Part 14

Gregory coldly refused him audience. The King, he intimated, might declare that he was repentant, he had done so often in the past, but words were not deeds. Putting aside his royal robes and clad in a penitent’s woollen tunic, Henry to show his sincerity remained barefoot for three days like a beggar, in the castle yard. Then only on the entreaty of some Italian friends was he admitted to the presence of the Pope, who at his cry of ‘Holy Father, spare me!’ raised him up and gave him formal forgiveness.

The scene at Canossa is so dramatic in its display of Hildebrand’s triumph and the Emperor’s humiliation that it has lived in the world’s memory: yet it was no closing act in their struggle, but merely an episode that passed and left little mark. Henry IV, as soon as he could win himself a following in Germany and Italy, returned to the practice of lay investiture, and Gregory VII, who had never believed in his sincerity, continued to denounce him and plan the coronation of rival emperors.

Imperial ambitions at last reached their height, for Henry IV succeeded in inducing German and Italian bishops to depose Gregory once more and even appoint an Anti-Pope, in whose name imperial armies ravaged Lombardy, forced their way as far south as Rome, and besieged Hildebrand in the castle of St. Angelo. From this predicament he was rescued by the Normans of South Italy under Robert Guiscard; but these ruthless vassals of the Church massacred and looted the Holy City directly they had scaled the walls, and when they turned homewards, carrying Gregory VII with them, they left half Rome in ruins.

Gregory VII died not long afterwards, homeless and deposed, but with unshaken confidence in the righteousness of his cause. ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity,’ he said, during his last illness, ‘therefore I die in exile.’ ‘In exile thou couldst not die,’ replied a bishop standing at his bedside. ‘Vicar of Christ and His Apostles, thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.’ Future history was to show that Hildebrand in defeat had achieved more than his rival in victory.

Henry IV outlived his enemy by twenty-one years, but they were bitter with disillusionment. Harassed by Gregory VII’s successors who continued to advocate papal supremacy, faced by one rebellion after another in Germany and Italy, Henry IV yielded at last to weariness and old age, when he found his sons had become leaders of the forces most hostile to him. Even in his submission to their demands he found no peace, for he was thrust into prison, compelled to abdicate, and left to die miserably of starvation and neglect.

In the reign of his son, Henry V, a compromise on the ‘Investiture Question’ was arranged between Church and Empire. By the Concordat of Worms it was agreed first that rulers should renounce their claim to invest bishops and abbots with the ring and crozier. These were to be given by representatives of the Church to candidates chosen and approved by them; but the second point of importance was that this ceremony must take place in the presence of the king or his representative, to whom the new bishop or abbot would at once do homage for his lands and offices.

Almost a similar settlement had been arrived at between Church and State in England some fifteen years earlier, arising out of the refusal of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to do homage to Henry I, the Conqueror’s son. In this case there was no clash of bitterness and dislike, for the old archbishop was perfectly loyal to the king at heart, though prepared to go to the stake on a matter of conscience, as this question had become to earnest churchmen. His master, on his side, respected Anselm’s saintly character and only wished to safeguard his royal rights over all his subjects.

Compromise was therefore a matter of rejoicing on both sides, and with the decisions of the Council at Worms investiture ceased to be a vital problem. Its importance lies in the fact that it was one of the first battles between Church and State and, though a compromise, yet a formal victory for the Church. The dependence of the Papacy on the imperial government that Europe had considered natural in the days of Charlemagne, or of Otto the Great, was a thing of the past, for the acknowledgement of ecclesiastical freedom from lay supremacy, one of the main issues for which Hildebrand had struggled, schemed, and died, had been won by his successors following in his steps.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

Pope Benedict IX 1033-48 Pope Leo IX 1048-54 Pope Nicholas II 1058-61

XII

THE EARLY CRUSADES

The imperial standards of Constantinople were designed with a two-headed eagle typifying Constantine’s rule over the kingdoms of East and West. Towards the end of the eleventh century this emblem had become more symbolic of the Emperor’s anxious outlook upon hostile neighbours. With Asia Minor practically lost by the establishment of a Mahometan dynasty at Nicea within one hundred miles of the Christian capital, with the Bulgarians at the gates of Adrianople, and the Normans and the Popes in possession of his Greek patrimony in Italy, Alexius Commenus, when he ascended the throne of the Caesars, found himself master of an attenuated Empire, consisting mainly of strips of Grecian seaboard.

