The Story Of Mankind - Part 15

This is part 15 of the story of mankind.

Medieval Self-Government.

How the people of the cities asserted their right to be heard in the royal councils of their country.

As long as people were nomads,

Wandering tribes of shepherds,

All men had been equal,

And had been responsible for the welfare and safety of the entire community.

But after they had settled down and some had become rich and others had grown poor,

The government was apt to fall into the hands of those who were not obliged to work for their living and who could devote themselves to politics.

I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in Mesopotamia and in Greece and in Rome.

It occurred among the Germanic population of Western Europe as soon as order had been restored.

The Western European world was ruled in the first place by an emperor who was elected by the seven or eight most important kings of the vast Roman Empire of the German nation and who enjoyed a great deal of imaginary and very little actual power.

It was ruled by a number of kings who sat upon shaky thrones.

The everyday government was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelots.

Their subjects were peasants or serfs.

There were few cities.

There was hardly any middle class.

But during the thirteenth century,

After an absence of almost a thousand years,

The middle class,

The merchant class,

Once more appeared upon the historical stage and its rise in power as we saw in the last chapter,

Had meant a decrease in the influence of the castlefolk.

Thus far the king,

In ruling his domains,

Had only paid attention to the wishes of the noblemen and his bishops.

But the new world of trade and commerce which grew out of the crusades forced him to recognize the middle class or suffer from an ever-increasing emptiness of his exchequer.

Their majesties,

If they had followed their hidden wishes,

Would have as leaf consulted their cows and their pigs as the goods burged of their cities.

But they could not help themselves.

They swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded,

But not without a struggle.

In England during the absence of Richard the Lion-Hearted,

Who had gone to the Holy Land but who was spending the greater part of the crusading voyage in an Austrian jail,

The government of the country had been placed in the hands of John,

A brother of Richard,

Who was his inferior in the art of war,

But his equal as a bad administrator.

John had began his career as a regent for losing Normandy and the greater part of the French possessions.

Next he had managed to get into a quarrel with Pope Innocent III,

The famous enemy of the Hohenstaufen.

The Pope had excommunicated John,

As Gregory VII had excommunicated the Emperor Henry IV two centuries before.

In the year 1213 John had been obliged to make an ignominious peace,

Just as Henry IV had been obliged to do in the year 1077.

Undismayed by his lack of success,

John continued to abuse his royal power until his disgruntled vassals made a prisoner of their anointed ruler and forced him to promise that he would be good and would never again interfere with the ancient rites of his subjects.

All this happened on a little island in the Thames,

Near the village of Runnymede,

On the 15th of June of the year 1215.

The document to which John signed his name was called the Big Charter,

The Magna Carta.

It contained very little that was new.

It restated in short and direct sentences the ancient duties of the king and enumerated the privilege of his vassals.

It paid little attention to the rites,

If any,

Of the vast majority of the people,

The peasants,

But it offered certain securities to the rising class of the merchants.

It was a charter of great importance,

Because it defined the powers of the king with more precision than had ever been done before.

But it was still a purely medieval document.

It did not refer to common human beings,

Unless they happened to be the property of the vassal,

Which must be safeguarded against royal tyranny,

Just as the baronial woods and cows were protected against the excess of zeal on the part of the royal foresters.

A few years later,

However,

We begin to hear a very different note in the council of his majesty.

John,

Who was bad,

Both by birth and inclination,

Solemnly had promised to obey the Great Charter,

And then had broken every one of its many stipulations.

Fortunately,

He soon died and was succeeded by his son,

Henry III,

Who was forced to recognize the charter anew.

Meanwhile,

Uncle Richard the crusader had cost the country a great deal of money,

And the king was obliged to ask for a few loans that he might pay his obligations to the Jewish moneylenders.

The large landowners and the bishops who acted as counsellors to the king could not provide him with the necessary gold and silver.

The king then gave orders that a few representatives of the cities be called upon to attend the sessions of his great council.

They made their first appearance in the year 1265.

They were supposed to act only as financial experts who were not supposed to take a part in the general discussion of matters of state,

But to give advice exclusively upon the question of taxation.

Gradually,

However,

These representatives of the commons were consulted upon many of the problems and the meeting of noblemen,

Bishops,

And city delegates developed into a regular parliament,

A place ou l'empare fée,

Which means in English where people talked before important affairs of state were decided upon.

