Chapter 10
PART II
THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD
THE DELUGE OF BARBARISM THE MEDIAEVAL STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE AND REeSTABLISH CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER V
NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE
THE WEAKENED EMPIRE. Though the first and second centuries A.D. have often been called one of the happiest ages in all human history, due to a succession of good Emperors and peace and quiet throughout the Roman world, [1] the reign of the last of the good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius (161-180 A.D.), may be regarded as clearly marking a turning-point in the history of Roman society. Before his reign Rome was ascendant, prosperous, powerful; during his reign the Empire was beset by many difficulties-- pestilence, floods, famine, troubles with the Christians, and heavy German inroads--to which it had not before been accustomed; and after his reign the Empire was distinctly on the defensive and the decline. Though the elements contributing to this change in national destiny had their origin in the changes in the character of the national life at least two centuries earlier, it was not until now that the Empire began to feel seriously the effects of these changes in a lowered vitality and a weakened power of resistance.
The virtues of the citizens of the early days of the Republic, trained according to the old ideas, had gradually given way in the face of the vices and corruption which beset and sapped the life of the upper and ruling cla.s.ses in the later Empire. The failure of Rome to put its provincial government on any honest and efficient civil-service basis, the failure of the State to establish and direct an educational system capable of serving as a corrective of dangerous national tendencies, the lack of a guiding national faith, the gradual admission of so many Germans into the Empire, the great extent and demoralizing influence of slavery [2]--all contributed to that loss of national strength and resisting power which was now becoming increasingly evident. Other contributing elements of importance were the almost complete obliteration of the peasantry by the creation of great landed estates and cattle ranches worked by slaves, in place of the small farms of earlier days; the increase of the poor in the cities, and the declining birth-rate; the introduction of large numbers of barbarians as farmers and soldiers; and the demoralization of the city rabble by political leaders in need of votes. Captured slaves performed almost every service, and a lavish display of wealth on the part of a few came to be a characteristic feature of city life. [3] The great middle, commercial, and professional cla.s.ses were still prosperous and contented, but luxury, imported vices, slavery, political corruption, and new ideals [4] had gradually sapped the old national vitality and destroyed the resisting power of the State in the face of a great national calamity.
Rome now stood, much like the sh.e.l.l of a fine old tree, apparently in good condition, but in reality ready to fall before the blast because it had been allowed to become rotten at the heart. Sooner or later the boundaries of the Empire, which had held against the pressure from without for so long, were destined to be broken and the barbarian deluge from the north and east would pour over the Empire.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 31. A BODYGUARD OF GERMANS A relief from the Column of Marcus Aurelius, at Rome, erected to celebrate his victories over the Marcomanni, and other German tribes.]
THE BOUNDARIES OF THE EMPIRE ARE BROKEN. While temporary extensions of territory had at times been made beyond the Rhine and the Danube, these rivers had finally come to be the established boundaries of the Empire on the north, and behind these rivers the Teutonic barbarians, or _Germani_, as the Romans called them, had by force been kept. To do even this the Romans had been obliged to admit bands of Germans into the Empire, and had taken them into the Roman army as "allies," making use of their great love for fighting to hold other German tribes in check. In 166 A.D. the plague, brought back by soldiers returning from the East, carried off approximately half the population of Italy. This same year the Marcomanni (see Figure 18), a former friendly tribe, invaded the Empire as far as the head of the Adriatic Sea, and it required thirteen years of warfare to put them back behind the Danube. Even this was accomplished only by the aid of friendly German tribes. From this time on the Empire was more or less on the defensive, with the barbarian tribes to the north casting increasingly longing eyes toward "a place in the sun" and the rich plunder that lay to the south, and frequently breaking over the boundaries. Rome, though, was still strong enough to put them back again.
