46.THE CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

46.THE CRUSADES AND  THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION 

It is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid of the _Arabian Nights. It is recorded that Haroun-al-Raschid sent ambassadors from Bagdad—which had now replaced Damascus as the Moslem capital—with a splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This latter present was admirably calculated to set the Byzantine Empire and this new Holy Roman Empire by the ears as to which was the proper protector of the Christians in Jerusalem.

These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth century was

still a weltering disorder of war and pillage, there flourished a great

Arab Empire in Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more civilized than anything

Europe could show. Here literature and science still lived; the arts

flourished, and the mind of man could move without fear or

superstition. And even in Spain and North Africa where the Saracenic

dominions were falling into political confusion there was a vigorous

intellectual life. Aristotle was read and discussed by these Jews and

Arabs during these centuries of European darkness. They guarded the

neglected seeds of science and philosophy.

North-east of the Caliph’s dominions was a number of Turkish tribes.

They had been converted to Islam, and they held the faith much more

simply and fiercely than the actively intellectual Arabs and Persians

to the south. In the tenth century the Turks were growing strong and

vigorous while the Arab power was divided and decaying. The relations

of the Turks to the Empire of the Caliphate became very similar to the

relations of the Medes to the last Babylonian Empire fourteen centuries

before. In the eleventh century a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk

Turks, came down into Mesopotamia and made the Caliph their nominal

ruler but really their captive and tool. They conquered Armenia. Then

they struck at the remnants of the Byzantine power in Asia Minor. In

1071 the Byzantine army was utterly smashed at the battle of Melasgird,

and the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule

remained in Asia. They took the fortress of Nicæa over against

Constantinople, and prepared to attempt that city.

The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror. He was

already heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman adventurers

who had seized Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish people, the

Petschenegs, who were raiding over the Danube. In his extremity he

sought help where he could, and it is notable that he did not appeal to

the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as the head of Latin

Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII, and his successor Alexius

Comnenus wrote still more urgently to Urban II.

This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the Latin and

Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly alive in men’s

minds, and this disaster to Byzantium must have presented itself to the

Pope as a supreme opportunity for reasserting the supremacy of the

Latin Church over the dissentient Greeks. Moreover this occasion gave

the Pope a chance to deal with two other matters that troubled western

Christendom very greatly. One was the custom of “private war” which

disordered social life, and the other was the superabundant fighting

energy of the Low Germans and Christianized Northmen and particularly

of the Franks and Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of

the Cross, was preached against the Turkish captors of Jerusalem, and a

truce to all warfare amongst Christians (1095). The declared object of

this war was the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from the unbelievers.

A man called Peter the Hermit carried on a popular propaganda

throughout France and Germany on broadly democratic lines. He went clad

in a coarse garment, barefooted on an ass, he carried a huge cross and

harangued the crowd in street or market-place or church. He denounced

the cruelties practised upon the Christian pilgrims by the Turks, and

the shame of the Holy Sepulchre being in any but Christian hands. The

fruits of centuries of Christian teaching became apparent in the

response. A great wave of enthusiasm swept the western world, and

popular Christendom discovered itself.

Such a widespread uprising of the common people in relation to a single

idea as now occurred was a new thing in the history of our race. There

is nothing to parallel it in the previous history of the Roman Empire

or of India or China. On a smaller scale, however, there had been

similar movements among the Jewish people after their liberation from

the Babylonian captivity, and later on Islam was to display a parallel

susceptibility to collective feeling. Such movements were certainly

connected with the new spirit that had come into life with the

development of the missionary- teaching religions. The Hebrew

prophets, Jesus and his disciples, Mani, Muhammad, were all exhorters

of men’s individual souls. They brought the personal conscience face

to face with God. Before that time religion had been much more a

business of fetish, of pseudoscience, than of conscience. The old kind

of religion turned upon temple, initiated priest and mystical

sacrifice, and ruled the common man like a slave by fear. The new kind

of religion made a man of him.

The preaching of the First Crusade was the first stirring of the common

people in European history. It may be too much to call it the birth of

modern democracy, but certainly at that time modern democracy stirred.

Before very long we shall find it stirring again, and raising the most

disturbing social and religious questions.

Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully and

lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people, crowds rather than

armies, set out eastward from France and the Rhineland and Central

Europe without waiting for leaders or proper equipment to rescue the

Holy Sepulchre. This was the “people’s crusade.” Two great mobs

blundered into Hungary, mistook the recently converted Magyars for

pagans, committed atrocities and were massacred. A third multitude with

a similarly confused mind, after a great pogrom of the Jews in the

Rhineland, marched eastward, and was also destroyed in Hungary. Two

other huge crowds, under the leadership of Peter the Hermit himself,

reached Constantinople, crossed the Bosphorus, and were massacred

rather than defeated by the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this

first movement of the European people, as people.

Next year (1097) the real fighting forces crossed the Bosphorus.

Essentially they were Norman in leadership and spirit. They stormed

Nicæa, marched by much the same route as Alexander had followed

fourteen centuries before, to Antioch. The siege of Antioch kept them

a year, and in June 1099 they invested Jerusalem. It was stormed after

a month’s siege. The slaughter was terrible. Men riding on horseback

were splashed by the blood in the streets. At nightfall on July 15th

the Crusaders had fought their way into the Church of the Holy

Sepulchre and overcome all opposition there: blood-stained, weary and

“sobbing from excess of joy” they knelt down in prayer.

Originally on the arch of Trajan at Constantinople, the Doge Dandalo V

took them after the Fourth Crusade, to Venice, whence Napoleon I

removed them to Paris, but in 1815 they were returned to Venice.

During the Great War of 1914-18 they were hidden away for fear of air

raids.

Immediately the hostility of Latin and Greek broke out again. The

Crusaders were the servants of the Latin Church, and the Greek

patriarch of Jerusalem found himself in a far worse case under the

triumphant Latins than under the Turks. The Crusaders discovered

themselves between Byzantine and Turk and fighting both. Much of Asia

Minor was recovered by the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin princes were

left, a buffer between Turk and Greek, with Jerusalem and a few small

principalities, of which Edessa was one of the chief, in Syria. Their

grip even on these possessions was precarious, and in 1144 Edessa fell

to the Moslim, leading to an ineffective Second Crusade, which failed

to recover Edessa but saved Antioch from a similar fate.

In 1169 the forces of Islam were rallied under a Kurdish adventurer

named Saladin who had made himself master of Egypt. He preached a Holy

War against the Christians, recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, and so

provoked the Third Crusade. This failed to recover Jerusalem. In the

Fourth Crusade (1202-4) the Latin Church turned frankly upon the Greek

Empire, and there was not even a pretence of fighting the Turks. It

started from Venice and in 1204 it stormed Constantinople. The great

rising trading city of Venice was the leader in this adventure, and

most of the coasts and islands of the Byzantine Empire were annexed by

the Venetians. A “Latin” emperor (Baldwin of Flanders) was set up in

Constantinople and the Latin and Greek Church were declared to be

reunited. The Latin emperors ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261

when the Greek world shook itself free again from Roman predominance.

The twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth was the age

of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was the age of the ascendancy

of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth the age of the Northmen. A united

Christendom under the rule of the Pope came nearer to being a working

reality than it ever was before or after that time.

In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and widespread

over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed through some dark

and discreditable phases; few writers can be found to excuse the lives

of Popes John XI and John XII in the tenth century; they were

abominable creatures; but the heart and body of Latin Christendom had

remained earnest and simple; the generality of the common priests and

monks and nuns had lived exemplary and faithful lives. Upon the wealth

of confidence such lives created rested the power of the church. Among

the great Popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I

(590-604) and Leo III (795-816) who invited Charlemagne to be Cæsar and

crowned him in spite of himself. Towards the close of the eleventh

century there arose a great clerical statesman, Hildebrand, who ended

his life as Pope Gregory VII (1073- 1085). Next but one after him came

Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the First Crusade. These two were

the founders of this period of papal greatness during which the Popes

lorded it over the Emperors. From Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway

to Sicily and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Gregory VII obliged the

Emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him at Canossa and to await

forgiveness for three days and nights in the courtyard of the castle,

clad in sackcloth and barefooted to the snow. In 1176 at Venice the

Emperor Frederick (Frederick Barbarossa), knelt to Pope Alexander III

and swore fealty to him.