But the institution of such general advisory board with certain executive powers was not an English invention,

As seems to be the general belief,

And government by a king and his parliament was by no means restricted to the British Isles.

You will find it in every part of Europe,

And some countries,

Like France,

The rapid increase of the royal power after the Middle Ages reduced the influence of the parliament to nothing.

In the year 1302,

Representatives of the cities had been admitted to the meeting of the French parliament,

But five centuries had to pass before this parliament was strong enough to assert the rights of the middle class,

The so-called third estate,

And break the power of the king.

Then they made up for lost time,

And during the French Revolution abolished the king,

The clergy,

And the nobles,

And made the representatives of the common people the rulers of the land.

In Spain the Cortex,

The king's council,

Had been open to the commoners as early as the first half of the 12th century.

In the German Empire,

A number of important cities had obtained the rank of imperial cities,

Whose representatives must be heard in the imperial diet.

In Sweden,

Representatives of the people attended the sessions of the Riksdag at the first meeting of the year 1359.

In Denmark,

The Danehof,

The ancient national assembly,

Was re-established in 1314,

And,

Although the nobles often regained control of the country at the expense of the king and the people,

The representatives of the city were never completely deprived of their power.

In the Scandinavian country,

The story of representative government is particularly interesting.

In Iceland,

The Þaldthing,

The assembly of all free landowners who managed the affairs of the island,

Began to hold regular meetings in the 9th century and continued to do so for more than a thousand years.

In Switzerland,

The three men of the different cantons defended their assemblies against the attempts of a number of feudal neighbors with great success.

Finally,

In the Low Countries,

In Holland,

The councils of the different duchies and counties were attended by representatives of the third estate as early as the 13th century.

In the 16th century,

A number of these small provinces rebelled against their king,

Abjured his majesty in a solemn meeting of the estates general,

Removed the clergy from the discussions,

Broke the power of the nobles,

And assumed full executive authority over the newly established republic of the United Seven Netherlands.

For two centuries,

The representatives of the town councils ruled the country without a king,

Without bishops,

And without noblemen.

The city had become supreme,

And the good burghers had become the rulers of the land.

The Medieval World What the people of the Middle Ages thought of the world in which they happened to live.

Dates are a very useful invention.

We could not do without them,

But unless we are very careful,

They will play tricks with us.

They are apt to make history too precise.

For example,

When I talk of the point of view of medieval man,

I do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476,

Suddenly all the people of Europe said,

Ah,

Now the Roman Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle Ages.

How interesting.

You could have found man at the Frankish court of Charlemagne who were Romans in their habits,

In their manners,

In their lookout upon life.

On the other hand,

When you grow up,

You will discover that some of the people in this world have never passed beyond the stage of cavemen.

All times and all ages overlap,

And the ideas of succeeding generations play tag with each other.

But it is possible to study the minds of a good many true representatives of the Middle Ages,

And then give you an idea of the average man's attitude towards life and the many difficult problems of living.

First of all,

Remember that the people of the Middle Ages never thought of themselves as freeborn citizens who could come and go at will and shape their fate according to their ability or energy or luck.

On the contrary,

They all considered themselves part of the general scheme of things,

Which included emperors and serfs,

Popes and heretics,

Heroes and swashbucklers,

Rich men,

Poor men,

Beggar men,

And thieves.

They accepted this divine ordinance and asked no questions.

In this of course,

They differed radically from modern people,

Who accept nothing and who are forever trying to improve their own financial and political situation.

To the man and woman of the thirteenth century,

The world hereafter,

A heaven of wonderful delights,

And a hell of brimstone and suffering,

Meant something more than empty words or vague theological phrases.

It was an actual fact,

And the medieval burgers and knights spent a greater part of their time preparing for it.

We modern people regard a noble death after a well-spent life with a quiet calm of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

After three square years of work and effort,

We go to sleep with the feeling that all will be well.

But during the Middle Ages,

The king of terrors with his grinning skull and his rattling bones was a man's steady companion.

He woke his victims with terrible tunes on his scratchy fiddle he sat down with them at dinner.

He smiled at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took a girl out for a walk.

