The Story Of Mankind - Part 13

The Story of Mankind was written and illustrated by Dutch-American journalist, professor, and author Hendrik Willem van Loon and published in 1921. In 1922, it was the first book to be awarded the Newbery Medal for its outstanding contribution to children's literature.

Transcript

This is part 13 of the Story of Mankind,

By Hendrik van Loon.

Chivalry It was quite natural that the professional fighting men of the Middle Ages should try to establish some sort of organization for their mutual benefit and protection.

Out of this need for close organization,

Knighthood or chivalry was born.

We know very little about the origins of knighthood,

But as the system developed,

It gave the world something which it needed very badly.

A definite rule of conduct,

Which softened the barbarous customs of that day and made life more livable than it had been during the 500 years of the Dark Ages.

It was not an easy task to civilize the rough frontiersmen,

Who had spent most of their time fighting Mohammedans and Huns and Norsemen.

Often they were guilty of backsliding,

And having vowed all sorts of oaths about mercy and charity in the morning,

They would murder all their prisoners before evening.

But progress is ever the result of slow and ceaseless labor,

And finally the most unscrupulous of knights was forced to obey the rules of his class or suffer the consequences.

These rules were different in the various parts of Europe,

But they all made much of service and loyalty to duty.

The Middle Ages regarded service as something very noble and beautiful.

It was no disgrace to be a servant,

Provided you were a good servant and did not slacken on the job.

As for loyalty,

At a time when life depended upon the faithful performance of many unpleasant duties,

It was the chief virtue of the fighting man.

A young knight,

Therefore,

Was asked to swear that he would be faithful as a servant to God and as a servant to his king.

Furthermore,

He promised to be generous to those whose need was greater than his own.

He pledged his word that he would be humble in his personal behavior,

And would never boast of his own accomplishments,

And that he would be a friend of all those who suffered,

With the exception of the Mohammedans,

Whom he was expected to kill on sight.

Around these vows,

Which was merely the Ten Commandments expressed in terms which the people of the Middle Ages could understand,

There developed a complicated system of manners and outward behavior.

The knights tried to model their own lives after the example of those heroes of Arthur's Round Table and Charlemagne's Court,

Of whom the troubadours had told them,

And of whom you may read in many delightful books,

Which are enumerated at the end of this volume.

They hoped that they might prove as brave as Lancelot,

And as faithful as Roland.

They carried themselves with dignity,

And they spoke careful and gracious words that they might be known as true knights,

However humble the cut of their coat or the size of their purse.

In this way the order of the knighthood became a school of those good manners,

Which are the oil of the social machinery.

Chivalry came to mean courtesy,

And the feudal castle showed the rest of the world that clothes to wear,

How to eat,

How to ask a lady for a dance,

And a thousand and one little things of everyday behavior which helped to make life interesting and agreeable.

Like all human institutions,

Knighthood was doomed to perish as soon as it had outlived its usefulness.

The crusaders,

About which one of the next chapters tells,

Were followed by a great revival of trade.

Cities grew overnight,

The townspeople became rich,

Hired good schoolteachers,

And soon were the equals of the knights.

The invention of gunpowder deprived the heavily armed chivalry of his former advantage and the use of mercenaries made it impossible to conduct a battle with the delicate niceties of a chess tournament.

The knight became superfluous.

Soon he became a ridiculous figure,

With his devotion to ideals that had no longer any practical value.

It was said that the noble Don Quixote de la Mancha had been the last of the true knights.

After his death,

His trusted sword and his armor were sold to pay his debts.

But somehow or other,

That sword seems to have fallen into the hands of a number of men.

Washington carried it during the hopeless days of Valley Forge.

It was the only defense of Gordon,

When he had refused to desert the people who had been entrusted on his care,

And stayed to meet his death in the besieged fortress of Khartoum.

And I am not sure,

But that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War.

Pope vs.

Emperor The strange double loyalty of the people of the Middle Ages and how it led to endless quarrels between the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors.

It is very difficult to understand the people of bygone ages.

Your own grandfather,

Whom you see every day,

Is a mysterious being who lives in a different world of ideas and clothes and manners.

I am now telling you the story of some of your grandfathers,

Who are 25 generations removed,

And I do not expect you to catch the meaning of what I write without rereading this chapter a number of times.

