The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 - Various
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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
SUPERVISING EDITOR
ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.
LITERARY EDITORS
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
JOHN RUDD, LL.D.
DIRECTING EDITOR
WALTER F. AUSTIN, LL.M.
With a staff of specialists
CONTENTS
VOLUME V
An Outline Narrative of the Great Events
CHARLES F. HORNE
Feudalism: Its Frankish Birth and English Development
(9th to 12th Century)
WILLIAM STUBBS
Decay of the Frankish Empire
Division into Modern France, Germany, and Italy
(A.D. 843-911)
FRANCOIS P. G. GUIZOT
Career of Alfred the Great (A.D. 871-901)
THOMAS HUGHES
JOHN R. GREEN
Henry the Fowler Founds the Saxon Line of German Kings
Origin of the German Burghers or Middle Classes (A.D. 911-936)
WOLFGANG MENZEL
Conquest of Egypt by the Fatimites (A.D. 969)
STANLEY LANE-POOLE
Growth and Decadence of Chivalry (10th to 15th Century)
LEON GAUTIER
Conversion of Vladimir the Great
Introduction of Christianity into Russia (A.D. 988-1015)
A. N. MOURAVIEFF
Leif Ericson Discovers America (A.D. 1000)
CHARLES C. RAFN
SAGA OF ERIC THE RED
Mahometans In India
Bloody Invasions under Mahmud (A.D. 1000)
ALEXANDER DOW
Canute Becomes King of England (A.D. 1017)
DAVID HUME
Henry III Deposes the Popes (A.D. 1048)
The German Empire Controls the Papacy
FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS
JOSEPH DARRAS
Dissension and Separation of the Greek and Roman
Churches (A.D. 1054)
HENRY F. TOZER
JOSEPH DEHARBE
Norman Conquest of England
Battle of Hastings (A.D. 1066)
SIR EDWARD S. CREASY
Triumphs of Hildebrand
"The Turning-point of the Middle Ages"
Henry IV Begs for Mercy at Canossa (A.D. 1073-1085)
ARTHUR R. PENNINGTON
ARTAUD DE MONTOR
Completion of the Domesday Book (A.D. 1086)
CHARLES KNIGHT
Decline of the Moorish Power in Spain
Growth and Decay of the Almoravide and Almohade
Dynasties (A.D. 1086-1214)
S.A. DUNHAM
The First Crusade (A.D. 1096-1099)
SIR GEORGE W. COX
Foundation of the Order of Knights Templars (A.D. 1118)
CHARLES G. ADDISON
Stephen Usurps the English Crown
His Conflicts with Matilda
Decisive Influence of the Church (A.D. 1135-1154)
CHARLES KNIGHT
Antipapal Democratic Movement
Arnold of Brescia
St. Bernard and the Second Crusade (A.D. 1145-1155)
JOHANN A. W. NEANDER
Decline of the Byzantine Empire
Ravages of Roger of Sicily (A.D. 1146)
GEORGE FINLAY
Universal Chronology (A.D. 843-1161)
JOHN RUDD
AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
(FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO FREDERICK BARBAROSSA)
CHARLES F. HORNE
The three centuries which follow the downfall of the empire of
Charlemagne laid the foundations of modern Europe, and made of it a
world wholly different, politically, socially, and religiously, from
that which had preceded it. In the careers of Greece and Rome we saw
exemplified the results of two sharply opposing tendencies of the Aryan
mind, the one toward individualism and separation, the other toward
self-subordination and union.
In the time of Charlemagne's splendid successes it appeared settled that
the second of these tendencies was to guide the Teutonic Aryans, that
the Europe of the future was to be a single empire, ever pushing out its
borders as Rome had done, ever subduing its weaker neighbors, until the
"Teutonic peace" should be substituted for the shattered "Roman peace,"
soldiers should be needed only for the duties of police, and a whole
civilized world again obey the rule of a single man.
Instead of this, the race has since followed a destiny of separation.
Europe is divided into many countries, each of them a vast camp
bristling with armies and arsenals. Civilization has continued
hag-ridden by war even to our own day, and, during at least seven
hundred of the years that followed Charlemagne, mankind made no greater
progress in the arts and sciences than the ancients had sometimes
achieved in a single century. We do indeed believe that at last we have
entered on an age of rapid advance, that individualism has justified
itself. The wider personal liberty of to-day is worth all that the race
has suffered for it. Yet the retardation of wellnigh a thousand years
has surely been a giant price to pay.
