[295] q.v., The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xiv.

[296] On the rise of dogma or tradition in the Church, especially at Rome, see Davis, Mediæval Europe (Home University Library).—E. B.

[297] Encyclopædia Britannica, art. “Church History,” p. 336.

[298] E. B. (quoted from Tröltsch).

[299] See Haverfield. The Romanization of Roman Britain.—E. B.

[300] No literature! I demur entirely. Apuleius, Ammianus, St. Augustine, the Vulgate, Claudian, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ausonius—I mention but a few names—are not these literature?—E. B.

I forgot the Golden Ass and St. Augustine as coming into the Imperial period, but do these two names save the situation? E. B. ekes out with one second-rate historian, a translation, three court poets. Yet we are dealing here with the literature of a “world” empire.—H. G. W.

[301] A very interesting and suggestive book bearing on this question of disease in relation to political history is Malaria: a Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome, by W. H. S. Jones.

[302] Baring Gould’s Lives of the Saints.

[303] On Benedictinism, see Dom. Berlière’s L’Ordre Monastique.—E. B.

[304] See Holmes’ Justinian and Theodora.—E. B.

[305] Great importance is attached to this task by historians, including one of the editors of this history. We are told that the essential contribution of Rome to the inheritance of mankind is the idea of society founded on law, and that this exploit of Justinian was the crown of the gift. The writer is ill-equipped to estimate the peculiar value of Roman legalism to mankind. Existing law seems to him to be based upon a confused foundation of conventions, arbitrary assumptions, and working fictions about human relationship, and to be a very impracticable and antiquated system indeed; he is persuaded that a time will come when the whole theory and practice of law will be recast in the light of a well-developed science of social psychology in accordance with a scientific conception of human society as one developing organization and in definite relationship to a system of moral and intellectual education. He contemplates the law and lawyers of to-day with a temperamental lack of appreciation. This may have made him negligent of Justinian and unjust to Rome as a whole.

[306] The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxiii.

[307] Turanians from Turkestan or Avars from the Caucasus.

[308] There is a good account of Mithraism in C. Bigg’s The Church’s Task in the Roman Empire.—E. B.

[309] Julian was not so much a Mithraist as a syncretist. See Alice Gardner, Julian the Apostate.—E. B.

[310] The Ephthalites on the Oxus produced a coinage in silver and copper consisting of three denominations: heavy silver, light silver, and copper. Thirteen specimens are known to survive, the light silver denomination being represented by two specimens in the British Museum and one at Petrograd, until I was fortunate enough to add two to their number by a trouvaille in Oxford Street.—P. G.

Our illustration shows one of these two coins. It may have been struck in India in some state under Ephthalite dominion. Its interest for us lies in the figure it gives of a Hun horseman. He seems to wear a feather head-dress, reminding one of a Red Indian or a Moscow hotel porter, and his leg gear suggests an American cow-boy. Note his great quiver of arrows.—H. G. W.

[311] I am greatly indebted to Mr. S. N. Fu and to Mr. Duyvendak for much information and criticism upon the matter of this and the next section. They have both been rewritten since the appearance of the Outline in parts.

[312] There were girl slaves who did domestic work and women who were bought and sold.—J.J.L.D.

[313] It is doubtful if the Chinese knew of the mariner’s compass. Hirth, Ancient History of China, p. 126 sqq. comes to the conclusion, after a careful examination of all data, that, although it is probable something like the compass was known in high antiquity, the knowledge of it was lost for a long time afterwards, until, in the Middle Ages, it reappears as an instrument in the hands of geomancers (people who selected favourable sites for graves, etc). The earliest unmistakable mention of its use as a guide to mariners occurs in a work of the 12th century and refers to its use on foreign ships trading between China and Sumatra. Hirth is rather inclined to assume that Arab travellers may have seen it in the hands of Chinese geomancers and applied its use to navigation, so that it was afterwards brought back by them to China as the “mariner’s compass.”—J. J. L. D.

[314] Helmolt.

