The Counts of Gruyere Part 1

The Counts of Gruyere.

by Mrs. Reginald de Koven.

PROLOGUE

On the edge of a green plain around which rise the first steps of the immense amphitheatre of the Alps, a little castled city enthroned on a solitary hill watches since a thousand years the eternal and surpa.s.sing spectacle.

Around its feet a river runs, a silver girdle bending northward between pastures green, while eastward over the towering azure heights the sunrise waves its flags of rose and gold.

In the dim hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud, evanescent and unreal.

By the fair light of noonday, sharp and clear upon its eminence, it is like a Durer drawing, ma.s.sed lines of crenelated bastions, sharp-pointed belfreys, and towered gateways completing a mediaeval vignette ideal in composition. Strange as the distant vision seems to the traveler fresh from the rude and time-stained chalets of the mountains, still more surprising is the scene which greets his arrival by the precipitous road, past the double towered gateway, within the city walls. Expressly set it seems for a theatrical _decor_ in its smiling gayety, its faultlessly pictorial effect. Every window in the blazoned houses is blossoming with brightest flowers, as for a perpetual fete. The voices of the people are soft with a strange Italianate patois, and the women at the fountain, the children at their play, the old men sunning themselves beside the deep carved doorways are seemingly living the happy holiday life which belongs to the picture. The one street in the city, opening widely in a long oval _place_, is bounded by stone houses fortified without and bearing suspended galleries for observation and defence, forming thus a continuous rampart along the whole extent of the hillside.

At the eastern extremity of this enclosure beyond the slender belfrey of the Hotel de Ville and the ancient shrine where a great crucifix looks down upon the scene, a flagged pathway rises sharply under a tall clock tower within the enceinte of the castle set at the steep extremity of the ridge. There behind strong walls a terrace looks from a crenelated parapet over the descending sunset plains, a prospect as fair as any in all Italy. Within a second rampart, semi-circular in form, the castle with its interior court looks eastward and southward over the encircling valley with its winding river, up to the surrounding nether heights of the Bernese Oberland. Walls twelve feet in thickness tell the history of its ancient construction, and chambers cut in the ma.s.sive stone foundations recall the rude life of the early knights and va.s.sals who defended this _chateau-fort_ from the Saracen invasion. n.o.ble halls, later superimposed upon the earlier foundations, with stone benches flanking the walls and recessed windows overlooking the jousting court, evoke the glittering days of chivalry and the vision of the sovereign race of counts who here held their court.

Ten centuries have pa.s.sed over this castle on the hill; six told the story of its sovereignty over the surrounding country, but unlike most of the chateaux of Switzerland it has been carefully restored and maintains its feudal character. The caparisoned steeds no longer gallop along the ancient road, the crested knights no longer break their lances in the jousting court; but in the wide street of the little city is heard a speech, and in the valleys and from the hillsides echo herdsmen's songs, which contain Latin and French words, Greek, Saracen and German, a patois holding in solution the long story of the past.

GRUYeRE

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE

Triply woven of the French, German and Italian races, the Swiss nation discovers in its Romand or French strain another triple weave of Celtic-Romand-Burgundian descent.

While the high mountainous regions of eastern Switzerland were early scaled and settled by the Germanic tribes, the western were still earlier inhabited by the ancient Celtic-Helvetians and then civilized and cultivated by the most luxurious of Roman colonies. Resisting first and then happily mingling with their Roman conquerors, the Celtic people were transformed into a Romand race, similar in speech and origin to the French. In the heart of this Romand country was an ancient princ.i.p.ality where the essential qualities of the beauty loving and imaginative races, Roman and Celtic, expressed themselves uniquely. A fountain of Celtic song and legend, a centre of chivalry and warlike power, this princ.i.p.ality is known only to the outer world by the pastoral product which bears its name "Gruyere."

Remarkable in the interest of the unbroken line of its valorous and lovable princes, and in the precious and enchanting race mixture of its brave, laughter-loving people, its supreme historical interest lies in its little recorded and astonishing political significance among the independent feudal princ.i.p.alities of Europe.

