured and Venice threatened.</p>
+
+<p>A poll-tax imposed on the people of England; this led directly to a
+revolution.</p>
+
+<p>War of the rival papal factions in Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Revolt of the White Hoods (<i>Les Chaperons blancs</i>) in Flanders;
+the workmen of Ghent, when they revolted against the Duke of Burgundy,
+adopted a white hood as their badge.</p>
+
+<p>1380. Establishment in Germany of post messengers.</p>
+
+<p>Surrender of the Genoese fleet and army at Chioggia. See "<span class="smcap">Genoese
+Surrender to Venetians</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_213">213.</a></p>
+
+<p>1381. Overthrow of Joanna I of Naples by Charles Durazzo (Charles
+the Little).</p>
+
+<p>An act of parliament surreptitiously obtained against heretics in England.</p>
+
+<p>Exasperated by the poll-tax the people of England revolt. See "<span class="smcap">Rebellion
+of Wat Tyler</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_217">217.</a></p>
+
+<p>Insurrection of the Maillotins against the new tax on bread in Paris.
+They were so called because they armed themselves with <i>maillets de fer</i>
+("iron malls") when they attacked the arsenal, put to death the officers, and
+set the prisoners at large.</p>
+
+<p>Philip van Artevelde rises to power in Flanders.</p>
+
+<p>1382. Queen Joanna I of Naples is put to death in prison.</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English</span>." See vii, <a href="#Page_227">227.</a></p>
+
+<p>Led by Philip van Artevelde the people of Ghent triumph over their
+ruler, Count Louis II; Bruges is captured and looted by them; Artevelde
+is acclaimed governor; a French army advances and defeats the forces
+of Artevelde, who is slain, and Louis is restored.</p>
+
+<p>1384. Flanders is incorporated in the dukedom of Burgundy; Artois
+and Franche Comt&eacute; are also acquired by Philip the Bold of Burgundy.</p>
+
+<p>1385. Scotland fruitlessly invaded by Richard II of England.</p>
+
+<p>John the Great ascends the throne of Portugal; he defeats the Castilians
+at Aljubarota.</p>
+
+<p>1386. Victory of the Swiss over the Austrians at Sempach. See
+"<span class="smcap">The Swiss Win Their Independence</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_238">238.</a></p>
+
+<p>Hedvige, Queen of Poland, marries Duke of Jagellon, of Lithuania,
+uniting the states and establishing the Jagellon dynasty; as sovereign of
+Poland he is styled Ladislaus II. The Lithuanians abandon paganism.</p>
+
+<p>Founding of the University of Heidelberg.</p>
+
+<p>A regency, that of the Duke of Gloucester, is imposed upon Richard II
+of England.</p>
+
+<p>1387. Consultation of Richard II at Nottingham with the judges;
+the regency commission is declared a criminal act.</p>
+
+<p>A brother of Emperor Wenceslaus, Sigismund, becomes king of Hungary.</p>
+
+<p>Birth of Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietri), the great friar-painter.</p>
+
+<p>1388. Battle of Otterburne (Chevy Chase); an English-Scotch en<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">394</a></span>counter
+in a private feud, not a national quarrel; the Earl of Douglas
+slain; Henry Percy captured by the Scots.</p>
+
+<p>At Naefels the Austrians are defeated by the Swiss.</p>
+
+<p>1389. Bulgaria and Servia conquered by the Turks under Amurath I
+at the decisive battle of Kosovo; he is slain.</p>
+
+<p>Death of Pope Urban VI; Boniface succeeds; the schism continues.</p>
+
+<p>Albert, King of Sweden, defeated and made prisoner by Queen Margaret,
+who reigns over the three Scandinavian kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>1390. War of Florence with Milan.</p>
+
+<p>Robert III ascends the throne of Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>1392. Fits of insanity seize the young King of France, Charles VI;
+cards are invented, or introduced, to amuse him during his lucid intervals.</p>
+
+<p>1394. Birth of Prince Henry of Portugal, known as the "Navigator."</p>
+
+<p>1395. Milan is created a hereditary duchy by Emperor Wenceslaus for
+Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti.</p>
+
+<p>1396. Battle of Nicopolis; the Christian defenders of Hungary suffer
+a great defeat at the hands of the Turkish sultan Bajazet I.</p>
+
+<p>1397. Scandinavia united under one crown. See "<span class="smcap">Union of Denmark,
+Sweden, and Norway</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_243">243.</a></p>
+
+<p>1398. Mortimer, Earl of March, presumptive heir to the English
+throne and governor of Ireland, slain by a rebel force in that island.</p>
+
+<p>Froissart writes his <i>Chronicles</i>.</p>
+
+<p>1399. Deposition of Richard II of England; Henry Bolingbroke founds
+the house of Lancaster. See "<span class="smcap">Deposition of Richard II</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_351">251.</a></p>
+
+<p>After a long struggle for the possession of Naples between Ladislaus
+and Louis II of Anjou, it ends in the triumph of Ladislaus.</p>
+
+<p>1400. A great revolt of the Welsh is headed by Owen Glendower.</p>
+
+<p>Emperor Wenceslaus is deposed.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert of the Palatinate elected to the throne of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>1401. Parliament ordains the burning of Lollards in England. Barcelona
+bank (earliest existing bank) established.</p>
+
+<p>1402. Battle of Homildon Hill; victory of the Percys, a noble northern
+English family, over the Scots.</p>
+
+<p>License by royal letters-patent given to the "<i>Confrerie de la Passion</i>"
+to exhibit sacred dramas, or <i>Mysteries</i>, in France.</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Discovery of the Canary Islands and the African Coast.</span>"
+See vii, <a href="#Page_266">266.</a></p>
+
+<p>Tamerlane (Timur the Tartar) defeats and captures Bajazet at Angora.</p>
+
+<p>1403. Battle of Shrewsbury; Henry IV defeats the Percys, who had
+allied themselves with Glendower to place the Earl of March on the English
+throne; Harry Percy (Hotspur) slain.</p>
+
+<p>1404. Queen Margaret of Sweden claims Schleswig and Holstein on
+the death of Gerard VI.</p>
+
+<p>1405. Pisa sold to Florence by the Visconti.</p>
+
+<p>An English act of parliament prohibits anyone not possessing twenty
+shillings a year in land from apprenticing his sons to any trade.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">395</a></span></p><p>Venice conquers Verona and Padua.</p>
+
+<p>Prince James Stuart, afterward James I, heir to the crown of Scotland,
+captured by the English.</p>
+
+<p>1406. Pisa compelled to submit to Florence after a year of war.</p>
+
+<p>Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, proposes a general
+council to terminate the schism in the Church.<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">93</a></p>
+
+<p>1407. France distracted by the animosities of her leading families;
+Louis, Duke of Orleans, is assassinated by John the Fearless, Duke of
+Burgundy.</p>
+
+<p>1408. Valentina, widow of the Duke of Orleans, demands justice on
+her husband's assassins; the Duke of Burgundy declared an enemy of
+the state; he occupies Paris and drives out the royal court.</p>
+
+<p>1409. Council of Pisa; both popes refuse to appear; they are deposed
+and Alexander V is elected.</p>
+
+<p>University of Leipsic founded.</p>
+
+<p>1410. Death of Rupert of the Palatinate, Emperor of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>Jagellon (Ladislaus II), King of Poland, vanquishes the Teutonic
+Knights.</p>
+
+<p>1411. Battle of Harlow; defeat of the Scotch Lord of the Isles and
+the highland clans.</p>
+
+<p>Sigismund elected emperor of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>John Huss excommunicated and forbidden to preach.</p>
+
+<p>University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, founded.</p>
+
+<p>1412. For insulting the chief justice of England the Prince of Wales
+is committed to prison.</p>
+
+<p>Birth of Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>1413. Death of Henry IV; Henry V ascends the English throne; he
+discards his dissolute associates and reforms his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Ladislaus takes forcible possession of Rome and most of the papal
+states.</p>
+
+<p>1414. The Seventeenth general council. See "<span class="smcap">Council of Constance</span>,"
+vii, <a href="#Page_284">284.</a></p>
+
+<p>Joanna II succeeds her brother Ladislaus of Naples on his death.</p>
+
+<p>1415. "<span class="smcap">Trial and Burning of John Huss</span>." See vii, <a href="#Page_294">294.</a></p>
+
+<p>John the Great of Portugal conquers Ceuta; he discards the use of
+the Julian period and introduces the computation of time from the Christian
+era.</p>
+
+<p>Brandenburg is acquired by the house of Hohenzollern. See "<span class="smcap">The
+House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_305">305.</a></p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Battle of Agincourt.</span>" See vii, <a href="#Page_320">320.</a></p>
+
+<p>1416. Jerome of Prague burned.</p>
+
+<p>Alfonso the Wise, so called for his patronage of letters, ascends the
+throne of Aragon on the death of his father, Ferdinand the Just.</p>
+
+<p>1417. Pope Martin V elected by the Council of Constance; end of the
+schism.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">396</a></span></p>
+<p>Sir John Oldcastle, the "Good Lord Cobham," after four years' hiding
+is captured and burned as a heretic in London.</p>
+
+<p>Gypsies appear in Transylvania; they are believed to have been low-caste
+Hindus expelled by Timur in the fourteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>1418. Close of the Council of Constance. See "<span class="smcap">Council of Constance</span>,"
+vii, <a href="#Page_284">284.</a></p>
+
+<p>A great massacre in Paris of the Armagnacs by the populace, the partisans
+of John the Fearless of Burgundy; the Dauphin and his adherents
+transfer their seat of government to Poitiers.</p>
+
+<p>1419. Surrender of Rouen to the English.</p>
+
+<p>John the Fearless, beguiled by a treaty, meets the Dauphin, who has
+him assassinated.</p>
+
+<p>Storming of the town-hall of Prague by the Hussites; outbreak of the
+Hussite wars.</p>
+
+<p>Madeira first reached by the Portuguese, who sail under the command
+of Henry the Navigator.</p>
+
+<p>1420. Henry V, King of England, made successor to the French
+throne. See "<span class="smcap">Battle of Agincourt</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_320">320.</a></p>
+
+<p>Sigismund besieges the Hussites in Prague; he is defeated by them,
+led by John Ziska.</p>
+
+<p>Joanna II of Naples, who summons to her aid Alfonso V of Aragon,
+is attacked by Louis III of Anjou.</p>
+
+<p>1421. Second crusade against the Bohemian Hussites.</p>
+
+<p>1422. Death of Henry V of England and Charles VI of France; the
+former is succeeded by his infant son; he is proclaimed King of England
+and France; his uncles, the Duke of Gloucester, regent in England, and
+the Duke of Bedford in France; Charles VII, son of Charles VI, is proclaimed
+by the French.</p>
+
+<p>Constantinople besieged by Amurath II, Sultan of Turkey.</p>
+
+<p>1423. Frederick the Warlike, Margrave of Misnia, assumes the electorate
+of Saxony and establishes the house of Wettin.</p>
+
+<p>1424. James I of Scotland, released after a captivity of nineteen years,
+marries a daughter of the Earl of Somerset; he assumes the government
+of Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>John Ziska is succeeded by Procopius the Great as head of the Taborites,
+a division of the Hussites.</p>
+
+<p>1425. Accession of John Pal&aelig;ologus II as emperor of Byzantium.</p>
+
+<p>John and Hulbert van Eyck, masters of the early Flemish school, invent
+painting in oil.</p>
+
+<p>1426. Lubeck and the Baltic Hanse Towns support the Duke of Holstein
+against Eric XIII of Sweden.</p>
+
+<p>Great Hussite victory at Aussig.</p>
+
+<p>1427. The Hussites extend their conquests in Saxony and Meissen;
+they gain a victory at Mies.</p>
+
+<p>1428. Orleans, France, besieged by the English.</p>
+
+<p>Death of John de' Medici, founder of the illustrious family at Florence.</p>
+
+<p>1429. Coronation of Charles VII of France at Rheims.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">397</a></span></p>
+<p>Jeanne d'Arc relieves Orleans. See "<span class="smcap">Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at
+Orleans</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_333">333.</a></p>
+
+<p>Refusal of the Hussites to treat for peace with Emperor Sigismund.</p>
+
+<p>Antipope Clement VIII abdicates and ends the Great Schism.</p>
+
+<p>1430. Institution of the Golden Fleece by Philip, Duke of Burgundy,
+on his marriage with Isabella, daughter of King John of Portugal, and
+in commemoration of the manufacturing prosperity of the Netherlands.</p>
+
+<p>1431. Jeanne d'Arc dishonorably and inhumanly burned at Rouen. See
+"<span class="smcap">Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_350">350.</a></p>
+
+<p>Council of Basel. Pope Martin V succeeded by Eugenius IV.</p>
+
+<p>1432. Prince Henry's navigators discover and take possession of the
+Azores for the Portuguese.</p>
+
+<p>Opening of the trade of the north to the English and Dutch by the
+wars of the Hanse Towns, and Holstein, with Denmark.</p>
+
+<p>1433. Treaty of the Council of Basel with the section of the Hussites
+called Calixtines; this satisfies them and they secede from the Hussite
+league.</p>
+
+<p>1434. Cosmo de' Medici recalled to Florence; his party triumphant.</p>
+
+<p>Organization of the national church (Utraquist) in Bohemia.</p>
+
+<p>First exploration of the west coast of Africa by the Portuguese.</p>
+
+<p>The Calixtines join the imperial army and defeat the Taborites at
+Bohmisch-Brod.</p>
+
+<p>1435. Treaty of Arras between France and Burgundy; the latter withdraws
+from the English party.</p>
+
+<p>Death of the Duke of Bedford.</p>
+
+<p>1436. A settlement effected between Emperor Sigismund and the Hussites
+by the treaty of Iglau; he is recognized as king of Bohemia.</p>
+
+<p>Charles VII, the French King, recovers Paris from the English.</p>
+
+<p>Eric, by a treaty of peace, relinquishes the greater part of Schleswig
+to the Duke of Holstein and makes concessions at Stockholm which restore
+tranquillity in Sweden.</p>
+
+<p>1437. Death of Emperor Sigismund; election of Albert of Austria to
+the throne of Hungary.</p>
+
+<p>Murder of James I; his son, James II, succeeds him on the throne of
+Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Eugenius IV is summoned to appear before the Council of
+Basel to answer various charges brought against him; he issues a bull
+dissolving the council; he calls another at Ferrara, whither he invites
+the Greek Emperor to attend and arrange for the union of the two
+churches.</p>
+
+<p>1438. Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII; it secures the liberty of
+the Gallican Church. See "<span class="smcap">Charles VII Issues His Pragmatic
+Sanction</span>," vii, <a href="#Page_370">370.</a></p>
+
+<p>Coronation of Albert II, King of Hungary; recognized by the Diet of
+Frankfort.</p>
+</div>
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> See <i>Dante Composes the Divina Commedia</i>, <a href="#Page_1">page 1.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">2</span></a> See <i>Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars</i>, <a href="#Page_51">page 51.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> See <i>The Third Estate Joins in the Government of France</i>, <a href="#Page_17">page 17.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">4</span></a> See <i>War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair</i>, <a href="#Page_23">page 23.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">5</span></a> See <i>First Swiss Struggle for Liberty</i>, <a href="#Page_28">page 28.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">6</span></a> See <i>The Swiss Win Their Independence</i>, <a href="#Page_238">page 238.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">7</span></a> See <i>Battle of Bannockburn</i>, <a href="#Page_41">page 41.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">8</span></a> See <i>Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance</i>, <a href="#Page_110">page 110.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">9</span></a> See <i>Crowning of Petrarch at Rome</i>, <a href="#Page_93">page 93.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">10</span></a> See <i>Rienzi's Revolution in Rome</i>, <a href="#Page_104">page 104.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">11</span></a> See <i>Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at Venice</i>, <a href="#Page_154">page 154.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">12</span></a> See <i>Genoese Surrender to Venetians</i>, <a href="#Page_213">page 213.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">13</span></a> See <i>Rise of the Hanseatic League</i>, vol. vi, <a href="#Page_214">page 214.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">14</span></a> See <i>Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway</i>, <a href="#Page_243">page 243.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">15</span></a> See <i>Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull</i>, <a href="#Page_160">page 160.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">16</span></a> See <i>The Black Death Ravages Europe</i>, <a href="#Page_130">page 130.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">17</span></a> See <i>Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages</i>, <a href="#Page_187">page 187.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">18</span></a> See <i>James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt</i>, <a href="#Page_68">page 68.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">19</span></a> See <i>Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King of France</i>,
+<a href="#Page_68">page 68.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">20</span></a> See <i>Battles of Sluys and Cr&eacute;cy</i>, <a href="#Page_78">page 78.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">21</span></a> See <i>Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France</i>, <a href="#Page_164">page 164.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">22</span></a> See <i>Rebellion of Wat Tyler</i>, <a href="#Page_217">page 217.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">23</span></a> See <i>Turks Seize Gallipoli</i>, <a href="#Page_147">page 147.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">24</span></a> See <i>Conquests of Timur the Tartar</i>, <a href="#Page_169">page 169.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">25</span></a> See <i>Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English</i>,<a href="#Page_227"> page 227.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">26</span></a> See <i>Election of Antipope Clement VII</i>, <a href="#Page_201">page 201.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">27</span></a> See <i>Trial and Burning of John Huss</i>, <a href="#Page_294">page 294.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">28</span></a> See <i>Council of Constance</i>, <a href="#Page_284">page 284.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">29</span></a> See <i>The Hussite Wars</i>, <a href="#Page_294">page 294.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">30</span></a> See <i>The House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg</i>, <a href="#Page_305">page
+305.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">31</span></a> See <i>Deposition of Richard II</i>, <a href="#Page_251">page 251.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">32</span></a> See <i>Battle of Agincourt</i>, <a href="#Page_320">page 320.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">33</span></a> See <i>English Conquest of France</i>, <a href="#Page_320">page 320.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">34</span></a> See <i>Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans</i>, <a href="#Page_33">page 333.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">35</span></a> See <i>Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc</i>, <a href="#Page_350">page 350.</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">36</span></a> See <i>Charles VII Issues his Pragmatic Sanction</i>, <a href="#Page_370">page 370.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">37</span></a> See <i>Discovery of the Canary Islands: Beginning of Negro Slave
+Trade</i>, <a href="#Page_266">page 266.</a></p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">38</span></a> "I am not going to lose the men for the old women."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">39</span></a>
+"The coward who the great refusal made."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">40</span></a>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The beams on the low shores now lost and dead."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">41</span></a>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">"A death-like shade&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">Like that beneath black boughs and foliage green</span>
+<span class="i0">O'er the cold stream in Alpine glens display'd."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">42</span></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"O'er all the sandy desert falling slow,</span>
+<span class="i0">Were shower'd dilated flakes of fire, like snow</span>
+<span class="i0">On Alpine summits, when the wind is low."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">43</span></a>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So will a greater fame redound to thee,</span>
+<span class="i0">To have formed a party by thyself alone."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">44</span></a> Translated by Charles Leonard-Stuart.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">45</span></a> This Emperor was Albert I, son of Rudolph I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">46</span></a> James van Artevelde was called "the Brewer of Ghent," because,
+although born an aristocrat, he was enrolled in the Guild of Brewers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">47</span></a> Translated from the French by Thomas Johnes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">48</span></a> Lord Berners' account of the advance of the Genoese is somewhat
+different from this; he describes them as <i>leaping</i> forward with a <i>fell</i> cry.
+The whole passage is so spirited and graphic that we give it entire:</p>
+
+<p>"Whan the genowayes were assembled toguyder and beganne to
+aproche, they made a great leape and crye to abasshe thenglysshmen,
+but they stode styll and styredde nat for all that. Than the genowayes
+agayne the seconde tyme made another leape and a fell crye and stepped
+forwarde a lytell, and thenglysshmen remeued nat one fote; thirdly
+agayne they leapt and cryed, and went forthe tyll they came within
+shotte; than they shotte feersly with their crosbowes. Than thenglysshe
+archers stept forthe one pase and lette fly their arowes so hotly and so
+thycke that it semed snowe. Whan the genowayes felte the arowes persynge
+through heedes, armes, and brestes, many of them cast downe
+their crosbowes and did cutte their strynges and retourned dysconfited.
+Whan the frenche kynge sawe them flye away, he said, Slee these rascals,
+for they shall lette and trouble us without reason; than you shoulde
+haue sene the men of armes dasshe in among them and kylled a great
+nombre of them; and euerstyll the englysshmen shot where as they sawe
+thyckest preace, the sharpe arowes ranne into the men of armes and into
+their horses, and many fell horse and men amonge the genowayes, and
+whan they were downe they coude nat relyne agayne; the preace was so
+thycke that one ouerthrewe a nother. And also amonge the englysshemen
+there were certayne rascalles that went a fote with great knyues, and
+they went in among the men of armes and slewe and murdredde many as
+they lay on the grounde, both erles, barownes, knyghts, and squyers,
+whereof the kyng of Englande was after dyspleased, for he had rather
+they had been taken prisoners."</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">49</span></a> His blindness was supposed to be caused by poison, which was given
+to him when engaged in the wars of Italy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">50</span></a> The following is Lord Berners' version of this narration: "In the
+mornyng the day of the batayle certayne frenchemen and almaygnes perforce
+opyned the archers of the princes batayle, and came and fought
+with the men at armes hande to hande. Than the second batayle of
+thenglyshe men came to socour the prince's batayle, the whiche was
+tyme, for they had as than moche ado, and they with the prince sent a
+messangar to the kynge who was on a lytell wyndmill hill. Than the
+knyght sayd to the kyng, Sir therle of Warwyke and therle of Cafort
+[Stafford] Sir Reynolde Cobham and other such as be about the prince
+your sonne are feersly fought with all, and are sore handled, wherefore
+they desire you that you and your batayle woll come and ayde them, for
+if the frenchemen encrease as they dout they woll your sonne and they
+shall have moche a do. Than the kynge sayde, is my sonne deed or hurt
+or on the yerthe felled? No, sir, quoth the knight, but he is hardely
+matched wherfore he hath nede of your ayde. Well sayde the kyng, retourne
+to hym and to them that sent you hyther, and say to them that
+they sende no more to me for any adventure that falleth as long as my
+sonne is alyve; and also say to them that they suffer hym this day to
+wynne his spurres, for if God be pleased, I woll this iourney be his and
+the honoure therof and to them that be aboute hym. Than the knyght
+retourned agayn to them and shewed the kynges wordes, the which greatly
+encouraged them, and repoyned in that they had sende to the kynge as they
+dyd."</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">51</span></a> Translated from the German by B. G. Babington.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">52</span></a> Thucydides, in his account of the earlier plague in Athens, <span class="smcap">B.C.</span> 430,
+says, "It was supposed that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns."</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">53</span></a> Translated from the French by Charles Leonard-Stuart.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">54</span></a> Osman is the real Turkish name, which has been corrupted into Othman.
+The descendants of his subjects style themselves Osmanlis&mdash;corrupted
+into Ottoman.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">55</span></a> Edebali, a Mussulman prophet and saint, whose daughter Osman
+married.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">56</span></a> A criminal tribunal, of which Steno himself was president.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">57</span></a> "Jacques Bonhomme." Froissart takes this for the name of an individual,
+but it is the common nickname&mdash;like "Hodge" or "Giles"&mdash;of
+the French peasantry. It is said that the term was applied by the
+lords of the manor to their villeins or serfs, in derision of their awkwardness
+and patient endurance of their lot. The "King who came from
+Clermont"&mdash;the leader of the Jacquerie&mdash;was William Karl or Callet.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">58</span></a> A most wonderful scene. The B'hagiratha or Ganges issues from
+under a very low arch at the foot of the grand snow-bed. The illiterate
+mountaineers compare the pendent icicles to Mahodeva's hair. Hindoos
+of research may formerly have been here; and if so, one cannot think of
+any place to which they might more aptly give the name of a cow's mouth
+than to this extraordinary <i>d&eacute;bouch&eacute;</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">59</span></a> Translated from the German by B. G. Babington.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">60</span></a> "Chorus Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus' dance; the lascivious dance, Paracelsus
+calls it, because they that are taken with it can do nothing but
+dance till they be dead or cured. It is so called for that the parties so
+troubled were wont to go to St. Vitus for help; and, after they had
+danced there awhile, they were certainly freed. 'Tis strange to hear
+how long they will dance, and in what manner, over stools, forms, and
+tables. One in red clothes they cannot abide. Musick above all things
+they love; and therefore magistrates in Germany will hire musicians to
+play to them, and some lusty, sturdy companions to dance with them.
+This disease hath been very common in Germany, as appears by those
+relations of Schenkius, and Paracelsus in his book of madness, who
+brags how many several persons he hath cured of it. Felix Platerus (<i>de
+Mentis Alienat.</i> cap. 3) reports of a woman in Basel whom he saw, that
+danced a whole month together. The Arabians call it a kind of palsie.
+Bodine, in his fifth book, speaks of this infirmity; Monavius, in his
+last epistle to Scoltizius, and in another to Dudithus, where you may
+read more of it."&mdash;<i>Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">61</span></a> The Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus in Syria states that, at the festival
+of St. John, large fires were annually kindled in several towns, through
+which men, women, and children jumped; and that young children were
+carried through by their mothers. He considered this custom as an ancient
+Asiatic ceremony of purification, similar to that recorded of Ahaz,
+in II Kings, xvi. 3. Zonaras, Balsamon, and Photius speak of the St.
+John's fires in Constantinople, and the first looks upon them as the remains
+of an old Grecian custom. Even in modern times fires are still lighted
+on St. John's Day in Brittany and other remote parts of Continental Europe,
+through the smoke of which the cattle are driven in the belief that
+they will thus be protected from contagious and other diseases, and in
+these practices protective fumigation originated. That such different
+nations should have had the same idea of fixing the purification by fire
+on St. John's Day is a remarkable coincidence, which perhaps can be
+accounted for only by its analogy to baptism.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">62</span></a> Beckmann makes many other observations on this well-known circumstance.
+The priest named is the same who is still known in the
+nursery tales of children as the <i>Knecht Ruprecht</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">63</span></a> <i>Dass dir Sanct Veitstanz ankomme</i> ("May you be seized with St.
+Vitus' dance").</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">64</span></a> "This proceeding was, however, no invention of his, but an imitation
+of a usual mode of enchantment by means of wax figures (<i>peri cunculas</i>).
+The witches made a wax image of the person who was to be bewitched;
+and in order to torment him, they stuck it full of pins, or melted it before
+the fire. The books on magic, of the Middle Ages, are full of such things;
+though the reader who may wish to obtain information on this subject
+need not go so far back. Only eighty years since, the learned and celebrated
+Storch, of the school of Stahl, published a treatise on witchcraft,
+worthy of the fourteenth century."&mdash;<i>Treatise on the Diseases of Children.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">65</span></a> Some authorities give twenty-nine.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">66</span></a> Selden, in his <i>Table Talk</i>, says: "There was once, I am sure, a parliamentary
+pope. Pope Urban was made pope in England by act of
+parliament, against Pope Clement: the act is not in the <i>Book of Statutes</i>,
+either because he that compiled the book would not have the name of the
+Pope there, or else he would not let it appear that they meddled with any
+such thing; but it is upon the rolls."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">67</span></a> A groat equalled fourpence, or eight cents.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">68</span></a> In Walsingham may be seen a long account of the death of the Archbishop,
+page 250. His head was carried in triumph through the streets
+on the point of a lance, and fixed on London bridge. That it might be
+the better known, the hat or bonnet worn by him was nailed to the
+skull.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">69</span></a> When Tresilian, one of the judges, tried the insurgents at St. Alban's,
+he impanelled three juries of twelve men each. The first was ordered to
+present all whom they knew to be the chiefs of the tumult, the second
+gave their opinion on the presentation of the first, and the third pronounced
+the verdict of guilty or not guilty. It does not appear that witnesses
+were examined. The juries spoke from their personal knowledge.
+Thus each convict was condemned on the oaths of thirty-six men. At
+first, on account of the multitude of executions, the condemned were beheaded:
+afterward they were hanged and left on the gibbet as objects of
+terror; but as their bodies were removed by their friends, the King
+ordered them to be hanged in chains, the first instance in which express
+mention of the practice is made. According to Holinshed the executions
+amounted to fifteen hundred.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">70</span></a> The readers, as might be expected, often surreptitiously copied portions
+of special interest. One is reminded of the story in ancient Irish
+history of a curious decision arising out of an incident of this kind nearly
+a thousand years before, which seems to have influenced the history of
+Christianity in Britain. St. Columb, on a visit to the aged St. Finian in
+Ulster, had permission to read in the Psalter belonging to his host. But
+every night while the good old saint was sleeping, the young one was
+busy in the chapel writing by a miraculous light till he had completed a
+copy of the whole Psalter. The owner of the Psalter, discovering this,
+demanded that it should be given up, as it had been copied unlawfully
+from his book; while the copyist insisted that, the materials of labor
+being his, he was entitled to what he had written. The dispute was referred
+to Diarmad, the King at Tara, and his decision (genuinely Irish)
+was given in St. Finian's favor. "To every book," said he, "belongs its
+son-book [copy], as to every cow belongs her calf." Columb complained
+of the decision as unjust, and the dispute is said to have been one of the
+causes of his leaving Ireland for Iona.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">71</span></a> Oliver Wendell Holmes: <i>Autocrat of the Breakfast-table.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">72</span></a> A town in Schwyz. The name means a "hermitage." St. Meinrad,
+according to legend, lived there (ninth century) as a hermit. It is a celebrated
+pilgrim resort.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">73</span></a> He descended from Henry III both by father and mother. But he
+could not claim by the father's side, because the young Earl of March
+was sprung from the Duke of Clarence, the elder brother of John of
+Gaunt; nor by the mother's side, because she was sprung from Edmund
+of Lancaster, a younger brother of Edward I. It was pretended that
+Edmund was the elder brother, but deformed in body, and therefore set
+aside with his own consent. If we may believe Hardyng, Henry on September
+21st produced in council a document to prove the seniority of
+Edmund over Edward, but that the contrary was shown by a number of
+unanswerable authorities.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">74</span></a> Charles IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">75</span></a> Allusion to John Ziska, leader of the Hussites, who waged a fierce
+war against Wenzel and the empire.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">76</span></a> Head of the House of Hohenzollern, Burggraves of Nuremberg.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">77</span></a> This was the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII, whose brother Jean,
+Duke of Burgundy, had, in 1407, procured the murder of the Duke of
+Orleans.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">78</span></a> To <i>houspiller</i> is to maul, pull about, abuse, "worry like a dog";
+hence the name <i>houspilleur</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">79</span></a> The English cardinal, most powerful ecclesiastic of the time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">80</span></a> Assistant judges.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">81</span></a> Tipstaffs, constables.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">82</span></a> The Duke of Bedford (John of Lancaster), third son of Henry IV of
+England, was regent of England and France, which office he assumed
+on the death of Henry V, in 1422.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">83</span></a> The memory of Jeanne d'Arc was long and shamefully traduced by
+descendants of those enemies of France whom she baffled. Even Shakespeare
+(<i>Henry VI</i>) is so unjust to her&mdash;refining upon the brutal calumnies
+of the historians&mdash;as to grieve his most loving critics. It remained for
+the opening years of the twentieth century to see the Maid canonized by
+the Church which, as the agent of her country's foes, was instrumental in
+her destruction.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">84</span></a> Translated by Chauncey C. Starkweather, M.A., LL.B.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">85</span></a> The Catalan Grand Company was a formidable body of mercenary
+soldiers; it arose in Sicily during the wars that followed the Sicilian Vespers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">86</span></a> See 1291.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">87</span></a> Date uncertain.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">88</span></a> Date uncertain.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">89</span></a> A specimen of an early speaking-tube exists, connecting the room
+said to have been occupied by Isabella with the old brewhouse, now a
+tavern, by means of which Mortimer was wont to communicate with his
+mistress. The castle stands upon a mount of 280 feet, sheer rock, and
+the brewhouse is at its base. A peculiarity of the tube, bored through the
+live rock, is an elbow-joint, which is a puzzle to scientists.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">90</span></a> Date uncertain.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">91</span></a> Often erroneously given as 1370, neglecting the fact that, by the old
+manner of reckoning, the year began on March 25th.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">92</span></a> Date uncertain.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">93</span></a> By the French it is claimed that Jean Charlier de Gerson was the author
+of <i>de Imitatione Christi</i>, usually attributed to Thomas &agrave; Kempis.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>END OF VOLUME VII</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
+Volume 07, by Various
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,16469 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
+Volume 07, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Rossiter Johnson
+        Charles Horne
+        John Rudd
+
+Release Date: December 18, 2008 [EBook #27562]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EVENTS, VOLUME 07 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during
+  the coronation of Charles VII before the high altar at
+  Rheims.
+
+  Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.]
+
+
+
+
+                       THE GREAT EVENTS
+
+                              BY
+
+                      FAMOUS HISTORIANS
+
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+    | A COMPREHENSIVE  AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S |
+    | HISTORY, EMPHASIZING  THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND |
+    | PRESENTING  THESE  AS  COMPLETE  NARRATIVES  IN  THE |
+    |     MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS      |
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+    NON-SECTARIAN         NON-PARTISAN        NON-SECTIONAL
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+    | ON  THE  PLAN  EVOLVED FROM  A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS |
+    | GATHERED FROM  THE  MOST DISTINGUISHED  SCHOLARS  OF |
+    | AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS BY |
+    | SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT  AND   EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED |
+    | NARRATIVES, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY,  WITH THOROUGH |
+    | INDICES,  BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND  COURSES |
+    |                     OF READING                       |
+    +------------------------------------------------------+
+
+                        EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
+
+                    ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.
+
+                       ASSOCIATE EDITORS
+
+                    CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
+
+                       JOHN RUDD, LL.D.
+
+                _With a staff of specialists_
+
+                         _VOLUME VII_
+
+
+                      The National Alumni
+
+                        COPYRIGHT, 1905,
+
+                    BY THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
+
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS
+
+
+                          VOLUME VII
+
+                                                           page
+
+_An Outline Narrative of the Great Events_,                xiii
+         CHARLES F. HORNE
+
+_Dante Composes the_ Divina Commedia _(A.D. 1300-1318)_,      1
+         RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
+
+_Third Estate Joins in the Government of France (A.D.
+  1302)_,                                                    17
+         HENRI MARTIN
+
+_War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair of France
+  (A.D. 1302)_,                                              23
+         EYRE EVANS CROWE
+
+_First Swiss Struggle for Liberty (A.D. 1308)_,              28
+         F. GRENFELL BAKER
+
+_Battle of Bannockburn (A.D. 1314)_,                         41
+         ANDREW LANG
+
+_Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars
+Burning of Grand Master Molay (A.D. 1314)_,                  51
+         F. C. WOODHOUSE
+         HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+_James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt
+Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King of
+  France (A.D. 1337-1340)_,                                  68
+         FRANCOIS P. G. GUIZOT
+
+_Battles of Sluys and Crecy (A.D. 1340-1346)_,               78
+         SIR JOHN FROISSART
+
+_Modern Recognition of Scenic Beauty
+Crowning of Petrarch at Rome (A.D. 1341)_,                   93
+         JACOB BURCKHARDT
+
+_Rienzi's Revolution in Rome (A.D. 1347)_,                  104
+         RICHARD LODGE
+
+_Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance (Fourteenth
+  to Sixteenth Century)_,                                   110
+         JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
+
+_The Black Death Ravages Europe (A.D. 1348)_,               130
+         J. F. C. HECKER
+         GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
+
+_First Turkish Dominion in Europe
+Turks Seize Gallipoli (A.D. 1354)_,                         147
+         JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL
+
+_Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at Venice
+  (A.D. 1355)_,                                             154
+         MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT
+
+_Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull
+  (A.D. 1356)_,                                             160
+         SIR ROBERT COMYN
+
+_Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France (A.D. 1358)_,      164
+         SIR JOHN FROISSART
+
+_Conquests of Timur the Tartar (A.D. 1370-1405)_,           169
+         EDWARD GIBBON
+
+_Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages (A.D. 1374)_,             187
+         J. F. C. HECKER
+
+_Election of Antipope Clement VII
+Beginning of the Great Schism (A.D. 1378)_,                 201
+         HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+_Genoese Surrender to Venetians (A.D. 1380)_,               213
+         HENRY HALLAM
+
+_Rebellion of Wat Tyler (A.D. 1381)_,                       217
+         JOHN LINGARD
+
+_Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English (A.D. 1382)_    227
+         J. PATERSON SMYTH
+
+_The Swiss Win Their Independence
+Battle of Sempach (A.D. 1386-1389)_                         238
+         F. GRENFELL BAKER
+
+_Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (A.D. 1397)_,         243
+         PAUL C. SINDING
+
+_Deposition of Richard II
+Henry IV Begins the Line of Lancaster (A.D. 1399)_,         251
+         JOHN LINGARD
+
+_Discovery of the Canary Islands and the African Coast
+Beginning of Negro Slave Trade (A.D. 1402)_,               266
+         SIR ARTHUR HELPS
+
+_Council of Constance (A.D. 1414)_,                        284
+         RICHARD LODGE
+
+_Trial and Burning of John Huss
+The Hussite Wars (A.D. 1415)_,                             294
+         RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
+
+_The House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg
+  (A.D. 1415)_,                                            305
+         THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+_Battle of Agincourt
+English Conquest of France (A.D. 1415)_,                   320
+         JAMES GAIRDNER
+
+_Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans (A.D. 1429)_,           333
+         SIR EDWARD S. CREASY
+
+_Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc (A.D. 1431)_,         350
+         JULES MICHELET
+
+_Charles VII Issues His Pragmatic Sanction
+Emancipation of the Gallican Church (A.D. 1438)_,          370
+         W. HENLEY JERVIS
+         RENE F. ROHRBACHER
+
+_Universal Chronology (A.D. 1301-1438)_,                   385
+         JOHN RUDD
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+VOLUME VII                                                page
+
+_Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during the
+coronation of Charles VII, before the high altar
+at Rheims (page 347)_,                            Frontispiece
+  Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.
+
+_Richard II resigns the crown of England to Henry,
+Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at
+London_,                                                   262
+  Painting by Sir John Gilbert.
+
+
+
+
+                     AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
+
+           TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS,
+                     AND CONSEQUENCES OF
+                      THE GREAT EVENTS
+
+     (FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)
+
+                      CHARLES F. HORNE
+
+
+Fifty years ago the term "renaissance" had a very definite meaning to
+scholars as representing an exact period toward the close of the
+fourteenth century when the world suddenly reawoke to the beauty of the
+arts of Greece and Rome, to the charm of their gayer life, the splendor
+of their intellect. We know now that there was no such sudden
+reawakening, that Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long
+centuries, and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer
+side of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with
+their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.
+
+Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and
+there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning
+ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid
+the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way
+of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period
+of the great poet's work, the first decade of the fourteenth century,
+has certainly the advantage of being characterized by three or four
+peculiarly striking events which serve to typify the tendencies of the
+coming age.
+
+In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic, by a
+political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended
+into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended
+only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found
+expression in his mighty poem, the _Divina Commedia_.[1] Throughout his
+masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and
+of such Greeks as he knew--so we have admiration of the ancient
+intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other
+more earthly tyrants--so we have the dawnings of democracy and of
+religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's
+self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.
+
+More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he
+began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon
+transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his
+commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote
+not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly
+friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very
+truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical
+set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous
+vitality, were to supersede the old.
+
+In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at
+work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the
+famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous
+bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening enough.
+
+If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene
+tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the
+Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause
+of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the great
+jubilee of 1300. Philip's soldiers, forcing their way into the little
+town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon
+his holiness. If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So
+few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of
+towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from
+the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck--beaten, say not
+wholly reliable authorities--and so insulted that rage and shame drove
+him mad, and he died.
+
+Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr.
+Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope,
+venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under
+strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the
+obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal
+authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years
+the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the
+Church was sudden, terrible, complete.
+
+
+INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE
+
+Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the
+mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders
+of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars,
+having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had
+dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized
+the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and
+confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles
+throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the
+extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its
+chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their
+helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which
+knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of
+feudalism was past.[2]
+
+We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this cruel,
+crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against the Pope, he
+called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of his people; and,
+following the example already established in England, he gave a voice in
+this assembly to the "Third Estate," the common folk or "citizens," as
+well as to the nobles and the clergy. So even in France we find the
+people acquiring power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but
+a timid and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by its
+money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one day be strong
+enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant overlords.[3]
+
+Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took place farther
+northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish cities Ghent, Liege, and
+Bruges had grown to be the great centres of the commercial world, so
+wealthy and so populous that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish
+burghers had not always been subject to France--else they had been less
+well to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and
+rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and
+the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout
+leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the
+knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers
+with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the
+helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness
+asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself
+a fresh nobility to replenish his depleted stock.[4]
+
+The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign will in
+itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most important state
+in Europe. This, however, was due less to French strength than to the
+weakness of the empire, where rival rulers were being constantly elected
+and wasting their strength against one another. If Courtrai had given
+the first hint that these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war,
+it was soon followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among
+themselves a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in
+1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.[5]
+The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival claimants for the
+title of emperor, and was much too busy to attend personally to the
+chastisement of these presumptuous boors. The army which he sent to do
+the work for him was met by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain
+passes, overwhelmed with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce
+charge of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years to
+forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second army into
+the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss liberty was
+established on an unarguable basis.[6]
+
+A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under Bruce, the
+Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the English.[7] Courtrai,
+Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new force was growing up over all
+Europe, and a new spirit among men. Knighthood, which had lost its power
+over kings, seemed like to lose its military repute as well.
+
+The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in Italy, where
+democracy had first asserted itself. In its train came intellectual
+ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Italy was in the
+full swing of the intellectual renaissance.[8] In 1341 Petrarch,
+recognized by all his contemporary countrymen as their leading scholar
+and poet, was crowned with a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol
+in Rome. This was the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for
+intellectual worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of
+the beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In
+reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our own,
+with a friend who understands.[9]
+
+
+THE PERIOD OF DISASTER
+
+Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too intense, too
+frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic in Rome and
+talked of the restoration of the city's ancient rule. But he governed
+like a madman or an inflated fool, and was slain in a riot of the
+streets.[10] Scarce one of the famous cities succeeded in retaining its
+republican form. Milan became a duchy. Florence fell under the sway of
+the Medici. In Venice a few rich families seized all authority, and
+while the fame and territory of the republic were extended, its dogeship
+became a mere figurehead. All real power was lodged in the dread and
+secret council of three.[11] Genoa was defeated and crushed in a great
+naval contest with her rival, Venice.[12] Everywhere tyrannies stood out
+triumphant. The first modern age of representative government was a
+failure. The cities had proved unable to protect themselves against the
+selfish ambitions of their leaders.
+
+In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen,
+slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of
+decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith
+of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully
+established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth
+of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of
+Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark, Norway,
+and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance of the Hansa, until,
+toward the end of the century, Queen Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis
+of the North," united the three countries under her sway, and partly at
+least upraised them from their sorry plight.[14]
+
+On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look back with
+pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of its wrangling rulers,
+Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an established government lay
+at the root of all the disorder, tried to mend matters by publishing his
+"Golden Bull," which exactly regulated the rules and formulae to be gone
+through in choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were
+to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested
+elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty. The
+Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.[15]
+
+Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated
+plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered,
+began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has
+been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation
+one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out.
+In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed,
+humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all
+the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its
+height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in
+Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg
+the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to
+stop.[17]
+
+France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years'
+War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact,
+her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting
+away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings.
+France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe.
+England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman
+dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived
+of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, France was
+having much trouble with her Flemish cities, which were in revolt again
+under the noted brewer-nobleman, Van Artevelde,[18] yet it seemed
+presumption for England to attack her--England, so feeble that she had
+been unable to avenge her own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at
+Bannockburn.
+
+But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves as had
+the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not been in that strife
+against the Scots, a brave and impoverished people struggling for
+freedom. But hearts and pockets, too, welcomed the quarrel with France,
+overbearing France, that plundered their ships when they traded with
+their friends the Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a
+main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom
+ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer
+Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and
+presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By
+asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the
+consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King
+Philip had on his hands a far more serious quarrel than he realized.[19]
+
+In England's first great naval victory, Edward destroyed the French
+fleet at Sluys and so started his country on its wonderful career of
+ocean dominance. Moreover, his success established from the start that
+the war should be fought out in France and not in England.[20] Then, in
+1346, he won his famous victory of Crecy against overwhelming numbers of
+his enemies. It has been said that cannon were effectively used for the
+first time at Crecy, and it was certainly about this time that gunpowder
+began to assume a definite though as yet subordinate importance in
+warfare. But we need not go so far afield to explain the English
+victory. It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through a century
+and a half of freedom, England had been building up a class of sturdy
+yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent
+lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a
+helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they
+had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English
+peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly
+accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized
+mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed what the English
+yeomen had begun.
+
+Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what with the
+Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging
+at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which
+had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation
+into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous
+plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with
+England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary
+soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take
+their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering
+and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and
+the English troops caught disease from their victims and perished in the
+desolation they had helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles
+with them and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won
+back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380, the
+English power in France had fallen again almost to where it stood at the
+beginning of the war.
+
+Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph.
+His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen.
+England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and
+her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of
+rebellion--though with them this meant no more than that they felt
+themselves over-taxed.[22]
+
+The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be regarded
+as a period of depression in European civilization, of retrograde
+movement during which the wheels of progress had turned back. It even
+seemed as though Asia would once more and perhaps with final success
+reassert her dominion over helpless Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in
+1291, had conquered Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land,
+had lost their power; but a new family of the Turkish race, the one that
+dwells in Europe to-day, the Osmanlis, had built up an empire by
+conquest over their fellows, and had begun to wrest province after
+province from the feeble Empire of the East. In 1354 their advance
+brought them across the Bosporus and they seized their first European
+territory.[23] Soon they had spread over most of modern Turkey. Only the
+strong-walled Constantinople held out, while its people cried
+frantically to the West for help. The invaders ravaged Hungary. A
+crusade was preached against them; but in 1396 the entire crusading
+army, united with all the forces of Hungary, was overthrown, almost
+exterminated in the battle of Nicopolis.
+
+Perhaps it was only a direct providence that saved Europe. Another
+Tartar conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine, had risen in the Far
+East.[24] Like Attila and Genghis Khan he swept westward asserting
+sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe
+to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which
+vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and
+slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and
+subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real
+unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations
+reasserted their independence. Yet Europe was granted a considerable
+breathing space before the Turks once more felt able to push their
+aggressions westward.
+
+
+THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
+
+Toward the close of this unlucky fourteenth century a marked religious
+revival extended over Europe. Perhaps men's sufferings had caused it.
+Many sects of reformers appeared, protesting sometimes against the
+discipline, sometimes the doctrines, of the Church. In Germany Nicholas
+of Basel established the "Friends of God." In England Wycliffe wrote the
+earliest translation of the Bible into any of our modern tongues.[25]
+The Avignon popes shook off their long submission to France and returned
+to Italy, to a Rome so desolate that they tell us not ten thousand
+people remained to dwell amid its stupendous ruins. Unfortunately this
+return only led the papacy into still deeper troubles. Several of the
+cardinals refused to recognize the Roman Pope and elected another, who
+returned to Avignon. This was the beginning of the "Great Schism" in the
+Church.[26] For forty years there were two, sometimes three, claimants
+to the papal chair. The effect of their struggles was naturally to
+lessen still further that solemn veneration with which men had once
+looked up to the accepted vicegerent of God on earth. Hitherto the
+revolt against the popes had only assailed their political supremacy;
+but now heresies that included complete denial of the religious
+authority of the Church began everywhere to arise. In England Wycliffe's
+preachings and pamphlets grew more and more opposed to Roman doctrine.
+In Bohemia John Huss not only said, as all men did, that the Church
+needed reform, but, going further, he refused obedience to papal
+commands.[27] In short, the reformers, finding themselves unable to
+purify the Roman Church according to their views, began to deny its
+sacredness and defy its power.
+
+At length an unusually energetic though not oversuccessful emperor,
+Sigismund, the same whom the Turks had defeated at Nicopolis, persuaded
+the leaders of the Church to unite with him in calling a grand council
+at Constance.[28] This council ended the great schism and restored order
+to the Church by securing the rule of a single pope. It also burned John
+Huss as a heretic, and thereby left on Sigismund's hands a fierce
+rebellion among the reformer's Bohemian followers. The war lasted for a
+generation, and during its course all the armies of Germany were
+repeatedly defeated by the fanatic Hussites.[29]
+
+Another interesting performance of the Emperor Sigismund was that, being
+deep in debt, he sold his "electorate" of Brandenburg to a friend, a
+Hohenzollern, and thus established as one of the four chief families of
+the empire those Hohenzollerns who rose to be kings of Prussia and have
+in our own day supplanted the Hapsburgs as emperors of Germany.[30] Also
+worth noting of Sigismund is the fact that during the sitting of his
+Council of Constance he made a tour of Europe to persuade all the
+princes and various potentates to join it. When he reached England he
+was met by a band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand whether
+by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England.
+Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look
+to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old
+mediaeval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the
+overlord of the whole of Europe.
+
+
+LATTER HALF OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
+
+By this time England had in fact recovered from her period of temporary
+disorder and depression. King Richard II, the feeble son of the Black
+Prince, had been deposed in 1399,[31] and a new and vigorous line of
+rulers, the Lancastrians, reached their culmination in Henry V
+(1415-1422). Henry revived the French quarrel, and paralleled Crecy and
+Poitiers with a similar victory at Agincourt.[32] The French King was a
+madman, and, aided by a civil war among the French nobility, Henry soon
+had his neighbor's kingdom seemingly helpless at his feet. By the
+treaty of Troyes he was declared the heir to the French throne, married
+the mad King's daughter, and dwelt in Paris as regent of the
+kingdom.[33]
+
+The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a similar English
+conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his
+insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a
+tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left a full-grown
+though rather worthless son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to
+deny the English authority, from a safe distance in Southern France. He
+made, however, no effort to assert himself or retrieve his fortunes; and
+the English captains in the name of their baby King took possession of
+one fortress after another, till, in 1429, Orleans was the only French
+city of rank still barring their way from Charles and the far south.[34]
+
+Then came the sudden, wonderful arousing of the French under their
+peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture and execution.[35]
+At last even the French peasantry were roused; and the French nobles
+forgot their private quarrels and turned a united front against the
+invaders. The leaderless English lost battle after battle, until of all
+France they retained only Edward III's first conquest, the city of
+Calais.
+
+France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the Council of
+Constance, and, remembering how long she had held the papacy within her
+own borders, asserted at least a qualified independence of the Romans by
+the "Pragmatic Sanction" which established the Gallican Church.[36]
+
+This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King Charles, who, in
+fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the power which his
+good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won. Among other innovations he
+established a "standing army," the first permanent body of government
+troops in Teutonic Europe. By this step he did much to alter the
+mediaeval into the modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy
+of kings over both nobles and people which continued in France and more
+or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow.
+
+Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen
+in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the
+Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a
+first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery
+into Europe[37]--a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was
+to face increasing responsibilities as well.
+
+An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In
+that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet
+unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a
+little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable type, that is,
+of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii,
+education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries
+impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as
+much for standing armies.
+
+
+
+
+DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"
+
+A.D. 1300-1318
+
+RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
+
+
+  Out of what may be called the civil and religious
+  storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into
+  the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the
+  new life upon which the world was about to enter. From
+  Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and
+  its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy
+  of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible
+  world"--Dante's _Divina Commedia_--wherein also the deeper
+  history of the visible world of man was both embodied from
+  the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.
+
+  Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its
+  ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it
+  the epithet "divine." It is in three parts--_Inferno_
+  (hell), _Purgatorio_ (purgatory), and _Paradiso_ (paradise).
+  It has been made accessible to English readers in the
+  metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and
+  others, and in the excellent prose version (_Inferno_) of
+  John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.
+
+  Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in
+  May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the
+  _Divina Commedia_ and his other great work, the _Vita Nuova_
+  (the new life), narrate the love--either romantic or
+  passionate--with which he was inspired by Beatrice
+  Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and
+  Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed
+  to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an
+  equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his
+  works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein
+  the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds
+  of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of
+  failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials
+  rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems,
+  which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of
+  Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of
+  the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of
+  the modern world.
+
+  Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life
+  of Dante, and of the history-making _Commedia_, attest the
+  importance of including the poet and his work in this record
+  of Great Events.
+
+The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
+magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening
+of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of
+a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the
+mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up
+ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by
+grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the
+consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and
+Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the
+_Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's Code, with the
+Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens
+European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And,
+like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in
+undiminished freshness the literature which it began.
+
+We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have
+pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing,
+and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a
+solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed
+up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but
+fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
+world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature,
+so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which he has added
+permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power
+which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and
+creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it
+was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of
+investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of
+the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its
+ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among
+the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the
+solemn recollection supervenes that powers were formed, and life
+preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, and thus
+it should be; and the work which man has brooded over, and at last
+created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end
+to end, strongly and sweetly disposing of all things."
+
+It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some cases and to
+a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the
+particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps
+to a heterogeneous and wildly discordant order of things, which are out
+of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which
+have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to
+bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we
+feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which
+its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to
+conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see
+nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work
+without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of
+its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina
+Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
+yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its
+chance incidents.
+
+The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it
+ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In
+general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great
+poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness
+in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of
+the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined
+by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and
+flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own
+life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all
+things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections
+of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the
+only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure
+ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful
+company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we
+never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to
+history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in
+Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather
+than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as
+generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great
+mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man
+conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among
+which he worked; but how the current of purpose threaded its way among
+them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot
+learn from history.
+
+It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and
+enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of
+his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder
+of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an
+autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and
+subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with
+far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes
+it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of
+raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he
+has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic
+change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes
+the student--the student of the thirteenth century--struggling painfully
+against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight
+and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but
+omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and
+ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of
+half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the Provencals.
+
+Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within his reach are
+accepted as the consolation of his human griefs; he is filled with the
+passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it.
+Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems
+in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his
+learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it
+is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by
+discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death.
+He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a
+family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his
+full share in the quarrels of the day.
+
+Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and
+figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and
+natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of
+the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been
+broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man,
+enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and
+abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and
+brooded once more on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory
+had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him
+and that stable country "where the angels are in peace." Round her
+image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was
+grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and
+success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged
+itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction,
+but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the
+softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no
+figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love,
+dissipated by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of
+feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's
+case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and
+suggested the form of the "sacred poem of earth and heaven."
+
+And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this
+passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of
+poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not
+ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration--the political
+life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and
+passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning,
+gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man.
+But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet.
+
+The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the
+Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving
+in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and
+contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the
+social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more
+felicitous in issue, of other western nations. It is remarkable for
+keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it
+has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that
+is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and
+empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind
+to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger
+than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire,
+indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not
+a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it
+prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were
+uniting and union was becoming organization--and neither geographical
+remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and
+differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which
+was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and
+cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the
+attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while
+this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in
+Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its
+narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The
+history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one--the history
+of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a
+history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent
+cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within,
+theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes
+and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and
+citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the
+minuteness of private life.
+
+Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not less from
+the custom of the day than from his own purpose a public man. He took
+his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he
+fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory at
+Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled
+himself in one of the guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the
+"art" of the apothecaries; he served the state as its agent abroad; he
+went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy according
+to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies,
+even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of jubilee, 1300, he
+was one of the priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from
+fellowship and cooperation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the
+market-place and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn
+by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men,
+the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought
+of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the
+real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous
+page of Vergil; and no scholar ever read Vergil with such feeling--no
+astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The
+whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul
+and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free
+and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes,
+seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual,
+natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is
+placed to labor and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.
+
+The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it
+is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know
+not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the
+parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a
+neighboring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and
+the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs, who were led by the
+Donati, and the White Guelfs, who sided with Cerchi. It is still
+professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but
+they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the
+whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a
+time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it
+grew evident that one party must crush the other and become dominant in
+Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less
+formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing
+Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely
+of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the
+martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause.
+The Cerchi, with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and
+showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the
+common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the _Parte
+Guelfa_; and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well.
+
+Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they
+might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had
+chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties
+equally, seem to have thought that this would have been the best result
+for the state. But the accounts of both, though they are very different
+writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They
+were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to
+aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to
+pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when
+they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the
+moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and
+for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune,
+"more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared
+their adversaries." Boniface VIII had no prepossessions in Florence,
+except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he
+would have accepted and backed. But he said, "_Io non voglio perdere gli
+uomini perle femminelle_."[38] If the Black party furnished types for
+the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White
+party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly
+selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the
+vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel
+nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is
+singled out in the _setta dei cattivi_, for deeper and special
+scorn--he,
+
+  "Che fece per vilta il gran rifinto,"[39]
+
+the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.
+
+Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general
+character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when
+they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at
+last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he
+found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his
+exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his
+writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but
+disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are
+not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry,
+shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi
+and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he
+appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates;
+in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The
+traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with
+a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
+recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy
+form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the
+Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he
+passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the
+West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little
+that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored
+and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find
+him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of
+Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not
+by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love,"
+asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is
+better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian
+Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the
+children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the
+assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del
+Fiore.
+
+The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's
+life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is
+that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It
+is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle
+Ages in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for
+this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his state of trial, as
+"comprehensor" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly
+country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the
+recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent
+scenery of the _inferno_ and _purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly
+marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and
+the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such
+scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown
+dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery
+from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and
+precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks
+of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of
+Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna;
+the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and
+Sestri; the marble quarries of Carrara; the "rough and desert ways
+between Lerici and Turbia," and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into
+the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty
+years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that
+picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing
+above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly
+through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top,
+while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:
+
+  "Ai raggi, morti gia' bassi lidi,"[40]
+
+or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath
+the Alpine fir:
+
+        "Un' ombra smorta
+  Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
+  Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta;"[41]
+
+or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:
+
+      "d'un cader lento
+  Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde
+  Come di neve in Alpe senza vento."[42]
+
+Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_
+was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with
+some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made
+in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes
+three lines of it--continued afterward in Italian. This is not
+impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the
+_Vita Nuova_. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure
+and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is
+already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the
+face of the Ever-blessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the
+promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes
+how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady
+receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed
+spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in
+which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this
+blessed one until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily
+of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she
+truly knows. So that it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things
+live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that
+which never hath been said of any woman. And afterward, may it please
+him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the
+glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously
+gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."
+It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life
+to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or
+laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what he was promising, what he
+was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would
+have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high
+venture should be realized.
+
+But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be
+surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the
+poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the
+_Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and
+downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is
+continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect
+work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the
+grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a
+figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly
+wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing
+thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the
+dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to
+naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life.
+But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt
+whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by
+the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand
+though barbarous Latin to the _literati_ of the fourteenth century; or a
+poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the
+literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the
+_Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time
+when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion and the condition of his
+life.
+
+But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante
+was alone--except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless.
+The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his
+home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free
+associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all
+Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already
+in the region of spirits, and meet him there--Casella, Forese; Guido
+Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and
+writes as a friendless man--to whom all that he had held dearest was
+either lost or imbittered; he thinks and writes for himself.
+
+So comprehensive in interest is the _Commedia_. Any attempt to explain
+it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life,
+or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the
+keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art,
+each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to
+the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in
+doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the
+plain-spoken prose of the _Convito_ would show how he placed "the Divine
+Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and
+sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," is
+single perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon
+speaks, but queens or concubines or maidens; but she is the 'Dove,' and
+the 'perfect one'--'Dove,' because without stain of strife; 'perfect,'
+because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in which our soul
+stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage shows likewise how
+he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, as holding their due
+place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's
+perfection. No account of the _Commedia_ will prove sufficient which
+does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep
+spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide liberty of
+materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his
+design.
+
+Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline
+poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political
+opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt.
+And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all
+ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That
+he should take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part
+of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he
+subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of
+his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet
+this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who
+read the _Commedia_ in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained
+as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labor and
+pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than
+the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred
+cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the
+Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and
+scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in
+all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang
+of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the
+greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to
+which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to
+solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in
+which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or
+infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and
+even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic
+doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries
+of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse
+blindness.
+
+Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an
+imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party.
+It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up,
+and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were
+at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with
+them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in which he
+disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his
+independence--
+
+      "A te fia bello
+  Averti fatto parte per te stesso."[43]
+
+Dante, by the _Divina Commedia_, was the restorer of seriousness in
+literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and
+by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the
+prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the
+faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers
+fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously
+diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
+Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance;
+the _Commedia_ checked it. The Provencal and Italian poetry was, with
+the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively
+amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
+had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling;
+in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it
+brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased
+at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But
+this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was,
+was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge
+first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all
+closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the
+idea of infidelity--not heresy, but infidelity--was quite a familiar
+one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and
+Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and
+opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a
+profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for
+its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and
+enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in
+safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found
+utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the
+Italian _Commedia_ had not seized on all minds. It would have been an
+evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the siren
+tales of the _Decameron_ had not been the first to occupy the ears with
+the charms of a new language.
+
+Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to open the grand
+procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote
+from popular thought--too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted
+frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even
+enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so
+undoubting--her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the
+unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and
+models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But
+with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics
+and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil,
+Ovid, and Statius--keen and subtle as a schoolman--as much an idolater
+of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance--his eye
+is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of
+external nature, to the wonders of the physical world--his interest in
+them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct,
+his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened
+or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as
+elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic
+materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days
+which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense
+of what is real in feeling and image--as if he had never felt the
+attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before
+the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time
+was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and
+appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with
+a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their
+spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material
+is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science,
+and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he
+wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose
+their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT
+OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1302
+
+HENRI MARTIN[44]
+
+
+  At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the
+  power of Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at
+  its height, contentions arose between him and Pope Boniface
+  VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the right of
+  nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the
+  dominions of the French King.
+
+  Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the
+  county of Melgueil, which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in
+  fief from the holy see. Boniface provoked Philip by a
+  chiding bull, and added to the provocation by sending to the
+  King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de
+  Saisset, whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created
+  Bishop of Pamiers.
+
+  This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant
+  attitude, and afterward spoke of the King, who received him
+  in sombre silence, as "that debaser of coinage, that proud
+  and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare at people
+  without saying anything."
+
+  Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him
+  arrested and imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of
+  treason, heresy, and blasphemy, and sent his chancellor,
+  Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to the Pope, to demand
+  the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his see.
+
+  The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta,
+  fili," bull, received Philip's ambassadors, but their
+  interview was marked by a violent scene: "My power!"
+  exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power embraces and
+  includes the temporal power!"
+
+  "So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that
+  of the King, real."
+
+  To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he
+  deemed the King guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior
+  clergy of France to an assembly at Rome.
+
+Philip and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its own weapons,
+to enlist public opinion on their side, and to shelter themselves behind
+a great national manifestation; the three estates of France were
+convoked at Notre Dame in Paris, the 10th of April, 1302, to take
+cognizance of the differences between the King and the Pope. For the
+first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town
+deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside
+of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment
+of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth
+the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective entity, a
+political order.
+
+It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked
+by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and that he had
+the idea to seek in them moral power and support.
+
+The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip
+the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the
+feudality did not possess sufficient union, the people did not have
+enough force to profit on this occasion against the Crown. Besides, the
+Pope was more unpopular than the King, and had been so for a much longer
+time; the nobility, which, since the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced
+to resist clerical jurisdiction, had not changed in sentiment; as to the
+people, filled with the remembrance of St. Louis, they loved the King
+still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the oppressions of Philip,
+and besides it was easy to foresee that the mayors, consuls, aldermen,
+jurats or magistrates, who were to represent their cities in the great
+assembly at Paris, dazzled with the unaccustomed _role_ to which they
+were called, and desirous to please the King in their personal interest
+or in that of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit
+lawyers who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the
+debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known,
+might well have produced in many respects a contrary effect to the
+wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface touching the debasement
+of the coinage and the royal exactions, reproaches which so irritated
+Philip, might have met with other sentiments from the townsmen. The
+chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed among the public,
+instead of the original bull, a species of _resume_ in which he had
+assembled, in a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant
+pretensions of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which
+touched on the troubles of the nation against the King.
+
+"Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of
+the French; fear God and observe his commandments. We want you to know
+that you are subject to us temporarily as well as spiritually; that the
+collation of the benefices and the prebends--revenues attached to the
+canonical positions--do not belong to you in any way; that if you have
+care of the vacant benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their
+successors; that if you have misapplied any of these benefices, we
+declare that collation invalid and revoke it, declaring as heretics all
+those who think otherwise.
+
+"Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."
+
+At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended answer to the
+pretended bull:
+
+"Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives
+out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your
+very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards
+temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends
+belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the
+collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the
+future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and
+against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."
+
+This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to
+abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the
+eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been
+greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which
+formerly would have drawn universal indignation on the head of the
+sacrilegious monarch.
+
+The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual. The
+prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute, neutralized by
+the difficulties of their position between the King and the Pope; the
+lords and the townsmen hastened thither irritated against the bull,
+heated by the violence of the royal answer. The members of the assembly
+were influenced each by the other according to their arrival; the
+pungent and wily eloquence of Peter Flotte did the rest. The chancellor,
+as the first of the great crown officers and the king's chief justice,
+opened the states by a long harangue in which, speaking in the name of
+Philip, he exposed with much force and ingenuity the enterprises of the
+court of Rome and its wrongs toward the kingdom and the Church.
+
+"The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers and
+unknown individuals who never become residents. The prelates no longer
+have benefices to give to nobles whose ancestors founded the churches,
+and to other lettered persons; from which results also that gifts are no
+longer given to the churches. The Pope imposes on the churches and
+benefices pensions, subsidies, exactions of all kinds. The bishops are
+kept from their ministry, being obliged to go to the holy see to carry
+presents--always presents. All these abuses have done nothing but
+increase under the actual pontificate, and increase every
+day--conditions that can no longer be tolerated. That is why I command
+you as your master and pray you as your friend to give me counsel and
+help."
+
+The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his own initiative,
+to remedy the encroachments that his officers had made on the rights of
+the Church, and would have done so sooner had he not feared the
+appearance of submitting to the menaces and orders of the Pope, who
+pretended to reduce to a condition of vassalage the most noble kingdom
+of France, which had never been raised but from God. Peter Flotte dwelt
+especially on this latter argument, and appealed in turn to the
+interests of the nobility and of the clergy, and to national pride. The
+fiery Count of Artois arose, and exclaimed that even if the King
+submitted to the encroachments of the Pope, the nobility would not
+suffer them, and that the gentry would never acknowledge any temporal
+superior other than the King. The nobility and the Third Estate
+confirmed these words by their acclamations, and swore to sacrifice
+their properties and lives to defend the temporal independence of the
+kingdom. A Norman advocate, named Dubosc, procurator of the commune of
+Coutances, accused the Pope, in writing, of heresy for having wanted to
+despoil the King of the independence of the crown which he held from
+God. The embarrassment of the clergy was extreme; the members of the
+Church, fearing to be crushed in the crash between King and Pope, asked
+time for deliberation; their declaration in the assembly then being
+held, was insisted upon; already cries arose around them that whoever
+did not subscribe to the oath would be held as an enemy of the State;
+they acquiesced, satisfied apparently by an appearance of violence which
+would serve them for an excuse at Rome. They acknowledged themselves
+obliged, in common with the other orders, to defend the rights of the
+King and of the kingdom, whether they held estates from the King or not;
+then they prayed the King to be allowed to go to the council convoked by
+the Pope; the King and the barons declared themselves formally opposed.
+
+The three orders then separated, so as to write to the court at Rome
+each its own side of the affair; the letters of the nobility and of the
+Third Estate--which as may be imagined were all prepared in advance by
+the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the
+assistants--were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of
+cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and
+unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and
+government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the
+universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any
+trouble, whether by the authority of the Pope or anyone else--unless it
+be from their sire, the King. This letter is signed, not only by the
+principal lords of the kingdom, but also by several great barons of the
+empire.
+
+The epistle of the mayors, aldermen, jurats, consuls, universities,
+communes, and communities of the towns of the kingdom of France has not
+been preserved. It is known only, by the answer that the cardinals made,
+that it was conceived in the same spirit as the letter of the barons.
+The letter of the clergy is quite in another style: the clerks address
+their very holy father and very holy sire, the Pope; expose to him the
+complaints of the King and of the nobility; the necessity in which they
+find themselves engaged to defend the King's rights, and the anger of
+the laity; the imminent rupture of France with the Roman Church--and
+even of the people with the clergy in general--and conjure the highest
+prudence of the Pope to conserve the ancient union by revoking the
+convocation of the ecclesiastical council.
+
+The states-general were dissolved immediately after the unique _seance_
+which had so well responded to the desires of the King. The means
+employed to attain this result were not entirely loyal, nor was public
+opinion altogether free; it was but slightly enlightened on the grave
+debates that the authorities affected to submit to it. Nevertheless it
+was an important matter, this call to the French nation, and it must be
+acknowledged that the genius of France responded in proclaiming national
+independence, and in repelling the intervention of the court of Rome in
+the internal politics of the country.
+
+
+
+
+WAR OF THE FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE
+FAIR OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1302
+
+EYRE EVANS CROWE
+
+
+  Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century the people of
+  Flanders, whose country had been for centuries a feudal
+  dependency of France, were considerably advanced in wealth
+  and importance. They had become restive under the French
+  rule, and their discontent ripened into settled hostility.
+  Common commercial interests drew them into friendship with
+  England, and in the quarrel between Philip the Fair and
+  Edward I, 1295, concerning Edward's rule in Guienne
+  (Aquitaine) the Flemings allied themselves with the English
+  King.
+
+  In 1297 Philip invaded Flanders and gained several successes
+  against the Flemings, who were feebly aided by King Edward.
+  In 1299 the two kings settled their quarrel, and the
+  Flemings were left to the vengeance of Philip, for in the
+  pacification the court of Flanders was not included. A
+  French army entered the Flemish territory, inflicted two
+  defeats upon the Count's troops, and received the submission
+  of the Count. Philip annexed Flanders to his crown and
+  appointed a governor over the Flemings. In less than two
+  years they rose in furious revolt. The insurrection began at
+  Bruges, May 18, 1302, when over three thousand Frenchmen in
+  that city were massacred by the insurgents. This massacre
+  was called the "Bruges Matins." Such an outrage upon the
+  French crown could not but bring upon the Flemings all the
+  forces that Philip was able to muster. The two leading
+  actions of the ensuing war--that at Courtrai, known as the
+  "Battle of the Spurs," on account of the number of gilt
+  spurs captured by the Flemings, and the engagement at
+  Mons-la-Puelle--are described in the course of the narrative
+  which follows. As a result of the battle of Courtrai the
+  French nobility were nearly destroyed, and Philip found it
+  necessary to recreate his titled bodies.
+
+The Flemings prepared to resist the storm. They chose Guy of Juliers,
+grandson of the Count of Flanders, to be their commander. Though a
+cleric, he did not hesitate to obey the call, in order to avenge his
+family, so cruelly betrayed by the French King. His brother, made
+prisoner at Furnes by the Count d'Artois, had perished in that rude
+Prince's keeping. His first attempt was to induce the people of Ghent to
+join the insurrection, but its rich burgesses preferred French rule to
+that of the Count of Flanders. Bruges, however, was supported by all
+the lesser and maritime towns of Flanders. Guy of Namur, a son of the
+Count, who had escaped to Germany, also returned with a body of soldiers
+from that country, and reassured the Flemings. These surprised one of
+the ducal manors, in which were five hundred French, and then took
+Courtrai, occupying the town, but not the castle. It was immediately
+besieged, as well as that of Cassel, the people of Ypres rallying to the
+French cause. The French garrison of the town of Courtrai sent pressing
+messengers for aid, and Robert of Artois marched with seven thousand
+knights and forty thousand foot, of which one-fourth were archers. The
+Flemish were but twenty thousand, of which none but the chiefs had
+horses. Neither was their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the
+latter being a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with
+iron, and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers and
+Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads from Courtrai to
+Ghent, behind a canal that communicated with the river Lys. A priest
+came with the host, but, there being no time to receive the communion,
+each man took some earth in his mouth. The counts then knighted Pierre
+Konig and the chiefs of bands, and took their station on foot with the
+rest.
+
+The French had nine battalions or divisions, their archers or light
+troops being Lombards or Navarrese and Provencals. These the constable
+placed foremost, to commence the fight and harass the Flemings by their
+missiles. But the Count d'Artois overruled this manoeuvre, and called
+it a Lombard trick, reproaching the Constable de Nesle with appreciating
+the Flemings too highly because of his connection with them. (He had
+married a daughter of the Count of Flanders.) "If you advance as far as
+I shall," replied the Count, "you will go far enough, I warrant." So
+saying he put spurs to his horse and led on his knights; on which the
+Count d'Artois and the French squadrons charged also. This formidable
+cavalry could not reach the Flemings, but fell one over the other into
+the canal, which they had not perceived, and which was five fathoms wide
+and three deep. The Flemish counts, seeing the disorder, instantly
+passed the canal on either side to take advantage of it, and fell on the
+discomfited French. The battle was but a massacre. Numbers of the French
+nobles perished--the Count d'Artois, Godfrey of Brabant and his son,
+the counts of Eu and of Albemarle, the Constable and his brother, De
+Tanquerville, Pierre Flotte, the Chancellor, and Jacques de St. Pol--in
+all some six thousand knights. Louis of Clermont and one or two others
+escaped, to the damage of their reputation. This battle of Courtrai was
+fought on July 11, 1302.
+
+Had the war not been one exclusively of defence on the part of the
+Flemings, or had they had ambitious and adventurous chiefs, such a
+disaster might have endangered the throne of France. It was the Flemish
+democracy which had conquered, and its chiefs contented themselves with
+reducing the remaining cities, and expelling the gentry and rich
+citizens as of French inclinations. This reaction extended from Flanders
+into Brabant and Hainault. Philip in the mean time exerted all his
+activities and resources. Had he been an English king he would have
+called his parliament together, and have found national support and
+national supplies. The French King preferred having recourse to a
+recoinage. In 1294 he had forbidden any persons to keep plate unless
+they possessed an annual revenue of six thousand livres. He now ordered
+his bailies to deliver up their plate, and all non-functionaries to send
+half of theirs. Those who did so received payment in the new coin, and
+lost one-half thereby. A tax of one-fifth, or 20 per cent., of the
+annual revenue was levied on the land, and a twentieth was levied on the
+movable property. In the following year the King found it more
+advantageous to order that all prelates and barons should, for every
+five hundred livres of yearly revenue in land, furnish an armed and
+mounted gentleman for five months' service, while the non-noble was to
+furnish and keep up six infantry soldiers (_sergens de pied_) for every
+hundred hearths. This decree was a return to feudal military service,
+occasioned, no doubt, by the general disaffection caused by the raising
+of the war supplies in money. As if to recompense all classes for the
+severity of the exaction, Philip published an _ordonnance_ of reform for
+the protection of both laymen and ecclesiastics from the arbitrary
+encroachments or interference of his officers.
+
+Having thus set his realm in order, and collected an army of seventy
+thousand men at Arras, the King marched to meet the Flemings, who in
+equal force had mustered in the vicinity of Dovai. They kept, as at
+Courtrai, on the defensive; and the King of France, too cautious to
+attack them, allowed the whole autumn to pass, and returned to France
+after a campaign as inefficient as inglorious.
+
+Philip had been long involved in a controversy with Pope Boniface VIII,
+and the quarrel still continued. It was not till some time after the
+battle of Courtrai that the King at last, delivered from the menacing
+hostility of Rome, had leisure to turn his mind and efforts again toward
+Flanders. During the year 1303 he had sought to keep the Flemings at bay
+by bodies of Lombard and Tuscan infantry, whom his Florentine banker
+persuaded him to hire, and by Amadeus V, Duke of Savoy, who brought
+soldiers of that country to his aid. Although the long lances and more
+perfect armor of these troops gave them some advantage over the
+Flemings, the latter took and burned Therouanne, overran Artois, and
+laid siege to Tournai. Amadeus of Savoy, unable to overcome the Flemings
+by arms, recommended Philip to do so by treaty, and the King accordingly
+concluded a pacification, one condition of which was that the Count of
+Flanders should be released from prison to negotiate terms of fresh
+accommodation. The Flemings received the aged Count with respect; but he
+brought no terms which they were willing to accept; and he returned, as
+he had pledged his word, to captivity at Compiegne, where he soon after
+died.
+
+For the campaign of the following year Philip, in lieu of Italian
+infantry, took sixteen Genoese galleys into his pay, commanded by
+Rainier de Grimaldi. This admiral passed through the Straits of
+Gibraltar and assailed the maritime towns and shipping of Flanders. Guy
+of Namur mustered to oppose them a fleet of greater numbers; but the
+Genoese, accustomed to naval warfare, defeated the Flemings and took Guy
+of Namur prisoner. Philip, at the same time, assembled a large army at
+Tournai, and marched to Mons-la-Puelle, near Lille, where the Flemings,
+to the number of seventy thousand, were encamped within a
+circumvallation of cars and chariots. There was no Robert of Artois on
+this occasion to precipitate a rash onslaught, and by Philip's order the
+southern light troops harassed the Flemings all day with arrows and
+missiles, allowing them no repose. Toward the evening many of the
+French withdrew to refresh themselves and take off their armor; the King
+himself was of this number; the Flemings, perceiving this slackness, and
+divining the cause, poured forth from their encampment in three
+divisions, which at first drove all before them, and reached as far as
+the King's tent, then in full preparation for supper. The monarch
+himself, without armor or helmet, was fortunately not recognized; his
+secretary, De Boville, and two Parisians of the name of Gentien, whom
+Philip had always about his person, were slain before his eyes. The King
+withdrew, but it was to arm, mount on horseback, and cry out to his
+followers to stand their ground. He himself, says Villani, "one of the
+strongest and best made men of his time," fought valiantly until his
+brother Charles and most of the barons, recovering from the first panic,
+came to his rescue, and the Flemings were finally repulsed and put to
+the rout. William of Juliers fell on the side of the Flemings; the son
+of the Duke of Burgundy and many others on that of the French. Philip
+immediately laid siege to Lille, deeming the Flemings totally
+discomfited. They had, however, rallied, obtained reenforcements at
+Bruges and at Ghent, and in three weeks appeared to the number of fifty
+thousand before the King's camp at Lille, crying for battle. Philip
+called a council, and observed that "even a victory would be dearly
+purchased over a party so desperate."
+
+The Duke of Brabant and the Count of Savoy therefore undertook to
+negotiate with the Flemings, and Philip consented to grant them fair
+terms. He recognized their independent rights, agreed to liberate
+Robert, eldest son of Guido, Count of Flanders, as well as all those in
+captivity. He granted Robert and his son the fiefs which belonged to him
+in France, especially that of Nevers, and promised to give him
+investiture of the County of Flanders. The Flemings, on their side,
+consented to pay two hundred thousand livres, and to leave the King of
+France in possession of the three towns of Lille, Douai, and Bethune,
+that part of Flanders in which French was spoken. It was thus, at least,
+that the French interpreted the treaty, while the Flemings afterward
+alleged that French Flanders was merely a pledge for the payment of the
+money, not an alienation to the crown of France.
+
+
+
+
+FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY
+
+A.D. 1308
+
+F. GRENFELL BAKER
+
+
+  Owing to the fact that the house of Hapsburg had its origin
+  in Switzerland, the accession of Rudolph I, founder of the
+  Hapsburg dynasty, to the throne of Germany (1273), with the
+  virtual headship of the Holy Roman Empire, was an event of
+  great importance in the history of the Swiss cantons. To
+  this day the paternal domains whence the Hapsburg family
+  takes its name are a part of Swiss territory. The local
+  administration, as well as such imperial offices as still
+  remained in the free communities of Switzerland, were
+  largely in the hands of this family long before it gave
+  sovereigns to the empire itself. Its chiefs were the chosen
+  champions or advocates of the district.
+
+  Of the Swiss communities Uri seems to have first established
+  its freedom within the empire, and in that canton liberty
+  was most completely preserved from the perils that always
+  threatened Switzerland in this period. Under Rudolph it was
+  at first the policy of the empire to secure the attachment
+  of the Swiss by making the two other cantons, Schwyz and
+  Unterwalden, similarly independent. But toward the end of
+  his reign the policy of Rudolph was so influenced by
+  ambition for territorial expansion that the Swiss began to
+  feel an encroachment upon their independence. In 1291, the
+  year of Rudolph's death, the three cantons, fearing danger
+  to their interests in the new settlement of the crown,
+  formed a league for mutual protection and cooperation. The
+  very parchment on which the terms of this union were written
+  "has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence
+  of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The
+  formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first
+  combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in
+  defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and
+  legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, are
+  romantically blended.
+
+  The empire passed out of the Hapsburg control when Rudolph
+  died, but the family again got possession of it in 1298,
+  when Rudolph's son Albert was elected German king. In the
+  following account the relations of Switzerland and Austria,
+  under the renewed Hapsburg sovereignty, are circumstantially
+  set forth.
+
+There can be little doubt that most of the many stories related by the
+Swiss of the cruelty and extortion of the Austrian bailies are wholly or
+in great part devoid of a historical basis of truth, as are the dates
+given for their occurrence. They doubtless sprang from the very natural
+feelings of hatred the mountaineers of the Forest State felt against a
+foreign master, who was probably only too ready to punish them for the
+part they took against him in the struggle for the imperial throne.
+Indeed, it was not till about two centuries after this period that any
+reference to the alleged cruelties of the Austrians can be found in the
+local records, though legends about them have been plentiful.
+
+Many and various are the stories that have come down to our times of the
+oppression and licentiousness of the bailies, most of which have
+probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not
+wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According
+to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for
+trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be
+tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and
+imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless
+manner; they openly violated the liberties of the people, and chose
+every occasion to insult and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of
+their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly
+reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another
+occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of
+Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's
+messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost
+his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a
+plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this
+insult Henry's son Arnold responded by attacking the messenger and
+breaking his fingers, and then, fearing lest his act should bring down
+some serious punishment, fled to the mountains, and left his aged father
+to Landenburg's vengeance. The bailie confiscated his little property,
+imposed a heavy fine, and finally burned out both his eyes.
+
+The hot irons used in this barbarous punishment, the Swiss are fond of
+saying, went deeper than the tyrant intended, and penetrated to the
+hearts and aroused the sympathies of their ancestors to perform such
+acts of heroism that tyranny fled in fear from the land. The conduct of
+Arnold, however, can hardly at this period of his life warrant the
+eulogies bestowed upon his memory, though he subsequently figures as one
+of the "Men of Ruetli."
+
+Landenburg lived in a castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden, where his
+imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his debaucheries
+aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the peasants, that
+culminated in his expulsion and the destruction of his stronghold. The
+latter is popularly believed to have occurred on January 1, 1308. As the
+bailie left his castle to attend mass, some forty determined peasants,
+who had already bound themselves by oath to free their country at a
+solemn meeting on the steep promontory over the Lake of Lucerne known as
+the Ruetli, appeared before him carrying sheep, fowls, and other
+customary presents, and thus gained admission to the castle. No sooner
+were they past the gates than, drawing the weapons they had till then
+concealed beneath their clothes, they disarmed the guard and took
+possession of the fortress. Other conspirators were admitted, and the
+people at once rose in revolt. Landenburg, hearing while still at church
+of what had occurred, managed to effect his escape, and fled to Lucerne.
+Of the other bailies, Gessler and Wolfenschiess are believed to have
+excited even more hatred than their colleague Landenburg, and to have
+exceeded him in acts of savage cruelty and vicious living.
+
+One example out of many similar ones will show the spirit in which the
+Swiss traditions have treated the memory of Wolfenschiess. On a certain
+day, finding that a peasant named Conrad, of Baumgarten, whose wife he
+had frequently tried in vain to seduce, was absent from home,
+Wolfenschiess entered Conrad's house and ordered his wife to prepare him
+a bath, at the same time renewing with ardor his former proposals. With
+the cunning of her sex, the wife feigned to be willing to accede to his
+wishes, and on the pretence of retiring to another room to undress sped
+to her husband, who quickly returned and slew Wolfenschiess while he was
+still in the bath. After this exploit an entrance was effected into the
+bailies' castle of Rotzberg by one of the conspirators, who was in the
+habit of paying nightly visits to a servant living in the castle, by
+means of a rope attached to her window, and who then admitted his
+companions, who were lying concealed in the moat.
+
+But, probably in consequence of his supposed connection with the legend
+of William Tell, the bailie to whom the name of Gessler has been given
+stands out more prominently in Swiss history than any other. Gessler's
+residence, according to tradition, was a strongly fortified castle built
+in the valley of Uri, near Altorf, and this he named Zwing Uri ("Uri's
+Restraint"). He used every means that cruelty or avarice could suggest
+in his conduct as governor, and incurred additional hatred from the
+methods he adopted to discover the members of a secret conspiracy he
+believed existed against him in the district. With this object in view,
+Gessler caused a pole, surmounted with the ducal cap of Austria, to be
+set up in the market-place at Altorf, before which emblem of authority
+he ordered every man to uncover and do reverence as he passed. The
+refusal of a peasant to obey this command, his arrest, trial, and
+condemnation to pierce with an arrow an apple placed on his own child's
+head, his dexterity in performing this feat, his escape from his
+enemies, his murder of the tyrant Gessler, the solemn compact sworn at
+Ruetli, and the revolutionary events that followed form the motive of
+the much-celebrated legend of William Tell.
+
+The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his
+person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and
+the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name
+has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse
+by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a
+noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular
+act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque
+representative of liberty has done much to mould the political life, if
+not also to write many pages of the history of the people, and that in
+spite of the questionable morality of the received narrative of his
+career, and its unquestionable untruth. The emergence of the Swiss from
+slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly
+a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the
+narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to
+have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies
+from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a
+possible substratum of actual fact.
+
+It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the
+illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge
+of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When,
+however, the naked truth can be discovered--and that is seldom the
+case--it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot
+receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of
+the former, not with the material of the latter.
+
+As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical
+foundation, and is more widely known and believed than are the many
+others related as the records of events happening at the period from
+which the Swiss date their independence, it may be as well to devote
+some little space to its consideration. All the local records that might
+possibly throw some light on the existence and career of Tell have now
+been thoroughly searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as
+well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that, till
+a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their deaths,
+not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending to prove the
+identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant Gessler. On the other
+hand, many local authorities, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth
+and sixteenth centuries, when the story was fully established, have gone
+out of their way to deny its truth and prove its entire falsity from
+their own researches. Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events
+that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies,
+whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the
+highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken
+so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly
+assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all
+contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and
+fifty or two hundred years--yet such is the case.
+
+William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds in or about
+the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474 are his acts recorded,
+when in a collection of the traditions of the Canton of Unterwalden,
+transcribed by a notary at Sarnen, an account is given of the apple
+episode and the subsequent escape of the famous archer, and his murder
+of Gessler, though nothing is said of his having taken part in a league
+to free his country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A
+little prior to the compilation of the _White Book of Sarnen_, as this
+collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a _Song of the Origin
+of the Confederation_, in which, although no reference is made to
+Gessler, the other details are related concerning William Tell shooting
+at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the expulsion of the bailies,
+and the formation of a patriotic league. It is, of course, quite
+possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was
+common enough at the time, but no member of that family--the records of
+which have now been most carefully traced--held any office under the
+Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all
+probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231.
+Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the
+castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been
+pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated
+Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly
+not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss
+hero.
+
+"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious case of
+confusion in identity. At least three totally different men seem to have
+been blended into one in the course of an attempt to reconcile the
+different versions of the three cantons. Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in
+1450, tells of a Hapsburg governor being on the little island of
+Schwanan, in the lake of Lowerz, who seduced a maid of Schwyz, and was
+killed by her brothers. Then there was another person, strictly
+historical, Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for
+the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his
+district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant
+bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler,
+writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These
+three persons were combined, and the result was named Gessler."
+
+Moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether the green plateau of the
+Ruetli below Seelisberg, and some six hundred and fifty feet above the
+lake, with its miraculous springs, ever witnessed the patriotic
+gathering of the thirty-three peasants who, tradition asserts, there
+formed the league against Austrian rule, or heard the solemn oath they
+and their leaders, Stauffacher, Fuerst, and Arnold, mutually swore.
+
+In all probability the legend of Tell and the apple originated in
+Scandinavia, and was brought by the Alemanni into Switzerland; as into
+other lands. Saxo Grammaticus, in the _Withina Saga_, places the scene
+of a very similar story in that country, some three hundred years before
+the appearance of the Swiss version, and tells of a certain Danish king
+named Harold, the counterpart of Gessler, and one Toki, who played the
+same _role_ enacted by Tell. Like legends are also related of Olaf,
+Eindridi, and an almost identical one to that of William Tell of Egil,
+who, being ordered by King Nidung to shoot an apple off the head of the
+son of the former, took two arrows from his quiver and prepared to obey.
+On the King asking why he had selected two arrows, Egil replied, "To
+shoot thee, tyrant, with the second, should the first fail."
+
+Neither are similar narratives absent from the legends of other
+countries. Thus Reginald Scott says: "Puncher shot a penny on his son's
+head, and made ready another arrow to have slain the Duke of Rengrave,
+who commanded it." So also similar incidents occur in the tales of Adam
+Bell, _Clym of the Clough_, and William of Claudeslie in the _Percy
+Ballads_, and in the legends of many places in Northern Europe. On this
+subject Sir Francis Adams mentions, in a note to his valuable book on
+the Swiss Confederation, that a well-known citizen of Berne, in answer
+to his inquiry as to whether Tell ever existed, replied: "Not in
+Switzerland. If you travel in the Hasli districts you will find a
+distinct race of men, who are of Scandinavian origin, and I believe that
+their ancestors brought the legend with them." To this it may be added
+that philologists have long since traced the rude dialect of Oberhasli
+to its Scandinavian sources, and the physical characteristics of the
+people mark them as of different racial origin from those around them.
+
+At the period these events were in progress, or, rather, about the time
+that the Austrian bailies were expelled, toward the close of the
+thirteenth century, the Emperor's[45] attention was too fully occupied
+conducting a war against the Bishop of Basel to allow him to enforce
+his authority among the revolted Waldstaette. He did not, however, allow
+the peasants for long to enjoy the fruits of their energetic and
+successful action, as some six months later he headed a large army with
+which he intended to enforce obedience. The expedition thus begun led to
+Albert's tragic death, and reared another step leading to the final
+independence of the Swiss. On reaching Baden, in the Aargau, a halt was
+made in order to deliberate on the best mode of punishing the rebels.
+Here a general council of nobles decided, after careful deliberation, on
+the route to be taken, and the nature of the measures best calculated to
+enforce Albert's authority. On May 1, 1308, the Emperor, with a few
+followers, returned to Rheinfelden, in order to visit the Empress
+Elizabeth, preparatory to marching against the Waldstaette. Shortly
+before this time Albert had had a violent quarrel with his nephew John,
+son of Duke Rudolph of Swabia, touching the youth's paternal
+inheritance, which he persistently declined to allow John to take
+possession of, and whom he had, moreover, publicly insulted by offering
+him a coronet of twigs as the only recompense for his just claims.
+
+In spite of this quarrel Albert allowed John and four of his fastest
+friends to occupy a place in his suite when he left Baden to visit his
+consort. Albert's disregard of his nephew's resentment was further shown
+when the party arrived on the bank of the Reuss, as he allowed him, with
+his friends, to accompany him in the boat in which he crossed the river.
+The passage was made in safety, but just as the Emperor was stepping on
+shore near the town of Windisch, John and three of his companions struck
+him down with their swords, and after inflicting a number of severe
+wounds left him for dead. The unhappy monarch expired a few minutes
+after in the arms of a passing peasant woman. All this bloody scene took
+place in full view of the Emperor's train on the opposite side of the
+river, though no one apparently was able to render him assistance,
+probably from the absence of boats and the suddenness of the tragedy.
+The murderers succeeded in making good their escape, though two of them
+were afterward captured and executed, as were also a number of innocent
+people believed to be participators in the conspiracy. John himself was
+more fortunate, for, disguised as a monk, he managed for many years to
+hide his identity, and, after wandering in Tuscany unsuspected,
+eventually died in a monastery at Pisa.
+
+Albert's daughter Agnes, Queen of Hungary, "a woman unacquainted with
+the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of
+devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable
+vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to
+have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and
+revenge. Aided by those in authority, who feared lest a widespread
+conspiracy had been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion,
+hundreds of innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity
+of a famished beast. Members of nearly a hundred noble families, and at
+least a thousand persons of lower rank, of every age and of both sexes,
+fell beneath her savage vengeance. She is said to have further whetted
+her appetite for horrors by wading, at Fahrwangen, in the blood of
+sixty-three innocent knights, exclaiming the while, "This day we bathe
+in May-dew." But at last, after several months, even the implacable
+bloodthirstiness of the Hungarian Queen was satisfied, and the massacre
+ceased. Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a
+monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of
+her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life,
+and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and
+here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried.
+Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and
+within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house of
+Austria.
+
+Strenuous efforts were made by Albert's widow to obtain the succession
+to the imperial throne for her son, Frederick, Duke of Austria, but the
+choice of the prince-electors, headed by the Archbishop of Mainz, fell
+on Count Henry of Luxemburg, a liberal-minded and generous noble, who
+was accordingly crowned, under the title of Henry VII. During the short
+reign of this monarch he proved himself a wise and generous friend to
+the Swiss, whose privileges he confirmed. He made no effort to reimpose
+local governors on the people of the Waldstaette, but, on the contrary,
+confirmed the charters of Schwyz and Uri, granted one to Unterwalden,
+and acknowledged jurisdiction. After Henry's death, in 1313, civil war
+once more divided the empire through the rival contentions of Ludwig
+(Louis) of Bavaria and Albert's son, Frederick of Austria. In this
+contest the powerful monastery of Einsiedeln sided with the Austrian
+candidate, and through its influence induced the Bishop of Constance to
+place the large portion of Switzerland supporting the Bavarian cause
+under a sentence of excommunication.
+
+Between Einsiedeln and the Waldstaette there had long existed a feeling
+of bitter hostility, the canons resenting the independent spirit
+displayed by the peasants, and the latter remembering the many acts of
+arbitrary oppression they and their ancestors had suffered at the
+instance of the abbey. Indeed, actual hostilities were only prevented by
+the friendly, though interested, mediation of the citizens of Zurich,
+who were most anxious to preserve tranquillity in the territories of
+both, in order to allow their trade with Italy over the St. Gothard
+being carried on. They also favored peace, because since the Hapsburgs
+had refused permission to the peasants to enter Lucerne, these had been
+in the habit of bringing their cattle and dairy produce through
+Einsiedeln to the monks of Zurich. The action of the monks, however, in
+bringing about the serious sentence of excommunication so roused the
+spirit of the mountaineers that, headed by their Landammann, Werner
+Stauffacher, they attacked and captured the abbey, ransacked the whole
+building from cellar to altar, and carried off the monks captive to the
+town of Schwyz. This daring and sacrilegious act led Frederick--the
+hereditary avoyer of the abbey--to place the Waldstaette under the
+further punishment of the "ban of the empire." Both these sentences were
+alike fruitless in bringing the peasants to submission to the house of
+Austria. Shortly after, on Ludwig ascending the throne, the "ban" was
+removed by the new monarch, and, with the aid of the Archbishop of
+Mainz, the Metropolitan of Constance in 1315, the excommunication was
+also revoked.
+
+The triumph of Ludwig's claims over those of Frederick began that long
+series of deadly conflicts between the Swiss and the house of Austria
+that led the two nations for so many years to regard each other as
+natural and implacable enemies. At this time Austria was governed by
+Duke Leopold, a man of arrogant, passionate temper, of unscrupulous
+ambition, and brutal cruelty, according to the Swiss chronicles, but
+who, from other accounts, does not appear specially to have deserved
+this character. His hatred of the Swiss was greatly increased by their
+action in opposing his brother, Frederick, in the late contest. No
+sooner, indeed, were the troubles of that contest over than he prepared
+to wreak his vengeance, and once for all crush the power and
+independence of the Forest States, and, as he declared, "trample the
+audacious rustics under his feet."
+
+Rapidly collecting his forces, Leopold soon found himself at the head of
+fifteen thousand or twenty thousand well-armed men, including a large
+body of heavily equipped cavalry. These latter were then looked upon as
+the main strength of an army. Most of the ancient nobility of Hapsburg,
+Kyburg, and Lenzburg rallied to his banners, besides many of the lesser
+nobles and a contingent from Zurich, the citizens of which, deserting
+their natural allies, had formed a treaty with Austria. Against this
+formidable array the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden were only able
+to muster some fourteen hundred men, who, however, made up for their
+want of weapons and discipline by the geographical advantages of the
+country, by their patriotism, unity, and determined bravery.
+
+Nothing now seemed to intervene between the Swiss and imminent
+destruction, when, viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days,
+the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of
+Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms,
+however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing
+came of these proposals.
+
+On November 3, 1315, Leopold's army reached Baden, where a council was
+held to determine upon the details of the campaign, a campaign having
+for its object, as the Duke openly declared, "the extirpation of the
+whole race of the people of Waldstaette." The difficulties of the
+enterprise now began to show themselves, as several of Leopold's
+followers, being well acquainted with the nature of the country and the
+characters of the inhabitants, pointed out that both would offer a
+determined resistance. Finally, relying upon their numbers and superior
+arms, it was settled to march on Schwyz, through the Sattel Pass by
+Morgarten, making Zug the base of operations; and while a false attack
+should be threatened on the side of Arth, Unterwalden should be attacked
+from Lucerne, as well as by a large force under the Count of Strasburg
+by way of the Bruenig. Leopold himself was to lead the main army and
+enter Schwyz through the pass. Had these operations remained secret, or
+been carried out successfully, the course of Swiss history would
+probably have been very different from what it was; but fortunately for
+the cause of freedom, the Austrian plans became known in time, and
+failed signally when put to the test. According to ancient chronicles,
+as the Confederates were hurrying to repel the feint from Arth, a
+friendly Austrian baron, named Henry of Huenenberg, shot an arrow amid
+them bearing the message, "Guard Morgarten on the eve of St. Othmar." Be
+this as it may, the Swiss collected their little band on the Sattel,
+between which mountain and the eastern shore of the Lake of Egeri is
+situated the ever-memorable Pass of Morgarten. Here, on the night of
+November 14th, they collected a number of loose bowlders and
+tree-trunks, and then, having offered up prayers for the preservation of
+their country, they awaited with resolution the coming struggle.
+
+With the first dawn of morning the Austrian army--the first that ever
+entered the country--made its appearance in the pass, headed by Duke
+Leopold and his formidable cavalry. Suddenly, when the whole narrow
+defile was blocked with horse and foot, thousands of heavy stones and
+trees were hurled among them from the neighboring heights, where the
+peasant band, forming the Swiss force, lay concealed. The suddenness and
+vigor of this unexpected attack quickly threw the first ranks of the
+invaders into confusion, and caused a panic to seize the horses, many of
+which in their fright turned and trampled down the men behind. Rapidly
+the panic increased as the showers of missiles came tearing down, and
+soon the whole army was in a state of wild terror and confusion--a
+condition greatly assisted by the slippery nature of the ground. Then,
+with wild shouts, and brandishing their iron-studded clubs and their
+formidable halberts and scythes, down the mountain-side rushed, with the
+fury of their native avalanche, the heroic Confederates; and falling on
+their foes literally slew them by thousands. Many hundreds of the
+Austrians perished in the lake, the men of Zurich alone making a stand,
+and falling each where he fought. Few succeeded in effecting their
+escape from what was little less than a general butchery.
+
+On that memorable day all the flower of Austria's nobility lay dead
+within the country they had hoped so easily to conquer. The Duke, with a
+handful of followers, alone survived, and even these were forced to
+undergo many perils before they eventually arrived in safety at
+Winterthur. Neither were the other attacks, under the Count of Strasburg
+and the forces from Lucerne, more successful for the invaders. Both
+armies were repulsed with enormous loss by the men of Unterwalden, who
+gave no quarter, many of their opponents being their own countrymen from
+the estates of the abbey of Interlaken. After these signal victories the
+Swiss, according to ancient custom, offered up a solemn thanksgiving to
+almighty God for their success and the overthrow of their enemies; and
+then, having laden themselves with the spoils of the dead, they returned
+to their humble occupations, whence the defence of their country and
+their lives had called them away. Among the Swiss, Morgarten has always
+taken the first place in the long record of heroic victories that since
+1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms second to none in Europe. This
+victory at once brought the Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and
+placed them in the front rank as powerful and respected states in
+Switzerland.
+
+Leopold, on his return to Austria, was so satisfied with the ability of
+the "audacious rustics" to defend themselves that he made no further
+attempt to enter their country.
+
+
+
+
+BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN
+
+A.D. 1314
+
+ANDREW LANG
+
+
+  After the submission of Scotland in 1303, at the end of
+  Wallace's heroic struggle, Edward I undertook to complete
+  the union of that kingdom with England. "But the great
+  difficulty," says a historian, "in dealing with the Scots
+  was that they never knew when they were conquered; and just
+  when Edward hoped that his scheme for union was carried out,
+  they rose in arms once more."
+
+  The Scottish leader now was Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale
+  and Earl of Carrick. He had acted with Wallace, but
+  afterward swore fealty to Edward. Still later he united with
+  William Lamberton, Bishop of St. Andrews, against the
+  English King. Edward heard of their compact while Bruce was
+  in London, and the Scot fled to Dumfries. There, 1306, in
+  the Church of the Gray Friars, he had an interview with John
+  Comyn, called the Red Comyn--Bruce's rival for the Scottish
+  throne--which ended in a violent altercation and the killing
+  of Comyn by Bruce with a dagger. Next to the Baliols, Bruce
+  was now nearest heir to the throne, and March 27, 1306, he
+  was crowned.
+
+  Edward now determined to take more vigorous measures than
+  ever against the Scots. He denounced as traitors all who had
+  participated in the murder of Comyn, and declared that all
+  persons taken in arms would be put to death. He made great
+  preparations for subduing Scotland, but while leading his
+  army into that country, 1307, he died at Burgh-on-the-Sands,
+  near Carlisle.
+
+  Meanwhile Bruce, who ranks with Wallace as a Scottish hero,
+  had suffered some reverses at the hands of the English.
+  Under the Earl of Pembroke, in 1306, they took Perth and
+  drove Bruce into the wilds of Athol. In the same year, at
+  Dairy, Bruce was defeated by Comyn's uncle, Macdougal, Lord
+  of Lorn, and escaped to Ireland. But in 1307 Bruce returned
+  to Scotland and carried on the war against Edward II. The
+  English were driven out of the strong places one by one; war
+  alternated with diplomacy through several years; and at last
+  came a crisis which roused the English government to a
+  supreme effort.
+
+  Stirling castle still held out, besieged by Edward Bruce,
+  Robert's brother, 1313, but its surrender was promised by
+  Mowbray, the governor, in the event of his not being
+  relieved before June 24, 1314. The relieving of Stirling
+  meant for the English a new invasion of Scotland. On both
+  sides the strongest efforts were made--on the one side to
+  relieve the castle, on the other to strengthen its
+  besiegers. The opposing forces met in battle at
+  Bannockburn, June 24, 1314, an action which has never been
+  better described than in this characteristic recital by
+  Professor Lang.
+
+Bannockburn, like the relief of Orleans, or Marathon, was one of the
+decisive battles of the world. History hinged upon it. If England had
+won, Scotland might have dwindled into the condition of Ireland--for
+Edward II was not likely to aim at a statesmanlike policy of union, in
+his father's manner. Could Scotland have accepted union at the first
+Edward's hands; could he have refrained from his mistreatment as we must
+think it of Baliol, the fortunes of the isle of Britain might have been
+happier. But had Scotland been trodden down at Bannockburn, the fortunes
+of the isle might well have been worse.
+
+The singular and certain fact is that Bannockburn was fought on a point
+of chivalry, on a rule in a game. England must "touch bar," relieve
+Stirling, as in some child's pastime. To the securing of the castle, the
+central gate of Scotland, north and south, England put forth her full
+strength. Bruce had no choice but to concentrate all the power of a now,
+at last, united realm, and stand just where he did stand. His enemies
+knew his purpose: by May 27th writs informed England that the Scots were
+gathering on heights and morasses inaccessible to cavalry. If ever
+Edward showed energy, it was in preparing for the appointed Midsummer
+Day of 1314. The _Rotuli Scotiae_ contain several pages of his demands
+for men, horses, wines, hay, grain, provisions, and ships. Endless
+letters were sent to master mariners and magistrates of towns. The King
+appealed to his beloved Irish chiefs, O'Donnells, O'Flyns, O'Hanlens,
+MacMahons, M'Carthys, Kellys, O'Reillys, and O'Briens, and to _Hiberniae
+Magnates, Anglico genere ortos_, Butlers, Blounts, De Lacys, Powers, and
+Russels. John of Argyll was made admiral of the western fleet, and was
+asked to conciliate the Islesmen, who, under Angus Og, were rallying to
+Bruce. The numbers of men engaged on either side in this war cannot be
+ascertained. Each kingdom had a year within which to muster and arm.
+
+  "Then all that worthy were to fight
+  Of Scotland, set all hale their might;"
+
+while Barbour makes Edward assemble not only
+
+        "His own chivalry
+  That was so great it was ferly,"
+
+but also knights of France and Hainault, Bretagne and Gascony, Wales,
+Ireland, and Aquitaine. The whole English force is said to have exceeded
+one hundred thousand, forty thousand of whom were cavalry, including
+three thousand horses "barded from counter to tail," armed against
+stroke of sword or point of spear. The baggage train was endless,
+bearing tents, harness, "and apparel of chamber and hall," wine, wax,
+and all the luxuries of Edward's manner of campaigning, including
+_animalia_, perhaps lions. Thus the English advanced from Berwick,
+
+  "Banners rightly fairly flaming,
+   And pencels to the wind waving."
+
+On June 23d Bruce heard that the English host had streamed out of
+Edinburgh, where the dismantled castle was no safe hold, and were
+advancing on Falkirk. Bruce had summoned Scotland to tryst in Torwood,
+whence he could retreat at pleasure, if, after all, retreat he must. The
+Fiery Cross, red with blood of a sacrificed goat, must have flown
+through the whole of the Celticland. Lanarkshire, Douglasdale, and
+Ettrick Forest were mustered under the banner of Douglas, the mullets
+not yet enriched with the royal heart. The men of Moray followed their
+new earl, Randolph, the adventurous knight who scaled the rock of the
+castle of the Maidens. Renfrewshire, Bute, and Ayr were under the _fesse
+chequy_ of young Walter Stewart. Bruce had gathered his own Carrick men,
+and Angus Og led the wild levies of the Isles. Of stout spearmen and
+fleet-footed clansmen Bruce had abundance; but what were his archers to
+the archers of England, or his five hundred horse under Keith the
+mareschal, to the rival knights of England, Hainault, Guienne, and
+Almayne?
+
+Battles, however, are won by heads, as well as by hearts and hands. The
+victor of Glen Trool and Cruachen and London Hill knew every move in the
+game, while Randolph and Douglas were experts in making one man do the
+work of five. Bruce, too, had choice of ground, and the ground suited
+him well.
+
+To reach Stirling the English must advance by their left, along the
+so-called German way, through the village of St. Nian's, or by their
+right, through the Carse, partly enclosed, and much broken, in drainless
+days, by reedy lochans. Bruce did not make his final dispositions till
+he learned that the English meant to march by the former route. He then
+chose ground where his front was defended, first by the little burn of
+Bannock, which at one point winds through a cleugh with steep banks, and
+next by two morasses, Halbert's bog and Milton bog. What is now arable
+ground may have been a loch in old days, and these two marshes were then
+impassable by a column of attack.
+
+Between Charter's Hall--where Edward had his head-quarters--and Park's
+Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in
+scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land.
+By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These
+approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and
+even by caltrops to maim the horses. He determined to fight on foot, the
+wooded country being difficult for horsemen, and the foe being
+infinitely superior in cavalry. His army was arranged in four "battles,"
+with Randolph to lead the vaward and watch against any attempt to throw
+cavalry into Stirling. Edward Bruce commanded the division on the right,
+next the Torwood. Walter Stewart, a lad, with Douglas led the third
+division. Bruce himself and Angus Og, with the men of Carrick and the
+Celts, were in the rear. Bruce had no mind to take the offensive, and as
+at the Battle of the Standard, to open the fight with a charge of
+impetuous mountaineers. On Sunday morning mass was said, and men shrived
+them.
+
+  "They thought to die in the melee,
+   Or else to set their country free."
+
+They ate but bread and water, for it was the vigil of St. John. News
+came that the English had moved out of Falkirk, and Douglas and the
+Steward brought tidings of the great and splendid host that was rolling
+north. Bruce bade them make little of it in the hearing of the army.
+
+Meanwhile Philip de Mowbray, who commanded in Stirling, had ridden
+forth to meet and counsel Edward. His advice was to come no nearer;
+perhaps a technical relief was held to have already been secured by the
+presence of the army.
+
+Mowbray was not heard--"the young men" would not listen. Gloucester,
+with the van, entered the park, where he was met, as we shall see, and
+Clifford, Beaumont, and Sir Thomas Grey, with three hundred horsemen,
+skirted the wood where Randolph was posted, a clear way lying before
+them to the castle of Stirling. Bruce had seen this movement, and told
+Randolph that "a rose of his chaplet was fallen," the phrase attesting
+the King's love of chivalrous romance. To pursue horsemen with infantry
+seemed vain enough; but Randolph moved out of cover, thinking perhaps
+that knights adventurous would refuse no chance to fight. If this was
+his thought, he reckoned well. Beaumont cried to his knights, "Give
+ground, leave them fair field." Grey hinted that the Scots were in too
+great force, and Beaumont answered, "If you fear, fly!" "Sir," said Sir
+Thomas, "for fear I fly not this day!" and so spurred in between
+Beaumont and D'Eyncourt and galloped on the spears. D'Eyncourt was
+slain, Grey was unhorsed and taken. The three hundred lances of Beaumont
+then circled Randolph's spearmen round about on every side, but the
+spears kept back the horses. Swords, maces, and knives were thrown; all
+was done as by the French cavalry against the British squares at
+Waterloo, and all as vainly. The hedge of steel was unbroken, and, in
+the hot sun of June, a mist of dust and heat brooded over the battle.
+
+          "Sic mirkness
+  In the air above them was"
+
+as when the sons of Thetis and the Dawn fought under the walls of windy
+Troy. Douglas beheld the distant cloud, and rode to Bruce, imploring
+leave to hurry to Randolph's aid. "I will not break my ranks for him,"
+said Bruce; yet Douglas had his will. But the English wavered, seeing
+his line advance, and thereon Douglas halted his men, lest Randolph
+should lose renown. Beholding this the spearmen of Randolph, in their
+turn, charged and drove the weary English horse and their disheartened
+riders.
+
+Meanwhile Edward had halted his main force to consider whether they
+should fight or rest. But Gloucester's party, knowing nothing of his
+halt, had advanced into the wooded park; and Bruce rode down to the
+right in his armor, and with a gold coronal on his basnet, but mounted
+on a mere palfrey. To the front of the English van, under Gloucester and
+Hereford, rode Sir Henry Bohun, a bow-shot beyond his company.
+Recognizing the King, who was arraying his ranks, Bohun sped down upon
+him, apparently hoping to take him.
+
+  "He thought that he should dwell lightly,
+   Win him, and have him at his will."
+
+But Bruce, in this fatal movement, when history hung on his hand and
+eye, uprose in his stirrups and clove Bohun's helmet, the axe breaking
+in that stroke. It was a desperate but a winning blow: Bruce's spears
+advanced, and the English van withdrew in half superstitious fear of the
+omen. His lords blamed Bruce, but
+
+  "The King has answer made them none,
+   But turned upon the axe-shaft, wha
+   Was with the stroke broken in twa."
+
+"_Initium malorum hoc_" ("This was the beginning of evil"), says the
+English chronicler.
+
+After this double success in the Quatre Bras of the Scottish Waterloo,
+Bruce, according to Barbour, offered to his men their choice of
+withdrawal or of standing it out. The great general might well be of
+doubtful mind--was to-morrow to bring a second and a more fatal Falkirk?
+The army of Scotland was protected, as Wallace's army at Falkirk had
+been, by difficult ground. But the English archers might again rain
+their blinding showers of shafts into the broad mark offered by the
+clumps of spears, and again the English knights might break through the
+shaken ranks. Bruce had but a few squadrons of horse--could they be
+trusted to scatter the bowmen of the English forests, and to escape a
+flank charge from the far heavier cavalry of Edward? On the whole, was
+not the old strategy best, the strategy of retreat? So Bruce may have
+pondered. He had brought his men to the ring, and they voted for
+dancing. Meanwhile the English rested on a marshy plain
+"_outre_-Bannockburn" in sore discomfiture, says Gray. He must mean south
+of Bannockburn, taking the point of view of his father, at that hour
+captive in Bruce's camp. He tells us that the Scots meant to retire
+"into the Lennox, a right strong country"--this confirms, in a way,
+Barbour's tale of Bruce suggesting retreat--when Sir Alexander Seton,
+deserting Edward's camp, advised Bruce of the English lack of spirit,
+and bade him face the foe next day. To retire, indeed, was Bruce's, as
+it had been Wallace's, natural policy. The English would soon be
+distressed for want of supplies; on the other hand, they had clearly
+made no arrangements for an orderly retreat if they lost the day; with
+Bruce this was a motive for fighting them. The advice of Seton
+prevailed; the Scots would stand their ground.
+
+The sun of Midsummer Day rose on the rite of the mass done in front of
+the Scottish lines. Men breakfasted, and Bruce knighted Douglas, the
+Steward, and other of his nobles. The host then moved out of the wood,
+and the standards rose above the spears of the soldiers. Edward Bruce
+held the right wing; Randolph the centre; the left, under Douglas and
+the Steward, rested of St. Ninian's. Bruce, as he had arranged, was in
+reserve with Carrick and the Isles. "Will these men fight?" asked
+Edward, and Sir Ingram assured him that such was their intent. He
+advised that the English should make a feigned retreat, when the Scots
+would certainly break their ranks--
+
+  "Then prick we on them hardily."
+
+Edward rejected his old ruse, which probably would not have beguiled the
+Scottish leader. The Scots then knelt for a moment of prayer, as the
+Abbot of Inchafray bore the crucifix along the line; but they did not
+kneel to Edward. His van, under Gloucester, fell on Edward Bruce's
+division, where there was hand-to-hand fighting, broken lances, dying
+chargers, the rear ranks of Gloucester pressing vainly on the front
+ranks, unable to deploy for the straitness of the ground.
+
+Meanwhile, Randolph's men moved forward slowly with extended spears, "as
+they were plunged in the sea" of charging knights. Douglas and the
+Steward were also engaged, and the "hideous shower" of arrows was ever
+raining from the bows of England. This must have been the crisis of the
+fight, according to Barbour, and Bruce bade Keith with his five hundred
+horse charge the English archers on the flank. The bowmen do not seem to
+have been defended by pikes; they fell beneath the lances of the
+mareschal, as the archers of Ettrick had fallen at Falkirk. The Scottish
+archers now took heart, and loosed into the crowded and reeling ranks of
+England, while the flying bowmen of the south clashed against and
+confused the English charge. Then Scottish archers took to their steel
+sparths--who ever loved to come to hand strokes--and hewed into the mass
+of the English, so that the field, whither Bruce brought up his reserves
+to support Edward Bruce on the right, was a mass of wild, confused
+fighting. In this mellay the great body of the English army could deal
+no stroke, swaying helplessly as southern knights or northern spears won
+some feet of ground. So, in the space between Halbert's bog and the
+burn, the mellay rang and wavered, the long spears of the Scottish ranks
+unbroken and pushing forward, the ground before them so covered with
+fallen men and horses that the English advance was clogged and crushed
+between the resistance in front and the pressure behind.
+
+"God will have a stroke in every fight," says the romance of Malory.
+While the discipline was lost, and England was trusting to sheer weight
+and "who will pound longest," a fresh force, banners displayed, was seen
+rushing down the Gillies' Hill, beyond the Scottish right. The English
+could deem no less than that this multitude were tardy levies from
+beyond the Spey, above all when the slogans rang out from the fresh
+advancing host. It was a body of yeomen, shepherds, and camp-followers,
+who could no longer remain and gaze when fighting and plunder were in
+sight. With blankets fastened to cut saplings for banner-poles, they ran
+down to the conflict. The King saw them, and well knew that the moment
+had come: he pealed his ensenye--called his battle-cry--faint hearts of
+England failed; men turned, trampling through the hardy warriors who
+still stood and died; the knights who rode at Edward's rein strove to
+draw him toward the castle of Stirling. But now the foremost knights of
+Edward Bruce's division, charging on foot, had fought their way to the
+English King and laid hands on the rich trappings of his horse. Edward
+cleared his way with strokes of his mace; his horse was stabbed, but a
+fresh mount was found for him. Even Sir Giles de Argentine, the best
+knight on ground, bade Edward fly to Stirling castle. "For me, I am not
+of custom to fly," he said, "nor shall I do so now. God keep you!"
+Thereon he spurred into the press, crying "Argentine!" and died among
+the spears.
+
+None held his ground for England. The burn was choked with fallen men
+and horses, so that folk might pass dry-shod over it. The country people
+fell on and slew. If Bruce had possessed more cavalry, not an Englishman
+would have reached the Tweed. Edward, as Argentine bade him, rode to
+Stirling, but Mowbray told him that there he would be but a captive
+king. He spurred south, with five hundred horse, Douglas following with
+sixty, so close that no Englishman might alight, but was slain or taken.
+Laurence de Abernethy, with eighty horse, was riding to join the
+English, but turned, and with Douglas, pursued them. Edward reached
+Dunbar, whence he took boat for Berwick. In his terror he vowed to build
+a college of Carmelites, students in theology. It is Oriel College
+to-day, with a Scot for provost. Among those who fell on the English
+side were the son of Comyn, Gloucester, Clifford, Harcourt, Courtenay,
+and seven hundred other gentlemen of coat-armor were slain. Hereford
+(later), with Angus, Umfraville, and Sir Thomas Grey, was among the
+prisoners. Stirling, of course, surrendered.
+
+The sun of Midsummer Day set on men wounded and weary, but victorious
+and free. The task of Wallace was accomplished. To many of the
+combatants not the least agreeable result of Bannockburn was the
+unprecedented abundance of the booty. When campaigning Edward denied
+himself nothing. His wardrobe and arms; his enormous and apparently
+well-supplied array of food wagons; his ecclesiastical vestments for the
+celebration of victory; his plate; his siege artillery; his military
+chests, with all the jewelry of his young minion knights, fell into the
+hands of the Scots. Down to Queen Mary's reign we read, in inventories,
+about costly vestments "from the fight at Bannockburn." In Scotland it
+rained ransoms. The _Rotuli Scotiae_, in 1314 full of Edward's
+preparation for war, in 1315 are rich in safe-conducts for men going
+into Scotland to redeem prisoners. One of these, the brave Sir Marmaduke
+Twenge, renowned at Stirling bridge, hid in the woods on Midsummer's
+Night, and surrendered to Bruce next day. The King gave him gifts and
+set him free unransomed. Indeed, the clemency of Bruce after his success
+is courteously acknowledged by the English chroniclers.
+
+This victory was due to Edward's incompetence, as well as to the
+excellent dispositions and indomitable courage of Bruce, and to "the
+intolerable axes" of his men. No measures had been taken by Edward to
+secure a retreat. Only one rally, at "the Bloody Fauld," is reported.
+The English fought widely, their measures being laid on the strength of
+a confidence which, after the skirmishes of Sunday, June 23d, they no
+longer entertained. They suffered what, at Agincourt, Crecy, Poitiers,
+and Verneuil, their descendants were to inflict. Horses and banners, gay
+armor and chivalric trappings, were set at naught by the sperthes and
+spears of infantry acting on favorable ground. From the dust and reek of
+that burning day of June, Scotland emerged a people, firm in a glorious
+memory. Out of weakness she was made strong, being strangely led through
+paths of little promise since the day when Bruce's dagger-stroke at
+Dumfries closed from him the path of returning.
+
+
+
+
+EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS
+
+BURNING OF GRAND MASTER MOLAY
+
+A.D. 1314
+
+F. C. WOODHOUSE   H. H. MILMAN
+
+
+  The quarrel between Philip the Fair of France and Pope
+  Boniface VIII, concerning the taxation of the clergy, and
+  the right of nomination to vacant bishoprics within the
+  dominions of Philip, had far-reaching effects. It led, in
+  1302, to the convocation of the first properly so-called
+  Parliament in France, to offset the actions of the Pope, who
+  excommunicated the King; and also to an expedition into
+  Italy of a small body of French troops which made the Pope
+  prisoner at Agnani, but were subsequently expelled with
+  great loss of life. The Pope was reinstated, but died
+  shortly afterward from brain fever; he was succeeded by
+  Benedict XI, whom the King of France sought to placate, but
+  unsuccessfully. Within nine months Benedict died, presumably
+  from poison, and Philip, by his intrigues, was enabled to
+  secure the election to the pontificate of Bertrand de Goth,
+  who became pope as Clement V, and was pledged to the service
+  of the French King.
+
+  Philip, who had obstructed the operations of commerce by
+  debasing the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the
+  state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited
+  by the wealth of the order of Knights Templars, and,
+  emboldened by his successes over the spiritual power, he now
+  entered upon the career of intrigue which resulted in the
+  destruction and plunder of the order.
+
+  The famous Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, founded in 1118
+  by a small band of nine French knights, sworn to protect
+  Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre, had become, in
+  almost every kingdom of the West, a powerful, wealthy,
+  semimilitary, semimonastic republic, governed by its own
+  laws, animated by the closest corporate spirit, under the
+  severest internal discipline, an all-pervading organization,
+  independent alike of the civil power and of the spiritual
+  hierarchy.
+
+  During two centuries as crusaders, the knights fought
+  valiantly and shed their blood in defence of the Sepulchre
+  of our Lord, earning the devout admiration of Western
+  Christendom, and receiving splendid endowments of lands,
+  castles, and riches of all kinds as contributions to the
+  cause of the holy wars.
+
+  But despite their valor, Mahometan persistency prevailed,
+  and the total expulsion of the Templars, with the rest of
+  the Christian establishments from Palestine, followed the
+  downfall of Acre in 1291.
+
+
+F. C. WOODHOUSE
+
+The loss of Palestine led indirectly to the ruin of the order of the
+Templars. The record is one of the dark episodes of history, encompassed
+with contradictions, full of surprises, painful to contemplate, whatever
+view may be taken, whichever side espoused.
+
+It is difficult to understand how an order of men who for nearly two
+hundred years earned the thanks and praise of Christendom for their
+bravery and devotion; who had shed blood like water to defend the places
+dearest to all Christian hearts; who had been recruited from the noblest
+families in every country in Europe, and had had princes of royal blood
+in their ranks; who claimed to act upon the purest and most exalted
+Christian principles; and who proved the sincerity of their professions
+by their lives of self-sacrifice, and their deaths, for the cause they
+had taken up; who had been honored and favored and dowered with gifts
+and privileges, in gratitude for their exploits--should suddenly have
+fallen into the blackest crimes. So it is no less difficult to
+understand how public opinion should turn against them as it did, and
+how all Europe should set itself to disgrace and despoil, to malign and
+execrate, those who had so long been its favorites and its champions. It
+is not easy to understand this, and it is painful to read the story in
+its sad and miserable details.
+
+But there are other pages of history that more or less correspond with
+this; and there are well-known characteristics of human nature that
+explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been
+found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and
+powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible
+and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy
+members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and
+crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and
+prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation. Then, too,
+facts may be perverted, circumstances may be made to bear a meaning
+that does not really belong to them, and fear and torture may force the
+weak to say anything that they are required. And, finally, the evidence
+and the judgment of those who have everything to gain by the
+condemnation of those whom they accuse, must always be viewed with
+suspicion by sober and truth-loving minds. Moreover, in judging the
+Templars, we must not forget the lapse of time and the change of
+circumstances that separate our age from theirs.
+
+After the loss of Acre a chapter of the surviving Templars was gathered,
+and James de Molay, preceptor of England, was elected grand master. One
+more attempt was made to recover a footing in the Holy Land, but it was
+defeated with great loss to the order, and all hope of restoring the
+Latin kingdom in Palestine seems to have been abandoned. The occupation
+of the Templars was gone. They had been banded together to fight upon
+the sacred soil of Palestine, and to defend pilgrims, but now they had
+been driven out of the country, and they could no longer execute their
+mission or fulfil their vows. We soon hear of them being engaged in
+civil or international wars, which seems to be a violation of their oath
+not to draw sword upon any Christian. Thus we read of Templars fighting
+on the side of the King of England, in the battle of Falkirk, 1298, and
+similar occurrences are recorded in the French wars of the time. Those
+against whom the Templars fought would not be slow to complain of them.
+
+But the real cause of the downfall of the Templars was probably the
+enormous wealth of the order. There had not been wanting indications for
+some years of covetous eyes and itching hands turned toward the
+possession of the Knights. Sometimes complaints were made because the
+rents of their estates were all sent out of the country; sometimes the
+grievance alleged was that they were exempted from paying taxes and
+other levies, civil and ecclesiastical. Sometimes open acts of
+spoliation were committed upon their property, and that even by royal
+hands.
+
+But it was in France that the final attack was made. Philip the Fair was
+king at this time, a man of bad character and unscrupulous as to the
+means by which he attained his ends. The country was exhausted and the
+treasury empty, and the idea seems to have occurred to him, as it did
+later to Henry VIII of England under similar circumstances, that an easy
+way to fill his own purse was to put his hand into the purses of others.
+But even kings cannot appropriate the property of a religious order
+without offering some apology or justification to the world. And so it
+began to be whispered that the Holy Land would never have been lost to
+Christendom if its sworn defenders had not failed in their Christian
+character. The whole blame of the defeat of the crusades was laid upon
+the Templars. It was said they had treacherously betrayed the Christian
+cause, that they had treated with the enemy, and by their personal sins,
+especially by secret, unhallowed rites, had provoked the just wrath of
+God, and so brought about the ruin of the dominion of the Cross in the
+East.
+
+When Ahab has determined to put Naboth to death, that he may seize his
+coveted vineyard, it is not difficult to find witness that he is a
+blasphemer of God and a traitor to the King; and so Philip found his
+first tool in a man guilty of a multitude of crimes, who secured his own
+pardon by a denunciation of the Templars.
+
+But even a king could not ruin a great religious order without the aid
+of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Templars had always been favored
+and protected by the popes, and nothing was in itself so likely to evoke
+that protection again as an attack upon the order by the secular powers.
+But Philip was prepared for this. The Pope of the day, Clement V, had
+been a subject of his own. As bishop of Bordeaux, he owed his election
+to the pontificate to Philip's own intrigues, and had been easily
+induced to quit Rome and live in France, so as to be more completely
+under the dictation of the King. Moreover, the majority of the cardinals
+were also French and entirely devoted to the King's interests.
+
+Clement V was one of the worst of those miserable men who have from time
+to time disgraced the papal chair, and was guilty of almost every crime.
+There are, indeed, authorities worthy of credit who assert that before
+his election he had been made to promise to perform six favors to the
+King, and that the last was not to be divulged till the time for its
+execution came. This last was then found to be the suppression of the
+order of the Templars. There was no difficulty, under these
+circumstances, in getting the so-called sanction of the Church for an
+inquiry into the crimes of which the Templars were accused.
+
+Accordingly, in 1307, Philip issued letters to his officers throughout
+the kingdom, commanding them to seize all the Templars on a certain day,
+that they might be tried for crimes of which he and the Pope had
+satisfied themselves they were guilty. They had apostatized from the
+Christian religion, worshipped idols in their secret meetings, and had
+been guilty of horrible and shameful offences against God, the Church,
+the State, and humanity itself. Philip professed the most pious horror
+at what he had discovered; he lamented the grievous necessity laid upon
+him, and urged upon the guilty men the expediency of a full and
+immediate confession of their wicked doings as the only way to secure
+pardon and escape the just and extreme penalty of such outrageous
+wickedness.
+
+It was during the night of October 13, 1307, that the King's orders were
+executed. Every house of the Templars in the dominions of the King of
+France was suddenly surrounded by a strong force, and all the Knights
+and members of the order were simultaneously taken prisoners.
+
+At the same time a strenuous endeavor was made to arouse popular
+indignation against the order. The regular and secular clergy were
+commanded to preach against the Templars, and to describe the horrible
+enormities that were practised among them. It is incredible to us in
+these days that such charges should be made, and still more that they
+should actually be believed. It was said that the Templars worshipped
+some hideous idol in their secret assemblies, that they offered
+sacrifices to it of infants and young girls, and that although every one
+saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties,
+people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak
+intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene
+orgies.
+
+It was hoped that some confession of guilt might be readily obtained
+from some of the weaker brethren in order to receive the pardon which
+was promised by the King. But no such confession was made. All the
+prisoners denied the charges brought against them. Then the usual
+mediaeval expedient was resorted to, and torture was used to extort
+acknowledgments of guilt. The unhappy Templars in Paris were handed over
+to the tender mercies of the tormentors with the usual results. One
+hundred and forty were subjected to trial by fire.
+
+The details preserved are almost too horrible to be related. The feet of
+some were fastened close to a hot fire till the very flesh and even the
+bones were consumed. Others were suspended by their limbs, and heavy
+weights attached to them to make the agony more intense. Others were
+deprived of their teeth; and every cruelty that a horrible ingenuity
+could invent was used.
+
+While this was going on, questions were asked, and offers of pardon were
+made if they would acknowledge themselves or others guilty of the
+monstrous wickednesses which were detailed to them. At the same time
+forged letters were read, purporting to come from the grand master
+himself, exhorting them to make a full confession, and declarations were
+made of the confessions which were said to have been already freely
+given by other members of the order.
+
+What wonder, then, that the usual consequences followed. Those who had
+strong will and indomitable courage stood firm and endured the slow
+martyrdom till death released them, maintaining to the last their own
+innocence, and the innocence of their order, of the crimes with which
+they were charged. But some weaker men broke down. In hope of release
+from the agony which they could not endure, they confessed anything and
+everything that was required of them, and these things were at once
+written down as grave facts and made matter of accusation of others.
+Often these unhappy men almost immediately recanted, and as soon as the
+torture ceased withdrew their confessions, and repeated their original
+denial of the accusations one and all.
+
+We have long ago ceased to set any value upon confessions extorted by
+torture, and the system has happily been abolished by all civilized
+nations, but in those days this was not understood; torture was relied
+upon as a means of extracting truth from unwilling witnesses when all
+other means failed; indeed, it was simpler and more expeditious than the
+calling of many witnesses, the testing of evidence by cross-examination,
+and other surer but slower methods; and especially when conviction, not
+truth, was the end in view, torture was a welcome and efficacious ally.
+
+All this was but too sadly exemplified in the proceedings against the
+Templars in France. No sooner were those who had made confessions of
+guilt while under torture released from their tormentors than they
+disavowed their forced admissions and proclaimed their innocence and the
+purity of their order, appealing to history and the testimony of their
+own day for evidence of their courage and devotion to the Catholic
+faith.
+
+Upon hearing of this Philip immediately ordered the rearrest of the
+Templars, and, proceeding against them as relapsed heretics, they were
+condemned to be burned alive. In Paris alone one hundred and thirteen
+suffered this terrible punishment, and many more were burned in other
+towns. In Spain, Portugal, and Germany, proceedings were taken against
+the order; their property was confiscated, and in some cases torture was
+used; but it is remarkable that it was only in France, and in those
+places where Philip's influence was powerful, that any Templar was
+actually put to death.
+
+Everywhere else the monstrous charges were declared to be unproved, and
+the order was declared innocent of heresy and sacrilegious rites.
+
+In October, 1311, a council was held at Vienna to dissolve the Order of
+the Temple, but the majority of the bishops were decidedly opposed to
+such a proceeding against so ancient and illustrious an order, till its
+members had been heard in their own defence in a fair and open trial.
+The Pope was furious at this and dismissed the council, and in the
+following year, 1312, by a papal brief, abolished the order and forbade
+its reconstitution. The property of the order in France was nominally
+made over to the Hospitallers, but Philip laid claim to an immense sum
+for the expenses of the prosecution, and by this and other means he
+obtained what he had all along desired--the greatest part of the
+possessions of the order. Similar proceedings took place in other
+countries. In some, new orders were founded in the place of the
+Templars, with the sovereign at their head, by which means the estates
+came into the possession of the Crown as completely as if they had
+been actually confiscated.
+
+In France the Templars who survived their torture and the horrors of
+their prisons were either executed or left to linger out a miserable
+existence in their dungeons till death released them. The grand master
+and a few other brethren of the highest rank were thus kept in prison
+for five years. They were then taken to Notre Dame in Paris, and
+required to give verbal assent to the confessions which had been
+extorted from them under torture. But the grand master, James de Molay,
+the grand preceptor, and some others seized the opportunity of declaring
+their innocence, and disowning the alleged confessions as forgeries. The
+old veterans stood up in the church before the assembled multitude, and,
+raising their chained hands to heaven, declared that whatever had been
+confessed to the detriment of the illustrious order was only forced from
+them by extreme agony and fear of death, and that they solemnly and
+finally repudiated and revoked all such admissions.
+
+On hearing of this, Philip ordered their immediate execution, and the
+same evening the last grand master of the Temple and his faithful
+comrades were burned to death at a slow fire.
+
+Impartial men had formed their own judgment, and a very strong feeling
+prevailed that justice had not been done. It was remarked that those who
+had been foremost in the proceedings against the Templars came to a
+speedy and miserable end. The Pope, the kings of France and of England,
+and others, all soon followed their victims and died violent or shameful
+deaths.
+
+We have somewhat anticipated the order of events, and must return to the
+earlier stage of the proceedings against the Templars. As soon as Philip
+had determined upon his own course of action, he desired to find
+countenance for it by stirring up other sovereigns to imitate it. He
+therefore wrote letters to the kings of other European states, informing
+them of his discovery of the guilt of the Templars, and urging them to
+adopt a similar course in their own dominions. The Pope, too, summoned
+the grand master to France, but with every mark of respect, and so got
+him into his power before the terrible proceedings against the members
+of his order were made public.
+
+The King of England, Edward II, acted with prudence. He expressed his
+unbounded astonishment at the contents of the French King's letter, and
+at the particulars detailed to him by an agent specially sent to him by
+Philip, but he would do no more at the time than promise that the matter
+should receive his serious attention in due course.
+
+He wrote at the same time to the kings of Portugal, Aragon, Castile, and
+Sicily, telling them of the extraordinary information he had received
+respecting the Templars, and declaring his unwillingness to believe the
+dreadful charges brought against them. He referred to the services
+rendered to Christendom by the order, and to its unblemished reputation
+ever since it was founded. He urged upon his fellow-sovereigns that
+nothing should be done in haste, but that inquiry should be made in due
+and solemn legal form, expressing his belief that the order was
+guiltless of the crimes alleged against it, and that the charges were
+merely the result of slander and envy and of a desire to appropriate the
+property of the order.
+
+At the same time Edward wrote to the Pope in similar terms. He declared
+that the Templars were universally respected by all classes throughout
+his dominions as pious and upright men, and begged the Pope to promote a
+just inquiry which should free the order from the unjust slander and
+injuries to which it was being subjected. But hardly was this letter
+despatched than Edward received another from the Pope, which had crossed
+his own on its way, calling upon him to imitate Philip, King of France,
+in proceeding against the Templars. The Pope professed great distress
+and astonishment that an order that had so long enjoyed the respect and
+gratitude of the Church for its worthy deeds in defence of the faith
+should have fallen into grievous and perfidious apostasy. He then
+narrated the commendable zeal of the King of France in rooting out the
+secrets of these men's hidden wickedness, and gave particulars of some
+of their confessions of the crimes with which they had been charged. He
+concluded by commanding the King of England to pursue a similar course,
+to seize and imprison all members of the order on one day, and to hold,
+in the Pope's name, all the property of the order till it should be
+determined how it was to be disposed of.
+
+King Edward, notwithstanding his recent declaration of confidence in the
+integrity of the Templars, yielded obedience to this missive of the
+Pope. Whether he was overawed by the authority of the Pontiff, and
+deferred his own opinion to that of so great a personage, or whether, as
+some suppose, he desired to give the Templars a fair and honorable
+trial, and the opportunity of clearing themselves; or whether he gave
+way to the evil counsels of those who whispered that the great wealth of
+the Templars would be useful to the Crown, and that he might avail
+himself of the opportunity of taking all--as his predecessors had taken
+some--of their treasure; whatever may have been his real motive, and the
+cause of his change of conduct, it is certain that he issued an order
+for the arrest of the Templars, and the seizure of all their estates,
+houses, and property.
+
+The greatest caution and secrecy were adopted. Instructions were sent to
+all the sheriffs throughout England to hold themselves in readiness to
+execute certain orders which would be given to them by trusty persons on
+that day. Similar arrangements were made in Scotland, Ireland, and
+Wales; and on January 8, 1308, every Templar was simultaneously
+arrested.
+
+It was not till October in the following year that any trial took place.
+All this time the Templars had been suffering the miseries of
+imprisonment. More than two hundred men of high rank, many of them
+veterans who had fought and bled in Palestine, and who were now grown
+old and feeble after a life of hardship and privation, maimed with
+wounds, bronzed with exposure to the Eastern sun, languished under the
+tender mercies of jailers, with no opportunity of defending themselves
+or of raising up friends to say a word for them. Some were foreigners
+who happened to be in England on the business of the order. A few
+managed to evade the vigilance of the King's emissaries, notwithstanding
+the secrecy and suddenness of the arrest, and escaped in various
+disguises to the wild and remote mountain districts of Scotland, Wales,
+and Ireland.
+
+The court appointed by the Pope commenced its proceedings in London, in
+October, 1309, under the presidency of the Bishop of London. Several
+French ecclesiastics had come over to take their seat upon the bench as
+judges--an ill omen for the English Templars. After the usual
+preliminaries, which were long and tedious, the articles of accusation
+were read. They stated that those who were received into the order of
+the Knights of the Temple did, at their reception, formally deny Jesus
+Christ and renounce all hope of salvation through him; that they
+trampled and spat upon the cross; that they worshipped a cat(!); that
+they denied the sacraments, and looked only to the grand master for
+absolution; that they possessed and worshipped various idols; that they
+practised a variety of cruel, degrading, and filthy customs and rites;
+that the grand master and many of the brethren had confessed to these
+things even before they had been arrested. Such is a brief summary of
+the accusation, the original documents of which have happily come down
+to us.
+
+It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity,
+profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a
+so-called court of justice in England as a state paper--a bill of
+indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order
+that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the
+defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless
+enemies. No writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a
+trial, and no one unacquainted with mediaeval history would credit the
+record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such a document,
+and then set themselves to prove the truth of its monstrous allegations
+by the use of torture.
+
+Students of the Middle Ages know well that such things were done in
+those days. They remember Savonarola and Beatrice Cenci in Italy, Jeanne
+d'Arc in France, Abbot Whiting and others in England. They call to mind
+the cruelties and exactions practised so often upon the Jews in every
+country in Europe; and with the contemporary records in their hands,
+they do not hesitate to accept as undoubted historical fact what would
+otherwise be rejected as a slander upon humanity and an outrage upon
+common-sense.
+
+If the Templars had been accused of the crimes vulgarly supposed to
+attach themselves to religious orders; if they had been charged with
+falling into the sins to which poor human nature by its frailty is
+liable; if erring members had been denounced, men who had entered the
+order through disappointment, or from some other unworthy motive, men
+such as Sir Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de
+Bois Guilbert, in his novel, _Ivanhoe_, we might well believe that some
+at least of the accusations against them were true.
+
+It is singular that no such charges are alleged against the Templars,
+though they were freely brought, two hundred years later, against the
+regular monks by the commissioners of Henry VIII. This fact has been
+noticed by most thoughtful historians, and has been considered to tell
+strongly in the tribunal of equity in favor of the Templars. Instead of
+these probable or possible crimes, we find nothing but monstrous charges
+of sorcery, idolatry, apostasy, and such like, instances of which we
+know are to be found in those strange times; but which it seems
+altogether unlikely would infect a large body whose fundamental
+principle was close adherence to Christianity; a body which was spread
+all over the world, and which included in its ranks such a multitude and
+variety of men and of nationalities, among whom there must have been, to
+say the least, some sincere, upright, and godly men who would have set
+themselves to root out such miserable errors, or, if they were found to
+be ineradicable, would have left the order as no place for them.
+
+Even Voltaire acknowledges that such an indictment destroys itself. It
+recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing but their intense hatred of
+their victims and their total unfitness to sit as judges.
+
+When this extraordinary paper had been read, the prisoners were asked
+what they had to say to it, and, as might be expected, they at once and
+unanimously declared that they and their order were absolutely guiltless
+of the crimes of which they were accused. After this the prisoners were
+examined one by one.
+
+It would be tedious to follow the long and wearisome questionings and to
+record the replies given by the several brethren of the Temple during
+their trial in London. One and all agreed in denying the existence of
+the horrible and ridiculous rites which were said to be used at the
+reception of new members; and whether they had been received in England
+or abroad, detailed the ceremonies that were used, and showed that they
+were substantially the same everywhere. The candidate was asked what he
+desired, and on replying that he desired admission to the order of the
+Knights of the Temple, he was warned of the strict and severe life that
+was demanded of members of the order; of the three vows of poverty,
+chastity, and obedience; and, moreover, that he must be ready to go and
+fight the enemies of Christ even to the death.
+
+Others related details of the interior discipline and regulations of the
+order, which were stern and rigorous, as became a body that added to the
+strictness of the convent the order and system of a military
+organization. Many of the brethren had been nearly all their lives in
+the order, some more than forty years, a great part of which had been
+spent in active service in the East.
+
+The witnesses who were summoned were not members of the order, and had
+only hearsay evidence to give. They had _heard_ this and that report,
+they _suspected_ something else, they had been _told_ that certain
+things had been said or done. Nothing definite could be obtained, and
+there was no proof whatever of any of the extravagant and incredible
+charges. Similar proceedings took place in Lincoln and York, and also in
+Scotland and Ireland; and in all places the results were the same, and
+the matter dragged on till October, 1311.
+
+Hitherto torture had not been resorted to; but now, in accordance with
+the repeated solicitations of the Pope, King Edward gave orders that the
+imprisoned Templars should be subjected to the rack in order that they
+might be forced to give evidence of their guilt. Even then there seems
+to have been reluctance to resort to this cruel and shameful treatment,
+and a series of delays occurred, so that nothing was done till the
+beginning of the following year.
+
+The Templars, having been now three years in prison, chained,
+half-starved, threatened with greater miseries here, and with eternal
+damnation hereafter; separated from one another, without friend,
+adviser, or legal defence, were now removed to the various jails in
+London and elsewhere, and submitted to torture. We have no particular
+record of the horrible details, but some evidence was afterward adduced
+which was said to have been obtained from the unhappy victims during
+their agony. It was such as was desired; an admission of the truth of
+the monstrous accusations that were detailed to them, which had been
+obtained, for the most part, from their tortured brethren in France.
+
+In April, 1311, these depositions were read in the court, in the
+presence of the Templars, who were required to say what they could
+allege in their defence. They replied that they were ignorant of the
+processes of law, and that they were not permitted to have the aid of
+those whom they trusted and who could advise them, but that they would
+gladly make a statement of their faith and of the principles of their
+order. This they were permitted to do, and a very simple and touching
+paper was produced and signed by all the brethren. They declared
+themselves, one and all, good Christians and faithful members of the
+Church, and they claimed to be treated as such, and openly and fairly
+tried if there were any just cause of complaint against them. But their
+persecutors were by no means satisfied. Fresh tortures and cruelties
+were resorted to to force confessions of guilt from these worn-out and
+dying men. A few gave way, and said what they were told to say; and
+these unhappy men were produced in St. Paul's Cathedral shortly
+afterward, and made to recant their errors, and were then "reconciled to
+the Church." A similar scene was enacted at York.
+
+The property of the Templars in England was placed under the charge of a
+commission at the time that proceedings were commenced against them, and
+the King very soon treated it as if it were his own, giving away manors
+and convents at his pleasure. A great part of the possessions of the
+order was subsequently made over to the Hospitallers. The convent and
+church of the Temple in London were granted, in 1313, to Aymer de
+Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whose monument is in Westminster Abbey. Other
+property was pawned by the King to his creditors as security for payment
+of his debts; but constant litigation and disputes seem to have pursued
+the holders of the ill-gotten goods.
+
+Some of the surviving Templars retired to monasteries, others returned
+to the world and assumed secular habits, for which they incurred the
+censures of the Pope.
+
+
+HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+The tragedy of the Templars had not yet drawn to its close. The four
+great dignitaries of the order, the grand master Du Molay, Guy, the
+commander of Normandy, son of the Dauphin of Auvergne, the commander of
+Aquitaine, Godfrey de Gonaville, the great visitor of France, Hugues de
+Peraud, were still pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to
+determine on their fate. The King and the Pope were now equally
+interested in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So
+long as these men lived, uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not
+extinct. A commission was named: the Cardinal-Archbishop of Albi, with
+two other cardinals, two monks, the Cistercian Arnold Novelli, and
+Arnold de Fargis, nephew of Pope Clement, the Dominican Nicolas de
+Freveauville, akin to the house of Marigny, formerly the King's
+confessor. With these the Archbishop of Sens sat in judgment on the
+Knights' own former confessions. The grand master and the rest were
+found guilty, and were to be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.
+
+A scaffold was erected before the porch of Notre Dame. On one side
+appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four noble prisoners, in
+chains, under the custody of the Provost of Paris. Six years of dreary
+imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the
+most valiant had been burned alive; the recreants had purchased their
+lives by confession; the Pope, in a full council, had condemned and
+dissolved the order. If a human mind--a mind like that of Du
+Molay--could be broken by suffering and humiliation, it must have
+yielded to this long and crushing imprisonment. The Cardinal-Archbishop
+of Albi ascended a raised platform: he read the confessions of the
+Knights, the proceedings of the court; he enlarged on the criminality of
+the order, on the holy justice of the Pope, and the devout,
+self-sacrificing zeal of the King; he was proceeding to the final, the
+fatal sentence. At that instant the grand master advanced; his gesture
+implored silence; judges and people gazed in awestruck apprehension. In
+a calm, clear voice Du Molay spoke: "Before heaven and earth, on the
+verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable
+weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved death, not
+on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves or our order have
+been guilty, but because we have yielded, to save our lives, to the
+seductive words of the Pope and of the King; and so by our confessions
+brought shame and ruin on our blameless, holy, and orthodox
+brotherhood."
+
+The cardinals stood confounded; the people could not suppress their
+profound sympathy. The assembly was hastily broken up; the Provost was
+commanded to conduct the prisoners back to their dungeons. "To-morrow we
+will hold further counsel." But on the moment that the King heard these
+things, without a day's delay, without the least consultation with the
+ecclesiastical authorities, he ordered them to death as relapsed
+heretics. On the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of
+Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the
+Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised--two out of
+the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour
+of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned;
+they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily;
+the wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the
+tardiness was designed that the victims might have time, while the fire
+was still curling round their extremities, to recant their bold
+recantation. But there was no sign, no word of weakness. Du Molay
+implored that the image of the Mother of God might be held up before
+him, and his hands unchained, that he might clasp them in prayer. Both,
+as the smoke rose to their lips, as the fire crept up to their vital
+parts, continued solemnly to aver the innocence and the Catholic faith
+of the order. The King himself sat and beheld, it might seem without
+remorse, this hideous spectacle; the words of Du Molay might have
+reached his ears. But the people looked on with far other feelings.
+Stupor kindled into admiration; the execution was a martyrdom; friars
+gathered up their ashes and bones and carried them away, hardly by
+stealth, to consecrated ground; they became holy relics. The two who
+wanted courage to die pined away their miserable life in prison.
+
+The wonder and the pity of the times which immediately followed, arrayed
+Du Molay not only in the robes of the martyr, but gave him the terrible
+language of a prophet. "Clement, iniquitous and cruel judge, I summon
+thee within forty days to meet me before the throne of the Most High!"
+According to some accounts this fearful sentence included the King, by
+whom, if uttered, it might have been heard. The earliest allusion to
+this awful speech does not contain that striking particularity, which,
+if part of it, would be fatal to its credibility, _i.e._, the precise
+date of Clement's death. It was not till the year after that Clement and
+King Philip passed to their account. The fate of these two men during
+the next year might naturally so appal the popular imagination, as to
+approximate more closely the prophecy and its accomplishment. At all
+events it betrayed the deep and general feeling of the cruel wrong
+inflicted on the order; while the unlamented death of the Pope, the
+disastrous close of Philip's reign, and the disgraceful crimes which
+attainted the honor of his family seemed as declarations of heaven as to
+the innocence of their noble victims.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES VAN ARTEVELDE LEADS A
+FLEMISH REVOLT
+
+EDWARD III OF ENGLAND ASSUMES THE
+TITLE OF KING OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1337-1340
+
+FRANCOIS P. G. GUIZOT
+
+
+  Having defeated the Flemings at Mons-la-Puelle in 1304,
+  Philip the Fair of France found that they were unsubdued and
+  ready to renew their war against him. Therefore he very soon
+  acknowledged their independence under their count, Robert de
+  Bethune. But Philip continually violated the treaty he had
+  made, and just before his death (1314) he again began
+  hostilities against Flanders.
+
+  Little of historical importance occurred in that country
+  between the death of Philip the Fair and the accession of
+  Philip of Valois (1328). His first act was to take up the
+  cause of Louis de Nevers, then Count of Flanders, whom the
+  independent burghers of most of the chief cities had united
+  to deprive of his territories, leaving him only Ghent for a
+  refuge. In the first year of his reign Philip gained a
+  victory over the Flemish "weavers" at Cassel, and laid all
+  Flanders at the feet of its rejected count.
+
+  In 1338 began the Hundred Years' War, arising from the claim
+  of Edward III of England to the French throne. Edward's most
+  important measure in preparation for the war was the
+  securing of an alliance with the Flemish burghers, whose
+  French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their
+  affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which
+  confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to
+  Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by
+  various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and
+  industry of both Flanders and England.
+
+  At last, by prohibiting the exportation of wool to Flanders,
+  Edward reduced the Flemings to despair and forced them to
+  fling themselves into his arms. Many of them emigrated to
+  England, where they helped to lay the foundation of
+  manufactures. But the Flemish towns burst into insurrection
+  and proceeded to organized action in the manner here related
+  by Guizot, who draws largely upon the narrative of
+  Froissart.
+
+The Flemings bore the first brunt of that war which was to be so cruel
+and so long. It was a lamentable position for them; their industrial and
+commercial prosperity was being ruined; their security at home was going
+from them; their communal liberties were compromised; divisions set in
+among them; by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn toward
+England, but the Count, their lord, did all he could to turn them away
+from her, and many among them were loath to separate themselves entirely
+from France. "Burghers of Ghent, as they chatted in the thoroughfares
+and at the cross-roads, said one to another that they had heard much
+wisdom, to their mind, from a burgher who was called James van
+Artevelde, and who was a brewer of beer. They had heard him say that, if
+he could obtain a hearing and credit, he would in a little while restore
+Flanders to good estate, and they would recover all their gains without
+standing ill with the King of France or the King of England.
+
+"These sayings began to get spread abroad insomuch that a quarter or
+half the city was informed thereof, especially the small folk of the
+commonalty, whom the evil touched most nearly. They began to assemble in
+the streets, and it came to pass that one day, after dinner, several
+went from house to house calling for their comrades, and saying, 'Come
+and hear the wise man's counsel.' On December 26, 1337, they came to the
+house of the said James van Artevelde, and found him leaning against his
+door. Far off as they were when they first perceived him, they made him
+a deep obeisance, and 'Dear sir,' they said, 'we are come to you for
+counsel; for we are told that by your great and good sense you will
+restore the country of Flanders to good case. So tell us how.'
+
+"Then James van Artevelde came forward, and said: 'Sirs comrades, I am a
+native and burgher of this city, and here I have my means. Know that I
+would gladly aid you with all my power, you and all the country; if
+there were here a man who would be willing to take the lead, I would be
+willing to risk body and means at his side; and if the rest of ye be
+willing to be brethren, friends, and comrades to me, to abide in all
+matters at my side, notwithstanding that I am not worthy of it, I will
+undertake it willingly.' Then said all with one voice: 'We promise you
+faithfully to abide at your side in all matters and to therewith
+adventure body and means, for we know well that in the whole countship
+of Flanders there is not a man but you worthy so to do.'" Then Van
+Artevelde bound them to assemble on the next day but one in the
+grounds of the monastery of Biloke, which had received numerous benefits
+from the ancestors of Sohier of Courtrai, whose son-in-law Van Artevelde
+was.
+
+This bold burgher of Ghent, who was born about 1285, was sprung from a
+family the name of which had been for a long while inscribed in their
+city upon the register of industrial corporations. His father, John van
+Artevelde, a cloth-worker, had been several times over-sheriff of Ghent,
+and his mother, Mary van Groete, was great-aunt to the grandfather of
+the illustrious publicist called in history Grotius. James van Artevelde
+in his youth accompanied Count Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the
+Handsome, upon his adventurous expeditions in Italy, Sicily, and Greece,
+and to the island of Rhodes; and it had been close by the spots where
+the soldiers of Marathon and Salamis had beaten the armies of Darius and
+Xerxes that he had heard of the victory of the Flemish burghers and
+workmen attacked in 1302, at Courtrai, by the splendid army of Philip
+the Handsome.
+
+James van Artevelde, on returning to his country, had been busy with his
+manufactures,[46] his fields, the education of his children, and Flemish
+affairs up to the day when, at his invitation, the burghers of Ghent
+thronged to the meeting on December 28, 1337, in the grounds of the
+monastery of Biloke. There he delivered an eloquent speech, pointing out
+unhesitatingly but temperately the policy which he considered good for
+the country. "Forget not," he said, "the might and the glory of
+Flanders. Who, pray, shall forbid that we defend our interests by using
+our rights? Can the King of France prevent us from treating with the
+King of England? And may we not be certain that if we were to treat with
+the King of England, the King of France would not be the less urgent in
+seeking our alliance? Besides, have we not with us all the communes of
+Brabant, of Hainault, of Holland, and of Zealand?" The audience cheered
+these words; the commune of Ghent forthwith assembled, and on January 3,
+1337, reestablished the offices of captains of parishes according to
+olden usage, when the city was exposed to any pressing danger.
+
+It was carried that one of these captains should have the chief
+government of the city; and James van Artevelde was at once invested
+with it. From that moment the conduct of Van Artevelde was ruled by one
+predominant idea: to secure free and fair commercial intercourse for
+Flanders with England, while observing a general neutrality in the war
+between the kings of England and France, and to combine so far all the
+communes of Flanders in one and the same policy. And he succeeded in
+this twofold purpose. On April 29, 1338, the representatives of all the
+communes of Flanders--the city of Bruges numbering among them a hundred
+and eight deputies--repaired to the castle of Male, a residence of Count
+Louis, and then James van Artevelde set before the Count what had been
+resolved upon among them. The Count submitted, and swore that he would
+thenceforth maintain the liberties of Flanders in the state in which
+they had hitherto existed. In the month of May following a deputation,
+consisting of James van Artevelde and other burghers appointed by the
+cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres scoured the whole of Flanders, from
+Bailleul to Termonde, and from Ninove to Dunkirk, "to reconcile the good
+folk of the communes to the Count of Flanders, as well for the Count's
+honor as for the peace of the country." Lastly, on June 10, 1338, a
+treaty was signed at Anvers between the deputies of the Flemish communes
+and the English ambassadors, the latter declaring: "We do all to wit
+that we have negotiated the way and substance of friendship with the
+good folk of the communes of Flanders, in form and manner hereinafter
+following:
+
+"First, they shall be able to go and buy the wools and other merchandise
+which have been exported from England to Holland, Zealand, or any other
+place whatsoever; and all traders of Flanders who shall repair to the
+ports of England shall there be safe and free in their persons and their
+goods, just as in any other place where their ventures might bring them
+together.
+
+"_Item_, we have agreed with the good folk and with all the common
+country of Flanders that they must not mix nor intermeddle in any way,
+by assistance in men or arms, in the wars of our lord the King and the
+noble Sir Philip of Valois (who holdeth himself for King of France)."
+
+Three articles following regulated in detail the principles laid down in
+the first two, and, by another charter, Edward III ordained that "all
+stuffs marked with the seal of the city of Ghent might travel freely in
+England without being subject according to ellage and quality to the
+control to which all foreign merchandise was subject."
+
+Van Artevelde was right in telling the Flemings that, if they treated
+with the King of England, the King of France would be only the more
+anxious for their alliance. Philip of Valois and even Count Louis of
+Flanders, when they got to know of the negotiations entered into between
+the Flemish communes and King Edward, redoubled their offers and
+promises to them. But when the passions of men have taken full
+possession of their souls, words of concession and attempts at
+accommodation are nothing more than postponements or lies. Philip, when
+he heard about the conclusion of a treaty between the Flemish communes
+and the King of England, sent word to Count Louis "that this James van
+Artevelde must not, on any account, be allowed to rule or even live, for
+if it were so for long, the Count would lose his land." The Count, very
+much disposed to accept such advice, repaired to Ghent and sent for Van
+Artevelde to come and see him at his hotel. He went, but with so large a
+following that the Count was not at the time at all in a position to
+resist him. He tried to persuade the Flemish burgher that "if he would
+keep a hand on the people so as to keep them to their love for the King
+of France, he having more authority than anyone else for such a purpose,
+much good would result to him; mingling, besides, with this address,
+some words of threatening import."
+
+Van Artevelde, who was not the least afraid of the threat, and who at
+heart was fond of the English, told the Count that he would do as he had
+promised the communes. "Hereupon he left the Count, who consulted his
+confidants as to what he was to do in this business, and they counselled
+him to let them go and assemble their people, saying that they would
+kill Van Artevelde secretly or otherwise. And, indeed, they did lay many
+traps and made many attempts against the captain; but it was of no
+avail, since all the commonalty was for him." When the rumor of these
+projects and these attempts was spread abroad in the city, the
+excitement was extreme, and all the burghers assumed white hoods, which
+was the mark peculiar to the members of the commune when they assembled
+under their flags; so that the Count found himself reduced to assuming
+one, for he was afraid of being kept captive at Ghent, and, on the
+pretext of a hunting-party, he lost no time in gaining his castle of
+Male.
+
+The burghers of Ghent had their minds still filled with their late alarm
+when they heard that by order, it was said, of the King of France--Count
+Louis had sent and beheaded at the castle of Rupelmonde, in the very bed
+in which he was confined by his infirmities, their fellow-citizen Sohier
+of Courtrai, Van Artevelde's father-in-law, who had been kept for many
+months in prison for his intimacy with the English. On the same day the
+Bishop of Senlis and the Abbot of St. Denis had arrived at Tournai, and
+had superintended the reading out in the market-place of a sentence of
+excommunication against the Ghentese.
+
+It was probably at this date that Van Artevelde in his vexation and
+disquietude assumed in Ghent an attitude threatening and despotic even
+to tyranny. "He had continually after him," says Froissart, "sixty or
+eighty armed varlets, among whom were two or three who knew some of his
+secrets. When he met a man whom he hated or had in suspicion, this man
+was at once killed, for Van Artevelde had given this order to his
+varlets: 'The moment I meet a man, and make such and such a sign to you,
+slay him without delay, however great he may be, without waiting for
+more speech.' In this way he had many great masters slain. And as soon
+as these sixty varlets had taken him home to his hotel, each went to
+dinner at his own house; and the moment dinner was over they returned
+and stood before his hotel and waited in the street until that he was
+minded to go and play and take his pastime in the city, and so they
+attended him to supper-time.
+
+"And know that each of these hirelings had _per diem_ four groschen of
+Flanders for their expenses and wages, and he had them regularly paid
+from week to week. And even in the case of all that were most powerful
+in Flanders, knights, esquires, and burghers of the good cities, whom he
+believed to be favorable to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from
+Flanders and levied half their revenues. He had levies made of rents,
+of dues on merchandise and all the revenues belonging to the Count,
+wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his will, and
+gave them away without rendering any account. And when he would borrow
+of any burghers on his word for payment, there was none that durst say
+him nay. In short there was never in Flanders, or in any other country,
+duke, count, prince, or other who can have had a country at his will as
+James van Artevelde had for a long time." It is possible that, as some
+historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers
+than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this
+portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events
+and passions into a demagogic tyrant.
+
+While the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted to excite an
+uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced, in order to escape
+from the people of Bruges, to mount his horse in hot haste, at night and
+barely armed, and to flee away to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward
+III were preparing on either side, for the war which they could see
+drawing near. Philip was vigorously at work on the Pope, the Emperor of
+Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to raise
+obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies. He ordered that
+short-lived meeting of the states-general about which we have no
+information left us, save that it voted the principle that "no talliage
+could be imposed on the people if urgent necessity or evident utility
+should not require it, and unless by concession of the estates."
+
+Philip, as chief of feudal society rather than of the nation which was
+forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked at Amiens all
+his vassals great and small, laic or cleric, placing all his strength in
+their cooperation, and not caring at all to associate the country itself
+in the affairs of his government. Edward, on the contrary, while
+equipping his fleet and amassing treasure at the expense of the Jews and
+Lombard usurers, was assembling his parliament, talking to it "of this
+important and costly war," for which he obtained large subsidies, and
+accepting, without making any difficulty, the vote of the commons'
+house, which expressed a desire "to consult their constituents upon this
+subject, and begged him to summon an early parliament, to which there
+should be elected, in each county, two knights taken from among the best
+landowners of their counties."
+
+The King set out for the Continent; the parliament met and considered
+the exigences of the war by land and sea, in Scotland and in France;
+traders, shipowners, and mariners were called and examined; and the
+forces determined to be necessary were voted. Edward took the field,
+pillaging, burning, and ravaging, "destroying all the country for twelve
+or fourteen leagues in extent," as he himself said in a letter to the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. When he set foot on French territory, Count
+William of Hainault, his brother-in-law and up to that time his ally,
+came to him and said that "he would ride with him no farther, for that
+his presence was prayed and required by his uncle the King of France, to
+whom he bore no hate, and whom he would go and serve in his own kingdom,
+as he had served King Edward on the territory of the Emperor, whose
+vicar he was," and Edward wished him "Godspeed!" Such was the binding
+nature of feudal ties that the same lord held himself bound to pass from
+one camp to another according as he found himself upon the domains of
+one or the other of his suzerains in a war one against the other.
+
+Edward continued his march toward St. Quentin, where Philip had at last
+arrived with his allies the kings of Bohemia, Navarre, and Scotland,
+"after delays which had given rise to great scandal and murmurs
+throughout the whole kingdom." The two armies, with a strength,
+according to Froissart, of a hundred thousand men on the French side,
+and forty-four thousand on the English, were soon facing one another,
+near Buironfosse, a large burgh of Picardy. A herald came from the
+English camp to tell the King of France that the King of England
+"demanded of him battle. To which demand," says Froissart, "the King of
+France gave willing assent and accepted the day which was fixed at first
+for Thursday the 21st, and afterward for Saturday the 25th of October,
+1339."
+
+To judge from the somewhat tangled accounts of the chroniclers and of
+Froissart himself, neither of the two kings was very anxious to come to
+blows. The forces of Edward were much inferior to those of Philip; and
+the former had accordingly taken up, as it appears, a position which
+rendered attack difficult for Philip. There was much division of
+opinion in the French camp. Independently of military grounds, a great
+deal was said about certain letters from Robert, King of Naples, "a
+mighty necromancer and full of mighty wisdom, it was reported, who,
+after having several times cast their horoscopes, had discovered, by
+astrology and from experience, that, if his cousin, the King of France,
+were to fight the King of England, the former would be worsted."
+
+"In thus disputing and debating," says Froissart, "the time passed till
+full mid-day. A little afterward a hare came leaping across the fields,
+and rushed among the French. Those who saw it began shouting and making
+a great halloo. Those who were behind thought that those who were in
+front were engaging in battle; and several put on their helmets and
+gripped their swords. Thereupon several knights were made; and the Count
+of Hainault himself made fourteen, who were thenceforth nicknamed
+Knights of the Hare."
+
+Whatever his motive may have been, Philip did not attack; and Edward
+promptly began a retreat. They both dismissed their allies; and during
+the early days of November Philip fell back upon St. Quentin, and Edward
+went and took up his winter-quarters at Brussels.
+
+For Edward it was a serious check not to have dared to attack the King
+whose kingdom he made a pretence of conquering; and he took it
+grievously to heart. At Brussels he had an interview with his allies and
+asked their counsel. Most of the princes of the Low Countries remained
+faithful to him and the Count of Hainault seemed inclined to go back to
+him; but all hesitated as to what he was to do to recover from the
+check. Van Artevelde showed more invention and more boldness. The
+Flemish communes had concentrated their forces not far from the spot
+where the two kings had kept their armies looking at one another; but
+they had maintained a strict neutrality, and at the invitation of the
+Count of Flanders, who promised them that the King of France would
+entertain all their claims, Artevelde and Breydel, the deputies from
+Ghent and Bruges, even repaired to Courtrai to make terms with him. But
+as they got there nothing but ambiguous engagements and evasive
+promises, they let the negotiation drop, and, while Count Louis was on
+his way to rejoin Philip at St. Quentin, Artevelde with the deputies
+from the Flemish communes started for Brussels.
+
+Edward, who was already living on very confidential terms with him, told
+him that "if the Flemings were minded to help him to keep up the war and
+go with him whithersoever he would take them, they should aid him to
+recover Lille, Douai, and Bethune, then occupied by the King of France.
+Artevelde, after consulting his colleagues, returned to Edward, and,
+'Dear sir,' said he, 'you have already made such requests to us, and
+verily, if we could do so while keeping our honor and faith, we would do
+as you demand: but we be bound, by faith and oath, and on a bond of two
+millions of florins entered into with the Pope, not to go to war with
+the King of France without incurring a debt to the amount of that sum
+and a sentence of excommunication; but if you do that which we are about
+to say to you, if you will be pleased to adopt the arms of France, and
+quarter them with those of England, and openly call yourself King of
+France, we will uphold you for the true King of France; you, as King of
+France, shall give us quittance of our faith; and then we will obey you
+as King of France, and will go whithersoever you shall ordain.'"
+
+This prospect pleased Edward mightily: but "it irked him to take the
+name and arms of that of which he had as yet won no title." He consulted
+his allies. Some of them hesitated; but "his most privy and especial
+friend," Robert d'Artois, strongly urged him to consent to the proposal.
+So a French prince and a Flemish burgher prevailed upon the King of
+England to pursue, as in assertion of his avowed rights, the conquest of
+the kingdom of France. King, prince, and burgher fixed Ghent as their
+place of meeting for the official conclusion of the alliance; and there,
+in January, 1340, the mutual engagement was signed and sealed. The King
+of England "assumed the arms of France quartered with those of England,"
+and thenceforth took the title of King of France.
+
+
+
+
+BATTLES OF SLUYS AND CRECY
+
+A.D. 1340-1346
+
+SIR JOHN FROISSART[47]
+
+
+  The sea fight of Sluys began the Hundred Years' War between
+  England and France. It is also memorable as England's first
+  great naval victory. The origin of the war lay in the Salic
+  Law, which excludes women from the throne of France. This
+  overruled the claims of Queen Isabella of England, and her
+  son Edward III in 1328, when the twelve peers and barons of
+  France unanimously gave the crown to Isabella's cousin,
+  Philip of Valois, who ascended the throne as Philip VI of
+  France.
+
+  Edward III ingeniously maintained that though the Salic Law
+  prevented his mother from filling the throne, it did not
+  destroy the rights of her male descendants, and he early
+  entertained the project of enforcing this contention; but it
+  was not until 1337 that he felt able to assert formally his
+  claim to the French crown and to assume the title of king of
+  France.
+
+  The following year, with a considerable body of troops to
+  support his presumed rights, he crossed to the Continent,
+  and passed the winter at Antwerp among the Flemings who had
+  taken up his cause, and with whom, as well as with the
+  Emperor-King of Germany, he effected aggressive alliances.
+  He made a formal declaration of war in 1339, beginning
+  hostilities which were prolonged into the Hundred Years'
+  War, and which as a contest of the English kings for the
+  sovereignty of France produced a series of important
+  revolutions in the fortunes of that country.
+
+  The first serious action of the war was a naval battle at
+  Sluys, near the Belgian frontier just northeast of Bruges,
+  June 23, 1340. King Edward and his entire navy sailed from
+  the Thames June 22, and made straight for Sluys. Sir Hugh
+  Quiriel and other French officers, with over one hundred and
+  twenty large vessels, were lying near Sluys for the purpose
+  of disputing the English King's passage. Froissart, with his
+  usual terseness, has graphically recorded the combat which
+  ensued.
+
+  A more important victory was that won in the land battle at
+  Crecy in 1346, which, however, simply paved the way to the
+  capture of Calais, for it was not until the battle of
+  Poitiers, ten years later, that Edward made any progress
+  toward the conquest of France. In 1346, after landing with a
+  force of troops at Cape La Hogue, Edward reduced Cherbourg,
+  Carentan, and Caen, and, with the intention of crossing the
+  Seine at Rouen, commenced his march on Calais, where he was
+  to be joined by his Flemish allies. Philip, making a rapid
+  march from Paris to Amiens, had posted detachments of
+  soldiers along the right bank of the river Somme, guarding
+  every ford, breaking down every bridge, and gradually
+  shutting up the invaders in the narrow space between the
+  Somme and the sea.
+
+  Edward sent out his marshals with their battalions to find a
+  passage, but they were unsuccessful, until a peasant led
+  them to the tidal ford of Blanchetaque. Although desperately
+  opposed by fully twelve thousand French, under the Norman
+  baron Sir Godemar du Fay, they effected a crossing, and,
+  marching on, encamped in the fields near Crecy. The King of
+  France with the main body of his troops had taken up his
+  quarters in Abbeville.
+
+
+BATTLE OF SLUYS
+
+When the King's fleet was almost got to Sluys, they saw so many masts
+standing before it that they looked like a wood. The King asked the
+commander of his ship what they could be, who answered that he imagined
+they must be that armament of Normans which the King of France kept at
+sea and which had so frequently done him much damage, had burned his
+good town of Southampton, and taken his large ship the Christopher. The
+King replied: "I have for a long time wished to meet with them, and now,
+please God and St. George, we will fight them; for, in truth, they have
+done me so much mischief that I will be revenged on them if it be
+possible."
+
+The King drew up all his vessels, placing the strongest in the front,
+and on the wings his archers. Between every two vessels with archers
+there was one of men-at-arms. He stationed some detached vessels as a
+reserve, full of archers, to assist and help such as might be damaged.
+There were in this fleet a great many ladies from England, countesses,
+baronesses, and knights' and gentlemen's wives, who were going to attend
+on the Queen at Ghent. These the King had guarded most carefully by
+three hundred men-at-arms and five hundred archers.
+
+When the King of England and his marshals had properly divided the
+fleet, they hoisted their sails to have the wind on their quarter, as
+the sun shone full in their faces, which they considered might be of
+disadvantage to them, and stretched out a little, so that at last they
+got the wind as they wished. The Normans, who saw them tack, could not
+help wondering why they did so, and said they took good care to turn
+about, for they were afraid of meddling with them. They perceived,
+however, by his banner, that the King was on board, which gave them
+great joy, as they were eager to fight with him; so they put their
+vessels in proper order, for they were expert and gallant men on the
+seas. They filled the Christopher, the large ship which they had taken
+the year before from the English, with trumpets and other warlike
+instruments, and ordered her to fall upon the English.
+
+The battle then began very fiercely; archers and cross-bowmen shot with
+all their might at each other, and the men-at-arms engaged hand to hand.
+In order to be more successful, they had large grapnels, and iron hooks
+with chains, which they flung from ship to ship, to moor them to each
+other. There were many valiant deeds performed, many prisoners made, and
+many rescues. The Christopher, which led the van, was recaptured by the
+English, and all in her taken or killed. There were then great shouts
+and cries, and the English manned her again with archers and sent her to
+fight against the Genoese.
+
+This battle was very murderous and horrible. Combats at sea are more
+destructive and obstinate than upon the land, for it is not possible to
+retreat or flee--everyone must abide his fortune and exert his prowess
+and valor. Sir Hugh Quiriel and his companions were bold and determined
+men, had done much mischief to the English at sea and destroyed many of
+their ships; this combat, therefore, lasted from early in the morning
+until noon, and the English were hard pressed, for their enemies were
+four to one, and the greater part men who had been used to the sea.
+
+The King, who was in the flower of his youth, showed himself on that day
+a gallant knight, as did the earls of Derby, Pembroke, Hereford,
+Huntingdon, Northampton, and Gloucester; the Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord
+Felton, Lord Bradestan, Sir Richard Stafford, the Lord Percy, Sir Walter
+Manny, Sir Henry de Flanders, Sir John Beauchamp, Sir John Chandos, the
+Lord Delaware, Lucie Lord Malton, and the Lord Robert d'Artois, now
+called Earl of Richmond.
+
+I cannot remember all the names of those who behaved so valiantly in the
+combat; but they did so well that, with some assistance from Bruges and
+those parts of the country, the French were completely defeated, and all
+the Normans and the others killed or drowned, so that not one of them
+escaped. This was soon known all over Flanders; and when it came to the
+two armies before Thin-l'Eveque, the Hainaulters were as much rejoiced
+as their enemies were dismayed.
+
+After the King had gained this victory, which was on the eve of St.
+John's Day, he remained all that night on board of his ship before
+Sluys, and there were great noises with trumpets and all kinds of other
+instruments. The Flemings came to wait on him, having heard of his
+arrival and what deeds he had performed. The King inquired of the
+citizens of Bruges after Jacob van Artevelde, and they told him he was
+gone to the aid of the Earl of Hainault with upward of sixty thousand
+men, against the Duke of Normandy. On the morrow, which was Midsummer
+Day, the King and his fleet entered the port. As soon as they were
+landed, the King, attended by crowds of knights, set out on foot on a
+pilgrimage to our Lady of Ardemburg, where he heard mass and dined. He
+then mounted his horse and went that day to Ghent, where the Queen was,
+who received him with great joy and kindness. The army and baggage, with
+the attendants of the King, followed him by degrees to the same place.
+
+
+BATTLE OF CRECY
+
+The two battalions of the marshals came, on Friday in the afternoon, to
+where the King was, and they fixed their quarters, all three together,
+near Crecy in Ponthieu. The King of England, who had been informed that
+the King of France was following him, in order to give him battle, said
+to his people: "Let us post ourselves here, for we will not go farther
+before we have seen our enemies. I have good reason to wait for them on
+this spot; as I am now upon the lawful inheritance of my lady mother,
+which was given her as her marriage portion, and I am resolved to defend
+it against my adversary, Philip de Valois." On account of his not having
+more than an eighth part of the forces which the King of France had, his
+marshals fixed upon the most advantageous situation, and the army went
+and took possession of it. He then sent his scouts toward Abbeville, to
+learn if the King of France meant to take the field this Friday,
+but they returned and said they saw no appearance of it; upon which he
+dismissed his men to their quarters with orders to be in readiness by
+times in the morning and to assemble in the same place. The King of
+France remained all Friday in Abbeville, waiting for more troops. He
+sent his marshals, the Lord of St. Venant and Lord Charles of
+Montmorency, out of Abbeville, to examine the country and get some
+certain intelligence of the English. They returned about vespers with
+information that the English were encamped on the plain. That night the
+King of France entertained at supper in Abbeville all the princes and
+chief lords. There was much conversation relative to war; and the King
+entreated them after supper that they would always remain in friendship
+with each other; that they would be friends without jealousy, and
+courteous without pride. The King was still expecting the Earl of Savoy,
+who ought to have been there with a thousand lances, as he had been well
+paid for them at Troyes in Champaign, three months in advance.
+
+The King of England encamped this Friday in the plain, for he found the
+country abounding in provisions, but, if they should have failed, he had
+plenty in the carriages which attended on him. The army set about
+furbishing and repairing their armor, and the King gave a supper that
+evening to the earls and barons of his army, where they made good cheer.
+On their taking leave the King remained alone with the lords of his
+bedchamber; he retired into his oratory, and, falling on his knees
+before the altar, prayed to God that if he should combat his enemies on
+the morrow, he might come off with honor. About midnight he went to bed
+and, rising early the next day, he and the Prince of Wales heard mass
+and communicated. The greater part of his army did the same, confessed,
+and made proper preparations. After mass, the King ordered his men to
+arm themselves, and assemble on the ground he had before fixed on. He
+had enclosed a large park near a wood, on the rear of his army, in which
+he placed all his baggage wagons and horses. This park had but one
+entrance; his men-at-arms and archers remained on foot.
+
+The King afterward ordered, through his constable and his two marshals,
+that the army should be divided into three battalions. In the first he
+placed the young Prince of Wales, and with him the earls of Warwick and
+Oxford, Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, the Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord Thomas
+Holland, Lord Stafford, Lord Mauley, the Lord Delaware, Sir John
+Chandos, Lord Bartholomew Burgherst, Lord Robert Neville, Lord Thomas
+Clifford, Lord Bourchier, Lord Latimer, and many other knights and
+squires. There might be, in this first division, about eight hundred
+men-at-arms, two thousand archers, and a thousand Welshmen. They
+advanced in regular order to their ground, each lord under his banner
+and pennon and in the centre of his men. In the second battalion were
+the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the lords Roos,
+Willoughby, Basset, St. Albans, Sir Lewis Tufton, Lord Multon, Lord
+Lascels, and many others; amounting, in the whole, to about eight
+hundred men-at-arms and twelve hundred archers. The third battalion was
+commanded by the King, and was composed of about seven hundred
+men-at-arms and two thousand archers.
+
+The King then mounted a small palfrey, having a white wand in his hand,
+and, attended by his two marshals on each side of him, he rode at a
+footpace through all the ranks, encouraging and entreating the army that
+they would guard his honor and defend his right. He spoke this so
+sweetly and with such a cheerful countenance that all who had been
+dispirited were directly comforted by seeing and hearing him. When he
+had thus visited all the battalions it was near ten o'clock; he retired
+to his own division, and ordered them all to eat heartily and drink a
+glass after. They ate and drank at their ease, and, having packed up
+pots, barrels, etc., in the carts they returned to their battalions
+according to the marshals' orders, and seated themselves on the ground,
+placing their helmets and bows before them, that they might be the
+fresher when their enemies should arrive.
+
+On Saturday the King of France rose betimes, and heard mass in the
+monastery of St. Peter's in Abbeville, where he was lodged; having
+ordered his army to do the same, he left that town after sunrise. When
+he had marched about two leagues from Abbeville, and was approaching the
+enemy, he was advised to form his army in order of battle and to let
+those on foot march forward that they might not be trampled on by the
+horses. The King, upon this, sent off four knights, Lord Moyne of
+Bastleberg, Lord of Noyers, Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord of Aubigny,
+who rode so near to the English that they could clearly distinguish
+their position. The English plainly perceived they were come to
+reconnoitre them; however, they took no notice of it, but suffered them
+to return unmolested. When the King of France saw them coming back, he
+halted his army; and the knights, pushing through the crowd, came near
+the King, who said to them, "My lords, what news?" They looked at each
+other, without opening their mouths, for neither chose to speak first.
+At last the King addressed himself to the Lord Moyne, who was attached
+to the King of Bohemia, and had performed very many gallant deeds, so
+that he was esteemed one of the most valiant knights in Christendom.
+Lord Moyne said: "Sir, I will speak, since it pleases you to order me,
+but under the correction of my companions. We have advanced far enough
+to reconnoitre your enemies. Know, then, that they are drawn up in three
+battalions, and are waiting for you. I would advise, for my
+part--submitting, however, to better counsel--that you halt your army
+here and quarter them for the night; for before the rear shall come up
+and the army be properly drawn out, it will be very late; your men will
+be tired and in disorder, while they will find your enemies fresh and
+properly arrayed. On the morrow you may draw up your army more at your
+ease and may reconnoitre at leisure on what part it will be most
+advantageous to begin the attack; for, be assured, they will wait for
+you." The King commanded that it should be so done, and the two marshals
+rode, one toward the front, and the other to the rear, crying out, "Halt
+banners, in the name of God and St. Denis." Those that were in the front
+halted, but those behind said they would not halt until they were as
+forward as the front. When the front perceived the rear pressing on they
+pushed forward, and neither the King nor the marshals could stop them,
+but they marched without any order until they came in sight of their
+enemies. As soon as the foremost rank saw them they fell back at once in
+great disorder, which alarmed those in the rear, who thought they had
+been fighting. There was then space and room enough for them to have
+passed forward, had they been willing so to do; some did so, but others
+remained shy. All the roads between Abbeville and Crecy were covered
+with common people, who, when they were come within three leagues of
+their enemies, drew their swords, bawling out, "Kill, kill," and with
+them were many great lords that were eager to make show of their
+courage. There is no man--unless he had been present--that can imagine
+or describe truly the confusion of that day; especially the bad
+management and disorder of the French, whose troops were out of number.
+
+The English were drawn up in three divisions and seated on the ground.
+On seeing their enemies advance they rose up and fell into their ranks.
+That of the Prince was the first to do so, whose archers were formed in
+the manner of a portcullis, or harrow, and the men-at-arms in the rear.
+The earls of Northampton and Arundel, who commanded the second division,
+had posted themselves in good order on his wing, to assist and succor
+the Prince if necessary. You must know that these kings, earls, barons,
+and lords of France did not advance in any regular order, but one after
+the other, or any way most pleasing to themselves. As soon as the King
+of France came in sight of the English his blood began to boil, and he
+cried out to his marshals, "Order the Genoese forward and begin the
+battle, in the name of God and St. Denis." There were about fifteen
+thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, but they were quite fatigued, having
+marched on foot that day six leagues, completely armed and with their
+cross-bows. They told the constable they were not in a fit condition to
+do any great things that day in battle. The Earl of Alencon, hearing
+this, said, "This is what one gets by employing such scoundrels, who
+fall off when there is any need for them." During this time a heavy rain
+fell, accompanied by thunder and a very terrible eclipse of the sun, and
+before this rain a great flight of crows hovered in the air over all
+those battalions, making a loud noise. Shortly afterward it cleared up
+and the sun shone very bright, but the Frenchmen had it on their faces
+and the English on their backs. When the Genoese were somewhat in order
+and approached the English they set up a loud shout[48] in order to
+frighten them, but they remained quite still and did not seem to attend
+to it. They then set up a second shout and advanced a little forward,
+but the English never moved.
+
+They hooted a third time, advancing with their cross-bows presented and
+began to shoot. The English archers then advanced one step forward and
+shot their arrows with such force and quickness that it seemed as if it
+snowed. When the Genoese felt these arrows, which pierced their arms,
+heads, and through their armor, some of them cut the strings of their
+cross-bows; others flung them on the ground and all turned about and
+retreated quite discomfited. The French had a large body of men-at-arms
+on horseback, richly dressed, to support the Genoese. The King of France
+seeing them thus fall back cried out, "Kill me those scoundrels, for
+they stop up our road without any reason." You would then have seen the
+above-mentioned men-at-arms lay about them, killing all they could of
+these runaways.
+
+The English continued shooting as vigorously and quickly as before; some
+of their arrows fell among the horsemen, who were sumptuously equipped,
+and, killing and wounding many, made them caper and fall among the
+Genoese, so that they were in such confusion they could never rally
+again. In the English army there were some Cornish and Welshmen on foot
+who had armed themselves with large knives. These, advancing through the
+ranks of the men-at-arms and archers, who made way for them, came upon
+the French when they were in this danger, and, falling upon earls,
+barons, knights, and squires, slew many; at which the King of England
+was afterward much exasperated. The valiant King of Bohemia was slain
+there. He was called Charles of Luxembourg, for he was the son of the
+gallant king and emperor Henry of Luxembourg. Having heard the order of
+the battle, he inquired where his son, Lord Charles, was. His attendants
+answered that they did not know, but believed he was fighting. The King
+said to them: "Gentlemen, you are all my people, my friends and
+brethren-at-arms this day; therefore, as I am blind,[49] I request of
+you to lead me so far into the engagement that I may strike one stroke
+with my sword." The knights replied that they would directly lead him
+forward, and, in order that they might not lose him in the crowd, they
+fastened all the reins of their horses together and put the King at
+their head, that he might gratify his wish and advance toward the enemy.
+Lord Charles of Bohemia--who already signed his name as King of Germany
+and bore the arms--had come in good order to the engagement, but when he
+perceived that it was likely to turn out against the French he departed.
+The King, his father, had rode in among the enemy, and made good use of
+his sword, for he and his companions had fought most gallantly. They had
+advanced so far that they were all slain, and on the morrow they were
+found on the ground, with their horses all tied together.
+
+The Earl of Alencon advanced in regular order upon the English, to fight
+with them; as did the Earl of Flanders in another part. These two lords,
+with their detachments--coasting, as it were, the archers--came to the
+Prince's battalion, where they fought valiantly for a length of time.