[315] The reason for the stationariness of China goes, we think, deeper than a script. China has formed a social-economic system which (1) cannot be transplanted, and (2) cannot be changed without tremendous effort. She lives by agriculture—rice-growing. (There is some tea among the foot hills, but it has to grow with rice to support the population.) Towns exist—on the edge of the rice-fields, for their needs. The town is dependent on the country, not, as elsewhere, country on town. There are small properties; all the hands are wanted, and can be absorbed, in old ancestral agricultural jobs. A state of small peasants, tilling, tilling, tilling, has no source of initiative towards change. If coal is to be mined in the future, and China industrialized, then a society that has not fundamentally changed for thousands of years may be changed. China is like an Egypt or Sumeria, so big that the nomads—those terrible agents of change—beat on its mass in vain. What the nomads have not done, modern industrialism may do.—J. L. M. and E. B.

Both Mr. Chen and Mr. Fu lay considerable stress upon the institution of the patriarchal Chinese family clan, which retains its sons at home, marrying them at an early age before they achieve economic independence, as a retarding influence upon Chinese progress. Mr. Chen and Mr. Duyvendak are also inclined to lay stress upon the paralyzing effect of the classical examinations upon the Chinese mind. These examinations have subdued or rejected all innovating intelligences. Mr. Duyvendak also points out that J. L. M. and E. B. have overlooked the fact that rice is grown only in South China.

L. C. B. disagrees with J. L. M. and E. B. in his analysis of the Chinese problem. His sympathies are with the south; with the philosophy of Lao Tse. He writes as follows:—

“In order to answer the question—why China achieved so much under the T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, and thereafter failed to achieve more, it is necessary to consider what were the principal factors of culture and progress under these dynasties, and how they came to be extinguished.

“From the earliest times there have always been two widely differing types of Chinese mind—the Northern or Confucian, and the Southern or Taoist. As Mr. Okakura has pointed out, the Yangtse-Kiang and the Hwang-Ho rivers are respectively, from the point of view of thought and culture, the Mediterranean and the Baltic of China. Taoism was the idealism of the south, Confucianism the practice of the north. Both stood for adjustment; but the adjustment of Confucius was the adjustment of the individual in his social and ceremonial relations to others, while that of Lao Tse was the adjustment of the individual soul in its relation to the Infinite. The history of China is bound up with the struggle of those two forces, culminating in the practically complete defeat of Taoism after centuries of ebb and flow. Chu Hsi, A.D. 1130-1200, was the later St. Paul of modern Confucianism. During the T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties China was temporarily united, and free play was allowed to the thought of both schools. Each played its part and each reacted upon the other, to the great benefit of the Empire. Yet both systems carried within them the seeds of decay. Taoism, divorced from the affairs of everyday life and the education of the people, lost itself in art, literature, and mythology. Confucianism added layer after layer of hard shell about the inert organism of social life. The end was finally reached in 1421 under the Mings with the transference of the capital from Nanking to Peking, and the dominance of the Confucian party who had brought it about. Only in the later Ming period does the great solitary figure of Wang Yang Ming arise. His central doctrine that thought and learning are of small value unless translated into action had little immediate effect in China, but it fell upon Japanese soil, quickened the drooping Samurai spirit, and reached maturity with the Russo-Japanese war and the advance of modern Japan.

“The imprisonment of the Chinese mind in the ancient script is merely one aspect of Confucianism in its bondage to the past. The statement of J. L. M. and E. B. that China is a nation of peasants is incomprehensible to me. There has always been a great urban industrialism and a great commerce. ‘The Chinese,’ as Dyer Ball says, ‘are pre-eminently a trading race.... Nor has the trade of China been simply a modern affair. From remote antiquity the Chinese have been true to their commercial instincts, and have not only been the civilizers of Eastern Asia, supplying them with their letters and literature’ [and artistic products], ‘but they have also provided for their more material wants, and received in exchange the commodities which they required from the neighbouring nations.’ Trade with India was developed to a great extent in the ninth century A.D.”

This interesting question is also discussed very ably and interestingly in Hubbard’s The Fate of Empires.