When the Teuton barbarians came to devastate the enchanting loveliness of the templed Roman garden which was Switzerland for three idyllic centuries, they stopped at last at the penultimate peaks of the Occidental Alps, at a certain region called _aux fenils_ (_ad fines_), where a glacial stream rushes across the narrow valley of the Griesbach, among the southern mountains of the Bernese Oberland. Thus western or Romand Switzerland preserves a character definitely apart from the eastern, and this barrier across the Bernese valley, unpa.s.sed for a thousand years, still divides the German from the Romand speaking peasantry. To the north and west lies Gruyere, greenest of pastoral countries, uniquely set in a ring of azure heights, where like a lost Provence, the Romand spirit has preserved its eternal youthfulness and charm. Greatly loved by all the Swiss, its annals piously preserved by ancient chroniclers, this country is German only in its eastern rocky portion; but where the castle stands and in all the wide valleys which open towards the setting sun, it is of purest Romand speech and character. Here ruled for six hundred years a sovereign line of counts whose history, a pastoral epic, is melodious with song and legend, and glowing with all the pageantry and chivalry of the middle ages. Although skirted by the great Roman roads, and flanked by outpost towers, Gruyere was never romanized, being settled only in its outlying plains by occasional Gallo-Roman villas, while the interior country, ringed by a barrier of almost inaccessible mountains, was left to the early Helvetian adventurers who had first penetrated its wild forests and its mountain fastnesses. Here, unaffected alike by Roman domination or Teuton destruction, they had set up the altars of their Druid faith and here preserved their ancient customs and their speech.

Here also traveled the adventurous Greek merchants from old Ma.s.silia (Ma.r.s.eilles), leaving in their buried coins and in the Greek words of the Gruyere dialect the impress of their ancient visitation.

A country fit for mysterious rites, for the habitation of the nature deities of the Druid mythology, was Gruyere in those early days. The deep caverns, the "black" lakes, and the terrifying depths of the precipitous defiles through which the mountain streams rushed into marshy valleys, were frequented by wild beasts and birds, and haunted in the imagination of the people by fairies and evil spirits holding unholy commerce for the souls of men. Here until the Teuton invasion the early Celts lived unmolested, when some fugitives from the once smiling cities and the cultivated plains came to join them in the refuge of their mountain homes. Strange to their half-savage brothers were these softened and romanized Celts who had tended the olives and the vines on sunny lake sides, and who in earlier days had mingled in Dionysian revels with Roman maidens with curled locks and painted cheeks. Strange their tales of the white pagan temples, and all the glories of the imperial cities left smouldering in ashes after the Teuton hordes had worked their will. The arduous pioneer life of their predecessors and the task of clearing and cultivating their wild asylum among the mountains and the marshes was now their lot. Adopting slowly the altered speech of these later romanized inhabitants and converted to the Christian faith by Gallo-Roman priests, the indigenous inhabitants finally lost all memory of the teachings of their Druid bards and the firm belief in reincarnation which sent the Celtic warrior laughing to his death; but in the traditions of the peasantry, abounding with nature myths, sorcerers still haunt their mountain caves, fairies and May maidens still flutter about their crystal streams.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHaTEAU]

One more strain, that of the heroes of the Nibelungen, the blond Burgundian giants who had forced the Romans to share with them a portion of their conquered territories, was destined to add height and virile force to the Celto-Roman people of this country. Strangely differing from their ancient enemies the merciless Teutons, these mighty Burgundians, most human of all the vandal hords, in an epic of tragic grandeur rivaling the cla.s.sic tales of mythology, for a century maintained an autonomous and mighty kingdom. Gentle as gigantic, indomitable in war, invading but not destroying, their greatest monarch, Gondebaud, who could exterminate his rival brothers, and enact a beneficient code of laws which forms the basis of the Gallic jurisprudence, was their protagonist and prototype. Beside his figure, looming in the mists of history, is Clothilde, his niece, the proselyting Christian queen, who fled in her ox cart from Geneva to the arms of Clovis the Merovingian, first king of France. Enthroned at Lyons, Gondebaud issued the laws which regulated the establishment of his people in their new domains, which spread over what was later the great French Duchy of Burgundy, the whole extent of occidental Switzerland and Savoy. "Like brothers," it is related by the Latin chroniclers, they mingled with the resident inhabitants, dividing lands and serfs by lot, marrying their daughters, and quickly adopting their language and their Christian faith.

Thus the whole of Romand Switzerland was deeply impregnated with the Burgundian influence, a.s.similating its vigorous race type and ruled by its laws. Although the country later pa.s.sed under the universal domination of Charlemagne, the character of the people was little affected by the distant rule of the great monarch, and when the Carlovingian Empire fell apart and Rodolph I, of the second Burgundian line, crowned himself king in the monastery of St. Maurice, his subjects were of the same race and customs as those of his predecessors.