In 275 A.D., after a five years' struggle, the Eastern Emperor gave the province of Dacia, to the south of the Danube, to the Visigoths, in an effort to buy them off from further invasion and warfare. This eased the pressure for another century. In 378 A.D., now pressed on by the terrible Huns from behind, the Visigoths, as a body, invaded the Eastern Empire, and in the Battle of Adrianople, near Constantinople, defeated the Roman army, slew the Roman Emperor, definitely broke the boundaries of the Empire, and they and the Ostrogoths now moved southward and settled in Moesia and Thrace. The Germans at Adrianople learned that they could beat the Roman legions, and from this time on it was they, and not the Romans, who named the terms of ransom and the price of peace. A few years later, under Alaric, the Visigoths invaded Greece, then turned westward through Illyria to the valley of the Po, in northern Italy, which they reached in the year 400. In 410 the great calamity came when they captured and sacked Rome. The effect produced on the Roman world by the fall of the Eternal City, as the news of the almost incredible disaster penetrated to the remote provinces, was profound (R. 48). For eight hundred years Rome had not been touched by foreign hands, and now it had been captured and plundered by barbarian hordes. It seemed to many as though the end of the world were approaching. The Visigoths now turned west once more, carrying with them the beautiful sister of the Emperor as a captive bride of the chief, and finally settled in Spain and southern Gaul, which provinces were thenceforth lost to Rome. This was the first of the great permanent inroads into the Empire, and from now on Roman resistance seemed powerless to stop the flood.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 32. THE GERMAN MIGRATIONS The barriers of the Empire along the Rhine and the Danube now are broken down. Take a pencil and trace the route followed by each of these peoples.]
A PERIOD OF TRIBAL MOVEMENTS. The Hunnish pressure also started the Vandals and Suevi, and within fifty years they had been able to move across Germany, France, and Spain, plundering the cities on their way.
Finally they crossed to the northern coast of Africa, where they became noted as the great sea pirates of the Mediterranean. In 455 they crossed back to Italy, and Rome was sacked for the second time by barbarian hordes. The Huns, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Attila, the so-called "Scourge of G.o.d," now moved in and ravaged Gaul (451) and northern Italy (452), and then, at the intercession of the Roman Pope Leo, were induced by a ransom price to return to the lower Danube, where they have since remained. In 476 the barbarian soldiers of the Empire, tired of camp life and demanding land on which they too might settle, rose in revolt, displaced the last of the Western Emperors, and elevated Odovacar, a tribesman from the north, as ruler in his stead. The Western Roman Empire was now at an end. In 493 Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, became king of Italy.
Between 443 and 485 the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes left their earlier homes in what is now Denmark and northwestern Germany, and overran eastern and southern Britain. In 486 the Franks, a great nation living along the lower Rhine, began to move, and within two generations had overrun almost all of Gaul. In 586 the Lombards invaded and settled the valleys of northern Italy, displacing the Ostrogoths there. Slavic tribes now moved into the Eastern Empire--Serbs and Bulgars--and settled in Moesia and Thrace.
Southeastern Europe thus became Slavic-Greek, as western Europe had become Teutonic-Latin. Figure 32 shows the results of these different migrations up to about 500 A.D.
EUROPE TO BE TEUTONIC-LATIN. In the seventh century another great wave of people, of a different racial stock and religion--Semitic and Mohammedan-- starting from Arabia and along the sh.o.r.es of the Red Sea, swept rapidly through Egypt and Africa and across into Spain and France. For a time it looked as though they might overrun all western Europe and bring the German tribes under subjection. Fortunately they were definitely stopped and decisively defeated by the Franks, in the great Battle of Tours, in 732. They also overran Syria and Persia, but were held in check in Asia Minor by the Eastern Empire, which did not completely succ.u.mb to barbarian inroads until Constantinople was taken by the Turks, in 1453.
The importance of the result, to the future of our western civilization, of this battle in the West can hardly be overestimated. The future of European government, law, education, and civilization was settled on that Sat.u.r.day afternoon in October, on the battle plains of Tours. [5] It was a struggle for mastery and dominion between the Aryan and Semitic races, between the Christian and Mohammedan religions, between the forces representing order on the one side and destruction on the other, and between races destined to succeed to the civilization of Greece and Rome and a race representing oriental despotism and static conditions.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 33. THE KNOWN WORLD IN 800 This map shows the great extent of the Mohammedan conquests. The part marked as "European Heathen" was added to Christianity within the next few centuries, and became a part of our Latin-Teutonic or western civilization.]
