Part 17

In Paris itself his reign marks a new era, when, instead of a town famed according to a chronicler of the day chiefly for its pestiferous smells, there were laid the foundations of one of the most luxurious cities of Europe. The cleansing and paving of the filthy streets, the building of fortifications, of markets, and of churches, and above all of that glory of Gothic architecture, Nôtre Dame de la Victoire, founded to celebrate the triumph of Bouvines: such were some of the works planned or undertaken in the capital during this reign. Over the young University of Paris the King also stretched out a protecting hand, defending the students from the hostility of the townsfolk by the command that they should be admitted to the privileges enjoyed by priests. For this practical sympathy he and his successors were well repaid in the growth of an educated public opinion ready to exalt its patron the crown by tongue and pen.

Philip Augustus died in July 1223. Great among the many great figures of his day, French chroniclers have yet left no distinct impression of his personality. It would almost seem as if the will, the foresight, and the patience that have won him fame in the eyes of posterity, built up a baffling barrier between his character and those who actually saw him. Men recognized him as a king to be admired and feared, ‘august’ in his conquests, terrible in his wrath if any dared cross his will, but his reserve, his indifference to court gaiety, his rigid attitude of dislike to those who used oaths or blasphemy, they found wholly unsympathetic and strange. Of the great work he had done for France they were too close to judge fairly, and would have understood him better had he been rash and heedless of design like the Lion-Heart. For a real appreciation of Philip Augustus we must turn to his modern biographer.

‘He had found France a small realm hedged in by mighty rivals. When he began his reign but a very small portion of the French-speaking people owned his sway. As suzerain his power was derided. Even as immediate lord he was defied and set at nought. But when he died the whole face of France was changed. The King of the Franks was undisputedly the king of by far the greater part of the land, and the internal strength of his government had advanced as rapidly and as securely as the external power.’

Such was the change in France itself, but we can estimate also to-day, what no contemporary of Philip Augustus could have realized, the effect of that change on Europe, when France from a collection of feudal fiefs stood forth at last a nation in the modern sense, ready to take her place as a leader amongst her more backward neighbours.

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

Louis VII of France 1137-47 Henry II of England 1154-89 Philip II of France 1180-1223 John, King of England 1199-1216 Battle of Bouvines 1214

XIV

EMPIRE AND PAPACY

When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey of submission to Canossa he was accompanied by a faithful knight, Frederick of Buren, whom he later rewarded for his loyalty with the hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Suabia. Frederick’s son was elected Emperor as Conrad III,[17] the first of the imperial line of Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations the war between Empire and Papacy.

The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one of Frederick of Buren’s strongest castles, but they were also called ‘Waiblingen’ after a town in their possession; while the House of Bavaria, their chief rivals, was called ‘Welf’ after an early ancestor. The feud of the Waiblingen and the Welfs that convulsed Germany had no less devastating an effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian tongues into ‘Ghibellines’ and ‘Guelfs’, became party cries throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

[Sidenote: The Italian Communes]

In our last chapter we spoke of French ‘communes’, municipalities that rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own: the same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy only that it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigour of town life.

‘In France’, says a thirteenth-century Italian, in surprise, ‘only the townspeople dwell in towns: the knights and noble ladies stay ... on their own demesnes.’ Certainly the contrast with his native Lombardy was strong. There each city lived like a fortified kingdom on its hill-top, or in the midst of wide plains, cut off from its neighbours by suspicion, by jealousy, by competition. In the narrow streets noble and knight jostled shoulders perforce with merchants, students, mountebanks, and beggars. The limits of space dictated that many things in life must be shared in common, whether religious processions or plagues, and if street fighting flourished in consequence so also did class intimacy and a sharpening of wits as well as of swords. Thus the towns of North Italy, like flowers in a hot-house, bore fruits of civilization in advance of the world outside, whether in commerce, painting, or the art of self-government; and visitors from beyond the Alps stared astonished at merchants’ luxurious palaces that made the castles of their own princes seem mere barbarian strongholds.

Yet this profitable independence was not won without struggles so fierce and continuous that they finally endangered the political freedom in whose interests they had originally been waged. At first the struggle was with barbarian invaders; and here, as in the case of Rome and the Popes, it was often the local bishops who, when emperors at Constantinople ceased to govern except in name, fostered the young life of the city states and educated their citizens in a rough knowledge of war and statecraft.

With the dawn of feudalism bishops degenerated into tyrants, and municipalities began to elect consuls and advisory councils and under their leadership to rebel against their former benefactors, and to establish governments independent of their control.

The next danger was from within: cities are swayed more easily than nations, and too often the ‘communes’ of Lombardy became the prey of private factions or of more powerful city neighbours. Class warred against class and city against city; and out of their struggles arose leagues and counter-leagues, bewildering to follow like the ever-changing colours of a kaleidoscope.

