No More Learning

If there was more culture amongst the laymen in the East than amongst
their kinsmen in the West, much of the work of actual administration
rested in the East as in the West on ecclesiastics. The Patriarch Daimbert,
at the time of the election of Baldwin I, put forward pretensions of the
loftiest character, which, if they could have been established in their
entirety, would have made the kingdom a theocratic state. Except for
a brief period under Baldwin II when Stephen of Chartres laid claim to
Jaffa and Jerusalem, his successors were content to work in harmony with
the king. Nevertheless the Latin Church with its privileged position and
immunities, supported by the vast wealth which it possessed not only in
Syria but in every country of the West, formed a power which was
dangerous to the unity of the kingdom. Jacques de Vitry, who was Bishop
of Acre in the thirteenth century, roundly charges the clergy of his time
with greed and avarice. But, whatever the faults of some, there were
great names amongst the churchmen of the East. William of Tyre, arch-
bishop, chancellor, and historian, was pre-eminent; whilst, amongst lesser
names, an English writer must not omit his countryman, Ralph, Bishop
of Bethlehem, who was chancellor under Baldwin III and Amaury.
After the Third Crusade the kingdom of Jerusalem was little more
than a shadow. For the most part it consisted of a narrow strip along
the coast, and such strength as it retained rested upon the possession of
the important ports from Jaffa to Beyrout, and above all of Acre. Further
north the Christians still held a more substantial territory, though
Bohemond III of Antioch, the son of Raymond and Constance, was hard
pressed by the Christian princes of Armenia. The county of Tripolis
gained strength from the presence within its borders of some of the
greatest fortresses of the Military Orders. Raymond III, at his death in
1187, left the county to his godson Raymond, son of Bohemond III.
But after the death of Bohemond III in 1201 Raymond resigned Tripolis
to his brother Bohemond IV, and henceforward the Princes of Antioch
were also Counts of Tripolis.
In the kingdom proper the native lords would have been content to
enjoy the small remnant of their former possessions, and it was against
their will, when German crusaders came to Acre in 1197, that the war
was renewed. In that same year Henry of Champagne died and his widow
CH. VII.


## p. 314 (#360) ############################################

314
John de Brienne and Frederick II
married for her fourth husband Amaury de Lusignan, who had succeeded
his brother Guy as King of Cyprus. The Lusignans ruled prosperously in
Cyprus for over three centuries, and from this time the fortunes of the
kingdom of Jerusalem were linked closely with the island. The reign of
Amaury II witnessed some recovery of territory on the mainland, and
more might have been accomplished had not the Fourth Crusade been
diverted to the conquest of Constantinople, an ill-advised enterprise which
did great injury to the Christian cause in the East. Amaury II died in
1205, and his infant son Amaury III a year later. Then the kingdom of
Jerusalem passed to Mary, Isabella's daughter by Conrad of Montferrat.
For Mary a husband was found in John de Brienne, a French knight,
who came to Acre in 1210. John, though a man of modest rank, was a
skilful soldier, whose incessant raids on Saracen territory did something to
stay the waning fortunes of his kingdom. It was in answer to John's appeal
that Innocent III in 1216 proclaimed a new crusade. In the autumn of
1217 a great host assembled at Acre. By the advice of King John it was
determined to make an expedition to Egypt by sea, and accordingly in
May 1218 the crusaders laid siege to Damietta. There they were joined
by further reinforcements from the West, including the four English Earls
of Chester, Arundel, Salisbury, and Winchester; Robert de Courçon, an
English cardinal, also came as one of the Pope's representatives, though
he died within a few weeks of his arrival. The siege lasted over a year,
and it was only on 5 November 1219 that the crusaders fought their way
into the city. This success brought the Saracens almost to despair. They
offered to surrender most of Palestine, if only Damietta were restored to
them. But the crusaders refused, in the vain hope that the Emperor
Frederick II would come to aid them in the conquest of all Egypt. After
long delay, in the summer of 1221 an advance was made towards Cairo.
Soon the crusaders found themselves in a perilous position, from which
they were glad to purchase their release at the price of the surrender of
Damietta. Well might Philip of France say that the men were daft who
for the sake of a town had refused the proffer of a kingdom.
John de Brienne had not been responsible for the folly which threw
away the fruits of the victory he had planned. In 1222 he went to Europe,
where in 1225 he found a husband for his daughter Yolande in the
Emperor Frederick II. Frederick soon quarrelled with his father-in-law,
and dispossessed him of his kingdom, which he claimed for himself in right
of his wife. He was already in the throes of his conflict with the Pope,
but in 1228 he paid a visit to the Holy Land, where by negotiations with
the Sultan Kāmil he obtained a partial surrender of Jerusalem, together
with Bethlehem and Nazareth. His enemies the Templars found a new
grudge against him, in that their great church at Jerusalem was left to
the Muslims, and Pope Gregory denounced the treaty as a concession
to Belial. Frederick's brief Crusade added only to his own troubles, and
it brought little good to his Eastern subjects. The Saracens soon broke


## p. 315 (#361) ############################################

Dissensions among the Muslims
315
the treaty, and reoccupied Jerusalem. Frederick then sent Richard
Filangieri to Palestine as his bailiff; Richard fell out with the native
lords under John of Ibelin, who called in the King of Cyprus to their
aid. After some years of strife, in 1236, when Yolande was dead, Queen
Alice' of Cyprus, who was a daughter of Henry of Champagne, persuaded
the native party to take her then husband, Ralph of Soissons, as bailiff.
When the Emperor had received the crown of Jerusalem it must have
appeared that the kingdom was assured of a powerful protector. But in
the issue Frederick's rule only embittered the old enmities, whilst his
quarrel with the Papacy introduced a new cause of discord. The results
might have been even more disastrous had it not been for the unsettled
condition of the Musulman state. Saladin's brother ‘Adil (Saphadin) was
succeeded in 1218 by his son Kāmil, whose reign of twenty years was
troubled by pressure from the Turks in the north and the Tartars ad-
vancing from the east. At Kāmil's death in 1238 his sons fell to civil
war, so that the moment was not unfavourable for the new Crusade which
was launched next year. In this crusade none of the great princes took
part. The chief leader was Theobald, King of Navarre. The French
nobles, who were his principal followers, persisted in making a series of
desultory raids, which ended in most of them being taken prisoners.
Earl Richard of Cornwall, who came to Acre in the following year, was
able through his great wealth to procure their release; but the quarrels
of the Military Orders prevented any prospect of successful war, and the
English earl soon went home. The Templars and Hospitallers continued
to dispute as to the relative advantages of alliance with Damascus or
Egypt. In the end the former prevailed, and in 1244, by a treaty with
Ismā'il of Damascus, the Franks secured the whole land west of Jordan.
There was a brief period of rejoicing in Christendom that all the holy
places had at last been recovered. Then Ayyüb, the Sultan of Egypt,
called to his aid the predatory horde of the Khwārazmian Turks, who
fell upon Jerusalem and massacred its inhabitants (23 August 1244).
The Muslims of Hamāh and Damascus united with the Franks to meet
this common danger, but their joint army was utterly defeated by the
Khwārazmians and Egyptians under the Mamlūk emir, Baibars Bun-
duqdāri, at Gaza on 17 October 1244. This was the greatest disaster
that had befallen the Franks since Hițțīn, and swept away nearly all that
had been so painfully recovered in the last fifty years.
The destruction of Jerusalem and the disaster of Gaza led directly
to the first crusade of Louis IX. Frederick, who should have been the
natural protector of his distant kingdom, was too deeply involved in his
own troubles, and Louis was the only one of the great princes of the
West who had both the will and the power to help. Though he took
the Cross early in 1245, it was not till the end of 1248 that he reached
Cyprus, where he spent six months. The ill-omened precedent of thirty
1 Alice had married Hugh de Lusignan, King of Cyprus 1205-18.
CH. VIII.


