The Thirteenth Part 40

1290.--Decline of the republic of Piza. Aggrandizement of that of Genoa.

1291.--Taking of Ptolemais and Tyre by the Mamelukes.

End of the crusades.

1294.--Decline of the Mogul empire at the death of Kublai-Khan.

1298.--Introduction of an hereditary aristocracy at Venice.

1300.--Foundation of the modern Turkish empire by Ottoman I. First Jubilee proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII.

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APPENDIX II.

TWENTY-SIX CHAPTERS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

I. AMERICA IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

To most people it would seem quite out of the question that a chapter on America in the Thirteenth Century might have been written. One of the most surprising chapters for most readers in the previous edition was that on Great Explorers and the Foundation of Geography, for it was a revelation to learn that Thirteenth Century travelers had antic.i.p.ated all of our discoveries in the Far and in the Near East seven centuries ago. Certain doc.u.ments have turned up, however, which make it very clear that with the same motives as those which urged Eastern travelers, Europeans went just as far towards the West at this time. Doc.u.ments found in the Vatican Archives in 1903 and exhibited at St. Louis in 1904, have set at rest finally and absolutely the long disputed question of the discovery of America by the Nors.e.m.e.n, and in connection with these the story of America in the Thirteenth Century might well have been told. There is a letter from Pope Innocent III., dated February 13, 1206, addressed to the Archbishop of Norway, who held jurisdiction over Greenland, which shows not only the presence of the Nors.e.m.e.n on the American Continent at this time, but also that they had been here for a considerable period, and that there were a number of churches and pastors and large flocks in whom the Roman See had a lively interest. There are Americana from three other Popes of the Thirteenth Century. John XXI. wrote, in 1276, Nicholas III. two letters, one dated January 31, 1279, and another June 9, 1279, and Martin III. wrote 1282. We have inserted on the opposite page a reproduction of a portion of the first Papal doc.u.ment extant relating to America, the letter of Pope Innocent III., taken from "The Norse Discovery of America" (The Norraena Society, N. Y., 1908). The word _Grenelandie_, underscored, indicates the subject. The writing as an example of the chirography of the century is of interest.

II. A REPRESENTATIVE UPPER HOUSE.

In most historical attempts at government by the people it has been recognized that legislation is better balanced if there are two chambers in the law-making body, one directly elected by the people, the other indirectly chosen and representing important vested interests that are likely to make its members conservative. The initiative for legislation comes, as a rule, from the direct representatives of the people, while the upper chamber represses radical law-making or sudden changes in legislative policy, yet does not hamper too much the progress of democracy.

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[Ill.u.s.tration]

PART OF LETTER OF POPE INNOCENT III. MENTIONING GREENLAND.

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During the last few years a crisis in English politics has led to a very general demand for a modification of the status of the House of Lords, while almost similar conditions have led to the beginning at least of a similar demand for the modification of our Senate in this country. Both these upper chambers have come to represent vested interests to too great a degree. The House of Lords has been the subject of special deprecation. The remark is sometimes made that it is unfortunate that England is weighted down by this political incubus, the House of Lords, which is spoken of as a heritage from the Middle Ages. The general impression, of course, is that the English House of Lords, as at present const.i.tuted, comes down from the oldest times of const.i.tutional government in England. Nothing could well be more untrue than any such idea.

The old upper chamber of England, the medieval House of Lords, was an eminently representative body. Out of the 625 or more of members of the English House of Lords at the present time about five hundred and fifty hold their seats by heredity. Only about seventy-five are in some sense elective. At least one-half of these elected peers, however, must be chosen from the hereditary n.o.bility of Ireland and Scotland. Nearly nineteen-twentieths of the membership of the House of Lords, as at present const.i.tuted, owe their place in national legislation entirely to heredity. Until the reformation so-called this was not so. More than one-half of the English House of Lords, a good working majority, consisted of the Lords spiritual. Besides the Bishops and Archbishops there were the Abbots and Priors of monasteries, and the masters of religious orders. These men as a rule had come up from the people. They had risen to their positions by intellectual abilities and by administrative capacity. The abbots and other superiors of religious orders had been chosen by their monks as a rule because, having shown that they knew how to rule themselves, they were deemed most fitting to rule over others.

