To break, as he thought, the Burgundian power, the Dauphin, that is, the eldest son of the king, murdered the Duke of Burgundy even as the latter knelt before him to do homage. The Duke's purpose in doing this homage was to unite the forces of Burgundy and France against the growing power of Henry. After this desperate deed the Burgundians deemed it their best course to make terms with Henry, and the terms they made were that he should marry the daughter of the mad King of France and should be placed, with the help of Burgundy, on the French throne as soon as the mad king died—excluding the Dauphin from the succession.

They were terms which committed Henry to a constant war with the Dauphin's forces. In this he was consistently successful; but the project formed by his treaty with the Burgundians was broken by his early death. Henry VI., his son and successor as King of England, was then two years old.

The English regent, who had charge of the kingdom while Henry VI. was under full age, carried on the war in France against the party of the Dauphin. And it was waged with steady success, so that the Dauphin, now come to the throne as Charles VII., was on the point of giving up all as lost, when the tide of England's victory was checked and then turned back by one of the most wonderful persons whom we meet in the whole course of the story—Joan of Arc.

This peasant girl, becoming prophetess, led the soldiers of France to victory and inspired them with the belief that heaven was on their side. From that moment the tide turned and all went in France's favour. The "Maid of Orleans," Joan herself, was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and to our shame was burnt by the English as a heretic. But the French successes continued, none the less; the Burgundians wavered and went over to the King of France again; and precisely in the middle year of the fifteenth century, 1450, the English lost Normandy and all their hold on Northern France.

Three years later that strip of Guienne, the coast line from Bordeaux southward, went the same way, and England was left with not a foot of French soil except the town of Calais.

And now it would seem as if England might at length hope to settle her own troubles within her island boundaries. If that was a hope which any men of that day entertained it was grievously disappointed, for she was just about to enter on those terrible years of civil war between the two great dukedoms of York and Lancaster, each claiming the throne, which went on during nearly all the latter half of the century. For their badge and emblem the Yorkists had a white rose and the Lancastrians a red, and from these roses those dreadful wars are known as the Wars of the Roses.

Wars of the Roses

The English people had naturally been bitterly disappointed by the final result of the French war. England continued under the practical governance of the regents even after the king had come of age, and their rule caused great dissatisfaction. A dangerous mob under one Jack Cade got the better of the king's troops and held the city of London for two days. But his mob was undisciplined, and when the citizens took arms in their own defence the rebellion was soon put down. It was a sign, however, of the general discontent that the rebellion could have even such success as this.

What helped to make the Wars of the Roses so prolonged and so bitter was that the claim of each of the rivals was so nearly equal. In an outlined story, such as this that I am trying to tell, there is no place for the details of the claims of each; but we may note that the claim as to the strict right of succession was complicated by the claim put forward by the York party that they stood for the national welfare against the bad government of the Lancastrian king and his regents. The Lancastrians posed as pure loyalists, affirming that they stood for the legitimate rights of succession to the throne. Certainly the evils of their government were obvious to all men. They had lost France; England was without a fleet to protect her shores, and the French landed and raided; the oversea trade of England with the Continent was nearly ruined. Victory went now to one and now to another of the evenly balanced forces, and with each successive victory the vengeance taken by the victors, in retaliation for what their side had suffered when it was defeated, became more and more sanguinary. In one of the battles, that fought at Towton in 1461, which was a great Yorkist victory, the statement that more than 36,000 men were killed seems to be generally accepted, though it is scarcely credible when we consider the small population of England at this time. More than three-quarters of the loss was suffered by the Lancastrians. Moreover, of twelve of what are regarded as the great battles of these wars, it is notable that the Yorkists won nine and the Lancastrians only three; yet the final battle, that of Bosworth Field, the battle which "counted" above all the others, was won by the Lancastrians, and its result was to place Henry VII. on the throne. Bosworth and 1485 are usually named as the place and date of the last battle in the long drawn-out Wars of the Roses, but in fact the struggle was maintained till within three years of the end of the century, and the really last battle was fought, again to a Lancastrian victory, at Blackheath in 1497.