## p. 316 (#362) ############################################

316
St Louis in Palestine
years before was followed for the plan of campaign with remarkably
similar results. Damietta fell on this occasion, almost without a blow.
Then there followed a long delay in waiting for reinforcements, amongst
whom there came a small body of English under William Longespée,
Earl of Salisbury. When at the end of November 1249 the crusaders
began their advance on Cairo, they soon found themselves entangled in
the difficulties of the Egyptian Delta. A rash attack on Manşūrah on
8 February 1250 ended disastrously. The crusaders could not advance,
and when, a few weeks later, sickness and lack of food compelled them to
retreat, they found the way blocked by their enemies. In the end Louis
and his army were obliged to surrender, and then to purchase their
freedom at the price of Damietta and a huge ransom in money. Louis
with the remnant of the crusaders reached Acre about the end of May.
He spent nearly four years in the Holy Land, and, though not able to
attempt any great enterprise, did something to strengthen the Franks
by repairing the fortifications of the seaports, and especially of Jaffa,
Caesarea, and Sidon.
Frederick II had died in 1250. During his twenty-five years' reign
the royal power had been virtually in abeyance, or exercised by bailiffs
whose authority was disputed by those whom they were supposed to rule.
The conflict of interests, political, military, and commercial, amongst
the Franks in Syria had thus, through the lack of control, free scope
to develope. The native lords, strengthened by their association with
the prosperous island kingdom of Cyprus, grew more impatient of an
outside authority. The jealousies of the Military Orders, enormously
increased in wealth and power and opposed to one another in policy,
became more acute. The Italian merchants, on whose commerce the
prosperity of the seaport towns, and therefore of the kingdom, depended,
gained greater importance and added political disputes to their com-
mercial rivalry. The dislike of the native lords for the rule of the
Emperor's bailiff had led to bitter strife in 1236, and the rivalry of the
two Military Orders went much deeper than the conflict of policies
which had crippled the crusades of Theobald of Navarre and Richard
of Cornwall. In 1249 there was actually open warfare for a month
between the Pisans and Genoese at Acre. The greatest service which
Louis IX rendered during his four years' sojourn in Palestine was that
the weight of his authority did something to check dispute. But on his
departure the old feuds soon broke out once more. The trouble began
with a quarrel between the Venetians and Genoese in 1256, in which all
other parties were soon involved. Four years of civil war exhausted the
Latin communities at a time when all should have been united to build
up the falling state.
The title of Frederick to the kingdom of Jerusalem passed ultimately
to his grandson Conradin, at whose death in 1268 the line of Yolande
came to an end. Up to that time the royal authority had been exercised


## p. 317 (#363) ############################################

Last days of the kingdom
317
nominally by bailiffs. On Conradin's death the succession was disputed
between Hugh III of Cyprus and Mary of Antioch. Both claimed to
represent Isabella, daughter of Amaury I, the former through Alice,
daughter of Henry of Champagne, and the latter through Melisend,
daughter of Amaury de Lusignan. The Hospitallers and the Genoese,
who had supported Conradin, favoured Hugh, who was actually crowned
King of Jerusalem at Tyre in 1269 and maintained some shew of
authority till 1276, when he was forced by the opposition of the Templars
to leave Acre. The jealousies of the Italian merchants of Genoa, Pisa,
and Venice, and the rivalry of the two great Military Orders, thus again pre-
vented any unity among the Franks at the time when it was most needed.
In 1259 the Tartars had appeared in Syria and threatened Muslim
and Christian alike. They were defeated next year by Quțuz, the Sultan
of Egypt, who on his return home was murdered by his Mamlūks.
This double event really sealed the fate of the Franks in Palestine. Baibars
Bunduqdārī, the victor of Gaza, who now became Sultan, was to prove
the most relentless foe that the Christians had had to encounter since
the death of Saladin. As soon as he had established his authority in
Syria, he set himself to destroy the remnant of Frankish rule. In 1265
Caesarea and Arsūf were taken, and other captures of less importance
followed, till in 1268 first Jaffa and then Antioch fell into his hands.
The fall of Antioch was the occasion for the last great Crusade under
Louis IX of France and Edward of England. Louis turned aside to
attack Tunis, where he died, whilst Edward, thus left to himself, only
reached Acre in the spring of 1271. He came in the nick of time to
save the city from a threatened attack, but, though during an eighteen
months' stay he achieved a series of minor successes, his Crusade brought
only a transient relief. Before he left Palestine Edward procured for
the Christians a ten years' truce, which on its expiration was again
renewed by the then Sultan, Qalā’ún, for a like period. The Franks
made but an ill use of this breathing space, and their domestic feuds
continued with all the former persistence.
Qalā’ūn was at first disposed to peace, but in 1285, provoked by an
attack which the Hospitallers made on a caravan, besieged and captured
their great fortress at Markab. In 1289, on a pretext that the treaty had
expired, Qalā’ūn appeared before Tripolis. After a month's siege that
great city, which was so rich and populous that four thousand weavers
are said to have found employment in its factories, was taken and sacked
with all the horrors of war. Those who escaped aboard ship took
refuge at Acre, as many from other towns and places had done before.
Thus, in the expressive words of an English chronicler: “There were
gathered in Acre not as of old holy and devout men, but wantons and
wastrels out of every country in Christendom who flowed into that
sacred city as it were into a sink of pollution.
Though some minor places like Sidon still remained to the Franks,
CH. VIII.


