II. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION
Sec. 1
In the twelfth century, then, we find in the full flush of life a number of prosperous Italian republics or "communes," closely resembling in many respects the City-States of ancient Greece. The salient differences were (1) the Christian Church, with its wealth[541] and its elaborate organisation; (2) the pretensions of the Empire; and (3) the presence of feudal nobles, some of whom were first imposed by the German emperors on the cities, and who, after their exodus and their life as castle-holders, had in nearly every case compromised with the citizens, spending some months of every year in their town palaces by stipulation of the citizens themselves. All of these differentia counted for the worse to Italy, in comparison with Hellas, as aggravations of the uncured evil of internal strife. The source of their strength--separateness and the need to struggle--was at the same time the source of their bane; for at no time do we find the Italian republics contemplating durable peace even as an ideal, or regarding political union as aught save a temporary expedient of the state of war.
On the familiar assumption of "race character" we should accordingly proceed to decide that the Italians, by getting mixed with the Teutons, had lost the "instinct of union" which built up Rome. Those who credit "Teutonic blood" with the revival never think of saddling it with the later ruinous strifes of cities and parties, or with the vices of the "Italian character." The rational explanation is, of course, that there was now neither a sufficient preponderance of strength in any one State to admit of its unifying Italy by conquest, nor such a concurrence of conditions as could enable any State to become thus preponderant; while on the other hand the Empire and the Church, each fighting for its own hand, were perpetual fountains of discord. The factions of Guelph (papal) and Ghibelline[542] (imperial) stereotyped and intensified for centuries every proclivity to strife inherent in the Italian populations.
All the cities alike were at once industrial and military, with the exception of Rome; and for all alike a career of mere plunder was out of the question, though every city sought to enlarge its territory. Forcible unification could conceivably be wrought only by the emperor or the Papacy; and in the nature of things these powers became enemies, carrying feud into the heart of every city in Italy, as well as setting each on one or the other side according as the majority swayed for the moment. At times, as after the destruction of Milan by Frederick Barbarossa, hatred of the foreigner and despot could unite a number of cities in a powerful league; but though the emperor was worsted there was no excising the trouble of the separate interests of the bishops and the nobles, or that of the old jealousies and hatreds of many of the cities for each other. Pope Innocent IV, after the death of Frederick II in 1250, turned against the Papacy many of the Milanese by his arrogance. They had made immense sacrifices for the Guelph cause; and their reward was to be threatened with excommunication for an ecclesiastical dispute.[543] The Christian religion not only did not avail to make Italians less madly quarrelsome than pagan Greeks: it embittered and complicated every difference; and if the cities could have agreed to keep out the Germans, the Papacy would not have let them. Commonly it played them one against the other, preaching union only when there was a question of a crusade.
Some writers, even non-Catholics, have spoken of the Papacy as a unifying factor in Italian life. Machiavelli, who was pretty well placed for knowing where the shoe pinched, repeatedly (Istorie fiorentine, l. i; Discorsi sopra Tito Livio, i, 12) speaks of it bitterly as being at all times the source of invasion and of disunion in Italy. This is substantially the view of Gregorovius (Geschichte der Stadt Rom, B. iv, cap. iii, Sec. 3) as to the process in the city of Rome to begin with. So also Symonds: "The whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right when he asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation in disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends" (Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots, ed. 1907, p. 75).
As a civilising lore or social science the religion of professed love and fraternity, itself a theatre of divisions and discords,[544] counted literally for less than nothing against the passions of ignorance, egoism, and patriotism; for ignorant all orders of the people still were--more ignorant than the Greeks of Athens--in the main matters of political knowledge and self-knowledge.[545] Yet such is the creative power of free intelligence even in a state of strife--given but the conditions of economic furtherance and variety of life and of culture-contact--that in this warring Italy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there grew up a civilisation almost as manifold as that of Hellas itself. The elements of variety, of culture, and of competition were present in nearly as potent a degree. In the north, in particular, the Lombard, and Tuscan, and other cities differed widely in their industries. Florence, besides being one of the great centres of European banking, was eminently the city of various occupations, manufacturing and trading in woollens and silks and gold brocades, working in gold and jewelry, the metals, and leather, and excelling in dyes. In 1266 the reformed constitution specified twelve arti or crafts, seven major and five minor, the latter list being later increased to fourteen.[546] Pisa, beginning as a commercial seaport, trading with the East, whither she exported the iron of Elba, became the first great seat of the woollen manufacture.[547] Milan, besides silks and woollens, manufactured in particular weapons and armour. Genoa had factories of wool, cotton, silk, maroquin, leather, embroidery, and silver and gold thread.[548] Bologna was in a special degree a culture city, with its school of law, and as such would have its special minor industries. But indeed every one of the countless Italian republics, with its specialty of dialect, of life, and of outward aspect, must have had something of its own to contribute to the complex whole.[549]
In the south the Norman kingdom set up in the eleventh century meant yet another norm of life, for there Frederick II established the University of Naples; and Saracen contact told alike on thought and imagination. All through these regions there now reigned something like a common speech, the skeleton of old Latin newly suppled and newly clothed upon; and for all educated men the Latin itself was the instrument of thought and intercourse. For them, too, the Church and the twofold law constituted a common ground of culture and discipline. On this composite soil, under heats of passion and stresses of warring energies, there gradually grew the many-seeded flower of a new literature.
Gradual indeed was the process. Italy, under stress of struggle, was still relatively backward at a time when Germany and France, and even England, under progressive conditions quickened with studious life;[550] and there was a great intellectual movement in France, in particular, in the twelfth century, when Italy had nothing of the kind to show, save as regarded the important part played by the law school of Bologna in educating jurists for the whole of western Europe. For other developments there still lacked the needed conditions, both political and social. The first economic furtherance given to mental life by the cities seems to have been the endowment of law schools and chronicle-writers; the schools of Ravenna and Bologna, and the first chronicles, dating from the eleventh century. Salerno had even earlier had a medical school, long famous, which may or may not have been municipally endowed.[551] To the Church, as against her constant influence for discord and her early encouragement of illiteracy,[552] must be credited a share in these beginnings. After the law school of Bologna (whence in 1222 was founded that of Padua, by a secession of teachers and students at strife with the citizens) had added medicine and philology to its chairs, the Papacy gave it a faculty of theology; and in Rome itself the Church had established a school of law. The first great literary fruit of this intellectual ferment is the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), a performance in which the revived study of Aristotle, set up by the stimulus of Saracen culture, is brought by a capacious and powerful mind to the insuperable task of philosophising at once the Christian creed and the problems of Christendom. Close upon this, the Latin expression of accepted medieval thought, comes the great achievement of Dante, wherein a new genius for the supreme art of rhythmic speech has preserved for ever the profound vibration of all the fierce and passionate Italian life of the Middle Ages. In his own spirit he carries it all, save its vice and levity. Its pitiless cruelty, its intellectuality, its curious observation, its ingrained intolerance, its piercing flashes of tenderness, its capacity for intense and mystic devotion, its absolute dogmatism in every field of thought, the whole pell-mell of its vehement experience, throbs through every canto of his welded strain. And no less does he incarnate for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante, politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction: his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence.
Sec. 2
With Dante we are already in the fourteenth century, close upon Petrarch and Boccaccio; and already the whole course of political things is curving back to tyranny, for lack of faculty in the cities, placed as they were, to learn the lesson of politics. Their inhabitants could neither combine as federations to secure well-being for all of their own members, nor cease to combine as groups against each other. Always their one principle of union remained negative--animal hatred of city to city, of faction to faction. It is important then to seek for a clear notion of the forces which fostered mental life and popular prosperity alongside of influences which wrought for demoralisation and dissolution. Taking progress to consist on one hand in increase and diffusion of knowledge and art, and on the other in better distribution of wealth, we find that slavery, to begin with, was substantially extinguished in the time of conflict between cities, barons, and emperor.
Already in the fifth century the process had begun in Gaul. Guizot treats the change from slave to free labour as a mystery. "Quand et comment il s'opera au sein du monde romain, je ne le sais pas; et personne, je crois, ne l'a decouvert; mais ... au commencement du Ve siecle, ce pas etait fait; il y avait, dans toutes les grandes villes de la Gaule, une classe assez nombreuse d'artisans libres; deja meme ils etaient constitues en corporations.... La plupart des corporations, dont on a continue d'attribuer l'origine au moyen age, remontent, dans le midi de la Gaule surtout et en Italie, au monde romain" (Civilisation en France, i, 57). But a few pages before (p. 51) we are told that at the end of the fourth century free men commenced in crowds to seek the protection of powerful persons. On this we have the testimony of Salvian (De gubernatione Dei, lib. v). The solution seems to be that the "freed" class in the rural districts were the serfs of the glebe, who, as we have seen, were rapidly substituted for slaves in Italy in the last age of the Empire; and that in the towns in the same way the crumbling upper class slackened its hold on its slaves. Both in town and country such detached poor folk would in time of trouble naturally seek the protection of powerful persons, thus preparing the way for feudalism.
At the same time the barbarian conquerors maintained slavery as a matter of course, so that in the transition period slaves were perhaps more numerous than ever before (cp. Milman, Hist. Lat. Christ. 4th ed. ii, 45-46; Lecky, European Morals, ed. 1884, ii, 70). Whatever were the case in the earlier ages of barbarian irruption, it seems clear that during the Dark Ages the general tendency was to reduce "small men" in general to a servile status, whether they were of the conquering or the conquered stock. Cp. Guizot, Essais, as cited, pp. 161-72; Civilisation, iii, 172, 190-203 (lecons 7, 8). The different grades of coloni and servi tended to approximate to the same subjection in Europe as in the England of the twelfth century. But in France and Italy betterment seems to have set in about the eleventh century; and the famous ordinance of Louis the Fat in 1118 (given by Guizot, iii, 204) tells of a general movement, largely traceable to the Crusades, which in this connection wrought good for the tillers of the soil in the process of squandering the wealth of their masters. Cp. Duruy, Hist. de France, ed. 1880, i, 291.
The process of causation is still somewhat obscure, and is further beclouded by a priori views and prepossessions as to the part played by religion in the change. The fact that the Catholic Church everywhere, though the last to free her own slaves,[553] encouraged penitents to free theirs, is taken as a phenomenon of religion, though we have seen slavery of the worst description[554] flourishing within the past century in a devoutly Protestant community. Pope Urban II actually reduced to slavery the wives of priests who refused to submit to the law of celibacy, handing them over to the nobles or bishops.[555] The rational inference is that the motives in the medieval abandonment of slavery, as in its disuse towards the end of the Roman Empire, and as in its later re-establishments in Christian States, were economic--that (1) nobles on the one hand and burghers on the other found it to their advantage to free their slaves for military purposes,[556] by way of getting money; (2) that the Church in the Dark Ages actually had to enrol many serfs as priests, the desire of freemen to escape military service by taking orders having made necessary a prohibitory law;[557] and (3) that the Church further promoted the process,[558] especially during the crusading period, because a free laity was to her more profitable than one of slaves--as apart from her own serfs. Freemen could be made to pay clerical dues: slaves could not, save on a very small scale.
See Larroque, as cited, ch. ii. The claim of Guizot (Essais, p. 167; Civ. en Europe, lec. 6) that the religious character of most of the formulas of enfranchisement proves them to have had a specially Christian motive, is pure fallacy. Before Christianity the process of manumission was a religious solemnity, being commonly carried out in the pagan temples (cp. A. Calderini, La manomissione e la condizione dei liberti in Grecia, 1908, p. 96 sq.), and there were myriads of freedmen. It appears from Cicero (Philipp. viii, 11, cited by Wallon, Hist. de l'esclavage dans l'antiquite, ii, 419) that a well-behaved slave might expect his liberty in six years. Among the acts of Constantine to establish Christianity was the transference of this function of manumission from the pagan temples to the churches. Thus Christianity took over the process, like the idea of "natural equality" itself, from the pagans.
And the principle goes farther. In Adam Smith's not altogether coherent discussion of the general question,[559] the unprofitableness of slave labour in comparison with free is urged, probably rightly, as counting for much more than the alleged bull of Alexander III (12th century); while the interest of the sovereign as against the noble is noted as a further factor. As regards the "love of domination" to which Smith attributes the slowness of slave-owners to see the inferiority of slave labour, it is to be remembered that the Roman slave-owner was fixed in his bias by the perpetual influx of captives and cheap slaves from the East; that this resource was lacking to the medieval Italians, who had to take the costly course of breeding most of their slaves; and that in such circumstances the concurrent pressure of all the other causes mentioned could very well suffice to make emancipation general.
While the lowest stratum of the people was thus being raised, the state of war was for a time comparatively harmless by reason of the primitiveness of the fighting. The cities were all alike walled, and incapable of capture in the then state of military technique;[560] so they had periodical conflicts[561] which often came to nothing, and involved no heavy outlay; even the long struggle with Barbarossa was much less vitally costly to the cities than to Germany. Frederick's eight variously devastating campaigns, ending in frustration, were the beginning of the medieval demoralisation of Germany,[562] to which such a policy meant retrogression in industry and agriculture; while the Lombards, traders and cultivators first, and soldiers only secondarily, rapidly made good all their heavy losses.
It was when the practice of war grew more and more systematic under Frederick II, and the policy of cities became more and more capricious for or against the Emperor, that their mutual animosities became more commonly savage. Thus we read that in 1250 "the Parmesans were overthrown by the Cremonese, losing 3,000 men. The captives were bound in the gravel-pit near the Taro ... the whole population seemed to have been captured. The Cremonese tortured them shamefully, drawing their teeth and ramming toads into their mouths. The exiles from Parma were more cruel to their countrymen than the Cremonese were."[563] And, indeed, the Parmesans a century before had burned Borgo San Donnino and led away all its inhabitants as prisoners.[564] Now the Cremonese threw into prison 1,575 of their Parmesan enemies; and when after a year the dungeons were thrown open, only 318 remained alive.[565] Thus civilisation in effect went backwards on several lines at once, the spirit of internecine strife growing step by step with the economic process under which the community divided into rich and poor, as formerly into noble and plebeian.
Up till the end of the thirteenth century, however, the growth of capital went on slowly,[566] and the division between rich and poor was not deep, the less so because thus far the middle and upper classes held by the sentiment of civic patriotism to the extent of being ready to spend freely for civic purposes, while they spent little on themselves as compared with the rich of a later period. So that, although the republics were from the first, in differing degrees, aristocratic rather than democratic--the popolo being the body of upper-class and middle-class citizens with the franchise, not the mass of the population--and though the workers had later to struggle for their political privileges very much as did the plebs of ancient Rome, the economic conditions were for a considerable period healthy enough. A rapid expansion of upper-class wealth seems to have begun in the thirteenth century, in connection, apparently, with the new usury[567] and the new monopolist commerce connected with the Crusades; and it is from this time that the economic conditions so markedly alter as to infect the political unity and independence of the republics without substituting any ideal of a wider union.
Much of the wealth of Florence must in early republican times have been drawn from the agriculture of the surrounding plains, which had a large population. Machiavelli (Istorie fiorentine, 1. ii) states that when at the death of Frederick II the city reorganised its military, there were formed twenty companies in the town and sixty-six in the country. Cp. Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 365. Dante (Paradiso, xv, 97-129) pictures the Florentine upper class as living frugally in the reign of Conrad III (d. 1152). Borghini and Giovanni Villani decide that the same standards still prevailed till the middle of the thirteenth century. (Cited by Villari, p. 200, and Testa, pp. 89-91: cp. Riccobaldi of Ferrara, there cited from Muratori; Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 293; Trollope, History of Florence, i, 34; and Hallam, Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 342-44.) If these testimonies can be in any degree trusted, the growth of wealth and luxury may be inferred to have taken place in part through the money-lending system developed by the Florentines in the period of the later Crusades, in part through the great commercial developments.
The wool-trade, in which Florentines soon surpassed Pisa by reason of their skill in dyeing, was a basis for capitalistic commerce, inasmuch as the wool they dyed and manufactured was mostly foreign, the Tuscan region being better suited for the growing of corn, wine, and olives than for pasture. Already in 1202 the Florentine wool trade had its consuls. (Villari puts these much earlier. He traces them in 1182, and thinks they were then long established. Two First Centuries, pp. 124, 313.) Woollen-weaving was first noticeably improved by the lay order of the Umiliati at Milan about 1020; and this order was introduced about 1210 into Florence, where it received special privileges. Thenceforward the city became the great emporium for the finer cloths till the Flemings and English learned to compete. (Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, as cited, iii, 265-70.)
The silk manufacture, brought into Sicily from the islands of the Archipelago by Roger II in 1147, and carried north from Sicily in the reign of Frederick III, seems to have existed in Florence at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but to have flourished at first on a larger scale at Lucca, whence, on the sack of the town by Uguccioni della Faggiola in 1315, most of the Lucchese manufacturers fled to Florence, taking their trade with them. (Pignotti, iii, 273-74; Villari, Two First Centuries, p. 323.) Many had fled to Venice from the power of Castruccio Castracani, five years earlier. (Below, p. 243.) Being much more profitable than any other, by reason of the high prices, it seems to have speedily ranked as more aristocratic than the wool trade; and when that declined, the silk trade restored Florentine prosperity. (Villari, as cited.)
The business of banking, again, must have been much developed before the Bardi and the Peruzzi could lend 1,500,000 florins to Edward III of England (G. Villani, xi, 88; xii, 54, 56; Gibbins, History of Commerce, 1891, pp. 47, 48; Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 340. Pignotti, iii, 279, Eng. tr., estimates the sum lent as = L3,000,000 of modern money). This function, in turn, arose on the basis of commerce, and the cambisti are subjects of legal regulation in Florence as early as 1299. (Pignotti, iii, 276.) On this line capitalism must have been developed greatly, till it became the preponderant power in the State. Even as the kings and tyrants were enabled, by borrowing from the bankers, to wage wars which otherwise might have been impossible to them, the republican statesman who could command the moneyed interest was destined to supersede the merely military tyrant. In Genoa the bankers coalesced in a corporation called the Bank of St. George, which controlled politics, traded, and even made conquests, thus giving a historic lead to the Bank of Amsterdam. (Cp. Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 341; J.T. Bent, Genoa, 1881, ch. ii.)
Summing up the industrial evolution, we note that about 1340 there were 200 cloth factories in Florence; and a century later 272, of which 83 made silk and cloth-of-gold. At the latter period there were 72 bankers or money-changers, 66 apothecary shops, 30 goldbeaters, and 44 of goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewellers. The artisan population was estimated at 30,000; and gold currency at two millions of florins (Pignotti, iii, 290-91). Concerning Milan, it is recorded that in 1288, a generation after it had lost its liberties, it had a population of 200,000 (certainly an exaggeration), 13,000 houses, 600 notaries, 200 physicians, 80 schoolmasters, and 50 copyists of MSS. (Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 393, citing Galvaneus Flamma; cp. Ranke, Latin and Teutonic Nations, Eng. tr. p. 111.)
Sec. 3
We can now generalise, then, the conditions of the rise of the arts and sciences in medieval Italy. First we have seen commerce, handicraft, and architecture flourish in the new free cities, as they did at the same time in Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. In the south, again, in the Two Sicilies, under the reign of Frederick II, prosperous industry and commerce, in contact and rivalry with those of the Saracens, supplied a similar basis, though without yielding such remarkable fruits. There, however, on the stimulus of Saracen literature, occur the decided beginnings of a new literature, in a speech at once vernacular and courtly, as being accepted by the emperor and the aristocracy. The same conditions, indeed, had existed before Frederick, under the later Norman kings; and it is in Sicily about 1190 that we must date the oldest known verses in an Italian dialect.[568] Some of them refer to Saladin; and the connection between Italian and Arab literature goes deeper than that detail; for there is reason to suppose that in Europe the very use of rhyme, arising as it thus did in the sphere of Saracen culture-contact, derives from Saracen models.[569] In any case, the Moorish poetry certainly influenced the beginnings of the Italian and Spanish. About the same time, however, there occurs the important literary influence of the troubadours, radiating from Provence, where, again, the special source of fertilisation was the culture of the Moors.[570] The Provencal speech, developed in a more stable life,[571] took literary form before the Italian, and yielded a literature which was the most effective stimulus to that of Italy. And, broadly speaking, the troubadours stood socially for either the leisured upper class or a class which entertained and was supported by it.
Here, then, as regards imaginative and artistic literature, we find the beginnings made in the sphere of the beneficent prince or "tyrant." But, exactly as in Greece, it is only in the struggling and stimulating life of the free cities that there arises, after the period of primary song, the great reflective literature, the great art: and, furthermore, the pursuit of letters at the courts of the princes is itself a result of outside stimulus. It needed the ferment of Moorish culture--itself promoted by the special tolerance of the earlier Ommiades towards Jews and Christians--to produce the literary stir in Sicily and Provence. Again, while the Provencal life, like the Moorish, included a remarkable development of free thought, the first great propagation of quasi-rational heresy in the south occurring in Provence, it was in the free Italian cities, where also many Cathari and Paterini were found for burning, that there arose the more general development of intelligence. That is to say, the intellectual climate, the mental atmosphere, in which great literature grows, is here as elsewhere found to be supplied by the "free" State, in which men's wills and ideas clash and compromise.[572] In turbulent Florence of the thirteenth century was nourished the spirit of Dante. And it is with art as with literature. Modern painting begins in the thirteenth century in Florence with Cimabue, and at Siena with Duccio, who, trained like previous Italian painters of other towns in the Byzantine manner, transcended it and led the Renaissance.