Use of firearms

In the beginning of the wars the unfortunate Henry VI. was twice taken prisoner. King Edward IV. then comes to the throne. Henry is released, regains the throne and Edward flees abroad. He gets the help of the Duke of Burgundy, and with a force of Burgundian soldiers returns and dethrones Henry. We may note that these Burgundians were armed with what were called arquebuses, firing gunpowder, ignited by a match. The arquebuses were made somewhat after the pattern of the crossbow, but of course without the bow, and with a barrel in place of the open trough for the bolt. It was not the first time of the use of firearms in England, but there seem to have been more soldiers thus armed, in the battle which brought Edward to the throne again, than ever before.

These Wars of the Roses, though they were waged for long, and though the vengeance taken by the successive victors was heavy, seem to have interfered surprisingly little with the agriculture and not greatly with the commerce of the country. Although the victors' vengeance was dire, it was directed mainly against the chiefs of the conquered side. It did not fall on the rank and file. Population, in spite of the war, increased both in town and country, and in rural districts the tenant farmer more and more took the place of the villein. The result was that when Edward IV. had firmly established himself on the throne he found himself very largely free of that menace from the great barons which had been a check on the authority of the kings before him and had won privileges and charters from them. Many of the great men had been killed in battle or in the executions which followed a victory.

Therefore, had Edward so pleased, he might, as it seems, have been a king almost as autocratic as any of the Tudors who followed him after the brief reign of Richard III. Before the Tudor family succeeded the Plantagenets, more battles were to be fought and the nobility were still further to be weakened. But Edward was strong enough over them. He, fortunately for England, cared for prosperity rather than for glory. He not only encouraged commerce, but was something of a merchant on his own account, owning trading vessels and making much money by the venture. The weaving trade, under him, extended in England and its great centre at Coventry was established.

He did indeed send an army to the Continent, to aid Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who was his brother-in-law, against Louis XI. of France, but even this turned into a financial venture, for he allowed Louis to bribe him out and took his army home again.

And here we touch a point, in the relations between Burgundy and France, which is the point on which the final result of these relations turned. The result was that France, under Louis XI., gained a complete victory and that he became really sovereign over the land in which the sovereignty of the French kings had been disputed very long and very hardly. But the point on which the relations turned towards that result is indicated by the very title given to Charles of Burgundy, "the Bold," while the extraordinary character of the King of France is hinted by the means he employed to get rid of Edward and the English army. He made appeal to the chief desire of Edward's heart, the love of money. Louis is known in history as perhaps the master diplomat and schemer of all the many that its pages show us. He was a master in detecting and in playing upon the weaknesses of men's characters. So he played on Edward's avarice.

Against this cunning and scheming, for which the king had a genius, his great vassal had perhaps in excess that quality of boldness which his title implies. He was over-venturesome and hasty, and Louis waited and schemed, like a spider in the web's centre, and finally sucked the blood of the buzzing impetuous fly.

The first Tudor king

The claims of the first Tudor king to the throne of England will be seen to be none too sound, if looked at critically. Largely it was Henry's own ability that enabled him to establish himself and to make a final end of the opposition and rebellions after he had been for twelve years king. It was an ability and strength of purpose characteristic of all his successors until the throne of England passed from the Tudors to the Scottish Stuarts. Yet always the despotism of the English kings differed from that of the French kings in this important point: that whereas the French kings had their foot on the necks of both barons and commons, in England even those who were most autocratic over their nobility always kept a wary eye on their commons, and not even Mary in her zeal for the Roman Catholic religion dared to go too far in opposition to the feeling of the country.

CHAPTER XXII

THE TEUTON AND THE SLAV

Thus we have traced in outline the course of the great story up to, or about, the year 1500, in respect of three of the nations which were among the foremost actors in it, England, France, and Spain. We have seen each of them establishing themselves within something very like the national boundaries which enclose them to-day. England and Scotland have not yet come into union, but the Tweed is in 1500, as now, the boundary river between them.