+The King of France was eager to march to the place were he saw their
+banners displayed, but there was a hedge of archers before him. He had
+that day made a present of a handsome black horse to Sir John of
+Hainault, who had mounted on it a knight called Sir John de Fusselles,
+that bore his banner. The horse ran off with him and forced its way
+through the English army, and, when about to return, stumbled and fell
+into a ditch and severely wounded him. He would have been dead if his
+page had not followed him round the battalions and found him unable to
+rise. He had not, however, any other hinderance than from his horse; for
+the English did not quit the ranks that day to make prisoners. The page
+alighted and raised him up, but he did not return the way he came, as he
+would have found it difficult from the crowd. This battle, which was
+fought on the Saturday, between La Broyes and Crecy, was very murderous
+and cruel, and many gallant deeds of arms were performed that were never
+known. Toward evening many knights and squires of the French had lost
+their masters. They wandered up and down the plain, attacking the
+English in small parties. They were soon destroyed, for the English had
+determined that day to give no quarter nor hear of ransom from anyone.
+
+Early in the day some French, Germans, and Savoyards had broken through
+the archers of the Prince's battalion and had engaged with the
+men-at-arms; upon which the second battalion came to his aid, otherwise
+he would have been hard pressed. The first division, seeing the danger
+they were in, sent a knight in great haste to the King of England, who
+was posted upon an eminence near a windmill. On the knight's arrival he
+said: "Sir, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Reginald Cobham, and the others
+who are about your son are vigorously attacked by the French. They
+entreat that you would come to their assistance with your battalion,
+for, if their numbers should increase, they fear he will have too much
+to do."
+
+The King replied, "Is my son dead, unhorsed, or so badly wounded that he
+cannot support himself?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort, thank God," rejoined the knight, "but he is in so
+hot an engagement that he has great need of your help." The King
+answered: "Now, Sir Thomas, return back to those that sent you, and tell
+them from me not to send again for me this day, or expect that I shall
+come, let what will happen, as long as my son has life; and say that I
+command them to let the boy win his spurs; for I am determined, if it
+please God, that all the glory and honor of this day shall be given to
+him and to those into whose care I have intrusted him." The knight
+returned to his lords, and related the King's answer, which mightily
+encouraged them and made them repent they had ever sent such a
+message.[50]
+
+It is a certain fact that Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, who was in the
+Prince's battalion, having been told by some of the English that they
+had seen the banner of his brother engaged in the battle against him,
+was exceedingly anxious to save him; but he was too late, for he was
+left dead on the field, and so was the Earl of Aumarle, his nephew. On
+the other hand, the earls of Alencon and of Flanders were fighting
+lustily under their banners and with their own people, but they could
+not resist the force of the English, and were slain, as well as many
+other knights and squires that were attending on or accompanying them.
+The Earl of Blois, nephew to the King of France, and the Duke of
+Lorraine, his brother-in-law, with their troops, made a gallant defence;
+but they were surrounded by a troop of English and Welsh and slain in
+spite of their prowess. The Earl of St. Pol and the Earl of Auxerre were
+also killed, as well as many others.
+
+Late after vespers, the King of France had not more about him than sixty
+men--every one included. Sir John of Hainault, who was of the number,
+had once remounted the King; for his horse had been killed under him by
+an arrow. He said to the King: "Sir, retreat while you have an
+opportunity and do not expose yourself so simply. If you have lost this
+battle, another time you will be the conqueror." After he had said this,
+he took the bridle of the King's horse and led him off by force, for he
+had before entreated him to retire. The King rode on until he came to
+the castle of La Broyes, where he found the gates shut, for it was very
+dark. The King ordered the governor of it to be summoned. He came upon
+the battlements and asked who it was that called at such an hour. The
+King answered: "Open, open, governor! It is the fortune of France!" The
+governor, hearing the King's voice, immediately descended, opened the
+gate and let down the bridge. The King and his company entered the
+castle, but he had only with him five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Lord
+Charles of Montmorency, Lord Beaujeu, Lord Aubigny, and Lord Montfort.
+The King would not bury himself in such a place as that, but, having
+taken some refreshments, set out again with his attendants about
+midnight, and rode on, under the direction of guides--who were well
+acquainted with the country--until about daybreak, when he came to
+Amiens, where he halted. The English never quitted their ranks in
+pursuit of anyone, but remained on the field, guarding their position
+and defending themselves against all who attacked them. The battle was
+ended at the hour of vespers.
+
+When, on Saturday night, the English heard no more hooting or shouting,
+nor any more crying out to particular lords or their banners, they
+looked upon the field as their own and their enemies as beaten. They
+made great fires, and lighted torches because of the obscurity of the
+night. King Edward then came down from his post, who all that day had
+not put on his helmet, and with his whole battalion advanced to the
+Prince of Wales, whom he embraced in his arms and kissed, and said:
+"Sweet son, God give you good perseverance; you are my son, for most
+loyally have you acquitted yourself this day. You are worthy to be a
+sovereign." The Prince bowed down very low and humbled himself, giving
+all the honor to the King, his father. The English, during the night,
+made frequent thanksgivings to the Lord for the happy issue of the day,
+and without rioting, for the King had forbidden all riot or noise. On
+Sunday morning there was so great a fog that one could scarcely see the
+distance of half an acre. The King ordered a detachment from the army,
+under the command of the two marshals--consisting of about five hundred
+lances and two thousand archers--to make an excursion and see if there
+were any bodies of French troops collected together. The quota of troops
+from Rouen and Beauvais had that morning left Abbeville and St. Ricquier
+in Ponthieu to join the French army, and were ignorant of the defeat of
+the preceding evening. They met this detachment, and, thinking they must
+be French, hastened to join them.
+
+As soon as the English found who they were, they fell upon them and
+there was a sharp engagement. The French soon turned their backs and
+fled in great disorder. There were slain in this flight in the open
+fields, under hedges and bushes, upward of seven thousand; and had it
+been clear weather, not one soul would have escaped.
+
+A little time afterward this same party fell in with the Archbishop of
+Rouen and the great Prior of France, who were also ignorant of the
+discomfiture of the French, for they had been informed that the King was
+not to fight before Sunday. Here began a fresh battle; for those two
+lords were well attended by good men-at-arms. However, they could not
+withstand the English, but were almost all slain, with the two chiefs
+who commanded them; very few escaping. In the morning the English found
+many Frenchmen who had lost their road on Saturday and had lain in the
+open fields, not knowing what was become of the King or their own
+leaders. The English put to the sword all they met; and it has been
+assured to me for fact that of foot soldiers, sent from the cities,
+towns, and municipalities, there were slain, this Sunday morning, four
+times as many as in the battle of Saturday.
+
+This detachment, which had been sent to look after the French, returned
+as the King was coming from mass, and related to him all that they had
+seen and met with. After he had been assured by them that there was not
+any likelihood of the French collecting another army, he sent to have
+the number and condition of the dead examined. He ordered on this
+business Lord Reginald Cobham, Lord Stafford, and three heralds to
+examine their arms, and two secretaries to write down all the names.
+They took much pains to examine all the dead, and were the whole day in
+the field of battle, not returning but just as the King was sitting down
+to supper. They made him a very circumstantial report of all they had
+observed, and said they had found eighty banners, the bodies of eleven
+princes, twelve hundred knights, and about thirty thousand common men.
+
+
+
+
+MODERN RECOGNITION OF SCENIC BEAUTY
+
+CROWNING OF PETRARCH AT ROME
+
+A.D. 1341
+
+JACOB BURCKHARDT
+
+
+  The beauty of nature, of natural scenery amid mountains,
+  fields, and lakes, seems to have passed unheeded during
+  early mediaeval times. Even in the ancient days of classic
+  culture it apparently attracted very little notice, except
+  from an occasional poet. The present attitude of enthusiasm,
+  which leads thousands of tourists to flock to Switzerland or
+  to Niagara every year, is wholly a modern development. This
+  development of what is almost a new sense in man certainly
+  deserves notice. To fix an exact date for its beginning is,
+  of course, impossible, but it is generally regarded as a
+  product of the Italian Renaissance, and Burckhardt, seeking
+  for its slow unfolding, traces it back to Petrarch, who, in
+  his poetry, speaks of nature repeatedly.
+
+  Petrarch's poetry was so highly valued by the Italians that
+  they unanimously agreed to confer upon the author a laurel
+  crown. This was a revival of the old Greek method of
+  honoring poets, and as such it was felt by the Italians a
+  specially fitting way to proclaim their reviving interest in
+  art. So a great public gathering was arranged at Rome, and
+  the laurel was with elaborate ceremonies placed on
+  Petrarch's brow.
+
+  The recipient of this new and distinguished honor is
+  regarded as second only to Dante in Italian literature. In
+  addition to his world-famed sonnets to Laura, he wrote
+  much-admired Latin poems, and was a scholar of high repute.
+  His enthusiasm for the ancient Greek and Latin authors made
+  him the central figure in that revival of classic learning
+  which at this time began in Italy.
+
+Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
+great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to
+the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that
+he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavored by his voluminous
+historical and philosophical writings not to supplant, but to make
+known, the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises
+on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
+unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
+handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings
+would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and
+thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he
+would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in
+blotting them out from the memory of men.
+
+It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
+known of the _Decameron_ north of the Alps, he was famous all over
+Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
+geography, and biography. One of these, _de Genealogia Deorum_, contains
+in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he
+discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the
+age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to _poesia_, as
+closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity
+of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously
+combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but
+debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian
+fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers,
+to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it;
+finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly
+enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality.
+Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the
+ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the
+praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings
+which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity
+which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant.
+
+And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work, the
+writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
+The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
+fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ!--true
+religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church
+in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and
+study paganism almost (_fere_) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did
+not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
+partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
+and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a
+theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the
+name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up
+his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined
+to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
+the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter's able
+demonstration that humanism was reconcilable with religion.
+
+There was thus a new cause in the world, and a new class of men to
+maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
+short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
+and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
+conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind than that
+antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.
+
+There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of
+poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
+coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this
+system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony
+never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and
+visible expression of literary enthusiasm, and naturally its form was
+variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the sense
+of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the
+baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine
+children, he had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have
+anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it
+nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned. From the
+same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held
+to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The most recent
+source to which the practices could be referred is to be found in the
+Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists, founded by
+Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five years,
+which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
+Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante
+desired to do, the question arises, To whom did this office belong?
+Albertino Mussato was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the Bishop and the
+rector of the university.
+
+The University of Paris, the rector of which was then a Florentine,
+1341, and the municipal authorities of Rome competed for the honor of
+crowning Petrarch. His self-elected examiner, King Robert of Anjou,
+would gladly have performed the ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch
+preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This
+honor was long the highest object of ambition, and so it seemed to
+Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the
+Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of
+ambitious men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous
+ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the coronation of poets was a
+prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently was no less his
+own, he crowned, May 15, 1355, the Florentine scholar Zanobi della
+Strada at Pisa, to the annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that the
+barbarian laurel had dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian muses,
+and to the great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognize this
+_laurea Pisana_ as legitimate. Indeed, it might be fairly asked with
+what right this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in
+judgment on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the
+emperors crowned poets whenever they went on their travels; and in the
+fifteenth century the popes and other princes assumed the same right,
+till at last no regard whatever was paid to place or circumstances.
+
+Outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another way to
+draw near to nature. The Italians are the first among modern peoples by
+whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. The
+power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated
+development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a dim feeling
+of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in poetry and
+painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients,
+for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human
+interests before they turned to the representation of nature, and even
+then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet,
+from the time of Homer downward, the powerful impression made by nature
+upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The
+Germanic races which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman
+Empire were thoroughly and specially fitted to understand the spirit of
+natural scenery; and though Christianity compelled them for a while to
+see in the springs and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they had
+till then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional
+conception was soon outgrown.
+
+By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty
+enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found lively
+expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence
+of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature--spring
+with its flowers, the green fields, and the woods. But these pictures
+are all foreground, without perspective. Even the crusaders, who
+travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in these
+poems. The epic poetry, which describes armor and costumes so fully,
+does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and even the
+great Wolfram von Eschenbach scarcely anywhere gives us an adequate
+picture of the scene on which his heroes move. From these poems it would
+never be guessed that their noble authors in all countries inhabited or
+visited lofty castles, commanding distant prospects. Even in the Latin
+poems of the wandering clerks, we find no traces of a distant view--of
+landscape properly so called; but what lies near is sometimes described
+with a glow and splendor which none of the knightly minstrels can
+surpass.
+
+To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time lost its
+taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. St.
+Francis of Assisi, in his _Hymn to the Sun_, frankly praises the Lord
+for creating the heavenly bodies and the four elements.
+
+The unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human
+spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous
+lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the
+distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he
+makes the ascent of lofty peaks, _with_ the only possible object of
+enjoying the view--the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity
+who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how country
+scenery affected him; yet his pastoral romances show his imagination to
+have been filled with it.
+
+But the significance of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and
+clearly displayed by Petrarch--one of the first truly modern men. That
+clear soul--who first collected from the literature of all countries
+evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of natural beauty, and
+himself, in his _Ansichten der Natur_, achieved the noblest masterpiece
+of description--Alexander von Humboldt, has not done full justice to
+Petrarch; and, following in the steps of the great reaper, we may still
+hope to glean a few ears of interest and value.
+
+Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of Italy
+is said to have been drawn by his direction--and not only a reproducer
+of the sayings of the ancients, but felt himself the influence of
+natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the favorite
+accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the two that
+he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from
+time to time fled from the world and from his age. We should do him
+wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of describing
+natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture, for
+instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he
+inserts at the end of the sixth book of the _Africa_, for the reason
+that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it, is no more than a
+simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his friends of
+Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly lingered,
+are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also conscious of
+the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the
+picturesqueness from the utility of nature. During his stay among the
+woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected
+him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deepest
+impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of Mont Ventoux, near
+Avignon. An indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger and
+stronger in him, till at length the accidental sight of a passage in
+Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Haemus, decided
+him. He thought that what was not blamed in a gray-headed monarch might
+be well excused in a young man of private station.
+
+The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard of, and there
+could be no thought of the companionship of friends or acquaintances.
+Petrarch took with him only his younger brother and two country people
+from the last place where he halted. At the foot of the mountain an old
+herdsman besought him to turn back, saying that he himself had attempted
+to climb it fifty years before, and had brought home nothing but
+repentance, broken bones, and torn clothes, and that neither before nor
+after had anyone ventured to do the same. Nevertheless, they struggled
+forward and upward, till the clouds lay beneath their feet, and at last
+they reached the top. A description of the view from the summit would be
+looked for in vain, not because the poet was insensible to it, but, on
+the contrary, because the impression was too overwhelming. His whole
+past life, with all its follies, rose before his mind; he remembered
+that ten years ago that day he had quitted Bologna a young man, and
+turned a longing gaze toward his native country; he opened a book which
+then was his constant companion, the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine, and
+his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter, "and men go forth, and
+admire lofty mountains and broad seas and roaring torrents and the ocean
+and the course of the stars, and forget their own selves while doing
+so." His brother, to whom he read these words, could not understand why
+he closed the book and said no more.
+
+Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes, in his
+rhyming geography, the wide panorama from the mountains of Auvergne,
+with the interest, it is true, of the geographer and antiquarian only,
+but still showing clearly that he himself had seen it. He must, however,
+have ascended higher peaks, since he is familiar with facts which only
+occur at a height of ten thousand feet or more above the
+sea--mountain-sickness and its accompaniments--of which his imaginary
+comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in essence. The
+ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he speaks, are perhaps only
+fictions.
+
+In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish school,
+Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their
+landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavor to reflect the real
+world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain
+poetical meaning--in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of
+the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the
+Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the
+Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression.
+
+On this point, as in the scientific description of nature, AEneas Sylvius
+is again one of the most weighty voices of his time. Even if we grant
+the justice of all that has been said against his character, we must,
+nevertheless, admit that in few other men was the picture of the age and
+its culture so fully reflected, and that few came nearer to the normal
+type of the men of the early Renaissance. It may be added
+parenthetically that even in respect to his moral character he will not
+be fairly judged if we listen solely to the complaints of the German
+Church, which his fickleness helped to balk of the council it so
+ardently desired.
+
+He here claims our attention as the first who not only enjoyed the
+magnificence of the Italian landscape, but described it with enthusiasm
+down to its minutest details. The ecclesiastical state and the South of
+Tuscany--his native home--he knew thoroughly, and after he became pope
+he spent his leisure during the favorable season chiefly in excursions
+to the country. Then at last the gouty man was rich enough to have
+himself carried in a litter through the mountains and valleys; and when
+we compare his enjoyments with those of the popes who succeeded him,
+Pius, whose chief delight was in nature, antiquity, and simple but noble
+architecture, appears almost a saint. In the elegant and flowing Latin
+of his _Commentaries_ he freely tells us of his happiness.
+
+His eye seems as keen and practised as that of any modern observer. He
+enjoys with rapture the panoramic splendor of the view from the summit
+of the Alban hills--from the Monte Cavo--whence he could see the shores
+of St. Peter from Terracina and the promontory of Circe as far as Monte
+Argentaro, and the wide expanse of country round about, with the ruined
+cities of the past, and with the mountain chains of central Italy
+beyond; and then his eye would turn to the green woods in the hollows
+beneath, and the mountain lakes among them. He feels the beauty of the
+position of Todi, crowning the vineyards and olive-clad slopes, looking
+down upon distant woods and upon the valley of the Tiber, where towns
+and castles rise above the winding river. The lovely hills about Siena,
+with villas and monasteries on every height, are his own home, and his
+descriptions of them are touched with a peculiar feeling. Single
+picturesque glimpses charm him, too, like the little promontory of Capo
+di Monte that stretches out into the Lake of Bolsena. "Rocky steps," we
+read, "shaded by vines, descend to the water's edge, where the evergreen
+oaks stand between the cliffs, alive with the song of thrushes." On the
+path round the Lake of Nemi, beneath the chestnuts and fruit-trees, he
+feels that here, if anywhere, a poet's soul must awake--here in the
+hiding-place of Diana! He often held consistories or received
+ambassadors under huge old chestnut-trees, or beneath the olives on the
+greensward by some gurgling spring. A view like that of a narrowing
+gorge, with a bridge arched boldly over it, awakens at once his artistic
+sense. Even the smallest details give him delight through something
+beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic in them--the blue fields of
+waving flax, the yellow gorge which covers the hills, even tangled
+thickets, or single trees, or springs, which seem to him like wonders of
+nature.
+
+The height of his enthusiasm for natural beauty was reached during his
+stay on Monte Amiata, in the summer of 1462, when plague and heat made
+the lowlands uninhabitable. Half way up the mountain, in the old Lombard
+monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court took up their quarters.
+There, between the chestnuts which clothe the steep declivity, the eye
+may wander over all Southern Tuscany, with the towers of Siena in the
+distance. The ascent of the highest peak he left to his companions, who
+were joined by the Venetian envoy; they found at the top two vast blocks
+of stone one upon the other--perhaps the sacrificial altar of a
+prehistorical people--and fancied that in the far distance they saw
+Corsica and Sardinia rising above the sea.
+
+In the cool air of the hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, on the
+green meadows where there were no thorns to wound the feet and no snakes
+or insects to hurt or to annoy, the Pope passed days of unclouded
+happiness. For the _segnatura_, which took place on certain days of the
+week, he selected on each occasion some new shady retreat "_novas in
+convallibus fontes et novas inveniens umbras, quae dubiam jacerent
+electionem_." At such times the dogs would perhaps start a great stag
+from his lair, who, after defending himself a while with hoofs and
+antlers, would fly at last up the mountain. In the evening the Pope was
+accustomed to sit before the monastery on the spot from which the whole
+valley of the Paglia was visible, holding lively conversations with the
+cardinals. The courtiers, who ventured down from the heights on their
+hunting expeditions, found the heat below intolerable, and the scorched
+plains like a very hell, while the monastery, with its cool, shady
+woods, seemed like an abode of the blessed.
+
+All this is genuine modern enjoyment, not a reflection of antiquity. As
+surely as the ancients themselves felt in the same manner, so surely,
+nevertheless, were the scanty expressions of the writers whom Pius knew
+insufficient to awaken in him such enthusiasm.
+
+The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of
+the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period,
+is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind.
+The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to
+convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are
+very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and
+the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. Bojardo and
+Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as briefly as possible, and with no
+effort to appeal by their descriptions to the feelings of the reader,
+which they endeavor to reach solely by their narrative and characters.
+
+Letter-writers and the authors of philosophical dialogues are, in fact,
+better evidences of the growing love of nature than the poets. The
+novelist Bandello, for example, observes rigorously the rules of his
+department of literature; he gives us in his novels themselves not a
+word more than is necessary on the natural scenery amid which the action
+of his tales takes place, but in the dedications which always precede
+them we meet with charming descriptions of nature as the setting for his
+dialogues and social pictures. Among letter-writers, Aretino
+unfortunately must be named as the first who has fully painted in words
+the splendid effect of light and shadow in an Italian sunset.
+
+We sometimes find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with
+tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the
+year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the dwelling of his mistress. We
+are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with
+weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much
+damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far
+off, the priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This
+is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment.
+
+It may be objected that the German painters at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these
+scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his
+engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought
+up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another
+thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is
+driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority in point
+of time is here, as in the descriptions of country life, on the side of
+the Italian poets.
+
+
+
+
+RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME
+
+A.D. 1347
+
+R. LODGE
+
+
+  When for nearly forty years Rome had been deserted by the
+  popes, who had betaken themselves in 1309 to a long
+  residence at Avignon, France, and when the Eternal City was
+  virtually without an imperial government--the Teutonic
+  emperors having likewise abandoned her--she fell back upon
+  the memories of her great past, recalling the glories of her
+  ancient supremacy and the means whereby it had been
+  established and maintained. Whatever might promise to
+  restore it she was ready to welcome.
+
+  At this time the real masters of Rome were the princes or
+  barons dwelling in their fortified castles outside or in
+  their strong palaces within the city. Over the northern
+  district, near the Quirinal, reigned the celebrated old
+  family of the Colonnas; while along the Tiber, from the
+  Campo-di-Fiore to the Church of St. Peter, extended the sway
+  of the new family of the Orsini. Other members of the
+  nobility, in the country, held their seats in small
+  fortified cities or castles. Under such domination Rome had
+  become almost deserted. "The population of the seven-hilled
+  city had come down to about thirty thousand souls." When at
+  peace with one another--which was rarely--the barons
+  exercised over the citizens and serfs a combined tyranny,
+  while the farmers, travellers, and pilgrims were made
+  victims of their plunder. At this period Petrarch--that
+  "first modern man"--wrote to Pope Clement VI that Rome had
+  become the abode of demons, the receptacle of all crimes, a
+  hell for the living.
+
+  "It was in these circumstances that a momentary revival of
+  order and liberty was effected by the most extraordinary
+  adventurer of an age that was prolific in adventurers." This
+  was Cola Di Rienzi, who was born in Rome about 1313, and who
+  is sometimes styled "an Italian patriot." In his ambitious
+  endeavor to reinstate the Caesarean power in Italy he appears
+  alternately in the figure of a hero and the character of a
+  charlatan. Believing himself the founder of a new era, he
+  was inflamed by his successes, and ended in "mystical
+  extravagances and follies which could not fail to cause his
+  ruin."
+
+Cola Di Rienzi was born of humble parents, though he afterward tried to
+gratify his own vanity and to gain the ear of Charles IV by claiming to
+be the bastard son of Henry VII. A wrong which he could not venture to
+avenge excited his bitter hostility against the baronage, while the
+study of Livy and other classical writers inspired him with regretful
+admiration for the glories of ancient Rome.
+
+He succeeded in attracting notice by his personal beauty and by the
+rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent. In 1342 he took the
+most prominent part in an embassy from the citizens to Clement VI; and
+though he failed to induce the Pope to return to Rome, which at that
+time he seems to have regarded as the panacea for the evils of the time,
+he gained sufficient favor at Avignon to be appointed papal notary.
+
+From this time he deliberately set himself to raise the people to open
+resistance against their oppressors, while he disarmed the suspicions of
+the nobles by intentional buffoonery and extravagance of conduct. On May
+20, 1347, the first blow was struck. Rienzi, with a chosen band of
+conspirators, and accompanied by the papal vicar, who had every interest
+in weakening the baronage, proceeded to the Capitol, and, amid the
+applause of the mob, promulgated the laws of the _buono stato_.
+
+He himself took the title of tribune, in order to emphasize his
+championship of the lower classes. The most important of his laws were
+for the maintenance of order. Private garrisons and fortified houses
+were forbidden. Each of the thirteen districts was to maintain an armed
+force of a hundred infantry and twenty-five horsemen. Every port was
+provided with a cruiser for the protection of merchandise, and the trade
+on the Tiber was to be secured by a river police.
+
+The nobles watched the progress of this astonishing revolution with
+impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day,
+expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on
+his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the
+city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete,
+when the proudest nobles of Rome submitted and took an oath to support
+the new constitution. But the suddenness of his success was enough to
+turn a head which was never of the strongest.
+
+The Tribune began to dream of restoring to the Roman Republic its old
+supremacy. And for a moment even this dream seemed hardly chimerical.
+Europe was really dazzled by the revival of its ancient capital. Louis
+of Hungary and Joanna of Naples submitted their quarrel to Rienzi's
+arbitration. Thus encouraged, he set no bounds to his ambition. He
+called upon the Pope and cardinals to return at once to Rome. He
+summoned Louis and Charles, the two claimants to the Imperial dignity,
+to appear before his throne and submit to his tribunal.
+
+His arrogance was shown in the pretentious titles which he assumed and
+in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied on public and even on
+private occasions. On August 15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in
+which the emperor Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with
+seven crowns representing the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. His most
+loyal admirer prophesied disaster when the Tribune ventured on this
+occasion to blasphemously compare himself with Christ.
+
+Rienzi's government deteriorated with his personal character. It had at
+first been liberal and just; it became arbitrary and even treacherous.
+His personal timidity made him at once harsh and vacillating. The heads
+of the great families, whom he had invited to a banquet, were seized and
+condemned to death on a charge of conspiracy. But a sudden terror of the
+possible consequences of his action caused him to relent, and he
+released his victims just as they were preparing for execution. His
+leniency was as ill-timed as his previous severity. The nobles could no
+longer trust him, and their fear was diminished by the weakness which
+they despised while they profited by it. They retired from Rome and
+concerted measures for the overthrow of their enemy.
+
+The first attack, which was led by Stefano Colonna, was repulsed almost
+by accident; but Rienzi, who had shown more cowardice than generalship,
+disgusted his supporters by his indecent exultation over the bodies of
+the slain. And there was one fatal ambiguity in Rienzi's position. He
+had begun by announcing himself as the ally and champion of the papacy,
+and Clement VI had been willing enough to stand by and watch the
+destruction of the baronage. But the growing independence and the
+arrogant pretensions of the Tribune exasperated the Pope. A new legate
+was despatched to Italy to denounce and excommunicate Rienzi as a
+heretic. The latter had no longer any support to lean upon. When a new
+attack was threatened, the people sullenly refused to obey the call to
+arms. Rienzi had not sufficient courage to risk a final struggle. On
+December 15th he abdicated and retired in disguise from Rome. His rise
+to power, his dazzling triumph, and his downfall were all comprised
+within the brief period of seven months.
+
+For the next few years Rienzi disappeared from view. According to his
+own account he was concealed in a cave in the Apennines, where he
+associated with some of the wilder members of the sect of the Fraticelli
+and probably imbibed some of their tenets. Rome relapsed into anarchy,
+and men's minds were distracted from politics by the ravages of the
+black death. The great jubilee held in Rome in 1350 became a kind of
+thanksgiving service of those whom the plague had spared.
+
+It is said that Rienzi himself visited the scene of his exploits without
+detection among the crowds of pilgrims. But he was destined to reappear
+in a more public and disastrous manner. In his solitude his courage and
+his ambition revived, and he meditated new plans for restoring freedom
+to Rome and to Italy. The allegiance to the Church, which he had
+professed in 1347, was weakened by the conduct of Clement VI and by the
+influence of the Fraticelli, and he resolved in the future to ally
+himself with the secular rather than with the ecclesiastical power, with
+the Empire rather than with the papacy. In August, 1351, he appeared in
+disguise in Prague and demanded an audience of Charles IV. To him he
+proposed the far-reaching scheme which he had formed during his exile.
+
+The Pope and the whole body of clergy were to be deprived of their
+temporal power; the petty tyrants of Italy were to be driven out; and
+the Emperor was to fix his residence in Rome as the supreme ruler of
+Christendom. All this was to be accomplished by Rienzi himself at his
+own cost and trouble. Charles IV listened with some curiosity to a man
+whose career had excited such universal interest, but he was the last
+man to be carried away by such chimerical suggestions.
+
+The introduction into the political proposals of some of the religious
+and communistic ideas of the Fraticelli gave the Emperor a pretext for
+committing Rienzi to the Archbishop of Prague for correction and
+instruction. The Archbishop communicated with the Pope, and on the
+demand of Clement VI Charles agreed to hand Rienzi over to the papal
+court on condition that his life should be spared. In 1352 Rienzi was
+conveyed to Avignon and thrust into prison. He owed his life perhaps
+less to the Emperor's request than to the opportune death of Clement VI
+in this year.
+
+The new Pope, Innocent VI, was more independent of French control than
+his immediate predecessors. The French King was fully occupied with
+internal disorders and with the English war. Thus the Pope was able to
+give more attention to Italian politics, which were sufficiently
+pressing. The independence and anarchy of the Papal States constituted a
+serious problem, but the danger of their subjection to a foreign power
+was still more serious. In 1350 the important city of Bologna had been
+seized by the Visconti of Milan, and the progress of this powerful
+family threatened to absorb the whole of the Romagna. Innocent
+determined to resist their encroachments and at the same time to restore
+the papal authority, and in 1353 he intrusted this double task to
+Cardinal Albornoz.
+
+Albornoz, equally distinguished as a diplomatist and as a military
+commander, resolved to ally the cause of the papacy with that of
+liberty. His programme was to overthrow the tyrants as the enemies both
+of the people and of the popes, and to restore municipal self-government
+under papal protection. His attention was first directed to the city of
+Rome, which, after many vicissitudes since 1347, had fallen under the
+influence of a demagogue named Baroncelli.
+
+Baroncelli had revived to some extent the schemes of Rienzi, but had
+declared openly against papal rule. To oppose this new tribune, Albornoz
+conceived the project of using the influence of Rienzi, whose rule was
+now regretted by the populace that had previously deserted him. The Pope
+was persuaded to release Rienzi from prison and to send him to Rome,
+where the effect of his presence was almost magical. The Romans flocked
+to welcome their former liberator, and he was reinstalled in power with
+the title of senator, conferred upon him by the Pope. But his character
+was not improved by adversity, and his rule was more arbitrary and
+selfish than it had been before.
+
+The execution of the _condottiere_, Fra Moreale, was an act of
+ingratitude as well as of treachery. Popular favor was soon alienated
+from a ruler who could no longer command either affection or respect,
+and, in a mob rising, Rienzi was put to death, October 8, 1354. But his
+return had served the purpose of Albornoz. Rome was preserved to the
+papacy, and the cardinal could proceed in safety with his task of
+subduing the independent tyrants of Romagna.
+
+Central Italy had not yet witnessed the general introduction of
+mercenaries, and the native populations still fought their own battles.
+The policy of exciting revolts among the subject citizens was completely
+successful, and by 1360 almost the whole of Romagna had submitted to the
+papal legate. His triumph was crowned in this year, when, by skilful use
+of quarrels among the Visconti princes, he succeeded in recovering
+Bologna.
+
+
+
+
+BEGINNING AND PROGRESS OF THE RENAISSANCE
+
+FOURTEENTH TO SIXTEENTH CENTURY
+
+JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
+
+
+  The new birth or resurrection known as the "Renaissance" is
+  usually considered to have begun in Italy in the fourteenth
+  century, though some writers would date its origin from the
+  reign of Frederick II, 1215-1250; and by this Prince--the
+  most enlightened man of his age--it was at least
+  anticipated. Well versed in languages and science, he was a
+  patron of scholars, whom he gathered about him, from all
+  parts of the world, at his court in Palermo.
+
+  At all events the Renaissance was heralded through the
+  recovery by Italian scholars of Greek and Roman classical
+  literature. When the movement began, the civilization of
+  Greece and Rome had long been exerting a partial influence,
+  not only upon Italy, but on other parts of mediaeval Europe
+  as well. But in Italy especially, when the wave of barbarism
+  had passed, the people began to feel a returning
+  consciousness of their ancient culture, and a desire to
+  reproduce it. To Italians the Latin language was easy, and
+  their country abounded in documents and monumental records
+  which symbolized past greatness.
+
+  The modern Italian spirit was produced through the
+  combination of various elements, among which were the
+  political institutions brought by the Lombards from Germany,
+  the influence of chivalry and other northern forms of
+  civilization, and the more immediate power of the Church.
+  That which was foreshadowed in the thirteenth century became
+  in the fourteenth a distinct national development, which, as
+  Symonds, its most discerning interpreter, shows us, was
+  constructing a model for the whole western world.
+
+The word "renaissance" has of late years received a more extended
+significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent--the
+"revival of learning." We use it to denote the whole transition from the
+Middle Ages to the modern world; and though it is possible to assign
+certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we
+cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say between this year and
+that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to
+name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended.
+Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer.
+
+The truth is that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The
+evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is
+progressive. As in the transformation scene of some pantomime, so here
+the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first
+shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the
+old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the
+new scene be finally set up?
+
+In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to
+any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one
+department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they
+mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution
+effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of
+antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see
+in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for
+antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a
+correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new
+systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the
+Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science
+will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and
+Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation
+of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point
+which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian,
+again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism,
+the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of
+monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority, and the
+erection of the papacy into an Italian kingdom, and in the last place
+the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in
+the Revolution: these are the aspects of the movement which engross his
+attention.
+
+Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the
+False Decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman code, and
+the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of modern
+iurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law.
+Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and
+inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will
+point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing
+and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by
+gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the
+instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the
+dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and
+perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.
+
+Yet neither any one of these answers, taken separately, nor indeed all
+of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. By the term
+"renaissance," or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be
+explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an
+effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the
+onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the
+Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature
+or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of
+self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European
+races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no
+restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the
+inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at
+the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of
+the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery
+which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the
+spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that
+moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues,
+vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.
+
+How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries
+after Christ, to speak roughly, humanity awoke as it were from slumber
+and began to live? That is a question which we can but imperfectly
+answer. The mystery of organic life defeats analysis. Whether the
+subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the
+commencement of a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or
+a new phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to
+state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point
+out what are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover, we must be
+careful not to be carried away by words of our own making. Renaissance,
+Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being
+isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we
+find it convenient to name; while history itself is one and continuous,
+so that our utmost endeavors to regard some portion of it, independently
+of the rest, will be defeated.
+
+A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after the
+dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there was no possibility
+of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had deluged
+Europe had to absorb their barbarism; the fragments of Roman
+civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated; the Germanic
+nations had to receive culture and religion from the effete people they
+had superseded. It was further necessary that the modern nationalities
+should be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that
+peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated, before
+the indispensable _milieu_ for a resurrection of the free spirit of
+humanity could exist. The first nation which fulfilled these conditions
+was the first to inaugurate the new era. The reason why Italy took the
+lead in the Renaissance was that Italy possessed a language, a favorable
+climate, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, at a time when
+other nations were still semibarbarous. Where the human spirit had been
+buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins
+of that Empire; and the papacy--called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead
+Roman Empire, seated, throned, and crowned, upon the ashes thereof--to
+some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.
+
+Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the
+Renaissance was intellectual--that it was the emancipation of the reason
+for the modern world--we may inquire how feudalism was related to it.
+The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration
+before the idols of the Church--dogma and authority and scholasticism.
+Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by
+the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the
+outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate,
+without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the
+traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter
+rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult
+hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved for humanity during
+the Middle Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was
+done unconsciously--that it was a gradual and instinctive process of
+becoming. The reason, in a word, was not awake; the mind of man was
+ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to
+think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated
+sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole
+systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles
+more idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at
+Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle
+were alive, but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to
+bid them speak with voice intelligible to the modern mind. It is no less
+pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of humanity sweeping from
+all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but unavailing foam upon the
+shores of Palestine, whole nations laying life down for the chance of
+seeing the walls of Jerusalem, worshipping the sepulchre whence Christ
+had risen, loading their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the
+sacred earth, while all the time, within their breasts and brains, the
+spirit of the Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of
+freedom which ere long was destined to restore its birthright to the
+world.
+
+Meanwhile the Middle Age accomplished its own work. Slowly and
+obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations
+and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took
+shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters,
+and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed.
+The qualities which render modern society different from that of the
+ancient world were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity,
+by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further
+phase. After the nations had been moulded, their monarchies and
+dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into
+various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany
+numerous principalities sprang into preeminence; and though the nation
+was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was
+acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of
+which the king could say, "_L'etat c'est moi_." England developed her
+complicated constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the
+same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of
+transformation. The papacy became more autocratic. Like the king the
+pope began to say, "_L'Eglise c'est moi_." This merging of the mediaeval
+state and mediaeval church in the personal supremacy of king and pope may
+be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism which
+preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary milieu was
+prepared. The organization of the five great nations, and the levelling
+of political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual
+despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the
+Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
+Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still
+evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.
+
+Meanwhile it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly
+upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms.
+Far from that, within the Middle Age itself, over and over again, the
+reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth
+century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and
+words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of
+the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that
+man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate
+between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his
+lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of
+the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three
+men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as
+an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
+emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs,
+especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were
+ready to resume their sway. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari,
+the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites--heretics in
+whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by
+the Church.
+
+We have to commemorate the vast conception of the emperor Frederick II,
+who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of
+Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance.
+He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly
+we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering
+her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not
+yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature
+and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophytic members of
+half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the
+birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans
+imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to
+keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles
+of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick;
+Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make
+way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the
+parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by
+sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with
+demoniac zeal--these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe.
+Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary
+and sterile.
+
+Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
+conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
+first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
+shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal of antique culture as
+the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
+his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
+speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
+Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
+Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
+freedom. His conception of human existence as a joy to be accepted with
+thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
+familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semipagan gladness
+that marked the real Renaissance.
+
+In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of
+intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;
+but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
+With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to
+create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius
+reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a
+splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of
+the world, the goodliness of youth, and strength and love and life,
+unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.
+
+It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had
+lost, indeed, the heroic spirit which we admire in her communes of the
+thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that
+repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last
+began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried
+the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of
+mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were
+as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who
+were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted,
+their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of
+enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially
+preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fibre of the men who
+were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to
+delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their
+capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No
+generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them
+down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of
+thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses
+rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They
+yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the
+same time the period of satiety was still far off.
+
+Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single
+pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment
+when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are
+not blunted, nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first
+time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we
+may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing
+is more remarkable than the fulness of the life that throbbed in them.
+Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of
+sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of
+personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning has written of
+Sordello's temperament:
+
+            "A footfall there
+  Suffices to upturn to the warm air
+  Half-germinating spices, mere decay
+  Produces richer life, and day by day
+  New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
+  And still more labyrinthine buds the rose."
+
+During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not
+seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and
+turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like St. Bernard travelling
+along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the
+waters nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
+mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
+thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule--even like this
+monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
+sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not
+known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is
+a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost,
+death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven
+hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and
+submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of
+life--these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church. The
+Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which
+they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing
+the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the
+mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical
+humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make
+himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as
+destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a
+dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.
+
+An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
+spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
+the ancient mind, which followed upon what is called the Revival of
+Learning. The fall of the Greek empire in 1453, while it signalized the
+extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated
+forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under
+all manifestations was generated. Men found that in classical as well as
+biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and
+intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern
+genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the
+ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the
+exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to
+be one.
+
+The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the
+world and the discovery of man. Under these two formulas may be
+classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The
+discovery of the world divides itself into two branches--the exploration
+of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is
+in fact what we call science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the
+Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar
+system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain
+statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid
+what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is
+only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with
+the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude
+of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been
+added to civilization.
+
+In like manner, it is worth while to pause a moment and consider what is
+implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system.
+The world, regarded in old times as the centre of all things, the apple
+of God's eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars,
+suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant
+sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable
+suns, attended each by a _cortege_ of planets, and scattered--how, we
+know not--through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the
+old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up
+through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples?
+The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a
+blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by
+annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo
+for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that
+in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her
+most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology.
+
+Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and
+religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth God could not be
+worshipped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new
+meaning had been given to the words "God is a Spirit, and they that
+worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The reason of man
+was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a
+part, and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three
+centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized
+astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have
+since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious, but also
+incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life, and then
+considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten
+centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to
+estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued
+from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with
+the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has
+never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the
+first-born of the spirit of the modern world.
+
+Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the
+appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable
+world, and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know
+about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is
+possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations,
+illustrated by pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations,
+illustrated by biblical antiquity: these are the two regions, at first
+apparently distinct, afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the
+critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for
+investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at
+work--art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
+philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism--a
+frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without
+inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically
+connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which
+to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the
+worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond
+eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy;
+and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the
+natural forms he saw around him.
+
+But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose.
+Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy
+of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite
+devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost
+beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude;
+he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented
+attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of
+his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the
+altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way
+the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to
+earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by
+dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of
+beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the
+Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of
+physical perfection, and to introduce _un bel corpo ignudo_ into the
+composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations
+of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the
+host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it
+expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of
+progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly
+human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.
+
+Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church,
+diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of
+beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became
+the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final
+emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great
+age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the
+Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally
+religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on
+a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received
+into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown
+her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna
+Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother.
+Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing
+devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went
+further, and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with
+architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church
+by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.
+
+Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
+introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world
+a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the
+pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements
+within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister. It was scholarship which
+revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human
+thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life
+regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the
+Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the
+prose of Boethius--and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually
+been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius,
+Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public
+the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the
+Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental
+learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic
+traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were
+for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison.
+With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous
+subject-matter of scholarship _Litterae Humaniores_ ("the more human
+literature"), the literature that humanizes.
+
+There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
+Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring
+over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
+learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
+poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
+Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
+acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican
+Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a
+little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and
+convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek,
+who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from
+Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the
+heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of
+uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by
+these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by
+their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in
+this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of
+pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like
+odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed
+on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the
+indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet
+begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically
+bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho--absorbing to
+intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that
+kept pouring from those long buried amphorae of inspiration.
+
+What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm
+which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture. Popes and
+princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the
+leaders of the _demi-monde_ alike became scholars. There is a story told
+by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular
+felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some
+Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the
+Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription
+"Julia, Daughter of Claudius," and inside the coffer lay the body of a
+most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents
+from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still
+upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long
+hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed--so goes the
+legend--to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all
+the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan world. In
+the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her beauty was beyond
+imagination or description. She was far fairer than any woman of the
+modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the
+orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia
+was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained
+in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by
+Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight
+variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another that it
+was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really
+have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the _mythus_
+as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age
+to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic
+world.
+
+Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
+philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
+had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
+their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
+There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
+dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared _thesauri_ of
+mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole
+mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato,
+Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be
+struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with
+printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and
+day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
+brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to
+accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond
+the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace
+of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in
+the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of
+these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for
+the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470,
+Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the
+inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
+expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
+endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to
+think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with
+emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus
+or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we
+owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of
+intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the
+future of human culture.
+
+This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship may be said
+to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed
+on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his
+_Adagia_ in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective
+spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength
+in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and
+sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the
+ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,
+comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of
+scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic culture
+was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was
+brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world,
+and emancipated from the thraldom of improved traditions. The force to
+judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in
+the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
+from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The
+minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval
+ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew
+to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This
+extravagance led of necessity to a reaction--in the North, of
+Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation
+effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity,
+that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
+imperilled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the
+other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially
+retarded by the reaction it produced.
+
+The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of
+man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom,
+is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage
+literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and
+encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom
+followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
+Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate
+the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to
+the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as
+yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and
+Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found
+philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the
+Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole
+movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the
+modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
+mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon, or as a
+mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits,
+in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the
+Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science--the
+recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of
+history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached
+chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection
+between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human
+spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is
+the true philosophy of history.
+
+The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its
+mediaeval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church
+successfully combated in North Italy, in France, and in Bohemia were the
+precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth
+century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type--Reuchlin in
+Germany, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as
+a humanist--contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
+incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the
+necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity as
+distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the
+individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for
+himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between humanity and
+God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. The
+principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous.
+Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it
+opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other
+side with intolerance of mere authority, it led to what has since been
+named rationalism--the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with
+the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the
+conceptions of the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating
+the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national
+politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It
+was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism of the
+Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and
+introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This
+high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by
+criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the
+eighteenth century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work
+that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the
+organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.
+
+Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty--the
+spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of
+self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the
+body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in
+religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the
+principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the
+Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the
+Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how, through
+education, to render culture accessible to all--to break down that
+barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and
+which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and
+ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men
+shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be
+realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity,
+from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy
+the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between
+individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be
+impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will
+lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God
+has made him.
+
+It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which
+aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over
+and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various
+times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material
+resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according
+to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for
+the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in
+the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus
+to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to
+substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after
+numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an
+art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was
+first made of cotton in Europe about 1000 and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder
+entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the
+Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of
+which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The
+feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess
+of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry
+trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the
+cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory
+was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as
+indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property
+of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing
+cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to
+every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the
+inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious
+calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when
+we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.
+
+In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared.
+But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter of history, the true
+Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities
+which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediaeval world
+were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture
+and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the
+European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of
+divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar
+vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in
+science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern
+intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England
+the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more
+for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the
+labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has collected,
+centralized, and diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But if
+we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a
+time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to
+organize the various elements of the modern spirit, and to set the
+fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and live.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE
+
+A.D. 1348
+
+J. F. C. HECKER[51]  GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
+
+
+  Different parts of the oriental world have been mentioned as
+  the probable locality of the first appearance of the plague
+  or pestilence known as the "black death," but its origin is
+  most generally referred to China, where, at all events, it
+  raged violently about 1333, when it was accompanied at its
+  outbreak by terrestrial and atmospheric phenomena of a
+  destructive character, such as are said to have attended the
+  first appearance of Asiatic cholera and other spreading and
+  deadly diseases; from which it has been conjectured that
+  through these convulsions deleterious foreign substances may
+  have been projected into the atmosphere.
+
+  But while for centuries the nature and causes of the black
+  death have been subjects of medical inquiry in all
+  countries, it remained for our own time to discover a more
+  scientific explanation than those previously advanced. The
+  malady is now identified by pathologists with the bubonic
+  plague, which at intervals still afflicts India and other
+  oriental lands, and has in recent years been a cause of
+  apprehension at more than one American seaport.
+
+  It is called _bubonic_--from the Greek _boubon_
+  ("groin")--because it attacks the lymphatic glands of the
+  groins, armpits, neck, and other parts of the body. Among
+  its leading symptoms are headache, fever, vertigo, vomiting,
+  prostration, etc., with dark purple spots or a mottled
+  appearance upon the skin. Death in severe cases usually
+  occurs within forty-eight hours. Bacteriologists are now
+  generally agreed that the disorder is due to a bacillus
+  identified by investigators both in India and in western
+  countries.
+
+  The first historic appearance of the black death in Europe
+  was at Constantinople, A.D. 543. But far more widespread and
+  terrible were its ravages in the fourteenth century, when
+  they were almost world-wide. Of the dreadful visitation in
+  Europe then, we are fortunate to have the striking account
+  of Dr. Hecker, which follows.
+
+  The name "black death" was given to the disease in the more
+  northern parts of Europe--from the dark spots on the skin
+  above mentioned--while in Italy it was called _la mortalega
+  grande_ ("the great mortality"). From Italy came almost the
+  only credible accounts of the manner of living, and of the
+  ruin caused among the people in their more private life,
+  during the pestilence; and the subjoined account of what was
+  seen in Florence is of special interest as being from no
+  less an eye-witness than Boccaccio.
+
+
+J. F. C. HECKER
+
+The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain
+intelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries of
+Asia. Here it showed itself as the oriental plague with inflammation of
+the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China--that
+is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion;
+a contagion that in ordinary pestilences requires immediate contact, and
+only under unfavorable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated
+by the mere approach to the sick.
+
+The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague over the
+whole earth was certainly very great; and the opinion that the black
+death might have been excluded from Western Europe, by good regulations,
+similar to those which are now in use, would have all the support of
+modern experience, provided it could be proved that this plague had been
+actually imported from the East; or that the oriental plague in general,
+whenever it appears in Europe, has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a
+proof, however, can by no means be produced so as to enforce conviction.
+The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by
+the bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground for
+supposing that it sprung up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude
+manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth; influences
+which peculiarly favor the origin of severe diseases. We need not go
+back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it had
+half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.
+
+If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that in
+countries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in a
+milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it had
+appeared for the last time, were particularly favorable to its
+unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in this
+eventful year also, the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe,
+which might be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations. Thus, at least
+in part, the black plague may have originated in Europe itself. The
+corruption of the atmosphere came from the East; but the disease itself
+came not upon the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increased
+by the atmosphere where it had previously existed.
+
+This source of the black plague was not, however, the only one; for, far
+more powerful than the excitement of the latent elements of the plague
+by atmospheric influences was the effect of the contagion communicated
+from one people to another, on the great roads, and in the harbors of
+the Mediterranean. From China, the route of the caravans lay to the
+north of the Caspian Sea, through Central Asia to Tauris. Here ships
+were ready to take the produce of the East to Constantinople, the
+capital of commerce and the medium of connection between Asia, Europe,
+and Africa. Other caravans went from India to Asia Minor, and touched at
+the cities south of the Caspian Sea, and lastly from Bagdad, through
+Arabia to Egypt; also the maritime communication on the Red Sea, from
+India to Arabia and Egypt, was not inconsiderable. In all these
+directions contagion made its way; and doubtless Constantinople and the
+harbors of Asia Minor are to be regarded as the _foci_ of infection;
+whence it radiated to the most distant seaports and islands.
+
+To Constantinople the plague had been brought from the northern coast of
+the Black Sea, after it had depopulated the countries between those
+routes of commerce and appeared as early as 1347, in Cyprus, Sicily,
+Marseilles, and some of the seaports of Italy. The remaining islands of
+the Mediterranean, particularly Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, were
+visited in succession. _Foci_ of contagion existed also in full activity
+along the whole southern coast of Europe, when, in January, 1348, the
+plague appeared in Avignon, and in other cities in the South of France
+and North of Italy, as well as in Spain.
+
+The precise days of its eruption in the individual towns are no longer
+to be ascertained; but it was not simultaneous; for in Florence the
+disease appeared in the beginning of April; in Cesena, the 1st of June;
+and place after place was attacked throughout the whole year; so that
+the plague, after it had passed through the whole of France and Germany,
+where, however, it did not make its ravages until the following year,
+did not break out till August in England; where it advanced so
+gradually that a period of three months elapsed before it reached
+London. The northern kingdoms were attacked by it in 1349; Sweden,
+indeed, not until November of that year, almost two years after its
+eruption in Avignon. Poland received the plague in 1349, probably from
+Germany, if not from the northern countries; but in Russia it did not
+make its appearance until 1351, more than three years after it had
+broken out in Constantinople. Instead of advancing in a northwesterly
+direction from Tauris and from the Caspian Sea, it had thus made the
+great circuit of the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, Southern and
+Central Europe, England, the northern kingdoms and Poland, before it
+reached the Russian territories; a phenomenon which has not again
+occurred with respect to more recent pestilences originating in Asia.
+
+We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages of the black
+plague. Let us go back for a moment to the fourteenth century. The
+people were yet but little civilized. Human life was little regarded;
+governments concerned not themselves about the numbers of their
+subjects, for whose welfare it was incumbent on them to provide. Thus,
+the first requisite for estimating the loss of human life--namely, a
+knowledge of the amount of the population--is altogether wanting.
+
+Cairo lost daily, when the plague was raging with its greatest violence,
+from ten thousand to fifteen thousand, being as many as, in modern
+times, great plagues have carried off during their whole course. In
+China, more than thirteen millions are said to have died; and this is in
+correspondence with the certainly exaggerated accounts from the rest of
+Asia. India was depopulated. Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak,
+Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds
+fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea, none was left
+alive. On the roads, in the camps, in the caravansaries, unburied bodies
+were seen; and a few cities only remained, in an unaccountable manner,
+free. In Aleppo, five hundred died daily; twenty-two thousand people and
+most of the animals were carried off in Gaza within six weeks. Cyprus
+lost almost all its inhabitants; and ships without crews were often seen
+in the Mediterranean, as afterward in the North Sea, driving about and
+spreading the plague wherever they went on shore. It was reported to
+Pope Clement, at Avignon, that throughout the East, probably with the
+exception of China, twenty-three million eight hundred and forty
+thousand people had fallen victims to the plague.
+
+Luebeck, which could no longer contain the multitudes that flocked to it,
+was thrown into such consternation on the eruption of the plague that
+the citizens destroyed themselves, as if in frenzy. When the plague
+ceased, men thought they were still wandering among the dead, so
+appalling was the livid aspect of the survivors, in consequence of the
+anxiety they had undergone, and the unavoidable infection of the air.
+Many other cities probably presented a similar appearance; and small
+country towns and villages, estimated at two hundred thousand
+population, were bereft of all their inhabitants.
+
+In many places in France not more than two out of twenty of the
+inhabitants were left alive. Two queens, one bishop, and great numbers
+of other distinguished persons fell a sacrifice to it, and more than
+five hundred a day died in the Hotel-Dieu, under the faithful care of
+the religious women, whose disinterested courage, in this age of horror,
+displayed the most beautiful traits of human virtue.
+
+The church-yards were soon unable to contain the dead, and many houses,
+left without inhabitants, fell to ruins. In Avignon, the Pope found it
+necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown into the
+river without delay, as the church-yards would no longer hold them.
+
+In Vienna, where for some time twelve hundred inhabitants died daily,
+the interment of corpses in the church-yards and within the churches was
+forthwith prohibited, and the dead were then arranged in layers, by
+thousands, in six large pits outside the city. In many places it was
+rumored that plague patients were buried alive, and thus the horror of
+the distressed people was everywhere increased. In Erfurt, after the
+church-yards were filled, twelve thousand corpses were thrown into
+eleven great pits; and the like might be stated with respect to all the
+larger cities. Funeral ceremonies, the last consolation of the
+survivors, were everywhere impracticable.
+
+In all Germany there seem to have died only one million two hundred and
+forty-four thousand four hundred and thirty-four inhabitants; this
+country, however, was more spared than others. Italy was most severely
+visited. It is said to have lost half its inhabitants; in Sardinia and
+Corsica, according to the account of John Villani, who was himself
+carried off by the black plague, scarcely a third part of the population
+remained alive; and the Venetians engaged ships at a high rate to
+retreat to the islands; so that, after the plague had carried off
+three-fourths of her inhabitants, their proud city was left forlorn and
+desolate. In Florence it was prohibited to publish the numbers of the
+dead and to toll the bells at their funerals, in order that the living
+might not abandon themselves to despair.
+
+In England most of the great cities suffered incredible losses; above
+all, Yarmouth, in which seven thousand and fifty-two died; Bristol,
+Oxford, Norwich, Leicester, York, and London, where, in one
+burial-ground alone, there were interred upward of fifty thousand
+corpses, arranged in layers, in large pits. It is said that in the whole
+country scarcely a tenth part remained alive. Morals were deteriorated
+everywhere, and public worship was, in a great measure, laid aside, in
+many places the churches being bereft of their priests. The instruction
+of the people was impeded, covetousness became general; and when
+tranquillity was restored, the great increase of lawyers was
+astonishing, to whom the endless disputes regarding inheritances offered
+a rich harvest. The want of priests, too, throughout the country,
+operated very detrimentally upon the people. The lower classes were most
+exposed to the ravages of the plague, while the houses of the nobility
+were, in proportion, much more spared. The sittings of parliament, of
+the king's bench, and of most of the other courts were suspended as long
+as the malady raged.
+
+Ireland was much less heavily visited than England. The disease seems to
+have scarcely reached the mountainous districts of that kingdom; and
+Scotland, too, would, perhaps, have remained free had not the Scots
+availed themselves of the misfortune of the English, to make an
+irruption into their territory, which terminated in the destruction of
+their army, by the plague and by the sword, and the extension of the
+pestilence, through those who escaped, over the whole country.
+
+In England the plague was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among the
+cattle. Of what nature this murrain may have been can no more be
+determined than whether it originated from communication with the plague
+patients or from other causes. There was everywhere a great rise in the
+price of food. For a whole year, until it terminated in August, 1349,
+the black plague prevailed and everywhere poisoned the springs of
+comfort and prosperity. In other countries it generally lasted only half
+a year, but returned frequently in individual places. Spain was
+uninterruptedly ravaged by the black plague till after the year 1350, to
+which the frequent internal feuds and the wars with the Moors not a
+little contributed. Alfonso XI, whose passion for war carried him too
+far, died of it at the siege of Gibraltar, March 26, 1350. He was the
+only king in Europe who fell a sacrifice to it. The mortality seems to
+have been less in Spain than in Italy, and about as considerable as in
+France.
+
+The whole period during which the black plague raged with destructive
+violence in Europe was, with the exception of Russia, from 1347 to 1350.
+The plagues which in the sequel often returned until 1383, we do not
+consider as belonging to the "great mortality."
+
+The premature celebration of the Jubilee, to which Clement VI cited the
+faithful to Rome 1350, during the great epidemic, caused a new eruption
+of the plague, from which it is said that scarcely one in a hundred of
+the pilgrims escaped. Italy was, in consequence, depopulated anew; and
+those who returned spread poison and corruption of morals in all
+directions.
+
+The changes which occurred about this period in the North of Europe are
+sufficiently memorable. In Sweden two princes died--Haken and Canute,
+half-brothers of King Magnus; and in Westgothland alone four hundred and
+sixty-six priests. The inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland found in the
+coldness of their inhospitable climate no protection against the
+southern enemy who had penetrated to them from happier countries. The
+plague wrought great havoc among them. In Denmark and Norway, however,
+people were so occupied with their own misery that the accustomed
+voyages to Greenland ceased.
+
+In Russia the black plague did not break out until 1351, after it had
+already passed through the South and North of Europe. The mortality was
+extraordinarily great. In Russia, too, the voice of nature was silenced
+by fear and horror. In the hour of danger, fathers and mothers deserted
+their children, and children their parents.
+
+Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe, the most
+probable is that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants were
+carried off. It may be assumed, without exaggeration, that Europe lost
+during the black death twenty-five million inhabitants.
+
+That her nations could so quickly recover from so fearful a visitation,
+and, without retrograding more than they actually did, could so develop
+their energies in the following century, is a most convincing proof of
+the indestructibility of human society as a whole. To assume, however,
+that it did not suffer any essential change internally, because in
+appearance everything remained as before, is inconsistent with a just
+view of cause and effect. Many historians seem to have adopted such an
+opinion; hence, most of them have touched but superficially on the
+"great mortality" of the fourteenth century. We for our part are
+convinced that in the history of the world the black death is one of the
+most important events which have prepared the way for the present state
+of Europe.
+
+He who studies the human mind with attention, and forms a deliberate
+judgment on the intellectual powers which set people and states in
+motion, may, perhaps, find some proofs of this assertion in the
+following observations. At that time the advancement of the hierarchy
+was, in most countries, extraordinary; for the Church acquired treasures
+and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the
+crusades; but experience has demonstrated that such a state of things is
+ruinous to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced on
+this occasion.
+
+After the cessation of the black plague, a greater fecundity in women
+was everywhere remarkable; marriages were prolific; and double and
+treble births were more frequent than at other times. After the "great
+mortality" the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before;
+at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers
+have felt surprise. Some writers of authority published their opinions
+on this subject. Others copied from them, without seeing for themselves,
+and thus the world believed in the miracle of an imperfection in the
+human body which had been caused by the black plague.
+
+The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings which they
+had undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten; and in the stirring
+vicissitudes of existence the world belonged to the living.
+
+The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the
+black plague is without parallel and beyond description. In the eyes of
+the timorous, danger was the certain harbinger of death; many fell
+victims to fear on the first appearance of the distemper, and the most
+stout-hearted lost their confidence. The pious closed their accounts
+with the world; their only remaining desire was for a participation in
+the consolations of religion. Repentance seized the transgressor,
+admonishing him to consecrate his remaining hours to the exercise of
+Christian virtues. Children were frequently seen, while laboring under
+the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayer and songs of
+thanksgiving. An awful sense of contrition seized Christians everywhere;
+they resolved to forsake their vices, to make restitution for past
+offences, before they were summoned hence, to seek reconciliation with
+their Maker, and to avert, by self-chastisement, the punishment due to
+their former sins.
+
+Human nature would be exalted could the countless noble actions which,
+in times of most imminent danger, were performed in secret, be recorded
+for future generations. They, however, have no influence on the course
+of worldly events. They are known only to silent eye-witnesses, and soon
+fall into oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad
+undaunted; they desecrate what is noble, they pervert what is divine, to
+the unholy purposes of selfishness; which hurries along every good
+feeling in the false excitement of the age. Thus it was in the years of
+this plague.
+
+In the fourteenth century the monastic system was still in its full
+vigor, the power of the religious orders and brotherhoods was revered by
+the people, and the hierarchy was still formidable to the temporal
+power. It was, therefore, in the natural constitution of society that
+bigoted zeal, which in such times makes a show of public acts of
+penance, should avail itself of the semblance of religion. But this took
+place in such a manner that unbridled, self-willed penitence degenerated
+into luke-warmness, renounced obedience to the hierarchy, and prepared a
+fearful opposition to the Church, paralyzed as it was by antiquated
+forms.
+
+While all countries were filled with lamentations and woe, there first
+arose in Hungary, and afterward in Germany, the Brotherhood of the
+Flagellants, called also the Brethren of the Cross, or Cross-bearers,
+who took upon themselves the repentance of the people for the sins they
+had committed, and offered prayers and supplications for the averting of
+this plague. This order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class,
+who were either actuated by sincere contrition or who joyfully availed
+themselves of this pretext for idleness and were hurried along with the
+tide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods gained in repute,
+and were welcomed by the people with veneration and enthusiasm, many
+nobles and ecclesiastics ranged themselves under their standard; and
+their bands were not unfrequently augmented by children, honorable
+women, and nuns.
+
+They marched through the cities with leaders and singers, their heads
+covered as far as the eyes, their look fixed on the ground, with every
+token of contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments,
+with red crosses on the breast, back, and cap, and bore triple scourges,
+tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers
+and magnificent banners of velvet and cloth of gold were carried before
+them; wherever they made their appearance they were welcomed by the
+ringing of bells, and the people flocked from all quarters to listen to
+their hymns and witness their penance.
+
+In 1349 two hundred Flagellants first entered Strasburg, where they were
+hospitably lodged by the citizens. Above a thousand joined the
+brotherhood, which now separated into two bodies, for the purpose of
+journeying to the north and to the south. Adults and children left their
+families to accompany them; till, at length, their sanctity was
+questioned and the doors of houses and churches were closed against
+them. At Spires two hundred boys, of twelve years of age and under,
+constituted themselves into a brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation of
+the children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at the
+instigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering the
+Holy Sepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were carried away by
+the delusion; they conducted the strangers to their houses with songs of
+thanksgiving, to regale them for the night. The women embroidered
+banners for them, and all were anxious to augment their pomp; and at
+every succeeding pilgrimage their influence and reputation increased.
+
+All Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders did homage
+to them; and they at length became as formidable to the secular as to
+the ecclesiastical power. The influence of this fanaticism was great and
+threatening. The appearance, in itself, was not novel. As far back as
+the eleventh century many believers in Asia and Southern Europe
+afflicted themselves with the punishment of flagellation.
+
+The author of the solemn processions of the Flagellants is said to have
+been St. Anthony of Padua (1231). In 1260 the Flagellants appeared in
+Italy as _Devoti_. "When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an
+unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians.
+The fear of Christ fell upon all; noble and lowly, old and young, and
+even children of five years of age marched through the streets with no
+covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of
+leathern thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and
+tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not
+only during the day, but even by night and in the severest winter, they
+traversed the cities with burning torches and banners, in thousands and
+tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves
+before the altars. The melancholy chant of the penitent alone was heard;
+enemies were reconciled; men and women vied with each other in splendid
+works of charity, as if they dreaded that divine omnipotence would
+pronounce on them the doom of annihilation."
+
+But at length the priests resisted this dangerous fanaticism, without
+being able to extirpate the illusion, which was advantageous to the
+hierarchy, as long as it submitted to its sway.
+
+The processions of the Brotherhood of the Cross undoubtedly promoted the
+spreading of the plague; and it is evident that the gloomy fanaticism
+which gave rise to them would infuse a new poison into the already
+desponding minds of the people.
+
+Still, however, all this was within the bounds of barbarous enthusiasm;
+but horrible were the persecutions of the Jews, which were committed in
+most countries with even greater exasperation than in the twelfth
+century, during the first crusades. In every destructive pestilence the
+common people at first attribute the mortality to poison. On whom, then,
+was vengeance so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the
+strangers who lived at enmity with the Christians? They were everywhere
+suspected of having poisoned the wells[52] or infected the air, and were
+pursued with merciless cruelty.
+
+These bloody scenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth century,
+are a counterpart to a similar mania of the age which was manifested in
+the persecutions of witches and sorcerers; and, like these, they prove
+that enthusiasm, associated with hatred and leagued with the baser
+passions, may work more powerfully upon whole nations than religion and
+legal order; nay, that it even knows how to profit by the authority of
+both, in order the more surely to satiate with blood the swords of
+long-suppressed revenge.
+
+The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October, 1348, at
+Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings
+were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by
+the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and
+in Freiburg, in 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the
+tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them;
+and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at
+Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince the world; and
+the persecution of the abhorred culprits thus appeared justifiable.
+
+Already in the autumn of 1348 a dreadful panic, caused by this supposed
+poisoning, seized all nations; in Germany, especially, the springs and
+wells were built over, that nobody might drink of them or employ their
+contents for culinary purposes; and for a long time the inhabitants of
+numerous towns and villages used only river and rain-water. The city
+gates were also guarded with the greatest caution: only confidential
+persons were admitted; and if medicine or any other article which might
+be supposed to be poisonous was found in the possession of a
+stranger--and it was natural that some should have these things by them
+for private use--he was forced to swallow a portion of it. By this
+trying state of privation, distrust, and suspicion the hatred against
+the supposed poisoners became greatly increased, and often broke out in
+popular commotions, which only served still further to infuriate the
+wildest passions.
+
+The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to
+extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their
+protectors, of whom the number was so small that throughout all Germany
+but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not
+regarded as outlaws and martyred and burned. Solemn summonses were
+issued from Bern to the towns of Basel, Freiburg in Breisgau, and
+Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as poisoners. The burgomasters and
+senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basel the populace
+obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews and to
+forbid persons of that community from entering their city for the space
+of two hundred years. Upon this, all the Jews in Basel, whose number
+could not have been inconsiderable, were enclosed in a wooden building,
+constructed for the purpose, and burned, together with it, upon the mere
+outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which, indeed, would
+have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place at
+Freiburg.
+
+A regular diet was held at Bennefeld, in Alsace, where the bishops,
+lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted
+how they should proceed with regard to the Jews; and when the deputies
+of Strasburg--not, indeed, the bishop of this town, who proved himself a
+violent fanatic--spoke in favor of the persecuted, as nothing criminal
+was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was
+vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed
+their buckets? A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the
+populace, who obeyed the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became
+but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burned they
+were at least banished; and so being compelled to wander about, they
+fell into the hands of the country people, who, without humanity and
+regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword.
+
+At Eslingen, the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their
+synagogue; and mothers were often seen throwing their children on the
+pile, to prevent their being baptized, and then precipitating themselves
+into the flames. In short, whatever deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice,
+and desperation, in fearful combination, could instigate mankind to
+perform, were executed in 1349, throughout Germany, Italy, and France,
+with impunity and in the eyes of all the world. It seemed as if the
+plague gave rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning
+and grief; and the greater part of those who, by their education and
+rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves led on
+the savage mob to murder and to plunder.
+
+The humanity and prudence of Clement VI must on this occasion also be
+mentioned to his honor. He not only protected the Jews at Avignon, as
+far as lay in his power, but also issued two bulls in which he declared
+them innocent, and he admonished all Christians, though without success,
+to cease from such groundless persecutions. The emperor Charles IV was
+also favorable to them, and sought to avert their destruction wherever
+he could; but he dared not draw the sword of justice, and even found
+himself obliged to yield to the selfishness of the Bohemian nobles, who
+were unwilling to forego so favorable an opportunity of releasing
+themselves from their Jewish creditors, under favor of an imperial
+mandate. Duke Albert of Austria burned and pillaged those of his cities
+which had persecuted the Jews--a vain and inhuman proceeding which,
+moreover, is not exempt from the suspicion of covetousness; yet he was
+unable, in his own fortress of Kyberg, to protect some hundreds of Jews,
+who had been received there, from being barbarously burned by the
+inhabitants.
+
+Several other princes and counts, among whom was Ruprecht of the
+Palatinate, took the Jews under their protection, on the payment of
+large sums; in consequence of which they were called "Jew-masters," and
+were in danger of being attacked by the populace and by their powerful
+neighbors. These persecuted and ill-used people--except, indeed, where
+humane individuals took compassion on them at their own peril, or when
+they could command riches to purchase protection--had no place of refuge
+left but the distant country of Lithuania, where Boleslav V, Duke of
+Poland, 1227-1279, had before granted them liberty of conscience; and
+King Casimir the Great, 1333-1370, yielding to the entreaties of Esther,
+a favorite Jewess, received them, and granted them further protection;
+on which account that country is still inhabited by a great number of
+Jews, who by their secluded habits have, more than any people in Europe,
+retained the manners of the Middle Ages.
+
+
+GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
+
+When the evil had become universal in Florence, the hearts of all the
+inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They fled from the sick
+and all that belonged to them, hoping by these means to save themselves.
+Others shut themselves up in their houses, with their wives, their
+children and households, living on the most costly food, but carefully
+avoiding all excess. None was allowed access to them; no intelligence of
+death or sickness was permitted to reach their ears; and they spent
+their time in singing and music and other pastimes.
+
+Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to excess,
+amusements of all descriptions, the indulgence of every gratification,
+and an indifference to what was passing around them as the best
+medicine, and acted accordingly. They wandered day and night from one
+tavern to another, and feasted without moderation or bounds. In this way
+they endeavored to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned their
+houses and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had already
+tolled.
+
+Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority of
+every law, human and divine, vanished. Most of those who were in office
+had been carried off by the plague, or lay sick, or had lost so many
+members of their families that they were unable to attend to their
+duties; so that thenceforth everyone acted as he thought proper. Others,
+in their mode of living, chose a middle course. They ate and drank what
+they pleased, and walked abroad; carrying odoriferous flowers, herbs, or
+spices, which they smelt at from time to time, in order to invigorate
+the brain and to avert the baneful influence of the air, infected by the
+sick and by the innumerable corpses of those who had died of the plague.
+Others carried their precaution still further, and thought the surest
+way to escape death was by flight. They therefore left the city; women
+as well as men abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and
+retiring into the country. But of these, also, many were carried off,
+most of them alone and deserted by all the world, themselves having
+previously set the example.
+
+Thus it was that one citizen fled from another--a neighbor from his
+neighbors--a relation from his relations; and in the end, so completely
+had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling that the brother forsook
+the brother, the sister the sister, the wife her husband, and at last
+even the parent his own offspring, and abandoned them, unvisited and
+unsoothed, to their fate. Those, therefore, that stood in need of
+assistance fell a prey to greedy attendants; who, for an exorbitant
+recompense, merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained
+with them in their last moments, and then not unfrequently became
+themselves victims to their avarice, and lived not to enjoy their
+extorted gain.
+
+Propriety and decorum were extinguished among the helpless sick. Females
+of rank seemed to forget their natural bashfulness, and committed the
+care of their persons, indiscriminately, to men and women of the lowest
+order. No longer were women, relatives or friends, found in the houses
+of mourning, to share the grief of the survivors; no longer was the
+corpse accompanied to the grave by neighbors and a numerous train of
+priests, carrying wax tapers and singing psalms, nor was it borne along
+by other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without a
+friend to comfort them in their last moments; and few indeed were they
+who departed amid the lamentations and tears of their friends and
+kindred.
+
+Instead of sorrow and mourning, appeared indifference, frivolity, and
+mirth; this being considered, especially by the females, as conducive to
+health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants;
+and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, hirelings of the lowest
+of the populace undertook the office for the sake of gain; and
+accompanied by only a few priests, and often without a single taper, it
+was borne to the very nearest church, and lowered into the first grave
+that was not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes,
+and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or
+negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings or in the
+immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended
+their lives in the streets by day and by night.
+
+The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their
+neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve
+themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the
+houses and laid before the doors, where the early morn found them in
+heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was no
+longer possible to have a bier for every corpse--three or four were
+generally laid together; husband and wife, father and mother, with two
+or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier;
+and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing
+the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals;
+so that instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment.
+
+
+
+
+FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN EUROPE
+
+TURKS SEIZE GALLIPOLI
+
+A.D. 1354
+
+JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL[53]
+
+
+  During the early years of the fourteenth century a new
+  Mahometan realm was established on the ruins of the
+  Seljukian and Byzantine power in Asia Minor. Osman,[54] or
+  Othman, the founder of this realm, which is regarded as the
+  original Ottoman empire, subdued a great part of Asia Minor,
+  and in the year of his death 1326, his son Orkhan captured
+  Prusa (now Brusa) and Nicomedia. In 1330 he took Nicaea--then
+  second only to Constantinople in the Greek or Byzantine
+  empire--and six years later he defeated the Turkish Prince
+  of Karasi, the ancient Mysia, and annexed his territory,
+  including the capital, Berghama, the ancient Pergamus, to
+  the Ottoman dominions, thus securing nearly the whole of
+  North-western Asia Minor.
+
+  During the reign of Orkhan the Ottomans made frequent
+  passages of the Hellespont for the purpose of extending
+  their power into Europe. After fifteen invasions without any
+  permanent conquest, in 1354 Orkhan and his son Suleiman
+  perceived an opportunity by which they prepared themselves
+  to profit--civil war was raging in the Byzantine empire,
+  where John Palaeologus was striving to deprive the emperor
+  Cantacuzenus of his throne.
+
+  The plan whereby the Ottomans secured a foothold in Europe
+  which soon enabled them to establish a permanent sovereignty
+  on the peninsula of Gallipoli was executed by Suleiman with
+  a military skill which gave his name a conspicuous place in
+  Turkish history.
+
+On the meridional shore of the Sea of Marmora, at the entrance of the
+Hellespont, is perceived the peninsula of Kapoutaghi--the ancient,
+almost insular Cyzicus, a Milesian colony. At the neck of the isthmus,
+where it joins the mainland, there where are seen to-day the ruins of
+Aidindjik, formerly arose Cyzicus, a city celebrated in the history of
+Persia and of Rome, of ancient Greece and of the Byzantine empire. This
+port, one of the most commercial of the Asiatic coast, possessed, like
+Rhodes, Marseilles, and Carthage, two military arsenals and an immense
+granary, each placed under the special superintendence of an architect.
+The annals of this town have been enriched by the passage of the
+Argonauts and of the Goths, by the siege of Mithridates and by the
+assistance received from the Romans under the leadership of Lucullus.
+
+Granted its freedom by the latter as a reward for its fidelity, Cyzicus
+was shortly afterward deprived of its privileges for having neglected
+the service of the temple of Augustus. Under the Byzantines it became
+the capital of the province of Hellespont and the metropolitan see of
+Mysia and of all the territory of Troy. On Mount Dyndimos, at the gates
+of Cyzicus, arose the temple of the great mother, the goddess Ida, whose
+worship had been established by the Argonauts, and who was venerated at
+Cyzicus as at Pessinunte, in the form of an aerolite, a sacred stone,
+which under the reign of King Attalus was carried to Rome, and installed
+in the city by all the matrons, preceded by Scipio the Younger. The
+inhabitants of the peninsula adored also Cybele, Proserpine, and
+Jupiter, who, according to a fabulous tradition, had given the town of
+Cyzicus to the wife of Pluto, as dower. Emperor Hadrian embellished this
+town with the largest and the finest of the temples of paganism. The
+columns of this edifice, all of one piece, were four ells (fifteen and
+one-half feet) in circumference and fifty ells (one hundred and
+ninety-five feet) in height.
+
+In 1354 Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, Governor of ancient Mysia, a
+province recently conquered by the Turks, was seized with admiration by
+the aspect of the majestic ruins of Cyzicus. The broken columns, the
+marbles prone on the sward, recalled to him the ruins of the palace of
+the Queen of Saba Balkis, erected by the order of Solomon, the remains
+of Istakhr (Persepolis), and of Tadmor (Palmyra). One evening when
+seated by the sea-shore, he saw, by the light of the moon (Aidindjik,
+the crescent moon), the porticoes and peristyles reflected in the waves.
+Clouds passed along the surface of the sea, and he imagined that he saw
+these ruined palaces and temples arise from the deep, and a fleet
+navigate the waters. Around him arose mysterious voices whose sound
+mingled with the murmur of the waves, while the moon, which at this
+moment shone in the east, seemed to unite Asia and Europe by a silver
+ribbon. It was she who, emerging formerly from the bosom of Edebali,[55]
+had come to hide herself in that of Osman. The remembrance of the
+fantastic vision, which had presaged a universal domination to his
+ancestor, inflamed the courage of Suleiman, and made him resolve to
+unite Europe and Asia by transporting the Ottoman power from the shores
+of Asia Minor to the strands of the Greek empire, and thus to realize
+the dream of Osman.
+
+Suleiman consulted immediately with Adjebeg, Ghazi-Fazil, Ewrenos, and
+Hadji-Ilbeki, ancient vizier of the Prince of Karasi, who had been his
+assistants in the government of Mysia. All confirmed him in his
+resolution. Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil the same night went to Gouroudjouk
+and took ship to make a reconnaissance in the environs of Tzympe,
+situated a league and a half from Gallipoli, opposite Gouroudjouk. A
+Greek prisoner whom they brought with them to Asia informed Suleiman of
+the abandoned and unprepared state of the place, and offered himself as
+a guide to surprise the garrison. Suleiman immediately had two rafts
+constructed of trees united by thongs of bull skins, and made the
+attempt the following night, with thirty-nine of his most intrepid
+companions in arms. Arrived before the fortress, they scaled the walls
+by mounting on an immense dung-heap, and took possession of it easily,
+owing to the inhabitants being all absent in the fields engaged in
+harvesting. Suleiman then hastened to send to Asia all the ships which
+he found in the port, to transport soldiers to Tzympe; and three days
+after, the fortress contained a garrison of three thousand Ottomans.
+
+In the mean while Cantacuzenus, unable to resist any longer the forces
+assembled against him by his young rival, John Palaeologus, asked the
+assistance of Orkhan. Orkhan sent him the conqueror of Tzympe, an
+auxiliary whose support later became more troublesome to the Emperor
+than it was useful against his enemy. Ten thousand Turkish cavaliers
+disembarked near Ainos, at the _embouchure_ of Maritza (Hebrus),
+defeated the auxiliary troops which John Palaeologus had drawn from
+Moesia and from the Triballiens, ravaged Bulgaria, and repassed into
+Asia, loaded with spoil.
+
+Cantacuzenus, more at his ease after the departure of the conquering
+horde, negotiated with Suleiman the ransom of Tzympe. Scarcely had he
+sent the ten thousand ducats agreed upon, when a commissary of the
+Ottoman Prince arrived bringing him the keys; but at the same time a
+terrific earthquake devastated the towns on the Thracian coasts. The
+inhabitants who did not find death in the destruction of their dwellings
+went with the garrisons to seek refuge against the destroying scourge
+and the barbarity of the Turks in the towns and the castles which the
+catastrophe had spared. But torrents of rain, snow, and a glacial
+temperature killed the women and the children on the road. As to the
+men, they fell into the power of Orkhan's soldiers, who were awaiting
+their passage. Thus the Ottomans found a powerful auxiliary in the
+warring elements. From that time they believed that God himself favored
+their projects. Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil, whom Suleiman had left in front
+of Gallipoli, penetrated into that town by the large breaches that the
+earthquake had made in the walls, and took possession of it, owing to
+the confusion which reigned among the inhabitants.
+
+Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont, the commercial _entrepot_ of the
+Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, is celebrated in history by the
+siege that it sustained against Philip of Macedon, and by the revolt of
+the Catalans or Mogabars who, half a century before the disaster, braved
+with impunity the power of the Greek Emperor and made it the centre of
+their piracies. The tombs of the two Ottoman chiefs are still seen
+to-day. These two mausoleums are much visited by Mussulman pilgrims, and
+the reason of this pious veneration is due to the fact that here in this
+sacred place lie the ashes of the two generations to whom the Ottoman
+empire owes the conquest of a town, the possession of which facilitated
+the passing of the Turks into Europe. For the same reason all the
+surrounding country, which, during the blockade of the town, Adjebeg and
+his lieutenant Ghazi-Fazil had put to fire and sword, received the name
+of Adje Owa. The two beys, taking advantage of the terror caused by so
+many disasters, penetrated into the deserted towns and established
+themselves.
+
+On the news of these conquests Suleiman, who then was at Bigha (Pegae),
+refused to restore Tzympe, and, far from being contented with the
+peaceful possession of the territory invaded by his hordes, dreamed of
+extending the boundaries, and for this purpose sent over to Europe
+numerous colonies of Turks and Arabs. One of his first cares was to
+raise the walls of Gallipoli and other strong places devastated by the
+earthquake; among the number were Konour, whose commander, called
+Calaconia by the Ottoman historians, was hanged by order of Suleiman at
+the doors of the castle; the fort of Boulair, before which Suleiman
+received, as a presage of his future glory, the bonnet of a dervish
+Mewlewi; Malgara, renowned for its trade in honey; Ipsala (ancient
+Cypsella) on the Marizza; and lastly Rodosto, now Tekourtaghi, ancient
+residence of Besus, King of Thrace, and the place of exile where died in
+modern times the Hungarian Francis Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania, and
+his partisans. All these towns and strong places fell into the power of
+the Ottomans in the course of the year 1357; they served them as
+starting-bases for their excursions, which they pushed as far as
+Hireboli (Chariupolis) and Tschorli (Tzurulum).
+
+Cantacuzenus, too weak to stop the progress of the Turks, complained of
+this violation of the peace. Orkhan excused his son, saying that it was
+not force of arms which had opened the gates of the towns of the Greek
+empire, but the divine will manifested by the earthquake. The Emperor
+made representations that he was not agitating to know whether it was by
+the gates or by the breaches that Suleiman had penetrated into the
+places in question, but whether or not he possessed them legitimately.
+Orkhan then asked a delay for reflection, and subsequently promised that
+he would request his son to return the towns that he occupied, if
+Cantacuzenus, on his side, would engage to pay him a sum of forty
+thousand ducats. At the same time he invited him to an interview to meet
+Suleiman on the Gulf of Nicomedia. But the Sultan pretending to be ill,
+the Emperor returned to Byzantium, without having obtained anything.
+
+Orkhan now found himself in one of the happiest of political situations.
+The division of sovereign authority between Cantacuzenus and his pupil
+John Palaeologus, and their continual wars, allowed him to address one or
+the other according as his interests and the circumstances demanded. It
+was thus that John Palaeeologus, ally of the Genoese, undertook to
+deliver from captivity to Phoceus, the son of Orkhan, Khalil or Kasim,
+whom the governor Calothes surrendered for a ransom of one hundred
+thousand pieces of gold and the concession of the glorious title of
+Panhypersebastos ("very venerable"). The service that John had rendered
+did not prevent Orkhan from sending to Abydos a body of troops to rescue
+the son of Cantacuzenus, Mathias, then at war with the Bulgarians.
+
+From the epoch when the Ottomans made durable conquests in the Greek
+empire, Asia each spring threw new hordes into Europe, until the time
+when the successors of Orkhan had extended their domination from the
+shores of the Sea of Marmora to those of the Danube.
+
+The conquest of Gallipoli, which had opened the gate of the Greek empire
+and the whole of the European continent to the Ottomans, was announced
+by "letters of victory" to the neighboring princes of Orkhan, whose
+father had divided with Osman the heritage of the Seljukian sultans. The
+use of these "letters of victory" has been preserved to this day in
+Turkey, and their style, already so pompous in the days of Orkhan, has
+become so proudly emphatic that this kind of document to-day is not the
+least curious of those which belong to the annals of the Turkish nation.
+
+Orkhan left to his son, Suleiman Pacha, and Hadji-Ilbeki the charge of
+preserving the conquests made in Europe; Suleiman established his
+residence at Gallipoli, and Ilbeki at Konour. The first overran the
+country as far as Demitoka; the second as far as Tschorli and Hireboli.
+Adjebeg received in fief the valley which still bears his name.
+
+But Suleiman enjoyed for only a few years the fruits of his conquests.
+One day while hunting wild geese between Boulair and Sidi-Kawak, that is
+to say near the palatine of the Cid, and following at a gallop the
+flight of his falcon, he fell so violently from his horse (1359) as to
+be instantly killed. His body was deposited, not in the mausoleum of
+the Osman family at Prusa, where he had caused a mosque to be erected in
+the quarter of the confectioners, but near the mosque of Boulair, also
+founded by him. Orkhan, to perpetuate the exploits of his son, caused a
+tomb to be built to his memory on the shore of the Hellespont, the only
+one which, during more than a century, was erected in memory of an
+Ottoman prince on Greek soil. Of all the sepulchres of Turkish heroes
+which the national historians mention with holy respect, that of the
+founder of the Ottoman power in Europe is the most venerated and the
+most frequented by pilgrims. It is still to be seen to the north of the
+embouchure of the Hellespont.
+
+Tradition attributes yet another victory to Suleiman after his death. At
+the head of a troop of celestial heroes, mounted on white horses,
+encircled by a brilliant aureole, he is said to have vanquished an army
+of infidels. The love of the marvellous, so general among orientals, the
+leaning which all people have to make heaven intervene in the deeds
+relating to their origin, alone can explain this tradition, for it would
+be useless to seek any historic fact which could have given it birth.
+According to this tradition, thirty thousand Christians appeared in the
+Hellespont on a fleet of sixty-one vessels; one half disembarked at
+Touzla and the other at Sidi-Kawak; it was this latter body which was
+cut in pieces by the celestial troop led by Suleiman. The Ottoman
+historians who relate this miracle have evidently borrowed the
+apparition of these vessels from the First or the Second Crusade of the
+Europeans against the Turks, and have transported them from the waters
+of Smyrna to those of Gallipoli, for the greater glory of Suleiman
+Pacha. Neither the history of Byzantium nor that of the crusades offers
+the slightest trace of this event.
+
+
+
+
+CONSPIRACY AND DEATH OF MARINO
+FALIERI AT VENICE
+
+A.D. 1355
+
+MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT
+
+
+  Marino Falieri was born at Venice about 1278, and was
+  elected doge in 1354. For many years the government of the
+  republic, under an oligarchy, had been arbitrarily dominated
+  by the Council of Ten, an assembly that, after serving a
+  special purpose for which it was created, was declared
+  permanent in 1325 and became a formidable tribunal.
+  Professing to guard the republic the Ten in fact destroyed
+  its liberties, disposed of its finances, overruled the
+  constitutional legislators, suppressed and excluded the
+  popular element from all voice in public affairs, and
+  finally reduced the nominal prince--the doge--to a mere
+  puppet or an ornamental functionary, still called "head of
+  the state."
+
+  At the time when Falieri entered upon his dogeship the city
+  in all quarters was pervaded by the spies of this great
+  oligarchy, which seized and imprisoned citizens, and even
+  put them to death, secretly, without itself being answerable
+  to any authority. The most notable event in the annals of
+  this extraordinary Venetian government is that which forms
+  the story of Marino Falieri himself. His conspiracy with the
+  plebeians to assassinate the oligarchs and make himself
+  actual ruler of the state had the double motive of a
+  personal grievance and the sense of a political wrong.
+
+  The fate of this old man has been made the subject of
+  tragedies by Byron (1820), Casimir Delavigne (1829), and
+  Swinburne (1885). The novel, _Doge und Dogaressa_, by Ernst
+  Theodor Hoffmann, was inspired by the same dramatic figure.
+  Of historical accounts, the following--in Mrs. Oliphant's
+  best manner--is justly regarded as the most impressive which
+  has hitherto appeared in English.
+
+Marino Falieri had been an active servant of Venice through a long life.
+He had filled almost all the great offices which were intrusted to her
+nobles. He had governed her distant colonies, accompanied her armies in
+that position of _proveditore_, omnipotent civilian critic of all the
+movements of war, which so much disgusted the generals of the republic.
+He had been ambassador at the courts of both emperor and pope, and was
+serving his country in that capacity at Avignon when the news of his
+election reached him.
+
+It is thus evident that Falieri was not a man used to the position of a
+lay figure, although at seventy-six the dignified retirement of a
+throne, even when so encircled with restrictions, would seem not
+inappropriate. That he was of a haughty and hasty temper seems apparent.
+It is told of him that, after waiting long for a bishop to head a
+procession at Treviso where he was _podesta_ ("chief magistrate"), he
+astonished the tardy prelate by a box on the ear when he finally
+appeared, a punishment for keeping the authorities waiting.
+
+Old age to a statesman, however, is in many cases an advantage rather
+than a defect, and Falieri was young in vigor and character, and still
+full of life and strength. He was married a second time to presumably a
+beautiful wife much younger than himself, though the chroniclers are not
+agreed even on the subject of her name, whether she was a Gradenigo or a
+Contarini. The well-known story of young Steno's insult to this lady and
+to her old husband has found a place in all subsequent histories, but
+there is no trace of it in the unpublished documents of the state.
+
+The story goes that Michel Steno, one of those young and insubordinate
+gallants who are a danger to every aristocratic state, having been
+turned out of the presence of the Dogaressa for some unseemly freedom of
+behavior, wrote upon the chair of the Doge in boyish petulance an
+insulting taunt, such as might well rouse a high-tempered old man to
+fury. According to Sanudo, the young man, on being brought before the
+Forty,[56] confessed that he had thus avenged himself in a fit of
+passion; and regard having been had to his age and the "heat of love"
+which had been the cause of his original misdemeanor--a reason seldom
+taken into account by the tribunals of the state--he was condemned to
+prison for two months, and afterward to be banished for a year from
+Venice.
+
+The Doge took this light punishment greatly amiss, considering it,
+indeed, as a further insult.
+
+Sabellico says not a word of Michel Steno, or of this definite cause of
+offence, and Romanin quotes the contemporary records to show that though
+_Alcuni zovanelli fioli de gentiluomini di Venetia_ are supposed to have
+affronted the Doge, no such story finds a place in any of them. But the
+old man thus translated from active life and power, soon became bitterly
+sensible in his new position that he was _senza parentado_, with few
+relations, and flouted by the _giovinastri_, the dissolute young
+gentlemen who swaggered about the Broglio in their finery, strong in the
+support of fathers and uncles.
+
+That he found himself, at the same time, shelved in his new rank,
+powerless, and regarded as a nobody in the state where hitherto he had
+been a potent signior--mastered in every action by the secret tribunal,
+and presiding nominally in councils where his opinion was of little
+consequence--is evident. And a man so well acquainted, and so long, with
+all the proceedings of the state, who had seen consummated the shutting
+out of the people, and since had watched through election after election
+a gradual tightening of the bonds round the feet of the doge, would
+naturally have many thoughts when he found himself the wearer of that
+restricted and diminished crown.
+
+He could not be unconscious of how the stream was going, nor unaware of
+that gradual sapping of privilege and decreasing of power which even in
+his own case had gone further than with his predecessor. Perhaps he had
+noted with an indignant mind the new limits of the _promissione_, a
+narrower charter than ever, when he was called upon to sign it. He had
+no mind, we may well believe, to retire thus from the administration of
+affairs. And when these giovinastri, other people's boys, the scum of
+the gay world, flung their unsavory jests in the face of the old man who
+had no son to come after him, the silly insults so lightly uttered, so
+little thought of, the natural scoff of youth at old age, stung him to
+the quick.
+
+Old Falieri's heart burned within him at his own injuries and those of
+his old comrades. How he was induced to head the conspiracy, and put his
+crown, his life, and honor on the cast, there is no further information.