The great step once taken, the new speech once broadly fixed, and the new art-ideal once adumbrated by masters, both literature and art could in differing sort flourish under the regimen of more or less propitious princes; but not so as to alter the truth just stated. What could best of all thrive was art. Architecture, indeed, save for one or two great undertakings, can hardly be said to have ever outgone the achievement of the republican period; and painting was first broadly developed by public patronage; but it lay in the nature of the case that painting could find ample economic furtherance under the princes and under the Church. For the rule of the princes was not, save in one or two places at a time, a tyranny of the kind that destroys all individuality; the invention of printing, and the general use of Latin, now maintained a constant interaction of thought throughout all Europe, checked only by the throttling hand of the Church; and the arts of form and colour, once well grown, are those which least closely depend on, though they also thrive by, a free all-round intellectual life. The efficient cause of the great florescence of Italian art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was economic--the unparalleled demand for art on the part alike of the cities, the Church, the princes, and the rich. From the tenth to the thirteenth century the outstanding economic phenomenon in Italy is the growth of wealth by industry and commerce. In the same period, Italian agriculture so flourished that by the fifteenth century Italy would on this ground alone have ranked as the richest of European countries.[573] From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century the outstanding economic fact is the addition to this still increasing wealth of the foreign revenues of the Church.[574]
In the sixteenth century all three sources of wealth are almost simultaneously checked--that from agriculture through the miserable devastation wrought by the wars[575] and by the Spanish and papal rule; and then it is that the great art period begins to draw to its close. While the revenue of the Church from the northern countries was sharply curtailed by the Reformation, which in rapid succession affected Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian States, the trade of Italy began to be affected through the development of the new sea route round the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese; and though that gradual change need not have brought depression speedily, the misrule of Leo X, raised to an unprecedented secular power, and the crowning blow of the Spanish Conquest, following upon the other and involving government by Spanish methods, were the beginning of the end of Italian greatness.
Prof. Thorold Rogers repeatedly generalises (Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 157; Holland, p. 49; Economic Interpretation of History, p. 11) that the Turkish conquest of Egypt (1517) blocked the only remaining road to the East known to the Old World; and that thenceforth the trade of the Rhine and Danube was so impoverished as to ruin the German nobles, who speedily took to oppressing their tenants, and so brought about the Peasants' War, while "the Italian cities fell into rapid decay." Whatever be the truth as to Germany, the statement as to Italy is very doubtful. The Professor confessedly came to these conclusions from having observed a "sudden and enormous rise in the prices of all Eastern products" at the close of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, not from having ascertained first the decay of the Italian cities. Now, H. Scherer expressly notes (Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels, 1852, i, 336), that Selim I, after conquering Egypt, made terms with his old enemies the Venetians (who were then the main Eastern traders in Italy) and "bestowed on them all the privileges they had under the Mamelukes." Prof. Rogers states that "the thriving manufactures of Alexandria were at once destroyed." Scherer states that Selim freed from imposts all the Indian wares brought into his States through Alexandria, while he burdened heavily all that came by way of Lisbon. Heyd sums up (Histoire du commerce du Levant, ed. fran. 1886, ii, 546), that "under the new regime as under the old, Egypt and Syria remained open to the Venetian merchants." It is hard to reconcile these data with the assertions of Prof. Rogers; and his statement as to prices is further indecisive because the Portuguese trade by sea should have availed to counteract the effect of the closing of the Egyptian route, if that were closed. But the subject remains obscure: Prof. Gibbins (History of Commerce in Europe, 1891, pp. 56, 57) follows Rogers without criticism. The difficulty is that, as Scherer complains (i, 272), we have very few records as to Italian trade. "They have illustrated nearly everything, but least of all their commerce and their commercial politics." The lack of information Scherer sets down to the internecine jealousy of the cities. But see the list of works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries given by Heyd, i, p. xvii sq., and his narrative, passim.
So superficially has history been written that it is difficult to gather the effect thus far of the change in the channels of trade; but there seems to be no obscurity as to the effect of papal and Spanish rule. What the arrest of trade began, and the rule of Leo X promoted, the desperate wars of France and Spain for the possession of Italy completed, and the misgovernment of the Spanish crown from 1530 onwards perpetuated. Under sane rule peace might have brought recuperation; but Spanish rule was ruin prolonged. Destructive taxation, and still more destructive monopolies, paralysed commerce in the cities under Spanish sway; while the executive was so weak for good that brigandage abounded in the interior, and the coasts were raided periodically by the fleets of the Turks or the Algerine pirates. The decline of the art of painting in Italy (apart from Venice and Rome) being broadly coincident with this collapse, the induction is pretty clear that the economic demand had been the fundamental force in the artistic development. The Church and the despot remained, but the artistic growth ceased.
Always in need of money for his vast outlays, Leo administered his secular power solely with a view to his own immediate revenue, and set up trade monopolies in Florence and the papal estates wherever he could. As to the usual effects of the papal power on commerce, see Napier, Florentine History, 1845, ii, 413. "The Court of Rome, since it had ceased to respect the ancient municipal liberties, never extended its authority over a new province without ruining its population and resources" (Sismondi, Short History, p. 319). Roscoe (Life of Leo X, ed. 1846, ii, 207) speaks of a revival of Florentine commerce under Leo's kinsman, the Cardinal, about 1520; but this is almost the only glance at the subject of trade and administration in Roscoe's work.
Under Pope Gregory XIII (1572-84) there was for a time fair prosperity in States that had formerly suffered from more precarious tyrannies; but ere long "the taxes laid upon persons, property, and commerce, to replace the lost revenues of Christendom, dried up these resources"; and many cities fell into poverty. Ancona in particular was so crushed by a tax on imports that her Mediterranean trade was lost once for all. (Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 406.) Sismondi's charge is substantially borne out also by Ranke's account (History of the Popes, Eng. trans. 1-vol. ed. 1859, pp. 118-19) of the ruinous impositions of Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who taxed the poorest trades and the necessaries of life, besides debasing the coinage and raising further revenue from the sale of places at exorbitant prices, leaving the holders to recoup themselves by extortion and corruption. Cp., however, Zeller, pp. 409-10, as to his municipal improvements.
As to Spanish misrule, see Cantu, Storia degli Italiani, cap. 139, ed. pop. ix, 512; Sismondi, Republiques, xvi, 71-76, 158-59, 170, 217; Symonds, Renaissance, vol. vi, pt. i (Catholic Reaction), pp. 52, 65; Procter, History of Italy, 1844, pp. 218, 219, following Muratori and Giannone; Spalding, Italy, ii, 264-72, citing many other sources. "The Spaniards, as a Milanese writer indignantly remarks, possessed Central Lombardy for 172 years. They found in its chief city 300,000 souls; they left in it scarcely a third of that number. They found in it seventy-five woollen manufactories; they left in it no more than five" (Spalding, ii, 272). Agriculture suffered equally. The decay of manufactures might be set down to outside causes, not so the rise in taxation.
Yet the decadence does not seem to have been universal, or at least was not continuous. In Sicily, it is alleged, though the statement is hardly credible, the revenue, which in 1558 was 1,770,000 ducats, was in 1620 5,000,000 (Leo, Geschichte von Italien, v, 506, 507); and at the latter date, according to Howell, Naples abounded "in rich staple commodities, as silks, cottons, and wines," from which there accrued to the King of Spain "a mighty revenue," which, however, was mostly spent in the province, being "eaten up 'twixt governors, garrisons, and officers" (Letter of October, 1621, in Epistolae Ho-elianae, Bennett's ed. 1891, i, 130). Thus there would seem to have been marked fluctuations, for in the time of Pope Gregory Naples is described as sinking under oppression and Milan as prosperous (Zeller, p. 407). The inference seems to be that some governors learned from the failures of their predecessors to handle trade aright.
The case of Florence after 1587, finally, shows how a wise ruler could so profit by experience as to restore prosperity where misrule had driven it out. Duke Ferdinand (1587-1609) was technically as much a "tyrant" as his brother and predecessor Francis, but by wise public works he restored prosperity to Leghorn and to Pisa, whose population had latterly fallen from 22,000 to 8,000 (Zeller, pp. 406, 411), and so increased both population and revenue that he even set up a considerable naval power. The net result was that at 1620, even under less sagacious successors, Florence "marvellously flourished with buildings, with wealth, and with artisans"; and the people of all degrees were declared to live "not only well but splendidly well, notwithstanding the manifold exactions of the Duke upon all things" (Howell's Letter of November, 1621, ed. cited, i, 136).
We are in sight, then, of the solution of the dispute as to whether it was the republics or the "tyrants" that evoked the arts and literature in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The true generalisation embraces both sides. It may be well, however, to meet in full the "protectionist" or "monarchist" view, as it has been very judiciously put by an accomplished specialist in Italian culture history, in criticism of the other theory:--
"The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed, under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which raised Italy to a first place among civilised nations. We are not justified by the facts in assuming that, had the free burghs continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a greater height. Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican career, produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her splendour in the art of painting to aliens from Cadore, Castle-franco, and Verona. Genoa remained silent and irresponsive to the artistic movement of Italy to the last days of the Republic, when her independence was but a shadow. Pisa, though a burgh of Tuscany, displayed no literary talent, while her architecture dates from the first period of the Commune. Siena, whose republican existence lasted longer even than that of Florence, contributed nothing of importance to Italian literature. The art of Perugia was developed during the ascendency of despotic families. The painting of the Milanese school owes its origin to Lodovico Sforza, and survived the tragic catastrophes of his capital, which suffered more than any other from the brutalities of Spaniards and Frenchmen. Next to Florence, the most brilliant centres of literary activity during the bright days of the Renaissance were princely Ferrara and royal Naples. Lastly, we might insist upon the fact that the Italian language took its first flight in the court of imperial Palermo, while republican Rome remained dumb throughout the earlier stage of Italian literary evolution. Thus the facts of the case seem to show that culture and republican independence were not so closely united in Italy as some historians would seek to make us believe.
"On the other hand, it is impossible to prove that the despotisms of the fifteenth century were necessary to the perfecting of art and literature. All that can be safely advanced upon this subject is that the pacification of Italy was demanded as a preliminary condition, and that this pacification came to pass through the action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the oligarchies of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the despots were in close sympathy with the masses of the people, shared their enthusiasms, and promoted their industry.... To be a prince and not to be the patron of scholarship, the pupil of the humanists, and the founder of libraries, was an impossibility. In like manner they employed their wealth upon the development of arts and industries. The great age of Florentine painting is indissolubly connected with the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes her magnificence to the despotic popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was the creation of the ducal house of Urbino."[576]
The criticism of this well-marshalled passage may best be put in a summary form, as thus:--
I. (a) The despot promoter of arts and letters is here admittedly the pupil and product of a previous culture. That being so, he could avail for fresh culture in so far as he gave it economic furtherance. He might even give such furtherance on some sides in a fuller degree than ever did the Republics. But he could not give (though after the invention of printing he could not wholly destroy) the mental atmosphere needed to produce great literature. None of the above-cited illustrations goes any way to prove that he could; and it is easy to show that his influence was commonly belittling to those who depended on him.
(b) The point as to pacification is unduly pressed, or is perhaps accidentally misstated. It is not to be denied that the despot in the Italian cities, as in old Greece and Rome, did in a measure earn popular support by giving the common people relief from the strifes of Guelphs and Ghibellines. But the despots did not pacify Italy, though they to some extent set up local stability by checking faction feuds.
(c) The popes were in the earlier Middle Ages a main cause of the ill-development of Rome. Their splendid works were much later than many of those of the Republics. St. Mark's at Venice, a result of Byzantine contact, was built in the eleventh century, as was the duomo of Pisa, whose baptistery and tower belong to the twelfth. The Campo Santa of Pisa, again, belongs to the thirteenth and fourteenth, and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence to the end of the thirteenth. And the great architects and sculptors of the thirteenth century were mostly Pisans.[577]
II. The point as to the lack of the right intellectual atmosphere under the princes can be proved by a comparison of products. The literature that is intellectually great, in the days before printing equalised and distributed cultures, belongs from first to last to Florence. Dante and Machiavelli are its terms; both standing for the experience of affairs in a disturbed but self-governing community; and it was in Florence that Boccaccio formed his powers. "Florentine art and letters, constituting the most fertile seeds of art and letters in Italy, were essentially republican; many writers, and most of the artists, of Florence were the offspring of traders or labouring men."[578] What the popes and the princes protected and developed was the literature of scholarship, their donations constituting an endowment of research. If the revival of classic learning and the rapid growth of art after the middle of the fifteenth century be held, as by some historians, to be the essence of the Renaissance,[579] then the Renaissance is largely the work of the despots. But even the artists and scholars patronised by Cosimo de' Medici were formed before his time,[580] and there is no proportional increase in number or achievement afterwards. On the other hand, it was mere scholarship that the potentates fostered: Lorenzo Valla, welcomed for his Elegantiae latinae linguae, had barely escaped exile for his De falsa donatione Constantini Magni;[581] and it is impossible to show that they promoted thought save in such a case as the encouragement of the Platonic philosophy by Cosimo and Lorenzo. For the rest, the character of the humanists whom the potentates fostered is admittedly illaudable in nearly every case. Pomponius Laetus, who almost alone of his class bears scrutiny as a personality, expressly set his face against patronage, and sought to live as a free professor in the University of Rome.[582] And it is open to argument, finally, whether the princely patronage of the merely retrospective humanists did not check vital culture in Italy.[583] It is true that when "despotism" has been so long acquiesced in as to mean a stable social state, there may take place under it new forms of intellectual life. The later cases of Galileo and Vico would suffice to prove as much. But it will hardly be suggested that monarchic rule evoked such forms of genius, any more than that the papacy was propitious to Galileo. In both cases the effective stimulant was foreign thought.
III. (a) The case of Venice has to be explained in respect of its special conditions. Venice was from the first partly aloof from ordinary Italian life by reason of its situation and its long Byzantine connections. It was further an aristocratic republic of the old Roman type, its patrician class developing as a caste of commanders and administrators; and its foreign possessions, added to in every century, reinforced this tendency.[584] The early usage of civic trading, carried on by means of fleets owned by the State, was habitually turned to the gain of the ruling minority. The use of the fleets was generally granted to monopoly companies, who paid no duties, while private persons did; the middle classes in general being allowed to trade only under burdensome restrictions.[585] Here were conditions contrary in effect to those of the progressive days of Greece. Contrasted with Florence, the Italian Athens, Venice has even been likened to Sparta by a modern Italian.[586] It has been more justly compared, however,[587] with Rhodes, which, unlike Sparta, was primarily a commercial and a maritime power; and where, as in Venice, the rich merchants patronised the arts rather than letters. From the first Venice achieved its wealth by an energetically prosecuted trade, with no basis of landed property to set up a leisured class. In such a city the necessarily high standards of living,[588] as well as the prevailing habit and tradition, would keep men of the middle class away from literature;[589] and only men of the middle class like Dante, or leisured officials like Poggio and Boccaccio and Machiavelli, are found to do important literary work even in Florence. Hence the small share of Venice in the structure of Italian literature.
The same explanation partly holds good of art. Venice, however, at length gave the needed economic furtherance; and men of other communities could there find a market, as did Greek sculptors in imperial Rome. Obviously a despot could not have evoked artists of Venetian birth any more than did the Republic, save by driving men out of commerce. But it is in Venice, where wealth and the republican form lasted longest, that we find almost the last of the great artists--Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. After these the Caracci, Guido, and many others gravitate to Rome, where the reorganised Church regains some riches with power. We are to remember, too, that the aristocratic rulers saw to the food supply of the whole Republic by a special promotion of agriculture in its possessions, particularly in Candia; besides carefully making treaties which secured its access to the grain markets of Sicily, Egypt, and North Africa.[590] Here again we have to recognise a form of civic self-preserving resource special in origin to republics, though afterwards exploited by autocracies, as earlier in the case of imperial Rome.
The fact that Venice did maintain great artists after the artistic arrest of Tuscany and Lombardy, is part of the proof that, as above contended (p. 221), it was papal and Spanish misrule rather than the change in the channels of trade that impoverished Italy in the sixteenth century. Venice could still prosper by her manufactures when her commerce was partly checked, because the volume of European trade went on increasing. As Hallam notes: "We are apt to fall into a vulgar error in supposing that Venice was crushed, or even materially affected [phrase slightly modified in footnote], as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the Portuguese. She was in fact more opulent, as her buildings themselves may prove, in the sixteenth century than in any preceding age. The French trade from Marseilles to the Levant, which began later to flourish, was what impoverished Venice rather than that of Portugal with the East Indies." As the treatise of Antonio Serra shows (1613), Venice was rich when Spanish Naples was poor (Introduction to the Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 165, 166).
(b) As regards Genoa, the explanation is similar. That republic resembled Venice in that it was from the beginning a city apart from the rest of Italy, devoted to foreign commerce, and absorbed in the management of distant possessions or trade colonies. When we compare the intellectual history of two such States with that of Florence, which was not less but more republican in its government, it becomes clear that it was not republicanism that limited culture in the maritime cities. Rather we must recognise that their development is analogous with that of England in the eighteenth century, when the growth of commerce, of foreign possessions, and of naval power seems to have turned the general energies, hitherto in large proportion intellectually employed, predominantly towards practical and administrative employment.[591] The case of Florence is the test for the whole problem. Its pre-eminence in art and letters alike is to be explained through (1) its being in constant touch with all the elements of Italian and other European culture; and (2) its having no direct maritime interests and no foreign possessions.[592]
IV. With the patronage of the princes of Ferrara, history associates the poetry of Ariosto and Tasso, though as a matter of fact the Orlando Furioso seems to have been written before Ariosto entered the ducal service. But even if that and the Gerusalemme be wholly credited to the principle of monarchism, it only needs to weigh the two works against those which were brought forth in the atmosphere of the free cities in order to see how little mere princely pay can avail for power and originality in literature where the princely rule thwarts the great instincts of personality. Ariosto and Tasso are charming melodists; and as such they have had an influence on European literature; but they have waned in distinction age by age, while earlier and later names have waxed. And all the while, what is delightful in them is clearly enough the outcome of the still manifold Italian culture in which they grew, though it may be that the influence of a court would do more to foster sheer melody than would the storm and stress of the life of a Republic.
Sismondi (Republiques italiennes, iv, 416-18), admits the encouragement given to men of letters by despots like Can' Grande, and the frequent presence of poets at the courts. But he rightly insists that the faculty of imagination itself visibly dwindled when intellectual freedom was gone. It is interesting to note how Montaigne, writing within a century of the production of the Orlando Furioso, is struck by its want of sustained imaginative flight in comparison with Virgil (Essais, B. ii, 10; ed. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 432). Compare the estimate of Cantu, Storia degli Italiani, cap. 142, ed. pop. x, 180-86.
In fine, we can rightly say with Mr. Symonds himself that the history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.[593] And this process, surely, was not accomplished at the courts of the despots. Nor can it well be disputed, finally, that the Spanish domination was the visible and final check to intellectual progress on the side of imaginative literature, at a time when there was every prospect of a great development of Italian drama. "It was the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit."[594]
Equally clear is it that the republican life evolved an amount of expansive commercial energy which at that period could not possibly have taken place under a tyrant. The efforts by which Florence developed her trade and power--efforts made possible by the mere union of self-interest among the commercial class--will compare with any process of monarchic imperialism in respect of mere persistency and success. Faced by the jealous enmity of Pisa, their natural port, and suffering from the trade burdens laid on them by the maritime States while they lacked a marine, the Florentines actually opened up trade communication with China when shut out from Egypt by the Venetians; traded through the port of Talamone when the Pisans barred their traffic; took Provencal and Neapolitan galleys in their pay when the Pisans and Genoese tried to close Talamone; and, after becoming masters of Pisa in 1406, not only established a well-ordered marine, but induced Genoa to sell to them the port of Leghorn. They could not, indeed, successfully compete with the Genoese and Venetians till the fall of the Greek Empire; but thereafter they contrived to obtain abundant concessions from the Turks, while the Genoese were driven out of the Levant. Commercial egoism, in fact, enabled them to tread the path of "empire" even as emperors had done long before them; and they hastened to the stage of political collapse on the old military road, spending on one war of two years, against Visconti, a sum equal to L15,000,000 at the present time; and in the twenty-nine years of struggle against Pisa (1377-1406) a sum equal to L58,000,000.[595] Thus they developed a capitalistic class, undermined in the old way the spirit of equity which is the cement of societies, and prepared their own subjection to a capitalist over-lord. But that is only another way of saying that the period of expansive energy preceded the age of the tyrant, wise or unwise.
When all is said, however, there can be no gainsaying of the judgment that the strifes of the republics were the frustration of their culture; and it matters little whether or not we set down the inveteracy of the strifes to the final scantiness and ill-distribution of the culture. Neither republics nor princes seem ever to have aimed at its diffusion. The latter, in common with the richer ecclesiastics, did undoubtedly promote the recovery of the literature of antiquity; but where the republics had failed to see any need for systematic popular tuition[596] the princes naturally did not dream of it. It would be a fallacy, however, to suppose that, given the then state of knowledge and of political forces, any system of public schooling could have saved Italian liberty. No class had the science that could solve the problem which pressed on all. The increase and culmination of social and political evil in Renaissance Italy was an outcome of more forces than could be checked by any expedient known to the thought of the time. It must never be forgotten that the very dividedness of the cities, by maximising energy, had been visibly a cause of their growth in riches;[597] and that, though peace could have fostered that when once it had been attained, anything like a federation which should secure to the satisfaction of each their conflicting commercial interests was an enormously difficult conception. It would be a bad fallacy, again, to suppose that there was lacking to the Italians of the Renaissance a kind of insight or judgment found in other peoples of the same period. There is no trace of any such estimate in that age; and we who look back upon it are rather set marvelling at the intense and luminous play of Italian intelligence, keen as that of Redskins on the trail, so far as the realisation of the self-expressive and self-assertive appetites could go. The tragedy of the decadence, here as in the case of Rome, is measured by the play of power from which men and States fall away; for the forces which next came to the top stand for no mental superiority. The problem, in fact, was definitely beyond the grasp of the age. It remains to realise this by a survey of the process of decline from self-government to despotism.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 541: Leo estimates that as early as the reign of Louis the Pious the Church owned about one-third of the land of Italy. Cp. B. iii, cc. 1, 3, as to the process.]
[Footnote 542: Names derived from the German Welf (or Woelf) and Waiblingen; Italianised as Guelfo and Ghibellino. Waiblingen was the name of a castle in the diocese of Augsburg belonging to the Salian or Franconian emperors, the descendants of Conrad the Salic, Welf was a family name of the Dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, who constantly resisted the predominance of the emperors, both of the Franconian and the Hohenstaufen lines. The names seem to have become war-cries in Italy about the end of the twelfth century. In Florence they appear first in 1239. Villari, Two First Centuries, p. 181, note.]
[Footnote 543: Sismondi, Short History, p. 81.]
[Footnote 544: As to the relations of successive popes in the Dark Ages--each cancelling the acts of his predecessor--see Sismondi, Republiques, i, 142; Gregorovius, as last cited, and passim.]
[Footnote 545: Prof. Butler (Communes of Lombardy, p. 231), credits the Italians with having acquired, as a result of the perpetual wars of the cities, "a breadth of view and a vigour of mind unknown among the urban populations of other lands." How can "breadth of view" in politics be ascribed to communities whose unending strifes finally brought them all under despotism?]