France, by the subtlety of Louis XI., has gained the mastery of all her great vassal lords. The English, it is true, still hold Calais, but no other possession on the Continent. And the boundary of France goes further north in 1500 than now, for it includes that count-ship, or province, of Flanders which had been brought into the possession of France's most powerful and dangerous vassal the Duke of Burgundy.

Northward, again, Holland and Scandinavia (the present Norway and Sweden)—with Denmark, sometimes the most powerful of them all—did not take much part as nations in the great story, but, as we have seen, the Northmen came very largely into its making by reason of their sea-faring raids and settlements upon the coasts of all the Western world. From Normandy they came to England and they conquered. They established themselves as kings of Sicily. A Northman, Baldwin, became Eastern Emperor at Constantinople.

CONSTANTINOPLE. Fountain and Square of St. Sophia.
CONSTANTINOPLE.
Fountain and Square of St. Sophia.

Spain we have seen coming together, by the union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, within its present boundaries of sea and mountains. It has finally overthrown the last stronghold of Mahommedan power in the western part of Europe by the conquest of Granada. Portugal ever since the time of the second Crusade has kept its independence.

On the other, the eastern side of Europe, however, we find that another Mahommedan power, of quite different race from any of the Syrians, Arabians, and Africans who composed the mixed Moslem force which occupied Spain, has taken firm possession of Constantinople itself and of a vast area of Europe northward—the Turks.

Constantine had been an Emperor of wise foresight when he surrounded with strong defensive walls the fine city which he built beside the older Byzantium. It was the gate commanding the narrow sea-way separating Europe from Asia. Its harbour, later known as the Golden Horn, was spacious and secure for ships of commerce or ships of war. Its importance was obvious. Long before its capture by the Crusaders at the beginning of the thirteenth century it had seen the barbarians from the north hammering at its walls. Already the growing nation which had Moscow for its chief city, and which was beginning to be called Russia, had commenced its attempts—of which there have been very many in later story—to reach down to Constantinople.

Partly by fighting and partly by bribing, the Emperor of the East had succeeded in keeping the barbarians off, but the attack of the Crusaders, with the Venetian fleet to aid, prevailed as we have seen. Baldwin and his successors reigned at Constantinople for more than fifty years.

The effect of that capture of the capital of the East by the Western powers was curious. It led to the incursion into Greece, and into all that south-eastern corner of Europe over which the Emperor at Constantinople was supposed to be sovereign, of many members of the most important families of the Western world, especially French and Burgundian. And so we have at this time as actors in our stories men with such titles as Duke of Thebes and Duke of Athens, but with names that are Gothic or Latin in origin.

Gothic Dukes in Greece

This hold of the West on the East, however, lasted only a little more than half a century, and then the Greeks regained the capital city and again a Greek Emperor reigned. And gradually, after the loss of the Empire, the lords from the West lost much of their power in their own territories also.

So this was but a quickly passing act in the story. There was an attempt at union between the Greek and the Roman Churches during that half-century. The Pope of Rome was officially recognised as the superior of the Patriarch at Constantinople. But it does not seem that his authority made much difference to the doctrine which the bishops in the Eastern world professed, nor in their way of conducting their religious affairs. And after the temporary union the Churches fell apart again, as before.

Now we saw, in a former chapter of the story—Chapter XVI.—how the great mass of the Slavonic peoples, pressing from the east westward, had been divided by the Hungarians, of different race from themselves, thrusting in like a wedge. The wedge split them into two parts, of which the northern, consisting chiefly of Russia and Poland, was far larger than the southern. The principal Slavonic peoples in the southern part were the Bulgarians and Serbians settled in those territories, or nearly so, which Bulgaria occupies now and which Serbia did occupy until the Great War. The place of the latter we now see marked on our modern maps as forming part of the larger State of Jugo-Slavia.

We have said something already about the beginnings of that vast and unfortunate country which is now called Russia. We saw how the name of the country and its first rulers came down from Scandinavia. The Scandinavians were great people, with unusual gifts of governing and organising at a time when these were very rare and precious gifts among the tribes and nations of Northern Europe. They must have had a touch of the genius which made the ancient Romans so masterful and effective.

