THE GREAT EVENTS

BY

FAMOUS HISTORIANS

A COMPREHENSIVE AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY, EMPHASIZING THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND PRESENTING THESE AS COMPLETE NARRATIVES IN THE MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS

ON THE PLAN EVOLVED FROM A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS GATHERED FROM THE MOST DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS BY SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT AND EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED NARRATIVES, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH THOROUGH INDICES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND COURSES OF READING

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
JOHN RUDD, LL.D.

With a staff of specialists

VOLUME VII

The National Alumni

COPYRIGHT, 1905,
By THE NATIONAL ALUMNI

CONTENTS

VOLUME VII

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME VII

AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE

TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS,
AND CONSEQUENCES OF

THE GREAT EVENTS

(FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)

CHARLES F. HORNE

IFTY years ago the term "renaissance" had a very definite meaning to scholars as representing an exact period toward the close of the fourteenth century when the world suddenly reawoke to the beauty of the arts of Greece and Rome, to the charm of their gayer life, the splendor of their intellect. We know now that there was no such sudden reawakening, that Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long centuries, and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer side of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.

Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period of the great poet's work, the first decade of the fourteenth century, has certainly the advantage of being characterized by three or four peculiarly striking events which serve to typify the tendencies of the coming age.

In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic, by a political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found expression in his mighty poem, the Divina Commedia.[1] Throughout his masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and of such Greeks as he knew—so we have admiration of the ancient intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other more earthly tyrants—so we have the dawnings of democracy and of religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.

More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous vitality, were to supersede the old.

In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening enough.

If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the great jubilee of 1300. Philip's soldiers, forcing their way into the little town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon his holiness. If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck—beaten, say not wholly reliable authorities—and so insulted that rage and shame drove him mad, and he died.

Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr. Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope, venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the Church was sudden, terrible, complete.

INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE

Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars, having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of feudalism was past.[2]

We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this cruel, crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against the Pope, he called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of his people; and, following the example already established in England, he gave a voice in this assembly to the "Third Estate," the common folk or "citizens," as well as to the nobles and the clergy. So even in France we find the people acquiring power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but a timid and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by its money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one day be strong enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant overlords.[3]

Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took place farther northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish cities Ghent, Liège, and Bruges had grown to be the great centres of the commercial world, so wealthy and so populous that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish burghers had not always been subject to France—else they had been less well to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself a fresh nobility to replenish his depleted stock.[4]

The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign will in itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most important state in Europe. This, however, was due less to French strength than to the weakness of the empire, where rival rulers were being constantly elected and wasting their strength against one another. If Courtrai had given the first hint that these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war, it was soon followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among themselves a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in 1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.[5] The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival claimants for the title of emperor, and was much too busy to attend personally to the chastisement of these presumptuous boors. The army which he sent to do the work for him was met by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain passes, overwhelmed with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce charge of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years to forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second army into the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss liberty was established on an unarguable basis.[6]

A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under Bruce, the Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the English.[7] Courtrai, Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new force was growing up over all Europe, and a new spirit among men. Knighthood, which had lost its power over kings, seemed like to lose its military repute as well.

The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in Italy, where democracy had first asserted itself. In its train came intellectual ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Italy was in the full swing of the intellectual renaissance.[8] In 1341 Petrarch, recognized by all his contemporary countrymen as their leading scholar and poet, was crowned with a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. This was the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for intellectual worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of the beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our own, with a friend who understands.[9]

THE PERIOD OF DISASTER

Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too intense, too frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic in Rome and talked of the restoration of the city's ancient rule. But he governed like a madman or an inflated fool, and was slain in a riot of the streets.[10] Scarce one of the famous cities succeeded in retaining its republican form. Milan became a duchy. Florence fell under the sway of the Medici. In Venice a few rich families seized all authority, and while the fame and territory of the republic were extended, its dogeship became a mere figurehead. All real power was lodged in the dread and secret council of three.[11] Genoa was defeated and crushed in a great naval contest with her rival, Venice.[12] Everywhere tyrannies stood out triumphant. The first modern age of representative government was a failure. The cities had proved unable to protect themselves against the selfish ambitions of their leaders.

In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen, slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance of the Hansa, until, toward the end of the century, Queen Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis of the North," united the three countries under her sway, and partly at least upraised them from their sorry plight.[14]

On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look back with pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of its wrangling rulers, Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an established government lay at the root of all the disorder, tried to mend matters by publishing his "Golden Bull," which exactly regulated the rules and formulæ to be gone through in choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty. The Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.[15]

Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered, began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out. In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to stop.[17]

France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years' War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact, her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings. France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe. England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, France was having much trouble with her Flemish cities, which were in revolt again under the noted brewer-nobleman, Van Artevelde,[18] yet it seemed presumption for England to attack her—England, so feeble that she had been unable to avenge her own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at Bannockburn.

But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves as had the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not been in that strife against the Scots, a brave and impoverished people struggling for freedom. But hearts and pockets, too, welcomed the quarrel with France, overbearing France, that plundered their ships when they traded with their friends the Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King Philip had on his hands a far more serious quarrel than he realized.[19]

In England's first great naval victory, Edward destroyed the French fleet at Sluys and so started his country on its wonderful career of ocean dominance. Moreover, his success established from the start that the war should be fought out in France and not in England.[20] Then, in 1346, he won his famous victory of Crécy against overwhelming numbers of his enemies. It has been said that cannon were effectively used for the first time at Crécy, and it was certainly about this time that gunpowder began to assume a definite though as yet subordinate importance in warfare. But we need not go so far afield to explain the English victory. It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through a century and a half of freedom, England had been building up a class of sturdy yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed what the English yeomen had begun.

Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what with the Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich châteaux.[21] A partial peace with England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and the English troops caught disease from their victims and perished in the desolation they had helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles with them and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380, the English power in France had fallen again almost to where it stood at the beginning of the war.

Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph. His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen. England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of rebellion—though with them this meant no more than that they felt themselves over-taxed.[22]

The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be regarded as a period of depression in European civilization, of retrograde movement during which the wheels of progress had turned back. It even seemed as though Asia would once more and perhaps with final success reassert her dominion over helpless Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in 1291, had conquered Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land, had lost their power; but a new family of the Turkish race, the one that dwells in Europe to-day, the Osmanlis, had built up an empire by conquest over their fellows, and had begun to wrest province after province from the feeble Empire of the East. In 1354 their advance brought them across the Bosporus and they seized their first European territory.[23] Soon they had spread over most of modern Turkey. Only the strong-walled Constantinople held out, while its people cried frantically to the West for help. The invaders ravaged Hungary. A crusade was preached against them; but in 1396 the entire crusading army, united with all the forces of Hungary, was overthrown, almost exterminated in the battle of Nicopolis.

Perhaps it was only a direct providence that saved Europe. Another Tartar conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine, had risen in the Far East.[24] Like Attila and Genghis Khan he swept westward asserting sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations reasserted their independence. Yet Europe was granted a considerable breathing space before the Turks once more felt able to push their aggressions westward.

THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE

Toward the close of this unlucky fourteenth century a marked religious revival extended over Europe. Perhaps men's sufferings had caused it. Many sects of reformers appeared, protesting sometimes against the discipline, sometimes the doctrines, of the Church. In Germany Nicholas of Basel established the "Friends of God." In England Wycliffe wrote the earliest translation of the Bible into any of our modern tongues.[25] The Avignon popes shook off their long submission to France and returned to Italy, to a Rome so desolate that they tell us not ten thousand people remained to dwell amid its stupendous ruins. Unfortunately this return only led the papacy into still deeper troubles. Several of the cardinals refused to recognize the Roman Pope and elected another, who returned to Avignon. This was the beginning of the "Great Schism" in the Church.[26] For forty years there were two, sometimes three, claimants to the papal chair. The effect of their struggles was naturally to lessen still further that solemn veneration with which men had once looked up to the accepted vicegerent of God on earth. Hitherto the revolt against the popes had only assailed their political supremacy; but now heresies that included complete denial of the religious authority of the Church began everywhere to arise. In England Wycliffe's preachings and pamphlets grew more and more opposed to Roman doctrine. In Bohemia John Huss not only said, as all men did, that the Church needed reform, but, going further, he refused obedience to papal commands.[27] In short, the reformers, finding themselves unable to purify the Roman Church according to their views, began to deny its sacredness and defy its power.

At length an unusually energetic though not oversuccessful emperor, Sigismund, the same whom the Turks had defeated at Nicopolis, persuaded the leaders of the Church to unite with him in calling a grand council at Constance.[28] This council ended the great schism and restored order to the Church by securing the rule of a single pope. It also burned John Huss as a heretic, and thereby left on Sigismund's hands a fierce rebellion among the reformer's Bohemian followers. The war lasted for a generation, and during its course all the armies of Germany were repeatedly defeated by the fanatic Hussites.[29]

Another interesting performance of the Emperor Sigismund was that, being deep in debt, he sold his "electorate" of Brandenburg to a friend, a Hohenzollern, and thus established as one of the four chief families of the empire those Hohenzollerns who rose to be kings of Prussia and have in our own day supplanted the Hapsburgs as emperors of Germany.[30] Also worth noting of Sigismund is the fact that during the sitting of his Council of Constance he made a tour of Europe to persuade all the princes and various potentates to join it. When he reached England he was met by a band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand whether by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England. Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old mediæval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the overlord of the whole of Europe.

LATTER HALF OE THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR

By this time England had in fact recovered from her period of temporary disorder and depression. King Richard II, the feeble son of the Black Prince, had been deposed in 1399,[31] and a new and vigorous line of rulers, the Lancastrians, reached their culmination in Henry V (1415-1422). Henry revived the French quarrel, and paralleled Crécy and Poitiers with a similar victory at Agincourt.[32] The French King was a madman, and, aided by a civil war among the French nobility, Henry soon had his neighbor's kingdom seemingly helpless at his feet. By the treaty of Troyes he was declared the heir to the French throne, married the mad King's daughter, and dwelt in Paris as regent of the kingdom.[33]

The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a similar English conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left a full-grown though rather worthless son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to deny the English authority, from a safe distance in Southern France. He made, however, no effort to assert himself or retrieve his fortunes; and the English captains in the name of their baby King took possession of one fortress after another, till, in 1429, Orleans was the only French city of rank still barring their way from Charles and the far south.[34]

Then came the sudden, wonderful arousing of the French under their peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture and execution.[35] At last even the French peasantry were roused; and the French nobles forgot their private quarrels and turned a united front against the invaders. The leaderless English lost battle after battle, until of all France they retained only Edward III's first conquest, the city of Calais.

France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the Council of Constance, and, remembering how long she had held the papacy within her own borders, asserted at least a qualified independence of the Romans by the "Pragmatic Sanction" which established the Gallican Church.[36]

This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King Charles, who, in fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the power which his good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won. Among other innovations he established a "standing army," the first permanent body of government troops in Teutonic Europe. By this step he did much to alter the mediæval into the modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy of kings over both nobles and people which continued in France and more or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow.

Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery into Europe[37]—a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was to face increasing responsibilities as well.

An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable types, that is, of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii, education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as much for standing armies.

DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"

A.D. 1300-1318

RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH

Out of what may be called the civil and religious storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the new life upon which the world was about to enter. From Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible world"—Dante's Divina Commedia—wherein also the deeper history of the visible world of man was both embodied from the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.

Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.

Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the Divina Commedia and his other great work, the Vita Nuova (the new life), narrate the love—either romantic or passionate—with which he was inspired by Beatrice Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems, which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of the modern world.

Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life of Dante, and of the history-making Commedia, attest the importance of including the poet and his work in this record of Great Events.

