250. The Crusade and after

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Unintended consequences

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades

Chapter III
The Crusade

Causes and Conditions

Conquest by Islam of Sicily 902. Gradual Christian reconquest of Iberia starting 10th century. Sicily reclaimed my Normans 1091. Sardinia recaptured by Pisa 1016. Genoa raids the more developed coast of Africa.

p191 ...from the middle of the 11th century, the Christian Occident was assuming, in a series of detached efforts, the offensive against Islam. But this offensive had nothing in common with a religious war...
...

...[the Crusade] was purely and exclusively religious. In this respect it was intimately related... to the great wave of Christian fervor of which the War of Investitures was another manifestation. [and] by the fact that the Pope, who instigated and waged this war, was also the instigator and organizer of the Crusade.

...Their objective was the Holy Places, and Sepulcher of Christ in Jerusalem. This had been in the hands of the Musulmans ever since the 9th century, but no one had paid much attention to the fact.
...

Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantium, appeals to Pope Urban II for help as he is being hard pressed by the Seldjuk Turks. The Crusade is proclaimed at Clermont November 27th, 1095.]

p192 The Crusade was essentially the work of the Papacy; as regards both its universal character and its religious nature. It was undertaken not by the States, nor yet by the people, but by the Papacy; its motive was wholly spiritual, divorced from any temporal preoccupation: the conquest of the Holy Places. Only those who set forth without the spirit of lucre in their hearts could share in the indulgences granted by the Pope. Not until the first wars of the French Revolution did history again show combatants so completely careless of any other consideration than devotion to an ideal.

With the benefit of hindsight, this is ironic and tragic. One could begin the Crusade in that spirit but one couldn't arrive at the destination without learning the basics of logistics, and logistics require money. Crusaders had to begin the process of monetizing their self-sufficient world before they could follow their spirit to the Holy Lands.

And I think that last sentence may be shortchanging the participants in some of Europe's religious wars, but he's probably right in excluding the Americans and their little "Revolution."

But religious enthusiasm, and the authority of the Pope, could not of themselves have promoted so vast an undertaking if the social conditions of Europe had not rendered it possible... A century earlier the thing would have been impossible, as it would have been a century later... the true Crusade, the parent of all the others, was the First, and this was essentially the child of the age.

p193 To begin with, there were as yet no States. The nations had no governments which could command them. Christianity was not yet politically divided...

Further, there was a military class which was ready to set forth at any moment: the Order of Chivalry. The army was in being; it had only to be mustered... And it was an army that cost nothing, since it was endowed, from father to son, by the fiefs. [So long as it stayed home or could live off the land.] There was no need to collect money for the Holy War. It was enough to appoint the leaders and lay down the routes to be followed. [But see logistics above.] Regarded from this point of view, the Crusade was essentially the one great feudal war, in which the Western feudality acted in a body... No king took part in this Crusade. The curious thing is that nobody gave a thought to the kings, to say nothing of the Emperor, who was the enemy of the Pope.

...the Crusade recruited its troops mainly from... France, England, the Low Countries and Norman Italy. Considered from this point of view it was above all an expedition... of the Roman chivalry.

...the Crusaders were by no means as numerous as is generally supposed. At the very most they numbered some tens of thousands...

2. The Conquest of Jerusalem

p194 The expedition was carefully prepared under the direction of the Pope... The excitatoria who were then dispatched throughout Christendom vaunted, in one breath, the quantity of relics to be found in Asia Minor, the charm and luxury of its customs and the beauty of its women... 

p195 If the Pope had hoped to bring the Greek Church into the Roman fold by means of the Crusade he was assuredly disillusioned. When the Westerners and the Greeks came into contact the antipathy between them was increased... After battles and fatigues... what was left of the army appeared at last before the walls of Jerusalem on June 7th, 1099. On July 15th the city was taken by assault, and rivers of blood were shed in the name of the God of peace and love...

The result of the conquest was the establishment of petty Christian States: the kingdom of Jerusalem, of which Godfry of Bouillon was elected sovereign... the principality of Edessa, whose inhabitants had given the title of count to Baldin, brother of Godfrey... and the principality of Antioch, of which Bohemund of Tarento made himself prince after taking the city in 1098. All these were organized in accordance with feudal law... They were colonies that did not answer to any of the requirements of colonies... While the spirit of lucre was far from absent from the minds of all those who took part in the Crusade, not a single Crusader had any thought of commerce. They were actuated only by the religious ideal. But the immediate result was a commercial one. The Christians' military base, which had thus been established in the East, had of course to be revictualled. Venice, Pisa, and Genoa at once undertook the task.The Crusader principalities became the objective of their fleets. The eastern Mediterranean was now in communication with the West. From this time forward Christian navigation underwent an incessant development. Those who derived the greatest profit from the Crusades were the middle classes of the Italian seaports. But their purpose had not been commercial. Their truest manifestation was the alliance of the military with the religious spirit in the Orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers.

p196 As Christian establishments, the possessions of the Crusaders were extremely difficult to defend. Edessa fell not later than 1143... In 1187 Saladin, Sultan of Egypt, conquered Jerusalem, and it was not again recaptured.

I read somewhere that finding forage for the heavy cavalry favored by the Europeans was a huge problem in the Holy Lands. One that could not really be solved.

And so the great movement of the Crusades had hardly any final result, beyond the greater activity and more rapid movement of trade on the Mediterranean...