Into this atmosphere of turmoil the quarrel between Popes and Holy Roman Emperors, begun by Henry IV and Hildebrand and carried on by the Hohenstaufen and the inheritors of Hildebrand’s ideals, entered from the ‘communes’ point of view like a heaven-sent opportunity for establishing their independence. In the words of a tenth-century bishop: ‘The Italians always wish to have two masters that they may keep one in check by the other.’

The cities that followed the Hohenstaufen were labelled ‘Ghibelline’, those that upheld the Pope ‘Guelf’; and at first, and indeed throughout the contest where cruelty and treachery were concerned, there was little to choose between the rivals. Later, however, the fierce imperialism of Frederick I was to give to the warfare of his opponents, the Guelfs, a patriotic aspect.

Frederick I, the ‘Barbarossa’ of the Third Crusade, was a Hohenstaufen on his father’s side, a Welf on his mother’s; and it had been the hope of those who elected him Emperor that ‘like a corner-stone he would bind the two together ... that thus with God’s blessing he might end their ancient quarrel’. At first it appeared this hope might be realized, for the new Emperor made a friend of his cousin Henry the Lion who, as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was heir of the Welf ambitions. Frederick also, by his firm and business-like rule, established what the chroniclers called such ‘unwonted peace’ that ‘men seemed changed, the world a different one, the very Heaven milder and softer’.

Unfortunately Frederick, who has been aptly described as an ‘imperialist Hildebrand’, regarded the peace of Germany merely as a stepping-stone to wider ambitions. Justinian, who had ruled Europe from Constantinople, was his model, and with the help of lawyers from the University of Bologna, whom he handsomely rewarded for their services, he revived all the old imperial claims over North Italy that men had forgotten or allowed to slip into disuse. The ‘communes’ found that rights and privileges for which their ancestors had fought and died were trampled under foot by an imperial official, the _podestà_, sent as supreme governor to each of the more important towns: taxes were imposed and exacted to the uttermost coin by his iron hand: complaint or rebellion were punished by torture and death.

‘Death for freedom is the next best thing to freedom,’ cried the men of Crema, flaming into wild revolt, while Milan shut her gates against her _podestà_ in an obstinate three years’ siege. Deliverance was not yet, and Frederick and his vast army of Germans desolated the plains: Crema was burned, her starving population turned adrift: the glory of Milan was reduced to a stone quarry: Pope Alexander III who, feeling his own independence threatened by imperial demands, had supported the movement for liberty, was driven from Rome and forced to seek refuge in France. Everywhere the Ghibellines triumphed, and it was in these black days in Italy that the Guelfs ceased for a time to be a faction and became patriots, while the Pope stood before the world the would-be saviour of his land from a foreign yoke.

Amid the smouldering ruins of Milan the Lombard League sprang into life: town after town, weary of German oppression and insolence, offered their allegiance: even Venice, usually selfish in the safe isolation of her lagoons, proffered ships and money. Milan was rebuilt, and a new city, called after the patriot Pope ‘Alessandria’, was founded on a strategic site. _Alessandria degla paglia_, ‘Alessandria of the straw’, Barbarossa nicknamed it contemptuously, threatening to burn it like a heap of weeds; but the new walls withstood his best engines, and plague and the damp cold of winter devastated his armies encamped around them.

The political horizon was not, indeed, so fair for the Emperor as in the early days of his reign. Germany seethed with plots in her master’s absence, and Frederick had good reason to suspect that Henry the Lion was their chief author, the more that he had sulkily refused to share in this last Italian campaign. Worst of all was the news that Alexander III, having negotiated alliances with the Kings of France and England, had returned to Italy and was busy stirring up any possible seeds of revolt against Frederick, whom he had excommunicated.

[Sidenote: Battle of Legnano]

In the year 1176, at Legnano, fifteen miles from Milan, the armies of the League and Empire met in decisive battle, Barbarossa nothing doubting of his success against mere armed citizens; but the spirit of the men of Crema survived in the ‘Company of Death’, a bodyguard of Milanese knights sworn to protect their _carroccio_, or sacred cart, or else to fall beside it. Upon the _carroccio_ was raised a figure of Christ with arms outstretched, beneath his feet an altar, while from a lofty pole hung the banner of St. Ambrose, patron saint of Milan.

When the battle opened the first terrific onslaught of German cavalry broke the Milanese lines; but the Company of Death, reckless in their resolve, rallied the waverers and turned defence into attack. In the ensuing struggle the Emperor was unhorsed, and, as the rumour spread through the ranks that he had been killed, the Germans broke, and their retreat became a wild, unreasoning rout that bore their commander back on its tide, unable to stem the current, scarcely able to save himself.