[Footnote 546: Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, l. ii. The seven major arti were (1) the judges and notaries; (2) the dealers in French cloths; (3) the money-changers; (4) the wool traders; (5) the physicians and apothecaries; (6) the silk dealers and mercers; and (7) the furriers.]
[Footnote 547: Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. trans. iii, 260.]
[Footnote 548: H. Scherer, Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels, 1852, i, 337, 338.]
[Footnote 549: Cp. Symonds, Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 26-27.]
[Footnote 550: Villari, Two First Centuries, p. 310; Hallam, Introd. to Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 8, 16, 19, 71, 77, 78. But see p. 74 as to the stimulus from Italy in the eleventh century. Cp. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, B. viii, Kap. vii, Sec. i (Bd. iv, 604-605), as to the primitive state of mental life in Rome in the twelfth century, and the resort of young nobles to Paris for education.]
[Footnote 551: In the previous edition I accepted the still current statement that Salerno drew its first medical lore from the Saracens. But Dr. Rashdall has, I think, sufficiently shown that there is no basis for the theory (The Universities in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 77-86). Salerno seems rather to have preserved some of the classic lore on which the Saracens also founded. Arabic influence in the Italian schools began in the twelfth century, and was in full force early in the fourteenth, when Salerno was in complete decline (Id. p. 85).]
[Footnote 552: As to the attitude and influence of Gregory the Great see Hallam, Literature of Europe, as cited, i, 4, 21, 22; and Gregorovius, B. iii, cap. iii, Sec. 2 (ii, 88). As to the reforms of Gregory VII in the tenth century, see also Gregorovius, B. vii, cap. vii, Sec. 5 (iv, 288). See the latter writer again, B. vii, cap. vi (iv, 242-46), and Guizot, Civilisation en Europe, lecon vi, ed. 1844, pp. 159-60, as to the effect of Hildebrandt's policy in dividing the Church.]
[Footnote 553: Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 9; Muratori, Dissert. xv, cited by Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, ii, 71; Milman, as last cited, ii, 51.]
[Footnote 554: We know further from Salvian, as noted above, p. 119, that the Christians of Gaul treated their slaves as badly as the pagans had ever done (De gubernatione Dei, l. iv). As to the whole subject, see the valuable researches of Larroque, De l'esclavage chez les nations chretiennes, 2e ed. 1864, and Biot, De l'abolition de l'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.]
[Footnote 555: Lea, Hist. Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 2nd ed. pp. 242-43.]
[Footnote 556: Cp. Sismondi, as before cited, and Testa, as cited, p. 92. Testa's book, like so many other modern Italian treatises, is written with the garrulity of the Middle Ages, but embodies a good deal of research. The pietistic passage on p. 93 is contradicted by that on p. 92.]
[Footnote 557: Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, p. 58 and refs. Manumission was the legal preliminary to ordination; but it was often set aside, with the object of having the serf-priest more subject to discipline. Cp. Tytler, Hist. of Scotland, ed. 1869, ii, 255, as to bondmen-clerks in Scotland in the thirteenth century.]
[Footnote 558: As in the war of cities against nobles under Conrad the Salic. See above, p. 203.]
[Footnote 559: Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. 2.]
[Footnote 560: Cp. Butler, pp. 224, 229.]
[Footnote 561: As to these see Testa, p. 56. Compare the accounts of the later bloodless battles of the condottieri, which were thus not without Italian precedent. Between 1013 and 1105 Pavia and Milan had six wars. Butler, The Communes of Lombardy, p. 58.]
[Footnote 562: Cp. Heeren, Essai sur l'influence des Croisades, Villers' tr. 1808, p. 101; Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. pp. 199, 211, 213, 223; Stubbs, Germany in the Middle Ages, 1908, pp. 105, 197.]
[Footnote 563: Memoirs of Fra Salimbene, tr. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in same vol. with The Duke and the Scholar, 1875, p. 120.]
[Footnote 564: Butler, p. 98.]
[Footnote 565: Id. p. 314.]
[Footnote 566: Wealth-accumulation first took the form of land-owning. At the beginning of the twelfth century the Florentine territory was merely civic; at the end it was about forty miles in diameter. (Trollope, History of the Commonwealth of Florence, 1865, i, 85.) The figure given for the beginning, six miles, is legendary and incredible. See Villari, Two First Centuries, pp. 71-72.]
[Footnote 567: As everywhere else in the Middle Ages, interest at Florence was high, varying from ten to thirty per cent. Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. 1823, iii, 280. Cp. Hallam, Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 337.]
[Footnote 568: Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, 1878, tom. ii, cap. vii.]
[Footnote 569: Sismondi, Literature of the South of Europe, Eng. tr. i, 61, 85, 86, 87, 89; Bouterwek, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 22, 23; Bartoli, i, 94.]
[Footnote 570: Sismondi, as last cited, i, 74, 76, 80, 242; Bartoli, tom. ii, cap. i, and p. 165.]
[Footnote 571: "The union of Provence, during two hundred and thirteen years, under a line of princes who ... never experienced any foreign invasion, but, by a fraternal government, augmented the population and riches of the State, and favoured commercial pursuits ... consolidated the laws, the language, and the manners of Provence" (Sismondi, as last cited, i, 75).]
[Footnote 572: See above, p. 135 sq., as to the theory of the culture-value of the despot.]
[Footnote 573: Sismondi, Republiques, xii, 38-41. The land was already cultivated on the metayer system, half the crop going to the tenant--a state of things advantageous all round. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 315) pronounces that the Florentines looked sagaciously to trade, but harassed agriculture. This does not seem to be true of Italian polity in general.]
[Footnote 574: As to these, consult M'Crie, History of the Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 23-25.]
[Footnote 575: See Sismondi, Republiques, xii, 39, as to the utter ruin of the Pisan territory by Florence.]
[Footnote 576: J.A. Symonds, The Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 61-62.]
[Footnote 577: Sismondi, Republiques italiennes, iv, 174-77.]
[Footnote 578: Villari, Two First Centuries, p. 239. So Perrens: "Its glory belonged to the democratic period" (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. vii, p. 171).]
[Footnote 579: Cp. Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309.]
[Footnote 580: Roscoe (Life of Leo X, ii, 318) attributes to the rivalry of Leonardo and Michel Angelo at Florence (in 1500, while the Medici were in exile, and the city was self-governed) the kindling of the art life of the greatest period. And see Perrens (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. cited, p. 457, also as cited below, p. 249) on the decay of architecture and the check to art through the policy of Lorenzo. "Art under the grandfather," he declares (p. 434), "completed a remarkable evolution which has no equivalent under the grandson." Previously (p. 200) he had noted that "many works of which the fifteenth century gets the glory because it finished them, were ordered and begun amid the confusion and terrible agitation of the demagogy." As to Cosimo's expenditure on building see p. 166, and on letters p. 168.]
[Footnote 581: Zeller, p. 310. The De falsa donatione was certainly an abusive document. See Hallam, Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, sect. i, par. 7, note.]
[Footnote 582: Burckhardt, as cited, p. 279. Another estimable type was Fra Urbano. See Roscoe, Leo X, i, 351, 352. On the character of Poliziano see Perrens, trans. cited, p. 441.]
[Footnote 583: Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203, 204, 291; Zeller, p. 330; and von Reumont, Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. trans. ii, 18. Lorenzo expressly cut down the scope and the resources of the Florentine Studio for selfish personal reasons. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 436-37. It was Bernardo Nerli, not Lorenzo, who bore the cost of printing Homer. Id. p. 443.]
[Footnote 584: See the estimate of Venetian ideals in Burckhardt, Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, pt. i, ch. vii.]
[Footnote 585: Nys, Researches in the History of Economics, 1899, pp. 66-67; Frignet, Histoire de l'association commerciale, 1868, p. 78.]
[Footnote 586: Prof. Giacomo Gay, Dei Carattere degli Italiani nel medio evo e nell' eta moderna, Asti, 1876, p. 8.]
[Footnote 587: By Prof. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 97.]
[Footnote 588: Compare these as described by Ranke (Latin and Teutonic Nations, Eng. tr. p. 248) with those of old Athens.]
[Footnote 589: Burckhardt (Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 71, 72) gives some illustrative details. See also H. Brown in Cambridge Modern History, 1902, i, 284. But cp. Geiger, Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland, Berlin, 1882, pp. 265-66, as to the per contra.]
[Footnote 590: Nys, Researches in the History of Economics, 1899, pp. 64-65, and ref.]
[Footnote 591: Cp. The Dynamics of Religion, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.), 1897, pp. 175, 176, 181.]
[Footnote 592: "Non partecipavi Firenze nelle faccende d'Europa cosi largamente, come Venezia e Genova, si per essere continuamente straziata dalle fazioni e si per non avere dominio di mare. Dal che nasceva, che niun cittadino potesse sorgere in lei di nome e di appichi esterni tanto possente che potesse stabilirvi da per se o la liberta o la tyrannide" (C. Botta, Storia d' Italia, 1837, i, 124). But Genoa also had countless strifes of faction, so that the vera causa of the greater inner development of Florence must be held to be her lack of external dominion and occupation.]
[Footnote 593: Vol. cited, p. 3. Cp. Burckhardt, Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, pt. iv, ch. iv, p. 309. Both writers adopt the language of Michelet.]
[Footnote 594: Burckhardt, p. 317. The Counter-Reformation, of course, must always be taken into account in estimates of the latter period of Italian history. The regeneration of the Papacy after the Reformation is to be credited jointly to Spain and the Reformation itself.]
[Footnote 595: Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 282-92.]
[Footnote 596: Study suffered in Florence particularly from the faction troubles. The Studio or college, founded in 1348, was closed between 1378 and 1386; reopened then, shut in 1404, again opened in 1412, and so on. Cp. Napier, Florentine History, 1846, iv, 75; Perrens, Histoire de Florence, Eng. tr. of vol. vii, pp. 172-77; and von Reumont, Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. tr. i, 428-30.]
[Footnote 597: Mr. Symonds notes (Age of the Despots, p. 34) how Guicciardini argued this (Op. Ined. i, 28), as against Machiavelli's lament over the lack of Italian unity.]
III. THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE
Sec. 1
Given the monarchic and feudal environment, the chronic strife within and between the Italian cities can be seen to be sufficient in time to undo them;[598] and some wonder naturally arises at their failure to frame some system of federal government that should restrain their feuds. It was their supreme necessity; but though the idea was now and then broached,[599] there is no sign that the average man ever came nearer planning for it than did the Ghibelline Dante, with his simple theory that Caesar should ride the horse,[600] or than did the clear brain of Machiavelli, with its longing for a native ruler[601] like Cesare Borgia, capable of beating down the rival princes and the adventurers, and of holding his own against the Papacy. One of the statesmen who harboured the ideal was Rienzi; but he never wrought for its realisation, and his devotion to the Papacy as well as to the headship of Rome would have made it miscarry had he set it on foot.[602] The failure of Cesare Borgia, who of all Italians of his day came nearest to combining the needed faculties for Italian unification, is the proof of the practical impossibility of that solution. But a federation of States, it has been reasoned, was relatively feasible; why then was it never attempted? As usual, the question has been answered in the simple verbalist way, by the decision that the Italians did not strike out a political philosophy or science because they were not that way given. They lacked the "faculty" for whatever they did not happen to do; whereas the ancient Greeks, on the contrary, did theorise because that faculty was theirs, though they had not the faculty to work out the theories.
E.g. the reasoning of so intelligent a thinker as Heeren: "Among those countries in which [political speculation] might have been expected to give the earliest sign of life, Italy was undoubtedly the first: all the ordinary causes appear to have united here; a number of small states arose near each other; republican constitutions were established; political parties were everywhere at work and at variance; and with all this, the arts and sciences were in the full splendour of their revival. The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!--a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there never was a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered under the sky of Italy. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. The history of the Roman philosophy, a mere echo of the Grecian, proves this of its earlier ages, nor was it otherwise in its later." (Essay "On the Rise and Progress of Political Theories," in Historical Treatises, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 118.)
To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo, Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more that on this principle the Germans must be pronounced to have been devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.
Seeking a less vacuous species of explanation, we are soon led to recognise (1) that the case of medieval Italy was to the extent of at least two factors more complicated than that of ancient Greece; and that these factors alone might suffice to explain their non-production of a "theory" which should avail for the need; (2) that the theories of the Greeks did not avail to solve their problem; and (3) that the Italians all the while had really two theories too many. At the very emergence of their republics they were already possessed or wrought upon by the embodied theories of the Empire and the Papacy, two elements never represented in the Greek problem, where empire was an alien and barbarian thing suddenly entering into the affairs of civilised Hellas, and where there was nothing in the nature of the Papacy. These two forces in Italian life were all along represented by specific theories; and their clash was a large part of the trouble. Their pressure set up a chronic clash of parties; and the theorist of to-day may be challenged to frame a theory which could have worked well for Italy otherwise than by setting those forces aside--a thing quite impossible in the Middle Ages. If mere system-making on either side could have availed, Thomas Aquinas might have rendered the service.[603]
The economic and political destiny of the Church may be said to have been determined in the eleventh century, when, after a desperate struggle, begun by Pope Hildebrandt, celibacy was forced on the secular clergy. The real motive to this policy was of course not ascetic but economic, the object being to prevent at once the appropriation of church property by married priests for family purposes, and the creation of hereditary titles to church benefices. An evolution of that kind had actually begun; and there can be no question that had it not been checked it would have been fatal to the Papacy. Naturally the married clergy on their part resisted to the uttermost. Only the desperate policy of Hildebrandt, withdrawing popular obedience and ecclesiastical protection from those who would not give up their wives, broke down the resistance; and even thereafter Urban II, as we saw, had to resort to the odious measure of making priests' wives slaves.[604] From that period we may date the creation of the Church as a unitary political power. Sacerdotal celibacy took many generations to establish; but when once the point was carried it involved a force of incorporation which only the strongest political forces--as at the Reformation--could outdo, and which since the Reformation has kept the Church intact.
It is true that the monk Arnold of Brescia, burned alive by the Papacy in 1155, fought a long battle (1139-55) against the papal power, creating an immense ferment in Lombardy, and rousing a strong anti-papal movement in Rome itself (Sismondi, Republiques italiennes, i, chs. 7, 8; Gibbon, ch. 69); and that, as noted by M'Crie (Reformation in Italy, p. 1), "the supremacy claimed by the bishops of Rome was resisted in Italy after it had been submitted to by the most remote churches of the west"; but once papalised, Italy necessarily remained so in her own pecuniary interest. Cp. Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 79. Arnold's movement led even to a revolution in Rome; but after he had ruled there for ten years, overbearing two successive popes, one of greater energy, Adrian IV, excommunicated the city, so expelling Arnold. Adrian then, making a bargain with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa at his coronation, got the republican leader in his power; and the movement ended with Arnold's life. The Papacy was now an irremovable element of division in Italy; and disunion was thenceforth the lot of the land.
If we seek to localise the disease, however, we find that no one factor is specially responsible. The alien emperor, coming in from outside, and setting city against city, Pavia against Milan, and nobles against burghers, is clearly a force of strife. Again, whereas the cities might on the whole have combined successfully against the emperor, to the point of abolishing his rule, the Papacy, calling him in to suit its own purposes, and calling in yet other aliens at a pinch, is still more a force of discord. At times the emperors, in the worst days of Roman corruption, had to choose among the competitors nominated to the Papacy by the intrigues of courtesans and nobles and the venal votes of the people, thus identifying the man they chose with their cause. Hildebrandt, again, after securing that the popes should be elected by the cardinals, became the fiercest of autocrats. By his strife with Henry IV he set up civil war through all Italy and Germany; and when in his despair he called in the Normans against Rome, they sold most of the people into slavery.[605] Later, in the minority of Frederick II, Innocent III so strengthened the Church that it was able by sheer slaughter to crush for a generation all Provencal heresy, and was able to prevail against Frederick in its long struggle with him; in so doing, however, deepening to the uttermost the passion of faction in all the cities, and so preparing the worst and bloodiest wars of the future.
Yet, on the other hand, if we make abstraction of pope and emperor, and consider only the nobles and the citizens, it is clear that they had among them the seeds of strife immeasurable. The nobles were by training and habit centres of violence.[606] Their mutual feuds, always tending to involve the citizens, were a perpetual peril to order; and their disregard of law kept them as ready to make war on citizens or cities as on each other. Again and again they were violently expelled from every Lombard city, on the score of their gross and perpetual disorders; but they being the chief experts in military matters, they were always welcomed back again, because the burghers had need of them as leaders in the feuds of city with city, and of Guelphs with Ghibellines. So that yet again, if we put the nobles out of sight, the spirit of strife as between city and city was sufficient, as in ancient Greece, to make them all the prey of any invader with a free hand. They could not master the science of their problem, could not rise above the plane of primary tribal or local passion and jealousy; though within each city were faction hatreds as bitter as those between the cities as wholes. Already in the twelfth century we find Milan destroying Lodi and unwalling Como. Later, in the thirteenth century, Genoa ruins the naval power of Pisa,[607] then under the tyranny of Ugolino, in a war of commercial hatred, such as Pisa had before waged with Amalfi and with Lucca; in the fourteenth, Genoa and Venice again and again fight till both are exhausted, and Genoa accepts a lord to aid her in the struggle, Pisa doing likewise, and so recovering strength on land;[608] in the fifteenth and sixteenth, Florence spares no cost or effort to keep Pisa in subjection. This fatal policy, in turn, was the result of the frequent attempts of the Pisans to destroy Florentine trade by closing their port to it.[609] All along, inter-civic hates are in full flow through all the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines; and the menace of neither French nor Spanish tyranny can finally unify the mutually repellent communities.
We may, indeed, make out a special case against the Papacy, to the effect that, but for that, Italian intelligence would have had a freer life; and that even if Italy, like Spain and France and England, underwent despotism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, her intellectual activity would have sufficed to work her recovery at least as rapidly as the process took place elsewhere. It has been argued[610] that the liberating force elsewhere in the sixteenth century was the Reformation--a theory which leaves us asking what originated the Reformation in its turn. Taking that to be the spirit of (a) inchoate free thought, of developing reason, or (b) of economic revolt against the fiscal exactions of an alien power, or both, we are entitled to say broadly that the crushing of such revolt in Italy, as in Provence and in Spain, clearly came of the special development of the papal power thus near its centre--the explanation of "national character" being as nugatory in this as in any other sociological issue.
Heeren naturally rests on this solution. The "new religion," he says, "was suited to the north, but not to the south. The calm and investigating spirit of the German nations found in it the nourishment which it required and sought for.... The more vivid imagination and sensitive feelings of the people of the south ... found little to please them in its tenets.... It was not, therefore, owing to the prohibitions of the government, but to the character of the nations themselves, that the Reformation found no support among them" (vol. cited, pp. 58, 59). The two explanations of climate and race can thus be employed alternatively at need. Ireland, though "northern," is to be got rid of as not being "German." For the rest, the Albigenses, the paterini, the reforming Franciscans, and the myriad victims of the Inquisition in Spain, are conveniently ignored. Heeren's phrase about the "almost total exclusion" of the southern countries from the "great ferment of ideas which in other countries of civilised Europe gave activity and life to the human intellect" can be described only as a piece of concentrated misinformation. And a similar judgment must be passed on the summing-up of Mr. Symonds that "Germany achieved the labour of the Reformation almost single-handed" (Renaissance in Italy, 2nd ed. i, 28). There is far more truth in the verdict of Guizot, that "la principale lutte d'erudition et de doctrine contre l'Eglise catholique a ete soutenue par la reforme francaise; c'est en France et en Hollande, et toujours en francais, qu'ont ete ecrits tants d'ouvrages philosophiques, historiques, polemiques, a l'appui de cette cause" (Civilisation en France, i, 18). Motley, though an uncritical Teutophile and Gallophobe, admits as to Holland that "the Reformation first entered the Provinces, not through the Augsburg but the Huguenot gate" (Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 162). As to the spirit of reformation in Italy and Spain, the student may consult the two careful and learned Histories of M'Crie, works which might have saved many vain generalisations by later writers, had they heeded them. The question of the supposed racial determination of the Reformation is discussed at some length in The Saxon and the Celt, pp. 92-97, 143-47, 203, 204. Cp. The Dynamics of Religion, 1897, pt. i; Letters on Reasoning, 2nd ed. 1905, pp. 20-24; and A Short History of Freethought, vol. i, chs. ix, x, xi.
The history of Italian religious life shows that the spirit of sheer reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stronger there than even in France in the sixteenth, where again it was perhaps positively stronger than in Germany, though not stronger relatively to the resistance. And in Italy the resistance was personified in the Papacy, which there had its seat and strength. When all is said, however, the facts remain that in England the Reformation meant sordid spoliation, retrogression in culture, and finally civil war; that in France it meant long periods of furious strife; that in Germany, where it "prospered," it meant finally a whole generation of the most ruinous warfare the modern world had seen, throwing back German civilisation a full hundred years. Save for the original agony of conquest and the special sting of subjection to alien rule, Italy suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less evils than these.
The lesson of our retrospect, then, is: (1) generally, that as between medieval Italian development and that of other countries--say our own--there has been difference, not of "race character" and "faculty," but of favouring and adverse conditions; and (2) particularly, that certain social evils which went on worsening in Florence and are in some degree present in all societies to-day, call for scientific treatment lest they go on worsening with us. The modern problem is in many respects different from that of pre-Reformation Italy; but the forces concerned are kindred, and it may be worth while to note the broad facts of the past process with some particularity.
Sec. 2
The central fact of disunion in Italian life, complicated as we have seen it to be by extraneous factors, analyses down to the eternal conflict of interests of the rich and the poor, the very rich and the less rich, or, as Italian humour figured it, the "fat" and the "lean." For Machiavelli this is the salient trouble in the Florentine retrospect, since it survived the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline; though he sets down to the Papacy the foreign invasions and the disunion of the cities. The faction-feuds, of course, tell of the psychological conditions of the feud of rich and poor, and were to some extent an early form of the feud,[611] the imperialist Ghibellines being originally the more aristocratic faction; while the papalist Guelphs, by the admission of Machiavelli, were the more friendly to the popular liberties, that being the natural course for the Papacy to take. The imperial cause, on the other hand, was badly compromised by the tyranny of the terrible Ezzelino III, the representative of Frederick II in the Trevisan March, who ruled half-a-dozen cities in a fashion never exceeded for cruelty in the later ages of Italian tyranny.[612] Whatever democratic feeling there was must needs be on the other side.