Yet in spite of her shorn territories Constantinople remained the greatest city in Europe, not merely in her magnificent site and architecture, nor even in her commerce, but in the hold she preserved over the imagination of men.

Athanaric the Goth had exclaimed that the ruler of Constantinople must be a god: eleventh-century Europe accepted him as mortal, but still crowned the lord of so great a city with a halo of awe. It was Constantinople that had won the Russians, the Bulgars, and the Slavs from heathenism to Christianity, not to the Catholicism of Western Europe but the Greek interpretation of the Christian faith called by its believers the ‘orthodox’. It was Constantinople whose gold coin, ‘the byzant’, was recognized as the medium of exchange between merchants of all nations. It was Constantinople again, her wealth, her palaces, her glory of pomp and government, that drew Russian, Norse, and Slav adventurers to serve as mercenaries in the Emperor’s army, just as auxiliaries had clamoured of old to join the Roman eagles. Amongst the ‘Varangar’ bodyguard, responsible for the safety of the Emperor’s person, were to be found at one time many followers of Harold the Saxon, who, escaping from a conquered England, gladly entered the service of a new master to whom the name ‘Norman’ was also anathema.

Alexius Commenus was in character like his Empire--a shrinkage from the dimensions of former days. There was nothing of the practical genius of a Constantine in his unscrupulous ability to mould small things to his advantage; nothing of the heroic Charlemagne in his eminently calculating courage. Yet his daughter, Anna Commena, who wrote a history of his reign, regarded him as a model of imperial virtues; and his court, that had ceased to distinguish pomp from greatness and elaborate ceremonial from glory, echoed this fiction. It was this mixture of pretension and weakness, of skill and cunning, of nerve and treachery, so typical of the later Eastern Emperors, that made the nations of Western Europe, while they admired Byzantium, yet use the word ‘Byzantine’ as a term of mingled contempt and dislike.

The Emperor, on his part, had no reason to love his Western neighbours. The Popes had robbed him of the Exarchate of Ravenna: they had set up a Headship of the Church in Rome deaf to the claims of Constantinople. When in the eighth century the Emperor Leo, the Isaurian,[12] earned the nickname of ‘Iconoclast’, or ‘Image-breaker’, by a campaign of destruction amongst devotional pictures and images that he denounced as idolatrous, Rome definitely refused to accept this ruling on behalf of Western Christendom.

This was the beginning of the actual schism between the Eastern and Western Churches that had been always alien in their outlook. In the ninth century the breach widened, for Pope Nicholas I supported a Patriarch, or Bishop of the Eastern Church, deposed by the Emperor and excommunicated his rival and successor, while subsequent disputes were rendered irreconcilable in the middle of the eleventh century when the Patriarch of Constantinople closed the Latin churches and convents in his diocese and publicly declared the views of Rome heretical.

Besides the Pope at Rome the Eastern Empire possessed other foes in Italy. Chief of these were the Normans, who, not content with acquiring Naples, had, under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemund, captured the famous port of Durazzo on the Adriatic and invaded Macedonia. From this province they were only evicted by Alexius Commenus after wearying campaigns of guerrilla warfare to which his military ability was better suited than to pitched battles or shock tactics.