DOWNFALL OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE
This mighty change in the course of Teutonic destiny, this breakdown of
the Frankish empire, was wrought by two destroying forces, one from
within, one from without. From within came the insubordination, the
still savage love of combat, the natural turbulence of the race. It is
conceivable that, had Charlemagne been followed on the throne by a son
and then a grandson as mighty as he and his immediate ancestors, the
course of the whole broad earth would have been altered. The Franks
would have grown accustomed to obey; further conquest abroad would have
insured peace at home; the imperial power would have become strong as in
Roman days, when the most feeble emperors could not be shaken. But the
descendants of Charlemagne sank into a decline. He himself had directed
the fighting energy of the Franks against foreign enemies. His son and
successor had no taste for war, and so allowed his idle subjects time to
quarrel with him and with one another. The next generation, under the
grandsons of Charlemagne, devoted their entire lives to repeated and
furious civil wars, in which the empire fell apart, the flower of the
Frankish race perished, and the strength of its dominion was sapped to
nothingness.[1]
[Footnote 1: See _Decay of Frankish Empire_, page 22.]
There were three of these grandsons, and, when their struggle had left
them thoroughly exhausted, they divided the empire into three. Their
treaty of Verdun (843) is often quoted as beginning the modern kingdoms
of Germany, France, and Italy. The division was in some sense a natural
one, emphasized by differences of language and of race. Italy was
peopled by descendants of the ancient Italians, with a thin
intermingling of Goths and Lombards; France held half-Romanized Gauls,
with a very considerable percentage of the Frankish blood; while Germany
was far more barbaric than the other regions. Its people, whether Frank
or Saxon, were all pure Teuton, and still spoke in their Teutonic or
German tongue.
The Franks themselves, however, did not regard this as a breaking of
their empire. They looked on it as merely a family affair, an
arrangement made for the convenience of government among the descendants
of the great Charles. So firm had been that mighty hero's grasp upon the
national imagination, that the Franks accepted as matter of course that
his family should bear rule, and rallied round the various worthless
members of it with rather pathetic loyalty, fighting for them one
against the other, reuniting and redividing the various fragments of the
empire, until the feeble Carlovingian race died out completely.
It is thus evident that there was a strong tendency toward union among
the Franks. But there was also an outside influence to disrupt their
empire. Charlemagne had not carried far enough their career of conquest.
He subdued the Teutons within the limits of Germany, but he did not
reach their weaker Scandinavian brethren to the north, the Danes and
Norsemen. He chastised the Avars, a vague non-Aryan people east of
Germany, but he could not make provision against future Asiatic swarms.
He humbled the Arabs in Spain, but he did not break their African
dominion. From all these sources, as the Franks grew weaker instead of
stronger, their lands became exposed to new invasion.
THE LAST INVADERS
Let us take a moment to trace the fortunes of these outside races,
though the main destiny of the future still lay with Teutonic Europe.
In speaking of the followers of Mahomet, we might perhaps at this period
better drop the term Arabs, and call them Saracens. They were thus known
to the Christians; and their conquests had drawn in their train so many
other peoples that in truth there was little pure Arab blood left among
them. The Saracens, then, had begun to lose somewhat of their intense
fanaticism. Feuds broke out among them. Different chiefs established
different kingdoms or "caliphates," whose dominion became political
rather than religious. Spain had one ruler, Egypt[2] another, Asia a
third. In the eleventh century an army of Saracens invaded India[3] and
added that strange and ancient land to their domain. Europe they had
failed to conquer; but their fleets commanded the Mediterranean. They
held all its islands, Sicily, Crete, Sardinia, and Corsica. They
plundered the coast towns of France and Italy. There was a Saracenic
ravaging of Rome.
[Footnote 2: See _Conquest of Egypt by the Fatimites_, page 94.]
[Footnote 3: See _Mahometans in India_, page 151.]
On the whole, however, the wave of Mahometan conquest receded. In Spain
the remnants of the Christian population, Visigoths, Romans, and still
older peoples, pressed their way down from their old-time, secret
mountain retreats and began driving the Saracens southward.[4] The
decaying Roman Empire of the East still resisted the Mahometan attack;
Constantinople remained a splendid city, type and picture of what the
ancient world had been.
[Footnote 4: See _Decline of the Moorish Power in Spain_, page 296.]
