A Source Book of Mediaeval History Part 53

[567] Isabella was the wife of Edward II., who reigned in England from 1307 until his deposition in 1327.

[568] Louis X. (the Quarrelsome) reigned 1314-1316; Philip V. (the Long), 1316-1322; and Charles IV. (the Fair), 1322-1328. Louis and Charles were very weak kings, though Philip was vigorous and able.

[569] The French Court of Twelve Peers did not const.i.tute a distinct organization, but was merely a high rank of baronage. In the earlier Middle Ages, the number of peers was generally twelve, including the most powerful lay va.s.sals of the king and certain influential prelates. In later times the number was frequently increased by the creation of peers by the crown.

[570] In 1317, after the accession of Philip IV., an a.s.sembly of French magnates (such as that which disposed of the crown in 1328) laid down the general rule that no woman should succeed to the throne of France. This rule has come to be known as the Salic Law of France, though it has no historical connection with the law of the Salian Franks against female inheritance of property, with which older writers have generally confused it [see p. 67, note 1]. The rule of 1317 was based purely on grounds of political expediency. It was announced at this particular time because the death of Louis X. had left France without a male heir to the throne for the first time since Hugh Capet's day and the barons thought it not best for the realm that a woman reign over it. Between 1316 and 1328 daughters of kings were excluded from the succession three times, and though in 1328, when Charles IV. died, there had been no farther legislation on the subject, the principle of the misnamed Salic Law had become firmly established in practice. In 1328, however, when the barons selected Philip of Valois to be regent first and then king, they went a step farther and declared not only that no woman should be allowed to inherit the throne of France but that the inheritance could not pa.s.s through a woman to her son; in other words, she could not transmit to her descendants a right which she did not herself possess. This was intended to cover any future case such as that of Edward III.'s claim to inherit through his mother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV. The action of the barons was supported by public opinion in practically all France--especially since it appeared that only through this expedient could the realm be saved from the domination of an alien sovereign.

[571] Philip of Valois was a son of Charles of Valois, who was a brother of Philip IV. The line of direct Capetian descent was now replaced by the branch line of the Valois. The latter occupied the French throne until the death of Henry III. in 1589.

[572] James van Arteveld, a brewer of Ghent, was the leader of the popular party in Flanders--the party which hated French influence, which had expelled the count of Flanders on account of his services to Philip VI., and which was the most valuable English ally on the continent. Arteveld was murdered in 1345 during the civil discord which prevailed in Flanders throughout the earlier part of the Hundred Years' War.

[573] These were towns situated near the Franco-Flemish frontier. They had been lost by Flanders to France and a.s.sistance in their recovery was rightly considered by the German advisers of Edward as likely to be more tempting to the Flemish than any other offer he could make them.

[574] That is, the papal court.

[575] Robert of Artois was a prince who had not a little to do with the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War. After having lost a suit for the inheritance of the county of Artois (the region about the Somme River) and having been proved guilty of fabricating doc.u.ments to support his claims, he had fled to England and there as an exile had employed every resource to influence Edward to claim the French throne and to go to war to secure it.

[576] In northeastern Flanders.

[577] That is, June 23. The English fleet was composed of two hundred and fifty vessels, carrying 11,000 archers and 4,000 men-at-arms.

[578] Edward III.'s queen was Philippa, daughter of the count of Hainault.

[579] In reality, until five o'clock in the evening, or about nine hours in all.

[580] The tide of battle was finally turned in favor of the English by the arrival of reinforcements in the shape of a squadron of Flemish vessels. The contest was not so one-sided or the French defeat so complete as Froissart represents, yet it was decisive enough, as is indicated by the fact that only thirty of the French ships survived and 20,000 French and Genoese were slain or taken prisoners, as against an English loss of about 10,000.

[581] June 24, 1340.

[582] As appears from Froissart's account (see p. 431), the king, on the advice of some of his knights, decided at one time to postpone the attack until the following day; but, the army falling into hopeless confusion and coming up unintentionally within sight of the English, he recklessly gave the order to advance to immediate combat. Perhaps, however, it is only fair to place the blame upon the system which made the army so unmanageable, rather than upon the king personally.

[583] That is, the plain east of the village of Crecy.

[584] The king's eldest son, Edward, generally known as the Black Prince.

[585] Abbeville was on the Somme about fifteen miles south of Crecy.

[586] This incident very well ill.u.s.trates the confusion and lack of discipline prevailing in a typical feudal army.

[587] Edward, the Black Prince, eldest son of the English king.

[588] The Emperor Henry VII., 1308-1314.

[589] Sir Thomas Norwich.

