Bab Bab 34 · They Happened To Live

Dates are a very useful invention. We could not do without them but

unless we are very careful, they will play tricks with us. They are

apt to make history too precise. For example, when I talk of the

point-of-view of mediæval man, I do not mean that on the 31st of

December of the year 476, suddenly all the people of Europe said, “Ah,

now the Roman Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle

Ages. How interesting!”

You could have found men at the Frankish court of Charlemagne who

were Romans in their habits, in their manners, in their out-look upon

life. On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some

of the people in this world have never passed beyond the stage of the

cave-man. All times and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding

generations play tag with each other. But it is possible to study the

minds of a good many true representatives of the Middle Ages and then

give you an idea of the average man’s attitude toward life and the many

difficult problems of living.

First of all, remember that the people of the Middle Ages never thought

of themselves as free-born citizens, who could come and go at will and

shape their fate according to their ability or energy or luck. On the

contrary, they all considered themselves part of the general scheme of

things, which included emperors and serfs, popes and heretics, heroes

and swashbucklers, rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves. They

accepted this divine ordinance and asked no questions. In this, of

course, they differed radically from modern people who accept nothing

and who are forever trying to improve their own financial and political

situation.

To the man and woman of the thirteenth century, the world

hereafter—a Heaven of wonderful delights and a Hell of brimstone and

suffering—meant something more than empty words or vague theological

phrases. It was an actual fact and the mediæval burghers and knights

spent the greater part of their time preparing for it. We modern people

regard a noble death after a well-spent life with the quiet calm of the

ancient Greeks and Romans. After three score years of work and effort,

we go to sleep with the feeling that all will be well.

But during the Middle Ages, the King of Terrors with his grinning skull

and his rattling bones was man’s steady companion. He woke his victims

up with terrible tunes on his scratchy fiddle—he sat down with them at

dinner—he smiled at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took

a girl out for a walk. If you had heard nothing but hair-raising yarns

about cemeteries and coffins and fearful diseases when you were very

young, instead of listening to the fairy stories of Andersen and Grimm,

you, too, would have lived all your days in a dread of the final hour

and the gruesome day of Judgment. That is exactly what happened to the

children of the Middle Ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks

and only a few occasional angels. Sometimes, their fear of the future

filled their souls with humility and piety, but often it influenced

them the other way and made them cruel and sentimental. They would

first of all murder all the women and children of a captured city and

then they would devoutly march to a holy spot and with their hands gory

with the blood of innocent victims, they would pray that a merciful

heaven forgive them their sins. Yea, they would do more than pray, they

would weep bitter tears and would confess themselves the most wicked

of sinners. But the next day, they would once more butcher a camp of

Saracen enemies without a spark of mercy in their hearts.

Of course, the Crusaders were Knights and obeyed a somewhat different

code of manners from the common men. But in such respects the common

man was just the same as his master. He, too, resembled a shy horse,

easily frightened by a shadow or a silly piece of paper, capable of

excellent and faithful service but liable to run away and do terrible

damage when his feverish imagination saw a ghost.

In judging these good people, however, it is wise to remember the

terrible disadvantages under which they lived. They were really

barbarians who posed as civilised people. Charlemagne and Otto the

Great were called “Roman Emperors,” but they had as little resemblance

to a real Roman Emperor (say Augustus or Marcus Aurelius) as “King”

Wumba Wumba of the Upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of

Sweden or Denmark. They were savages who lived amidst glorious ruins

but who did not share the benefits of the civilisation which their

fathers and grandfathers had destroyed. They knew nothing. They were

ignorant of almost every fact which a boy of twelve knows to-day. They

were obliged to go to one single book for all their information. That

was the Bible. But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the

history of the human race for the better are those chapters of the New

Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of love, charity and

forgiveness. As a handbook of astronomy, zoölogy, botany, geometry and

all the other sciences, the venerable book is not entirely reliable. In

the twelfth century, a second book was added to the mediæval library,

the great encyclopædia of useful knowledge, compiled by Aristotle,

the Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ. Why the

Christian church should have been willing to accord such high honors to

the teacher of Alexander the Great, whereas they condemned all other

Greek philosophers on account of their heathenish doctrines, I really

do not know. But next to the Bible, Aristotle was recognized as the

only reliable teacher whose works could be safely placed into the

hands of true Christians.

