Part 15

It was the loss of Edessa that roused Europe to its Second Crusade, this time through the eloquence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who persuaded not only Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor, but also the at first reluctant Emperor Conrad III, to bind the Cross on their arms and go to the succour of Christendom. ‘The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure if he is slain.’

The pictures of the glories of martyrdom and of earthly conquests painted by the famous monk were so vivid that on one occasion he was forced to tear up his own robes to provide sufficient crosses for the eager multitude, but the triumph to which he called so great a part of the populations of France and Germany proved the beckoning hand of death and failure.

Both the King and Emperor reached Palestine--Louis VII even visited Jerusalem--but when they sailed homewards they had accomplished nothing of any lasting value. Edessa remained under Mahometan rule and the Christians had been forced to abandon the siege of Damascus that they had intended as a prelude to a victorious campaign. What was worse was that Louis and Conrad had left the chivalry of their armies in a track of whitening bones where they had retreated, victims not merely of Turkish prowess and numbers but of Christian feuds, Greek treachery, the failure of food supplies, and disease.

The Byzantine Empire owed to the first crusaders large tracts of territory recovered from the Turks in Asia Minor; but, angered by broken promises of homage on the part of Latin rulers, the Greeks repaid this debt in the Second Crusade by acting as spies and secret allies of the Mahometans. On occasions they were even to be found fighting openly side by side with the Turks, yet more merciless than these pagans in their brutal refusal to give food and drink to the stragglers of the Latin armies whom they had so basely betrayed.

The widows and orphans of France and Germany, when their rulers returned reft both of glory and men-at-arms, reviled St. Bernard as a false prophet; but though he responded sternly that the guilt lay not with God but in the worldliness of those who had taken the Cross, he was sorely troubled at the shattering of his own hopes.

‘The Sons of God’, he wrote wearily, ‘have been overthrown in the desert, slain with the sword, or destroyed by famine. We promised good things and behold disorder. The judgements of the Lord are righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him blessed who is not scandalized therein.’

[Sidenote: Fall of Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem]

For some years after the Second Crusade Western Europe turned a deaf ear to entreaties for help from Palestine, and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to decline steadily not only in territory but in its way of life. The ennervating climate, the temptations to an unhealthy luxury that forgot Christian ideals, the almost unavoidable intermarriage of the races of East and West: all these sapped the vitality and efficiency of the crusading settlers; while the establishment of a feudal government at Jerusalem resulted in the usual quarrels amongst tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants. In these feuds the Hospitallers and Templars joined with an avaricious rivalry unworthy of their creed of self-denial.

By 1183 Guy de Lusignan, who had succeeded in seizing the crown of Jerusalem by craft on the failure of the royal line, could only count on the lukewarm support of the majority of Latin barons. Thus handicapped he found himself suddenly confronted by a union of the Turks of Egypt and Syria under Saladin, Caliph of Cairo, a leader so capable and popular that the downfall of divided enemies was inevitable.

At Hattin, near the Lake of Tiberias, on a rocky, waterless spot, the Christians and Mahometans met for a decisive battle in the summer of 1187. The Latins, hemmed in by superior numbers, and tortured by the heat and thirst, fought desperately beneath the relic of the True Cross that they had borne with them as an incitement to their courage; but the odds were too great, and King Guy himself was forced to surrender when the defeat of his army had turned into a rout.

In the autumn of the same year Jerusalem, after less than a month’s siege, opened her gates to the victor. Very different was the entry of Saladin to that of the first crusaders; for instead of a general massacre the Christian population was put to ransom, the Sultan and his brother as an ‘acceptable alms to Allah’ freeing hundreds of the poorer classes for whom enough money could not be provided.

[Sidenote: The Third Crusade]

Europe received the news that the Holy Sepulchre had returned to the custody of the infidel with a shame and indignation that was expressed in the Third Crusade. This time, however, no straggling bands of enthusiasts were encouraged; and though the expedition was approved by the Pope, neither he nor any famous churchman, such as Peter the Hermit or St. Bernard of Clairvaux, were responsible for the majority of volunteers.

