It is a trite thing to say that all long periods of European history are ages of transition. The old order is ever passing gradually away, and a new society is ever springing up from amidst the ruins of the dying system that has done its work. But the period with which this book is concerned is transitional in no merely conventional sense. We take up the story in the early years of the tenth century, when the Dark Ages had not yet run their course. We end it in the closing years of the thirteenth century, when the choicest flowers of mediÆval civilisation were already in full bloom. Starting at the end of a period of deep depression and degradation, we have to note how feudalism got rid of the barbarian invaders, and restored the military efficiency of Europe at the expense of its order and civilisation. We learn how the revival of the Roman Empire again set up an effective and orderly political power, and led to the revival of the Church and religion, and the subsequent renewal of intellectual life. But the Empire was never more than a half-realised theory; and while the world had theoretically one master, it was in reality ruled by a multitude of petty feudal chieftains. Thus was brought about the universal monarchy of the Papacy, the Crusades, the monastic revivals, the strong but limited intellectual renascence of the twelfth century, and the marvellous development of art, letters, and material civilisation that flowed from it. The conflict of Papacy and Empire impaired the efficiency of both, and made possible the growth of the great national states of the thirteenth century, from which the ultimate salvation of Europe was to come. Turbulent as was the period during which these great revolutions were worked out, it was one of many-sided activity, and of general, but by no means unbroken, progress. It was the time of the development and perfection of all the most essential features of that type of civilisation which is called mediÆval. It was the age of feudalism, of the Papacy and Empire, of the Crusades, of chivalry, of scholasticism and the early universities, of monasticism in its noblest types, of mediÆval art in its highest aspects, and of national monarchy in its earliest form. Before our period ends, the best characteristics of the Middle Ages had already manifested themselves. Fertile as were the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in their promise of later developments, they bore witness only to the decline of what was most characteristic of the period that we now have to consider.

Let us dwell for a moment on some of the leading features of this period in a little more detail.

We begin in a time of gloom and sorrow. The Carolingian Empire, which had united the vigour of the barbarians with the civilisation of the Roman world, had broken up. The sacred name of Emperor had been assumed so constantly by weaklings that it had ceased to have much hold upon the minds of men. The great kingdoms, into which the Carolingian Empire had resolved itself, seemed destined to undergo the process that had destroyed the parent state. The East Frankish realm—the later Germany—was breaking up into its four national duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Bavaria, and Swabia. The West Frankish realm was the prey of the rivalry of the Carolings and the Robertians. The Middle Kingdom was in still worse plight. Italy had fallen away under a line of nominal Italian or Lombard kings, but the south was Greek or Saracen, and the north was in hopeless confusion. The northern parts of the Middle Kingdom, to which alone the name Lotharingia clung, were tending towards their ultimate destiny of becoming a fifth national duchy of the German realm, though their loyalty for the Carolingian house brought them more than once back to the West Frankish kingdom. The lands between this restricted Lotharingia and the Mediterranean had become the kingdom of Arles or Burgundy by the union, in 932, of the two Burgundian states that had grown up in the days of chaos. But of the six kingdoms which now represented the ancient Empire, not one was effectively governed. The administrative system of the Carolingians had altogether disappeared. The kings were powerless, the Church was corrupt, the people miserable and oppressed, the nobles self-seeking and brutal. The barbarian invader had profited by the weakness of civilisation. The restored Rome of Charlemagne, like the old Rome of Constantine and Theodosius, was threatened with annihilation by pagan hordes. The Norsemen threatened the coasts of the west; the Saracens dominated the Mediterranean, captured the islands, and established outposts in southern Gaul and Italy. The Slavs overran Germany. The Magyars threatened alike Germany and Italy. Everywhere civilisation and Christianity were on the wane.

Yet the darkest hour was already past when the tenth century had begun. The feudal system had saved Europe from its external enemies. The feudal cavalry and the feudal castle had proved too strong for the barbarians. The Norse plunderers had gone home beaten, or had settled with Rolf in Neustria, or with Guthrum in eastern England. "The end of the Dark Ages." The Saracens had been driven from Italy, and were soon to be chased out of Provence. The Wends and the Magyars were soon to feel the might of Henry the Fowler. The Saxon dukes were restoring the East Frankish realm. The Robertians were getting the upper hand in France. Even the consolidation of the two Burgundies made for unity. In the east the Macedonian dynasty was ruling over the Greek Empire in uneventful peace, and extending its sway to the farthest limits of Asia Minor. In Spain the Christians had definitely got the better of the Moors. The break-up of the Caliphate robbed Islam both of its political and religious unity, and destroyed for the time its capacity for aggression. "Feudalism." The first gleams of a religious revival began with the foundation of Cluny. But despite all these glimpses of hope, the state of western Europe was still deplorable. The feudal nobles were the masters of the situation. Their benefices were rapidly becoming hereditary, their authority more recognised and systematic. But no salvation was to be expected from a system that was the very abnegation of all central and national authority. It was but little more than organised anarchy when the west had to depend upon a polity that made every great landholder a petty tyrant over his neighbours. The military strength of feudalism had given it authority. Its political weakness was revealed when the feudal baron had to govern as well as fight.

