the storm. For most of these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb. All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for. They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By 900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.
Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession, and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know that many of our public men think of government not as something to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a free man.
These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds growing on a ruin.
This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king, continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory, and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage of their own needy little vassals to them.
There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors, kings, and nobles alike, to mike of the officers of the Church the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to “invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a disintegrating tendency.
There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming principally from the monks and especially from the new order of Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement. Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared, sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year 1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.
The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester II, stands as a symbol. Great as an intriguer, to us he is even greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.
I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the “Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise begins.
For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose. The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the barrier between East and West and begins a new day.
It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.
At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus, if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it. Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it. The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century. Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked out. It is an astonishing time.
In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in “Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private, specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over, has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.
And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his