Differing in blood from the early Burgundian rulers, these Rodolphian kings, allied to the Carlovingian emperors and long governors of lower or Swiss Burgundy, ruled pacifically and under the beloved Rodolph II and his still better loved Queen Berthe, and their son Conrad, resisted the Saracen invasion and preserved for a hundred and fifty years the autonomy of their kingdom. n.o.bles with their serfs and freemen already divided the land, their prerogatives and va.s.salage long since established by the laws of Gondebaud. The Oberland, or Pays-d'en-Haut, Hoch Gau, or D'Ogo, in the German tongue, a country no longer wild but rich in fertile valleys and wooded mountain sides, was given to a Burgundian lord, under the t.i.tle of King's Forester or Grand Gruyer; Count he was or Comes D'Ogo, first lord of the country afterwards called Gruyere. Although Burgundian, the subjects of Count Turimbert were of different races. In the country of Ogo, called Haute Gruyere, they were German, while in the lower northern plains, called Ba.s.se Gruyere, they were Celtic or Celto-Roman. Between these two divisions the mountain torrent of the Sarine rushes through a deep gorge called the Pas de la Tine. For many years the Gallo-Roman peasants feared to penetrate this terrifying barrier between the rising valleys and the frowning heights, until, according to a legend, a young adventurer broke his way through the primeval woods and the rocky depths of the gorge to find out-spread before him the fertile upper plateaux of the Pays-d'en-Haut.

"It happened," so runs another legend, "that the Roman peasants who had pa.s.sed the Pas de la Tine and led their herds along the course of the Sarine, wished to cut their way through the thick forest, but encountered other peasants who spoke a different language. Here peacefully they halted on the hither side of the dividing Griesbach, 'where it touched the limit of the Alamanni.'" (_In ea parte quae facit contra Alamannos._)

CHAPTER II

INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH

Twenty lords of Gruyere made up the line which maintained a singularly kindly and paternal rule over the differing people of their pastoral kingdom; all of one race, and all but the three last in the direct descent from father to son. Six centuries they ruled, distinguished first for their inexhaustible love of life, their knightly valor and their fidelity to the Catholic faith. The first Count Turimbert, with his wife Avana, lived in the first castle belonging to the domain at Castrum in Ogo or Chateau d'Oex. His was the time of good Queen Berthe, who, for defence against the Saracen invasion, built a long series of towers on height after height from Neuchatel to the borders of Lake Leman, many of which, situated in the county of Gruyere, became the property of its ruling family. That Turimbert was of importance among the secular landholders of the tenth century is attested by his partic.i.p.ation in the Plaid of St. Gervais, a tribunal famous as being one of the earliest on record, and held by the Seigneur de la Justice of Geneva. His exchange of lands with Bishop Boson of Lausanne is also recorded in the first of a series of yellow parchments, which in monastic Latin narrate the succeeding incidents of the Gruyere sovereignty and tell the story of the long predominance of the church in Switzerland. Seven centuries before Turimbert, in the period of the Roman domination, a cloister had been founded at St. Maurice D'Agaune, near the great Rhone gateway of the Alps, in memory of the Theban legion who had preferred death to the abjuration of their Christian faith.

Here, three centuries later, the converted Burgundian king, Sigismund, took refuge after the murder of his son, enlarging it into a vast monastery where five hundred monks, singing in relays from dawn to dawn in never ceasing psalmodies, implored heaven for pardon of his crime. In the seventh century came the missionary monks from Ireland, St. Columban and his successor, St. Gall, who built his hermitage on the site of the great mediaeval centre of arts and learning which still bears his name.

At the same time, St. Donat, son of the governor of lower Burgundy, and disciple of Columban, mounted the archiepiscopal throne at Besancon. In his honor the earliest church of the county of Gruyere was erected near the castle of Count Turimbert in the Pays-d'en-Haut. Under the influence of these powerful religious inst.i.tutions, the country was cultivated and the people instructed, but under Rodolph III the second Burgundian kingdom rapidly approached its dissolution. Weakly subservient to the church, and dispossessing himself of his revenues to such an extent that he was forced to beg a small pittance for his daily necessities from his churchly despoilers, it was said of him that "_Onc ne fut roi comme ce roi_." Ceding the whole of the province of Vaud, including part of the possessions of Count Turimbert, to the bishop of Lausanne, the already practically dispossessed monarch named the Emperor Henry II of Germany, as heir to his throne. And although Henry the II was unable to enter into this inheritance during the lifetime of Rodolph, the latter's nephew, the Emperor Conrad the Salique, a.s.sumed control of the kingdom which then was incorporated into the German Empire. Not without devastating wars and desperate opposition on the part of the heirs of the Rodolphian line was the country preserved to the German sovereign, and under his distant rule it became a prey to continuous dissensions between the bishops and the feudal lords.