HE Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the Iliad and Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began.

We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar world—as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature, so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which he has added permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its ornaments—by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the solemn recollection supervenes that powers were formed, and life preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, and thus it should be; and the work which man has brooded over, and at last created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing of all things."

It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some cases and to a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the particular accidents among which it was developed—which belong perhaps to a heterogeneous and wildly discordant order of things, which are out of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to conspire—affects the imagination even more than cases where we see nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the Iliad, a work without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the Divina Commedia, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy, yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its chance incidents.

The Divina Commedia is singular among the great works with which it ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In general we associate little more than the name—not the life—of a great poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of the Commedia, as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose—the man conscious of power and intending to use it—and then the accidents among which he worked; but how the current of purpose threaded its way among them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot learn from history.

It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes the student—the student of the thirteenth century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the Provençals.

Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within his reach are accepted as the consolation of his human griefs; he is filled with the passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it. Philosophy has become the lady of his soul—to write allegorical poems in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death. He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the day.

Beatrice reappears—shadowy, melting at times into symbol and figure—but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and brooded once more on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him and that stable country "where the angels are in peace." Round her image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and suggested the form of the "sacred poem of earth and heaven."

And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration—the political life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet.

The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more felicitous in issue, of other western nations. It is remarkable for keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire, indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were uniting and union was becoming organization—and neither geographical remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network—while this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one—the history of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities—points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within, theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the minuteness of private life.

Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not less from the custom of the day than from his own purpose a public man. He took his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory at Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled himself in one of the guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the "art" of the apothecaries; he served the state as its agent abroad; he went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italyaccording to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies, even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of jubilee, 1300, he was one of the priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and coöperation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous page of Vergil; and no scholar ever read Vergil with such feeling—no astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labor and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.

The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a neighboring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs, who were led by the Donati, and the White Guelfs, who sided with Cerchi. It is still professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it grew evident that one party must crush the other and become dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause. The Cerchi, with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the Parte Guelfa; and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well.

Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they might have been the governors and guides of the Republic—if they had chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties equally, seem to have thought that this would have been the best result for the state. But the accounts of both, though they are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune, "more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared their adversaries." Boniface VIII had no prepossessions in Florence, except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he would have accepted and backed. But he said, "Io non voglio perdere gli uomini perle femminelle."[38] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is singled out in the setta dei cattivi, for deeper and special scorn—he,

"Che fece per vilta il gran rifinto,"[39]

the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.

Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates; in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West—with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love," asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire—the mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian—than among the assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del Fiore.

The Commedia, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle Ages in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his state of trial, as "comprehensor" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent scenery of the inferno and purgatorio, very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes—one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks of the Adige Valley—the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna; the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri; the marble quarries of Carrara; the "rough and desert ways between Lerici and Turbia," and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:

"Ai raggi, morti gia' bassi lidi,"[40]

or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath the Alpine fir:

"Un' ombra smorta Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta;"[41]

or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:

"d'un cader lento Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde Come di neve in Alpe senza vento."[42]

Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the Divina Commedia was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence—begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it—continued afterward in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the Vita Nuova. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)—"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of any woman. And afterward, may it please him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the countenance of Him, qui est per omnia secula benedictus." It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what he was promising, what he was pledging himself to—through what years of toil and anguish he would have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high venture should be realized.

But the Commedia is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the Vita Nuova. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may assume various changes—an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy—but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught—to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand though barbarous Latin to the literati of the fourteenth century; or a poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the Commedia. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion and the condition of his life.

But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone—except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already in the region of spirits, and meet him there—Casella, Forese; Guido Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and writes as a friendless man—to whom all that he had held dearest was either lost or imbittered; he thinks and writes for himself.

So comprehensive in interest is the Commedia. Any attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the plain-spoken prose of the Convito would show how he placed "the Divine Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife of opinions and sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject, which is God," is single perfection above all other sciences, "which are, as Solomon speaks, but queens or concubines or maidens; but she is the 'Dove,' and the 'perfect one'—'Dove,' because without stain of strife; 'perfect,' because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in which our soul stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage shows likewise how he viewed all human knowledge and human interests, as holding their due place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the steps of man's perfection. No account of the Commedia will prove sufficient which does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral purpose and deep spirit of faith with which it was written, and then the wide liberty of materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his design.

Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt. And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That he should take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who read the Commedia in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it—maintained with great labor and pertinacious ingenuity—that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness.

Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in which he disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his independence—

"A te fia bello Averti fatto parte per te stesso."[43]

Dante, by the Divina Commedia, was the restorer of seriousness in literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more. Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance; the Commedia checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the idea of infidelity—not heresy, but infidelity—was quite a familiar one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian Commedia had not seized on all minds. It would have been an evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the siren tales of the Decameron had not been the first to occupy the ears with the charms of a new language.

Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to open the grand procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote from popular thought—too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so undoubting—her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil, Ovid, and Statius—keen and subtle as a schoolman—as much an idolater of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance—his eye is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of external nature, to the wonders of the physical world—his interest in them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct, his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real in feeling and image—as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.

THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE

A.D. 1302

HENRI MARTIN[44]

At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the power of Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at its height, contentions arose between him and Pope Boniface VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the right of nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the dominions of the French King.

Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the county of Melgueil, which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in fief from the holy see. Boniface provoked Philip by a chiding bull, and added to the provocation by sending to the King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de Saisset, whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created Bishop of Pamiers.

This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant attitude, and afterward spoke of the King, who received him in sombre silence, as "that debaser of coinage, that proud and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare at people without saying anything."

Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him arrested and imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of treason, heresy, and blasphemy, and sent his chancellor, Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to the Pope, to demand the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his see.

The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta, fili," bull, received Philip's ambassadors, but their interview was marked by a violent scene: "My power!" exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power embraces and includes the temporal power!"

"So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that of the King, real."

To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he deemed the King guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior clergy of France to an assembly at Rome.

HILIP and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its own weapons, to enlist public opinion on their side, and to shelter themselves behind a great national manifestation; the three estates of France were convoked at Notre Dame in Paris, the 10th of April, 1302, to take cognizance of the differences between the King and the Pope. For the first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective entity, a political order.

It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and that he had the idea to seek in them moral power and support.

The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the feudality did not possess sufficient union, the people did not have enough force to profit on this occasion against the Crown. Besides, the Pope was more unpopular than the King, and had been so for a much longer time; the nobility, which, since the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced to resist clerical jurisdiction, had not changed in sentiment; as to the people, filled with the remembrance of St. Louis, they loved the King still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the oppressions of Philip, and besides it was easy to foresee that the mayors, consuls, aldermen, jurats or magistrates, who were to represent their cities in the great assembly at Paris, dazzled with the unaccustomed rôle to which they were called, and desirous to please the King in their personal interest or in that of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit lawyers who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known, might well have produced in many respects a contrary effect to the wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface touching the debasement of the coinage and the royal exactions, reproaches which so irritated Philip, might have met with other sentiments from the townsmen. The chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed among the public, instead of the original bull, a species of résumé in which he had assembled, in a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant pretensions of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which touched on the troubles of the nation against the King.

"Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of the French; fear God and observe his commandments. We want you to know that you are subject to us temporarily as well as spiritually; that the collation of the benefices and the prebends—revenues attached to the canonical positions—do not belong to you in any way; that if you have care of the vacant benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their successors; that if you have misapplied any of these benefices, we declare that collation invalid and revoke it, declaring as heretics all those who think otherwise.

"Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."

At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended answer to the pretended bull:

"Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."

This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which formerly would have drawn universal indignation on the head of the sacrilegious monarch.

The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual. The prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute, neutralized by the difficulties of their position between the King and the Pope; the lords and the townsmen hastened thither irritated against the bull, heated by the violence of the royal answer. The members of the assembly were influenced each by the other according to their arrival; the pungent and wily eloquence of Peter Flotte did the rest. The chancellor, as the first of the great crown officers and the king's chief justice, opened the states by a long harangue in which, speaking in the name of Philip, he exposed with much force and ingenuity the enterprises of the court of Rome and its wrongs toward the kingdom and the Church.

"The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers and unknown individuals who never become residents. The prelates no longer have benefices to give to nobles whose ancestors founded the churches, and to other lettered persons; from which results also that gifts are no longer given to the churches. The Pope imposes on the churches and benefices pensions, subsidies, exactions of all kinds. The bishops are kept from their ministry, being obliged to go to the holy see to carry presents—always presents. All these abuses have done nothing but increase under the actual pontificate, and increase every day—conditions that can no longer be tolerated. That is why I command you as your master and pray you as your friend to give me counsel and help."

The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his own initiative, to remedy the encroachments that his officers had made on the rights of the Church, and would have done so sooner had he not feared the appearance of submitting to the menaces and orders of the Pope, who pretended to reduce to a condition of vassalage the most noble kingdom of France, which had never been raised but from God. Peter Flotte dwelt especially on this latter argument, and appealed in turn to the interests of the nobility and of the clergy, and to national pride. The fiery Count of Artois arose, and exclaimed that even if the King submitted to the encroachments of the Pope, the nobility would not suffer them, and that the gentry would never acknowledge any temporal superior other than the King. The nobility and the Third Estate confirmed these words by their acclamations, and swore to sacrifice their properties and lives to defend the temporal independence of the kingdom. A Norman advocate, named Dubosc, procurator of the commune of Coutances, accused the Pope, in writing, of heresy for having wanted to despoil the King of the independence of the crown which he held from God. The embarrassment of the clergy was extreme; the members of the Church, fearing to be crushed in the crash between King and Pope, asked time for deliberation; their declaration in the assembly then being held, was insisted upon; already cries arose around them that whoever did not subscribe to the oath would be held as an enemy of the State; they acquiesced, satisfied apparently by an appearance of violence which would serve them for an excuse at Rome. They acknowledged themselves obliged, in common with the other orders, to defend the rights of the King and of the kingdom, whether they held estates from the King or not; then they prayed the King to be allowed to go to the council convoked by the Pope; the King and the barons declared themselves formally opposed.

The three orders then separated, so as to write to the court at Rome each its own side of the affair; the letters of the nobility and of the Third Estate—which as may be imagined were all prepared in advance by the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the assistants—were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any trouble, whether by the authority of the Pope or anyone else—unless it be from their sire, the King. This letter is signed, not only by the principal lords of the kingdom, but also by several great barons of the empire.

The epistle of the mayors, aldermen, jurats, consuls, universities, communes, and communities of the towns of the kingdom of France has not been preserved. It is known only, by the answer that the cardinals made, that it was conceived in the same spirit as the letter of the barons. The letter of the clergy is quite in another style: the clerks address their very holy father and very holy sire, the Pope; expose to him the complaints of the King and of the nobility; the necessity in which they find themselves engaged to defend the King's rights, and the anger of the laity; the imminent rupture of France with the Roman Church—and even of the people with the clergy in general—and conjure the highest prudence of the Pope to conserve the ancient union by revoking the convocation of the ecclesiastical council.

The states-general were dissolved immediately after the unique séance which had so well responded to the desires of the King. The means employed to attain this result were not entirelytirely loyal, nor was public opinion altogether free; it was but slightly enlightened on the grave debates that the authorities affected to submit to it. Nevertheless it was an important matter, this call to the French nation, and it must be acknowledged that the genius of France responded in proclaiming national independence, and in repelling the intervention of the court of Rome in the internal politics of the country.