...They did not repulse Islam, they did not recover the Greek Church... On the other hand, they were of considerable importance in a domain which was totally opposed to the spirit which had inspired them: for their true result was the development of Italian maritime commerce, and, from the time of the Forth Crusade, the establishment of the colonial empire of Venice and Genoa in the Levant....

p197 The Crusades... had yet one more consequence of a religious order. From the time of the First Crusade the Holy War was substituted for the evangelization of the non-Christian world. Henceforth it would be employed against heretics also. The heresy of the Albigenses, and later, that of the Hussites, were extirpated by means of Holy War. As for the pagans, the methods employed against the Wends, the Prussians and the Lithuanians were characteristic of the age: the infidel had no longer to be converted, but exterminated.


And this brings us back to Book 5, and the Formation of the Bourgeoisie. (See 232.)

249. War of Investitures

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The Papacy outsmarts itself again

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades

Chapter II
The War of Investitures

1. The Empire and the Papacy since Henry III (1039)

p173 By restoring the fallen Empire in 962... Otto had undoubtedly intended to revive the Carolingian tradition...
...

p174 Henceforth... the Imperial dignity was merely an appendage, a consequence of German monarchy... But the Empire... although it belonged to the King of Germany, was by no means a German Empire. Debased though it was, its universality prevented it from becoming nationalized. Being Roman, it could not become the property of any nation... Instead of Germany having nationalized the Empire to her advantage, her kings... denationalized themselves to her detriment... the new Emperors were condemned to occupy the unprecedented situation of being neither universal sovereigns nor German sovereigns...

Down to the end of the 12th century they were incontestably the most powerful of the continental monarchs, and yet, when we come to consider them closely, we quickly perceive that their strength was more apparent than actual... The power of the Emperors was based... only on the Church, or rather, on the episcopal principalities... It was from these principalities that they drew the better part of their revenues and their military contingents... but unlike the King of France, the Emperor possessed no dynastic territory, no principality of his own... [?] He had no capital; and he wandered about the Empire, an eternal traveler, sometimes beyond the Alps, sometimes in Saxony, Swabia or Franconia. And naturally, this wandering power had no secular administration... 

p176 ...They [the Emperors] no longer risked such perilous adventures: [to the south of Rome after 982] so that Sicily, Apulia and Calabria... fell... into the hands of the Normans: a paradoxical spectacle.

p177 The story of the foundation of the Norman State in the south of Italy reads like a chanson de gestes. This extraordinary spectacle gave striking proof of the military strength of the Northern chivalry, and was a prelude to... the conquest of England and the first Crusade.

p178 Between the pontificates of Leo IX and Nicholas II the attitude of Rome toward the Normans underwent a complete transformation. The schism between the Latin and Greek Churches, which had so long been threatening, became definitive in 1054, after which date the Pope was directly interested in the expulsion from Italy of the few Byzantine troops which still remained there.

...It was... not surprising that he should conclude a close alliance with his enterprising neighbors in the South, and that he should favor their expansion. In 1059 -- though he was really disposing of territory which did not belong to him -- he gave Capua as fief to Richard of Arezzo, and to Robert Guiscard, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. Two years later Guiscard seized Messina, and thirty years later still the island was completely liberated from the Muselman invasion. The last of the Byzantine outposts in Italy were similarly conquered... What none of the successive masters of Italy had been able to do the Normans had accomplished in less that fifty years...



2. The Conflict

...
p181 During the fifteen years which had elapsed since the pontificate of Clement II, the Papacy, thanks to the nominations of [Emperor] Henry III had not only recovered its position at the head of the Church, but was regarded with veneration and had acquired an influence such as it had never yet enjoyed... The immense moral force which had been evoked by the asceticism of the monks had at last given Rome the head for whom she had been waiting... The loyalty to Christ which had inspired men's souls was now confounded with loyalty to His Vicar... Since the beginning of the 11th century [Catholic] Christianity had spread into Denmark, Sicily and Norway, and even into remote Iceland... Never had Rome possessed so vast a spiritual domain, so potent an authority...

...In 1059 Nicholas II, in order henceforth to guard the nomination of the Popes from any alien influence, confided it to the college of Cardinals... Henceforth the election of the Vicar of Christ would be a matter of the Church alone...

p182 The conflict between the Papacy and the Empire may be dated from this reform... It was not due merely to chance that he concluded a treaty of alliance with the Normans in the very year in which the right of electing the Pope was conferred upon the Cardinals.

At the same time the Pope took measures to prohibit the marriage of priests, and in prevention of simony, which showed that he could henceforth count upon the support of the masses... Under the influence of reviving commerce a new social class, the bourgeoisie, was growing up in Lombard cities, and it took advantage of the motive provided by piety in order to rebel against the bishops, whose administration took no account of its [the bourgeoisie's] new requirements. 
...

...In 1075... [Pope Gregory VII] solemnly condemned, under penalty of excommunication, the investiture of any ecclesiastical function by the secular authority.

p183 Nothing... could be more consistent with the principles of the Church, but nothing could have been more impossible for the Emperor to concede...

...Gregory has been regarded as a sort of mystical revolutionary, an Ultramontaine endeavoring to ruin the State...

p184 ...In reality what Gregory was attacking was the political conception that made the Emperor the equal of the Pope... it must not be said that he attacked the State. It would be more correct to say that he deprived it of its clerical character. After all, by depriving the Emperor of the investiture of the bishops he was accelerating the secularization of the State... What if the Empire had been triumphant? The theocracy would have held the power; the priests would have governed in the name of the prince. Gregory... withdrew the priests from the government. What he really did was to launch the State on the path of secularization.  

p185 ...There were still enough bishops in Germany who were devoted to the sovereign... to make it possible for... [Henry IV] to act. He assembled them at Worms, and on January 24th 1076, he induced them to declare that Gregory was unworthy of the Papacy...

