A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
45.THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM
It is worth while to note the extremely shrunken dimensions of the share of the world remaining under Aryan control in the seventh and eighth centuries. A thousand years before, the Aryan-speaking races were triumphant over all the civilized world west of China. Now the Mongol had thrust as far as Hungary, nothing of Asia remained under Aryan rule except the Byzantine dominions in Asia Minor, and all Africa was lost and nearly all Spain. The great Hellenic world had shrunken to a few possessions round the nucleus of the trading city of Constantinople, and the memory of the Roman world was kept alive by the Latin of the western Christian priests. In vivid contrast to this tale of retrogression, the Semitic tradition had risen again from subjugation and obscurity after a thousand years of darkness.
Yet the vitality of the Nordic peoples was not exhausted. Confined now
to Central and North-Western Europe and terribly muddled in their
social and political ideas, they were nevertheless building up
gradually and steadily a new social order and preparing unconsciously
for the recovery of a power even more extensive than that they had
previously enjoyed.
We have told how at the beginning of the sixth century there remained
no central government in Western Europe at all. That world was divided
up among numbers of local rulers holding their own as they could. This
was too insecure a state of affairs to last; a system of co-operation
and association grew up in this disorder, the feudal system, which has
left its traces upon European life up to the present time. This feudal
system was a sort of crystallization of society about power.
Everywhere the lone man felt insecure and was prepared to barter a
certain amount of his liberty for help and protection. He sought a
stronger man as his lord and protector; he gave him military services
and paid him dues, and in return he was confirmed in his possession of
what was his. His lord again found safety in vassalage to a still
greater lord. Cities also found it convenient to have feudal
protectors, and monasteries and church estates bound themselves by
similar ties. No doubt in many cases allegiance was claimed before it
was offered; the system grew downward as well as upward. So a sort of
pyramidal system grew up, varying widely in different localities,
permitting at first a considerable play of violence and private warfare
but making steadily for order and a new reign of law. The pyramids
grew up until some became recognizable as kingdoms. Already by the
early sixth century a Frankish kingdom existed under its founder Clovis
in what is now France and the Netherlands, and presently Visigothic and
Lombard and Gothic kingdoms were in existence.
The Moslim when they crossed the Pyrenees in 720 found this Frankish
kingdom under the practical rule of Charles Martel, the Mayor of the
Palace of a degenerate descendant of Clovis, and experienced the
decisive defeat of Poitiers (732) at his hands. This Charles Martel
was practically overlord of Europe north of the Alps from the Pyrenees
to Hungary. He ruled over a multitude of subordinate lords speaking
French- Latin, and High and Low German languages. His son Pepin
extinguished the last descendants of Clovis and took the kingly state
and title. His grandson Charlemagne, who began to reign in 768, found
himself lord of a realm so large that he could think of reviving the
title of Latin Emperor. He conquered North Italy and made himself
master of Rome.
Map: Area more or less under Frankish dominion in the time of Charles
Martel
Approaching the story of Europe as we do from the wider horizons of a
world history we can see much more distinctly than the mere nationalist
historian how cramping and disastrous this tradition of the Latin Roman
Empire was. A narrow intense struggle for this phantom predominance
was to consume European energy for more than a thousand years. Through
all that period it is possible to trace certain unquenchable
antagonisms; they run through the wits of Europe like the obsessions of
a demented mind. One driving force was this ambition of successful
rulers, which Charlemagne (Charles the Great) embodied, to become
Cæsar. The realm of Charlemagne consisted of a complex of feudal
German states at various stages of barbarism. West of the Rhine, most
of these German peoples had learnt to speak various Latinized dialects
which fused at last to form French. East of the Rhine, the racially
similar German peoples did not lose their German speech. On account of
this, communication was difficult between these two groups of barbarian
conquerors and a split easily brought about. The split was made the
more easy by the fact that the Frankish usage made it seem natural to
divide the empire of Charlemagne among his sons at his death. So one
aspect of the history of Europe from the days of Charlemagne onwards is
a history of first this monarch and his family and then that,
struggling to a precarious headship of the kings, princes, dukes,
bishops and cities of Europe, while a steadily deepening antagonism
between the French and German speaking elements develops in the medley.