If you had heard nothing but hair-raising yarns about cemeteries and coffins and fearful diseases when you were very young,

Instead of listening to the fairy tales of Anderson and Grimm,

You too would have lived all your days in the dread of the final hour and the gruesome day of judgment.

That is exactly what happened to the children of the Middle Ages.

They moved in a world of devils and spooks and only a few occasional angels.

Sometimes their fear of the future filled their souls with humility and piety.

But often it influenced them the other way and made them cruel and sentimental.

They would first of all murder all the women and children of a captured city and then they would devoutly march to a holy spot with their hands in glory with the blood of innocent victims.

They would pray that a merciful heaven forgive them from their sins.

Yeah,

They would do more than pray.

They would weep bitter tears and would confess themselves the most wicked of sinners.

But the next day they would once more butcher a camp of Sarachan enemies without a spark of mercy in their hearts.

Of course,

The crusaders were knights and debate a somewhat different code of manners from the common man.

But in such respects the common man was just the same as his master.

He too resembled a shy horse,

Easily frightened by a shadow or a silly piece of paper,

Capable of excellent and faithful service,

But liable to run away and do terrible damage when his feverish imagination saw a ghost.

In judging these good people,

However,

It was wise to remember the terrible disadvantages under which they lived.

They were really barbarians who posed as civilized people.

Charlemagne and Otto the Great were called Roman emperors.

But they had as little resemblance to a real Roman emperor as King Wumba Wumba of the Upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of Sweden or Denmark.

They were savages who lived amidst glorious ruins,

But who did not share the benefits of the civilization which their fathers and grandfathers had destroyed.

They knew nothing.

They were ignorant of almost every fact which a boy of twelve knows today.

They were obliged to go to one single book for all their information.

That was the Bible.

But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the history of the human race for the better are those chapters of the New Testament which teach us the great moral lesson of love,

Charity,

And forgiveness.

As a handbook of astronomy,

Zoology,

Botany,

Geometry,

And all of the other sciences,

The venereal book is not entirely reliable.

In the 12th century,

A second book was added to the medieval library,

The Great Encyclopedia of Useful Knowledge,

Compiled by Aristotle,

The great philosopher of the 4th century before Christ.

Why the Christian Church should have been willing to accord such a high honor to the teacher of Alexander the Great,

Whereas they condemn all other Greek philosophers on account of their heathenish doctrines?

I really do not know.

But next to the Bible,

Aristotle was recognized as the only reliable teacher whose works could be safely placed into the hands of true Christians.

His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout way.

They had gone from Greece to Alexandria.

They had been translated from Greek into the Arabic language by the Mohammedans who conquered Egypt in the 7th century.

They had followed the Muslim armies into Spain,

And the philosophy of the great Stegrite was taught in the Moorish universities of Cordova.

The Arabic text was then translated into Latin by the Christian students who had crossed the Pyrenees to get a liberal education,

And this much-traveled version of the famous book was at last taught at the different schools of northwestern Europe.

It was not very clear,

But that made it all the more interesting.

With the help of the Bible and Aristotle,

The most brilliant man of the Middle Ages now set to work to explain all things between heaven and earth in their relation to the expressed will of God.

These brilliant men,

The so-called scholars or schoolmen,

Were really very intelligent,

And they had obtained their information exclusively from books,

And never from actual observation.

If they wanted to lecture on the Sturgeon or on a caterpillar,

They read the Old and New Testaments and Aristotle,

And told their students everything these good books had to say upon the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons.

They did not leave their libraries and repair to the backyard to catch a few caterpillars and look at these animals and study them in their native haunts.

Even such famous scholars as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire whether the Sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the caterpillars of Macedonia might not have been different from the Sturgeons and the caterpillars of western Europe.

When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like Roger Bacon appeared in the Council of the Learned and began to experiment with magnifying glasses and funny little telescopes,

And actually dragged the Sturgeon and the caterpillar into the lecturing room and proved that they were different from the creatures described by the Old Testament and by Aristotle,

The schoolmen shook their dignified heads.

Bacon was going too far.

When he dared to suggest that an hour of actual observation was more than ten years with Aristotle,

And that the works of that famous Greek might as well have remained untranslated for all the good they had ever done,

The scholars went to the police and said,

"'This man is a danger to the safety of the state.

He wants us to study Greek that we may read Aristotle in the original.

