THERE were three good reasons why the Italian cities should have been the first to regain
a position of great importance during the late Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been
settled by Rome at a very early date. There had been more roads and more towns and
more schools than anywhere else in Europe.
The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, but there had been so much to
destroy that more had been able to survive. In the second place, the Pope lived in Italy
and as the head of a vast political machine, which owned land and serfs and buildings and
forests and rivers and conducted courts of law, he was in constant receipt of a great deal
of money. The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and silver as did the merchants and
ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The cows and the eggs and the horses and al the
other agricultural products of the north and the west must be changed into actual cash
before the debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome.
This made Italy the one country where there was a comparative abundance of gold and
silver. Finaly, during the Crusades, the Italian cities had become the point of embarkation
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for the Crusaders and had profiteered to an almost unbelievable extent.
And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same Italian cities remained the
distributing centres for those Oriental goods upon which the people of Europe had come
to depend during the time they had spent in the near east.
Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was a republic built upon a mud
bank. Thither people from the mainland had fled during the invasions of the barbarians in
the fourth century. Surrounded on al sides by the sea they had engaged in the business of
salt-making. Salt had been very scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had been
high. For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of this indispensable table
commodity (I say indispensable, because people, like sheep, fal il unless they get a
certain amount of salt in their food). The people had used this monopoly to increase the
power of their city. At times they had even dared to defy the power of the Popes. The
town had grown rich and had begun to build ships, which engaged in trade with the Orient.
During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry passengers to the Holy Land, and
when the passengers could not pay for their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help the
Venetians who were for ever increasing their colonies in the AEgean Sea, in Asia Minor
and in Egypt.
By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had grown to two hundred thousand,
which made Venice the biggest city of the Middle Ages. The people were without
influence upon the government which was the private affair of a smal number of rich
merchant families. They elected a senate and a Doge (or Duke), but the actual rulers of the
city were the members of the famous Council of Ten,—who maintained themselves with
the help of a highly organised system of secret service men and professional murderers,
who kept watch upon al citizens and quietly removed those who might be dangerous to
the safety of their high-handed and unscrupulous Committee of Public Safety.
The other extreme of government, a democracy of very turbulent habits, was to be found
in Florence. This city controled the main road from northern Europe to Rome and used
the money which it had derived from this fortunate economic position to engage in
manufacturing. The Florentines tried to folow the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests
and members of the guilds al took part in the discussions of civic affairs. This led to great
civic upheaval. People were forever being divided into political parties and these parties
fought each other with intense bitterness and exiled their enemies and confiscated their
possessions as soon as they had gained a victory in the council. After several centuries of
this rule by organised mobs, the inevitable happened. A powerful family made itself master
of the city and governed the town and the surrounding country after the fashion of the old
Greek "tyrants." They were caled the Medici. The earliest Medici had been physicians
(medicus is Latin for physician, hence their name), but later they had turned banker. Their
banks and their pawnshops were to be found in al the more important centres of trade.
Even today our American pawn-shops display the three golden bals which were part of
the coat of arms of the mighty house of the Medici, who became rulers of Florence and
married their daughters to the kings of France and were buried in graves worthy of a
Roman Caesar.
Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where the merchants specialised in trade
with Tunis in Africa and the grain depots of the Black Sea. Then there were more than
two hundred other cities, some large and some smal, each a perfect commercial unit, al of
them fighting their neighbours and rivals with the undying hatred of neighbours who are
depriving each other of their profits.
Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been brought to these distributing centres,
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they must be prepared for the voyage to the west and the north.
Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseiles, from where they were reshipped to the
cities along the Rhone, which in turn served as the market places of northern and western
France.
Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This ancient road led across the Brenner
pass, the old gateway for the barbarians who had invaded Italy. Past Innsbruck, the
merchandise was carried to Basel. From there it drifted down the Rhine to the North Sea
and England, or it was taken to Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both
bankers and manufacturers and who prospered greatly by "shaving" the coins with which
they paid their workmen), looked after the further distribution to Nuremberg and Leipzig
and the cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on the Island of Gotland) which looked after the
needs of the Northern Baltic and dealt directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old
commercial centre of Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the
sixteenth century.
The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had an interesting story of their own.
