Читать книгу The Law of Civilization and Decay - Adams Brooks - Страница 4

Until the mechanical arts have advanced far enough to cause the attack in war to predominate over the defence, centralization cannot begin; for when a mud wall can stop an army, a police is impossible. The superiority of the attack was the secret of the power of the monied class who controlled Rome, because with money a machine could be maintained which made individual resistance out of the question, and revolt difficult. Titus had hardly more trouble in reducing Jerusalem, and dispersing the Jews, than a modern officer would have under similar circumstances.

As the barbarians overran the Roman provinces, and the arts declined, the conditions of life changed. The defence gained steadily on the attack, and, after some centuries, a town with a good garrison, solid ramparts, and abundant provisions had nothing to fear from the greatest king. Even the small, square Norman tower was practically impregnable. As Viollet-le-Duc has explained, these towers were mere passive defences, formidable to a besieger only because no machinery existed for making a breach in a wall. The beleaguered nobles had only to watch their own men, see to their doors, throw projectiles at the enemy if he approached too near, counter-mine if mined, and they might defy a great army until their food failed. Famine was the enemy most feared.100

By the eleventh century these towers had sprung up all over the West. Even the convents and churches could be defended, and every such stronghold was the seat of a count or baron, an abbot or bishop, who was a sovereign because no one could coerce him, and who therefore exercised all the rights of sovereignty, made war, dispensed justice, and coined money. In France alone there were nearly two hundred mints in the twelfth century.

Down to the close of the Merovingian dynasty the gold standard had been maintained, and contraction had steadily gone on; but, for reasons which are not understood, under the second race, the purchasing power of bullion temporarily declined, and this expansion was probably one chief cause of the prosperity of the reign of Charlemagne. Perhaps the relief was due to the gradual restoration of silver to circulation, for the coinage was then reformed, and the establishment of the silver pound as the measure of value may be considered as the basis of all the monetary systems of modern Europe.

The interval of prosperity was, however, brief; no permanent addition was made to the stock of precious metals, and prices continued to fall, as is demonstrated by the rapid deterioration of the currency. In this second period of relapse disintegration reached its limit.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries the Northmen infested the coasts of France, and sailed up the rivers burning and ravaging, as far as Rouen and Orléans. Even the convents of Saint Martin of Tours and Saint Germain des Près were sacked. The Mediterranean swarmed with Saracenic corsairs, who took Fraxinetum, near Toulon, seized the passes of the Alps, and levied toll on travel into Italy. The cannibalistic Huns overran the Lower Danube, and closed the road to Constantinople. Western Europe was cut off from the rest of the world. Commerce nearly ceased – the roads were so bad and dangerous, and the sea so full of pirates.

The ancient stock of scientific knowledge was gradually forgotten, and the imagination had full play. Upon philosophy the effect was decisive; Christianity sank to a plane where it appealed more vividly to the minds of the surrounding pagans than their own faiths, and conversion then went on rapidly. In 912 Rollo of Normandy was baptized; the Danes, Norwegians, Poles, and Russians followed; and in 997 Saint Stephen ascended the throne of Hungary and reopened to Latin Christians the way to the Sepulchre.

Perhaps the destiny of modern Europe has hinged upon the fact that the Christian sacred places lay in Asia, and therefore the pilgrimage brought the West into contact with the East. But the pilgrimage was the effect of relic-worship, and relic-worship the vital principle of monasticism. In these centuries of extreme credulity monasticism had its strongest growth. A faculty for scientific study was abnormal, and experimental knowledge was ascribed to sorcery. The monk Gerbert, who became pope as Sylvester II., was probably the most remarkable man of his generation. Though poor and of humble birth, he attracted so much attention that he was sent to Spain, where he studied in the Moorish schools at Barcelona and Cordova, and where he learned the rudiments of mathematics and geography. His contemporaries were so bewildered by his knowledge that they thought it due to magic, and told how he had been seen flying home from Spain, borne on the back of the demon he served, and loaded with the books he had stolen from the wizard, his master. Sylvester died in 1003, but long afterwards anatomy was still condemned by the Church, and four separate councils anathematized experimental medicine, because it threatened to destroy the value of the shrines. The ascendency of Cluny began with Saint Hugh, who was chosen abbot in 1049, the Year Leo’s election. The corporation then obtained control of Rome, and in another twenty-five years was engaged in its desperate struggle with the remains of the old secular police power. But though Hildebrand crushed Henry, the ancient materialism was too deeply imbedded to be eradicated in a single generation, and meanwhile the imagination had been brought to an uncontrollable intensity. A new and fiercer excitement seethed among the people – a vision of the conquest of talismans so powerful as to make their owners sure of heaven and absolute on earth.

