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Chapter 10. The Close Of The Middle Ages.

Many great regions are discovered

Which to late age were ne’er mentioned,

Who ever heard of th’ Indian Peru

Or who, in venturous vessel, measured

The Amazon huge river, now found true?

Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?

Yet all these were when no man did them know,

Yet have from wisest ages hidden been.

And later times things more unknown shall show.

Why then should witless man so much misween,

That nothing is but that which he hath seen.

—Spenser, Faerie Queene.

No period in the history of the Christian Church has a more clear date set for its close than the Middle Ages. In whatever light the Protestant Reformation is regarded there can be no doubt that a new age began with the nailing of the Theses on the church doors in Wittenberg. All attempts to find another date for the beginning of modern history have failed, whether the date be the reign of Philip the Fair or the Fall of Constantinople,1453, or the invention of printing. Much as the invention of movable type has done for the spread of intelligence, the personality and conduct of Luther must always be looked upon as the source from which the new currents of human thought and action in Western Europe emanated.1337

Not so easy, however, is it to fix a satisfactory date for the opening of the Middle Ages. They have been dated from Charlemagne, the founder of the Holy German Empire, the patron of learning, the maker of codes of law. The better starting-point is the pontificate of Gregory the Great, who is well called the last of the Fathers and the first of the mediaeval popes. From that date, the rift between the Eastern and the Western Churches, which was already wide as a result of the arrogance of the bishops of Rome, rapidly grew to be unhealable.

The Middle Ages, with their limits, fall easily into 3 periods, but it must be confessed that the first, extending from 600–1050, is a period of warring elements, with no orderly development. Hildebrand properly opens the Middle Ages as a period of great ideas, conscious of its power and begetting movements which have exerted a tremendous influence upon the history of the Church. From the moment that monk entered Rome, the stream of ecclesiastical affairs proceeded on its course between well-defined banks. During the 500 years that followed, the voice of the supreme pontiff was heard above all other voices and controlled every movement emanating from the Church. In this period, the doctrinal system, which is distinctively known as the mediaeval, came to its full statement. It was the period of great corporate movements, of the Crusades, the Mendicant orders, of the cathedrals and universities, of the canon law and the sacramental combination and of the Reformatory councils.

The third period of the Middle Ages, which this volume traverses, is at once the product of the former period of Gregory VII. and Innocent III. and, at the same time, the germinative seed-plot of new forces. The sacerdotal keeps its hold and the papacy remains the central tribunal and court of Europe, but protests were heard—vigorous and startling from different quarters, from Prag, Paris, Oxford—which, without overthrowing old institutions, shook the confidence in their Apostolic appointment and perpetuity. These last two centuries of the mediaeval world betray no consuming passion like the Crusades, for all efforts of the pope to stir the dead nerves of that remarkable impulse were futile. And Pius II., looking from the bluffs of Ancona out upon the sea in the hope of discerning ships rigged to undertake the reconquest of the East, furnishes a pathetic spectacle of an attempt to call forth energies to achieve the dreams of the past, when for practical minds the illusion itself has already disappeared.

The Reformatory councils endeavored to undo what Hildebrand and Innocent III. had built up and Thomas Aquinas had sanctioned, the control of the Church and society by the will of the supreme pontiff. The system of the Schoolmen broke down. Wyclif, himself endowed with scholastic acuteness, belonged to that modern class of men who find in practical considerations a sufficient reason to ignore the contentions of dialectic philosophy. And, finally, the Renaissance completely set aside some of the characteristic notions of the Middle Ages, stirring the interest of man in all the works of God, and honoring those who in this earthly sphere of action wrought out the products of intellectual endeavor in literature and art, on the platform and in the department of state.