Feudalism was not long in undisputed possession of the field. From the revival of the German kingdom by the Saxon kings sprang the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, beginning with the coronation of Otto the Great in 962. Less universal, less ecclesiastical, less truly Roman than the Carolingian Empire, the Empire of the Saxons and Franks was based essentially upon the German kingship, yet was ever trying to outgrow its limitations, and to claim in its completeness the Carolingian heritage. Within a century of the coronation of Otto, the revived Empire included in its sphere the German, Italian, Burgundian, and Lotharingian realms—in short, all the Empire of Charles the Great, save the West Frankish states, ruled since 987 by Hugh Capet and his descendants. Moreover, the Empire had pushed forward the limits of Christianity and civilisation in the barbarous north and east. It had extended its direct rule over a wide stretch of marchlands. The Scandinavians, Wends, Poles, Bohemians, and Hungarians all received the Christian faith from missionaries profoundly impressed with the imperial idea, and their conversion involved at least temporary dependence upon the power that again aspired to be lord of the world. At home the Emperors checked and restrained, though recognising and utilising, the feudal principle. In their fear of the lay aristocracy, no less than in their zeal for religion and order, they associated themselves closely with the work of reforming the Church. But the restoration of religion soon involved the restoration of Papacy and hierarchy, and thus they raised up the power before which Emperors were finally to succumb. Yet the Empire did not fall until it had kept central Europe together for nearly three centuries, at a time when no other power could possibly have accomplished the task. From the coronation of the Saxon to the fall of the Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Empire had no small claim to the lordship of the world.

The darkest hour of the State was the darkest hour of the Church. The last faint traces of the Carolingian revival of religion disappeared amid the horrors of Danish, Saracen, and Hungarian invasions. The feudalism that saved Europe from the barbarians now began to infect what remained of Christian life with its own ferocity, greed, and lust. The spiritual offices of the Church were becoming heritable property, dissociated from all effective spiritual duties. But amidst the turmoil of feudal times, a few nobler spirits sought salvation from the wickedness that lay thick around them in the solitude of the cloister. Before the end of the tenth century, the Cluniac revival presented to Europe an ideal of life very different from feudal militarism. In alliance with the Empire, the Cluniacs restored religion in central Europe, and missionaries, working in their spirit, spread the Gospel beyond the bounds of the Empire among the barbarians of the north and east. But from Cluny also came new theories of the province of the Church, which soon brought religion into sharp conflict with the temporal authority. When the power of the State lay almost in abeyance, it was natural that the Church should encroach upon the sphere it left vacant. From Cluny came the Hildebrandine Reformation, and from the theories of Hildebrand sprang two centuries of conflict between Papacy and Empire. "The struggles of Papacy and Empire." The great struggle of Popes and Emperors (the highest expression of the universal struggle of the spiritual and temporal swords), was the central event of the Middle Ages. It first took the form of the Investiture Contest, but when the Investiture Contest had been ended by the substantial victory of the Church, the eternal strife was soon renewed under other pretexts. It inspired the contest of Alexander III. with Frederick Barbarossa, of Thomas of Canterbury with Henry of Anjou, of Innocent III. with half the princes of Europe, and the final great conflict between the successors of Innocent and Frederick II. At last the Empire succumbed before the superior strength of the Papacy. But the Hohenstaufen were soon revenged; and, within two generations of the death of Frederick II., the victorious Papacy was degraded from its pride of place by its ancient ally.

From the triumphs of Hildebrand and his successors sprang the religious revivals that enriched the Middle Ages with all that was fairest and most poetical in the life of those times. The Cistercians and the Carthusians revived the ideals of St. Benedict, with special precautions against the dangers before which the old Benedictine houses had succumbed. The orders of Canons Regular sought to unite the life of the monk with the work of the clerk. They paved the way for the more complete realisation of their ideal in the thirteenth century, when the mendicant orders of Friars arose under Francis and Dominic. From the monastic movement sprang a revival of spiritual religion and a renewed interest in the world of thought and art. "Art." The artistic impulses of the time found their highest expression in the vast and stern Romanesque minsters of the older orders, and in the epic literature of the chansons de geste. The transition during the twelfth century from Romanesque to Gothic architecture, and the parallel change in vernacular literature from the epic to the romance, mark a new development in the European spirit. Side by side with them went the great intellectual renascence of the same momentous century. While an Anselm sought to enlist philosophy in the service of the Church, an Abelard began to question the very sources of authority. In Abelard the intellectual movement outgrew its monastic parentage, and in his conflict with Bernard the dictator of Christendom, the old and the new spirit came into the sharpest antagonism. "Revival of speculative activity." The systematic schoolmen of later ages had neither the independence of Abelard nor the limitation of Bernard. Learning passed from monastic to secular hands, but the scholastic philosophy was already enlisted on the side of the Church, and active as was its intelligence, it henceforth worked within self-appointed limits. Side by side with the revival of philosophy, came the work of Irnerius and Gratian, the revival of the systematic study of Civil Law, and the building up of the great structure of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. "Law." From the multiplication of students and studies sprang the organisation of teachers and learners into the universities. "The Universities." From the ignorance and barbarism of the tenth century, there is a record of continuous progress until the end of our period. Yet the thirteenth century does not only illustrate the crowning glories of the Middle Ages: it suggests new modes of thought that indicate that the Middle Ages themselves are passing away. The triumph of the Church bore with it the seeds of its own ruin, in the world of thought as well as in the world of action.

