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The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]». Краткое содержание книги:
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 01
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 02 / (From the Rise of Greece to the Christian Era)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 05 / (From Charlemagne to Frederick Barbarossa)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 06 / (From Barbarossa to Dante)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08 / The Later Renaissance: from Gutenberg to the Reformation
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 09
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 10
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 13
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 14
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 17
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21 / The Recent Days (1910-1914)
Among other spectacular features of his reign Innocent founded the Inquisition, and thus formally divorced the Church from its earlier preaching of universal peace and love. Moreover, he attempted a diversion of the tremendous, wasted power of the crusades. He wanted holy wars fought nearer home, and preached a crusade against John of England. The mere threat brought John to his knees; and Innocent then turned his newfound weapon against the heretics of southern France, the Albigenses. These unfortunate people, having a certain religious firmness wholly incomprehensible to John, refused submission.
The crusade against them became an actual and awful reality. In the name of Christ, men devastated a Christian country. The spirit of persecution thus aroused became rampant in religion and remained so for over half a thousand years. Rebels against the Church accepted its most evil teaching, and in their brief periods of power became torturers and executioners in their turn.
This first of the "religious wars" achieved its purpose. It exterminated or at least suppressed the heresy by exterminating every heretic who dared assert himself. Vast numbers of wholly orthodox Christians perished also, since even they fought against the "crusaders" in defending their homes. War did not change its hideous face because man had presumed to place a blessing on it. Next to Italy, Southern France had been the most cultured land of Europe. The crusaders left it almost a desert. It had been practically independent of the kings at Paris, henceforth it offered them no resistance.
A more excusable direction given by Innocent to the crusading enthusiasm was against the Saracens in Spain. A new and tremendous army of these had come over from Africa to reënforce their brethren, who shared the peninsula with the Spaniards. The Pope's preaching sent sixty thousand crusaders to help the Spaniards against this swarm of invaders, and the Saracens were completely defeated. The battle of Navas de Tolosa, in 1212, settled that Spain was to be Christian instead of Mahometan.[8]
THE LATER CRUSADES
Against the Saracens of the East, however, crusades grew less and less effective. "Geography explains much of history." In Spain the Saracens were weak because far from the centre of their power. In the East the Europeans were at the same disadvantage. For one man who fell in battle in the Holy Land, twenty perished of starvation or disease upon the journey thither. Europe began to realize this. The East no longer lured men with the golden glamour that it held for an earlier generation. Kings had the contrasted examples of Philip Augustus and the heroic Richard to teach them the value of staying at home.
We need glance but briefly at these later crusades. The fourth was undertaken in 1203. Venice contracted to transport its warriors to the Holy Land, but instead persuaded them to join her in an attack upon the decrepit Empire of the East.[9] Constantinople fell before their assault and received a Norman emperor, nor did the religious zeal of these particular followers of the cross ever carry them farther on their original errand. They were content to establish themselves as kings, dukes, and counts in their unexpected empire. Some of the little Frankish states thus created lasted for over two centuries, though the central power at Constantinople was regained by the Greek emperors of the east in 1261.[10]
Meanwhile the patriotic and powerful King Andrew of Hungary led a fifth crusade. The German Emperor, Frederick II, headed a sixth in which, by diplomacy rather than arms, he temporarily regained Jerusalem.[11] For a time this treaty of peace deprived of their occupation the orders of religious knighthood still warring in the East. One of these, the Teutonic Knights, made friends with Frederick, and by his aid its members were transported to the eastern frontier of Germany, where among the Poles and Po-russians (Prussians) they could still find heathen fighting to their taste. From this order sprang the military basis of modern Prussia.[12]
The Seventh and Eighth crusades were the work of the great French King and saint, Louis IX. The enthusiasm which had roused the mass of ordinary men to these vast destructive outpourings was faded. Louis had to coax and persuade his people to follow him, and even his earnest purpose and real ability could not save his expeditions from disastrous failure. In the Seventh Crusade he attacked, not Jerusalem, but Egypt, then the centre of Mahometan power. He was defeated and made prisoner; his army was practically exterminated. Yet by a personal heroism, which shone even more brilliantly in adversity than in success, he has won lasting fame. His captivity disrupted an empire. The mamelukes, the slave soldiers of Egypt, who had fought most valiantly against him, were wakened to a realization of their own power. They overthrew their sultan, and founded an Egyptian government which lasted until Napoleon's time.[13]
After much suffering, Louis was allowed to purchase his freedom and returned to France. There he spent long years of wise government, of noble guidance of his people, and of secret preparations which he dared not avow. At length in his old age he confessed to his astounded nation that he meant to make one more attempt against the Saracens. It was a vow to God, he said, and he begged his people for assistance. The age had outgrown crusades. Perhaps no one man in all Louis' domains believed in the possibility of his success. History scarce presents anywhere a spectacle more pathetic than this last crusade, compelled by the fire of a single enthusiast. In love of him, his soldiers followed him, though with despair at heart; and the weeping crowds who bade them farewell at their ships, mourned them as men already dead. They attempted to attack the Saracens first at Tunis, and there Louis died of fever. The crusades perished with him.[14]
POPE AND EMPEROR
With the wane of the crusading fervor waned also the power of the popes. Innocent had extended his authority by terror and physical force. But men soon ceased to find religious inspiration for such "holy wars," and the calls of later popes fell upon deafened ears. The democratic policy of Innocent's predecessors had rallied all Italy around them; but his successors seem to have failed to recognize their true sources of strength. They abandoned their allies and ruled with autocratic power. Italy became divided, half Guelf, half Ghibelline, Moreover, even Frederick II, the ward whom Innocent had placed on the imperial throne, refused to sanction the encroachments of papal authority over the empire. So the strife of emperor and pope began again, only to terminate with the utter defeat and extermination of the great house of Barbarossa. Their possessions in Southern Italy and Sicily were conferred by the popes upon Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France.
But while the popes were thus temporarily successful in the giant contest against their greatest rival, to such partisan extremities were they driven by the necessities of the struggle, that the awakening world looked at them with doubtful eyes, began to question their spiritual rights and honors, as well as the temporal authority they claimed. In Charles of Anjou the popes soon found that they had but substituted one master for another. Charles was rapidly becoming as obnoxious to Rome as the emperors had ever been, when suddenly the tyranny of his French soldiers roused the Sicilians to desperation, and by the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers[15] the French power in Italy was crushed.