WAR OF THE FLEMINGS WITH PHILIP THE FAIR OF FRANCE

A.D. 1302

EYRE EVANS CROWE

Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century the people of Flanders, whose country had been for centuries a feudal dependency of France, were considerably advanced in wealth and importance. They had become restive under the French rule, and their discontent ripened into settled hostility. Common commercial interests drew them into friendship with England, and in the quarrel between Philip the Fair and Edward I, 1295, concerning Edward's rule in Guienne (Aquitaine) the Flemings allied themselves with the English King.

In 1297 Philip invaded Flanders and gained several successes against the Flemings, who were feebly aided by King Edward. In 1299 the two kings settled their quarrel, and the Flemings were left to the vengeance of Philip, for in the pacification the court of Flanders was not included. A French army entered the Flemish territory, inflicted two defeats upon the Count's troops, and received the submission of the Count. Philip annexed Flanders to his crown and appointed a governor over the Flemings. In less than two years they rose in furious revolt. The insurrection began at Bruges, May 18, 1302, when over three thousand Frenchmen in that city were massacred by the insurgents. This massacre was called the "Bruges Matins." Such an outrage upon the French crown could not but bring upon the Flemings all the forces that Philip was able to muster. The two leading actions of the ensuing war—that at Courtrai, known as the "Battle of the Spurs," on account of the number of gilt spurs captured by the Flemings, and the engagement at Mons-la-Puelle—are described in the course of the narrative which follows. As a result of the battle of Courtrai the French nobility were nearly destroyed, and Philip found it necessary to recreate his titled bodies.

HE Flemings prepared to resist the storm. They chose Guy of Juliers, grandson of the Count of Flanders, to be their commander. Though a cleric, he did not hesitate to obey the call, in order to avenge his family, so cruelly betrayed by the French King. His brother, made prisoner at Furnes by the Count d'Artois, had perished in that rude Prince's keeping. His first attempt was to induce the people of Ghent to join the insurrection, but its rich burgesses preferred French rule to that of the Count of Flanders. Bruges, however, was supported by all the lesser and maritime towns of Flanders. Guy of Namur, a son of the Count, who had escaped to Germany, also returned with a body of soldiers from that country, and reassured the Flemings. These surprised one of the ducal manors, in which were five hundred French, and then took Courtrai, occupying the town, but not the castle. It was immediately besieged, as well as that of Cassel, the people of Ypres rallying to the French cause. The French garrison of the town of Courtrai sent pressing messengers for aid, and Robert of Artois marched with seven thousand knights and forty thousand foot, of which one-fourth were archers. The Flemish were but twenty thousand, of which none but the chiefs had horses. Neither was their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the latter being a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with iron, and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers and Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads from Courtrai to Ghent, behind a canal that communicated with the river Lys. A priest came with the host, but, there being no time to receive the communion, each man took some earth in his mouth. The counts then knighted Pierre Konig and the chiefs of bands, and took their station on foot with the rest.

The French had nine battalions or divisions, their archers or light troops being Lombards or Navarrese and Provençals. These the constable placed foremost, to commence the fight and harass the Flemings by their missiles. But the Count d'Artois overruled this manœuvre, and called it a Lombard trick, reproaching the Constable de Nesle with appreciating the Flemings too highly because of his connection with them. (He had married a daughter of the Count of Flanders.) "If you advance as far as I shall," replied the Count, "you will go far enough, I warrant." So saying he put spurs to his horse and led on his knights; on which the Count d'Artois and the French squadrons charged also. This formidable cavalry could not reach the Flemings, but fell one over the other into the canal, which they had not perceived, and which was five fathoms wide and three deep. The Flemish counts, seeing the disorder, instantly passed the canal on either side to take advantage of it, and fell on the discomfited French. The battle was but a massacre. Numbers of the French nobles perished—the Count d'Artois, Godfrey of Brabant and his son, the counts of Eu and of Albemarle, the Constable and his brother, De Tanquerville, Pierre Flotte, the Chancellor, and Jacques de St. Pol—in all some six thousand knights. Louis of Clermont and one or two others escaped, to the damage of their reputation. This battle of Courtrai was fought on July 11, 1302.

Had the war not been one exclusively of defence on the part of the Flemings, or had they had ambitious and adventurous chiefs, such a disaster might have endangered the throne of France. It was the Flemish democracy which had conquered, and its chiefs contented themselves with reducing the remaining cities, and expelling the gentry and rich citizens as of French inclinations. This reaction extended from Flanders into Brabant and Hainault. Philip in the mean time exerted all his activities and resources. Had he been an English king he would have called his parliament together, and have found national support and national supplies. The French King preferred having recourse to a recoinage. In 1294 he had forbidden any persons to keep plate unless they possessed an annual revenue of six thousand livres. He now ordered his bailies to deliver up their plate, and all non-functionaries to send half of theirs. Those who did so received payment in the new coin, and lost one-half thereby. A tax of one-fifth, or 20 per cent., of the annual revenue was levied on the land, and a twentieth was levied on the movable property. In the following year the King found it more advantageous to order that all prelates and barons should, for every five hundred livres of yearly revenue in land, furnish an armed and mounted gentleman for five months' service, while the non-noble was to furnish and keep up six infantry soldiers (sergens de pied) for every hundred hearths. This decree was a return to feudal military service, occasioned, no doubt, by the general disaffection caused by the raising of the war supplies in money. As if to recompense all classes for the severity of the exaction, Philip published an ordonnance of reform for the protection of both laymen and ecclesiastics from the arbitrary encroachments or interference of his officers.

Having thus set his realm in order, and collected an army of seventy thousand men at Arras, the King marched to meet the Flemings, who in equal force had mustered in the vicinity of Dovai. They kept, as at Courtrai, on the defensive; and the King of France, too cautious to attack them, allowed the whole autumn to pass, and returned to France after a campaign as inefficient as inglorious.

Philip had been long involved in a controversy with Pope Boniface VIII, and the quarrel still continued. It was not till some time after the battle of Courtrai that the King at last, delivered from the menacing hostility of Rome, had leisure to turn his mind and efforts again toward Flanders. During the year 1303 he had sought to keep the Flemings at bay by bodies of Lombard and Tuscan infantry, whom his Florentine banker persuaded him to hire, and by Amadeus V, Duke of Savoy, who brought soldiers of that country to his aid. Although the long lances and more perfect armor of these troops gave them some advantage over the Flemings, the latter took and burned Therouanne, overran Artois, and laid siege to Tournai. Amadeus of Savoy, unable to overcome the Flemings by arms, recommended Philip to do so by treaty, and the King accordingly concluded a pacification, one condition of which was that the Count of Flanders should be released from prison to negotiate terms of fresh accommodation. The Flemings received the aged Count with respect; but he brought no terms which they were willing to accept; and he returned, as he had pledged his word, to captivity at Compiègne, where he soon after died.

For the campaign of the following year Philip, in lieu of Italian infantry, took sixteen Genoese galleys into his pay, commanded by Rainier de Grimaldi. This admiral passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and assailed the maritime towns and shipping of Flanders. Guy of Namur mustered to oppose them a fleet of greater numbers; but the Genoese, accustomed to naval warfare, defeated the Flemings and took Guy of Namur prisoner. Philip, at the same time, assembled a large army at Tournai, and marched to Mons-la-Puelle, near Lille, where the Flemings, to the number of seventy thousand, were encamped within a circumvallation of cars and chariots. There was no Robert of Artois on this occasion to precipitate a rash onslaught, and by Philip's order the southern light troops harassed the Flemings all day with arrows and missiles, allowing them no repose. Toward the evening many of the French withdrew to refresh themselves and take off their armor; the King himself was of this number; the Flemings, perceiving this slackness, and divining the cause, poured forth from their encampment in three divisions, which at first drove all before them, and reached as far as the King's tent, then in full preparation for supper. The monarch himself, without armor or helmet, was fortunately not recognized; his secretary, De Boville, and two Parisians of the name of Gentien, whom Philip had always about his person, were slain before his eyes. The King withdrew, but it was to arm, mount on horseback, and cry out to his followers to stand their ground. He himself, says Villani, "one of the strongest and best made men of his time," fought valiantly until his brother Charles and most of the barons, recovering from the first panic, came to his rescue, and the Flemings were finally repulsed and put to the rout. William of Juliers fell on the side of the Flemings; the son of the Duke of Burgundy and many others on that of the French. Philip immediately laid siege to Lille, deeming the Flemings totally discomfited. They had, however, rallied, obtained reënforcements at Bruges and at Ghent, and in three weeks appeared to the number of fifty thousand before the King's camp at Lille, crying for battle. Philip called a council, and observed that "even a victory would be dearly purchased over a party so desperate."

The Duke of Brabant and the Count of Savoy therefore undertook to negotiate with the Flemings, and Philip consented to grant them fair terms. He recognized their independent rights, agreed to liberate Robert, eldest son of Guido, Count of Flanders, as well as all those in captivity. He granted Robert and his son the fiefs which belonged to him in France, especially that of Nevers, and promised to give him investiture of the County of Flanders. The Flemings, on their side, consented to pay two hundred thousand livres, and to leave the King of France in possession of the three towns of Lille, Douai, and Béthune, that part of Flanders in which French was spoken. It was thus, at least, that the French interpreted the treaty, while the Flemings afterward alleged that French Flanders was merely a pledge for the payment of the money, not an alienation to the crown of France.

FIRST SWISS STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY

A.D. 1308

F. GRENFELL BAKER

Owing to the fact that the house of Hapsburg had its origin in Switzerland, the accession of Rudolph I, founder of the Hapsburg dynasty, to the throne of Germany (1273), with the virtual headship of the Holy Roman Empire, was an event of great importance in the history of the Swiss cantons. To this day the paternal domains whence the Hapsburg family takes its name are a part of Swiss territory. The local administration, as well as such imperial offices as still remained in the free communities of Switzerland, were largely in the hands of this family long before it gave sovereigns to the empire itself. Its chiefs were the chosen champions or advocates of the district.

Of the Swiss communities Uri seems to have first established its freedom within the empire, and in that canton liberty was most completely preserved from the perils that always threatened Switzerland in this period. Under Rudolph it was at first the policy of the empire to secure the attachment of the Swiss by making the two other cantons, Schwyz and Unterwalden, similarly independent. But toward the end of his reign the policy of Rudolph was so influenced by ambition for territorial expansion that the Swiss began to feel an encroachment upon their independence. In 1291, the year of Rudolph's death, the three cantons, fearing danger to their interests in the new settlement of the crown, formed a league for mutual protection and coöperation. The very parchment on which the terms of this union were written "has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating narrative, are romantically blended.

The empire passed out of the Hapsburg control when Rudolph died, but the family again got possession of it in 1298, when Rudolph's son Albert was elected German king. In the following account the relations of Switzerland and Austria, under the renewed Hapsburg sovereignty, are circumstantially set forth.

HERE can be little doubt that most of the many stories related by the Swiss of the cruelty and extortion of the Austrian bailies are wholly or in great part devoid of a historical basis of truth, as are the dates given for their occurrence. They doubtless sprang from the very natural feelings of hatred the mountaineers of the Forest State felt against a foreign master, who was probably only too ready to punish them for the part they took against him in the struggle for the imperial throne. Indeed, it was not till about two centuries after this period that any reference to the alleged cruelties of the Austrians can be found in the local records, though legends about them have been plentiful.

Many and various are the stories that have come down to our times of the oppression and licentiousness of the bailies, most of which have probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless manner; they openly violated the liberties of the people, and chose every occasion to insult and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this insult Henry's son Arnold responded by attacking the messenger and breaking his fingers, and then, fearing lest his act should bring down some serious punishment, fled to the mountains, and left his aged father to Landenburg's vengeance. The bailie confiscated his little property, imposed a heavy fine, and finally burned out both his eyes.