This last period of the Middle Ages appears to the student of general history as a period of presentiments—and efforts on the part of scattered thinkers, to reach a more free and rational mode of thought and living than the mode they had inherited from the past. The period opening with Hildebrand and extending to Boniface VIII. furnished more imposing personalities,—architects compelling by the force of intellectual assertion,—but fewer useful men. It created a dogmatic unity and triumphed by a policy of force, but the rights of the individual and the principle of liberty of thought and conscience, with which God has chosen to endow mankind, it could not consign to permanent burial.

However, in spite of the efforts put forth in the closing period of the Middle Ages to shake off the fetters of the rigid ecclesiastical compulsion, it failed. The individual reformers and prophets prepared the way for a new time, but were unable to marshal forces enough in their own age to inaugurate the new order. This it was the task of Luther to do.

In a retrospect of the marked features of the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, we are struck first of all with the process by which the nations of Western Europe became consolidated until they substantially won the limits which they now occupy. The conquest of the weary Byzantine empire seemed to open the way for the Turks into all Europe. The acropolis of Athens was occupied in 1458. Otranto on the Italian coast was seized and Vienna itself threatened. All Europe felt as Luther did when he offered the prayer, "from the murderous cruelty of the Turk, Good Lord deliver us."  Much as the loss of the city on the Bosphorus was lamented at this time, it cannot but be felt that there was no force in Eastern Christendom which gave any promise of progress, theological or civil.

The papacy, claiming to be invested with plenitude of authority, abated none of its claims, but by its history proved that those very claims are fictitious and have no necessary place in the divine appointment.

Seldom has a more impressive spectacle been furnished than was furnished by the Reformatory councils. Following the Avignon period and the age of the papal schism, they struggled to correct the abuses of the papal system and to define its limitations. The first oecumenical council held on German soil, the Council of Constance, made such an authoritative decision. Its weight was derived from its advocates, the most distinguished theologians and canonists of the time, and the combined voice of the universities and the nations of Latin Christendom. But the decision proved to be no stronger than a spider’s web. The contention, which had been made by that long series of pungent tracts which was opened with the tract of Gelnhausen, was easily set aside by the dexterous hand of the papacy itself. Gelnhausen had declared that the way to heal the troubles in the papal household was to convoke a general council.1338  To this mode of statement Pius II. opposed his bull, Execrabilis, and his successors went on untroubled by the outcry of Latin Christendom for some share in the government of the Church.

But the appeal for a council was an ominous portent. It had been made by Philip the Fair and the French Parliament,1303. It was made by the Universities of Paris and Oxford and the great churchmen of France. It was made by Wyclif, by Huss and Savonarola. In vain, to be sure, but the body of the Church was thinking and the arena of free discussion was extending.

The most extravagant claims of the papacy still had defenders. Augustus Triumphus and Alvarus Pelayo declared there could be no appeal from the pope to God, because the pope and God were in agreement. He who looks upon the pope with intent and trusting eye, looks upon Christ, and wherever the pope is, there is the Church. Yea, the pope is above canon law. But these men were simply repeating what was current tradition. Dante struck another note, when he put popes in the lowest regions of hell, and Marsiglius of Padua, when he cast doubt upon Peter’s ever having been in Rome and insisted that the laity are also a part of the Church.

The scandalous lives of the popes whose names fill the last paragraph of the history of the Middle Ages would have excluded them from decent modern circles and exposed them to sentence as criminals. They were perjurers, adulterers. Avarice, self-indulgence ruled their life. They had no mercy. The charges of murder and vicious disease were laid to their door. They were willing to set the states of Italy one over against the other and to allow them to lacerate each other to extend their own territory or to secure power and titles for their own children and nephews. Luther was not far out of the way when, in his Appeal to the German Nobility, he declared "Roman avarice is the greatest of robbers that ever walked the earth. All goes into the Roman sack, which has no bottom, and all in the name of God."  In all history, it would be difficult to discover a more glaring inconsistency between profession and practice than is furnished by the careers of the last popes of the Middle Ages.