While the Saracens were thus laying waste the Frankish empire along its
Mediterranean coasts, a more dangerous enemy was assailing it from the
east. Toward the end of the ninth century the Magyars, an Asiatic,
Turanian people, burst on Europe, as the Huns had done five centuries
before. Indeed, the Christians called these later comers Huns also, and
told of them the same extravagant tales of terror. The land which the
Magyars settled was called Hungary. They dwell there and possess it even
to this day, the only instance of a Turanian people having permanently
established themselves in an Aryan continent and at the expense of Aryan
neighbors.
From Hungary the Magyars soon advanced to the German border line, and
made fierce plundering inroads upon the more civilized regions beyond.
They came on horseback, so that the slower Teutons could never gather
quickly enough to resist them. The marauding parties, as they learned
the wealth and weakness of this new land, grew bigger, until at length
they were armies, and defeated the German Franks in pitched battles, and
spread desolation through all the country. They returned now every year.
Their ravages extended even to the Rhine and to the ancient Gallic land
beyond. The Frankish empire seemed doomed to reenact, in a smaller, far
more savage way, the fate of Rome.
Yet more widespread in destruction, more important in result than the
raids of either Saracens or Magyars, were those of the Scandinavians or
Northmen. These, the latest, and perhaps therefore the finest, flower of
the Teutonic stock, are closer to us and hence better known than the
early Goths or Franks. Shut off in their cold northern peninsulas and
islands, they had grown more slowly, it may be, than their southern
brethren. Now they burst suddenly on the world with spectacular dramatic
effect, wild, fierce, and splendid conquerors, as keen of intellect and
quick of wit as they were strong of arm and daring of adventure.
We see them first as sea-robbers, pirates, venturing even in
Charlemagne's time to plunder the German and French coasts. One tribe of
them, the Danes, had already been harrying England and Ireland. Only
Alfred,[5] by heroic exertions, saved a fragment of his kingdom from
them. Later, under Canute,[6] they become its kings. The Northmen
penetrate Russia and appear as rulers of the strange Slavic tribes
there; they settle in Iceland, Greenland, and even distant and unknown
America.[7]
[Footnote 5: See _Career of Alfred the Great_.]
[Footnote 6: See _Canute Becomes King of England_.]
[Footnote 7: _Leif Ericson Discovers America_.]
Meanwhile, after Charlemagne's death they become a main factor in the
downfall of his empire. Year after year their little ships plunder the
undefended French coast, until it is abandoned to them and becomes a
desert. They build winter camps at the river mouths, so that in the
spring they need lose less time and can hurry inland after their
retreating prey. Sudden in attack, strong in defence, they venture
hundreds of miles up the winding waterways. Paris is twice attacked by
them and must fight for life. They penetrate so far up the Loire as to
burn Orleans.
It was under stress of all these assaults that the Franks, grown too
feeble to defend themselves as Charlemagne would have done, by marching
out and pursuing the invaders to their own homes, developed instead a
system of defence which made the Middle Ages what they were. All central
authority seemed lost; each little community was left to defend itself
as best it might. So the local chieftain built himself a rude fortress,
which in time became a towered castle; and thither the people fled in
time of danger. Each man looked up to and swore faith to this, his own
chief, his immediate protector, and took little thought of a distant and
feeble king or emperor. Occasionally, of course, a stronger lord or king
bestirred himself, and demanded homage of these various petty
chieftains. They gave him such service as they wished or as they must.
This was the "feudal system."[8]
[Footnote 8: See _Feudalism: Its Frankish Birth and English
Development_.]
The inclination of each lesser lord was obviously to assert as much
independence as he could. He naturally objected to paying money or
service without benefit received; and he could see no good that this
"overlord" did for him or for his district. It seemed likely at this
time that instead of being divided into three kingdoms, the Frankish
empire would split into thousands of little castled states.
That is, it seemed so, after the various marauding nations were disposed
of. The Northmen were pacified by presenting them outright with the
coast lands they had most harried. Their great leader, Rolf, accepted
the territory with some vague and ill-kept promise of vassalage to the
French King, and with a very firmly held determination that he would let
no pirates ravage his land or cross it to reach others. So the French
coast became Normandy, and the Northmen learned the tongue and manners
of their new home, and softened their harsh name to "Norman," even as
they softened their harsh ways, and rapidly became the most able and
most cultured of Frenchmen.