The Third Crusade was in character a military campaign of three great nations: of the Germans under the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, or the ‘Red Beard’; of the French under Philip II; and of the English under Richard the ‘Lion-Heart’. Other princes famous enough in their lands for wealth and prowess sailed also; and had there been union in that great host Saladin might well have trembled for his Empire. He was saved by the utter lack of cohesion and petty jealousies of his enemies as well as by his statecraft and military skill.

While English and French rulers still haggled over the terms of an alliance that would allow them to leave their lands with an easy mind, Frederick Barbarossa, the last to take the Cross, set out from Germany, rapidly crossed Hungary and Bulgaria, reduced the Greek Emperor to hostile inactivity by threats and military display, and began a victorious campaign through Asia Minor. Here fate intervened to help the Mahometans, for while fording a river in Cilicia the Emperor was swept from his horse by the current and drowned. So passed away Frederick the ‘Red Beard’, and with him what his strong personality had made an army. Some of the Teutons returned home, while those who remained degenerated into a rabble, easy victims for their enemies’ spears and arrows.

In the meantime Richard of England (1189-99) and Philip of France had clasped the hand of friendship, and, having levied the Saladin Tithe, a tax of one-tenth of the possessions of all their subjects, in order to pay their expenses, set sail eastwards from Marseilles. Both were young and eager for military glory; but the French king could plot and wait to achieve the ultimate success he desired while in Richard the statesman was wholly sunk in the soldier of fortune.

To mediaeval chroniclers there was something dazzling in the Lion-Heart’s physical strength, and in the sheer daring with which he would force success out of apparently inevitable failure, or realize some dangerous enterprise.

‘Though fortune wreaks her spleen on whomsoever she pleases, yet was he not drowned for all her adverse waves.’

‘The Lord of Ages gave him such generosity of soul and endued him with such virtues that he seemed rather to belong to earlier times than these.’

‘To record his deeds would cramp the writer’s finger joints and stun the hearer’s mind.’

Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions the obvious sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the men who fought beside him.

A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself, and with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone-slingers, Richard turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack of diplomacy and tact. Of gifts such as these, that are one-half of kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He ‘willed’ to do things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain.

‘The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang thieves and robbers on ... deeming it no matter of what country the criminals were, he considered every man as his own and left no wrong unavenged.’

This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, ‘winked at the wrongs his men inflicted and received,’ but he gained friends, while Richard’s progress was a series of embittered feuds, accepted light-heartedly without any thought of his own future interests or of those of the crusade.

Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before they had left the French coasts through Richard’s repudiation of his ally’s sister, to whom he had been bethrothed, since the English king was now determined on a match with Berengaria, the daughter of the King of Navarre.

In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had battered one of the rivals, the Norman, Tancred, into an outwardly submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the Emperor Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying it.

From Cyprus Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen; and thus, adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern Emperor to his list of foes, arrived at last in Palestine, in the summer of 1191, just in time to join Philip II in the siege of Acre.

‘The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other.’ So the tale runs in the contemporary chronicle; and when Acre at last surrendered the feuds between the English and French had grown so irreconcilable that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard in his heart because of an insult to his banner, that, planted on an earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung into the ditch below.

The Lion-Heart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror to the Turks, who would use his name to frighten their unruly children into submission; but though he remained fourteen months, the jealousies and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend, kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in diplomacy.

News came that Philip II and the Emperor Henry VI were plotting with his brother John for his ruin at home, and Richard, weary at heart and sick in health, agreed to a three years and eight months’ truce that left the Christians in the possession of the seaports of Jaffa and Tyre, with the coastal territory between them, and gave pilgrims leave to visit Jerusalem untaxed. He himself refused with tears in his eyes even to gaze from a distant height on the city he could not conquer; but, vowing he would return, he set sail for the West in the autumn of 1192, and with his departure the Third Crusade ended.

There were to be many other crusades, but none that expressed in the same way as these first three expeditions the united aspirations of Western Europe for the recovery of the land of the Holy Sepulchre. National jealousies had ruined the chances of the Third Crusade, and with every year the spirit of nationality was to grow in strength and make common action less possible for Europe.