The mediaeval world ate a great deal of fish. There were many fast days and then people
were not permitted to eat meat. For those who lived away from the coast and from the
rivers, this meant a diet of eggs or nothing at al. But early in the thirteenth century a Dutch
fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so that it could be transported to distant
points. The herring fisheries of the North Sea then became of great importance. But some
time during the thirteenth century, this useful little fish (for reasons of its own) moved from
the North Sea to the Baltic and the cities of that inland sea began to make money. Al the
world now sailed to the Baltic to catch herring and as that fish could only be caught during
a few months each year (the rest of the time it spends in deep water, raising large families
of little herrings) the ships would have been idle during the rest of the time unless they had
found another occupation. They were then used to carry the wheat of northern and central
Russia to southern and western Europe. On the return voyage they brought spices and
silks and carpets and Oriental rugs from Venice and Genoa to Bruges and Hamburg and
Bremen.
Out of such simple beginnings there developed an important system of international trade
which reached from the manufacturing cities of Bruges and Ghent (where the almighty
guilds fought pitched battles with the kings of France and England and established a labour
tyranny which completely ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic of
Novgorod in northern Russia, which was a mighty city until Tsar Ivan, who distrusted al
merchants, took the town and kiled sixty thousand people in less than a month's time and
reduced the survivors to beggary.
That they might protect themselves against pirates and excessive tols and annoying
legislation, the merchants of the north founded a protective league which was caled the
"Hansa." The Hansa, which had its headquarters in Lubeck, was a voluntary association of
more than one hundred cities. The association maintained a navy of its own which
patroled the seas and fought and defeated the Kings of England and Denmark when they
dared to interfere with the rights and the privileges of the mighty Hanseatic merchants.
I wish that I had more space to tel you some of the wonderful stories of this strange
commerce which was carried on across the high mountains and across the deep seas
amidst such dangers that every voyage became a glorious adventure. But it would take
several volumes and it cannot be done here.
Besides, I hope that I have told you enough about the Middle Ages to make you curious
to read more in the excelent books of which I shal give you a list at the end of this
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volume.
The Middle Ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a period of very slow progress.
The people who were in power believed that "progress" was a very undesirable invention
of the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap-pened to occupy the seats
of the mighty, it was easy to enforce their wil upon the patient serfs and the iliterate
knights. Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into the forbidden
region of science, but they fared badly and were considered lucky when they escaped
with their lives and a jail sentence of twenty years.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of international commerce swept over
western Europe as the Nile had swept across the valey of ancient Egypt. It left behind a
fertile sediment of prosperity. Prosperity meant leisure hours and these leisure hours gave
both men and women a chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in literature and art
and music.
Then once more was the world filed with that divine curiosity which has elevated man
from the ranks of those other mammals who are his distant cousins but who have remained
dumb, and the cities, of whose growth and development I have told you in my last
chapter, offered a safe shelter to these brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow
domain of the established order of things.
They set to work. They opened the windows of their cloistered and studious cels. A flood
of sunlight entered the dusty rooms and showed them the cobwebs which had gathered
during the long period of semi-darkness.
They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gardens.
Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crumbling town wals, and said, "This
is a good world. We are glad that we live in it."
At that moment, the Middle Ages came to an end and a new world began.
THE RENAISSANCE
PEOPLE ONCE MORE DARED TO BE HAPPY JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE
ALIVE. THEY TRIED TO SAVE THE REMAINS OF THE OLDER AND MORE
AGREEABLE CIVILISATION OF ROME AND GREECE AND THEY WERE SO
PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS THAT THEY SPOKE OF A
RENAISSANCE OR RE-BIRTH OF CIVILISATION
THE Renaissance was not a political or religious movement. It was a state of mind.
The men of the Renaissance continued to be the obedient sons of the mother church. They
were subjects of kings and emperors and dukes and murmured not.
But their outlook upon life was changed. They began to wear different clothes—to speak
a different language—to live different lives in different houses.
They no longer concentrated al their thoughts and their efforts upon the blessed existence
that awaited them in Heaven. They tried to establish their Paradise upon this planet, and,
truth to tel, they succeeded in a remarkable degree.