+His fierce temper, and the fact that he had no powerful house behind him
+to help to support his case, probably made him reckless. In April, 1355,
+six months after his arrival in Venice as doge, the smouldering fire
+broke out. Two of the conspirators were seized with compunction on the
+eve of the catastrophe and betrayed the plot--one with a merciful motive
+to serve a patrician he loved, the other with perhaps less noble
+intentions--and, without a blow struck, the conspiracy collapsed. There
+was no real heart in it, nothing to give it consistence; the hot passion
+of a few men insulted, the variable gaseous excitement of wronged
+commoners, and the ambition--if it was ambition--of one enraged and
+affronted old man, without an heir to follow him or anything that could
+make it worth his while to conquer.
+
+An enterprise more wild was never undertaken. It was the passionate
+stand of despair against force so overwhelming as to make mad the
+helpless, yet not submissive, victims. The Doge, who no doubt in former
+days had felt it to be a mere affair of the populace, a thing with which
+a noble ambassador and proveditore had nothing to do, a struggle beneath
+his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a
+fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to
+believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the
+forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real
+hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a
+man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his
+fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but
+feel in that passion of helpless age and unfriendedness, something of
+the terrible disappointment of one to whom the real situation of affairs
+had never been revealed before; who had come home triumphant to reign
+like the doges of old, and, only after the ducal cap was on his head and
+the palace of the state had become his home, found out that the
+doge--like the unconsidered plebeian--had been reduced to bondage; his
+judgment and experience put aside in favor of the deliberations of a
+secret tribunal, and the very boys, when they were nobles, at liberty to
+jeer at his declining years.
+
+The lesser conspirators, all men of the humbler sort--Calendario, the
+architect, who was then at work upon the palace, a number of seamen, and
+other little-known persons--were hanged; not like the greater criminals,
+beheaded between the columns, but strung up--a horrible fringe--along
+the side of the palazzo. The fate of Falieri himself is too generally
+known to demand description. Calmed by the tragic touch of fate, the
+Doge bore all the humiliations of his doom with dignity, and was
+beheaded at the head of the stairs where he had sworn the promissione on
+first assuming the office of doge.
+
+What a contrast was this from that triumphant day when probably he felt
+that his reward had come to him after the long and faithful service of
+years. Death stills disappointment as well as rage, and Falieri is said
+to have acknowledged the justice of his sentence. He had never made any
+attempt to justify or defend himself, but frankly and at once avowed his
+guilt and made no attempt to escape from its penalties. His body was
+conveyed privately to the Church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, the
+great "Zanipolo"--with which all visitors to Venice are familiar--and
+was buried in secrecy and silence in the _atrio_ of a little chapel
+behind the great church--where no doubt for centuries the pavement was
+worn by many feet with little thought of those who lay below. Even from
+that refuge his bones have been driven forth, but his name remains in
+the corner of the Hall of the Great Council, where--with a certain
+dramatic affectation--the painter-historians have painted a black veil
+across the vacant place. "This is the place of Marino Falieri, beheaded
+for his crimes," is all the record left of the Doge disgraced.
+
+Was it a crime? The question is one which it is difficult to discuss
+with any certainty. That Falieri desired to establish--as so many had
+done in other cities--an independent despotism in Venice, seems entirely
+unproved. It was the prevailing fear; the one suggestion which alarmed
+everybody and made sentiment unanimous. But one of the special points
+which are recorded by the chroniclers as working in him to madness, was
+that he was _senza parentado_--without any backing of relationship or
+allies--_i.e._, sonless, with no one to come after him. How little
+likely then was an old man to embark on such a desperate venture for
+self-aggrandizement merely. He had, indeed, a nephew who was involved in
+his fate, but apparently not so deeply as to expose him to the last
+penalty of the law.
+
+The incident altogether points more to a sudden outbreak of the rage and
+disappointment of an old public servant coming back from his weary
+labors for the state in triumph and satisfaction to what seemed the
+supreme reward; and finding himself no more than a puppet in the hands
+of remorseless masters, subject to the scoffs of the younger generation,
+with his eyes opened by his own suffering, perceiving for the first time
+what justice there was in the oft-repeated protest of the people, and
+how they and he alike were crushed under the iron heel of that oligarchy
+to which the power of the people and that of the Prince were equally
+obnoxious. The chroniclers of his time were so much at a loss to find
+any reason for such an attempt on the part of a man, _non abbiando alcum
+propinquo_, that they agree in attributing it to diabolical inspiration.
+
+It was more probably that fury which springs from a sense of wrong,
+which the sight of the wrongs of others raised to frenzy, and that
+intolerable impatience of the impotent which is more harsh in its
+hopelessness than the greatest hardihood. He could not but die for it,
+but there seems no more reason to characterize this impossible attempt
+as deliberate treason than to give the same name to many an alliance
+formed between prince and people in other regions--the king and commons
+of the early Stuarts, for example--against the intolerable exactions and
+cruelty of an aristocracy too powerful to be faced alone by either.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES IV OF GERMANY PUBLISHES
+HIS GOLDEN BULL
+
+A.D. 1356
+
+SIR ROBERT COMYN
+
+
+  The Golden Bull of Charles IV of Germany, Emperor of the
+  Holy Roman Empire, first published at the Diet of Nuremberg
+  in 1356, was a charter--sometimes called the "Magna Charta
+  of Germany"--regulating the election of the emperor. It was
+  called "golden" because the seal attached to the parchment
+  on which it was engrossed was of gold instead of the
+  customary lead. In a diet at Metz in the same year six
+  additional clauses were promulgated.
+
+  By some historians the origin of the imperial electoral
+  college is assigned to the year 1125, when at the election
+  of Lothair II certain of the nobles and church dignitaries
+  made a selection of candidates to be voted for. But until
+  the promulgation of the Golden Bull the constitution and
+  prerogatives of the college were never definitely
+  ascertained.
+
+  The personal traits and the languid reign of Charles IV have
+  been treated by historians with derision. He forgot the
+  general welfare of the empire in his eagerness to enrich his
+  own house and aggrandize his paternal kingdom of Bohemia.
+  The one remarkable law which emanated from him, and whereby
+  alone his reign is distinguished in the constitutional
+  history of the empire, is that embodied in the Golden Bull.
+  By this instrument the dignity of the electors was greatly
+  enhanced, and the disputes which had arisen between members
+  of the same house as to their right of suffrage were
+  terminated. The number of electors was absolutely restricted
+  to seven.
+
+After a solemn invocation of the Trinity, a reprobation of the seven
+deadly sins, and a pointed allusion to the seven candlesticks and the
+seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Golden Bull proceeds to the subject
+of the imperial election. It provides, in the first place, for the safe
+conduct of the seven electors to and from Frankfort-on-the-Main, which
+is fixed as the place of election; it directs the archbishop of Mainz to
+summon the electors upon the death of the emperor, and regulates the
+manner in which their proxies are to be appointed; it enjoins the
+citizens of Frankfort to protect the assembled electors; and forbids
+them to admit any stranger into the city during the election.
+
+It next prescribes the form of oath to be taken by the electors; and
+also forbids them to quit the city before the completion of the
+election; and after thirty days restricts their diet to bread and water.
+A majority of votes is to decide the election; and in case any elector
+obtain three votes, his own vote is to be taken in his favor.
+
+The precedence of the electors is thus settled: First, the archbishops
+of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves; then the King of Bohemia, the Count
+Palatine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The
+Elector of Treves is to vote first; then the Elector of Cologne; then
+the secular electors; and the Elector of Mainz is finally to collect the
+votes and deliver his own.
+
+The Elector of Cologne is to perform the coronation. At all feasts the
+Margrave of Brandenburg, as grand chamberlain, is to present the Emperor
+with water to wash; the King of Bohemia, as cup-bearer, is to offer the
+goblet of wine; the Count Palatine, as grand steward, is to set the
+first dish on the table; and the Duke of Saxony is to officiate as grand
+marshal.
+
+The Count Palatine and the Duke of Saxony are declared vicars of the
+empire during the vacancy of the throne. An exclusive jurisdiction is
+guaranteed to the electors; and their precedence over all other princes
+of Germany is enforced.
+
+The right of voting is vested in the eldest son of a deceased elector,
+provided he have attained the age of eighteen; and during the minority,
+the guardianship and vote are vested in the next kinsman of the
+deceased.
+
+If one of the lay electorates become vacant by default of heirs, it
+shall revert to the Emperor, and be by him disposed of--Bohemia
+excepted, where the vacancy is to be supplied by ancient mode of
+election.
+
+The electors are invested with the possession of all mines discovered
+within their respective territories. They are authorized to give refuge
+to the Jews, and to receive dues payable within their states. They are
+also privileged to coin money, and to purchase lands subject to the
+feudal rights of the sovereign.
+
+A yearly assembly of the electors, in one of the imperial cities, is
+enjoined.
+
+All privileges granted to any city or community prejudicial to the
+rights of the electors are revoked. All fraudulent resignations of fiefs
+by vassals, with intent to attack their lords, are declared void. All
+leagues, associations, and confederacies, not sanctioned by law, are
+made punishable by fine; and all burgesses and subjects of princes and
+nobles are to adhere to their original subjection, and not to claim any
+rights or exemptions as burgesses of any city unless actually domiciled
+therein.
+
+Challenges, with design of destroying another's property or committing
+any outrage, are prohibited; and all challenges are to be given three
+days before the onset.
+
+The forms of summoning electors, and of their delegation of proxies, are
+laid down. And the right of voting, as well as all other rights, is
+declared inseparably incident to the electoral principality.
+
+On grand occasions the Duke of Saxony is to carry the sword; the Count
+Palatine, the globe; the Margrave of Brandenburg, the sceptre. In
+celebrating mass before the Emperor, the benedictions are to be
+pronounced by the senior spiritual elector present.
+
+All persons conspiring against the lives of the electors are declared
+guilty of leze-majesty, and shall forfeit their lives and possessions.
+The lives of their sons, though justly forfeited, are spared only by the
+particular bounty of the Emperor; but they are declared incapable of
+holding any property, honor, or dignity, and doomed to perpetual
+poverty. The daughters are permitted to enjoy one-fourth of their
+mother's succession.
+
+The secular principalities, Bohemia, the Palatinate, the duchy of
+Saxony, and the margravate of Brandenburg, are declared indivisible and
+entire, descendible in the male line.
+
+On all the solemn occasions the electors shall attend the Emperor, and
+the arch-chancellors shall carry the seals. And the bull then proceeds
+minutely to point out the manner in which the electors are to exercise
+their ministerial functions at the imperial banquet; and regulates the
+order and disposition of the imperial and electoral tables.
+
+Frankfort is again declared as the place of election; Aix-la-Chapelle,
+of coronation; and Nuremberg, for holding the first royal court.
+
+The electors are exempted from all payments on receiving their fiefs
+from their sovereign. But other princes are to pay certain fees, etc.,
+to the imperial officers.
+
+Lastly, the secular electors are enjoined to instruct their sons in the
+Latin, Italian, and Slavonic tongues.
+
+At the final promulgation of the bull in the Diet of Metz the Emperor
+and Empress feasted, in the presence of the dauphin (Charles V) and the
+legate of Pope Innocent VI, with all the pageantry and ceremonies
+prescribed by the new ordinances. The imperial tables were spread in the
+grand square of the city; Rudolph, Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg, attended
+with a silver measure of oats, and marshalled the order of the company;
+Louis II, Margrave of Brandenburg, presented to the Emperor the golden
+basin, with water and fair napkins; Rupert, Count Palatine, placed the
+first dish upon the table; and the Emperor's brother, Wenceslaus,
+representing the King of Bohemia, officiated as cup-bearer. Lastly, the
+princes of Schwarzburg and the deputy huntsman came with three hounds
+amid the loud din of horns, and carried up a stag and a boar to the
+table of the Emperor.
+
+
+
+
+INSURRECTION OF THE JACQUERIE IN FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1358
+
+SIR JOHN FROISSART
+
+
+  The defeat of the French under King John II, at Poitiers, by
+  the British forces of Edward, the Black Prince, September
+  19, 1356, aroused great indignation among the common people
+  of France, with scorn of the nobility; for these leaders,
+  with an army of sixty thousand, had fled before an enemy
+  whom they outnumbered seven to one. In the next assembly of
+  the states-general the bourgeois obtained a preponderance so
+  intolerable to the nobles that they withdrew to their homes.
+  A little later the deputies of the clergy also retired,
+  leaving only the representatives of the cities--among whom
+  the supremacy of the members from Paris was generally
+  accepted--to deal with the affairs of the kingdom.
+
+  At this point appeared a man who in an age "so uncivilized
+  and sombre," says Pierre Robiquet, "by wonderful instinct
+  laid down and nearly succeeded in obtaining the adoption of
+  the essential principles on which modern society is
+  founded--the government of the country by elected
+  representatives, taxes voted by representatives of the
+  taxpayers, abolition of privileges founded upon right of
+  birth, extension of political rights to all citizens, and
+  subordination of traditional sovereignty to that of the
+  nation." This man was Etienne Marcel, provost of the
+  merchants of Paris--that is to say, mayor of the
+  municipality, whom eminent historians have called the
+  greatest personage of the fourteenth century. During a
+  career of three years his name dominates French history--a
+  brief ascendency, but of potent influence. His endeavor, in
+  Thierry's view, "was, as it were, a premature attempt at the
+  grand designs of Providence, and the mirror of the bloody
+  changes of fortune through which those designs were destined
+  to advance to their accomplishment under the impulse of
+  human passions."
+
+  After the disaster of Poitiers, Marcel finished the
+  fortifications of Paris and barricaded the streets, and in
+  the assembly there he presided over the bourgeois--the Third
+  Estate. In the growing conflict between the two other
+  estates--nobles and clergy--and the third, Marcel armed the
+  bourgeois and began an open revolution, thus organizing the
+  commune for carrying out his designs. The nobles were
+  meanwhile laying heavier miseries upon the peasantry, and in
+  the spring of 1358 occurred the rising of the Jacquerie,
+  here described by Froissart, whose brilliant narrative is to
+  be read in the light of modern critical judgment, which
+  regards it as an exaggeration both of the numbers of the
+  insurgents and their atrocities, while Froissart had no
+  capacity for understanding the conditions which explain, if
+  they do not also justify, the present revolt.
+
+  This outbreak, to which Marcel gave his support, was enough
+  to ruin his cause, and he died in a massacre, July 31, 1358,
+  having failed "because the time was not yet ripe," and
+  because the violence to which he lent his sanction was
+  overcome by stronger violence.
+
+A marvellous and great tribulation befell the kingdom of France, in
+Beauvoisis, Brie, upon the river Marne, in the Laonnois, and in the
+neighborhood of Soissons. Some of the inhabitants of the country towns
+assembled together in Beauvoisis, without any leader; they were not at
+first more than one hundred men. They said that the nobles of the
+kingdom of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that
+it would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all; to which
+proposition everyone assented, and added, shame befall him that should
+be the means of preventing the gentlemen from being wholly destroyed.
+They then, without further counsel, collected themselves in a body, and
+with no other arms than the staves shod with iron which some had, and
+others with knives, marched to the house of a knight who lived near,
+and, breaking it open, murdered the knight, his lady, and all the
+children, both great and small; they then burned the house.
+
+After this, their second expedition was to the strong castle of another
+knight, which they took, and, having tied him to a stake, many of them
+violated his wife and daughter before his eyes; they then murdered the
+lady, her daughter, and the other children, and last of all the knight
+himself, with much cruelty. They destroyed and burned his castle. They
+did the like to many castles and handsome houses; and their numbers
+increased so much that they were in a short time upward of six thousand.
+Wherever they went they received additions, for all of their rank in
+life followed them, while everyone else fled, carrying off with them
+their ladies, damsels, and children ten or twenty leagues distant, where
+they thought they could place them in security, leaving their houses,
+with all their riches in them.
+
+These wicked people, without leader and without arms, plundered and
+burned all the houses they came to, murdered every gentleman, and
+violated every lady and damsel they could find. He who committed the
+most atrocious actions, and such as no human creature would have
+imagined, was the most applauded and considered as the greatest man
+among them. I dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities
+they committed on the persons of the ladies.
+
+Among other infamous acts they murdered a knight, and, having fastened
+him to a spit, roasted him before the eyes of his wife and his children,
+and forced her to eat some of her husband's flesh, and then knocked her
+brains out. They had chosen a king among them, who came from Clermont in
+Beauvoisis. He was elected as the worst of the bad, and they denominated
+him "Jacques Bonhomme."[57]
+
+These wretches burned and destroyed in the county of Beauvoisis, and at
+Corbie, Amiens, and Montdidier, upward of sixty good houses and strong
+castles. By the acts of such traitors in the country of Brie and
+thereabout, it behooved every lady, knight, and squire, having the means
+of escape, to fly to Meaux, if they wished to preserve themselves from
+being insulted and afterward murdered. The Duchess of Normandy, the
+Duchess of Orleans, and many other ladies had adopted this course. These
+cursed people thus supported themselves in the countries between Paris,
+Noyon, and Soissons, and in all the territory of Coucy, in the County of
+Valois. In the bishoprics of Noyon, Laon, and Soissons there were upward
+of one hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed.
+
+When the gentlemen of Beauvoisis, Corbie, Vermandois, and of the lands
+where these wretches were associated, saw to what lengths their madness
+had extended, they sent for succor to their friends in Flanders,
+Hainault, and Bohemia; from which places numbers soon came and united
+themselves with the gentlemen of the country. They began therefore to
+kill and destroy these wretches wherever they met them, and hung them up
+by troops on the nearest trees. The King of Navarre even destroyed in
+one day, near Clermont in Beauvoisis, upward of three thousand; but
+they were by this time so much increased in numbers that, had they been
+all together, they would have amounted to more than one hundred
+thousand. When they were asked for what reason they acted so wickedly,
+they replied, they knew not, but they did so because they saw others do
+it, and they thought that by this means they should destroy all the
+nobles and gentlemen in the world.
+
+At this period the Duke of Normandy, suspecting the King of Navarre, the
+provost of merchants and those of his faction--for they were always
+unanimous in their sentiments--set out from Paris, and went to the
+bridge at Charenton-upon-Marne, where he issued a special summons for
+the attendance of the crown vassals, and sent a defiance to the provost
+of merchants and to all those who should support him. The provost, being
+fearful he would return in the night-time to Paris--which was then
+unenclosed--collected as many workmen as possible from all parts, and
+employed them to make ditches all around Paris. He also surrounded it by
+a wall with strong gates. For the space of one year there were three
+hundred workmen daily employed; the expense of which was equal to
+maintaining an army. I must say that to surround with a sufficient
+defence such a city as Paris was an act of greater utility than any
+provost of merchants had ever done before; for otherwise it would have
+been plundered and destroyed several times by the different factions.
+
+At the time these wicked men were overrunning the country, the Earl of
+Foix, and his cousin the Captal of Buch were returning from a crusade in
+Prussia. They were informed, on their entering France, of the distress
+the nobles were in; and they learned at the city of Chalons that the
+Duchess of Orleans and three hundred other ladies, under the protection
+of the Duke of Orleans, were fled to Meaux on account of these
+disturbances. The two knights resolved to go to the assistance of these
+ladies, and to reenforce them with all their might, notwithstanding the
+Captal was attached to the English; but at that time there was a truce
+between the two kings. They might have in their company about sixty
+lances.
+
+They were most cheerfully received, on their arrival at Meaux, by the
+ladies and damsels; for these Jacks and peasants of Brie had heard what
+number of ladies, married and unmarried, and young children of quality
+were in Meaux; they had united themselves with those of Valois and were
+on their road thither. On the other hand, those of Paris had also been
+informed of the treasures Meaux contained, and had set out from that
+place in crowds. Having met the others, they amounted together to nine
+thousand men. Their forces were augmenting every step they advanced.
+
+They came to the gates of the town, which the inhabitants opened to them
+and allowed them to enter; they did so in such numbers that all the
+streets were quite filled, as far as the market-place, which is
+tolerably strong, but it required to be guarded, though the river Marne
+nearly surrounds it. The noble dames who were lodged there, seeing such
+multitudes rushing toward them, were exceedingly frightened. On this,
+the two lords and their company advanced to the gate of the
+market-place, which they had opened, and, marching under the banners of
+the Earl of Foix and Duke of Orleans, and the pennon of the Captal of
+Buch, posted themselves in front of this peasantry, who were badly
+armed.
+
+When these banditti perceived such a troop of gentlemen, so well
+equipped, sally forth to guard the market-place, the foremost of them
+began to fall back. The gentlemen then followed them, using their lances
+and swords. When they felt the weight of their blows, they, through
+fear, turned about so fast they fell one over the other. All manner of
+armed persons then rushed out of the barriers, drove them before them,
+striking them down like beasts, and clearing the town of them; for they
+kept neither regularity nor order, slaying so many that they were tired.
+They flung them in great heaps into the river. In short, they killed
+upward of seven thousand. Not one would have escaped if they had chosen
+to pursue them farther.
+
+On the return of the men-at-arms, they set fire to the town of Meaux,
+burned it; and all the peasants they could find were shut up in it,
+because they had been of the party of the Jacks. Since this discomfiture
+which happened to them at Meaux, they never collected again in any great
+bodies; for the young Enguerrand de Coucy had plenty of gentlemen under
+his orders, who destroyed them, wherever they could be met with, without
+mercy.
+
+
+
+
+CONQUESTS OF TIMUR THE TARTAR
+
+A.D. 1370-1405
+
+EDWARD GIBBON
+
+
+  Timur, better known as Tamerlane ("Timur the Lame"), was
+  born in Central Asia--probably in the village of Sebzar,
+  near Samarkand, in Transoxiana (Turkestan). He is supposed
+  to have been descended from a follower of Genghis Khan,
+  founder of the Mongol empire; or, as some say, directly, by
+  the mother's side, from Genghis himself. He is the
+  Tamerlaine or Tamburlaine of Marlowe and other dramatists.
+  Gibbon introduces him in the _Decline and Fall_, apparently
+  because fascinated with the subject, although he gives as a
+  historical reason the fact that Timur's triumph in Asia
+  delayed the final fall of Constantinople--taken by the Turks
+  in 1453.
+
+  In early youth the future ruler of so vast an empire was
+  engaged in struggles for ascendency with the petty chiefs of
+  rival tribes. His boundless ambition early conceived the
+  conquest and monarchy of the world; his wish was "to live in
+  the memory and esteem of future ages." He was born in a
+  period of anarchy, when the crumbling kingdoms of the
+  Asiatic dynasties were no longer able to resist the
+  adventurous spirit determined to occupy the new field of
+  military triumph which opened before him. At the age of
+  twenty-five Timur was hailed as the deliverer of his
+  country. When he chose Samarkand as the capital of his
+  dominion, he declared his purpose to make that dominion
+  embrace the whole habitable earth; and at the height of his
+  power he ruled from the Great Wall of China to the centre of
+  Russia on the north, while his sovereignty extended to the
+  Mediterranean and the Nile on the west, and on the east to
+  the sources of the Ganges. In his own person he united
+  twenty-seven different sovereignties, and nine several
+  dynasties of kings gave place to the unparalleled conqueror,
+  who won by the sword a larger portion of the globe than
+  Cyrus or Alexander, Caesar or Attila, Genghis Khan,
+  Charlemagne, or Napoleon.
+
+  It was believed in the family and empire of Timur that he
+  himself composed the _Commentaries_ of his life and the
+  _Institutions_ of his government, which, however, were
+  probably the work of his secretaries. These manuscripts have
+  been of great service to historians in their study of
+  Timur's career.
+
+At the age of thirty-four, and in a general diet, Timur was invested
+with imperial command, but he affected to revere the house of Genghis;
+and while the emir Timur reigned over Zagatai and the East, a nominal
+khan served as a private officer in the armies of his servant. Without
+expatiating on the victories of thirty-five campaigns, without
+describing the lines of march which he repeatedly traced over the
+continent of Asia, I shall briefly represent Timur's conquests in
+Persia, Tartary, and India, and from thence proceed to the more
+interesting narrative of his Ottoman war.
+
+No sooner had Timur reunited to the patrimony of Zagatai the dependent
+countries of Karizme and Kandahar than he turned his eyes toward the
+kingdoms of Iran or Persia. From the Oxus to the Tigris that extensive
+country was without a lawful sovereign. Peace and justice had been
+banished from the land above forty years; and the Mongol invader might
+seem to listen to the cries of an oppressed people. Their petty tyrants
+might have opposed him with confederate arms: they separately stood and
+successively fell; and the difference of their fate was only marked by
+the promptitude of submission or the obstinacy of resistance. Ibrahim,
+Prince of Shirwan or Albania, kissed the footstool of the imperial
+throne. His peace offerings of silks, horses, and jewels were composed,
+according to the Tartar fashion, each article of nine pieces; but a
+critical spectator observed that there were only eight slaves. "I myself
+am the ninth," replied Ibraham, who was prepared for the remark: and his
+flattery was rewarded by the smile of Timur.
+
+Shah Mansur, Prince of Fars, or the proper Persia, was one of the least
+powerful, but most dangerous, of his enemies. In a battle under the
+walls of Shiraz, he broke, with three or four thousand soldiers, the
+_coul_, or main body, of thirty thousand horse, where the Emperor fought
+in person. No more than fourteen or fifteen guards remained near the
+standard of Timur; he stood firm as a rock, and received on his helmet
+two weighty strokes of a cimeter; the Mongols rallied; the head of
+Mansur was thrown at his feet; and he declared his esteem of the valor
+of a foe by extirpating all the males of so intrepid a race. From Shiraz
+his troops advanced to the Persian Gulf; and the richness and weakness
+of Ormus were displayed in an annual tribute of six hundred thousand
+dinars of gold.
+
+Bagdad was no longer the city of peace, the seat of the caliphs; but the
+noblest conquest of Khulagu could not be overlooked by his ambitious
+successor. The whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the mouth
+to the sources of those rivers, was reduced to his obedience; he entered
+Edessa; and the Turcomans of the black sheep were chastised for the
+sacrilegious pillage of a caravan of Mecca. In the mountains of Georgia
+the native Christians still braved the law and the sword of Mahomet; by
+three expeditions he obtained the merit of the _gazie_, or holy war; and
+the Prince of Tiflis became his proselyte and friend.
+
+A just retaliation might be urged for the invasion of Turkestan, or the
+Eastern Tartary. The dignity of Timur could not endure the impunity of
+the Getes: he passed the Sihun, subdued the kingdom of Kashgar, and
+marched seven times into the heart of their country. His most distant
+camp was two months' journey to the northeast of Samarkand; and his
+emirs, who traversed the river Irtysh, engraved in the forests of
+Siberia a rude memorial of their exploits. The conquest of Kiptchak, or
+the Western Tartary, was founded on the double motive of aiding the
+distressed and chastising the ungrateful. Toctamish, a fugitive prince,
+was entertained and protected in his court; the ambassadors of Auruss
+Khan were dismissed with a haughty denial, and followed on the same day
+by the armies of Zagatai; and their success established Toctamish in the
+Mongol empire of the North.
+
+But, after a reign of ten years, the new Khan forgot the merits and the
+strength of his benefactor--the base usurper, as he deemed him, of the
+sacred rights of the house of Genghis. Through the gates of Derbent he
+entered Persia at the head of ninety thousand horse: with the
+innumerable forces of Kiptchak, Bulgaria, Circassia, and Russia, he
+passed the Sihun, burned the palaces of Timur, and compelled him, amid
+the winter snows, to contend for Samarkand and his life. After a mild
+expostulation and a glorious victory the Emperor resolved on revenge;
+and by the east and the west of the Caspian and the Volga he twice
+invaded Kiptchak with such mighty powers that thirteen miles were
+measured from his right to his left wing. In a march of five months they
+rarely beheld the footsteps of man; and their daily subsistence was
+often trusted to the fortune of the chase. At length the armies
+encountered each other; but the treachery of the standard-bearer, who,
+in the heat of action, reversed the imperial standard of Kiptchak,
+determined the victory of the Zagatais and Toctamish--I speak the
+language of the _Institutions_--gave the tribe of Toushi to the wind of
+desolation. He fled to the Christian Duke of Lithuania, again returned
+to the banks of the Volga, and, after fifteen battles with a domestic
+rival, at last perished in the wilds of Siberia.
+
+The pursuit of a flying enemy carried Timur into the tributary provinces
+of Russia; a duke of the reigning family was made prisoner amid the
+ruins of his capital; and Yelets, by the pride and ignorance of the
+orientals, might easily be confounded with the genuine metropolis of the
+nation. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar. Ambition and
+prudence recalled him to the south, the desolate country was exhausted,
+and the Mongol soldiers were enriched with an immense spoil of precious
+furs, of linen of Antioch, and of ingots of gold and silver. On the
+banks of the Don, or Tanais, he received a humble deputation from the
+consuls and merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay,
+who occupied the commerce and city of Tana, or Azov, at the mouth of the
+river. They offered their gifts, admired his magnificence, and trusted
+his royal word. But the peaceful visit of an emir, who explored the
+state of the magazines and harbor, was speedily followed by the
+destructive presence of the Tartars. The city of Tana was reduced to
+ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and dismissed; but all the Christians
+who had not fled to their ships were condemned either to death or
+slavery. Revenge prompted him to burn the cities of Sarai and Astrakhan,
+the monuments of rising civilization; and his vanity proclaimed that he
+had penetrated to the region of perpetual daylight, a strange
+phenomenon, which authorized his Mahometan doctors to dispense with the
+obligation of evening prayer.
+
+When Timur first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion of India
+or Hindustan, he was answered by a murmur of discontent: "The rivers!
+and the mountains and deserts! and the soldiers clad in armor! and the
+elephants, destroyers of men!" But the displeasure of the Emperor was
+more dreadful than all these terrors; and his superior reason was
+convinced that an enterprise of such tremendous aspect was safe and easy
+in the execution. He was informed by his spies of the weakness and
+anarchy of Hindustan: the _subahs_ of the provinces had erected the
+standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of Sultan Mahmud was
+despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mongol army moved in three
+great divisions, and Timur observes with pleasure that the ninety-two
+squadrons of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with the
+ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet.
+
+Between the Jihun and the Indus they crossed one of the ridges of
+mountains which are styled by the Arabian geographers the "Stony Girdles
+of the Earth." The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but
+great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the Emperor
+himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold--the ropes were
+one hundred and fifty cubits in length--and before he could reach the
+bottom, this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timur crossed
+the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attock, and successively traversed,
+in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab, or five rivers, that fall
+into the master stream. From Attock to Delhi the high road measures no
+more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the
+southeast; and the motive of Timur was to join his grandson, who had
+achieved by his command the conquest of Multan. On the eastern bank of
+the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and
+wept; the Mongol entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batnir, and
+stood in arms before the gates of Delhi, a great and flourishing city,
+which had subsisted three centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan
+kings.
+
+The siege, more especially of the castle, might have been a work of
+time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness, the Sultan Mahmud
+and his wazir to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers,
+forty thousand of his foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants,
+whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers.
+Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops,
+he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire and a
+ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught
+the Mongols to smile at their own fears; and as soon as these unwieldy
+animals were routed, the inferior species (the men of India) disappeared
+from the field. Timur made his triumphal entry into the capital of
+Hindustan, and admired, with a view to imitate, the architecture of the
+stately mosque; but the order or license of a general pillage and
+massacre polluted the festival of his victory. He resolved to purify his
+soldiers in the blood of the idolaters, or Gentoos, who still surpass,
+in the proportion of ten to one, the numbers of the Moslems. In this
+pious design he advanced one hundred miles to the northeast of Delhi,
+passed the Ganges, fought several battles by land and water, and
+penetrated to the famous rock of Cupele, the statue of the cow,[58] that
+_seems_ to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among
+the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern
+hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange
+foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would
+degenerate into a race of Hindus.
+
+It was on the banks of the Ganges that Timur was informed, by his speedy
+messengers, of the disturbances which had arisen on the confines of
+Georgia and Anatolia, of the revolt of the Christians, and the ambitious
+designs of the sultan Bajazet. His vigor of mind and body was not
+impaired by sixty-three years and innumerable fatigues; and, after
+enjoying some tranquil months in the palace of Samarkand, he proclaimed
+a new expedition of seven years into the western countries of Asia. To
+the soldiers who had served in the Indian war he granted the choice of
+remaining at home or following their prince; but the troops of all the
+provinces and kingdoms of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan
+and wait the arrival of the imperial standard. It was first directed
+against the Christians of Georgia, who were strong only in their rocks,
+their castles, and the winter season; but these obstacles were overcome
+by the zeal and perseverance of Timur: the rebels submitted to the
+tribute or the _Koran_; and if both religions boasted of their martyrs,
+that name is more justly due to the Christian prisoners, who were
+offered the choice of abjuration or death.
+
+On his descent from the hills the Emperor gave audience to the first
+ambassadors of Bajazet, and opened the hostile correspondence of
+complaints and menaces, which fermented two years before the final
+explosion. Between two jealous and haughty neighbors, the motives of
+quarrel will seldom be wanting. The Mongol and Ottoman conquests now
+touched each other in the neighborhood of Erzerum and the Euphrates; nor
+had the doubtful limit been ascertained by time and treaty. Each of
+these ambitious monarchs might accuse his rival of violating his
+territory, of threatening his vassals and protecting his rebels; and, by
+the name of rebels, each understood the fugitive princes, whose kingdoms
+he had usurped and whose life or liberty he implacably pursued. In their
+victorious career Timur was impatient of an equal, and Bajazet was
+ignorant of a superior.
+
+In his first expedition, Timur was satisfied with the siege and
+destruction of Sebaste, a strong city on the borders of Anatolia. He
+then turned aside to the invasion of Syria and Egypt, where the military
+republic of the mamelukes still reigned. The Syrian emirs were assembled
+at Aleppo to repel the invasion; they confided in the fame and
+discipline of the mamelukes, in the temper of their swords and lances of
+the purest steel of Damascus, in the strength of their walled cities,
+and in the populousness of sixty thousand villages; and instead of
+sustaining a siege, they threw open their gates and arrayed their forces
+in the plain. But these forces were not cemented by virtue and union,
+and some powerful emirs had been seduced to desert or betray their more
+loyal companions. Timur's front was covered with a line of Indian
+elephants, whose turrets were filled with archers and Greek fire; the
+rapid evolutions of his cavalry completed the dismay and disorder; the
+Syrian crowds fell back on each other; many thousands were stifled or
+slaughtered in the entrance of the great street; the Mongols entered
+with the fugitives; and after a short defence the impregnable citadel of
+Aleppo was surrendered by cowardice or treachery. Among the suppliants
+and captives, Timur distinguished the doctors of the law, whom he
+invited to the dangerous honor of a personal conference. The Mongol
+Prince was a zealous Mussulman; but his Persian schools had taught him
+to revere the memory of Ali and Hasan; and he had imbibed a deep
+prejudice against the Syrians as the enemies of the son of the daughter
+of the apostle of God. To these doctors he proposed a captious question,
+which the casuists of Samarkand and Herat were incapable of resolving.
+"Who are the true martyrs, of those who are slain on my side or on that
+of my enemies?" But he was silenced, or satisfied, by the dexterity of
+one of the cadis of Aleppo, who replied, in the words of Mahomet
+himself, that the motive, not the ensign, constitutes the martyr; and
+that the Moslems of either party who fight only for the glory of God may
+deserve that sacred appellation. The true succession of the caliphs was
+a controversy of a still more delicate nature; and the frankness of a
+doctor, too honest for his situation, provoked the Emperor to exclaim:
+"Ye are as false as those of Damascus: Moawiyah was a usurper, Yezid a
+tyrant, and Ali alone is the lawful successor of the Prophet." A prudent
+explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar
+topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty
+years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here,"
+continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the
+Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the
+Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my
+wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always
+been the authors of their own calamity." During this peaceful
+conversation the streets of Aleppo streamed with blood and reechoed with
+the cries of mothers and children, with the shrieks of violated virgins.
+The rich plunder that was abandoned to his soldiers might stimulate
+their avarice; but their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command
+of producing an adequate number of heads, which, according to his
+custom, were curiously piled in columns and pyramids. The Mongols
+celebrated the feast of victory, while the surviving Moslems passed the
+night in tears and in chains.
+
+I shall not dwell on the march of the destroyer from Aleppo to Damascus,
+where he was rudely encountered, and almost overthrown, by the armies
+of Egypt. A retrograde motion was imputed to his distress and despair;
+one of his nephews deserted to the enemy; and Syria rejoiced in the tale
+of his defeat, when the Sultan was driven, by the revolt of the
+mamelukes, to escape with precipitation and shame to his palace of
+Cairo. Abandoned by their Prince, the inhabitants of Damascus still
+defended their walls; and Timur consented to raise the siege if they
+would adorn his retreat with a gift or ransom, each article of nine
+pieces. But no sooner had he introduced himself into the city, under
+color of a truce, than he perfidiously violated the treaty, imposed a
+contribution of ten millions of gold, and animated his troops to
+chastise the posterity of those Syrians who had executed, or approved,
+the murder of the grandson of Mahomet. After a period of seven centuries
+Damascus was reduced to ashes, because a Tartar was moved by religious
+zeal to avenge the blood of an Arab.
+
+The losses and fatigues of the campaign obliged Timur to renounce the
+conquest of Palestine and Egypt; but in his return to the Euphrates he
+delivered Aleppo to the flames and justified his pious motive by the
+pardon and reward of two thousand sectaries of Ali, who were desirous to
+visit the tomb of his son. I have expatiated on the personal anecdotes
+which mark the character of the Mongol hero, but I shall briefly mention
+that he erected, on the ruins of Bagdad, a pyramid of ninety thousand
+heads; again visited Georgia; encamped on the banks of the Araxes; and
+proclaimed his resolution of marching against the Ottoman Emperor.
+Conscious of the importance of the war, he collected his forces from
+every province; eight hundred thousand men were enrolled on his military
+list, but the splendid commands of five and ten thousand horse may be
+rather expressive of the rank and pension of the chiefs than of the
+genuine number of effective soldiers. In the pillage of Syria the
+Mongols had acquired immense riches; but the delivery of their pay and
+arrears for seven years more firmly attached them to the imperial
+standard.
+
+During this diversion of the Mongol arms, Bajazet had two years to
+collect his forces for a more serious encounter. They consisted of four
+hundred thousand horse and foot whose merit and fidelity were of an
+unequal complexion. We may discriminate the janizaries, who have been
+gradually raised to an establishment of forty thousand men; a national
+cavalry (the _spahis_ of modern times); twenty thousand cuirassiers of
+Europe, clad in black and impenetrable armor; the troops of Anatolia,
+whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timur: and a colony of
+Tartars, whom he had driven from Kiptchak, and to whom Bajazet had
+assigned a settlement in the plains of Adrianople. The fearless
+confidence of the Sultan urged him to meet his antagonist; and, as if he
+had chosen that spot for revenge, he displayed his banner near the ruins
+of the unfortunate Sebaste.
+
+In the mean while Timur moved from the Araxes through the countries of
+Armenia and Anatolia. His boldness was secured by the wisest
+precautions; his speed was guided by order and discipline; and the
+woods, the mountains, and the rivers were diligently explored by the
+flying squadrons, who marked his road and preceded his standard. Firm in
+his plan of fighting in the heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided
+their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea,
+traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora;
+while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the
+Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of
+indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike
+impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a
+memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur and the
+shame of Bajazet.
+
+For this signal victory the Mongol Emperor was indebted to himself, to
+the genius of the moment, and the discipline of thirty years. He had
+improved the tactics, without violating the manners, of his nation,
+whose force still consisted in the missile weapons and rapid evolutions
+of a numerous cavalry. From a single troop to a great army, the mode of
+attack was the same; a foremost line first advanced to the charge, and
+was supported in a just order by the squadrons of the great vanguard.
+The general's eye watched over the field, and at his command the front
+and rear of the right and left wings successively moved forward in their
+several divisions, and in a direct or oblique line; the enemy was
+pressed by eighteen or twenty attacks; and each attack afforded a
+chance of victory. If they all proved fruitless or unsuccessful, the
+occasion was worthy of the Emperor himself, who gave the signal of
+advancing to the standard and main body, which he led in person. But in
+the battle of Angora, the main body itself was supported, on the flanks
+and in the rear, by the bravest squadrons of the reserve, commanded by
+the sons and grandsons of Timur. The conqueror of Hindustan
+ostentatiously showed a line of elephants, the trophies rather than the
+instruments of victory; the use of the Greek fire was familiar to the
+Mongols and Ottomans; but had they borrowed from Europe the recent
+invention of gunpowder and cannon, the artificial thunder, in the hands
+of either nation, must have turned the fortune of the day. In that day
+Bajazet displayed the qualities of a soldier and a chief; but his genius
+sunk under a stronger ascendant; and, from various motives, the greatest
+part of his troops failed him in the decisive moment. His rigor and
+avarice had provoked a mutiny among the Turks; and even his son Solyman
+too hastily withdrew from the field. The forces of Anatolia, loyal in
+their revolt, were drawn away to the banners of their lawful princes.
+His Tartar allies had been tempted by the letters and emissaries of
+Timur, who reproached their ignoble servitude under the slaves of their
+fathers; and offered to their hopes the dominion of their new, or the
+liberty of their ancient, country. In the right wing of Bajazet the
+cuirassiers of Europe charged with faithful hearts and irresistible
+arms; but these men of iron were soon broken by an artful flight and
+headlong pursuit; and the janizaries, alone, without cavalry or missile
+weapons, were encompassed by the circle of the Mongol hunters. Their
+valor was at length oppressed by heat, thirst, and the weight of
+numbers; and the unfortunate Sultan, afflicted with the gout in his
+hands and feet, was transported from the field on the fleetest of his
+horses. He was pursued and taken by the titular Khan of Zagatai; and,
+after his capture and the defeat of the Ottoman powers, the kingdom of
+Anatolia submitted to the conqueror, who planted his standard at
+Kiotahia, and dispersed on all sides the ministers of rapine and
+destruction. Mirza Mehemmed Sultan, the eldest and best beloved of his
+grandsons, was despatched to Bursa, with thirty thousand horse; and such
+was his youthful ardor that he arrived with only four thousand at the
+gates of the capital, after performing in five days a march of two
+hundred and thirty miles. Yet fear is still more rapid in its course;
+and Solyman, the son of Bajazet, had already passed over to Europe with
+the royal treasure. The spoil, however, of the palace and city was
+immense; the inhabitants had escaped; but the buildings, for the most
+part of wood, were reduced to ashes. From Bursa, the grandson of Timur
+advanced to Nice, even yet a fair and flourishing city; and the Mongol
+squadrons were only stopped by the waves of the Propontis. The same
+success attended the other mirzas and emirs in their excursions, and
+Smyrna, defended by the zeal and courage of the Rhodian knights, alone
+deserved the presence of the Emperor himself. After an obstinate
+defence, the place was taken by storm; all that breathed was put to the
+sword; and the heads of the Christian heroes were launched from the
+engines, on board of two caracks, or great ships of Europe, that rode at
+anchor in the harbor. The Moslems of Asia rejoiced in their deliverance
+from a dangerous and domestic foe and a parallel was drawn between the
+two rivals, by observing that Timur, in fourteen days, had reduced a
+fortress which had sustained seven years the siege, or at least the
+blockade, of Bajazet.
+
+The "iron cage" in which Bajazet was imprisoned by Timur, so long and so
+often repeated as a moral lesson, is now rejected as a fable by the
+modern writers, who smile at the vulgar credulity. They appeal with
+confidence to the Persian history of Sherefeddin Ali, according to which
+has been given to our curiosity in a French version, and from which I
+shall collect and abridge, a more specious narrative of this memorable
+transaction. No sooner was Timur informed that the captive Ottoman was
+at the door of his tent than he graciously stepped forward to receive
+him, seated him by his side, and mingled with just reproaches a soothing
+pity for his rank and misfortune.
+
+"Alas!" said the Emperor, "the decree of fate is now accomplished by
+your own fault; it is the web which you have woven, the thorns of the
+tree which yourself have planted. I wished to spare, and even to assist,
+the champion of the Moslems. You braved our threats; you despised our
+friendship; you forced us to enter your kingdom with our invincible
+armies. Behold the event. Had you vanquished, I am not ignorant of the
+fate which you reserved for myself and my troops. But I disdain to
+retaliate; your life and honor are secure; and I shall express my
+gratitude to God by my clemency to man."
+
+The royal captive showed some signs of repentance, accepted the
+humiliation of a robe of honor, and embraced with tears his son Musa,
+who, at his request, was sought and found among the captives of the
+field. The Ottoman princes were lodged in a splendid pavilion; and the
+respect of the guards could be surpassed only by their vigilance. On the
+arrival of the harem from Bursa, Timur restored the queen Despina and
+her daughter to their father and husband; but he piously required that
+the Servian princess, who had hitherto been indulged in the profession
+of Christianity, should embrace, without delay, the religion of the
+Prophet. In the feast of victory, to which Bajazet was invited, the
+Mongol Emperor placed a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand,
+with a solemn assurance of restoring him with an increase of glory to
+the throne of his ancestors. But the effect of this promise was
+disappointed by the Sultan's untimely death. Amid the care of the most
+skilful physicians, he expired of an apoplexy, about nine months after
+his defeat. The victor dropped a tear over his grave; his body, with
+royal pomp, was conveyed to the mausoleum which he had erected at Bursa;
+and his son Musa, after receiving a rich present of gold and jewels, of
+horses and arms, was invested by a patent in red ink with the kingdom of
+Anatolia.
+
+Such is the portrait of a generous conqueror, which has been extracted
+from his own memorials and dedicated to his son and grandson, nineteen
+years after his decease; and, at a time when the truth was remembered by
+thousands, a manifest falsehood would have implied a satire on his real
+conduct. Weighty, indeed, is this evidence, adopted by all the Persian
+histories; yet flattery, more especially in the East, is base and
+audacious; and the harsh and ignominious treatment of Bajazet is
+attested by a chain of witnesses.
+
+I am satisfied that Sherefeddin Ali has faithfully described the first
+ostentatious interview, in which the conqueror, whose spirits were
+harmonized by success, affected the character of generosity. But his
+mind was insensibly alienated by the unseasonable arrogance of Bajazet;
+and Timur betrayed a design of leading his royal captive in triumph to
+Samarkand. An attempt to facilitate his escape, by digging a mine under
+the tent, provoked the Mongol Emperor to impose a harsher restraint; and
+in his perpetual marches, an iron cage on a wagon might be invented, not
+as a wanton insult, but as a rigorous precaution. But the strength of
+Bajazet's mind and body fainted under the trial, and his premature death
+might, without injustice, be ascribed to the severity of Timur.
+
+From the Irtysh and Volga to the Persian Gulf, and from the Ganges to
+Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in the hands of Timur; his armies
+were invincible, his ambition was boundless, and his zeal might aspire
+to conquer and convert the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already
+trembled at his name. He touched the utmost verge of the land; but an
+insuperable, though narrow, sea rolled between the two continents of
+Europe and Asia; and the lord of so many myriads of horse was not master
+of a single galley. The two passages of the Bosporus and Hellespont, of
+Constantinople and Gallipoli, were possessed, the one by the Christians,
+the other by the Turks. On this great occasion they forgot the
+difference of religion, to act with union and firmness in the common
+cause; the double straits were guarded with ships and fortifications;
+and they separately withheld the transports which Timur demanded of
+either nation, under the pretence of attacking their enemy. At the same
+time they soothed his pride with tributary gifts and suppliant
+embassies, and prudently tempted him to retreat with the honors of
+victory. Solyman, the son of Bajazet, implored his clemency for his
+father and himself; accepted, by a red patent, the investiture of the
+kingdom of Romania, which he already held by the sword; and reiterated
+his ardent wish of casting himself in person at the feet of the king of
+the world. The Greek Emperor--either John or Manuel--submitted to pay
+the same tribute which he had stipulated with the Turkish Sultan, and
+ratified the treaty by an oath of allegiance, from which he could
+absolve his conscience so soon as the Mongol arms had retired from
+Anatolia. But the fears and fancy of nations ascribed to the ambitious
+Tamerlane a new design of vast and romantic compass; a design of
+subduing Egypt and Africa, marching from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean,
+entering Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, after imposing his
+yoke on the kingdoms of Christendom, of returning home by the deserts of
+Russia and Tartary. This remote, and perhaps imaginary, danger was
+averted by the submission of the Sultan of Egypt, the honors of the
+prayer and the coin attested at Cairo the supremacy of Timur; and a rare
+gift of a giraffe, or camelopard, and nine ostriches, represented at
+Samarkand the tribute of the African world. Our imagination is not less
+astonished by the portrait of a Mongol, who, in his camp before Smyrna,
+meditates, and almost accomplishes, the invasion of the Chinese empire.
+Timur was urged to this enterprise by national honor and religious zeal.
+He received a perfect map and description of the unknown regions, from
+the source of Irtysh to the Wall of China. During the preparations, the
+Emperor achieved the final conquest of Georgia; passed the winter on the
+banks of the Araxes; appeased the troubles of Persia; and slowly
+returned to his capital, after a campaign of four years and nine months.
+
+On the throne of Samarkand he displayed, in a short repose, his
+magnificence and power; listened to the complaints of the people;
+distributed a just measure of rewards and punishments; employed his
+riches in the architecture of palaces and temples; and gave audience to
+the ambassadors of Egypt, Arabia, India, Tartary, Russia, and Spain, the
+last of whom presented a suit of tapestry which eclipsed the pencil of
+the oriental artists. A general indulgence was proclaimed; every law was
+relaxed, every pleasure was allowed; the people was free, the sovereign
+was idle; and the historian of Timur may remark that, after devoting
+fifty years to the attainment of empire, the only happy period of his
+life was the two months in which he ceased to exercise his power.
+
+But he soon awakened to the cares of government and war. The standard
+was unfurled for the invasion of China; the emirs made their report of
+two hundred thousand, the select and veteran soldiers of Iran and Turan;
+their baggage and provisions were transported by five hundred great
+wagons and an immense train of horses and camels; and the troops might
+prepare for a long absence, since more than six months were employed in
+the tranquil journey of a caravan from Samarkand to Peking. Neither age
+nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timur; he
+mounted on horseback, passed the Sihun on the ice, marched seventy-six
+parasangs (three hundred miles) from his capital, and pitched his last
+camp in the neighborhood of Otrar, where he was expected by the angel of
+death. Fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water accelerated the
+progress of his fever; and the conqueror of Asia expired in the
+seventieth year of his age, 1405, thirty-five years after he had
+ascended the throne of Zagatai. His designs were lost; his armies were
+disbanded; China was saved; and, fourteen years after his decease, the
+most powerful of his children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce
+to the court of Peking.
+
+The fame of Timur has pervaded the East and West; his posterity is still
+invested with the imperial title; and the admiration of his subjects,
+who revered him almost as a deity, may be justified in some degree by
+the praise or confession of his bitterest enemies. Although he was lame
+of a hand and foot, his form and stature were not unworthy of his rank;
+and his vigorous health, so essential to himself and to the world, was
+corroborated by temperance and exercise. In his familiar discourse he
+was grave and modest; and if he was ignorant of the Arabic language, he
+spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish idioms. It was
+his delight to converse with the learned on topics of history and
+science; and the amusement of his leisure hours was the game of chess,
+which he improved or corrupted with new refinements.
+
+In his religion he was a zealous, though not perhaps an orthodox,
+Mussulman; but his sound understanding may tempt us to believe that a
+superstitious reverence for omens and prophecies, for saints and
+astrologers, was only affected as an instrument of policy. In the
+government of a vast empire, he stood alone and absolute, without a
+rebel to oppose his power, a favorite to seduce his affections, or a
+minister to mislead his judgment.
+
+Timur might boast that at his accession to the throne Asia was the prey
+of anarchy and rapine, while under his prosperous monarchy a child,
+fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold from the East to the
+West. Such was his confidence of merit that from this reformation he
+derived an excuse for his victories and a title to universal dominion.
+The four following observations will serve to appreciate his claim to
+the public gratitude; and perhaps we shall conclude that the Mongol
+Emperor was rather the scourge than the benefactor of mankind. If some
+partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of
+Timur, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By their
+rapine, cruelty, and discord the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict
+their subjects; but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of
+the reformer. The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities
+was often marked by his abominable trophies--by columns, or pyramids of
+human heads. Astrakhan, Karizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo,
+Damascus, Bursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others were sacked or burned or
+utterly destroyed in his presence and by his troops; and perhaps his
+conscience would have been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared
+to number the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the
+establishment of peace and order. His most destructive wars were rather
+inroads than conquests. He invaded Turkestan, Kiptchak, Russia,
+Hindustan, Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and Georgia, without a hope or a
+desire of preserving those distant provinces. From thence he departed
+laden with spoil; but he left behind him neither troops to awe the
+contumacious nor magistrates to protect the obedient natives. When he
+had broken the fabric of their ancient government, he abandoned them in
+their evils which his invasion had aggravated or caused; nor were these
+evils compensated by any present or possible benefits. The kingdoms of
+Transoxiana and Persia were the proper field which he labored to
+cultivate and adorn as the perpetual inheritance of his family. But his
+peaceful labors were often interrupted, and sometimes blasted, by the
+absence of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the Volga or the Ganges,
+his servants, and even his sons, forgot their master and their duty. The
+public and private injuries were poorly redressed by the tardy rigor or
+inquiry and punishment; and we must be content to praise the
+_Institutions_ of Timur as the specious idea of a perfect monarchy.
+Whatsoever might be the blessings of his administration, they evaporated
+with his life. To reign, rather than to govern, was the ambition of his
+children and grandchildren--the enemies of each other and of the people.
+A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by Sharokh, his
+youngest son; but after his decease the scene was again involved in
+darkness and blood; and before the end of a century Transoxiana and
+Persia were trampled by the Usbegs from the north, and the Turcomans of
+the black and white sheep. The race of Timur would have been extinct if
+a hero, his descendant in the fifth degree, had not fled before the
+Usbeg arms to the conquest of Hindustan. His successors--the great
+Mongols--extended their sway from the mountains of Cashmere to Cape
+Comorin, and from Kandahar to the Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign of
+Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved; their treasures of Delhi
+have been rifled by a Persian robber; and the richest of their kingdoms
+is now possessed by a company of Christian merchants, of a remote island
+in the Northern Ocean.
+
+
+
+
+DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES
+
+A.D. 1374
+
+J. F. C. Hecker[59]
+
+
+  The black death, which originated in Central China about
+  1333, appeared on the Mediterranean littoral in 1347,
+  ravaged the island of Cyprus, made the circuit of the
+  Mediterranean countries, spread throughout Europe northward
+  as far as Iceland, and in 1357 appeared in Russia, where it
+  seems to have been checked by the barrier of the Caucasus.
+
+  Scarce had its effects subsided, and the graves of its
+  25,000,000 victims were hardly closed, when it was followed
+  by an epidemic of the dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which
+  like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and
+  spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring
+  countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping,
+  furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to
+  the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity.
+
+  The epidemic was not confined to particular localities, but
+  was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, and for over
+  two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries.
+  The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy
+  the disease became known as _tarantism_, it being supposed
+  to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous
+  spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism
+  spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a
+  wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to
+  furnish magical means for exorcising the malady of the
+  patients.
+
+  The epidemic subsided in Central Europe in the seventeenth
+  century, but diseases approximating to the original dancing
+  mania have occurred at various periods in many parts of
+  Europe, Africa, and the United States. Nathaniel Pearce, an
+  eye-witness, who resided nine years in Abyssinia early in
+  the nineteenth century, gives a graphic account of a similar
+  epidemic there, called _tigretier_, from the Tigre district,
+  in which it was most prevalent. In France, from 1727 to
+  1790, an epidemic prevailed among the Convulsionnaires, who
+  received relief from brethren in the faith known as
+  Secourists, very much after the rough methods administered
+  to the St. John's dancers and to the _tarantati_. About the
+  same period nervous epidemics of a similar character,
+  largely propagated by sympathy, were very prevalent in the
+  Shetland Islands and in various parts of Scotland, but were
+  for the most part eradicated by cold-water immersion.
+
+  An epidemic of _chorea sancti Viti_, recorded by Felix
+  Robertson of Tennessee (Philadelphia, 1805), found vent in
+  an unparalleled blaze of enthusiastic religion, which spread
+  with lightning-like rapidity in almost every part of
+  Tennessee and Kentucky, and in various parts of Virginia, in
+  1800, being distinguished by uncontrollable and infectious
+  muscular contractions, gesticulations, crying, laughing,
+  shouting, and singing. To similar epidemics are attributed
+  the uncontrollable acts which, till late in the nineteenth
+  century, were a feature of North American camp meetings for
+  divine service in the open air, and which exhibited the same
+  form of mental disturbance as did the St. Vitus' dance in
+  mediaeval Europe.
+
+So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at
+Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one
+common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the
+churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in
+hand, and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses,
+continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in
+wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of
+exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as
+if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound
+tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and
+remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of
+swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these
+spasmodic ravings, but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a
+less artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts
+affected. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to
+external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions,
+their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and
+some of them afterward asserted that they felt as if they had been
+immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high.
+Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour
+enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of
+the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.
+
+Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with
+epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless,
+panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly
+springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady
+doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by
+temporary or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but
+imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were to
+confound their observation of natural events with their notions of the
+world of spirits.
+
+It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from
+Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighboring
+Netherlands. In Liege, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns of Belgium
+the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists girt
+with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive
+immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. This bandage was, by the
+insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight. Many, however, obtained more
+relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers of persons ready
+to administer; for, wherever the dancers appeared, the people assembled
+in crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At
+length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety
+than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages they
+took possession of the religious houses; processions were everywhere
+instituted on their account and masses were said and hymns were sung,
+while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one
+entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror.
+In Liege the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavored, by every
+means in their power, to allay an evil which threatened so much danger
+to themselves; for the possessed, assembling in multitudes, frequently
+poured forth imprecations against them and menaced their destruction.
+They intimidated the people also to such a degree that there was an
+express ordinance issued that no one should make any but square-toed
+shoes, because these fanatics had manifested a morbid dislike to the
+pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediately after the "great
+mortality," in 1350. They were still more irritated at the sight of red
+colors, the influence of which on the disordered nerves might lead us to
+imagine an extraordinary accordance between this spasmodic malady and
+the condition of infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this
+excitement was probably connected with apparitions consequent upon their
+convulsions. There were likewise some of them who were unable to
+endure the sight of persons weeping. The clergy seemed to become daily
+more and more confirmed in their belief that those who were affected
+were a kind of sectarians, and on this account they hastened their
+exorcisms as much as possible, in order that the evil might not spread
+among the higher classes, for hitherto scarcely any but the poor had
+been attacked, and the few people of respectability among the laity and
+clergy who were to be found among them were persons whose natural
+frivolity was unable to withstand the excitement of novelty, even though
+it proceeded from a demoniacal influence. Some of the affected had
+indeed themselves declared, when under the influence of priestly forms
+of exorcism, that, if the demons had been allowed only a few weeks more
+time, they would have entered the bodies of the nobility and princes,
+and through these have destroyed the clergy. Assertions of this sort,
+which those possessed uttered while in a state which may be compared
+with that of magnetic sleep, obtained general belief, and passed from
+mouth to mouth with wonderful additions. The priesthood were, on this
+account, so much the more zealous in their endeavors to anticipate every
+dangerous excitement of the people, as if the existing order of things
+could have been seriously threatened by such incoherent ravings. Their
+exertions were effectual, for exorcism was a powerful remedy in the
+fourteenth century; or it might perhaps be that this wild infatuation
+terminated in consequence of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from
+it; at all events, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's
+dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The
+evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such
+feeble attacks.
+
+A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those
+possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at
+Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with
+eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their
+workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels,
+and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous
+disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found
+opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by
+vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a
+temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants
+their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and
+greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Gangs of idle
+vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and
+convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking
+maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this
+disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind
+the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the
+reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous
+guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests
+and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after
+four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these
+impostors, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the
+mean time, when once called into existence, the plague crept on, and
+found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the
+fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree,
+throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder
+of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose inhabitants it was
+a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable.
+
+Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague, or St. Vitus' dance,[60] in
+the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there
+as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at
+the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their
+confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the
+swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the
+streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by
+innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added
+anxious parents and relations, who came to look after those among the
+misguided multitude who belonged to their respective families. Imposture
+and profligacy played their part in this city also, but the morbid
+delusion itself seems to have predominated. On this account religion
+could only bring provisional aid, and therefore the town council
+benevolently took an interest in the afflicted. They divided them into
+separate parties, to each of which they appointed responsible
+superintendents to protect them from harm and perhaps also to restrain
+their turbulence. They were thus conducted on foot and in carriages to
+the chapels of St. Vitus, near Zabern and Rotestein, where priests were
+in attendance to work upon their misguided minds by masses and other
+religious ceremonies. After divine worship was completed, they were led
+in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering
+of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence
+of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable
+aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing
+mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him
+alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition
+a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of human skill. The
+personal history of St. Vitus is by no means unimportant in this matter.
+He was a Sicilian youth, who, together with Modestus and Crescentia,
+suffered martyrdom at the time of the persecution of the Christians,
+under Diocletian, in the year 303. The legends respecting him are
+obscure, and he would certainly have been passed over without notice
+among the innumerable apocryphal martyrs of the first centuries, had not
+the transfer of his body to St. Denis, and thence, in the year 836, to
+Corvey, raised him to a higher rank. From this time forth, it may be
+supposed that many miracles were manifested at his new sepulchre, which
+were of essential service in confirming the Roman faith among the
+Germans, and St. Vitus was soon ranked among the fourteen saintly
+helpers (_Nothhelfer_ or _Apotheker_). His altars were multiplied, and
+the people had recourse to them in all kinds of distresses, and revered
+him as a powerful intercessor. As the worship of these saints was,
+however, at that time stripped of all historical connections, which were
+purposely obliterated by the priesthood, a legend was invented at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, or perhaps even so early as the
+fourteenth, that St. Vitus had, just before he bent his neck to the
+sword, prayed to God that he might protect from the dancing mania all
+those who should solemnize the day of his commemoration, and fast upon
+its eve, and that thereupon a voice from heaven was heard, saying,
+"Vitus, thy prayer is accepted." Thus St. Vitus became the patron saint
+of those afflicted with the dancing plague, as St. Martin of Tours was
+at one time the succorer of persons in smallpox.
+
+The connection which John the Baptist had with the dancing mania of the
+fourteenth century was of a totally different character. He was
+originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked,
+or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered
+as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was
+worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its
+development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the
+fourth century, St. John's Day was solemnized with all sorts of strange
+and rude customs, of which the originally mystical meaning was variously
+disfigured among different nations by super-added relics of heathenism.
+Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St. John's Day an
+ancient heathen usage, the kindling of the _Nodfyr_, which was forbidden
+them by St. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day
+that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their
+smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as
+if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have
+originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth,
+and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant
+accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the
+period of which we are treating, however, the Germans were not the only
+people who gave way to the ebullitions of fanaticism in keeping the
+festival of St. John the Baptist. Similar customs were also to be found
+among the nations of Southern Europe and of Asia,[61] and it is more
+than probable that the Greeks transferred to the festival of John the
+Baptist, who is also held in high esteem among the Mahometans, a part of
+their Bacchanalian mysteries, an absurdity of a kind which it but too
+frequently met with in human affairs. How far a remembrance of the
+history of St. John's death may have had an influence on this occasion
+we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is of importance here
+to add only that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe,
+where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity
+against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint
+of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of
+the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not
+to be found.
+
+When we observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle
+appeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths, the conjecture is
+probable that the wild revels of St. John's Day, A.D. 1374, gave rise to
+this mental plague, which thenceforth has visited so many thousands with
+incurable aberration of mind and disgusting distortions of body.
+
+This is rendered so much the more probable because some months
+previously the districts in the neighborhood of the Rhine and the Maine
+had met with great disasters. So early as February both these rivers had
+overflowed their banks to a great extent; the walls of the town of
+Cologne, on the side next the Rhine, had fallen down, and a great many
+villages had been reduced to the utmost distress. To this was added the
+miserable condition of Western and Southern Germany. Neither law nor
+edict could suppress the incessant feuds of the barons, and in Franconia
+especially the ancient times of club law appeared to be revived.
+Security of property there was none; arbitrary will everywhere
+prevailed; corruption of morals and rude power rarely met with even a
+feeble opposition; whence it arose that the cruel, but lucrative,
+persecutions of the Jews were in many places still practised, through
+the whole of this century, with their wonted ferocity. Thus, throughout
+the western parts of Germany, and especially in the districts bordering
+on the Rhine, there was a wretched and oppressed populace; and if we
+take into consideration that among their numerous bands many wandered
+about whose consciences were tormented with the recollection of the
+crimes which they had committed during the prevalence of the black
+plague, we shall comprehend how their despair sought relief in the
+intoxication of an artificial delirium. There is hence good ground for
+supposing that the frantic celebration of the festival of St. John, A.D.
+1374, only served to bring to a crisis a malady which had been long
+impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless
+usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition,
+could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account
+the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences of
+wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by
+hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were
+attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the
+intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of the
+disorder which is well worth consideration.
+
+The dancing mania of the year 1374 was, in fact, no new disease, but a
+phenomenon well known in the Middle Ages, of which many wondrous stories
+were traditionally current among the people. In the year 1237, upward of
+a hundred children were said to have been suddenly seized with this
+disease at Erfurt, and to have proceeded dancing and jumping along the
+road to Arnstadt. When they arrived at that place they fell exhausted
+to the ground, and, according to an account of an old chronicle, many of
+them, after they were taken home by their parents, died, and the rest
+remained affected to the end of their lives with the permanent tremor.
+Another occurrence was related to have taken place on the Mosel bridge
+at Utrecht, on June 17, 1278, when two hundred fanatics began to dance,
+and would not desist until a priest passed who was carrying the host to
+a person that was sick, upon which, as if in punishment of their crime,
+the bridge gave way, and they were all drowned. A similar event also
+occurred, so early as the year 1027, near the convent church of Kolbig,
+not far from Bernburg. According to an oft-repeated tradition, eighteen
+peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have
+disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the
+church-yard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon
+them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without
+ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that
+the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into the earth, and
+remained the whole time without nourishment, until they were finally
+released by the intercession of two pious bishops. It is said that upon
+this they fell into a deep sleep, which lasted three days, and that four
+of them died; the rest continuing to suffer all their lives from a
+trembling of their limbs.[62] It is not worth while to separate what may
+have been true and what the addition of crafty priests in this strangely
+distorted story. It is sufficient that it was believed, and related with
+astonishment and horror, throughout the Middle Ages, so that, when there
+was any exciting cause for this delirious raving, and wild rage for
+dancing, it failed not to produce its effects upon men whose thoughts
+were given up to a belief in wonders and apparitions.
+
+This disposition of mind, altogether so peculiar to the Middle Ages, and
+which, happily for mankind, has yielded to an improved state of
+civilization and the diffusion of popular instruction, accounts for the
+origin and long duration of this extraordinary mental disorder. The good
+sense of the people recoiled with horror and aversion from this heavy
+plague, which, whenever malevolent persons wished to curse their
+bitterest enemies and adversaries, was long after used as a
+malediction.[63] The indignation also that was felt by the people at
+large against the immorality of the age was proved by their ascribing
+this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste
+priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after years,
+for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We
+have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands
+incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavored to hasten their
+reconciliation with the irritated and at that time very degenerate
+people by exorcisms, which, with some, procured them greater respect
+than ever, because they thus visibly restored thousands of those who
+were affected. In general, however, there prevailed a want of confidence
+in their efficacy, and then the sacred rites had as little power in
+arresting the progress of this deeply rooted malady as the prayers and
+holy services subsequently had at the altars of the greatly revered
+martyr St. Vitus. We may, therefore, ascribe it to accident merely, and
+to a certain aversion to this demoniacal disease, which seemed to lie
+beyond the reach of human skill, that we meet with but few and imperfect
+notices of the St. Vitus' dance in the second half of the fifteenth
+century. The highly colored descriptions of the sixteenth century
+contradict the notion that this mental plague had in any degree
+diminished in its severity, and not a single fact is to be found which
+supports the opinion that any one of the essential symptoms of the
+disease, not even excepting the tympany, had disappeared, or that the
+disorder itself had become milder in its attacks. The physicians never,
+as it seems, throughout the whole of the fifteenth century, undertook
+the treatment of the dancing mania, which, according to the prevailing
+notions, appertained exclusively to the servants of the Church. Against
+demoniacal disorders they had no remedies, and though some at first did
+promulgate the opinion that the malady had its origin in natural
+circumstances, such as a hot temperament, and other causes named in the
+phraseology of the schools, yet these opinions were the less examined,
+as it did not appear worth while to divide with a jealous priesthood the
+care of a host of fanatical vagabonds and beggars.
+
+It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that the St.
+Vitus' dance was made the subject of medical research, and stripped of
+its unhallowed character as a work of demons. This was effected by
+Paracelsus, that mighty, but as yet scarcely comprehended, reformer of
+medicine, whose aim it was to withdraw diseases from the pale of
+miraculous interpositions and saintly influences, and explain their
+causes upon principles deduced from his knowledge of the human frame.
+"We will not, however, admit that the saints have power to inflict
+diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many
+there are who in their theology lay great stress on this supposition,
+ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We
+dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but
+only by faith, a thing which is not human, whereon the gods themselves
+set no value."
+
+Such were the words which Paracelsus addressed to his contemporaries,
+who were as yet incapable of appreciating doctrines of this sort; for
+the belief in enchantment still remained everywhere unshaken, and faith
+in the world of spirits still held men's minds in so close a bondage
+that thousands were, according to their own conviction, given up as a
+prey to the devil; while, at the command of religion as well as of law,
+countless piles were lighted, by the flames of which human society was
+to be purified.
+
+Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus' dance into three kinds: First, that
+which arises from imagination (_Vitista_, _chorea imaginativa_,
+_aestimativa_), by which the original dancing plague is to be understood;
+secondly, that which arises from sensual desires, depending on the will
+(_chorea lasciva_); thirdly, that which arises from corporeal causes
+(_chorea naturalis_, _coacta_), which, according to a strange notion of
+his own, he explained by maintaining that in certain vessels which are
+susceptible of an internal pruriency, and thence produce laughter, the
+blood is set in commotion, in consequence of an alteration in the vital
+spirits, whereby involuntary fits of intoxicating joy, and a propensity
+to dance, are occasioned. To this notion he was, no doubt, led from
+having observed a milder form of St. Vitus' dance, not uncommon in his
+time, which was accompanied by involuntary laughter, and which bore a
+resemblance to the hysterical laughter of the moderns, except that it
+was characterized by more pleasurable sensations, and by an extravagant
+propensity to dance. There was no howling, screaming, and jumping, as in
+the severer form; neither was the disposition to dance by any means
+insuperable. Patients thus affected, although they had not a complete
+control over their understandings, yet were sufficiently self-possessed,
+during the attack, to obey the directions which they received. There
+were even some among them who did not dance at all, but only felt an
+involuntary impulse to allay the internal sense of disquietude, which is
+the usual forerunner of an attack of this kind, by laughter, and quick
+walking carried to the extent of producing fatigue. This disorder, so
+different from the original type, evidently approximates to the modern
+chorea, or rather is in perfect accordance with it, even to the less
+essential symptom of laughter. A mitigation in the form of the dancing
+mania had thus clearly taken place at the commencement of the sixteenth
+century.
+
+On the communication of the St. Vitus' dance by sympathy, Paracelsus, in
+his peculiar language, expresses himself with great spirit, and shows a
+profound knowledge of the nature of sensual impressions, which find
+their way to the heart--the seat of joys and emotions--which overpower
+the opposition of reason; and while "all other qualities and natures"
+are subdued, incessantly impel the patient, in consequence of his
+original compliance, and his all-conquering imagination, to imitate what
+he has seen. On his treatment of the disease we cannot bestow any great
+praise, but must be content with the remark that it was in conformity
+with the notions of the age in which he lived. For the first kind, which
+often originated in passionate excitement, he had a mental remedy, the
+efficacy of which is not to be despised, if we estimate its value in
+connection with the prevalent opinions of those times. The patient was
+to make an image of himself in wax or resin, and by an effort of thought
+to concentrate all his blasphemies and sins in it. "Without the
+intervention of any other person, to set his whole mind and thoughts
+concerning these oaths in the image;" and when he had succeeded in this,
+he was to burn the image, so that not a particle of it should
+remain.[64] In all this there was no mention made of St. Vitus, or any
+of the other mediatory saints, which is accounted for by the
+circumstance, that, at this time, an open rebellion against the Romish
+Church had begun, and the worship of saints was by many rejected as
+idolatrous. For the second kind of St. Vitus' dance, Paracelsus
+recommended harsh treatment and strict fasting. He directed that the
+patients should be deprived of their liberty, placed in solitary
+confinement, and made to sit in an uncomfortable place, until their
+misery brought them to their senses and to a feeling of penitence. He
+then permitted them gradually to return to their accustomed habits.
+Severe corporal chastisement was not omitted; but, on the other hand,
+angry resistance on the part of the patient was to be sedulously
+avoided, on the ground that it might increase his malady, or even
+destroy him; moreover, where it seemed proper, Paracelsus allayed the
+excitement of the nerves by immersion in cold water. On the treatment of
+the third kind we shall not here enlarge. It was to be effected by all
+sorts of wonderful remedies, composed of the quintessences; and it would
+require, to render it intelligible, a more extended exposition of
+peculiar principles than suits our present purpose.
+
+About this time the St. Vitus' dance began to decline, so that milder
+forms of it appeared more frequently, while the severer cases became
+more rare; and even in these, some of the important symptoms gradually
+disappeared. Paracelsus makes no mention of the tympanites as taking
+place after the attacks, although it may occasionally have occurred; and
+Schenck von Graffenberg, a celebrated physician of the latter half of
+the sixteenth century, speaks of this disease as having been frequent
+only in the time of his forefathers.
+
+
+
+
+ELECTION OF ANTIPOPE CLEMENT VII
+
+Beginning of the Great Schism
+
+A.D. 1378
+
+HENRY HART MILMAN
+
+
+  In 1308 Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, under the influence of
+  King Philip the Fair, of France, transferred the papal chair
+  from Rome to Avignon, a possession of the holy see beyond
+  the Alps, in Philip's dominions. The sojourn there of
+  Clement and his successors, which continued until 1376, is
+  known as the "Babylonish captivity" of the popes.
+
+  Rome, from the first, was angry at this loss of supremacy,
+  and aimed at recovering her prestige; and throughout the
+  Christian world--France alone excepted--it was regarded as a
+  scandal that the chair of St. Peter should rest on any soil
+  but that of the Eternal City; but the French kings, and the
+  cardinals of France--outnumbering all others in the sacred
+  college--were determined to retain the pontifical seat in
+  their own territory.
+
+  During the pontificate of Gregory XI (1371-1378) Italy was
+  torn by civil dissensions; the "free companies"--bands of
+  organized marauders--ravaged the country with fire and
+  sword, plundering Guelf and Ghibelline alike. Gregory's
+  legates in the government of the ecclesiastical states
+  rendered themselves so odious to the people by their
+  immorality and rapacity that a league of the more powerful
+  political factions was formed for throwing off the yoke of
+  the "absentee" papal rulers. This was the beginning of the
+  War of Liberation (1375) that was to shake the papal power
+  in Italy to its very foundations.
+
+  Gregory saw that, in order to preserve even a vestige of
+  temporal power in the Italian states, he must act with
+  crushing vigor. He therefore sent the cardinal legate,
+  Robert, of Geneva--afterward Antipope Clement VII--into
+  Italy with a company of Breton adventurers dreaded for their
+  ferocity, and trained to plunder in the terrible wars of
+  France. In spite of the atrocities committed by Robert and
+  his hirelings, the revolt continued with unabated fury, and
+  at last Gregory was constrained to return in person to Italy
+  with the purpose of pacifying the turbulent forces. He
+  entered Rome, January 17, 1377; but after a year of futile
+  effort he died, leaving the confusion worse than he found
+  it.
+
+  Since, according to ecclesiastical law, the election of a
+  new pope must be held at the place of the last pontiff's
+  decease, great clamor arose among the Romans, whose demands
+  were seconded throughout Europe, for the election of a
+  Roman pope and the ending of the "Babylonish captivity." The
+  history of the Great Schism and election of the rival
+  pontiffs is nowhere to be found in better form of narrative
+  than that of Milman, which here follows.
+
+Gregory XI had hardly expired when Rome burst out into a furious tumult.
+A Roman pope, at least an Italian pope, was the universal outcry. The
+conclave must be overawed; the hateful domination of a foreign, a French
+pontiff, must be broken up, and forever. This was not unforeseen. Before
+his death Gregory XI had issued a bull conferring the amplest powers on
+the cardinals to choose, according to their wisdom, the time and the
+place for the election. It manifestly contemplated their retreat from
+the turbulent streets of Rome to some place where their deliberations
+would not be overborne, and the predominant French interest would
+maintain its superiority. On the other hand there were serious and not
+groundless apprehensions that the fierce Breton and Gascon bands, at the
+command of the French cardinals, might dictate to the conclave. The
+Romans not only armed their civic troops, but sent to Tivoli, Velletri,
+and the neighboring cities; a strong force was mustered to keep the
+foreigners in check.
+
+Throughout the interval between the funeral of Gregory and the opening
+of the conclave, the cardinals were either too jealously watched, or
+thought it imprudent to attempt flight. Sixteen cardinals were present
+at Rome, one Spaniard, eleven French, four Italians. The ordinary
+measures were taken for opening the conclave in the palace near St.
+Peter's. Five Romans, two ecclesiastics and three laymen, and three
+Frenchmen were appointed to wait upon and to guard the conclave. The
+Bishop of Marseilles represented the great chamberlain, who holds the
+supreme authority during the vacancy of the popedom. The chamberlain,
+the Archbishop of Arles, brother of the Cardinal of Limoges, had
+withdrawn into the castle of St. Angelo, to secure his own person and to
+occupy that important fortress.
+
+The nine solemn days fully elapsed, on the 7th of April they assembled
+for the conclave. At that instant (inauspicious omen!) a terrible flash
+of lightning, followed by a stunning peal of thunder, struck through the
+hall, burning and splitting some of the furniture. The hall of conclave
+was crowded by a fierce rabble, who refused to retire. After about an
+hour's strife, the Bishop of Marseilles, by threats, by persuasion, or
+by entreaty, had expelled all but about forty wild men, armed to the
+teeth. These ruffians rudely and insolently searched the whole building;
+they looked under the beds, they examined the places of retreat. They
+would satisfy themselves whether any armed men were concealed, whether
+there was any hole, or even drain through which the cardinals could
+escape. All the time they shouted: "A Roman pope! we will have a Roman
+pope!" Those without echoed back the savage yell. Before long appeared
+two ecclesiastics, announcing themselves as delegated by the commonalty
+of Rome; they demanded to speak with the cardinals. The cardinals dared
+not refuse. The Romans represented, in firm but not disrespectful
+language, that for seventy years the holy Roman people had been without
+their pastor, the supreme head of Christendom. In Rome were many noble
+and wise ecclesiastics equal to govern the Church: if not in Rome, there
+were such men in Italy.
+
+They intimated that so great were the fury and determination of the
+people that, if the conclave should resist, there might be a general
+massacre, in which probably they themselves, assuredly the cardinals,
+would perish. The cardinals might hear from every quarter around them
+the cry: "A Roman pope! if not a Roman, an Italian!" The cardinals
+replied, that such aged and reverend men must know the rules of the
+conclave; that no election could be by requisition, favor, fear, or
+tumult, but by the interposition of the Holy Ghost. To reiterated
+persuasions and menaces they only said: "We are in your power; you may
+kill us, but we must act according to God's ordinance. To-morrow we
+celebrate the mass for the descent of the Holy Ghost; as the Holy Ghost
+directs, so shall we do." Some of the French uttered words which sounded
+like defiance. The populace cried: "If ye persist to do despite to
+Christ, if we have not a Roman pope, we will hew these cardinals and
+Frenchmen in pieces."
+
+At length the Bishop of Marseilles was able to entirely clear the hall.
+The cardinals sat down to a plentiful repast; the doors were finally
+closed. But all the night through they heard in the streets the
+unceasing clamor: "A Roman pope, a Roman pope!" Toward the morning the
+tumult became more fierce and dense. Strange men had burst into the
+belfry of St. Peter's; the clanging bells tolled as if all Rome was on
+fire.
+
+Within the conclave, the tumult, if less loud and clamorous, was hardly
+less general. The confusion without and terror within did not allay the
+angry rivalry, or suspend that subtle play of policy peculiar to the
+form of election. The French interest was divided; within this circle
+there was another circle. The single diocese of Limoges, favored as it
+had been by more than one pope, had almost strength to dictate to the
+conclave. The Limousins put forward the Cardinal de St. Eustache.
+Against these the leader was the Cardinal Robert of Geneva, whose fierce
+and haughty demeanor and sanguinary acts as legate had brought so much
+of its unpopularity on the administration of Gregory XI. With Robert
+were the four Italians and three French cardinals. Rather than a
+Limousin, Robert would even consent to an Italian. They on the one side,
+the Limousins on the other, had met secretly before the conclave: the
+eight had sworn not on any account to submit to the election of a
+traitorous Limousin.
+
+All the sleepless night the cardinals might hear the din at the gate,
+the yells of the people, the tolling of the bells. There was constant
+passing and repassing from each other's chamber, intrigues,
+altercations, manoeuvres, proposals advanced and rejected, promises of
+support given and withdrawn. Many names were put up. Of the Romans
+within the conclave two only were named, the old Cardinal of St.
+Peter's, the Cardinal Jacobo Orsini. The Limousins advanced in turn
+almost every one of their faction; no one but himself thought of Robert
+of Geneva.
+
+In the morning the disturbance without waxed more terrible. A vain
+attempt was made to address the populace by the three cardinal priors;
+they were driven from the windows with loud derisive shouts, "A Roman! A
+Roman!" For now the alternative of an Italian had been abandoned; a
+Roman, none but a Roman, would content the people. The madness of
+intoxication was added to the madness of popular fury. The rabble had
+broken open the Pope's cellar and drunk his rich wines. In the conclave
+the wildest projects were started. The Cardinal Orsini was to dress up
+a Minorite friar (probably a Spiritual) in the papal robes, to show him
+to the people, and so for themselves to effect their escape to some safe
+place and proceed to a legitimate election. The cardinals, from honor or
+from fear, shrunk from this trick.
+
+At length both parties seemed to concur. Each claimed credit for first
+advancing the name--which most afterward repudiated--of the Archbishop
+of Bari, a man of repute for theologic and legal erudition, an Italian,
+but a subject of the Queen of Naples, who was also Countess of Provence.
+They came to the nomination. The Cardinal of Florence proposed the
+Cardinal of St. Peter's. The Cardinal of Limoges arose: "The Cardinal of
+St. Peter's is too old. The Cardinal of Florence is of a city at war
+with the holy see. I reject the Cardinal of Milan as the subject of the
+Visconti, the most deadly enemy of the Church. The Cardinal Orsini is
+too young, and we must not yield to the clamor of the Romans. I vote for
+Bartholomew Prignani, Archbishop of Bari." All was acclamation; Orsini
+alone stood out; he aspired to be the pope of the Romans.
+
+But it was too late; the mob was thundering at the gates, menacing death
+to the cardinals, if they had not immediately a Roman pontiff. The
+feeble defences sounded as if they were shattering down; the tramp of
+the populace was almost heard within the hall. They forced or persuaded
+the aged Cardinal of St. Peter's to make a desperate effort to save
+their lives. He appeared at the window, hastily attired in what either
+was or seemed to be the papal stole and mitre. There was a jubilant and
+triumphant cry: "We have a Roman pope, the Cardinal of St. Peter's. Long
+live Rome! Long live St. Peter!" The populace became even more frantic
+with joy than before with wrath. One band hastened to the Cardinal's
+palace, and, according to the strange usage, broke in, threw the
+furniture into the streets, and sacked it from top to bottom. Those
+around the hall of conclave, aided by the connivance of some of the
+cardinals' servants within, or by more violent efforts of their own,
+burst in in all quarters. The supposed pope was surrounded by eager
+adorers; they were at his feet; they pressed his swollen, gouty hands
+till he shrieked from pain, and began to protest, in the strongest
+language, that he was not the pope.
+
+The indignation of the populace at this disappointment was aggravated by
+an unlucky confusion of names. The Archbishop was mistaken for John of
+Bari, of the bedchamber of the late pope, a man of harsh manners and
+dissolute life, an object of general hatred. Five of the cardinals,
+Robert of Geneva, Acquasparta, Viviers, Poitou, and De Verny, were
+seized in their attempt to steal away, and driven back, amid
+contemptuous hootings, by personal violence. Night came on again; the
+populace, having pillaged all the provisions in the conclave, grew weary
+of their own excesses. The cardinals fled on all sides. Four left the
+city; Orsini and St. Eustache escaped to Vicovaro, Robert of Geneva to
+Zagarolo, St. Angelo to Guardia; six, Limoges, D'Aigrefeuille, Poitou,
+Viviers, Brittany, and Marmoutiers, to the castle of St. Angelo;
+Florence, Milan, Montmayeur, Glandeve, and Luna, to their own strong
+fortresses.
+
+The Pope lay concealed in the Vatican. In the morning the five cardinals
+in Rome were assembled round him. A message was sent to the bannerets of
+Rome, announcing his election. The six cardinals in St. Angelo were
+summoned; they were hardly persuaded to leave their place of security;
+but without their presence the Archbishop would not declare his assent
+to his elevation. The Cardinal of Florence, as dean, presented the
+Pope-elect to the sacred college, and discoursed on the text, "Such
+ought he to be, an undefiled high-priest." The Archbishop began a long
+harangue, "Fear and trembling have come upon me, the horror of great
+darkness." The Cardinal of Florence cut short the ill-timed sermon,
+demanding whether he accepted the pontificate. The Archbishop gave his
+assent; he took the name of Urban VI. _Te Deum_ was intoned; he was
+lifted to the throne. The fugitives returned to Rome. Urban VI was
+crowned on Easter Day, in the Church of St. John Lateran. All the
+cardinals were present at the august ceremony. They announced the
+election of Urban VI to their brethren who had remained in Avignon.
+Urban himself addressed the usual encyclic letters, proclaiming his
+elevation, to all the prelates in Christendom.
+
+None could determine how far the nomination of the Archbishop of Bari
+was free and uncontrolled by the terrors of the raging populace; but the
+acknowledgment of Urban VI by all the cardinals, at his inauguration in
+the holy office--their assistance at his coronation without protest,
+when some at least might have been safe beyond the walls of Rome--their
+acceptance of honors, as by the cardinals of Limoges, Poitou, and
+Aigrefeuille--the homage of all--might seem to annul all possible
+irregularity in the election, to confirm irrefragably the legitimacy of
+his title.
+
+Not many days had passed, when the cardinals began to look with dismay
+and bitter repentance on their own work. "In Urban VI," said a writer of
+these times (on the side of Urban as rightful pontiff), "was verified
+the proverb--None is so insolent as a low man suddenly raised to power."
+The high-born, haughty, luxurious prelates, both French and Italian,
+found that they had set over themselves a master resolved not only to
+redress the flagrant and inveterate abuses of the college and of the
+hierarchy, but also to force on his reforms in the most hasty and
+insulting way. He did the harshest things in the harshest manner.
+
+The Archbishop of Bari, of mean birth, had risen by the virtues of a
+monk. He was studious, austere, humble, a diligent reader of the Bible,
+master of the canon law, rigid in his fasts; he wore haircloth next his
+skin. His time was divided between study, prayer, and business, for
+which he had great aptitude. From the poor bishopric of Acherontia he
+had been promoted to the archbishopric of Bari, and had presided over
+the papal chancery in Avignon. The monk broke out at once on his
+elevation in the utmost rudeness and rigor, but the humility changed to
+the most offensive haughtiness. Almost his first act was a public rebuke
+in his chapel to all the bishops present for their desertion of their
+dioceses. He called them perjured traitors. The Bishop of Pampeluna
+boldly repelled the charge; he was at Rome, he said, on the affairs of
+his see. In the full consistory Urban preached on the text, "I am the
+Good Shepherd," and inveighed in a manner not to be mistaken against the
+wealth and luxury of the cardinals. Their voluptuous banquets were
+notorious--Petrarch had declaimed against them. The Pope threatened a
+sumptuary law that they should have but one dish at their table: it was
+the rule of his own order. He was determined to extirpate simony. A
+cardinal who should receive presents he menaced with excommunication.
+He affected to despise wealth. "Thy money perish with thee!" he said to
+a collector of the papal revenue. He disdained to conceal the most
+unpopular schemes; he declared his intention not to leave Rome. To the
+petition of the bannerets of Rome for a promotion of cardinals, he
+openly avowed his design to make so large a nomination that the Italians
+should resume their ascendency over the Ultramontanes. The Cardinal of
+Geneva turned pale and left the consistory. Urban declared himself
+determined to do equal justice between man and man, between the kings of
+France and England. The French cardinals, and those in the pay of
+France, heard this with great indignation.
+
+The manners of Urban were even more offensive than his acts. "Hold your
+tongue!" "You have talked long enough!" were his common phrases to his
+mitred counsellors. He called the Cardinal Orsini a fool. He charged the
+Cardinal of St. Marcellus of Amiens, on his return from his legation in
+Tuscany, with having robbed the treasures of the Church. The charge was
+not less insulting for its justice. The Cardinal of Amiens, instead of
+allaying the feuds of France and England, which it was his holy mission
+to allay, had inflamed them in order to glut his own insatiable avarice
+by draining the wealth of both countries in the Pope's name. "As
+Archbishop of Bari, you lie," was the reply of the high-born Frenchman.
+On one occasion such high words passed with the Cardinal of Limoges that
+but for the interposition of another cardinal the Pope would have rushed
+on him, and there had been a personal conflict.
+
+Such were among the stories of the time. Friends and foes agree in
+attributing the schism, at least the immediate schism, to the imprudent
+zeal, the imperiousness, the ungovernable temper of Pope Urban. The
+cardinals among themselves talked of him as mad; they began to murmur
+that it was a compulsory, therefore invalid, election.
+
+The French cardinals were now at Anagni: they were joined by the
+Cardinal of Amiens, who had taken no part in the election, but who was
+burning under the insulting words of the Pope, perhaps not too eager to
+render an account of his legation. The Pope retired to Tivoli; he
+summoned the cardinals to that city. They answered that they had gone
+to large expenses in laying in provisions and making preparations for
+their residence in Anagni; they had no means to supply a second sojourn
+in Tivoli. The Pope, with his four Italian cardinals, passed two
+important acts as sovereign pontiff. He confirmed the election of
+Wenceslaus, son of Charles IV, to the empire; he completed the treaty
+with Florence by which the republic paid a large sum to the see of Rome.
+The amount was seventy thousand florins in the course of the year, one
+hundred and eighty thousand in four years, for the expenses of the war.
+They were relieved from ecclesiastical censures, under which this
+enlightened republic, though Italian, trembled, even from a pope of
+doubtful title. Their awe showed perhaps the weakness and dissensions in
+Florence rather than the papal power.
+
+The cardinals at Anagni sent a summons to their brethren inviting them
+to share in their counsels concerning the compulsory election of the
+successor to Gregory XI. Already the opinions of great legists had been
+taken; some of them, that of the famous Baldus, may still be read. He
+was in favor of the validity of the election.
+
+But grave legal arguments and ecclesiastical logic were not to decide a
+contest which had stirred so deeply the passions and interests of two
+great factions. France and Italy were at strife for the popedom. The
+Ultramontane cardinals would not tamely abandon a power which had given
+them rank, wealth, luxury, virtually the spiritual supremacy of the
+world, for seventy years. Italy, Rome, would not forego the golden
+opportunity of resuming the long-lost authority. On the 9th of August
+the cardinals at Anagni publicly declared, they announced in encyclic
+letters addressed to the faithful in all Christendom, that the election
+of Urban VI was carried by force and the fear of death; that through the
+same force and fear he had been inaugurated, enthroned, and crowned;
+that he was an apostate, an accursed antichrist. They pronounced him a
+tyrannical usurper of the popedom, a wolf that had stolen into the fold.
+They called upon him to descend at once from the throne which he
+occupied without canonical title; if repentant, he might find mercy; if
+he persisted he would provoke the indignation of God, of the apostles
+St. Peter and St. Paul, and all of the saints, for his violation of the
+Spouse of Christ, the common Mother of the Faithful. It was signed by
+thirteen cardinals. The more pious and devout were shocked at this
+avowal of cowardice; cardinals who would not be martyrs in the cause of
+truth and of spiritual freedom condemned themselves.