[Sidenote: The Venetian Republic]

More subtly dangerous than either Pope or Normans was the commercial rivalry of the merchant cities of the Mediterranean, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. It was Venice who from behind her barrier of islands had watched Attila the Hun lead away his armies in impotent rage.[13] It was Venice again who of the North Italian states successfully resisted the feudal domination of Western Emperors and kept her own form of republican government inviolate of external control. It was the young Venice, the ‘Queen of the Adriatic’ as her sons and daughters proudly called her, that could alone in her commercial splendour and arrogance compare with the dying glory of Constantinople.

Alexius Commenus in his struggles against Robert Guiscard had been compelled to call twice upon Venice for the assistance of her fleet; but he paid dearly for this alliance in the trading privileges he was forced to grant in Eastern waters. Wherever in the Orient Venetian merchants landed to exchange goods they were quick to establish a political footing; and the world mart on the Adriatic, into which poured the silks and dyes, the sugar and spices of Asia, built up under the rule of its ‘Doges’, or Dukes, a national as well as a commercial reputation.

In 1095 necessity spurred Alexius Commenus to appeal not merely to Venice for succour but to Pope Urban II and all the leading princes of Western Europe.

‘From Jerusalem to the Aegean,’ he wrote, ‘the Turkish hordes have mastered all: their galleys, sweeping the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, threaten the imperial city itself, which, if fall it must, had better fall into the hands of Latins than of Pagans.’

These Turks, or ‘Tartars’, to whom he referred, were the cause of the Eastern Empire’s sudden danger. Descendants of a Mongol race in central Asia, of which the Huns were also an offshoot, they turned their faces westward some centuries later than the ancestors of Attila, fired by the same love of battle and bloodshed and the same contempt for civilization. To them the wonderful Arabian kingdom, moulded by successive Caliphs of Bagdad out of Eastern art, luxury, and mysticism, held no charm save loot. Conquered Greece had endowed Rome with its culture, but the inheritance of Haroun al-Raschid bequeathed to its conquerors only the fighting creed of Islam.

Mahometans in faith, the Turkish armies, more dangerous than ever because more fanatical, swept over Persia, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor, subjugating Arabs and Christians until they came almost to the straits of the Bosporus. Here it was that they forced Alexius Commenus to realize his imminent danger and to turn to his enemies in Europe for the protection of his tottering Empire.

The Latins, or Christians of the West, to whom he appealed, had reasons enough of their own for answering him with ready promises of men and money. From the early days of the Church it had been the custom of pious folk, or of sinners anxious to expiate some crime, to set out in small companies to visit the Holy Places in Jerusalem where tradition held that Christ had preached, prayed, and suffered, that there they might give praise to God and seek His pardon. These ‘pilgrimages’, with their mixture of good comradeship, danger, and discomfort, had become very dear to the popular mind, and, if not encouraged by the Mahometan Arabs, had been at least tolerated. ‘Hospitals’, or sanctuaries, were built for the refreshment of weary or sick travellers, and pilgrims on the payment of a toll could wander practically where they chose.

On the advent of the Turks all was changed: the Holy Places became more and more difficult to visit, Christians were stoned and beaten, mulcted of their last pennies in extortionate tolls, and left to die of hunger or flung into dungeons for ransom.

[Sidenote: The First Crusade]

Tradition says that a certain French hermit called Peter, who visited Jerusalem during the worst days of Turkish rule, went one night to the Holy Sepulchre weeping at the horrors he had seen, and as he knelt in prayer, it seemed to him that Christ himself stood before him and bade him ‘rouse the Faithful to the cleansing of the Holy Places’. With this mission in mind he at once left the Holy Land and sought Pope Urban II, who had already received the letter of Alexius Commenus and now, fired by the hermit’s enthusiasm, willingly promised his support.

Whether Urban was persuaded by Peter or no is a matter of doubt, but he at any rate summoned a council to Clermont in 1095, and there in moving words besought the chivalry of Europe to set aside its private feuds and either recover the Holy Places or die before the city where Christ had given his life for the world. It is likely that he spoke from mixed motives. A true inheritor of the theories of Gregory VII, he could not but recognize in the prospect of a religious war, where the armies of Europe would fight under the papal banner and at the papal will, the exaltation of the Roman See. Was there not also the hope of bringing the Greek Church into submission to the Roman as the outcome of an alliance with the Greek Empire? Might not many turbulent feudal princes be persuaded to journey to the East, who by happy chance would return no more to trouble Europe?

