15th centuries, is so easily marked off and played so considerable
a rôle in the academic history of that time, that historians often
refer to it as the only intellectual interest of “medieval” men.
Then, selecting some of the later and less virile scholastics as
victims, they ask how men could be seriously interested in their
trivialities. But these men were not all busy over the problem
of how many angels could stand on a needle-point; nor were
they all dominated by the religious spirit of faith or intellectual
cowardice. They were searching for truth with scientific eagerness.
Their very failure made possible the modern era. It is
perhaps unnecessary to point out how small a proportion of the
“intellectuals” were scholastics even in the 13th century.
In the realm of art the “middle ages” had already set in before Constantine robbed the arch of Titus to decorate his own, and before those museums of antiquity, the temples, were plundered by Christian mobs. The victory of Christianity—iconoclastic in its primitive spirit—was but a single chapter in the story of decline. The process was completed by the misery of the decaying empire, and by the Germanic invasions. The barbarians, however, destroyed less than has been commonly supposed. Destruction was more the product of necessity than of wantonness. Thus public monuments became fortresses, and antique sculpture was built into city walls. Such art as continued was almost wholly religious; for in the wilderness of the times the churches formed oases of comparative prosperity and peace, and, even in the darkest times, wherever such oases existed there the seeds of art took root. The Church architecture of the “middle ages,” then developed naturally and without a break, through the Byzantine and Romanesque styles, out of the secular and religious architecture of Greece and Rome. And, with the return of comparatively settled and prosperous conditions, not only architecture but the other arts also blossomed under the influence of what was later stigmatized as the “Gothic” spirit into new and original forms. Down to the Reformation the churches continued to be, as the temples of the ancient world had been, the main centres of the arts; yet the arts were not confined to them, but flourished wherever, as in castles or walled cities, the conditions essential to their development existed. With the revival of civilized conditions in secular life, secular ideals in art also revived; the ecclesiastical traditions in painting and sculpture, which always tend to become stereotyped, began in the West to be encroached upon long before the period of the “Renaissance.” The 12th and 13th centuries, which witnessed the great struggle between the secular and spiritual powers in the state, witnessed also the rise of a literature inspired by the lay spirit, and of an art which was already escaping from the thraldom of the stereotyped ecclesiastical forms. Gothic sculpture was not incidentally decorative, it was an essential element in the harmony of the architectural design. The elongated kings that guard the door of Chartres Cathedral, or the portals with the Last Judgment, are a necessary element in the façade. Thus fettered, even the realism of the Gothic sculptors failed, except in rare instances, of its full expression. The plastic arts were left for Italy, where antique models were at hand, and the glory of its achievement in the 15th and 16th centuries was so great as to obscure in men’s eyes what had been done before.
But this Italian renaissance was not the only one. It was but one of many; and it was concerned with the two subjects which perhaps least deeply influence the lives of the mass of men—literary humanism and art. It is obviously absurd, in the face of the foregoing facts, to regard it as the end of a middle age in anything but in its own field.
When one studies the history of Europe subject by subject, as indicated above, and not merely in a monastic chronicle of things in general, chosen according to the author’s point of view, one sees the old-time framework passing away. The traditional idea of a barren middle age and a single glorious renaissance proves false. An organic study of the past reveals a more rational picture of the process which produced the Europe of to-day. Cataclysm and special creation here as elsewhere give way to evolution. The new synthesis reveals a universal decline from the 5th to the 10th centuries, while the Germanic races were learning the rudiments of culture, a decline that was deepened by each succeeding wave of migration, each tribal war of Franks or Saxons, and reached its climax in the disorders of the 9th and 10th centuries when the half-formed civilization of Christendom was forced to face the migration of the Northmen by sea, the raids of the Saracen upon the south and the onslaught of Hungarians and Slavs upon the east. That was the dark age. It left Europe bristling with feudal castles, and already alert for the march of progress. At once the march begins. Henry the Fowler beats back the Slavs and places the outposts of Christendom along the Elbe and the Oder. Otto I., his son, drives the Magyars from southern Germany and establishes the East Mark (Austria) to guard the upper Danube. The restoration of the Empire in 962 marks the first milestone on the pathway of recovery. Already scholarship had found a home in monasteries planted in the heart of the German forests. The succeeding century brought the Empire to the acme of its power, until Henry III. in the Synod of Sutri, sat in judgment on the impotent and demoralized papacy. Meanwhile France had been learning something even in its feudal anarchy. The monks of Cluny were at work. The Capetians had begun. The great monastery of Bec was drawing the sons of northern sea-robbers to the service of that greatest civilizing force, the Church. The progress made through even this darkest age may be measured by the difference between the army of Rollo and that which William the Conqueror gathered for the invasion of England.
There is a legend, current among historians from the days of Robertson and Hallam, that as the year 1000 approached mankind prepared for the Last Judgment; that the earth “clothed itself with the white mantle of churches,” and like a penitent watched in terror and in prayer for the fatal dawn. Contemporary sources fail to bear out this beautiful conception. Apart from the fact that reckoning from the birth of Christ was by no means universal, and consequently the mass of men were ignorant that there was such a thing as the year 1000, one wonders how that most enduring type of architecture, the Romanesque, reached its maturity among men who thought that the earth itself was so soon to “shrivel like a parched scroll.” Recent scholarship has absolutely disproved this legend, founded on a few trite phrases in monastic chronicles, and still to be heard in similar contexts. The year 1000 marks no epoch in medieval history.
The latter half of the 11th century witnessed the most remarkable political creation in Europe since the days of Caesar, the papal monarchy of Hildebrand. The great scholastic controversies had already begun in the schools of France; the revival of Roman law had called forth the university of Bologna, and the canonists had begun the codification of the law of the Church. The way was already cleared for the busy 12th century—the age of Louis VI. and Henry II., of Glanvill and Suger, of Abelard and Maimonides, of Frederick Barbarossa and Alexander III., of the emancipation of French communes and cities and the independence of those of Lombardy, of the growth of gilds and the extension of commerce, of trouvère and troubadour and the beginnings of vernacular literature, of the creation of Gothic art, of trial by jury and the supremacy of royal justice. Such are but a fraction of its achievements. The 12th century stands beside the 18th as one of the greatest creative centuries in human history. The 13th like the 19th applied these creations in the transformation of society. The century of Dante was also that of the first English parliament; its vast economic expansion enabled the national state to triumph in both England and France, and furnished the grounds for the overthrow of Boniface VIII. Into the complex history of this momentous age it is impossible to go in any detail. Sufficient to say that in the opening quarter of the 14th century England and France at least stood on the brink of “modern times.” Then these two nations entered upon that long tragedy of the Hundred Years War, a calamity absolutely immeasurable to both. But during its massacres, jacqueries, plagues and famines, the cities of Italy, growing rich with trade and manufactures, were in their turn