The hot irons used in this barbarous punishment, the Swiss are fond of saying, went deeper than the tyrant intended, and penetrated to the hearts and aroused the sympathies of their ancestors to perform such acts of heroism that tyranny fled in fear from the land. The conduct of Arnold, however, can hardly at this period of his life warrant the eulogies bestowed upon his memory, though he subsequently figures as one of the "Men of Ruetli."

Landenburg lived in a castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden, where his imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his debaucheries aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the peasants, that culminated in his expulsion and the destruction of his stronghold. The latter is popularly believed to have occurred on January 1, 1308. As the bailie left his castle to attend mass, some forty determined peasants, who had already bound themselves by oath to free their country at a solemn meeting on the steep promontory over the Lake of Lucerne known as the Ruetli, appeared before him carrying sheep, fowls, and other customary presents, and thus gained admission to the castle. No sooner were they past the gates than, drawing the weapons they had till then concealed beneath their clothes, they disarmed the guard and took possession of the fortress. Other conspirators were admitted, and the people at once rose in revolt. Landenburg, hearing while still at church of what had occurred, managed to effect his escape, and fled to Lucerne. Of the other bailies, Gessler and Wolfenschiess are believed to have excited even more hatred than their colleague Landenburg, and to have exceeded him in acts of savage cruelty and vicious living.

One example out of many similar ones will show the spirit in which the Swiss traditions have treated the memory of Wolfenschiess. On a certain day, finding that a peasant named Conrad, of Baumgarten, whose wife he had frequently tried in vain to seduce, was absent from home, Wolfenschiess entered Conrad's house and ordered his wife to prepare him a bath, at the same time renewing with ardor his former proposals. With the cunning of her sex, the wife feigned to be willing to accede to his wishes, and on the pretence of retiring to another room to undress sped to her husband, who quickly returned and slew Wolfenschiess while he was still in the bath. After this exploit an entrance was effected into the bailies' castle of Rotzberg by one of the conspirators, who was in the habit of paying nightly visits to a servant living in the castle, by means of a rope attached to her window, and who then admitted his companions, who were lying concealed in the moat.

But, probably in consequence of his supposed connection with the legend of William Tell, the bailie to whom the name of Gessler has been given stands out more prominently in Swiss history than any other. Gessler's residence, according to tradition, was a strongly fortified castle built in the valley of Uri, near Altorf, and this he named Zwing Uri ("Uri's Restraint"). He used every means that cruelty or avarice could suggest in his conduct as governor, and incurred additional hatred from the methods he adopted to discover the members of a secret conspiracy he believed existed against him in the district. With this object in view, Gessler caused a pole, surmounted with the ducal cap of Austria, to be set up in the market-place at Altorf, before which emblem of authority he ordered every man to uncover and do reverence as he passed. The refusal of a peasant to obey this command, his arrest, trial, and condemnation to pierce with an arrow an apple placed on his own child's head, his dexterity in performing this feat, his escape from his enemies, his murder of the tyrant Gessler, the solemn compact sworn at Ruetli, and the revolutionary events that followed form the motive of the much-celebrated legend of William Tell.

The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque representative of liberty has done much to mould the political life, if not also to write many pages of the history of the people, and that in spite of the questionable morality of the received narrative of his career, and its unquestionable untruth. The emergence of the Swiss from slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a possible substratum of actual fact.

It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with the material of the latter.

As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical foundation, and is more widely known and believed than are the many others related as the records of events happening at the period from which the Swiss date their independence, it may be as well to devote some little space to its consideration. All the local records that might possibly throw some light on the existence and career of Tell have now been thoroughly searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that, till a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their deaths, not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending to prove the identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant Gessler. On the other hand, many local authorities, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the story was fully established, have gone out of their way to deny its truth and prove its entire falsity from their own researches. Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies, whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and fifty or two hundred years—yet such is the case.

William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds in or about the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474 are his acts recorded, when in a collection of the traditions of the Canton of Unterwalden, transcribed by a notary at Sarnen, an account is given of the apple episode and the subsequent escape of the famous archer, and his murder of Gessler, though nothing is said of his having taken part in a league to free his country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A little prior to the compilation of the White Book of Sarnen, as this collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a Song of the Origin of the Confederation, in which, although no reference is made to Gessler, the other details are related concerning William Tell shooting at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the expulsion of the bailies, and the formation of a patriotic league. It is, of course, quite possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was common enough at the time, but no member of that family—the records of which have now been most carefully traced—held any office under the Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231. Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss hero.

"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious case of confusion in identity. At least three totally different men seem to have been blended into one in the course of an attempt to reconcile the different versions of the three cantons. Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in 1450, tells of a Hapsburg governor being on the little island of Schwanan, in the lake of Lowerz, who seduced a maid of Schwyz, and was killed by her brothers. Then there was another person, strictly historical, Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and the result was named Gessler."

Moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether the green plateau of the Ruetli below Seelisberg, and some six hundred and fifty feet above the lake, with its miraculous springs, ever witnessed the patriotic gathering of the thirty-three peasants who, tradition asserts, there formed the league against Austrian rule, or heard the solemn oath they and their leaders, Stauffacher, Fuerst, and Arnold, mutually swore.

In all probability the legend of Tell and the apple originated in Scandinavia, and was brought by the Alemanni into Switzerland; as into other lands. Saxo Grammaticus, in the Withina Saga, places the scene of a very similar story in that country, some three hundred years before the appearance of the Swiss version, and tells of a certain Danish king named Harold, the counterpart of Gessler, and one Toki, who played the same rôle enacted by Tell. Like legends are also related of Olaf, Eindridi, and an almost identical one to that of William Tell of Egil, who, being ordered by King Nidung to shoot an apple off the head of the son of the former, took two arrows from his quiver and prepared to obey. On the King asking why he had selected two arrows, Egil replied, "To shoot thee, tyrant, with the second, should the first fail."

Neither are similar narratives absent from the legends of other countries. Thus Reginald Scott says: "Puncher shot a penny on his son's head, and made ready another arrow to have slain the Duke of Rengrave, who commanded it." So also similar incidents occur in the tales of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Claudeslie in the Percy Ballads, and in the legends of many places in Northern Europe. On this subject Sir Francis Adams mentions, in a note to his valuable book on the Swiss Confederation, that a well-known citizen of Berne, in answer to his inquiry as to whether Tell ever existed, replied: "Not in Switzerland. If you travel in the Hasli districts you will find a distinct race of men, who are of Scandinavian origin, and I believe that their ancestors brought the legend with them." To this it may be added that philologists have long since traced the rude dialect of Oberhasli to its Scandinavian sources, and the physical characteristics of the people mark them as of different racial origin from those around them.

At the period these events were in progress, or, rather, about the time that the Austrian bailies were expelled, toward the close of the thirteenth century, the Emperor's[45] attention was too fully occupied conducting a war against the Bishop of Basel to

allow him to enforce his authority among the revolted Waldstaette. He did not, however, allow the peasants for long to enjoy the fruits of their energetic and successful action, as some six months later he headed a large army with which he intended to enforce obedience. The expedition thus begun led to Albert's tragic death, and reared another step leading to the final independence of the Swiss. On reaching Baden, in the Aargau, a halt was made in order to deliberate on the best mode of punishing the rebels. Here a general council of nobles decided, after careful deliberation, on the route to be taken, and the nature of the measures best calculated to enforce Albert's authority. On May 1, 1308, the Emperor, with a few followers, returned to Rheinfelden, in order to visit the Empress Elizabeth, preparatory to marching against the Waldstaette. Shortly before this time Albert had had a violent quarrel with his nephew John, son of Duke Rudolph of Swabia, touching the youth's paternal inheritance, which he persistently declined to allow John to take possession of, and whom he had, moreover, publicly insulted by offering him a coronet of twigs as the only recompense for his just claims.

In spite of this quarrel Albert allowed John and four of his fastest friends to occupy a place in his suite when he left Baden to visit his consort. Albert's disregard of his nephew's resentment was further shown when the party arrived on the bank of the Reuss, as he allowed him, with his friends, to accompany him in the boat in which he crossed the river. The passage was made in safety, but just as the Emperor was stepping on shore near the town of Windisch, John and three of his companions struck him down with their swords, and after inflicting a number of severe wounds left him for dead. The unhappy monarch expired a few minutes after in the arms of a passing peasant woman. All this bloody scene took place in full view of the Emperor's train on the opposite side of the river, though no one apparently was able to render him assistance, probably from the absence of boats and the suddenness of the tragedy. The murderers succeeded in making good their escape, though two of them were afterward captured and executed, as were also a number of innocent people believed to be participators in the conspiracy. John himself was more fortunate, for, disguised as a monk, he managed for many years to hide his identity, and, after wandering in Tuscany unsuspected, eventually died in a monastery at Pisa.

Albert's daughter Agnes, Queen of Hungary, "a woman unacquainted with the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and revenge. Aided by those in authority, who feared lest a widespread conspiracy had been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion, hundreds of innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity of a famished beast. Members of nearly a hundred noble families, and at least a thousand persons of lower rank, of every age and of both sexes, fell beneath her savage vengeance. She is said to have further whetted her appetite for horrors by wading, at Fahrwangen, in the blood of sixty-three innocent knights, exclaiming the while, "This day we bathe in May-dew." But at last, after several months, even the implacable bloodthirstiness of the Hungarian Queen was satisfied, and the massacre ceased. Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life, and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried. Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house of Austria.

Strenuous efforts were made by Albert's widow to obtain the succession to the imperial throne for her son, Frederick, Duke of Austria, but the choice of the prince-electors, headed by the Archbishop of Mainz, fell on Count Henry of Luxemburg, a liberal-minded and generous noble, who was accordingly crowned, under the title of Henry VII. During the short reign of this monarch he proved himself a wise and generous friend to the Swiss, whose privileges he confirmed. He made no effort to reimpose local governors on the people of the Waldstaette, but, on the contrary, confirmed the charters of Schwyz and Uri, granted one to Unterwalden, and acknowledged jurisdiction. After Henry's death, in 1313, civil war once more divided the empire through the rival contentions of Ludwig (Louis) of Bavaria and Albert's son, Frederick of Austria. In this contest the powerful monastery of Einsiedeln sided with the Austrian candidate, and through its influence induced the Bishop of Constance to place the large portion of Switzerland supporting the Bavarian cause under a sentence of excommunication.

Between Einsiedeln and the Waldstaette there had long existed a feeling of bitter hostility, the canons resenting the independent spirit displayed by the peasants, and the latter remembering the many acts of arbitrary oppression they and their ancestors had suffered at the instance of the abbey. Indeed, actual hostilities were only prevented by the friendly, though interested, mediation of the citizens of Zurich, who were most anxious to preserve tranquillity in the territories of both, in order to allow their trade with Italy over the St. Gothard being carried on. They also favored peace, because since the Hapsburgs had refused permission to the peasants to enter Lucerne, these had been in the habit of bringing their cattle and dairy produce through Einsiedeln to the monks of Zurich. The action of the monks, however, in bringing about the serious sentence of excommunication so roused the spirit of the mountaineers that, headed by their Landammann, Werner Stauffacher, they attacked and captured the abbey, ransacked the whole building from cellar to altar, and carried off the monks captive to the town of Schwyz. This daring and sacrilegious act led Frederick—the hereditary avoyer of the abbey—to place the Waldstaette under the further punishment of the "ban of the empire." Both these sentences were alike fruitless in bringing the peasants to submission to the house of Austria. Shortly after, on Ludwig ascending the throne, the "ban" was removed by the new monarch, and, with the aid of the Archbishop of Mainz, the Metropolitan of Constance in 1315, the excommunication was also revoked.