Such calculations could Urban’s ambitions weave, but with them were entwined unworldly visions that lent him a force and eloquence that no calculations could have supplied. Wherever he spoke the surging crowd would rush forward with the shout _Deus vult_, ‘It is the will of God,’ and this became the battle-cry of the crusaders.

‘The whole world,’ says a contemporary, ‘desired to go to the tomb of our Lord at Jerusalem.... First of all went the meaner people, then the men of middle rank, and lastly very many kings, counts, marquesses, and bishops, and, a thing that never happened before, many women turned their steps in the same direction.’

The order is significant and shows that the appeal of Urban and of Peter the Hermit had touched first the heart of the masses to whom the rich man’s temptation to hesitate and think of the morrow were of no account. Corn had been dear in France before the Council of Clermont owing to bad harvests; but the speculators who had bought up the grain to sell at a high price to those who later must eat or die found it left on their hands after the council was over. The men and women of France were selling not buying, regardless of possible famine, that they might find money to fulfil their burning desire to go to the Holy Land and there win the Holy Sepulchre and gain pardon for their sins as Pope and hermit had promised them.

The ordinary crusading route passed through the Catholic kingdom of Hungary to Bulgaria and thence to Constantinople, where the various companies of armed pilgrims had agreed to meet. It was with the entry into Bulgaria, whose ‘orthodox’[14] king was secretly hostile to the pilgrims, that trouble began. Food and drink were grudged by the suspicious natives even to those willing to pay their way; whereupon the utterly undisciplined forces could not be prevented from retaliating on this inhospitality by fire and pillage. A species of warfare ensued in which Latin stragglers were cut off and murdered by mountain robbers, while the many ‘undesirables’, who had joined the crusaders more in hope of loot and adventure than of pardon, brought an evil reputation on their comrades by their greed and the brutality they exhibited towards the peasants.

Reason enough was here to account for the pathetic failure of the advance-guard of crusaders, the poor, the fanatic, the disreputable, drawn together in no settled organization and with no leaders of military repute.

Alexius Commenus, who had demanded an army, not a rabble, dealt characteristically with the problem by shipping these first crusaders in haste and unsupported to Asia Minor. There he left them to fall a prey to the Turks, disease, and their own inadequacy, so that few ever saw the coasts of their native lands again.

If the First Crusade began in tragedy it ended in triumph, through the arrival in Constantinople of a second force from the West, this time of disciplined troops under the chief military leaders of Europe. Alexius Commenus had good cause to remember the prowess of his old enemy, Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, who rode at the head of his Sicilian Normans, while other names of repute were Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine, and Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, with Archbishop Odo of Bayeux, his uncle.

‘Some of the crusaders’, wrote Anna Commena, ‘were guileless men and women, marching in all simplicity to worship at the tomb of Christ; but there were others of a more wicked kind, to wit Bohemund and the like: such men had but one object--to obtain possession of the imperial city.’

These suspicions, perhaps well founded, were natural to the daughter of the untrustworthy Alexius Commenus, who trusted nobody. Hating to entertain at his court so many well-armed and often insolent strangers, yet fearing in his heart to aid their advance lest they should set up a rival kingdom to his own, the Emperor, having cajoled the leaders into promises of homage for any conquests they might make, at length transported them and their followers across the Hellespont.