## p. 318 (#364) ############################################

318
The fall of Acre
Acre stood out as their chief stronghold, and it was clear that Acre
must soon share the fortune of Tripolis, unless some great deliverance
came to it from the West. There was, however, little practical enthusiasm
for a new crusade. Pope Nicholas IV and most of the greater princes
were more intent on schemes of aggrandisement nearer home, and though
Edward of England had never lost his interest in the East he was too
deeply engaged in his own affairs to take the Cross once more. The
Pope, it is true, sent a force of 1600 mercenaries, for whom the republic
of Venice provided shipping. But these mercenaries did more harm
than good, and the most effectual assistance was perhaps that which
Edward sent by his trusty knight, Sir Otto de Grandison, who, however,
brought more money than men.
In the tragedy of Acre all the main causes that had led to the
downfall of the kingdom were brought, as it were, to a focus. In Acre
during its last days, the legate of the Pope and the bailiffs of the Kings
of England, France, and Cyprus, all exercised their authority in inde-
pendence; whilst the lords of the land, the Military Orders, and the
traders of the Italian towns had all their strong towers and quarters
fortified, not against the common foe so much as in hostility to their
Christian rivals. Thus within the walls of one city there were seventeen
separate and distinct communities; whence," wrote Villani, “there
sprang no small confusion. ”
Nevertheless the manifest peril of Acre after the fall of Tripolis
restored for the moment some unity of purpose, and all joined in accepting
the leadership of Henry of Cyprus, who was also titular King of
Jerusalem. Henry made it his first care to conclude a two years' truce.
But the old feuds soon broke out again, and when the papal mercenaries
arrived they fell through lack of discipline to plundering the Saracen
villages. Provoked by this breach of the truce, Qalā’ūn's son Khalil,
who had but lately succeeded as Sultan, took the field early in 1291.
Had there been any unity of command in Acre it is just possible
that the city might have been saved. But from the first the defence was
hampered by the bitterness of the ancient jealousies. The rival parties
each fought bravely enough in their own quarter, but would give no
help to one another. So when, after a six weeks' siege, the Saracens began
their assault, many, like the King of Cyprus, sailed away in despair. For
four terrible days those who remained fought stubbornly, though even
in such a crisis the Knights of the Hospital and the Temple could not
lay aside their mutual enmity. Acre was finally stormed and taken on
18 May, though the Templars with Otto de Grandison held out for ten
days longer in their castle by the waterside. Some of the Christians made
good their escape by sea, but many were drowned in the attempt, and a
far greater number perished by the sword or were carried into captivity?
1 See, for a full narrative, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd Series,
III, 134-150.


## p. 319 (#365) ############################################

End of the Latin kingdom
319
The fall of Acre was the death-knell of the Latin kingdom of
Jerusalem. One after another, the remaining strongholds of the Franks
were abandoned or surrendered, amongst the last to go being Sidon and
Beyrout about the middle of July. Pope Nicholas IV, whose schemes
for the conquest of Sicily had made him half-hearted whilst there was
yet time, was stirred by such a disaster to make a vain effort to revive
the crusading spirit. But the old enthusiasm lingered only in the
visionary ideals of men like Philip de Mézières, and it was a mockery
of fate that for centuries to come the phantom title of King of Jeru-
salem was claimed by princes whose predecessors had failed to defend
its reality
CH, VIII.


## p. 320 (#366) ############################################

320
CHAPTER IX.
THE EFFECTS OF THE CRUSADES UPON
WESTERN EUROPE.
That eastward adventure of united Christendom which we call the
Crusades, the common endeavour of all Europe to recapture the home
of its religion and to subdue the rival faith of Mahomet, has naturally
exercised a strong fascination over the minds of later ages. With the
rediscovery of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century, with the
realisation that, after all, what the rationalism of the eighteenth century
had been inclined to regard as a period of static misery was in fact a
time of steady and fruitful growth, the crusading movement began to
be studied with renewed interest, and the marked development of Euro-
pean civilisation during the two centuries from A. D. 1100 to 1300 was,
on the principle of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc," assigned to its influence.
So Michelet and Heeren attribute to it all those changes in Western
Europe which make its condition in 1300 so marked a contrast to that
of two hundred years before. The rise of the French monarchy, the growth
of towns all over Europe, the great increase in international trade, the
development of the Universities, the decline of feudalism, the opening up
of Asia, the thirteenth-century Renaissance in literature, philosophy, and
art-all this was regarded as due to the stir and movement introduced
by the Crusades into a sleeping Europe. If such a view is too facile and
enthusiastic, it is perhaps no less difficult to accept the more cynical
estimate of the Crusades which would regard them as marauding ex-
peditions disguised by a profession of piety, momentarily successful,
but incapable, by their very nature, of leaving a permanent mark upon
the West.
The Crusades were initiated by the Papacy, and from the moment of
Urban II's appeal to the Council of Clermont down to the fall of Acre-
and indeed for long after—they remained one of the first preoccupations
of every Pope. Describing the policy of the Curia of so late a date as the
middle of the fourteenth century, Viollet remarks that “Rome ne cessait
guère, dans l'intérêt général de la chrétienté, d'entretenir de grands mais
stériles projets de Croisade; c'est pour elle un impérissable honneur. ”
And what was true of the French Papacy of Avignon was far more true
of the Popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the height of
their power. It were strange if this continuous direction for two hundred
years of the armed forces of Europe in the campaign against the infidel
should have left no mark upon the Papacy itself.


## p. 321 (#367) ############################################

The Papacy and the Crusades
321
When Nicholas II, in 1059, issued the decree regulating the election
of future Popes, the great effort of the Church to emancipate itself
from the secularisation involved in its acceptance of a feudal constitu-
tion began. The long struggle with the Empire, which opens between
Hildebrand and Henry IV, and which continued relentlessly throughout
the period of the Crusades, was an attempt ---successful in the main-to
organise the Church as a “societas perfecta,” to use a phrase of later
controversy, independent of the secular power within its own sphere, and
only dependent upon that power in so far as it needed the sword of
material force to carry out the sentences of spiritual judgment. In all
other respects the Divine Society was to be as superior to the secular as
its very nature demanded. The attempt to attain this ideal, with all its
tremendous implications, involved the Popes not only in continual war-
fare with successive Emperors but also in decisive conflict with the Kings
of England and France, and, in an increasing degree, it involved the secu-
larisation of the Papacy itself. To be successful its occupants must be
statesmen first and men of God second; to carry on war they must raise
men and money, and resort to shifts of all kinds to do so; to seize every
advantage, to shape policy to fit every change of circumstance, they must
be prepared to use diplomatic dissimulation and, if necessary, to lie with
hardihood. That this process of degradation, from the lofty heights of
spiritual control to the lowest levels of political expediency, set in, is
not difficult of proof; it suffices to compare Gregory VII with Innocent IV,
or the enthusiastic response with which the call to the First Crusade was
met, with the indifference and even hostility which greeted such appeals
in the later thirteenth century. The wheel had gone full circle, and the
attempt to free the members of the Church from secular control ended
in a more subtle secularisation of its very heart, the Papacy itself.
In that process the Crusades played an important part. They were
one of the main sources of papal strength throughout the twelfth century,
for they provided the Popes with the moral support of Europe, and
placed the Papacy in a position of acknowledged leadership which was
of the greatest value in the struggle with the secular powers. The literal
mind of the Middle Ages found it more easy to understand the task of
succouring the earthly Jerusalem by force of arms than that of gaining
the heavenly Jerusalem by the practice of the Christian virtues, and in
this case the natural man could at once find an outlet for his martial
energies and also, by virtue of the indulgence attached to the Crusade,
make certain of attaining the heavenly reward. Every motive of self-
sacrifice or self-interest, every desire for glory or for gain, was appealed
to by the call to the Crusade. The noble could hope to carve out a
principality in the East; the merchant to make gain by transporting
the crusading armies and supplying their necessities; the peasant to
escape from the crushing burdens of his servile status. But foremost in
the minds of all, at least in the early days, was the unselfish desire to
C. MIED. H. v0L. v. CH. Ix.
21