Such was the battle of Legnano, worthy to be remembered not as an isolated twelfth-century victory of one set of forces against another, but as one of the first very definite advances in the great campaign for liberty that is still the battle of the world. At Venice in the following year the Hohenstaufen acknowledged his defeat and was reconciled to the Church; while by the ‘Perpetual Peace of Constance’ signed in 1183 he granted to the communes of North Italy ‘all the royal rights (regalia) which they had ever had or at the moment enjoyed’.

Such rights--coinage, the election of officials and judges, the power to raise and control armies, to impose and exact taxes--are the pillars on which democracy must support her house of freedom. Yet since ‘freedom’ to the mediaeval mind too often implied the right to oppress some one else or maintain a state of anarchy, too much stress must not be laid on the immediate gains. North Italy in the coming centuries was to fall again under foreign rule, her ‘communes’ to abuse and betray the rights for which the Company of Death had risked their lives: yet, in spite of this taint of ignorance and treachery, the victory of Legnano had won for Europe something infinitely precious, the knowledge that tyrants could be overthrown by the popular will and feudal armies discomfited by citizen levies.

[Sidenote: Henry ‘the Lion’]

Barbarossa returned to Germany to vent his rage on Henry the Lion, to whose refusal to accompany him to Italy he considered his defeat largely due. Strong in the support of the Church, to which he was now reconciled, he summoned his cousin to appear before an imperial Diet and make answer to the charge of having confiscated ecclesiastical lands and revenues for his own use. Henry merely replied to this mandate by setting fire to Church property in Saxony, and in his absence the ban of outlawry was passed against him by the Diet. Here again was the old ‘Waiblingen’ and ‘Welf’ feud bursting into flame, like a fire that has been but half-suppressed, and cousinship went to the wall. Henry the Welf was a son-in-law of Henry II of England and had made allies of Philip Augustus and the King of Denmark: his Duchy of Bavaria in the south and of Saxony in the north covered a third of German territory: he had been winning military laurels in a struggle against the Slavs, while Frederick had been losing Lombardy. Thus he pitted himself against the Emperor, unmindful that even in Germany the hands of the political clock were moving forward and feudalism slowly giving up its dominion.

To the dawning sense of German nationality Barbarossa was something more than first among his barons, he was a king supported by the Church, and Bavarians and Saxons came reluctantly to the rebel banner; while, as the campaign developed, the other princes saw their fellow vassal beaten and despoiled of his lands and driven into exile without raising a finger to help him.

Frederick allowed Henry the Lion to keep his Brunswick estates, but Saxony and Bavaria he divided up amongst minor vassals, in order to avoid the risk of another powerful rival. Master of Germany not merely in name but in power, he and his successors could have built up a strong monarchy, as Philip II and the House of Capet were to do in France, had not the siren voice of Italy called them to wreck on her shifting policies.

Hitherto we have spoken chiefly of North Italy; but Frederick I bound Germany to her southern neighbours by fresh ties when he married his eldest son Henry in 1187 to Constance, heiress of the Norman kingdom of Naples and Sicily. By this alliance he hoped to establish a permanent Hohenstaufen counterpoise in the south to the alliance of the Pope and the Guelf towns in the north. Triumphant over the wrathful but helpless Roman See, he felt himself an emperor indeed, and having crowned his son Henry as ‘Caesar’, in imitation of classic times, he rode away to the Third Crusade, still lusting after adventure and glory.

The news of his death in Asia Minor[18] swept Germany with sadness and pride. Like all his house, he had been cruel and hard; but vices like these seemed to weigh little to the mediaeval mind against the peace and prosperity enjoyed under his rule. Legends grew about his name, and the peasants whispered that he had not died but slept beneath the sandstone rocks, and would awake again when his people were in danger to be their leader and protector.

Henry VI, who succeeded Frederick in the Empire, succeeded also to his dreams and the pitfalls that they inspired. One of his earliest struggles had been the finally successful attempt to secure Sicily against the claims of Count Tancred, an illegitimate grandson of the last ruler. Great were the sufferings of the unhappy Sicilians who had adopted the Norman’s cause; for Henry, having bribed or coerced the Pope and North Italy into a temporary alliance, exacted a bitter vengeance. Tancred’s youthful son, blinded and mutilated, was sent with his mother to an Alpine prison to end his days, while in the dungeons of Palermo and Apulia torture and starvation brought to his followers death as a blessed relief from pain.

Queen Constance, who had been powerless to check these atrocities, turned against her husband in loathing: the Pope excommunicated their author; but Henry VI laughed contemptuously at both. It was his threefold ambition: first, to make the imperial crown not elective but hereditary in the House of Hohenstaufen; next, to tempt the German princes into accepting this proposition by the incorporation of Naples and Sicily as a province of the Empire; and thirdly, to rule all his dominions from his southern kingdom, with the Pope at Rome, as in the days of Otto the Great, the chief bishop in his empire.