In discussing §§ 7 and 8, Mr. S. N. Fu has pointed out that little or nothing is said in this Outline of the period of confusion before Shi-Hwang-ti. It was an age of political division indeed, but of very great intellectual initiatives. Unhappily there exists as yet little or no material in Europe available for the purposes of this history, upon this equivalent to the Athenian period of mental vigour in Europe.

[316] See Watters’ Travels of Yuan Chwang and Beal’s Life of Hiuen Tsiang (= Yuan Chwang).

[317] There is some little doubt about this identification. See Watters.

[318] The British Encyclopædia article (Hsuan Tsang) is full and good on his Indian travels.

[319] See Margoliouth’s Mahommedanism and his Life of Mahomet.—E. B.

[320] Should be spelt Mădina and Măkka.—H. H. J.

[321] Mark Sykes.

[322] Should be spelt and pronounced Hijra.—H. H. J.

[323] From the year of this flight (= Hegira) from Mecca through the desert to Medina, the Moslem world dates its era. The Moslem year is a year of twelve lunar months (354 days), and is therefore shorter than the year of Western chronology by eleven days. A.H. (the Moslem reckoning) gains a year on A.D. once in every 33 years (about). A.D. 1920 is A.H. 1338 until September 15, when A.H. 1339 begins. A.D. 20,526 and A.H. 20,526 will be partly coincident.

[324] Published by the Islamic Review.

[325] But Schurtz, in Helmolt’s History of the World, says that the private life of the gallant Khalid was a scandal to the faithful. He committed adultery, a serious offence in a world of polygamy.

[326] At Ctesiphon.

[327] Paraphrased from Schurtz in Helmolt’s History of the World.

[328] Mark Sykes.

[329] St. John’s Gospel, chap. i. 1.

[330] Thus Sykes. But Skrine and Ross say only that seventy members of the Omayyad family were invited to a feast under promise of amnesty, and then massacred by the attendants. Gibbon gives eighty victims, and tells his story thus: “Four score of the Omayyads, who had yielded to the faith or clemency of their foes, were invited to a banquet at Damascus. The laws of hospitality were violated by a promiscuous massacre; the board was spread over their fallen bodies; and the festivity of their guests were enlivened by the music of their dying groans.” History is not yet an exact science.

[331] Harun-ar-Rashid = Aaron the Just.—H. H. J.

[332] The Caliph’s Last Heritage.

[333] A General History of Europe.

[334] Alcohol as “spirits of wine” was known to Pliny (100 A.D.) The studentof the history of science should consult Campbell Brown’s History of Chemistry and check these statements in the text.

[335] Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Feudalism,” by Professor G. B. Adams.

[336] The Franks differed from the Swabians and South Germans, and came much nearer the Anglo-Saxons in that they spoke a “Low German” and not a “High German” dialect. Their language resembled plattdeutsch and Anglo-Saxon, and was the direct parent of Dutch and Flemish. In fact, the Franks where they were not Latinized became Flemings and “Dutchmen” of South Holland (North Holland is still Friesisch—i.e. Anglo-Saxon). The “French” which the Latinized Franks and Burgundians spoke in the seventh to the tenth centuries was remarkably like the Rumansch language of Switzerland, judging from the vestiges that remain in old documents.—H. H. J.

[337] A General History of Europe, Thatcher and Schwill.

[338] N. B.—Vik-ings, not Vi-kings. Vik = a fiord or inlet.

[339] Vide Stubbs’ History of Germany in the Middle Ages, and Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire.

[340] The Lateran was the earlier palace of the Popes in Rome. Later they occupied the Vatican.

[341] Eginhard’s Life of Karl the Great. (Glaister.)

[342] The addition was discreetly opposed by Leo III. “In the correspondence between them the Pope assumes the liberality of a statesman and the prince descends to the prejudice and passions of a priest.”—Gibbon, chap. lx.

[343] The Byzantine style in Gaul is, I fancy, much earlier than Charlemagne, and goes back to the 4th century or earlier. See Rivoira’s History of Lombard Architecture, or T. G. Jackson’s History of Gothic Architecture.—E. B.