## p. 322 (#368) ############################################

322
Extension of papal influence
regain for Christ the city made sacred by His life and death, and, inspired
by this common aim, men of every class and country of Europe flocked
to take the Cross at the instigation of the one authority acknowledged
by them all—Christ's earthly Vicar. Here for the first time Christian
Europe gave expression to a common mind and will, and it is of the
highest significance that this mind and will had been formed and edu-
cated by the Church and was now placed at the service of the Church's
head.
There can be little doubt that this moral enthusiasm of Europe
proved in the twelfth century an almost incalculable assistance to the
Papacy in its struggle with the Empire. To this force of a united
Christendom behind them the successors of that Gregory VII who died
in exile owed much of the great advance which they were able to make
in the century after his death. For the Crusades were a living parable
of the doctrine of the superiority of the spiritual sword. They were
organised by the Popes and directed by their legates, and, what was more,
all those who took the Cross became by that act the subjects of the
Papacy in a new and special sense. Their goods during their absence,
themselves before they departed and until they returned with their
vows fulfilled, were removed from secular and placed under ecclesiastical
jurisdiction. The Kings of France or England, of Hungary or Naples,
the very Emperors themselves were, as crusaders, at the orders of the
Pope, and the value of the moral compulsion of public opinion upon
which the Popes could rely in forcing reluctant monarchs to take the
Cross is clearly evidenced by the example of Henry II in his extreme old
age, or of Philip Augustus, or of Frederick II. It is difficult indeed,
except by this explanation, to account for the amazing difference be-
tween the position of the Papacy at the accession of Urban II, stagger-
ing under the defeat of Gregory VII and the schism which followed,
faced too with a Church as yet but half-hearted in support of the reform-
ing policy, and the position of almost undisputed supremacy occupied by
Innocent III. After making all allowances for the ability of Alexander III
and the persistence with which the “Hildebrandine” policy was pursued,
after taking into account all the circumstances which were favourable to
Innocent III's own assertion of his claims—the folly of John, the death
of Henry VI, and the youth of Frederick II—there remains the fact that
in an age when emotional religion was becoming steadily more powerful,
the Pope, as leader of the conflict with the infidel, was enabled to com-
mand to an unprecedented degree the devotion of the faithful.
Yet, in the thirteenth century, much of this prestige and much of this
popular devotion were lost. It was not merely that the Holy Land little
by little fell into the hands of the Saracen and that the respect given to
success was withdrawn when failure followed. The Papacy might have
retained undiminished reverence had it failed, as St Louis failed, with
clean hands and for no lack of high courage.
But the
very
which
success


## p. 323 (#369) ############################################

Crusades as a source of revenue
323
had attended the crusading appeal proved too strong a temptation to the
Popes, and the appeal to take the Cross not only ceased to attract but de-
finitely alienated the faithful when it was used as a weapon in the struggle
against the Hohenstaufen. The list of so-called crusades in the thirteenth
century, not directed against the Saracen, makes sad reading. No good
Christian, indeed, was likely to be shocked by an appeal to take the
Cross against the infidels of Provence, though a full Holy Land in-
dulgence for forty days' service might seem almost too easily won when
“the greater part of the faithful returned home after the forty days
were over”; but since the expedition of Prince Louis against the English
king was announced as a crusade, since the papal feud with the Hohen-
staufen, so obviously maintained to safeguard the Papal States from
danger, was provided with religious sanctions, it is not improbable that
Matthew Paris represents a genuine popular reaction, and not merely
his own opinion, when he writes of the “crusade” of 1255: “When the
faithful heard this, they marvelled that he should promise them reward
for shedding the blood of Christian men that was in former time pro-
mised for the shedding of infidel blood. ”
But, apart from the direct effect upon public opinion of this misuse of
the Crusade for party ends, there emerged from the crusading movement
two financial weapons of lasting importance to the papal armoury—the
indulgence and the tithe.
It would, indeed, be untrue to assert that indulgences originated in
the Crusades, but there can be no doubt that the indulgence as a finan-
cial expedient is a direct outcome of them. More than this, the practice
had been instituted by Gregory VII of granting absolution from their
sins to those who, in particular localities, fought on the Pope's side in a
holy cause? Urban II applied this to the whole of Christendom by
his assurance that “those who die there in true penitence will without
doubt receive indulgence of their sins and the fruits of the reward
hereafter. ” The plenary indulgence to crusaders marks an epoch in the
development of the system.
It is not, however, till the end of the twelfth century and the begin-
ning of the thirteenth that the indulgence began to be used as a source
of revenue. In 1184 those who cannot themselves take the Cross are
bidden to give alms to support the Crusade and, in return for these con-
tributions and for a threefold repetition of the Paternoster, are promised
a partial indulgence. In 1195 Celestine III writes to Hubert of Canter-
bury as his English legate that “those who send of their goods in aid of
the Holy Land shall receive pardon of their sins from their bishop on
the terms that he shall prescribe. ” In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council
goes a step farther and promises a plenary indulgence to those who shall
contribute to the crusading funds in proportion to their means.
With
that step the downward path was begun, and in the thirteenth century
1 Gregorii VII Reg. 11, 54, vii, 12 a ad fin. , viii, 6.
CH. IX.
21-2