Strong-willed, persistent, resourceful, with the imagination that sees visions, and the practical brain of a man of business who can realize them, Henry VI, had he lived longer, might have gained at least a temporary recognition of his schemes; but in 1197 he died at the age of thirty-two, leaving a son not yet three years old as the heir of Hohenstaufen ambitions. Twelve months later died also Queen Constance, having reversed as much as she could during her short widowhood of her hated husband’s German policy, and having bequeathed the little King of Naples to the guardianship of the greatest of mediaeval Popes and the champion of the Guelfs, Innocent III.

[Sidenote: Pope Innocent III]

At the coronation of Innocent III the officiating priest had used these words: ‘Take the tiara and know that thou art the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the Vicar on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ.’ To Lothario di Conti this utterance was but the confirmation of his own beliefs, as unshakable as those of Hildebrand, as wide in their scope as the imperialism of Frederick Barbarossa or Henry VI. ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ he declared, ‘has set up one ruler over all things as His Universal Vicar, and as all things in Heaven, Earth, and Hell bow the knee to Christ, so should all obey Christ’s Vicar that there be one flock and one shepherd.’ Again: ‘Princes have power on earth, priests have also power in Heaven.’

In illustration of these views he likened the Papacy to the sun, the Empire to the lesser light of the moon, and recalled how Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane gave to St. Peter two swords. By these, he explained, were meant temporal and spiritual power, and emperors who claimed to exercise the former could only do so by the gracious consent of St. Peter’s successors, since ‘the Lord gave Peter the rule not only of the universal Church but also the rule of the whole world’.

Gregory VII had made men wonder in the triumph of Canossa whether such an ideal of the Papacy could ever be realized; but as if in proof he had been hunted from Rome and died in exile. It was left to Innocent III to exhibit the partial fulfilment, at any rate, of all that his predecessor had dreamed. In character no saintly Bernard of Clairvaux, but a clear-brained practical statesman, he set before himself the vision of a kingdom of God on earth after the pattern of earthly kingdoms; and to this end, that he sincerely believed carried with it the blessing of God for the perfecting of mankind, he used every weapon in his armoury.

Sometimes his ambitions failed, as when, in a real glow of enthusiasm, he preached the Fourth Crusade--an expedition that ended in Venice, who had promised the necessary ships, diverting the crusaders to storm her a coveted port on the Dalmatian coast, and afterwards to sack and burn Constantinople in the mingled interests of commerce and pillage. His anger at the news that the remonstrances of his legates had been ignored could hardly at first be extinguished. Not thus had been his plan of winning Eastern Christendom to the Catholic Faith and of destroying the infidel; for the Latin Empire of Constantinople, set up by the victorious crusaders, was obviously too weak to maintain for long its tyranny over hostile Greeks, or to serve as an effective barrier against the Turks. Statesmanship, however, prompted him to reap what immediate harvest he could from the blunders of his faithless sons; and he accepted the submission of the Church in Constantinople as a debt long owing to the Holy See.

The Fourth Crusade, in spite of the extension of Rome’s ecclesiastical influence, must be reckoned as one of Innocent’s failures. In the West, on the other hand, the atmosphere created by his personality and statecraft made the name of ‘The Lord Innocent’ one of weight and fear to his enemies, of rejoicing to his friends. When upholding Queen Ingeborg he had stood as a moral force, bending Philip Augustus to his will by his convinced determination; and this same tenacity of belief and purpose, added to the purity of his personal life and the charm of his manner, won him the affection of the Roman populace, usually so hostile to its Vicars.

Mediaeval popes were, as a rule, respected less in Italy than beyond the Alps, and least of all in their own capital, where too many spiritual gifts had been seen debased for material ends, and papal acts were often at variance with pious professions. During the pontificate of Innocent III, however, we find the ‘Prefect’, the imperial representative at Rome, accept investiture at his hands, the ‘Senator’, chief magistrate of the municipality, do him homage; and through this double influence his control became paramount over the city government.

In Naples and Sicily he was able to continue the policy of Constance, drive out rebellious German barons, struggle against the Saracens in Sicily, and develop the education of his ward, the young King of Naples, as the spiritual son who should one day do battle for his ideals. ‘God has not spared the rod,’ he wrote to Frederick II. ‘He has taken away your father and mother: yet he has given you a worthier father, His Vicar; and a better mother, the Church.’

In Lombardy, where the Guelfs naturally turned to him as their champion, the papal way was comparatively smooth, for the cruelty of Barbarossa and his son Henry VI had aroused hatred and suspicion on all sides. Thus Innocent found himself more nearly the master of Italy than any Pope before his time, and from Italy his patronage and alliances extended like a web all over Europe.