...Nothing could have served the cause of Gregory better than this pretension on the part of the King of Germany to dispose, as the master, of the head of Catholic Christendom. He replied by excommunicating Henry, and absolving from their oath all who had sworn fidelity to him. It then became evident that the decision of the Synod of Worms was not accepted even by the princes of Germany... the response of one and all to the sentence of Rome was to abandon Henry. In order to avoid a general revolt the king did not hesitate to repudiate the judgement of his own bishops and to humiliate himself before the Pope... [civil war breaks out in Germany which Henry wins. He places his own Pope (Clement III) in Rome but can't deal with Gregory who is secure in Castel Sant' Angelo and is soon relieved by Robert Giscard and the Normans.]

p187 ...[in] the Concordat of Worms (1222)... The Emperor [Henry V] renounced the right of investiture of his fiefs (regales) from the scepter before consecration; in other parts of the Empire (Italy and Burgundy) after consecration. There was thus a distinction between the spiritual power... and the temporal power... ...the election of bishops... would now be influenced not by the Emperor but by the neighboring princes. In reality, the Imperial Church was in ruins; there remained only a feudal Church. The Empire suffered thereby; the Papacy gained in prestige; but the discipline of the Church was not improved... Every election was bound to be a conflict of influences... The true solution would have been that of Pascal II, according to which the bishops would have abandoned their fiefs; but to this the Emperor would not give his consent, for the vast territorial wealth of the Church would have passed into the hands of the princes. In the last resort, the quarrel of the investitures ended in the triumph of the feudality over the Church... Elected by chapters in which the younger sons of the nobles predominated... [bishops] were now entirely feudal, and with them the dominating influence was the temporal. In seeking to liberate the clergy from the secular influence the Church had made it more than ever subordinate to them.



On rereading this in January of 2022...

We are getting close to the first crusade and the return of trade in the west -- above it is mentioned that the bourgeoisie was already growing in parts of Italy. That the Eastern Mediterranean was becoming a Norman Lake also removed the Islamic limit on Western trade. Thus the scene was already set for the transformation of Europe. 

While some writers have attributed this transformation to the Crusades -- and the need of the nobility to raise cash to travel far from their domains -- it looks to me that this was just an accelerant sprayed on a fire that had already started. The conquests of the Normans was an essential precondition to the return of trade and the consequent re-monetization of the feudal world.

248. Cluniac reform of the Church

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The Church in crisis

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades

Chapter I
The Church

A lot here about the fall of the Papacy as it became the plaything of Italian noble families. But in other ways the Church was doing well,

p167 ...The influence of the abbeys was increased by the fact that many of the rural churches belonged to them, or were dependent upon them; and the monks officiated in them. The contemporary ideal of sanctity was the monastic ideal; the renunciation of worldly joys in order to save one's soul; the withdrawal from social activities, and even from all other virtues than those of renunciation, humility, and chastity. And it was to this ideal that the Church owed its renaissance: not to the bishops, whether they were semi-feudal as in France, or faithful to the Carolingian tradition, as in Germany. Their learning made no impression on this uncultivated public. The people wanted saints and workers of miracles.

p168 The feudal nobles, even more than the people, regarded the bishops as their enemies. They pillaged the monasteries, but they respected them...

We can judge of their feelings by the encouragement which they accorded to asceticism whenever this made itself conspicuous... Cluny... [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluny and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluniac_Reforms] founded in 910 by Duke Guillaume d'Auvergne... played a part whose importance might be compared with that of the Jesuits in the 16th century...The point at issue was the orientation of religious thought and feeling. I think we may say that the reform of Cluny monasticism set its stamp upon Western Christianity for centuries to come... For them [the Clunians] the world was the antechamber to Eternity. Everything had to be sacrificed to supra-terrestrial ends. The Salvation of the soul was everything, and it could be effected only by the Church; and the Church, in order to fulfill it's mission, must be absolutely innocent of temporal interests. Here there was no question of the alliance of Church and State, but only of the complete subordination, in the spiritual domain, of man and society to the Church, the intermediary between man and God... The priest belonged to the Church and the Church alone. He could have no seigneur, just as he could have no family. The marriage of priests, tolerated in practice, was an abomination which must disappear... In the domain of piety it [the tendency of Cluny] made for asceticism: in the political domain, for the complete liberty of the Church, and the breaking of ties that bound it to civil society...

p169 ...From the middle of the 10th century the reform spread through the whole of France, and into Italy, Flanders, and Lotharingia -- whence, at the beginning of the 11th century, it overflowed into Germany...

p170 The Church was regarded as a purely superhuman institution. Men lived in an atmosphere of wonder; miracles were matters of everyday experience. Every epidemic gave rise to miracles... The "peace of God" which interrupted the private wars on the occasion of the great annual feasts was one of the results of the extraordinary influence which the Church exerted over men's thoughts and feelings. But the riots which broke out in the 11th century to mark the popular disapproval of married priests were also the direct result of this influence...

p171 The power of the movement has left its traces to this day. It was then that the first great churches were built... The 11th century was an extraordinary period of church-building... 

...A serf could not enter the nobility, but he could enter the Church. He had only to go to school and learn Latin... 