The attraction of Palestine had been very early felt, for in 333 a guide-book had been written, called the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, which gave the route through the valley of the Danube, together with an excellent account of the Holy Land. In those days, before the barbaric inroads, the journey was safe enough; but afterwards communication nearly ceased, and when Stephen was baptized in 997, the relics of Jerusalem had all the excitement of novelty. Europe glowed with enthusiasm. Sylvester proposed a crusade, and Hildebrand declared he would rather risk his life for the holy places “than rule the universe.”

Each year the throngs upon the road increased, convents sprang up along the way to shelter the pilgrims, the whole population succoured and venerated them, and by the time Cluny had seized the triple crown, they left in veritable armies. Ingulf, secretary to William the Conqueror, set out in 1064 with a band seven thousand strong.

In that age of faith no such mighty stimulant could inflame the human brain as a march to Jerusalem. A crusade was no vulgar war for a vulgar prize, but an alliance with the supernatural for the conquest of talismans whose possession was tantamount to omnipotence. Urban’s words at Clermont, when he first preached the holy war, have lost their meaning now; but they burned like fire into the hearts of his hearers then, for he promised them glory on earth and felicity in heaven, and he spoke in substance thus: No longer do you attack a castle or a town, but you undertake the conquest of the holy places. If you triumph, the blessings of heaven and the kingdoms of the East will be your share; if you fall, you will have the glory of dying where Christ died, and God will not forget having seen you in His holy army.101

Urban told them “that under their general Jesus Christ … they, the Christian, the invincible army,” would march to certain victory. In the eleventh century this language was no metaphor, for the Cluniac monk spoke as the mouthpiece of a god who was there actually among them, offering the cross he brought from the grave, and promising them triumphs: not the common triumphs which may be won by man’s unaided strength, but the transcendent glory which belongs to beings of another world.

So the crusaders rode out to fight, the originals of the fairy knights, clad in impenetrable armour, mounted on miraculous horses, armed with resistless swords, and bearing charmed lives.

Whole villages, even whole districts, were left deserted; land lost its value; what could not be sold was abandoned; and the peasant, loaded with his poor possessions, started on foot with his wife and children in quest of the Sepulchre, so ignorant of the way that he mistook each town upon the road for Zion. Whether he would or no, the noble had to lead his vassals or be forsaken, and riding at their head with his hawks and hounds, he journeyed towards that marvellous land of wealth and splendour, where kingdoms waited the coming of the devoted knight of God. Thus men, women, and children, princes and serfs, priests and laymen, in a countless, motley throng, surged toward that mighty cross and tomb whose possessor was raised above the limitations of the flesh.

The crusaders had no commissariat and no supply train, no engines of attack, or other weapons than those in their hands, and the holy relics they bore with them. There was no general, no common language, no organization; and so over unknown roads, and through hostile peoples, they wandered from the Rhine to the Bosphorus, and from the Bosphorus to Syria.

These earlier crusades were armed migrations, not military invasions, and had they met with a determined enemy, they must have been annihilated; but it chanced that the Syrians and Egyptians were at war, and the quarrel was so bitter that the caliph actually sought the Christian alliance. Even under such circumstances the waste of life was fabulous, and, had not Antioch been betrayed, the starving rabble must have perished under its walls. At Jerusalem, also, the Franks were reduced to the last extremity before they carried the town; and had it not been for the arrival of a corps of Genoese engineers, who built movable towers, they would have died miserably of hunger and thirst. Nor was the coming of this reinforcement preconcerted. On the contrary, the Italians accidentally lost their ships at Joppa, and, being left without shelter, sought protection in the camp of the besiegers just in time.

So incapable were the crusaders of regular operations, that even when the towers were finished and armed, the leaders did not know how to fill the moat, and Raymond of Saint Gilles had nothing better to propose than to offer a penny for every three stones thrown into the ditch.