The average man of the Middle Ages lived a very simple and uneventful life.

Even if he was a free citizen,

Able to come and go at will,

He rarely left his own neighborhood.

There were no printed books and only a few manuscripts.

Here and there,

A small band of industrious monks taught reading and writing and some arithmetic.

But science and history and geography lay buried beneath the ruins of Greece and Rome.

Whatever people knew about the past,

They had learned by listening to stories and legends.

Such information,

Which goes from father to son,

Is often slightly incorrect in details,

But it will preserve the main facts of history with astonishing accuracy.

After more than 2,

000 years,

The mothers of India still frighten their naughty children by telling them that Iskander will get them.

And Iskander is none other than Alexander the Great,

Who visited India in the year 330 before the birth of Christ,

But whose story has lived through all these ages.

The people of the early Middle Ages never saw a textbook of Roman history.

They were ignorant of many things,

Which every schoolboy today knows before he has entered the third grade.

But the Roman Empire,

Which is merely a name to you,

Was to them something very much alive.

They felt it.

They willingly recognized the Pope as their spiritual leader because he lived in Rome and represented the idea of the Roman superpower.

And they were profoundly grateful when Charlemagne and afterwards Otto the Great revived the idea of a world empire and created the Holy Roman Empire,

That the world might again be as it always had been.

But the fact that there were two different heirs to the Roman tradition placed the faithful burghers of the Middle Ages in a difficult position.

The theory behind the medieval political system was both sound and simple.

While the worldly master,

The Emperor,

Looked after the physical well-being of his subject,

The spiritual master,

The Pope,

Guarded their souls.

In practice,

However,

The system worked very badly.

The Emperor invariably tried to interfere with the affairs of the Church,

And the Pope retaliated and told the Emperor how he should rule his domains.

Then they told each other to mind their own business,

In very unceremonious language,

And the inevitable end was war.

Under those circumstances,

What were the people to do?

A good Christian obeyed both the Pope and his king.

But the Pope and the Emperor were enemies.

Which side should a dutiful subject and an equally dutiful Christian take?

It was never easy to give the correct answer.

When the Emperor happened to be a man of energy and was sufficiently well-provided with money to organize an army,

He was very apt to cross the Alps and march on Rome,

Besiege the Pope in his own palace if need be,

And force His Holiness to obey the imperial instructions or suffer the consequences.

But more frequently the Pope was the stronger.

Then the Emperor or the King together with all his subjects was excommunicated.

This meant that all churches were closed,

That no one should be baptized,

That no dying man could be given absolution.

In short,

That half of the functions of medieval government came to an end.

More than that,

The people were absolved from their oath of loyalty to their sovereign and were urged to rebel against their master.

But if they followed this advice of the distant Pope and were caught,

They were hanged by their nearby liege lord,

And that too was very unpleasant.

Indeed,

The poor fellows were in a difficult position,

And none feared worse than those who lived during the latter of the 11th century when the Emperor Henry IV of Germany and Pope Gregory VII fought a two-round battle which decided nothing and upset the peace of Europe for almost 50 years.

In the middle of the 11th century there had been a strong movement for reform in the Church.

The election of the Popes thus far had been a most irregular affair.

It was to the advantage of the Holy Roman Emperors to have a well-disposed priest elected to the Holy See.

They frequently came to Rome at the time of election and used their influence for the benefit of one of their friends.

In the year 1059 this had been changed by a decree of Pope Nicholas II.

The principal priests and deacons of the churches in and around Rome were organized into the so-called College of Cardinals,

And this gathering of prominent churchmen – the word cardinal meant principal – was given the exclusive power of electing the future Popes.

In the year 1073 the College of Cardinals elected a priest by the name of Hildebrand,

The son of very simple parents in Tuscany,

As Pope,

And he took the name of Gregory VII.

His energy was unbounded.

His belief in the supreme powers of his Holy Office was built upon a granite rock of conviction and courage.

In the mind of Gregory,

The Pope was not only the absolute head of the Christian Church,

But also the highest court of appeal in all worldly matters.

The Pope who had elevated simple German princes to the dignity of emperor could dispose them at will.