The first capital of that infant Russia, which was destined to grow into such a giant, was Novgorod, not very far from where its later capital of Petrograd now stands. As with other famous cities in other lands, Novgorod was important because of its situation on a navigable waterway. Then from it again there stretched waterways to the south, both to the Caspian and to the Black Sea. The enterprising Scandinavians who went down to the Mediterranean and took possession of many coast towns and of islands in the Ionian Sea did not all go sea-roving round France and Spain and Italy to the eastward. The majority, I expect, did go by sea; but there is record of many going by the land (or river) route, through Russia. Soon the people that had occupied Novgorod and its neighbourhood spread eastward to another settlement called Nijni-Novgorod, which, as you may see on the map, is also on a great waterway. We may always find a reason for the growth of a big city, if we go a-hunting for the reason; and it is always an interesting hunt.

Another tribe or nation of these same Slavonic people began to grow in numbers and importance. They had their capital at Moscow.

The Tartars

During the first half of the thirteenth century these Slavs, whose pressure on his borders gave trouble to the German Emperor, were being pressed in their turn by a people coming from farther east, from the very borders of China. They were a people from Mongolia, called Tartars, and they lived the hardy, nomadic life. They moved less like armies than like nations, taking all their belongings, their wives and children, with them. They were very numerous and very fierce. They came down upon these Slavs repeatedly, but it appears to have made but little difference whether they were victors or vanquished; for if they won they did not settle on the conquered territory; they went away again. And if they were defeated there was no permanence about their defeat; they came back again. They were a constant vexation and menace.

So the story went, during all that half-century or so—at one time the Tartars overrunning nearly all Russia, as well as parts of Poland, except Novgorod itself. Later again they captured Novgorod. But by that time, that is to say just a little before the date at which the Greeks regained Constantinople—namely 1261—Moscow and the Muscovite province had increased in importance and strength. It seems that this capture by the Tartars of the capital of the southern province gave Moscow the opportunity to assert and make good a claim to authority over both provinces, for the Tsar or Czar (or Cæsar, or Kaiser) of Moscow entered into an alliance with the Khan (or chieftain) of the Tartar horde, and it is in this alliance that we may see the seed from which grew that immense Russia of to-day, which includes part of Mongolia itself, where those Tartar hordes came from.

The story of the next two centuries in Russia is really the story of the growth of the country from this seed. Other Slavonic peoples that grew powerful at the same time as, and in some rivalry with, Russia, were the Poles and Lithuanians. The latter were a fierce barbarous people. Probably they were a branch of the Slavonic family, but less civilised than the others and a constant menace both to Poles and Russians.

Teuton and Slav

Now you will perhaps remember that at the time of the second Crusade, that is in the middle of the twelfth century, a body of knights raised to go to Palestine requested the Pope's leave to go instead against a tribe called the Wends, who were pressing in upon Germany through the country that now is Prussia. The Wends were a pagan people and the Pope's leave was granted. This body of knights were called the Knights of the Sword, but they were absorbed later by the larger body called the Teutonic Order. This Order got possession of extensive territory along the south shore of the Baltic, and there the knights and their retainers maintained themselves—a Teutonic force lying between the Slavs and the ports on the Baltic. That was a position which was tolerably sure to lead to trouble. Several times in course of this great story we have seen a foreign army invited into a country and establishing itself there in a manner quite unexpected by the hosts. Actually it was on the invitation of one of the grandees of Poland that these Teutonic knights came to settle on their borders. They were established to the north of Poland, and on the eastern side they were bounded by the Lithuanians. And against these Lithuanians they would naturally fight, according to the purpose with which their order had been founded, because the Lithuanians were pagans until about halfway through the thirteenth century. At that time their ruler was converted to Christianity, and proclaimed Christianity as the State religion; and early in the next century they made an alliance with the Poles, their kinsmen. The Poles had been very hardly beset during the early part of the fourteenth century by those Teutonic guests who had come in on their invitation, but they heavily defeated the knights in 1332, and by their alliance with the Lithuanians they became strong. The Teutonic Order had henceforth to stand on the defensive, trying, but in vain, to hold the lands that it had won.