+
+But letters and appeals to the judgment of the world, and awful
+maledictions, were not their only resources. The fierce Breton bands
+were used to march and to be indulged in their worst excesses under the
+banner of the Cardinal of Geneva. As Ultramontanists it was their
+interest, their inclination, to espouse the Ultramontane cause. They
+arrayed themselves to advance and join the cardinals at Anagni. The
+Romans rose to oppose them; a fight took place near the Ponte Salario,
+three hundred Romans lay dead on the field.
+
+Urban VI was as blind to cautious temporal as to cautious ecclesiastical
+policy. Every act of the Pope raised him up new enemies. Joanna, Queen
+of Naples, had hailed the elevation of her subject the Archbishop of
+Bari. Naples had been brilliantly illuminated. Shiploads of fruit and
+wines, and the more solid gift of twenty thousand florins, had been her
+oblations to the Pope. Her husband, Otho of Brunswick, had gone to Rome
+to pay his personal homage. His object was to determine in his own favor
+the succession to the realm. The reception of Otho was cold and
+repulsive; he returned in disgust. The Queen eagerly listened to
+suspicions, skilfully awakened, that Urban meditated the resumption of
+the fief of Naples, and its grant to the rival house of Hungary. She
+became the sworn ally of the cardinals at Anagni. Honorato Gaetani,
+Count of Fondi, one of the most turbulent barons of the land, demanded
+of the Pontiff twenty thousand florins advanced on loan to Gregory XI.
+Urban not only rejected the claim, declaring it a personal debt of the
+late Pope, not of the holy see, he also deprived Gaetani of his fief,
+and granted it to his mortal enemy, the Count San Severino. Gaetani
+began immediately to seize the adjacent castles in Campania, and invited
+the cardinals to his stronghold at Fondi. The Archbishop of Arles,
+chamberlain of the late Pope, leaving the castle of St. Angelo under the
+guard of a commander who long refused all orders from Pope Urban,
+brought to Anagni the jewels and ornaments of the papacy, which had been
+carried for security to St. Angelo. The prefect of the city, De Vico,
+Lord of Viterbo, had been won over by the Cardinal of Amiens.
+
+The four Italian cardinals still adhered to Pope Urban. They labored
+hard to mediate between the conflicting parties. Conferences were held
+at Zagarolo and other places; when the French cardinals had retired to
+Fondi, the Italians took up their quarters at Subiaco. The Cardinal of
+St. Peter's, worn out with age and trouble, withdrew to Rome, and soon
+after died. He left a testamentary document declaring the validity of
+the election of Urban. The French cardinals had declared the election
+void; they were debating the next step. Some suggested the appointment
+of a coadjutor. They were now sure of the support of the King of France,
+who would not easily surrender his influence over a pope at Avignon, and
+of the Queen of Naples, estranged by the pride of Urban, and secretly
+stimulated by the Cardinal Orsini, who had not forgiven his own loss of
+the tiara. Yet even now they seemed to shrink from the creation of an
+antipope. Urban precipitated and made inevitable this disastrous event.
+He was now alone; the Cardinal of St. Peter's was dead; Florence, Milan,
+and the Orsini stood aloof; they seemed only to wait to be thrown off by
+Urban, to join the adverse faction. Urban at first declared his
+intention to create nine cardinals; he proceeded at once, and without
+warning, to create twenty-six.[65] By this step the French and Italian
+cardinals together were now but an insignificant minority. They were
+instantly one. All must be risked or all lost.
+
+On September 20th, at Fondi, Robert of Geneva was elected pope in the
+presence of all the cardinals (except St. Peter's) who had chosen,
+inaugurated, enthroned, and for a time obeyed Urban VI. The Italians
+refused to give their suffrages, but entered no protest. They retired
+into their castles and remained aloof from the schism. Orsini died
+before long at Tagliacozzo. The qualifications which, according to his
+partial biographer, recommended the Cardinal of Geneva, were rather
+those of a successor to John Hawkwood or to a duke of Milan, than of the
+apostles. Extraordinary activity of body and endurance of fatigue,
+courage which would hazard his life to put down the intrusive pope,
+sagacity and experience in the temporal affairs of the Church; high
+birth, through which he was allied with most of the royal and princely
+houses of Europe; of austerity, devotion, learning, holiness, charity,
+not a word. He took the name of Clement VII; the Italians bitterly
+taunted the mockery of this name, assumed by the captain of the Breton
+Free Companies--by the author, it was believed, of the massacre at
+Cesena.
+
+So began the schism which divided Western Christendom for thirty-eight
+years. Italy, excepting the kingdom of Joanna of Naples, adhered to her
+native pontiff; Germany and Bohemia to the pontiff who had recognized
+King Wenceslaus as emperor; England to the pontiff hostile to
+France;[66] Hungary to the pontiff who might support her pretentions to
+Naples; Poland and the Northern kingdoms, with Portugal, espoused the
+same cause. France at first stood almost alone in support of her
+subject, of a pope at Avignon instead of at Rome. Scotland only was with
+Clement, because England was with Urban. So Flanders was with Urban
+because France was with Clement. The uncommon abilities of Peter di
+Luna, the Spanish cardinal (afterward better known under a higher
+title), detached successively the Spanish kingdoms, Castile, Aragon, and
+Navarre, from allegiance to Pope Urban.
+
+
+
+
+GENOESE SURRENDER TO VENETIANS
+
+A.D. 1380
+
+HENRY HALLAM
+
+
+  Prolonged commercial rivalry between Genoa and Venice
+  brought them to a state of bitter jealousy which led to
+  furious wars. In the second half of the twelfth century
+  Genoa established her power on the Black Sea, and aimed at a
+  commercial monopoly in that region. This aroused the
+  Venetians to anger and led to open hostilities. The first
+  war growing out of these antagonisms between the two
+  republics began in 1257, and throughout the rest of the
+  thirteenth century hostilities were almost continuous.
+
+  In 1351 the Venetians formed an alliance against Genoa with
+  the Greeks and Aragonese, and, in the ensuing war, the
+  advantage gained by Genoa was confirmed by a treaty of peace
+  in 1355. But this peace lasted only until 1378, when a
+  dispute arose between Genoa and Venice in relation to the
+  island of Tenedos, in the AEgean Sea, of which the Venetians
+  had taken possession.
+
+  The Venetians, having denounced Genoa as false to all its
+  oaths and obligations, formally declared war in April, after
+  several acts of hostility had occurred in the Levant. Of all
+  the wars between the rival states, this was the most
+  remarkable and led to the most important consequences.
+
+Genoa did not stand alone in this war. A formidable confederacy was
+raised against Venice, which had given provocation to many enemies. Of
+this Francis Carrara, seignior of Padua, and the King of Hungary were
+the leaders. But the principal struggle was, as usual, upon the waves.
+During the winter of 1378 a Genoese fleet kept the sea, and ravaged the
+shores of Dalmatia. The Venetian armament had been weakened by an
+epidemic disease, and when Vittor Pisani, their admiral, gave battle to
+the enemy, he was compelled to fight with a hasty conscription of
+landsmen against the best sailors in the world.
+
+Entirely defeated, and taking refuge at Venice with only seven galleys,
+Pisani was cast into prison, as if his ill-fortune had been his crime.
+Meanwhile the Genoese fleet, augmented by a strong reenforcement, rode
+before the long natural ramparts that separate the lagunes of Venice
+from the Adriatic. Six passages intersect the islands which constitute
+this barrier, besides the broader outlets of Brondolo and Fossone,
+through which the waters of the Brenta and the Adige are discharged. The
+Lagoon itself, as is well known, consists of extremely shallow water,
+unnavigable for any vessel except along the course of artificial and
+intricate passages.
+
+Notwithstanding the apparent difficulties of such an enterprise, Pietro
+Doria, the Genoese admiral, determined to reduce the city. His first
+successes gave him reason to hope. He forced the passage, and stormed
+the little town of Chioggia, built upon the inside of the isle bearing
+that name, about twenty-five miles south of Venice. Nearly four thousand
+prisoners fell here into his hands--an augury, as it seemed, of a more
+splendid triumph.
+
+In the consternation this misfortune inspired at Venice, the first
+impulse was to ask for peace. The ambassadors carried with them seven
+Genoese prisoners, as a sort of peace-offering to the admiral, and were
+empowered to make large and humiliating concessions, reserving nothing
+but the liberty of Venice. Francis Carrara strongly urged his allies to
+treat for peace. But the Genoese were stimulated by long hatred, and
+intoxicated by this unexpected opportunity of revenge. Doria, calling
+the ambassadors into council, thus addressed them: "Ye shall obtain no
+peace from us, I swear to you, nor from the lord of Padua, till first we
+have put a curb in the mouths of those wild horses that stand upon the
+place of St. Mark. When they are bridled you shall have enough of peace.
+Take back with you your Genoese captives, for I am coming within a few
+days to release both them and their companions from your prisons."
+
+When this answer was reported to the senate, they prepared to defend
+themselves with the characteristic firmness of their government. Every
+eye was turned toward a great man unjustly punished, their admiral,
+Vittor Pisani. He was called out of prison to defend his country amid
+general acclamations. Under his vigorous command the canals were
+fortified or occupied by large vessels armed with artillery; thirty-four
+galleys were equipped; every citizen contributed according to his power;
+in the entire want of commercial resources--for Venice had not a
+merchant-ship during this war--private plate was melted; and the senate
+held out the promise of ennobling thirty families who should be most
+forward in this strife of patriotism.
+
+The new fleet was so ill-provided with seamen that for some months the
+admiral employed them only in manoeuvring along the canals. From some
+unaccountable supineness, or more probably from the insuperable
+difficulties of the undertaking, the Genoese made no assault upon the
+city. They had, indeed, fair grounds to hope its reduction by famine or
+despair. Every access to the Continent was cut off by the troops of
+Padua; and the King of Hungary had mastered almost all the Venetian
+towns in Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. The doge Contarini,
+taking the chief command, appeared at length with his fleet near
+Chioggia, before the Genoese were aware. They were still less aware of
+his secret design. He pushed one of the large round vessels, then called
+_cocche_, into the narrow passage of Chioggia which connects the Lagoon
+with the sea, and, mooring her athwart the channel, interrupted that
+communication. Attacked with fury by the enemy, this vessel went down on
+the spot, and the Doge improved his advantage by sinking loads of stones
+until the passage became absolutely unnavigable.
+
+It was still possible for the Genoese fleet to follow the principal
+canal of the Lagoon toward Venice and the northern passages, or to sail
+out of it by the harbor of Brondolo; but, whether from confusion or from
+miscalculating the dangers of their position, they suffered the
+Venetians to close the canal upon them by the same means they had used
+at Chioggia, and even to place their fleet in the entrance of Brondolo
+so near to the Lagoon that the Genoese could not form their ships in
+line of battle. The circumstances of the two combatants were thus
+entirely changed. But the Genoese fleet, though besieged in Chioggia,
+was impregnable, and their command of the land secured them from famine.
+
+Venice, notwithstanding her unexpected success, was still very far from
+secure; it was difficult for the Doge to keep his position through the
+winter; and if the enemy could appear in open sea, the risks of combat
+were extremely hazardous. It is said that the senate deliberated upon
+transporting the seat of their liberty to Candia, and that the Doge had
+announced his intention to raise the siege of Chioggia, if expected
+succors did not arrive by January 1, 1380. On that very day Carlo Zeno,
+an admiral who, ignorant of the dangers of his country, had been
+supporting the honor of her flag in the Levant and on the coast of
+Liguria, appeared with a reenforcement of eighteen galleys and a store
+of provisions.
+
+From that moment the confidence of Venice revived. The fleet, now
+superior in strength to the enemy, began to attack them with vivacity.
+After several months of obstinate resistance, the Genoese--whom their
+republic had ineffectually attempted to relieve by a fresh
+armament--blocked up in the town of Chioggia, and pressed by hunger,
+were obliged to surrender. Nineteen galleys only, out of forty-eight,
+were in good condition; and the crews were equally diminished in the ten
+months of their occupation of Chioggia. The pride of Genoa was deemed to
+be justly humbled; and even her own historian confesses that God would
+not suffer so noble a city as Venice to become the spoil of a conqueror.
+
+Though the capture of Chioggia did not terminate the war, both parties
+were exhausted, and willing, next year, to accept the mediation of the
+Duke of Savoy. By the peace of Turin, Venice surrendered most of her
+territorial possessions to the King of Hungary. That Prince and Francis
+Carrara were the only gainers. Genoa obtained the isle of Tenedos, one
+of the original subjects of dispute--a poor indemnity for her losses.
+Though, upon a hasty view, the result of this war appears more
+unfavorable to Venice, yet in fact it is the epoch of the decline of
+Genoa. From this time she never commanded the ocean with such navies as
+before; her commerce gradually went into decay; and the fifteenth
+century--the most splendid in the annals of Venice--is, till recent
+times, the most ignominious in those of Genoa. But this was partly owing
+to internal dissensions, by which her liberty, as well as glory, was for
+a while suspended.
+
+
+
+
+REBELLION OF WAT TYLER
+
+A.D. 1381
+
+JOHN LINGARD
+
+
+  Richard II, of England, at eleven years of age, succeeded to
+  a heritage of foreign complications and wars, which were a
+  legacy from the reign of his grandfather, Edward III.
+
+  At the request of the commons, the lords, in the King's
+  name, appointed nine persons to be a permanent council, and
+  it was resolved that during the King's minority the
+  appointment of all the chief officers of the crown should be
+  with the parliament. The administration was conducted in the
+  King's name, and the whole system was for some years kept
+  together by the secret authority of the King's uncles,
+  especially of the Duke of Lancaster, who was in reality the
+  regent.
+
+  France, Scotland, and Castile continued their hostilities
+  against England, and during the first two years of Richard's
+  reign the ministers had no difficulty in obtaining ample
+  grants of money to carry on the wars. In the third year the
+  expense of the campaign in Brittany compelled them to
+  solicit yet additional aid.
+
+  Various methods of taxation failing to raise the amount
+  required, the commons, in great discontent, demanded
+  alterations in the council, and after long debate
+  reluctantly consented to the imposition of a new and unusual
+  tax of three groats[67] on every person, male and female,
+  above fifteen years of age. For the relief of the poor it
+  was provided that in the cities and towns the aggregate
+  amount should be divided among the inhabitants according to
+  their abilities, so that no individual should pay less than
+  one groat, or more than sixty groats for himself and his
+  wife. Parliament thereupon was dismissed; but the collection
+  of the tax gave rise to an insurrection which threatened the
+  life of the King and the existence of the government.
+
+At this period [1381] a secret ferment seems to have pervaded the mass
+of the people in many nations of Europe. Men were no longer willing to
+submit to the impositions of their rulers, or to wear the chains which
+had been thrown round the necks of their fathers by a warlike and
+haughty aristocracy. We may trace this awakening spirit of independence
+to a variety of causes, operating in the same direction; to the
+progressive improvement of society, the gradual diffusion of knowledge,
+the increasing pressure of taxation, and above all to the numerous and
+lasting wars by which Europe had lately been convulsed. Necessity had
+often compelled both the sovereigns and nobles to court the good-will of
+the people; the burghers in the towns and inferior tenants in the
+country had learned, from the repeated demands made upon them, to form
+notions of their own importance; and the archers and foot-soldiers, who
+had served for years in the wars, were, at their return home, unwilling
+to sit down in the humble station of bondmen to their former lords. In
+Flanders the commons had risen against their Count Louis, and had driven
+him out of his dominions; in France the populace had taken possession of
+Paris and Rouen, and massacred the collectors of the revenue. In England
+a spirit of discontent agitated the whole body of the villeins, who
+remained in almost the same situation in which we left them at the
+Norman Conquest. They were still attached to the soil, talliable at the
+will of the lord, and bound to pay the fines for the marriage of their
+females, to perform customary labor, and to render the other servile
+prestations incident to their condition. It is true that in the course
+of time many had obtained the rights of freemen. Occasionally the king
+or the lord would liberate at once all the bondmen on some particular
+domain, in return for a fixed rent to be yearly assessed on the
+inhabitants.
+
+But the progress of emancipation was slow; the improved condition of
+their former fellows served only to embitter the discontent of those who
+still wore the fetters of servitude; and in many places the villeins
+formed associations for their mutual support, and availed themselves of
+every expedient in their power to free themselves from the control of
+their lords. In the first year of Richard's reign a complaint was laid
+before parliament that in many districts they had purchased
+exemplifications out of the _Domesday Book_ in the king's court, and
+under a false interpretation of that record had pretended to be
+discharged of all manner of servitude both as to their bodies and their
+tenures, and would not suffer the officers of their lords either to levy
+distress or to do justice upon them. It was in vain that such
+exemplifications were declared of no force, and that commissions were
+ordered for the punishment of the rebellious. The villeins, by their
+union and perseverance, contrived to intimidate their lords, and set at
+defiance the severity of the law. To this resistance they were
+encouraged by the diffusion of the doctrines so recently taught by
+Wycliffe, that the right of property was founded in grace, and that no
+man, who was by sin a traitor to God, could be entitled to the services
+of others; at the same time itinerant preachers sedulously inculcated
+the natural equality of mankind, and the tyranny of artificial
+distinctions; and the poorer classes, still smarting under the exactions
+of the late reign, were by the impositions of the new tax wound up to a
+pitch of madness. Thus the materials had been prepared; it required but
+a spark to set the whole country in a blaze.
+
+It was soon discovered that the receipts of the treasury would fall
+short of the expected amount; and commissions were issued to different
+persons to inquire into the conduct of the collectors, and to compel
+payment from those who had been favored or overlooked. One of these
+commissioners, Thomas de Bampton, sat at Brentwood in Essex; but the men
+of Fobbings refused to answer before him; and when the chief justice of
+the common pleas attempted to punish their contumacy, they compelled him
+to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission, and, carrying
+their heads upon poles, claimed the support of the nearest townships. In
+a few days all the commons of Essex were in a state of insurrection,
+under the command of a profligate priest, who had assumed the name of
+Jack Straw.
+
+The men of Kent were not long behind their neighbors in Essex. At
+Dartford one of the collectors had demanded the tax for a young girl,
+the daughter of a tyler. Her mother maintained that she was under the
+age required by the statute; and the officer was proceeding to ascertain
+the fact by an indecent exposure of her person, when her father, who had
+just returned from work, with a stroke of his hammer beat out the
+offender's brains. His courage was applauded by his neighbors. They
+swore that they would protect him from punishment, and by threats and
+promises secured the cooperation of all the villages in the western
+division of Kent.
+
+A third party of insurgents was formed by the men of Gravesend,
+irritated at the conduct of Sir Simon Burley. He had claimed one of the
+burghers as his bondman, refused to grant him his freedom at a less
+price than three hundred pounds, and sent him a prisoner to the castle
+of Rochester. With the aid of a body of insurgents from Essex, the
+castle was taken and the captive liberated. At Maidstone they appointed
+Wat the tyler, of that town, leader of the commons of Kent, and took
+with them an itinerant preacher of the name of John Ball, who for his
+seditious and heterodox harangues had been confined by order of the
+archbishop. The mayor and aldermen of Canterbury were compelled to swear
+fidelity to the good cause; several of the citizens were slain; and five
+hundred joined them in their intended march toward London. When they
+reached Blackheath their numbers are said to have amounted to one
+hundred thousand men. To this lawless and tumultuous multitude Ball was
+appointed preacher, and assumed for the text of his first sermon the
+following lines:
+
+  "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+   Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+He told them that by nature all men were born equal; that the
+distinction of bondage and freedom was the invention of their
+oppressors, and contrary to the views of their Creator; that God now
+offered them the means of recovering their liberty, and that, if they
+continued slaves, the blame must rest with themselves; that it was
+necessary to dispose of the archbishop, the earls and barons, the
+judges, lawyers, and questmongers; and that when the distinction of
+ranks was abolished, all would be free, because all would be of the same
+nobility and of equal authority. His discourse was received with shouts
+of applause by his infatuated hearers, who promised to make him, in
+defiance of his own doctrines, archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor
+of the realm.
+
+By letters and messengers the knowledge of these proceedings was
+carefully propagated through the neighboring counties. Everywhere the
+people had been prepared; and in a few days the flame spread from the
+southern coast of Kent to the right bank of the Humber. In all places
+the insurgents regularly pursued the same course. They pillaged the
+manors of their lords, demolished the houses, and burned the court
+rolls; cut off the heads of every justice and lawyer and juror who fell
+into their hands; and swore all others to be true to King Richard and
+the commons; to admit of no king of the name of John; and to oppose all
+taxes but fifteenths, the ancient tallage paid by their fathers. The
+members of the council saw, with astonishment, the sudden rise and rapid
+spread of the insurrection; and, bewildered by their fears and
+ignorance, knew not whom to trust or what measures to pursue.
+
+The first who encountered the rabble on Blackheath was the Princess of
+Wales, the King's mother, on her return from a pilgrimage to Canterbury.
+She liberated herself from danger by her own address; and a few kisses
+from "the fair maid of Kent" purchased the protection of the leaders,
+and secured the respect of their followers. She was permitted to join
+her son, who, with his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby, Simon, Archbishop of
+Canterbury and Chancellor, Sir Robert Hales, master of the Knights of
+St. John and treasurer, and about one hundred sergeants and knights had
+left the castle of Windsor, and repaired for greater security to the
+Tower of London. The next morning the King in his barge descended the
+river to receive the petitions of the insurgents. To the number of ten
+thousand, with two banners of St. George, and sixty pennons, they waited
+his arrival at Rotherhithe; but their horrid yells and uncouth
+appearance so intimidated his attendants, that instead of permitting him
+to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned with
+precipitation. Tyler and Straw, irritated by this disappointment, led
+their men into Southwark, where they demolished the houses belonging to
+the Marshalsea and the king's bench, while another party forced their
+way into the palace of the Archbishop at Lambeth, and burned the
+furniture with the records belonging to the chancery.
+
+The next morning they were allowed to pass in small companies, according
+to their different townships, over the bridge into the city. The
+populace joined them; and as soon as they had regaled themselves at the
+cost of the richer inhabitants, the work of devastation commenced. They
+demolished Newgate, and liberated the prisoners; plundered and destroyed
+the magnificent palace of the Savoy, belonging to the Duke of Lancaster;
+burned the temple with the books and records; and despatched a party to
+set fire to the house of the Knights Hospitallers at Clerkenwell,
+which had been lately built by Sir Robert Hales. To prove, however, that
+they had no views of private emolument, a proclamation was issued
+forbidding any one to secrete part of the plunder; and so severely was
+the prohibition enforced that the plate was hammered and cut into small
+pieces, the precious stones were beaten to powder, and one of the
+rioters, who had concealed a silver cup in his bosom, was immediately
+thrown, with his prize, into the river. To every man whom they met they
+put the question, "With whom holdest thou?" and unless he gave the
+proper answer, "With King Richard and the commons," he was instantly
+beheaded. But the principal objects of their cruelty were the natives of
+Flanders. They dragged thirteen Flemings out of one church, seventeen
+out of another, and thirty-two out of the Vintry, and struck off their
+heads with shouts of triumph and exultation. In the evening, wearied
+with the labor of the day, they dispersed through the streets, and
+indulged in every kind of debauchery.
+
+During this night of suspense and terror, the Princess of Wales held a
+council with the ministers in the Tower. The King's uncles were absent;
+the garrison, though perhaps able to defend the place, was too weak to
+put down the insurgents; and a resolution was taken to try the influence
+of promises and concession. In the morning the Tower Hill was seen
+covered with an immense multitude, who prohibited the introduction of
+provisions, and with loud cries demanded the heads of the chancellor and
+treasurer. In return, a herald ordered them, by proclamation, to retire
+to Mile End, where the King would assent to all their demands.
+Immediately the gates were thrown open. Richard with a few unarmed
+attendants rode forward; the best intentioned of the crowd followed him,
+and at Mile End he saw himself surrounded with sixty thousand
+petitioners. Their demands were reduced to four: the abolition of
+slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence the acre; the
+free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a
+general pardon for past offences. A charter to that effect was engrossed
+for each parish and township; during the night thirty clerks were
+employed in transcribing a sufficient number of copies; they were sealed
+and delivered in the morning; and the whole body, consisting chiefly of
+the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, retired, bearing the King's banner
+as a token that they were under his protection.
+
+But Tyler and Straw had formed other and more ambitious designs. The
+moment the King was gone, they rushed, at the head of four hundred men,
+into the Tower. The Archbishop, who had just celebrated mass, Sir Robert
+Hales, William Apuldore, the King's confessor, Legge, the farmer of the
+tax, and three of his associates, were seized, and led to immediate
+execution.[68] As no opposition was offered, they searched every part of
+the Tower, burst into the private apartment of the Princess, and probed
+her bed with their swords. She fainted, and was carried by her ladies to
+the river, which she crossed in a covered barge. The royal wardrobe, a
+house in Carter Lane, was selected for her residence.
+
+The King joined his mother at the wardrobe; and the next morning, as he
+rode through Smithfield with sixty horsemen, encountered Tyler at the
+head of twenty thousand insurgents. Three different charters had been
+sent to that demagogue, who contemptuously refused them all. As soon as
+he saw Richard, he made a sign to his followers to halt, and boldly rode
+up to the King. A conversation immediately began. Tyler, as he talked,
+affected to play with his dagger; at last he laid his hand on the bridle
+of his sovereign; but at the instant Walworth, the Lord Mayor, jealous
+of his design, plunged a short sword into his throat. He spurred his
+horse, rode about a dozen yards, fell to the ground, and was despatched
+by Robert Standish, one of the King's esquires. The insurgents, who
+witnessed the transaction, drew their bows to revenge the fall of their
+leader, and Richard would inevitably have lost his life had he not been
+saved by his own intrepidity. Galloping up to the archers he exclaimed:
+"What are ye doing, my lieges? Tyler was a traitor. Come with me, and I
+will be your leader." Wavering and disconcerted, they followed him into
+the fields of Islington, whither a force of one thousand men-at-arms,
+which had been collected by the Lord Mayor and Sir Robert Knowles,
+hastened to protect the young King; and the insurgents, falling on their
+knees, begged for mercy. Many of the royalists demanded permission to
+punish them for their past excesses; but Richard firmly refused, ordered
+the suppliants to return to their homes, and by proclamation forbade,
+under pain of death, any stranger to pass the night in the city.
+
+On the southern coast the excesses of the insurgents reached as far as
+Winchester; on the eastern, to Beverley and Scarborough; and, if we
+reflect that in every place they rose about the same time, and uniformly
+pursued the same system, we may discover reason to suspect that they
+acted under the direction of some acknowledged though invisible leader.
+The nobility and gentry, intimidated by the hostility of their tenants,
+and distressed by contradictory reports, sought security within the
+fortifications of their castles. The only man who behaved with
+promptitude and resolution was Henry Spenser, the young and warlike
+Bishop of Norwich. In the counties of Norfolk, Cambridge, and Huntington
+tranquillity was restored and preserved by this singular prelate, who
+successively exercised the offices of general, judge, and priest. In
+complete armor he always led his followers to the attack; after the
+battle he sat in judgment on his prisoners; and before execution he
+administered to them the aids of religion. But as soon as the death of
+Tyler and the dispersion of the men of Kent and Essex were known,
+thousands became eager to display their loyalty; and knights and
+esquires from every quarter poured into London to offer their services
+to the King. At the head of forty thousand horse he published
+proclamations, revoking the charters of manumission which he had
+granted, commanding the villeins to perform their usual services, and
+prohibiting illegal assemblies and associations. In several parts the
+commons threatened to renew the horrors of the late tumult in defence of
+their liberties; but the approach of the royal army dismayed the
+disaffected in Kent; the loss of five hundred men induced the insurgents
+of Essex to sue for pardon; and numerous executions in different
+counties effectually crushed the spirit of resistance. Among the
+sufferers were Lister and Westbroom, who had assumed the title and
+authority of kings in Norfolk and Suffolk; and Straw and Ball, the
+itinerant preachers, who have been already mentioned, and whose sermons
+were supposed to have kindled and nourished the insurrection.[69]
+
+When the parliament met, the two houses were informed by the Chancellor,
+that the King had revoked the charters of emancipation, which he had
+been compelled to grant to the villeins, but at the same time wished to
+submit to their consideration whether it might not be wise to abolish
+the state of bondage altogether. The minds of the great proprietors were
+not, however, prepared for the adoption of so liberal a measure; and
+both lords and commons unanimously replied that no man could deprive
+them of the services of their villeins without their consent; that they
+had never given that consent, and never would be induced to give it,
+either through persuasion or violence. The King yielded to their
+obstinacy; and the charters were repealed by authority of parliament.
+The commons next deliberated, and presented their petitions. They
+attributed the insurrection to the grievances suffered by the people
+from: 1. The purveyors, who were said to have exceeded all their
+predecessors in insolence and extortion; 2. From the rapacity of the
+royal officers in the chancery and exchequer, and the courts of king's
+bench and common pleas; 3. From the banditti, called maintainers, who,
+in different counties, supported themselves by plunder, and, arming in
+defence of each other, set at defiance all the provisions of the law;
+and 4. From the repeated aids and taxes, which had impoverished the
+people and proved of no service to the nation. To silence these
+complaints, a commission of inquiry was appointed; the courts of law
+and the King's household were subjected to regulations of reform, and
+severe orders were published for the immediate suppression of illegal
+associations. But the demand of a supply produced a very interesting
+altercation. The commons refused, on the ground that the imposition of a
+new tax would goad the people to a second insurrection. They found it,
+however, necessary to request of the King a general pardon for all
+illegal acts committed in the suppression of the insurgents, and
+received for answer that it was customary for the commons to make their
+grants before the King bestowed his favors. When the subsidy was again
+pressed on their attention they replied that they should take time to
+consider it, but were told that the King would also take time to
+consider of their petition. At last they yielded; the tax upon wool,
+wool-fells, and leather was continued for five years, and in return a
+general pardon was granted for all loyal subjects, who had acted
+illegally in opposing the rebels, and for the great body of the
+insurgents, who had been misled by the declamations of the demagogues.
+
+
+
+
+WYCLIFFE TRANSLATES THE BIBLE INTO
+ENGLISH
+
+A.D. 1382
+
+J. PATERSON SMYTH
+
+
+  It may safely be said that no greater service has been
+  rendered at once to religion and to literature than the
+  translation of the Bible into the English tongue. This
+  achievement did not indeed, like that of Luther's German
+  translation, come as it were by a single stroke. Luther's
+  Bible caused him to be regarded as the founder of the
+  present literary language of Germany--New High German--which
+  his translation permanently established. The English Bible,
+  on the other hand, was the growth of centuries. But to the
+  contributions of able hands through many generations, during
+  which the English language itself passed through a wonderful
+  formative development, the incomparable beauty of King
+  James' version owes its existence, and our literature its
+  greatest ornaments.
+
+  It is impossible to say when the first translation of any
+  part of the Bible into English was made. No English Bible of
+  earlier date than the fourteenth century has ever been
+  found. But translations, even of the whole Bible, older than
+  Wcyliffe's are, by at least two eminent witnesses, said to
+  have existed. "As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe's
+  time," says Sir Thomas More, "they remain lawful and be in
+  some folkes handes." "The hole byble," he declares
+  (_Dyalogues_, p. 138, ed. 1530), "was long before Wycliffe's
+  days, by vertuous and well learned men, translated into the
+  English tong." And Cranmer, in his prologue to the second
+  edition of the "Great Bible," bears testimony equally
+  explicit to the translation of Scripture "in the Saxons
+  tongue." And when that language "waxed olde and out of
+  common usage," he says, the Bible "was again translated into
+  the newer language." There has never been any means of
+  testing these statements, which were probably due to some
+  inexplicable error. Abundant evidence exists relating to
+  many Saxon and later translations of various parts of the
+  Bible before the time of Wycliffe. Among the most notable of
+  the early translators were the Venerable Bede and Alfred the
+  Great. Some portions of Scripture were likewise translated
+  into Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century. Some of the
+  early fragments are still preserved in English libraries.
+
+  Three versions of the Psalter in English, from the early
+  years of the fourteenth century, still exist, one of which
+  was by Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire hermit, who also
+  translated the New Testament.
+
+  But so far as known, the first complete Bible in English was
+  the work of John Wycliffe, assisted by Nicholas de
+  Hereford--whom some would name first in this partnership,
+  though the product of their joint labors is known as
+  "Wycliffe's Bible."
+
+  John Wycliffe, the "Morning Star of the Reformation," was
+  born near Richmond, Yorkshire, about 1324. He became a
+  fellow, and later master of Balliol College, Oxford,
+  afterward held several rectorships--the last being that of
+  Lutterworth, upon which he entered in 1374. For opposing the
+  papacy and certain church doctrines and practices, he was
+  condemned by the university, and his followers--known as
+  Lollards--were persecuted. Something of his life in
+  connection with these matters is fitly dealt with by Smyth
+  in connection with his account of the famous translation.
+
+After the early Anglo-Saxon versions comes a long pause in the history
+of Bible translation. Amid the disturbance resulting from the Danish
+invasion there was little time for thinking of translations and
+manuscripts; and before the land had fully regained its quiet the fatal
+battle of Hastings had been fought, and England lay helpless at the
+Normans' feet. The higher Saxon clergy were replaced by the priests of
+Normandy, who had little sympathy with the people over whom they came,
+and the Saxon manuscripts were contemptuously flung aside as relics of a
+rude barbarism. The contempt shown to the language of the defeated race
+quite destroyed the impulse to English translation, and the Norman
+clergy had no sympathy with the desire for spreading the knowledge of
+the Scriptures among the people, so that for centuries those Scriptures
+remained in England a "spring shut up, a fountain sealed."
+
+Yet this time must not be considered altogether lost, for during those
+centuries England was becoming fitted for an English Bible. The future
+language of the nation was being formed; the Saxon and Norman French
+were struggling side by side; gradually the old Saxon grew
+unintelligible to the people; gradually the French became a foreign
+tongue, and with the fusion of the two races a language grew up which
+was the language of united England.
+
+Passing, then, from the quiet death-beds of Alfred and of Bede, we
+transfer ourselves to the great hall of the Blackfriars' monastery,
+London, on a dull, warm May day in 1378, amid purple robes and gowns of
+satin and damask, amid monks and abbots, and bishops and doctors of the
+Church, assembled for the trial of John Wycliffe, the parish priest of
+Lutterworth.
+
+The great hall, crowded to its heavy oaken doors, witnesses to the
+interest that is centred in the trial, and all eyes are fixed on the
+pale, stern old man who stands before the dais silently facing his
+judges. He is quite alone, and his thoughts go back, with some
+bitterness, to his previous trial, when the people crowded the doors
+shouting for their favorite, and John of Gaunt and the Lord Marshal of
+England were standing by his side. He has learned since then not to put
+his trust in princes. The power of his enemies has rapidly grown; even
+the young King (Richard II) has been won over to their cause, and
+patrons and friends have drawn back from his side, whom the Church has
+resolved to crush.
+
+The judges have taken their seats, and the accused stands awaiting the
+charges to be read, when suddenly there is a quick cry of terror. A
+strange rumbling sound fills the air, and the walls of the judgment hall
+are trembling to their base--the monastery and the city of London are
+being shaken by an earthquake! Friar and prelate grow pale with
+superstitious awe. Twice already has this arraignment of Wycliffe been
+strangely interrupted. Are the elements in league with this enemy of the
+Church? Shall they give up the trial?
+
+"No!" thunders Archbishop Courtenay, rising in his place. "We shall not
+give up the trial. This earthquake but portends the purging of the
+kingdom; for as there are in the bowels of the earth noxious vapors
+which only by a violent earthquake can be purged away, so are these
+evils brought by such men upon this land which only by a very earthquake
+can ever be removed. Let the trial go forward!"
+
+What think you, reader, were the evils which this pale ascetic had
+wrought, needing a very earthquake to cleanse them from the land? Had he
+falsified the divine message to the people in his charge? Was he turning
+men's hearts from the worship of God? Was his priestly office disgraced
+by carelessness or drunkenness or impurity of life?
+
+Oh, no. Such faults could be gently judged at the tribunal in the
+Blackfriars' hall. Wycliffe's was a far more serious crime. He had dared
+to attack the corruptions of the Church, and especially the enormities
+of the begging friars; he had indignantly denounced pardons and
+indulgences and masses for the soul as part of a system of gigantic
+fraud; and worst of all, he had filled up the cup of his iniquity by
+translating the Scriptures into the English tongue; "making it," as one
+of the chroniclers angrily complains, "common and more open to laymen
+and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well learned and of good
+understanding. So that the pearl of the Gospel is trodden under foot of
+swine."
+
+The feeling of his opponents will be better understood if we notice the
+position of the Church in England at the time. The meridian of her power
+had been already passed. Her clergy as a class were ignorant and
+corrupt. Her people were neglected, except for the money to be extorted
+by masses and pardons, "as if," to quote the words of an old writer,
+"God had given his sheep, not to be pastured, but to be shaven and
+shorn." This state of things had gone on for centuries, and the people
+like dumb, driven cattle had submitted. But those who could discern the
+signs of the times must have seen now that it could not go on much
+longer. The spread of education was rapidly increasing, several new
+colleges having been founded in Oxford during Wycliffe's lifetime. A
+strong spirit of independence, too, was rising among the people. Already
+Edward III and his parliament had indignantly refused the Pope's demand
+for the annual tribute to be sent to Rome. It was evident that a crisis
+was near. And, as if to hasten the crisis, the famous schism of the
+papacy had placed two popes at the head of the Church, and all
+Christendom was scandalized by the sight of the rival "vicars of Jesus
+Christ" anathematizing each other from Rome and Avignon, raising armies
+and slaughtering helpless women and children, each for the aggrandizing
+of himself.
+
+The minds of men in England were greatly agitated, and Wycliffe felt
+that at such a time the firmest charter of the Church would be the open
+Bible in her children's hands; the best exposure of the selfish policy
+of her rulers, the exhibiting to the people the beautiful,
+self-forgetting life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels. "The
+sacred Scriptures," he said, "are the property of the people, and one
+which no one should be allowed to wrest from them. Christ and his
+apostles converted the world by making known the Scriptures to men in a
+form familiar to them, and I pray with all my heart that through doing
+the things contained in this book we may all together come to the
+everlasting life." This Bible translation he placed far the first in
+importance of all his attempts to reform the English Church, and he
+pursued his object with a vigor and against an opposition that remind
+one of the old monk of Bethlehem and his Bible a thousand years before.
+
+The result of the Blackfriars' synod was that after three days'
+deliberation Wycliffe's teaching was condemned, and at a subsequent
+meeting he himself was excommunicated. He returned to his quiet
+parsonage at Lutterworth--for his enemies dared not yet proceed to
+extremities--and there, with his pile of old Latin manuscripts and
+commentaries, he labored on at the great work of his life, till the
+whole Bible was translated into the "modir tongue," and England received
+for the first time in her history a complete version of the Scriptures
+in the language of the people.
+
+And scarce was his task well finished when, like his great predecessor
+Bede, the brave old priest laid down his life. He himself had expected
+that a violent death would have finished his course. His enemies were
+many and powerful; the Primate, the King, and the Pope were against
+him--with the friars, whom he had so often and so fiercely defied; so
+that his destruction seemed but a mere question of time. But while his
+enemies were preparing to strike, the old man "was not, for God took
+him."
+
+It was the close of the old year, the last Sunday of 1384, and his
+little flock at Lutterworth were kneeling in hushed reverence before the
+altar, when suddenly, at the time of the elevation of the sacrament, he
+fell to the ground in a violent fit of the palsy, and never spoke again
+until his death on the last day of the year.
+
+In him England lost one of her best and greatest sons, a patriot sternly
+resenting all dishonor to his country, a reformer who ventured his life
+for the purity of the Church and the freedom of the Bible--an earnest,
+faithful "parson of a country town," standing out conspicuously among
+the clergy of the time.
+
+  "For Criste's lore and his apostles twelve
+   He taughte--and first he folwede it himselve."
+
+Here is a choice specimen from one of the monkish writers of the time
+describing his death: "On the feast of the passion of St. Thomas of
+Canterbury, John Wycliffe, the organ of the devil, the enemy of the
+Church, the idol of heretics, the image of hypocrites, the restorer of
+schism, the storehouse of lies, the sink of flattery, being struck by
+the horrible judgment of God, was seized with the palsy throughout his
+whole body, and that mouth which was to have spoken huge things against
+God and his saints, and holy Church, was miserably drawn aside, and
+afforded a frightful spectacle to beholders; his tongue was speechless
+and his head shook, showing painfully plainly that the curse which God
+had thundered forth against Cain was also inflicted on him."
+
+Some time after his death a petition was presented to the Pope, which to
+his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe's body to be taken
+out of consecrated ground and buried in a dunghill. But forty years
+after, by a decree of the Council of Constance, the old reformer's bones
+were dug up and burned, and the ashes flung into the little river Swift
+which "runneth hard by his church at Lutterworth." And so, in the
+often-quoted words of old Fuller, "as the Swift bear them into the
+Severn, and the Severn into the narrow seas, and they again into the
+ocean, thus the ashes of Wycliffe is an emblem of his doctrine, which is
+now dispersed all over the world."
+
+But it is with his Bible translation that we are specially concerned. As
+far as we can learn, the whole Bible was not translated by the reformer.
+About half the Old Testament is ascribed to Nicholas de Hereford, one of
+the Oxford leaders of the Lollards; the remainder, with the whole of the
+New Testament, being done by Wycliffe himself. About eight years after
+its completion the whole was revised by Richard Purvey, his curate and
+intimate friend, whose manuscript is still in the library of Trinity
+College, Dublin. Purvey's preface is a most interesting old document,
+and shows not only that he was deeply in earnest about his work, but
+that he thoroughly understood the intellectual and moral conditions
+necessary for its success.
+
+"A simpel creature," he says, "hath translated the Scripture out of
+Latin into Englische. First, this simpel creature had much travayle
+with divers fellows and helpers to gather many old Bibles and other
+doctors and glosses to make one Latin Bible. Some deal true and then to
+study it anew the texte and any other help he might get, especially Lyra
+on the Old Testament, which helped him much with this work. The third
+time to counsel with olde grammarians and old divines of hard words and
+hard sentences how they might best be understood and translated, the
+fourth time to translate as clearly as he could to the sense, and to
+have many good fellows and cunnying at the correcting of the
+translacioun. A translator hath great nede to studie well the sense both
+before and after, and then also he hath nede to live a clene life and be
+full devout in preiers, and have not his wit occupied about worldli
+things that the Holy Spyrit author of all wisdom and cunnynge and truthe
+dresse him for his work and suffer him not to err." And he concludes
+with the prayer, "God grant to us all grace to ken well and to kepe well
+Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the laste."
+
+Like all the earlier English translations, Wycliffe's Bible was based on
+the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome; and this is the great defect in his
+work, as compared with the versions that followed. He was not capable of
+consulting the original Greek and Hebrew even if he had access to
+them--in fact, there was probably no man in England at the time capable
+of doing so; and therefore, though he represents the Latin faithfully
+and well, he of course handed on its errors as faithfully as its
+perfections. But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of
+fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for
+nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those
+for whom he wrote--plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its
+homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that
+they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions,
+such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith
+himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our
+present Bible originated with him; _e.g._, "the beame and the mote,"
+"the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye,"
+"no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing which we
+blessen," etc.
+
+Here is a specimen from Wycliffe's Gospels:
+
+  In thilke dayes came Joon Baptist prechynge in the
+  desert of Jude, saying, Do ye penaunce: for the kyngdom
+  of heuens shall neigh. Forsothe this is he of whom
+  it is said by Ysaye the prophete, A voice of a cryinge in
+  desert, make ye redy the wayes of the Lord, make ye
+  rightful the pathes of hym. Forsothe that like Joon hadde
+  cloth of the beeris of cameylis and a girdil of skyn about
+  his leendis; sothely his mete weren locustis and hony of
+  the wode. Thanne Jerusalem wente out to hym, and al
+  Jude, and al the cuntre aboute Jordan, and thei weren
+  crystened of hym in in Jordon, knowlechynge there synnes.
+
+It is somewhere recorded that at a meeting in Yorkshire recently a long
+passage of Wycliffe's Bible was read, which was quite intelligible
+throughout to those who heard.
+
+It will be seen that this specimen (Matt. iii. 1-6) is not divided into
+verses. Verse division belongs to a much later period, and, though
+convenient for reference, it sometimes a good deal spoils the sense. The
+division into chapters appears in Wycliffe's as in our own Bibles. This
+chapter division had shortly before been made by a cardinal Hugo, for
+the purpose of a Latin concordance, and its convenience brought it
+quickly into use. But, like the verse division, it is often very badly
+done, the object aimed at seeming to be uniformity of length rather than
+any natural division of the subject. Sometimes a chapter breaks off in
+the middle of a narrative or an argument, and, especially in St. Paul's
+epistles, the incorrect division often becomes misleading. The removal
+as far as possible of these divisions is one of the advantages of the
+Revised Version to be noticed later on.
+
+The book had a very wide circulation. While the Anglo-Saxon versions
+were confined for the most part to the few religious houses where they
+were written, Wycliffe's Bible, in spite of its disadvantage of being
+only manuscript, was circulated largely through the kingdom; and, though
+the cost a good deal restricted its possession to the wealthier classes,
+those who could not hope to possess it gained access to it too, as well
+through their own efforts as through the ministrations of Wycliffe's
+"pore priestes." A considerable sum was paid for even a few sheets of
+the manuscript, a load of hay was given for permission to read it for a
+certain period one hour a day,[70] and those who could not afford even
+such expenses adopted what means they could. It is touching to read such
+incidents as that of one Alice Collins, sent for to the little
+gatherings "to recite the Ten Commandments and parts of the epistles of
+SS. Paul and Peter, which she knew by heart." "Certes," says old John
+Foxe in his _Book of Martyrs_, "the zeal of those Christian days seems
+much superior to this of our day, and to see the travail of them may
+well shame our careless times."
+
+But it was at a terrible risk such study was carried on. The appearance
+of Wycliffe's Bible aroused at once fierce opposition. A bill was
+brought into parliament to forbid the circulation of the Scriptures in
+English; but the sturdy John of Gaunt vigorously asserted the right of
+the people to have the Word of God in their own tongue; "for why," said
+he, "are we to be the dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the
+Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At
+length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate,
+complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son
+of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his
+iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly
+after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade such translations, under
+penalty of the major excommunication.
+
+"God grant us," runs the prayer in the old Bible preface, "to ken and to
+kepe well Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the
+laste." What a meaning that prayer must have gained when the readers of
+the book were burned with the copies round their necks, when men and
+women were executed for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer and
+Ten Commandments in English, when husbands were made to witness against
+their wives, and children forced to light the death-fires of their
+parents, and possessors of the banned Wycliffe Bible were hunted down as
+if they were wild beasts!
+
+Thus did Wycliffe, in his effort for the spread of the Gospel of Peace,
+bring, like his Master fourteen centuries before, "not peace, but a
+sword." Every bold attempt to let in the light on long-standing darkness
+seems to result first in a fierce opposition from the evil creatures
+that delight in the darkness, and the weak creatures weakened by
+dwelling in it so long. It is not till the driving back of the evil and
+the strengthening of the weak, as the light gradually wins its way, that
+the true results can be seen. It is, to use a simile of a graceful
+modern writer,[71] "As when you raise with your staff an old flat stone,
+with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, around it as it lies.
+Beneath it, what a revelation! Blades of grass flattened down,
+colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed;
+hideous crawling things; black crickets with their long filaments
+sticking out on all sides; motionless, slug-like creatures; young larvae,
+perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than in the infernal
+wriggle of maturity. But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome
+light of day let in on this compressed and blinded community of creeping
+things than all of them that have legs rush blindly about, butting
+against each other and everything else in their way, and end in a
+general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by
+sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green
+where the stone lay--the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle
+had his hole--the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the
+broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the
+rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified
+being.
+
+"The stone is ancient error, the grass is human nature borne down and
+bleached of all its color by it, the shapes that are found beneath are
+the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness, and the weak
+organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone is whosoever
+puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, whether he do it with
+a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming
+time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in
+its full stature and native lines in the sunshine. Then shall God's
+minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then
+shall beauty--divinity taking outline and color--light upon the souls of
+men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the
+dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have
+found wings unless that stone had been lifted."
+
+
+
+
+THE SWISS WIN THEIR INDEPENDENCE
+
+BATTLE OF SEMPACH
+
+A.D. 1386-1389
+
+F. Grenfell Baker
+
+
+  For two generations after the victory of the Swiss over the
+  Austrians at Morgarten (1315), which was followed by the
+  renewal of the Swiss Confederation of 1291, the leagued
+  cantons were favored with growth and internal development.
+  To the original cantons--Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden--were
+  added (1332-1353) Lucerne, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern.
+  The Confederation acknowledged no superior but the Emperor
+  of Germany.
+
+  In 1375 there was an irruption into Switzerland of a horde
+  of irregular soldiers under Enguerrand de Courcy, son-in-law
+  of Edward III of England. The mother of De Courcy was a
+  daughter of Leopold I, Duke of Austria, and through her De
+  Courcy claimed several Swiss towns. As the present Austrian
+  Duke, Leopold II, who held nominal suzerainty over
+  Switzerland, refused to give them up, De Courcy invaded
+  Swiss territory with a large force and a fury which at first
+  threw the country into panic. But at last the Swiss
+  recovered their old spirit of bravery, and in many severe
+  encounters they either killed or chased out of the country
+  the whole ruthless host of invaders.
+
+  This war is known in Swiss chronicles as the _Guglerkrieg_,
+  either from the pointed spikes on the helmets of the Swiss
+  soldiers or from the cowls which many of them wore. It is
+  also called the "English War," although De Courcy's men were
+  nearly all from the Continent and Wales.
+
+  The Swiss soon had need of their old military prowess, which
+  this defence of their country against foreign invaders had
+  freshly put to the proof. By the victory of Sempach, July 9,
+  1386, their independence was practically won, and by later
+  acts of valor and statesmanship they made it secure for many
+  years.
+
+Austria's conduct soon began once more to disturb the Swiss, and to
+threaten a renewal of hostilities. Her first act of importance was the
+conquest of the Tyrol, after which, under pretence of benefiting the
+pilgrims to Einsiedeln,[72] but in reality to separate Glarus from
+Zurich, she built a bridge across the lake at Rapperschwyl. The
+possession of this bridge by Austria acted as a perpetual hinderance to
+Zurich's trade with the South, and was accordingly greatly resented by
+the city. Austria's position, as ruler in so many burghs that, from
+their situation and the nationality of their inhabitants, were
+essentially Swiss, also acted as a never-ending source of trouble. Her
+rule was both harsh and unjust, and, as a result, her local governors
+were extremely unpopular. In 1386 the anti-Austrian feeling in
+Switzerland had grown to such a pitch that popular outbreaks against her
+authority were, in many centres, of frequent occurrence, and war
+appeared inevitable.
+
+From Lucerne came the final troubles that precipitated the country again
+into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the actual declaration of war,
+constant collisions in the neighborhood of Lucerne had for some time
+past taken place, with all the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a
+body of men from Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of
+Rothenburg, the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch
+and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted against her
+Austrian rulers, expelled the bailies, and entered into alliances with
+the city. Lucerne herself commenced extending her territories by the
+purchase of Wiggis, and--contrary to her treaty stipulations--admitted a
+number of Austrian subjects into the privileges of citizenship. Austria
+retaliated by attacking Richensee, a small Lucerne town containing a
+garrison of some two hundred soldiers. This she carried by assault and
+destroyed, massacring the inhabitants of all ages and of both sexes.
+
+Other reprisals on both sides followed in quick succession, in which
+immense numbers of victims perished. Soon both the Duke, Leopold II, and
+the Confederates were fully prepared, and the former took the field with
+a large army. After menacing Zurich, the Duke, accompanied by many
+nobles from Germany, France, and North Italy, headed some six thousand
+picked men, and marched upon Lucerne. On his way he burned Willisau and
+several smaller towns, where his troops committed every form of excess.
+On July 9th a portion of his forces appeared before the walls of
+Sempach, while another division menaced Zurich. At Sempach the
+Confederates mustered to the help of Lucerne, but were only able to
+bring about sixteen hundred men, taken chiefly from the Forest States.
+In spite of their disparity in numbers, the Confederates determined to
+risk an encounter.
+
+The decisive and brilliant battle of Sempach, the second of the long
+roll of victories that mark the prowess of the Swiss, is thus described
+by an old writer: "The Swiss order of battle was angular, one soldier
+followed by two, these by four, and so on. The Swiss were all on foot,
+badly armed, having only their long swords and their halberds, and
+boards on their left arms with which to parry the blows of their
+adversaries, and they could at first make no impression on the close
+ranks of the Austrians, all bristling with spears. But Anthony zer Pot,
+of Uri, cried to his men to strike with their halberds on the shafts of
+the spears, which he knew were made hollow to render them lighter, and,
+at the same time, Arnold von Winkelried, a knight from Unterwalden,
+devoting himself for his country, cried out: 'I'll open a way for you,
+Confederates!' and, seizing as many spears as he could grasp in his
+arms, dragged them down with his whole weight and strength upon his own
+bosom, and thus made an opening for his countrymen to penetrate the
+Austrian ranks.
+
+"This act of heroism decided the victory. The Swiss rushed into the gap
+made by Winkelried, and, having now come to close quarters with their
+enemies, their bodily strength and the lightness of their equipment gave
+them a great advantage over the heavily armed Austrians, who were
+already fainting under the heat of a July sun. The very closeness of the
+array of the Austrian men-at-arms rendered them incapable either of
+advancing or falling back, and, the grooms who held their horses having
+taken flight, panic seized them, they broke their ranks, and were hewed
+down by the Swiss halberds in frightful numbers. Duke Leopold was urged
+by those around him to save his life, but he scorned the advice, and,
+seeing the banner of Austria in danger, rushed to save it, and was
+killed in the attempt. The rout then became general, but the Swiss had
+the humanity, or the policy, not to pursue their enemies, of whom
+otherwise not one, perhaps, would have escaped. The loss of the
+Austrians amounted to two thousand men, including six hundred and
+seventy-six noblemen, three hundred and fifty of whom wore coroneted
+helmets. Most of them were buried at Koenigsfelden, with their leader
+Leopold. The Swiss lost two hundred men in this memorable battle, the
+second in which they had defeated a duke of Austria at the head of his
+chivalry."
+
+After Sempach the men of Glarus set about making themselves a free
+people. One of their first acts was the capture of Wesen and the
+expulsion of its Austrian soldiers. This was followed by a truce, which
+lasted till 1388, when Leopold's sons recommenced the war with fresh
+fury. Wesen was recaptured by the admission of a number of soldiers in
+disguise, who opened the gates to their comrades without and massacred
+all the chief Swiss leaders. Some months later the men of Glarus
+inflicted a severe defeat on the Austrians at the little town of
+Naefels, within their state. In this important combat three hundred and
+fifty men of Glarus, together with fifty from Schwyz, posted themselves
+on the heights above the town, and, as the Austrians advanced, suddenly
+hurled down masses of stones that soon caused a panic. Then, following
+the successful tactics employed at Morgarten, the Swiss rushed down on
+the disordered mass--said to consist of fifteen thousand soldiers, but
+probably about half that number--and dealt death on every side. A
+precipitate flight of the invaders followed, but they were met near
+Wesen by a fresh body of seven hundred Glarus peasants, who completed
+the victory.
+
+Though Bern took no part in the battle of Sempach, after that victory
+she entered actively into the war, and overran the Austrian dependencies
+in Freiburg and Valengrin. She drove the Duke's followers out of
+Rapperschwyl, annexed Nidau and Bueren, and conquered the upper
+Simmenthal.
+
+At length, both sides being weary of war and carnage, a peace was signed
+for seven years in 1389, with the condition that Bern should restore
+Nidau and Bueren. This peace was in 1394 further prolonged for twenty
+years. These treaties brought great benefits to Switzerland in many
+ways. Glarus and Zug obtained their formal freedom from Austrian rule in
+payment of a moderate sum of money; Schwyz received the town and abbey
+of Einsiedeln (1397); Lucerne purchased Sempach and Entlibuch from the
+Duke, as also other towns; but chief of all, the political power of the
+Hapsburgs came to an end in Switzerland.
+
+An important feature of this period was the lessened influence of the
+Emperor of Germany in Swiss affairs, and the gradual withdrawal of the
+Swiss from the position they so long occupied as subject-vassals of the
+empire. This was especially seen toward the close of the fourteenth
+century, when the Emperor, being pressed for money, sold his rights over
+several important Swiss districts to their inhabitants, and thus
+forfeited all authority over them.
+
+But chief of all the memorable events of this time was the close it
+brought to the long and bloody struggle between Austria and Switzerland.
+At length the heroism and persevering patriotism of the Swiss effected
+the liberation of their country from Austrian rule, and henceforth the
+dukes ceased to attempt to enforce their claims, and tacitly
+acknowledged their defeat. The Swiss states from this period, moreover,
+began to be known, not as an unimportant portion of the German empire,
+but as a separate country, Die Schweiz, from the prominent part taken by
+Schwyz in initiating the freedom of the land.
+
+
+
+
+UNION OF DENMARK, SWEDEN, AND NORWAY
+
+A.D. 1397
+
+PAUL C. SINDING
+
+
+  Canute the Great, King of England and Denmark, by successful
+  wars added almost the whole of Norway to his dominions. At
+  his death in 1035 his kingdoms were divided, and fell into
+  anarchy and discord for two centuries, until the tyrant
+  Black Geert, who had driven out Christopher II, and been for
+  fourteen years the virtual sovereign of Denmark, was
+  assassinated by the Danish patriot Niels Ebbeson.
+
+  Christopher's third son, Waldemar, surnamed Atterdag,
+  because he used to say when a misfortune happened,
+  "To-morrow it is again day," was recalled from Bavaria and
+  crowned king as Waldemar IV. He commenced at once with vigor
+  and marked success the improvement of the internal
+  conditions of the country, and strove to encompass his chief
+  ambition, the reunion of the ancient Danish possessions.
+
+  By marrying his daughter Margaret to Hakon VI, King of
+  Norway and son of Magnus Smek, King of Sweden, Waldemar laid
+  a basis for a junction of the three great Scandinavian
+  kingdoms. The union was realized under the administration of
+  his illustrious and sagacious daughter, Margaret, known as
+  the "Semiramis of the North."
+
+Waldemar Atterdag left no direct male issue. But his two grandsons,
+Albert the Younger, of Mecklenburg, a son of Ingeborg, Waldemar's eldest
+daughter, and of Henry of Mecklenburg; and Olaf, a son of Margaret, his
+younger daughter, and of Hakon VI of Norway, were now claiming the
+hereditary succession to the throne. One party declared for Olaf, but,
+as he was the son of the younger daughter, his claim was very doubtful.
+But because the house of Mecklenburg had acted with hostility toward
+Denmark, and Olaf had expectation of Norway and claims to the crown of
+Sweden, as a grandson of Magnus Smek, Denmark was, by his election, in
+hopes of one day seeing the three crowns united on the same head. It was
+therefore not long before this important affair was determined. The
+preference was given Olaf, who, although only six years of age, was,
+under the name of Olaf V, elected king of Denmark, under the
+guardianship of Margaret his mother; and after the death of his father
+Hakon VI, he became also king of Norway, the two kingdoms thus being
+united. This union, till the expiration of four hundred and thirty-four
+years, was not dissolved. When Olaf V, seven years after, died in
+Falsterbo, both kingdoms elected Margaret their queen, though custom had
+not yet authorized the election of a female.
+
+During the reign of this great Princess, who deservedly has been called
+the "Semiramis of the North," Denmark and Norway exercised in Europe an
+influence the effects of which were long felt throughout the
+Scandinavian countries with their vast extent and rival races. She
+united wisdom and policy with courage and determination, had strength of
+mind to preserve her rectitude without deviation, and her efforts were
+crowned by divine Providence with success. She is justly considered one
+of the most illustrious female rulers in history. Her renown even
+reached the Byzantine emperor Emanuel Palaeologus, who called her _Regina
+sine exemplo maxima_. But under her successors--destitute of her high
+sense of duty, great ability, and consistent virtue--her triumphs proved
+a snare instead of a blessing. The great union she created dissolved in
+a short time, and its downfall was as sudden as its elevation had been
+extraordinary. She was born in 1353. Her father was, as we have seen,
+Waldemar Atterdag, her mother Queen Hedevig, and she became queen of
+Denmark and Norway in 1387. She was no sooner elected queen of Denmark,
+and homaged on the hill of Sliparehog, near Lund, in Ringsted, Odensee,
+and Wiborg, than she sailed to Norway to receive their homage. But a
+remarkable occurrence is mentioned by historians as occurring about this
+time. A report prevailed that King Olaf, the Queen's son, was not dead;
+it was propagated by the nobility, and very likely set on foot by them,
+in order to punish Margaret for her liberality to the clergy. An
+impostor claimed the crown of Denmark and Norway, and gained credit
+every day by making discoveries which could only be known to Olaf and
+his mother. Margaret, however, proved him to be a son of Olaf's nurse.
+Olaf had a large wart between his shoulders--a mark which did not appear
+on the impostor. The false Olaf was seized, broken on the wheel, and
+publicly burned at a place between Falsterbo and Skanor, in Sweden, and
+Margaret continued uninterruptedly her regency.
+
+But the Queen, not wishing to contract a new marriage, and comprehending
+the importance of having a successor elected to the throne, proposed her
+nephew, Eric, Duke of Pomerania. This proposal the clergy and nobility
+approved, and they elected him to be king of Denmark and Norway after
+Margaret's death. Meanwhile Albert, King of Sweden, having, on account
+of his preference given to German favorites, incurred the hatred of his
+people, the Swedes requested Margaret to assist them against him, which
+she promised to do if they in return would make her queen of Sweden.
+Moreover, Albert had highly offended the Danish Queen; had, though
+hardly able to govern his own kingdom, assumed the title "king of
+Denmark," and laid claim to Norway, too; and when she blamed him for it
+he had answered her disdainfully. In a letter he had used foul and
+abusive language, calling her "a king without breeches," and the
+"abbot's concubine" (_abbedfrillen_), on account of her particular
+attachment to a certain abbot of Soro, who was her spiritual director.
+It is, however, true, that her intimacy with this monk gave room for
+some suspicion that her privacies with him were not all employed about
+the care of her soul. Afterward, to ridicule her yet more, King Albert
+sent her a hone to sharpen her needles, and swore not to put on his
+nightcap until she had yielded to him. But under perilous circumstances
+Margaret was never at a loss how to act. She acted here with the utmost
+prudence, trying first to gain the favor of the peers of the state, and
+solemnly promising to rule according to the Swedish laws. War now broke
+out between Albert and Margaret, whose army was commanded by Jvar Lykke.
+The encounter of the two armies--about twelve thousand men on each
+side--took place at Falkoping, September 21, 1388. A furious battle was
+fought, in which the victory for a long while hung in suspense. But
+Margaret's good fortune prevailed; Albert was routed and his army cut to
+pieces, and Margaret was now mistress of Sweden.
+
+While this was passing, the Queen tarried in Wordingborg Sjelland,
+ardently desiring to learn the result. But no sooner did she hear that
+the victory was gained, and the Swedish King and his son Eric taken
+prisoners, than she hastened to Bahus, in Sweden, where the King and his
+son were brought before her. Lost in joy and amazement at having her
+enemy in her power, the Queen now retorted upon King Albert with
+revilings, and she made him wear a large nightcap of paper--a
+retaliation proportioned to his offensive words. He and his son were
+thereupon brought to Lindholm, a castle in Skane, where they were kept
+prisoners for seven years. When they entered the castle, a dark, square
+room was assigned them, and when the King said, "I hope that this
+torture against a crowned head will only last a few days," the jailer
+replied: "I grieve to say that the Queen's orders are to the contrary;
+anger not the Queen by any bravado, else you will be placed in the
+irons, and if these fail we can have recourse to sharper means." To the
+excessive self-love, intemperance, conceitedness, and want of foresight
+which had characterized all his actions, the unhappy Albert had to
+ascribe his present situation.
+
+The year following, the Queen stormed the important city of Calmar, yet
+siding with the imprisoned King. She made several wise alliances with
+Richard II of England, and other potentates, and concluded a truce for
+two years with the princes of Mecklenburg, and the cities of Rostock and
+Wismar, which had begun to raise fresh levies in favor of the
+unfortunate Albert. This period expired, she laid siege to Stockholm and
+other fortified places, of which John, Duke of Mecklenburg, and other
+friends of the imprisoned King had become masters. But the cause of
+Albert was little forwarded, and Margaret gained ground every day. She
+compelled the capital to surrender to her and do homage to her as its
+sovereign; whereafter a peremptory peace was concluded on Good Friday,
+which restored tranquillity to the three kingdoms. The imprisoned King
+and his son were delivered up to the Hanseatic towns, and they obtained
+their liberty for sixty thousand ounces of silver, upon condition that
+they should resign all claims to Sweden if the amount were not paid
+within three years. As soon as the King and his son were delivered to
+the deputies, they solemnly swore to a strict observance of this
+article, the Hanse towns engaging themselves to guarantee the treaty.
+The money, however, not being paid by the stipulated time, Margaret
+became undisputed sovereign of Sweden, the third Scandinavian kingdom.
+
+About this time the "Victuals Brethren," so called because they brought
+victuals from the Hanse towns to Stockholm while besieged, began to
+imperil Denmark, plundering the Danish and Norwegian coasts, and
+destroying all commercial business along the Baltic. But Margaret
+ordered the harbors of the maritime towns to be blockaded, thus putting
+a quick stop to their cruelties and piracies. The Queen's principal care
+was now to visit the different provinces, to administer justice and
+redress grievances of every kind. Among other salutary regulations, the
+affairs of commerce were not forgotten. It was, for instance, decreed
+that all manner of assistance should be given to foreign merchants and
+sailors, particularly in case of misfortune and shipwreck, without
+expectation of reward; and that all pirates should be treated with the
+greatest rigor.
+
+Eric of Pomerania was, as we have said, elected to be king of Denmark
+and Norway after Margaret's death. But wishing to have him also elected
+her successor to the Swedish throne, Margaret brought him to Sweden, and
+introduced him to the deputies, one by one, whom she requested to
+confirm his election to the succession. The majesty of the Queen's
+person, the strength of her arguments, and the sweetness of her
+eloquence gained over the deputies, who, on July 22, 1396, elected him
+at Morastone by Upsala, to succeed her also in Sweden. But Margaret,
+soon discovering his inability and impetuousness, took pains to remedy
+these defects, as much as possible, by procuring for him as a wife the
+intelligent and virtuous princess Philippa, a daughter of Henry V of
+England, and shortly after had got Catharine, her niece and Eric's
+sister, married to Prince John, a son of the German emperor Ruprecht;
+John being promised the Scandinavian crowns if Eric of Pomerania should
+die childless. Thus having strengthened and consolidated her power by
+influential connections and relationships, the Queen, upon whose head
+the three northern crowns were actually united, now proceeded to realize
+the great plan she had long cherished--to get a fundamental law
+established for a perpetual union of the three large Scandinavian
+kingdoms. The realization of this purpose immortalized her, securing for
+her the admiration of the world, whose most eminent historians do not
+hesitate to surname her the "Great," and to compare her with the
+loftiest Greek and Roman heroes and statesmen.
+
+On June 17, 1397, Margaret summoned to an assembly at Calmar, in the
+province of Smaland, Sweden, the clergy and the nobility of Denmark,
+Norway, and Sweden, and established, by their aid and consent, a
+fundamental law. This was the law so celebrated in the North under the
+name of the "Union of Calmar," and which afterward gave birth to wars
+between Sweden and Denmark that lasted a whole century. It consisted of
+three articles. The first provided that the three kingdoms should
+thenceforward have but one and the same king, who was to be chosen
+successively by each of the kingdoms. The second article imposed upon
+the sovereign the obligation of dividing his time equally between the
+three kingdoms. The third, and most important, decreed that each kingdom
+should retain its own laws, customs, senate, and privileges of every
+kind; that the highest officers should be natives; that any alliance
+concluded with foreign potentates should be obligatory upon all three
+kingdoms when approved by the council of one kingdom; and that, after
+the death of the King, his eldest son, or, if the King died childless,
+then another wise, intelligent, and able prince, should be chosen common
+monarch; and if anyone, because of high treason, was banished from one
+kingdom, then he should be banished from them all. A month after, on the
+Queen's birthday, July 13th, a legitimate charter was drawn up, to which
+the Queen subscribed and put her seal; on which occasion Eric of
+Pomerania was anointed and crowned by the archbishops of Upsala and Lund
+as king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The _Te Deum_ was sung in the
+churches of Calmar, the assembly crying out: "_Haecce unio esto perpetua!
+Longe, longe, longe, vivat Margarethe, regina Daniae, Norvegiae et
+Sveciae!_"
+
+This strict union of the three large states became a potent bulwark for
+their security, and made them, in more than one century, the arbiter of
+the European system; the three nations of the northern peninsula
+presenting a compact and united front, that could bid defiance to any
+foreign aggression.
+
+Although Eric of Pomerania was elected king, and in 1407 passed his
+minority, Margaret continued governing until the day of her death. "You
+have done all well," wrote the people to her, "and we value your
+services so highly that we would gladly grant you everything." The union
+of the three Scandinavian kingdoms having been established in Calmar,
+all her efforts were now aimed at regaining the duchy of Schleswig,
+which circumstances had compelled her to resign to Gerhard IV, Count of
+Holstein. For such a reunion with Schleswig a favorable opportunity
+appeared, when Gerhard was killed in an expedition against the
+Ditmarshers, leaving behind three sons in minority. Elizabeth, Gerhard's
+widow, fled to Margaret for succor against her violent brother-in-law,
+Bishop Henry of Osnabrueck. Margaret, fond of fishing in foul water, was
+very willing to help her, but availed herself of the opportunity to
+annex successively different parts of Schleswig.
+
+The dethroned Swedish King, Albert, never able to forget his anger
+toward Margaret or her severity against him, and continually cherishing
+a hope of reascending the Swedish throne, and considering the Union of
+Calmar a breach of peace, contrived to make the Swedish people
+displeased with her, and thought it a suitable time to revolt from her
+dominion. He established a strong camp before Visby, the capital of the
+island of Gulland, having six thousand foot and, at some distance, nine
+thousand horse. Determined to engage before their junction could take
+place, the Queen's commander-in-chief, Abraham Broder, immediately
+advanced until in sight of the enemy, and then endeavored to gain
+possession of Visby and the ground near by. In this he was so far
+successful that Albert and his army had to leave the camp and conclude a
+truce. But nevertheless he did not till after a lapse of seven years
+give up his hope of remounting the throne of Sweden, making a final
+peace with Margaret, and henceforward living in Gadebush, Mecklenburg,
+where in 1412 he closed his inglorious life.
+
+Soon after, October 27th, Queen Margaret died on board a ship in the
+harbor of Flensburg, at the age of fifty-nine, after an active and
+notable reign of thirty-seven years. Her funeral was attended with the
+greatest solemnity, and her corpse was brought to the Cathedral of
+Roeskilde, where Eric of Pomerania, her successor, in 1423, caused her
+likeness to be carved in alabaster. Her acts show her character. She
+displayed judiciousness united with circumspection; wisdom in devising
+plans, and perseverance in executing them; skill in gaining the
+confidence of the clergy and peasantry, and thereby counterbalancing the
+imperious nobility. On the whole she applied herself to the civilization
+of her three kingdoms, and to their improvement by excellent laws, the
+great aim of which was to undermine the nobility. She pursued the plan
+of her great father to recall all rights to the crown lands, which
+during the reign of her weak and inefficient predecessors had been
+granted to the nobility. The prosecution of this plan for the perfect
+subversion of the feudal aristocracy was unfortunately interrupted by
+her death; her imprudent and weak successor having no power to restrain
+the turbulent spirit of a factious nobility.
+
+
+
+
+DEPOSITION OF RICHARD II
+
+HENRY IV BEGINS THE LINE OF LANCASTER
+
+A.D. 1399
+
+JOHN LINGARD
+
+
+  Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince, succeeded his
+  grandfather, Edward III, on the throne of England in 1377,
+  when Richard was but ten years old. During his minority the
+  government was intrusted to a council of twelve, but for
+  some years it was mainly controlled by Richard's uncles,
+  John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas of Woodstock,
+  Duke of Gloucester. War with France, then in progress,
+  entailed great expenditures, which were increased by court
+  extravagance, and at length burdensome taxes led to popular
+  uprisings. These became most serious in the great revolt of
+  the peasants led by Wat Tyler, in 1381. Richard appeared
+  among the insurgents and granted them concessions.
+
+  From this time the King became more active in his
+  government, and in 1386 John of Gaunt withdrew to the
+  Continent. About the same time the Duke of Gloucester headed
+  a coalition of the baronial party in opposition to the
+  sovereign; but in 1389 Richard suddenly declared himself of
+  age and gave a check to their designs. For eight years he
+  ruled with moderation as a constitutional monarch.
+
+  But in 1396 Richard married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI
+  of France, and henceforth seems to have adopted French
+  ideas, and to have made pretensions in the direction of
+  absolutism. He proceeded to arbitrary prosecutions which led
+  to the violent death of several leading nobles. Richard also
+  quarrelled with Henry, son of John of Gaunt, whom as Duke of
+  Lancaster he succeeded in 1399. The year before, Richard had
+  banished Henry for ten years--fearing him as a possible
+  rival. The history of the remaining months of Richard's
+  reign is crowded with the events which rapidly led to the
+  ending of the direct line of the Plantagenets and the
+  beginning of the line of Lancaster.
+
+  In Shakespeare's _Richard II_--the first of his historical
+  plays--the poet, following Holinshed's chronicle, presents
+  not only a skilful dramatic construction of the recorded
+  incidents of the reign, but also a finely discriminated
+  portrait of Richard's much debated character as man and
+  monarch.
+
+Richard now saw himself triumphant over all his opponents. Even his
+uncles, through affection or fear, seconded all his measures. He had
+attained what seems for some time to have been the great object of his
+policy. He had placed himself above the control of the law. By the
+grant of a subsidy for life he was relieved from the necessity of
+meeting his parliament; with the aid of his committee, the members of
+which proved the obsequious ministers of his will, he could issue what
+new ordinances he pleased; and a former declaration by the two houses,
+that he was as free as any of his predecessors, was conveniently
+interpreted to release him from the obligations of those statutes which
+he deemed hostile to the royal prerogative. But he had forfeited all
+that popularity which he had earned during the last ten years; and the
+security in which he indulged hurried him on to other acts of despotism,
+which inevitably led to his ruin. He raised money by forced loans; he
+compelled the judges to expound the law according to his own prejudices
+or caprice; he required the former adherents of Gloucester to purchase
+and repurchase charters of pardon; and, that he might obtain a more
+plentiful harvest of fines and amercements, put at once seventeen
+counties out of the protection of the law, under the pretence that they
+had favored his enemies.
+
+The Duke of Lancaster did not survive the banishment of his son more
+than three months; and the exile expected to succeed by his attorneys to
+the ample estates of his father. But Richard now discovered that his
+banishment, like an outlawry, had rendered him incapable of inheriting
+property. At a great council, including the committee of parliament, it
+was held that the patents granted, both to him and his antagonist, were
+illegal, and therefore void; and all the members present were sworn to
+support that determination. Henry Bowet, who had procured the patent for
+the duke of Hereford, was even condemned, for that imaginary offence, to
+suffer the punishment of treason; though, on account of his character,
+his life was spared on condition that he should abjure the kingdom
+forever.
+
+This iniquitous proceeding seems to have exhausted the patience of the
+nation. Henry--on the death of his father he had assumed the title of
+duke of Lancaster--had long been the idol of the people; and the
+voluntary assemblage of thousands to attend him on his last departure
+from London might have warned Richard of the approaching danger. The
+feeling of their own wrongs had awakened among them a spirit of
+resistance; the new injury offered to their favorite pointed him out to
+them as their leader. Consultations were held; plans were formed; the
+dispositions of the great lords were sounded; and the whole nation
+appeared in a ferment. Yet it was in this moment, so pregnant with
+danger, that the infatuated monarch determined to leave his kingdom. His
+cousin and heir, the Earl of March, had been surprised and slain by a
+party of Irish; and, in his eagerness to revenge the loss of a relation,
+he despised the advice of his friends, and wilfully shut his eyes to the
+designs of his enemies.
+
+Having appointed his uncle, the Duke of York, regent during his absence,
+the King assisted at a solemn mass at Windsor, chanted a collect
+himself, and made his offering. At the door of the Church he took wine
+and spices with his young Queen; and, lifting her up in his arms,
+repeatedly kissed her, saying, "Adieu, madam, adieu till we meet again."
+From Windsor, accompanied by several noblemen, he proceeded to Bristol,
+where the report of plots and conspiracies reached him, and was received
+with contempt. At Milford Haven he joined his army, and, embarking in a
+fleet of two hundred sail, arrived in a few days in the port of
+Waterford. His cousin the Duke of Albemarle had been ordered to follow
+with a hundred more; and three weeks were consumed in waiting for that
+nobleman, whose delay was afterward attributed to a secret understanding
+with the King's enemies.
+
+At length Richard led his forces from Kilkenny against the Irish.
+Several of the inferior chiefs hastened barefoot and with halters round
+their necks to implore his mercy; but M'Murchad spurned the idea of
+submission, and boasted that he would extirpate the invaders. He dared
+not indeed meet them in open combat; but it was his policy to flee
+before them, and draw them into woods and morasses, where they could
+neither fight with advantage nor procure subsistence. The want of
+provisions and the clamor of the soldiers compelled the King to give up
+the pursuit, and to direct his march toward Dublin; and M'Murchad, when
+he could no longer impede their progress, solicited and obtained a
+parley with the Earl of Gloucester, the commander of the rear-guard. The
+chieftain was an athletic man; he came to the conference mounted on a
+gray charger, which had cost him four hundred head of cattle, and
+brandished with ease and dexterity a heavy spear in his hand. He seemed
+willing to become the nominal vassal of the King of England, but refused
+to submit to any conditions. Richard set a price on his head, proceeded
+to Dublin, and at the expiration of a fortnight was joined by the Duke
+of Albemarle with men and provisions. This seasonable supply enabled him
+to recommence the pursuit of M'Murchad; but while he was thus occupied
+with objects of inferior interest in Ireland, a revolution had occurred
+in England, which eventually deprived him both of his crown and his
+life.
+
+When the King sailed to Ireland, Henry of Bolingbroke, the new Duke of
+Lancaster, resided in Paris, where he was hospitably entertained, but at
+the same time narrowly watched, by the French monarch. About Christmas
+he offered his hand to Marie, one of the daughters of the Duke of Berry.
+The jealousy of Richard was alarmed; the Earl of Salisbury hastened to
+Paris to remonstrate against the marriage of a daughter of France with
+an English "traitor," and, suiting his conduct to his words, the envoy,
+having accomplished his object, returned without deigning to speak to
+the exile. While Henry was brooding over these injuries, the late
+Primate, or nominal Bishop of St. Andrews, secretly left his house at
+Cologne, and in the disguise of a friar procured an interview with the
+Duke at the Hotel de Vinchester. The result of their meeting was a
+determination to return to England during the King's absence. To elude
+the suspicions of the French ministers, Henry procured permission to
+visit the Duke of Bretagne; and, on his arrival at Nantes, hired three
+small vessels, with which he sailed from Vannes to seek his fortune in
+England. His whole retinue consisted only of the Archbishop, the son of
+the late Earl of Arundel, fifteen lances, and a few servants. After
+hovering for some days on the eastern coast, he landed at Ravenspur in
+Yorkshire, and was immediately joined by the two powerful earls of
+Northumberland and Westmoreland; before whom, in the White Friars at
+Doncaster, he declared upon oath that his only object was to recover the
+honors and estates which had belonged to his father, and bound himself
+not to advance any claim to the crown.
+
+The Duke of York, to whom the King had intrusted the government during
+his absence, was accurately informed of his motions, and had summoned
+the retainers of the crown to join the royal standard at St. Albans.
+There is, however, reason to believe that he was not hearty in the cause
+which it was his duty to support. He must have viewed with pity the
+unmerited misfortunes of one nephew, and have condemned the violent and
+thoughtless career of the other; and from the fate of his brother
+Gloucester, and the cruel and unjust treatment of the only son of his
+brother, John of Gaunt, he could not draw any very flattering conclusion
+with respect to the stability of his own family. Whether it was from
+suspicion of his fidelity, or from the disinclination of the chief
+barons to draw the sword against one who demanded nothing more than his
+right, the favorites of Richard became alarmed for their own safety.
+
+The Earl of Wiltshire, with Bussy and Greene, members of the committee
+of parliament, had been appointed to wait on the young Queen at
+Wallingford; but they suddenly abandoned their charge, and fled with
+precipitation to Bristol. York himself followed with the army in the
+same direction. It might be that, to relieve himself from
+responsibility, he wished to be in readiness to deliver up the command
+on the expected arrival of Richard from Ireland; but at the same time he
+left open the road from Yorkshire to the metropolis, and allowed the
+adventurer to pursue his object without impediment. Henry was already on
+his march. The snowball increased as it rolled along, and the small
+number of forty followers, with whom he had landed, swelled by the time
+that he had reached St. Albans to sixty thousand men. He was preceded by
+his messengers and letters, stating not only his own wrongs, but also
+the grievances of the people, and affirming that the revenue of the
+kingdom had been let out to farm to the rapacity of Scrope, Bussy, and
+Greene. In all those lordships which had been the inheritance of his
+family he was received with enthusiasm; in London by a procession of the
+clergy and people, with addresses of congratulation, and presents, and
+offers of service.
+
+His stay in the capital was short. Having flattered the citizens, and
+confirmed them in their attachment to his person, he turned to the west,
+and entered Evesham, on the same day on which York reached Berkeley.
+After an interchange of messages they met in the church of the castle;
+and, before they separated, the doom of Richard was sealed. That the
+regent consented to the actual deposition of his nephew does not
+necessarily follow; he might only have sought his reformation by putting
+it out of his power to govern amiss; but he betrayed the trust which had
+been reposed to him, united his force with that of Henry, and commanded
+Sir Peter Courtenay, who held the castle of Bristol for the King, to
+open its gates. That officer, protesting that he acknowledged no
+authority in the Duke of Lancaster, obeyed the mandate of the regent.
+The next morning the three fugitives, the Earl of Wiltshire, Bussy, and
+Greene, were executed by order of the constable and marshal of the host.
+The Duke of York remained at Bristol; Henry with his own forces
+proceeded to Chester to secure that city, and awe the men of Cheshire,
+the most devoted adherents of the King.
+
+We may now return to Richard in Ireland. It must appear strange, but
+Henry had been in England a fortnight before the King, in consequence,
+it was said, of the tempestuous weather, had heard of his landing. The
+intelligence appears to have provoked indignation as much as alarm.
+"Ha!" he exclaimed, "fair uncle of Lancaster, God reward your soul! Had
+I believed you, this man would not have injured me. Thrice have I
+pardoned him; this is his fourth offence." But he referred the matter to
+his council, and was advised to cross over to England immediately with
+the ships which had brought the reenforcement under the Duke of
+Albemarle. That nobleman, however, insidiously, as it was afterward
+pretended, diverted him from this intention. The Earl of Salisbury
+received orders to sail immediately with his own retainers, a body of
+one hundred men, and to summon to the royal standard the natives of
+Wales. Richard promised to follow in the fleet from Waterford in the
+course of six days. The Earl obeyed; the men of Wales and Cheshire
+answered the call; and a gallant host collected at Conway.
+
+But Richard appeared not according to his promise; distressing reports
+were circulated among the troops; and the royalists, having waited for
+him almost a fortnight, disbanded in spite of the fears and entreaties
+of their commander. At last, on the eighteenth day, the King arrived in
+Milford Haven with the dukes of Albemarle, Exeter, and Surrey, the Earl
+of Worcester, the bishops of London, Lincoln, and Carlisle, and
+several thousands of the troops who had accompanied him to Ireland. With
+such a force, had it been faithful, he might have made a stand against
+his antagonist; but on the second morning, when he arose, he observed
+from his window that the greater part had disappeared. A council was
+immediately summoned, and a proposal made that the King should flee by
+sea to Bordeaux; but the Duke of Exeter objected that to quit the
+kingdom in such circumstances was to abdicate the throne. Let them
+proceed to the army at Conway. There they might bid defiance to the
+enemy; or at all events, as the sea would still be open, might thence
+set sail to Guienne. His opinion prevailed; and at nightfall the King,
+in the disguise of a Franciscan friar, his two brothers of Exeter and
+Surrey, the Earl of Gloucester, the Bishop of Carlisle, Sir Stephen
+Scrope, and Sir William Feriby, with eight others, stole away from the
+army, and directed their route toward Conway. Their flight was soon
+known. The royal treasure, which Richard left behind him, was plundered;
+Albemarle, Worcester, and most of the leaders hastened to pay their
+court to Henry; the rest attempted in small bodies to make their way to
+their own counties, but were in most instances plundered and ill-treated
+by the Welsh.
+
+The royal party with some difficulty, but without any accident, reached
+Conway, where, to their utter disappointment, instead of a numerous
+force, they found only the Earl of Salisbury with a hundred men. In this
+emergency the King's brothers undertook to visit Henry at Chester, and
+to sound his intentions; and during their absence Richard, with the Earl
+of Salisbury, examined the castles of Beaumaris and Carnarvon; but
+finding them without garrisons or provisions, the disconsolate wanderers
+returned to their former quarters.
+
+When the two dukes were admitted into the presence of Henry, they bent
+the knee and acquainted him with their message from the King. He took
+little notice of Surrey, whom he afterward confined in the castle, but,
+leading Exeter aside, spoke with him in private, and gave him, instead
+of the hart, the King's livery, his own badge of the rose. But no
+entreaties could induce him to allow them to return. Exeter was observed
+to drop a tear when the Duke of Albemarle said to him tauntingly: "Fair
+cousin, be not angry. If it please God, things shall go well."
+
+The immediate object of Henry was to secure the royal person. He was
+gratified to learn from the envoys the place of Richard's retreat, and
+detained them at Chester, that the King, instead of making his escape,
+might await their return. His first care was to take possession of the
+treasure which the King had deposited in the strong castle of Holt; his
+next, to despatch the Earl of Northumberland at the head of four hundred
+men-at-arms and a thousand archers to Conway, with instructions not to
+display his force, lest the King should put to sea, but by artful
+speeches and promises to draw him out of the fortress and then make him
+prisoner. The Earl took possession in his journey of the castles of
+Flint and Rhuddlan, and a few miles beyond the latter, placing his men
+in concealment under a rock, rode forward with only five attendants to
+Conway.
+
+He was readily admitted, and, to the King's anxious inquiries about his
+brothers, replied that he had left them well at Chester, and had brought
+a letter from the Duke of Exeter. In it that nobleman said, or rather
+was made to say, that full credit might be given to the offers of the
+bearer. These offers were, that Richard should promise to govern and
+judge his people by law; that the dukes of Exeter and Surrey, the Earl
+of Salisbury, the Bishop of Carlisle, and Maudelin, the King's chaplain,
+should submit to a trial in parliament, on the charge of having advised
+the assassination of Gloucester; that Henry should be made grand
+justiciary of the kingdom, as his ancestors had been for a hundred
+years; and that, on the concession of these terms, the Duke should come
+to Flint, ask the King's pardon on his knees, and accompany or follow
+him to London. Richard consulted his friends apart. He expressed his
+approbation of the articles, but bade them secretly be assured that no
+consideration should induce him to abandon them on their trial, and that
+he would grasp the first opportunity of being revenged on his and their
+enemies--"for there were some among them whom he would flay alive; whom
+he would never spare for all the gold in the land." Northumberland was
+then sworn to the observance of the conditions. He took his oath on the
+host; and, "like Judas," says the writer, "perjured himself on the body
+of our Lord."
+
+As Northumberland departed to make arrangements for the interview at
+Flint, the King said to him: "I rely, my lord, on your faith. Remember
+your oath, and the God who heard it." Soon afterward he followed with
+his friends and their servants, to the number of twenty-two. They came
+to a steep declivity, to the left of which was the sea, and on the right
+a lofty rock overhanging the road. The King dismounted, and was
+descending on foot, when he suddenly exclaimed: "I am betrayed. God of
+Paradise, assist me! Do you not see banners and pennons in the valley?"
+Northumberland with eleven others met them at the moment and affected to
+be ignorant of the circumstance. "Earl of Northumberland," said the
+King, "if I thought you capable of betraying me, it is not too late to
+return." "You cannot return," the Earl replied, seizing the King's
+bridle; "I have promised to conduct you to the Duke of Lancaster." By
+this time he was joined by a hundred lances, and two hundred archers on
+horseback; and Richard, seeing it impossible to escape, exclaimed: "May
+the God, on whom you laid your hand, reward you and your accomplices at
+the last day!" and then, turning to his friends, added: "We are
+betrayed; but remember that our Lord was also sold and delivered into
+the hands of his enemies."
+
+They dined at Rhuddlan, and reached Flint in the evening. The King, as
+soon as he was left with his friends, abandoned himself to the
+reflections which his melancholy situation inspired. He frequently
+upbraided himself with his past indulgence to his present opponent:
+"Fool that I was!" he exclaimed: "thrice did I save the life of this
+Henry of Lancaster. Once my dear uncle his father, on whom the Lord have
+mercy! would have put him to death for his treason and villany. God of
+Paradise! I rode all night to save him; and his father delivered him to
+me, to do with him as I pleased. How true is the saying that we have no
+greater enemy than the man whom we have preserved from the gallows!
+Another time he drew his sword on me, in the chamber of the Queen, on
+whom God have mercy! He was also the accomplice of the Duke of
+Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel; he consented to my murder, to that
+of his father, and of all my council. By St. John, I forgave him all;
+nor would I believe his father, who more than once pronounced him
+deserving of death."
+
+The unfortunate King rose after a sleepless night, heard mass, and
+ascended the tower to watch the arrival of his opponent. At length he
+saw the army, amounting to eighty thousand men, winding along the beach
+till it reached the castle and surrounded it from sea to sea. He
+shuddered and wept, and cursed the Earl of Northumberland, but was
+called down by the arrival of Archbishop Arundel, the Duke of Albemarle,
+and the Earl of Worcester. They knelt to Richard, who, drawing the
+prelate apart, held a long conversation with him. After their departure
+he again mounted the tower, and, surveying the host of his enemies,
+exclaimed: "Good Lord God! I commend myself into thy holy keeping, and
+cry thee mercy, that thou wouldst pardon all my sins. If they put me to
+death I will take it patiently, as thou didst for us all."
+Northumberland had ordered dinner, and the Earl of Salisbury, the Bishop
+and the two knights, Sir Stephen Scrope and Sir William Feriby, sat with
+the King at the same table by his order; for since they were all
+companions in misfortune, he would allow no distinction among them.
+While he was eating, unknown persons entered the hall, insulting him
+with sarcasms and threats. As soon as he rose, he was summoned into the
+court to receive the Duke of Lancaster. Henry came forward in complete
+armor, with the exception of his helmet. As soon as he saw the King he
+bent his knee, and, advancing a few paces, he repeated his obeisance
+with his cap in his hand.
+
+"Fair cousin of Lancaster," said Richard, uncovering himself, "you are
+right welcome." "My lord," answered the Duke, "I am come before my time.
+But I will show you the reason. Your people complain that for the space
+of twenty or two-and-twenty years you have ruled them rigorously; but,
+if it please God, I will help you to govern better." The King replied,
+"Fair cousin, since it pleaseth you, it pleaseth us well." Henry then
+addressed himself successively to the Bishop and to the knights, but
+refused to notice the Earl. The King's horses were immediately ordered;
+and two lean and miserable animals were brought out, on which Richard
+and Salisbury mounted, and amid the flourish of trumpets and shouts of
+triumph followed the Duke into Chester.
+
+At Chester writs were issued in the King's name for the meeting of
+parliament and the preservation of the peace. Henry dismissed the
+greater part of his army, and prepared to conduct his prisoner to the
+capital. At Lichfield Richard seized a favorable moment to let himself
+down from his window, but was retaken in the garden, and from that
+moment was constantly guarded by ten or twelve armed men. In the
+neighborhood of London they separated. Henry, accompanied by the mayor
+and principal citizens, proceeded to St. Paul's, prayed before the high
+altar, and wept a few minutes over the tomb of his father. The King was
+sent to Westminster, and thence on the following day to the Tower, and,
+as he went along, was greeted with curses and the appellation of "the
+bastard," a word of ominous import, and prophetic of his approaching
+degradation.
+
+When the Duke first landed in England, he had sworn on the Gospels that
+his only object was to vindicate his right to the honors and possessions
+of the house of Lancaster. If this was the truth, his ambition had grown
+with his good-fortune. He now aspired to exchange the coronet of a duke
+for the crown of a king. Can we believe that he would meet with
+opposition from his associates, the Percy family? Yet so we are assured.