[344] See L. Brechier, L’Eglise et l’Orient au Moyen Age.

[345] Gibbon mentions a second Theodora, the sister of Marozia.

[346] This period is a tangled one. The authority is Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (an excellent general book from A.D. 400 to 1527), vol. iii of the Eng. trans., p. 249 seq. John X owed the tiara to his mistress, the elder Theodora, but he was “the foremost statesman of his age” (Gregorovius, p. 259). He fell in 928 owing to Marozia. John XI became Pope in 931 (after two Popes had intervened in the period 928-931); he was Marozia’s son, possibly by Pope Sergius III. John XII did not come at once after John XI, who died in 936; there were several Popes in between; and he became Pope in 955.—E. B.

[347] There were three dynasties of emperors in the early Middle Ages:

Saxon: Otto I (962) to Henry II, ending 1024.

Salian: Conrad II to Henry V, ending about 1125.

Hohenstaufen: Conrad III to Frederic II, ending in 1250.

The Hohenstaufens were Swabian in origin. Then came the Habsburgs with Rudolph I in 1273, who lasted until 1918.

[348] These dates are from Gibbon. Beazley gives 865, 904-7, 935, 944, 971-2. (History of Russia, Clarendon Press.)

[349] “A Turkish people whose leaders had adopted Judaism,” says Harold Williams.

[350] For the development of the papacy, see H. W. C. Davis, Mediæval Europe.

[351] E. Barker, art. “Crusades,” Encyclopædia Britannica.

[352] Technically only twice, the excommunication of 1245 was a renewal by Innocent IV of that of 1239.—E. B.

[353] “The custody of the True Cross, which on Easter Sunday was solemnly exposed to the people, was entrusted to the Bishop of Jerusalem; and he alone might gratify the curious devotion of the pilgrims, by the gift of small pieces, which they encased in gold or gems, and carried away in triumph to their respective countries. But, as this gainful branch of commerce must soon have been annihilated, it was found convenient to suppose that the marvellous wood possessed a secret power of vegetation, and that its substance, though continually diminished, still remained entire and unimpaired.”—Gibbon.

[354] The Popes inhabited the palace of the Lateran until 1305, when a French Pope set up the papal court at Avignon. When the Pope returned to Rome in 1377 the Lateran was almost in ruins, and the palace of the Vatican became the seat of the papal court. It was, among other advantages, much nearer to the papal stronghold, the Castle of San Angelo.

[355] He was crowned emperor in 1220 by Honorius III, the successor of Innocent.

[356] Some authorities deny his authorship of this letter. See A. L. Smith’s Church and State in the Middle Ages.

[357] Perhaps parchment, rather than leather. Such promises on parchment were also used by the Carthaginians. Was Frederick’s money an inheritance from an old tradition living on in Sicily since Carthaginian times?—E. B.

[358] Encyclopædia Britannica, art. “Frederick II.”

[359] In relation to this section, see the chapter on the “Unity of the Middle Ages” in F. S. Marvin’s Unity of Western Civilization.

[360] See Paul Sabatier’s Vie de S. Francois d’Assise (English trans. by Houghton).

[361] Encyclopædia Britannica, art. “Dominic.”

[362] J. H. Robinson.

[363] Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliphs’ Last Heritage.

[364] Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliphs’ Last Heritage.

[365] But see Pastor, History of the Popes, Vol. I.

[366] See Beazley, Forbes and Birkett’s Russia for a fuller account of the Cossacks and also see later chap. xxxvi, § 10.

[367] See Malleson’s Akbar, in the Rulers of India series.

[368] “Mogul” is our crude rendering of the Arabic spelling Mughal, which itself was a corruption of Mongol, the Arabic alphabet having no symbol for ng.—H. H. J.

[369] Dr. Schmit in Helmolt’s History of the World.

[370] I do not think this is fair. See Edinburgh Review for January, 1920, article on Calcutta University Commission.—E. B.

But popular education!—H. G. W.