## p. 324 (#370) ############################################

324
Indulgences and clerical tithes
the process of degeneration went steadily on. The demand for exemp-
tions from actual service-at first the pretext for a monetary transaction-
ceased to be more than a form, and the oratory of the mendicants stirred
the ignorant to buy what they at least thought to be a certificate of
admittance to Paradise. The Pardoner became a characteristic figure of
medieval life, and the abuse of indulgences, after rousing the protests of
Wyclif and of Hus, increased steadily till it provoked the avenging
wrath of Luther.
If the Crusading Indulgence formed a lucrative and welcome addition
to the papal revenues, the Clerical Tithe, another crusading device,
proved even more profitable. Before the Crusades papal taxation in the
strict sense did not exist. Romescot was a gift and not a tribute, and the
Popes had not yet developed the system of annates and first-fruits which
later provided them with a large part of their revenues. In 1146, how-
ever, the necessities of the Second Crusade led Louis VII of France
to impose a tax upon all clerics under his jurisdiction of a tithe of their
moveables, and this innovation was taken over by Richard I and Philip
Augustus in the “Saladin Tithe” of 1188. The secular princes had here
taken the initiative, and the tithe may be regarded as of first-rate
importance in the general history of taxation as almost the first recorded
step in the substitution of national taxes based on property values for
the ruder and less profitable feudal taxation. But, important as the
tithe may be in the history of secular, it is still more important in the
history of ecclesiastical taxation. The Popes could not afford to allow
ecclesiastical property to become the basis of national revenues. A tithe
for a crusade might soon become a tax for foreign aggression, and when
Louis VII in 1163 repeated his fruitful experiment, the Council of Tours
of that year forbade bishops to pay tithe under penalty of deposition.
The position was further defined by the Third Lateran Council of 1179,
which allowed tithes to be levied by princes, subject to the consent of
the clergy; but Innocent III thought this concession too great, and de-
sired to monopolise the new invention as far as clerical property was
concerned. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 decreed, therefore, that
bishops should never pay tithe without first applying to Rome for the
Pope's consent, whilst Innocent at the same time definitely adopted the
system of tithe as a source of papal revenue by imposing a half-tithe on
all the clergy of Christendom for the Crusade. From that year onwards
the new weapon was constantly in use, and the list of tithes imposed
during the thirteenth century is too long to reproduce. But that the
Crusades provided first a reason and later an ever-ready excuse for the
enormous extension in the thirteenth century of papal control over all
ecclesiastical revenues is certain, and but for the Crusades the position
adopted by Boniface VIII might never have been reached. “The Apostolic
See has the absolute power of administering (the ecclesiastical property).
It can dispose of it without the consent of anyone. It can exact, as it sees


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Peaceful crusaders: missionary work
325
fit, the hundredth, the tenth, or any other part of this property. ” The
absolutist theory of Hildebrand may have contained this doctrine im-
plicitly; it was the needs of the Crusades which made possible its practical
application.
One further result of the crusading movement on the life of the
Western Church was more obviously consonant with its Founder's
teaching than those already mentioned. Before the date at which our
period closes—the fall of Acre—the most truly religious minds of the
West had begun to turn from the propagation of the Kingdom of
Heaven by force to the project of converting the heathen by persuasion,
from militant Crusades to peaceful Missions. St Francis of Assisi, after
two unsuccessful attempts, reached Egypt in 1219 and preached before
the Sultan ; and his followers, as well as those of St Dominic, continued
during the first half of the thirteenth century their attempts to convert
the Muslim world. St Louis, for whom the Crusade in every form was
the passion of his life, gave a new turn to missionary effort when in
1252 he sent the Franciscan William of Rubruquis to the Great
Khan in Central Asia, in the hope that the new Mongolian Empire,
once converted to Christianity, might descend upon the rear of the
Turks and render the recovery of Palestine easy of accomplishment.
At his instance, too, Innocent IV formed in 1253 the first “ Missionary
Society” since the conversion of the West—the “ Peregrinantes propter
Christum ”—who were, for the most part, Franciscans and Dominicans.
But the foremost figure in the development of the policy of the peaceful
“ Crusade” of persuasion was Raymond Lull, who devoted his life to
the organisation of missionary work, and found a martyr's death in
attempting to execute his projects. A Spaniard himself, the conversion
of the Arab invader was his first concern, and in 1276 he persuaded the
King of Majorca to found the College of the Holy Trinity of Miramar.
Here Lull, who had learnt Arabic himself, trained the brothers for
their work as true followers of Christ and His apostles, whose only
weapons for conquest of the heathen had been “ love, prayers, and the
outpouring of tears. ” After ten years of this work of preparation, he
began a career of incessant activity amongst the Tartars and Armenians
of the East and the Muslims of North Africa, only interrupted by
his efforts, constantly renewed, to persuade Popes and kings to engage
their energies in missionary enterprise. To his efforts the decision of the
Council of Vienne in 1311 to establish six schools of oriental languages
in Europe must be attributed, and only his death by martyrdom, in
1314, put an end to his strenuous attempts to persuade Western Europe
that the way to recover the Holy Places was to convert the heathen into
whose hands they had fallen.
The missionary effort thus begun as a reaction from the methods of
the Crusades, as well as a result of the interest in the East created by
them, continued throughout the Middle Ages. In particular it was
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326
Increase of geographical knowledge
successful in Asia. Here Buddhism was an enemy less energetic and
less directly hostile to Christianity than the faith of the Prophet.
Political conditions, too, were favourable during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, and bishoprics were set up not only in Armenia,
Persia, and the Kipchak in Western Asia, but right across China to the
Pacific coast. The twenty-six years' journey of Orderic of Pordenone be-
tween the years 1304 and 1330 shews that at that time there was Christian
missionary work in active progress in Persia, India, China, and Tibet;
and for a time, in the fourteenth century, it must have seemed possible
that the dreams of Raymond Lull were about to be fulfilled, and that
the West, having converted the Mongol Empire to the faith of Christ,
would be able to recover the Holy Land by a concerted movement of
West and East upon the centre of Christian devotion. But Asia was
not yet to be converted. The slackening of the activities of the Western
Church produced by the Babylonish Captivity and the Great Schism
was felt in the failure to give adequate support to the eastern missions;
in the latter half of the fourteenth century the constituent portions
of the Mongol Empire were rapidly converted to Islām, and with the
rise of Tīmūr and his dreams of a reconstitution of the Caliphate the
opportunity of converting Asia had definitely passed.
But if ultimate failure descended upon the missionary side of
crusading activity, as it had fallen earlier upon the Christian states set
up and maintained by force of arms in Syria, the effort was not all lost.
Both from the Crusades proper and from the missionary activity which
resulted from and succeeded them the peoples of Europe learned much
of the world which they had not known before. One of the first-fruits
of the Crusades is to be seen in the numberless itineraries written by
those who had taken part in them for the benefit of future crusaders or
pilgrims. Such writings appeared, indeed, before the Crusades began,
but their number very greatly increased afterwards and, as Dr Barker
says, “there were medieval Baedekers in abundance for the use of the
annual flow of tourists who were carried every Easter by the vessels of
the Italian towns or of the Orders to visit the Holy Land. ” Naturally
these “ Itineraria” are mainly concerned with Europe and Syria ; the
different routes to and from the Holy Sepulchre are their obvious sub-
ject, and in the latter half of the thirteenth century so intelligent a
man as de Joinville could exhibit the grossest ignorance about the
countries beyond the crusading area, could speak of the Nile as rising
in the earthly paradise from which “ginger, rhubarb, wood of aloes, and
cinnamon ” floated down the stream to enrich the happy fishermen who
cast their nets in its upper waters. Of the route from India to Egypt,
indeed of the existence of India, he plainly had no conception. Such a
combination of knowledge and ignorance is characteristic of the Middle
Ages, and it would be easy to exaggerate the number of those who
shared the new knowledge of the world which was brought back to


