Читать книгу Heart of Europe - Ralph Adams Cram - Страница 6

THE CHAPEL AT AIX

of personal and civil liberty which is one of the great glories of mediævalism. The Tribunal of Peace, established by the Bishop of Liége, is another shining sign of the times, while the defeat of France in its attacks on Flemish independence assured a long period of splendid development.

This was enhanced by the Crusades, and here, particularly in the first, the Heart of Europe showed the quality of the blood that was its life. Whatever the Crusades may have become after long years, they were in their earliest impulse supreme examples of human faith, unselfishness, devotion, heroism, and piety. The redemption of the Holy Places of Christianity from the infidel became a passion, and the protagonist, the moving and vitalising spirit, was one Peter the Hermit, of the province of Liége, who, crucifix in hand, toiled through eastern France, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, as well as through his own country, exhorting prince and peasant to take up arms for the freeing of the Holy Land from the Saracen.

His success was almost miraculous, for the great adventure appealed to every instinct of the time—piety, reverence, chivalry, romance, the passion for a new and venturesome and knightly quest—and in less than two years the Pope himself set his seal of approbation on the First Crusade. In Clermont, in the year 1095, surrounded by four hundred bishops and mitred abbots, he cried to the waiting multitudes of Europe: “Are we called upon to see in this century the desolation of Christianity and to remain at peace the while our holy religion is given over into the hands of the oppressor? Here is a lawful war; go, defend the House of Israel!” Almost with a single voice Europe made answer with the rallying-cry: “God wills it!” Every scarlet garment was shredded in pieces to furnish crosses which were sewn to the shoulders; some even branded themselves with the sign of the cross by means of red-hot irons.

Within another year an army of 100,000 men had been gathered together, under the leadership of Peter, himself, and it poured across Europe as far as Constantinople, a disorganised and impotent mob. It met its fate as soon as it had crossed the Bosporus into Saracen territory, and only a shattered remnant, including the originator of the mad venture, ever returned to its home. In the meantime, however, a greater captain than Peter the Hermit, and of the same race, was gathering the enormous host that succeeded where he had failed. Godfrey of Bouillon, of the province of Liége, a great scholar and greater soldier, gathered 90,000 knights and men-at-arms in Flanders and Brabant, and set out for Jerusalem on the 10th of August, 1096. A month later the French under command of the King’s brother, and the Flemings under Robert, Count of Flanders, followed in his track. Baldwin of Bourg, the Counts of Hainault, Namur, Grez, Audenaarde, and Ypres, with knights of Dixmude, Alost, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Tournai were amongst the leaders, and a concentration was effected at Constantinople when there were no less than 600,000 in all. Crossing into Asia, the great host swept onward from one victory to another; the battle of Dorylæum, fought on the 4th of July, 1097, proved them invincible. Tarsus and Antioch fell, and nothing lay between them and Jerusalem. The city was besieged and finally carried by assault, the attack beginning on the 14th of July, and after a week of incessant fighting on the walls and through the streets, Jerusalem was wholly in the hands of the Crusaders. But the host that set out from its many sources in Europe had vanished and only a tenth of the original number remained to fight the relieving army from Egypt at Ascalon, and to organise the victory. Five hundred thousand men had perished on the long march, died of disease, or fallen in battle.

Godfrey of Bouillon became the first King of Jerusalem, the choice resting between him and Robert of Flanders. He reigned only a year, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who had made himself Count of Edessa, and whose descendants continued on the throne for several generations.

In all the succeeding Crusades, Flanders and Brabant, Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy played leading parts, and in the fifth, when the arms of the knights were turned from the relief of Jerusalem to the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, another Baldwin of Flanders was leader, and, after the fall of Constantinople, became the first Latin Emperor of the East, his dynasty continuing on the throne for fifty years.

Amazing as were the results of the Crusades, with the conquering of the Saracens in the Holy Land, and the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, a Walloon being crowned first King of Jerusalem and a Fleming first Latin Emperor of Byzantium, the local results had no permanency, Jerusalem falling again to the Mussulmans after a century and a half, Constantinople reverting to the Eastern line at about the same time. In Europe, however, the results had been of profound import; directly, the Crusades had had a vast influence in determining the temper and the course of mediævalism, indirectly they had laid the foundations of the industrial supremacy of the Belgian cities and of the emancipation of the people from feudalism. The Saracen of the twelfth century was the antithesis of the Ottoman Turk of to-day, and from him the Crusaders learned much to their advantage, while from the Eastern Empire came new impulses toward the development of a broader culture than the West alone could have achieved. So far as the cities of Flanders, Brabant, and Lorraine were concerned, the absence of their martial and turbulent knights was by no means an unmixed catastrophe. The vast expeditions demanded vast expenditures: money came generally into use in place of barter; the common people who remained at home developed their industries, increased their wealth, and in the end took into their own hands much of the business of the government. The habit and tradition of independence and liberty which so grew up, maintained itself steadily against all assaults, nor has it lapsed or waned, as the last year has gloriously proved, and many of the tall towers that became the recognised symbol of civic independence still stand in testimony, though one by one they are falling before the armed negation of all they rose to proclaim.