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I have quite often warned you against the danger that lies in historical dates. People take
them too literaly. They think of the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignorance.
"Click," says the clock, and the Renaissance begins and cities and palaces are flooded
with the bright sunlight of an eager intelectual curiosity.
As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible to draw such sharp lines. The thirteenth century
belonged most decidedly to the Middle Ages. Al historians agree upon that. But was it a
time of darkness and stagnation merely? By no means. People were tremendously alive.
Great states were being founded. Large centres of commerce were being developed. High
above the turretted towers of the castle and the peaked roof of the town-hal, rose the
slender spire of the newly built Gothic cathedral. Everywhere the world was in motion.
The high and mighty gentlemen of the city-hal, who had just become conscious of their
own strength (by way of their recently acquired riches) were struggling for more power
with their feudal masters. The members of the guilds who had just become aware of the
important fact that "numbers count" were fighting the high and mighty gentlemen of the
city-hal. The king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled waters and
caught many a shining bass of profit which they proceeded to cook and eat before the
noses of the surprised and disappointed councilors and guild brethren.
To enliven the scenery during the long hours of evening when the badly lighted streets did
not invite further political and economic dispute, the Troubadours and Minnesingers told
their stories and sang their songs of romance and adventure and heroism and loyalty to al
fair women. Meanwhile youth, impatient of the slowness of progress, flocked to the
universities, and thereby hangs a story.
The Middle Ages were "internationaly minded." That sounds difficult, but wait until I
explain it to you. We modern people are "nationaly minded." We are Americans or
Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians and speak English or French or Italian and go to
English and French and Italian universities, unless we want to specialise in some particular
branch of learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn another language and
go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow. But the people of the thirteenth or fourteenth
century rarely talked of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians. They said, "I
am a citizen of Sheffield or Bordeaux or Genoa." Because they al belonged to one and the
same church they felt a certain bond of brotherhood. And as al educated men could
speak Latin, they possessed an international language which removed the stupid language
barriers which have grown up in modern Europe and which place the smal nations at such
an enormous disadvantage. Just as an example, take the case of Erasmus, the great
preacher of tolerance and laughter, who wrote his books in the sixteenth century. He was
the native of a smal Dutch vilage. He wrote in Latin and al the world was his audience. If
he were alive to-day, he would write in Dutch. Then only five or six milion people would
be able to read him. To be understood by the rest of Europe and America, his publishers
would be obliged to translate his books into twenty different languages. That would cost a
lot of money and most likely the publishers would never take the trouble or the risk.
Six hundred years ago that could not happen. The greater part of the people were stil
very ignorant and could not read or write at al. But those who had mastered the difficult
art of handling the goose-quil belonged to an international republic of letters which spread
across the entire continent and which knew of no boundaries and respected no limitations
of language or nationality. The universities were the strongholds of this republic. Unlike
modern fortifications, they did not folow the frontier. They were to be found wherever a
teacher and a few pupils happened to find themselves together. There again the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance differed from our own time. Nowadays, when a new university
is built, the process (almost invariably) is as folows: Some rich man wants to do something
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for the community in which he lives or a particular religious sect wants to build a school to
keep its faithful children under decent supervision, or a state needs doc-tors and lawyers
and teachers. The university begins as a large sum of money which is deposited in a bank.
This money is then used to construct buildings and laboratories and dormitories. Finaly
professional teachers are hired, entrance examinations are held and the university is on the
way.
But in the Middle Ages things were done differently. A wise man said to himself, "I have
discovered a great truth. I must impart my knowledge to others." And he began to preach
his wisdom wherever and whenever he could get a few people to listen to him, like a
modern soap-box orator. If he was an interesting speaker, the crowd came and stayed. If
he was dul, they shrugged their shoulders and continued their way.
By and by certain young men began to come regularly to hear the words of wisdom of this
great teacher. They brought copybooks with them and a little bottle of ink and a goose
quil and wrote down what seemed to be important. One day it rained. The teacher and
his pupils retired to an empty basement or the room of the "Professor." The learned man
sat in his chair and the boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the University, the
"universitas," a corporation of professors and students during the Middle Ages, when the
"teacher" counted for everything and the building in which he taught counted for very little.
