He who would understand the Middle Ages must make a special study of the thirteenth century — one of the landmarks between the ancient and the modern world, one of the most pregnant, most organic, most memorable, in the annals of mankind. It is an epoch (perhaps the last of the centuries of which this can be said) crowded with names illustrious in action, in thought, in art, in religion equally; which is big with those problems, intellectual, social, political, and spiritual that six succeeding centuries have in vain toiled to solve.
A ' Century ' is, of course, a purely arbitrary limit of time. But for practical purposes we can only reckon by years and groups of years. And, as in the biography of a man, we speak of the happy years of a life, or a decade of great activity, so it is convenient to speak of a brilliant ' century,' if we attach no mysterious value to our artificial measure of time. It happens, however, that the thirteenth century not only has a really distinctive character of its own, but that, near to its beginning and to its close, very typical events occurred. In 1198 took place the election of Innocent in tours sofia, the most successful, perhaps the most truly representative name, of all the mediaeval popes. In the year preceding (1197) we may see the Empire visibly beginning to change its spirit with the death of Henry vi., the ferocious son of Barbarossa. In the year following
1 Fortnightly Revieiv, vol. 50, N.s. September 1891. (1199) died Richard Lion-heart, the last of the Anglo- French sovereigns, and, we may say, the last of the genuine Crusader kings, to be succeeded by his brother John, who was happily forced to become an English king, and to found the Constitution of England by signing the Great Charter.
And at the end of the century, its last year (1300) is the date of the ominous 'Jubilee' of the Papacy — the year in which Dante places his great poem—a year which is one of the most convenient points in the memoria technical of modern history. Three years later died Boniface VIII., after the tremendous humiliation which marked the manifest decadence of the Papacy; eight years later began the ' Babylonish Captivity,' the seventy years' exile of the Papacy at Avignon; then came the ruin of the Templars throughout Europe, and all the tragedies and convulsions which mark the reigns of Philip the Fair in France, Edward I in England, and the confusion that overtook the Empire on the death of Henry of Luxembourg, that last hope of imperial ambition. Thus, taking the period between the election of Innocent 111., in 1198, and the removal of the Papacy to Avignon, in 1308, we find a very definite character in the thirteenth century. It would, of course, be necessary to fix the view on Europe as a whole, or rather on Latin Christendom, to obtain any unity of conception; and, obviously, the development and decay of the Church must be the central point, for this is at once the most general and the important element in the common life of Christendom.
Reformation in England and in Germany
Within the limits of the thirteenth century, so understood, a series of striking events and great names is crowded — the growth, culmination, extravagance, and then the humiliation of the Papal See; the eighteen years' rule of Innocent HI., the fourteen years of Gregory ix., the twenty- one of Innocent IV.; the short revival of Gregory x.; the ambition, the pride, the degradation, and shame of Boniface VIII. The great experiment to organise Christendom under a single spiritual sovereign had been made by some of the most aspiring natures, and the most consummate politicians who ever wore mitre had been made and failed. When the Popes returned from Avignon to Rome in 1378, after the seventy years of exile from their capital, it was to find the Catholic world rent with schism, a series of anti-popes, heresy, and the seeds of the Reformation in England and in Germany. Thus the secession to Avignon in the opening of the fourteenth century was the beginning of the end of spiritual unity for Latin Christendom.
At the very opening of the thirteenth century, the diversion of the Crusade to the capture of Constantinople in 1204, and all the incidents of that unholy war, prove that, as a moral and spiritual movement, the era of Godfrey and Tancred, of Peter the Hermit and Bernard of Clair- vaux was ended; and though, for a century or two, kings took the Cross, like St. Louis and our Edward I., in the thirteenth century, or, like our Henry V., in the fifteenth century, talked of so doing, the hope of annihilating Islam was gone for ever, and Christendom, for four centuries, had enough to do to protect Europe itself from the Moslem.
And within a few years of this cynical prostitution of the Crusading enthusiasm in the conquest of Byzantium, the Crusading passion broke out in the dreadful persecution of the Albigenses and the Crusade against heresy of Simon de Montfort. And hardly was the unity of Christendom assured by blood and terror, when the spiritual Crusades of Francis and Dominic begin, and the contagious zeal of the Mendicant Friars restored the force of the Church, and gave it a new era of moral and social vitality.
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