Even in our day, when the Church occupies nothing like the position in the hearts of the ma.s.ses that she held in the ages of faith, our Catholic Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops, both here and in England, are chosen as members of arbitration boards to settle strikes and other social difficulties, because it is felt that the working cla.s.s has full confidence in them, and that they are thoroughly representative of the spirit of democracy. In England Cardinal Manning served more than once in critical social conditions. In this country we have had a series of such examples. From these we can better understand what the Lords spiritual represented in the English House of Lords. There were abuses, though they were not nearly so frequent as were thought, by which unworthy men sometimes reached such positions, for men abuse even the best things, but in general these clerical members of the House of Lords were the chosen intellectual and moral products of the kingdom. Since they were without families they had {435} less temptation to serve personal interests and, besides, they had received a life-long training in unselfishness, and the best might be expected of them. For an ideal second chamber I know none that can compare with this old English House of Lords of the Middle Ages. How much it was responsible for the foundation of the liberties of which the English-speaking people are deservedly so proud, and which have been treated in some detail in the chapter on Origins in Law, would be interesting to trace.

III. THE PARISH, AND TRAINING IN CITIZENSHIP.

Mr. Toulmin Smith, in his book on "The Parish," and Dom Gasquet, in his volume on "The Parish Before the Reformation," have shown what a magnificent inst.i.tution for popular self-government was the English medieval parish, and how much this contributed to the solution of important social problems and to the creation of a true democratic spirit. Mr. Toulmin Smith calls particular attention to the fact that when local self-government gets out of the hands of the people of a neighborhood personal civic energy goes to sleep. The feeling of mutual responsibility of the men of the place is lost, to the great detriment of their larger citizenship in munic.i.p.ality and nation. In the parish, however, forming a separate community, of which the members had rights and duties, the primal solid basis for government, the parish authorities took charge of the highways, the roads, the paths, the health, the police, the constabulary, and the fires of their neighborhood. They kept, besides, a registry of births and deaths and marriages. When these essentially local concerns are controlled in large bodies the liability to abuse at once becomes easy and political corruption sets in. He mentions, besides many parochial inst.i.tutions, a parochial friendly society for loans on security, parish gilds for insurance, and many other phases of that thoroughly organized mutual aid so characteristic of the Middle Ages.

These parishes became completely organized, so as to be thoroughly democratic and representative of all the possibilities of local self-government under King Edward at the end of the Thirteenth and the beginning of the Fourteenth Century. Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in "After the Great Pillage," tells the story of how the parishes were broken up as a consequence of the confiscation of their endowment during the so-called reformation. The quotation from him may be found in Appendix III. in the section on "How it all stopped."

Toulmin Smith is not so emphatic, but he is scarcely less explicit than Jessopp. "The attempts of ecclesiastical authority to encroach on the civil authorities of the parish have been more successful since the reformation." As a matter of fact, at that time all government became centralized, and complete contradiction though it may seem to be of what is sometimes declared the place of the reformation in the history {436} of human liberty, the genuine democratic inst.i.tutions of England were to a great extent impaired by the reform, and an autocracy, which later developed into an autocratic aristocracy, largely took its place. Out of that England has gradually lifted itself during the Nineteenth Century. Even now, however, as pointed out in the preceding chapter that might have been, the House of Lords is not at all what it was in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries when the majority of its members were Lords spiritual, men who had come up from the ma.s.ses as a rule.

IV. THE CHANCE TO RISE.

We are very p.r.o.ne to think that even though there may have been excellent opportunities for the higher education in the Thirteenth Century and, in many ways, an ideal education of the ma.s.ses, still there was one great social drawback in those times, the lack of opportunity for men of humble birth to rise to higher stations.

Nothing, however, is less true. There probably never was a time when even members of the poorest families might rise more readily or rapidly to the highest positions in the land. The sons of village merchants and village artisans, nay, the sons and grandsons of farmers bound to the soil, could by educational success become clergymen in various ranks, and by attaining a bishopric or the position of abbot or prior of a monastery, reach a seat in the House of Lords. Most of the Lord High Chancellors of England during the Middle Ages--and some of them are famous for their genius as canon and civil lawyers, for their diplomatic abilities and their breadth of view and capacity as administrators--were the sons of humble parents.

Take the single example of Stratford, the details of whose inhabitants' lives, because of the greatness of one of them, have attracted more attention than those of any other town of corresponding size in England. At the beginning of the Fourteenth Century it is only what we would call a village, and it probably did not have 3,000 inhabitants, if, indeed, the number was not less than 2,000. In his book, "Shakespeare the Boy," Mr. Rolfe calls attention to certain conditions that interest us in the old village. He tells us of what happened as a result of the development of liberty in the Thirteenth Century:

"Villeinage gradually disappeared in the reign of Edward VII.

