Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273 - T. F. Tout - Страница 12
ОглавлениеBurgundy.
The duchy of Burgundy was the last remaining great fief of the Capetians in northern and central France. While various kingdoms, duchies, and counties of Burgundy grew up, as we have seen, in the imperial lands beyond the Saône and the Rhone, one Richard the Justiciar, famous like all the founders of fiefs as a successful foe of the Norman marauders, became, in 877, the first duke or marquis of that Burgundy which became a French vassal state. His brother was Boso, founder of the kingdom of Provence, his brother-in-law was Rudolf, king of Transjurane Burgundy, and his son was Rudolf, king of the French. His sons succeeded him in his rule, though for more than a century each successive duke received a fresh formal appointment; and it was not until a junior branch of the Capetian house began with Robert the Old (1032–1073), the younger brother of King Henry I., that the hereditary duchy of Burgundy can be said to have been definitively established.
Aquitaine.
South of the Loire the development of feudal states took even a more decided form than in the north. In these regions feudal separation had the freest field to run riot. There was still a nominal duke of Aquitaine, who might be regarded as having some sort of vague authority over the old Aquitania that was substantially synonymous with south-western France; but neither in Gascony, nor Auvergne, nor in La Marche, nor in the Limousin was any recognition paid to this shadowy potentate. The duchy of Aquitaine seemed on the verge of sharing the fate of the kingdom of France and disappearing altogether because it stood outside the newly grown feudal system, when, like the kingdom of France, it procured a new lease of life by being granted to a house that, like the Robertians of Paris, possessed with great fiefs a firm position in the new system. |Poitou.| In 928 Ebles, Count of Poitou, received a grant of the duchy of Aquitaine, and in 951 William Tow-head, his son by a daughter of Edward the Elder of Wessex, was confirmed in his father’s possession by Louis d’Outremer. The county that took its name from Poitiers was a substantial inheritance. It was the marchland that divided north and south, but its main characteristics were those of the north. Its uplands seldom permit the cultivation of the vine, and its manners, like its climate and tongue, were northern. As the dialects of Romance became differentiated, Poitou spoke, as it still speaks, a dialect of the north French tongue, the langue d’oil. Aquitaine proper spoke the southern langue d’oc, and differed in a thousand ways from the colder, fiercer, ruder, more martial lands of the north. But the infusion of fresh blood from Poitou saved the Aquitaine duchy from extinction. Eight dukes of Aquitaine and counts of Poitou reigned in succession to William Tow-head, seven of whom were named William. Under this line county after county was gradually added to the original fief of Poitou. At last all the Limousin, Auvergne, and parts of Berri owned them as at least nominal lords. Gascony, in the lands beyond the Garonne, had since 872 been ruled by a hereditary line of dukes, whose favourite name was Sancho. |Gascony.| On the extinction of this family, Gascony, with its dependencies, passed in 1062 to William VIII. of Poitiers, whose grandson William X., the last of the male stock of the house of the Guilhems, died in 1137, leaving the nominal overlordship over the swarm of seigneurs that ruled the district between the Loire, the Pyrenees, and the Cevennes to his daughter Eleanor, whose vast inheritance made Louis VII. of France and Henry II. of England in succession successful suitors for her hand. Under the fostering care of the Williams, Aquitaine had prospered in civilisation and the arts; and their court at Poitiers, whose magnificent series of Romanesque basilicas still attests the splendour of their capital, became the centre of the earliest literary efforts of the troubadours, the poets and minstrels of the langue d’oc, though the southern tongue of the court was not the Poitevins’ native speech.
Toulouse.
To the east of Aquitaine the county of Toulouse became the nucleus of a sort of monarchical centralisation that, by the beginning of the twelfth century, had brought the French lands beyond the Aquitanian border, the imperial lands between the Alps and the Rhone, and the old Spanish march between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, to look to Toulouse as the source of its intellectual and almost of its political life. The lands dependent on the counts of Toulouse became emphatically the Languedoc, the region where the Romance vernacular of southern Gaul was spoken with the greatest purity and force. While the subjects of the dukes of Aquitaine had the purity of their Gascon contaminated by the Basque of the Pyrenean valleys, and the northern idiom of the lands beyond the Gironde and Dordogne, the followers of the counts of Toulouse spoke the same tongue as the Burgundian vassals of the count of Provence, or the fierce marchers ruled by the counts of Barcelona. The tongue of Oc has as much claim to be regarded as a language distinct from northern French, as northern French has to be considered separate from Italian or Spanish. It was the first Romance tongue that boasted of a strong vernacular literature, and those who spoke it were the first Romance people to attain either the luxuries or corruptions of an advanced civilisation. Its spread over southern Gaul drew a deep dividing line between northern and southern France that has not yet been blotted out. It gave the subjects of the southern feudalists, like the counts of Toulouse and the dukes of Aquitaine, a solidarity that made them almost separate nations, like the Flemings or the Bretons. Its vast expansion between the Alps and the Ebro bade fair to overleap the boundaries set by the Treaty of Verdun, and set up in those regions a well-defined nationality strong and compact enough to be a makeweight against the growing concentration of the northern French under the Capetian kings. But the civilisation of Languedoc flowered too early to produce mature fruit. We shall see how in the thirteenth century it succumbed to the ruder spirit of the north. Raymond I., the first hereditary count of Toulouse, died in 864. His successors, with whom Raymond was ever the favourite name, continued to grow in power until they had united all Languedoc early in the twelfth century. Their hereditary hostility to the dukes of Aquitaine, no less than the centrifugal tendencies of southern feudalism, which they could at best but partially counteract, prevented their authority from attaining wider limits.
Such was the France of the tenth and eleventh centuries—divided, chaotic, anarchic, and turbulent, yet full of vigorous life and many-sided activity. Its growth was slower, its exploits less dazzling than those of contemporary Germany, though perhaps it was developing on more solid and permanent lines. Even when Germany was still the chief political centre of the west, the fame of the French warrior had extended over all Europe. The alliance with the Church did much, the prevalence of the Cluniac idea did more to bring this about. The wanderings of the Normans first spread abroad the terror of the Frankish name. The Crusades became an essentially Frankish movement, and made the Frankish knight the type of the feudal warrior. But the concentration of France into a great state followed very slowly on the growth of the reputation of the individual Frenchman.