There was a formality of election for each emperor; and the climax of
his ambition was to struggle to the possession of that worn-out,
misplaced capital Rome and to a coronation there.
The next factor in the European political disorder was the resolve of
the Church at Rome to make no temporal prince but the Pope of Rome
himself emperor in effect. He was already pontifex maximus; for all
practical purposes he held the decaying city; if he had no armies he
had at least a vast propaganda organization in his priests throughout
the whole Latin world; if he had little power over men’s bodies he held
the keys of heaven and hell in their imaginations and could exercise
much influence upon their souls. So throughout the middle ages while
one prince manœuvred against another first for equality, then for
ascendancy, and at last for the supreme prize, the Pope of Rome,
sometimes boldly, sometimes craftily, sometimes feebly—for the Popes
were a succession of oldish men and the average reign of a Pope was not
more than two years—manœuvred for the submission of all the princes to
himself as the ultimate overlord of Christendom.
But these antagonisms of prince against prince and of Emperor against
Pope do not by any means exhaust the factors of the European confusion.
There was still an Emperor in Constantinople speaking Greek and
claiming the allegiance of all Europe. When Charlemagne sought to
revive the empire, it was merely the Latin end of the empire he
revived. It was natural that a sense of rivalry between Latin Empire
and Greek Empire should develop very readily. And still more readily
did the rivalry of Greek-speaking Christianity and the newer
Latin-speaking version develop. The Pope of Rome claimed to be the
successor of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles of Christ, and the
head of the Christian community everywhere. Neither the emperor nor
the patriarch in Constantinople were disposed to acknowledge this
claim. A dispute about a fine point in the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity consummated a long series of dissensions in a final rupture in
1054. The Latin Church and the Greek Church became and remained
thereafter distinct and frankly antagonistic. This antagonism must be
added to the others in our estimate of the conflicts that wasted Latin
Christendom in the middle ages.
STATUE OF CHARLEMAGNE IN FRONT OF NOTRE DAME, PARIS
STATUE OF CHARLEMAGNE IN FRONT OF NOTRE DAME, PARIS
The figure is entirely imaginary and romantic. There is no
contemporary portrait of Charlemagne
_Photo: Rischgitz_
Upon this divided world of Christendom rained the blows of three sets
of antagonists. About the Baltic and North Seas remained a series of
Nordic tribes who were only very slowly and reluctantly Christianized;
these were the Northmen. They had taken to the sea and piracy, and
were raiding all the Christian coasts down to Spain. They had pushed
up the Russian rivers to the desolate central lands and brought their
shipping over into the south-flowing rivers. They had come out upon
the Caspian and Black Seas as pirates also. They set up principalities
in Russia; they were the first people to be called Russians. These
Northmen Russians came near to taking Constantinople. England in the
early ninth century was a Christianized Low German country under a
king, Egbert, a protégé and pupil of Charlemagne. The Northmen wrested
half the kingdom from his successor Alfred the Great (886), and finally
under Canute (1016) made themselves masters of the whole land. Under
Rolph the Ganger (912) another band of Northmen conquered the north of
France, which became Normandy.
Canute ruled not only over England but over Norway and Denmark, but his
brief empire fell to pieces at his death through that political
weakness of the barbaric peoples—division among a ruler’s sons. It is
interesting to speculate what might have happened if this temporary
union of the Northmen had endured. They were a race of astonishing
boldness and energy. They sailed in their galleys even to Iceland and
Greenland. They were the first Europeans to land on American soil.
Later on Norman adventurers were to recover Sicily from the Saracens
and sack Rome. It is a fascinating thing to imagine what a great
northern sea-faring power might have grown out of Canute’s kingdom,
reaching from America to Russia.