[371] Renascence here means rebirth, and it is applied to the recovery of the entire Western world. It is not to be confused with “the Renaissance,” an educational, literary, and artistic revival that went on in Italy and the Western world affected by Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Renaissance was only a part of the Renascence of Europe. The Renaissance was a revival due to the exhumation of classical art and learning; it was but one factor in the very much larger and more complicated resurrection of European capacity and vigour, with which we are dealing in this chapter.

[372] The early Frankish and other German kings were not elective. They were hereditary; but as there was no primogeniture, there was either partition among the sons, or a struggle to decide which son or relative should succeed. In such a struggle the nobles might take part, and this might mean some form of election. But heredity is the thing: reges ex nobilitate sumunt, says Tacitus: the king must have the nobility of being Woden-born, or he cannot be king. The genealogies of our early Saxon kings all go back to Woden, and George V is Woden-born.—E. B.

[373] But the Jews were already holding their community together by systematic education at least as early as the beginning of the Christian era.

[374] The Greeks had this idea.—E. B.

[375] I do not think this is just. The Anglo-Saxons were not anti-monastic. They were converted by Benedictine monks in 600; just after 700 they sent out monks to convert Germany; about 960, under Dunstan and Edgar, they experienced a monastic revival. The Normans after 1066 introduced the Cluniac and Cistercian orders, and spread monasticism, while the earlier Northmen, after 900, were quite favourable to the Church in England.

Note that Gregory’s imposition of celibacy on the clergy was accepted, and willingly accepted, by the contemporary lay world. William the Conqueror, through Archbishop Lanfranc, enforced celibacy in England.—E. B.

[376] Wycliffe believed in a real presence—but he held that it was spiritual and not substantial. The host was two things—bread, and at the same time a spiritual Christ. This is not the “memorial” view.—E. B.

[377] Lützow’s Bohemia.

[378] Dr. C. O. Stallybrass says that this plague reached China thirty or forty years after its first appearance in Europe. Ibn Batuta, the Arab traveller, who was in China from 1342 to 1346, first met with it on his return to Damascus. The Black Death is the human form of a disease endemic among the jerboas and other small rodents in the districts round the head of the Caspian Sea.

[379] The seeds of conflict which grew up into the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 were sown upon ground which is strangely familiar to any writer in 1920. A European catastrophe had reduced production and consequently increased the earnings of workers and traders. Rural wages had risen by 48 per cent in England, when an unwise executive endeavored to enforce in the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers (1350-51) a return to the pre-plague wages and prices of 1346, and aimed a blow in the Statute of 1378 against labour combinations. The villeins were driven to desperation by the loss of their recent increase of comfort, and the outbreak came, as Froissart saw it from the angle of the Court, “all through the too great comfort of the commonalty.” Other ingredients which entered into the outbreak were the resentment felt by the new working class at the restrictions imposed on its right to combine, the objection of the lower clergy to papal taxes, and a frank dislike of foreigners and landlords. There was no touch of Wycliffe’s influence in the rising. It was at its feeblest in Leicestershire, and it murdered one of the only other Liberal churchmen in England.—P. G.

[380] See article “Typography” in the Encyclo. Brit.

[381] Standard Italian dates from Dante (1300); standard English from Chaucer and Wycliffe (1380); standard German from Luther (1520).—E. B.

[382] But Nonconformity was stamped out in Germany. See § 11 B of this chapter.