In course of the fifteenth century, Russia grew in strength, by her alliance with the Tartars, and she too began to press upon the Teutonic knights. The knights were gallant fighters in these days of their adversity, and just after the end of the century they won a victory over the Tsar's forces which led to a fifty years' truce. But the terms of the truce did not give the victors any increase of territory. It did but confirm their position for a while, and for a while only, as masters of what they still held. If you look at a modern map it will show you no trace of these Teutonic knights and their possessions, once so extensive. Their story, which is part of the larger story of the long struggle between Teuton and Slav, ended in a complete victory for the Slav. Nearly at the date of this treaty between the knights and the Tsar, the great State of Lithuania was merged in the Kingdom of Poland. Together they became a great power, while Cracow, the Polish capital, and other towns favoured by their positions on navigable waterways grew rich and prosperous.

We saw, in Chapter XVI., that one of the German States, that of Austria (the eastern land), lay especially exposed to the pressure of the Slavs. Because it lay in that exposed position, it had need to be strong. And it was for the advantage of the whole German Empire further to its west that it should be thus strong, because only by its strength could it act as an effective defence against these eastern enemies. Therefore it was granted privileges. Its ruler was raised to the rank of Duke, and later to Archduke. The situation of its capital, Vienna, on that great waterway, the Danube River, brought wealth. All through the fourteenth century Austria was gradually adding to her territory by conquest of weaker States along her borders.

It was in 1273 that Rudolph, Count of Habsburg, in the north of what now is Switzerland, became ruler of Austria; and the Habsburgs, or Hapsburgs, have been the ruling family in Austria ever since, until the Austrian Emperor's resignation on the loss of the Great War. Rudolph was also King of Germany. His claim to Austria was not very clear, but he was able to establish it because of the division of parties caused by the dying out of the direct descendants of the former ruling family.

It was for a like reason that Hungary, lying up against Austria's eastern border, and frequently at war with her, was able, after the middle of the fifteenth century, to annex some of Austria's most easterly possessions. But it was Austria's fortune at this crisis to have as her Archduke a bold and able man of the Habsburg line, Maximilian I., who was afterwards elected Emperor. Austria was by now an arch-duchy, but she was not yet an "electorate"; that is to say she had no vote, as those German States that were "electorates" had a vote, for the choice of an Emperor. For it was thus, by vote among those States that had the right of "election," that one was chosen to sit on the throne of Charlemagne. When you read of a ruler as an "Elector"—say of Hanover or of whatever State it be—you will know that it means that he was ruler of a State that had this right of election.

Maximilian then, later thus chosen Emperor, led and organised Austria with such success that by the end of the century, that is to say before the year 1500, he had regained all the territory that Hungary had lately taken, and restored to Austria all her old possessions. He had extended her boundaries to very much those which she continued to hold right up to the re-arrangement made after the Great War.

Thus this powerful family of Habsburgs established themselves in Austria, and at the same time established Austria as the most powerful State in Germany, although she did not have a vote in the Emperor's election. But the Habsburgs had possessions in other parts of Europe as well as in Austria. The castle from which their name was taken was near the junction of the Aar with the Rhine, in the north of that country which we now call Switzerland. It began to be so called about the middle of the fourteenth century, and the name was taken from one of its cantons, or divisions, the canton of Schwyz. But at first the name did not cover anything like the territory to which it soon was applied. In the fourteenth century it stood for a confederation of eight cantons.

The confederation grew out of an "Everlasting League," as it was called, which was formed shortly after the death of that Rudolph, the first Habsburg ruler of Austria, to resist the political claims of the Habsburgs. Apparently the founders of the League did not dispute the right of the Habsburgs as owners of extensive lands. The Habsburgs might deal with the land and any profits they might derive from it as they would. What the confederates disputed was their claim to govern.