There is another reason also for the changing character of the Crusades, namely, the loss of the religious enthusiasm in which they had their origin. Men and women had believed that the cross on their arms could turn sinners into saints, break down battlements, and destroy infidels, as if by miracle. When they found that human passions flourished as easily in Palestine as at home and that the way of salvation was, as ever, the path of hard labour and constant effort, they were disillusioned, and eager multitudes no longer clamoured to go to the East. The Crusades did not stop suddenly, but degenerated with a few exceptions into mere political enterprises, patronized now by one nation, now by another: the armies recruited by mere love of adventure, lust of battle, or the desire for plunder.

If Western Christendom had gained no other blessing by them, the early Crusades at least freed the nations at a critical moment from a large proportion of the unruly baronage that had been a danger to commerce and good government. England paid heavily in gold for the Third Crusade; but the money supplied by merchants and towns was well spent in securing from the Lion-Heart privileges and charters that laid the foundations of municipal liberty.

In France the results of the Second Crusade had been for the moment devastating. Whole villages marched away, cities and castles stood empty, and in some provinces it was said ‘scarce one man remained to seven women’. In the orgy of selling that marked this exodus lands and possessions rapidly changed hands, the smaller fiefs tending to be absorbed by the larger fiefs and many of these in their turn by the crown. Aided also by other causes, the King of France with his increased demesnes and revenues came to assume a predominant position in the national life.

Perhaps the chief effect of the Crusades on Europe generally was the stimulus of new influences. Men and women, if they live in a rut and feed their brains continually on the same ideas, grow prejudiced. It is good for them to travel and come in contact with opposite views of life and different manners and customs, however much it may annoy them at the time. The Crusades provided this kind of stimulus not only to the commerce of Mediterranean ports but in the world of thought, literature, and art. The necessity of transport for large armies improved shipbuilding; the cunning of Turkish foes the ingenuity of Christian armourers and engineers; the influence of Byzantine architecture and mosaics the splendour of Venice in stone and colour.

Western Europe continued to hate the East; but she could not live without her silks, spices, and perfumes, nor forget to dream of the fabulous wonders of Cathay. Thus the age of the Crusades will be seen at last to merge its failures in the successes of an age of discovery, that were to lay bare a new West and another road to the Orient.

XIII

THE MAKING OF FRANCE

Amongst those who took the Cross during the Second Crusade had been Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor. They were an ill-matched pair, the King of mediocre ability, weak, peace-loving, and pious; Eleanor, like all the House of Aquitaine, to which she belonged, imperious, fierce-willed, and without scruples where she loved or hated. Restless excitement had prompted her journey to Palestine; and Louis was impelled by the scandal to which her conduct there gave rise, and also by his annoyance that they had no son, to divorce her soon after they returned home.

The foolishness of this step from a political point of view can be gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the twelfth century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country in name, Louis as feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small block round Paris, while away to the north, east, and south were the provinces of tenants-in-chief three or four times as extensive in area as those of the royal House of Capet. By marrying Eleanor, Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the middle and south-west of France as well as of his own crown demesnes, but when he divorced his wife he at once forfeited her possessions.

[Sidenote: Henry II of England]

Worse from his point of view was to follow; for Eleanor made immediate use of her freedom to marry Henry, Count of Anjou, a man fourteen years her junior, but the most important tenant-in-chief of the King of France and therefore, if he chose, not unlikely to prove that king’s most dangerous enemy. This Henry, besides being Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, was also Duke of Normandy and King of England, for he was a grandson of Henry I, and had in 1154 succeeded the feeble Stephen, of the anarchy of whose reign we gave a slight description in another chapter.[16]

Before dealing with the results of Henry’s marriage with the heiress of Aquitaine it is well to note his work as King of England, for this was destined to be the greatest and most lasting of all the many tasks he undertook. In character Henry was the exact opposite of Stephen. Where the other had wavered he pressed forward, utterly determined to be master of his own land. One by one he besieged the rebel barons, and levelled with the ground the castles they had built in order to torture and oppress their neighbours. He also took from them the crown lands which Stephen had recklessly given away in the effort to buy popularity and support. When he found that many of these nobles had usurped the chief offices of state he replaced them as quickly as he could by men of humble rank and of his own choosing. In this way he appointed a Londoner, Thomas Becket, whom he had first created Chancellor, to be Archbishop of Canterbury; but the impetuous choice proved one of his few mistakes.