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The Crusades and economic life
327
the West by crusaders. For example, the traders of the Italian cities
undoubtedly increased their knowledge of Mediterranean geography
enormously during the crusading period, and examples of accurate and
detailed charts for the use of their navigators can be found dating from
the late thirteenth century at least. But that such knowledge was very
far from being universally shared is shewn plainly enough by a monastic
map like the famous Mappa Mundi of Hereford, to which the date 1280
is assigned, and in which even Europe appears as an almost incompre-
hensible maze. Further knowledge of the East was provided by the
story in which William de Rubruquis narrated the adventures of his
mission for the benefit of his royal patron St Louis. But it was not
until the fourteenth century, when the book of Marco Polo began to be
widely read, and when the Christian missions had spread throughout
the vast Mongol Empire, that the conception of the vastness of Asia
began to take hold upon the consciousness of the West. Moreover it is
at least doubtful whether this new knowledge can be regarded as directly
a fruit of the Crusades. The Polos were traders not crusaders, and it
was Marco Polo's story far more than any other which captured the
imagination and attention of Europe. Even so it was Mediterranean
Europe, and in particular the seafarers of the Italian towns, who were
interested. Europe north of the Alps had other things to think of in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when England and France were at
grips in the Hundred Years' War. Even the Church lost its interest in
the East after the overthrow of the missions in the late fourteenth
century, and was more absorbed in the struggles of the Schism and in
the settlement of its internal difficulties in the Councils than in the affairs
of Asia. The knowledge of the East accumulated by its missionaries
lay unused in the papal archives, and it was left to the discoverers and
merchant adventurers of Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries to prove the value of Marco Polo's stories, and to renew
the direct contact of the West with the riches of India and China.
The effects of the Crusades on the economic and social life of
Western Europe are, in the nature of the case, almost impossible to
disentangle from the general process of growth of which these effects are
but a part. To attribute to the Crusades the rise of the cities of Italy
in particular, or of Western Europe as a whole, is to ignore the fact
that the towns of the West had been steadily recovering for centuries
before the Crusades began, and, even if that movement had never taken
place, there is good reason to suppose that they would still have won their
emancipation from feudalism, have created their organs of local self-
government, and developed their trade with its system of internal
organisation. Gibbon writes: “ The estates of the barons were dissi-
pated and their race often extinguished in these costly and perilous
expeditions. Their poverty extorted from their pride those charters of
freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave, secured the farm of the
CH, X.


## p. 328 (#374) ############################################

328
Development of the towns
peasant and the shop of the artificer, and gradually restored a substance
and soul to the most numerous and useful part of the community. The
conflagration which destroyed the tall and barren trees of the forest
gave air and scope to the vegetation of the smaller and nutritive plants
of the soil. ” The rhetorical method of writing history is a pleasant
one, but we are no longer permitted the untroubled serenity of the
classical historian.
It is, indeed, impossible to set down any general effects which the
Crusades had upon feudal society as a whole. Many of the “ tall and
barren trees of the forest” were destroyed in the East, and much of the
martial energies of the nobles of the West found an outlet in crusading
less destructive of civil peace than they could have found at home. By
so much the task of kingship, especially in France, was lightened, the
growth of the central power at the expense of feudalism made easier.
The Counts of Toulouse, of whom four in less than 6fty years died in
the East, provide an example of the failure of a house to consolidate
its fiefs because of a too passionate love of crusading. So also the lands
of the house of Bouillon passed into the female line for a similar
reason, to be absorbed by marriage into other fiefs. Yet the total ex-
tinction of a noble house was not a common event, and the most striking
example of the union of a great fief with the royal demesne in twelfth-
century France-a union which, in the event, was only temporary-was
solely due to the failure of male heirs to the house of Aquitaine and
had nothing to do with the Crusades. The charters of liberties obtained
by the French and English towns cannot, for the most part, be attributed
to the Crusades, though exception should be made for Richard Coeur-
de-Lion's great auction of liberties before his departure to the Holy
Land. Yet, at the most, such charters were only ante-dated by the
necessities of their grantors. They could not exist had not towns been
quietly growing during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had not
groups of merchants, or of tenants acquiring a mercantile character,
formed themselves to purchase exemption from feudal dues. The Cru-
sades in some cases certainly provided opportunities for the towns; they
did not create the civic demand for “liberties. ”
So too, in the general question of the relation of the Crusades to the
development of European commerce, it is impossible to make the progress
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries depend upon them. The case is
best illustrated with reference to the Italian cities, in particular to
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. It has been very clearly shewn, as for example
by Heyd, that before the Crusades began the products of the East, silk,
sugar, and spices especially, were reaching Europe not only by land
from what is now Russia but even more by way of Italy. Here, before
the First Crusade, Amalfi and Venice were the two chief agents in
supplying Western Europe with the Eastern luxuries which her de-
veloping civilisation led her to desire. Amalfi fell out of the race with


## p. 329 (#375) ############################################

The conquests of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa
329
the Norman Conquest of South Italy and the attempt of the Norman
rulers to regulate commerce too rigidly in the interests of politics.
Venice therefore was left, at the period when the Crusades began, as the
chief agent of the Levantine trade in Italy, and her position was
rendered the more advantageous by the large concessions in Constan-
tinople and the Eastern Empire granted in 1082 by Alexius Comnenus
when Amalfi had fallen under the power of Robert Guiscard. But this
position was not to remain unchallenged. The crusaders, as they poured
into Italy for the journey to Palestine, sought transport and maritime
assistance not only from Venice but from Genoa and Pisa as well, while
these two cities were not slow to perceive in the needs of the crusading
hosts a source of profit to themselves, and in the conquests that might be
made in Syria a means to obtain secure access to the trade between East and
West. In the first three Crusades, and in the intervening years between
them, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa all took an active part, not merely in
trans-shipping crusaders but in the actual work of conquest. The Genoese
were largely responsible for the capture of Arsūf, Caesarea, and Acre,
the Pisans for that of Laodicea, the Venetians for that of Sidon and
Tyre. Moreover, the diversion of the crusading effort to capture these
towns, strategically sound as it was for defensive purposes, was dictated
mainly by trading interests. All three cities received wide privileges
both in the seaports and inland towns of all the crusading states of
Syria, and they all benefited equally in one respect—that they had for
almost a hundred years secure markets for their Eastern trade. Further,
the crusaders who had settled in Palestine depended upon the West for
vital necessities, for armour, for horses and ships, for wine and woollen
goods, and, above all, for reinforcements to maintain their position.
Pilgrims flocked to see in security the newly-recovered Holy City, and
a very large proportion of all the carrying-trade for this flow of people
to and from Palestine was in the hands of the Italian cities. More
shipping was required and was built; every year Venice sent two feets
to Syria; Genoa and Pisa did the same. The rivalry of the Eastern
Empire, the necessity for dependence upon Constantinople as a market,
was almost removed, and there can be no question but that the Crusades
brought to all three cities in the twelfth century a steady increase of
prosperity and wealth. Statistics, unhappily, do not exist by which this
increase can be measured, but one event stands out as evidence of the
height of power and success to which the events of the twelfth century
had brought Venice.
The Fourth Crusade could not have been planned by the Venetians
of 1100 with any hope of success. Yet in 1204 they were able to provide
the naval equipment for a force consisting of “4500 horses, 9000 squires,
. . . 4500 knights, and 20,000 sergeants on foot,” to pay the expenses of
the whole, and to overturn the Empire which it had been the primary
object of the First, as it was professedly the object of the Fourth, Crusade
CHIx.