[590] Limoges, besieged by the duke of Berry and the great French general, Bertrand du Guesclin, had just been forced to surrender. It was a very important town and its capture was the occasion of much elation among the French. Treaties were entered into between the duke of Berry on the one hand and the bishop and citizens of Limoges on the other, whereby the inhabitants recognized the sovereignty of the French king. It was the news of this surrender that so angered the Black Prince.

[591] A force of 3,200 men was led by the Black Prince from the town of Cognac to undertake the siege of Limoges. Froissart here enumerates a large number of notable knights who went with the expedition.

[592] The Limousin was a district in south central France, southeast of Poitou.

[593] Limoges was now in the hands of three commanders representing the French king. Their names were John de Villemur, Hugh de la Roche, and Roger de Beaufort.

[594] Here follows a minute enumeration of the districts, towns, and castles conceded to the English. The most important were Poitou, Limousin, Rouergne, and Saintonge in the south, and Calais, Guines, and Ponthieu in the north.

[595] That is, King John II. and the regent Charles.

[596] The enormous ransom thus specified for King John was never paid.

The three million gold crowns would have a purchasing power of perhaps forty or forty-five million dollars to-day. On the strength of the treaty provision John was immediately released from captivity. With curious disregard of the bad conditions prevailing in France as the result of foreign and civil war he began preparations for a crusade, which, however, he was soon forced to abandon. In 1364, attracted by the gayety of English life as contrasted with the wretchedness and gloom of his impoverished subjects, he went voluntarily to England, where he died before the festivities in honor of his coming were completed.

[597] Throughout the Hundred Years' War the English had maintained close relations with the Flemish enemies of France, just as France, in defiance of English opposition, had kept up her traditional friendship with Scotland. The treaty of Bretigny provided for a mutual reshaping of foreign policy, to the end that these obstacles to peace might be removed.

[598] That is, the death of King Charles VI.

[599] France was not to be dealt with as conquered territory. This article comprises the only important provision in the treaty for safeguarding the interests of the French people.

[600] Charles VI., Henry V., and Philip the Good bind themselves not to come to any sort of terms with the Dauphin, which compact reveals the irreconcilable att.i.tude characteristic of the factional and dynastic struggles of the period. Chapter 6 of the treaty disinherits the Dauphin; chapter 29 proclaims him an enemy of France.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

The question as to when the Middle Ages came to an end cannot be answered with a specific date, or even with a particular century. The transition from the mediaeval world to the modern was gradual and was accomplished at a much earlier period in some lines than in others.

Roughly speaking, the change fell within the two centuries and a half from 1300 to 1550. This transitional epoch is commonly designated the Age of the Renaissance, though if the term is taken in its most proper sense as denoting the flowering of an old into a new culture it scarcely does justice to the period, for political and religious developments in these centuries were not less fundamental than the revival and fresh stimulus of culture. But in the earlier portion of the period, particularly the fourteenth century, the intellectual awakening was the most obvious feature of the movement and, for the time being, the most important.

The renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was not the first that Europe had known. There had been a notable revival of learning in the time of Charlemagne--the so-called Carolingian renaissance; another at the end of the tenth century, in the time of the Emperor Otto III. and Pope Sylvester II.; and a third in the twelfth century, with its center in northern France. The first two, however, had proved quite transitory, and even the third and most promising had dried up in the fruitless philosophy of the scholastics.

Before there could be a vital and permanent intellectual revival it was indispensable that the mediaeval att.i.tude of mind undergo a fundamental change. This att.i.tude may be summed up in the one phrase, the absolute dominance of "authority"--the authority, primarily, of the Church, supplemented by the writings of a few ancients like Aristotle. The scholars of the earlier Middle Ages busied themselves, not with research and investigation whereby to increase knowledge, but rather with commenting on the Scriptures, the writings of the Church fathers, and Aristotle, and drawing conclusions and inferences by reasoning from these accepted authorities. There was no disposition to question what was found in the books, or to supplement it with fresh information. Only after about 1300 did human interests become sufficiently broadened to make men no longer altogether content with the mere process of threshing over the old straw. Gradually there began to appear scholars who suggested the idea, novel for the day, that the books did not contain all that was worth knowing, and also that perchance some things that had long gone unquestioned just because they were in the books were not true after all. In other words, they proposed to investigate things for themselves and to apply the tests of observation and impartial reason.

