The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor

The Medieval Mind - Henry Osborn Taylor


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Great, and, finally, Hugh Capet, playing something like the old rôle of the palace mayors, were becoming the actual rulers, although not till 987 was the last-named Hugh formally elected and anointed king.

      Other great houses also had arisen through the land of France, which was very far from being under the power of the last Carolingians or the first Capetians. The year 911 saw the treaty between Norman Rollo and Charles the Simple, and may be taken to symbolize the settling down of Norsemen from freebooters to denizens, with a change of faith. Rollo received the land between the Epte and the sea, to the borders of Brittany, along with temporary privileges, granted by the same Simple Charles, of sack and plunder over the latter. But a generation later the valiant Count Alan of the Twisted Beard drove out the plunderers, and established the feudal duchy long to bear the name of Brittany. Likewise, aided by the need of protection against invading plunderers, feudal principalities were formed in Flanders, Champagne, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Languedoc.

      At the time when Hugh Capet drew near his royal destiny, his brother was Duke of Burgundy, the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine were his brothers-in-law, and Adalberon, Archbishop of Rheims, was his partisan. As a king elected by his peers, his royal rights were only such as sprang from the feudal homage and fidelity which they tendered him. Yet he, with the clergy, deemed that his consecration by the Church gave him the prerogatives of Frankish sovereigns, which were patterned on those of Roman emperors and Old Testament kings. It was to be the long endeavour of the Capetian line to make good these higher claims against the counter-assumptions of feudal vassals, who individually might be stronger than the king.[288]

      Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom, formed the centre of those portions of the Carolingian Empire which were to remain German. Throughout these lands, as in the West, feudal disintegration was progressing. The great territorial divisions were set by differences of race or stamm. Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, had never been one people. In the tenth century each of these stamms, with the land it dwelt in, made a dukedom; and there were besides marks or frontier lordships, each under its markgrave, upon whom lay the duty of repelling outer foes. These divisions, fixed in differences of law, language, and blood, were destined to prevent the formation of a strong kingdom like that of France.

      Yet what was to prove a veritable German royalty sprang from the ducal Saxon house. Upon the failure of the German Carolingian branch in 911, Conrad, Duke of Franconia, was elected king, the Saxons and Suabians consenting. After struggling a few years, mainly against the power of the Saxon duke Henry, Conrad at his death in 918 pronounced in favour of his stronger rival. Thereupon Henry, called by later legend “The Fowler,” became king, and having maintained his royal authority against recalcitrants, and fought successfully with Hungarians and Bohemians, he died in 936, naming his son Otto as his successor.

      The latter’s reign was to be a long and great one. He was consecrated at Aix-la-Chapelle in Charlemagne’s basilica, thus at the outset showing what and whom he had in mind. Then and thereafter all manner of internal opposition had to be suppressed. His own competing brothers were, first of all, to be put down; and with them the Dukes of Bavaria, Franconia, and Lorraine, whom Otto conquered and replaced with men connected with him by ties of blood or marriage. Far to the West he made his power felt, settling affairs between Louis and Hugh the Great. Hungarians and Slavs attacked his realm in vain. New marks were established to hold them in check, and new bishoprics were founded, fonts of missionary Christianity and fortresses of defence.

      Thereupon Otto looked southward, over the Alps. To say that Italy was sick with turmoil and corruption, and exposed to the attack of every foe, is to give but the negative and least interesting side. She held more of civilized life and of education than any northern land; she differed from the north in her politics and institutions. Feudalism did not fix itself widely there, although the Roman barons, who made and unmade popes, represented it; and in many regions, as later among the Normans in the south, there was to be a feudal land-holding nobility. But in Italy, it was the city, whether under civic or episcopal government, or in a despot’s grip, that took the lead, and was to keep the life of the peninsula predominantly urban, as it had been in the Roman time.