His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout way. They had

gone from Greece to Alexandria. They had then been translated from

the Greek into the Arabic language by the Mohammedans who conquered

Egypt in the seventh century. They had followed the Moslem armies

into Spain and the philosophy of the great Stagirite (Aristotle was a

native of Stagira in Macedonia) was taught in the Moorish universities

of Cordova. The Arabic text was then translated into Latin by the

Christian students who had crossed the Pyrenees to get a liberal

education and this much travelled version of the famous books was at

last taught at the different schools of northwestern Europe. It was not

very clear, but that made it all the more interesting.

With the help of the Bible and Aristotle, the most brilliant men of

the Middle Ages now set to work to explain all things between Heaven

and Earth in their relation to the expressed will of God. These

brilliant men, the so-called Scholiasts or Schoolmen, were really very

intelligent, but they had obtained their information exclusively from

books, and never from actual observation. If they wanted to lecture on

the sturgeon or on caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments

and Aristotle, and told their students everything these good books had

to say upon the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons. They did not go

out to the nearest river to catch a sturgeon. They did not leave their

libraries and repair to the backyard to catch a few caterpillars and

look at these animals and study them in their native haunts. Even such

famous scholars as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire

whether the sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the caterpillars

of Macedonia might not have been different from the sturgeons and the

caterpillars of western Europe.

When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like Roger Bacon

appeared in the council of the learned and began to experiment with

magnifying glasses and funny little telescopes and actually dragged the

sturgeon and the caterpillar into the lecturing room and proved that

they were different from the creatures described by the Old Testament

and by Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon

was going too far. When he dared to suggest that an hour of actual

observation was worth more than ten years with Aristotle and that the

works of that famous Greek might as well have remained untranslated for

all the good they had ever done, the scholiasts went to the police and

said, “This man is a danger to the safety of the state. He wants us to

study Greek that we may read Aristotle in the original. Why should he

not be contented with our Latin-Arabic translation which has satisfied

our faithful people for so many hundred years? Why is he so curious

about the insides of fishes and the insides of insects? He is probably

a wicked magician trying to upset the established order of things by

his Black Magic.” And so well did they plead their cause that the

frightened guardians of the peace forbade Bacon to write a single word

for more than ten years. When he resumed his studies he had learned a

lesson. He wrote his books in a queer cipher which made it impossible

for his contemporaries to read them, a trick which became common as the

Church became more desperate in its attempts to prevent people from

asking questions which would lead to doubts and infidelity.

[Illustration: THE MEDIÆVAL WORLD]

This, however, was not done out of any wicked desire to keep people

ignorant. The feeling which prompted the heretic hunters of that

day was really a very kindly one. They firmly believed—nay, they

knew—that this life was but the preparation for our real existence

in the next world. They felt convinced that too much knowledge made

people uncomfortable, filled their minds with dangerous opinions

and led to doubt and hence to perdition. A mediæval Schoolman who

saw one of his pupils stray away from the revealed authority of the

Bible and Aristotle, that he might study things for himself, felt as

uncomfortable as a loving mother who sees her young child approach a

hot stove. She knows that he will burn his little fingers if he is

allowed to touch it and she tries to keep him back, if necessary she

will use force. But she really loves the child and if he will only

obey her, she will be as good to him as she possibly can be. In the

same way the mediæval guardians of people’s souls, while they were

strict in all matters pertaining to the Faith, slaved day and night to

render the greatest possible service to the members of their flock.

They held out a helping hand whenever they could and the society

of that day shows the influence of thousands of good men and pious

women who tried to make the fate of the average mortal as bearable as

possible.

A serf was a serf and his position would never change. But the Good

Lord of the Middle Ages who allowed the serf to remain a slave all

his life had bestowed an immortal soul upon this humble creature and

therefore he must be protected in his rights, that he might live and

die as a good Christian. When he grew too old or too weak to work he

must be taken care of by the feudal master for whom he had worked.

The serf, therefore, who led a monotonous and dreary life, was never

haunted by fear of to-morrow. He knew that he was “safe”—that he could

not be thrown out of employment, that he would always have a roof over

his head (a leaky roof, perhaps, but a roof all the same), and that he

would always have something to eat.

This feeling of “stability” and of “safety” was found in all classes

of society. In the towns the merchants and the artisans established

guilds which assured every member of a steady income. It did not

encourage the ambitious to do better than their neighbours. Too often

the guilds gave protection to the “slacker” who managed to “get by.”

But they established a general feeling of content and assurance among

the labouring classes which no longer exists in our day of general

competition. The Middle Ages were familiar with the dangers of what we

modern people call “corners,” when a single rich man gets hold of all

the available grain or soap or pickled herring, and then forces the

world to buy from him at his own price. The authorities, therefore,

discouraged wholesale trading and regulated the price at which

merchants were allowed to sell their goods.