In short, it was in the 10th and 11th centuries that the Church finally conquered the privileged situation that it retained until the end of the ancien regime...

p172 ...the Church, being the necessary medium of salvation, on concerning itself exclusively with the eschatological motives, obtained an ascendancy over men's souls which it had never before enjoyed... Lastly, its prestige brought it enormous wealth, in land, in alms, in privileges.

The whole movement evolved outside Rome and apart form the papacy. But it was bound to reach Rome...

Free Kool-aid

This is probably the best (or worst) time to insert this bit of fiction I've been sitting on.

(Cult representative at table on Market Street with large jug and paper cups.)

"Drink our Kool-aid! Free Kool-aid! Have faith in our Kool-aid!"

(Large, wordy, sign behind table.) 

"We are still hashing out the details of what our God is all about, but be assured our religion will be a doozy. What we can tell you is that if you drink our Kool-aid you won't go to Hell -- Hell is exactly like an endless morning commute to a job you hate, where you are stuck in looping detours while all the people you hate the most pass you (honking and waving) in a nearly empty HOV lane."

247. Knoxville Summer

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Here's a change of pace...

Auden

There is a passage in What W.H. Auden Can Do For You by Alexander McCall Smith -- about psychoanalysts in Morocco after WW2 -- that jumped out at me. Surely there's a book here.


p69 ...The author, a Moroccan doctor... revealed that there had been a small circle of psychoanalysts in Casablanca after the Second World War. These had been effectively forced out of France on Liberation; they were unpopular because they were thought to have been Vichy collaborators. They chose exile in Morocco rather than ostracism in France -- and so did their patients, who accompanied them in this exile. They were all getting up in years and eventually the psychoanalysts died, as did their patients. The patients are buried next to their analysts.

First, why would psychoanalysts be Vichy collaborators? That in itself must be an interesting story. 

Then we come to the migration to Morocco: Is this some extreme level of transference? Tertiary transference, perhaps? These patients must have been really committed to their analysis. "I'm afraid I don't have any more openings here, but I could see you next Thursday at 2:30pm in Casablanca."

Did they all socialize once removed to Casablanca? It would almost be odd if they didn't. I'm curious about what this was really like, but the opportunities for turning this story into humor are almost endless.  

Auden to Agee

Reading the book about Auden above, made me aware that I had never actually read him in school. My primary association with Auden was through Agee who (as I recall from over forty years ago?) gave up writing poetry in college because he felt Auden had that gig nailed down. So he switched to writing prose that was like poetry but spread further across the page. 

At university, I adored looking up Agee's early writings. They took my breath away. I even scanned issues of Fortune magazine from the 1930s (when he took a job there during the Great Depression) searching for the pieces he had written -- no byline, so you could only tell by his voice, which was so distinctive that it jumped off the page.

Thinking about all this made me look online to see if I could find "Knoxville Summer of 1915." This is what I read if I think my tear ducts might be broken. If I can get to the end without needing a towel I need to consult with a medical professional. 

To my surprise, it was not easy to find the complete work online, even though it is quite short. Mostly you find the abridged version Samuel Barber used to go with the musical piece he based on Agee's work. I did find what follows, but it appears to have been copied out by generations of non-English speaking Medieval scribes. Anything in red below will be a correction of what someone took the trouble to post online.

According to Agee, this now legendary piece was written in an hour and a half. “I was greatly interested in improvisatory writing, as against carefully composed, multiple-draft writing: i.e., with a kind of parallel to improvisation in jazz, to a certain kind of “genuine” lyric which I thought should be purely improvised… It took possibly an hour and a half; on revision, I stayed about 98 per cent faithful to my rule, for these “improvised” experiments, against any revision whatever.” said Agee before his early death at the age of 45. An excerpt was set to music by Samuel Barber  in 1947, and has become legend. However, for me, there is nothing more powerful than the purity of this in it’s entirety . Of course, it’s about a summer but it’s more importantly about identity, fatherhood, and the incredible power of living on this earth….

Knoxville: Summer of 1915  by James Agee (This is in its entirety with the same paragraph breaks as originally provided by the author. The “Samuel Barber” version set to music uses approximately a third of this text)

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-­sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. These were softwooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods. There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn’t doing very well. There were few good friends among the grown people, and they were not poor enough for the other sort of intimate acquaintance, but everyone nodded and spoke, and even might talk short times, trivially, and at the two extremes of general or the particular, and ordinarily next door neighbors talked quiet quite a bit when they happened to run into each other, and never paid calls. The men were mostly small businessmen, one or two very modestly executives, one or two worked with their hands, most of them clerical, and most of them between thirty and forty-­five.

But it is of these evenings, I speak. Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out. The children ran out first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and their necks looking tall and shy. The mothers stayed back in the kitchen washing and drying, putting things away, recrossing their traceless footsteps like the lifetime journeys of bees, measuring out the dry cocoa for breakfast. When they came out they had taken off their aprons and their skirts were dampened and they sat in rockers on porches quietly. 