(1327-1337), and those who had been subject to it became free tenants, paying definite rents for house and land. Three natives of the town, who, after the fashion of the time, took their surnames from the place of their birth, rose to high positions in the Church, one becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, and the others respectively Bishops of London and Chichester. John of Stratford and Robert of Stratford were brothers, and Ralph of Stratford was their nephew.

John and Robert were both for a time Chancellors of England, and there is no other instance of two brothers attaining that high office in succession."

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To many people the fact that the avenue to rise was through the Clergy more than in any other way will be disappointing. One advantage, however, that the old people would insist that they had from their system was that these men, having no direct descendants, were less likely to pursue selfish aims and more likely to try to secure the benefit of the Community than are those who, in our time, rise through the legal profession. The Lord High Chancellors of recent time have all been lawyers. Would not most of the world confess that the advantage was with the medieval peoples?

President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton realized sympathetically this great element of saving democracy in the Middle Ages, and has paid worthy tribute to it. He said: "The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church--from that great church, that body which we now distinguish from other church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of Christendom, and every chancellery in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men--the priesthood of that great and then dominant church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."

V. INSURANCE.

Insurance is usually supposed to be a modern idea representing one of those developments of the capitalization of mutual risks of life, property, and the like that have come as a consequence of modern progress. The insurance system of the Middle Ages, the organization of which came in the Thirteenth Century, is therefore extremely interesting. It was accomplished, as was every form of co-operation and co-ordination of effort, through special gilds or through the trade or merchant gilds. Among the objects of the gilds enumerated by Toulmin Smith is insurance against loss by fire. This was paid through the particular gild to which the merchant belonged, or in the case of the artisan through a special gild which he joined for the purpose.

Provision was made, however, for much more than insurance by fire. Our fire insurance companies are probably several centuries old, so also are our insurance arrangements against shipwreck. Other features of insurance, however, are much more recent. Practically all of these were in active existence during the Middle Ages, though they disappeared with the so-called reformation, and then {438} did not come into existence again for several centuries and, indeed, not until our own time.

The old gilds, for instance, provided insurance against loss from flood, a feature of insurance that has not, so far as I know, developed in our time, against loss by robbery (our burglary insurance is quite recent), against loss by the fall of a house, by imprisonment, and then also insurance against the loss of cattle and farm products. All the features of life insurance also were in existence. The partial disability clauses of life or accident insurance policies are recent developments. In the old days there is insurance against the loss of sight, against the loss of a limb, or any other form of crippling. The deaf and dumb might be insured so as to secure an income for them, and corresponding relief for leprosy might be obtained; so that, if one were set apart from the community by the law requiring segregation of lepers, there might be provision for food and lodging, even though productive work had become impossible. In a word, the insurance system of the Middle Ages was thoroughly developed. It was not capitalistic. The charges were only enough to maintain the system, and not such as to provide large percentage returns on invested stock and on bonds, and the acc.u.mulation of huge surpluses that almost inevitably lead to gross abuses. What is best in our modern system of insurance is an imitation of the older methods. Certain of the trade insurance companies which a.s.sume a portion of the risk on mills, factories and the like, are typical examples. They know the conditions, enforce proper precautions, keep an absolute check on suspicious losses, acc.u.mulate only a moderate surplus and present very few opportunities for insurance abuses. The same thing is true for the fraternal societies that conduct life insurance. When properly managed they represent the lowest possible cost and the best efficiency with least opportunities for fraud and without any temptations to interfere with legislation and any allurements for legislators to spend their time making strike and graft bills instead of doing legislative work.

VI. OLD AGE PENSIONS.

This generation has occupied itself much with the question of old age pensions. Probably most people feel that this is the first time in the world's history that such arrangements have been made. The movement is supposed to represent a recent development of humanitarian purpose, and to be a feature of recent philanthropic evolution. It is rather interesting, in the light of that idea, to see how well they accomplish this same purpose in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. In our time it has been a government affair, with all the possibilities of abuse that there are in a huge pension system, and surely no country knows it better than we do here in America. The old countries, Germany and France, have established a contributing {439} system of pension. This was the model of their system of caring for the old and the disabled in the Middle Ages. Toulmin Smith cites a rule of one of the gilds which gives us exactly the status of the old age disability pension question. After a workman had been seven years a member, the gild a.s.sured him a livelihood in case of disability from any cause.