Driven back across the Pyrenees by the Franks, these people settled in Spain; later developed there, for a short period, a for-the-time remarkable civilization, but one that only slightly influenced the current of European development; and then disappeared as a force in our western development and progress. We shall meet them again a little later, but only for a little while, and then they concern our western development no more.
Our interest from now on lies with the Teutonic-Latin peoples of western Europe, for it is through them that our western civilization has been worked out and has come down to us.
WHO THESE INVADERS WERE. A long-continued series of tribal migrations, unsurpa.s.sed before in history, had
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG 34. A GERMAN WAR CHIEF Restored, and rather idealized (From the Musee d'Artillerie at Paris)]
The tribes nearest the Rhine and the Danube had taken on a little civilization from long contact with the Romans, but those farther away were savage and unorganized (Rs. 46, 47). In general they represented a degree of civilization not particularly different from that of the better American Indians in our colonial period, [6] though possessing a much larger ability to learn. The "two terrible centuries" which brought these new peoples into the Empire were marked by unspeakable disorder and frightful destruction. It was the most complete catastrophe that had ever befallen civilized society.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 35. ROMANS DESTROYING A GERMAN VILLAGE (From the Column of Marcus Aurelius, at Rome) Note the circular huts of reeds, without windows, and with but a single door.]
THEY SETTLE DOWN WITHIN THE EMPIRE. Finally, after a period of wandering and plundering, each of these new peoples settled down within the Empire as rulers over the numerically larger native Roman population, and slowly began to turn from hunting to a rude type of farming. For three or four centuries after the invasions ceased, though, Europe presented a dreary spectacle of ignorance, lawlessness, and violence. Force reigned where law and order had once been supreme. Work largely ceased, because there was no security for the results of labor. The Roman schools gradually died out, in part because of pagan hostility (all pagan schools were closed by imperial edict in 529 A.D.), and in part because they no longer ministered to any real need. The church and the monastery schools alone remained, the instruction in these was meager indeed, and they served almost entirely the special needs of the priestly and monastic cla.s.ses. The Latin language was corrupted and modified into spoken dialects, and the written language died out except with the monks and the clergy. Even here it became greatly corrupted. Art perished, and science disappeared. The former Roman skill in handicrafts was largely lost. Roads and bridges were left without repair. Commerce and intercourse almost ceased. The cities decayed, and many were entirely destroyed (R. 49).
The new ruling cla.s.s was ignorant--few could read or write their names-- and they cared little for the learning of Greece and Rome. Much of what was excellent in the ancient civilizations died out because these new peoples were as yet too ignorant to understand or use it, and what was preserved was due to the work of others than themselves. It was with such people and on such a basis that it was necessary for whatever constructive forces still remained to begin again the task of building up new foundations for a future European civilization. This was the work of centuries, and during the period the lamp of learning almost went out.
BARBARIAN AND ROMAN IN CONTACT. Civilization was saved from almost complete destruction chiefly by reason of the long and substantial work which Rome had done in organizing and governing and unifying the Empire; by the relatively slow and gradual coming of the different tribes; and by the thorough organization of the governing side of the Christian Church, which had been effected before the Empire was finally overrun and Roman government ceased. In unifying the government of the Empire and establis.h.i.+ng a common law, language, and traditions, and in early beginning the process of receiving barbarians into the Empire and educating them in her ways and her schools, [7] Rome rendered the western world a service of inestimable importance and one which did much to prepare the way for the reception and a.s.similation of the invaders. [8] In the cities, which remained Roman in spirit even after their rulers had changed, and where the Roman population greatly preponderated even after the invaders had come, some of the old culture and handicrafts were kept up, and in the cities of southern Europe the munic.i.p.al form of city government was retained. Roman law still applied to trials of Roman citizens, and many Roman governmental forms pa.s.sed over to the invader chiefly because he knew no other. The old Roman population for long continued to furnish the clergy, and these, because of their ability to read and write, also became the secretaries and advisers of their rude Teutonic overlords. In one capacity or another they persuaded the leaders of the tribes to adopt, not only Christianity, but many of the customs and practices of the old civilization as well. These various influences helped to a.s.similate and educate the newcomers, and to save something of the old civilization for the future. Being strong, st.u.r.dy, and full of youthful energy, and with a large capacity for learning, the civilizing process, though long and difficult, was easier than it might otherwise have been, and because of their strength and vigor these new races in time infused new life and energy into every land from Spain to eastern Europe (R. 50).