The Christian campaign began with the capture of Nicea in 1097, followed by a victorious progress through Asia Minor. For nearly a year the crusaders besieged and then were in their turn besieged in Antioch, enduring tortures of hunger, thirst, and disease. When courage flagged and hope seemed nearly dead, it was the supposed discovery, by one of the chaplains, of the lance that had pierced Christ’s side as he hung upon the Cross that kept the Christians from surrender. With this famous relic borne in their midst by the papal legate, the crusaders flung the gates of Antioch wide and issued forth in a charge so irresistible in its certainty of victory that the Turks broke and fled. The defeat became a rout, and Antioch remained as a Christian principality under Bohemund, when the crusaders marched southwards along the coast route towards Jerusalem.

They came in sight of this, the goal of their ambitions, on 7th June, 1099, not garbed as knights and soldiers but barefooted as humble pilgrims, kneeling in an ecstasy of awe upon the Mount of Olives. This mood of prayer passed rapidly into one of fierce determination, and on 15th June Godfrey de Bouillon and his Lorrainers forced a breach in the massive walls, and, hacking their way with sword and spear through the streets, met their fellow crusaders triumphantly entering from another side. The scene that followed, while in keeping with mediaeval savagery, has left a shameful stain upon the Christianity it professed to represent. Turks, Arabs, and Jews, old men and women, children and babies, thousands of a defenceless population, were deliberately butchered as a sacrifice to the Christ who, dying, preached forgiveness. The crusaders rode their horses up to the knees in the blood of that human shambles. ‘There might no prayers nor crying of mercy prevail,’ says an eyewitness. ‘Such a slaughter of pagan folk had never been seen nor heard of. None knew their number, save God alone.’

Their mission accomplished, the majority of crusaders turned their faces homewards, but before they went they elected Godfrey de Bouillon to be the first ruler of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with Antioch and Edessa in the north as dependent principalities.

Godfrey reigned for almost a year, bearing the title ‘Guardian of the Holy Grave’, since he refused to be crowned master of a city where Christ had worn a wreath of thorns. His protest is typical of the genuine humility and love of God that mingled so strangely in his veins with pride and cruelty. When he died he left a reputation for courage and justice that wove around his memory romance and legends like the tales of Charlemagne.

[Sidenote: The Military Orders]

His immediate successors were a brother and nephew, and it is in the reign of the latter that we first hear mention of the Military Orders, so famous in the crusading annals of the Middle Ages. These were the ‘Hospitallers’ or ‘Knights of St. John’, inheritors of the rents and property belonging to the old ‘Hospital’ founded for pilgrims in Jerusalem, and the ‘Templars’, so called from their residence near the sight of Solomon’s Temple.

Both Orders were bound like the monks by the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity; but the work demanded of them, instead of labour in the fields, was perpetual war against the infidel. ‘When the Templars are summoned to arms,’ said a thirteenth-century writer, ‘they inquire not of the number but of the position of their foe. They are lions in war, lambs in the house: to the enemies of Christ fierce and implacable, but to Christians kind and gracious.’

Yet a third Order, that of the Teutonic Knights, was founded in the twelfth century, arising like that of the Knights of St. John out of a hospital, but one that had been built by German merchants for crusaders of their own race. At the end of the thirteenth century the Order removed to the southern Baltic, and on these cold inhospitable shores embarked on a crusade against the heathen Lithuanians. It is of interest to students of modern history to note that in the sixteenth century the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became converted to the doctrines of Luther, suppressed his Order, and absorbed the estates into an hereditary fief, the Duchy of Brandenburg. On the ‘Mark’[15] and Duchy of Brandenburg, both founded with entirely military objects, was the future kingdom of Prussia built.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187) survived for more than three-quarters of a century. That it had been established with such comparative ease was due not only to the fighting quality of the crusaders, but also to the feuds that divided Turkish rulers of the House of Seljuk. The Turks far outnumbered the Christians, and whenever the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cairo should sink their rivalries, or one Moslem ruler in the East gain supremacy over all others, the days of the small Latin kingdom in Palestine would be numbered. In the meantime the Latins maintained their position with varying fortune, now with the aid of fresh recruits from Europe and Genoese and Venetian sailors, capturing coast towns, now losing land-outposts there were insufficient garrisons to protect.