The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment. Hoffman Nickerson
that his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a free man.
These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds growing on a ruin.
This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king, continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory, and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage of their own needy little vassals to them.
There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors, kings, and nobles alike, to mike of the officers of the Church the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to “invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a disintegrating tendency.
There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming principally from the monks and especially from the new order of Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement. Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared, sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year 1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.
The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester II, stands as a symbol. Great as an intriguer, to us he is even greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.
I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the “Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise begins.
For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose. The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the barrier between East and West and begins a new day.
It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.
At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus, if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it. Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it. The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century. Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked out. It is an astonishing time.
In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in “Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private, specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over, has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.
And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war, that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.1 In military engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles, they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too. Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages had begun.
What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time, with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its
“Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”
as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to their death.
Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to the layman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.
In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned. They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a new time, the twelfth century.
I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but also the barrier