The great power of the church in the beginning of the eleventh century

lay in the wills and consciences of men. It failed to retain the moral

prestige on which its power was based. In the opening decades of the

fourteenth century it was discovered that the power of the Pope had

evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naive confidence of the

common people of Christendom in the church so that they would no longer

rally to its appeal and serve its purposes?

The first trouble was certainly the accumulation of wealth by the

church. The church never died, and there was a frequent disposition on

the part of dying childless people to leave lands to the church.

Penitent sinners were exhorted to do so. Accordingly in many European

countries as much as a fourth of the land became church property. The

appetite for property grows with what it feeds upon. Already in the

thirteenth century it was being said everywhere that the priests were

not good men, that they were always hunting for money and legacies.

The kings and princes disliked this alienation of property very

greatly. In the place of feudal lords capable of military support,

they found their land supporting abbeys and monks and nuns. And these

lands were really under foreign dominion. Even before the time of Pope

Gregory VII there had been a struggle between the princes and the

papacy over the question of “investitures,” the question that is of who

should appoint the bishops. If that power rested with the Pope and not

the King, then the latter lost control not only of the consciences of

his subjects but of a considerable part of his dominions. For also the

clergy claimed exemption from taxation. They paid their taxes to Rome.

And not only that, but the church also claimed the right to levy a tax

of one-tenth upon the property of the layman in addition to the taxes

he paid his prince.

The history of nearly every country in Latin Christendom tells of the

same phase in the eleventh century, a phase of struggle between monarch

and Pope on the issue of investitures and generally it tells of a

victory for the Pope. He claimed to be able to excommunicate the

prince, to absolve his subjects from their allegiance to him, to

recognize a successor. He claimed to be able to put a nation under an

interdict, and then nearly all priestly functions ceased except the

sacraments of baptism, confirmation and penance; the priests could

neither hold the ordinary services, marry people, nor bury the dead.

With these two weapons it was possible for the twelfth century Popes to

curb the most recalcitrant princes and overawe the most restive

peoples. These were enormous powers, and enormous powers are only to

be used on extraordinary occasions. The Popes used them at last with a

frequency that staled their effect. Within thirty years at the end of

the twelfth century we find Scotland, France and England in turn under

an interdict. And also the Popes could not resist the temptation to

preach crusades against offending princes—until the crusading spirit

was extinct.

It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled simply against

the princes and had had a care to keep its hold upon the general mind,

it might have achieved a permanent dominion over all Christendom. But

the high claims of the Pope were reflected as arrogance in the conduct

of the clergy. Before the eleventh century the Roman priests could

marry; they had close ties with the people among whom they lived; they

were indeed a part of the people. Gregory VII made them celibates; he

cut the priests off from too great an intimacy with the laymen in order

to bind them more closely to Rome, but indeed he opened a fissure

between the church and the commonalty. The church had its own law

courts. Cases involving not merely priests but monks, students,

crusaders, widows, orphans and the helpless were reserved for the

clerical courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages

and oaths and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever the

layman found himself in conflict with the priest he had to go to a

clerical court. The obligations of peace and war fell upon his

shoulders alone and left the priest free. It is no great wonder that

jealousy and hatred of the priests grew up in the Christian world.

Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the consciences of

common men. It fought against religious enthusiasm, which should have

been its ally, and it forced doctrinal orthodoxy upon honest doubt and

aberrant opinion. When the church interfered in matters of morality it

had the common man with it, but not when it interfered in matters of

doctrine. When in the south of France Waldo taught a return to the

simplicity of Jesus in faith and life, Innocent III preached a crusade

against the Waldenses, Waldo’s followers, and permitted them to be

suppressed with fire, sword, rape and the most abominable cruelties.

When again St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) taught the imitation of

Christ and a life of poverty and service, his followers, the

Franciscans, were persecuted, scourged, imprisoned and dispersed. In

1318 four of them were burnt alive at Marseilles. On the other hand

the fiercely orthodox order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic

(1170-1221) was strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its

assistance set up an organization, the Inquisition, for the hunting of

heresy and the affliction of free thought.

So it was that the church by excessive claims, by unrighteous

privileges, and by an irrational intolerance destroyed that free faith

of the common man which was the final source of all its power. The

story of its decline tells of no adequate foemen from without but

continually of decay from within.