+They, however, by their perfidy, had given themselves a master. Their
+retainers had been already dismissed; and the friends of Richard
+abhorred them as the worst of traitors. They had therefore no resource
+but to submit, and to second the design of Lancaster. After several
+consultations it was resolved to combine a solemn renunciation of the
+royal authority on the part of Richard with an act of deposition on the
+part of the two houses of parliament, in the hope that those whose
+scruples should not be satisfied with the one, might acquiesce in the
+other. To obtain the first, the royal captive was assailed with promises
+and threats. Generally he abandoned himself to lamentation and despair;
+occasionally he exerted that spirit which he had formerly displayed.
+"Why am I thus guarded?" he asked one day. "Am I your king or your
+prisoner?" "You are my king, sir," replied the Duke with coolness; "but
+the council of your realm has thought proper to place a guard about
+you."
+
+  [Illustration: Richard II resigns the crown of England to
+  Henry, Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at London.
+
+  Painting by Sir John Gilbert.]
+
+On the day before the meeting of parliament a deputation of prelates,
+barons, knights, and lawyers waited on the captive in the Tower, and
+reminded him that in the castle of Conway, while he was perfectly his
+own master, he had promised to resign the crown on account of his own
+incompetency to govern. On his reply that he was ready to perform his
+promise, a paper was given him to read, in which he was made to absolve
+all his subjects from their fealty and allegiance, to renounce of his
+own accord all kingly authority, to acknowledge himself incapable of
+reigning, and worthy for his past demerits to be deposed, and to swear
+by the holy Gospels that he would never act, nor, as far as in him lay,
+suffer any other person to act, in opposition to this resignation. He
+then added, as from himself, that if it were in his power to name his
+successor, he would choose his cousin of Lancaster, who was present, and
+to whom he gave his ring, which he took from his own finger.
+
+Such is the account of this transaction inserted by the order of Henry
+in the rolls of parliament; an account the accuracy of which is liable
+to strong suspicion. It is difficult to believe that Richard had so much
+command over his feelings as to behave with that cheerfulness which is
+repeatedly noticed in the record; and the assertion that he had promised
+to resign the crown when he saw Northumberland in the castle of Conway,
+is not only contradictory to the statement of the two eye-witnesses, but
+also in itself highly improbable. From the fate of Edward II, with which
+he had so often been threatened, he must have known that it was better
+to flee to his transmarine dominions, which were still open to him, than
+to resign his crown and remain a prisoner in the custody of his
+successor.
+
+The next day the two houses met amid a great concourse of people in
+Westminster hall. The Duke occupied his usual seat near the throne,
+which was empty and covered with cloth of gold. The resignation of the
+King was read; each member, standing in his place, signified his
+acceptance of it aloud; and the people with repeated shouts expressed
+their approbation. Henry now proceeded to the second part of his plan,
+the act of deposition. For this purpose the coronation oath was first
+read; thirty-three articles of impeachment followed, in which it was
+contended that Richard had violated that oath; and thence it was
+concluded that he had by his misconduct forfeited his title to the
+throne. Of the articles, those which bear the hardest on the King are:
+the part which he was supposed to have had in the death of the Duke of
+Gloucester, his revocation of the pardons formerly granted to that
+Prince and his adherents, and his despotic conduct since the dissolution
+of parliament. Of the remainder, some are frivolous; many might, with
+equal reason, have been objected to each of his predecessors; and the
+others rest on the unsupported assertion of men whose interest it was to
+paint him in the blackest colors.
+
+No opposition had been anticipated, nor is any mentioned on the rolls;
+but we are told that the Bishop of Carlisle, to the astonishment of the
+Lancastrians, rose and demanded for Richard what ought not to be refused
+to the meanest criminal, the right of being confronted with his
+accusers; and for parliament what it might justly claim, the opportunity
+of learning from the King's own mouth whether the resignation of the
+crown, which had been attributed to him, were his own spontaneous act.
+If Merks actually made such a speech, he must have stood alone; no one
+was found to second it; the house voted the deposition of Richard; and
+eight commissioners, ascending a tribunal erected before the throne,
+pronounced him degraded from the state and authority of king, on the
+ground that he notoriously deserved such punishment, and had
+acknowledged it under his hand and seal on the preceding day. Sir
+William Thirnyng, chief justice, was appointed to notify the sentence to
+the captive, who meekly replied that he looked not after the royal
+authority, but hoped his cousin would be good lord to him.
+
+The rightful possessor was now removed from the throne. But, supposing
+it to be vacant, what pretensions could Henry of Lancaster advance to
+it? By the law of succession it belonged to the descendants of Lionel,
+the third son of Edward III; and their claim, it is said, had been
+formally recognized in parliament. All waited in anxious suspense till
+the Duke, rising from his seat, and forming with great solemnity the
+sign of the cross on his forehead and breast, pronounced the following
+words: "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of
+Lancaster, challenge this realm of England, and the crown, with all the
+members and appurtenances, as that I am descended by right line of
+blood, coming from the good lord King Henry III, and through that right
+that God, of his grace, hath sent me with help of my kin and of my
+friends to recover it; the which realm was in point to be undone for
+default of governance and undoing of good laws."
+
+In these extraordinary terms did Lancaster advance his pretensions,
+artfully intermixing an undefined claim of inheritance[73] with those of
+conquest and expediency, and rather hinting at each than insisting on
+either. But, however difficult it might be to understand the ground, the
+object of his challenge was perfectly intelligible. Both houses admitted
+it unanimously; and, as a confirmation, Henry produced the ring and seal
+which Richard had previously delivered to him. The Archbishop of
+Canterbury now took him by the hand, and led him to the throne. He knelt
+for a few minutes in prayer on the steps, arose, and was seated in it by
+the two archbishops. As soon as the acclamations had subsided, the
+Primate, stepping forward, made a short harangue, in which he undertook
+to prove that a monarch in the vigor of manhood was a blessing, a young
+and inexperienced prince was a curse to a people. At the conclusion the
+King rose. "Sirs," said he, "I thank God, and you, spiritual and
+temporal, and all estates of the land; and do you to wit, it is not my
+will that no man think that by way of conquest I would disinherit any
+man of his heritage, franchises, or other rights that him ought to have,
+nor put him out of that that he has and has had by the good laws and
+customs of the realm; except those persons that have been against the
+good purpose and the common profit of the realm."
+
+With the authority of Richard had expired that of the parliament and of
+the royal officers. Henry immediately summoned the same parliament to
+meet again in six days, appointed new officers of the crown, and as soon
+as he had received their oaths retired in state to the royal apartments.
+Thus ended this eventful day, with the deposition of Richard of
+Bordeaux, and the succession of his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke.
+
+
+
+
+DISCOVERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS
+AND THE AFRICAN COAST
+
+BEGINNING OF NEGRO SLAVE TRADE
+
+A.D. 1402
+
+SIR ARTHUR HELPS
+
+
+  The Canary Islands--the "Elysian Fields" and "Fortunate
+  Islands" of antiquity--have perhaps figured in fabulous lore
+  more extensively than any others, and have been discovered,
+  invaded, and conquered more frequently than any country in
+  the world. There has scarcely been a nation of any maritime
+  enterprise that has not had to do with them, and in one
+  manner or another made its appearance in them.
+
+  During the period following the death of ancient empires,
+  the Canary Islands lay hidden in the general darkness which
+  fell upon the world. With the modern revival came new and
+  greater mariners, and the islands were once more discovered.
+  It is well to note the connection between these modern
+  rediscoveries and the origin of negro slavery.
+
+  In Europe the old pagan slavery existed in many nations, and
+  in the early Christian centuries underwent many
+  modifications through the advance of the new religion and
+  civilization. The modern form of slavery began with the
+  first importation of negroes into Europe, as shown in the
+  following account, from which it appears that the history of
+  modern slavery begins with the history of African discovery.
+
+Petrarch is referred to by Viera to prove that the Genoese sent out an
+expedition to the Canary Islands. Las Casas mentions that an English or
+French vessel bound from France or England to Spain was driven by
+contrary winds to these Islands, and on its return spread abroad in
+France an account of the voyage. The information thus obtained--or
+perhaps in other ways of which there is no record--stimulated Don Luis
+de la Cerda, Count of Clermont, great-grandson of Don Alonzo the Wise of
+Castile, to seek for the investiture of the crown of the Canaries, which
+was given to him with much pomp by Clement VI, at Avignon, in 1344,
+Petrarch being present. This sceptre proved a barren one. The affairs of
+France, with which state the new King of the Canaries was connected,
+drew off his attention; and he died without having visited his
+dominions. The next authentic information that we have of the Canary
+Islands is that, in the times of Don Juan I of Castile, and of Don
+Enrique, his son, these islands were much visited by the Spaniards. In
+1399, we are told, certain Andalusians, Biscayans, Guipuzcoans, with the
+consent of Don Enrique, fitted out an expedition of five vessels, and
+making a descent on the island of Lanzarote, one of the Canaries, took
+captive the King and Queen, and one hundred and seventy of the
+islanders.
+
+Hitherto there had been nothing but discoveries, rediscoveries, and
+invasions of these islands; but at last a colonist appears upon the
+scene. This was Juan de Bethencourt, a great Norman baron, lord of St.
+Martin le Gaillard in the County of Eu, of Bethencourt, of Granville, of
+Sancerre, and other places in Normandy, and chamberlain to Charles VI of
+France. Those who are at all familiar with the history of that period,
+and with the mean and cowardly barbarity which characterized the
+long-continued contests between the rival factions of Orleans and
+Burgundy, may well imagine that any Frenchman would then be very glad to
+find a career in some other country. Whatever was the motive of Juan de
+Bethencourt, he carried out his purpose in the most resolute manner.
+Leaving his young wife, and selling part of his estate, he embarked at
+Rochelle in 1402, with men and means for the purpose of conquering, and
+establishing himself in, the Canary Islands. It is not requisite to give
+a minute description of this expedition. Suffice it to say that
+Bethencourt met with fully the usual difficulties, distresses,
+treacheries, and disasters that attach themselves to this race of
+enterprising men. After his arrival at the Canaries, finding his means
+insufficient, he repaired to the court of Castile, did acts of homage to
+the King, Enrique III, and afterward renewed them to his son Juan II,
+thereby much strengthening the claim which the Spanish monarchs already
+made to the dominion of these islands. Bethencourt, returning to the
+islands with renewed resources, made himself master of the greater part
+of them, reduced several of the natives to slavery, introduced the
+Christian faith, built churches, and established vassalage.
+
+On the occasion of quitting his colony in A.D. 1405, he called all his
+vassals together, and represented to them that he had named for his
+lieutenant and governor Maciot de Bethencourt, his relation; that he
+himself was going to Spain and to Rome to seek for a bishop for them;
+and he concluded his oration with these words: "My loved vassals, great
+or small, plebeians or nobles, if you have anything to ask me or to
+inform me of, if you find in my conduct anything to complain of, do not
+fear to speak; I desire to do favor and justice to all the world." The
+assembly he was addressing contained none of the slaves he had made. We
+are told, however, and that by eye-witnesses, that the poor natives
+themselves bitterly regretted his departure, and, wading through the
+water, followed his vessel as far as they could. After his visit to
+Spain and to Rome, he returned to his paternal domains in Normandy,
+where, while meditating another voyage to his colony, he died in 1425.
+
+Maciot de Bethencourt ruled for some time successfully; but afterward,
+falling into disputes with the Bishop, and his affairs generally not
+prospering, he sold his rights to Prince Henry of Portugal--also, as it
+strangely appears, to another person--and afterward settled in Madeira.
+The claims to the government of the Canaries were, for many years, in a
+most entangled state; and the right to the sovereignty over these
+islands was a constant ground of dispute between the crowns of Spain and
+Portugal.
+
+Thus ended the enterprise of Juan de Bethencourt, which, though it
+cannot be said to have led to any very large or lasting results, yet, as
+it was the first modern attempt of the kind, deserves to be chronicled
+before commencing with Prince Henry of Portugal's long-continued and
+connected efforts in the same direction. The events also which preceded
+and accompanied Bethencourt's enterprise need to be recorded, in order
+to show the part which many nations, especially the Spaniards, had in
+the first discoveries on the coast of Africa.
+
+We now turn to the history of the discoveries made, or rather caused to
+be made, by Prince Henry of Portugal. This Prince was born in 1394. He
+was the third son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the daughter of
+John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. That good Plantagenet blood on the
+mother's side was, doubtless, not without avail to a man whose life was
+to be spent in continuous and insatiate efforts to work out a great
+idea. Prince Henry was with his father at the memorable capture of
+Ceuta, the ancient Septem, in 1415. This town, which lies opposite to
+Gibraltar, was of great magnificence, and one of the principal marts in
+that age for the productions of the East. It was here that the
+Portuguese nation first planted a firm foot in Africa; and the date of
+this town's capture may, perhaps, be taken as that from which Prince
+Henry began to meditate further and far greater conquests. His aims,
+however, were directed to a point long beyond the range of the mere
+conquering soldier. He was especially learned, for that age of the
+world, being skilled in mathematical and geographical knowledge. And it
+may be noticed here that the greatest geographical discoveries have been
+made by men conversant with the book knowledge of their own time. A
+work, for instance, often seen in the hands of Columbus, which his son
+mentions as having had much influence with him, was the learned treatise
+of Cardinal Petro de Aliaco (Pierre d'Ailly), the _Imago Mundi_.
+
+But to return to Prince Henry of Portugal. We learn that he had
+conversed much with those who had made voyages in different parts of the
+world, and particularly with Moors from Fez and Morocco, so that he came
+to hear of the Azeneghis, a people bordering on the country of the
+negroes of Jalof. Such was the scanty information of a positive kind
+which the Prince had to guide his endeavors. Then there were the
+suggestions and the inducements which to a willing mind were to be found
+in the shrewd conjectures of learned men, the fables of chivalry, and,
+perhaps, in the confused records of forgotten knowledge once possessed
+by Arabic geographers. The story of Prister John, which had spread over
+Europe since the crusades, was well known to the Portuguese Prince. A
+mysterious voyage of a certain wandering saint, called St. Brendan, was
+not without its influence upon an enthusiastic mind. Moreover, there
+were many sound motives urging the Prince to maritime discovery; among
+which, a desire to fathom the power of the Moors, a wish to find a new
+outlet for traffic, and a longing to spread the blessings of the faith
+may be enumerated. The especial reason which impelled Prince Henry to
+take the burden of discovery on himself was that neither mariner nor
+merchant would be likely to adopt an enterprise in which there was no
+clear hope of profit. It belonged, therefore, to great men and princes,
+and among such he knew of no one but himself who was inclined to it.
+
+The map of the world being before us, let us reduce it to the
+proportions it filled in Prince Henry's time: let us look at our infant
+world. First, take away those two continents, for so we may almost call
+them, each much larger than a Europe, to the far west. Then cancel that
+square, massive-looking piece to the extreme southeast; happily there
+are no penal settlements there yet. Then turn to Africa: instead of that
+form of inverted cone which it presents, and which we now know there are
+physical reasons for its presenting, make a cimetar shape of it, by
+running a slightly curved line from Juba on the eastern side to Cape Nam
+on the western. Declare all below that line unknown. Hitherto, we have
+only been doing the work of destruction; but now scatter emblems of
+hippogriffs and anthropophagi on the outskirts of what is left in the
+map, obeying a maxim, not confined to the ancient geographers
+only--where you know nothing, place terrors. Looking at the map thus
+completed, we can hardly help thinking to ourselves, with a smile, what
+a small space, comparatively speaking, the known history of the world
+has been transacted in, up to the last four hundred years. The idea of
+the universality of the Roman dominions shrinks a little; and we begin
+to fancy that Ovid might have escaped his tyrant. The ascertained
+confines of the world were now, however, to be more than doubled in the
+course of one century; and to Prince Henry of Portugal, as to the first
+promoter of these vast discoveries, our attention must be directed.
+
+This Prince, having once the well-grounded idea in his mind that Africa
+did not end where it was commonly supposed, namely, at Cape Nam (Not),
+but that there was a world beyond that forbidding negative, seems never
+to have rested until he had made known that quarter of the globe to his
+own. He fixed his abode upon the promontory of Sagres, at the southern
+part of Portugal, whence, for many a year, he could watch for the rising
+specks of white sail bringing back his captains to tell him of new
+countries and new men. We may wonder that he never went himself; but he
+may have thought that he served the cause better by remaining at home
+and forming a centre whence the electric energy of enterprise was
+communicated to many discoverers, and then again collected from them.
+Moreover, he was much engaged in the public affairs of his country. In
+the course of his life he was three times in Africa, carrying on war
+against the Moors; and at home, besides the care and trouble which the
+state of the Portuguese court and government must have given him, he was
+occupied in promoting science and encouraging education.
+
+In 1415, as before noticed, he was at Ceuta. In 1418 he was settled on
+the promontory of Sagres. One night in that year he is thought to have
+had a dream of promise, for on the ensuing morning he suddenly ordered
+two vessels to be got ready forthwith, and to be placed under the
+command of two gentlemen of his household, Joham Goncalvez Zarco and
+Tristam Vaz, whom he ordered to proceed down the Barbary coast on a
+voyage of discovery.
+
+A contemporary chronicler, Azurara, whose work has recently been
+discovered and published, tells the story more simply, and merely states
+that these captains were young men, who, after the ending of the Ceuta
+campaign, were as eager for employment as the Prince for discovery; and
+that they were ordered on a voyage having for its object the general
+molestation of the Moors, as well as that of making discoveries beyond
+Cape Nam. The Portuguese mariners had a proverb about this cape--"He who
+would pass Cape Not, either will return or not"; intimating that, if he
+did not turn before passing the cape, he would never return at all. On
+the present occasion it was not destined to be passed; for these
+captains, Joham Goncalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz, were driven out of
+their course by storms, and accidentally discovered a little island,
+where they took refuge, and from that circumstance called the island
+Porto Santo. "They found there a race of people living in no settled
+polity, but not altogether barbarous or savage, and possessing a kindly
+and most fertile soil."
+
+I give this description of the first land discovered by Prince Henry's
+captains, thinking it would well apply to many other lands about to be
+found out by his captains and by other discoverers. Joham Goncalvez
+Zarco and Tristam Vaz returned. Their master was delighted with the news
+they brought him, more on account of its promise than its substance. In
+the same year he sent them out again, together with a third captain,
+named Bartholomew Perestrelo, assigning a ship to each captain. His
+object was not only to discover more lands, but also to improve those
+which had been discovered. He sent, therefore, various seeds and animals
+to Porto Santo. This seems to have been a man worthy to direct
+discovery. Unfortunately, however, among the animals some rabbits were
+introduced into the new island; and they conquered it, not for the
+Prince, but for themselves. Hereafter, we shall find that they gave his
+people much trouble, and caused no little reproach to him.
+
+We come now to the year 1419. Perestrelo, for some unknown cause,
+returned to Portugal at that time. After his departure, Joham Goncalvez
+Zarco and Tristam Vaz, seeing from Porto Santo something that seemed
+like a cloud, but yet different--the origin of so much discovery, noting
+the difference in the likeness--built two boats, and, making for this
+cloud, soon found themselves alongside a beautiful island, abounding in
+many things, but most of all in trees, on which account they gave it the
+name of "Madeira" (Wood). The two discoverers entered the island at
+different parts. The Prince, their master, afterward rewarded them with
+the captaincies of those parts. To Perestrelo he gave the island of
+Porto Santo to colonize it. Perestrelo, however, did not make much of
+his captaincy, but after a strenuous contest with the rabbits, having
+killed an army of them, died himself. This captain has a place in
+history as being the father-in-law of Columbus, who, indeed, lived at
+Porto Santo for some time, and here, on new-found land, meditated far
+bolder discoveries.
+
+Joham Goncalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz began the cultivation of their
+island of Madeira, but met with an untoward event at first. In clearing
+the wood, they kindled a fire among it, which burned for seven years, we
+are told; and in the end, that which had given its name to the island,
+and which, in the words of the historian, overshadowed the whole land,
+became the most deficient commodity. The captains founded churches in
+the island; and the King of Portugal, Don Duarte, gave the temporalities
+to Prince Henry, and all the spiritualities to the Knights of Christ.
+
+While these things were occurring at Madeira and at Porto Santo, Prince
+Henry had been prosecuting his general scheme of discovery, sending out
+two or three vessels each year, with orders to go down the coast from
+Cape Nam, and make what discoveries they could; but these did not amount
+to much, for the captains never advanced beyond Cape Bojador, which is
+situated seventy leagues to the south of Cape Nam. This Cape Bojador was
+formidable in itself, being terminated by a ridge of rocks with fierce
+currents running round them, but was much more formidable from the
+fancies which the mariners had formed of the sea and land beyond it. "It
+is clear," they were wont to say, "that beyond this cape there is no
+people whatever; the land is as bare as Libya--no water, no trees, no
+grass in it; the sea so shallow that at a league from the land it is
+only a fathom deep; the currents so fierce that the ship which passes
+that cape will never return;" and thus their theories were brought in to
+justify their fears. This outstretcher--for such is the meaning of the
+word _bojador_--was, therefore, as a bar drawn across that advance in
+maritime discovery which had for so long a time been the first object of
+Prince Henry's life.
+
+The Prince had now been working at his discoveries for twelve years,
+with little approbation from the generality of persons; the discovery of
+these islands, Porto Santo and Madeira, serving to whet his appetite for
+further enterprise, but not winning the common voice in favor of
+prosecuting discoveries on the coast of Africa. The people at home,
+improving upon the reports of the sailors, said that "the land which the
+Prince sought after was merely some sandy place like the deserts of
+Libya; that princes had possessed the empires of the world, and yet had
+not undertaken such designs as his, nor shown such anxiety to find new
+kingdoms; that the men who arrived in those foreign parts--if they did
+arrive--turned from white into black men; that the King Don John, the
+Prince's father, had endowed foreigners with land in his kingdom, to
+break it up and cultivate it--a thing very different from taking the
+people out of Portugal, which had need of them, to bring them among
+savages to be eaten, and to place them upon lands of which the mother
+country had no need; that the Author of the world had provided these
+islands solely for the habitation of wild beasts, of which an additional
+proof was that those rabbits the discoverers themselves had introduced
+were now dispossessing them of the island."
+
+There is much here of the usual captiousness to be found in the
+criticism of bystanders upon action, mixed with a great deal of false
+assertion and premature knowledge of the ways of Providence. Still, it
+were to be wished that most criticism upon action was as wise; for that
+part of the common talk which spoke of keeping their own population to
+bring out their own resources had a wisdom in it which the men of future
+centuries were yet to discover throughout the peninsula. Prince Henry,
+as may be seen by his perseverance up to this time, was not a man to
+have his purposes diverted by such criticism, much of which must have
+been, in his eyes, worthless and inconsequent in the extreme.
+Nevertheless, he had his own misgivings. His captains came back one
+after another with no good tidings of discovery, but with petty plunder
+gained, as they returned from incursions on the Moorish coast.
+
+The Prince concealed from them his chagrin at the fruitless nature of
+their attempts, but probably did not feel it less on that account. He
+began to think: Was it for him to hope to discover that land which had
+been hidden from so many princes? Still, he felt within himself the
+incitement of "a virtuous obstinacy," which would not let him rest.
+Would it not, he thought, be ingratitude to God, who thus moved his mind
+to these attempts, if he were to desist from his work, or be negligent
+in it? He resolved, therefore, to send out again Gil Eannes, one of his
+household, who had been sent the year before, but had returned, like the
+rest, having discovered nothing. He had been driven to the Canary
+Islands, and had seized upon some of the natives there, whom he brought
+back. With this transaction the Prince had shown himself dissatisfied;
+and Gil Eannes, now intrusted again with command, resolved to meet all
+dangers rather than to disappoint the wishes of his master. Before his
+departure, the Prince called him aside and said: "You cannot meet with
+such peril that the hope of your reward shall not be much greater; and
+in truth, I wonder what imagination this is that you have all taken
+up--in a matter, too, of so little certainty; for if these things which
+are reported had any authority, however little, I would not blame you so
+much. But you quote to me the opinions of four mariners, who, as they
+were driven out of their way to Frandes or to some other ports to which
+they commonly navigated, had not, and could not have used, the needle
+and the chart; but do you go, however, and make your voyage without
+regard to their opinion,--and, by the grace of God, you will not bring
+out of it anything but honor and profit."
+
+We may well imagine that these stirring words of the Prince must have
+confirmed Gil Eannes in his resolve to efface the stain of his former
+misadventure. And he succeeded in doing so; for he passed the dreaded
+Cape Bojador--a great event in the history of African discovery, and one
+that in that day was considered equal to a labor of Hercules. Gil Eannes
+returned to a grateful and most delighted master. He informed the Prince
+that he had landed, and that the soil appeared to him unworked and
+fruitful; and, like a prudent man, he could not tell of foreign plants,
+but had brought some of them home with him in a barrel of the new-found
+earth--plants much like those which bear in Portugal the roses of Santa
+Maria. The Prince rejoiced to see them, and gave thanks to God, "as if
+they had been the fruit and sign of the promised land; and besought Our
+Lady, whose name the plants bore, that she would guide and set forth the
+doings in this discovery to the praise and glory of God and to the
+increase of his holy faith."
+
+After passing the Cape of Bojador there was a lull in Portuguese
+discovery, the period from 1434 to 1441 being spent in enterprises of
+very little distinctness or importance. Indeed, during the latter part
+of this period, the Prince was fully occupied with the affairs of
+Portugal. In 1437 he accompanied the unfortunate expedition to Tangier,
+in which his brother Ferdinand was taken prisoner, who afterward ended
+his days in slavery to the Moor. In 1438, King Duarte dying, the
+troubles of the regency occupied Prince Henry's attention. In 1441,
+however, there was a voyage which led to very important consequences. In
+that year Antonio Goncalvez, master of the robes to Prince Henry, was
+sent out with a vessel to load it with skins of "sea-wolves," a number
+of them having been seen, during a former voyage, in the mouth of a
+river about fifty-four leagues beyond Cape Bojador. Goncalvez resolved
+to signalize his voyage by a feat that should gratify his master more
+than the capture of sea-wolves; and he accordingly planned and executed
+successfully an expedition for capturing some Azeneghi Moors, in order,
+as he told his companions, to take home "some of the language of that
+country." Nuno Tristam, another of Prince Henry's captains, afterward
+falling in with Goncalvez, a further capture of Moors was made, and
+Goncalvez returned to Portugal with his spoil.
+
+In the same year Prince Henry applied to Pope Martin V, praying that his
+holiness would grant to the Portuguese crown all that it could conquer,
+from Cape Bojador to the Indies, together with plenary indulgence for
+those who should die while engaged in such conquests. The Pope granted
+these requests. "And now," says a Portuguese historian, "with this
+apostolic grace, with the breath of royal favor, and already with the
+applause of the people, the Prince pursued his purpose with more courage
+and with greater outlay."
+
+In 1442 the Moors whom Antonio Goncalvez had captured in the previous
+year promised to give black slaves in ransom for themselves if he would
+take them back to their own country; and the Prince, approving of this,
+ordered Goncalvez to set sail immediately, "insisting as the foundation
+of the matter, that if Goncalvez should not be able to obtain so many
+negroes (as had been mentioned) in exchange for the three Moors, yet
+that he should take them; for whatever number he should get, he would
+gain souls, because the negroes might be converted to the faith, which
+could not be managed with the Moors." Goncalvez obtained ten black
+slaves, some gold-dust, a target of buffalo-hide, and some ostrich eggs
+in exchange for two of the Moors, and, returning with his cargo, excited
+general wonderment on account of the color of the slaves. These, then,
+we may presume, were the first black slaves that had made their
+appearance in the peninsula since the extinction of the old slavery.
+
+I am not ignorant that there are reasons for alleging that negroes had
+before this era been seized and carried to Seville. The _Ecclesiastical
+and Secular Annals_ of that city, under the date 1474, record that negro
+slaves abounded there, and that the fifths levied on them produced
+considerable gains to the royal revenue; it is also mentioned that there
+had been traffic of this kind in the days of Don Enrique III, about
+1399, but that it had since then fallen into the hands of the
+Portuguese. The chronicler states that the negroes of Seville were
+treated very kindly from the time of King Enrique, being allowed to keep
+their dances and festivals; and that one of them was named _mayoral_ of
+the rest, who protected them against their masters and before the courts
+of law, and also settled their own private quarrels. There is a letter
+from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474 to a celebrated negro, Juan
+de Valladolid, commonly called the "Negro Count," nominating him to this
+office of mayoral of the negroes, which runs thus: "For the many good,
+loyal, and signal services which you have done us, and do each day, and
+because we know your sufficiency, ability, and good disposition, we
+constitute you mayoral and judge of all the negroes and mulattoes, free
+or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble city of Seville, and
+throughout the whole archbishopric thereof, and that the said negroes
+and mulattoes may not hold any festivals nor pleadings among themselves,
+except before you, Juan de Valladolid, negro, our judge and mayoral of
+the said negroes and mulattoes; and we command that you, and you only,
+should take cognizance of the disputes, pleadings, marriages, and other
+things which may take place among them, forasmuch as you are a person
+sufficient for that office, and deserving of your power, and you know
+the laws and ordinances which ought to be kept, and we are informed that
+you are of noble lineage among the said negroes."
+
+But the above merely shows that in the year 1474 there were many negroes
+in Seville, and that laws and ordinances had been made about them. These
+negroes might all, however, have been imported into Seville since the
+Portuguese discoveries. True it is that in the times of Don Enrique III,
+and during Bethencourt's occupation of the Canary Islands, slaves from
+thence had been brought to France and Spain; but these islanders were
+not negroes, and it certainly may be doubted whether any negroes were
+imported into Seville previous to 1443.
+
+Returning to the course of Portuguese affairs, a historian of that
+nation informs us that the gold obtained by Goncalvez "awakened, as it
+always does, covetousness"; and there is no doubt that it proved an
+important stimulus to further discovery. The next year Nuno Tristam went
+farther down the African coast; and, off Adeget, one of the Arguim
+Islands, captured eighty natives, whom he brought to Portugal. These,
+however, were not negroes, but Azeneghis.
+
+The tide of popular opinion was now not merely turned, but was rushing
+in full flow, in favor of Prince Henry and his discoveries. The
+discoverers were found to come back rich in slaves and other
+commodities; whereas it was remembered that, in former wars and
+undertakings, those who had been engaged in them had generally returned
+in great distress. Strangers, too, now came from afar, scenting the
+prey. A new mode of life, as the Portuguese said, had been found out;
+and "the greater part of the kingdom was moved with a sudden desire to
+follow this way to Guinea."
+
+In 1444 a company was formed at Lagos, who received permission from the
+Prince to undertake discovery along the coast of Africa, paying him a
+certain portion of any gains which they might make. This has been
+considered as a company founded for carrying on the slave trade; but the
+evidence is by no means sufficient to show that its founders meant such
+to be its purpose. It might rather be compared to an expedition sent
+out, as we should say in modern times, with letters of marque, in which,
+however, the prizes chiefly hoped for were not ships nor merchandise,
+but men. The only thing of any moment, however, which the expedition
+accomplished was to attack successfully the inhabitants of the islands
+Nar and Tider, and to bring back about two hundred slaves. I grieve to
+say that there is no evidence of Prince Henry's putting a check to any
+of these proceedings; but, on the contrary, it appears that he rewarded
+with large honors Lancarote, one of the principal men of this
+expedition, and received his own fifth of the slaves. Yet I have
+scarcely a doubt that the words of the historian are substantially
+true--that discovery, not gain, was still the Prince's leading idea. We
+have an account from an eye-witness of the partition of the slaves
+brought back by Lancarote, which, as it is the first transaction of the
+kind on record, is worthy of notice, more especially as it may enable
+the reader to understand the motives of the Prince and of other men of
+those times. It is to be found in the _Chronicle_, before referred to,
+of Azurara. The merciful chronicler is smitten to the heart at the
+sorrow he witnesses, but still believes it to be for good, and that he
+must not let his mere earthly commiseration get the better of his piety.
+
+"O thou heavenly Father," he exclaims, "who, with thy powerful hand,
+without movement of thy divine essence, governest all the infinite
+company of thy holy city, and who drawest together all the axles of the
+upper worlds, divided into nine spheres, moving the times of their long
+and short periods as it pleases thee! I implore thee that my tears may
+not condemn my conscience, for not its law, but our common humanity,
+constrains my humanity to lament piteously the sufferings of these
+people (slaves). And if the brute animals, with their mere bestial
+sentiments, by a natural instinct, recognize the misfortunes of their
+like, what must this by human nature do, seeing thus before my eyes this
+wretched company, remembering that I myself am of the generation of the
+sons of Adam! The other day, which was the eighth of August, very early
+in the morning, by reason of the heat, the mariners began to bring to
+their vessels, and, as they had been commanded, to draw forth those
+captives to take them out of the vessel: whom, placed together on that
+plain, it was a marvellous sight to behold; for among them there were
+some of a reasonable degree of whiteness, handsome and well made; others
+less white, resembling leopards in their color; others as black as
+Ethiopians, and so ill-formed, as well in their faces as their bodies,
+that it seemed to the beholders as if they saw the forms of a lower
+hemisphere.
+
+"But what heart was that, how hard soever, which was not pierced with
+sorrow, seeing that company: for some had sunken cheeks, and their faces
+bathed in tears, looking at each other; others were groaning very
+dolorously, looking at the heights of the heavens, fixing their eyes
+upon them, crying out loudly, as if they were asking succor from the
+Father of nature; others struck their faces with their hands, throwing
+themselves on the earth; others made their lamentations in songs,
+according to the customs of their country, which, although we could not
+understand their language, we saw corresponded well to the height of
+their sorrow. But now, for the increase of their grief, came those who
+had the charge of the distribution, and they began to put them apart one
+from the other, in order to equalize the portions, wherefore it was
+necessary to part children and parents, husbands and wives, and
+brethren from each other. Neither in the partition of friends and
+relations was any law kept, only each fell where the lot took him. O
+powerful Fortune! who goest hither and thither with thy wheels,
+compassing the things of the world as it pleaseth thee, if thou canst,
+place before the eyes of this miserable nation some knowledge of the
+things that are to come after them, that they may receive some
+consolation in the midst of their great sadness! and you others who have
+the business of this partition, look with pity on such great misery, and
+consider how can those be parted whom you cannot disunite! Who will be
+able to make this partition without great difficulty? for while they
+were placing in one part the children that saw their parents in another,
+the children sprang up perseveringly and fled to them; the mothers
+enclosed their children in their arms and threw themselves with them on
+the ground, receiving wounds with little pity for their own flesh, so
+that their offspring might not be torn from them!
+
+"And so, with labor and difficulty, they concluded the partition, for,
+besides the trouble they had with the captives, the plain was full of
+people, as well of the place as of the villages and neighborhood around,
+who in that day gave rest to their hands, the mainstay of their
+livelihood, only to see this novelty. And as they looked upon these
+things, some deploring, some reasoning upon them, they made such a
+riotous noise as greatly to disturb those who had the management of this
+distribution. The Infante was there upon a powerful horse, accompanied
+by his people, looking out his share, but as a man who for his part did
+not care for gain, for, of the forty-six souls which fell to his fifth,
+he speedily made his choice, as all his principal riches were in his
+contentment, considering with great delight the salvation of those souls
+which before were lost. And certainly his thought was not vain, for as
+soon as they had knowledge of our language they readily became
+Christians; and I, who have made this history in this volume, have seen
+in the town of Lagos young men and young women, the sons and grandsons
+of those very captives, born in this land, as good and as true
+Christians as if they had lineally descended, since the commencement of
+the law of Christ, from those who were first baptized."
+
+The good Azurara wished that these captives might have some foresight
+of the things to happen after their death. I do not think, however, that
+it would have proved much consolation to them to have foreseen that they
+were almost the first of many millions to be dealt with as they had
+been; for, in this year 1444, Europe may be said to have made a distinct
+beginning in the slave trade, henceforth to spread on all sides, like
+the waves upon stirred water, and not, like them, to become fainter and
+fainter as the circles widen.
+
+In 1445 an expedition was fitted out by Prince Henry himself, and the
+command given to Gonsalvo de Cintra, who was unsuccessful in an attack
+on the natives near Cape Blanco. He and some other of the principal men
+of the expedition lost their lives. These were the first Portuguese who
+died in battle on that coast. In the same year the Prince sent out three
+other vessels. The captains received orders from the Infante, Don Pedro,
+who was then Regent of Portugal, to enter the river D'Oro, and make all
+endeavors to convert the natives to the faith, and even, if they should
+not receive baptism, to make peace and alliance with them. This did not
+succeed. It is probable that the captains found negotiation of any kind
+exceedingly tame and apparently profitless in comparison with the
+pleasant forays made by their predecessors. The attempt, however, shows
+much intelligence and humanity on the part of those in power in
+Portugal. That the instructions were sincere is proved by the fact of
+this expedition returning with only one negro, gained in ransom, and a
+Moor who came of his own accord to see the Christian country.
+
+This same year 1445 is signalized by a great event in the progress of
+discovery along the African coast. Dinis Dyaz, called by Barros and the
+historians who followed him Dinis Fernandez, sought employment from the
+Infante, and, being intrusted by him with the command of a vessel,
+pushed boldly down the coast, and passed the river Sanaga (Senegal),
+which divides the Azeneghis--whom the first discoverers always called
+Moors--from the negroes of Jalof. The inhabitants were much astonished
+at the presence of the Portuguese vessel on their coasts, and at first
+took it for a fish or a bird or a phantasm; but when in their rude
+boats--hollowed logs--they neared it, and saw that there were men in it,
+judiciously concluding that it was a more dangerous thing than fish or
+bird or phantasm, they fled. Dinis Fernandez, however, captured four of
+them off that coast, but as his object was discovery, not slave-hunting,
+he went on till he discovered Cape Verd, and then returned to his
+country, to be received with much honor and favor by Prince Henry. These
+four negroes taken by Dinis Fernandez were the first taken in their own
+country by the Portuguese. That the Prince was still engaged in high
+thoughts of discovery and conversion we may conclude from observing that
+he rewarded and honored Dinis Fernandez as much as if he had brought him
+large booty; for the Prince "thought little of whatever he could do for
+those who came to him with these signs and tokens of another greater
+hope which he entertained."
+
+In this case, as in others, we should do great injustice if we supposed
+that Prince Henry had any of the pleasure of a slave-dealer in obtaining
+these negroes: it is far more probable that he valued them as persons
+capable of furnishing intelligence, and, perhaps, of becoming
+interpreters, for his future expeditions. Not that, without these
+especial motives, he would have thought it anything but great gain for a
+man to be made a slave, if it were the means of bringing him into
+communion with the Church.
+
+After this, several expeditions, which did not lead to much, occupied
+the Prince's time till 1447. In that year a fleet, large for those
+times, of fourteen vessels, was fitted out at Lagos by the people there,
+and the command given by Prince Henry to Lancarote. The object seems to
+have been, from a speech that is recorded of Lancarote's, to make war
+upon the Azeneghi Moors, and especially to take revenge for the defeat
+before mentioned which Gonsalvo de Cintra suffered in 1445 near Cape
+Blanco. That purpose effected, Lancarote went southward, extending the
+discovery of the coast to the Gambia. In the course of his proceedings
+on that coast we find again that Prince Henry's instructions insisted
+much upon the maintenance of peace with the natives. Another instance of
+the same disposition on his part deserves to be especially recorded. The
+expedition had been received in a friendly manner at Gomera, one of the
+Canary Islands. Notwithstanding this kind reception, some of the natives
+were taken prisoners. On their being brought to Portugal, Prince Henry
+had them clothed and afterward set at liberty in the place from which
+they had been taken.
+
+This expedition under Lancarote had no great result. The Portuguese went
+a little farther down the coast than they had ever been before, but they
+did not succeed in making friends of the natives, who had already been
+treated in a hostile manner by some Portuguese from Madeira. Neither did
+the expedition make great spoil of any kind. They had got into feuds
+with the natives, and were preparing to attack them, when a storm
+dissipated their fleet and caused them to return home.
+
+It appears, I think, from the general course of proceedings of the
+Portuguese in those times, that they considered there was always war
+between them and the Azeneghi Moors--that is, in the territory from
+Ceuta as far as the Senegal River; but that they had no declared
+hostility against the negroes of Jalof, or of any country farther south,
+though skirmishes would be sure to happen from ill-understood attempts
+at friendship on the one side, and just or needless fears on the other.
+
+The last public enterprise of which Prince Henry had the direction was
+worthy to close his administration of the affairs relating to Portuguese
+discovery. He caused two ambassadors to be despatched to the King of the
+Cape Verd territory, to treat of peace and to introduce the Christian
+faith. One of the ambassadors, a Danish gentleman, was treacherously
+killed by the natives, and upon that the other returned, having
+accomplished nothing.
+
+Don Alfonso V, the nephew of Prince Henry, now took the reins of
+government, and the future expeditions along the coast of Africa
+proceeded in his name. Still it does not appear that Prince Henry ceased
+to have power and influence in the management of African affairs; and
+the first thing that the King did in them was to enact that no one
+should pass Cape Bojador without a license from Prince Henry. Some time
+between 1448 and 1454 a fortress was built in one of the islands of
+Arguim, which islands had already become a place of bargain for gold and
+negro slaves. This was the first Portuguese establishment on the coast
+of Africa. It seems that a system of trade was now established between
+the Portuguese and the negroes.
+
+
+
+
+COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
+
+A.D. 1414
+
+RICHARD LODGE
+
+
+  During the forty years of the second great schism in the
+  Roman Catholic Church, 1378-1417, different parties adhered
+  to different popes, of whom there were sometimes two or more
+  simultaneously in office. The French cardinals preferred
+  Avignon--to which the holy see had been removed in 1309--as
+  the seat of the pope, the Italian cardinals preferred Rome,
+  and two lines of popes were consequently chosen. This
+  division proved extremely injurious to the papal power and
+  authority.
+
+  Meanwhile there were various efforts for reform in the
+  Church, among the most notable movements being those led by
+  John Wycliffe in England and John Huss on the Continent. At
+  last a council was called to decide who was the rightful
+  claimant to the papal throne. The council assembled at Pisa,
+  Italy, in 1409, but recognized neither of the then rival
+  popes--Gregory XII and Benedict XIII--Alexander V being
+  elected in their stead. The deposed popes, however, would
+  not give up their rule, and so the action of the council
+  added to the difficulty, since there were now three popes
+  instead of two.
+
+  Alexander V died ten months after his election, and the
+  cardinals chose as his successor Cardinal Cossa, who took
+  the name of John XXIII. The Church remained as much divided
+  as before. In 1412 Pope John, who was a shrewd and politic
+  man, opened at Rome a council for the reformation of the
+  Church, but there seems to have been little serious purpose
+  either on the part of John himself or of the ecclesiastics
+  who assembled; and practically nothing was done.
+
+  John was more concerned about his political relations with
+  various sovereigns. He was at war with Ladislaus, King of
+  Naples, who soon drove him from Rome. John fled to Florence,
+  and appealed to Sigismund, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
+  for assistance. But the Emperor would aid him only on
+  condition that the Pope should summon a new council to some
+  German city, in order to end the schism. At last John issued
+  a formal summons for a council to meet at Constance on
+  November 1, 1414. Before it assembled, Ladislaus died, and
+  Sigismund determined to conduct the council in the interest
+  of his imperial dignity and that of the German kingship,
+  which he also held.
+
+The Council of Constance, like that of Pisa, had two very obvious
+questions to consider: (1) The restoration of unity; and (2), if the
+reforming party could have its way, the reform of the Church in its head
+and members. But circumstances forced the council to consider a third
+question, which had never been even touched in the discussions at Pisa.
+This was reformation in its widest sense; not merely a constitutional
+change in the relations of pope and hierarchy, but a vital change in
+dogma and ritual. This question was brought to the front by the
+so-called Hussite movement in Bohemia. The fundamental issues involved
+were those which have been at the bottom of most subsequent disputes in
+the Christian Church.
+
+How far was the Christianity of the day unlike the Christianity to be
+found in the record of Christ and his apostles? And the difference, if
+any, was it a real and necessary difference consequent on the
+development of society, or was it the result of abuses and innovations
+introduced by fallible men? The orthodox took their stand upon the unity
+and authority of the Church. The Church was the true foundation of
+Christ and the inheritor of his spirit. Therefore what the Church
+believed and taught, that alone was the true Christian doctrine; and the
+forms and ceremonies of the Church were the necessary aids to faith. The
+reformers, on the other hand, looked to Scripture for the fundamental
+rules of life and conduct. Any deviation from these rules, no matter on
+what authority, must be superfluous and might very probably be harmful.
+
+The Council of Constance is one of the most notable assemblies in the
+history of the world. In the number and fame of its members, in the
+importance of its objects, and, above all, in the dramatic interest of
+its records, it has few rivals. It is like the meeting of two worlds,
+the old and the new, the mediaeval and the modern. We find there
+represented views which have hardly yet been fully accepted, which have
+occupied the best minds of succeeding centuries; at the same time, the
+council itself and its ceremonial carry us back to the times of the
+Roman Empire, when church and state were scarcely yet dual, and when
+Christianity was coextensive with one united empire. At Constance all
+the ideas, religious and political, of the Middle Ages seem to be put
+upon their trial. If that trial had ended in condemnation, there could
+be no fitter point to mark the division between mediaeval and modern
+history. But the verdict was acquittal, or at least a partial aquittal;
+and the old system was allowed, under modified conditions, a lease of
+life for another century. It must not be forgotten that there were
+great secular as well as ecclestiasical interests involved in the
+council. Princes and nobles were present as well as cardinals and
+prelates. The council may be regarded not only as a great assembly of
+the Church, but also as a great diet of the mediaeval empire.
+
+The man who had done more than anyone to procure the summons of the
+council, and whose interests were most closely bound up in its success,
+was Sigismund, King of the Romans and potential Emperor. He was eager to
+terminate the schism, and to bring about such a reform in the Church as
+would prevent the recurrence of similar scandals. But his motive in this
+was not merely disinterested devotion to the interests of the Church. He
+wished to revive the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire, and to gratify
+his own personal vanity by posing as the secular head of Christendom and
+the arbiter of its disputes. More especially he wished to restore the
+authority of the monarchy in Germany, and to put an end to that anarchic
+independence of the princes of which the recent schism was both the
+illustration and the result.
+
+In pursuing this aim he was confronted by the champions of "liberty" and
+princely interests, who were represented at Constance by the Archbishop
+of Mainz and Frederick of Hapsburg, Count of Tyrol. The Archbishop, John
+of Nassau, had been prominent in effecting and prolonging the schism in
+the Empire. He was a firm supporter of John XXIII, and had no interest
+in attending the council except to thwart the designs of the King, whom
+he had been the last to accept. Frederick of Tyrol was the youngest son
+of that duke Leopold who had fallen at Sempach in the war with the
+Swiss. Of his father's possessions Frederick had inherited Tyrol and the
+Swabian lands, and the propinquity of his territories made him a
+powerful personage at Constance. His family was the chief rival of the
+house of Luxemburg for ascendency in Eastern Germany, and he himself
+seems to have cherished a personal grudge against Sigismund. To these
+enemies Sigismund could oppose two loyal allies, the elector palatine
+Lewis, who had completely abandoned the anti-Luxemburg policy pursued by
+his father, Rupert, and Frederick of Hohenzollern, the most prominent
+representative of national sentiment in Germany, who had already given
+in Brandenburg an example of that restoration of order which he wished
+Sigismund to effect throughout his dominions.
+
+Of the clerical members of the council the most prominent at the
+commencement was the pope John XXIII. He had been forced by his
+difficulties in Italy to issue the summons, but as the time for the
+meeting approached he felt more and more misgiving. His object was to
+maintain himself in office; but he was conscious that neither Sigismund
+nor the cardinals would hesitate to throw him over if he stood in the
+way of the restoration of unity. He therefore allied himself with
+Sigismund's opponents, the Elector of Mainz and Frederick of Tyrol, and
+spared no pains to bring about dissension between Sigismund and the
+council.
+
+The assembled clergy may be divided roughly into two parties, the
+reformers, and the conservative or ultramontane party. The reformers
+were not in favor of any radical change in the Church. They were, if
+anything, more vehemently opposed than their antagonists to the
+doctrines of Wycliffe and Huss. Such reform as they desired was
+aristocratic rather than democratic. They had no intention of weakening
+the authority of the Church; but within the Church they desired to
+remove gross abuses, and to strengthen the hierarchy as against the
+papacy. Their chief contention was that a general council has supreme
+authority, even over the pope, and they wished such councils to meet at
+regular intervals. By this means papal absolutism would be limited by a
+sort of oligarchical parliament within the Church. The conservatives, on
+the other hand, consisting chiefly of the cardinals and Italian
+prelates, had no wish to alter a system under which they enjoyed
+material advantages. Their object, as it had been at Pisa, was to
+restore the union of the Church, but to defeat, or at any rate postpone,
+any schemes of reform.
+
+The council was opened on November 5th, but the meeting was only formal,
+and no real business was transacted for a month. Meanwhile Huss had been
+followed to Constance by the representatives of the orthodox party in
+Bohemia, who brought a formidable list of charges against the reformer.
+John XXIII at once saw in this an opportunity for embroiling the council
+with Sigismund. Adroitly keeping himself in the background, he allowed
+the cardinals to take the lead in the matter. They summoned Huss to
+appear before them, and in spite of his protest that he was only
+answerable to the whole council, they committed him to prison. The news
+that his safe-conduct had been so insultingly disregarded reached
+Sigismund as he was starting for Constance after the coronation ceremony
+at Aachen.
+
+He arrived on Christmas Day, and at once demanded that Huss should be
+released. The Pope excused himself, and threw the blame on the
+cardinals. To the King's right to protect his subject the cardinals
+opposed their duty to suppress heresy. In high dudgeon, Sigismund
+declared that he would leave the council to its fate, and actually set
+out on his return journey. The Pope was jubilant at the success of his
+wiles. But Sigismund's friends, and especially Frederick of
+Hohenzollern, urged him not to sacrifice the interests of Germany and of
+Christendom for the sake of a heretic. This advice, and the feeling that
+his personal reputation was staked on the success of the council,
+triumphed. Sigismund returned to Constance, and Huss remained a
+prisoner. From this moment John XXIII began to despair.
+
+The Pope's position became worse when the council, copying the procedure
+of the universities, began to discuss matters, not in a general
+assembly, but each nation separately. This deprived John of the
+advantage which he hoped to gain from the numerical majority of Italian
+prelates attending the council. Four nations organized themselves:
+Italians, French, Germans, and English. Over the last three John XXIII
+had no hold whatever. To his disgust they treated him, not as the
+legitimate pope, whose authority was to be vindicated against his
+rivals, but as one of three schismatic popes, whose retirement was a
+necessary condition of the restoration of unity. When he tried to evade
+their demand, they brought unanswerable charges against his personal
+character and threatened to depose him.
+
+He tried to disarm hostility by declaring his readiness to resign if the
+other popes would do the same. His promise was welcomed with enthusiasm,
+but neither Sigismund nor his supporters were softened by it. In spite
+of the vehement protests of the Elector of Mainz that he would obey no
+pope but John XXIII, the proposal was made to proceed to a new
+election. John had to fall back upon his last expedient. If he departed
+from Constance he might throw the council into fatal confusion; at the
+worst he could maintain himself as an antipope, as Gregory and Benedict
+had done against the Council of Pisa. His ally Frederick of Tyrol was
+prepared to assist him. Frederick arranged a tournament outside the
+walls; and while this absorbed public interest, the Pope escaped from
+Constance in the disguise of a groom, and made his way to Schaffhausen,
+a strong castle of the Hapsburg Count.
+
+For the moment John XXIII seemed not unlikely to gain his end. Constance
+was thrown into confusion by the news of his flight. The mob rushed to
+pillage the papal residence. The Italian and Austrian prelates prepared
+to leave the city, and the council was on the verge of dissolution. But
+Sigismund's zeal and energy succeeded in averting such a disaster. He
+restored order in the city, persuaded the prelates to remain, and took
+prompt measures to punish his rebellious vassal. An armed force under
+Frederick of Hohenzollern succeeded in capturing not only John XXIII,
+but also Frederick of Tyrol. The latter was compelled to undergo public
+humiliation, and to hand over his territories to his suzerain on
+condition that his life should be spared. No such exercise of imperial
+power had been witnessed in Germany since the days of the Hohenstaufen,
+and Sigismund chose this auspicious moment to secure a powerful
+supporter within the electoral college by handing over the electorate of
+Brandenburg to Frederick of Nuremberg, April 30, 1415. He thus
+established a dynasty which was destined to play a great part in German
+history, and ultimately to create a new German empire.
+
+The unsuccessful flight of John XXIII not only enabled Sigismund to
+assume a more authoritative position in the council and in Germany; it
+also sealed his own fate. The council had no longer any hesitation in
+proceeding to the formal deposition of the Pope May 29, 1415. As the two
+popes who had been deposed at Pisa had never been recognized at
+Constance, the Church was now without a head. But instead of hastening
+to fill the vacancy, the council turned aside to the suppression of
+heresy and the trial of Huss. On three occasions, the 5th, 7th, and 8th
+of June, Huss was heard before a general session. No point in his
+teaching excited greater animadversion than his contention that a
+priest, whether pope or prelate, forfeited his office by the commission
+of mortal sin. With great cunning his accusers drew him on to extend
+this doctrine to temporal princes. This was enough to complete the
+alienation of Sigismund, and after the third day's trial he was the
+first to pronounce in favor of condemnation. The last obstacle in the
+way of the prosecution was thus removed, and Huss was burned in a meadow
+outside the city walls on July 6, 1415.
+
+With the death of Huss ends the first and most eventful period of the
+Council of Constance. Within these seven or eight months Sigismund and
+the reforming party, thanks to the division of the council into nations,
+seemed to have gained a signal success. Sigismund had purchased his
+triumph by breaking his pledge to Huss, and for this he was to pay a
+heavy penalty in the subsequent disturbances in Bohemia. But for the
+moment these were not foreseen, and Sigismund was jubilantly eager to
+prosecute his scheme. Warned by the experience of its predecessor at
+Pisa, the Council of Constance was careful not to put too much trust in
+paper decrees. John XXIII was not only deposed, but a prisoner. Gregory
+XII had given a conditional promise of resignation, and had so few
+supporters as to be of slight importance. But Benedict XIII was still
+strong in the allegiance of the Spanish kingdoms, and unless they could
+be detached from his cause there was little prospect of ending the
+schism.
+
+This task Sigismund volunteered to undertake, and he also proposed to
+avert the impending war between England and France, to reconcile the
+Burgundian and Armagnac parties in the latter country, and to negotiate
+peace between the King of Poland and the Teutonic Knights. It would,
+indeed, be a revival of the imperial idea if its representative could
+thus act as a general mediator in European quarrels. The council
+welcomed the offer with enthusiasm, and showed their loyalty to
+Sigismund by deciding to postpone all important questions till his
+return. And this decision was actually adhered to. During the sixteen
+months of Sigismund's absence--July 15, 1415, to January 27, 1417--only
+two prominent subjects were considered by the council. One was the trial
+of Jerome of Prague, which was a mere corollary of that of Huss, and
+ended in a similar sentence. The other was the thorny question raised by
+the proposed condemnation of the writings of Jean Petit, a Burgundian
+partisan who had defended the murder of the Duke of Orleans. The leader
+of the attack upon Jean Petit was Gerson, the learned and eloquent
+chancellor of the University of Paris. But so completely had the matter
+become a party question, and so great was the influence of the Duke of
+Burgundy, that the council could not be induced to go further than a
+general condemnation of the doctrine of lawful tyrannicide; and Gerson's
+activity in the matter provoked such ill-will that after the close of
+the council he could not venture to return to France, which was then
+completely under Burgundian and English domination.
+
+It is impossible to narrate here the story of Sigismund's journey,
+though it abounds with illustrations of his impulsive character and of
+the attitude of the western states toward the imperial pretensions. It
+furnished conclusive proofs, if any were needed, that however the
+council, for its own ends, might welcome the authority of a secular
+head, national sentiment was far too strongly developed to give any
+chance of success to a projected revival of the mediaeval empire. As
+regards his immediate object, Sigismund was able to achieve some
+results. He failed to induce Benedict XIII to abdicate, but the quibbles
+of the veteran intriguer exhausted the patience of his supporters, and
+at a conference at Narbonne the Spanish kings agreed to desert him and
+to adhere to the Council of Constance, December, 1415. But Sigismund's
+more ambitious schemes came to nothing. So far from preventing a war
+between England and France, he only forwarded an alliance between Henry
+V and the Duke of Burgundy; and though he may have done this in the hope
+of forcing peace upon France, the result was to make the war more
+disastrous and prolonged.
+
+When Sigismund reappeared in Constance, January 27, 1417, he found that
+the state of affairs both in Germany and in the council had altered for
+the worse. Frederick of Tyrol had returned to his dominions and had been
+welcomed by his subjects.
+
+The Archbishop of Mainz had renewed his intrigues, and an attempt had
+even been made to release John XXIII. With the Elector Palatine,
+formerly his loyal supporter, Sigismund had quarrelled on money matters,
+and it seemed possible that the four Rhenish electors would form a
+league against Sigismund as they had done against Wenceslaus in 1400.
+Still more galling was his loss of influence in the council. The
+adhesion of the Spanish kingdoms had been followed by the arrival of
+Spanish prelates, who formed a fifth nation and strengthened the party
+opposed to reform. The war between England and France had created a
+quarrel between the two nations at Constance, and the French deserted
+the cause they had once championed rather than vote with their enemies.
+
+Sigismund could only rely upon the English and the Germans; and the
+question which agitated the council was one of vital importance. Which
+was to come first, the election of a new pope or the adoption of a
+scheme of ecclesiastical reform? The conservatives contended that the
+Church could hardly be said to exist without its head; that no reform
+would be valid until the normal constitution of the Church was restored.
+On the other hand, it was urged that no reform was possible unless the
+supremacy of a general council was fully recognized; that certain
+questions could be more easily discussed and settled during a vacancy;
+that if the reforms were agreed upon, a new pope could be pledged to
+accept them, whereas a pope elected at once could prevent all reform.
+Party spirit ran extremely high, and it seemed almost impossible to
+effect an agreement. Sigismund was openly denounced as a heretic, while
+he in turn threatened to imprison the cardinals for contumacy.
+
+But gradually the balance turned against the reformers. Some of the
+leading German bishops were bribed to change their votes. The head of
+the English representatives, Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury, died at
+the critical moment, and the influence of Henry Beaufort, the future
+cardinal, induced the English nation to support an immediate election.
+It was agreed that a new pope should be chosen at once, and that the
+council should then proceed to the work of reform. But the only
+preliminary concession that Sigismund and his party could obtain was the
+issue of a decree in October, 1417, that another council should meet
+within five years, a second within seven years, and that afterward a
+council should be regularly held every ten years.
+
+For the new election it was decided that the twenty-three cardinals
+should be joined by thirty delegates of the council, six from each
+nation. The conclave met on November 8th, and three days later their
+choice fell upon Cardinal Oddo Colonna, who took the name of Martin V.
+Even the defeated party could not refrain from sharing in the general
+enthusiasm at the restoration of unity after forty years of schism. But
+their fears as to the ultimate fate of the cause of reform were fully
+justified. Soon after his election Martin declared that it was impious
+to appeal to a council against a papal decision. Such a declaration, as
+Gerson said, nullified the acts of the councils of Pisa and Constance,
+including the election of the Pope himself. In their indignation the
+members made a strong appeal to the Pope to fulfil the conditions agreed
+upon before his election. But Martin had a weapon to hand which had been
+furnished by the council itself.
+
+It was the division into nations that had led to the fall of John XXIII,
+and it was the same division into nations that had ruined the prospects
+of reform. The Pope now drew up a few scanty articles of reform, which
+he offered as separate concordats to the French, Germans, and English.
+It was a dangerous expedient for a pope to adopt, because it seemed to
+imply the separate existence of national churches; but it answered its
+immediate purpose. Martin could contend that there was no longer any
+work for the council to do, and he dissolved it in May, 1418.
+
+He set out for Italy, where a difficult task awaited him. Papal
+authority in Rome had ceased with the flight of John XXIII in 1414.
+Sigismund offered the Pope a residence in some Germany city, but Martin
+wisely refused. The support of his own family, the Colonnas, enabled him
+to reenter Rome in 1421. By that time almost all traces of the schism
+had disappeared. Gregory XII was dead; John XXIII had recently died in
+Florence; Benedict XIII still held out in his fortress of Peniscola, but
+was impotent in his isolation.
+
+
+
+
+TRIAL AND BURNING OF JOHN HUSS
+
+THE HUSSITE WARS
+
+A.D. 1415
+
+RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
+
+
+  Among the heralds of the Reformation, John Wycliffe, the
+  English Protestant who antedated Protestantism by a century
+  and a half, holds the first position in order of time. For
+  many years after the death of Wycliffe the movement which he
+  began continued to be, as it was at first, confined to
+  England; but at length it was to acquire a wider
+  significance and to enter upon its European extension.
+
+  Not long after his own day the spirit of Wycliffe--even
+  before knowledge of his work had crossed the Channel--had
+  come to a new birth on the Continent. And when some sparks
+  of Wycliffe's own fire were blown over the half of
+  Europe--even as far as Bohemia--the kindred fires which had
+  long burned in spite of all suppression were quickened into
+  a living and a spreading flame.
+
+  While then there was a direct and vital influence from the
+  work of the English reformer which gave to his teachings
+  partial identity with those of his Bohemian successors, the
+  movement led by these was still quite independent and
+  national.
+
+  The central figure of the Bohemian Reformation was John
+  Huss, or Hus, the son of a peasant. He was born in 1369 at
+  Husinetz--of which his own name is a contraction--in
+  Southern Bohemia. The principal events of his life, from the
+  time that he took his degree at the University of Prague
+  until his death at the stake, July 6, 1415, will be found in
+  Trench's sympathetic but discriminating narrative.
+
+If we look for the proper forerunners of Huss, his true spiritual
+ancestors, we shall find them in his own land, in a succession of
+earnest and faithful preachers--among these Militz (d. 1374) and Janow
+(d. 1394) stand out the most prominently--who had sown seed which could
+hardly have failed to bear fruit sooner or later, though no line of
+Wycliffe's writings had ever found its way to Bohemia. This land, not
+German, however it may have been early drawn into the circle of German
+interests, with a population Slavonic in the main, had first received
+the faith through the preaching of Greek monks. The Bohemian Church
+probably owed to this fact that, though incorporated from the first with
+the churches of the West, uses and customs prevailed in it--as the
+preaching in the mother tongue, the marriage of the clergy, communion in
+both kinds--which it only slowly and unwillingly relinquished. It was
+not till the fourteenth century that its lines were drawn throughout in
+exact conformity with those of Rome. All this deserves to be kept in
+mind; for it helps to account for the kindly reception which the seed
+sown by the later Bohemian reformers found, falling as this did in a
+soil to which it was not altogether strange.
+
+John Huss took in the year 1394 his degree as bachelor of theology in
+that University of Prague upon the fortunes of which he was destined to
+exercise so lasting an influence; and four years later, in 1398, he
+began to deliver lectures there. Huss had early taken his degree in a
+school higher than any school of man's. He himself has told us how he
+was once careless and disobedient, how the word of the Cross had taken
+hold of him with strength, and penetrated him through and through as
+with a mighty purifying fire. What he had learned in the school of
+Christ he could not keep to himself. Holding, in addition to his
+academical position, a lectureship founded by two pious laymen for the
+preaching of the Word in the Bohemian tongue (1401), he soon signalized
+himself by his diligence in breaking the bread of life to hungering
+souls, and his boldness in rebuking vice in high places as in low. So
+long as he confined himself to reproving the sins of the laity, he found
+little opposition, nay, rather support and applause. But when he brought
+the clergy and monks also within the circle of his condemnation, and
+began to upbraid them for their covetousness, their ambition, their
+luxury, their sloth, and for other vices, they turned resentfully upon
+him, and sought to undermine his authority, everywhere spreading reports
+of the unsoundness of his teaching.
+
+Let us see on what side he mainly exposed himself to charges such as
+these. Many things had recently wrought together to bring into nearness
+countries geographically so remote from one another as Bohemia and
+England. Anne, wife of our second Richard, was a sister of Wenceslaus,
+King of Bohemia. The two flourishing universities of Oxford and Prague
+were bound together by their common zeal for Realism. This may seem to
+us but a slight and fantastic bond; it was in those days a very strong
+one indeed. Young English scholars studied at Prague, young Bohemian at
+Oxford. Now, Oxford, long after Wycliffe's death, was full of interest
+for his doctrine; and among the many strangers sojourning there, it
+could hardly fail that some should imbibe opinions and bring back with
+them books of one whom they had there learned to know and to honor. Thus
+Jerome, called of Prague, on his return from the English university,
+gave a new impulse to the study of Wycliffe's writings, bearer as he was
+of several among these which had not hitherto travelled so far.
+
+This man, whose fortunes were so tragically bound up with those of Huss,
+who should share with him in the same fiery doom, was his junior by
+several years; his superior in eloquence, in talents, in gifts--for
+certainly Huss was not a theologian of the first order; speculative
+theologian he was not at all--but notably his inferior in moderation and
+practical good-sense. Huss never shared in his friend's indiscriminate
+admiration of Wycliffe. When, in 1403, some forty-five theses, which
+either were or professed to be drawn from the writings of the English
+reformer, were brought before the university, that they might be
+condemned as heretical, Huss expressed himself with extreme caution and
+reserve. Many of these, he affirmed, were true when a man took them
+aright; but he could not say this of all. Not first at the Council of
+Constance, but long before, he had refused to undertake the
+responsibility of Wycliffe's teaching on the holy eucharist. But he did
+not conceal what he had learned from Wycliffe's writings. By these there
+had been opened to him a deeper glimpse into the corruptions of the
+Church, and its need of reformation in the head and in the members, than
+ever he had before obtained. His preaching, with the new accesses of
+insight which now were his, more than ever exasperated his foes.
+
+While matters were in this strained condition, events took place at
+Prague which are too closely connected with the story that we are
+telling, exercised too great an influence in bringing about the issues
+that lie before us, to allow us to pass them by, even though they may
+prove somewhat long to relate. The University of Prague, though recently
+founded--it only dated back to the year 1348--was now, next after those
+of Paris and Oxford, the most illustrious in Europe. Saying this I say
+much; for we must not measure the influence and authority of a
+university at that day by the influence and authority, great as these
+are, which it may now possess. This university, like that of Paris, on
+the pattern of which it had been modelled, was divided into four
+"nations"--four groups, that is, or families of scholars--each of these
+having in academical affairs a single collective vote. These nations
+were the Bavarian, the Saxon, the Polish, and the Bohemian. This does
+not appear at first an unfair division--two German and two Slavonic; but
+in practical working the Polish was so largely recruited from Silesia
+and other German or half-German lands that its vote was in fact German
+also.
+
+The Teutonic votes were thus as three to one, and the Bohemians, in
+their own land and in their own university, on every important matter
+hopelessly outvoted. When, by aid of this preponderance, the university
+was made to condemn the teaching of Wycliffe in those forty-five points,
+matters came to a crisis. Urged by Huss--who as a stout patriot, and an
+earnest lover of the Bohemian language and literature, had more than a
+theological interest in the matter--by Jerome, by a large number of the
+Bohemian nobility, King Wenceslaus published an edict whereby the
+relations of natives and foreigners were completely reversed. There
+should be henceforth three votes for the Bohemian nation, and only one
+for the three others. Such a shifting of the weight certainly appears as
+a redressing of one inequality by creating another. At all events it was
+so earnestly resented by the Germans, by professors and students alike,
+that they quitted the university in a body, some say of five thousand
+and some of thirty thousand, and founded the rival University of
+Leipsic, leaving no more than two thousand students at Prague. Full of
+indignation against Huss, whom they regarded as the prime author of this
+affront and wrong, they spread throughout Germany the most unfavorable
+reports of him and of his teaching.
+
+This exodus of the foreigners had left Huss, who was now rector of the
+university, with a freer field than before. But church matters at Prague
+did not mend; they became more confused and threatening every day,
+until presently Huss stood in open opposition with the hierarchy of his
+time. Pope John XXIII, having a quarrel with the King of Naples,
+proclaimed a crusade against him, with what had become a constant
+accompaniment of this--indulgences to the crusaders. But to denounce
+indulgences, as Huss with fierce indignation did now, was to wound Pope
+John in a most sensitive part. He was excommunicated at once, and every
+place which should harbor him stricken with an interdict. While matters
+were in this frame the Council of Constance was opened, which should
+appease all the troubles of Christendom and correct whatever was amiss.
+The Bohemian difficulty could not be omitted, and Huss was summoned to
+make answer at Constance for himself.
+
+He had not been there four weeks when he was required to appear before
+the Pope and cardinals, November 18, 1414. After a brief informal
+hearing he was committed to harsh durance, from which he never issued as
+a free man again. Sigismund, the German King and Emperor-elect, who had
+furnished Huss with a safe-conduct which should protect him, "going to
+the Council, tarrying at the Council, returning from the Council," was
+absent from Constance at the time, and heard with real displeasure how
+lightly regarded this promise and pledge of his had been.
+
+Some big words, too, he spoke, threatening to come himself and release
+the prisoner by force; but, being waited on by a deputation from the
+council, who represented to him that he, as a layman, in giving such a
+safe-conduct had exceeded his powers, and intruded into a region which
+was not his, Sigismund was convinced, or affected to be convinced.
+Doubtless the temptations to be convinced were strong. Had he insisted
+on the liberation of Huss, the danger was imminent that the council, for
+which he had labored so earnestly, would be broken up on the plea that
+its rightful freedom was denied it. He did not choose to run this risk,
+preferring to leave an everlasting blot upon his name.
+
+Some modern sophists assure us that this safe-conduct--or free pass, as
+they prefer to call it--engaged the imperial word for Huss' safety in
+going to the council, but for nothing more--a most perfidious document,
+if this is all which it undertook; for the words--I quote the more
+important of them in the original Latin--are as follows: "_ut ei
+transire, stare, morari, redire permittatis_." But the treachery was not
+in the document, and nobody at the time attempted to find it there. If
+this had not engaged the honor of the Emperor, what cause of complaint
+would he have had against the cardinals as having entangled him in a
+breach of his word? what need of their solemn ambassage to him? Untrue
+also is the assertion that this was so little regarded by Huss himself
+as a safe-conduct covering the whole period during which he should be
+exposed to the malice of his enemies that he never appealed to it or
+claimed protection from it. He did so appeal at this second formal
+hearing, June 7th, the first at which Sigismund was present. "I am
+here," he there said, "under the King's promise that I should return to
+Bohemia in safety"; while at his last, by a look and by a few like
+words, he brought the royal word-breaker to a blush, evident to all
+present, July 6th.
+
+But to return a little. More than seven months elapsed before Huss could
+obtain a hearing before the council. This was granted to him at last.
+Thrice heard, June 5, 7, 8, 1415--if, indeed, such tumultuary sittings,
+where the man speaking for his life, and for much more than his life,
+was continually interrupted and overborne by hostile voices, by loud
+cries of "Recant, recant!" may be reckoned as hearings at all--he bore
+himself, by the confession of all, with courage, meekness, and dignity.
+The charges brought against him were various; some so far-fetched as
+that urged by a Nominalist from the University of Paris--for Paris was
+Nominalist now--namely, that as a Realist he could not be sound on the
+doctrine of the eucharist. Others were vague enough, as that he had sown
+discord between the church and the state. Nor were accusations wanting
+which touched a really weak point in his teaching, namely, the
+subjective aspect which undoubtedly some aspects of it wore; as when he
+taught that not the baptized, but the predestinated to life, constituted
+the Church. Beset as he was by the most accomplished theologians of the
+age, the best or the worst advantage was sure to be made of any
+vulnerable side which he exposed.
+
+But there were charges against him with more in them of danger than
+these. The point which was really at issue between him and his
+adversaries concerned the relative authority of the Church and of
+Scripture. What they demanded of him was a retractation of all the
+articles brought against him, with an unconditional submission to the
+council. Some of the articles, he replied, charged him with teaching
+things which he had never taught, and he could not by this formal act of
+retractation admit that he had taught them. Let any doctrine of his be
+shown to be contrary to God's holy Word, and he would retract it; but
+such unconditional submission he could not yield.
+
+His fate was now sealed--that is, unless he could be induced to recant;
+in which event, though he did not know it, his sentence would have been
+degradation from the priesthood and a lifelong imprisonment. Many
+efforts up to the last moment were made by friend and foe to persuade
+him to this, but in vain. And now once more, July 6th, he is brought
+before the council, but this time for sentence and for doom. The
+sentence passed, his suffering begins. The long list of his heresies,
+among which they are not ashamed to include many which he has distinctly
+repudiated, is read out in his hearing. He is clothed with priestly
+garments, that these, piece by piece, and each with an appropriate
+insult malediction, may be stripped from him again. The sacred vessels
+are placed in his hands, that from him, "accursed Judas that he is,"
+they may be taken again. There is some difficulty in erasing his
+tonsure; but this difficulty with a little violence and cruelty is
+overcome. A tall paper cap, painted over with flames and devils, and
+inscribed "Heresiarch," is placed upon his head. This done, and his soul
+having been duly delivered to Satan, his body is surrendered to the
+secular arm. One last touch is not wanting. As men bind him to the
+stake, attention is called to the fact that his face is turned to the
+east. This honor must not be his, upon whom no sun of righteousness
+shall ever rise. He is unfastened, and refastened anew. All is borne
+with perfect meekness, in the thought and in the strength of Him who had
+borne so much more for sinners, the Just for the unjust; and so, in his
+fire-chariot of a painful martyrdom, Huss passes from our sight.
+
+Some may wonder that he, a reformer, should have been so treated by a
+council, itself also reforming, and with a man like Gerson--_Doctor
+Christianissimus_ was the title he bore--virtually at its head. But a
+little consideration will dispel this surprise, and lead us to the
+conclusion that a council less earnestly bent on reforms of its own
+would probably have dealt more mildly with him. His position and theirs,
+however we may ascribe alike to him and to them a desire to reform the
+Church, were fundamentally different. They, when they deposed a pope,
+where they proclaimed the general superiority of councils over popes,
+had no intention of diminishing one jot the Church's authority in
+matters of faith, but only of changing the seat of that authority,
+substituting an ecclesiastical aristocracy for an ecclesiastical
+monarchy--or despotism, as long since it had grown to be. And thus the
+more earnest the council was to carry out a reformation in discipline,
+the more eager was it also to make evident to all the world that it did
+not intend to touch doctrine, but would uphold this as it had received
+it. It is not then uncharitable to suspect that the leading men of the
+council--like those reformers at Geneva who a century and a half later,
+1553, sent Servetus to the stake--were not sorry to be able to give so
+signal an evidence of their zeal for the maintenance of the faith which
+they had received, as thus, in the condemnation of Huss, they had the
+opportunity of doing. Nor may we leave altogether out of account that
+the German element must of necessity have been strong in a council held
+on the shores of the Bodensee; while in his vindication of Bohemian
+nationality, perhaps an excessive vindication, Huss had offended and
+embittered the Germans to the uttermost.
+
+If any had flattered themselves that with the death of Huss the
+Reformation in Bohemia had also received its death-blow, they had not
+long to wait for a painful undeception. Words fail to describe the
+tempest of passionate indignation with which the tidings of his
+execution, followed within a year by that of Jerome, were received
+there. Both were honored as martyrs, and already, in the fierce
+exasperation of men's spirits against the authors of their doom, there
+was a prophecy of the unutterable woes which were even at the door. Some
+watchword by which his followers could know and be known--this
+watchword, if possible, a spell of power like that which Luther had
+found in the doctrine of justification by faith--was still wanting.
+One, however, was soon found; which indeed had this drawback, that it
+concerned a matter disciplinary rather than doctrinal, yet having a real
+value as a visible witness for the rights of the laity in the Church of
+Christ. So far as we know, Huss had not himself laid any special stress
+on communion under both kinds; but in 1414--he was then already at
+Constance--the subject had come to the forefront at Prague; and, being
+consulted, Huss had entirely approved of such communion as most
+conformable to the original institution and to the practice of the
+primitive Church. On the other hand, the council, learning the agitation
+of men's spirits in this direction, had declared what is called the
+"Concomitance"--that is, that wherever one kind was present, there was
+also the other, which being so, nothing was, indeed, withholden from the
+communicant through the withholding of the cup. At the same time the
+council had solemnly condemned as a heretic everyone who refused to
+submit himself to the decision of the Church in this matter, June 15,
+1415.
+
+But there was no temper of submission in Bohemia--least of all when the
+University of Prague gave its voice in favor of this demand. Wenceslaus,
+the well-intentioned but poor-spirited King, was quite unable to keep
+peace between the rival factions, and could only slip out of his
+difficulties by dying, August 16, 1419. Sigismund, his brother, was also
+his successor; but of one thing the Bohemians were at this time
+resolved; namely, that the royal betrayer of his word should not reign
+over them. And thus a condition of miserable anarchy followed, and, in
+the end, of open war; which, lasting for eleven years, could be matched
+by few wars in the cruelties and atrocities by which on both sides it
+was disgraced. In Ziska, their blind chief, the Hussites had a leader
+with a born genius for war. It was he who invented the movable
+wagon-fortress whereof we hear so much, against which the German
+chivalry would break as idle waves upon a rock. Three times crusading
+armies--for this name they bore, thinking with no serious opposition to
+enforce the decrees of the council--invaded Bohemia, to be thrice driven
+back with utter defeat, disgrace, and loss; the Hussites, who for a long
+while were content with merely repelling the invaders, after a while,
+and as the only way of conquering a peace, turning the tables, and
+wasting with fire and sword all neighboring German lands.
+
+A conflict so hideous could not long be waged without a rapid
+deterioration of all who were engaged in it. The spirit of Huss more and
+more departed from those who called themselves by his name. Intestine
+strifes devoured their strength. There were first the
+Moderates--Calixtines, Utraquists, or "Those of Prague," they were
+called--who, weary of the long struggle, were willing to return to the
+bosom of the Church if only the cup (_calix_), and thus communion under
+both kinds (_sub utraque_), were guaranteed to them, with two or three
+secondary matters. Not so the Taborites, who drew their name from a
+mountain fastness which they fortified and called Mount Tabor. These,
+the Ultras, the democratic radical party, separating themselves off as
+early as 1419, had left Huss and his teaching very far behind. Ignoring
+the whole historical development of Christianity, they demanded that a
+clean sweep should be made of everything in the Church's practice for
+which an express and literal warrant in Scripture could not be found.
+When at the Council of Basel an agreement was patched up with the
+Calixtines on the footing which I have just named, 1433, a few further
+promises being thrown in which might mean anything and, as the issue
+proved, did mean nothing, the Taborites would not listen to the
+compromise. Again they appealed to arms: but now their old comrades and
+allies had passed to the other side; and, defeated in battle, 1434,
+their stronghold taken and destroyed, 1453, their political power
+forever broken, they, too, as so many before and since, were doomed to
+learn that violence is weakness in disguise, and that the wrath of man
+worketh not the righteousness of God.
+
+Whether the Church of Rome made the concessions to the Calixtines which
+she did, with the intention of retracting them at the first opportunity,
+it is impossible to say. This, however, is certain, that half a dozen
+years had scarcely elapsed before these concessions were brought into
+question and dispute; while, in less than thirty, Pope Pius II formally
+withdrew altogether the papal recognition of them, 1462; though a
+struggle for their maintenance, not always unsuccessful, lasted on into
+the century ensuing.
+
+It was in truth a melancholy close of a movement so hopefully begun. And
+yet not altogether the close; for, indeed, nothing, in which any
+elements of true heroism are mingled, so disappears as to leave no
+traces of itself behind. If it does no more, it serves to feed the high
+tradition of the world--that most precious of all bequests to the
+present age from the ages which are behind it. But there was more than
+this. If much was consumed, yet not all. Something--and that the best
+worth the saving--was saved from the fires, having first been purified
+in them. The stormy zealots, as many as had taken the sword, had for the
+most part perished by the sword.
+
+But there were some who made for themselves a better future than the
+sword could have ever made. A feeble remnant, extricating themselves
+from the wreck and ruin of their party, and having been taught of God in
+his severest school, pious Calixtines, too, that were little content
+with the Compacts of Basel, a few stray Waldensians mingling with them,
+all these, drawing together in an evil time, refashioned and
+reconstituted themselves in humblest guise, though not in guise so
+humble that they could escape the cruel attentions of Rome. Seeking to
+build on a true scriptural foundation, with a scheme of doctrine, it may
+be, dogmatically incomplete--even as that of Huss himself had been--with
+their episcopate lost and never since recovered, the Unitas Fratrum, the
+Moravian Brethren, trampled and trodden down, but overcoming now, not by
+weapons of carnal warfare, but by the blood of the Cross, lived on to
+hail the breaking of a fairer dawn, and to be themselves greeted as
+witnesses for God, who in a dark and gloomy day, and having but a little
+strength, had kept his word, and not denied his name.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF HOHENZOLLERN ESTABLISHED
+IN BRANDENBURG
+
+A.D. 1415
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+
+  The German princely family of Hohenzollern, which ruled over
+  Brandenburg from 1415, has furnished the kings of Prussia
+  since 1701, and since 1871 those kings have also been German
+  emperors. The Hohenzollerns were originally owners of a
+  castle on the Upper Danube, at no great distance from the
+  ancestral seat of the Hapsburg family. They acquired
+  influence at the court of Swabia, and in 1192 had
+  established themselves in Nuremberg, where in that year
+  Frederick I became burggraf. When Rudolph I, founder of the
+  house of Hapsburg, finally defeated his rival, Ottocar of
+  Bohemia (1278), his cause was saved by the assistance of a
+  Hohenzollern--Frederick of Nuremberg.
+
+  The Hohenzollerns made fortunate marriages and shrewd
+  purchases and the descendants of Frederick I, succeeding to
+  his burggravate, in the course of time acquired great
+  estates in Franconia, Moravia, and Burgundy. Through their
+  increasing wealth--whereby in the fifteenth century they had
+  gained a position similar to that of the present
+  Rothschilds--and by use of their political abilities, they
+  attained commanding influence in the councils of the German
+  princes.
+
+  Such was the eminence of this powerful family at the time
+  when they acquired the electorate of Brandenburg, the
+  nucleus of the present kingdom of Prussia. Brandenburg was a
+  district formerly inhabited by the Wends, a Slavic people,
+  from whom it was taken in 926 by Henry the Fowler, King of
+  Germany, of which kingdom it afterward became a margravate.
+  Its first margrave was Albert the Bear, under whom, about
+  1150, it was made an electorate; from Albert's line it
+  passed to Louis the Bavarian, in 1319; and in 1371 it was
+  transferred to Charles (Karl) IV. On the death of Charles,
+  his son and successor Wenzel (Wenceslaus) relinquished
+  Brandenburg to his brothers, as told by Carlyle, who in his
+  own pictorial manner describes the subsequent complications
+  which finally resulted in giving that possession to the
+  ancestors of the present ruling house of Germany.
+
+Karl[74] left three young sons, Wenzel, Sigismund, Johann; and also a
+certain nephew much older; all of whom now more or less concern us in
+this unfortunate history.
+
+Wenzel, the eldest son, heritable Kurfuerst of Brandenburg as well as
+King of Bohemia, was as yet only seventeen, who nevertheless got to be
+kaiser--and went widely astray, poor soul. The nephew was no other than
+Margrave Jobst of Moravia, now in the vigor of his years and a stirring
+man: to him, for a time, the chief management in Brandenburg fell, in
+these circumstances. Wenzel, still a minor, and already Kaiser and King
+of Bohemia, gave up Brandenburg to his two younger brothers, most of it
+to Sigismund, with a cutting for Johann, to help their appanages; and
+applied his own powers to govern the Holy Roman Empire, at that early
+stage of life.
+
+To govern the Holy Roman Empire, poor soul--or rather "to drink beer and
+dance with the girls"; in which, if defective in other things, Wenzel
+had an eminent talent. He was one of the worst kaisers and the least
+victorious on record. He would attend to nothing in the Reich; "the Prag
+white beer, and girls" of various complexion, being much preferable, as
+he was heard to say. He had to fling his poor Queen's Confessor into the
+river Moldau--Johann of Nepomuk, Saint so called, if he is not a fable
+altogether; whose Statue stands on Bridges ever since, in those parts.
+Wenzel's Bohemians revolted against him; put him in jail; and he broke
+prison, a boatman's daughter helping him out, with adventures. His
+Germans were disgusted with him; deposed him from the kaisership; chose
+Rupert of the Pfalz; and then, after Rupert's death, chose Wenzel's own
+brother Sigismund in his stead--left Wenzel to jumble about in his
+native Bohemian element, as king there, for nineteen years longer, still
+breaking pots to a ruinous extent.
+
+He ended by apoplexy, or sudden spasm of the heart; terrible Ziska,[75]
+as it were, killing him at second hand. For Ziska, stout and furious,
+blind of one eye and at last of both, a kind of human rhinoceros driven
+mad, had risen out of the ashes of murdered Huss, and other bad papistic
+doings, in the interim; and was tearing up the world at a huge rate.
+Rhinoceros Ziska was on the Weissenberg, or a still nearer hill of Prag
+since called Ziska-berg (Ziska Hill); and none durst whisper of it to
+the King. A servant waiting at dinner inadvertently let slip the word:
+"Ziska there? Deny it, slave!" cried Wenzel, frantic. Slave durst not
+deny. Wenzel drew his sword to run at him, but fell down dead: that was
+the last pot broken by Wenzel. The hapless royal ex-imperial phantasm
+self-broken in this manner. Poor soul, he came to the kaisership too
+early; was a thin violent creature, sensible to the charms and horrors
+of created objects; and had terrible rhinoceros ziskas and unruly horned
+cattle to drive. He was one of the worst kaisers ever known--could have
+done Opera Singing much better--and a sad sight to Bohemia. Let us leave
+him there: he was never actual Elector of Brandenburg, having given it
+up in time; never did any ill to that poor country.
+
+The real Kurfuerst of Brandenburg all this while was Sigismund, Wenzel's
+next brother, under tutelage of cousin Jobst or otherwise--a real and
+yet imaginary, for he never himself governed, but always had Jobst of
+Maehren or some other in his place there. Sigismund was to have married a
+daughter of Burggraf Friedrich V;[76] and he was himself, as was the
+young lady, well inclined to this arrangement. But the old people being
+dead, and some offer of a king's daughter turning up for Sigismund,
+Sigismund broke off; and took the king's daughter, King of
+Hungary's--not without regret then and afterward, as is believed. At any
+rate, the Hungarian charmer proved a wife of small merit, and a
+Hungarian successor she had was a wife of light conduct even; Hungarian
+charmers, and Hungarian affairs, were much other than a comfort to
+Sigismund.
+
+As for the disappointed princess, Burggraf Friedrich's daughter, she
+said nothing that we hear; silently became a Nun, an Abbess: and through
+a long life looked out, with her thoughts to herself, upon the loud
+whirlwind of things, where Sigismund (oftenest an imponderous rag of
+conspicuous color) was riding and tossing. Her two brothers also, joint
+Burggraves after their father's death, seemed to have reconciled
+themselves without difficulty. The elder of them was already Sigismund's
+brother-in-law; married to Sigismund's and Wenzel's sister--by such
+predestination as we saw. Burggraf Johann III was the name of this one;
+a stout fighter and manager for many years; much liked, and looked to,
+by Sigismund, as indeed were both the brothers, for that matter; always,
+together or in succession, a kind of right hand to Sigismund. Frederick
+(Friedrich), the younger Burggraf, and ultimately the survivor and
+inheritor (Johann having left no sons), is the famed Burggraf Friedrich
+VI the last and notablest of all the Burggraves--a man of distinguished
+importance, extrinsic and intrinsic; chief or among the very chief of
+German public men in his time; and memorable to Posterity, and to this
+history, on still other grounds! But let us not anticipate.
+
+Sigismund, if appanaged with Brandenburg alone, and wedded to his first
+love, not a king's daughter, might have done tolerably well there;
+better than Wenzel, with the empire and Bohemia, did. But delusive
+Fortune threw her golden apple at Sigismund too; and he, in the wide
+high world, had to play strange pranks. His father-in-law died in
+Hungary, Sigismund's first wife his only child. Father-in-law bequeathed
+Hungary to Sigismund, who plunged into a strange sea thereby; got
+troubles without number, beatings not a few, and had even to take boat,
+and sail for his life down to Constantinople, at one time. In which sad
+adventure Burggraf Johann escorted him, and as it were tore him out by
+the hair of the head. These troubles and adventures lasted many years;
+in the course of which, Sigismund, trying all manner of friends and
+expedients, found in the Burggraves of Nuremberg, Johann and Friedrich,
+with their talents, possessions, and resources, the main or almost only
+sure support he got.
+
+No end of troubles to Sigismund, and to Brandenburg through him, from
+this sublime Hungarian legacy. Like a remote fabulous golden fleece,
+which you have to go and conquer first, and which is worth little when
+conquered. Before ever setting out (1387), Sigismund saw too clearly
+that he would have cash to raise: an operation he had never done with,
+all his life afterward. He pawned Brandenburg to cousin Jobst of Maehren;
+got "twenty thousand Bohemian gulden"--I guess, a most slender sum, if
+Dryasdust would but interpret it. This was the beginning of pawnings to
+Brandenburg; of which when will the end be? Jobst thereby came into
+Brandenburg on his own right for the time, not as tutor or guardian,
+which he had hitherto been. Into Brandenburg; and there was no chance of
+repayment to get him out again.
+
+Jobst tried at first to do some governing; but finding all very
+anarchic, grew unhopeful; took to making matters easy for himself. Took,
+in fact, to turning a penny on his pawn-ticket; alienating crown
+domains, winking hard at robber barons, and the like--and after a few
+years, went home to Moravia, leaving Brandenburg to shift for itself,
+under a Statthalter (Viceregent, more like a hungry land-steward), whom
+nobody took the trouble of respecting. Robber castles flourished; all
+else decayed. No highway not unsafe; many a Turpin with sixteen
+quarters, and styling himself Edle Herr (noble gentleman), took to
+"living from the saddle": what are Hamburg pedlers made for but to be
+robbed?
+
+The towns suffered much; any trade they might have had, going to wreck
+in this manner. Not to speak of private feuds, which abounded _ad
+libitum_. Neighboring potentates, Archbishop of Magdeburg and others,
+struck in also at discretion, as they had gradually got accustomed to
+do, and snapped away some convenient bit of territory, or, more
+legitimately, they came across to coerce, at their own hand, this or the
+other Edle Herr of the Turpin sort, whom there was no other way of
+getting at, when he carried matters quite too high. "Droves of six
+hundred swine"--I have seen (by reading in those old books) certain
+noble gentlemen, "of Putlitz," I think, driving them openly, captured by
+the stronger hand; and have heard the short querulous squeak of the
+bristly creatures: "What is the use of being a pig at all, if I am to be
+stolen in this way, and surreptitiously made into ham?" Pigs do continue
+to be bred in Brandenburg: but it is under such discouragements.
+Agriculture, trade, well-being and well-doing of any kind, it is not
+encouragement they are meeting here. Probably few countries, not even
+Ireland, have a worse outlook, unless help come.
+
+Jobst came back in 1398, after eight years' absence; but no help came
+with Jobst. The Neumark of Brandenburg, which was brother Johann's
+portion, had fallen home to Sigismund, brother Johann having died; but
+Sigismund, far from redeeming old pawn-tickets with the Neumark, pawned
+the Neumark too--the second pawnage of Brandenburg. Pawned the Neumark
+to the Teutsch Ritters "for sixty-three thousand Hungarian gulden" (I
+think, about thirty thousand pounds), and gave no part of it to Jobst;
+had not nearly enough for himself and his Hungarian occasions.
+
+Seeing which, and hearing such squeak of pigs surreptitiously driven,
+with little but discordant sights and sounds everywhere, Jobst became
+disgusted with the matter; and resolved to wash his hands of it, at
+least to have his money out of it again. Having sold what of the domains
+he could to persons of quality, at an uncommonly easy rate, and so
+pocketed what ready cash there was among them, he made over his
+pawn-ticket, or properly he himself repawned Brandenburg to the Saxon
+potentate, a speculative moneyed man, Markgraf of Meissen, "Wilhelm the
+Rich," so called. Pawned it to Wilhelm the Rich--sum not named; and went
+home to Moravia, there to wait events. This is the third Brandenburg
+pawning: let us hope there may be a fourth and last.
+
+And so we have now reached that point in Brandenburg history when, if
+some help does not come, Brandenburg will not long be a country, but
+will either get dissipated in pieces and stuck to the edge of others
+where some government is, or else go waste again and fall to the bisons
+and wild bears.