"Oh, King," appealed the prelates, "rise and hasten to our succour--Burgundia calls thee. These countries lately added to thy dominions are troubled by the absence of their lord. Thy people cry to thee, as the source of peace, desiring to refresh their sad eyes with the sight of their King."

The answer to this appeal was the establishment of the Rectorate of Burgundy under the Count Rudolph of Rheinfelden and his successors, the Dukes of Zearingen, who founded in the borders of ancient Gruyere the two cities of Berne and Fribourg. Between these centres of the rising power of the bourgeoisie arose mutual dissensions and quarrels with the already hostile lords and bishops, and the country was more than ever the scene of wars innumerable.

Still holding the supreme power, the Church alone could bring the peace for which the country longed. At Romont, near the borders of Gruyere, Hughes, Bishop of Lausanne, invoking a great a.s.sembly of prelates, proclaimed the _Treve de Dieu_ before a throng of people carrying palm branches and crying "_Pax, Pax Domini_." Thus in this corner of the world was adopted the law originating in Acquitaine, which prevailed over all Europe and which alone controlled in those strange times the violence and the pillage which was the permitted privilege of the robber bishops and the robber lords. Gruyere and its rulers reflected the influence of the all-powerful hierarchy, and Turimbert and his successors took their part in the great religious society extending over all Europe, where the conservation of faith was of supreme importance, and when men belonged more to the church than to their country.

The possession of the great monasteries surpa.s.sed those of the largest landholders, and Rome with its mighty prelates for the second time became the capital of the world. When Hildebrand the monk, mounting the papal throne as Gregory VII, excommunicated the German Emperor, Henry IV, he placed the imperial crown upon the head of none other than Rudolph of Rheinfelden, the governor of Transjurane Burgundy and of the province of Gruyere. After Henry, forced to submission, had scaled the icy heights of the Alps to prostrate himself before Hildebrand at Canossa, after Rudolph had been killed in battle by Henry's supporter G.o.dfrey de Bouillon, Hildebrand's pupil and successor Urban II, journeying to Clermont in Cisjurane Burgundy, summoned all Europe in torrents of fiery eloquence to rise and deliver the Holy Land from the power of the Saracens. Unmarked in the churchly parchments which alone record the history of these times, were the successors of Turimbert; but in the period of the first Crusade, Guillaume I, of the succeeding and unbroken line of Gruyere counts, appears as the head of a numerous and powerful family preeminent for their loyalty to the church. Among the shining names of chivalry immortalized in the annals of the Holy wars are those of Guillaume, of his son Ulric, chanoine of the Church at Lausanne, and of his nephews Hughes and Turin.

Not with Peter the Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyerian soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard n.o.bles who swelled the fabled hosts of G.o.dfrey de Bouillon. With gifts of lands to churches and to priories and with the blessing of the lord bishop of their county the Gruyere pilgrims, eager to battle for the holy cause, obeyed with ardor the cry of _Dieu le veut, Diex le volt_, and leaving their country, faced without faltering, dangers and distant lands and carried their scarlet banner with its silver crane, bravely among the bravest.

"The young bergeres of Gruyere," so runs the chronicle, "barred the gates of the city to prevent their departure, by force the gates were burst, and the poor maidens wept as they listened to the standard-bearers cry, a hundred times repeated, "_En Avant la Grue, S'agit d'aller, reviendra qui pourra._" How wide is the ocean we must cross," they asked as they galloped down the valleys, "as wide as the lake we must pa.s.s when we go to pray to our Lady of Lausanne?"

Ta.s.so, the poet of the Crusades, so well appreciated the valor of the Swiss soldiers that he chose their leader for the honor of first scaling the walls of Jerusalem.

"Over the moat, on a sudden filled to the brim With a thousand thrown f.a.ggots, and with rolled trees stout and slim, Before all he ventured.

On helmet and buckler poured floods of sulphurous fire.

Yet scatheless he pa.s.sed through the furnace of flame, And with powerful hand throwing the ladder high over the wall, mounted with pride."

Again when the Christians were in want of wood for the catapults and rolling towers with which to scale and batter down resisting walls, Ta.s.so leads this same undaunted servant of de Bouillon into the forest enchanted by the Satanic ally of the Musselmans.