The most powerful force with which the barbarians came in contact, though, and the one which did most to reduce them to civilization, was the Christian Church. Organized, as we have seen, after the Roman governmental model, and as a State within a State, the Church gained in strength as the Roman government grew weaker, and was ready to a.s.sume governmental authority when Rome could no longer exert it. The barbarians here encountered an organization stronger than force and greater than kings, [9] which they must either accept and make terms with or absolutely destroy. As all the tribes, though heathen, possessed some form of spirit or nature wors.h.i.+p or heathen G.o.ds, which served as a basis for understanding the appeal of the Church, the result was the ultimate victory, and the Christianizing, in name at least, of all the barbarian tribes. This was the first step in the long process of civilizing and educating them.
THE IMPRESS OF CHRISTIANITY UPON THEM. The importance of the services rendered by bishops, priests, and monks during what are known as the _Dark Ages_ can hardly be overestimated. In the face of might they upheld the right of the Church and its representatives to command obedience and respect. [10] The Christian priest gradually forced the barbarian chief to do his will, though at times he refused to be awed into submission, murdered the priest, and sacked the sacred edifice. That the Church lost much of its early purity of wors.h.i.+p, and adopted many practices fitted to the needs of the time, but not consistent with real religion, there can be no question. In time the Church gained much from the mixture of these new peoples among the old, as they infused new vigor and energy into the blood of the old races, but the immediate effect was quite otherwise. The Church itself was paganized, but the barbarians were in time Christianized.
Priests and missionaries went among the heathen tribes and labored for their conversion. Of course the leaders were sought out first, and often the conversion of a chieftain was made by first converting his wife. After the chieftain had been won the minor leaders in time followed. The lesson of the cross was proclaimed, and the softening and restraining influences of the Christian faith were exerted on the barbarian. It was, however, a long and weary road to restore even a semblance of the order and respect for life and property which had prevailed under Roman rule.
One of the most interesting of all the conversions was that made by the Bishop Ulphilas (c. 313-383) among the Visigoths, before they moved westward from their original home north of the Danube, in what is now southwestern Russia. Ulphilas was made bishop and sent among them in 343, and spent the remainder of his life in laboring with them. He devised an alphabet for them, based on the Greek, and gave them a written language into which he translated for them the Bible, or rather large portions of it. In the translation he omitted the two books of Kings and the two Samuels, that the people might not find in them a further stimulus to their great warlike activity.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 36. A PAGE OF THE GOTHIC GOSPELS (_reduced_) One of the treasures of the library of the University or Upsala, in Sweden, is a ma.n.u.script of this translation by Bishop Ulphilas. Greek letters, with a few Runic signs were used to represent Gothic sounds. The word "rune" comes from a Gothic word meaning "mystery." To the primitive Germans it seemed a mysterious thing that a series of marks could express thought.]