It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns. The hoses were attached at spigots that stood out of the brick foundations of the houses. The nozzles were variously set but usually so there was a long sweet stream of spray, the nozzle wet in the hand, the water trickling the right forearm and peeled-­back cuff, and the water whishing out a long loose and low­curved and so gentle a sound. First an insane noise of violence in the nozzle, then the irregular sound of adjustment, then the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch accurately tuned to the size and style of stream as any violin. So many qualities of sound out of one hose: so many choral differences out of those several hoses that were in earshot. Out of any one hose, the almost dead silence of the release, and the short still arch of the separate big drops, silent as a held breath, and only the noise of the flattering noise on leaves and the slapped grass at the fall of a each big drop. That, and the intense hiss with the intense stream; that, and that intensity not growing less but growing more quiet and delicate with the turn the nozzle, up to the that extreme tender whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film. Chiefly, though, the hoses were set much alike, in a compromise between distance and tenderness of spray (and quite surely a sense of art behind this compromise, and a quiet deep joy, too real to recognize itself), and the sounds therefore were pitched much alike; pointed by the snorting start of a new hose; decorated by some man playful with the nozzle; left empty, like God by the sparrow’s fall, when any single one of them desists: and all, though near alike, of various pitch; and in this unison. These sweet pale streamings in the light lift out their pallors and their voices all together, mothers hushing their children, the hushing unnaturally prolonged, the men gentle and silent and each snail-like withdrawn into the quietude of what he singly is doing, the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible wall, and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths; while the locusts carry on this noise of hoses on their much higher and sharper key. The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night. And yet it is habitual to summer nights, and is of the great order of noises, like the noises of the sea and of the blood her precocious grandchild, which you realize you are hearing only when you catch yourself listening. Meantime from low in the dark, just outside the swaying horizons of the hoses, conveying always grass in the damp of dew and its strong green-black smear of smell, the regular yet spaced noises of the crickets, each a sweet cold silver noise three-noted, like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain. But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them. Now only two, and now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle inquiring of your presence in a pitch dark pool of meadow; and now he too is gone; and it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints ; halts, the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew. 

  Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
  Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes.      Content, silver, like peeps of light, each cricket makes his comment over and over in the drowned grass.
  A cold toad thumpily flounders.
  Within the edges of damp shadows of side yards are hovering children nearly sick with joy of fear, who watch the unguarding of a telephone pole. 
  Around white carbon corner lamps bugs of all sizes are lifted elliptic, solar systems. Big hardshells bruise themselves, assailant: he is fallen on his back, legs squiggling. 
  Parents on porches: rock and rock: From damp strings morning glories : hang their ancient faces. 
  The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums. 

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. 

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. (c) 1938

That was interesting. While I love every line of this, it's the ending that is the most powerful. And as error filled as the start was, I didn't find any errors toward the end. (And I think I was pretty careful.)

246. Nobility and princes

Link to Table of Contents

Capetian France

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Three
Feudal Europe

Chapter II
The Division of Europe

2. The New States

p143 On the death of Louis V, and in the absence of a possible Carolingian heir... the election of Hugh Capet (June 1st, 987) followed, in accordance with the traditions of his family... With his accession to the throne [of France] a new dynasty began, which was to endure for eight centuries, and achieve hegemony in Europe.

There was nothing to suggest this... Nothing was changed [by his accession]... There had already been Capetian kings: so his election was not a novelty. The conception of royalty was not in any way modified by it.
...

The Capetians accepted the situation. They were not by any means feudal kings in the sense of considering that their power was legally restricted by that of the aristocracy. They were simply opportunists... they were careful to give the magnates no cause of discontent which might excite their mistrust. They kept out of difficulties at home and abroad... They were content to live, and to leave behind them... an heir whom they had elected in their own lifetime. 

p144 The first Capetians dug themselves in... The kings were sustained only by their own domains of Paris, Amiens, Orleans and Bourges. They could not create prince-bishops, like the Ottos: the great lay nobles had absorbed all the territory... They were so modest that they have no history... Henri I (1031-1060) allowed the Emperor Conrad to take possession of the kingdom of Burgundy. Philip I (1060-1108) did nothing to make his reign remarkable. But the Capets endured, and they stuck roots in the soil. At the same time their residence, Paris, which they rarely left, was gradually becoming a capital. [This seems to be an exaggeration if the account of Paris in Wiki is to be believed.] It was the first capital that Europe had known. Hitherto the kings had moved about: the Capets, territorial princes, settled down and provided the country with a center. There was no reason why Paris should become the capital of France. It became the capital because it was the residence of the Capets.

...And when, under Louis VI, the son of Philip I, an age of peril began with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror (1066), the monarchy showed that it was already sufficiently established to enter upon the conflict which was henceforth to shape the history of France.

Who knew I was interested in the story of the House of Capet?


Chapter III
The Feudality

1. The Disintegration of the State

p146 We are accustomed to give the name of "feudal" to the political system which prevailed in Europe after the disappearance of the Carolingian dynasty. This habit of ours goes back to the French Revolution, which indiscriminately attributed to the feudal system all the rights, privileges, usages and traditions which were inconsistent with the constitution of the modern State and modern society. Yet if we accept the words in their exact sense, we ought to understand, by the terms "feudal" and "feudal system," only the juridical relations arising from the fief or the bond of vassalage, [Footnote: The old feudal seigneurs, down to the close of the 18th century, were under no illusion in this respect. It was generally admitted by all that "fief and justice have nothing in common." In reality, feudal law was a special kind of law, like commercial law.] and it is an abuse of language to stretch the sense of these terms to include a whole political order, in which the feudal element was, after all, only of secondary importance, and... formal rather than substantial. We shall follow the common usage, but we shall also call attention to the fact that the most significant feature of the so-called feudal system was the disintegration of the State.
...

p148 It [the monarchy] might have disappeared. [by the close of the 9th century] It did not disappear, and this was characteristic of the age. [Footnote: The election of the king was a mark of progress in the sense that it assured the unity of the monarchy: there would be no more partitions of kingdoms.] It did not occur to the magnates that they could dispense with the king. They still had a lingering sense of the unity of the State. Here, above all, the Church had to intervene, for it did not acknowledge the magnates; for the Church the king was the guardian of the providential order of the world. And he, for his part, protected the Church and guaranteed its property. And the magnates themselves needed a king as judge and arbiter: just as in the law-courts there must be a judge or magistrate who presides over the proceedings and pronounces sentence. The king was indispensable to the social order, to the "public peace." But it was clearly understood that the king reigned and did not govern.