"Like all soldiers I must challenge fate-- Surprises, fears and phantoms know I not.

Floods and roaring monsters, the terrors Of the common herd affright not me!

The last realm of h.e.l.l I would invade, Descending fearless, sword in hand."

Such, according to Ta.s.so, was the spirit of the Swiss Crusaders. Did the banner of Gruyere float with those of Tancred, of Robert of Normandy and of all the flower of the French n.o.blesse over the walls of Jerusalem delivered? No record tells of it. Many of the hundred "beaux Grueriens"

doubtless perished on the holy soil. A fraction only of the host which in mult.i.tudes like the stars and desert sands invaded the east, a.s.sembled for the a.s.sault upon the Holy City. Famine, thirst and pestilence decimated the great armies upon which fell the united cohorts of the oriental powers. Blasphemy and prost.i.tution, the refuge of despair, alternated in the camp of the Crusaders with fanatic visions of visiting archangels, of armed and shining knights descending the slopes of heaven in their defence. From such a phantasmagoria, surpa.s.sing in the historical records all the poetic imaginations of its famous chroniclers, only a few returned to tell the tale. Among these fortunate pilgrims was Guillaume of Gruyere, who, once more safe among his home mountains, ended his life with lavish gifts to the holy church of which he was so preeminent a servant. The priory of Rougemont founded by him upon his return, the church of St. Nicholas in the same region, near the borders of the Griesbach, still exist in testimony of his devotion and preserve the memory of his name and reign. Exemplifying by his deeds the dominating religious exaltation of his time he was allied by marriage with a family equally ill.u.s.trious for its loyalty to the church. His wife, Agathe de Glane, was sister to Pierre and Philippe de Glane, protectors and tutors of the young count of Upper Burgundy, who through his mother's marriage to the duke of Zearingen shared with the latter the rule of the united provinces under the sovereignty of the German Empire. Son of a father done traitorously to death by his own va.s.sals, the young count of Burgundy was himself as basely murdered while at prayer in the church of Payerne by these same va.s.sals, and with him the brothers-in-law of Guillaume de Gruyere, Pierre and Philippe de Glane.

Guillaume de Glane, son and nephew of the murdered protectors of their young suzerain, profoundly moved by the tragedy which had befallen his house, determined to renounce the world and commanding that not one stone should remain of his great castle of Glane dedicated these same stones to the enlargement of the monastery of Hauterive, where, taking the garb of a monk, he finished the remainder of his days. Such was the origin of the power of the great Cistercian monastery which still stands at the junction of the rivers Glane and Sarine in the county of Fribourg. Not content with this unequalled act of piety and renunciation, the insatiable Bishop of Lausanne exacted the cession of every chateau and every rood of land belonging to the family of de Glane, part of which--through the marriage of Agnes to Count Rodolphe I, and of Juliane to Guillaume of the cadet branch of Gruyere--had extended the domain of the latter house. Undeterred by the greed of the bishop, Rodolphe piously preserved the traditions of his predecessors Raimond and Guillaume II, who had founded the monasteries of Humilimont and Hautcret, by continued gifts to the latter as well as to Hauterive.

Yet the robber bishop implacably demanded another act of renunciation from Count Rodolphe, one of serious significance to the future of his house, by which he authorized the transference of the market of the county from Gruyere to the neighboring city of Bulle which belonged to the bishop. The city of Bulle thereafter became the centre of exchange of the county, while Gruyere, although now the _chef-lieu_ of the reigning counts, was permanently deprived of all possibility of progress or enlargement. Thus the city of Bulle, busy and flourishing even to this day, has kept its place in the growing commercial importance of the county, while Gruyere is still the little feudal city of the middle ages, precious historically as it is picturesque, but crystalized in a permanent immobility. Forty marks, scarcely more than the worth of the mess of pottage for which Esau sold his heritage, was the price accepted by Count Rodolphe for the commercial existence of Gruyere.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GATEWAY]

Rodolphe's far more virile successors, Pierre I and Rodolphe II and III, attempted with the support of the people to defy the power of the bishop, and in disregard of the act of their predecessor, to keep up the marche at Gruyere. But the power which could excommunicate an emperor did not hesitate to launch the same formidable curse upon the princes of Gruyere and they were forced to yield. The foundation of the church of St. Theodule at Gruyere and of the rich and venerated convent of the Part Dieu by his daughter-in-law, Guillemette de Grandson (widow of his eldest son Pierre) attested the unabated devotion of the Gruyere house to the Catholic religion.