The triumph of Ludwig's claims over those of Frederick began that long series of deadly conflicts between the Swiss and the house of Austria that led the two nations for so many years to regard each other as natural and implacable enemies. At this time Austria was governed by Duke Leopold, a man of arrogant, passionate temper, of unscrupulous ambition, and brutal cruelty, according to the Swiss chronicles, but who, from other accounts, does not appear specially to have deserved this character. His hatred of the Swiss was greatly increased by their action in opposing his brother, Frederick, in the late contest. No sooner, indeed, were the troubles of that contest over than he prepared to wreak his vengeance, and once for all crush the power and independence of the Forest States, and, as he declared, "trample the audacious rustics under his feet."

Rapidly collecting his forces, Leopold soon found himself at the head of fifteen thousand or twenty thousand well-armed men, including a large body of heavily equipped cavalry. These latter were then looked upon as the main strength of an army. Most of the ancient nobility of Hapsburg, Kyburg, and Lenzburg rallied to his banners, besides many of the lesser nobles and a contingent from Zurich, the citizens of which, deserting their natural allies, had formed a treaty with Austria. Against this formidable array the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden were only able to muster some fourteen hundred men, who, however, made up for their want of weapons and discipline by the geographical advantages of the country, by their patriotism, unity, and determined bravery.

Nothing now seemed to intervene between the Swiss and imminent destruction, when, viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days, the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms, however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing came of these proposals.

On November 3, 1315, Leopold's army reached Baden, where a council was held to determine upon the details of the campaign, a campaign having for its object, as the Duke openly declared, "the extirpation of the whole race of the people of Waldstaette." The difficulties of the enterprise now began to show themselves, as several of Leopold's followers, being well acquainted with the nature of the country and the characters of the inhabitants, pointed out that both would offer a determined resistance. Finally, relying upon their numbers and superior arms, it was settled to march on Schwyz, through the Sattel Pass by Morgarten, making Zug the base of operations; and while a false attack should be threatened on the side of Arth, Unterwalden should be attacked from Lucerne, as well as by a large force under the Count of Strasburg by way of the Bruenig. Leopold himself was to lead the main army and enter Schwyz through the pass. Had these operations remained secret, or been carried out successfully, the course of Swiss history would probably have been very different from what it was; but fortunately for the cause of freedom, the Austrian plans became known in time, and failed signally when put to the test. According to ancient chronicles, as the Confederates were hurrying to repel the feint from Arth, a friendly Austrian baron, named Henry of Huenenberg, shot an arrow amid them bearing the message, "Guard Morgarten on the eve of St. Othmar." Be this as it may, the Swiss collected their little band on the Sattel, between which mountain and the eastern shore of the Lake of Egeri is situated the ever-memorable Pass of Morgarten. Here, on the night of November 14th, they collected a number of loose bowlders and tree-trunks, and then, having offered up prayers for the preservation of their country, they awaited with resolution the coming struggle.

With the first dawn of morning the Austrian army—the first that ever entered the country—made its appearance in the pass, headed by Duke Leopold and his formidable cavalry. Suddenly, when the whole narrow defile was blocked with horse and foot, thousands of heavy stones and trees were hurled among them from the neighboring heights, where the peasant band, forming the Swiss force, lay concealed. The suddenness and vigor of this unexpected attack quickly threw the first ranks of the invaders into confusion, and caused a panic to seize the horses, many of which in their fright turned and trampled down the men behind. Rapidly the panic increased as the showers of missiles came tearing down, and soon the whole army was in a state of wild terror and confusion—a condition greatly assisted by the slippery nature of the ground. Then, with wild shouts, and brandishing their iron-studded clubs and their formidable halberts and scythes, down the mountain-side rushed, with the fury of their native avalanche, the heroic Confederates; and falling on their foes literally slew them by thousands. Many hundreds of the Austrians perished in the lake, the men of Zurich alone making a stand, and falling each where he fought. Few succeeded in effecting their escape from what was little less than a general butchery.

On that memorable day all the flower of Austria's nobility lay dead within the country they had hoped so easily to conquer. The Duke, with a handful of followers, alone survived, and even these were forced to undergo many perils before they eventually arrived in safety at Winterthur. Neither were the other attacks, under the Count of Strasburg and the forces from Lucerne, more successful for the invaders. Both armies were repulsed with enormous loss by the men of Unterwalden, who gave no quarter, many of their opponents being their own countrymen from the estates of the abbey of Interlaken. After these signal victories the Swiss, according to ancient custom, offered up a solemn thanksgiving to almighty God for their success and the overthrow of their enemies; and then, having laden themselves with the spoils of the dead, they returned to their humble occupations, whence the defence of their country and their lives had called them away. Among the Swiss, Morgarten has always taken the first place in the long record of heroic victories that since 1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms second to none in Europe. This victory at once brought the Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and placed them in the front rank as powerful and respected states in Switzerland.

Leopold, on his return to Austria, was so satisfied with the ability of the "audacious rustics" to defend themselves that he made no further attempt to enter their country.

BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN

A.D. 1314

ANDREW LANG

After the submission of Scotland in 1303, at the end of Wallace's heroic struggle, Edward I undertook to complete the union of that kingdom with England. "But the great difficulty," says a historian, "in dealing with the Scots was that they never knew when they were conquered; and just when Edward hoped that his scheme for union was carried out, they rose in arms once more."

The Scottish leader now was Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale and Earl of Carrick. He had acted with Wallace, but afterward swore fealty to Edward. Still later he united with William Lamberton, Bishop of St. Andrews, against the English King. Edward heard of their compact while Bruce was in London, and the Scot fled to Dumfries. There, 1306, in the Church of the Gray Friars, he had an interview with John Comyn, called the Red Comyn—Bruce's rival for the Scottish throne—which ended in a violent altercation and the killing of Comyn by Bruce with a dagger. Next to the Baliols, Bruce was now nearest heir to the throne, and March 27, 1306, he was crowned.

Edward now determined to take more vigorous measures than ever against the Scots. He denounced as traitors all who had participated in the murder of Comyn, and declared that all persons taken in arms would be put to death. He made great preparations for subduing Scotland, but while leading his army into that country, 1307, he died at Burgh-on-the-Sands, near Carlisle.

Meanwhile Bruce, who ranks with Wallace as a Scottish hero, had suffered some reverses at the hands of the English. Under the Earl of Pembroke, in 1306, they took Perth and drove Bruce into the wilds of Athol. In the same year, at Dairy, Bruce was defeated by Comyn's uncle, Macdougal, Lord of Lorn, and escaped to Ireland. But in 1307 Bruce returned to Scotland and carried on the war against Edward II. The English were driven out of the strong places one by one; war alternated with diplomacy through several years; and at last came a crisis which roused the English government to a supreme effort.

Stirling castle still held out, besieged by Edward Bruce, Robert's brother, 1313, but its surrender was promised by Mowbray, the governor, in the event of his not being relieved before June 24, 1314. The relieving of Stirling meant for the English a new invasion of Scotland. On both sides the strongest efforts were made—on the one side to relieve the castle, on the other to strengthen its besiegers. The opposing forces met in battle at Bannockburn, June 24, 1314, an action which has never been better described than in this characteristic recital by Professor Lang.

ANNOCKBURN, like the relief of Orleans, or Marathon, was one of the decisive battles of the world. History hinged upon it. If England had won, Scotland might have dwindled into the condition of Ireland—for Edward II was not likely to aim at a statesmanlike policy of union, in his father's manner. Could Scotland have accepted union at the first Edward's hands; could he have refrained from his mistreatment as we must think it of Baliol, the fortunes of the isle of Britain might have been happier. But had Scotland been trodden down at Bannockburn, the fortunes of the isle might well have been worse.

The singular and certain fact is that Bannockburn was fought on a point of chivalry, on a rule in a game. England must "touch bar," relieve Stirling, as in some child's pastime. To the securing of the castle, the central gate of Scotland, north and south, England put forth her full strength. Bruce had no choice but to concentrate all the power of a now, at last, united realm, and stand just where he did stand. His enemies knew his purpose: by May 27th writs informed England that the Scots were gathering on heights and morasses inaccessible to cavalry. If ever Edward showed energy, it was in preparing for the appointed Midsummer Day of 1314. The Rotuli Scotiæ contain several pages of his demands for men, horses, wines, hay, grain, provisions, and ships. Endless letters were sent to master mariners and magistrates of towns. The King appealed to his beloved Irish chiefs, O'Donnells, O'Flyns, O'Hanlens, MacMahons, M'Carthys, Kellys, O'Reillys, and O'Briens, and to Hiberniæ Magnates, Anglico genere ortos, Butlers, Blounts, De Lacys, Powers, and Russels. John of Argyll was made admiral of the western fleet, and was asked to conciliate the Islesmen, who, under Angus Og, were rallying to Bruce. The numbers of men engaged on either side in this war cannot be ascertained. Each kingdom had a year within which to muster and arm.

"Then all that worthy were to fight Of Scotland, set all hale their might;"

while Barbour makes Edward assemble not only

"His own chivalry That was so great it was ferly,"

but also knights of France and Hainault, Bretagne and Gascony, Wales, Ireland, and Aquitaine. The whole English force is said to have exceeded one hundred thousand, forty thousand of whom were cavalry, including three thousand horses "barded from counter to tail," armed against stroke of sword or point of spear. The baggage train was endless, bearing tents, harness, "and apparel of chamber and hall," wine, wax, and all the luxuries of Edward's manner of campaigning, including animalia, perhaps lions. Thus the English advanced from Berwick,

"Banners rightly fairly flaming, And pencels to the wind waving."

On June 23d Bruce heard that the English host had streamed out of Edinburgh, where the dismantled castle was no safe hold, and were advancing on Falkirk. Bruce had summoned Scotland to tryst in Torwood, whence he could retreat at pleasure, if, after all, retreat he must. The Fiery Cross, red with blood of a sacrificed goat, must have flown through the whole of the Celticland. Lanarkshire, Douglasdale, and Ettrick Forest were mustered under the banner of Douglas, the mullets not yet enriched with the royal heart. The men of Moray followed their new earl, Randolph, the adventurous knight who scaled the rock of the castle of the Maidens. Renfrewshire, Bute, and Ayr were under the fesse chequy of young Walter Stewart. Bruce had gathered his own Carrick men, and Angus Og led the wild levies of the Isles. Of stout spearmen and fleet-footed clansmen Bruce had abundance; but what were his archers to the archers of England, or his five hundred horse under Keith the mareschal, to the rival knights of England, Hainault, Guienne, and Almayne?

Battles, however, are won by heads, as well as by hearts and hands. The victor of Glen Trool and Cruachen and London Hill knew every move in the game, while Randolph and Douglas were experts in making one man do the work of five. Bruce, too, had choice of ground, and the ground suited him well.

To reach Stirling the English must advance by their left, along the so-called German way, through the village of St. Nian's, or by their right, through the Carse, partly enclosed, and much broken, in drainless days, by reedy lochans. Bruce did not make his final dispositions till he learned that the English meant to march by the former route. He then chose ground where his front was defended, first by the little burn of Bannock, which at one point winds through a cleugh with steep banks, and next by two morasses, Halbert's bog and Milton bog. What is now arable ground may have been a loch in old days, and these two marshes were then impassable by a column of attack.

Between Charter's Hall—where Edward had his head-quarters—and Park's Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land. By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and even by caltrops to maim the horses. He determined to fight on foot, the wooded country being difficult for horsemen, and the foe being infinitely superior in cavalry. His army was arranged in four "battles," with Randolph to lead the vaward and watch against any attempt to throw cavalry into Stirling. Edward Bruce commanded the division on the right, next the Torwood. Walter Stewart, a lad, with Douglas led the third division. Bruce himself and Angus Og, with the men of Carrick and the Celts, were in the rear. Bruce had no mind to take the offensive, and as at the Battle of the Standard, to open the fight with a charge of impetuous mountaineers. On Sunday morning mass was said, and men shrived them.