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330
Nationality and the Crusades
to protect. In the division of the spoils which followed the capture of
Constantinople Venice received her reward. One-third of the great city
itself fell beneath her sovereignty, and all the ports and islands of the
Eastern Empire were secured for her commerce to the exclusion of her
rivals. It is true that Venice was unable to retain her monopoly intact,
for the Genoese and Pisans intrigued with the representatives of the
deposed Emperors at Nicaea and received concessions in the ports which
remained under their control; but this did not prevent the Venetians
from reaping a rich harvest from their new dominions during the thirteenth
century. Venice took then a position of superiority over the other Italian
cities which she never lost, even when the Latin Empire had fallen and
the kingdom of Jerusalem had perished with the fall of Acre. And,
as the prosperity of Venice depended on the development in north-western
Europe of markets for the products of the East which she supplied, the
Crusades must be regarded as an important cause of the development of
the chain of commercial republics along the Rhine Valley into Flanders,
as also of the increased prosperity of Marseilles and the towns of southern
France. Undoubtedly the more constant intercourse with the East aroused
a new demand for the luxuries which it alone could supply, and the silks,
sugar, and spices which flowed through Damascus and Egypt became the
indispensable necessities of the nobles and their ladies, to say nothing of
the rich bourgeois, of France, Germany, and England. On the other
hand it is impossible to claim that the Crusades introduced these Eastern
products to the West; nor must it be forgotten that the development of
creative manufacture in the towns of Western Europe had begun before
the Crusades started, and that, without the wealth produced in steadily
increasing quantities by the gildsmen of the West, Europe would have
had no means of purchasing the Eastern wares to satisfy the craving
which the experience of crusades and pilgrims taught.
If an indeterminate answer must be given to the question “What
effects had the Crusades on the economic life of Western Europe? " it is
equally difficult to define their relation either to the growth of a sense of
nationality in the Western nations or to the great development of
Western thought which took place during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The term “nationality” is not easy to define, but, by the end of
the period with which this volume deals, “Frenchmen” had a feeling of
their difference from “Englishmen,” “Germans,” or “ Italians," more acute
than at the beginning of the Crusades. That, like other international move-
ments, the Crusades accentuated the sense of national unity and even of a
natural hostility between nations is, à priori, likely enough and, so early as
1146, evidence of this can be found in the account of the Second Crusade
written by Odo of Deuil, who certainly nourished a hearty dislike for
both Greeks and Germans as such. His dislike for the Greeks may have
been stimulated by their heretical opinions, though it is rather their
excessive flattery and their guile that appear to have aroused him; at


## p. 331 (#377) ############################################

Revived study of Greek
331
any rate no such explanation will account for his hard sayings about the
Germans. “Nostris etiam erant importabiles Alemanni,” he says, and
goes on to give instances of the trouble created by King Conrad's host
for the French who followed after, and of the direct affronts offered to
the French by German soldiers, finishing his complaint by saying, “Thus
the Germans, going before us,disturbed everything; so that the Greeks fled
from our peaceful army. ”Further evidence tending in the same direction
may be seen in the national name and character of the Teutonic Order,
founded in 1190, which are in striking contrast to those of the older
international Orders of the Hospitallers or Templars. Yet it is not often
that this note of national separateness and rivalry is sounded in the
chronicles of the Crusades, and the development of “nationality” can only
be in part attributed to the rivalries which arose in the mixed hosts of
Christendom travelling towards or engaged in the Holy War.
The coincidence of the thirteenth-century “Renaissance” with the
period of the Crusades is striking, and it would be rash to deny any share
in the outburst of intellectual energy which marks the thirteenth
century to the new ideas and broadened outlook of those who, having gone
on crusade, had seen the world of men and things in a way to which the
society of the tenth and eleventh centuries was unaccustomed. But it
must be admitted that a man may travel much and yet see little, may
preserve intact the narrowness of vision with which he set out. St Louis,
as Joinville shews him to us, or Joinville himself, was not intellectually
changed by his crusading. And when we examine the great motive force
of the thirteenth century “Revival of Learning” it is Aristotle from whom
the impulse proceeded, and Aristotle first brought back to the West by
way of Spain and the Moorish versions of his works. It is true that, so
early as 1128, James of Venice translated into Latin some of the works of
Aristotle, but the greater impulse to the absorption of Greek philosophy
by the Western Church came from the study and translation of the Arabic
versions of the Aristotelian writings and the commentaries upon those
writings made by the scholars of Musulman Spain, in particular by
Avicenna and Averroës. In the thirteenth century, however, the conquest
of the Eastern Empire by the crusaders of 1204, and the discontent felt
by Western scholars with the versions of Aristotle which had come to
them at second hand, led to the direct translation of Aristotle's works
from the Greek, as well as to Latin versions of other Greek writings. Thus
Robert Grosseteste translated the Analytica Posteriora and is said to have
written a commentary upon the Nicomachean Ethics, while later in the
century St Thomas Aquinas, refusing to rely upon the faulty Arabic
versions, was able to find in William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth
from 1275 to 1286, a Greek scholar capable of translating the whole of
Aristotle's writings from the original Greek into tortured Latin. In this
task William of Moerbeke may have received some assistance from another
1 MPL. CLxxxv, S. Bernardi Clarae-Vallensis opera, iv, col. 1217.
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332
Military results: check to Turkish advance
member of the Dominican order, Henry of Brabant, and, in view of the
enormous influence exerted by the theological writings of St Thomas, it
is at least interesting to be able to point to these translations as the source
upon which he relied in the task of incorporating the thought of Aristotle
in his great Summa Theologiae. Yet in general the course of the great
movement of medieval thought which began soon after the year 1000
gives little evidence of having been affected by the Crusades. To them
indeed we owe the work of the greatest medieval historian, William of
Tyre, and, on the purely literary side with which we cannot here deal,
their influence was profound in the development of vernacular romances.
But the growth of an articulated system of philosophy, theology, and
politics began before the Crusades, and went on steadily throughout their
course with no more assistance from that movement than was given by
such improvements in the Aristotelian texts as we have already men-
tioned.
It remains to consider the military results of the Crusades upon the
West. Their influence on the improvement of the art of war and military
architecture must be left to be described in special chapters in a future
volume. With regard, however, to the ever-wavering frontier of East and
West, it is clear that the foundation of the Latin States of Syria during
the First Crusade and the course of the twelfth century checked for the
moment the Muslim
advance upon Constantinople which had threatened
its very existence. But against the assistance rendered to the Eastern
Empire in the First Crusade must be set its overthrow in the Fourth-a
blow from which, despite its revival at the end of the thirteenth century,
it never wholly recovered. Whether therefore it is fair to attribute to the
Crusades the delay of nearly three hundred years in the Turkish advance
into the Balkan lands is a problem perhaps incapable of decision, though
the diversion of Muslim effort to the Holy Land probably outweighs
by much the disintegrating effect of the Fourth Crusade and the foun-
dation and fall of the Latin Empire. And on this view the Crusades
must be given credit for providing Western Europe with time to con-
solidate itself into centralised national States, far better able than those
of the eleventh century to defend themselves against the renewed
Muslim advance when it came in the sixteenth century. Nor, in that
renewed struggle between East and West, must the gallant defence of
Rhodes and Cyprus, and later of Malta, by the crusading Knights of St
John, be forgotten.
It was however another and younger order of crusading Knights
which left the deepest mark upon the history of Europe. Founded in 1190,
during the Third Crusade, by certain citizens of Bremen and Lübeck as
a hospital, and raised in 1198 to the rank of an order of Knights, the
Teutonic Order under its great Master, Hermann von Salza, transferred
its energies from the Holy Land to the forcible conversion of infidels
nearer home. Already in East Prussia the Knights of the Sword of