Christianity had been carried early to Great Britain by Roman missionaries, and in 440 Saint Patrick converted the Irish. In 563 Saint Columba crossed to Scotland, founded the monastery at Iona, and began the conversion of the Scots. After the Angles and Saxons and Jutes had overrun eastern and southern Britain there was a period of several generations during which this portion of the island was given over to Teutonic heathenism. In 597 Saint Augustine, "the Apostle to the English," landed in Kent and began the conversion of the people, that year succeeding in converting Ethelbert, King of Kent. In 626 Edwin, King of Northumbria, was converted, and in 635 the English of Wess.e.x accepted Christianity. The English at once became strong supporters of the Christian faith, and in 878 they forced the invading Danes to accept Christianity as one of the conditions of the Peace of Wedmore. (See Map, Figure 42.)
In 496 Clovis, King of the Franks, and three thousand of his followers were baptized, following a vow and a victory in battle; [11] in 587 Recarred, King of the Goths in Spain, was won over; and in 681 the South Saxons accepted Christianity. The Germans of Bavaria and Thuringia were finally won over by about 740. Charlemagne repeatedly forced the northern Saxons to accept Christianity, between 772 and 804, when the final submission of this German tribe took place. Finally, in the tenth century, Rollo, Duke of the Normans, was won (912); Boleslav II, King of the Bohemians, in 967; and the Hungarians in 972. In the tenth century the Slavs were converted to the Eastern or Greek type of Christianity, and Poland, Norway, and Sweden to the Western or Roman type. The last people to be converted were the Prussians, a half-Slavic tribe inhabiting East Prussia and Lithuania, along the eastern Baltic, who were not brought to accept Christianity, in name, until near the middle of the thirteenth century, though efforts were begun with them as early as 900. As late as 1230 they were still offering human sacrifices to their heathen G.o.ds to secure their favor, but soon after this date they were forced to a nominal acceptance of Christianity as a result of conquest by the "Teutonic Knights." It was thus a thousand years after its foundation before Europe had accepted in name the Christian faith. To change a nominal acceptance to some semblance of a reality has been the work of the succeeding centuries.
WORK OF THE CHURCH DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. Everywhere throughout the old Empire, and far into the forest depths of barbarian lands, went bishops, priests, and missionaries, and there parishes were organized, rude churches arose, and the process of educating the fighting tribesmen in the ways of civilized life was carried out. It was not by schools of learning, but by faith and ceremonial that the Church educated and guided her children into the type she approved. Schools for other than monks and clergy for a time were not needed, and such practically died out. The Church and its offices took the place of education and exercised a wholesome and restraining influence over both young and old throughout the long period of the Middle Ages. These the Church in time taught the barbarian to respect. The great educational work of the Church during this period of insecurity and ignorance has seldom been better stated than in the following words by Draper:
Of the great ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks of society, and these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often found to be the inflexible supporters of right against might.
Eventually coming to be the depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, they opposed intellect to brute force, in many instances successfully, and by the example of the organization of the Church, which was essentially republican, they showed how representative systems may be introduced into the State. Nor was it over communities and nations that the Church displayed her chief power. Never in the world before was there such a system. From her central seat at Rome, her all-seeing eye, like that of Providence itself, could equally take in a hemisphere at a glance, or examine the private life of any individual. Her boundless influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the beggar at the monastery gate. In all Europe there was not a man too obscure, too insignificant, or too desolate for her.
Surrounded by her solemnities, every one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted from him the secrets of his life at her confessionals, and punished his faults by her penances. In his hour of sickness and trouble her servants sought him out, teaching him, by her exquisite litanies and prayers, to place his reliance on G.o.d, or strengthening him for the trials of life by the example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy to give repose to the souls of his dead. When, even to his friends, his lifeless body had become an offense, in the name of G.o.d she received it into her consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till the great reckoning-day.
From little better than a slave she raised his wife to be his equal, and, forbidding him to have more than one, met her recompense for those n.o.ble deeds in a firm friend at every fireside. Discountenancing all impure love, she put round that fireside the children of one mother, and made that mother little less than sacred in their eyes. In ages of lawlessness and rapine, among people but a step above savages, she vindicated the inviolability of her precincts against the hand of power, and made her temples a refuge and sanctuary for the despairing and oppressed. Truly she was the shadow of a great rock in many a weary land. [12.]
