FRENCH LANGUAGE IN THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 77 § 8. disorganisation incident to the early consolidation of the CHAP. II. feudal system, produced a great revolution of discipline among the Latin clergy; and a series of disorders prevailed in the Western Church to which there is no parallel, until far later times, in the Eastern. But the exertions of the well-disposed-who are generally the most numerous, though the least active portion of society -soon effected a reformation. This spirit of reform conferred on Gregory VII. the extensive temporal power which he assumed for the good of society, but which was too great for an imperfect mortal to possess without abusing it. Thus, at the time when a variety of events invested the Popes with the rank of temporal princes of the highest order, numerous causes conspired to constitute them supreme judges of right and wrong, both in the eyes of kings and people; while their real power was also increased by a widespread superstition that the end of the world was approaching, and that the possession of the keys of St Peter conferred an immense power over all those without the portal of heaven. Such was the position of one of the enemies which the vanity and bigotry of the Greek clergy arrayed in hostility against their nation. SECT. VIII.—PREDOMINANT POSITION OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN The progress of events, rather than any fault in the Byzantine government, ranged many of the nations of western Europe as enemies of the Greeks. All the nations who spoke the French were regarded by the Greeks as one people, and all were treated as enemies in consequence of the wars with the Normans of Italy and Sicily. The name of Franks was given, in the Byzantine empire, to all who spoke French; and, consequently, under this hated designation the Greeks included not only § 8. CHAP. II. Normans and French, but also Flemings, English, and Scots.1 The Norman conquests on the shores of the Mediterranean, and their commercial relations with the Italian republics, began to place their interests in rivalry with those of the Byzantine Greeks. And when the East was invaded by the Crusaders, the prevalence of the French language, and the number of Normans in their ranks, tended to make the Greeks view the intruders as old enemies. It is singular that the most numerous body of those who appeared in the East, making use of the French language, were neither French by race nor political allegiance. Normandy, Flanders, southern Italy, Sicily, England, and we may add Scotland, were then more French in language and manners, in the higher and military classes, than the southern provinces of what is now France. The foundation of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and the smaller principalities of Syria, gave the French language and Norman manners a predominant influence in the East. Though the king of France really exercised no direct authority over the greater part of the states in which French was spoken, still the dependence of several of the most powerful princes on the French crown as feudatories, and the constant communications that arose from similarity of feelings, rendered the king of France, in the eyes of the Greeks, the real sovereign of all the French or Frank nations. 1 "At this period, (A.D. 1290,) Norman-French was, alike in England and Scotland, the language in which state affairs were generally conducted."Tytler's History of Scotland, i. 75. CHAPTER III. OVERTHROW OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE BY THE CRUSADERS SECTION I. -THE CRUSADES THE Crusades are among the great events, in the progress of European civilisation, from which it is usual to trace the new social combinations that changed the position of the mass of the people in relation to their sovereigns and the ruling classes. The feudal system was certainly so much modified by their consequences, that their history forms an important link in the chain of events connecting the aristocratic institutions of the conquerors of the Roman empire with the democratic political laws of modern Europe. In the West, the Crusades were productive of much good; but they were the cause of unmixed evil, in the East, to the Christian population. During the early period, while the force of the Crusaders was greatest, and religious enthusiasm directed their conduct, they respected the Byzantine empire as a Christian state, and treated the Greeks as a Christian people. The earlier armies passed through the empire like hurricanes, producing widespread but only temporary desolation. But in later times, when ambition, fashion, and the hope of gain made men Crusaders, avarice and intolerance exerted more influence over their conduct than religion and a sense of justice. The Crusades must, consequently, be examined under two different aspects in § 1. CHAP. III. order to be correctly appreciated. In the East, they offer little beyond the records of military incursions of undisciplined invaders, seeking to conquer foreign lands by the sword, and to maintain possession of them by the singular combinations of the feudal system. To the Christians of Greece and Syria, the Latins appeared closely to resemble the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards. Viewed, therefore, as the actions of the Crusaders must have been by the Eastern nations, the results of their expeditions were so inadequate to the forces brought into the field, that the character of the Western nations suffered for ages after, and the Franks were long regarded with contempt as well as hatred both by Christians and Mussulmans. With armies far exceeding in number those of the early Saracens who subdued Asia, Africa, and Spain, and much greater than those of the Seljouk Turks, who had recently made themselves masters of great part of Asia, the conquests of the Crusaders were comparatively insignificant and transitory. One striking difference between the Asiatic and European warriors deserves to be noticed, for it formed the main cause of the inefficiency of the latter as conquerors. The Asiatics left untouched the organisation of society among the Christians, Persians, and Hindoos, throughout their wide-extended empires. The changes effected by their conquests in the relations of rich and poor, master and slave, resulted from altered habits gradually arising out of new social exigencies, and were rarely interposed by the direct agency of legislation. But the Crusaders immediately destroyed all the existing order of society, and revolutionised every institution connected with property and the cultivation of the soil. Mankind was forced back into a state of barbarism, which made predial servitude an element of feudal tenures. In the East, the progress of society had already introduced the cultivation of the soil by free agricultural labour before $ 1. the arrival of the Crusaders in Palestine; the Franks CHAP. III. brought back slavery and serfage in their train. The Saracens had considered agricultural labour as honourable; the Franks regarded every useful occupation as a degradation. The Saracens became agriculturists in all their conquests, and were, consequently, colonists who increased in number under certain social conditions. The Franks, on the contrary, were nothing but a feudal garrison in their Eastern possessions; so that, as soon as they had reduced the cultivators of the soil to the condition of serfs, they were themselves subjected to the operation of that law of population which, like an avenging Nemesis, is perpetually exterminating every class that dares to draw a line of separation between itself and the rest of mankind. Thus the system of government introduced by the Crusaders, in their Asiatic conquests, contained within itself the causes of its own destruction. The Crusades are the last example of the effects of that mighty spirit of emigration and adventure that impelled the Goths, Franks, Saxons, and Normans to seek new possessions and conquer distant kingdoms. The old spirit of emigration in its military form, engrafted on the passion for pilgrimages in the Western church, was roused into religious enthusiasm by many coincident circumstances. The passion for pilgrimages, though of ancient date, received great extension in the eleventh century; but as early as the fourth, the conduct of the numerous pilgrims who, in the abundance of the ancient world, went on their way to Palestine feasting and revelling, had scandalised St Gregory of Nyssa. The great increase of pilgrimages in the eleventh century was connected with. the idea then prevalent, that the thousand years of the imprisonment of Satan mentioned in the Apocalypse had expired; and, as the tempter was supposed to be raging over the face of the earth, no place was considered so safe from his intrusion as the holy city of Jerusalem. F |