To the east of the Germans and Latinized Europeans was a medley of Slav
tribes and Turkish peoples. Prominent among these were the Magyars or
Hungarians who were coming westward throughout the eighth and ninth
centuries. Charlemagne held them for a time, but after his death they
established themselves in what is now Hungary; and after the fashion of
their kindred predecessors, the Huns, raided every summer into the
settled parts of Europe. In 938 they went through Germany into France,
crossed the Alps into North Italy, and so came home, burning, robbing
and destroying.
Finally pounding away from the south at the vestiges of the Roman
Empire were the Saracens. They had made themselves largely masters of
the sea; their only formidable adversaries upon the water were the
Northmen, the Russian Northmen out of the Black Sea and the Northmen of
the west.
Map: Europe at the death of Charlemagne—814
Hemmed in by these more vigorous and aggressive peoples, amidst forces
they did not understand and dangers they could not estimate,
Charlemagne and after him a series of other ambitious spirits took up
the futile drama of restoring the Western Empire under the name of the
Holy Roman Empire. From the time of Charlemagne onward this idea
obsessed the political life of Western Europe, while in the East the
Greek half of the Roman power decayed and dwindled until at last
nothing remained of it at all but the corrupt trading city of
Constantinople and a few miles of territory about it. Politically the
continent of Europe remained traditional and uncreative from the time
of Charlemagne onward for a thousand years.
The name of Charlemagne looms large in European history but his
personality is but indistinctly seen. He could not read nor write, but
he had a considerable respect for learning; he liked to be read aloud
to at meals and he had a weakness for theological discussion. At his
winter quarters at Aix-la- Chapelle or Mayence he gathered about him a
number of learned men and picked up much from their conversation. In
the summer he made war, against the Spanish Saracens, against the Slavs
and Magyars, against the Saxons, and other still heathen German tribes.
It is doubtful whether the idea of becoming Cæsar in succession to
Romulus Augustulus occurred to him before his acquisition of North
Italy, or whether it was suggested to him by Pope Leo III, who was
anxious to make the Latin Church independent of Constantinople.
There were the most extraordinary manœuvres at Rome between the Pope
and the prospective emperor in order to make it appear or not appear as
if the Pope gave him the imperial crown. The Pope succeeded in
crowning his visitor and conqueror by surprise in St. Peter’s on
Christmas Day 800 A.D. He produced a crown, put it on the head of
Charlemagne and hailed him Cæsar and Augustus. There was great
applause among the people. Charlemagne was by no means pleased at the
way in which the thing was done, it rankled in his mind as a defeat;
and he left the most careful instructions to his son that he was not to
let the Pope crown him emperor; he was to seize the crown into his own
hands and put it on his own head himself. So at the very outset of
this imperial revival we see beginning the age-long dispute of Pope and
Emperor for priority. But Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne,
disregarded his father’s instructions and was entirely submissive to
the Pope.
The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the death of Louis the Pious
and the split between the French-speaking Franks and the
German-speaking Franks widened. The next emperor to arise was Otto,
the son of a certain Henry the Fowler, a Saxon, who had been elected
King of Germany by an assembly of German princes and prelates in 919.
Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned emperor there in 962. This
Saxon line came to an end early in the eleventh century and gave place
to other German rulers. The feudal princes and nobles to the west who
spoke various French dialects did not fall under the sway of these
German emperors after the Carlovingian line, the line that is descended
from Charlemagne, had come to an end, and no part of Britain ever came
into the Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King of France
and a number of lesser feudal rulers remained outside. In 987 the
Kingdom of France passed out of the possession of the Carlovingian line
into the hands of Hugh Capet, whose descendants were still reigning in
the eighteenth century. At the time of Hugh Capet the King of France
ruled only a comparatively small territory round Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an invasion of
the Norwegian Northmen under King Harold Hardrada and by the Latinized
Northmen under the Duke of Normandy. Harold King of England defeated
the former at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and was defeated by the
latter at Hastings. England was conquered by the Normans, and so cut
off from Scandinavian, Teutonic and Russian affairs, and brought into
the most intimate relations and conflicts with the French. For the next
four centuries the English were entangled in the conflicts of the
French feudal princes and wasted upon the fields of France.