The Middle Ages disliked competition. Why compete and fill the world

with hurry and rivalry and a multitude of pushing men, when the Day of

Judgement was near at hand, when riches would count for nothing and

when the good serf would enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad

knight was sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno?

In short, the people of the Middle Ages were asked to surrender part

of their liberty of thought and action, that they might enjoy greater

safety from poverty of the body and poverty of the soul.

And with a very few exceptions, they did not object. They firmly

believed that they were mere visitors upon this planet—that they were

here to be prepared for a greater and more important life. Deliberately

they turned their backs upon a world which was filled with suffering

and wickedness and injustice. They pulled down the blinds that the rays

of the sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the

Apocalypse which told them of that heavenly light which was to illumine

their happiness in all eternity. They tried to close their eyes to most

of the joys of the world in which they lived that they might enjoy

those which awaited them in the near future. They accepted life as a

necessary evil and welcomed death as the beginning of a glorious day.

The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the future but had

tried to establish their Paradise right here upon this earth. They had

succeeded in making life extremely pleasant for those of their fellow

men who did not happen to be slaves. Then came the other extreme of

the Middle Ages, when man built himself a Paradise beyond the highest

clouds and turned this world into a vale of tears for high and low, for

rich and poor, for the intelligent and the dumb. It was time for the

pendulum to swing back in the other direction, as I shall tell you in

my next chapter.

MEDIÆVAL TRADE

HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE MEDITERRANEAN A BUSY CENTRE

OF TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE

GREAT DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA

There were three good reasons why the Italian cities should have been

the first to regain a position of great importance during the late

Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been settled by Rome at a very

early date. There had been more roads and more towns and more schools

than anywhere else in Europe.

The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, but there

had been so much to destroy that more had been able to survive. In

the second place, the Pope lived in Italy and as the head of a vast

political machine, which owned land and serfs and buildings and forests

and rivers and conducted courts of law, he was in constant receipt of

a great deal of money. The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold

and silver as did the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa.

The cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural

products of the north and the west must be changed into actual cash

before the debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome. This made

Italy the one country where there was a comparative abundance of gold

and silver. Finally, during the Crusades, the Italian cities had become

the point of embarkation for the Crusaders and had profiteered to an

almost unbelievable extent.

[Illustration: MEDIÆVAL TRADE]

And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same Italian cities

remained the distributing centres for those Oriental goods upon which

the people of Europe had come to depend during the time they had spent

in the near east.

Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was a republic

built upon a mud bank. Thither people from the mainland had fled during

the invasions of the barbarians in the fourth century. Surrounded on

all sides by the sea they had engaged in the business of salt-making.

Salt had been very scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had

been high. For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of this

indispensable table commodity (I say indispensable, because people,

like sheep, fall ill unless they get a certain amount of salt in their

food). The people had used this monopoly to increase the power of their

city. At times they had even dared to defy the power of the Popes. The

town had grown rich and had begun to build ships, which engaged in

trade with the Orient. During the Crusades, these ships were used to

carry passengers to the Holy Land, and when the passengers could not

pay for their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help the Venetians

who were for ever increasing their colonies in the Ægean Sea, in Asia

Minor and in Egypt.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had grown to two

hundred thousand, which made Venice the biggest city of the Middle

Ages. The people were without influence upon the government which was

the private affair of a small number of rich merchant families. They

elected a senate and a Doge (or Duke), but the actual rulers of the

city were the members of the famous Council of Ten,—who maintained

themselves with the help of a highly organised system of secret-service

men and professional murderers, who kept watch upon all citizens and

quietly removed those who might be dangerous to the safety of their

high-handed and unscrupulous Committee of Public Safety.

The other extreme of government, a democracy of very turbulent habits,

was to be found in Florence. This city controlled the main road from

northern Europe to Rome and used the money which it had derived from

this fortunate economic position to engage in manufacturing. The

Florentines tried to follow the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests

and members of the guilds all took part in the discussions of civic

affairs. This led to great civic upheaval. People were forever being

divided into political parties and these parties fought each other

with intense bitterness and exiled their enemies and confiscated their

possessions as soon as they had gained a victory in the council. After

several centuries of this rule by organised mobs, the inevitable

happened. A powerful family made itself master of the city and governed

the town and the surrounding country after the fashion of the old Greek

“tyrants.” They were called the Medici. The earliest Medici had been

physicians (medicus is Latin for physician, hence their name), but

later they had turned banker. Their banks and their pawnshops were to

be found in all the more important centres of trade. Even today our

American pawn-shops display the three golden balls which were part of

the coat of arms of the mighty house of the Medici, who became rulers

of Florence and married their daughters to the kings of France and were

buried in graves worthy of a Roman Cæsar.

Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where the merchants

specialised in trade with Tunis in Africa and the grain depots of

the Black Sea. Then there were more than two hundred other cities,

some large and some small, each a perfect commercial unit, all of

them fighting their neighbours and rivals with the undying hatred of

neighbours who are depriving each other of their profits.

Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been brought to these

distributing centres, they must be prepared for the voyage to the west

and the north.

Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where they were

reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in turn served as the

market places of northern and western France.

[Illustration: GREAT NOVGOROD]

Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This ancient road led

across the Brenner pass, the old gateway for the barbarians who had

invaded Italy. Past Innsbrück, the merchandise was carried to Basel.

From there it drifted down the Rhine to the North Sea and England, or

it was taken to Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both bankers

and manufacturers and who prospered greatly by “shaving” the coins with

which they paid their workmen), looked after the further distribution

to Nuremberg and Leipzig and the cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on

the Island of Gotland) which looked after the needs of the Northern

Baltic and dealt directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old

commercial centre of Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in

the middle of the sixteenth century.

The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had an

interesting story of their own. The mediæval world ate a great deal of

fish. There were many fast days and then people were not permitted

to eat meat. For those who lived away from the coast and from the

rivers, this meant a diet of eggs or nothing at all. But early in the

thirteenth century a Dutch fisherman had discovered a way of curing

herring, so that it could be transported to distant points. The

herring fisheries of the North Sea then became of great importance.

But some time during the thirteenth century, this useful little fish

(for reasons of its own) moved from the North Sea to the Baltic and

the cities of that inland sea began to make money. All the world now

sailed to the Baltic to catch herring and as that fish could only be

caught during a few months each year (the rest of the time it spends

in deep water, raising large families of little herrings) the ships

would have been idle during the rest of the time unless they had found

another occupation. They were then used to carry the wheat of northern

and central Russia to southern and western Europe. On the return voyage

they brought spices and silks and carpets and Oriental rugs from Venice

and Genoa to Bruges and Hamburg and Bremen.

Out of such simple beginnings there developed an important system of

international trade which reached from the manufacturing cities of

Bruges and Ghent (where the almighty guilds fought pitched battles with

the kings of France and England and established a labour tyranny which

completely ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic

of Novgorod in northern Russia, which was a mighty city until Tsar

Ivan, who distrusted all merchants, took the town and killed sixty

thousand people in less than a month’s time and reduced the survivors

to beggary.

That they might protect themselves against pirates and excessive

tolls and annoying legislation, the merchants of the north founded a

protective league which was called the “Hansa.” The Hansa, which had

its headquarters in Lübeck, was a voluntary association of more than

one hundred cities. The association maintained a navy of its own which

patrolled the seas and fought and defeated the Kings of England and

Denmark when they dared to interfere with the rights and the privileges

of the mighty Hanseatic merchants.

I wish that I had more space to tell you some of the wonderful stories

of this strange commerce which was carried on across the high mountains

and across the deep seas amidst such dangers that every voyage became a

glorious adventure. But it would take several volumes and it cannot be

done here. Besides, I hope that I have told you enough about the Middle

Ages to make you curious to read more in the excellent books of which I

shall give you a list at the end of this volume.

[Illustration: THE HANSA SHIP]

The Middle Ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a period of very

slow progress. The people who were in power believed that “progress”

was a very undesirable invention of the Evil One and ought to be

discouraged, and as they happened to occupy the seats of the mighty,

it was easy to enforce their will upon the patient serfs and the

illiterate knights. Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured

forth into the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and

were considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail

sentence of twenty years.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of international

commerce swept over western Europe as the Nile had swept across

the valley of ancient Egypt. It left behind a fertile sediment of

prosperity. Prosperity meant leisure hours and these leisure hours gave

both men and women a chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in

literature and art and music.

Then once more was the world filled with that divine curiosity which

has elevated man from the ranks of those other mammals who are his

distant cousins but who have remained dumb, and the cities, of whose

growth and development I have told you in my last chapter, offered a

safe shelter to these brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow

domain of the established order of things.

They set to work. They opened the windows of their cloistered and

studious cells. A flood of sunlight entered the dusty rooms and

showed them the cobwebs which had gathered during the long period of

semi-darkness.

They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gardens.

Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crumbling town

walls, and said, “This is a good world. We are glad that we live in it.”

At that moment, the Middle Ages came to an end and a new world began.