After Florence had recast its constitution at the death of Frederick II, establishing twelve anziani or magistrates, replaced every two months, and two foreign judges--one the upper-class podesta and the other the captain of the people[613]--to prevent grounds of quarrel, matters were in fair train, and the city approved its unity by the sinister steps of forcing Pistoia, Arezzo, and Siena to join its confederation, capturing Volterra, and destroying several villages, whose inhabitants were deported to Florence. But new plots on behalf of Manfred led to the expulsion of the Ghibellines, who in turn, getting the upper hand with no sense of permanence, reasoned that to make their party safe they must destroy the city; a purpose changed, as the familiar story goes, only by the protest of the Florentine Ghibelline chief, Farinata degli Uberti. They then tried, in obvious bad faith, the expedient of conciliating the people, whom they had always hitherto oppressed, by giving them a quasi-democratic constitution, in which the skilled workers were recognised as bodies, to which all citizens had to belong.[614] But this scheme being accompanied by fresh taxation, the Ghibellines were driven out by force; and once more the Guelphs, now backed by Charles of Anjou (1266), organised a government of twelve magistrates, adding a council of twenty-four upper-class citizens, called the credenza, and yet another body of 180 popular deputies, thirty for each of the six quarters of the city, making up with the others a Council General. To this, however, was strangely added yet another council of 120, charged with executive functions. The purpose was to identify the Guelph cause with that of the people--that is, the lower bourgeoisie and skilled artisans; and the property of the exiled Ghibellines was confiscated and divided among the public treasury, the heads of the ruling party, and the Guelphs in general. At this stage the effort of Gregory X, at his election, to effect a restoration of the Ghibellines and a general reconciliation, naturally failed. Yet when his successor, Nicolas III, persisted in the anti-French policy, he was able through his northern legate to persuade the city, suffering from the lawlessness of the Guelph as of old from that of the Ghibelline nobles, to recall the latter and set up a new constitution of fourteen governors, seven of each party, all nominated by the Pope--a system which lasted ten years. Then came another French interregnum; whereafter, on the fall of the French rule in Sicily in 1282, there was set up yet another constitution of compromise. For the council of fourteen was set up one of three priori delle arti, heads of the crafts--a number immediately raised to six, so as to give one prior to each ward of the city, with a change in the title to signoria. These were to be elected every two months. The system, aristocratic in respect of its small governing body, yet by its elective method lent itself peculiarly to the new bourgeois tendencies; and thenceforward, says Machiavelli, we find the parties of Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence supplanted by the simpler enmity of rich and poor. Soon many of the nobles, albeit Guelph, were driven out of the city, or declared disqualified for priorship on the score of their past disorders; and outside they set up new feuds.
While Florence thus held out, other cities sought safety in one-man-power, choosing some noble as "captain of the people" and setting him above the magistrates. Thus Pagano della Torre, a Guelph, became war-lord of Milan, and his brothers succeeded him, till the office came to be looked on as hereditary, and other cities inclined to choose the same head. And so astutely egotistic was the action of all the forces concerned, that when the Guelph house of Della Torre thus became unmanageably powerful, the Papacy did not scruple to appoint to the archbishopric of Milan an exiled Ghibelline, Visconti. "Henceforward," says Sismondi, "the rivalry between the families of Della Torre and Visconti made that between the people and the nobles almost forgotten." The Visconti finally defeated the other faction, made Milan Ghibelline, and became its virtual rulers.
On the other hand, the entrance of a French army under Charles of Anjou, called in by a French pope to conquer the Ghibelline realm of the Two Sicilies (1266), put a due share of wrong to the account of the Guelphs, the French power standing for something very like barbarism. Its first achievement was to exterminate the Saracen name and religion in Sicily. On its heels came a new irruption from Germany, in the person of Conradin, the claimant of the imperial succession, to whom joined themselves Pisa and Siena, in opposition to their big neighbour and enemy Florence, and the people of Rome itself, at quarrel with their Pope, who had left the city for Viterbo. By Conradin's defeat the French power became paramount; and then it was that the next pope, Gregory X, sought to restore the Ghibellines as counterpoise: a policy pursued by his successor, to the end, however, of substituting (1278) papal for imperial claims over Italy. Even Florence at his wish recalled her Ghibellines. But then came the forced election of another French pope, who acted wholly in the French interest, and re-exiled everywhere the Ghibellines: a process speedily followed in turn by the "Sicilian Vespers," involving the massacre and expulsion of the French, and introducing a Spanish king as representative of the imperial line. Again the Papacy encouraged the other power, relieving Charles II, as King of Naples, from his treaty oath, and set him upon making a war with Sicily, which dragged for twenty-four years. Such were the main political features of the Italy of Dante. The Papacy, becoming a prize of the leading Roman families, played a varying game as between the two monarchies of the south and their partisans in the north; and the minor cities, like the greater, underwent chronic revolutions. Still, so abundant was the Italian outflow of intellectual and inventive energy, so substantial was the general freedom of the cities, and so soundly was the average regimen founded on energetic agriculture and commerce, that wealth abounded on all hands.
With the new French invasion (1302) under Charles of Valois, called in by Boniface VIII to aid him against Sicily, a partially new stage begins. Charles was received at Florence as the typical Guelph; but, being counselled by the pope to pacify Tuscany to his own advantage, allied himself with the ultra-Guelphs, the Neri, gave up to plunder, the proceeds of which he pocketed, the houses of the other or pro-Ghibelline faction, the Bianchi, and enforced the execution or exile of its leading men, including Dante. Then came the election of a strictly French pope and his establishment at Avignon. A new lease being now given to faction, the cities rapidly lapsed into the over-lord system as the only means of preserving order; and when in 1316 a new emperor, Henry VII, presented himself for homage and claimed to place an imperial vicar in each city, most were well disposed to agree. When however Henry, like Charles, showed himself mainly bent on plunder, demanding 100,000 florins from Milan and 60,000 from Genoa, he destroyed his prestige. He had insisted on the recall of all exiles of either party; but all united against his demands, save the Pisans, who had sent him 60,000 florins in advance. His sudden death, on his way to fight the forces of Naples, left everything in a new suspense, save that Pisa, already shorn of maritime power, was soon eclipsed, after setting up a military tyranny as a last resort.
The regime of the local tyrant now rapidly developed. On the fall of the Pisan tyrant rose that of Lucca, Castruccio Castracani, the great type, after Ezzelino, of the Italian despot-adventurer of the Renaissance. Such a leader was too dangerous an antagonist to such a corporation as that of Florence--once more (1323) reconstructed on an upper-class basis, with a scrutinised franchise, election by ballot, and a more complicated system of offices than ever.[615] To command them against Castruccio, they called in the Catalonian general Cardona, who utterly failed them. He took the course of so handling and placing his troops as to force those citizens in the army who could afford it to buy leave of absence, and was finally defeated with his wilfully weakened army. Florence was driven to call in the King of Naples, at the price of conferring the signoria on his son. Meanwhile the new emperor Ludwig, called in by Castruccio, plundered the Milanese and imprisoned their lords, the Visconti, who had been of his own party; extorted 150,000 florins from the Pisans; tortured, to extort treasure, a Ghibelline who had given up to him a fortress in the papal State; and generally showed the Italians, before he withdrew, that a German tyrant could beat even a native at once in treachery, cruelty, and avarice. Castruccio and the son of the King of Naples, who had proved a bad bargain, died about the same time as did the reigning Visconti at Milan, the reigning tyrant at Mantua, and Can' Grande of Verona, the successor of Ezzelino, who had conquered Padua. Again the encouraged middle class of Florence recast their constitution (1328), annulling the old councils and electing two new: a Council of the "People," composed of 300 middle-class citizens, and a Council of the Commune, composed of 250 of both orders. Elsewhere the balance inclined to anarchy and despotism, as of old. A new emperor, John of Bohemia, offered (1330) a new chance of pacification, eagerly welcomed, to a harassed people, in large part shaken by military dangers in its devotion to republicanism, and weary of local tyrannies. But against the new imperialism Florence stoutly held out, with the aid of Lombard Ghibellines; the new emperor, leaving Italy, sold his influence everywhere to local tyrants, and once more everything was in suspense.
At length, in 1336, there occurred the new phenomenon of a combination between Florence and Venice against a new tyrant of Padua and Lucca, who had betrayed Florence; but the Venetians in turn did the same thing, leaving the Florentines half a million of florins in debt; whereupon they were attacked by their old enemies the Pisans, who heavily defeated them and captured Lucca, for which Florence had been fighting. It was in this stage of demoralisation that the Florentines (1342) suddenly forced their signoria to give the war-lordship to the French Gaultier de Brienne, "Duke of Athens," formerly the right-hand man of the son of the King of Naples, who had now been sent to them as a new commander by that king, on the request of the Commission of Twenty charged with the war. The commission elected him to the sole command in order to save themselves[616] and pacify the people; and his natural associates, the old nobility, counselled him to seize the government, which he gradually did, beheading and exiling the discredited middle-class leaders, and so winning the support of the populace, who, on his putting himself for open election to the signoria for one year, acclaimed him to the function for life. To this pass had come the see-saw of middle class (popolo) and upper class, with a populace held in pupilage.
Sismondi, in his Short History, pp. 147, 148, seems to represent the episode as wholly one of wanton popular caprice and venality, even representing that Duke Gaultier was only by chance in the city. The narrative of Machiavelli explicitly sets forth how he came through the appeal of the Commission of Twenty; how the nobility and some of the bourgeoisie conspired with him; and how the populace were worked upon by the conspirators. The public acclamation, bad as it was, had been carefully subsidised. The middle class, whose war policy, however, had brought the city into such danger, were far more guilty than the mostly unenfranchised populace. Sismondi had latterly an undue faith in the principle of middle-class rule. (Cp. Mr. Boulting's Memoir in his recast of the Republiques, p. xxiv.) In his Histoire des republiques italiennes (v, 329-53) he sets forth the financial corruption of the middle-class rulers (p. 330), and recognises that they and the aristocrats were alike dangerous to liberty. Cp. as to his change of front, F. Morin, Origines de la democratie, 3e edit. 1865, introd. pp. 17-18.
Within a year, partly on the sudden pressure of a scarcity, the tyrant was overthrown, after having wrung from Florence 400,000 florins and infuriated all classes against him and his race. Not the least of his offences was his conclusion of a peace with Pisa, by which she for a given period was to rule over Lucca. The rising against him was universal. Three of his henchmen were literally torn to pieces with hands and teeth: a madness of fury which was only too profoundly in keeping with the self-abandonment that had placed the tyrant in power. The political organism was beginning to disintegrate. A new constitution was set up, with a leaning to aristocracy, which was soon upset by the middle class, who in turn established yet another. The nobles, believing the populace to be hostile to the bourgeoisie, attempted anew a revolution, and were utterly crushed. And now began, according to the greatest of the publicists of the Renaissance, the final enfeeblement of Florence, in that the ruin of the nobility, whose one merit had been their fighting power, led to the abandonment of all military exercise.[617] Yet Florence a generation later made vigorous war under a "committee," and in the meantime at least the city tasted domestic peace and grew in civilisation. And though we doubtless exaggerate when we conceive of a transition from what we are apt to figure as the fierce and laughterless Florence of Dante to the gay Florence of the Medici, it is hard to hold that life was worsened when men changed the ways which made them collectively capable of rending with their teeth the carcases of those they hated, and which left the Viscontis of Milan capable of torturing their political prisoners to death through forty days.
Still the process of disintegration and reintegration proceeded. The tyrants of the smaller cities usually established themselves by the aid of professional mercenaries, German and other, whom, when their funds failed, they turned loose to shift for themselves, having in the meantime disarmed the citizens. These companies, swelled by others disbanded after the English wars in France, ravaged and plundered Italy from Montferrat to Naples, and were everywhere bought off save by Florence. Only the Pope and the greater tyrants could keep them regularly in pay; and by their means the Viscontis became lords of sixteen cities of Lombardy, while the Papacy began to build up a military power. Naples, on the other hand, continuously degenerated; while Genoa and Venice exhausted each other in deadly strife for the commercial monopoly of the East; and Pisa leaned to the Viscontis, who ultimately obtained its headship.
Rome, popeless, and domineered over by warring nobles, had its brief vision of a republic under the dreamer Cola di Rienzi, who at last fell by the hand of the masses whom he had for a brief space hypnotised. Neither he nor they were meet for the destiny they fain would have fulfilled; and had people and leader alike been worthier, they would ultimately have failed to master the forces joined against them. Rienzi's brief, and on some sides remarkably vigorous, administration in 1346-47 was not wholly unworthy of his ideal of "the good estate"; he seems, indeed, to have ruled the Roman territory with an efficiency that recalled the ancient State; and his early successes against the nobles tell of unexpected weakness on their side and energy on that of the people. His dream of an Italian federation, too, remains to prove that he was no mere mob-leader. But had he been as stable in purpose and policy as he was heady and capricious, and had the Roman populace been as steadfast as it was turbulent, the forces of division represented by the nobles and the Papacy would ultimately have overthrown any republican polity. What Florence could not compass, Rome could not maintain. Two centuries before, Arnold of Brescia had fallen, after fifteen years of popularity, as soon as pope and emperor joined hands against him; and the papalism of Rienzi was as fatal to him as anti-papalism had been to Arnold. Had Rienzi had his way, the Pope would have at once returned to Rome; and where the Papacy was, no republic could endure, however strong and sober were its head. And Rienzi was not sober. After his overthrow in 1347 and his seven years of wandering exile, he was restored solely by the choice and as the agent of the Pope at Avignon; and his death in a tumult after four months of renewed office was the end of his cause.
In Florence the disintegration went on apace. A new emperor, Charles IV, charged the city 100,000 florins (1355) for her immunities, leaving all men hopeless as ever of the Empire as a political solution; and when the crimes of the Viscontis drove cities and Papacy to call Charles in against them (1368), he did but use the opportunity to levy blackmail wherever he went. Later (1375), the Papacy combined with Florence against the reigning Visconti, but only to betray its ally. And now occurred what for a time must have seemed a vital revolution in Italian affairs; the infuriated Florentines suddenly allying themselves with Visconti, the enemy of the day before, against the treacherous Pope, and framing a league with Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Church that Florence had so long sustained. Eighty towns in ten days drove out their legates; and furious reprisals broke out on all hands, till the very Pope at Avignon was fain to come to stay the universal warfare. Now, however, an aristocratic and papalist party in Florence bitterly opposed "The Eight" who managed the war, the aristocracy having gravitated to the papal side; and at length exhaustion and the absolute instability of all alliances brought about a peace in which most of the cities, freed from the Papacy--now become an affair of two mutually anathematising heads--fell once more under local tyrants. In the hour of extreme need the Papacy was, if possible, a worse influence than the emperor; nowhere was to be found a force of stability save in the tyrannies, which were merely unstable with a difference.
Florence, still republican and still obstinately prosperous, stood as a strange anomaly in the general transformation. But she had now reached the stage when the long-ignored populace--the multitude beneath the popolo--made up of handworkers with no nominal incorporation or franchise, was able to press its claims as against the other orders, which in turn were divided, as of old, by the jealousies between the major and minor middle-class guilds and between the new nobility of capital and their former equals. Refused the status of incorporation, the ciompi ("chums" or "mates," from the French compere) made their insurrection in turn, finding for the nonce in a wool-carder a leader of the best quality the time could show, who carried his point, was chosen head magistrate, enforced order among his own partisans, and established a new magistracy, with three representatives of the major arts, three of the minor (1378).
Among other things, the ciompi demanded that interest should no longer be paid on the public debt; that the principal be paid off in twelve years, and that no "small people" should be sued for debts under fifty florins for the next two years (see Trollope, ii, 216). The trouble was that the brains in the movement, good as they were, could not permanently control the spirit of riot. Sismondi, after arguing (Short History, p. 182) in the Whig manner that "those who have not learnt to think, those to whom manual labour leaves no time for meditation, ought not to undertake the guidance of their fellow-citizens," amusingly proceeds (p. 185) to point to the capacity of Lando as showing "how much a free government spreads sound sense and elevated sentiments among even the lowest classes of society." Immediately afterwards he has to record how the upper classes fell into fresh disorders.
But where the educated burgesses and nobles had failed in the science of self-government, the mass of untrained toilers[618] could not succeed. Suborned doubtless by the other classes, they rebelled against the man whom they had made leader, and were by him promptly and capably suppressed, many being exiled; whereupon in due course he was himself deprived of his post by the old parties, and the new order was annulled (1382). After fresh strifes and proscriptions among the aristocracy themselves, all traces of the popular rising were effaced, and the aristocracy of wealth was definitely re-established.
What had happened was the attainment of the capitalistic stage and the enthronement of capital in the republican State. In place of strifes between wealth and nobility there had arisen the strife of capital and labour, the new aristocracy of wealth having in large part taken the place of that of descent. The latter transition had occurred nearly simultaneously in the other remaining Republics. Genoa had substituted factions with the names of new wealthy families for the old. In Siena, where the bourgeoisie dispossessed the nobles, they were in turn assailed by "reformers" of the lower class, who were finally defeated in battle and exiled wholesale (1385). Meantime the hereditary tyrants of Milan, the Visconti, with their singular continuity of capacity, had grown stronger than ever, had built up a native and scientific military system, and more than ever menaced all their neighbours. Florence called in aid successively from Germany and France (1390-91); but the Milanese army triumphed over all; and the skilled adventurer Sir John Hawkwood, the hired general of the Florentine troops, could not hold his ground. The Emperor, as usual, was satisfied to take payment for non-intervention; and the reigning Visconti, Gian Galeazza, invested by the Emperor with the titles of Duke of Mantua and Count of Pavia, and the lordship of twenty-six cities, had by the year 1402 further compassed, by all manner of fraud and force, the mastery of Pisa, Perugia, Genoa, Siena, Lucca, and Bologna, dying of the plague at the height of his power. His sons being boys, his power broke up among his generals, to be in large part recovered later, however, by his second son, who first assassinated the elder.
At this stage Venice once more intervenes, taking up the cause of Verona against the tyrant of Padua, whom, having defeated him by her carefully-chosen and supervised mercenaries, she put to death (1406). He had been the ally of Florence; but Florence let him fall, being now wholly bent on reconquering Pisa, her natural seaport. Pisa, in turn, always invincibly opposed to Florentine rule, was on commercial grounds backed by Genoa, now under the nominal rule of a representative of the King of France, who, however, sought to sell Pisa to the Florentines, and did receive from them 200,000 florins. Still resisting, the Pisans recalled an exile to lead them; and he in turn sold them for 50,000 florins, this time to their complete undoing. Refusing all Florentine favours, the bulk of the ruling middle-class abandoned the city for ever, taking much of its special commerce with them. Meantime, the kingdom of Naples, under an energetic king, Ladislaus, had acquired most of the States of the distracted Church, menaced Florence, and was pressing her hard, despite French support, when Ladislaus died (1414). By this time the new Visconti was establishing himself at Milan by means of mercenaries, commanded for him by well-chosen captains. Six times were the Florentines defeated by his forces; till his capable general, Carmagnola, whom he had disgraced, revealed to the Council of Venice his master's intention to attack them; and Venice joined Florence to crush the tyrant. Carmagnola, acting slackly, met ill success, and was therefore executed by his Venetian masters. But the Visconti too finally died defeated, leaving his power to a new adventurer, Francesco Sforza, who had married his daughter, and had fought both for and against him in the endless imbroglio of Italian conspiracy.
Florentine republicanism was now near its euthanasia. By the fatal law of empire, the perpetual enterprise of destroying other men's freedom left Florence unfit to use or to defend her own; and the tyrants of Pisa became meet for the yoke of tyranny. The family of Medici, growing rapidly rich, began to use the power of capital as elsewhere less astute adventurers used the power of the sword. From the overthrow of the ciompi party in 1382 to 1434, the Republic had been ruled by a faction of the new commercial aristocracy with substantial unity; and the period is claimed as the most prosperous, intellectually and materially, though not the most progressive, in Florentine history.
See above, p. 226-27. Perrens (Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, pp. 171-72, 202) thinks otherwise, but does not blame the oligarchy. Sismondi, in his larger and earlier work (Republiques, ed. 1826, xi, 2), represents that Florence ceased to be great under the Medici; cp. however, xii, 52, and the different note in the reactionary Short History (p. 224), where he deems that in this period were born and formed "all those great men" whose glory is credited to the Medici. This holds good of Brunelleschi the architect, Masallio the artist, and Ghiberti the sculptor, as well as of Poggio and other scholars. Cp. Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309, and the list given by Perrens, Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, p. 456. M. Perrens pronounces that under Lorenzo "the decadence of sculpture is visible, and still more that of architecture," both being too rapidly produced from motives of gain (La civilisation florentine du 13e siecle au 16e, 1893, p. 190). Here he follows Romohr (see Histoire de Florence, last cited). Lorenzo, he notes, had the reactionary belief, odd on the part of a merchant, that only nobles could produce perfect work, they only having the necessary leisure. He accordingly ignored all plebeian genius, such as that of Leonardo da Vinci.
Cosimo de' Medici, descendant of a democrat, was grown too rich to be one in his turn; and between him and the Albizzi, who led the ruling faction, there grew up one of the old and typical jealousies of power-seekers. Exiled by a packed balia, Cosimo's wealth enabled him to turn the tables in a year and exile his exilers, taking their place and silently absorbing their power. "The moment was come when the credit of the Medici was to prevail over the legal power of the Florentine signoria." Thus when the Visconti died, Cosimo and the doge of Venice combined their forces to prevent the recovery of the republican independence of Milan, whose middle class, divided by their own jealousies, speedily succumbed to the fraud and force of Sforza, the Visconti's heir.
For thirty years Cosimo maintained at Florence, by the power of capital, prosperity and peace under the semblance of the old constitution, the richer of the ever-renewed capitalist class accepting his primacy, while the populace, being more equitably governed than of yore under the old nobility, and being steadily prosperous, saw no ground for revolt. Capital as "tyrant" had in fact done what the tyrants of early Greece and Rome are presumed to have often done--favoured the people as against the aristocracy; Cosimo's liberality giving employment and pay at the same time to the artisans and to the scholars. Under Cosimo and his political colleagues, doubtless, the subject cities were corruptly governed; but Florence seems to have been discreetly handled. Attempts to break the capitalistic domination came to nothing, save the exile or at a pinch the death of the malcontents.