+
+Who now is Kurfuerst of Brandenburg, might be a question. "I
+unquestionably!" Sigismund would answer, with astonishment. "Soft, your
+Hungarian Majesty," thinks Jobst: "till my cash is paid may it not
+probably be another?" This question has its interest: the Electors just
+now (1400) are about deposing Wenzel; must choose some better Kaiser. If
+they wanted another scion of the house of Luxemburg--a mature old
+gentleman of sixty; full of plans, plausibilities, pretensions--Jobst is
+their man. Jobst and Sigismund were of one mind as to Wenzel's going; at
+least Sigismund voted clearly so, and Jobst said nothing counter: but
+the Kurfuersts did not think of Jobst for successor. After some
+stumbling, they fixed upon Rupert Kur-Pfalz (Elector Palatine, Ruprecht
+von der Pfalz) as Kaiser.
+
+Rupert of the Pfalz proved a highly respectable Kaiser; lasted for ten
+years (1400-10), with honor to himself and the Reich. A strong heart,
+strong head, but short of means. He chastised petty mutiny with vigor,
+could not bring down the Milanese Visconti, who had perched themselves
+so high on money paid to Wenzel; could not heal the schism of the
+Church (double or triple Pope, Rome-Avignon affair), or awaken the
+Reich to a sense of its old dignity and present loose condition. In the
+late loose times, as antiquaries remark, most members of the Empire,
+petty princes even and imperial towns, had been struggling to set up for
+themselves; and were now concerned chiefly to become sovereign in their
+own territories. And Schilter informs us it was about this period that
+most of them attained such rather unblessed consummation; Rupert of
+himself not able to help it, with all his willingness. The people called
+him "Rupert Klemm (Rupert Smith's-vise)," from his resolute ways; which
+nickname--given him not in hatred, but partly in satirical good-will--is
+itself a kind of history. From historians of the Reich he deserves
+honorable regretful mention.
+
+He had for Empress a sister of Burggraf Friedrich's; which high lady,
+unknown to us otherwise, except by her tomb at Heidelberg, we remember
+for her brother's sake. Kaiser Rupert--great-grandson of that Kur-Pfalz
+who was Kaiser Ludwig's elder brother--is the culminating point of the
+Electors Palatine; the highest that Heidelberg produced. Ancestor of
+those famed Protestant "Palatines"; of all the Palatines or Pfalzes that
+reign in these late centuries. Ancestor of the present Bavarian Majesty;
+Kaiser Ludwig's race having died out. Ancestor of the unfortunate
+Winterkoenig, Friedrich, King of Bohemia, who is too well known in
+English history--ancestor also of Charles XII of Sweden, a highly
+creditable fact of the kind to him. Fact indisputable: a cadet of
+Pfalz-Zweibrueck (Deux-Ponts), direct from Rupert, went to serve in
+Sweden in his soldier business; distinguished himself in soldiering; had
+a sister of the great Gustaf Adolf to wife; and from her a renowned son,
+Karl Gustaf (Christiana's cousin), who succeeded as King; who again had
+a grandson made in his own likeness, only still more of iron in his
+composition. Enough now of Rupert Smith's-vise; who died in 1410, and
+left the Reich again vacant.
+
+Rupert's funeral is hardly done, when, over in Preussen, far off in the
+Memel region, place called Tannenberg, where there is still "a
+church-yard to be seen," if little more, the Teutsch Ritters had,
+unexpectedly, a terrible defeat; consummation of their Polish
+miscellaneous quarrels of long standing; and the end of their high
+courses in this world. A ruined Teutsch Ritterdom, as good as ruined,
+ever henceforth. Kaiser Rupert died May 18th; and on July 15th, within
+two months, was fought that dreadful "Battle of Tannenburg," Poland and
+Polish King, with miscellany of savage Tartars and revolted Prussians,
+versus Teutsch Ritterdom; all in a very high mood of mutual rage; the
+very elements, "wild thunder, tempest and rain deluges," playing chorus
+to them on the occasion. Ritterdom fought lion-like, but with
+insufficient strategic and other wisdom, and was driven nearly
+distracted to see its pride tripped into the ditch by such a set. Vacant
+Reich could not in the least attend to it; nor can we further at
+present.
+
+Jobst and Sigismund were competitors for the Kaisership; Wenzel, too,
+striking in with claims for reinstatement: the house of Luxemburg
+divided against itself. Wenzel, finding reinstatement not to be thought
+of, threw his weight, such as it was, into the scale of cousin Jobst.
+The contest was vehement, and like to be lengthy. Jobst, though he had
+made over his pawn-ticket, claimed to be Elector of Brandenburg; and
+voted for himself. The like, with still more emphasis, did Sigismund, or
+Burggraf Friedrich acting for him: "Sigismund, sure, is Kur-Brandenburg,
+though under pawn!" argued Friedrich--and, I almost guess, though that
+is not said, produced from his own purse, at some stage of the business,
+the actual money for Jobst, to close his Brandenburg pretension.
+
+Both were elected (majority contested in this manner); and old Jobst,
+then above seventy, was like to have given much trouble; but happily in
+three months he died; and Sigismund became indisputable. In his day
+Jobst made much noise in the world, but did little or no good in it. He
+was thought "a great man," says one satirical old Chronicler; and there
+"was nothing great about him but the beard."
+
+"The cause of Sigismund's success with the Electors," says Kohler, "or
+of his having any party among them, was the faithful and unwearied
+diligence which had been used for him by the above-named Burggraf
+Friedrich VI of Nuremberg, who took extreme pains to forward Sigismund
+to the Empire; pleading that Sigismund and Wenzel would be sure to agree
+well henceforth, and that Sigismund, having already such extensive
+territories (Hungary, Brandenburg, and so forth) by inheritance, would
+not be so exact about the Reichs-tolls and other imperial incomes. This
+same Friedrich also, when the election fell out doubtful, was
+Sigismund's best support in Germany, nay almost his right hand, through
+whom he did whatever was done."
+
+Sigismund is Kaiser, then, in spite of Wenzel. King of Hungary, after
+unheard-of troubles and adventures, ending some years ago in a kind of
+peace and conquest, he has long been. King of Bohemia, too, he at last
+became; having survived Wenzel, who was childless. Kaiser of the Holy
+Roman Empire, and so much else: is not Sigismund now a great man? Truly
+the loom he weaves upon, in this world, is very large. But the weaver
+was of headlong, high-pacing, flimsy nature; and both warp and woof were
+gone dreadfully entangled!
+
+This is the Kaiser Sigismund who held the Council of Constance; and
+"blushed visibly," when Huss, about to die, alluded to the letter of
+safe-conduct granted him, which was issuing in such fashion. Sigismund
+blushed; but could not conveniently mend the matter--so many matters
+pressing on him just now. As they perpetually did, and had done. An
+always-hoping, never-resting, unsuccessful, vain and empty Kaiser.
+Specious, speculative; given to eloquence, diplomacy, and the windy
+instead of the solid arts; always short of money for one thing. He
+roamed about, and talked eloquently; aiming high, and generally missing.
+Hungary and even the Reich have at length become his, but have brought
+small triumph in any kind; and instead of ready money, debt on debt. His
+Majesty has no money, and his Majesty's occasions need it more and more.
+
+He is now (1414) holding this Council of Constance, by way of healing
+the Church, which is sick of three simultaneous popes and of much else.
+He finds the problem difficult; finds he will have to run into Spain, to
+persuade a refractory pope there, if eloquence can (as it cannot): all
+which requires money, money. At opening of the council, he "officiated
+as deacon"; actually did some kind of litanying "with a surplice over
+him," though Kaiser and King of the Romans. But this passage of his
+opening speech is what I recollect best of him there: "Right reverend
+Fathers, _date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur_," exclaims
+Sigismund, intent on having the Bohemian schism well dealt with--which
+he reckons to be of the feminine gender. To which a cardinal mildly
+remarking, "_Domine, schisma est generis neutrius_ (schisma is neuter,
+your Majesty)," Sigismund loftily replies: "_Ego sum Rex Romanus et
+super grammaticam_ (I am King of the Romans, and above Grammar)!" For
+which reason I call him in my note-books Sigismund Super Grammaticam, to
+distinguish him in the imbroglio of kaisers.
+
+How Jobst's pawn-ticket was settled I never clearly heard; but can guess
+it was by Burggraf Friedrich's advancing the money, in the pinch above
+indicated, or paying it afterward to Jobst's heirs whoever they were.
+Thus much is certain: Burggraf Friedrich, these three years and more
+(ever since July 8, 1411) holds Sigismund's deed of acknowledgment "for
+one hundred thousand gulden lent at various times"; and has likewise got
+the Electorate of Brandenburg in pledge for that sum; and does himself
+administer the said Electorate till he be paid. This is the important
+news; but this is not all.
+
+The new journey into Spain requires new money; this council itself, with
+such a pomp as suited Sigismund, has cost him endless money.
+Brandenburg, torn to ruins in the way we saw, is a sorrowful matter;
+and, except the title of it, as a feather in one's cap, is worth nothing
+to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why
+could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying,
+he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of
+ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too,
+amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church.
+"Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund;
+"and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more
+ever needed, especially for this grand Spanish journey!" these were his
+sad thoughts. "Advance me, in a round sum, two hundred and fifty
+thousand more," said he to Burggraf Friedrich, "two hundred and fifty
+thousand more, for my manifold occasions in this time--that will be four
+hundred thousand in whole--and take the Electorate of Brandenburg to
+yourself, Land, Titles, Sovereign, Electorship and all, and make me rid
+of it!" That was the settlement adopted, in Sigismund's apartment at
+Constance, on April 30, 1415; signed, sealed, and ratified--and the
+money paid. A very notable event in World-History; virtually completed
+on the day we mention.
+
+The ceremony of investiture did not take place till two years afterward,
+when the Spanish journey had proved fruitless, when much else of
+fruitless had come and gone and Kaiser and council were probably more at
+leisure for such a thing. Done at length it was by Kaiser Sigismund in
+almost gala, with the Grandees of the Empire assisting, and august
+members of the council and world in general looking on; in the big
+square or market-place of Constance, April 17, 1417; is to be found
+described in Rentsch, from Nauclerus and the old news-mongers of the
+times. Very grand indeed: much processioning on horseback, under
+powerful trumpet-peals and flourishes; much stately kneeling, stately
+rising, stepping backward (done well, _zierlich_, on the Kurfuerst's
+part); liberal expenditure of cloth and pomp; in short, "above one
+hundred thousand people looking on from roofs and windows," and Kaiser
+Sigismund in all his glory. He was on a high platform in the
+market-place, with stairs to it; the illustrious Kaiser--red as a
+flamingo, "with scarlet mantle and crown of gold,"--a treat to the eyes
+of simple mankind.
+
+What sum of modern money, in real purchasing power, this "four hundred
+thousand Hungarian Gold Gulden" is, I have inquired in the likely
+quarters without result; and it is probable no man exactly knows. The
+latest existing representative of the ancient gold gulden is the ducat,
+worth generally a half-sovereign in English. Taking the sum at that
+latest rate, it amounts to two hundred thousand pounds; and the reader
+can use that as a note of memory for the sale-price of Brandenburg with
+all its lands and honors--multiplying it perhaps by four or six to bring
+out its effective amount in current coin. Dog cheap, it must be owned,
+for size and capability; but in the most waste condition, full of
+mutiny, injustice, anarchy, and highway robbery; a purchase that might
+have proved dear enough to another man than Burggraf Friedrich.
+
+But so, at any rate, moribund Brandenburg has got its Hohenzollern
+Kurfuerst, and started on a new career it little dreamt of; and we can
+now, right willingly, quit Sigismund and the Reichs-History, leave
+Kaiser Sigismund to sink or swim at his own will henceforth. His grand
+feat in life, the wonder of his generation, was this same Council of
+Constance; which proved entirely a failure; one of the largest wind-eggs
+ever dropped with noise and travail in this world. Two hundred thousand
+human creatures, reckoned and reckoning themselves the elixir of the
+intellect and dignity of Europe. Two hundred thousand--nay some,
+counting the lower menials and numerous unfortunate females, say four
+hundred thousand--were got congregated into that little Swiss town; and
+there as an Ecumenic Council, or solemnly distilled elixir of what pious
+intellect and valor could be scraped together in the world, they labored
+with all their select might for four years' space. That was the Council
+of Constance. And except this transfer of Brandenburg to Friedrich of
+Hohenzollern, resulting from said council, in the quite reverse and
+involuntary way, one sees not what good result it had.
+
+They did, indeed, burn Huss; but that could not be called a beneficial
+incident; that seemed to Sigismund and the council a most small and
+insignificant one. And it kindled Bohemia, and kindled Rhinoceros Ziska,
+into never-imagined flame of vengeance; brought mere disaster, disgrace,
+and defeat on defeat to Sigismund, and kept his hands full for the rest
+of his life, however small he had thought it. As for the sublime four
+years' deliberations and debates of this Sanhedrim of the
+Universe--eloquent debates, conducted, we may say, under such extent of
+wig as was never seen before or since--they have fallen wholly to the
+domain of Dryasdust; and amount, for mankind at this time, to zero plus
+the burning of Huss. On the whole, Burggraf Friedrich's Electorship, and
+the first Hohenzollern to Brandenburg, is the one good result.
+
+Burggraf Friedrich, on his first coming to Brandenburg, found but a cool
+reception as Statthalter. He came as the representative of law and rule;
+and there had been many helping themselves by a ruleless life, of late.
+Industry was at a low ebb, violence was rife; plunder, disorder,
+everywhere; too much the habit for baronial gentlemen to "live by the
+saddle," as they termed it, that is, by highway robbery in modern
+phrase.
+
+The towns, harried and plundered to skin and bone, were glad to see a
+Statthalter, and did homage to him with all their heart. But the
+baronage or squirearchy of the country were of another mind. These, in
+the late anarchies, had set up for a kind of kings in their own right.
+They had their feuds; made war, made peace, levied tolls, transit dues;
+lived much at their own discretion in these solitary countries; rushing
+out from their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any
+herd of "six hundred swine," and convoy of Luebeck or Hamburg merchant
+goods, that had not contented them in passing. What were pedlers and
+mechanic fellows made for, if not to be plundered when needful?
+Arbitrary rule, on the part of these noble robber lords! And then much
+of the crown domains had gone to the chief of them--pawned (and the
+pawn-ticket lost, so to speak), or sold for what trifle of ready money
+was to be had, in Jobst and Company's time. To these gentlemen a
+Statthalter coming to inquire into matters was no welcome phenomenon.
+Your Edle Herr (noble lord) of Putlitz, noble lords of Quitzow, Rochow,
+Maltitz, and others, supreme in their grassy solitudes this long while,
+and accustomed to nothing greater than themselves in Brandenburg, how
+should they obey a Statthalter?
+
+Such was more or less the universal humor in the squirearchy of
+Brandenburg; not of good omen to Burggraf Friedrich. But the chief seat
+of contumacy seemed to be among the Quitzows, Putlitzes, above spoken
+of; big squires in the district they call the Priegnitz, in the country
+of the sluggish Havel River, northwest from Berlin a forty or fifty
+miles. These refused homage, very many of them; said they were
+"incorporated with Boehmen"; said this and that; much disinclined to
+homage; and would not do it. Stiff, surly fellows, much deficient in
+discernment of what is above them and what is not: a thick-skinned set;
+bodies clad in buff leather; minds also cased in ill habits of long
+continuance.
+
+Friedrich was very patient with them; hoped to prevail by gentle
+methods. He "invited them to dinner"; "had them often at dinner for a
+year or more:" but could make no progress in that way. "Who is this we
+have got for a Governor?" said the noble lords privately to each other:
+"A Nuremberger Tand" (Nuremberg plaything--wooden image, such as they
+make at Nuremberg), said they, grinning, in a thick-skinned way: "If it
+rained Burggraves all the year round, none of them would come to luck in
+this country;" and continued their feuds, toll-levyings, plunderings,
+and other contumacies.
+
+Seeing matters come to this pass after above a year, Burggraf Friedrich
+gathered his Frankish men-at-arms; quietly made league with the
+neighboring Potentates, Thueringen and others; got some munitions, some
+artillery together--especially one huge gun, the biggest ever seen, "a
+twenty-four pounder," no less; to which the peasants, dragging her with
+difficulty through the clayey roads, gave the name of Faule Grete (Lazy
+or Heavy Peg); a remarkable piece of ordnance. Lazy Peg he had got from
+the Landgraf of Thueringen, on loan merely; but he turned her to
+excellent account of his own. I have often inquired after Lazy Peg's
+fate in subsequent times; but could never learn anything distinct; the
+German Dryasdust is a dull dog, and seldom carries anything human in
+those big wallets of his!
+
+Equipped in this way, Burggraf Friedrich (he was not yet Kurfuerst, only
+coming to be) marches for the Havel Country (early days of 1414); makes
+his appearance before Quitzow's strong house of Friesack, walls fourteen
+feet thick: "You, Dietrich von Quitzow, are you prepared to live as a
+peaceable subject henceforth? to do homage to the laws and me?" "Never!"
+answered Quitzow, and pulled up his drawbridge. Whereupon Heavy Peg
+opened upon him, Heavy Peg and other guns; and, in some eight-and-forty
+hours, shook Quitzow's impregnable Friesack about his ears. This was in
+the month of February, 1414, day not given: Friesack was the name of the
+impregnable castle (still discoverable in our time); and it ought to be
+memorable and venerable to every Prussian man. Burggraf Friedrich VI,
+not yet quite become Kurfuerst Friedrich I, but in a year's space to
+become so, he in person was the beneficent operator; Heavy Peg and
+steady human insight, these were clearly the chief implements.
+
+Quitzow being settled--for the country is in military occupation of
+Friedrich and his allies, and except in some stone castle a man has no
+chance--straightway Putlitz or another mutineer, with his drawbridge up,
+was battered to pieces, and his drawbridge brought slamming down. After
+this manner, in an incredibly short period, mutiny was quenched; and it
+became apparent to noble lords, and to all men, that here at length was
+a man come who would have the laws obeyed again, and could and would
+keep mutiny down.
+
+
+
+
+BATTLE OF AGINCOURT
+
+ENGLISH CONQUEST OF FRANCE
+
+A.D. 1415-1420
+
+JAMES GAIRDNER
+
+
+  King Henry V of England, son of Henry IV, was born in 1387,
+  and two years later was made prince of Wales. In 1401-1408
+  he was engaged against the Welsh rebels under Owen
+  Glendower, and in 1410 became captain of Calais. His
+  youthful period is represented--probably with much
+  exaggeration, to which Shakespeare, in _Henry IV_,
+  contributed--as full of wild and dissolute conduct, but as
+  king he was distinguished for his courage, ability, and
+  enterprise.
+
+  Henry was crowned in 1413, about seventy-five years after
+  the beginning of the Hundred Years' War between England and
+  France, which arose from the claim of Edward III to the
+  French throne. For some years a feud had been raging in
+  France between the houses of Burgundy and Orleans, the rival
+  parties being known as Burgundians and Armagnacs. Led by
+  Simonet Caboche, a butcher, adherents of the Armagnacs rose
+  with great fury against the Burgundians. This was in the
+  first year of Henry's reign, and to him and other rulers
+  Charles VI of France appealed in order to prevent them from
+  aiding the outbreak, which was soon quelled by the princes
+  of the blood and the University of Paris. Order in France
+  was restored by the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of
+  Burgundy withdrew to Flanders. But war between the two
+  factions was soon after renewed, and both sides sought the
+  alliance of England.
+
+  In these contentions and appeals for his interference Henry
+  saw an opportunity for pressing his designs to recover what
+  he claimed as the French inheritance of his predecessors. In
+  1414, as the heir of Isabella, mother of his
+  great-grandfather Edward, he formally demanded the crown of
+  France. The French princes refused to consider his claim.
+  Henry modified his demands, but after several months of
+  negotiation, with no promise of success, he prepared for
+  renewal of the ancient war.
+
+The claim made by Edward III to the French crown had been questionable
+enough. That of Henry was certainly most unreasonable. Edward had
+maintained that though the Salic Law, which governed the succession in
+France, excluded females from the throne, it did not exclude their male
+descendants. On this theory Edward himself was doubtless the true heir
+to the French monarchy. But even admitting the claims of Edward, his
+rights had certainly not descended to Henry V, seeing that even in
+England neither he nor his father was true to the throne by lineal
+right. A war with France, however, was sure to be popular with his
+subjects, and the weakness of that country from civil discord seemed a
+favorable opportunity for urging the most extreme pretensions.
+
+To give a show of fairness and moderation the English ambassadors at
+Paris lessened their demands more than once, and appeared willing for
+some time to renew negotiations after their terms had been rejected. But
+in the end they still insisted on a claim which in point of equity was
+altogether preposterous, and rejected a compromise which would have put
+Henry in possession of the whole of Guienne and given him the hand of
+the French King's daughter Catharine with a marriage portion of eight
+hundred thousand crowns. Meanwhile Henry was making active preparations
+for war, and at the same time carried on secret negotiations with the
+Duke of Burgundy, trusting to have him for an ally in the invasion of
+France.
+
+At length, in the summer of 1415, the King had collected an army and was
+ready to embark at Southampton. But on the eve of his departure a
+conspiracy was discovered, the object of which was to dethrone the King
+and set aside the house of Lancaster. The conspirators were Richard,
+Earl of Cambridge, Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, and a knight of
+Northumberland named Sir Thomas Grey. The Earl of Cambridge was the
+King's cousin-german, and had been recently raised to that dignity by
+Henry himself. Lord Scrope was, to all appearance, the King's most
+intimate friend and counsellor. The design seems to have been formed
+upon the model of similar projects in the preceding reign. Richard II
+was to be proclaimed once more, as if he had been still alive; but the
+real intention was to procure the crown for Edmund Mortimer, Earl of
+March, the true heir of Richard, whom Henry IV had set aside.
+
+At the same time the Earl of March himself seems hardly to have
+countenanced the attempt; but the Earl of Cambridge, who had married his
+sister, wished, doubtless, to secure the succession for his son Richard,
+as the Earl of March had no children. Evidently it was the impression
+of some persons that the house of Lancaster was not even yet firmly
+seated upon the throne. Perhaps it was not even yet apparent that the
+young man who had so recently been a gamesome reveller was capable of
+ruling with a firm hand a king.
+
+But all doubt on this point was soon terminated. The commissioners were
+tried by a commission hastily issued, and were summarily condemned and
+put to death. The Earl of March, it is said, revealed the plot to the
+King, sat as one of the judges of his two brother peers, and was taken
+into the King's favor. The Earl of Cambridge made a confession of his
+guilt. Lord Scrope, though he repudiated the imputation of disloyalty,
+admitted having had a guilty knowledge of the plot, which he said it had
+been his purpose to defeat. The one nobleman, in consideration of his
+royal blood, was simply beheaded; the other was drawn and quartered. We
+hear of no more attempts of the kind during Henry's reign.
+
+With a fleet of one thousand five hundred sail Henry crossed the sea and
+landed without opposition at Chef de Caux, near Harfleur, at the mouth
+of the Seine. The force that he brought with him was about thirty
+thousand men, and he immediately employed it in laying siege to
+Harfleur. The place was strong, so far as walls and bulwarks could make
+it, but it was not well victualled, and after a five-weeks' siege it was
+obliged to capitulate. But the forces of the besieged were thinned by
+disease as well as actual fighting. Dysentery had broken out in the
+camp, and, though it was only September, they suffered bitterly from the
+coldness of the nights; so that, when the town had been won and
+garrisoned, the force available for further operations amounted to less
+than half the original strength of the invading army.
+
+Under the circumstances it was hopeless to expect to do much before the
+winter set in, and many counselled the King to return to England. But
+Henry could not tolerate the idea of retreat or even of apparent
+inaction. He sent a challenge to the Dauphin, offering to refer their
+differences to single combat; and when no notice was taken of this
+proposal, he determined to cut his way, if possible, through the country
+to Calais, along with the remainder of his forces.
+
+It was a difficult and hazardous march. Hunger, dysentery, and fever had
+already reduced the little band to less than nine thousand men, or, as
+good authorities say, to little more than six thousand. The country
+people were unfriendly, their supplies were cut off on all sides, and
+the scanty stock of provisions with which they set out was soon
+exhausted. For want of bread, many were driven to feed on nuts, while
+the enemy harassed them upon the way and broke down the bridges in
+advance of them. On one or two occasions, having repulsed an attack from
+a garrison town, Henry demanded and obtained from the governor a
+safe-conduct and a certain quantity of bread and wine, under threat of
+setting fire to the place if refused.
+
+In this manner he and his army gradually approached the river Somme at
+Blanche Tache, where there was a ford by which King Edward III had
+crossed before the battle of Crecy. But while yet some distance from it,
+they received information from a prisoner that the ford was guarded by
+six thousand fighting men, and, though the intelligence was untrue, it
+deterred him from attempting the passage. They accordingly turned to the
+right and went up the river as far as Amiens, but were still unable to
+cross, till, after following the course of the river about fifty miles
+farther, they fortunately came upon an undefended ford and passed over
+before their enemies were aware.
+
+Hitherto their progress had not been without adventures and skirmishes
+in many places. But the main army of the French only overtook them when
+they had arrived within about forty-five miles of Calais. On the night
+of October 24th they were posted at the village of Maisoncelles, with an
+enemy before them five or six times their number, who had resolved to
+stop their further progress. Both sides prepared for battle on the
+following morning. The English, besides being so much inferior in
+numbers, were wasted by disease and famine, while their adversaries were
+fresh and vigorous, with a plentiful commissariat. But the latter were
+overconfident. They spent the evening in dice-playing and making wagers
+about the prisoners they should take; while the English, on the
+contrary, confessed themselves and received the sacrament.
+
+Heavy rain fell during the night, from which both armies suffered; but
+Henry availed himself of a brief period of moonlight to have the
+ground thoroughly surveyed. His position was an admirable one. His
+forces occupied a narrow field hemmed in on either side by hedges and
+thickets, so that they could only be attacked in front, and were in no
+fear of being surrounded. Early on the following morning Henry arose and
+heard mass; but the two armies stood facing each other for some hours,
+each waiting for the other to begin. The English archers were drawn up
+in front in form of a wedge, and each man was provided with a stake shod
+with iron at both ends, which being fixed into the ground before him,
+the whole line formed a kind of hedge bristling with sharp points, to
+defend them from being ridden down by the enemy's cavalry.
+
+At length, however, Henry gave orders to commence the attack, and the
+archers advanced, leaving their stakes behind them fixed in the ground.
+The French cavalry on either side endeavored to close them in, but were
+soon obliged to retire before the thick showers of arrows poured in upon
+them, which destroyed four-fifths of their numbers. Their horses then
+became unmanageable, being plagued with a multitude of wounds, and the
+whole army was thrown into confusion. Never was a more brilliant victory
+won against more overwhelming odds.
+
+One sad piece of cruelty alone tarnished the glory of that day's action,
+but it seems to have been dictated by fear as a means of
+self-preservation. After the enemy had been completely routed in front,
+and a multitude of prisoners taken, the King, hearing that some
+detachments had got round to his rear, and were endeavoring to plunder
+his baggage, gave orders to the whole army to put their prisoners to
+death. The order was executed in the most relentless fashion. One or two
+distinguished prisoners afterward were taken from under heaps of slain,
+among whom were the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon. Altogether, the
+slaughter of the French was enormous. There is a general agreement that
+it was upward of ten thousand men, and among them were the flower of the
+French nobility. That of the English was disproportionately small. Their
+own writers reckon it not more than one hundred altogether, some
+absurdly stating it as low as twenty or thirty, while the French
+authorities estimate it variously from three hundred to one thousand six
+hundred.
+
+Henry called his victory the battle of Agincourt, from the name of a
+neighboring castle. The army proceeded in excellent order to Calais,
+where they were triumphantly received, and after resting there awhile
+recrossed to England. The news of such a splendid victory caused them to
+be welcomed with an enthusiasm that knew no bounds. At Dover the people
+rushed into the sea to meet the conquerors, and carried the King in
+their arms in triumph from his vessel to the shore. From thence to
+London his progress was like one continued triumphal procession, and the
+capital itself received him with every demonstration of joy.
+
+The progress of the English arms in France did not, for a long time,
+induce the rival factions in that country to suspend the civil war among
+themselves. But at length some feeble efforts were made toward a
+reconciliation. The Council of Constance having healed the divisions in
+the Church by the election of Martin V as pope in place of the three
+rival popes deposed, the new Pontiff despatched two cardinals to France
+to aid in this important object. By their mediation a treaty was
+concluded between the Queen, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Dauphin; but
+it was no sooner published than the Count of Armagnac and his partisans
+made a vehement protest against it and accused of treason all who had
+promoted it.
+
+On this, Paris rose in anger, took part with the Burgundians, fell upon
+all the leading Armagnacs, put them in prison, and destroyed their
+houses. The Dauphin was only saved by one of Armagnac's principal
+adherents, Tannegui du Chatel, who carried him to the Bastille. The
+Bastille, however, was a few days after stormed by the populace, and Du
+Chatel was forced to withdraw his charge to Melun. The Armagnac party,
+except those in prison, were entirely driven out of Paris. But even this
+did not satisfy the rage of the multitude. Riots continued from day to
+day, and, a report being spread that the King was willing to ransom the
+captives, the people broke open the prisons and massacred every one of
+the prisoners. The Count of Armagnac, his chancellor, and several
+bishops and officers of state were the principal victims; but no one,
+man or woman, was spared. State prisoners, criminals, and debtors, even
+women great with child, perished in this indiscriminate slaughter.
+
+Almost the whole of Normandy was by this time in possession of the
+English; but Rouen, the capital of the duchy, still held out. It was a
+large city, strongly fortified, but Henry closed it in on every side
+until it was reduced to capitulate by hunger. At the beginning of the
+siege the authorities took measures to expel the destitute class of the
+inhabitants, and several thousands of poor people were thus thrown into
+the hands of the besiegers, who endeavored to drive them back into the
+town. But the gates being absolutely shut against them, they remained
+between the walls and the trenches, pitifully crying for help and
+perishing for want of food and shelter, until, on Christmas Day, when
+the siege had continued nearly five months, Henry ordered food to be
+distributed to them "in the honor of Christ's nativity."
+
+Those within the town, meanwhile, were reduced to no less extremities.
+Enormous prices were given for bread and even for the bodies of dogs,
+cats, and rats. The garrison at length were induced to offer terms, but
+Henry for some time insisted on their surrendering at discretion.
+Hearing, however, that a desperate project was entertained of
+undermining the wall and suddenly rushing out upon the besiegers, he
+consented to grant them conditions, and the city capitulated on January
+19th. The few places that remained unconquered in Normandy then opened
+their gates to Henry; others in Maine and the Isle of France did the
+same, and the English troops entered Picardy on a further career of
+conquest.
+
+Both the rival factions were now seriously anxious to stop the progress
+of the English, either by coming at once to terms with Henry or by
+uniting together against him; and each in turn first tried the former
+course. The Dauphin offered to treat with the King of England; but Henry
+demanding the whole of those large possessions in the north and south of
+France which had been secured to Edward III by the treaty of Bretigni,
+he felt that it was impossible to prolong the negotiation. The Duke of
+Burgundy then arranged a personal interview at Meulan between Henry on
+the one side and himself and the French Queen on behalf of Charles, at
+which terms of peace were to be adjusted. The Queen brought with her the
+princess Catharine, her daughter, whose hand Henry himself had formerly
+demanded as one of the conditions on which he would have consented to
+forbear from invading France. It was now hoped that if he would take her
+in marriage he would moderate his other demands. But Henry, for his
+part, was altogether unyielding. He insisted on the terms of the treaty
+of Bretigni, and on keeping his own conquests besides, with Anjou,
+Maine, Touraine, and the sovereignty over Brittany.
+
+Demands so exorbitant the Duke of Burgundy did not dare to accept, and
+as a last resource he and the Dauphin agreed to be reconciled and to
+unite in defence of their country against the enemy. They held a
+personal interview, embraced each other, and signed a treaty by which
+they promised each to love the other as a brother, and to offer a joint
+resistance to the invaders. A further meeting was arranged to take place
+about seven weeks later to complete matters and to consider their future
+policy. France was delighted at the prospect of internal harmony and the
+hope of deliverance from her enemies. But at the second interview an
+event occurred which marred all her prospects once more. The meeting had
+been appointed to take place at Montereau, where the river Yonne falls
+into the Seine.
+
+The Duke, remembering doubtless how he had perfidiously murdered the
+Duke of Orleans, allowed the day originally appointed to pass by, and
+came to the place at last after considerable misgivings, which appear to
+have been overcome by the exhortations of treacherous friends.
+
+When he arrived he found a place railed in with barriers for the
+meeting. He nevertheless advanced, accompanied by ten attendants, and,
+being told that the Dauphin waited for him, he came within the barriers,
+which were immediately closed behind him. The Dauphin was accompanied by
+one or two gentlemen, among whom was his devoted servant, Tannegui du
+Chatel, who had saved him from the Parisian massacre. This Tannegui had
+been formerly a servant of Louis, Duke of Orleans, whose murder he had
+been eagerly seeking an opportunity to revenge; and as the Duke of
+Burgundy knelt before the Dauphin, he struck him a violent blow on the
+head with a battle-axe. The attack was immediately followed up by two or
+three others, who, before the Duke was able to draw his sword, had
+closed in around him and despatched him with a multitude of wounds.
+
+The effect of this crime was what might have been anticipated. Nothing
+could have been more favorable to the aggressive designs of Henry, or
+more ruinous to the party of the Dauphin, with whose complicity it had
+been too evidently committed. Philip, the son and heir of the murdered
+Duke of Burgundy, at once sought means to revenge his father's death.
+The people of Paris became more than ever enraged against the Armagnacs,
+and entered into negotiations with the King of England. The new Duke
+Philip and Queen Isabel did the same, the latter being no less eager
+than the former for the punishment of her own son. Within less than
+three months they made up their minds to waive every scruple as to the
+acceptance of Henry's most exorbitant demands. He was to have the
+princess Catharine in marriage, and, the Dauphin being disinherited, to
+succeed to the crown of France on her father's death. He was also to be
+regent during King Charles' life; and all who held honors or offices of
+any kind in France were at once to swear allegiance to him as their
+future sovereign. Henry, for his part, was to use his utmost power to
+reduce to obedience those towns and places within the realm which
+adhered to the Dauphin or the Armagnacs.
+
+A treaty on this basis was at length concluded at Troyes in Champagne on
+May 21, 1420, and on Trinity Sunday, June 2d, Henry was married to the
+princess Catharine. Shortly afterward the treaty was formally registered
+by the states of the realm at Paris, when the Dauphin was condemned and
+attainted as guilty of the murder of the Duke of Burgundy and declared
+incapable of succeeding to the crown. But the state of affairs left
+Henry no time for honeymoon festivities. On the Tuesday after his
+wedding he again put himself at the head of his army, and marched with
+Philip of Burgundy to lay siege to Sens, which in a few days
+capitulated. Montereau and Melun were next besieged in succession, and
+each, after some resistance, was compelled to surrender. The latter
+siege lasted nearly four months, and during its continuance Henry fought
+a single combat with the governor in the mines, each combatant having
+his vizor down and being unknown to the other. The governor's name was
+Barbason, and he was one of those accused of complicity in the murder of
+the Duke of Orleans; but in consequence of this incident, Henry saved
+him from the capital punishment which he would otherwise have incurred
+on his capture.
+
+Toward the end of the year Henry entered Paris in triumph with the
+French King and the Duke of Burgundy. He there kept Christmas, and
+shortly afterward moved with his Queen into Normandy on his return into
+England. He held a parliament at Rouen to confirm his authority in the
+duchy, after which he passed through Picardy and Calais, and, crossing
+the sea, came by Dover and Canterbury to London. By his own subjects,
+and especially in the capital, he and his bride were received with
+profuse demonstrations of joy. The Queen was crowned at Westminster with
+great magnificence, and afterward Henry went a progress with her through
+the country, making pilgrimages to several of the more famous shrines in
+England.
+
+But while he was thus employed, a great calamity befell the English
+power in France, which, when the news arrived in England, made it
+apparent that the King's presence was again much needed across the
+Channel. His brother, the Duke of Clarence, whom he had left as his
+lieutenant, was defeated and slain at Beauge in Anjou by an army of
+French and Scots, a number of English noblemen being also slain or taken
+prisoners. This was the first important advantage the Dauphin had
+gained, and the credit of the victory was mainly due to his Scotch
+allies. For the Duke of Albany, who was regent of Scotland, though it is
+commonly supposed that he was unwilling to give needless offence to
+England lest Henry should terminate his power by setting the Scotch King
+at liberty, had been compelled by the general sympathy of the Scots with
+France to send a force under his son the Earl of Buchan to serve against
+the English. The service which they did in that battle was so great that
+the Earl of Buchan was created, by the Dauphin, constable of France.
+
+Again Henry crossed the sea with a new army, having borrowed large sums
+for the expenses of the expedition. Before he left England he made a
+private treaty with his prisoner King James of Scotland, promising to
+let him return to his country after the campaign in France on certain
+specified conditions, among which it was agreed that he should take the
+command of a body of troops in aid of the English. James had accompanied
+him in his last campaign, and Henry had endeavored to make use of his
+authority to forbid the Scots in France from taking part in the war, but
+they had refused to acknowledge themselves bound to a king who was a
+captive.
+
+By this agreement, however, Henry obtained real assistance and
+cooperation from his prisoner, whom he employed, in concert with the
+Duke of Gloucester, in the siege of Dreux, which very soon surrendered.
+He himself meanwhile marched toward the Loire to meet the Dauphin, and
+took Beaugency; then, returning northward, first reduced Villeneuve on
+the Yonne, and afterward laid siege to Meaux on the Marne. The latter
+place held out for seven months, and while Henry lay before it he
+received intelligence that his Queen had borne him a son at Windsor, who
+was christened Henry.
+
+The city of Meaux surrendered on May 10, 1422. The Governor, a man who
+had been guilty of great cruelties, was beheaded, and his head and body
+were suspended from a tree on which he himself had caused a number of
+people to be hanged as adherents of the Duke of Burgundy. Henry was now
+master of the greater part of the North of France, and his Queen came
+over from England to join him, with reenforcements under his brother the
+Duke of Bedford. But he was not permitted to rest; for the Dauphin,
+having taken from his ally the Duke of Burgundy the town of La Charte on
+the Loire, proceeded to lay siege to Cosne, and, Philip having applied
+to Henry for assistance, he sent forward the Duke of Bedford with his
+army, intending shortly to follow himself. This demonstration was
+sufficient. The Dauphin felt that he was too weak to contend with the
+united English and Burgundian forces, and he withdrew from the siege.
+
+Henry, however, was disabled from joining the army by a severe attack of
+dysentery; and though he had at first hoped that he might be carried in
+a litter to head-quarters, he soon found that his illness was far too
+serious to permit him to carry out his intention. He was accordingly
+conveyed back to Vincennes, near Paris, where he grew so rapidly worse
+that it was evident his end was near. In a few brief words to those
+about him he declared his will touching the government of England and
+France after his death, until his infant son should be of age. The
+regency of France he committed to the Duke of Bedford, in case it
+should be declined by the Duke of Burgundy. That of England he gave to
+his other brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. To his two uncles,
+Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of
+Exeter, he intrusted the guardianship of his child. He besought all
+parties to maintain the alliance with Burgundy, and never to release the
+Duke of Orleans and the other prisoners of Agincourt during his son's
+minority. Having given these instructions he expired, on the last day of
+August, 1422.
+
+His death was bewailed both in England and France with no ordinary
+regret. The great achievements of his reign made him naturally a popular
+hero; nor was the regard felt for his memory diminished when, under the
+feeble reign of his son, all that he had gained was irrecoverably lost
+again, so that nothing remained of all his conquests except the story of
+how they had been won. Those past glories, indeed, must have seemed all
+the brighter when contrasted with a present which knew but disaster
+abroad and civil dissension at home. The early death of Henry also
+contributed to the popular estimate of his greatness. It was seen that
+in a very few years he had subdued a large part of the territory of
+France. It was not seen that in the nature of things this advantage
+could not be maintained, and that even the greatest military talents
+would not have succeeded in preserving the English conquests.
+
+Nor can it be said that Henry's success, extraordinary as it was, was
+altogether owing to his own abilities. That he exhibited great qualities
+as a general cannot be denied; but these would have availed him little
+if the rival factions in France had not been far more bitterly opposed
+to each other than to him. Indeed, it is difficult after all to justify,
+even as a matter of policy, his interference in French affairs, except
+as a means of diverting public attention from the fact that he inherited
+from his father but an indifferent title even to the throne of England.
+And though success attended his efforts beyond all expectation, he most
+wilfully endangered the safety not only of himself, but of his gallant
+army, when he determined to march with reduced forces through the
+enemy's country from Harfleur to Calais. It was a rashness nothing less
+than culpable, but in his own interests rashness was good policy.
+Unless he could succeed in desperate enterprises against tremendous
+odds and so make himself a military hero and a favorite of the
+multitude, his throne was insecure. He succeeded; but it was only by
+staking everything upon the venture--his own safety and that of his
+army, which, if the French had exercised but a little more discretion,
+would inevitably have been cut to pieces or made prisoners to a man.
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC'S VICTORY AT ORLEANS
+
+A.D. 1429
+
+Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy
+
+
+  In the Hundred Years' War between England and France, a
+  critical period was reached when Henry V, in 1415, won the
+  battle of Agincourt, and five years later, by the treaty of
+  Troyes, secured the succession to the French throne on the
+  death of Charles VI. Both monarchs dying in 1422, Charles
+  VII was proclaimed King of France, and Henry's son--Henry
+  VI--succeeded to his father's throne.
+
+  France now realized that her condition was wellnigh
+  hopeless, for the greater part of her territory was in the
+  hands of her enemies. When the English began the siege of
+  Orleans the extinction of French independence seemed to be
+  inevitable. The chivalry of France had been wasted in
+  terrible wars, and the spirits of her soldiers were daunted
+  by repeated disaster. The English king had been proclaimed
+  in Paris, and the "native prince was a dissolute trifler,
+  stained with the assassination of the most powerful noble of
+  the land."[77] Anarchy and brigandage everywhere prevailed,
+  and the condition of the peasantry was too wretched to be
+  described.
+
+  "Such," says Lamartine, "was the state of the nation when
+  Providence showed it a savior in a child." This child was
+  Jeanne d'Arc, called _La Pucelle_ ("the Maid"--more fully,
+  "the Maid of Orleans"), whose character and services to her
+  country made her, perhaps, the most illustrious heroine of
+  history. She was born at Domremy, in the northeast part of
+  France, January 6, 1412. All that is essential concerning
+  her personality and life prior to the great achievement
+  recorded here will be found in Creasy's own introduction to
+  his spirited account of the victory at Orleans.
+
+Orleans was looked upon as the last stronghold of the French national
+party. If the English could once obtain possession of it, their
+victorious progress through the residue of the kingdom seemed free from
+any serious obstacle. Accordingly, the Earl of Salisbury, one of the
+bravest and most experienced of the English generals, who had been
+trained under Henry V, marched to the attack of the all-important city;
+and, after reducing several places of inferior consequence in the
+neighborhood, appeared with his army before its walls on the 12th of
+October, 1428.
+
+The city of Orleans itself was on the north side of the Loire, but its
+suburbs extended far on the southern side, and a strong bridge connected
+them with the town. A fortification, which in modern military phrase
+would be termed a _tete-du-pont_, defended the bridge head on the
+southern side, and two towers, called the _Tourelles_, were built on the
+bridge itself, at a little distance from the tete-du-pont. Indeed, the
+solid masonry of the bridge terminated at the Tourelles; and the
+communication thence with the tete-du-pont and the southern shore was by
+means of a drawbridge. The Tourelles and the tete-du-pont formed
+together a strong-fortified post, capable of containing a garrison of
+considerable strength; and so long as this was in possession of the
+Orleannais, they could communicate freely with the southern provinces,
+the inhabitants of which, like the Orleannais themselves, supported the
+cause of their dauphin against the foreigners.
+
+Lord Salisbury rightly judged the capture of the Tourelles to be the
+most material step toward the reduction of the city itself. Accordingly,
+he directed his principal operations against this post, and after some
+severe repulses he carried the Tourelles by storm on the 23d of October.
+The French, however, broke down the arches of the bridge that were
+nearest to the north bank, and thus rendered a direct assault from the
+Tourelles upon the city impossible. But the possession of this post
+enabled the English to distress the town greatly by a battery of cannon
+which they planted there, and which commanded some of the principal
+streets.
+
+It has been observed by Hume that this is the first siege in which any
+important use appears to have been made of artillery. And even at
+Orleans both besiegers and besieged seem to have employed their cannons
+merely as instruments of destruction against their enemy's _men_, and
+not to have trusted to them as engines of demolition against their
+enemy's walls and works. The efficacy of cannon in breaching solid
+masonry was taught Europe by the Turks a few years afterward, at the
+memorable siege of Constantinople.
+
+In our French wars, as in the wars of the classic nations, famine was
+looked on as the surest weapon to compel the submission of a well-walled
+town; and the great object of the besiegers was to effect a complete
+circumvallation. The great ambit of the walls of Orleans, and the
+facilities which the river gave for obtaining succors and supplies,
+rendered the capture of the town by this process a matter of great
+difficulty. Nevertheless, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Suffolk, who
+succeeded him in command of the English after his death by a
+cannon-ball, carried on the necessary works with great skill and
+resolution. Six strongly-fortified posts, called _bastilles_, were
+formed at certain intervals round the town, and the purpose of the
+English engineers was to draw strong lines between them. During the
+winter, little progress was made with the intrenchments, but when the
+spring of 1429 came, the English resumed their work with activity; the
+communications between the city and the country became more difficult,
+and the approach of want began already to be felt in Orleans.
+
+The besieging force also fared hardly for stores and provisions, until
+relieved by the effects of a brilliant victory which Sir John Fastolf,
+one of the best English generals, gained at Rouvrai, near Orleans, a few
+days after Ash Wednesday, 1429. With only sixteen hundred fighting men,
+Sir John completely defeated an army of French and Scots, four thousand
+strong, which had been collected for the purpose of aiding the
+Orleannais and harassing the besiegers. After this encounter, which
+seemed decisively to confirm the superiority of the English in battle
+over their adversaries, Fastolf escorted large supplies of stores and
+food to Suffolk's camp, and the spirits of the English rose to the
+highest pitch at the prospect of the speedy capture of the city before
+them, and the consequent subjection of all France beneath their arms.
+
+The Orleannais now, in their distress, offered to surrender the city
+into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, who, though the ally of the
+English, was yet one of their native princes. The regent Bedford refused
+these terms, and the speedy submission of the city to the English seemed
+inevitable. The dauphin Charles, who was now at Chinon with his remnant
+of a court, despaired of continuing any longer the struggle for his
+crown, and was only prevented from abandoning the country by the more
+masculine spirits of his mistress and his Queen. Yet neither they nor
+the boldest of Charles' captains could have shown him where to find
+resources for prolonging war; and least of all could any human skill
+have predicted the quarter whence rescue was to come to Orleans and to
+France.
+
+In the village of Domremy, on the borders of Lorraine, there was a poor
+peasant of the name of Jacques d'Arc, respected in his station of life,
+and who had reared a family in virtuous habits and in the practice of
+the strictest devotion. His eldest daughter was named by her parents
+Jeannette, but she was called Jeanne by the French, which was Latinized
+into Johanna, and Anglicized into Joan.
+
+At the time when Jeanne first attracted attention, she was about
+eighteen years of age. She was naturally of a susceptible disposition,
+which diligent attention to the legends of saints and tales of fairies,
+aided by the dreamy loneliness of her life while tending her father's
+flocks, had made peculiarly prone to enthusiastic fervor. At the same
+time, she was eminent for piety and purity of soul, and for her
+compassionate gentleness to the sick and the distressed.
+
+The district where she dwelt had escaped comparatively free from the
+ravages of war, but the approach of roving bands of Burgundian or
+English troops frequently spread terror through Domremy. Once the
+village had been plundered by some of these marauders, and Jeanne and
+her family had been driven from their home, and forced to seek refuge
+for a time at Neufchateau. The peasantry in Domremy were principally
+attached to the house of Orleans and the Dauphin, and all the miseries
+which France endured were there imputed to the Burgundian faction and
+their allies, the English, who were seeking to enslave unhappy France.
+
+Thus, from infancy to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes
+of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it
+caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The
+deliverance of France from the English was the subject of her reveries
+by day and her dreams by night. Blended with these aspirations were
+recollections of the miraculous interpositions of heaven in favor of
+the oppressed, which she had learned from the legends of her Church.
+Her faith was undoubting; her prayers were fervent. "She feared no
+danger, for she felt no sin," and at length she believed herself to have
+received the supernatural inspiration which she sought.
+
+According to her own narrative, delivered by her to her merciless
+inquisitors in the time of her captivity and approaching death, she was
+about thirteen years old when her revelations commenced. Her own words
+describe them best. "At the age of thirteen, a voice from God came to
+her to help her in ruling herself, and that voice came to her about the
+hour of noon, in summer-time, while she was in her father's garden. And
+she had fasted the day before. And she heard the voice on her right, in
+the direction of the church; and when she heard the voice, she saw also
+a bright light."
+
+Afterward St. Michael and St. Margaret and St. Catharine appeared to
+her. They were always in a halo of glory; she could see that their heads
+were crowned with jewels; and she heard their voices, which were sweet
+and mild. She did not distinguish their arms or limbs. She heard them
+more frequently than she saw them; and the usual time when she heard
+them was when the church bells were sounding for prayer. And if she was
+in the woods when she heard them, she could plainly distinguish their
+voices drawing near to her. When she thought that she discerned the
+heavenly voices, she knelt down, and bowed herself to the ground. Their
+presence gladdened her even to tears, and after they departed she wept
+because they had not taken her with them back to paradise. They always
+spoke soothingly to her. They told her that France would be saved, and
+that she was to save it.
+
+Such were the visions and the voices that moved the spirit of the girl
+of thirteen; and as she grew older, they became more frequent and more
+clear. At last the tidings of the siege of Orleans reached Domremy.
+Jeanne heard her parents and neighbors talk of the sufferings of its
+population, of the ruin which its capture would bring on their lawful
+sovereign, and of the distress of the Dauphin and his court. Jeanne's
+heart was sorely troubled at the thought of the fate of Orleans; and her
+"voices" now ordered her to leave her home, and warned her that she was
+the instrument chosen by heaven for driving away the English from that
+city, and for taking the Dauphin to be anointed king at Rheims. At
+length she informed her parents of her divine mission, and told them
+that she must go to the Sire de Baudricourt, who commanded at
+Vaucouleurs, and who was the appointed person to bring her into the
+presence of the King, whom she was to save.
+
+Neither the anger nor the grief of her parents, who said that they would
+rather see her drowned than exposed to the contamination of the camp,
+could move her from her purpose. One of her uncles consented to take her
+to Vaucouleurs, where De Baudricourt at first thought her mad, and
+derided her, but by degrees was led to believe, if not in her
+inspiration, at least in her enthusiasm, and in its possible utility to
+the Dauphin's cause.
+
+The inhabitants of Vaucouleurs were completely won over to her side by
+the piety and devoutness which she displayed, and by her firm assurance
+in the truth of her mission. She told them that it was God's will that
+she should go to the King, and that no one but her could save the
+kingdom of France. She said that she herself would rather remain with
+her poor mother and spin; but the Lord had ordered her forth.
+
+The fame of "the Maid," as she was termed, the renown of her holiness
+and of her mission, spread far and wide. Baudricourt sent her with an
+escort to Chinon, where the dauphin Charles was dallying away his time.
+Her "voices" had bidden her assume the arms and the apparel of a knight;
+and the wealthiest inhabitants of Vaucouleurs had vied with each other
+in equipping her with war-horse, armor, and sword. On reaching Chinon,
+she was, after some delay, admitted into the presence of the Dauphin.
+Charles designedly dressed himself far less richly than many of his
+courtiers were apparelled, and mingled with them, when Jeanne was
+introduced, in order to see if the holy Maid would address her
+exhortations to the wrong person. But she instantly singled him out,
+and, kneeling before him, said:
+
+"Most noble Dauphin, the King of Heaven announces to you by me that you
+shall be anointed and crowned king in the city of Rheims, and that you
+shall be his vicegerent in France."
+
+His features may probably have been seen by her previously in
+portraits, or have been described to her by others; but she herself
+believed that her "voices" inspired her when she addressed the King, and
+the report soon spread abroad that the holy Maid had found the King by a
+miracle; and this, with many other similar rumors, augmented the renown
+and influence that she now rapidly acquired.
+
+The state of public feeling in France was now favorable to an
+enthusiastic belief in a divine interposition in favor of the party that
+had hitherto been unsuccessful and oppressed. The humiliations which had
+befallen the French royal family and nobility were looked on as the just
+judgments of God upon them for their vice and impiety. The misfortunes
+that had come upon France as a nation were believed to have been drawn
+down by national sins. The English, who had been the instruments of
+heaven's wrath against France, seemed now, by their pride and cruelty,
+to be fitting objects of it themselves.
+
+France in that age was a profoundly religious country. There was
+ignorance, there was superstition, there was bigotry; but there was
+_faith_--a faith that itself worked true miracles, even while it
+believed in unreal ones. At this time, also, one of those devotional
+movements began among the clergy in France, which from time to time
+occur in national churches, without it being possible for the historian
+to assign any adequate human cause for their immediate date or
+extension. Numberless friars and priests traversed the rural districts
+and towns of France, preaching to the people that they must seek from
+heaven a deliverance from the pillages of the soldiery and the insolence
+of the foreign oppressors.
+
+The idea of a providence that works only by general laws was wholly
+alien to the feelings of the age. Every political event, as well as
+every natural phenomenon, was believed to be the immediate result of a
+special mandate of God. This led to the belief that his holy angels and
+saints were constantly employed in executing his commands and mingling
+in the affairs of men. The Church encouraged these feelings, and at the
+same time sanctioned the concurrent popular belief that hosts of evil
+spirits were also ever actively interposing in the current of earthly
+events, with whom sorcerers and wizards could league themselves, and
+thereby obtain the exercise of supernatural power.
+
+Thus all things favored the influence which Jeanne obtained both over
+friends and foes. The French nation, as well as the English and the
+Burgundians, readily admitted that superhuman beings inspired her; the
+only question was whether these beings were good or evil angels; whether
+she brought with her "airs from heaven or blasts from hell." This
+question seemed to her countrymen to be decisively settled in her favor
+by the austere sanctity of her life, by the holiness of her
+conversation, but still more by her exemplary attention to all the
+services and rites of the Church. The Dauphin at first feared the injury
+that might be done to his cause if he laid himself open to the charge of
+having leagued himself with a sorceress. Every imaginable test,
+therefore, was resorted to in order to set Jeanne's orthodoxy and purity
+beyond suspicion. At last Charles and his advisers felt safe in
+accepting her services as those of a true and virtuous Christian
+daughter of the holy Church.
+
+It is, indeed, probable that Charles himself and some of his counsellors
+may have suspected Jeanne of being a mere enthusiast, and it is certain
+that Dunois and others of the best generals took considerable latitude
+in obeying or deviating from the military orders that she gave. But over
+the mass of the people and the soldiery her influence was unbounded.
+While Charles and his doctors of theology, and court ladies, had been
+deliberating as to recognizing or dismissing the Maid, a considerable
+period had passed away during which a small army, the last gleanings, as
+it seemed, of the English sword, had been assembled at Blois, under
+Dunois, La Hire, Xaintrailles, and other chiefs, who to their natural
+valor were now beginning to unite the wisdom that is taught by
+misfortune. It was resolved to send Jeanne with this force and a convoy
+of provisions to Orleans. The distress of that city had now become
+urgent. But the communication with the open country was not entirely cut
+off: the Orleannais had heard of the holy Maid whom Providence had
+raised up for their deliverance, and their messengers earnestly implored
+the Dauphin to send her to them without delay.
+
+Jeanne appeared at the camp at Blois, clad in a new suit of brilliant
+white armor, mounted on a stately black war-horse, and with a lance in
+her right hand, which she had learned to wield with skill and grace. Her
+head was unhelmeted, so that all could behold her fair and expressive
+features, her deep-set and earnest eyes, and her long black hair, which
+was parted across her forehead, and bound by a ribbon behind her back.
+She wore at her side a small battle-axe, and the consecrated sword,
+marked on the blade with five crosses, which had at her bidding been
+taken for her from the shrine of St. Catharine at Fierbois. A page
+carried her banner, which she had caused to be made and embroidered as
+her voices enjoined. It was white satin, strewn with _fleurs-de-lis_,
+and on it were the words
+
+  "JHESUS MARIA,"
+
+and the representation of the Saviour in his glory. Jeanne afterward
+generally bore her banner herself in battle; she said that though she
+loved her sword much, she loved her banner forty times as much; and she
+loved to carry it, because it could not kill anyone.
+
+Thus accoutred, she came to lead the troops of France, who looked with
+soldierly admiration on her well-proportioned and upright figure, the
+skill with which she managed her war-horse, and the easy grace with
+which she handled her weapons. Her military education had been short,
+but she had availed herself of it well. She had also the good sense to
+interfere little with the manoeuvres of the troops, leaving these
+things to Dunois and others whom she had the discernment to recognize as
+the best officers in the camp.
+
+Her tactics in action were simple enough. As she herself described it,
+"I used to say to them, 'Go boldly in among the English,' and then I
+used to go boldly in myself." Such, as she told her inquisitors, was the
+only spell she used, and it was one of power. But, while interfering
+little with the military discipline of the troops, in all matters of
+moral discipline she was inflexibly strict. All the abandoned followers
+of the camp were driven away. She compelled both generals and soldiers
+to attend regularly at confessional. Her chaplain and other priests
+marched with the army under her orders; and at every halt, an altar was
+set up and the sacrament administered. No oath or foul language passed
+without punishment or censure. Even the roughest and most hardened
+veterans obeyed her. They had put off for a time the bestial coarseness
+which had grown on them during a life of bloodshed and rapine; they
+felt that they must go forth in a new spirit to a new career, and
+acknowledged the beauty of the holiness in which the heaven-sent Maid
+was leading them to certain victory.
+
+Jeanne marched from Blois on the 25th of April with a convoy of
+provisions for Orleans, accompanied by Dunois, La Hire, and the other
+chief captains of the French, and on the evening of the 28th they
+approached the town. In the words of the old chronicler Hall: "The
+Englishmen, perceiving that thei within could not long continue for
+faute of vitaile and pouder, kepte not their watche so diligently as
+thei were accustomed, nor scoured now the countrey environed as thei
+before had ordained. Whiche negligence the citizens shut in perceiving,
+sent worde thereof to the French captaines, which, with Pucelle, in the
+dedde tyme of the nighte, and in a greate rayne and thundere, with all
+their vitaile and artillery, entered into the citie."
+
+When it was day, the Maid rode in solemn procession through the city,
+clad in complete armor, and mounted on a white horse. Dunois was by her
+side, and all the bravest knights of her army and of the garrison
+followed in her train. The whole population thronged around her; and
+men, women, and children strove to touch her garments or her banner or
+her charger. They poured forth blessings on her, whom they already
+considered their deliverer. In the words used by two of them afterward
+before the tribunal which reversed the sentence, but could not restore
+the life of the virgin-martyr of France, "the people of Orleans, when
+they first saw her in their city, thought that it was an angel from
+heaven that had come down to save them."
+
+Jeanne spoke gently in reply to their acclamations and addresses. She
+told them to fear God, and trust in him for safety from the fury of
+their enemies. She first went to the principal church, where _Te Deum_
+was chanted; and then she took up her abode at the house of Jacques
+Bourgier, one of the principal citizens, and whose wife was a matron of
+good repute. She refused to attend a splendid banquet which had been
+provided for her, and passed nearly all her time in prayer.
+
+When it was known by the English that the Maid was in Orleans, their
+minds were not less occupied about her than were the minds of those in
+the city; but it was in a very different spirit. The English believed
+in her supernatural mission as firmly as the French did, but they
+thought her a sorceress who had come to overthrow them by her
+enchantments. An old prophecy, which told that a damsel from Lorraine
+was to save France, had long been current, and it was known and applied
+to Jeanne by foreigners as well as by the natives. For months the
+English had heard of the coming Maid, and the tales of miracles which
+she was said to have wrought had been listened to by the rough yeomen of
+the English camp with anxious curiosity and secret awe. She had sent a
+herald to the English generals before she marched for Orleans, and he
+had summoned the English generals in the name of the most High to give
+up to the Maid, who was sent by heaven, the keys of the French cities
+which they had wrongfully taken; and he also solemnly adjured the
+English troops, whether archers or men of the companies of war or
+gentlemen or others, who were before the city of Orleans, to depart
+thence to their homes, under peril of being visited by the judgment of
+God.
+
+On her arrival in Orleans, Jeanne sent another similar message; but the
+English scoffed at her from their towers, and threatened to burn her
+heralds. She determined, before she shed the blood of the besiegers, to
+repeat the warning with her own voice; and accordingly she mounted one
+of the boulevards of the town, which was within hearing of the
+Tourelles, and thence she spoke to the English, and bade them depart,
+otherwise they would meet with shame and woe.
+
+Sir William Gladsdale--whom the French call "Glacidas"--commanded the
+English post at the Tourelles, and he and another English officer
+replied by bidding her go home and keep her cows, and by ribald jests
+that brought tears of shame and indignation into her eyes. But, though
+the English leaders vaunted aloud, the effect produced on their army by
+Jeanne's presence in Orleans was proved four days after her arrival,
+when, on the approach of reenforcements and stores to the town, Jeanne
+and La Hire marched out to meet them, and escorted the long train of
+provision wagons safely into Orleans, between the bastiles of the
+English, who cowered behind their walls instead of charging fiercely and
+fearlessly, as had been their wont, on any French band that dared to
+show itself within reach.
+
+Thus far she had prevailed without striking a blow; but the time was now
+come to test her courage amid the horrors of actual slaughter. On the
+afternoon of the day on which she had escorted the reenforcements into
+the city, while she was resting fatigued at home, Dunois had seized an
+advantageous opportunity of attacking the English bastile of St. Loup,
+and a fierce assault of the Orleannais had been made on it, which the
+English garrison of the fort stubbornly resisted. Jeanne was roused by a
+sound which she believed to be that of her heavenly voices; she called
+for her arms and horse, and, quickly equipping herself, she mounted to
+ride off to where the fight was raging. In her haste she had forgotten
+her banner; she rode back, and, without dismounting, had it given to her
+from the window, and then she galloped to the gate whence the sally had
+been made.
+
+On her way she met some of the wounded French who had been carried back
+from the fight. "Ha!" she exclaimed, "I never can see French blood flow
+without my hair standing on end." She rode out of the gate, and met the
+tide of her countrymen, who had been repulsed from the English fort, and
+were flying back to Orleans in confusion. At the sight of the holy Maid
+and her banner they rallied and renewed the assault, Jeanne rode forward
+at their head, waving her banner and cheering them on. The English
+quailed at what they believed to be the charge of hell; St. Loup was
+stormed, and its defenders put to the sword, except some few, whom
+Jeanne succeeded in saving. All her woman's gentleness returned when the
+combat was over. It was the first time that she had ever seen a
+battlefield. She wept at the sight of so many bleeding corpses; and her
+tears flowed doubly when she reflected that they were the bodies of
+Christian men who had died without confession.
+
+The next day was Ascension Day, and it was passed by Jeanne in prayer.
+But on the following morrow it was resolved by the chiefs of the
+garrison to attack the English forts on the south of the river. For this
+purpose they crossed the river in boats, and after some severe fighting,
+in which the Maid was wounded in the heel, both the English bastiles of
+the Augustins and St. Jean de Blanc were captured. The Tourelles were
+now the only posts which the besiegers held on the south of the river.
+But that post was formidably strong, and by its command of the bridge
+it was the key to the deliverance of Orleans. It was known that a fresh
+English army was approaching under Fastolfe to reenforce the besiegers,
+and, should that army arrive while the Tourelles were yet in the
+possession of their comrades, there was great peril of all the
+advantages which the French had gained being nullified, and of the siege
+being again actively carried on.
+
+It was resolved, therefore, by the French to assail the Tourelles at
+once, while the enthusiasm which the presence and the heroic valor of
+the Maid had created was at its height. But the enterprise was
+difficult. The rampart of the tete-du-pont, or landward bulwark, of the
+Tourelles was steep and high, and Sir John Gladsdale occupied this
+all-important fort with five hundred archers and men-at-arms, who were
+the very flower of the English army.
+
+Early in the morning of the 7th of May some thousands of the best French
+troops in Orleans heard mass and attended the confessional by Jeanne's
+orders, and then crossing the river in boats, as on the preceding day,
+they assailed the bulwark of the Tourelles "with light hearts and heavy
+hands." But Gladsdale's men, encouraged by their bold and skilful
+leader, made a resolute and able defence. The Maid planted her banner on
+the edge of the fosse, and then, springing down into the ditch, she
+placed the first ladder against the wall and began to mount. An English
+archer sent an arrow at her, which pierced her corselet and wounded her
+severely between the neck and shoulder. She fell bleeding from the
+ladder; and the English were leaping down from the wall to capture her,
+but her followers bore her off. She was carried to the rear and laid
+upon the grass; her armor was taken off, and the anguish of her wound
+and the sight of her blood made her at first tremble and weep.
+
+But her confidence in her celestial mission soon returned: her patron
+saints seemed to stand before her and reassure her. She sat up and drew
+the arrow out with her own hands. Some of the soldiers who stood by
+wished to stanch the blood by saying a charm over the wound; but she
+forbade them, saying that she did not wish to be cured by unhallowed
+means. She had the wound dressed with a little oil, and then, bidding
+her confessor come to her, she betook herself to prayer.
+
+In the mean while the English in the bulwark of the Tourelles had
+repulsed the oft-renewed efforts of the French to scale the wall.
+Dunois, who commanded the assailants, was at last discouraged, and gave
+orders for a retreat to be sounded. Jeanne sent for him and the other
+generals, and implored them not to despair.
+
+"By my God," she said to them, "you shall soon enter in there. Do not
+doubt it. When you see my banner wave again up to the wall, to your arms
+again! the fort is yours. For the present, rest a little and take some
+food and drink."
+
+"They did so," says the old chronicler of the siege, "for they obeyed
+her marvellously."
+
+The faintness caused by her wound had now passed off, and she headed the
+French in another rush against the bulwark. The English, who had thought
+her slain, were alarmed at her reappearance, while the French pressed
+furiously and fanatically forward. A Biscayan soldier was carrying
+Jeanne's banner. She had told the troops that directly the banner
+touched the wall they should enter. The Biscayan waved the banner
+forward from the edge of the fosse, and touched the wall with it, and
+then all the French host swarmed madly up the ladders that now were
+raised in all directions against the English fort. At this crisis the
+efforts of the English garrison were distracted by an attack from
+another quarter. The French troops who had been left in Orleans had
+placed some planks over the broken arch of the bridge, and advanced
+across them to the assault of the Tourelles on the northern side.
+
+Gladsdale resolved to withdraw his men from the landward bulwark, and
+concentrate his whole force in the Tourelles themselves. He was passing
+for this purpose across the drawbridge that connected the Tourelles and
+the tete-du-pont, when Jeanne, who by this time had scaled the wall of
+the bulwark, called out to him, "Surrender! surrender to the King of
+Heaven! Ah, Glacidas, you have foully wronged me with your words, but I
+have great pity on your soul and the souls of your men." The Englishman,
+disdainful of her summons, was striding on across the drawbridge, when a
+cannon-shot from the town carried it away, and Gladsdale perished in the
+water that ran beneath. After his fall, the remnant of the English
+abandoned all further resistance. Three hundred of them had been killed
+in the battle and two hundred were made prisoners.
+
+The broken arch was speedily repaired by the exulting Orleannais, and
+Jeanne made her triumphal reentry into the city by the bridge that had
+so long been closed. Every church in Orleans rang out its gratulating
+peal; and throughout the night the sounds of rejoicing echoed, and the
+bonfires blazed up from the city. But in the lines and forts which the
+besiegers yet retained on the northern shore, there was anxious watching
+of the generals, and there was desponding gloom among the soldiery. Even
+Talbot now counselled retreat. On the following morning the Orleannais,
+from their walls, saw the great forts called "London" and "St. Lawrence"
+in flames, and witnessed their invaders busy in destroying the stores
+and munitions which had been relied on for the destruction of Orleans.
+
+Slowly and sullenly the English army retired; and not before it had
+drawn up in battle array opposite to the city, as if to challenge the
+garrison to an encounter. The French troops were eager to go out and
+attack, but Jeanne forbade it. The day was Sunday.
+
+"In the name of God," she said, "let them depart, and let us return
+thanks to God."
+
+She led the soldiers and citizens forth from Orleans, but not for the
+shedding of blood. They passed in solemn procession round the city
+walls, and then, while their retiring enemies were yet in sight, they
+knelt in thanksgiving to God for the deliverance which he had vouchsafed
+them.
+
+Within three months from the time of her first interview with the
+Dauphin, Jeanne had fulfilled the first part of her promise, the raising
+of the siege of Orleans. Within three months more she had fulfilled the
+second part also, and had stood with her banner in her hand by the high
+altar at Rheims, while he was anointed and crowned as king Charles VII
+of France. In the interval she had taken Jargeau, Troyes, and other
+strong places, and she had defeated an English army in a fair field at
+Patay. The enthusiasm of her countrymen knew no bounds; but the
+importance of her services, and especially of her primary achievement at
+Orleans, may perhaps be best proved by the testimony of her enemies.
+There is extant a fragment of a letter from the regent Bedford to his
+royal nephew, Henry VI, in which he bewails the turn that the war has
+taken, and especially attributes it to the raising of the siege of
+Orleans by Jeanne. Bedford's own words, which are preserved in Rymer,
+are as follows:
+
+"And alle thing there prospered for you til the tyme of the Siege of
+Orleans taken in hand God knoweth by what advis. At the whiche tyme,
+after the adventure fallen to the persone of my cousin of Salisbury,
+whom God assoille, there felle, by the hand of God as it seemeth, a
+great strook upon your peuple that was assembled there in grete nombre,
+caused in grete partie, as y trowe, of lakke of sadde beleve, and of
+unlevefulle doubte, that thei hadde of a disciple and lyme of the
+Feende, called the Pucelle, that used fals enchantments and sorcerie.
+
+"The whiche strooke and discomfiture nott oonly lessed in grete partie
+the nombre of your peuple there, but as well withdrewe the courage of
+the remenant in merveillous wyse, and couraiged your adverse partie and
+ennemys to assemble them forthwith in grete nombre."
+
+When Charles had been anointed king of France, Jeanne believed that her
+mission was accomplished. And in truth the deliverance of France from
+the English, though not completed for many years afterward, was then
+insured. The ceremony of a royal coronation and anointment was not in
+those days regarded as a mere costly formality. It was believed to
+confer the sanction and the grace of heaven upon the prince, who had
+previously ruled with mere human authority. Thenceforth he was the
+Lord's Anointed. Moreover, one of the difficulties that had previously
+lain in the way of many Frenchmen when called on to support Charles VII
+was now removed. He had been publicly stigmatized, even by his own
+parents, as no true son of the royal race of France. The queen-mother,
+the English, and the partisans of Burgundy called him the "Pretender to
+the title of Dauphin"; but those who had been led to doubt his
+legitimacy were cured of their scepticism by the victories of the holy
+Maid and by the fulfilment of her pledges. They thought that heaven had
+now declared itself in favor of Charles as the true heir of the crown of
+St. Louis, and the tales about his being spurious were thenceforth
+regarded as mere English calumnies.
+
+With this strong tide of national feeling in his favor, with victorious
+generals and soldiers round him, and a dispirited and divided enemy
+before him, he could not fail to conquer, though his own imprudence and
+misconduct, and the stubborn valor which the English still from time to
+time displayed, prolonged the war in France until the civil Wars of the
+Roses broke out in England, and left France to peace and repose.
+
+
+
+
+TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF JEANNE D'ARC
+
+A.D. 1431
+
+Jules Michelet
+
+
+  After her victory at Orleans (1429), Jeanne d'Arc "knelt
+  before the French King in the cathedral of Rheims, and shed
+  tears of joy." She felt that she had fulfilled her mission,
+  and she desired to return to her home at Domremy. But King
+  Charles VII persuaded her to remain with the army. "She
+  still heard her heavenly voices, but she now no longer
+  thought herself the appointed minister of heaven to lead her
+  countrymen to certain victory." She expected but one year
+  more of life; but she still bravely faced the future with
+  its perils.
+
+  The Maid took part in the capture of Laon, Soissons,
+  Compiegne, and other places, and, in the attack on Paris,
+  September, 1429, which she prematurely urged, was severely
+  wounded. In a sally from Compiegne, where she was besieged
+  by Burgundians, she was taken prisoner May 24, 1430, and
+  held until November, when for a large payment in money she
+  was surrendered to the English, who took her to Rouen, their
+  real capital in France.
+
+  On January 3, 1431, by order of King Henry VI of England,
+  Jeanne was placed in the hands of Peter Cauchon, Bishop of
+  Beauvais, who had already moved to have her delivered up to
+  the Inquisition of France, as demanded by the University of
+  Paris. The Bishop proceeded to form at Rouen a "court of
+  justice" for her trial, and on February 21st the Maid was
+  brought before her judges--"Norman priests and doctors of
+  Paris"--in the chapel of Rouen castle. The trial lasted
+  until May 30th, forty sittings being held--some of them in
+  Jeanne's prison, where for a time she was kept in an iron
+  cage.
+
+  Commanded to take "an oath to tell the truth about
+  everything as to which she should be questioned," she
+  replied: "Perchance you may ask me things I would not tell
+  you. I do not like to take an oath to tell the truth save as
+  to matters which concern the faith." She fearlessly tried to
+  guard against violation of what she considered her right to
+  be silent.
+
+  In "this odious and shameful trial," says Guizot, "the
+  judges' prejudiced servility and scientific subtlety were
+  employed for three months to wear out the courage or
+  overreach the understanding of a young girl of nineteen, who
+  made no defence beyond holding her tongue or appealing to
+  God, who had dictated to her that which she had done."
+  Formal accusation was made under twelve heads or articles,
+  based on the preliminary examination, and the trial
+  proceeded to its merciless end.
+
+In Passion Week, Jeanne d'Arc fell sick. Her temptation began, no doubt,
+on Palm Sunday. A country girl, born on the skirts of a forest, and
+having ever lived in the open air of heaven, she was compelled to pass
+this fine Palm Sunday in the depths of a dungeon. The grand "succor"
+which the Church invokes came not for her; the "doors did not open."
+
+They were opened on the Tuesday, but it was to lead the accused to the
+great hall of the castle, before her judges. They read to her the
+articles which had been founded on her answers, and the Bishop
+previously represented to her "that these doctors were all churchmen,
+clerks, and well read in law, divine and human; that they were all
+tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed mildly, seeking neither
+vengeance nor corporal punishment, but solely wishing to enlighten her,
+and put her in the way of truth and of salvation; and that, as she was
+not sufficiently informed in such high matters, the Bishop and the
+Inquisitor offered her the choice of one or more of the assessors to act
+as her counsel." The accused, in presence of this assembly, in which she
+did not descry a single friendly face, mildly answered: "For what you
+admonish me as to my good, and concerning our faith, I thank you; as to
+the counsel you offer me, I have no intention to forsake the counsel of
+our Lord."
+
+The first article touched the capital point, submission. She replied:
+"Well do I believe that our holy Father, the bishops, and others of the
+Church are to guard the Christian faith and punish those who are found
+wanting. As to my deeds, I submit myself only to the Church in heaven,
+to God and the Virgin, to the sainted men and women in paradise. I have
+not been wanting in regard to the Christian faith, and trust I never
+shall be." And, shortly afterward, "I would rather die than recall what
+I have done by our Lord's command."
+
+What illustrates the time, the uninformed mind of these doctors, and
+their blind attachment to the letter without regard to the spirit is
+that no point seemed graver to them than the sin of having assumed male
+attire. They represented to her that, according to the canons, those who
+thus change the habit of their sex are abominable in the sight of God.
+At first she would not give a direct answer, and begged for a respite
+till the next day, but her judges insisted on her discarding the dress;
+she replied "that she was not empowered to say when she could quit it."
+
+"But if you should be deprived of the privilege of hearing mass?"
+
+"Well, our Lord can grant me to hear it without you."
+
+"Will you put on a woman's dress, in order to receive your Saviour at
+Easter?"
+
+"No; I cannot quit this dress; it matters not to me in what dress I
+receive my Saviour."
+
+After this she seems shaken, asks to be at least allowed to hear mass,
+adding, "I won't say but if you were to give me a gown such as the
+daughters of the burghers wear, a very _long gown_."
+
+It is clear she shrank, through modesty, from explaining herself. The
+poor girl durst not explain her position in prison or the constant
+danger she was in. The truth is that three soldiers slept in her room,
+three of the brigand ruffians called _houspilleurs_;[78] that she was
+chained to a beam by a large iron chain, almost wholly at their mercy;
+the man's dress they wished to compel her to discontinue was all her
+safeguard. What are we to think of the imbecility of the judge, or of
+his horrible connivance?
+
+Besides being kept under the eyes of these wretches, and exposed to
+their insults and mockery, she was subjected to espial from without.
+Winchester,[79] the Inquisitor, and Cauchon had each a key to the tower,
+and watched her hourly through a hole in the wall. Each stone of this
+infernal dungeon had eyes.
+
+Her only consolation was that she was at first allowed interviews with a
+priest, who told her that he was a prisoner and attached to Charles
+VII's cause. Loyseleur, so he was named, was a tool of the English. He
+had won Jeanne's confidence, who used to confess herself to him; and, at
+such times, her confessions were taken down by notaries concealed on
+purpose to overhear her. It is said that Loyseleur encouraged her to
+hold out, in order to insure her destruction.
+
+The deplorable state of the prisoner's health was aggravated by her
+being deprived of the consolations of religion during Passion Week. On
+the Thursday, the sacrament was withheld from her; on that selfsame day
+on which Christ is universal host, on which he invites the poor and all
+those who suffer, she seemed to be forgotten.
+
+On Good Friday, that day of deep silence, on which we all hear no other
+sound than the beating of one's own heart, it seems as if the hearts of
+the judges smote them, and that some feeling of humanity and of religion
+had been awakened in their aged scholastic souls; at least it is certain
+that, whereas thirty-five of them took their seats on the Wednesday, no
+more than nine were present at the examination on Saturday; the rest, no
+doubt, alleged the devotions of the day as their excuse.
+
+On the contrary, her courage had revived. Likening her own sufferings to
+those of Christ, the thought had roused her from her despondency. She
+agreed to "defer to the Church militant, provided it commanded nothing
+impossible."
+
+"Do you think, then, that you are not subject to the Church which is
+upon earth, to our holy father the Pope, to the cardinals, archbishops,
+bishops, and prelates?"
+
+"Yes, certainly, our Lord served."
+
+"Do your voices forbid your submitting to the Church militant?"
+
+"They do not forbid it, our Lord being served _first_."
+
+This firmness did not desert her once on the Saturday; but on the next
+day, the Sunday, Easter Sunday! what must her feelings have been? What
+must have passed in that poor heart when, the sounds of the universal
+holiday enlivening the city, Rouen's five hundred bells ringing out with
+their joyous peals on the air, and the whole Christian world coming to
+life with the Saviour, she remained with death! Could she who, with all
+her inner life of visions and revelations, had not the less docilely
+obeyed the commands of the Church; could she, who till now had believed
+herself in her simplicity "a good girl," as she said, a girl altogether
+submissive to the Church--could she without terror see the Church
+against her?
+
+After all, what, who was she, to undertake to gainsay these prelates,
+these doctors? How dared she speak before so many able men--men who had
+studied? Was there not presumption and damnable pride in an ignorant
+girl's opposing herself to the learned--a poor, simple girl, to men in
+authority? Undoubtedly fears of the kind agitated her mind.
+
+On the other hand, this opposition is not Jeanne's, but that of the
+saints and angels who have dictated her answers to her, and, up to this
+time, sustained her. Wherefore, alas! do they come no more in this
+pressing need of hers? Wherefore is the so long promised deliverance
+delayed? Doubtless the prisoner has put these questions to herself over
+and over again.
+
+There was one means of escaping; this was, without expressly disavowing,
+to forbear affirming, and to say, "It seems to me." The lawyers thought
+it easy for her to pronounce these few simple words; but in her mind, to
+use so doubtful an expression was in reality equivalent to a denial; it
+was abjuring her beautiful dream of heavenly friendships, betraying her
+sweet sisters on high. Better to die. And indeed, the unfortunate,
+rejected by the visible, abandoned by the invisible, by the Church, by
+the world, and by her own heart, was sinking. And the body was following
+the sinking soul.
+
+It so happened that on that very day she had eaten part of a fish which
+the charitable Bishop of Beauvais had sent her, and might have imagined
+herself poisoned. The bishop had an interest in her death; it would have
+put an end to this embarrassing trial, would have got the judge out of
+the scrape; but this was not what the English reckoned upon. The Earl of
+Warwick, in his alarm, said: "The King would not have her by any means
+die a natural death. The King has bought her dear. She must die by
+justice and be burned. See and cure her."
+
+All attention, indeed, was paid her; she was visited and bled, but was
+none the better for it, remaining weak and nearly dying. Whether through
+fear that she should escape thus and die without retracting, or that her
+bodily weakness inspired hopes that her mind would be more easily dealt
+with, the judges made an attempt while she was lying in this state,
+April 18th. They visited her in her chamber, and represented to her that
+she would be in great danger if she did not reconsider, and follow the
+advice of the Church. "It seems to me, indeed," she said, "seeing my
+sickness, that I am in great danger of death. If so, God's will be done;
+I should like to confess, receive my Saviour, and be laid in holy
+ground."
+
+"If you desire the sacraments of the Church, you must do as good
+Catholics do, and submit yourself to it." She made no reply. But, on the
+judge's repeating his words, she said: "If the body die in prison, I
+hope that you will lay it in holy ground; if you do not, I appeal to our
+Lord."
+
+Already, in the course of these examinations, she had expressed one of
+her last wishes. _Question_: "You say that you wear a man's dress by
+God's command, and yet, in case you die, you want a woman's shift?"
+_Answer_: "All I want is to have a long one." This touching answer was
+ample proof that, in this extremity, she was much less occupied with
+care about life than with the fears of modesty.
+
+The doctors preached to their patient for a long time; and he who had
+taken on himself the especial care of exhorting her, Master Nicolas
+Midy, a scholastic of Paris, closed the scene by saying bitterly to her,
+"If you don't obey the Church, you will be abandoned for a Saracen."
+
+"I am a good Christian," she replied meekly; "I was properly baptized,
+and will die like a good Christian."
+
+The slowness of these proceedings drove the English wild with
+impatience. Winchester had hoped to bring the trial to an end before the
+campaign; to have forced a confession from the prisoner, and have
+dishonored King Charles. This blow struck, he would recover Louviers,
+secure Normandy and the Seine, and then repair to Basel to begin another
+war--a theological war--to sit there as arbiter of Christendom, and make
+and unmake popes. At the very moment he had these high designs in view,
+he was compelled to cool his heels, waiting upon what it might please
+this girl to say.
+
+The unlucky Cauchon happened at this precise juncture to have offended
+the chapter of Rouen, from which he was soliciting a decision against
+the Pucelle; he had allowed himself to be addressed beforehand as "My
+lord the Archbishop." Winchester determined to disregard the delays of
+these Normans, and to refer at once to the great theological tribunal,
+the University of Paris.
+
+While waiting for the answer, new attempts were made to overcome the
+resistance of the accused; and both stratagem and terror were brought
+into play. In the course of a second admonition, May 2d, the preacher,
+Master Chatillon, proposed to her to submit the question of the truth of
+her visions to persons of her own party. She did not give in to the
+snare. "As to this," she said, "I depend on my Judge, the King of heaven
+and earth." She did not say this time, as before, "On God and the Pope."
+
+"Well, the Church will give you up, and you will be in danger of fire,
+both soul and body. You will not do what we tell you until you suffer
+body and soul."
+
+They did not stop at vague threats. On the third admonition, which took
+place in her chamber, May 11th, the executioner was sent for, and she
+was told that the torture was ready. But the manoeuvre failed. On the
+contrary, it was found that she had resumed all, and more than all, her
+courage. Raised up after temptation, she seemed to have mounted a step
+nearer the source of grace. "The angel Gabriel," she said, "has appeared
+to strengthen me; it was he--my saints have assured me so. God has been
+ever my master in what I have done; the devil has never had power over
+me. Though you should tear off my limbs and pluck my soul from my body,
+I would say nothing else." The spirit was so visibly manifested in her
+that her last adversary, the preacher Chatillon, was touched, and became
+her defender, declaring that a trial so conducted seemed to him null.
+Cauchon, beside himself with rage, compelled him to silence.
+
+The reply of the University arrived at last. The decision to which it
+came on the twelve articles was that this girl was wholly the devil's;
+was impious in regard to her parents; thirsted for Christian blood, etc.
+This was the opinion given by the faculty of theology. That of law was
+more moderate, declaring her to be deserving of punishment, but with two
+reservations: (1) In case she persisted in her nonsubmission; (2) if
+she were in her right senses.
+
+At the same time the university wrote to the Pope, to the cardinals, and
+to the King of England, lauding the Bishop of Beauvais and setting
+forth, "there seemed to it to have been great gravity observed, and a
+holy and just way of proceeding, which ought to be most satisfactory to
+all."
+
+Armed with this response, some of the assessors[80] were for burning her
+without further delay; which would have been sufficient satisfaction for
+the doctors, whose authority she rejected, but not for the English, who
+required a retraction that should defame King Charles. They had recourse
+to a new admonition and a new preacher, Master Pierre Morice, which was
+attended by no better result. It was in vain that he dwelt upon the
+authority of the University of Paris, "which is the light of all
+science."
+
+"Though I should see the executioner and the fire there," she exclaimed,
+"though I were in the fire, I could only say what I have said."
+
+It was by this time the 23d of May, the day after Pentecost; Winchester
+could remain no longer at Rouen, and it behooved to make an end of the
+business. Therefore it was resolved to get up a great and terrible
+public scene, which should either terrify the recusant into submission,
+or, at the least, blind the people. Loyseleur, Chatillon, and Morice
+were sent to visit her the evening before, to promise her that, if she
+would submit and quit her man's dress, she should be delivered out of
+the hands of the English, and placed in those of the Church.
+
+This fearful farce was enacted in the cemetery of St. Ouen, behind the
+beautifully severe monastic church so called, and which had by that day
+assumed its present appearance. On a scaffolding raised for the purpose
+sat Cardinal Winchester, the two judges, and thirty-three assessors, of
+whom many had their scribes seated at their feet. On another scaffold,
+in the midst of _huissiers_[81] and torturers, was Jeanne, in male
+attire, and also notaries to take down her confessions, and a preacher
+to admonish her; and, at its foot, among the crowd, was remarked a
+strange auditor, the executioner upon his cart, ready to bear her off as
+soon as she should be adjudged his.
+
+The preacher on this day, a famous doctor, Guillaume Erard, conceived
+himself bound, on so fine an opportunity, to give the reins to his
+eloquence; and by his zeal he spoiled all. "O noble house of France," he
+exclaimed, "which wast ever wont to be protectress of the faith, how
+hast thou been abused to ally thyself with a heretic and schismatic!" So
+far the accused had listened patiently; but when the preacher, turning
+toward her, said to her, raising his finger: "It is to thee, Jeanne,
+that I address myself; and I tell thee that thy King is a heretic and
+schismatic," the admirable girl, forgetting all her danger, burst forth
+with, "On my faith, sir, with all due respect, I undertake to tell you,
+and to swear, on pain of my life, that he is the noblest Christian of
+all Christians, the sincerest lover of the faith and of the Church, and
+not what you call him."
+
+"Silence her," called out Cauchon.
+
+The accused adhered to what she had said. All they could obtain from her
+was her consent to submit herself to the Pope. Cauchon replied, "The
+Pope is too far off." He then began to read the sentence of
+condemnation, which had been drawn up beforehand, and in which, among
+other things, it was specified: "And furthermore, you have obstinately
+persisted, in refusing to submit yourself to the holy Father and to the
+council," etc. Meanwhile, Loyseleur and Erard conjured her to have pity
+on herself; on which the Bishop, catching at a shadow of hope,
+discontinued his reading. This drove the English mad; and one of
+Winchester's secretaries told Cauchon it was clear that he favored the
+girl--a charge repeated by the Cardinal's chaplain. "Thou art a liar,"
+exclaimed the Bishop. "And thou," was the retort, "art a traitor to the
+King." These grave personages seemed to be on the point of going to
+cuffs on the judgment-seat.
+
+Erard, not discouraged, threatened, prayed. One while he said, "Jeanne,
+we pity you so!" and another, "Abjure or be burned!" All present evinced
+an interest in the matter, down even to a worthy catchpole (huissier),
+who, touched with compassion, besought her to give way, assuring her
+that she should be taken out of the hands of the English and placed in
+those of the Church. "Well, then," she said, "I will sign." On this
+Cauchon, turning to the Cardinal, respectfully inquired what was to be
+done next. "Admit her to do penance," replied the ecclesiastical prince.
+
+Winchester's secretary drew out of his sleeve a brief revocation, only
+six lines long--that which was given to the world took up six pages--and
+put a pen in her hand, but she could not sign. She smiled and drew a
+circle: the secretary took her hand and guided it to make a cross.
+
+The sentence of grace was a most severe one: "Jeanne, we condemn you,
+out of our grace and moderation, to pass the rest of your days in
+prison, on the bread of grief and water of anguish, and so to mourn your
+sins."
+
+She was admitted by the ecclesiastical judge to do penance, no doubt,
+nowhere save in the prisons of the Church. The ecclesiastic _in pace_,
+however severe it might be, would at the least withdraw her from the
+hands of the English, place her under shelter from their insults, save
+her honor. Judge of her surprise and despair when the Bishop coldly
+said, "Take her back whence you brought her."
+
+Nothing was done; deceived on this wise, she could not fail to retract
+her retractation. Yet, though she had abided by it, the English in their
+fury would not have allowed her to escape. They had come to St. Ouen in
+the hope of at last burning the sorceress, had waited panting and
+breathless to this end; and now they were to be dismissed on this
+fashion, paid with a slip of parchment, a signature, a grimace. At the
+very moment the Bishop discontinued reading the sentence of
+condemnation, stones flew upon the scaffolding without any respect for
+the Cardinal. The doctors were in peril of their lives as they came down
+from their seats into the public place; swords were in all directions
+pointed at their throats. The more moderate among the English confined
+themselves to insulting language--"Priests, you are not earning the
+King's money." The doctors, making off in all haste, said tremblingly,
+"Do not be uneasy, we shall soon have her again."
+
+And it was not the soldiery alone, not the English mob, always so
+ferocious, which displayed this thirst for blood. The better born, the
+great, the lords, were no less sanguinary. The King's man, his tutor,
+the Earl of Warwick, said like the soldiers: "The King's business goes
+on badly; the girl will not be burned."
+
+According to English notions, Warwick was the mirror of worthiness, the
+accomplished Englishman, the perfect gentleman. Brave and devout, like
+his master, Henry V, and the zealous champion of the Established Church,
+he had performed the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as well as many other
+chivalrous expeditions. With all his chivalry, Warwick was not the less
+savagely eager for the death of a woman, and one who was, too, a
+prisoner of war. The best and the most looked-up-to of the English was
+as little deterred by honorable scruples as the rest of his countrymen
+from putting to death on the award of priests, and by fire, her who had
+humbled them by the sword.
+
+The Jews never exhibited the rage against Jesus which the English did
+against the Pucelle. It must be owned that she had wounded them cruelly
+in the most sensible part--in the simple but deep esteem they have for
+themselves. At Orleans the invincible men-at-arms, the famous archers,
+Talbot at their head, had shown their backs; at Jargeau, sheltered by
+the good walls of a fortified town, they had suffered themselves to be
+taken; at Patay they had fled as fast as their legs would carry them,
+fled before a girl. This was hard to be borne, and these taciturn
+English were forever pondering over the disgrace. They had been afraid
+of a girl, and it was not very certain but that, chained as she was,
+they felt fear of her still, though, seemingly, not of her, but of the
+devil, whose agent she was. At least, they endeavored both to believe
+and to have it believed so.
+
+But there was an obstacle in the way of this, for she was said to be a
+virgin; and it was a notorious and well-ascertained fact that the devil
+could not make a compact with a virgin. The coolest head among the
+English, Bedford,[82] the regent, resolved to have the point cleared up;
+and his wife, the Duchess, intrusted the matter to some matrons, who
+declared Jeanne to be a maid; a favorable declaration which turned
+against her by giving rise to another superstitious notion; to wit, that
+her virginity constituted her strength, her power, and that to deprive
+her of it was to disarm her, was to break the charm, and lower her to
+the level of other women.