As an example, let me tel you of something that happened in the ninth century. In the town
of Salerno near Naples there were a number of excelent physicians. They attracted
people desirous of learning the medical profession and for almost a thousand years (until
1817) there was a university of Salerno which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great
Greek doctor who had practiced his art in ancient Helas in the fifth century before the
birth of Christ.
Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany, who early in the twelfth century
began to lecture on theology and logic in Paris. Thousands of eager young men flocked to
the French city to hear him. Other priests who disagreed with him stepped forward to
explain their point of view. Paris was soon filed with a clamouring multitude of Englishmen
and Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hungary and around the old
cathedral which stood on a little island in the Seine there grew the famous University of
Paris. In Bologna in Italy, a monk by the name of Gratian had compiled a text-book for
those whose business it was to know the laws of the church. Young priests and many
laymen then came from al over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas. To protect
themselves against the landlords and the innkeepers and the boarding-house ladies of the
city, they formed a corporation (or University) and behold the beginning of the university
of Bologna.
Next there was a quarrel in the University of Paris. We do not know what caused it, but a
number of disgruntled teachers together with their pupils crossed the channel and found a
hospitable home in a little vilage on the Thames caled Oxford, and in this way the famous
University of Oxford came into being. In the same way, in the year 1222, there had been a
split in the University of Bologna. The discontented teachers (again folowed by their
pupils) had moved to Padua and their proud city thenceforward boasted of a university of
its own. And so it went from Valadolid in Spain to Cracow in distant Poland and from
Poitiers in France to Rostock in Germany.
It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these early professors would sound
absurd to our ears, trained to listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point
however, which I want to make is this—the Middle Ages and especialy the thirteenth
century were not a time when the world stood entirely stil. Among the younger generation,
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there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless if somewhat bashful asking
of questions. And out of this turmoil grew the Renaissance.
But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene of the Mediaeval world, a
solitary figure crossed the stage, of whom you ought to know more than his mere name.
This man was caled Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer who belonged to the
Alighieri family and he saw the light of day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his
ancestors while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis of Assisi upon the
wals of the Church of the Holy Cross, but often when he went to school, his frightened
eyes would see the puddles of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare that
raged forever between the Guelphs and the Ghibelines, the folowers of the Pope and the
adherents of the Emperors.
When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father had been one before him, just
as an American boy might become a Democrat or a Republican, simply because his father
had happened to be a Democrat or a Republican. But after a few years, Dante saw that
Italy, unless united under a single head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered
jealousies of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Ghilbeiline.
He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a mighty emperor might come and re-
establish unity and order. Alas! he hoped in vain. The Ghibelines were driven out of
Florence in the year 1802. From that time on until the day of his death amidst the dreary
ruins of Ravenna, in the year 1321, Dante was a homeless wanderer, eating the bread of
charity at the table of rich patrons whose names would have sunk into the deepest pit of
oblivion but for this single fact, that they had been kind to a poet in his misery. During the
many years of exile, Dante felt compeled to justify himself and his actions when he had
been a political leader in his home-town, and when he had spent his days walking along
the banks of the Arno that he might catch a glimpse of the lovely Beatrice Portinari, who
died the wife of another man, a dozen years before the Ghibeline disaster.
He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had faithfuly served the town of is birth
and before a corrupt court he had been accused of stealing the public funds and had been
condemned to be burned alive should he venture back within the realm of the city of
Florence. To clear himself before his own conscience and before his contemporaries,
Dante then created an Imaginary World and with great detail he described the
circumstances which had led to his defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed
and lust and hatred which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a battlefield for the
pitiless mercenaries of wicked and selfish tyrants.
He tels us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year 1300 he had lost his way in a
dense forest and how he found his path barred by a leopard and a lion and a wolf. He
gave himself up for lost when a white figure appeared amidst the trees. It was Virgil, the
Roman poet and philosopher, sent upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by
Beatrice, who from high Heaven watched over the fate of her true lover. Virgil then takes
Dante through Purgatory and through Hel. Deeper and deeper the path leads them until
they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands frozen into the eternal ice
surrounded by the most terrible of sinners, traitors and liars and those who have achieved
fame and success by lies and