[Under all of the Medici, it appears, "the fiscal legislation adhered to the principle of burdening the old nobility of the city" (Von Reumont, Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. tr. i, 33). They however built up a fresh public debt, and their finance had very crooked aspects, especially under Lorenzo, who lacked the mercantile faculty of his grandfather (id. pp. 31-33. Cp. Perrens, Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, pp. 55-60, 288, 408-13, 416-17). Lorenzo was even accused of appropriating the dowries of orphan girls; and it seems clear that he defrauded the monte delle doti, or dowry bank.
As regards fiscal policy, it may be interesting to note that in Florence taxes had been imposed alternately on capital or income from the thirteenth century onwards, both being taken at the lowest values, and rated at from one-half to three per cent. according to the estimo (Esquiron de Parieu, Traite des impots, 2e edit. 1866, i, 417). These taxes in turn were probably suggested by the practice of ancient Athens, where extraordinary revenue for war purposes was obtained "partly from voluntary contributions, partly from a graduated income or property tax." In 1266 a fresh income-tax of ten per cent. on an already heavily taxed city incited the decisive rising against the rule of the Ghibelline Count Guido. The earlier historians of Florence, like most others, pay little attention to the history of taxation; but details emerge for the later period.
In 1427 Giovanni de' Medici imposed on Florence a tax called the catasto--apparently not, like earlier taxes of the same name, based on a survey of land, but on disposable or movable capital--and also one of 1/2 per cent. on income over what was necessary to support life. Further, he levied a super-tax, which was paid by 1,400 citizens out of the 10,000 who came under the catasto. At a pinch, the catasto was levied several times in the year. Yet further, a regularly graduated income-tax was imposed by Cosimo de' Medici, in 1441, and raised in 1443; but, in this case, the salutary principle of sparing the amount of income necessary to sustain life seems to have been departed from, since incomes of from one to fifty florins paid 4 per cent., the rate gradually rising thereafter to 33-1/3 per cent. for incomes over 1,500 florins. By reason of bad finance, further, taxes had now to be levied even ten and fifteen times a year. Cp. Perrens, as last cited. It is yet further noteworthy that, from 1431 to 1458, traders were required to show their books to the revenue officers for the purpose of fair assessment. The abandonment of this provision seems to have been partly due to the evasions practised by the traders, partly to the irritation and the abuses set up by it.]
At Cosimo's death there was dynastic strife of capital, as elsewhere of blood; but the blundering financier Pitti went to the wall, and the invalid Piero de' Medici kept his father's power. At his death the group of his henchmen kept their hold on it; and in time his son Lorenzo ousted them and engrossed all, escaping the plot which was fatal to his brother. The failure of that and other plots, in Florence and elsewhere, sufficed to prove that the artisans, well employed and protected by the laws, had no concern to upset the orderly and business-like "tyranny" either of one great capitalist or of a prince, in the interest of an oligarchy which would rule no better, which gave them no more of political privilege than did he, and which was less ready than he with public gifts. Thus he had little difficulty in cutting down every institution that restricted his power, whether popular or oligarchic.[619] Italian republicanism had always been a matter of either upper-class or middle-class rule; and when the old upper class of feudal descent was superseded by one of commercial descent, the populace had nothing to gain by supporting the bourgeoisie. A capitalistic "lord," most of whose wealth was in its nature unseizable, was thus a more stable power than any mere swordsman among swordsmen; and Lorenzo de' Medici not only crushed all the conspiracies against him, but held his own against the dangerous alliance of the republican Pope Sixtus IV and the King of Naples--the menace of Turkish invasion helping him. When, early in his reign, he joined in and carried through the plot for the confiscation of Volterra, chiefly in order to secure a hold on its rich alum mines, his popularity at Florence was in the ratio of the baseness of his triumph. As always, imperialism and corruption went hand in hand, and the Florentines ensured their own servitude by their eagerness to compass the fall of others.[620]
After Lorenzo's death (1492) only the incompetence of his son Piero at the hazardous juncture of the new French invasion under Charles VIII could upset the now hereditary power of the house; but such incompetence at such a crisis was sufficient, Savonarola having now set up a new democratic force, partly analogous to that of Puritanism in the England of a later age. The new party, however, brought no new political science.[621] Republican Florence in its interim of self-government proceeded as of old to make war on indomitable Pisa, with which it could never consent to live on terms of equality. Time after time, vanquished by force and treachery, the Pisans had again cast loose, fighting for independence as fiercely as did their fathers of a previous generation. Savonarola, who had no better light for this problem than was given to the other Florentines of his age, "staked the truth of his inspiration on the recovery of Pisa"; he had not a grain of sympathy for the Pisans, and punished those who had;[622] and though his party had the wisdom to proclaim a general amnesty for Florence (1495), the war against Pisa went on, with the French king insensately admitted as a Florentine ally. Savonarola in his turn fell, on his plain failure to evoke the miraculous aid on the wild promise of which he had so desperately traded; his party of pietists went to pieces; and the upper-class party which succeeded carried on the war, destroying the Pisan harvests every year, till, under the one-man command of Loderini, Florence triumphed (1507), and the staunch sea-city fell once more. Even now the conquering city consented to pay great bribes to the kings of France and Aragon for leave to take her prey. And once more multitudes of Pisans emigrated, refusing to live in subjection, despite all attempts at conciliation.[623]
Slowly the monarchic powers closed in; France, after several campaigns, decisively defeated and captured Lodovico Sforza, lord of Milan, and proceeded by a secret treaty with Spain to partition the kingdom of Naples--a rascals' bargain, which ended in a quarrel and in the destruction of two French armies; Spain remaining master of Naples and the Sicilies, while France held the Milanese and Liguria, including Genoa. For a few years Cesare Borgia flared across the Italian sky, only to fall with his great purposes unfulfilled; and still the foreign powers encroached. France, with Swiss support, proceeded in turn to make war on Venice; and the emperor, the pope, Spain, and the smaller neighbouring despots, joined in the attack. Against these dastardly odds the invincible oligarchy of Venice held out, till Pope Julius, finding his barbarian friends worse than his Italian enemies, changed sides, joined the republic, and after many reverses got together an anti-French league of English, Swiss, and Spanish. Finally the emperor betrayed his French allies, who were once more driven out of Italy, leaving their ally, Florence, to fall into the hands of the Spaniards (1512).
Now came the restoration of the family of Medici, soon followed by the elevation of Giovanni de' Medici to the Papacy as Leo X; whence came yet more wars, enough to paralyse Italy financially had there been no other impoverishing cause. But Leo X, now the chief Italian power, misgoverned in secular affairs as badly as in ecclesiastical; and the wars, so barbarous in themselves, were waged upon dwindling resources. Venice, pressed afresh by Maximilian, made alliance with Louis, who was defeated by the Swiss, as defenders and "lords" of Milan; whereupon the Spanish, papal, and German forces successively ravaged the Venetian territories. Francis I zealously renewed the war, grappled with the Swiss in the desperate battle of Marignano in such sort as to get them to come to terms, and compassed the sovereignty of Milan. On the succession of Charles V to the throne of Spain and the Empire (1519), war between him and Francis set in systematically, and continued under Adrian and Clement VII as under Leo, both combatants feeding on and plundering Italy. The defeat of Francis at Pavia (1525) brought no cessation to the drain; a new league was formed between France, the Papacy, Venice, and Sforza; and soon, besides the regular armies, a guerilla horde of Germans on the imperial side, receiving no pay, was living by the plunder of Lombardy. At length, in 1527, came the sack of Rome by the imperial forces, Germans and Spanish combining for nine miserable months to outdo the brutalities and the horrors of all previous conquests, Christian or heathen. Two years' more fighting "only added to the desolation of Italy, and destroyed alike in all the Italian provinces the last remains of prosperity."[624] When a fresh German army entered Lombardy, in 1529, there was "nothing more to pillage."[625]
The curtain now falls rapidly on every form of "independence" in Italy. Pope Clement VII, freed of his barbarian conquerors, sent them against Florence, which fell in a fashion not unworthy of its great republican tradition, after tasting three final years of its ancient and thrice-forfeited "freedom." With the dying Machiavelli to frame the ordinances of her revived military system, and Michel Angelo to construct her last fortifications, she had in her final effort bound up with her name as a republic two of the greatest Italian names of the age of the Renaissance. Then came the vengeance of the Medicean Pope, Clement VII, the ducal tyranny, and the end of a great period.
The prolonged life of the maritime and commercial-aristocratic republics of Genoa and Venice, interesting as a proof of the defensive powers of communities so placed and so ordered, was no prolongation of Italian civilisation, save in so far as a brilliant art survived at Venice till the close of the sixteenth century. It is sufficient to note that what of artistic and intellectual life Venice and Genoa had was dependent first on Venetian contact with Byzantium, and later on the fecundity of freer Italy. The mere longer duration of Venice was due as much to her unique situation as to her system. On the other hand, it seems substantially true that the Venetian oligarchy did rule its subjects, both at home and on the mainland, with greater wisdom and fairness than was shown by any other Italian power. When Castruccio Castracani drove nine hundred families out of Lucca in 1310, thus destroying some of its chief manufactures, Venice gave the silk-weavers among them a politic encouragement, and so widened her commercial basis.[626] Her rulers, in short, had the common sense of men of business, who knew the value of goodwill. There is thus an unwarrantable extravagance in the verdict of the young Macaulay, that in Venice "aristocracy had destroyed every seed of genius and virtue";[627] and in his outburst: "God forbid that there should ever again exist a powerful and civilised State which, after existing through thirteen hundred eventful years, shall not bequeath to mankind the memory of one great name or one generous action." Such actions are not rife in any history, and in mere civic selfishness of purpose the rulers of Venice were on a par with most others.[628] As citizens, or as a caste, they seem to have been not more but less self-seeking as against the rest of the community, despite their determined exclusiveness, than the same class in other States.[629] Their history does but prove that an astute oligarchy, protectively governing a commercial and industrial State, is not helpful to civilisation in the ratio of its power and stability, and that the higher political wisdom is not the appanage of any class.
When all is said, the whole Italian civilisation of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance represents a clear political gain over that of ancient Hellas in that it had transcended slavery, while failing to attain or to aim at the equality and fraternity which alone realise liberty. Despite, too, all the scandals of the Renaissance in general, and of papal Rome in particular, the life of such a city as Florence was morally quite on a par with that of any northern city.[630] But the later States and civilisations which, while so much more fortunate in their political conditions, are still so far from the moral liberation of their labouring masses--these are not entitled to plume themselves on their comparative success. "The petty done" is still dwarfed by "the undone vast."
What they and we may truly claim is that in the modern State, freed from the primal curse of fratricidal strife between cities and provinces, the totality of "good life," no less than of industrial and commercial life, is far greater than of old, even if signal genius be less common. To contrast the Genoa of to-day with the old City-State is to realise how peace can liberate human effort. The city of Petrarch, Columbus, and Mazzini has no recent citizen of European fame; but since a wealthy son bequeathed to her his huge fortune (1875), she has become the chief port of Italy, passing some forty per cent. of the total trade of the country. The fact that half her imports, in weight, consist of coal, tells of the main economic disadvantage of modern Italy as compared with the chief northern countries; but the modern development of industry is all the more notable. Under a system of general free trade, it might go much further.
The fact remains that modern Italy is no such intellectual beacon-light among the nations as she was in the "old, unhappy, far-off times"; and upon this the historical sentimentalist is prone to moralise. But there is no perceptible reason why the new life, well managed, should not yield new intellectual glories; and the latterday intellectual Renaissance of Italy may one day take its place in the historic retrospect as no less notable than that of the days of strife.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 598: Burckhardt (as cited, p. 94) agrees with Ranke that, if Italy had escaped subjugation by the Spaniards, she would have fallen into the hands of the Turks.]
[Footnote 599: Burckhardt, p. 82. Freeman, from whom one looks for details (History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy, ed. 1893, pp. 558, 615), gives none.]
[Footnote 600: Purgatorio, canto vi, 91-93.]
[Footnote 601: Machiavelli, however, had special schemes of constitutional compromise (see Burckhardt, p. 85, and Roscoe, Life of Leo X, ed. 1846, ii, 204, 205); and there were many framers of paper constitutions for Florence (Burckhardt, p. 83).]
[Footnote 602: See Gibbon, ch. 70. Bohn ed. vii, 398, 404.]
[Footnote 603: Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 6, 7.]
[Footnote 604: Lea, Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 2nd ed. pp. 145-47, 212-20, 224-36, 242-43.]
[Footnote 605: Sismondi, Short History, p. 20.]
[Footnote 606: Trollope notes (History of the Commonwealth of Florence, i, 31) how Dante and Villani caught at the theory of an intermixture of alien blood as an explanation of the strifes which in Florence, as elsewhere, grew out of the primordial and universal passions of men in an expanding society. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 73) endorses the old theory without asking how civil strifes came about in the cities of early Greece and in those of the Netherlands.]
[Footnote 607: Which, however, was probably already being weakened by the silting up of the Pisan harbour. This seems to have begun through the action of the Genoese in blocking it with huge masses of stone in 1290. Bent, Genoa, pp. 86-87. Sismondi notes that, after the great defeat of 1284, "all the fishermen of the coast quitted the Pisan galleys for those of Genoa." Short History, p. 111. As to the Pisan harbour, whose very site is now uncertain, see Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 258, note.]
[Footnote 608: After destroying Ugolino, the Pisans chose as leader Guido de Montefeltro, who made their militia a formidable power.]
[Footnote 609: Pignotti, as cited, iii, 283-84.]
[Footnote 610: Heeren, as cited, pp. 69, 120, etc.]
[Footnote 611: Cp. Trollope, History of Florence, i, 105; Villari, Two First Centuries, pp. 95, 100.]
[Footnote 612: Cp. Sismondi, Short History, pp. 88-90.]
[Footnote 613: Podesta, as we have seen, was an old imperialist title. In Florence it became communal, and in 1200 it was first held by a foreigner, chosen, it would seem, as likely to be more impartial than a native. Cp., however, the comments of Villari, First Two Centuries, p. 157, and Trollope, i, 84, 94; and the mention by Plutarch, De amore prolis, Sec. 1, as to the same development among the Greeks. In the memoirs of Fra Salimbene (1221-90) there is mention that in 1233 the Parmesans "made a friar their podesta, who put an end to all feuds" (trans. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in The Duke and the Scholar, 1875, p. 90). The Florentine institution of the priori delle arti, mentioned below, is traced back as far as 1204 (Cantu, as cited, viii, 465, note). The anziani, during their term of office, slept at the public palace, and could not go out save together.]
[Footnote 614: Thus Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici belonged to the craft of apothecaries.]
[Footnote 615: See Trollope, ii, 179, as to the endless Florentine devices to check special power and to vary the balance of the constitution.]
[Footnote 616: Two years before a feebler attempt had been made to set up a military tool, named Gabrielli.]
[Footnote 617: Machiavelli, Istorie, end of 1. ii and beginning of 1. iii.]
[Footnote 618: According to Giovanni Villani, in the fourteenth century there were schools only for 8,000 children, and only 1,200 were taught arithmetic.]
[Footnote 619: Details in Perrens' Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. viii, pp. 268, 284-88, 291, 307, 310.]
[Footnote 620: Cp. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 276-80.]
[Footnote 621: M. Perrens indeed pronounces the two Councils set up by Savonarola's party to be much superior to the former bodies (La civilisation florentine, p. 61); but he admits that "at bottom and from the start the system was vitiated by the theocracy which presided over it."]
[Footnote 622: Cp. Armstrong, in Cambridge Modern History, 1902, i, 171.]
[Footnote 623: The constancy of Pisa in resisting the yoke of Florence, and the repeated self-expatriation of masses of the inhabitants, is hardly intelligible in view of the submission of so many other cities to worse tyrannies. It would seem that the sting lay in the idea that the rule of the rival city was more galling to pride than any one-man tyranny, foreign or other.]
[Footnote 624: Sismondi, Republiques, xvi, 71-76, 158, 159, 170, 217; Short History, p. 336.]
[Footnote 625: As to the misery of Florence after the siege, see Napier, Florentine History, iv, 533, 534.]
[Footnote 626: Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii. citing Sandi.]
[Footnote 627: Review of Mitford, Miscellaneous Writings, ed. 1868, p. 74.]
[Footnote 628: Macaulay doubtless proceeded on the history of Daru, now known to be seriously erroneous. Compare that of W.C. Hazlitt, above cited, pref.]
[Footnote 629: Cp. Brown, in Cambridge Modern History, 1902, vol. i, The Renaissance, p. 285.]
[Footnote 630: Cp. Armstrong, in Cambridge History, i, 150-51.]
I. THE IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS
It lies on the face of the foregoing surveys that the principle which gives mass-form to all politics--to wit, the principle of nationality--makes at once for peace and war, co-operation and enmity. As against the tendency to atomism, the tribal principle supplies cohesion; as against tribalism, the principle of the State plays the same part; and as against oppression the instinct of race or nationality inspires and sustains resistance. But in every aggregate, the force of attraction tends to generate a correlative repulsion to other aggregates, and--save for the counterplay of class repulsions--the fundamental instinct of egoism takes new extensions in pride of family, pride of clan, pride of nation, pride of race. Until the successive extensions have all been rectified by the spirit of reciprocity, politics remains so far unmoralised and unrationalised.
The nullity of the conception of "race genius" has been forced on us at every meeting with it. No less clear, on a critical analysis, is the irrationality of the instinct of racial pride which underlies that conception, and which is involved in perhaps half of the strifes of tribes, States, and nations. Yet perhaps most of the reflections made by historical writers in the way of generalisations of the history of States and peoples are in terms of the fallacy and the irrationality in question. And the instinctive persistence of both reveals itself when we come to reflect on the fortunes of what we usually call the little nations--employing a term which at once sets up a whole series of partial hallucinations.
The main distinction between civilised nations being difference of language, there has spontaneously arisen the habit of identifying language with "race," and regarding a dwindling tongue as implying a dwindling people. In the British Islands, for instance, the decline in the numbers of the people speaking Celtic dialects--the Erse, the Welsh, and the Gaelic--leads many persons, including some of the speakers of those tongues, to regard the "Celtic stock" as in course of diminution; and statesmen speak quasi-scientifically of "the Celtic fringe" as representing certain political tendencies in particular. Yet as soon as we substitute the comparatively real test of name-forms for the non-test of language, we find that the Welsh and Gaelic-speaking stocks have enormously extended within the English-speaking population, so that "Welsh blood" is very much commoner in Britain than "Saxon," relatively to the proportions between the areas and populations of Wales and England, while "Highland blood" is relatively predominant in "Saxon"-speaking Scotland; and "Irish blood" is almost similarly abundant even in England, to say nothing of its immense multiplication in the United States.
Enthusiasm for one's nation as such thus begins on scrutiny to resolve itself into enthusiasm for one's speech; and as our English speech is a near variant of certain others held alien, as Dutch and Scandinavian and German, with a decisive control from French, enthusiasm for the speech-tie begins, on reflection, to assimilate to the enthusiasm of the district, the glen, the parish. Millions of us are at a given moment rapturous about the deeds of our non-ancestors, on the supposition that they were our ancestors, and in terms of a correlative aversion to the deeds of certain other ancients loosely supposed to have been the ancestors of certain of our contemporaries. Thus the ostensible entity which plays so large a part in the common run of thought about history--the nation, considered as a continuous and personalised organism--is in large measure a metaphysical dream, and the emotion spent on it partakes much of the nature of superstition.
How hard it is for anyone trained in such emotion to transcend it is seen from the form taken by the sympathy which is bestowed by considerate members of a large community on members of a small one. "Gallant little Wales" is a phrase in English currency; and a contemporary poet, who had actually written pertinently and well in prose on the spurious conception of greatness attached to membership in a large population, has also written in verse a plea for "little peoples" in terms of the assumption of an entity conscious of relative smallness. Some of these more sympathetic pictures of the lesser States obscurely recall the anecdote of the little girl who, contemplating a picture of martyrs thrown to the lions, sorrowed for the "poor lion who hadn't any Christian." The late Sir John Seeley, on the other hand, wrote in the more normal Anglo-Saxon manner that "some countries, such as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably (sic) regard their history as in a manner wound up; ... the only practical lesson of their history is a lesson of resignation."[631] The unit in a population of three millions is implicitly credited with the consciousness of a dwarf or a cripple facing a gigantic rival when he thinks of the existence of a community of thirty or sixty millions. Happily, the unit of the smaller community has no such consciousness;[632] and, inasmuch as his state is thus intellectually the more gracious, there appears to be some solid psychological basis for the paradox, lately broached by such a one, that "the future lies with the small nations." That is to say, it seems likely that a higher level of general rationality will be attained in the small than in the large populations, in virtue of their escaping one of the most childish and most fostered hallucinations current in the latter.
Certain patriots of the wilful sort are wont to flout reason in these matters, blustering of "false cosmopolitanism" and "salutary prejudice." To all such rhetoric the fitting answer is the characterisation of it as false passion. Those who indulge in it elect wilfully to enfranchise from the mass of detected and convicted animal passions one which specially chimes with their sentiment, as if every other might not be allowed loose with as good reason. Matters are truly bad enough without such perverse endorsement of vulgar ideals by those who can see their vulgarity. Ordinary observation makes us aware that the most commonplace and contracted minds are most prone to the passion of national and racial pride; whereas the men of antiquity who first seem to have transcended it are thereby marked out once for all as a higher breed. It is in fact the proof of incapacity for any large or deep view of human life to be habitually and zealously "patriotic" in the popular sense of the term. Yet, in the civilisations which to-day pass for being most advanced, the majority of the units habitually batten on that quality of feeling, millions of adults for ever living the political life of the schoolboy; and, as no polity can long transcend the ideals of the great mass, national fortunes and institutions thus far tend to be determined by the habit of the lower minds.
It is pure paralogism to point to the case of a large backward population without a national-flag idea--for instance, the Chinese[633]--as showing that want of patriotic passion goes with backwardness in culture. There is an infinity of the raw material of patriotism among precisely the most primitive of the Chinese population, whose hatred of "foreign devils" is the very warp of "imperialism." The ideal of cosmopolitanism is at the other end of the psychological scale from that of the ignorance which has gone through no political evolution whatever; its very appearance implies past patriotism as a stepping-stone; and its ethic is to that of patriotism what civil law is to club law. If "salutary prejudice" is to be the shibboleth of future civilisation, the due upshot will be the attainment of it one day by the now semi-civilised races, and the drowning out of European patriotisms by Mongolian.