Henry was so self-confident himself that he was apt to underrate the abilities of those with whom life brought him in contact and to believe that every other will must necessarily bow to his own. It is certain that he found it difficult to pause and listen to reason, for his restless energy was ever spurring him on to fresh ambitions, and he could not bear to waste time, as he thought, in listening to criticisms on what he had already decided. Chroniclers describe how he would fidget impatiently or draw pictures during Mass, commending the priest who read fastest, while he would devote odd moments of his day to patching his old clothes for want of something more interesting to do.

[Illustration: FRANCE

in the reign of HENRY II]

Henry II was so able that haste in his case did not mean that his work was slipshod. He had plenty of foresight, and did not content himself with destroying those of his subjects who were unruly. He knew that he must win the support of the English people if he hoped to build up his estates in France, and this, though destined to bear no lasting fruit, was ever his chief ambition. Henry II was one of the greatest of English kings, but he had been brought up in France and remained more of an Angevin than an Englishman at heart.

Instead of driving his barons into sulky isolation Henry summoned them frequently to his _Magnum Concilium_, or ‘Great Council’, and asked their advice. When they objected to serving with their followers in France as often as he wished, he arranged a compromise that was greatly to his advantage. This was the institution of ‘Scutage’, or ‘Shield-money’, a tax paid by the barons in order to escape military service abroad. With the funds that ‘scutage’ supplied Henry could hire mercenary troops, while the feudal barons lost a military training-ground.

Besides consulting his ‘Great Council’, destined to develop into our national parliament, Henry strengthened the _Curia Regis_, or ‘King’s Court’, that his grandfather, Henry I, had established to deal with questions of justice and finance. The barons in the time of Stephen had tried to make their own feudal courts entirely independent of royal authority; but Henry, besides establishing a central Court of Justice to which any subject who thought himself wronged might appeal for a new trial, greatly improved and extended the system of ‘Itinerant Justices’ whose circuits through the country to hold ‘Pleas of the Crown’ had been instituted by Henry I.

This interference he found was resented not only by the feudal courts but also by the Sheriffs of the County Courts, the Norman form of the old ‘shire-moots’, a popular institution of Anglo-Saxon times. Of late years the latter courts had more and more fallen under the domination of neighbouring landowners, and in order to free them Henry held an ‘Inquest’ into the doings of the Sheriffs, and deposed many of the great nobles who had usurped these offices, replacing them by men of lesser rank who would look to him for favour and advice.

Other sovereigns in Europe adopted somewhat similar means of exalting royal authority; but England was fortunate in possessing such popular institutions as the ‘moots’ or ‘meetings’ of the shire and ‘hundred’, through which Henry could establish his justice, instead of merely through crown officials who would have no personal interest in local conditions.

By the Assize of Clarendon it was decreed that twelve men from each hundred and four from each township should decide in criminal cases who amongst the accused were sufficiently implicated to be justly sentenced by the royal judges. Local representatives also were employed on other occasions during Henry’s reign in assisting his judges in assessing taxes and in deciding how many weapons and of what sort the ordinary freeman might fittingly carry to the safety of his neighbours and of himself. In civil cases, as when the ownership of land or personal property was in dispute, twelve ‘lawful men’ of the neighbourhood, or in certain cases twelve Knights of the Shire, were to be elected to help the Sheriff arrive at a just decision. In this system of ‘recognition’, as it was called, lay the germ of our modern jury.

It is probable that the knights and representatives of the hundreds and townships grumbled continually at the trouble and expense to which the King’s legislation put them; for neither they nor Henry II himself would realize that they were receiving a splendid education in the A B C of self-government that must be the foundation of any true democracy. Yet a few generations later, when Henry’s weak grandson and namesake Henry III misruled England, the Knights of the Shire were already accepted as men of public experience, and their representatives summoned to a parliament to defend the liberties of England.