+
+The poor girl's only defence against such a danger had been wearing male
+attire; though, strange to say, no one had ever seemed able to
+understand her motive for wearing it. All, both friends and enemies,
+were scandalized by it. At the outset, she had been obliged to explain
+her reasons to the woman of Poitiers; and when made prisoner, and under
+the care of the ladies of Luxemburg, those excellent persons prayed her
+to clothe herself as honest girls were wont to do. Above all, the
+English ladies, who have always made a parade of chastity and modesty,
+must have considered her so disguising herself monstrous and
+insufferably indecent. The Duchess of Bedford sent her female attire;
+but by whom? By a man, a tailor. The fellow, with impudent familiarity,
+was about to pass it over her head, and, when she pushed him away, laid
+his unmannnerly hand upon her--his tailor's hand on that hand which had
+borne the flag of France. She boxed his ears.
+
+If women could not understand this feminine question, how much less
+could priests! They quoted the text of a council held in the fourth
+century, which anathematized such changes of dress; not seeing that the
+prohibition specially applied to a period when manners had been barely
+retrieved from pagan impurities. The doctors belonging to the party of
+Charles VII, the apologists of the Pucelle, find exceeding difficulty in
+justifying her on this head. One of them--thought to be Gerson--makes
+the gratuitous supposition that the moment she dismounted from her
+horse, she was in the habit of resuming woman's apparel; confessing that
+Esther and Judith had had recourse to more natural and feminine means
+for their triumphs over the enemies of God's people. Entirely
+preoccupied with the soul, these theologians seem to have held the body
+cheap; provided the letter, the written law, be followed, the soul will
+be saved; the flesh may take its chance. A poor and simple girl may be
+pardoned her inability to distinguish so clearly.
+
+On the Friday and the Saturday the unfortunate prisoner, despoiled of
+her man's dress, had much to fear. Brutality, furious hatred, vengeance,
+might severally incite the cowards to degrade her before she perished,
+to sully what they were about to burn. Besides, they might be tempted to
+varnish their infamy by a "reason of state," according to the notions of
+the day--by depriving her of her virginity they would undoubtedly
+destroy that secret power of which the English entertained such great
+dread, who perhaps might recover their courage when they knew that,
+after all, she was but a woman. According to her confessor, to whom she
+divulged the fact, an Englishman, not a common soldier, but a
+_gentleman_, a lord, patriotically devoted himself to this
+execution--bravely undertook to violate a girl laden with fetters, and,
+being unable to effect his wishes, rained blows upon her.
+
+"On the Sunday morning, Trinity Sunday, when it was time for her to
+rise--as she told him who speaks--she said to her English guards, 'Leave
+me, that I may get up.' One of them took off her woman's dress, emptied
+the bag in which was the man's apparel, and said to her, 'Get up.'
+'Gentlemen,' she said, 'you know that dress is forbidden me; excuse me,
+I will not put it on.' The point was contested till noon; when, being
+compelled to go out for some bodily want, she put it on. When she came
+back, they would give her no other, despite her entreaties."
+
+In reality, it was not to the interest of the English that she should
+resume her man's dress, and so make null and void a retractation
+obtained with such difficulty. But at this moment, their rage no longer
+knew any bounds. Saintrailles had just made a bold attempt upon Rouen.
+It would have been a lucky hit to have swept off the judges from the
+judgment seat, and have carried Winchester and Bedford to Poitiers; the
+latter was, subsequently, all but taken on his return, between Rouen and
+Paris. As long as this accursed girl lived, who beyond a doubt continued
+in prison to practise her sorceries, there was no safety for the
+English; perish she must.
+
+The assessors, who had notice instantly given them of her change of
+dress, found some hundred English in the court to obstruct their
+passage; who, thinking that if these doctors entered they might spoil
+all, threatened them with their axes and swords, and chased them out,
+calling them "traitors of Armagnacs." Cauchon, introduced with much
+difficulty, assumed an air of gayety to pay his court to Warwick, and
+said with a laugh, "She is caught."
+
+On the Monday he returned, along with the Inquisitor and eight
+assessors, to question the Pucelle, and ask her why she had resumed that
+dress. She made no excuse, but, bravely facing the danger, said that the
+dress was fitter for her as long as she was guarded by men, and that
+faith had not been kept with her. Her saints, too, had told her "that it
+was great pity she had abjured to save her life." Still, she did not
+refuse to resume woman's dress. "Put me in a seemly and safe prison,"
+she said; "I will be good, and do whatever the Church shall wish."
+
+On leaving her the Bishop encountered Warwick and a crowd of English;
+and to show himself a good Englishman he said in their tongue,
+"Farewell, farewell." This joyous adieu was about synonymous with "Good
+evening, good evening; all's over."
+
+On the Tuesday, the judges got up at the Archbishop's palace a court of
+assessors as they best might; some of them had assisted at the first
+sittings only, others at none; in fact, composed of men of all sorts,
+priests, legists, and even three physicians. The judges recapitulated to
+them what had taken place, and asked their opinion. This opinion, quite
+different from what was expected, was that the prisoner should be
+summoned, and her act of abjuration be read over to her. Whether this
+was in the power of the judges is doubtful. In the midst of the fury and
+swords of a raging soldiery, there was in reality no judge, and no
+possibility of judgment. Blood was the one thing wanted; and that of the
+judges was, perhaps, not far from flowing. They hastily drew up a
+summons, to be served the next morning at eight o'clock; she was not to
+appear, save to be burned.
+
+Cauchon sent her a confessor in the morning, brother Martin l'Advenu,
+"to prepare her for her death, and persuade her to repentance. And when
+he apprised her of the death she was to die that day, she began to cry
+out grievously, to give way, and tear her hair: 'Alas! am I to be
+treated so horribly and cruelly? must my body, pure as from birth, and
+which was never contaminated, be this day consumed and reduced to ashes?
+Ha! ha! I would rather be beheaded seven times over than be burned on
+this wise! Oh! I make my appeal to God, the great judge of the wrongs
+and grievances done me!'"
+
+After this burst of grief, she recovered herself and confessed; she then
+asked to communicate. The brother was embarrassed; but, consulting the
+Bishop, the latter told him to administer the sacrament, "and whatever
+else she might ask." Thus, at the very moment he condemned her as a
+relapsed heretic, and cut her off from the Church, he gave her all that
+the Church gives to her faithful. Perhaps a last sentiment of humanity
+awoke in the heart of the wicked judge; he considered it enough to burn
+the poor creature, without driving her to despair, and damning her.
+Besides, it was attempted to do it privately, and the eucharist was
+brought without stole and light. But the monk complained, and the Church
+of Rouen, duly warned, was delighted to show what it thought of the
+judgment pronounced by Cauchon; it sent along with the body of Christ
+numerous torches and a large escort of priests, who sang litanies, and,
+as they passed through the streets, told the kneeling people, "Pray for
+her."
+
+After partaking of the communion, which she received with abundance of
+tears, she perceived the Bishop, and addressed him with the words,
+"Bishop, I die through you." And, again, "Had you put me in the prisons
+of the Church, and given me ghostly keepers, this would not have
+happened. And for this I summon you to answer before God."
+
+Then, seeing among the bystanders Pierre Morice, one of the preachers by
+whom she had been addressed, she said to him, "Ah, Master Pierre, where
+shall I be this evening?"
+
+"Have you not good hope in the Lord?"
+
+"Oh! yes; God to aid, I shall be in paradise."
+
+It was nine o'clock: she was dressed in female attire, and placed on a
+cart. On one side of her was brother Martin l'Advenu; the constable,
+Massieu, was on the other. The Augustine monk, Brother Isambart, who had
+already displayed much charity and courage, would not quit her.
+
+Up to this moment the Pucelle had never despaired, with the exception,
+perhaps, of her temptation in the Passion Week. While saying, as she at
+times would say, "These English will kill me," she in reality did not
+think so. She did not imagine that she could ever be deserted. She had
+faith in her King, in the good people of France. She had said expressly:
+"There will be some disturbance, either in prison or at the trial, by
+which I shall be delivered, greatly, victoriously delivered." But though
+King and people deserted her, she had another source of aid, and a far
+more powerful and certain one from her friends above, her kind and dear
+saints. When she was assaulting St. Pierre, and deserted by her
+followers, her saints sent an invisible army to her aid. How could they
+abandon their obedient girl, they who had so often promised her "safety
+and deliverance"?
+
+What then must her thoughts have been when she saw that she must die;
+when, carried in a cart, she passed through a trembling crowd, under the
+guard of eight hundred Englishmen armed with sword and lance? She wept
+and bemoaned herself, yet reproached neither her King nor her saints.
+She was only heard to utter, "O Rouen, Rouen! must I then die here?"
+
+The term of her sad journey was the old market-place, the fish-market.
+Three scaffolds had been raised; on one was the episcopal and royal
+chair, the throne of the Cardinal of England, surrounded by the stalls
+of his prelates; on another were to figure the principal personages of
+the mournful drama, the preacher, the judges, and the bailiff, and,
+lastly, the condemned one; apart was a large scaffolding of plaster,
+groaning under a weight of wood--nothing had been grudged the stake,
+which struck terror by its height alone. This was not only to add to the
+solemnity of the execution, but was done with the intent that, from the
+height to which it was reared, the executioner might not get at it save
+at the base, and that to light it only, so that he would be unable to
+cut short the torments and relieve the sufferer, as he did with others,
+sparing them the flames.
+
+On this occasion the important point was that justice should not be
+defrauded of her due or a dead body be committed to the flames; they
+desired that she should be really burned alive, and that, placed on the
+summit of this mountain of wood, and commanding the circle of lances and
+of swords, she might be seen from every part of the market-place. There
+was reason to suppose that being slowly, tediously burned, before the
+eyes of a curious crowd, she might at last be surprised into some
+weakness, that something might escape her which could be set down as a
+disavowal, at the least some confused words which might be interpreted
+at pleasure, perhaps low prayers, humiliating cries for mercy, such as
+proceed from a woman in despair.
+
+The frightful ceremony began with a sermon. Master Nicolas Midy, one of
+the lights of the University of Paris, preached upon the edifying text:
+"When one limb of the Church is sick, the whole Church is sick." He
+wound up with the formula: "Jeanne, go in peace; the Church can no
+longer defend thee."
+
+The ecclesiastical judge, the Bishop of Beauvais, then benignly
+exhorted her to take care of her soul and to recall all her misdeeds, in
+order that she might awaken to true repentance. The assessors had ruled
+that it was the law to read over her abjuration to her; the Bishop did
+nothing of the sort. He feared her denials, her disclaimers. But the
+poor girl had no thought of so chicaning away life; her mind was fixed
+on far other subjects. Even before she was exhorted to repentance, she
+had knelt down and invoked God, the Virgin, St. Michael, and St.
+Catharine, pardoning all and asking pardon, saying to the bystanders,
+"Pray for me!" In particular, she besought the priests to say each a
+mass for her soul. And all this so devoutly, humbly, and touchingly
+that, sympathy becoming contagious, no one could any longer contain
+himself; the Bishop of Beauvais melted into tears, the Bishop of
+Boulogne sobbed, and the very English cried and wept as well, Winchester
+with the rest.
+
+Might it be in this moment of universal tenderness, of tears, of
+contagious weakness, that the unhappy girl, softened, and relapsing into
+the mere woman, confessed that she saw clearly she had erred, and that,
+apparently, she had been deceived when promised deliverance? This is a
+point on which we cannot implicitly rely on the interested testimony of
+the English. Nevertheless, it would betray scant knowledge of human
+nature to doubt, with her hopes so frustrated, her having wavered in her
+faith. Whether she confessed to this effect in words is uncertain; but I
+will confidently affirm that she owned it in thought.
+
+Meanwhile the judges, for a moment put out of countenance, had recovered
+their usual bearing, and the Bishop of Beauvais, drying his eyes, began
+to read the act of condemnation. He reminded the guilty one of all her
+crimes, of her schism, idolatry, invocation of demons, how she had been
+admitted to repentance, and how, "seduced by the Prince of Lies, she had
+fallen, O grief! 'like the dog which returns to his vomit.' Therefore,
+we pronounce you to be a rotten limb, and, as such, to be lopped off
+from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power, praying it at
+the same time to relax its sentence and to spare you death and the
+mutilation of your members."
+
+Deserted thus by the Church, she put her whole trust in God. She asked
+for the cross. An Englishman handed her a cross which he made out of a
+stick; she took it, rudely fashioned as it was, with not less devotion,
+kissed it, and placed it under her garments, next to her skin. But what
+she desired was the crucifix belonging to the Church, to have it before
+her eyes till she breathed her last. The good huissier Massieu and
+Brother Isambart interfered with such effect that it was brought her
+from St. Sauveur's. While she was embracing this crucifix, and Brother
+Isambart was encouraging her, the English began to think all this
+exceedingly tedious; it was now noon at least; the soldiers grumbled,
+and the captains called out: "What's this, priest; do you mean us to
+dine here?"
+
+Then, losing patience, and without waiting for the order from the
+bailiff, who alone had authority to dismiss her to death, they sent two
+constables to take her out of the hands of the priests. She was seized
+at the foot of the tribunal by the men-at-arms, who dragged her to the
+executioner with the words, "Do thy office." The fury of the soldiery
+filled all present with horror; and many there, even of the judges, fled
+the spot, that they might see no more.
+
+When she found herself brought down to the market-place, surrounded by
+English, laying rude hands on her, nature asserted her rights and the
+flesh was troubled. Again she cried out, "O Rouen, thou art then to be
+my last abode!" She said no more, and, in this hour of fear and trouble,
+did not sin with her lips.
+
+She accused neither her King nor her holy ones. But when she set foot on
+the top of the pile, on viewing this great city, this motionless and
+silent crowd, she could not refrain from exclaiming, "Ah! Rouen, Rouen,
+much do I fear you will suffer from my death!" She who had saved the
+people, and whom that people deserted, gave voice to no other sentiment
+when dying--admirable sweetness of soul!--than that of compassion for
+it.
+
+She was made fast under the infamous placard, mitred with a mitre on
+which was read, "Heretic, relapser, apostate, idolater."
+
+And then the executioner set fire to the pile. She saw this from above
+and uttered a cry. Then, as the brother who was exhorting her paid no
+attention to the fire, forgetting herself in her fear for him, she
+insisted on his descending.
+
+The proof that up to this period she had made no express recantation is,
+that the unhappy Cauchon was obliged--no doubt by the high satanic will
+which presided over the whole--to proceed to the foot of the pile,
+obliged to face his victim to endeavor to extract some admission from
+her. All that he obtained was a few words, enough to rack his soul. She
+said to him mildly what she had already said: "Bishop, I die through
+you. If you had put me into the Church prisons, this would not have
+happened." No doubt hopes had been entertained that, on finding herself
+abandoned by her King, she would at last accuse and defame him. To the
+last, she defended him: "Whether I have done well or ill, my King is
+faultless; it was not he who counselled me."
+
+Meanwhile the flames rose. When they first seized her, the unhappy girl
+shrieked for holy _water_--this must have been the cry of fear. But,
+soon recovering, she called only on God, on her angels and her saints.
+She bore witness to them, "Yes, my voices were from God, my voices have
+not deceived me." The fact that all her doubts vanished at this trying
+moment must be taken as a proof that she accepted death as the promised
+deliverance; that she no longer understood her salvation in the Judaic
+and material sense, as until now she had done, that at length she saw
+clearly; and that, rising above all shadows, her gifts of illumination
+and of sanctity were at the final hour made perfect unto her.
+
+The great testimony she thus bore is attested by the sworn and compelled
+witness of her death, by the Dominican who mounted the pile with her,
+whom she forced to descend, but who spoke to her from its foot, listened
+to her, and held out to her the crucifix.
+
+There is yet another witness of this sainted death, a most grave
+witness, who must himself have been a saint. This witness, whose name
+history ought to preserve, was the Augustine monk already mentioned,
+Brother Isambart de la Pierre. During the trial he had hazarded his life
+by counselling the Pucelle, and yet, though so clearly pointed out to
+the hate of the English, he persisted in accompanying her in the cart,
+procured the parish crucifix for her, and comforted her in the midst of
+the raging multitude, both on the scaffold where she was interrogated
+and at the stake.
+
+Twenty years afterward, the two venerable friars, simple monks, vowed to
+poverty and having nothing to hope or fear in this world, bear witness
+to the scene we have just described: "We heard her," they say, "in the
+midst of the flames invoke her saints, her archangel; several times she
+called on her Saviour. At the last, as her head sunk on her bosom, she
+shrieked, 'Jesus!'"
+
+"Ten thousand men wept. A few of the English alone laughed, or
+endeavored to laugh. One of the most furious among them had sworn that
+he would throw a fagot on the pile. Just as he brought it she breathed
+her last. He was taken ill. His comrades led him to a tavern to recruit
+his spirits by drink, but he was beyond recovery. 'I saw,' he exclaimed,
+in his frantic despair, 'I saw a dove fly out of her mouth with her last
+sigh.' Others had read in the flames the word 'Jesus,' which she so
+often repeated. The executioner repaired in the evening to Brother
+Isambart, full of consternation, and confessed himself; he felt
+persuaded that God would never pardon him. One of the English King's
+secretaries said aloud, on returning from the dismal scene: 'We are
+lost; we have burned a saint.'"
+
+Though these words fell from an enemy's mouth, they are not the less
+important, and will live, uncontradicted by the future. Yes, whether
+considered religiously or patriotically, Jeanne d'Arc was a saint.
+
+Where find a finer legend than this true history? Still, let us beware
+of converting it into a legend; let us piously preserve its every trait,
+even such as are most akin to human nature, and respect its terrible and
+touching reality.[83]
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES VII ISSUES HIS PRAGMATIC SANCTION
+
+EMANCIPATION OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH
+
+A.D. 1438
+
+W. H. JERVIS R. F. ROHRBACHER
+
+
+  "No two words," says Smedley, "convey less distinct meaning
+  to English ears than 'pragmatic sanction.' Perhaps 'a
+  well-considered ordinance' may in some degree represent
+  them, _i.e._, an ordinance which has been fully discussed by
+  men practised in state affairs." Carlyle defines "pragmatic
+  sanction" as "the received title for ordinances of a very
+  irrevocable nature, which a sovereign makes in affairs that
+  belong wholly to himself, or what he reckons his own
+  rights." A dictionary definition calls it "an imperial edict
+  operating as a fundamental law." The term was probably first
+  applied to certain decrees of the Byzantine emperors for
+  regulating their provinces and towns, and later it was given
+  to imperial decrees in the West. In the present case it is
+  applied to the limitations set to the power of the pope in
+  France.
+
+  In the Council of Constance, 1414-1418, at which decrees
+  were passed subordinating the pope as well as the whole
+  Church to the authority of a general council, Gallican or
+  French opinion on this subject won its first great victory.
+  But this triumph introduced into the Western Church an
+  element of strife which resulted in calamities scarcely less
+  grave than those of the Great Schism of 1378-1417, during
+  which different parties adhered to rival popes. From the
+  Council of Constance may be dated the formal divergence of
+  the Gallican from the Ultramontane or strictly Roman church
+  government.
+
+  Pope Martin V, who was elected by the Council of Constance
+  after it had deposed John XXIII, Gregory XII, and Benedict
+  XIII, is generally considered to have assented to all its
+  decrees. In 1431, on the death of Martin V, Eugenius IV
+  succeeded to the papal throne. A council had been convened
+  at Pavia in 1423. After a few weeks it was transferred to
+  Siena, and subsequently to Basel. Fearing that it would
+  follow the policy of Constance, Eugenius (1431) attempted to
+  dissolve it and to have it reconvened at Bologna under his
+  own eye. A rupture followed between Pope and council,
+  resulting in years of confused strife.
+
+  In all this confusion our historians, Jervis and Rohrbacher,
+  distinguish the leading events, the most significant of
+  which was the issuing of the Pragmatic Sanction by Charles
+  VII of France. This ordinance is known, from the place of
+  its promulgation, as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, and
+  is sometimes called the "Palladium of France," also the
+  "Magna Charta of the Gallican Church."
+
+
+W. HENLEY JERVIS
+
+The position assumed by the Gallican Church at this junction was
+peculiar and in some respects questionable. It declared decidedly in
+favor of the Council of Basel; many French prelates repaired thither,
+and ambassadors were sent by the King, Charles VII, to Pope Eugenius, to
+beseech him to support the authority of the synod, and to protest
+against its dissolution. The fathers stood firm at their posts,
+appealing to the principles solemnly asserted at Constance, that the
+pope is bound in certain specified cases to submit to an ecumenical
+council, and that the latter cannot be translated, prorogued, or
+dissolved without its own consent. The gift of infallibility, they
+affirmed, resides in the collective Church. It does not belong to the
+popes, several of whom have erred concerning the faith. The Church alone
+has authority to enact laws which are binding on the whole body of the
+faithful.
+
+Now, the authority of general councils is identical with that of the
+Church. This was expressly determined by the Council of Constance, and
+acknowledged by Pope Martin V. The pope is the ministerial head of the
+Church, but he is not its absolute sovereign; on the contrary, facts
+prove that he is subject to the jurisdiction of the Church; for
+well-known instances are on record of popes being deposed on the score
+of erroneous doctrine and immoral life, whereas no pope has ever
+attempted to condemn or excommunicate the Church. Both the pope and the
+Church have received authority to bind and loose; but the Church has
+practically exerted that authority against the pope, whereas the latter
+has never ventured to take any such step against the Church. In fine,
+the words of Christ himself are decisive of the question--"If any man
+neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto you as a heathen man and a
+publican." This injunction was addressed to St. Peter equally with the
+rest of the disciples.
+
+The council proceeded to cite Eugenius by a formal monition to appear in
+person at Basel; and on his failing to comply, they signified that on
+the expiration of a further interval of sixty days ulterior means would
+be put in force against him. Their firmness, added to the pressing
+solicitations of the emperor Sigismund, at length induced the Pope to
+yield. He reconciled himself with the council in December, 1433;
+acknowledged that it had been legitimately convoked; approved its
+proceedings up to that date; and cancelled the act by which he had
+pronounced its dissolution.
+
+Elated by their triumph, the Basilian fathers commenced in earnest the
+task of Church reform, and passed several decrees of a character
+vexatious to the Pope, particularly one for the total abolition of
+annates. A second breach was the consequence. Eugenius, under pretence
+of furthering the negotiation then pending for the reunion of the Greek
+and Latin branches of the Church, published in 1437 a bull dissolving
+the Council of Basel, and summoning another to meet at Ferrara. The
+assembly at Basel retorted by declaring the Pope contumacious, and
+suspending him from the exercise of all authority. Both parties
+proceeded eventually to the last extremities. The council, after
+proclaiming afresh, as "Catholic verities," that a general council has
+power over the pope, and cannot be transferred or dissolved but by its
+own act, passed a definitive sentence in its thirty-fourth session, June
+25, 1439, deposing Eugenius from the papal throne. The Pope retaliated
+by stigmatizing the Fathers of Basel as schismatical and heretical,
+cancelling their acts, and excommunicating their president, the Cardinal
+Archbishop of Arles.
+
+Meanwhile an energetic and independent line of action was adopted by the
+Government in France. The Crown, in concert with the heads of the
+Church, availed itself of a train of events, which had so seriously
+damaged the prestige of the papacy to make a decisive advance in the
+path of practical reform and to establish the long-cherished Gallican
+privileges on a secure basis. For this purpose Charles VII assembled a
+great national council at Bourges, in July, 1438, at which he presided
+in person, surrounded by the princes of his family and by all the most
+eminent dignitaries spiritual and temporal; and here was promulgated the
+memorable ordinance known as the "Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges."
+
+The French Church, it must be observed, did not recognize the deposition
+of Pope Eugenius, but adhered to his obedience, rejecting Felix V, whom
+the Council of Basel elected to succeed him, as a pretender. It
+continued, nevertheless, to support the council and to assert its
+supreme legislative authority. Hence there arises a considerable
+difficulty _in limine_ as to the character of the proceedings at
+Bourges. For the deposition of Eugenius was either a rightful and valid
+exercise of conciliar authority or it was not. If it was not--if the
+council had wrongfully or uncanonically condemned the successor of
+Peter--how could it be infallible? and when should its legislation in
+any other particulars be indisputable? On the other hand, if the
+deposition was a valid one, with what consistency could the French
+continue to regard Eugenius as their legitimate pastor? It was a knotty
+dilemma.
+
+The position, however, though logically open to objections, was not
+without its practical advantages. For, since France maintained a good
+understanding with both the contending parties, both found it conducive
+to their interests to send deputations to the Council of Bourges: Pope
+Eugenius, with a view to obtain its support for the rival council which
+he had opened at Ferrara; the Fathers of Basel, in order to make known
+their decrees, which, as agreeing with the received doctrine of Gallican
+theologians, would, it was hoped, meet with a cordial welcome throughout
+France. The assembly at Bourges did not fail to profit by these
+exceptional circumstances. It accepted the decrees of Basel, yet not
+absolutely, but after critical examination and with certain
+modification; a course which, by implication, asserted a right to
+legislate for the concerns of the French Church even independently of a
+general council acknowledged to be orthodox. The following explanation
+of this proceeding was inserted in the preamble of the celebrated
+statute agreed upon by the authorities at Bourges. It is there stated
+that this policy was adopted, "not from any hesitation as to the
+authority of the Council of Basel to enact ecclesiastical decrees, but
+because it was judged advisable, under the circumstances and
+requirements of the French realm and nation." So that it appears, on the
+whole, that while the French professed great zeal on this occasion for
+the dogma of the superiority of a general council over the pope, the
+principle practically illustrated at Bourges was that of a supremacy of
+a national council over every other ecclesiastical authority. Such were
+the anomalies which arose out of the strange necessities of the time.
+
+The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges embraces twenty-three articles. The
+first treats of the authority of general councils, and of the time and
+manner of convening and celebrating them. The second relates to
+ecclesiastical elections, which are enjoined to be made hereafter in
+strict accordance with the canons, by the cathedral, collegiate, and
+conventual chapters. Reserves, annates, and "expective graces" are
+abolished; the rights of patrons are to be respected, provided their
+nominees be graduates of the universities and otherwise well qualified.
+The pope retains only a veto in case of unfitness or uncanonical
+election, and the nominations to benefices "_in curia vacantia_,"
+_i.e._, of which the incumbents may happen to die at Rome or within two
+days' journey of the pontifical residence. The king and other princes
+may occasionally _recommend_ or _request_ the promotion of persons of
+special merit, but without threats or violent pressure of any kind.
+
+Other articles regulate the order of ecclesiastical appeals, which, with
+the exception of the "_causa majores_" specified by law, and those
+relating to the elections in cathedral and conventual churches, are
+henceforth to be decided on the spot by the ordinary judges; appeals are
+to be carried in all cases to the court immediately superior; no case to
+be referred to the pope "_omisso medio_," _i.e._, without passing
+through the intermediate tribunals. The remaining clauses consist of
+regulations for the performance of divine service, and various matters
+of discipline. The reader will remember that Pope Eugenius, on the
+occasion of his temporary reconciliation with the Council of Basel in
+1433, expressed his approbation of all its synodal acts up to that date;
+and this sanction of their validity is held by Gallicans to extend to
+the period of the second and final rupture in 1437. It follows that the
+provisions of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, so far as they coincide
+with the decrees of Basel prior to 1437, were authorized by the holy
+see; and this includes them all, with two exceptions.
+
+The Pragmatic Sanction was registered by the Parliament of Paris on
+July 13, 1439; becoming thereby part of the statute law of France. Its
+publication caused universal satisfaction throughout the kingdom. At
+Rome, on the other hand, it was indignantly censured and resolutely
+opposed. Eugenius IV vainly strove to obtain the King's consent to an
+alteration of some of its details. Nicholas V protested against it
+without effect; but the superior genius and subtle measures of Pius II
+were more successful. This Pontiff denounced the Pragmatic at the
+Council of Mantua in 1460 as "a blot which disfigured the Church of
+France; a decree which no ecumenical council would have passed nor any
+pope have confirmed; a principle of confusion in the ecclesiastical
+hierarchy. Since it had been in force, the laity had become the masters
+and judges of the clergy; the power of the spiritual sword could no
+longer be exerted except at the good pleasure of the secular authority.
+The Roman pontiff, whose diocese embraced the world, whose jurisdiction
+is not bounded even by the ocean, possessed only such extent of power in
+France as the parliament might see fit to allow him." The ambassadors of
+Charles VII, however, reminded his holiness that the Pragmatic Sanction
+was founded on the canons of Constance and Basel, which had been
+ratified by his predecessors; and when the Pope proceeded to threaten
+France with the interdict, and to prohibit all appeal from his decisions
+to a future council, the King caused his procureur-general, Jean Dauvet,
+to publish an official protest against these acts of violence,
+concluding with a solemn appeal to the judgment of the Church Catholic
+assembled by the representation. While awaiting that event, Charles
+declared himself resolved to uphold the laws and regulations which had
+been sanctioned by previous councils.
+
+Louis XI, urged by alternate menaces, entreaties, and flattery from
+Rome, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction shortly after his accession. This
+step accorded well with his own arbitrary temper; for he could not
+endure the privilege of free election by the cathedral and monastic
+chapters; nor was he less jealous of the influence exerted, under the
+shelter of that privilege, by the high feudal nobility in the disposal
+of church preferment. He seems to have expected, moreover, that while
+ostensibly conceding the right of patronage to the apostolic see, he
+should be able to retain the real power in his own hands. The event
+disappointed his calculations. No sooner was the decree of Bourges
+rescinded than the Pope resumed and enforced his claim to the provision
+of benefices in France. Simony and the whole train of concomitant abuses
+reappeared more scandalously than ever; and Louis found himself despised
+by his subjects as the dupe of papal artifice.
+
+The parliamentary courts, meanwhile, assumed a determined attitude in
+defence of the right of election guaranteed by the Pragmatic Sanction.
+They pronounced the abolition of that act illegal, and treated it as
+null and void; they insisted on their own authority in entertaining
+appeals against ecclesiastical abuses; they eagerly supported anyone who
+showed a disposition to withstand the pretensions of Rome in the matter
+of patronage. The King, smarting under the trickery of the Pope, made no
+attempt to restrain them in this line of conduct; and the result was
+that the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction was never fully executed,
+having never been legalized by the forms of the constitution. On the
+other hand, the popes so far maintained the advantage they had extorted
+from Louis that the ancient franchise of the Church as to elections
+became virtually extinct in France.
+
+Things remained in this unsettled state during the reigns of Louis XI,
+Charles VIII, and Louis XII. The latter Prince, on coming to the throne,
+published an edict reestablishing the Pragmatic Sanction; and this step,
+added to his ambitious enterprises in Italy, brought him into hostile
+collision with Pope Julius II. The King, unwilling to make war on the
+head of the Church without some semblance of ecclesiastical sanction,
+convoked a council at Tours in September, 1510, and consulted the clergy
+on a series of questions arising out of the disturbed state of his
+relations with Rome. They decided, in accordance with the known views
+and wishes of the sovereign, that it is lawful for an independent
+prince, if unjustly attacked, to defend himself against the pope by
+force of arms; to withdraw for a time from his obedience; to take
+possession of the territory of the Church, not with the purpose of
+retaining it, but as a temporary measure of self-protection; and to
+resist the pretensions of the pontiff to powers not rightfully belonging
+to him. Citations to appear in Rome might, under such circumstances, be
+safely disregarded; as also papal censures, which would be null and
+void. If the emergency should arise, the council added, the king ought
+to be governed by the ancient principles of ecclesiastical law, as
+confirmed and reenacted by the Pragmatic Sanction.
+
+The Gallican clergy sent a deputation to Pope Julius on this occasion to
+entreat him to adopt a more conciliatory policy toward the princes of
+Christendom; and they determined, in case their advice should be
+fruitless, to demand the convocation of a general council to take
+cognizance of the Pope's conduct, and prescribe the measures necessary
+for the guidance and welfare of the Church. An ecclesiastical congress,
+calling itself a council-general, but altogether unworthy of that august
+title, was held, in fact, in the following year at Pisa, under the
+auspices of the King of France and the emperor Maximilian. The Pope
+refused to appear there, and convoked a rival synod at Rome, summoning
+the cardinals who had authorized the meeting at Pisa to present
+themselves at his court within sixty days. On the expiration of this
+term he publicly excommunicated them, degraded them from their dignity,
+and deprived them of their preferments.
+
+Thus the Western Church once more exhibited the spectacle of a "house
+divided against itself," as during the scandalous strife between the
+synods of Basel and Florence; and for some time a formal schism appeared
+imminent. The so-called Council of Pisa consisted of the four rebellious
+cardinals, twenty Gallican prelates, several abbots and other
+dignitaries, the envoys of the King of France, deputies from some of the
+French universities, and a considerable number of doctors of the Faculty
+of Paris. This assembly justified its position on the ground that there
+are extraordinary cases in which a council may be called without the
+intervention of the pope; and that, since the present Pontiff had
+neglected to obey the decree of the Council of Constance which enjoined
+a similar celebration at the interval of every ten years, the cardinals
+were bound to take the initiative in the matter, according to a solemn
+engagement which they had made in the conclave when Julius was elected.
+After repeating the stereotyped formula concerning the supreme authority
+of general councils, and the imperative necessity of a reformation of
+the Church in its head and in its members, the fathers addressed
+themselves professedly to the herculean task thus indicated; but little
+or nothing was effected of any practical importance.
+
+
+RENE FRANCOIS ROHRBACHER[84]
+
+Charles held an assembly at Bourges in the month of July, 1438. He
+attended this himself, with the Dauphin, his son, afterward Louis XI,
+many princes of the blood, and other nobles, with a great number of
+bishops and doctors of the Church. The deputies of Pope Eugenius IV and
+those of the prelates of Basel were heard one after another.
+
+The result of this Assembly of Bourges was an ordinance and twenty-three
+articles which were called the "Pragmatic Sanction," a name introduced
+under the ancient emperors. In this were adopted, sometimes with
+modifications, most of the decrees of Basel. Among them the first was
+conceived in these terms: "General councils shall be held every ten
+years, and the pope, according to the opinion of the council which is
+closing, shall designate the place of the next council, which cannot be
+changed except for most important reasons and by the advice of the
+cardinals. As to the authority of the general council, the decrees
+published at Constance are renewed, by which it is said that the general
+council holds its power immediately from Jesus Christ; that all persons,
+even of papal dignity, are subject to it in that which regards the
+faith, the extirpation of schism, and the reformation of the Church in
+the head and in the members; and that all must obey it, even the pope,
+who is punishable if he transgresses it. Consequently, the Council of
+Basel states that it is legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, and
+that no one, not even the pope, can dissolve, transfer, nor prolong it,
+without the consent of the fathers of the council."
+
+The other articles may be reduced principally to the following
+propositions: Canonical elections shall be held, and the pope shall not
+reserve the bishoprics and other elective benefices. Expectant pardons
+shall be abolished. Graduates shall be preferred to others in the
+conferring of benefices, and for this reason they shall suggest their
+degrees during Lent. All ecclesiastical causes of the provinces at a
+distance of four days' journey from Rome shall be tried in the place
+where they arise, except major causes and those of churches which are
+immediately dependent on the holy see. In the case of appeals, the order
+of the tribunals shall be preserved. No one shall ever appeal to the
+pope without passing previously through the intermediate tribunal. If
+anyone, believing himself injured by an intermediate tribunal subject to
+the pope, makes an appeal to the holy see, the pope shall name the
+judges from the same places, unless there should be important reasons
+for bringing the cause directly to Rome. Frivolous appeals are punished.
+The celebration of divine service is regulated and spectacles in
+churches are forbidden. The abuse of ecclesiastical censures is
+repressed, and it is declared that no one is obliged to shun
+excommunicated persons, unless they have been proclaimed by name, or
+else that the censure shall be so notorious that it cannot be denied or
+excused. Such are the principal matters of the Pragmatic Sanction of
+Bourges. It was registered at the Parliament of Paris, July 13, 1439;
+but the King ordered its execution from the day of its date, 1438.
+
+The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had a little defect; it was radically
+null; for every contract is null which is not consented to by both of
+the contracting parties. Now the Pragmatic Sanction was a contract
+between the churches of France and the pope to regulate their mutual
+relations. The consent of the pope to it was therefore absolutely
+necessary, the more especially as he was the superior. For if one must
+admit that a general council is superior to the pope, the Assembly of
+Bourges was certainly not a general council. Moreover, the first use
+that it made of its Pragmatic Sanction was to break it--and happily. In
+its first articles, it had recognized the Council of Basel as ecumenical
+and as superior to Pope Eugenius IV, with obligation to everyone to obey
+its decrees. Now, the following year, 1439, the Council of Basel deposes
+Eugenius IV, and substitutes for him Felix V, with obligation to
+everyone, under penalty of anathema, to reject the first and submit to
+the second. Nevertheless France does neither the one nor the other; she
+continues to recognize Eugenius IV, and derides the pope of Ripaille and
+of Basel, as she will declare in a new assembly of Bourges in 1440.
+Above certain laws which men write on sheets of paper, with a
+goose-quill and ink, they bear in themselves another law, written by
+the hand of God, and which is good sense. Happy the nations which never
+depart from this living and general law, or which, at least, know enough
+to return to it promptly!
+
+Accordingly, September 2, 1440, in the new Assembly of Bourges, King
+Charles VII published a declaration by which he commanded all his
+subjects to yield obedience to Pope Eugenius, with prohibition to
+recognize another pope or to circulate among the public any letters or
+despatches bearing the name of any other one whomsoever who pretended to
+the pontificate. Nevertheless, Monsieur de Savoie, for so Charles VII
+called the antipope, was united to him by ties of blood. This
+declaration of the King and of the Assembly of Bourges was religiously
+observed in all France, except in the University of Paris, where they
+declared openly enough for the antipope. The reason of this is very
+simple: the doctors of the Church in Paris dominated in the mob of
+Basel, the antipope was of their own creation, and their colleagues of
+Paris could not fail to recognize him.
+
+As for King Charles VII, at the close of the year 1441 he sent an
+embassy to Pope Eugenius to ask the convocation of a general council
+which should put an end to the troubles of Christendom. The principal
+orator was the Bishop of Meaux, Pierre de Versailles, formerly Bishop of
+Digne, and originally a monk of the Abbey of St. Denis. He had an
+audience in full consistory December 16th, and he spoke to the Pope in
+the following terms:
+
+"The most Christian King, our master, implores your assistance, most
+holy Father, or rather it is the entire people of the faithful who
+address to you these words of Scripture: '_Be our leader and our
+prince._' Not that any one among us doubts that you have not the
+princedom in the Church; for we know that the state of the Church was
+constituted monarchical by Jesus Christ himself; but we ask you to be
+_our prince_ by functions of zeal and by considerateness. We pray you to
+manage wisely the boat of St. Peter, in the midst of the tempests by
+which it is buffeted. The princes of the Church, most holy Father, ought
+not to resemble those of the nations. The latter have frequently no
+other rule of government than their own will; on the contrary, the
+princes of the Church ought to temper the use of their authority; and it
+is for that that the holy fathers have established laws and canons.
+Now, here is the source of the ills which afflict the Church. There are
+two extremes: one consists in exercising ecclesiastical authority as the
+princes of the nations exercise theirs, without rule and without
+measure; the other is the enterprise of those who, in order to correct
+its abuses, have desired to annihilate authority, who have denied that
+supreme power rests in the Church, who have given this power to the
+multitude, who have changed the entire ecclesiastical order in
+destroying the monarchy which God placed there, to substitute for it
+democracy or aristocracy, who have arrived, not only with respect to the
+leader but also with respect to doctrine, at the point of causing an
+execrable schism among the faithful.
+
+"These considerations, most holy Father, have touched the most Christian
+King; and to mitigate these two extremes, he has resolved to solicit the
+convocation of a general council. That of Basel pushed the second
+extreme too far when it undertook to suppress the truth as to the
+supreme power in one alone. That of Florence, which you are now holding,
+has well elucidated this truth, as may be seen in the decree concerning
+the Greeks; but it has determined upon nothing to temper the use of this
+power. This has caused many to believe it too near to the first
+extremity. A third will be able, therefore, to take the just mean and
+restore everything to order.
+
+"I shall be told, no doubt, that there is no more need of general
+councils; that there have been enough of them up to this time; that the
+Roman Church suffices to terminate all controversies; that a prince does
+not willingly intrust his rights to the multitude; that we would be
+again exposed, by the convocation of another council, to the movements
+which agitated the assembly at Basel; but, in order to answer that, it
+is sufficient to cast our eyes upon the present state of the Church.
+There should rest in you, most holy Father, and in all other prelates,
+two kinds of authority; one of divine power and institution, the other
+of confidence in the people and of good reputation. The first, although
+it cannot fail you, has, however, to be amenable to the second, and you
+will obtain this by means of a general council, not such a one as that
+of Basel, but such as the most Christian King asks; that is to say, a
+council which shall be held at your order, and which shall be regulated
+according to the decrees of the holy fathers. Such an assembly will not
+be a confused multitude; and your monarchical power, which comes from
+heaven, which is attested by the Gospel, which is recognized by the
+saints and by the universal Church, will not be exposed to any danger."
+
+The orator then shows how dangerous it is to refuse the convocation of
+this council, dwelling long upon the enterprises of the prelates of
+Basel, whom he emphatically blames, even to the extent of saying that,
+from their practice and their maxims, there is no more peace possible in
+the Church, and that a great many are asking if this schism be not that
+great apostasy of which St. Paul spoke to the Thessalonians, and which
+should open the door to the Antichrist. He finishes the address by this
+declaration: "I have desired to say all this in public, most holy
+Father, in order to make known to you the upright intentions of the King
+my master in the present affair. He does not attach himself to flesh and
+blood, but he hears the voice of the celestial Father. From this source
+he learns to recognize you and to revere you as the sovereign pontiff
+and the head of all Christians, the vicar of Jesus Christ, conformably
+with the doctrine of the saints and of the whole Church. And because he
+sees that these truths are obscured to-day, he asks for the call of the
+general council. In this he equally manifests his justice and his piety.
+
+"As for your person, most holy Father, he has sentiments for you which
+pass the limits of ordinary filial affection. He always speaks of you
+with consideration. He does not like to have others speak otherwise. He
+conceives the most favorable hopes of you. He counts upon it that, after
+having reconciled all the orientals to the Roman Church, you will also
+reestablish the affairs of the Occident."
+
+This discourse certainly did honor to the good sense of France. In spite
+of the intrigues of the learned doctors of the university, the King and
+the episcopacy early and clearly remarked the revolutionary and
+anarchistic tendency of Basel. As for the amicably regulating relation
+of the churches of France with the holy see to remedy certain abuses,
+the thing was not difficult. It would have been sufficient to send some
+more bishops to Florence like the Bishop of Meaux. All would have been
+very quickly arranged, to the satisfaction of everybody, and the
+example of France would have drawn the rest of the Occident. But to
+desire a third council was not of the same wisdom. Thus the Pope took
+good care not to consent to it.
+
+In 1444 Eugenius IV created the Dauphin of France, who was afterward
+King Louis XI, grand gonfalonier of the Roman Church, granting him a
+pension of fifteen thousand florins, to be taken annually from the
+apostolic chamber. The Dauphin made an expedition to the gates of Basel,
+where he overcame a corps of Swiss and spread consternation among those
+who were still at the pretended council. This expedition was followed by
+a long truce between France and England; an event which was considered
+as the prelude to a good peace. In order to obtain from God this good,
+so necessary and so much desired, there were public fetes at Paris,
+among others a solemn procession in which were carried all the holy
+relics of the city.
+
+In November, 1446, King Charles VII, being at Tours, made with his
+council a plan of accommodation between the two parties that divided the
+Church. It arranged that all the censures published on one side and the
+other should be revoked; that Pope Eugenius should be recognized by all
+as before the schism; that Monsieur de Savoie, called Felix by his
+adherents, should renounce the popedom; that he should hold the highest
+rank in the Church, next to the person of the Pope, and that his
+partisans should be also maintained in their dignities, grades, and
+benefices.
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGY OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY
+
+EMBRACING THE PERIOD COVERED IN THIS VOLUME
+
+A.D. 1301-1438
+
+JOHN RUDD, LL.D
+
+Events treated at length are here indicated in large type; the numerals
+following give volume and page.
+
+Separate chronologies of the various nations, and of the careers of
+famous persons, will be found in the INDEX VOLUME, with volume and page
+references showing where the several events are fully treated.
+
+A.D.
+
+1301. In Hungary the crown becomes elective; end of the Arpad dynasty.
+
+Dante begins writing his _Divine Comedy_, See "DANTE COMPOSES THE DIVINA
+COMMEDIA," vii, 1.
+
+1302. Philip the Fair convenes the first meeting of the States-General
+of France. See "THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE," vii,
+17.
+
+Dante and his party banished from Florence. See "DANTE COMPOSES THE
+DIVINA COMMEDIA," vii, 1.
+
+Comyn is appointed regent by the Scots, who make another effort to
+regain their independence.
+
+Pope Boniface VIII issues a bull against Philip the Fair, who burns it,
+accuses him of simony and heresy, and refuses to acknowledge him as
+pope.
+
+Battle of Courtrai; the Flemings defeat the French. See "WAR OF THE
+FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE FAIR OF FRANCE," vii, 23.
+
+1303. Pope Boniface VIII is surprised at Anagni by William de Nogaret,
+King Philip's adviser; after being kept for some days a prisoner he is
+rescued and allowed to return to Rome, where he dies.
+
+Scotland submits to Edward I of England.
+
+Andronicus Palaeologus, the Byzantine Emperor, engages the Catalan Grand
+Company to aid him against the Turks.[85]
+
+1304. Roger di Flor defeats the Mongols, enters Philadelphia, and
+stations himself at Ephesus.
+
+1305. Wallace, "Hero of Scotland," is executed. See "EXPLOITS AND DEATH
+OF WILLIAM WALLACE, THE HERO OF SCOTLAND," vi, 369.
+
+Beginning of the so-called Babylonish Captivity, being the establishment
+of the papal court at Lyons, France.
+
+1306. A grandson of the first claimant, Robert Bruce, is crowned King of
+Scotland; he dispossesses the English of a great part of Scotland.
+
+On complaint of the nobility and gentry the use of sea-coal is
+prohibited in London.
+
+1307. Death of Edward I; his son, Edward II, succeeds to the English
+throne.
+
+Charges against the Knights Templars. See "EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF
+KNIGHTS TEMPLARS," vii, 51.
+
+1308. Albert of Austria assassinated by his nephew; Henry VII, Count of
+Luxemburg, elected emperor of Germany.
+
+Origin of the Swiss confederations according to common traditions.[86]
+See "FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY," vii, 28.
+
+1309. Pope Clement V removes the papal court from Rome to Avignon,
+France.
+
+Rhodes captured from the Turks by the Knights of St. John.
+
+1310. Fifty Knights Templars are burned in Paris.
+
+Expedition of Henry VII of Germany into Italy to restore the imperial
+authority. He obtains the throne of Bohemia for his son John,
+inaugurating the Luxemburg dynasty.
+
+1311. Fifteenth general council (Council of Vienne); it suppresses the
+order of Knights Templars, and condemns the Beghards (Beguins), a
+begging order of monks and nuns.
+
+Matteo Visconti secures the sovereignty of Milan.
+
+Walter de Brienne quarrels with the Catalans and is defeated and slain
+by them; they conquer the duchy of Athens and appoint Roger Deslau grand
+duke.
+
+1312. Henry VII unsuccessful in an attempt on Florence.
+
+Gaveston, a foreigner and favorite of the King, and who for some years
+had made himself obnoxious to the barons and people of England, is made
+prisoner and beheaded; peace ensues between Edward II and his barons.
+
+Robert, King of Naples, seizes the principal forts in Rome; Henry VII
+is, notwithstanding, crowned emperor in the Lateran Church by three
+cardinals.
+
+1313. In conjunction with the Genoese and Sicilians, Emperor Henry VII
+prepares to attack Robert of Naples, but dies suddenly.
+
+Birth of Boccaccio.
+
+1314. Defeat of the English by the Scots under Robert Bruce. See "BATTLE
+OF BANNOCKBURN," vii, 41.
+
+Louis of Bavaria and Frederick, son of the late Albert of Austria, are
+elected by opposite parties to the crown of Germany; they make war on
+each other.
+
+Ireland invaded by Edward Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, and a younger
+brother of Robert Bruce.
+
+Louis X succeeds his father, Philip IV, in France.
+
+Molay, grand master of the Knights Templars, is burned at the stake in
+Paris. See "EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS," vii, 51.
+
+1315. Louis Hutin, King of France, emancipates all serfs within the
+royal domains on payment of a just surrender charge.
+
+A great victory achieved by the Swiss over the Austrians, under Leopold
+(brother of Frederick the Handsome) at Morgarten.
+
+1316. Edward Bruce crowned king of Ireland.
+
+Establishment of the Salic law excluding females and their descendants
+from the throne of France.
+
+A predominance of French cardinals, created by Pope Clement V, secures
+the election of another French pope, and the continuance of the papal
+see at Avignon. The new pope, John XXII, appoints eight more cardinals,
+of whom seven are French.
+
+1317. Birger, King of the Swedes, murders his two brothers and causes a
+rebellion of his people.
+
+1318. Battle of Dundalk; Edward Bruce defeated and slain by Lord
+Birmingham; end of the war in Ireland.
+
+Giotto, a friend of Dante, famous in Italy; he was the first painter of
+portraits from life.
+
+1319. Pope John XXII excommunicates Robert Bruce of Scotland; the Scotch
+Parliament resists all papal interference in its affairs.
+
+1320.[87] The Old English poem _Cursor Mundi_ composed. It was founded
+on Caedmon's paraphrase of the book of Genesis.
+
+1321. Death of Dante while in exile at Ravenna.
+
+1322. Philip V dies; he is succeeded by his brother, Charles IV, on the
+throne of France.
+
+Louis the Bavarian triumphs over his rival Frederick of Austria, who is
+captured.
+
+Queen Isabella, while resident in the Tower of London, first sees
+Mortimer, who is brought there a prisoner.
+
+Sir John Mandeville, an English exile in France, sets out on his eastern
+travels.
+
+1323. Louis of Bavaria invests his son with the margraviate of
+Brandenburg.
+
+1324. Commencement of Queen Isabella's guilty intimacy with Mortimer.
+
+Birth of Wycliffe.[88]
+
+Pope John XXII excommunicates Louis the Bavarian.
+
+1325. Birth of John Gower, poet, and friend of Chaucer.
+
+1326. Burgesses are first admitted into the Scotch Parliament.
+
+Isabella, Queen of Edward II, and Earl Mortimer invade England; the King
+is captured and imprisoned in Kenilworth castle.
+
+1327. King Edward II is deposed by parliament; Edward III, his son,
+succeeds. Edward II is brutally murdered by his keepers.
+
+Louis V, the Bavarian, of Germany heads an expedition into Italy; he
+proclaims the deposition of Pope John XXII; he is forced to retreat
+after being crowned in Rome.
+
+1328. Independence of Scotland recognized by Edward III of England.
+
+Accession of Philip VI of France, the first of the house of Valois.
+
+Birth of Chaucer.[88]
+
+1329. Death of Robert Bruce; his infant son, David, succeeds to the
+Scotch throne.
+
+1330. Orkham, Sultan of the Turks, captures Nicaea.
+
+Queen Isabella and Mortimer are surprised in Nottingham castle[89]; he
+is executed at Tyburn; Isabella is confined during her life at Castle
+Rising.
+
+1331. John Kempe takes his servants and apprentices from Flanders to
+join the weaving colony already founded at Norwich, England.
+
+1332. Edward Balliol claims the crown of Scotland; he invades that
+country with an English army. The young King, David, takes refuge in
+France.
+
+Lucerne joins the Swiss confederacy.
+
+1333. Edward III of England invades Scotland; he defeats the Scotch at
+Halidon Hill and captures Berwick, which is annexed to England.
+
+Casimir the Great, last king of the Piast line, succeeds to the throne
+of Poland.
+
+1334. Denmark in a state of anarchy; Gerard, Count of Holstein,
+exercises a disputed power as regent.
+
+1335. The house of Austria becomes possessed of Carinthia.
+
+1336. Birth of Timur (Tamerlane) the Tartar.
+
+1337. Edward III of England obtains the support of Van Artevelde; he
+obtains money by grants from parliament and confiscating the wealth of
+the Lombard merchants. See "JAMES VAN ARTEVELDE LEADS A FLEMISH REVOLT,"
+vii, 68.
+
+Birth of Froissart, the chronicler, at Valenciennes.
+
+1338. Beginning of the wars of Edward III against France; he sails with
+a fleet of five hundred ships; lands his army at Antwerp. See "BATTLE OF
+SLUYS AND CRECY," vii, 78.
+
+Declaration of the Electors at Rense that Germany is an independent
+empire over which the Pope has no jurisdiction; the diet at Frankfort
+ratifies the manifesto.
+
+1339. France invaded by Edward III of England; beginning of the Hundred
+Years' War.
+
+Genoa elects its first doge, Simone Boccanera.
+
+A body of disbanded mercenaries form themselves into the first
+_condottiere_ company known in Italy. The word means a captain or
+leader, the _condottieri_ those under the leader. They were free lances,
+open to serve under any flag.
+
+1340. Edward destroys a large French fleet at Sluys; beginning of
+England's naval power. See "BATTLE OF SLUYS AND CRECY," vii, 78.
+
+War between the Hanseatic League and Denmark; the Danes defeated.
+
+1341. Death of John III of Brittany; his brother, John of Montfort, and
+his niece, Jeanne de Penthievre, wife of Charles of Blois, contest the
+succession; England supports the former, France the latter.
+
+Edward Balliol retires on the return of David II to Scotland.
+
+Petrarch is crowned with laurel at Rome. See "MODERN RECOGNITION OF
+SCENIC BEAUTY," vii, 93.
+
+1342. Edward III pursues his campaign in Brittany; he relieves
+Hennebonne, besieged by the French.
+
+Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, becomes sovereign lord of Florence.
+
+Accession of Louis, called the Great, to the throne of Hungary, on the
+death of King Charles Robert, his father.
+
+1343. Expulsion from Florence of the Duke of Athens; popular government
+restored.
+
+A truce of three years arranged between England and France by the
+mediation of the papal legates.
+
+1344. Breach of the truce between England and France; Earl Derby defeats
+Count de Lisle and reduces a great part of Perigord.
+
+A Turkish fleet is destroyed at Pallene by the Knights of Rhodes, who
+assist in the capture of Smyrna by the Venetians and the King of Cyprus.
+
+Masham, an Englishman, first discovers the Madeira Islands.
+
+In England, parliament, by the Statute of Provisors, forbids the
+interference of the pope in bestowing benefices and livings in England.
+
+1345. Fall and death of James Van Artevelde at Ghent.
+
+1346. Battle of Crecy; cannon said to have been first used by the
+English. See "BATTLES OF SLUYS AND CRECY," vii, 78.
+
+At the instance of Pope Clement VI, Charles of Luxemburg (Charles IV) is
+elected emperor of Germany in opposition to Louis the Bavarian.
+
+David Bruce invades England; he is vanquished and made prisoner at
+Neville's Cross.
+
+Servia at the zenith of her power; the ruler, Stephen Dushan, assumes
+the imperial title.
+
+1347. Calais captured by Edward III.
+
+Death of Louis the Bavarian; he is succeeded by Charles IV, whose title
+is disputed until 1349.
+
+Queen Joanna I of Naples has her dominions invaded by Louis the Great of
+Hungary to avenge the murder of her husband, Andrew, brother of Louis,
+supposedly at her instigation. See "RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME," vii,
+104.
+
+1348. About this time begins the Renaissance in Italy. See "BEGINNING
+AND PROGRESS OF THE RENAISSANCE," vii, 110.
+
+Founding of the University of Prague, the first in Germany.
+
+Pope Clement VI purchases Avignon from Queen Joanna I of Naples.
+
+The plague stalks in Europe. See "THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE," vii,
+130.
+
+1349. Institution (or revival, see A.D. 1192) of the Order of the Garter
+in England.
+
+Dauphiny annexed to France on condition that the King's eldest son
+should be called the dauphin.
+
+1350. Death of Philip VI; his son, John the Good, succeeds to the French
+throne.
+
+1351. Zurich joins the Swiss confederation.
+
+Paganino Doria, commanding the Genoese fleet, plunders many Venetian
+towns on the Adriatic.
+
+1352. A statute of praemunire still further limits the papal power in
+England.
+
+Naval battle in the Bosporus between the Genoese, under Paganino Doria,
+and the Venetians, Byzantines, and Catalans under Niccola Pisano; the
+latter are defeated, and concede the entire command of the Black Sea to
+the Genoese.
+
+1353. Alliance of Genoa with Louis of Hungary; their fleet, under
+Antonino Grinaldi, defeated; in despair the Genoese place themselves
+under the protection of John Visconte.
+
+Bern joins the league of Swiss cantons.
+
+1354. Downfall and death of Rienzi. See "RIENZI'S REVOLUTION IN ROME,"
+vii, 104.
+
+Paganino Doria captures or destroys the Venetian fleet in the Morea;
+their admiral, Pisano, is captured.
+
+Beginning of Turkish dominion in Europe. See "FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN
+EUROPE," vii, 136.
+
+1355. King Charles of Navarre is treacherously seized and imprisoned in
+France; his brother Philip, and Geoffry d'Harcourt, make an alliance
+with Edward III; the war is renewed.
+
+Marino Falieri, Doge of Venice, beheaded. See "CONSPIRACY AND DEATH OF
+MARINO FALIERI AT VENICE," vii, 154.
+
+1356. Battle of Poitiers; John II, King of France, taken prisoner by
+Edward, the Black Prince; the Dauphin, Charles, escapes and assumes the
+government of France during his father's captivity.
+
+Emperor Charles defines the duties of the electors of Germany. See
+"CHARLES IV OF GERMANY PUBLISHES HIS GOLDEN BULL," vii, 160.
+
+Wycliffe publishes his _Last Age of the Court_.
+
+1357. London enthusiastically welcomes the Prince of Wales (the Black
+Prince) on his return with his prisoners; King Edward III concludes a
+treaty with the captive French King, which the Dauphin rejects.
+
+Popular movement in Paris under Stephen Marcel; meeting of the
+States-general of France.
+
+1358. Violent commotions in France. See "INSURRECTION OF THE JACQUERIE
+IN FRANCE," vii, 164.
+
+By a treaty of peace the Venetians resign Dalmatia and Istria to the
+King of Hungary; they agree to style their doge Duke of Venice only.
+
+1359. Edward III again invades France, his terms of peace not being
+accepted.
+
+1360. England and France conclude the treaty of Bretigny; King John II
+is set at liberty on payment of a heavy ransom.
+
+Outbreak of the Children's Plague in England.
+
+1361. End of the first ducal house of Burgundy.
+
+Adrianople is conquered by Sultan Amurath I of Turkey.
+
+All military operations in Europe suspended by the virulence of the
+plague.
+
+1362. Edward III grants Aquitaine to his son, the Black Prince; he also
+celebrates his fiftieth birthday by a general amnesty and a confirmation
+of Magna Charta.
+
+Conjectured beginning of Langland's _Vision of Piers Plowman_, a noted
+allegorical and satirical poem.[90]
+
+1363. Disbanded English soldiers enter the service of the Pisans, and
+obtain a victory for them over the Florentines.
+
+1364. Death of King John the Good of France, in Savoy palace, London;
+his son, Charles V, succeeds; Du Guesclin, his general, defeats the
+English and the army of Charles the Bad at Cocherel. Du Guesclin is
+afterward defeated and captured by the English, under Sir John Chandos;
+besides the capture of Du Guesclin, Charles of Blois is slain. The house
+of Montfort secures Brittany.
+
+Treaty of union between Bohemia and Austria.
+
+Chaucer writes his _Canterbury Tales_.
+
+1365. Pedro the Cruel, the epithet "cruel" being given him mainly for
+the murder of his brother, Don Fadrique, becomes so odious to his
+subjects that Henry of Trastamare, his brother, revives his claim to the
+throne of Leon and Castile; Du Guesclin takes command of his forces.
+
+University of Vienna founded.
+
+1366. Pedro the Cruel driven from his throne.
+
+Pope Urban V claims the tribute which had previously been paid by
+England; an act of parliament resists the demand; it further declares
+the concessions made by King John to be illegal and invalid.
+
+Tamerlane (Timur the Tartar), reviver of the great Mongol empire,
+inaugurates his conquests.
+
+1367. Edward the Black Prince, having espoused the cause of Pedro the
+Cruel, attacks and dethrones Henry of Trastamare; Pedro is restored to
+the throne, but refuses the stipulated pay to his allies, who leave him
+to his fate.
+
+Passage of the Kilkenny Statute; it forbade any Englishman to use an
+Irish name, to speak the Irish language, to adopt the Irish dress, or to
+allow the cattle of an Irishman to graze on his lands; it also made it
+high treason to marry a native.
+
+1369. King Charles V breaks the Anglo-French treaty; the Hundred Years'
+War reopened.
+
+1370. End of the Piast dynasty, Poland, caused by the death of Casimir
+the Great; Louis the Great, King of Hungary, succeeds.
+
+Timur the Tartar extends his domains. See "CONQUESTS OF TIMUR THE
+TARTAR," vii, 169.
+
+1371. Robert II ascends the throne and founds the Stuart dynasty in
+Scotland, on the death of David Bruce.[91]
+
+A petition of the English Parliament to the King that he employ no
+churchmen in any office of the state, and threatening to resist by force
+the oppressions of papal authority.
+
+1373. Henry of Castile invades Portugal, besieges Lisbon, and compels
+Ferdinand to sign a treaty of peace.
+
+Birth of John Huss.[92]
+
+1374. A strange plague, the dancing mania, appears in Europe. See
+"DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES," vii, 187.
+
+Wycliffe is appointed one of the seven ambassadors to represent to the
+Pope the grievances of the Church of England.
+
+1375. A general council of citizens of Florence declares "liberty
+paramount to every other consideration"; it appoints the "Seven Saints
+of War," which effectually resist aggression.
+
+1376. Death of Edward the Black Prince. Gregory XI abandons Avignon as
+the papal residence.
+
+1377. Rome again becomes the home of the papal court.
+
+Gregory XI orders proceedings against Wycliffe, the English reformer.
+
+Death of Edward III; his grandson, Richard II, succeeds to the English
+throne.
+
+1378. Wenceslaus becomes emperor of Germany on the death of his father,
+Charles IV.
+
+Rival popes elected. See "ELECTION OF ANTIPOPE CLEMENT VII: BEGINNING OF
+THE GREAT SCHISM," vii, 201.
+
+1379. Pietro Doria, at the head of the Genoese fleet, defeats the
+Venetian fleet off Pola; Chioggia is captured and Venice threatened.
+
+A poll-tax imposed on the people of England; this led directly to a
+revolution.
+
+War of the rival papal factions in Rome.
+
+Revolt of the White Hoods (_Les Chaperons blancs_) in Flanders; the
+workmen of Ghent, when they revolted against the Duke of Burgundy,
+adopted a white hood as their badge.
+
+1380. Establishment in Germany of post messengers.
+
+Surrender of the Genoese fleet and army at Chioggia. See "GENOESE
+SURRENDER TO VENETIANS," vii, 213.
+
+1381. Overthrow of Joanna I of Naples by Charles Durazzo (Charles the
+Little).
+
+An act of parliament surreptitiously obtained against heretics in
+England.
+
+Exasperated by the poll-tax the people of England revolt. See "REBELLION
+OF WAT TYLER," vii, 217.
+
+Insurrection of the Maillotins against the new tax on bread in Paris.
+They were so called because they armed themselves with _maillets de fer_
+("iron malls") when they attacked the arsenal, put to death the
+officers, and set the prisoners at large.
+
+Philip van Artevelde rises to power in Flanders.
+
+1382. Queen Joanna I of Naples is put to death in prison.
+
+"WYCLIFFE TRANSLATES THE BIBLE INTO ENGLISH." See vii, 227.
+
+Led by Philip van Artevelde the people of Ghent triumph over their
+ruler, Count Louis II; Bruges is captured and looted by them; Artevelde
+is acclaimed governor; a French army advances and defeats the forces of
+Artevelde, who is slain, and Louis is restored.
+
+1384. Flanders is incorporated in the dukedom of Burgundy; Artois and
+Franche Comte are also acquired by Philip the Bold of Burgundy.
+
+1385. Scotland fruitlessly invaded by Richard II of England.
+
+John the Great ascends the throne of Portugal; he defeats the Castilians
+at Aljubarota.
+
+1386. Victory of the Swiss over the Austrians at Sempach. See "THE SWISS
+WIN THEIR INDEPENDENCE," vii, 238.
+
+Hedvige, Queen of Poland, marries Duke of Jagellon, of Lithuania,
+uniting the states and establishing the Jagellon dynasty; as sovereign
+of Poland he is styled Ladislaus II. The Lithuanians abandon paganism.
+
+Founding of the University of Heidelberg.
+
+A regency, that of the Duke of Gloucester, is imposed upon Richard II of
+England.
+
+1387. Consultation of Richard II at Nottingham with the judges; the
+regency commission is declared a criminal act.
+
+A brother of Emperor Wenceslaus, Sigismund, becomes king of Hungary.
+
+Birth of Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietri), the great friar-painter.
+
+1388. Battle of Otterburne (Chevy Chase); an English-Scotch encounter
+in a private feud, not a national quarrel; the Earl of Douglas slain;
+Henry Percy captured by the Scots.
+
+At Naefels the Austrians are defeated by the Swiss.
+
+1389. Bulgaria and Servia conquered by the Turks under Amurath I at the
+decisive battle of Kosovo; he is slain.
+
+Death of Pope Urban VI; Boniface succeeds; the schism continues.
+
+Albert, King of Sweden, defeated and made prisoner by Queen Margaret,
+who reigns over the three Scandinavian kingdoms.
+
+1390. War of Florence with Milan.
+
+Robert III ascends the throne of Scotland.
+
+1392. Fits of insanity seize the young King of France, Charles VI; cards
+are invented, or introduced, to amuse him during his lucid intervals.
+
+1394. Birth of Prince Henry of Portugal, known as the "Navigator."
+
+1395. Milan is created a hereditary duchy by Emperor Wenceslaus for
+Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti.
+
+1396. Battle of Nicopolis; the Christian defenders of Hungary suffer a
+great defeat at the hands of the Turkish sultan Bajazet I.
+
+1397. Scandinavia united under one crown. See "UNION OF DENMARK, SWEDEN,
+AND NORWAY," vii, 243.
+
+1398. Mortimer, Earl of March, presumptive heir to the English throne
+and governor of Ireland, slain by a rebel force in that island.
+
+Froissart writes his _Chronicles_.
+
+1399. Deposition of Richard II of England; Henry Bolingbroke founds the
+house of Lancaster. See "DEPOSITION OF RICHARD II," vii, 251.
+
+After a long struggle for the possession of Naples between Ladislaus and
+Louis II of Anjou, it ends in the triumph of Ladislaus.
+
+1400. A great revolt of the Welsh is headed by Owen Glendower.
+
+Emperor Wenceslaus is deposed.
+
+Rupert of the Palatinate elected to the throne of Germany.
+
+1401. Parliament ordains the burning of Lollards in England. Barcelona
+bank (earliest existing bank) established.
+
+1402. Battle of Homildon Hill; victory of the Percys, a noble northern
+English family, over the Scots.
+
+License by royal letters-patent given to the "_Confrerie de la Passion_"
+to exhibit sacred dramas, or _Mysteries_, in France.
+
+"DISCOVERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS AND THE AFRICAN COAST." See vii, 266.
+
+Tamerlane (Timur the Tartar) defeats and captures Bajazet at Angora.
+
+1403. Battle of Shrewsbury; Henry IV defeats the Percys, who had allied
+themselves with Glendower to place the Earl of March on the English
+throne; Harry Percy (Hotspur) slain.
+
+1404. Queen Margaret of Sweden claims Schleswig and Holstein on the
+death of Gerard VI.
+
+1405. Pisa sold to Florence by the Visconti.
+
+An English act of parliament prohibits anyone not possessing twenty
+shillings a year in land from apprenticing his sons to any trade.
+
+Venice conquers Verona and Padua.
+
+Prince James Stuart, afterward James I, heir to the crown of Scotland,
+captured by the English.
+
+1406. Pisa compelled to submit to Florence after a year of war.
+
+Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, proposes a general
+council to terminate the schism in the Church.[93]
+
+1407. France distracted by the animosities of her leading families;
+Louis, Duke of Orleans, is assassinated by John the Fearless, Duke of
+Burgundy.
+
+1408. Valentina, widow of the Duke of Orleans, demands justice on her
+husband's assassins; the Duke of Burgundy declared an enemy of the
+state; he occupies Paris and drives out the royal court.
+
+1409. Council of Pisa; both popes refuse to appear; they are deposed and
+Alexander V is elected.
+
+University of Leipsic founded.
+
+1410. Death of Rupert of the Palatinate, Emperor of Germany.
+
+Jagellon (Ladislaus II), King of Poland, vanquishes the Teutonic
+Knights.
+
+1411. Battle of Harlow; defeat of the Scotch Lord of the Isles and the
+highland clans.
+
+Sigismund elected emperor of Germany.
+
+John Huss excommunicated and forbidden to preach.
+
+University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, founded.
+
+1412. For insulting the chief justice of England the Prince of Wales is
+committed to prison.
+
+Birth of Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
+
+1413. Death of Henry IV; Henry V ascends the English throne; he discards
+his dissolute associates and reforms his conduct.
+
+Ladislaus takes forcible possession of Rome and most of the papal
+states.
+
+1414. The Seventeenth general council. See "COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE," vii,
+284.
+
+Joanna II succeeds her brother Ladislaus of Naples on his death.
+
+1415. "TRIAL AND BURNING OF JOHN HUSS." See vii, 294.
+
+John the Great of Portugal conquers Ceuta; he discards the use of the
+Julian period and introduces the computation of time from the Christian
+era.
+
+Brandenburg is acquired by the house of Hohenzollern. See "THE HOUSE OF
+HOHENZOLLERN ESTABLISHED IN BRANDENBURG," vii, 305.
+
+"BATTLE OF AGINCOURT." See vii, 320.
+
+1416. Jerome of Prague burned.
+
+Alfonso the Wise, so called for his patronage of letters, ascends the
+throne of Aragon on the death of his father, Ferdinand the Just.
+
+1417. Pope Martin V elected by the Council of Constance; end of the
+schism.
+
+Sir John Oldcastle, the "Good Lord Cobham," after four years' hiding is
+captured and burned as a heretic in London.
+
+Gypsies appear in Transylvania; they are believed to have been low-caste
+Hindus expelled by Timur in the fourteenth century.
+
+1418. Close of the Council of Constance. See "COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE,"
+vii, 284.
+
+A great massacre in Paris of the Armagnacs by the populace, the
+partisans of John the Fearless of Burgundy; the Dauphin and his
+adherents transfer their seat of government to Poitiers.
+
+1419. Surrender of Rouen to the English.
+
+John the Fearless, beguiled by a treaty, meets the Dauphin, who has him
+assassinated.
+
+Storming of the town-hall of Prague by the Hussites; outbreak of the
+Hussite wars.
+
+Madeira first reached by the Portuguese, who sail under the command of
+Henry the Navigator.
+
+1420. Henry V, King of England, made successor to the French throne. See
+"BATTLE OF AGINCOURT," vii, 320.
+
+Sigismund besieges the Hussites in Prague; he is defeated by them, led
+by John Ziska.
+
+Joanna II of Naples, who summons to her aid Alfonso V of Aragon, is
+attacked by Louis III of Anjou.
+
+1421. Second crusade against the Bohemian Hussites.
+
+1422. Death of Henry V of England and Charles VI of France; the former
+is succeeded by his infant son; he is proclaimed King of England and
+France; his uncles, the Duke of Gloucester, regent in England, and the
+Duke of Bedford in France; Charles VII, son of Charles VI, is proclaimed
+by the French.
+
+Constantinople besieged by Amurath II, Sultan of Turkey.
+
+1423. Frederick the Warlike, Margrave of Misnia, assumes the electorate
+of Saxony and establishes the house of Wettin.
+
+1424. James I of Scotland, released after a captivity of nineteen years,
+marries a daughter of the Earl of Somerset; he assumes the government of
+Scotland.
+
+John Ziska is succeeded by Procopius the Great as head of the Taborites,
+a division of the Hussites.
+
+1425. Accession of John Palaeologus II as emperor of Byzantium.
+
+John and Hulbert van Eyck, masters of the early Flemish school, invent
+painting in oil.
+
+1426. Luebeck and the Baltic Hanse Towns support the Duke of Holstein
+against Eric XIII of Sweden.
+
+Great Hussite victory at Aussig.
+
+1427. The Hussites extend their conquests in Saxony and Meissen; they
+gain a victory at Mies.
+
+1428. Orleans, France, besieged by the English.
+
+Death of John de' Medici, founder of the illustrious family at Florence.
+
+1429. Coronation of Charles VII of France at Rheims.
+
+Jeanne d'Arc relieves Orleans. See "JEANNE D'ARC'S VICTORY AT ORLEANS,"
+vii, 333.
+
+Refusal of the Hussites to treat for peace with Emperor Sigismund.
+
+Antipope Clement VIII abdicates and ends the Great Schism.
+
+1430. Institution of the Golden Fleece by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, on
+his marriage with Isabella, daughter of King John of Portugal, and in
+commemoration of the manufacturing prosperity of the Netherlands.
+
+1431. Jeanne d'Arc dishonorably and inhumanly burned at Rouen. See
+"TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF JEANNE D'ARC," vii, 350.
+
+Council of Basel. Pope Martin V succeeded by Eugenius IV.
+
+1432. Prince Henry's navigators discover and take possession of the
+Azores for the Portuguese.
+
+Opening of the trade of the north to the English and Dutch by the wars
+of the Hanse Towns, and Holstein, with Denmark.
+
+1433. Treaty of the Council of Basel with the section of the Hussites
+called Calixtines; this satisfies them and they secede from the Hussite
+league.
+
+1434. Cosmo de' Medici recalled to Florence; his party triumphant.
+
+Organization of the national church (Utraquist) in Bohemia.
+
+First exploration of the west coast of Africa by the Portuguese.
+
+The Calixtines join the imperial army and defeat the Taborites at
+Bohmisch-Brod.
+
+1435. Treaty of Arras between France and Burgundy; the latter withdraws
+from the English party.
+
+Death of the Duke of Bedford.
+
+1436. A settlement effected between Emperor Sigismund and the Hussites
+by the treaty of Iglau; he is recognized as king of Bohemia.
+
+Charles VII, the French King, recovers Paris from the English.
+
+Eric, by a treaty of peace, relinquishes the greater part of Schleswig
+to the Duke of Holstein and makes concessions at Stockholm which restore
+tranquillity in Sweden.
+
+1437. Death of Emperor Sigismund; election of Albert of Austria to the
+throne of Hungary.
+
+Murder of James I; his son, James II, succeeds him on the throne of
+Scotland.
+
+Pope Eugenius IV is summoned to appear before the Council of Basel to
+answer various charges brought against him; he issues a bull dissolving
+the council; he calls another at Ferrara, whither he invites the Greek
+Emperor to attend and arrange for the union of the two churches.
+
+1438. Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII; it secures the liberty of the
+Gallican Church. See "CHARLES VII ISSUES HIS PRAGMATIC SANCTION," vii,
+370.
+
+Coronation of Albert II, King of Hungary; recognized by the Diet of
+Frankfort.
+
+     [1] See _Dante Composes the Divina Commedia_, page 1.
+
+     [2] See _Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars_,
+         page 51.
+
+     [3] See _The Third Estate Joins in the Government of
+         France_, page 17.
+
+     [4] See _War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair_, page
+         23.
+
+     [5] See _First Swiss Struggle for Liberty_, page 28.
+
+     [6] See _The Swiss Win Their Independence_, page 238.
+
+     [7] See _Battle of Bannockburn_, page 41.
+
+     [8] See _Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance_, page
+         110.
+
+     [9] See _Crowning of Petrarch at Rome_, page 93.
+
+     [10] See _Rienzi's Revolution in Rome_, page 104.
+
+     [11] See _Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at
+          Venice_, page 154.
+
+     [12] See _Genoese Surrender to Venetians_, page 213.
+
+     [13] See _Rise of the Hanseatic League_, vol. vi, page
+          214.
+
+     [14] See _Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway_, page
+          243.
+
+     [15] See _Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden
+          Bull_, page 160.
+
+     [16] See _The Black Death Ravages Europe_, page 130.
+
+     [17] See _Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages_, page 187.
+
+     [18] See _James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt_,
+          page 68.
+
+     [19] See _Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King
+          of France_, page 68.
+
+     [20] See _Battles of Sluys and Crecy_, page 78.
+
+     [21] See _Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France_, page
+          164.
+
+     [22] See _Rebellion of Wat Tyler_, page 217.
+
+     [23] See _Turks Seize Gallipoli_, page 147.
+
+     [24] See _Conquests of Timur the Tartar_, page 169.
+
+     [25] See _Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English_,
+          page 227.
+
+     [26] See _Election of Antipope Clement VII_, page 201.
+
+     [27] See _Trial and Burning of John Huss_, page 294.
+
+     [28] See _Council of Constance_, page 284.
+
+     [29] See _The Hussite Wars_, page 294.
+
+     [30] See _The House of Hohenzollern Established in
+          Brandenburg_, page 305.
+
+     [31] See _Deposition of Richard II_, page 251.
+
+     [32] See _Battle of Agincourt_, page 320.
+
+     [33] See _English Conquest of France_, page 320.
+
+     [34] See _Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans_, page 333.
+
+     [35] See _Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc_, page 350.
+
+     [36] See _Charles VII Issues his Pragmatic Sanction_,
+          page 370.
+
+     [37] See _Discovery of the Canary Islands: Beginning of
+          Negro Slave Trade_, page 266.
+
+     [38] "I am not going to lose the men for the old women."
+
+     [39] "The coward who the great refusal made."
+
+     [40] "The beams on the low shores now lost and dead."
+
+     [41] "A death-like shade--Like that beneath black boughs
+          and foliage green O'er the cold stream in Alpine
+          glens display'd."
+
+     [42] "O'er all the sandy desert falling slow, Were
+          shower'd dilated flakes of fire, like snow On Alpine
+          summits, when the wind is low."
+
+     [43] "So will a greater fame redound to thee, To have
+          formed a party by thyself alone."
+
+     [44] Translated by Charles Leonard-Stuart.
+
+     [45] This Emperor was Albert I, son of Rudolph I.
+
+     [46] James van Artevelde was called "the Brewer of
+          Ghent," because, although born an aristocrat, he was
+          enrolled in the Guild of Brewers.
+
+     [47] Translated from the French by Thomas Johnes.
+
+     [48] Lord Berners' account of the advance of the Genoese
+          is somewhat different from this; he describes them
+          as _leaping_ forward with a _fell_ cry. The whole
+          passage is so spirited and graphic that we give it
+          entire:
+
+          "Whan the genowayes were assembled toguyder and
+          beganne to aproche, they made a great leape and crye
+          to abasshe thenglysshmen, but they stode styll and
+          styredde nat for all that. Than the genowayes agayne
+          the seconde tyme made another leape and a fell crye
+          and stepped forwarde a lytell, and thenglysshmen
+          remeued nat one fote; thirdly agayne they leapt and
+          cryed, and went forthe tyll they came within shotte;
+          than they shotte feersly with their crosbowes. Than
+          thenglysshe archers stept forthe one pase and lette
+          fly their arowes so hotly and so thycke that it
+          semed snowe. Whan the genowayes felte the arowes
+          persynge through heedes, armes, and brestes, many of
+          them cast downe their crosbowes and did cutte their
+          strynges and retourned dysconfited. Whan the frenche
+          kynge sawe them flye away, he said, Slee these
+          rascals, for they shall lette and trouble us without
+          reason; than you shoulde haue sene the men of armes
+          dasshe in among them and kylled a great nombre of
+          them; and euerstyll the englysshmen shot where as
+          they sawe thyckest preace, the sharpe arowes ranne
+          into the men of armes and into their horses, and
+          many fell horse and men amonge the genowayes, and
+          whan they were downe they coude nat relyne agayne;
+          the preace was so thycke that one ouerthrewe a
+          nother. And also amonge the englysshemen there were
+          certayne rascalles that went a fote with great
+          knyues, and they went in among the men of armes and
+          slewe and murdredde many as they lay on the grounde,
+          both erles, barownes, knyghts, and squyers, whereof
+          the kyng of Englande was after dyspleased, for he
+          had rather they had been taken prisoners."
+
+     [49] His blindness was supposed to be caused by poison,
+          which was given to him when engaged in the wars of
+          Italy.
+
+     [50] The following is Lord Berners' version of this
+          narration: "In the mornyng the day of the batayle
+          certayne frenchemen and almaygnes perforce opyned
+          the archers of the princes batayle, and came and
+          fought with the men at armes hande to hande. Than
+          the second batayle of thenglyshe men came to socour
+          the prince's batayle, the whiche was tyme, for they
+          had as than moche ado, and they with the prince sent
+          a messangar to the kynge who was on a lytell
+          wyndmill hill. Than the knyght sayd to the kyng, Sir
+          therle of Warwyke and therle of Cafort [Stafford]
+          Sir Reynolde Cobham and other such as be about the
+          prince your sonne are feersly fought with all, and
+          are sore handled, wherefore they desire you that you
+          and your batayle woll come and ayde them, for if the
+          frenchemen encrease as they dout they woll your
+          sonne and they shall have moche a do. Than the kynge
+          sayde, is my sonne deed or hurt or on the yerthe
+          felled? No, sir, quoth the knight, but he is hardely
+          matched wherfore he hath nede of your ayde. Well
+          sayde the kyng, retourne to hym and to them that
+          sent you hyther, and say to them that they sende no
+          more to me for any adventure that falleth as long as
+          my sonne is alyve; and also say to them that they
+          suffer hym this day to wynne his spurres, for if God
+          be pleased, I woll this iourney be his and the
+          honoure therof and to them that be aboute hym. Than
+          the knyght retourned agayn to them and shewed the
+          kynges wordes, the which greatly encouraged them,
+          and repoyned in that they had sende to the kynge as
+          they dyd."
+
+     [51] Translated from the German by B. G. Babington.
+
+     [52] Thucydides, in his account of the earlier plague in
+          Athens, B.C. 430, says, "It was supposed that the
+          Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns."
+
+     [53] Translated from the French by Charles
+          Leonard-Stuart.
+
+     [54] Osman is the real Turkish name, which has been
+          corrupted into Othman. The descendants of his
+          subjects style themselves Osmanlis--corrupted into
+          Ottoman.
+
+     [55] Edebali, a Mussulman prophet and saint, whose
+          daughter Osman married.
+
+     [56] A criminal tribunal, of which Steno himself was
+          president.
+
+     [57] "Jacques Bonhomme." Froissart takes this for the
+          name of an individual, but it is the common
+          nickname--like "Hodge" or "Giles"--of the French
+          peasantry. It is said that the term was applied by
+          the lords of the manor to their villeins or serfs,
+          in derision of their awkwardness and patient
+          endurance of their lot. The "King who came from
+          Clermont"--the leader of the Jacquerie--was William
+          Karl or Callet.
+
+     [58] A most wonderful scene. The B'hagiratha or Ganges
+          issues from under a very low arch at the foot of the
+          grand snow-bed. The illiterate mountaineers compare
+          the pendent icicles to Mahodeva's hair. Hindoos of
+          research may formerly have been here; and if so, one
+          cannot think of any place to which they might more
+          aptly give the name of a cow's mouth than to this
+          extraordinary _debouche_.
+
+     [59] Translated from the German by B. G. Babington.
+
+     [60] "Chorus Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus' dance; the
+          lascivious dance, Paracelsus calls it, because they
+          that are taken with it can do nothing but dance till
+          they be dead or cured. It is so called for that the
+          parties so troubled were wont to go to St. Vitus for
+          help; and, after they had danced there awhile, they
+          were certainly freed. 'Tis strange to hear how long
+          they will dance, and in what manner, over stools,
+          forms, and tables. One in red clothes they cannot
+          abide. Musick above all things they love; and
+          therefore magistrates in Germany will hire musicians
+          to play to them, and some lusty, sturdy companions
+          to dance with them. This disease hath been very
+          common in Germany, as appears by those relations of
+          Schenkius, and Paracelsus in his book of madness,
+          who brags how many several persons he hath cured of
+          it. Felix Platerus (_de Mentis Alienat._ cap. 3)
+          reports of a woman in Basel whom he saw, that danced
+          a whole month together. The Arabians call it a kind
+          of palsie. Bodine, in his fifth book, speaks of this
+          infirmity; Monavius, in his last epistle to
+          Scoltizius, and in another to Dudithus, where you
+          may read more of it."--_Burton's Anatomy of
+          Melancholy._
+
+     [61] The Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus in Syria states that,
+          at the festival of St. John, large fires were
+          annually kindled in several towns, through which
+          men, women, and children jumped; and that young
+          children were carried through by their mothers. He
+          considered this custom as an ancient Asiatic
+          ceremony of purification, similar to that recorded
+          of Ahaz, in II Kings, xvi. 3. Zonaras, Balsamon, and
+          Photius speak of the St. John's fires in
+          Constantinople, and the first looks upon them as the
+          remains of an old Grecian custom. Even in modern
+          times fires are still lighted on St. John's Day in
+          Brittany and other remote parts of Continental
+          Europe, through the smoke of which the cattle are
+          driven in the belief that they will thus be
+          protected from contagious and other diseases, and in
+          these practices protective fumigation originated.
+          That such different nations should have had the same
+          idea of fixing the purification by fire on St.
+          John's Day is a remarkable coincidence, which
+          perhaps can be accounted for only by its analogy to
+          baptism.
+
+     [62] Beckmann makes many other observations on this
+          well-known circumstance. The priest named is the
+          same who is still known in the nursery tales of
+          children as the _Knecht Ruprecht_.
+
+     [63] _Dass dir Sanct Veitstanz ankomme_ ("May you be
+          seized with St. Vitus' dance").
+
+     [64] "This proceeding was, however, no invention of his,
+          but an imitation of a usual mode of enchantment by
+          means of wax figures (_peri cunculas_). The witches
+          made a wax image of the person who was to be
+          bewitched; and in order to torment him, they stuck
+          it full of pins, or melted it before the fire. The
+          books on magic, of the Middle Ages, are full of such
+          things; though the reader who may wish to obtain
+          information on this subject need not go so far back.
+          Only eighty years since, the learned and celebrated
+          Storch, of the school of Stahl, published a treatise
+          on witchcraft, worthy of the fourteenth
+          century."--_Treatise on the Diseases of Children._
+
+     [65] Some authorities give twenty-nine.
+
+     [66] Selden, in his _Table Talk_, says: "There was once,
+          I am sure, a parliamentary pope. Pope Urban was made
+          pope in England by act of parliament, against Pope
+          Clement: the act is not in the _Book of Statutes_,
+          either because he that compiled the book would not
+          have the name of the Pope there, or else he would
+          not let it appear that they meddled with any such
+          thing; but it is upon the rolls."
+
+     [67] A groat equalled fourpence, or eight cents.
+
+     [68] In Walsingham may be seen a long account of the
+          death of the Archbishop, page 250. His head was
+          carried in triumph through the streets on the point
+          of a lance, and fixed on London bridge. That it
+          might be the better known, the hat or bonnet worn by
+          him was nailed to the skull.
+
+     [69] When Tresilian, one of the judges, tried the
+          insurgents at St. Alban's, he impanelled three
+          juries of twelve men each. The first was ordered to
+          present all whom they knew to be the chiefs of the
+          tumult, the second gave their opinion on the
+          presentation of the first, and the third pronounced
+          the verdict of guilty or not guilty. It does not
+          appear that witnesses were examined. The juries
+          spoke from their personal knowledge. Thus each
+          convict was condemned on the oaths of thirty-six
+          men. At first, on account of the multitude of
+          executions, the condemned were beheaded: afterward
+          they were hanged and left on the gibbet as objects
+          of terror; but as their bodies were removed by their
+          friends, the King ordered them to be hanged in
+          chains, the first instance in which express mention
+          of the practice is made. According to Holinshed the
+          executions amounted to fifteen hundred.
+
+     [70] The readers, as might be expected, often
+          surreptitiously copied portions of special interest.
+          One is reminded of the story in ancient Irish
+          history of a curious decision arising out of an
+          incident of this kind nearly a thousand years
+          before, which seems to have influenced the history
+          of Christianity in Britain. St. Columb, on a visit
+          to the aged St. Finian in Ulster, had permission to
+          read in the Psalter belonging to his host. But every
+          night while the good old saint was sleeping, the
+          young one was busy in the chapel writing by a
+          miraculous light till he had completed a copy of the
+          whole Psalter. The owner of the Psalter, discovering
+          this, demanded that it should be given up, as it had
+          been copied unlawfully from his book; while the
+          copyist insisted that, the materials of labor being
+          his, he was entitled to what he had written. The
+          dispute was referred to Diarmad, the King at Tara,
+          and his decision (genuinely Irish) was given in St.
+          Finian's favor. "To every book," said he, "belongs
+          its son-book [copy], as to every cow belongs her
+          calf." Columb complained of the decision as unjust,
+          and the dispute is said to have been one of the
+          causes of his leaving Ireland for Iona.
+
+     [71] Oliver Wendell Holmes: _Autocrat of the
+          Breakfast-table._
+
+     [72] A town in Schwyz. The name means a "hermitage." St.
+          Meinrad, according to legend, lived there (ninth
+          century) as a hermit. It is a celebrated pilgrim
+          resort.--ED.
+
+     [73] He descended from Henry III both by father and
+          mother. But he could not claim by the father's side,
+          because the young Earl of March was sprung from the
+          Duke of Clarence, the elder brother of John of
+          Gaunt; nor by the mother's side, because she was
+          sprung from Edmund of Lancaster, a younger brother
+          of Edward I. It was pretended that Edmund was the
+          elder brother, but deformed in body, and therefore
+          set aside with his own consent. If we may believe
+          Hardyng, Henry on September 21st produced in council
+          a document to prove the seniority of Edmund over
+          Edward, but that the contrary was shown by a number
+          of unanswerable authorities.
+
+     [74] Charles IV.
+
+     [75] Allusion to John Ziska, leader of the Hussites, who
+          waged a fierce war against Wenzel and the empire.
+
+     [76] Head of the House of Hohenzollern, Burggraves of
+          Nuremberg.
+
+     [77] This was the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII, whose
+          brother Jean, Duke of Burgundy, had, in 1407,
+          procured the murder of the Duke of Orleans.
+
+     [78] To _houspiller_ is to maul, pull about, abuse,
+          "worry like a dog"; hence the name _houspilleur_.
+
+     [79] The English cardinal, most powerful ecclesiastic of
+          the time.
+
+     [80] Assistant judges.
+
+     [81] Tipstaffs, constables.
+
+     [82] The Duke of Bedford (John of Lancaster), third son
+          of Henry IV of England, was regent of England and
+          France, which office he assumed on the death of
+          Henry V, in 1422.
+
+     [83] The memory of Jeanne d'Arc was long and shamefully
+          traduced by descendants of those enemies of France
+          whom she baffled. Even Shakespeare (_Henry VI_) is
+          so unjust to her--refining upon the brutal calumnies
+          of the historians--as to grieve his most loving
+          critics. It remained for the opening years of the
+          twentieth century to see the Maid canonized by the
+          Church which, as the agent of her country's foes,
+          was instrumental in her destruction.--ED.
+
+     [84] Translated by Chauncey C. Starkweather, M.A., LL.B.
+
+     [85] The Catalan Grand Company was a formidable body of
+          mercenary soldiers; it arose in Sicily during the
+          wars that followed the Sicilian Vespers.
+
+     [86] See 1291.
+
+     [87] Date uncertain.
+
+     [88] Date uncertain.
+
+     [89] A specimen of an early speaking-tube exists,
+          connecting the room said to have been occupied by
+          Isabella with the old brewhouse, now a tavern, by
+          means of which Mortimer was wont to communicate with
+          his mistress. The castle stands upon a mount of 280
+          feet, sheer rock, and the brewhouse is at its base.
+          A peculiarity of the tube, bored through the live
+          rock, is an elbow-joint, which is a puzzle to
+          scientists.
+
+     [90] Date uncertain.
+
+     [91] Often erroneously given as 1370, neglecting the fact
+          that, by the old manner of reckoning, the year began
+          on March 25th.
+
+     [92] Date uncertain.
+
+     [93] By the French it is claimed that Jean Charlier de
+          Gerson was the author of _de Imitatione Christi_,
+          usually attributed to Thomas a Kempis.
+
+
+     END OF VOLUME VII
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
+Volume 07, by Various
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