If a saner lesson is to be widely learned, one way to it, if not the best way, may be an effort on the part of the units of the "great nations" to realise the significance of the fortunes of the "little nations," in terms, not of the imagined consciousness of metaphysical entities, but of actual human conditions--material, passional, and intellectual. We have seen how erudite specialists can express themselves in terms of the fallacy of racial genius. Specialists perhaps as erudite, and certainly multitudes of educated people, seem capable of thinking as positively in terms of the hallucinations of racial entity, national consciousness, political greatness, national revenue, and imperial success. Thus we have publicists speaking of Holland as an "effete nation," of Belgium as "doomed to absorption," of the Scandinavian peoples as "having failed in the race," and of Switzerland as "impotent"; even as they call Spain "dying" and Turkey "decomposing."
Nearly every one of those nations, strictly speaking, has a fairer chance of ultimate continuance without decline of wealth and power than England, whose units in general show as little eye for the laws of decline as Romans did in the days of Augustus. Spain has large potentialities of rich agricultural life; Turkey needs only new habits to develop her natural resources; the life of Belgium, indeed, is, like that of England, in part founded on exhaustible minerals; but Switzerland and Scandinavia, with their restrained populations, may continue to maintain, as they do, a rather higher average of decent life and popular culture than that of the British Islands,[634] though they, too, have at all times a social problem to deal with. British greatness, on dissection, consists in the aggregation of much greater masses of wealth and much greater masses of poverty, larger groups of idlers and larger swarms of degenerates, with much greater maritime power, than are to be seen in the little nations; certainly not in a higher average of manhood and intelligence and well-being. Sir John Seeley, in a moment of misgiving, avowed that "bigness is not necessarily greatness"; adding, "if by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold the front rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude."[635] But he had before used the term "greatness" without reserve as equivalent to "mere material magnitude"; and even in revising his doctrine, it seems, he must needs crave some sort of supremacy, some sense of the inferiority of the mass of mankind. Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations--though it had to be a poet--who saw not hardship but happiness in the thought of "leaving great verse unto a little clan." And it was a Christian bishop, looking on the break-up of a great empire, who asked, An congruat bonis latius velle regnare?--Doth it beseem the good to seek to widen their rule?--and gave the judgment that if human things had gone in the happier way of righteousness, all States had remained small, happy in peaceful neighbourhood.[636]
As for the sentiment of a national greatness that is measured by acreage and census and quantity of war material, it is hard to distinguish ethically between it and that individual pride in lands and wealth which all men save those who cherish it are agreed to pronounce odious. Even the snobs of nationality have, as a rule, a saving sense which withholds them from flaunting their pride in the eyes of their "poorer" neighbours, the members of the less numerous communities. Yet the note which is thus tacitly admitted to be vulgarly jarring for alien ears is habitually struck for domestic satisfaction; few newspapers let many days pass without sounding it; and certain poets and writers of verse appear to find their chief joy in its vibrations. The men of some of the lesser States, then, stand a fair chance of becoming ethically and aesthetically, as well as intellectually, superior in the average to those of the larger aggregates, in that their moral codes are not vitiated nor their literary taste vulgarised by national purse-pride and the vertigo of the higher dunghill; though they, too, have their snares of "patriotism," with its false ideals and its vitiation of true fraternity.
To some degree, no doubt, the habit of mind of our megalophiles connects with the vague but common surmise that a small aggregate is more liable to unscrupulous aggression than a large one. If, however, there be any justice in that surmise, there is obviously implied a known disposition in the larger aggregates to commit such aggression; so that to act or rest upon it is simply to prefer being the wronger to being the wronged. Thus to glory in being rather on the side of the bully than on the side of the bullied is only to give one more proof of the unworthiness of the instinct at work. All the while, there is no real ground for the hope; and as regards the small nations themselves, the apprehension does not appear to prevail. There has indeed been a recrudescence of the barbaric ethic of the Napoleonic period in the Bismarckian period; but there is no present sign of a serious fear of national suppression on the part of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Scandinavian States; while, apart from Bismarck's early aggression upon Denmark, and the ill-fortune of Greece in attacking Turkey, it is not small but large aggregates--to wit, Austria, France, Russia, Turkey, Spain--that have suffered any degree of military humiliation during the past half century; and it is precisely the large aggregates that avowedly live in the most constant apprehension either of being outnumbered in their armies and navies by single rivals or coalitions, or of losing their "prestige" by some failure to punish a supposed slight. It is a matter of historic fact that the "patriotic" consciousness in England had its withers wrung during a long series of years by the remembrance of such military disasters as the fall of Gordon at Khartoum, and the defeat of an incompetent general at Majuba Hill.[637] No "little nation" could exhibit a more wincing sense of humiliation and disgrace than is thus visibly felt by multitudes of a great aggregate over military repulses at the hands of extremely small and primitive groups. Politically speaking, then, the future of the small nations seems rather brighter than that of the large; and thus in the last analysis the pride of the unit of the latter is found to be still a folly.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 631: The Expansion of England, 1883, p. 1.]
[Footnote 632: This though it be true, as remarked by Sismondi (Histoire des republiques italiennes, ed. 1826, i, 100, 101), that all nations spontaneously desire to be large and powerful, in disregard of all experience.]
[Footnote 633: This, it need hardly be repeated, was written before 1900.]
[Footnote 634: Compare the remarks of Freeman, History of Federal Government, 2nd ed. p. 41.]
[Footnote 635: Expansion of England, p. 16. Compare the further vacillations in pp. 132-37, 301, 304, 306. In the concluding chapter (p. 294) comes the avowal that "we know no reason in the nature of things why a State should be any the better for being large."]
[Footnote 636: Augustine, De Civitate Dei, iv, 15.]
[Footnote 637: This was written before 1900. The disasters of the South African War confirmed the proposition.]
II. THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES
Sec. 1
When the early history of Scandinavia is studied as a process of social evolution rather than as a chronicle of feuds and of the exploits of heroes of various grades,[638] it is found to constitute a miniature norm of a simple and instructive sort. Taken as it emerges from the stage of myth, about the time of Charlemagne, it presents a vivid phase of barbarism, acted on by powerful conditions of change. The three sections of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden stand in a certain natural gradation as regards their possibilities of political development. All alike were capable only of a secondary or tertiary civilisation, being at once geographically disrupted and incapable, on primitive methods, of feeding an abundant population. In their early piratical stage, the Scandinavians are not greatly different from the pre-Homeric Greeks as these were conceived by Thucydides; but whereas the Greeks came in contact with the relatively high civilisations which had preceded them, the Scandinavians of the Dark Ages had no contacts save with the primitive life of the pre-Christian Slavs, the premature and arrested cross-civilisations of Carlovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England, and, in a fuller and more fruitful degree, with the similarly arrested semi-Christian civilisation of Celtic Ireland, which latter counted for so much in their literature.
But in barbarian conditions certain main laws of social evolution operate no less clearly than in later stages; and we see sections of the Norsemen passing from tribal anarchy to primitive monarchy, and thence to military "empire," afterwards returning to their stable economic basis, as every military empire sooner or later must. Of the Scandinavian sections, Denmark and the southern parts of Sweden (round the Maelar) are the least disrupted and most fertile; and these were respectively the most readily reducible to a single rule. In all, given to begin with the primordial bias to royalism in any of its forms,[639] the establishment of a supreme and hereditary military rule was only a question of time; every successive attempt, however undone by the forces of barbaric independence, being a lead and stimulus to others. It is important to note how the process was promoted by, and in its turn promoted, the establishment of Christianity. The incomplex phenomena in Scandinavia throw a new light on the more complex evolution of other parts of Christendom. Primitive polytheism is obviously unpropitious to monarchic rule; and in every ancient religion it can be seen to have undergone adaptations where such rule arose. In the widely varying systems of Homeric Greece, Babylonia, Egypt, and Rome, the same tendency is visibly at work in different degrees, the ascendent principle of earthly government being more or less directly duplicated in theological theory. Under the Roman Empire, all cults were in a measure bent to the imperial service, and it was only the primary exclusiveness of Christianity that put it in conflict with the State. Once the emperor accepted it, recognising its political use, and conceded its exclusive claims, it became a trebly effective political instrument,[640] centralising as it did the whole machinery of religion throughout the Empire, and co-ordinating all to the political system. To use a modern illustration, it "syndicated" the multifold irregular activities of worship, and was thus the ideal system for a centralised and imperial State.[641] This was as readily seen by Theodoric and Charlemagne as by the rulers at Constantinople; and to such a perception, broadly speaking, is to be attributed the forcing of Christianity on the northern races by their kings.
Compare the explicit admissions of Mosheim, Eccles. Hist. 8 cent., pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec. 5 and note, following on the testimony of William of Malmesbury as to Charlemagne. Other ecclesiastical historians coincide. "Numbers of the earliest and most active converts, both in Germany and England, were connected with the royal households; and in this way it would naturally occur that measures which related to the organising of the Church would emanate directly from the King.... It is indeed remarkable that so long as kings were esteemed the real patrons of the Church, she felt no wish to define exactly her relations to the civil power; the two authorities ... laboured to enforce obedience to each other" (Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, pp. 56-57). The same historian (p. 127) describes the Wends of the eleventh century as seeing in the missionary a means for their subjection to Germany, and as "constantly attempting to regain their independence and extinguish the few glimmerings of truth that had been forced into their minds."
Northern paganism, more than the semi-cosmopolitan polytheism of the south in the period of Augustus, was a local and domestic faith, lending itself to separateness and independence, as did the civic and family religions of early Greece and Rome. While there were communal assemblies with specially solemn sacrifices, the popular beliefs were such that every district could have its holy places, and every family or group its special rites;[642] and in primitive Scandinavia a priesthood could still less develop than even in primitive Germany, whose lack of any system corresponding to the Druidism of Gaul is still empirically ascribed to some anti-sacerdotal element in the "national character," whereas it is plainly a result of the nomadic life-conditions of the scattered people. In germ the Teutonic priesthood was extremely powerful, being the judiciary power from which there was no appeal.[643] But an organised priestly system can arise only on the basis of some measure of political levelling or centralisation, involving some peaceful inter-communication. Romanised Christianity, coming ready-made from its centre, permitted of no worship save that of the consecrated church, and no ministry save that of the ordained priest.[644] Only the most obstinately conservative kings or chieftains, therefore, could fail to see their immediate advantage in adopting it.[645]
Naturally the early Christian records gloss the facts. Thus it is told in the life of Anskar (Ancharius) that "the Swedes" sent messengers to the Emperor Ludovic the Pious (circa 825) telling that "many" of them "longed to embrace the Christian faith"--a story for which the only possible basis would be the longings and perhaps the propaganda of Christian captives of some western European nationality. (Cp. Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, p. 110, notes, and p. 111.) Still it is admitted that the king was avowedly willing to listen; and the tale of the first acceptance of Christianity in Sweden, even if true in detail, would plainly point to a carefully rehearsed plan under the king's supervision. The admission that afterwards there was a return to heathenism for nearly a century consists entirely with the view that the first tentative was one of kingly policy. See Geijer, c. iii, pp. 34, 35. It was the people who drove out the missionaries; and Hardwick's statement that after seven years Anskar "was able to regain his hold on the affections of the Swedes" is confuted by his own narrative. All that Anskar obtained was a toleration of his mission; and this was given after a trial by lots, on heathen principles (Hardwick, pp. 112, 113; cp. p. 115). The account in Crichton and Wheaton's Scandinavia, 1837, i, 122, brings the king's initiative into prominence. (Cp. Otte, Scandinavian History, 1874, p. 34.) They also note that Charlemagne, in treating with the Danes, "did not attempt to impose his religion" upon them; but they do not glimpse the true explanation, which is that he could gain nothing by helping to organise a hostile kingdom. In point of fact he refused to let Lindger pursue his purpose of converting the Northmen. (Hardwick, p. 108, note 2, citing Vit. S. Lindger.) He had not developed the devotion or the subservience to the Church which in later ages led emperors to force the acceptance of Christianity on a defeated State that remained otherwise independent.
When in a later age Christianity was definitely established in Sweden under Olaf the Lap (or Tribute) King (circa 1000), whose father Erik is said to have been murdered in a tumult for his destruction of a pagan temple, the process was again strictly monarchic, the Diet resisting; but Olaf's substantial success was such as to permit of his annexing Gothland, temporarily conquering Norway, and styling himself king of all Sweden; and his son, Anund Jakob, continuing the profitable policy, earned the title of Most Christian Majesty (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 111; Geijer, p. 39). Even after this the attempt of a bishop (1067) to destroy the old temple at Upsala, resisted by the Christian King Stenkil, but supported by his rasher son Inge, caused the expulsion of the latter by the pagan party under Svend. Only after Inge's restoration by Danish help (1075) was the heathen worship suppressed (Hardwick, p. 116).
As regards Denmark, the historians incidentally make it clear that Harald Klak, usurping king of Jutland (circa 820), wanted to Christianise his turbulent subjects in order to subordinate them, having learned the wisdom of the policy from Louis the Pious; and it is no less clear that the same motive swayed Erik I, who, after having in his days of piratical adventure, as usurper of the Jute crown, destroyed the Christian settlement of Charlemagne at Hamburg, entirely changed his attitude and favoured Christianity when, on the death of King Horda-Knut, he became king of all Denmark (Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 120-23).
So plain was the political tendency of the new creed that after the Christianisation of Denmark by Erik I the nobility forced Erik II to restore the pagan system; but the triumph of the Church, like that of monarchy, was only a question of time. Even kings who, being caught late in life, did not renounce their paganism, are found ready to favour the missionaries; and in Denmark such tolerance on the part of Gorm the Old (d. 941), successor of Erik II, is followed by the official Christianity of his son Harald Bluetooth. Danish "empire" duly follows; and in the next century we find Knut the Great (1014-1035) utterly reversing[646] the pagan policy of his father, Svend[647] (who had been enabled to dethrone his Christian father, Harald, by the pagan malcontents), and dying in the odour of sanctity, "lord" of six kingdoms--Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, Scotland, and Wales.
The principle is established from another side in the case of Norway. There the first notable monarchic unification had been wrought by the pagan Harold Fairhair (875), without the aid of Christianity; and the pagan resistance was so irreducible that revolters sailed off in all directions, finding footing in Scotland and Ireland, and in particular in Northern France and Iceland.[648] In the next generation the monarchy relapsed to the old position; and Harold's Christian son Hakon (educated in England) had to cede to the determined demands of the pagan majority, who forced him to join in the old heathen rites, and murdered the leading Christians;[649] a course followed by the further weakening of the power of the crown. The Danish Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm, who then conquered Norway, sought to re-establish the Church by the sword; but Hakon Jarl, who followed, gave up Christianity in order to reign and again put it down by violence.[650] The next king to restore it, Olaf Tryggvason, who had met with Christianity in his wanderings in Greece, Russia, England, and Germany,[651] established that creed by brute force when he attained the throne (977), and again the spirit of local independence, abnormally conserved in Norway by the special separateness set up by the geographical conditions, fiercely resisted the new system as it had done the rule of Harold Fairhair, many defeated pagans withdrawing to remote glens and fastnesses, where to this day their mythology thrives.[652] On Olaf's final defeat and death (1000), his immediate successors, jarls supported by Denmark and Sweden, were content to leave paganism alone, as representing a too dangerous spirit of independence; and when St. Olaf, in turn, again undertook to crush it, he found he had but beaten down and alienated the forces that would have enabled him to resist Knut.[653] Danish "imperialism" had been evolved while the Norwegian kings were striving towards it; and St. Olaf was exiled, defeated, and slain (1030). His subsequent popularity is a mere posthumous Church-made cult of the Christian period.
The spread of Christianity among the Franks; in England; in Saxony by Charlemagne; in North Germany later; and among the Wends, Poles, Hungarians, and Bohemians, constantly exhibits the same phenomena. Always it is the duke or king who is "converted"; whereupon the people are either baptised in mass or dragooned for generations. A powerful king like Clovis could secure obedience; others, as in Scandinavia, Bohemia, and Wendland, lost life and kingdom in the attempt to crush at once paganism and local independence. Prussia was almost depopulated by sixty years of war before the Order of Teutonic Knights, who undertook to convert it on being awarded the territory, could extinguish by savagery its staunch paganism. The Christianisation of almost the whole of Northern Europe was thus a purely political process, accomplished in great part by the sword. See Hardwick, passim, and cp. the author's Short History of Christianity, pp. 211-16.
Sec. 2
The ultimate arrest of all aggression by the Scandinavian peoples is to be explained as a simple redressing of the balance between them and the States they had formerly plundered. To begin with, all the Scandinavian groups alike practised piracy[654] as against the more civilised States of Northern Europe; and piracy showed them the way to conquest and colonisation. At home their means of subsistence were pasturage, fishing, the chase, and an agriculture which cannot have been easily extensible beyond the most fertile soils; hence a constant pressure of population, promoting piracy and aggressive emigration. How the pressure was purposively met is not clear; but as the Scandinavian father, like the Greek and Roman, was free either to expose or bring up a new-born child,[655] there is a presumption that at some periods exposure was not uncommon.[656] There is even testimony, going back to the eighth century and recurring frequently as late as the twelfth, to the effect that a certain number of men were periodically sent away by lot when the mouths had visibly multiplied beyond the meat.
See, for instance, the Roman de Rou (1160), ed. Andresen, 1877-79, i, 18, 19, verses 208-25 of prologue. Pluquet, in a note on the passage in his edition (1827, i, 10), remarking that the usage is often mentioned, not only by Norman but by English and French annalists of the Middle Ages, adds that the oldest mention of all, in the Tractatus of Abbot Odo (d. 942), must be rejected, the document being apocryphal. That, however, is not the oldest mention by a long way. Paulus Diaconus (740-99) gives the statement in a very circumstantial form (cited by Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, Eng. tr. p. 68) in his history of the Longobardians, his own stock, who he says came from Scandinavia. He testifies that he had actually talked with persons who had been in Scandinavia--his descriptions pointing to Scania. M. Pluquet notes (so also Crichton and Wheaton, i, 166-67) that no northern saga mentions the usage in question. But it was likely to be commemorated only by the stocks forced in that fashion to emigrate. The saga-making Icelanders were not among these. The old statement, finally, is in some measure corroborated by the testimony of Geijer, p. 84, as to the long subsistence of the Swedish practice of sending forth sons to seek their fortune by sea.
But without any such organised exodus there were adventurers enough.[657] Hence colonisations and conquests in Scotland, the Hebrides, Ireland, Iceland, Russia, England, and remote plundering expeditions by land and river, some getting as far south as Italy; one conquering expedition passing from Gaul through Arab Spain (827) and along the Mediterranean coasts, north and south; another passing through Russia to Constantinople. Thus the Norwegian and Danish stocks must have rooted in nearly every part of the British Islands; and the settlement in Gaul of a colony of revolters from Norway, in the reign of Harold Fairhair, built up one of the great provinces of France. Only in Iceland did the colonists preserve their language; hence, in terms of the hallucination of race, the assumption that the others "failed," when in reality they helped to constitute new races; no more "failing" in these cases than did the British stock in its North American colonies. It may be said, indeed, that the Teutonic stocks which overran Italy, Spain, and North Africa did in large part physically disappear thence, their physiological type having failed to survive as against the southern types. Even on that view, however, the impermanent type must in some degree have affected that which survived. In any case, the amalgamated Norse stock in Normandy, grown French-speaking, in turn overran England and part of Italy and Sicily, and, in the Crusades, formed new kingdoms in the East; while in the case of England, turning English-speaking, they again modified the stock of the nation. As against the notion that in this case there was "failure" either for French or for Normans, we might almost adopt the mot of M. Clemenceau and call England "a French colony gone wrong."[658] In terms of realities there has been no racial decease; it is but names and languages that have changed with the generations.
But there was an arrest of military exodus from Scandinavia; and thenceforward the Norse-speaking stocks figure as more or less small and retiring communities. They gave up piracy and conquest only because they had to, Danish imperialism causing the arrest on a wide scale, as every monarchic unification had done on a small.[659] When Knut reigned over six kingdoms, piracy was necessarily checked as among these; and when Knut's empire broke up after his death through the repulsive powers of its component parts and the relative lack of resources in Denmark, the various States of north-western Europe, in the terms of the case, were more able than before to resist Norse attacks in general. In England, William the Conqueror was fain to keep them off by bribery and intrigue; but the States with the greater natural resources grew in strength, while those of Scandinavia could not. When the pirates began to get the worst of it, and when the Scandinavian kings had cause to dread reprisals from those of the west, piracy began to dwindle. The last regular practitioners were the pagan Wends, and the republican pagans of the city of Jomsborg, who plundered the Scandinavians as they had of yore plundered others; and after the Christianised Danish people had for a time defended themselves by voluntary associations, both sets of pirates were overthrown by an energetic Danish king. The suppression was under Christian auspices; but it is a conventional fallacy to attribute it to the influence of Christianity. It was simply an act of necessary progressive polity, like the suppression of the Cilician pirates by Pompeius.
Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton make the regulation statement that when Christianity was introduced into Scandinavia, "it corrected the abuses of an ill-regulated freedom; it banished vindictive quarrels and bloody dissensions; it put a restraint upon robberies and piracies; it humanised the public laws and softened the ferocity of public manners; it emancipated the peasantry from a miserable servitude, restored to them their natural rights, and created a relish for the blessings of peace and the comforts of life" (Scandinavia, i, 196). For the general and decisive disproof of these assertions it is necessary only to follow Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton's own narrative, pp. 201, 213, 216, 219, 230, 240, 244, 247, 275, 278, 280, 308, 312, 322, etc., and note their contrary generalisation at pp. 324, 325. It was his "Most Christian Majesty" Anund Jakob who got the nickname of Coal-burner for his law that the houses and effects of malefactors should be burned to the value of the harm they had done. The Swedes, polygamous before Christianity, continued to be so for generations as Christians (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 197, 198, citing Adam of Bremen. Cp. Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, i, 18, 188.) Civil wars and ferocious feuds greatly multiplied in the early Christian period, apart altogether from pagan insurrections. Geijer, while erroneously attributing to Christianity the lessening of war between Scandinavia and the rest of the world, admits that the passions of strife, "hitherto turned in an external direction, now spent themselves in a domestic field of action, generating civil discord and war. Christianity, besides, dissolved the effective bond of the old social institutions" (p. 40). In that case it clearly cannot have been religious feeling that checked external war. As to piracy, that was later practised by Elizabethan Protestants and by the Huguenots of La Rochelle, when the opportunities were tempting. As to popular misery, it is told in the life of Anskar that the poor in ancient Sweden wore so few that the first Christians could find a use for their alms only in foreign countries (Geijer, p. 33). That difficulty has not prevailed since. Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton later admit that the Danish peasantry, free as pagans, "gradually sunk under the increasing power and influence of the feudal chiefs and the Romish hierarchy" (p. 227), and that the Crusades did not forward the emancipation of the serfs in Denmark as elsewhere, the peasantry on the contrary sinking into "a state of hopeless bondage" (pp. 251, 252).