      Tenth-century Italy contained enough claimants to the royal, even the imperial, title. Rome reeked with faction; and the papal power was nearly snuffed out. Pope followed pope, to reign or be dragged from his throne—eight of them between 896 and 904. Then began at Rome the domination of the notorious, but virile, Theodora and her daughter Marozia, makers and perhaps mistresses of popes, and leaders in feudal violence. Marozia married a certain valiant Alberic, “markgrave of Camerino” and forerunner of many a later Italian soldier and tyrant of fortune. When he fell, she married again, and overthrew Pope John X., who had got the better of her first husband. In 931 she made her son pope as John XI. For yet a third husband she took a certain King Hugo, a Burgundian; but another son of hers, a second Alberic, roused the city, drove him out, and proclaimed himself “Prince and Senator of all the Romans.”

      It was in this Italy that Otto intervened, in 951, drawn perhaps by the wrongs of Queen Adelaide, widow of Hugo’s son, Lothaire, a landless king, since Markgrave Berengar had ousted him from his Italian holdings. This Berengar now persecuted and imprisoned the queen-widow. She escaped; Otto descended from the Alps, and married her; Lombardy submitted; Berengar fled. This time Otto did not advance to Rome, being impeded by many things—Alberic’s refusal to admit him, and behind his back in Germany the rebellion of his own son Liudolf aided by the Archbishop of Mainz, and later by those whom Otto left in Italy to represent him as he hurried north. These were straitened times for the king, and the Hungarians poured over the boundaries to take advantage of the confusion. But Otto’s star triumphed over both rebels and Hungarians—a bloody star for the latter, as the plains of Lech might testify, where they were so handled that they never ravaged German lands again.

      Otto’s power now reached its zenith. He reordered the German dukedoms, filled the archbishoprics with faithful servants, bound the German clergy to himself with gifts and new foundations, and ruled them like another Charlemagne. It was his time to become emperor, an emperor like Charlemagne, and not like later weaklings. In 961 he again entered Italy, to be greeted with universal acclaim as by men longing for a deliverer. He was crowned king in Pavia; the levies of the once more hostile Berengar dispersed before him. In February 962 he was anointed emperor at Rome by John XII., son of that second Alberic who had refused to open the gates, but whose debauched son had called for aid upon the mighty German. Once more the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans was refounded to endure a while with power, and continue a titular existence for eight centuries.

      The power of the first Otto was so overwhelming that the papacy could not escape the temporary subjection which its vile state deserved. And the Empire was its honest patron, for the good of both. So on through the reigns of Otto II., who died in 983, aged twenty-eight, and his son Otto III., who died in 1002, at the age of twenty-two, a dreamer and would-be universal potentate. Then came the practical-minded rule of the second Henry (1002–1024), who still aided and humbly ruled the Church. Conrad II., of Franconia, followed, faithful to the imperial tradition.[289] He was succeeded in 1039 by his son Henry III., beneficent and prosperous, if not far-seeing, who again cared for both Church and State, and imperially constrained the papacy, itself impotent in the grip of the Roman barons and the Counts of Tusculum. Henry did not hesitate to clear away at once three rival popes (1046) and name a German, Clement II. It was this worthy man, but still more another German, his successor, Leo IX. (1049–1054), who lifted the papacy from its Italian mire, and launched it full on its course toward an absolute spiritual supremacy that was to carry the temporal control of kings and princes. But the man already at the helm was a certain deacon Hildebrand, who was destined to guide the papal policy through the reigns of successive popes until he himself was hailed as Gregory VII. (1073–1085).[290]

      With Hildebrand’s pontificate, which in truth began before he sat in Peter’s chair, the reforming spirits among the clergy, aroused to his keen policy, set themselves to the uplifting of their order. In all countries the Church, heavy with its possessions, seemed about to become feudal and secular. Bishops and abbots were appointed by kings and the great feudatories, and were by them invested with their lands as fiefs, for which the clerical appointee did homage, and undertook to perform feudal duties. Church fiefs failed to become hereditary only because bishops and abbots could


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