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The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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The towns attained a position of greater importance in the state. For when the king needed money, and all his usual resources, such as taxes and forced contributions of all kinds, were exhausted, he made application to the towns and entered into separate negotiations with them. It was Philip the Fair who, in the year 1302, first convoked the deputies of the towns as a third estate, in conjunction with the clergy and the barons. All indeed that they were in the first instance concerned with was the authority of the sovereign as the power that had convoked them, and the raising of taxes as the object of their convocation; the states nevertheless secured an importance and weight in the kingdom, and as a natural result, an influence on legislation also.
A fact which is particularly remarkable is the proclamation issued by the kings of France, giving permission to the bondsmen on the crown lands to purchase their freedom at a moderate price. In the way we have indicated the kings of France very soon attained great power; while the flourishing state of the poetic art in the hands of the troubadours, and the growth of the scholastic theology, whose especial centre was Paris, gave France a culture superior to that of the other European states, and which secured the respect of foreign nations.
IN ENGLAND
William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, introduced the feudal system into England, and divided the kingdom into fiefs, which he granted almost exclusively to his Norman followers. He himself retained considerable crown possessions; the vassals were under obligation to perform service in the field, and to aid in administering justice; the king was the guardian of all vassals under age; they could not marry without his consent. Only by degrees did the barons and the towns attain a position of importance. It was especially in the disputes and struggles for the throne that they acquired considerable weight.
When the oppressive rule and fiscal exactions of the kings became intolerable, contentions and even war ensued; the barons compelled King John to swear to Magna Charta, the basis of English liberty, i.e., more particularly of the privileges of the nobility. Among the liberties thus secured, that which concerns the administration of justice was the chief; no Englishman was to be deprived of personal freedom, property, or life without the judicial verdict of his peers. Everyone, moreover, was to be entitled to the free disposition of his property. Further, the king was to impose no taxes without the consent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, and barons. The towns, also, favoured by the kings in opposition to the barons, soon elevated themselves into a third estate and to representation in the commons’ house of parliament. Yet the king was always very powerful, if he possessed strength of character: his crown estates procured for him due consideration; in later times, however, these were gradually alienated, given away, so that the king was reduced to apply for subsidies to the parliament.
We shall not pursue the minute and specifically historic details that concern the incorporation of principalities with states, or the dissensions and contests that accompanied such incorporations. We have only to add that the kings, when by weakening the feudal constitution they had attained a higher degree of power, began to use that power against each other in the undisguised interest of their own dominion. Thus France and England carried on wars with each other for a century. The kings were always endeavouring to make foreign conquests; the towns, which had the largest share of the burdens and expenses of such wars, were opposed to them, and in order to placate them the kings granted them important privileges.
THE PAPACY AND FEUDALISM
The popes endeavoured to make the disturbed state of society, to which each of these changes gave rise, an occasion for the intervention of their authority; but the interest of the growth of states was too firmly established to allow them to make their own interest of absolute authority valid against it. Princes and peoples were indifferent to papal clamour urging them to new crusades. The emperor Louis set to work to deduce from Aristotle, the Bible, and the Roman law a refutation of the assumptions of the papal see; and the electors declared at the diet held at Rense in 1338, and afterwards still more decidedly at the imperial diet held at Frankfort, that they would defend the liberties and hereditary rights of the empire, and that to make the choice of a Roman emperor or king valid, no papal confirmation was needed. So, at an earlier date, 1302, on occasion of a contest between Pope Boniface and Philip the Fair, the assembly of the states convoked by the latter had offered opposition to the pope. For states and communities had arrived at the consciousness of independent moral worth.
Various causes had united to weaken the papal authority; the great schism of the church, which led men to doubt the pope’s infallibility, gave occasion to the decisions of the councils of Constance and Bâle, which assumed an authority superior to that of the pope, and therefore deposed and appointed popes. The numerous attempts directed against the ecclesiastical system confirmed the necessity of a reformation. Arnold of Brescia, Wycliffe, and Huss met with sympathy in contending against the dogma of the papal vicegerency of Christ, and the gross abuses that disgraced the hierarchy. These attempts were, however, only partial in their scope. On the one hand the time was not yet ripe for a more comprehensive onslaught; on the other hand the assailants in question did not strike at the heart of the matter, but (especially the two latter) attacked the teaching of the church chiefly with the weapons of erudition, and consequently failed to excite a deep interest among the people at large.
HEGEL ON THE RISE OF MANKIND THROUGH FEUDALISM
But the ecclesiastical principle had a more dangerous foe in the incipient formation of political organisations than in the antagonists above referred to. A common object, an aim intrinsically possessed of perfect moral validity, presented itself to secularity in the formation of states; and to this aim of community the will, the desire, the caprice of the individual submitted itself. The hardness characteristic of the self-seeking quality of “heart,” maintaining its position of isolation—the knotty heart of oak underlying the national temperament of the Germans—was broken down and mellowed by the terrible discipline of the Middle Ages.
The two iron rods which were the instruments of this discipline were the church and serfdom. The church drove the “heart” (Gemüth) to desperation—made spirit pass through the severest bondage, so that the soul was no longer its own; but it did not degrade it to Hindu torpor, for Christianity is an intrinsically spiritual principle and, as such, has a boundless elasticity. In the same way serfdom, which made a man’s body not his own but the property of another, dragged humanity through all the barbarism of slavery and unbridled desire, and the latter was destroyed by its own violence.
It was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated. For barbarism, lust, injustice constitute eviclass="underline" man, bound fast in its fetters, is unfit for morality and religiousness; and it is from this intemperate and ungovernable state of volition that the discipline in question emancipated him. The church fought the battle with the violence of rude sensuality in a temper equally wild and terroristic with that of its antagonist; it prostrated the latter by dint of the terrors of hell, and held it in perpetual subjection, in order to break down the spirit of barbarism and to tame it into repose.