[383] “If I were writing a history of democracy,” comments E. B., “I should deal first with democracy in religion, which is Calvinism, founded by a great Frenchman at Geneva, and then with democracy in politics, which is the French Revolution, inaugurated by another great Frenchman at Geneva, Rousseau. (The parallel of these two is striking—both typical exponents of the French genius, in its ardent logic and its apostolic fervour which gives in a burning lava to the world the findings of its logic.) It is noticeable in England how democracy in religion (Presbyterianism, which is simply Calvinism, plus Independency or Congregationalism) leads straight under the Stuarts to the English democratic ideas of the seventeenth century. I do not think the democratic element in Protestantism is sufficiently appreciated in the text. Even Luther, in the early days of 1520, could write The Freedom of a Christian Man and champion the priesthood of each believer and his direct access to his Maker. Luther, it is true, changed by 1525, and became a monarchist, the apostle of a state religion, under a godly prince who was summus episcopus. Anglicanism was from the first a monarchist religion, under a Henry VIII who was supremum caput. But if Lutheranism became, and Anglicanism was from the first, a religion of the State, Calvinism was always the religion of resistance to the State—in Holland and in Scotland most especially. The Reformation thus produced two opposite effects in politics; so far as it was Lutheran and Anglican it was monarchist; so far as it was Calvinistic, it was democratic. It is at first sight curious, but it is really quite natural, that the Catholics of the counter-reformation should also have been democratic. The Catholics could not admit the control of the monarch in the sphere of religion any more than the Calvinist; and here, as in other things (e.g. in the claim to possession of infallible truth), the Catholic priest and the Calvinistic presbyter were agreed. Filmer, an exponent of Anglican monarchism, expresses this well when he says, in speaking of the doctrine of a social contract, that ‘Cardinal Bellarmine and Calvin both look asquint this way.’ For the doctrine of a social contract was the democratic doctrine put forward by Catholics and Calvinists in opposition to the Lutheran and Anglican doctrine of divine right.”

[384] Aristotle’s Organon, or logic, had always been in part known to the West and was known as a whole after about 1130. In the thirteenth century the rest of his writings became known, in two ways. One way was that of direct translation from the Greek into Latin: it was in this way that St. Thomas Aquinas knew the Ethics and the Politics (the latter translated about 1260 by William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth in the Latin Empire of Constantinople started under Baldwin of Flanders in 1204, and a Fleming himself). The other way was that of indirect translation, that is to say, of translations of Arabic paraphrases of, or commentaries on, the works of Aristotle, such as had been made by Averroes and by Avicenna before him. It was Aristotle’s Physics and (I think) Metaphysics that first became known in this way. In this latter way the West received a version of Aristotle which, like Bottom the Weaver, was strangely “translated.” Sometimes translations were made direct from Arabic into Latin; sometimes they were made first into Hebrew, and then new translations were made from Hebrew into Latin. As the Arabic version of Aristotle was not always itself direct, but sometimes made from Syriac versions of the Greek, confusion became confounded. The Latin translations of the Arabic Aristotle sometimes contained not translation, but transliteration of Arabic words or sentences; and Roger Bacon very naturally objected to their unintelligibility. What is more, Aristotle’s views, as well as his words, were transmogrified in the process. But the important thing is that for Aristotle’s Organon, Ethics, and Politics there were direct translations from the Greek. (See Sandys’ History of Classical Scholarship and Renan’s Averroes et l’Averroisme.)—E. B.

[385] I do not agree with this paragraph. In the first sentence things are alleged about Realism which are not justified. It was the philosophy of the priests and most humane thinkers of the Middle Ages, of St. Anselm and of John Wycliffe. Nor is it true that Realism was the philosophy of the church. It was, in the early Middle Ages; but after Occam (1330) Nominalism triumphed, and was the philosophy of the church till the Reformation. Luther denounced Nominalism.—E. B.

[386] Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Scholasticism.”

[387] The Medieval Mind, by Henry Osborn Taylor.

[388] This gives a wrong impression about Nominalism, that it was banned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The contrary is the case. The attempt of 1339 came to nothing; that of 1473 was belated and unsuccessful. Except Wycliffe, there is no considerable thinker of these centuries, so far as I know, who is not Nominalist. The triumph of Nominalism was no unmixed benefit. Its insistence on study of the individual was indeed favourable to natural science; and Harnack says that it led to good work in psychology. But its nescience about Universals led to obscurantism in theology. Wycliffe as a Realist could hold that God acted secundum rationes exemplares, by certain and known universal rules; the Nominalists reduced God to inscrutable omnipotence. They went on to add that He could therefore only be known at all by the miraculous intervention of the mass through the priesthood. Their scepticism about Universals thus overleapt itself, and fell on the other side, into obscurantist ecclesiasticism.—E. B.