He could veto any law passed by duke or king or emperor,

But whosoever should question a Popal decree,

Let him beware,

For the punishment would be swift and merciless.

Gregory sent ambassadors to all the European courts to inform the patented of Europe of his new laws and ask them to take due notice of their contents.

William the Conqueror promised to be good,

But Henry IV,

Who since the age of six had been fighting with his subjects,

Had no intention of submitting to the Popal will.

He called together a college of German bishops,

Accused Gregory of every crime under the sun,

And then had him deposed by the Council of Worms.

The Pope answered with excommunication and demanded the German princes rid themselves of their unworthy ruler.

The German princes,

Only too happy to be rid of Henry,

Asked the Pope to come to Augsburg and help them elect a new emperor.

Gregory left home and traveled northward.

Henry,

Who was no fool,

Appreciated the danger of his position.

At all costs he must make peace with the Pope,

And he must do it at once.

In the midst of winter he crossed the Alps and hastened to Canossa,

Where the Pope had stopped for a short rest.

Through long days,

From the 25th to the 28th of January of the year 1077,

Henry dressed as a penitent pilgrim,

But with a worm sweater underneath his monkish garb,

Waited outside the gates of the castle of Canossa.

Then he was allowed to enter and was pardoned for his sins.

But the repentance did not last long.

As soon as Henry had returned to Germany,

He behaved exactly as before.

Again he was excommunicated.

For the second time a council of German bishops deposed Gregory,

But this time,

When Henry crossed the Alps,

He was at the head of the large army,

Besieged Rome,

And forced Gregory to retire to Salerno,

Where he died in exile.

This first violent outbreak decided nothing.

As soon as Henry was back in Germany,

The struggle between Pope and Emperor was continued.

The Hohenstaufen family,

Which got hold of the imperial German throne shortly afterwards,

Were even more independent than their predecessors.

Gregory had claimed that the Popes were superior to all kings because they,

The Popes,

At the Day of Judgment,

Would be responsible for the behavior of all the sheep of their flock,

And in the eyes of God,

A king was one of that faithful herd.

Frederick of Hohenstaufen,

Commonly known as Barbarossa or Redbeard,

Set up the counterclaim that the Empire had been bestowed upon his predecessor by God himself,

And as the Empire included Italy and Rome,

He began a campaign which was to add these lost provinces to the northern country.

Barbarossa was accidentally drowned in Asia Minor during the Second Crusade,

But his son Frederick II,

A brilliant young man who in his youth has been exposed to the civilization of the Mohammedans of Sicily,

Continued the war.

The Popes accused him of heresy.

It is true that Frederick seems to have felt a deep and serious contempt for the rough Christian world of the North,

For the boorish German knights and intriguing Italian priests.

But he held his tongue,

Went on a crusade and took Jerusalem from the infidel,

And was duly crowned as King of the Holy City.

Even this act did not placate the Popes.

They deposed Frederick and gave his Italian possessions to Charles of Anjou,

The brother of that King Louis of France,

Who became famous as Saint Louis.

This led to more warfare.

Conrad V,

The son of Conrad IV,

And the last of the Hohenstaufens,

Tried to regain the kingdom,

And was defeated and decapitated at Naples.

But twenty years later,

The French,

Who had made themselves thoroughly unpopular in Sicily,

Were all murdered during the so-called Sicilian Vespers.

And so it went.

The quarrel between the Popes and the Emperors was never settled.

But after a while the two enemies learned to leave each other alone.

In the year 1278,

Rudolf of Habsburg was elected Emperor.

He did not take the trouble to go to Rome to be crowned.

The Popes did not object,

And in turn they kept away from Germany.

This meant peace,

But two entire centuries which might have been used for the purpose of internal organization had been wasted in useless warfare.

It is an ill wind,

However,

That bloweth no good to someone.

The little cities of Italy,

By a process of careful balancing,

Had managed to increase their power and their independence at the expense of both Emperors and Popes.

When the rush for the Holy Land began,

They were able to handle the transportation problem of the thousands of eager pilgrims who were clamoring for passage.

And at the end of the Crusades,

They had built themselves such strong defenses of brick and of gold,

That they could defy Pope and Emperor with equal indifference.

Church and state fought each other,

And the third party,

The medieval city,

Ran away with the spoils.

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