Sec. 3
From the period of arrest of aggression, the economic and political history of the Scandinavian States is that of slightly expansible communities with comparatively small resources; and their high status to-day is the illustration of what civilisation may come to under such conditions. In the feudal period they made small material or intellectual progress. It is not probable that the Norse population was ever greater than in the eighteenth century, though Malthus had a surmise that it might anciently have been so:[660] the old belief that Scandinavia was the great officina gentium, the nursery of the races which overran the Roman Empire, is a delusion; but it is certain that the increase since the twelfth century has been even slower than the European average. In the absence of emigration, this meant for past centuries constant restraint of marriage through lack of houses and livelihoods--the preventive check in its most stringent form. Emigration there must have been; but the check must also have been strong. Thus, while the lot of the common people, in so far as it remained free, was likely to be comparatively comfortable, the land-owning classes, in the absence of industry and commerce, tended to become nearly all-powerful; and the Church, which inherits and does not squander, would engross most of the power if not specially checked. The conditions were thus as unfavourable to intellectual as to material progress.
Denmark was the first of the Scandinavian States to develop a considerable commerce, beginning as did Holland on the footing of the fishery;[661] and on that basis there was a certain renewal of Danish empire. But this again could not hold out against the neighbouring forces; and in the thirteenth century, the herring fishery in the Baltic failing, it had to yield its hold on the mainland cities of Hamburg and Luebeck, which began a new career of commercial power as the nucleus of the great trading federation of the Hansa cities, while Denmark itself was riven by the struggles of six claimants of the throne. The result was a "feudal and sacerdotal oligarchy,"[662] leading to an era of "the complete triumph of the Romish clergy over the temporal power in Denmark," in which the peasantry were reduced to absolute predial slavery.[663] Similar evolution took place in Norway,[664] though with less depression of the peasantry,[665] by reason of the small scope there for capitalistic agriculture; and there too the now nascent commerce was appropriated by the Hansa.[666] In Sweden, where industry remained so primitive that down till the sixteenth century there was hardly any attempt to work up the native iron,[667] Germans greatly predominated in the cities and controlled trade,[668] even before the accession of Albert of Mecklenburg (1363), who further depressed the native nobility in the German interest.[669] On the other hand, the clergy were less plenipotent than in the sister kingdoms, the people having retained more of their old power.
Cp. Schweitzer, Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur, i, 129. The Swedish peasantry, like the Norwegian, were less easy to enslave than the Danish by reason of the natural conditions; those of the remote mountain and mining districts in particular retaining their independence (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 375, 376; Geijer, pp. 50, 81, 89, 97, 103), so that they ultimately enabled Gustavus Vasa to throw off the Danish yoke. Yet they had at first refused to recognise him, being satisfied with their own liberties; and afterwards they gave him much serious trouble (Otte, Scandinavian History, 1874, pp. 228, 235; Geijer, pp. 109, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120-24). Slavery, too, was definitely abolished in Sweden as early as 1335 (Geijer, pp. 57, 86; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 316, 333). As regards the regal power, the once dominant theory that the Swedish kings in the thirteenth century obtained a grant of all the mines, and of the province of the four great lakes (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 332), appears to be an entire delusion (Geijer, pp. 51, 52). Such claims were first enforced by Gustavus Vasa (id. p. 129). As regards the clergy, they appear from the first, qua churchmen, to have been kept in check by the nobles, who kept the great Church offices largely in the hands of their own order (Geijer, p. 109), though Magnus Ladulas strove to strengthen the Church in his own interest (id. pp. 52-53). Thus the nobles became specially powerful (id. pp. 50, 56, 108); and when in the fifteenth century Sweden was subject to Denmark, they specially resented the sacerdotal tyranny (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 356).
In Sweden, as in the other Scandinavian States, however, physical strife and mental stagnation were the ruling conditions. Down till the sixteenth century her history is pronounced "a wretched detail of civil wars, insurrections, and revolutions, arising principally from the jealousies subsisting between the kings and the people, the one striving to augment their power, the other to maintain their independence."[670] The same may be said of the sister kingdoms, all alike being torn and drained by innumerable strifes of faction and wars with each other. The occasional forcible and dynastic unions of crowns came to nothing; and the Union of Calmar (1397), an attempt to confederate the three kingdoms under one crown, repeatedly collapsed. The marvel is that in such an age even the attempt was made. The remarkable woman who planned and first effected it, Queen Margaret of Norway, appealed in the first instance with heavy bribes for the co-operation of the clergy,[671] who, especially in Sweden, where they preferred the Danish rule to the domination of the nobles,[672] were always in favour of it for ecclesiastical reasons.
Had such a union permanently succeeded, it would have eliminated a serious source of positive political evil; but to carry forward Scandinavian civilisation under the drawbacks of the medieval difficulty of inter-communication (involving lack of necessary culture-contacts), the natural poverty of the soil, and the restrictive pressure of the Catholic Church, would have been a task beyond the power of a monarchy comprising three mutually jealous sections. As it was, the old strifes recurred almost as frequently as before, and moral union was never developed. If historical evidence is to count for anything, the experience of the Scandinavian stocks should suffice to discredit once for all the persistent pretence that the "Teutonic races" have a faculty for union denied to the Celtic, inasmuch as they, apparently the most purely Teutonic of all, were even more irreconcilable, less fusible, than the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and the Germans down till our own day, and much more mutually jealous than the quasi-Teutonic provinces of the Netherlands, which, after the severance of Belgium, have latterly lost their extreme repulsions, while those of Scandinavia are not yet dead.[673] The explanation, of course, is not racial in any case; but it is for those who affirm that capacity for union is a Teutonic gift to find a racial excuse.
With the Reformation, though that was nowhere more clearly than in Scandinavia a revolution of plunder, there began a new progress, in respect not of any friendliness of the Lutheran system to thought and culture, but of the sheer break-up of the intellectual ice of the old regimen. In Denmark the process is curiously instructive. Christian II, personally a capable and reformative but cruel tyrant, aimed throughout his life at reducing the power alike of the clergy and the nobles, and to that end sought on the one hand to abolish serfdom and educate the poor and the burghers,[674] and on the other to introduce Lutheranism (1520). From the latter attempt he was induced to desist, doubtless surmising that the remedy might for him be a new disease: but on his enforcing the reform of slavery he was rebelled against and forced to fly by the nobility, who thereupon oppressed the people more than ever.[675] His uncle and successor, Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, accepted the mandate of the nobles to the extent of causing to be publicly burned in his presence all the laws of the last reign in favour of the peasants, closing the poor schools throughout the kingdom, burning the new books,[676] and pledging himself to expel Lutheranism. He seems, however, to have been secretly a Protestant, and to have evaded his pledge; and the rapid spread of the new heresy, especially in the cities, brought about a new birth of popular literature in the vernacular, despite the suppression of the schools.[677] In a few years' time, Frederick, recognising the obvious interest of the crown, and finding the greater nobles in alliance with the clergy, made common cause with the smaller nobility, and so was able (1527) to force on the prelates, who could hope for no better terms from the exiled king, the toleration of Protestantism, the permission of marriage to the clergy, and a surrender of a moiety of the tithes.[678] A few years later (1530) the monasteries were either stormed by the populace or abandoned by the monks, their houses and lands being divided among the municipalities, the king and his courtiers, and the secular clergy.[679] After a stormy interregnum, in which the Catholic party made a strenuous reaction, the next king, Christian III, taking the nobles and commons-deputies into partnership, made with their help an end of the Catholic system; the remaining lands, castles, and manors of the prelates going to the crown, and the tithes being parcelled among the landowners, the king, and the clergy. Naturally a large part of the lands, as before, was divided among the nobles,[680] who were in this way converted to Protestantism. Thus whereas heathen kings had originally embraced Christianity to enable them to consolidate their power, Christian kings embraced Protestantism to enable them to recover wealth and power from the Catholic Church. Creed all along followed interest;[681] and the people had small concern in the change.[682]
Norway, being under the same crown, followed the course of Denmark. In Sweden the powerful Gustavus Vasa saw himself forced at the outset of his reign to take power and wealth from the Church if he would have any of his own; and after the dramatic scene in the Diet of Westeras (1527), in which he broke out with a passionate vow to renounce the crown if he were not better supported,[683] he carried his point. The nobles, being "squared"[684] by permission to resume such of their ancestral lands as had been given to churches and convents since 1454, and by promise of further grants, forced the bishops to consent to surrender to the king their castles and strongholds, and to let him fix their revenues; all which was duly done. The monasteries were soon despoiled of nearly all their lands, many of which were seized by or granted in fief to the barons;[685] and the king became head of the Church in as full a degree as Henry VIII in England;[686] sagaciously, and in part unscrupulously, creating for the first time in Scandinavia a strong yet not wholly despotic monarchy, with such revenues from many sources[687] as made possible the military power and activity of Gustavus Adolphus, and later the effort of Charles XII to create an "empire"--an effort which, necessarily failing, reduced Sweden permanently to her true economic basis.
Apart from those remarkable episodes, the development of the Scandinavian States since the sixteenth century has been, on their relatively small scale, that of the normal monarchic community with a variously vigorous democratic element; shaken frequently by civil strife; wasting much strength in insensate wars; losing much through bad kings and gaining somewhat from the good; passing painfully from bigotry to tolerance; getting rid of their old aristocracies and developing new; exhibiting in the mass the northern vice of alcoholism, yet maintaining racial vigour; disproportionately taxing their producers as compared with their non-producers; aiming, nevertheless, at industry and commerce, and suffering from the divisive social influences they entail; meddling in international strifes, till latterly the surrounding powers preponderated too heavily; disunited and normally jealous of each other, even when dynastically united, through stress of crude patriotic prejudice and lack of political science; frequently retrograding, yet in the end steadily progressing in such science as well as in general culture and well-being. Losses of territory--as Finland and Schleswig-Holstein--at the hands of stronger rivals, and the violent experiences and transitions of the Napoleonic period, have left them on a relatively stable and safe basis, albeit still mutually jealous and unable to pass beyond the normal monarchic stage. To-day their culture is that of all the higher civilisations, as are their social problems.
Sec. 4
In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special illustrations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland; and the natural conditions, enforcing long spells of winter leisure, greatly furthered the movement. But the finest growth of the new literature, it turns out, is due to culture-contacts--an unexpected confirmation, in a most unlikely quarter, of a general principle arrived at on other data. The vigilant study of our own day has detected, standing out from the early Icelandic literature, "a group of poems which possess the very qualities of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language, which [other] Icelandic poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at all. They are the poetry of the 'Western Islands'"[688]--that is, the poetry of the meeting and mixing of the "Celtic" and Scandinavian stocks in Ireland and the Hebrides--the former already much mixed, and proportionally rich in intellectual variations. It was in this area that "a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries after their date.... This school, which is totally distinct from the Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the thirteenth century."[689]
Compare Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale, 1883, vol. i, Introd. pp. lxii, lxiii; and, as regards the old Irish civilisation, the author's Saxon and Celt, pp. 127, 128, 131-33.
The theory of Celtic influence, though established in its essentials, is not perfectly consistent as set forth in the Britannica article. Thus, while the Celticised literature is remarked for "noble simplicity of language," the true Icelandic, primarily like the Old English, is said to develop a "complexity of structure and ornament, an elaborate mythological and enigmatical phraseology, and a regularity of rhyme, assonance, luxuriance, quantity, and syllabification which it caught up from the Latin and Celtic poets." Further, while the Celticised school is described as "totally distinct from the Icelandic," Celtic influence is also specified as affecting Norse literature in general. The first generations of Icelandic poets were men of good birth, "nearly always, too, of Celtic blood on one side at least"; and they went to Norway or Denmark, where they lived as kings' or chiefs' henchmen. The immigration of Norse settlers from Ireland, too, affected the Iceland stock very early. "It is to the west that the best sagas belong: it is to the west that nearly every classic writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest" (ib.). The facts seem decisive, and the statements above cited appear the more clearly to need modification. It is to be noted that Schweitzer's Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur gives no hint of the Celtic influence.
But the Icelandic civilisation as a whole could not indefinitely progress on its own basis any more than the Irish. Beyond a certain point both needed new light and leading; for the primeval spirit of strife never spontaneously weakened; the original Icelandic stock being, to begin with, a selection of revolters from over-rule. So continual domestic feuds checked mental evolution in Iceland as in old Scandinavia; and the reduction of the island to Norwegian rule in the thirteenth century could not do more for it than monarchy was doing for Norway. Mere Christianity without progressive conditions of culture availed less for imaginative art than free paganism had done; and when higher culture-contacts became possible, the extreme poverty of Iceland tended more than ever to send the enterprising people where the culture and comfort were. It is in fact not a possible seat for a relatively flourishing civilisation in the period of peaceful development. The Reformation seems there to have availed for very little indeed. It was vehemently resisted,[690] but carried by the preponderant acquisitive forces: "nearly all who took part in it were men of low type, moved by personal motives rather than religious zeal."[691] "The glebes and hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful class in the island; while the bad system of underleasing at rack-rent and short lease with unsecured tenant-right extended in this way over at least a quarter of the better land, stopping any possible progress." For the rest, "the Reformation had produced a real poet [Hallgrim Petersen], but the material rise of Iceland"--that is, the recent improvements in the condition of the people--"has not yet done so,"[692] though poetry is still cultivated in Iceland very much as music is elsewhere.
Thus this one little community may be said to have reached the limits of its evolution, as compared with others, simply because of the strait natural conditions in which its lot was cast. But to think of it as a tragically moribund organism is merely to proceed upon the old hallucinations of race-consciousness. Men reared in Iceland have done their part in making European civilisation, entering the more southerly Scandinavian stocks as these entered the stocks of western Europe; and the present population, who are a remnant, have no more cause to hang their heads than any family that happens to have few members or to have missed wealth. Failure is relative only to pretension or purpose.
The modern revival of Scandinavian culture, as must needs be, is the outcome of all the European influences. At the close of the sixteenth century, in more or less friendly intercourse with the other Protestant countries of north Europe, Denmark began effectively to develop a literature such as theirs, imaginative and scientific, in the vernacular as well as in Latin; and so the development went on while Sweden was gaining military glory with little enlightenment. Then a rash attack upon Sweden ended in a loss of some of the richest Danish provinces (1658); whereafter a sudden parliamentary revolution, wrought by a league of king and people against the aristocracy, created not a constitutional but an absolute and hereditary monarchy (1660), enthroning divine right at the same instant in Denmark and Norway as in England. Thereafter, deprived of their old posts and subjected to ruinous taxes, the nobility fell rapidly into poverty;[693] and the merchant class, equally overtaxed, withdrew their capital; the peasantry all the while remaining in a state of serfdom.[694] Then came a new series of wars with Sweden, recurring through generations, arresting, it is said, literature, law, philosophy, and medicine,[695] but not the natural sciences, then so much in evidence elsewhere: Tycho Brahe being followed in astronomy by Horrebow, while chemistry, mathematics, and even anatomy made progress. But to this period belongs the brilliant dramatist and historian Holberg, the first great man of letters in modern Scandinavia (d. 1754); and in the latter half of the eighteenth century the two years of ascendency of the freethinking physician Struensee as queen's favourite (1770-72) served partially to emancipate the peasants, establish religious toleration, abolish torture, and reform the administration. Nor did his speedy overthrow and execution wholly undo his main work,[696] which outdid that of many generations of the old regime. Still, the history of his rise and fall, his vehement speed of reconstruction and the ruinous resistance it set up, is one of the most dramatic of the many warnings of history against thinking suddenly to elevate a nation by reforms imposed wholly from without.[697]
Thenceforward, with such fluctuations as mark all culture-history, the Scandinavian world has progressed mentally nearly step for step with the rest of Europe, producing scholars, historians, men of science, artists, and imaginative writers in more than due proportion. Many names which stand for solid achievement in the little-read Scandinavian tongues are unknown save to specialists elsewhere; but those of Holberg, Linnaeus, Malte-Brun, Rask, Niebuhr, Madvig, Oehlenschlaeger, Thorwaldsen, and Swedenborg tell of a comprehensive influence on the thought and culture of Europe during a hundred years in which Europe was being reborn; and in our own day some of the greatest imaginative literature of the modern world comes from Norway, long the most backward of the group. Ibsen, one of a notable company of masters, stood at the head of the drama of the nineteenth century; and the society which sustained him, however he may have satirised it, is certificated abreast of its age.
Sec. 5
In one aspect the Scandinavian polities have a special lesson for the larger nations. They have perforce been specially exercised latterly, as of old, by the problem of population; and in Norway there was formerly made one of the notable, if not one of the best, approaches to a practical solution of it. Malthus long ago[698] noted the Norwegian marriage-rate as the lowest in Europe save that of Switzerland; and he expressed the belief that in his day Norway was "almost the only country in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehension expressed of a redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower classes of people is in some degree seen and understood."[699] This state of things having long subsisted, there is a presumption that it persists uninterruptedly from pagan times, when, as we have seen, there existed a deliberate population-policy; for Christian habits of mind can nowhere be seen to have set up such a tendency, and it would be hard to show in the history of Norway any great political change which might effect a rapid revolution in the domestic habits of the peasantry, such as occurred in France after the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the mass of the Norwegian people had till the last century continued to live under those external or domiciliary restraints on multiplication which were normal in rural Europe in the Middle Ages, and which elsewhere have been removed by industrialism; yet without suffering latterly from a continuance of the severer medieval destructive checks. They must, therefore, have put a high degree of restraint on marriage, and probably observed parental prudence in addition.
When it is found that in Sweden, where the conditions and usages were once similar, there was latterly at once less prudential restraint on marriage and population, and a lower standard of material well-being, the two cases are seen to furnish a kind of experimentum crucis. The comparatively late maintenance of a powerful military system in Sweden having there prolonged the methods of aristocratic and bureaucratic control while they were being modified in Denmark-Norway, Swedish population in the eighteenth century was subject to artificial stimulus. From about the year 1748, the Government set itself, on the ordinary empirical principle of militarism, to encourage population.[700] Among its measures were the variously wise ones of establishing medical colleges and lying-in and foundling hospitals, the absolute freeing of the internal trade in grain, and the withdrawal in 1748 of an old law limiting the number of persons allowed to each farm. The purpose of that law had been to stimulate population by spreading tillage; but the spare soil being too unattractive, the young people emigrated. On the law being abolished, population did increase considerably, rising between 1751 and 1800 from 1,785,727 to 2,347,308,[701] though some severe famines had occurred within the period. But in the year 1799, when Malthus visited the country, the increased population suffered from famine very severely indeed, living mainly and miserably on bark bread.[702] It was one of Malthus's great object-lessons in his science. On one side a poor country was artificially over-populated; on the other, the people of Norway, an even poorer country, directly and indirectly[703] restrained their rate of increase, while the Government during a long period wrought to the same end by the adjustment of its military system and by making a certificate of earning power or income necessary for all marriages.[704] The result was that, save in the fishing districts, where speculative conditions encouraged early marriages and large families, the Norwegian population were better off than the Swedish.[705]
Already in Malthus' youth the Norwegian-Danish policy had been altered, all legal and military restrictions on marriage having been withdrawn; and he notes that fears were expressed as to the probable results. It is one of his shortcomings to have entirely abstained from subsequent investigation of the subject; and in his late addendum as to the state of Sweden in 1826 he further fails to note that as a result of a creation there after 1803 of 6,000 new farms from land formerly waste, the country ceased to need to import corn and was able to export a surplus.[706] It still held good, however, that the Norwegian population, being from persistence of prudential habit[707] much the slower in its rate of increase, had the higher standard of comfort, despite much spread of education in Sweden.
Within the past half-century the general development of commerce and of industry has tended broadly to equalise the condition of the Scandinavian peoples. As late as 1835 a scarcity would suffice to drive the Norwegian peasantry to the old subsistence of bark bread, a ruinous resort, seeing that it destroyed multitudes of trees of which the value, could the timber have found a market, would have far exceeded that of a quantity of flour yielding much more and better food. At that period the British market was closed by duties imposed in the interest of the Canadian timber trade.[708] Since the establishment of British free trade, Norwegian timber has become a new source of wealth; and through this and other and earlier commercial developments prudential family habits were affected. Thus, whereas the population of Sweden had all but doubled between 1800 and 1880, the population of Norway had grown even faster.[709] And whereas in 1834 the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate births in Stockholm was 1 to 2.26[710] (one of the results of foundling hospitals, apparently), in 1890 the total Swedish rate was slightly below 1 to 10, while in Norway it was 1 to 14. The modern facilities for emigration have further affected conjugal habits. Latterly, however, there are evidences of a new growth of intelligent control.
In recent years the statistics of emigration and population tell a fairly plain story. In Norway and Sweden alike the excess of births over deaths reached nearly its highest in 1887, the figures being 63,942 for Sweden and 29,233 for Norway. In 1887, however, emigration was about its maximum in both countries, 50,786 leaving Sweden and 20,706 leaving Norway. Thereafter the birth-rate rapidly fell, and the emigration, though fluctuating, has never again risen in Sweden to the volume of 1887-88, though it has in Norway. But when, after falling to 43,728 in 1892, the excess of Swedish births over deaths rises to 60,231 in 1895, while the emigration falls from 45,000 in 1892 to 13,000 in 1894, it is clear that the lesson of regulation is still very imperfectly learned. Norway shows the same fluctuations, the excess of births rising from 23,600 in 1892 to nearly 32,000 in 1896, and again from 27,685 in 1908 to 29,804 in 1909, doubtless because of ups and downs in the harvests, as shown in the increase of marriages from 12,742 in 1892 to 13,962 in 1896.
