The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment. Hoffman Nickerson
what it is to-day.1 No new process to spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping energy of its own vigorous will.
In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings, Christendom feels a great calamity.
The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.
While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics, and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous range of thought, to feel his luminous common sense, was to give them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.
Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such words had never been represented by governments. They had stood always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was a blind instinct.
This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless, this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.
First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness, the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess. With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines that are firm and even severe. As vet the Gothic (which was to be the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in relation to the whole. The classic forms begin to be rationalized so as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds. Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in, the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of that which it made.
The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only that the time, with its fluidity and the swiftness and extent of its social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year 1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of “progress.” It was because the new things that they had made were certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.
Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.
Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus, in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity. Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day. Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea, more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes (often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole. But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers, government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to give the commander