Upon freedom of thought, the papacy continued to lay the mortmain of alleged divine appointment. Dante’s De monarchia was burnt by John XXII. The evangelical text-book, the Theologia Germanica has been put on the index. Erasmus’ writings were put on the Index. Curses were hurled against a German emperor by Clement VI. which it would almost be sacrilege to repeat with the lips. Eckart was declared a heretic. Wyclif’s bones were dug up and cast into the flames. Huss was burnt. Savonarola was burnt. And, from nameless graves in Spain and Germany rises the protest against the papacy as a divine institution.

Valla said again and again that the papacy was responsible for all the misfortunes of Italy, its worst enemy. To such a low plane was that institution brought that the Emperor Maximilian I. seriously considered having himself elected pope and combining in himself the two sovereignties of Church and state. That such a thought was possible is proof of the actual state of affairs. A most Catholic historian, Janssen (III. 77), says: "The court of Leo X., with its extravagant expenditure in card-playing, theatres and all manner of worldly amusements, was still more flagrantly opposed to the position of chief overseer of the Church than the courts of the German ecclesiastical princes, notably Albrecht of Mainz. The iniquity of Rome exceeded that of the ecclesiastical princes of Germany."  And was not the chief idea, which some of the aspirants after the highest office in Christendom had in mind, well embodied in the words with which Leo followed his election, "Let us enjoy the papacy"?  If the lives of these latter popes were unworthy, their treatment of the spiritual prerogatives was sacrilegious. Rome encouraged the Crusades but sent no Crusaders. In Rome everything was for sale. The forgiveness of sins itself was offered for money.

And, within papal circles, there was no movement towards reform. As well might men have looked for a burnt field to furnish food. It is not improbable that the very existence of the papacy was saved by the Reformation. This is the view to which Burckhardt chooses to give expression twice in the same work.1339  It discredited by its incumbents every high claim asserted for it. And yet, with abounding self-confidence, in the last hours of the Middle Ages, it solemnly reaffirmed the claim of supreme jurisdiction over the souls and bodies of men, the Church and the state. And after the Reformation had begun, Prierias, Master of the palace, declared the pope’s superiority to the Scriptures in these words: "Whoever does not rest upon the doctrine of the Roman Church and the Roman pope as an infallible rule of faith, from which even the Holy Scriptures derive their authority, is a heretic."  And to be a heretic meant to be an outlaw. Prierias was the man who spoke of Luther as "the brute with the deep eyes and strange fantasies."

Forces of another character were working. In quiet pathways, the mystics walked with God and, though they did not repudiate the sacramental system, they called attention to the religion of the heart as the seat of religion. The Imitation of Christ was written once, for all ages. The Church had found its proper definition as the body of the elect and that idea stood in direct antithesis to the theory the hierarchy worked upon. The preaching of the Waldenses had been condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council, but there was a growing popular demand for instruction as well as the spectacle of the mass, and the catechetical manuals laid stress upon the sermon. The Albigenses had been completely blotted out, but the principles of Lollardism and Hussitism continued to flow, though as little rills. The Inquisition was still doing its work, but in Germany schools for all classes of children were being taught. The laity was asserting its rights in the domain of learning and culture. These influences were silently preparing the soil for the new teachings.

In the 15th century, a potent force stirred Europe as Europe had never been stirred by it before,—Commerce. The industrial change, then going on, deserves more than a passing reference as a factor preparing the mind for intellectual and religious innovation. This, at least, is true of the German people. Explorations and the extension of commerce have, in more periods than one, preceded a revival of missionary enterprise. But, of all the centuries, none is so like the 19th as the last century of the Middle Ages,—vital with humanistic forces of all kinds. It was a time of revolution in the methods of trade and the comforts and prices of living. The world could never be again just what it had been before. There was marked restlessness among the artisan and peasant classes. This industrial unrest was adapted to encourage and to beget unrest in things ecclesiastical and to accustom the mind to the thought of change there.