Why should he not be contented with our Latin Arabic translation,

Which has satisfied our faithful people for so many hundred years?

Why is he so curious about the insides of fishes and the insides of insects?

He is probably a wicked magician,

Trying to upset the established order of things by his black magic.

" And so well did they plead their cause,

That the frightened guardians of the peace forbade Bacon to write a single word for more than ten years.

When he resumed his studies,

He had learned a lesson.

He wrote his books in a queer cipher which made it impossible for his contemporaries to read them.

A trick which became common as the Church began more desperate in its attempts to prevent people from asking questions which would lead to doubts and infidelity.

This however was not done out of any wicked desire to keep people ignorant.

The feeling which prompted the heretic hunters of that day was really a very kindly one.

They firmly believed,

Nay,

They knew,

That this life was but the preparation for our real existence in the next world.

They felt convinced that too much knowledge made people uncomfortable,

Filled their minds with dangerous opinions,

And led to doubt and hence to perdition.

The medieval schoolman who saw one of his pupils stray away from the revealed authority of the Bible and Aristotle,

That he might study things for himself,

Felt as uncomfortable as a loving mother who sees her young child approach a hot stove.

She knows that he will burn his little fingers if he is allowed to touch it,

And she tries to keep him back.

If necessary,

She will use force.

But she really loves the child,

And if he will only obey her,

She will be as good to him as she possibly can be.

In the same way the medieval guardians of people's souls,

While they were strict in all matters pertaining to the faith,

Slaved day and night to render the greatest possible service to the members of their flock.

They held out a helping hand whenever they could,

And the society of that day shows the influence of thousands of good men and pious women who tried to make the fate of the average mortal as bearable as possible.

A serf was a serf,

And his position would never change.

But the good Lord of the Middle Ages,

Who allowed the serf to remain a slave all his life,

Had bestowed an immortal soul upon this humble creature,

And therefore he must be protected in his rights that he might live and die as a good Christian.

When he grew too old,

Or too weak,

To work,

He must be taken care of by the feudal master for whom he had worked.

The serf,

Therefore,

Who led a monotonous and dreary life,

Was never haunted by fear of tomorrow.

He knew that he was safe,

That he could not be thrown out of employment,

That he would always have a roof over his head,

A leaky roof perhaps,

But roof all the same,

And that he would always have something to eat.

This feeling of stability and of safety was found in all classes of society.

In the towns of merchants and the artisans established guilds which assured every member of a steady income.

It did not encourage the ambition to do better than their neighbors.

Too often the guilds gave protection to the slacker who managed to get by.

But they established a general feeling of content and assurance to the laboring classes which no longer exists in our day of general competition.

The Middle Ages were familiar with the dangers of what we modern people call corners.

When a single rich man gets hold of all the available grain or soap or pickled herring and then forces the world to buy from him at his own price.

The authorities,

Therefore,

Discouraged wholesale trading and regulated the price at which merchants were allowed to sell their goods.

The Middle Ages disliked competition.

Why compete and fill the world with hurry and rivalry and a multitude of pushing man when the day of judgment was near at hand,

When riches would count for nothing,

And when the good serve would enter the golden gates of heaven while the bad night was sent to do penance in the deepest pit of inferno?

In short,

The people of the Middle Ages were asked to surrender part of their liberty of thought and action,

That they might enjoy greater safety from poverty of the body and poverty of the soul.

And with a very few exceptions they did not object.

They firmly believed that they were mere visitors upon this planet,

That they were here to be prepared for a greater and more important life.

Deliberately they turned their backs upon a world which was filled with suffering and wickedness and injustice.

They pulled down the blinds that the rays of sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the Apocalypse which told them of that heavenly light which was to illuminate their happiness in all eternity.

They tried to close their eyes to most of the joys of the world in which they lived,

That they might enjoy those which awaited them in the near future.

They accepted life as a necessary evil and welcomed death as the beginning of a glorious day.

The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the future,

But had tried to establish their paradise right here upon their earth.

They had succeeded in making life extremely pleasant for those of their fellow-men who did not happen to be slaves.

Then came the other extreme of the Middle Ages,

When man built himself a paradise beyond the highest clouds and turned this world into a veil of tears for high and low,

For rich and poor,

For the intelligent and the dumb.

It was time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction,

As I shall tell you in my next chapter.