CHAPTER TWO

SURVEY OF CIVILIZATION IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

I. FEUDAL EUROPE, II. CATHOLIC INFLUENCES: CLUNY, CITEAUX, THE BISHOPS, THE POPE. III. A NEW SPIRIT: THE VALUE AND DIGNITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL MAN. IV. NEW FORMS OF ART. V. THE TWELFTH CENTURY ONE OF FRENCH INFLUENCES.

I

TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE CIVILIZATION of the twelfth century is reflected in its philosophy, we must view in a general way the elements of that civilization which are most intimately connected with intellectual life,—namely, political institutions, moral and social ideals, standards of art, and religious beliefs.

These several elements operate in various ways in the different countries of Europe; but in our general survey we shall consider rather the resemblances, without meaning thereby to deny or to belittle the differences. Since it is in France that this civilization produces its choicest fruits, it is there especially that we must seek its most original and coherent forms.

In the political and social orders feudalism had become general. Barons, dukes, earls, and lords lived independently in their own castles and usurped more or less of the sovereign right. Not only did relations of personal loyalty exist between them, but obligations founded upon a free contract bound one man to another, according to some privilege or some land given and received. The one, the vassal, was bound to render service; the other, the lord, was equally bound to protect and defend.

In France, where the new organization appears in its purest form, nothing is more complicated than the scheme of feudalistic relations. At the head, theoretically, but not always practically, stood the king. The greatest lords were vassals of other lords. Were not the feudal relations of Henry II of England and Louis VII of France the starting point for all their wars and quarrels? For, the first became the vassal of the second on the very day he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose duchy was granted by the French king to the English monarch. The particular and local lords were forced to fight against the centralizing tendencies of the kings, and the antagonism of the vassals and the king, their suzerain, was the main feature of French policy in the twelfth century. Particularism remained, but it was on the decline, and the following century witnessed the triumph of the centralizing principle.

A similar development occurred in England. For, that country was so closely connected with France that their combined territories may be called the common soil of the mediaeval civilization. English society, as a whole, had its origin in French soil; at any rate, the seeds were planted in 1066 by William the Conqueror and his French barons, Kings of French blood, who came from Normandy and from Anjou, ruled over the British Isles; but much of their time was spent in their French provinces. French was the court-language; they made provision for burial in the Norman abbey of Caen or the Angevine abbey of Fontevrault; they drew their counsellors from France and favoured the establishment of French clergy and French monks in England. The English King Henry II, the first of the Plantagenet dynasty, was one of the most thorough-going organizers of the age; indeed one might well take him for a contemporary of Philip the Fair of France. Is it then surprising that we find England too being divided into feudal domains, and the royal policy exhibiting the same centralizing tendency?

But while monarchy and feudalism were so closely akin in France and in England, they presented quite a different aspect in Germany. The reason was that at the very time when the king’s power was weakening in France, the Saxon dynasty of the Ottos had established in Germany an autocratic régime, patterned after that of Charlemagne. The German kings, who had been crowned Emperors of the West, held the nobles in a sort of military servitude; they appointed bishops and abbots and bound them to military service. However, little by little, the principalities asserted their rights; the fast developing towns gained more freedom. We shall see how the monks of Cluny contributed to this change. Thus, by a process of decentralization, Germany gradually assumed in the twelfth century a more feudal aspect, while France and England were developing toward centralization.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the destiny of Italy is intimately connected with that of Germany. The reason for this was that the German imperial ambitions involved the seizure of Italy, a great country which was also divided into various principalities. The emperors were successful for a time; but much opposition developed. Hence their long struggle against the Lombard cities, which were true municipal republics; against the Papacy, which was to triumph finally; against the great southern realm of the Sicilies, which had been founded by Norman knights and was a centre of French feudal ideas, being governed by French princes.

As for Spain, situated as it was on the confines of the western and the Arabian civilizations, it presents a unique aspect. The Christian kingdoms of Castille, of Leon, of Navarre, of Aragon, had undertaken to “reconquer” the Peninsula from the Mussulman, and they were organized on French feudal principles. On the other hand, the South remained in the hands of the Infidels, and the infiltration of Arabian civilization was to have its part in the philosophical awakening of the thirteenth century, as we shall see.

Hence, when we consider the outstanding features of the political and social situation, feudal divisions are found everywhere. France, which seems to be the starting point for the system, England after the Conquest, some parts of Italy and of Spain, and also Germany—the whole of western Europe, in fact, presents the appearance of a checkerboard.

II

The Catholic Church was intimately connected with this feudal system, through her bishops, who were lords both temporal and spiritual, and more especially through the abbots of her monasteries. The twelfth century is the golden age of the abbeys. In no period of history has any institution had a closer contact with both religious and social background than had the abbeys of Cluny and Citeaux. These were the two great branches of the Benedictine stem, the two mother-houses whose daughters were scattered throughout France and Europe.

The ninth century had witnessed a disastrous relaxation of religious discipline, and it was Cluny which first returned to the faithful observance of the rule of St. Benedict. The monastery was founded in Burgundy in 910 by a feudal lord, Duke William of Aquitaine. And just here we meet with a peculiar phenomenon, which shows how the religious spirit had become the great moral force of that period. “The abbeys built in the ninth and the tenth centuries,” says Reynaud, “to restore the ancient rule of St. Benedict, were all, or nearly all, the work of the military class.” After a life of adventure and war, or after a stormy youth, these proud feudal lords often shut themselves up in cloisters, to do penance. They renounced the world, and henceforth their austerities were performed with the same ardour which they had formerly exhibited in their exploits of war. Thus, Poppo of Stavelot was affianced to a wealthy heiress, when one evening, on his way home after visiting her, a bright light suddenly shone about him; whereupon he was terrified, and in remorse for his past life he donned the Benedictine cowl. Examples of such conversions are numerous.

The monks of Cluny not only instilled a new religious zeal within their own cloister, not only did they restore discipline and vows and piety, not only did they sustain and augment the fervid faith of the people depending on them; they also awakened the same spirit in a great many other monasteries. This was effected through a far reaching reform: the federation of monasteries. For, up to that time, the Benedictine monasteries had been independent. But Cluny organized these groups and placed itself at the head of a strongly centralized régime. It became a mother-house whose daughters spread rapidly abroad throughout all France and England and Germany and Northern Spain and Hungary and Poland. At the beginning of the twelfth century, two thousand Benedictine houses were dependent on the Cluny system; and today dozens of French villages still bear the name of St. Benedict, in memory of one or another of those Benedictine monasteries. All western Christendom was enmeshed in a great network of monastic institutions, of which Cluny was the soul and the inspiration; and thus one mind and one polity permeated the whole system.

In this process of federalization the abbey of Cluny was successfully modelled after the feudal system; but it then in turn proceeded to impregnate that same feudalism with its own spirit. Thus, the feudal conception appears in the vow of devotion which attached a monk to his monastery as a vassal to his lord, and which he might not break without his superior’s consent; in the sovereignty of the abbot; in his visits as chief to his subordinates; in the contributions of the affiliated monasteries to the mother-house; and in the graded series of federated groups. But, by its far reaching influence, so mighty a power could successfully combat the forces of evil in contemporary society, and it could also turn current ideas to the service of Christianity. Cluny christianized feudalism. This influence is revealed to us in four main aspects, which we shall now consider.

First, the monks treated their serfs with justice and kindness; those fellow...