From Italy, whose harbors were the outfitting points for fleets during the Crusades, the centre of trade had shifted to the cities north of the Alps and to the Portuguese coast. Nürnberg, Ulm, Augsburg and Constance in Southern Germany; Bruges, Antwerp and other cities along the lower Rhine and in Flanders; and the cities of the Hanseatic League were bustling marts, turning out new and wonderful products of manufacture and drawing the products of the outside world through London, Lisbon, Lyons and Venice. Energy and enterprise were making Germany rich and her mercantile houses had their representatives and depots in Venice, Antwerp and other ports.1340

Methods of business, such as to-day are suggesting grave problems to the political economist and moralist, were introduced and flourished. Trading companies and monopolies came upon the stage and startled the advocates of the old feudal ways by the extent and boldness of their operations. Trusts flourished in Augsburg and other German cities.1341  Individuals and corporations cornered the import trade, the grain crop, the wine harvest, the silver, copper and iron product, sugar, linen, leather, pepper, even soap, for they used soap also in those days. The Höchstetters, the Ebners and the Fuggers were among the great speculative and trading firms of the age. They carried things with a high hand. Ambrose Höchstetter of Augsburg, for example, one season bought up all the ash wood, another all the grain and another all the wine. Nor was the art of adulteration left for these later, and often discredited, times to practice. They condescended to small things, even to the mixing of brick-dust with pepper. Commodities rose suddenly in price. In Germany, wine rose, in 1510, 49 per cent and grain 32 per cent. Imperial diets took cognizance of these conditions and tried to correct the evils complained of by regulating the prices of goods.1342  Municipalities did the same. Preachers, like Geiler of Strassburg, charged the monopolists with fearing neither God nor man and called upon the cities to banish them. Professors of jurisprudence, for there was at that time no department of social science, inveighed against monopolies as spiders’ webs to ensnare the innocent.1343  It was a fast age. There was no precedent for what was going on. Men sighed for the good old times. Speculation was rampant and the prospect of quick gains easily captivated the people. They took shares in the investment companies and often lost everything. It was noticed that the directors of the companies were able to avoid losses which the common and unsuspecting investor had to bear. The confusion was increased by the readiness of town aldermen and city councillors to take stock in the concerns. It also happened that the great traders, whose ventures involved others in loss, were conspicuous in church affairs.

To the wealth, arising from manufactures and foreign commerce, were added the riches which were being dug up from the newly opened mines of silver, copper and iron in Bohemia and Saxony. Avarice was cried down as the besetting sin of the age and, in some quarters, commerce was denounced as being carried on in defiance of the simplest precepts of the Gospel.1344

With wealth came extravagance in dress and at the table. Municipalities legislated against it and imperial parliaments sought to check it by arbitrary rules. Wimpheling says, table services of gold were not unusual and that he himself had eaten from golden plates at Cologne. Complaint was frequently made at the diets that men were being brought to poverty by their expenditures for dress upon themselves and the expenditures of the female members of their households.

In Germany, peasants were limited to a certain kind of cloth for their outer garments and to a maximum price.1345  The women had their share in making the disturbance and dignified town councils sat in judgment upon the number of gowns and other articles of apparel and ornament the ladies of the day might possess without detriment to the community or hurt to the solvency of their indulgent husbands. The council of Ratisbon, for example, in 1485 made it a rule that the wives and daughters of distinguished burghers should be limited to 8 dresses, 6 long cloaks, 3 dancing gowns, one plaited mantle with not more than 3 sets of sleeves of silk velvet and brocade, 2 pearl hair bands not to cost more than 12 florins, one tiara of gold set with pearls, not more than three veils costing 8 florins each, etc. But why enumerate the whole list of articles?  It is supposable the women conformed, even if they were inclined to criticise the aldermen for not sticking to their legitimate municipal business. Geiler of Strassburg had his word to say for these innovations of an extravagant age, the women with two dresses for a single day, their long trains trailing in the dust, the cocks’ feathers worn in the women’s hats and the long hair falling down over their shoulders. The times were cried down as bad. It is, however, pleasant to recall that a contemporary annalist commended as praiseworthy the habit of bathing at least "once every two weeks."