... The kings continued to employ all the old formulae, to receive... all the marks of respect. But they had allowed the reality of power to pass into the hands of the aristocracy... After Charles the Bald there are no more capitularies, and not until the 12th century do we find the king acting again in a legislative capacity.
...

p149 ...The 10th century, like the 15th, was an epoch of political assassination. The territorial power of the feudal princes was no more scrupulous in the choice of means than that of the absolutist monarchs or the tyrants of the Renaissance; it was merely more brutal. Each sought to increase his power to the detriment of his neighbor, and any weapon was permissible. The passion for land ruled the actions of all these feudal magnates, and as there was no one to stop them, they struck at each other with all the brutality of their instincts...

p150 ...For the time being the king gave way to the seigneurs, and recognized the ursurpations which he could not prevent. The hereditary principle was in force among the feudal magnates. The son succeeded to the father, and from the 11th century onwards the hereditary principle was extended to women.
...

p151 Thus, from the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century the State was reduced to an empty form. The provinces had become principalities, and the functionaries princes. The king, except on his own territory, was merely the "enfeoffed sovereign" of his kingdom... The protection of human beings is not merely the primordial function of the State: it is also the origin of the State. Now, the king no longer protected his subjects; the magnates protected them. It was therefore necessary and beneficial that they should dismember the State to their own advantage...

Details of the organization of the principalities follows, and is interesting enough, though I'm going to skip most of it.

p153 From every point of view, then, his [the prince's] power was greater than that of the king. For while the king was elective, the principality was hereditary, and at an early period -- as early as the 10th century -- the right of sole succession was established, so that the principalities were not divided. It is interesting to note how unchanged they continued until the end of the ancien regime, which preserved them as provinces. The prince, from the 10th century... had a court, modeled on that of the king: chancellor, marshal, seneschal, cup-bearer. He had his vassals, who were more loyal to him than he was to the king...He was the advowee of all the monasteries within his territory, and he exacted dues or services from them. The documents call him princeps, monarcha, advocatus patriae, post Deum princeps.

He was... the territorial chieftain, the head of the patria... In... [these little local "counties"] was formed, for the first time, the patriotism which in modern society has replaced the civic sentiment of antiquity... Modern patriotism, born of the dynastic sentiment, was in the first place nurtured in the principalities.

I think of patriotism as being a product of nationalism, but I guess that really doesn't make as much sense as this. Ignoring France, even if you think of Germany (and Hegel), nationalism was tied to the dynasty. The 2nd Reich was not a "nation" but a collection of nations serving one dynasty. And you could say the same for the UK.

He [the prince] was the supreme justiciary on his own territory, the guardian and guarantor of public order... When one speaks of the "bloodthirsty" feudal magnates one should make reservations. The feudal seigneur was bloodthirsty when abroad, in his enemy's country, but not in his own...

2. Nobility and Chivalry

p154 In the 10th century a new juridical class had sprung up in the European States: the nobility. Its importance is sufficiently shown by the fact that in lay society the nobles alone had political rights. Later on the bourgeoisie would take its place beside the nobility. This place would become more and more considerable, but down to the end of the ancien regime it would still be regarded as a secondary place. In the history of Europe the nobles have played -- though under different conditions -- almost the same part as the patricians in Roman history, while the bourgeoisie may be compared with the plebians. It is only in the modern State that they have become merged in the mass of the citizens, much as in the Empire the general bestowal of civic rights effaced the old difference between the patriciate and the plebs.

p155 The noblesse exercised so great and so general an influence over the history of Europe that it is not easy to realize that it constituted an original phenomenon, and one peculiar to the Christian society of Western Europe. Neither the Roman nor the Byzantine Empire, nor the Musulman world, had ever known a similar institution...
...

...Those who had retained their liberty were in a privileged situation, and from the 10th century the word liber took on the meaning of nobilis. The old juridical usages relating to the family and inheritance now applied only to these privileged persons. The common law of freemen was modified into a special law. The connubium was enlarged in Roman law: at the beginning of the Middle Ages it was reduced. Family right was finally the apanage only of the few; and the same was true of free hereditary property (allodium).
...

p156 ...As a general rule, the son of a knight would himself become a knight. He was therefore counted, from birth, as belonging to the military caste; and the daughters of a knight would be regarded as belonging to the same social class. And as soon as this state of affairs was reached -- which in France... was by the close of the 10th century -- the nobility was born: that is, a hereditary class, conferring a particular rank in the State, independent of social position. All those who belonged to the milicia, or whose ancestors had belonged to it, were nobiles. It was not absolutely essential that the "noble" should be free; for in the end the ministeriales came to be regarded as nobles. [Footnote: But this was not definitely the case until the 14th century.]

p157 Thus the class of vassals was practically merged in the nobility. However, nobility did not depend upon the possession of a fief... it was... not until the 13th century -- that the plebian was debarred from the possession of a fief... The nobility was really the army... The noble did not pay the count an impost on account of his land, because he furnished him with military service. This was the sole privilege, so-called, of the nobility: it had no others. His special juridical situation, his special status in respect of his family, and the special procedure by which he benefited in the law-courts, were merely the survival of the common law of freemen, which had been modified for villeins.