"They thought to die in the mêlée, Or else to set their country free."

They ate but bread and water, for it was the vigil of St. John. News came that the English had moved out of Falkirk, and Douglas and the Steward brought tidings of the great and splendid host that was rolling north. Bruce bade them make little of it in the hearing of the army.

Meanwhile Philip de Mowbray, who commanded in Stirling, had ridden forth to meet and counsel Edward. His advice was to come no nearer; perhaps a technical relief was held to have already been secured by the presence of the army.

Mowbray was not heard—"the young men" would not listen. Gloucester, with the van, entered the park, where he was met, as we shall see, and Clifford, Beaumont, and Sir Thomas Grey, with three hundred horsemen, skirted the wood where Randolph was posted, a clear way lying before them to the castle of Stirling. Bruce had seen this movement, and told Randolph that "a rose of his chaplet was fallen," the phrase attesting the King's love of chivalrous romance. To pursue horsemen with infantry seemed vain enough; but Randolph moved out of cover, thinking perhaps that knights adventurous would refuse no chance to fight. If this was his thought, he reckoned well. Beaumont cried to his knights, "Give ground, leave them fair field." Grey hinted that the Scots were in too great force, and Beaumont answered, "If you fear, fly!" "Sir," said Sir Thomas, "for fear I fly not this day!" and so spurred in between Beaumont and D'Eyncourt and galloped on the spears. D'Eyncourt was slain, Grey was unhorsed and taken. The three hundred lances of Beaumont then circled Randolph's spearmen round about on every side, but the spears kept back the horses. Swords, maces, and knives were thrown; all was done as by the French cavalry against the British squares at Waterloo, and all as vainly. The hedge of steel was unbroken, and, in the hot sun of June, a mist of dust and heat brooded over the battle.

"Sic mirkness In the air above them was"

as when the sons of Thetis and the Dawn fought under the walls of windy Troy. Douglas beheld the distant cloud, and rode to Bruce, imploring leave to hurry to Randolph's aid. "I will not break my ranks for him," said Bruce; yet Douglas had his will. But the English wavered, seeing his line advance, and thereon Douglas halted his men, lest Randolph should lose renown. Beholding this the spearmen of Randolph, in their turn, charged and drove the weary English horse and their disheartened riders.

Meanwhile Edward had halted his main force to consider whether they should fight or rest. But Gloucester's party, knowing nothing of his halt, had advanced into the wooded park; and Bruce rode down to the right in his armor, and with a gold coronal on his basnet, but mounted on a mere palfrey. To the front of the English van, under Gloucester and Hereford, rode Sir Henry Bohun, a bow-shot beyond his company. Recognizing the King, who was arraying his ranks, Bohun sped down upon him, apparently hoping to take him.

"He thought that he should dwell lightly, Win him, and have him at his will."

But Bruce, in this fatal movement, when history hung on his hand and eye, uprose in his stirrups and clove Bohun's helmet, the axe breaking in that stroke. It was a desperate but a winning blow: Bruce's spears advanced, and the English van withdrew in half superstitious fear of the omen. His lords blamed Bruce, but

"The King has answer made them none, But turned upon the axe-shaft, wha Was with the stroke broken in twa."

"Initium malorum hoc" ("This was the beginning of evil"), says the English chronicler.

After this double success in the Quatre Bras of the Scottish Waterloo, Bruce, according to Barbour, offered to his men their choice of withdrawal or of standing it out. The great general might well be of doubtful mind—was to-morrow to bring a second and a more fatal Falkirk? The army of Scotland was protected, as Wallace's army at Falkirk had been, by difficult ground. But the English archers might again rain their blinding showers of shafts into the broad mark offered by the clumps of spears, and again the English knights might break through the shaken ranks. Bruce had but a few squadrons of horse—could they be trusted to scatter the bowmen of the English forests, and to escape a flank charge from the far heavier cavalry of Edward? On the whole, was not the old strategy best, the strategy of retreat? So Bruce may have pondered. He had brought his men to the ring, and they voted for dancing. Meanwhile the English rested on a marshy plain "outre-Bannockburn" in sore discomfiture, says Gray. He must mean south of Bannockburn, taking the point of view of his father, at that hour captive in Bruce's camp. He tells us that the Scots meant to retire "into the Lennox, a right strong country"—this confirms, in a way, Barbour's tale of Bruce suggesting retreat—when Sir Alexander Seton, deserting Edward's camp, advised Bruce of the English lack of spirit, and bade him face the foe next day. To retire, indeed, was Bruce's, as it had been Wallace's, natural policy. The English would soon be distressed for want of supplies; on the other hand, they had clearly made no arrangements for an orderly retreat if they lost the day; with Bruce this was a motive for fighting them. The advice of Seton prevailed; the Scots would stand their ground.

The sun of Midsummer Day rose on the rite of the mass done in front of the Scottish lines. Men breakfasted, and Bruce knighted Douglas, the Steward, and other of his nobles. The host then moved out of the wood, and the standards rose above the spears of the soldiers. Edward Bruce held the right wing; Randolph the centre; the left, under Douglas and the Steward, rested of St. Ninian's. Bruce, as he had arranged, was in reserve with Carrick and the Isles. "Will these men fight?" asked Edward, and Sir Ingram assured him that such was their intent. He advised that the English should make a feigned retreat, when the Scots would certainly break their ranks—

"Then prick we on them hardily."

Edward rejected his old ruse, which probably would not have beguiled the Scottish leader. The Scots then knelt for a moment of prayer, as the Abbot of Inchafray bore the crucifix along the line; but they did not kneel to Edward. His van, under Gloucester, fell on Edward Bruce's division, where there was hand-to-hand fighting, broken lances, dying chargers, the rear ranks of Gloucester pressing vainly on the front ranks, unable to deploy for the straitness of the ground.

Meanwhile, Randolph's men moved forward slowly with extended spears, "as they were plunged in the sea" of charging knights. Douglas and the Steward were also engaged, and the "hideous shower" of arrows was ever raining from the bows of England. This must have been the crisis of the fight, according to Barbour, and Bruce bade Keith with his five hundred horse charge the English archers on the flank. The bowmen do not seem to have been defended by pikes; they fell beneath the lances of the mareschal, as the archers of Ettrick had fallen at Falkirk. The Scottish archers now took heart, and loosed into the crowded and reeling ranks of England, while the flying bowmen of the south clashed against and confused the English charge. Then Scottish archers took to their steel sparths—who ever loved to come to hand strokes—and hewed into the mass of the English, so that the field, whither Bruce brought up his reserves to support Edward Bruce on the right, was a mass of wild, confused fighting. In this mellay the great body of the English army could deal no stroke, swaying helplessly as southern knights or northern spears won some feet of ground. So, in the space between Halbert's bog and the burn, the mellay rang and wavered, the long spears of the Scottish ranks unbroken and pushing forward, the ground before them so covered with fallen men and horses that the English advance was clogged and crushed between the resistance in front and the pressure behind.

"God will have a stroke in every fight," says the romance of Malory. While the discipline was lost, and England was trusting to sheer weight and "who will pound longest," a fresh force, banners displayed, was seen rushing down the Gillies' Hill, beyond the Scottish right. The English could deem no less than that this multitude were tardy levies from beyond the Spey, above all when the slogans rang out from the fresh advancing host. It was a body of yeomen, shepherds, and camp-followers, who could no longer remain and gaze when fighting and plunder were in sight. With blankets fastened to cut saplings for banner-poles, they ran down to the conflict. The King saw them, and well knew that the moment had come: he pealed his ensenye—called his battle-cry—faint hearts of England failed; men turned, trampling through the hardy warriors who still stood and died; the knights who rode at Edward's rein strove to draw him toward the castle of Stirling. But now the foremost knights of Edward Bruce's division, charging on foot, had fought their way to the English King and laid hands on the rich trappings of his horse. Edward cleared his way with strokes of his mace; his horse was stabbed, but a fresh mount was found for him. Even Sir Giles de Argentine, the best knight on ground, bade Edward fly to Stirling castle. "For me, I am not of custom to fly," he said, "nor shall I do so now. God keep you!" Thereon he spurred into the press, crying "Argentine!" and died among the spears.

None held his ground for England. The burn was choked with fallen men and horses, so that folk might pass dry-shod over it. The country people fell on and slew. If Bruce had possessed more cavalry, not an Englishman would have reached the Tweed. Edward, as Argentine bade him, rode to Stirling, but Mowbray told him that there he would be but a captive king. He spurred south, with five hundred horse, Douglas following with sixty, so close that no Englishman might alight, but was slain or taken. Laurence de Abernethy, with eighty horse, was riding to join the English, but turned, and with Douglas, pursued them. Edward reached Dunbar, whence he took boat for Berwick. In his terror he vowed to build a college of Carmelites, students in theology. It is Oriel College to-day, with a Scot for provost. Among those who fell on the English side were the son of Comyn, Gloucester, Clifford, Harcourt, Courtenay, and seven hundred other gentlemen of coat-armor were slain. Hereford (later), with Angus, Umfraville, and Sir Thomas Grey, was among the prisoners. Stirling, of course, surrendered.

The sun of Midsummer Day set on men wounded and weary, but victorious and free. The task of Wallace was accomplished. To many of the combatants not the least agreeable result of Bannockburn was the unprecedented abundance of the booty. When campaigning Edward denied himself nothing. His wardrobe and arms; his enormous and apparently well-supplied array of food wagons; his ecclesiastical vestments for the celebration of victory; his plate; his siege artillery; his military chests, with all the jewelry of his young minion knights, fell into the hands of the Scots. Down to Queen Mary's reign we read, in inventories, about costly vestments "from the fight at Bannockburn." In Scotland it rained ransoms. The Rotuli Scotiæ, in 1314 full of Edward's preparation for war, in 1315 are rich in safe-conducts for men going into Scotland to redeem prisoners. One of these, the brave Sir Marmaduke Twenge, renowned at Stirling bridge, hid in the woods on Midsummer's Night, and surrendered to Bruce next day. The King gave him gifts and set him free unransomed. Indeed, the clemency of Bruce after his success is courteously acknowledged by the English chroniclers.

This victory was due to Edward's incompetence, as well as to the excellent dispositions and indomitable courage of Bruce, and to "the intolerable axes" of his men. No measures had been taken by Edward to secure a retreat. Only one rally, at "the Bloody Fauld," is reported. The English fought widely, their measures being laid on the strength of a confidence which, after the skirmishes of Sunday, June 23d, they no longer entertained. They suffered what, at Agincourt, Crécy, Poitiers, and Verneuil, their descendants were to inflict. Horses and banners, gay armor and chivalric trappings, were set at naught by the sperthes and spears of infantry acting on favorable ground. From the dust and reek of that burning day of June, Scotland emerged a people, firm in a glorious memory. Out of weakness she was made strong, being strangely led through paths of little promise since the day when Bruce's dagger-stroke at Dumfries closed from him the path of returning.

EXTINCTION OF THE ORDER OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS

BURNING OF GRAND MASTER MOLAY

A.D. 1314

F. C. WOODHOUSE H. H. MILMAN

The quarrel between Philip the Fair of France and Pope Boniface VIII, concerning the taxation of the clergy, and the right of nomination to vacant bishoprics within the dominions of Philip, had far-reaching effects. It led, in 1302, to the convocation of the first properly so-called Parliament in France, to offset the actions of the Pope, who excommunicated the King; and also to an expedition into Italy of a small body of French troops which made the Pope prisoner at Agnani, but were subsequently expelled with great loss of life. The Pope was reinstated, but died shortly afterward from brain fever; he was succeeded by Benedict XI, whom the King of France sought to placate, but unsuccessfully. Within nine months Benedict died, presumably from poison, and Philip, by his intrigues, was enabled to secure the election to the pontificate of Bertrand de Goth, who became pope as Clement V, and was pledged to the service of the French King.