On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem was stormed; almost exactly three years after the march began. Eight days later Godfrey de Bouillon was elected king, and then the invaders spread out over the strip of mountainous country which borders the coast of Palestine and Syria, and the chiefs built castles in the defiles of the hills, and bound themselves together by a loose alliance against the common enemy.

The decentralization of the colony was almost incredible. The core of the kingdom was the barony of Jerusalem, which extended only from the Egyptian desert to a stream just north of Beyrout, and inland to the Jordan and the spurs of the hills beyond the Dead Sea, and yet it was divided into more than eighteen independent fiefs, whose lords had all the rights of sovereignty, made war, administered justice, and coined money.102

Beside these petty states, the ports were ceded to the Italian cities whose fleets helped in the conquest. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa held quarters in Ascalon, Joppa, Tyre, Acre, and Beyrout, which were governed by consuls or viscounts, who wrangled with each other and with the central government.

Such was the kingdom over which Godfrey reigned, but there were three others like it which together made up the Frankish monarchy. To the north of the barony of Jerusalem lay the county of Tripoli, and beyond Tripoli, extending to Armenia, the principality of Antioch. To the east of Antioch the county of Edessa stretched along the base of the Taurus Mountains and spread out somewhat indefinitely beyond the Euphrates.

Thus on the north Edessa was the outwork of Christendom, while to the south the castle of Karak, which commanded the caravan road between Suez and Damascus, held a corresponding position among the hills to the east of the Dead Sea.

Beyond the mountains the great plain sweeps away into Central Asia, and in this plain the Franks never could maintain their footing. Their failure to do so proved their ruin, for their position lay exposed to attack from Damascus; and it was by operating from Damascus as a base that Saladin succeeded in forcing the pass of Banias, and in cutting the Latin possessions in two at the battle of Tiberias.

A considerable body of Europeans were thus driven in like a wedge between Egypt and the Greek Empire, the two highest civilizations of the Middle Ages, while in front lay the Syrian cities of the plain, with whom the Christians were at permanent war. The contact was the closest, the struggle for existence the sharpest, and the barbaric mind received a stimulus not unlike the impulse Gaul received from Rome; for the interval which separated the East from the West, at the beginning of the twelfth century, was probably not less than that which divided Italy from Gaul at the time of Cæsar.

When Godfrey de Bouillon took the cross, the Byzantine Empire was already sinking. The Eastern trade which, for so many centuries, had nourished its population, was beginning to flow directly from Asia into Italy, and, as the economic aristocracy of the capital lost its nutriment, it lost its energy. Apparently it fell in 1081, in the revolution which raised Alexius Comuenus to the throne. Because Alexius sacked Constantinople with a following of mongrel Greeks, Slavs, and Bulgarians, he has been called the first Greek emperor, but in reality the pure Greek blood had long since perished. The Byzantine population at the end of the eleventh century was the lees of a multitude of races, – a mixture of Slavs, Armenians, Jews, Thracians, and Greeks; a residuum of the most tenacious organisms, after all that was higher had disappeared. The army was a mixed horde of Huns, Arabs, Italians, Britons, Franks; of all in short who could fight and were for sale, while the Church was servile, the fancy dead, and art and literature were redolent of decaying wealth.

Nevertheless, ever since the fall of Rome, Constantinople had been the reservoir whence the West had drawn all its materialistic knowledge, and therefore, it was during the centuries when the valley of the Danube was closed, that the arts fell to their lowest ebb beyond the Alps and Rhine. After pilgrimages began again in the reign of Stephen, the Bosphorus lay once more in the path of travel, and as the returning palmers spread over the West, a revival followed in their track; a revival in which the spirit of Byzantium may yet be clearly read in the architecture of Italy and France. Saint Mark is a feeble imitation of Saint Sophia, while Viollet-le-Duc has described how long he hesitated before he could decide whether the carving of Vézelay, Autun, and Moissac was Greek or French; and has dwelt upon the laborious care with which he pored over all the material, before he became convinced that the stones were cut by artists trained at Cluny, who copied Byzantine models.103

But the great gulf between the economic and the imaginative development, separated the moribund Greek society from the semi-childhood of the Franks; a chasm in its nature impassable because caused by a difference of mind, and which is, perhaps, seen most strikingly in religious architecture; for religious architecture, though always embodying the highest poetical aspirations of every civilization, yet had in the East and West diametrically opposite points of departure.