The importance of the nobility resided in its social role. Uplifted by its military functions above the rest of the population, in constant touch with the princes, it was the nobility and the nobility alone that furnished the administrative personnel, just as it was the nobility alone that constituted the army. It was from the nobility that the chatelaines were chosen, the mayors, and all the other agents of the territorial administration. It was therefore regarded not only as a military but also as a political caste... Below the nobility and the clergy was the mass of plebeians, by whose labor they lived...

p158 ...In France and the Low Countries one could count on finding a number of knights in every country town, and we certainly shall not be far out if we estimate that in these countries they represented at least one tenth of the population.

...they were the most turbulent of men, furiously destroying one another in the private wars and family vendettas in which they were continually involved. In vain did the Church, from the close of the 10th century... restrict the days of battle by the "peace of God"; custom proved to be too strong for it... 

p159 Naturally, in such an environment there was no intellectual culture. Only in the wealthiest families would a clerk teach the daughters to read. As for the sons, who were in the saddle as soon as they could mount a horse, they had no knowledge of anything but fighting... They were violent, gross, and superstitious, but excellent soldiers...

At the close of the 11th century chivalry was extremely widespread. But "chivalrous" manners -- by which I mean the code of courtesy and loyalty which distinguished the gentlemen after the age of the Crusades -- has as yet no existence.

...To the very last the great majority of the nobility would retain the traces of their descent from a class of men to whom all notions of profit and productive labor were alien [I get the productive labor part of this, but weren't the nobility keen to gain a profit from other peoples labor from fairly early on? I'm thinking of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, but weren't there similarly greedy noblemen in France in the 18th century?]. To a certain extent the ancient idea that labor is unworthy of the freeman was revived by the chivalry of Europe. But the freeman of antiquity devoted his leisure, which he owned to the labor of his slaves, to public affairs [like our "Founding Fathers"]: the knights of the Middle Ages profited by the gift of land which he received to devote himself to the calling of arms and the service of his lord [like the Spartans]. When centuries had passed, and when the nobility had gradually been ousted from the rank which it held of old, the expression "to live like a nobleman" finally came to mean, "to live without doing anything."

245. Carolingians to Saxons

Link to Table of Contents

Mostly Germany, and Lotharingia

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Three
Feudal Europe

Chapter II
The Division of Europe

1. The Treaty of Verdun

p128 The Roman unity was replaced, in the epoch of the Invasions, by States which were independent of one another, conquered by different peoples, and governed by dynasties belonging to these peoples... All these States -- excepting the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Visigothic kingdoms of Spain -- were fused together in the Carolingian conquest, and absorbed into the great politico-religious unity of the Empire. It was upon its ruins that the States of continental Europe established themselves... There was nothing national in the partition of the monarchy under the sons of Louis the Pious. The question of different peoples did not enter into the case... Since the government to which they were subjected was of a universal and ecclesiastical character... The Carolingians were, so to speak, transferable; they could govern anywhere; their nationality mattered no more that the nationality of the Pope mattered to the Church... The quarrel between Lothair and his brothers... ended in the compromise of Verdun (843). 

p129 This was the first of the great treaties of European history, and none was to have more lasting consequences. Even to this day [1917?] we see its traces in Western Europe, where -- between France and Germany -- Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy represent the share of Lothair.

...All they could do... was to give each party to the treaty, as far as possible, a region whose revenue would be approximately equal... and they had not to take into consideration such matters as trade routes and highways and the extent of the coasts... [because there was no commerce to speak of]. The whole destiny of Europe depended on the share to be awarded to Lothair, the elder and the holder of the Imperial title, which gave him at least a moral supremacy over his brothers. Evidently he must be given the central portion... [and Italy].

...It was due to chance that Louis' share consisted entirely of Germanic peoples, and that of Charles of peoples almost entirely Romantic. But we have only to consider Lothair's share to realize how little attention was paid to national differences... it included, counting from north to south, Frisians, Flemings, Walloons, Germans, Provencaux, and Italians. Evidently no more regard was paid to the populations than modern States have paid to the negro tribes on partitioning Africa. And this method answered very well: no one had cause for complaint, since the peoples were conscious only of the rule of the aristocracy, and the aristocracy was everywhere local. 

p130 There were no nations in the 9th century. There was only Chrisendom... The division concerned the dynasty; it was made over the heads of the peoples, and no one was inconvenienced. The Treaty of Verdun was... perfectly adapted to a Europe in which the only policy was universal, and the domainal economy had no outlets...

On the death of Lothair (855) his three sons divided his Empire... Lothair [II, took] the territory to the north of the Jura... The kingdom of Lothair II was heterogeneous... so it was called... Lotharingia... when Lothair II died in his turn... Lotharingia was divided into two parts... more or less along the linguistic frontier... Charles the Bald, on the death of his brother Louis (876), attempted to seize his States. He was defeated by his nephew Louis III, then King of Germany, at Andernach. This was the first battle in which a French and a German army fought for the prize of Lotharingia, although there was as yet no talk of France or Germany. Contemporaries... gave the same name of France to the kingdom of the East and to that of the West, merely adding the adjective, Eastern or Western... Louis III adroitly took advantage of the disturbances... [following the deaths of Charles and Louis the Stammerer (879)] to obtain the cession of all the territory which Charles the Bald had acquired. This time the whole of Lotharingia was annexed to the Eastern kingdom.

That's as much of that as I can stand. You would have to have money riding on this to continue following this dynastic mess.