THE CIVILIZING WORK OF THE MONASTERIES. No less important than the Church and its clergy was the work of the monasteries and their monks in building up a basis for a new civilization. These, too, were founded all over Europe. To make a map of western Europe showing the monasteries established by 800 A.D. would be to cover the map with a series of dots.
[13] The importance of their work is better understood when we remember that the Germans had never lived in cities, and did not settle in them on entering the Empire. The monasteries, too, were seldom established in towns. Their sites were in the river valleys and in the forests (R. 69), and the monks became the pioneers in clearing the land and preparing the way for agriculture and civilization. Not infrequently a swamp was taken and drained. The Middle-Age period was essentially a period of settlement of the land and of agricultural development, and the monks lived on the land and among a people just pa.s.sing through the earliest stages of settled and civilized life. In a way the inheritors of the agricultural and handicraft knowledge of the Romans, the monks became the most skillful artisans and farmers to be found, and from them these arts in time reached the developing peasantry around them. Their work and services have been well summed up by the same author just quoted, as follows:
It was mainly by the monasteries that to the peasant cla.s.s of Europe was pointed out the way of civilization. The devotions and charities; the austerities of the brethren; their abstemious meal; their meager clothing, the cheapest of the country in which they lived; their shaven heads, or the cowl which shut out the sight of sinful objects; the long staff in their hands; their naked feet and legs; their pa.s.sing forth on their journeys by twos, each a watch on his brother; the prohibitions against eating outside of the wall of the monastery, which had its own mill, its own bakehouse, and whatever was needed in an abstemious domestic economy (Figure 38); their silent hospitality to the wayfarer, who was refreshed in a separate apartment; the lands around their buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden, and, above all, labor exalted and enn.o.bled by their holy hands, and celibacy, forever, in the eye of the vulgar, a proof of separation from the world and a sacrifice to heaven--these were the things that arrested the attention of the barbarians of Europe, and led them on to civilization. [14]
THE PROBLEM FACED BY THE MIDDLE AGES. That the lamp of learning burned low during this period of a.s.similation is no cause for wonder. Recovery from such a deluge of barbarism on a weakened society is not easy. In fact the recovery was a long and slow process, occupying nearly the whole of a thousand years. The problem which faced the Church, as the sole surviving force capable of exerting any constructive influence, was that of changing the barbarism and anarchy of the sixth century, with its low standards of living and lack of humane ideals, into the intelligent, progressive civilization of the fifteenth century. This was the work of the Middle Ages, and largely the work of the Christian Church. It was not a period of progress, but one of a.s.similation, so that a common western civilization might in time be developed out of the diverse and hostile elements mixed together by the rude force of circ.u.mstances. The enfeebled Roman race was to be reinvigorated by mixture with the youthful and vigorous Germans (R.
50); to the inst.i.tutions of ancient society were to be added certain social and political inst.i.tutions of the Germanic peoples; all were to be brought under the rule of a common Christian Church; and finally, when these people had become sufficiently civilized and educated to enable them to understand and appreciate, "nearly every achievement of the Greeks and the Romans in thought, science, law, and the practical arts" was to be recovered and made a part of our western civilization.
In this chapter we have dealt largely with the great fundamental movements which have so deeply influenced the course of human history. In the chapters which immediately follow we shall tell how learning was preserved during the period and what facilities for education actually existed; trace the more important efforts made to reestablish schools and learning; and finally describe the culmination of the process of absorbing and educating the Germans in the civilization they had conquered that came in the great period of recovery of the ancient learning and civilization--the age of the Renaissance.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Do the peculiar problems of a.s.similation of the foreign-born, revealed to us by the World War, put us in a somewhat similar position to Rome under the Empire as relates to the need of a guiding national faith?
2. Outline how Rome might have been helped and strengthened by a national school system under state control.
3. Outline how our state school systems could be made much more effective as national instruments by the infusion into their instruction of a strong national faith.
4. Try to picture the results upon our civilization had western Europe become Mohammedan.