The most influential factor in producing this change of att.i.tude was the revival of cla.s.sical literature and learning. The Latin cla.s.sics, and even some of the Greek, had not been unknown in the earlier Middle Ages, but they had not been read widely, and when read at all they had been valued princ.i.p.ally as models of rhetoric rather than as a living literature to be enjoyed for the ideas that were contained in it and the forms in which they were expressed. These ideas were, of course, generally pagan, and that in itself was enough to cause the Church to look askance at the use of cla.s.sical writings, except for grammatical or antiquarian purposes. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, due to a variety of causes, the reading of the cla.s.sics became commoner than since Roman days, and men, bringing to them more open minds, were profoundly attracted by the fresh, original, human ideas of life and the world with which Vergil and Horace and Cicero, for example, overflowed. It was all a new discovery of the world and of man, and from the _humanitas_ which the scholars found set forth as the cla.s.sical conception of culture they themselves took the name of "humanists," while the subjects of their studies came to be known as the _litterae humaniores_. This first great phase of the Renaissance--the birth of humanism--found its finest expression in Dante and Petrarch, and it cannot be studied with better effect than in certain of the writings of these two men.

79. Dante's Defense of Italian as a Literary Language

Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265. Of his early life little is known. His family seems to have been too obscure to have much part in the civil struggles with which Florence, and all Italy, in that day were vexed. The love affair with Beatrice, whose story Boccaccio relates with so much zest, is the one sharply-defined feature of Dante's youth and early manhood. It is known that at the age of eighteen the young Florentine was a poet and was winning wide recognition for his sonnets. Much time was devoted by him to study of literature and the arts, but the details of his employments, intellectual and otherwise, are impossible to make out. In 1290 occurred the death of Beatrice, which event marked an epoch in the poetical lover's life. In his sorrow he took refuge in the study of such books as Boethius's _Consolations of Philosophy_ and Cicero's _Friendship_, and became deeply interested in literary, and especially philosophical, problems. In 1295 he entered political life, taking from the outset a prominent part in the deliberations of the Florentine General Council and the Council of Consuls of the Arts. He a.s.sumed a firm att.i.tude against all forms of lawlessness and in resistance to any external interference in Florentine affairs. Owing to conditions which he could not influence, however, his career in this direction was soon cut short and most of the remainder of his life was spent as a political exile, at Lucca, Verona, Ravenna, and other Italian cities, with a possible visit to Paris. He died at Ravenna, September 14, 1321, in his fifty-seventh year.

Dante has well been called "the Ja.n.u.s-faced," because he stood at the threshold of the new era and looked both forward and backward. His _Divine Comedy_ admirably sums up the mediaeval spirit, and yet it contains many suggestions of the coming age. His method was essentially that of the scholastics, but he knew many of the cla.s.sics and had a genuine respect for them as literature. He was a mediaevalist in his attachment to the Holy Roman Empire, yet he cherished the purely modern ambition of a united Italy. It is deeply significant that he chose to write his great poem--one of the most splendid in the world's literature--in the Italian tongue rather than the Latin. Aside from the fact that this, more than anything else, caused the Tuscan dialect, rather than the rival Venetian and Neapolitan dialects, to become the modern Italian, it evidenced the new desire for the popularization of literature which was a marked characteristic of the dawning era. Not content with putting his greatest effort in the vernacular, Dante undertook formally to defend the use of the popular tongue for literary purposes. This he did in _Il Convito_ ("The Banquet"), a work whose date is quite uncertain, but which was undoubtedly produced at some time while its author was in exile. It is essentially a prose commentary upon three _canzoni_ written for the honor and glory of the "n.o.ble, beautiful, and most compa.s.sionate lady, Philosophy." In it Dante sought to set philosophy free from the schools and from the heavy disputations of the scholars and to render her beauty visible even to the unlearned. It was the first important work on philosophy written in the Italian tongue, an innovation which the author rightly regarded as calling for some explanation and defense. The pa.s.sage quoted from it below comprises this defense.

Similar views on the n.o.bility of the vulgar language, as compared with the Latin, were later set forth in fuller form in the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquentia_.

Source--Dante Alighieri, _Il Convito_ ["The Banquet"], Bk. I., Chaps. 5-13 _pa.s.sim_. Translated by Katharine Hillard (London, 1889), pp. 17-47 _pa.s.sim_.

[Sidenote: Reasons for using the Italian]

V. =1.= This bread being cleansed of its accidental impurities,[601] we have now but to free it from one [inherent] in its substance, that is, its being in the vulgar tongue, and not in Latin; so that we might metaphorically call it made of oats instead of wheat. And this [fault] may be briefly excused by three reasons, which moved me to prefer the former rather than the latter [language]. The first arises from care to avoid an unfit order of things; the second, from a consummate liberality; the third, from a natural love of one's own tongue. And I intend here in this manner to discuss, in due order, these things and their causes, that I may free myself from the reproach above named.