2. The New States

p133 Between the two distinct States which had now [911] emerged from the Carolingian unity -- France and Germany -- there was no necessary and inherent motive of hostility. The nationalities of the two States were different, but not more different, each from the other, than were the peoples within each State... Their economic constitution did not urge them to encroach upon each other. And yet there arose between them, immediately, that "Belgian question" which one might really call the Western question, and which ever since, under various forms, has made periodic reappearances in the course of European history. On this occasion it appeared as a Lotharingian question. 

I agree that it is hard to imagine why either party would be particularly eager to expand into a non-belligerent territory at this time. After the return of trade, this is no longer true and the area, like the Ardennes in particular, is mostly a battlefield for geographical reasons having little to do with the people or even the resources of the area.

p134 The Lotharingian aristocracy remembered that Lotharingia had been a kingdom... They had had kings of their own... and they wished to continue the tradition. They had not acknowledged Conrad of Franconia, elected by the German Duchies; they had placed themselves under the scepter of Charles the Simple, who left them under the authority of their Duke Regnier; and he assumed an attitude of such independence that his son Gislebert had already hopes of obtaining the royal title...

p135 Lotharingia became a German duchy [after Henry the Fowler] against her will, because Germany was stronger than France....
...

...The Wends, along the Elbe and the Saale, and the Czechs further to the south, had begun to assail the frontiers; and presently a more terrible enemy appeared, the last comer among the European peoples: the Magyars or Hungarians.

p136 They were the last wave of that Finnish inundation which since the days of Attila had never ceased to beat upon the frontiers of Europe: bringing first the Avars, and finally these Magyars, who, like the rest, having traversed the Russian Steppe, made their way into the Danube corridor, driven onward by the Petchenegs. Their earliest raids occurred at the close of the 9th century, when Arnold of Carinthia fought against them. Their arrival in Europe was of the greatest importance to the Western Slavs, whom they cut in two. They destroyed the kingdom of Moravia, founded by the Czechs of Bohemia. The latter were henceforth separated from the Croats and the Serbs, and also from the Poles; so that they were isolated from the Byzantine influence which had recently manifested itself in Bohemia by the dispatch of evangelists Methodius and Cyril, for whom Ratislav, the Prince of Moravia, had sent in order to escape the Frankish influence. From the Danube the Hungarians flung themselves upon Germany and Italy: as terrible as the Normans, and equally adventurous. One of their raids penetrated as far as the Rhine, and as they retired they ravaged Burgundy.

The Hungarian plain -- previously known as Pannonia -- is geographically interesting. The Romans took the area but, it's difficult borders made it impossible to hold. Instead of a valuable strong-point in their frontier, it became a dangerous salient. It isn't large enough to support an empire (compared with France or even Germany) and has always been surrounded by typically ferocious mountain peoples. The Balkans were the best recruiting ground for both the Roman and the Ottoman empires. Hard to conquer but too small to rule.

...Henry the Fowler... a Saxon king... was the most powerful of the German dukes, and his purely military rule did much to enhance the importance of royalty. [In the Eastern kingdom] With his Saxons, Henry repulsed the Slavs, enforced an oath upon the Duke of the Bohemians, and defeated the Hungarians, who had penetrated as far as Merseburg (933). He consolidated the royal power to such effect that the princes acknowledge his son Otto as his successor during Henry's lifetime.

p137 Henry had based his power mainly on his duchy of Saxony. Otto entered upon the stage as King of Germany... The Hungarians were finally defeated at Augsburg (955). Henceforth they settled down and became Christians... they entered once and for all into the European community; which proves that racial differences are of no significance... An expedition was despatched to Poland, where Duke Mesko I took the oath, paid tribute, and became a Christian (966), a fact of considerable importance, in so far as it attached Poland to Rome. In the same way, Harold Bluetooth, King of Denmark, was compelled to found bishoprics and to become a convert.

...It was to the bishops -- and not to the Pope -- that he [Otto] looked for support... His brother Bruno was Archbishop of Cologne, and Otto created him Duke of Lotharingia... the bishops were about to become rulers. Otto considered them rather in their secular aspect than from the spiritual standpoint. One might say that what distinguished his policy from that of the Carolingians was that the latter clericalized the State, while he secularized the Church... The King of Germany could make such gifts, [of land to the clergy to increase their standing] though the King of France could not... It was because the evolution of Germany was less advanced, in a feudal sense, that his royal policy was practicable, and it was for this reason that he was able to make his bishops princes of the Empire... In their eyes the king, not the State, was the stronger, since they themselves were given a portion of the State... For the rest, neither Otto nor his successors meddled in questions of dogma. It was enough for them that they had the Church well in hand. Their Reichskirche had something in common with the Landeskirchen of a later day. 

p139 The Pope, absolutely powerless, did nothing to obstruct the great episcopal policy of the King of Germany... John XII called on him for assistance, and on February 2nd, 962 restored the Imperial dignity for his benefit. This merely placed the Church more than ever in Otto's hands, until the day when it brought upon Germany the War of Investitures.

... in 951 Otto crossed the Alps and assumed the title of King of Italy. The peninsula having been left to its devices for a moment, had taken the opportunity of rending itself to pieces, with the result that for centuries it was tied to Germany.
...

p140 ...There were no words to describe Germany [after Otto]; she was merged in the Empire. Her kings exhausted their strength in maintaining the Empire. They were all Germans, but they had no German policy... They were destined to wear themselves out in pursuit of their policy. Germany has been the victim of the Empire, but her history is confounded with that of the Empire.
...