Among the artisans and the peasants, the unrest asserted itself in strikes and uprisings, strikes for shorter hours, for better food and for better wages. Sometimes a municipality and a gild were at strife for years. Sometimes a city was bereft at one stroke of all the workers of a given craft, as was Nürnberg of her tin workers in 1475. The gilds of tailors are said to have been most given to strikes.

The new social order involved the peasant class in more hardship than any other. The peasants were made the victims of the rapacity and violence of the landowners, who encroached upon their fields and their traditional but unwritten rights, and deprived them of the right to fish and hunt and gather wood in the forests. The Church also came in for its share of condemnation. One-fifth of the soil of Germany was in the possession of convents and other religious establishments and the peasant leaders called upon the monks and priests to distribute their lands. In their marching songs they appealed to Christ to keep them from putting the priests to death. The Peasant War of 1525 was not the product of the abuse of the principle of personal freedom introduced by the Reformation. It was one of a long series of uprisings and it has been said that, if the Reformation had not come and diverted the attention of the people, it is likely Germany would have been shaken by such a social revolution in the 16th century as the world has seldom seen.1346

In England, the restlessness was scarcely less demonstrative and the condition of the laboring classes scarcely less deplorable. Their hardships in the 14th century called forth the rebellion of Watt Tyler. The famous statute of laborers of 1350 fixed the wages of reapers at 8 pence a day; the statute of 1444, a century later, raised it to 5 pence. The laws of 1495, Cunningham says, were intended to keep down the wages of the daily toiler. English legislation was habitually bent on preventing an artificial enhancement of prices. At the very close of the Middle Ages,1515, a regulation fixed the day’s work from 5 in the morning until 7 or 8 in the evening in summer and during the hours of daylight during the winter. Legislation was sought to put a limit on prices against the inflation of combinations. Frauds and adulterations in articles offered for sale, bad work and false weights were officially condemned in 1504. Against the proclivity of the gilds to fix the prices of their wares at unreasonable figures, Henry VII. set himself with determination. With the development of sheep-walks farm hands lost their employment.1347  To the author of Utopia the act of parliament in 1515, fixing wages, seemed to be "nothing else than a conspiracy of the rich against the poor," and, the laboring man was doomed to a life so wretched that even a beast’s life in comparison seemed to be enviable."

The discoveries in the New World and the nautical exploits, which carried Portuguese sailors around the Cape of Good Hope, also stimulated this feeling of restlessness. While the horizon of the natural world was being enlarged and new highways of commerce were being opened, thoughtful men had questions whether the geography of the spiritual world, as outlined in the scholastic systems, did not need revision. The resurrection of the Bible as a popular book stimulated the curiosity and questioning. The Bible also was a new world. The trade, the enterprise, the thought awakened during the last 70 years of the Middle Ages were incomparably more vital than had been awakened by the Crusades and the Crusaders’ tales. When the Reformation came, the chief centres of business in Germany and England became, for the most part, seats of the new religious movement, Nürnberg, Ulm, Augsburg, Geneva, Strassburg, Frankfurt, Lübeck and London.

The Renaissance, as has already been set forth, was another potent factor contributing to the forward impulse of the last century of the Middle Ages. All the faculties of man were to be recognized as worthy of cultivation. Europe arose as out of a deep sleep. Men opened their eyes and saw, as Mr. Taine put it. The Renaissance made the discovery of man and the earth. The Schoolmen had forgotten both. Here also a new world was revealed to view and Ulrich von Hutten, referring to it and to the age as a whole could exclaim, "O century, studies flourish, spirits are awaking. It is a pleasure to live!"