In Denmark the progression has been similar. There the excess of births over deaths was so far at its maximum in 1886, the figures being 29,986 in a population of a little over 2,000,000; whereafter they slowly decreased, till in 1893 the excess was only 26,235. All the while emigration was active, gradually rising from 4,346 in 1885 to 10,382 in 1891; then again falling to 2,876 in 1896, when the surplus of births over deaths was 34,181--a development sure to force more emigration. In 1911 the population was 2,775,076--a rapid rise; and in 1910 the surplus of births over deaths was 40,110. The Scandinavians are thus still in the unstable progressive stage of popular well-being, though probably suffering less from it than either Germany or England.
Here, then, is a group of kindred peoples apparently at least as capable of reaching a solution of the social problem as any other, and visibly prospering materially and morally in proportion as they bring reason to bear on the vital lines of conduct, though still in the stage of curing over-population by emigration. Given continued peaceful political evolution in the direction first of democratic federation, and further of socialisation of wealth, they may reach and keep the front rank in civilisation, while the more unmanageably large communities face risks of dire vicissitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 638: As in Carlyle's Early Kings of Norway, the caput mortuum of his historical method. Much more instructive works on Scandinavian history are available to the English reader. The two volumes on Scandinavia by Crichton and Wheaton (1837) are not yet superseded, though savouring strongly of the conservatism of their period. Dunham, who rapidly produced, for Gardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia series, histories of Spain and Portugal (5 vols.), Europe during the Middle Ages (4 vols.), and the Germanic Empire (3 vols.), compiled also one of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (3 vols. 1839-40), of inferior quality. But Geijer's History of Sweden, one of the standard modern national histories of Europe, is translated into English as far as the period of Gustavus Vasa (3 vols. of orig. in one of trans. 1845); and the competent History of Denmark by C.-F. Allen is available in a French translation (Copenhagen, 2 tom. 1878). Otte's Scandinavian History, 1874, is an unpretending and unliterary but well-informed work, which may be used to check Crichton and Wheaton. The more recent work of Mr. R. Nisbet Bain, Scandinavia: a Political History of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1513 to 1900 (Camb. Univ. Press, 1905), is useful for the period covered, but has little sociological value. For the history of ancient Scandinavian literature, the introduction to Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), and Prof. Powell's article on Icelandic Literature in the 10th ed. of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, are preferable to Schweitzer's Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur (1886, 2 Bde.), which, however, is useful for the modern period.]
[Footnote 639: See Geijer's History of the Swedes, Eng. tr. of pt. i, 1-vol. ed. p. 30, as to the special persistence in Scandinavia of the early religious conception of kingship. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton's Scandinavia, 1837, i, 157.]
[Footnote 640: Such New Testament passages as Rom. xiii, 1-7, and Titus iii, 1, seem to have been penned or interpolated expressly to propitiate the Roman government.]
[Footnote 641: It was by entirely overlooking this historic fact that M. Fustel de Coulanges, in the last chapter of his Cite antique, was able to propound a theory of historic Christianity as something extra-political. He there renounced the inductive method for a pure ecclesiastical apriorism, and the result is a very comprehensive sociological misconception.]
[Footnote 642: Geijer, pp. 31, 33; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 102, 104, 183, 184.]
[Footnote 643: Tacitus, Germania, cc. 7, 11.]
[Footnote 644: Cp. Zschokke, Des Schweizerlands Geschichte, c. 7, as to the psychological effect of an organised worship in a great building on heathens without any such centre. And see the frank admission of J.R. Green, Short History, p. 54, that among the Anglo-Saxons "religion had told against political independence."]
[Footnote 645: Cp. C.F. Allen, History of Denmark, French tr., Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55, 56.]
[Footnote 646: Crichton and Wheaton, Scandinavia, i, 129-32; Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, p. 115. Knut was a great supporter of missionaries. Hardwick attributes to Gorm a "bitter hatred" of the Church, and also "violence," but gives no details.]
[Footnote 647: Even Svend is said to have laboured for Christianity in his latter years--another suggestion that it was found to answer monarchic purposes. See Hardwick, p. 115, note 9.]
[Footnote 648: Cp. Dasent, Introd. to The Burnt Njal, p. ix.]
[Footnote 649: Hardwick, as cited, p. 117.]
[Footnote 650: Hardwick, as cited.]
[Footnote 651: A warlike priest of Bremen is said to have converted him in Germany; and he was baptised in the Scilly Islands, which he had visited on a piratical expedition. Finally he was confirmed in England, which he promised to treat in future as a friendly State. (Id. ib.)]
[Footnote 652: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 151.]
[Footnote 653: Cp. Hardwick. p. 118, note 3.]
[Footnote 654: Though this was often of the most brutal description, there were some comparatively "mild-mannered" pirates, who rarely "cut a throat or scuttled ship." See C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, i, 21.]
[Footnote 655: Geijer, History of Sweden, Eng. tr. p. 31.]
[Footnote 656: It is actually on record that the practice long subsisted in Iceland, despite the efforts of St. Olaf to suppress it. Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 119, note, citing Torfaens, Hist. Norveg. ii, 2, and Neander. Among the Slavonic Pomeranians in the twelfth century it was still common to destroy female children at birth. Id. p. 224, note.]
[Footnote 657: Cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, Fr. tr. 1878, i, 20.]
[Footnote 658: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que l'Angleterre? Une colonie francais mal tournee."]
[Footnote 659: Thus Rolf the Ganger fared forth to France because Harold Fairhair would not suffer piracy on any territory acquired by him.]
[Footnote 660: Essay on the Principle of Population, 7th ed. p. 139.]
[Footnote 661: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 254. Dr. Ph. Schweitzer (Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur, Sec. 19), makes the surprising statement that the quantity of old coins found in Scandinavia (over 100,000 within the last century) proves that the ancient Scandinavian commerce was very great (ein ganz grossartiger). His own account of the occasional barter of the Vikings shows that there was nothing "grossartig" about it, and the coins prove nothing beyond piracy.]
[Footnote 662: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 263, 287.]
[Footnote 663: Id. pp. 251, 252, 277, 377.]
[Footnote 664: Id. pp. 304, 305, 311.]
[Footnote 665: Id. ii, 350. Cp. Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway (1834-36), ed. 1851, p. 135. Bain, however, pronounces that in Norway in the latter part of the fifteenth century "the peasantry were mostly thralls" (Scandinavia, 1905, p. 10).]
[Footnote 666: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 305, 310.]
[Footnote 667: Id. p. 332; Geijer, p. 135.]
[Footnote 668: Geijer, pp. 88, 91; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 331.]
[Footnote 669: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 324.]
[Footnote 670: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 331.]
[Footnote 671: Id. p. 336.]
[Footnote 672: Geijer, pp. 100, 109; Otte, Scandinavian History, 1874, p. 252.]
[Footnote 673: Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ii, 225, on Anglo-Saxon separatism. Since this was written there has taken place the decisive separation between Norway and Sweden.]
[Footnote 674: Otte, Scandinavian History, 1874, pp. 214-18. Himself an excellent Latinist, he sought to raise the learned professions, and compelled the burghers to give their children schooling under penalty of heavy fines. He further caused new and better books to be prepared for the public schools, and stopped witch-burning. Cp. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, i, 281.]
[Footnote 675: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 377-79, 383; Allen, as cited, i, 286, 310.]
[Footnote 676: Otte, p. 222; Allen, i, 287, 290.]
[Footnote 677: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 384-86; Allen, pp. 287-90.]
[Footnote 678: Allen, i, 299, 300.]
[Footnote 679: Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 386, 387. These writers suppress the details as to Frederick's anti-popular action; and Otte's history, giving these, omits all mention of his act of toleration. Allen's is the best account, i, 293, 299, 301, 305.]
[Footnote 680: Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 394-96; Otte, pp. 222-24. According to some accounts, the great bulk of the spoils went to the nobility. Villers, Essay on the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 105.]
[Footnote 681: It is notable that even in the thirteenth century there was a Norwegian king (Erik) called the Priest-hater, because of his efforts to make the clergy pay taxes.]
[Footnote 682: "The bulk of the people, at least in the first instance, and especially in Sweden and Norway, were by no means disposed to look to Wittenberg rather than to Rome for spiritual guidance" (Bain, Scandinavia, p. 86; cp. pp. 60, 64).]
[Footnote 683: Geijer, p. 177; Otte, p. 234.]
[Footnote 684: As the king wrote later to an acquisitive noble: "To strip churches, convents, and prebends of estates, manors, and chattels, thereto are all full willing and ready; and after such a fashion is every man a Christian and evangelical"--i.e. Lutheran. Geijer, p. 126. Cp. p. 129 as to the practice of spoliation.]
[Footnote 685: Geijer, pp. 119, 129.]
[Footnote 686: Id. p. 125; Otte, p. 236. The prelates were no longer admitted to any political offices, though the bishops and pastors sat together in the Diet.]
[Footnote 687: See Geijer, pp. 129-36.]
[Footnote 688: Prof. York Powell, article on Icelandic Literature, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed. xii, 621; 11th ed. xiv, 233.]
[Footnote 689: Id. (11th ed. xiv, 234).]
[Footnote 690: Bain, Scandinavia, pp. 100-1.]
[Footnote 691: Powell, article on Icelandic Literature, Ency. Brit. 10th ed. xii, 621.]
[Footnote 692: Id. p. 623.]
[Footnote 693: Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 262) writes in 1713 of "that forlorn troop of begging gentry extant in Denmark or Sweden, since the time that those nations lost their liberties."]
[Footnote 694: Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 104.]
[Footnote 695: Id. ii, 321-22.]
[Footnote 696: Laing in 1839 (Tour in Sweden, p. 13) thought the Danes as backward as they had been in 1660, quoting the ambassador Molesworth as to the effect of Lutheran Protestantism in destroying Danish liberties (pp. 10, 11). But it is hard to see that there were any popular liberties to destroy, save in so far as the party which set up the Reformation undid the popular laws of Christian II. The greatest social reforms in Denmark are certainly the work of the last half-century.]
[Footnote 697: It will be remembered that the Marquis of Pombal, in Portugal, at the same period, was similarly overthrown after a much longer and non-scandalous reformatory rule, the queen being his enemy.]
[Footnote 698: His particulars were gathered during a tour he made in 1799. Thus the Norse practice he notes had been independent of any effect produced by his own essay.]
[Footnote 699: Essay on the Principle of Population, 7th ed. pp. 126, 133.]
[Footnote 700: This was doubtless owing to the loss of Finland (1742), a circumstance not considered by Malthus.]
[Footnote 701: Malthus (p. 141) gives higher and clearly erroneous figures for both periods, and contradicts them later (p. 143) with figures which he erroneously applies to Sweden and Finland. He seems to have introduced the latter words in the wrong passage.]
[Footnote 702: Id. p. 141.]
[Footnote 703: See p. 131 as to the restrictions on subdivision of farms by way of safeguarding the forests.]
[Footnote 704: Id. p. 126. A priest would often refuse to marry a couple who had no good prospect of a livelihood: so far could rational custom affect even ecclesiastical practice.]
[Footnote 705: Cp. Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 339-50; Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway (1834-36), ed. 1851, pp. 22, 23, 34, 35, 191, 214.]
[Footnote 706: Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 345. Laing (Tour in Sweden, pp. 277-82) thought the Swedish peasants better off than the Scotch, though morally inferior to the Norwegian.]
[Footnote 707: Laing, Norway, p. 213.]
[Footnote 708: Laing, as cited, p. 220; Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 368.]
[Footnote 709: Sweden in 1800 stood at 2,347,303; in 1880, at 4,565,668; in 1900, at 5,136,441. Estimate for 1910, 5,521,943. Norway in 1815 stood at 886,656; in 1910 at 2,391,782.]
[Footnote 710: Laing, as cited, p. 103, note.]
III. THE HANSA
Systematic commerce in the north of Europe, broadly speaking, begins with the traffic of the Hansa towns, whose rise may be traced to the sudden development of civic life forced on Germany in the tenth century by the emperor Henry I, as a means of withstanding the otherwise irresistible raids of the Hungarians.[711] Once founded, such cities for their own existence' sake gave freedom to all fugitive serfs who joined them, defending such against former masters, and giving them the chance of earning a living.[712] That is by common consent the outstanding origin of German civic industry, and the original conditions were such that the cities, once formed, were gradually forced[713] to special self-reliance. Faustrecht, or private war, was universal, even under emperors who suppressed feudal brigandage; and the cities had to fight their own battle, like those of Italy, from the beginning. As compared with the robber baronage and separate princes, they stood for intelligence and co-operation, and supplied a basis for organisation without which the long German chaos of the Middle Ages would have been immeasurably worse. Taking their commercial cue from the cities of Italy, they reached, as against feudal enemies, a measure of peaceful union which the less differentiated Italian cities could not attain save momentarily. The decisive conditions were that whereas in Italy the enemies were manifold--sometimes feudal nobles, sometimes the Emperor, sometimes the Pope--the German cities had substantially one objective, the protection of trade from the robber-knights. Thus, as early as the year 1284, seventy cities of South Germany formed the Rhenish League, on which followed that of the Swabian towns. The league of the Hansa cities, like the other early "Hansa of London," which united cities of Flanders and France with mercantile London, was a growth on all fours with these.[714] Starting, however, in maritime towns which grew to commerce from beginnings in fishing, as the earlier Scandinavians had grown to piracy, the northern League gave its main strength to trade by sea.
Its special interest for us to-day lies in the fact that it was ultra-racial, beginning in 1241 in a pact between the free cities of Luebeck and Hamburg,[715] and finally including Wendish, German, Dutch, French, and even Spanish cities, in fluctuating numbers. The motive to union, as it had need be, was one of mercantile gain. Beginning, apparently, by having each its separate authorised hansa or trading-group in foreign cities, the earlier trading-towns of the group, perhaps from the measure of co-operation and fraternity thus forced on them abroad,[716] saw their advantage in a special league for the common good as a monopoly maintained against outsiders; and this being extended, the whole League came to bear the generic name.
See Kohlrausch for the theory that contact in foreign cities is the probable cause of the policy of union (History of Germany, Eng. tr., p. 260; cp. Ashley, Introd. to Economic History, i, 104, 110). As to the origin of the word, see Stubbs, i, 447, note. The hans or hansa first appears historically in England as a name apparently identical with gild; and, starting with a hansa or hanse-house of their own, English cities in some cases are found trading through subordinate hansas in other cities, not only of Normandy but of England itself. Thus arose the Flemish Hansa or "Hansa of London," ignored in so many notices of the better-known Hanseatic League. Early in the thirteenth century it included a number of the towns of Flanders engaged in the English wool-trade; and later it numbered at one time seventeen towns, including Chalons, Rheims, St. Quentin, Cambray, and Amiens (Ashley, Introd. to Economic History, i, 109; cp. Prof. Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, 1889, i, 6, citing Varenbergh, Hist. des relations diplomatiques entre le comte de Flandre et l'Angleterre au moyen age, Bruxelles, 1874, p. 146 sq.). There is some obscurity as to when the foreign Hansards were first permitted to have warehouses and residences of their own in London. Cp. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. i, Sec. 68; and Ashley, i, 105, following Schanz, who dates this privilege in the reign of Henry III, though the merchants of Cologne (id. p. 110) had a hansa or gildhall in London in the reign of Richard I. Under whatever conditions, it is clear that London was one of the first foreign cities in which the German Hansard traders came in friendly contact.
A reciprocal and normal egoism furthered as well as thwarted the Hansard enterprise. Trade in the feudal period being a ground of privilege like any other, the monopolied merchants of every city strove to force foreign traders to deal with them only. On the other hand, the English nobility sought to deal rather with the foreigner directly than with the English middlemen; and thus in each feudal country, but notably in England,[717] the interest of the landed class tended to throw foreign trade substantially in foreign hands, which did their best to hold it. In the reigns of the Edwards privileges of free trade with natives were gradually conferred on the foreign traders[718] in the interests of the landed class--the only "general consumers" who could then make their claims felt--in despite of the angry resistance of the native merchant class. For the rest, in a period when some maritime English cities, like those of France and Germany, could still carry on private wars with each other as well as with foreign cities,[719] a trader of one English town was in any other English town on all fours with a foreigner.[720] When, therefore, the foreigners combined, their advantage over the native trade was twofold.
Naturally the cities least liable to regal interference carried on a cosmopolitan co-operation to the best advantage. The Hansa of London, being made up of Flemish and French cities, was hampered by the divided allegiance of its members and by their national jealousies;[721] while the German cities, sharing in the free German scramble under a nominal emperor much occupied in Italy, could combine with ease. Cologne, having early Hansa rights in London, sought to exclude the other cities, but had to yield and join their union;[722] and the Hansa of London dwindled and broke up before their competition. As the number of leagued cities increased, it might be thought, something in the nature of an ideal of free trade must have partly arisen, for the number of "privileged" towns was thus apparently greater than that of the outside towns traded with. To the last, however, the faith seems to have been that without monopoly the league must perish; and in the closing Protestant period the command of the Baltic, as against the Dutch and the Scandinavians, was desperately and vainly battled for. But just as the cities could not escape the play of the other political forces of the time, and were severally clutched by this or that potentate, or biassed to their own stock, so they could not hinder that the principle of self-seeking on which they founded should divide themselves. As soon as the Dutch affiliated cities saw their opening for trade in the Baltic on their own account, they broke away.
While the league lasted, it was as remarkable a polity as any in history. With its four great foreign factories of Bruges, London, Bergen, and Novgorod, and its many minor stations, all conducted by celibate servitors living together like so many bodies of friars;[723] with its four great circles of affiliated towns, and its triennial and other congresses, the most cosmopolitan of European parliaments; with its military and naval system, by which, turning its trading into fighting fleets, it made war on Scandinavian kings and put down piracy on every hand--it was in its self-seeking and often brutal way one of the popular civilising influences of northern Europe for some two hundred and fifty years; and the very forces of separate national commerce, which finally undermined it, were set up or stimulated by its own example. With less rapacity, indeed, it might have conciliated populations that it alienated. A lack of any higher ideals than those of zealous commerce marks its entire career; it is associated with no such growth of learning and the fine arts as took place in commercial Holland; and its members seem to have been among the most unrefined of the northern city populations.[724] But it made for progress on the ordinary levels. In a world wholly bent on privilege in all directions, it at least tempered its own spirit of monopoly in some measure by its principle of inclusion; and it passed away as a great power before it could dream of renewing the ideal of monopoly in the more sinister form of Oriental empire taken up by the Dutch. And, while its historians have not been careful to make a comparative study of the internal civic life which flourished under the commercial union, it does not at all appear that the divisions of classes were more steep, or the lot of the lower worse, than in any northern European State of the period.
The "downfall" of such a polity, then, is conceptual only. All the realities of life evolved by the league were passed on to its constituent elements throughout northern Europe; and there survived from it what the separate States had not yet been able to offer--the adumbration, however dim, of a union reaching beyond the bounds of nationality and the jealousies of race. In an age of private war, without transcending the normal ethic, it practically limited private war as regarded its German members; and while joining battle at need with half-barbarian northern kings, or grudging foreigners, it of necessity made peace its ideal. Its dissolution, therefore, marked at once the advance of national organisation up to its level, and the persistence of the more primitive over the more rational instincts of coalition.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 711: Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, bk. ix, cap. 147; Kohlrausch, History of Germany, Eng. tr., pp. 157, 162, 257; Dunham, History of the Germanic Empire, 1835, i, 108; Sharon Turner, History of Europe during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 13. The main authority is the old annalist Wittikind.]
[Footnote 712: Heeren, Essai sur l'influence des Croisades, 1808, pp. 269-72; Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. 3.]
[Footnote 713: As to the process of evolution, see a good summary in Robertson's View of the Progress of Society in Europe (prefixed to his Charles V), Note xvii to Sect. I.]
[Footnote 714: The Spanish Hermandad was originally an organisation of cities set up in similar fashion. E. Armstrong, Introduction to Major Martin Hume's Spain, 1898, p. 12.]
[Footnote 715: Luebeck was founded in 1140 by a count of Holstein, and won its freedom in the common medieval fashion by purchase. Hamburg bought its freedom of its bishop in 1225. Hallam, Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 324. Many Dutch, supposed to have been driven from their own land by an inundation, settled on the Baltic coast between Bremen and Dantzic in the twelfth century. Heeren, Essai sur les Croisades, 1808, pp. 266-69, citing Leibnitz and Hoche. Cp. G.H. Schmidt, Zur Agrargeschichte Luebecks, 1887, p. 30 sq.]
[Footnote 716: "The league ... would scarcely have held long together or displayed any real federal unity but for the pressure of external dangers" (Art. "Hanseatic League" in Ency. Brit., 10th ed. xi, 450).]
[Footnote 717: Cp. Ashley, as cited, i, 104-112; Schanz, as cited, i, 331.]
[Footnote 718: Cp. W. von Ochenkowski, Englands wirtschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters, 1879. pp. 177-82, 221-31. Cp. the author's Trade and Tariffs, pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec. 1.]
[Footnote 719: Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 335. On private war in general see Robertson's View, note 21 to Sec. i.]
[Footnote 720: Ashley, i, 108, 109.]
[Footnote 721: Whereas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries England and Flanders had freely exchanged trading privileges, in the fifteenth century they begin to withdraw them, treating each other as trading rivals (Schanz, i, 7, 8).]
[Footnote 722: Ashley, i, 110.]
[Footnote 723: This principle may have been copied from the practice of the Lombard Umiliati. The common account of that order is that when in 1014 the Emperor banished a number of Lombards, chiefly Milanese, into Germany, they formed themselves into a religious society, called "The Humbled," and in that corporate capacity devoted themselves to various trades, in particular to wool-working. Returning to Milan in 1019, they developed their organisation there. Down to 1140 all the members were laymen; but thereafter priests were placed in control. For long the organisation was in high repute both for commercial skill and for culture. Ultimately, like all other corporate orders, they grew corrupt; and in 1571 they were suppressed by Pius V. (Pignotti, Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. trans. 1823, pp. 266-67, note, following Tiraboschi.)]
[Footnote 724: In such accounts as M'Culloch's (Treatises and Essays) and those of the German patriotic historians the Hansa is seen in a rather delusive abstract. The useful monograph of Miss Zimmern (The Hansa Towns: Story of the Nations Series) gives a good idea of the reality. See in particular pp. 82-147. It should be noted, however, that Luebeck is credited with being the first northern town to adopt the Oriental usage of water-pipes (Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, 1802, i, 381).]