Philip, who had obstructed the operations of commerce by debasing the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited by the wealth of the order of Knights Templars, and, emboldened by his successes over the spiritual power, he now entered upon the career of intrigue which resulted in the destruction and plunder of the order.

The famous Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, founded in 1118 by a small band of nine French knights, sworn to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre, had become, in almost every kingdom of the West, a powerful, wealthy, semimilitary, semimonastic republic, governed by its own laws, animated by the closest corporate spirit, under the severest internal discipline, an all-pervading organization, independent alike of the civil power and of the spiritual hierarchy.

During two centuries as crusaders, the knights fought valiantly and shed their blood in defence of the Sepulchre of our Lord, earning the devout admiration of Western Christendom, and receiving splendid endowments of lands, castles, and riches of all kinds as contributions to the cause of the holy wars.

But despite their valor, Mahometan persistency prevailed, and the total expulsion of the Templars, with the rest of the Christian establishments from Palestine, followed the downfall of Acre in 1291.

F. C. WOODHOUSE

HE loss of Palestine led indirectly to the ruin of the order of the Templars. The record is one of the dark episodes of history, encompassed with contradictions, full of surprises, painful to contemplate, whatever view may be taken, whichever side espoused.

It is difficult to understand how an order of men who for nearly two hundred years earned the thanks and praise of Christendom for their bravery and devotion; who had shed blood like water to defend the places dearest to all Christian hearts; who had been recruited from the noblest families in every country in Europe, and had had princes of royal blood in their ranks; who claimed to act upon the purest and most exalted Christian principles; and who proved the sincerity of their professions by their lives of self-sacrifice, and their deaths, for the cause they had taken up; who had been honored and favored and dowered with gifts and privileges, in gratitude for their exploits—should suddenly have fallen into the blackest crimes. So it is no less difficult to understand how public opinion should turn against them as it did, and how all Europe should set itself to disgrace and despoil, to malign and execrate, those who had so long been its favorites and its champions. It is not easy to understand this, and it is painful to read the story in its sad and miserable details.

But there are other pages of history that more or less correspond with this; and there are well-known characteristics of human nature that explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation. Then, too, facts may be perverted, circumstances may be made to bear a meaning that does not really belong to them, and fear and torture may force the weak to say anything that they are required. And, finally, the evidence and the judgment of those who have everything to gain by the condemnation of those whom they accuse, must always be viewed with suspicion by sober and truth-loving minds. Moreover, in judging the Templars, we must not forget the lapse of time and the change of circumstances that separate our age from theirs.

After the loss of Acre a chapter of the surviving Templars was gathered, and James de Molay, preceptor of England, was elected grand master. One more attempt was made to recover a footing in the Holy Land, but it was defeated with great loss to the order, and all hope of restoring the Latin kingdom in Palestine seems to have been abandoned. The occupation of the Templars was gone. They had been banded together to fight upon the sacred soil of Palestine, and to defend pilgrims, but now they had been driven out of the country, and they could no longer execute their mission or fulfil their vows. We soon hear of them being engaged in civil or international wars, which seems to be a violation of their oath not to draw sword upon any Christian. Thus we read of Templars fighting on the side of the King of England, in the battle of Falkirk, 1298, and similar occurrences are recorded in the French wars of the time. Those against whom the Templars fought would not be slow to complain of them.

But the real cause of the downfall of the Templars was probably the enormous wealth of the order. There had not been wanting indications for some years of covetous eyes and itching hands turned toward the possession of the Knights. Sometimes complaints were made because the rents of their estates were all sent out of the country; sometimes the grievance alleged was that they were exempted from paying taxes and other levies, civil and ecclesiastical. Sometimes open acts of spoliation were committed upon their property, and that even by royal hands.

But it was in France that the final attack was made. Philip the Fair was king at this time, a man of bad character and unscrupulous as to the means by which he attained his ends. The country was exhausted and the treasury empty, and the idea seems to have occurred to him, as it did later to Henry VIII of England under similar circumstances, that an easy way to fill his own purse was to put his hand into the purses of others. But even kings cannot appropriate the property of a religious order without offering some apology or justification to the world. And so it began to be whispered that the Holy Land would never have been lost to Christendom if its sworn defenders had not failed in their Christian character. The whole blame of the defeat of the crusades was laid upon the Templars. It was said they had treacherously betrayed the Christian cause, that they had treated with the enemy, and by their personal sins, especially by secret, unhallowed rites, had provoked the just wrath of God, and so brought about the ruin of the dominion of the Cross in the East.

When Ahab has determined to put Naboth to death, that he may seize his coveted vineyard, it is not difficult to find witness that he is a blasphemer of God and a traitor to the King; and so Philip found his first tool in a man guilty of a multitude of crimes, who secured his own pardon by a denunciation of the Templars.

But even a king could not ruin a great religious order without the aid of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Templars had always been favored and protected by the popes, and nothing was in itself so likely to evoke that protection again as an attack upon the order by the secular powers. But Philip was prepared for this. The Pope of the day, Clement V, had been a subject of his own. As bishop of Bordeaux, he owed his election to the pontificate to Philip's own intrigues, and had been easily induced to quit Rome and live in France, so as to be more completely under the dictation of the King. Moreover, the majority of the cardinals were also French and entirely devoted to the King's interests.

Clement V was one of the worst of those miserable men who have from time to time disgraced the papal chair, and was guilty of almost every crime. There are, indeed, authorities worthy of credit who assert that before his election he had been made to promise to perform six favors to the King, and that the last was not to be divulged till the time for its execution came. This last was then found to be the suppression of the order of the Templars. There was no difficulty, under these circumstances, in getting the so-called sanction of the Church for an inquiry into the crimes of which the Templars were accused.

Accordingly, in 1307, Philip issued letters to his officers throughout the kingdom, commanding them to seize all the Templars on a certain day, that they might be tried for crimes of which he and the Pope had satisfied themselves they were guilty. They had apostatized from the Christian religion, worshipped idols in their secret meetings, and had been guilty of horrible and shameful offences against God, the Church, the State, and humanity itself. Philip professed the most pious horror at what he had discovered; he lamented the grievous necessity laid upon him, and urged upon the guilty men the expediency of a full and immediate confession of their wicked doings as the only way to secure pardon and escape the just and extreme penalty of such outrageous wickedness.

It was during the night of October 13, 1307, that the King's orders were executed. Every house of the Templars in the dominions of the King of France was suddenly surrounded by a strong force, and all the Knights and members of the order were simultaneously taken prisoners.

At the same time a strenuous endeavor was made to arouse popular indignation against the order. The regular and secular clergy were commanded to preach against the Templars, and to describe the horrible enormities that were practised among them. It is incredible to us in these days that such charges should be made, and still more that they should actually be believed. It was said that the Templars worshipped some hideous idol in their secret assemblies, that they offered sacrifices to it of infants and young girls, and that although every one saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties, people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene orgies.

It was hoped that some confession of guilt might be readily obtained from some of the weaker brethren in order to receive the pardon which was promised by the King. But no such confession was made. All the prisoners denied the charges brought against them. Then the usual mediæval expedient was resorted to, and torture was used to extort acknowledgments of guilt. The unhappy Templars in Paris were handed over to the tender mercies of the tormentors with the usual results. One hundred and forty were subjected to trial by fire.

The details preserved are almost too horrible to be related. The feet of some were fastened close to a hot fire till the very flesh and even the bones were consumed. Others were suspended by their limbs, and heavy weights attached to them to make the agony more intense. Others were deprived of their teeth; and every cruelty that a horrible ingenuity could invent was used.

While this was going on, questions were asked, and offers of pardon were made if they would acknowledge themselves or others guilty of the monstrous wickednesses which were detailed to them. At the same time forged letters were read, purporting to come from the grand master himself, exhorting them to make a full confession, and declarations were made of the confessions which were said to have been already freely given by other members of the order.

What wonder, then, that the usual consequences followed. Those who had strong will and indomitable courage stood firm and endured the slow martyrdom till death released them, maintaining to the last their own innocence, and the innocence of their order, of the crimes with which they were charged. But some weaker men broke down. In hope of release from the agony which they could not endure, they confessed anything and everything that was required of them, and these things were at once written down as grave facts and made matter of accusation of others. Often these unhappy men almost immediately recanted, and as soon as the torture ceased withdrew their confessions, and repeated their original denial of the accusations one and all.

We have long ago ceased to set any value upon confessions extorted by torture, and the system has happily been abolished by all civilized nations, but in those days this was not understood; torture was relied upon as a means of extracting truth from unwilling witnesses when all other means failed; indeed, it was simpler and more expeditious than the calling of many witnesses, the testing of evidence by cross-examination, and other surer but slower methods; and especially when conviction, not truth, was the end in view, torture was a welcome and efficacious ally.

All this was but too sadly exemplified in the proceedings against the Templars in France. No sooner were those who had made confessions of guilt while under torture released from their tormentors than they disavowed their forced admissions and proclaimed their innocence and the purity of their order, appealing to history and the testimony of their own day for evidence of their courage and devotion to the Catholic faith.

Upon hearing of this Philip immediately ordered the rearrest of the Templars, and, proceeding against them as relapsed heretics, they were condemned to be burned alive. In Paris alone one hundred and thirteen suffered this terrible punishment, and many more were burned in other towns. In Spain, Portugal, and Germany, proceedings were taken against the order; their property was confiscated, and in some cases torture was used; but it is remarkable that it was only in France, and in those places where Philip's influence was powerful, that any Templar was actually put to death.

Everywhere else the monstrous charges were declared to be unproved, and the order was declared innocent of heresy and sacrilegious rites.

In October, 1311, a council was held at Vienna to dissolve the Order of the Temple, but the majority of the bishops were decidedly opposed to such a proceeding against so ancient and illustrious an order, till its members had been heard in their own defence in a fair and open trial. The Pope was furious at this and dismissed the council, and in the following year, 1312, by a papal brief, abolished the order and forbade its reconstitution. The property of the order in France was nominally made over to the Hospitallers, but Philip laid claim to an immense sum for the expenses of the prosecution, and by this and other means he obtained what he had all along desired—the greatest part of the possessions of the order. Similar proceedings took place in other countries. In some, new orders were founded in the place of the Templars, with the sovereign at their head, by which means the estates came into the possession of the Crown as completely as if they had been actually confiscated.

In France the Templars who survived their torture and the horrors of their prisons were either executed or left to linger out a miserable existence in their dungeons till death released them. The grand master and a few other brethren of the highest rank were thus kept in prison for five years. They were then taken to Notre Dame in Paris, and required to give verbal assent to the confessions which had been extorted from them under torture. But the grand master, James de Molay, the grand preceptor, and some others seized the opportunity of declaring their innocence, and disowning the alleged confessions as forgeries. The old veterans stood up in the church before the assembled multitude, and, raising their chained hands to heaven, declared that whatever had been confessed to the detriment of the illustrious order was only forced from them by extreme agony and fear of death, and that they solemnly and finally repudiated and revoked all such admissions.

On hearing of this, Philip ordered their immediate execution, and the same evening the last grand master of the Temple and his faithful comrades were burned to death at a slow fire.

Impartial men had formed their own judgment, and a very strong feeling prevailed that justice had not been done. It was remarked that those who had been foremost in the proceedings against the Templars came to a speedy and miserable end. The Pope, the kings of France and of England, and others, all soon followed their victims and died violent or shameful deaths.