From the Hildebrandine revival sprang also the Crusades, and the combination of the military and religious ideals of the Latin world in the pursuit of a holy war for the recovery of Christ’s Sepulchre. The Turkish advance was checked; the Eastern Empire was saved from imminent destruction; and a series of Latin states in Syria and Greece extended the scope of western influence at the expense of Orthodox and Mohammedan alike. But the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to overthrow the Empire of Constantinople indicates the high-water mark of the Latin Christian power in the East; and the change in the current of western ideas made the Crusades of the thirteenth century but vain attempts to restore a vanished dream. Before the end of our period, the Christian domination in the East had shrunk to the lordship of a few Greek islands. The PalÆologi brought back Byzantine rule to the Byzantine capital; and the strongest kings of the West could not save the remnants of the Latin states in Syria. The Mongol invasions threatened Christian and Saracen alike. While the western prospects were so fair, in the East barbarism was on the highway to ascendency.

The failure of the Empire to rule the world led to a feudal reaction, that was not least felt in the lands directly governed by the Emperors. Our period witnesses both the triumph and the decay of feudalism. It is the time when feudal ideas prevailed all over the western world, following the Crusaders into the burning deserts of Syria, and the lands of the Eastern Emperors. The Normans took feudalism to southern Italy and Sicily, and developed the feudalism that they already found in England. Even Scandinavia evolved a feudalism of its own, and the sons and grandsons of the followers of William the Conqueror planted feudal states side by side with the Celtic tribalism of Wales and Ireland. For nearly four centuries the mail-clad feudal horseman was invincible in battle, and the stone-built feudal castle, ever becoming more complex and elaborate in structure, was impregnable except to famine. The better side of feudal social ideals—chivalry, knighthood, honour, and courtesy—did something to temper the brutality and pride of the average baron, and found powerful expression in the vernacular literatures, written to amuse nobles and gentry. But before our period ends, the days of feudal ascendency were over. Hopeful of triumph in Germany, where the German state suffered by its kings’ pursuit of the imperial vision, feudalism found in Italy a powerful rival in strong municipalities closely allied with the Church. In western Europe it was beginning to give ground. The greater feudatories crushed their lesser neighbours, and built up states that were powerful enough to stand by themselves. The Church, though fitting itself into the feudal organisation of society, could never repose simply on brute force. "The Towns." The towns, whose separate organisation was, in some parts of Europe at least, as much the result of military, as of economic necessities, became the centres of expanding trade and increasing wealth. Within their strong walls they were able to hold their own, and claim for themselves a part in the social system as well as baron or bishop. But feudalism had at last met its master. With its decline before the national spirit, we are on the threshold of modern times.

The division of the Empire into local kingdoms, begun at the treaty of Verdun, paved the way for the modern idea of a national state. The Empire stifled the early possibilities of a German nation, and Empire and Papacy combined to make impossible an Italian nation. But in France other prospects arose. Through its virtual exclusion from the Empire, France had been delivered from some very real dangers. The early Capetians were shadows round which a mighty system revolved; but they had a lofty theory and a noble tradition at their back, and the time at last came when they could convert their theory into practice. Philip Augustus made France a great state and nation. "Power passes from Germany to France." Under St. Louis the leadership of Europe passed definitely from the Germans to the French—from the people ruled by the visionary world-Empire to the people ruled by a popular and effective national monarchy. The alliance between France and the Church, the preponderance of French effort in the Crusades, the spread of the French tongue and literature as the common expression of European chivalry, had made the French nation famous, long before a large proportion of the French nation had been organised into a French state. The Spanish peoples acquired strong local attachments; the English became conscious of their national life. Alfonso the Wise of Castile and Edward I. of England rank with St. Louis and Philip the Fair. Even Frederick II. owed his strength to his national position in Germany and Naples, rather than to his imperial aspirations. Before our period ends, the national principle had clearly asserted itself. Trade, art, literature, religion began to desert cosmopolitan for national channels, and the beginnings of the system of estates and representative institutions show that the great organised classes of mediÆval society aspired to share with their kings the direction of the national destinies. The Empire had fallen; the Papacy was soon to be overthrown; feudalism was decayed; the cosmopolitan culture of the universities had seen its best days. It is in the juxtaposition of what was best in the old, and what was most fertile in the new, that gives its unique charm to the thirteenth century. The transition from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages had been worked out. There were signs that the transition was beginning that culminates in the Renascence and the Reformation.