When we recall that employer as well as employee as a rule belonged to the gild and this was a real mutual organization in which there was a sharing of the various risks of life, we see how eminently well adapted to avoid abuses this old system was. Where the pensioners appeal to a government pension system, abuses are almost inevitable.

There is the constant temptation to exploit the system on the part of the pensioners, because they have the feeling that if they do not, others will. Then the investigation of each particular case is difficult, and favoritism and graft of various kinds inevitably finds its way in. Where the pension is paid by a small body of fellow workmen, the investigation is easy, the temptation to exploit does not readily find place, and while abuses are to some extent inevitable, these are small in amount, and not likely to be frequent. Friends and neighbors know conditions, and men are not pauperized by the system, and if, after an injury that seemed at first so disabling as to be permanent, the pensioner should improve enough to be able to get back to work, or, at least, to do something to support himself, the system is elastic enough so that he is not likely to be tempted to continue to live on others rather than on his own efforts.

VII. THE WAYS AND MEANS OF CHARITY--ORGANIZED CHARITY.

Most of us would be apt to think that our modern methods of obtaining funds for charitable purposes represented definite developments, and that at least special features of our collections for charity were our own invention. In recent years the value of being able to reach a great many people even for small amounts has been particularly recognized. "Tag day" is one manifestation of that. Everyone in a neighborhood is asked to contribute a small amount for a particular charitable purpose, and the whole collection usually runs up to a snug sum. Practices very similar to this were quite common in the Thirteenth Century. As in our time, it was the women who collected the money. A rope, for instance, was stretched across a marketplace, where traffic was busy, and everyone who pa.s.sed was required to pay a toll for charity. Occasionally the rope was stretched across a bridge and the tolls were collected on a particular day each year. Other forms of charitable acc.u.mulation resembled ours in many respects.

Entertainments of various kinds were given for charity, and special collections were made during the exhibition of mystery plays {440} partly to pay the expenses of the representation, and the surplus to go to the charities of the particular gild.

Most of the charity, however, was organized. Indeed it is the organization of charity during the Thirteenth Century that represents the best feature of its fraternalism. The needy were cared for by the gilds themselves. There were practically no poorhouses, and if a man was willing to work and had already shown this willingness, there were definite bureaus that would help him at least to feed his family while he was out of work. This system, however, was flexible enough to provide also for the ne'er-do-wells, the tramps, the beggars, but they were given not money, but tokens which enabled them to obtain the necessaries of life without being able to abuse charity. The committees of the gilds consulted in various ways among themselves and with the church wardens so as to be sure that, while all the needy were receiving help, no one was abusing charity by drawing help from a number of different quarters. Of course, they did not have the problem of large city life that we have, and so their comparatively simple organization of charity sufficed for all the needs of the time, and at the same time antic.i.p.ated our methods.

VIII. SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES.

In the first edition of this book I called attention to the fact, that science, even in our sense of physical science, was, in spite of impressions to the contrary, a favorite subject for students and teachers in the early universities. What might have been insisted on, however, is that these old universities were scientific universities resembling our own so closely in their devotion to science as to differ from them only in certain unimportant aspects. Because the universities for three centuries before the Nineteenth had been occupied mainly with cla.s.sical studies, we are p.r.o.ne to think that these were the main subjects of university teaching for all the centuries before. Nothing could well be less true. The undergraduate studies consisted of the seven liberal arts so-called, though these were largely studied from the scientific standpoint. The quotation from Prof. Huxley (Appendix III., Education) makes this very clear.

What we would now call the graduate studies consisted of metaphysics, in which considerable physics were studied, astronomy, medicine, above all, mathematics, and then the ethical sciences, under which were studied what we now call ethics, politics and economics. The picture of these medieval universities as I have given them in my lecture on Medieval Scientific Universities, in "Education, How Old the New,"

makes this very clear. The interests and studies were very like those of our own time, only the names for them being different. Nature-study was a favorite subject, and, as I have pointed out in "The Popes and Science," Dante must be considered as a great nature student, for he was able to draw the most exquisite figures from details of knowledge of living things with which few {441} poets are familiar. The books of the professors of the Thirteenth Century which have been preserved, those of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others, make it very clear that scientific teaching was the main occupation of the university faculties, while the preservation of these huge tomes by the diligent copying of disciples shows how deeply interested were their pupils in the science of the time.