As for the Saracens, being unprogressive and no longer enthusiastic,
they grew ever feebler, while the Italian cities, being Aryan and left
to themselves, grew strong. At length their fleets met those of the
Saracens on equal terms, and defeated them, and gradually wrested from
them the control of the Mediterranean. Invaders were thus everywhere met
as they came, locally. There was no general gathering of the Frankish
forces against them.
The repulse of the Huns proved the hardest matter of all. Fortunately
for the Germans, their line of Carlovingian emperors died out. So the
various dukes and counts, practically each an independent sovereign, met
and elected a king from among themselves, not really to rule them, but
to enable them to unite against the Huns. After their first elected king
had been soundly beaten by one of his dukes, he died, and in their next
choice they had the luck to light upon a leader really great. Henry the
Fowler, more honorably known as Henry the City-builder,[9] taught them
how to defeat their foe.
[Footnote 9: See _Henry the Fowler Founds the Saxon Line of German
Kings_.]
Much to the disgust of his simple and war-hardened comrades, he first
sent to the Hungarians and purchased peace and paid them tribute. Having
thus secured a temporary respite, Henry encouraged and aided his people
in building walled cities all along the frontier. He also planned to
meet the invaders on equal terms by training his warriors to fight on
horseback. He instituted tournaments and created an order of knighthood,
and is thus generally regarded as the founder of chivalry, that fairest
fruit of mediaeval times, which did so much to preserve honor and
tenderness and respect for womankind.[10]
[Footnote 10: See _Growth and Decadence of Chivalry_.]
When he felt all prepared, Henry deliberately defied and insulted the
Hungarians, and so provoked from them a combined national invasion,
which he met and completely overthrew in the battle of Merseburg (933).
A generation later the Huns felt themselves strong enough to try again;
but Henry's son, Otto the Great, repeated the chastisement. He then
formed a boundary colony or "East-mark" from which sprang Austria; and
this border kingdom was always able to keep the weakened Huns in check.
At the same time there was growing up in Russia a Slavic civilization,
which received Christianity[11] from the South as it had received
Teutonic dominion from the North, and so developed along very similar
lines to Western Europe. The Russian states served as a barrier against
later Asiatic hordes; and this, combined with the civilizing of the last
remnants of the Scandinavians in the North, and the fading of Saracenic
power in the South, left the tottering civilization of the West free
from further barbarian invasion. We shall find destruction threatened
again in later ages by Tartar and by Turk; but the intruders never reach
beyond the frontier. The Teutons and the half-Romanized ancients with
whom they had assimilated were left to work out their own problems. All
the ingredients, even to the last, the Northmen, had been poured into
the caldron. There remains to see what the intermingling has brought
forth.
[Footnote 11: See _Conversion of Vladimir the Great_.]
FEUDAL EUROPE
We have here, then, somewhere about the middle of the tenth century, a
date which may be regarded as marking a distinctly new era. The
ceaseless work of social organization and improvement, which seems so
strong an instinct of the Aryan mind, had been recommenced again and
again from under repeated deluges of barbarism. To-day for nearly a
thousand years it has progressed uninterrupted, except by disturbances
from within; nor does it appear possible, with our present knowledge of
science and of the remoter corners of the globe, that our civilization
will ever again be even menaced by the other races.
Chronologists frequently adopt as a convenient starting-point for this
modern development the year 962, in which Otto the Great, conqueror of
the Huns, felt himself strong enough to march a German army to Rome and
assume there the title of emperor, which had been long in abeyance. To
be sure, there was still an Emperor of the East in Constantinople, but
nobody thought of him; and, to be sure, the power of Otto and the later
emperors was purely German, with scarce a pretence of extending beyond
their own country and sometimes Italy. Yet here was at least one
restored influence that made toward unity and, by its own devious and
erratic ways, toward peace.
It must not be supposed, of course, that there was no more war. But, as
it became a private affair between relatives, or at least acquaintances,
its ravages were greatly reduced. It was accepted as the "pastime of
gentlemen," "the sport of kings;" and though we may quote the phrases
to-day with kindling sarcasm, yet they open a very different vision from
that of the older inroads by unknown hordes, frenzied with the passion
and the purpose of the brute. The usefulness of the common people was
recognized, and they were allowed to continue to live and cultivate the
ground; while all the great dukes and even the lesser nobles, having
secured as many castles as possible, intrenched themselves in their
strongholds and defied all comers.