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The Teutonic Knights
333
Livonia were engaged in the difficult task of converting the mixed heathen
population of Letts, Slavs, and Wends to Christianity, and the Teutonic
Knights, after absorbing this order in 1237, carried on the same work
with great energy and striking success for the next eighty years. They
founded Thorn, Königsberg, Marienberg—to which in 1309 they trans-
ferred their headquarters—and finally, in 1311, they captured Dantzig.
They allied themselves with the Hanseatic League, and sought by
every means to develop trade in the dominions won by their swords. To
their activities in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is due the
Germanisation of East Prussia, as to their weakness in the fifteenth
century, to their defeat at Tannenberg and the recovery of Dantzig and
the mouth of the Vistula by the Polish kingdom, is due the problem
of giving Poland access to the sea which has cost so much anxiety since
the Treaty of Versailles. The junction of the lands of the Teutonic
Order with those of the Hohenzollern house at the Reformation brought
Prussia into the affairs of Western Europe.
Yet, despite the tangible conquests of the Teutonic Order in north-
eastern Germany and, what should not be forgotten, the assistance given
by such Orders as those of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcántara to the
Christian monarchs who reconquered Spain from the Moors, it is perhaps
in the realm of ideas that we must seek for the most permanent influence of
the crusading movement. Just as it was itself the product of a Christendom
that at the outset of the struggle felt itself morally united, so it has in
turn been the exemplar in later times of many movements undertaken on
a smaller scale indeed, and using the weapons of reason rather than of
war. Never since the fall of Acre has “ Christendom" acted as a united
whole; for never since has it enjoyed unity. Yet the memory of the
failure in which the Crusades ended has only served to heighten the value
of the ideal which created them and won, especially in the First Crusade,
all their success. Our modern use of the word “Crusade” is in fact a
testimony of our belief in the effectiveness of action possible where large
groups of men share a common ideal, and the grounds of that belief are
to be found in the events narrated in this volume.
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334
CHAPTER X.
GERMANY, 1125–1152.
The Saxon wars, the imperial struggle with the Papacy, had brought
to the front a new nobility. The Hohenstaufen, the Wittelsbachs, the
Wettins emerge to replace the families which, in consequence of the wars,
had become extinct. In like case Lothar, the son of a petty count, one
Gebhard of Supplinburg, rose to the first rank among German princes.
By his marriage he acquired a pre-eminent position in Saxony; for his
wife Richenza was the heiress of Henry of Nordheim and Ekbert of
Meissen. In 1106, on the death of Magnus, Duke of Saxony, the last of
the Billungs, he succeeded to the duchy and to the power which that
family had sedulously built up since the time of Otto the Great. During
the reign of the Emperor Henry V, Lothar as Duke of Saxony had been
conspicuous for his activity in extending his influence in the Wendish
districts and for his constant opposition to the Salian house. In 1125 he
was raised to the throne.
His election marks a change in the German kingship. Though always
elective in theory, owing to the strength of the Saxon and Salian rulers
it had been rendered in practice hereditary. At the diet of Forchheim
in 1077 the German princes passed a resolution, accepted by the Pope,
in favour of spontaneous election'. Effect was given to this resolution in
1125. Henry V died childless, his nephew, Frederick of Swabia, was passed
over, and Lothar without a shadow of hereditary claim-his pedigree is
lost beyond one generation—won the throne by right of election. During
the twelfth century the elective principle becomes firmly established.
Lothar is succeeded by his rival Conrad, and Conrad's son is passed over
in favour of his nephew. The attempt of the Hohenstaufen Emperors to
restore the principle of hereditary succession meets with very limited
success. The Electoral College of princes is gradually forming itself and
establishing its control.
It is fortunate that of an election so important in the history of the
German kingship a detailed and contemporary account has come down
to us? Immediately after the completion of the obsequies of the late
Emperor, writs of summons were issued to the princes to attend an
electoral council at Mayence on the feast of St Bartholomew (24 August).
i Bruno, De Bello Saxonico, SGUS, ed. Wattenbach, p. 67.
2 The author of the Narratio de Electione Lotharii (MGH, Script. xii, 509–512) is
unknown, but he is presumed to have been one of the clergy present at the election
from the diocese of Salzburg, and a member of the extreme Church party.


## p. 335 (#381) ############################################

Election of Lothar of Supplinburg
335
The gathering was a large one'; it included, besides the German princes
and their vassals, two papal legates and Suger, Abbot of St Denis, the
famous minister of the French King Louis VI.
The natural choice would have been Frederick of Swabia. He was
nearly related to the Salian house, he was executor of the late king, heir
to his private estates, guardian of his widow Matilda, the daughter of
Henry I of England, to whose care were entrusted the imperial insignia;
he was well qualified by age—being then thirty-five years old—and by
his personal character and attainments. The head of the house of
Hohenstaufen, he was possessed of considerable private wealth; in addition
to his own duchy of Swabia, he could command the interest of Eastern
Franconia, over which his younger brother Conrad exercised ducal
powers.
But he was out of sympathy with the Church party; and the Church party
was strong under the able leadership of Archbishop Adalbert of Mayence.
Already before the meeting at Mayence Archbishop Frederick of Cologne
had dispatched an embassy to Charles, Count of Flanders, inviting him
to stand for election; the count however declined the offer. Archbishop
Adalbert was more successful. His candidate Lothar commended him-
self to the Church dignitaries on the ground of his enmity to the Salian
house, to the lay princes because he was advanced in years”, destitute of a
male heir, and therefore unable to found a dynasty to deprive them of
their power of election.
At Mayence the business of selection was delegated to a committee
of fortys, ten representatives from each tribe, Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia,
and Saxony. Three names were submitted: Frederick, Leopold, Margrave
of Austria, and Lothar. From this moment the skilful diplomacy of
Archbishop Adalbert comes into play. He had already, by means not
too reputable, if we are to believe Bishop Otto, succeeded in persuading
the Empress to surrender the insignia; now, by addressing awkward
questions to the candidates, he managed to place Frederick in a dilemma.