We have somewhat anticipated the order of events, and must return to the earlier stage of the proceedings against the Templars. As soon as Philip had determined upon his own course of action, he desired to find countenance for it by stirring up other sovereigns to imitate it. He therefore wrote letters to the kings of other European states, informing them of his discovery of the guilt of the Templars, and urging them to adopt a similar course in their own dominions. The Pope, too, summoned the grand master to France, but with every mark of respect, and so got him into his power before the terrible proceedings against the members of his order were made public.

The King of England, Edward II, acted with prudence. He expressed his unbounded astonishment at the contents of the French King's letter, and at the particulars detailed to him by an agent specially sent to him by Philip, but he would do no more at the time than promise that the matter should receive his serious attention in due course.

He wrote at the same time to the kings of Portugal, Aragon, Castile, and Sicily, telling them of the extraordinary information he had received respecting the Templars, and declaring his unwillingness to believe the dreadful charges brought against them. He referred to the services rendered to Christendom by the order, and to its unblemished reputation ever since it was founded. He urged upon his fellow-sovereigns that nothing should be done in haste, but that inquiry should be made in due and solemn legal form, expressing his belief that the order was guiltless of the crimes alleged against it, and that the charges were merely the result of slander and envy and of a desire to appropriate the property of the order.

At the same time Edward wrote to the Pope in similar terms. He declared that the Templars were universally respected by all classes throughout his dominions as pious and upright men, and begged the Pope to promote a just inquiry which should free the order from the unjust slander and injuries to which it was being subjected. But hardly was this letter despatched than Edward received another from the Pope, which had crossed his own on its way, calling upon him to imitate Philip, King of France, in proceeding against the Templars. The Pope professed great distress and astonishment that an order that had so long enjoyed the respect and gratitude of the Church for its worthy deeds in defence of the faith should have fallen into grievous and perfidious apostasy. He then narrated the commendable zeal of the King of France in rooting out the secrets of these men's hidden wickedness, and gave particulars of some of their confessions of the crimes with which they had been charged. He concluded by commanding the King of England to pursue a similar course, to seize and imprison all members of the order on one day, and to hold, in the Pope's name, all the property of the order till it should be determined how it was to be disposed of.

King Edward, notwithstanding his recent declaration of confidence in the integrity of the Templars, yielded obedience to this missive of the Pope. Whether he was overawed by the authority of the Pontiff, and deferred his own opinion to that of so great a personage, or whether, as some suppose, he desired to give the Templars a fair and honorable trial, and the opportunity of clearing themselves; or whether he gave way to the evil counsels of those who whispered that the great wealth of the Templars would be useful to the Crown, and that he might avail himself of the opportunity of taking all—as his predecessors had taken some—of their treasure; whatever may have been his real motive, and the cause of his change of conduct, it is certain that he issued an order for the arrest of the Templars, and the seizure of all their estates, houses, and property.

The greatest caution and secrecy were adopted. Instructions were sent to all the sheriffs throughout England to hold themselves in readiness to execute certain orders which would be given to them by trusty persons on that day. Similar arrangements were made in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; and on January 8, 1308, every Templar was simultaneously arrested.

It was not till October in the following year that any trial took place. All this time the Templars had been suffering the miseries of imprisonment. More than two hundred men of high rank, many of them veterans who had fought and bled in Palestine, and who were now grown old and feeble after a life of hardship and privation, maimed with wounds, bronzed with exposure to the Eastern sun, languished under the tender mercies of jailers, with no opportunity of defending themselves or of raising up friends to say a word for them. Some were foreigners who happened to be in England on the business of the order. A few managed to evade the vigilance of the King's emissaries, notwithstanding the secrecy and suddenness of the arrest, and escaped in various disguises to the wild and remote mountain districts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

The court appointed by the Pope commenced its proceedings in London, in October, 1309, under the presidency of the Bishop of London. Several French ecclesiastics had come over to take their seat upon the bench as judges—an ill omen for the English Templars. After the usual preliminaries, which were long and tedious, the articles of accusation were read. They stated that those who were received into the order of the Knights of the Temple did, at their reception, formally deny Jesus Christ and renounce all hope of salvation through him; that they trampled and spat upon the cross; that they worshipped a cat(!); that they denied the sacraments, and looked only to the grand master for absolution; that they possessed and worshipped various idols; that they practised a variety of cruel, degrading, and filthy customs and rites; that the grand master and many of the brethren had confessed to these things even before they had been arrested. Such is a brief summary of the accusation, the original documents of which have happily come down to us.

It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless enemies. No writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a trial, and no one unacquainted with mediæval history would credit the record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such a document, and then set themselves to prove the truth of its monstrous allegations by the use of torture.

Students of the Middle Ages know well that such things were done in those days. They remember Savonarola and Beatrice Cenci in Italy, Jeanne d'Arc in France, Abbot Whiting and others in England. They call to mind the cruelties and exactions practised so often upon the Jews in every country in Europe; and with the contemporary records in their hands, they do not hesitate to accept as undoubted historical fact what would otherwise be rejected as a slander upon humanity and an outrage upon common-sense.

If the Templars had been accused of the crimes vulgarly supposed to attach themselves to religious orders; if they had been charged with falling into the sins to which poor human nature by its frailty is liable; if erring members had been denounced, men who had entered the order through disappointment, or from some other unworthy motive, men such as Sir Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de Bois Guilbert, in his novel, Ivanhoe, we might well believe that some at least of the accusations against them were true.

It is singular that no such charges are alleged against the Templars, though they were freely brought, two hundred years later, against the regular monks by the commissioners of Henry VIII. This fact has been noticed by most thoughtful historians, and has been considered to tell strongly in the tribunal of equity in favor of the Templars. Instead of these probable or possible crimes, we find nothing but monstrous charges of sorcery, idolatry, apostasy, and such like, instances of which we know are to be found in those strange times; but which it seems altogether unlikely would infect a large body whose fundamental principle was close adherence to Christianity; a body which was spread all over the world, and which included in its ranks such a multitude and variety of men and of nationalities, among whom there must have been, to say the least, some sincere, upright, and godly men who would have set themselves to root out such miserable errors, or, if they were found to be ineradicable, would have left the order as no place for them.

Even Voltaire acknowledges that such an indictment destroys itself. It recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing but their intense hatred of their victims and their total unfitness to sit as judges.

When this extraordinary paper had been read, the prisoners were asked what they had to say to it, and, as might be expected, they at once and unanimously declared that they and their order were absolutely guiltless of the crimes of which they were accused. After this the prisoners were examined one by one.

It would be tedious to follow the long and wearisome questionings and to record the replies given by the several brethren of the Temple during their trial in London. One and all agreed in denying the existence of the horrible and ridiculous rites which were said to be used at the reception of new members; and whether they had been received in England or abroad, detailed the ceremonies that were used, and showed that they were substantially the same everywhere. The candidate was asked what he desired, and on replying that he desired admission to the order of the Knights of the Temple, he was warned of the strict and severe life that was demanded of members of the order; of the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; and, moreover, that he must be ready to go and fight the enemies of Christ even to the death.

Others related details of the interior discipline and regulations of the order, which were stern and rigorous, as became a body that added to the strictness of the convent the order and system of a military organization. Many of the brethren had been nearly all their lives in the order, some more than forty years, a great part of which had been spent in active service in the East.

The witnesses who were summoned were not members of the order, and had only hearsay evidence to give. They had heard this and that report, they suspected something else, they had been told that certain things had been said or done. Nothing definite could be obtained, and there was no proof whatever of any of the extravagant and incredible charges. Similar proceedings took place in Lincoln and York, and also in Scotland and Ireland; and in all places the results were the same, and the matter dragged on till October, 1311.

Hitherto torture had not been resorted to; but now, in accordance with the repeated solicitations of the Pope, King Edward gave orders that the imprisoned Templars should be subjected to the rack in order that they might be forced to give evidence of their guilt. Even then there seems to have been reluctance to resort to this cruel and shameful treatment, and a series of delays occurred, so that nothing was done till the beginning of the following year.

The Templars, having been now three years in prison, chained, half-starved, threatened with greater miseries here, and with eternal damnation hereafter; separated from one another, without friend, adviser, or legal defence, were now removed to the various jails in London and elsewhere, and submitted to torture. We have no particular record of the horrible details, but some evidence was afterward adduced which was said to have been obtained from the unhappy victims during their agony. It was such as was desired; an admission of the truth of the monstrous accusations that were detailed to them, which had been obtained, for the most part, from their tortured brethren in France.

In April, 1311, these depositions were read in the court, in the presence of the Templars, who were required to say what they could allege in their defence. They replied that they were ignorant of the processes of law, and that they were not permitted to have the aid of those whom they trusted and who could advise them, but that they would gladly make a statement of their faith and of the principles of their order. This they were permitted to do, and a very simple and touching paper was produced and signed by all the brethren. They declared themselves, one and all, good Christians and faithful members of the Church, and they claimed to be treated as such, and openly and fairly tried if there were any just cause of complaint against them. But their persecutors were by no means satisfied. Fresh tortures and cruelties were resorted to to force confessions of guilt from these worn-out and dying men. A few gave way, and said what they were told to say; and these unhappy men were produced in St. Paul's Cathedral shortly afterward, and made to recant their errors, and were then "reconciled to the Church." A similar scene was enacted at York.

The property of the Templars in England was placed under the charge of a commission at the time that proceedings were commenced against them, and the King very soon treated it as if it were his own, giving away manors and convents at his pleasure. A great part of the possessions of the order was subsequently made over to the Hospitallers. The convent and church of the Temple in London were granted, in 1313, to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whose monument is in Westminster Abbey. Other property was pawned by the King to his creditors as security for payment of his debts; but constant litigation and disputes seem to have pursued the holders of the ill-gotten goods.

Some of the surviving Templars retired to monasteries, others returned to the world and assumed secular habits, for which they incurred the censures of the Pope.

HENRY HART MILMAN

The tragedy of the Templars had not yet drawn to its close. The four great dignitaries of the order, the grand master Du Molay, Guy, the commander of Normandy, son of the Dauphin of Auvergne, the commander of Aquitaine, Godfrey de Gonaville, the great visitor of France, Hugues de Peraud, were still pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to determine on their fate. The King and the Pope were now equally interested in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So long as these men lived, uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not extinct. A commission was named: the Cardinal-Archbishop of Albi, with two other cardinals, two monks, the Cistercian Arnold Novelli, and Arnold de Fargis, nephew of Pope Clement, the Dominican Nicolas de Freveauville, akin to the house of Marigny, formerly the King's confessor. With these the Archbishop of Sens sat in judgment on the Knights' own former confessions. The grand master and the rest were found guilty, and were to be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.

A scaffold was erected before the porch of Notre Dame. On one side appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four noble prisoners, in chains, under the custody of the Provost of Paris. Six years of dreary imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the most valiant had been burned alive; the recreants had purchased their lives by confession; the Pope, in a full council, had condemned and dissolved the order. If a human mind—a mind like that of Du Molay—could be broken by suffering and humiliation, it must have yielded to this long and crushing imprisonment. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Albi ascended a raised platform: he read the confessions of the Knights, the proceedings of the court; he enlarged on the criminality of the order, on the holy justice of the Pope, and the devout, self-sacrificing zeal of the King; he was proceeding to the final, the fatal sentence. At that instant the grand master advanced; his gesture implored silence; judges and people gazed in awestruck apprehension. In a calm, clear voice Du Molay spoke: "Before heaven and earth, on the verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved death, not on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves or our order have been guilty, but because we have yielded, to save our lives, to the seductive words of the Pope and of the King; and so by our confessions brought shame and ruin on our blameless, holy, and orthodox brotherhood."