Saint Sophia is pregnant with the spirit of the age of Justinian. There was no attempt at mystery, or even solemnity, about the church, for the mind of the architect was evidently fixed upon solving the problem of providing the largest and lightest space possible, in which to display the functions of a plutocratic court. His solution was brilliantly successful. He enlarged the dome and diminished the supports, until, nothing remaining to interrupt the view, it seemed as though the roof had been suspended in the air. For his purpose the exterior had little value, and he sacrificed it.

The conception of the architects of France was the converse of this, for it was highly emotional. The gloom of the lofty vaults, dimly lighted by the subdued splendour of the coloured windows, made the interior of the Gothic cathedral the most mysterious and exciting sanctuary for the celebration of the miracle which has ever been conceived by man; while without, the doors and windows, the pinnacles and buttresses, were covered with the terrific shapes of demons and the majestic figures of saints, admonishing the laity of the danger lurking abroad, and warning them to take refuge within.

But if the Greeks and the Franks had little affinity for each other, the case was different with the Saracens, who were then in the full vigour of their intellectual prime, and in the meridian of their material splendour.

In the eleventh century, when Paris was still a cluster of huts cowering for shelter on the islands of the Seine, and the palace of the Duke of Normandy and King of England was the paltry White Tower of London, Cairo was being adorned with those masterpieces which are still the admiration of the world.

Prisse d’Avennes considered that, among the city gates the Bab-el-Nasr stands first in “taste and style,” and the famous Bab-el-Zouilyeh is of the same period. He also thought the mosque of Teyloun a “model of elegance and grandeur,” and observed, when criticising the mosque of the Sultan Hassan, built in 1356, that though imposing and beautiful, it lacks the unity which is only found in the earlier Arabic monuments, such as Teyloun.104 Indeed, the signs are but too apparent that, from the twelfth century, the instinct for form began to fail in Egypt, the surest precursor of artistic decay.

The magnificence of the decoration and furnishing of the Arabic palaces and houses has seldom been surpassed, and a few extracts from an inventory of a sale of the collections of the Caliph Mostanser-Billah, held in 1050, may give some idea of its gorgeousness.

Precious Stones.– A chest containing 7 Mudds of emeralds; each of these worth at least 300,000 dynars, which makes in all at the lowest estimation, 36,000,000 francs.

A necklace of precious stones worth about 80,000 dynars.

Seven Waïbah of magnificent pearls sent by the Emir of Mecca.

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Glass.– Several chests, containing a large number of vases … of the purest crystal, chased and plain.

Other chests filled with precious vases of different materials.

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Table Utensils.– A large number of gold dishes, enamelled or plain, in which were incrusted all sorts of colours, forming most varied designs.

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One hundred cups and other shapes, of bezoar-stone, on most of which was engraved the name of the Caliph Haroun-el-Raschid.

Another cup which was 3 1⁄2 hands wide and one deep.

Different Articles.– Chests containing inkstands of different shapes, round or square, small or large, of gold or silver, sandal wood, aloe, ebony, ivory, and all kinds of woods, enriched with stones, gold and silver, or remarkable for beauty and elegance of workmanship.

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Twenty-eight enamel dishes inlaid with gold, which the Caliph Aziz had received as a present from the Greek emperor and each of which was valued at 3000 dynars.

Chests filled with an enormous quantity of steel, china, and glass mirrors, ornamented with gold and silver filagree; some were bordered with stones, and had cornelian handles, and others precious stones. One of them had quite a long and thick handle of emeralds. These mirrors were enclosed in cases made of velvet or silk or most beautiful wood; their locks were of gold or silver.

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Four hundred large cases, ornamented with gold and filled with all sorts of jewels.

Various silver household goods, and six thousand gold vases, in which were put narcissus or violets.

Thirty-six thousand pieces of crystal, among them a box ornamented with figures in relief, weighing 17 roks.

A large number of knives which, at the lowest price, were sold for 36,000 dynars.

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A turban enriched with precious stones, one of the most curious and valuable articles in the palace: it was said to be worth 130,000 dynars. The stones which covered it, and whose weight was 17 roks, were divided between two chiefs, who both claimed it. One had in his share a ruby weighing 23 mitqâls, and in the share which fell to the other were 100 pearls each of which weighed 3 mitqâls. When the two generals were obliged to fly from Fostat, all these valuables were given up to pillage.