45.THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

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.

44.THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

44.THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS

There follows the most amazing story of conquest in the whole history of our race. The Byzantine army was smashed at the battle of the Yarmuk (a tributary of the Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor Heraclius, his energy sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted by the Persian war, saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus, Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem and the rest fall almost without resistance to the Moslim. Large elements in the population went over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned east. The Persians had found an able general in Rustam; they had a great host with a force of elephants; and for three days they fought the Arabs at Kadessia (637) and broke at last in headlong rout.

The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem Empire pushed far

into Western Turkestan and eastward until it met the Chinese. Egypt

fell almost without resistance to the new conquerors, who full of a

fanatical belief in the sufficiency of the Koran, wiped out the

vestiges of the book-copying industry of the Alexandria Library. The

tide of conquest poured along the north coast of Africa to the Straits

of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded in 710 and the Pyrenees

Mountains were reached in 720. In 732 the Arab advance had reached the

centre of France, but here it was stopped for good at the battle of

Poitiers and thrust back as far as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of

Egypt had given the Moslim a fleet, and for a time it looked as though

they would take Constantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between

672 and 718 but the great city held out against them.

Map: The Growth of the Moslem Power in 25 Years

Map: The Moslem Empire, 750 A.D.

The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political experience,

and this great empire with its capital now at Damascus, which stretched

from Spain to China, was destined to break up very speedily. From the

very beginning doctrinal differences undermined its unity. But our

interest here lies not with the story of its political disintegration

but with its effect upon the human mind and upon the general destinies

of our race. The Arab intelligence had been flung across the world

even more swiftly and dramatically than had the Greek a thousand years

before. The intellectual stimulation of the whole world west of China,

the break-up of old ideas and development of new ones, was enormous.

In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not only

with Manichæan, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with the

scientific Greek literature, preserved not only in Greek but in Syrian

translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also. Every-where, and

particularly in Spain, it discovered an active Jewish tradition of

speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met Buddhism and the

material achievements of Chinese civilization. It learnt the

manufacture of paper—which made printed books possible—from the

Chinese. And finally it came into touch with Indian mathematics and

philosophy.

JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR

JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR

_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_

Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of

faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible book, was dropped.

Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the Arab conquerors.

By the eighth century there was an educational organization throughout

the whole “Arabized” world. In the ninth learned men in the schools of

Cordoba in Spain were corresponding with learned men in Cairo, Bagdad,

Bokhara and Samarkand. The Jewish mind assimilated very readily with

the Arab, and for a time the two Semitic races worked together through

the medium of Arabic. Long after the political break-up and

enfeeblement of the Arabs, this intellectual community of the

Arab-speaking world endured. It was still producing very considerable

results in the thirteenth century.

VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES

VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES

_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_

So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts which

was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in this astonishing

renascence of the Semitic world. The seed of Aristotle and the museum

of Alexandria that had lain so long inactive and neglected now

germinated and began to grow towards fruition. Very great advances

were made in mathematical, medical and physical science. The clumsy

Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic figures we use to this day and

the zero sign was first employed. The very name algebra is Arabic. So

is the word chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol, Aldebaran and

Boötes preserve the traces of Arab conquests in the sky. Their

philosophy was destined to reanimate the medieval philosophy of France

and Italy and the whole Christian world.

The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists, and they were

still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods and results

secret as far as possible. They realized from the very beginning what

enormous advantages their possible discoveries might give them, and

what far-reaching consequences they might have on human life. They

came upon many metallurgical and technical devices of the utmost value,

alloys and dyes, distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass; but

the two chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was “the

philosopher’s stone”—a means of changing the metallic elements one into

another and so getting a control of artificial gold, and the other was

the _elixir vitœ_, a stimulant that would revivify age and prolong life

indefinitely. The crabbed patient experimenting of these Arab

alchemists spread into the Christian world. The fascination of their

enquiries spread. Very gradually the activities of these alchemists

became more social and co-operative. They found it profitable to

exchange and compare ideas. By insensible gradations the last of the

alchemists became the first of the experimental philosophers.

The old alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone which was to

transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality; they found

the methods of modern experimental science which promise in the end to

give man illimitable power over the world and over his own destiny.