They asserted their right of "private war" and attacked each other upon
every conceivable provocation, whether it were the disputed succession
to some vast estate or the ravage spread by a reckless cow in a foreign
field. Indeed, it is not always easy to distinguish these private wars
from mere robberies or plundering expeditions; and it is not probable
that the wild barons exercised any very delicate discrimination. Even
Otto the Great had little real influence or authority over such lords as
these. His immediate successors found themselves with even less.
In short, it was the golden age of feudalism, of the individual feudal
lords. In Italy there was no central authority whatever, nor among the
little Christian states gradually arising in Spain. In France and
England the title of king was but a name. France was really composed of
a dozen or more independent counties and dukedoms. For a while its lords
elected a king as the Germans did; and gradually the title became
hereditary in the Capet family, the counts of Paris, who had fought most
valiantly against the Northmen. But the entire power of these so-called
kings lay in their own estates, in the fact that they were counts of
Paris, and by marriage or by force were slowly adding new possessions to
their old. Any other noble might have been equally fortunate in his
investments, and wrested from them their purely honorary title. In fact,
there was more than once a king of Aquitaine.
Yet, in 1066, William the Conqueror was able to form for a moment a
strong and centralized monarchy in England.[12] With him we reach the
period of the second Northmen, or now Norman, outbreak. The marauders
had grown polished, but not peaceful, in their French home. They had
become more numerous and more restless, until we find them again taking
to their ships and seeking newer lands to master. Only they go now as a
civilizing as well as a devastating influence.
[Footnote 12: See _Norman Conquest of England_.]
Most famed of their undertakings, of course, was William's Conquest of
England. But we find them also sailing along the Spanish coast, entering
the Mediterranean, seizing the Balearic Isles, making out of Sicily and
most of Southern Italy a kingdom which lasted until 1860, and finally
ravaging the Eastern Empire, and entering Constantinople itself.[13]
Last and mightiest of the wandering races, they accomplished what all
their predecessors had failed to do.
[Footnote 13: See _Decline of the Byzantine Empire_, page 353.]
In England, William, with the shrewdness of his race, recognized the
tendencies of the age, and erected a state so planned that there could
be no question as to who was master. He gave fiefs liberally to his
followers; but he took care that the gifts should be in small and
scattered parcels. No one man controlled any region sufficiently
extensive to give him the faintest chance of defying the King. William
had the famous _Domesday Book_[14] compiled, that he might know just
what every freeman in his dominions owned and for what he could be held
accountable. The England of the later days of the Conqueror seemed far
advanced upon our modern ways.
[Footnote 14: See _Completion of the Domesday Book_, page 242.]
But what can one man, however able and advanced, do against the current
of his age? History shows us constantly that the great reformers have
been those who felt and followed the general feeling of their times, who
became mouthpieces for the great mass of thought and effort behind them,
not those who struggled against the tide. William's successors failed to
comprehend what he had done, or why. By the time of Stephen (1135)[15]
we find the barons of England wellnigh as powerful as those of other
lands. A civil war arises in which Stephen and his rival Matilda are
scarce more than pawns upon the board. The lords shift sides at will,
retreat to safety in their strong castles, plunder the common folk, and
make private war quite as they please.
[Footnote 15: See _Stephen Usurps the English Crown_, page 317.]
If any sage before the reign of the Emperor Barbarossa, that is, before
the middle of the twelfth century, had studied to predict the course of
society, he would probably have said that the empire was wholly
destroyed, and that the principle of separation was becoming ever more
insistent, that even kings were mere fading relics of the past, and that
the future world would soon see every lordship an independent state.
THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY UNDER FEUDALISM
Amid all this turmoil of the upper classes, one would like much to know
what was the condition, what the lives, of the common people.
Unfortunately, the data are very slight. We see dimly the peasant
staring from his field as the armed knights ride by; we see him fleeing
to the shelter of the forests before more savage bandits. We see the
people of the cities drawing together, building walls around their
towns, and defying in their turn their so-called "overlords." We see
Henry the City-builder thus become champion of the lower classes,
despite the strenuous warning of his conservative and not wholly
disinterested barons. We see shadowy troops of armed merchants drift
along the unsafe roads. And, most interesting perhaps of all, we see one
Arnold of Brescia,[16] an Italian monk, advocating a democracy, actually
urging a return to what he supposed early Rome to have been, a
government by the masses. Arnold, too, you see, was in advance of his
time. He was executed by the advice of even so good and wise a man as
St. Bernard. But the principle of modern life was there, the germ seems
to have been planted. These humble people of the cities, "citizens,"
grow to be rulers of the world.