The Swiss cantons

Nearly all through the fourteenth century this claim was being disputed, sometimes diplomatically, and sometimes by active war. Twice the Habsburgs raised an army to go against these audacious rebels, as they deemed them. The story of William Tell shooting the apple on his son's head belongs to this period. We need not accept it as actual historical fact, but rather as a legend expressive of the patriotism of the Swiss cantons. The confederates were very few in numbers, but they had the courage common among mountaineers, and in their mountainous country they could defend themselves against a far larger force of invaders. The numbers of the opposing armies that met in these conflicts were curiously unequal. In one great battle, that of Morgarten, early in the century, the attacking force is estimated at anything between 15,000 and 20,000, and the defending force at between 1,300 and 1,500. Yet the larger force, charging up the mountains and being beset with huge stones hurled at them by the defenders on the ridges, were utterly defeated. The same thing happened again towards the end of the century at the battle of Sempach. After that the Habsburgs made little further attempt to enforce their claims, but it was not till towards the end of the following century that the claim was formally renounced in a treaty called the "Ever-lasting Compact."

The Swiss seem to have been fond of that dangerous word, as applied to leagues and compacts, "ever-lasting."

In the course of the fifteenth century other cantons were taken into the confederacy.

In the contest between Louis XI. of France and his great vassal the Duke of Burgundy, the Swiss were brought into alliance with the French, the winning side, and they were consistently successful in a series of battles with the Burgundians. Maximilian, the Habsburg, was on the other, the Burgundian, side, for he had married the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy. Their alliance with the French added to the strength of the Swiss, and by the end of that century they had succeeded in throwing off any authority that the Emperor might still claim to wield over them, just as they had thrown off the claim of the Habsburgs at the end of the century before.

But the power of the Emperor was growing more and more nominal, and less and less real, and many States and cities were shaking off its burden. It was a time when authority both of Church and State was in dispute. John Huss, a Bohemian preacher, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, had taken up, as we have seen on p. 195, the doctrines of our Wycliffe and preached eloquently against the evil practices which had come into the Church. He had a very large following. Just as had happened in England, the Hussite attack on the authority of the Church became associated with an attack on the civil authority too. But this latter attack was checked in England by the defeat of Wat Tyler's rebellion and by the cruel measures taken to put down the Lollards, who carried on the doctrines of Wycliffe. Huss was burnt, as a heretic, at Rome, whither he had been summoned to give an account of his doings, in spite of an assurance of safe-conduct made to him by the King of the Romans. This made Huss a martyr in the eyes of his followers, and his popular movement in Bohemia gained great force. A regular Hussite army was formed. The Bohemians were akin to the Slavs rather than the Teutons, and this revolutionary force became a menace not only in Bohemia itself but in other States of the Empire. When armies were sent against the Hussites, the latter, fired, like the Puritans later, with religious zeal, always had the advantage. But they do not seem to have tried to take possession of territory. They fought for what may be shortly called reformation in the Church. The great Reformation, under Luther's lead, was still to come, in the following century, but we may regard our own Wycliffe as its forerunner, with Huss as his disciple, preparing the way for Luther.

The Hussite rising

The Hussite revolution was set to rest by a compact, made in 1436, to which the Church of Rome itself was a party. Larger freedom in religious ceremonies, and relinquishment by the clergy of their worldly wealth, were the two principal points agreed in the compact. But the agreement was not very faithfully carried out.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE TURKS IN EUROPE

I have now tried to tell you the story—up to the year 1500 and the beginning of that century which was to see the new birth of learning and the reformation in the Church—of the way in which most of the countries of Europe settled down nearly into the shape in which we see them now, or see them in maps made before the Great War. There remains one corner of the picture, the south-eastern corner, which we still have to look at; and there we find that a people entirely strange to Europe entered into possession during the fifteenth century. That people were the Ottoman Turks who had succeeded to the rule of the Mahommedan world, which they had wrested from their own kinsmen the Seljuk Turks.

The story of this branch of the Turkish nation is the common story of a people coming West by reason of pressure of other tribes from the East. Mongols, from the borders of China, seem to have been the oppressors, from the East, of the Ottomans.

Before the middle of the thirteenth century they were settled near Angora, in what was then called the Kingdom of Rum. It was in the possession of the Seljuk Turks. But the Seljuk kingdom was breaking up. The Greeks of the Eastern Empire were attacking it heavily. The Ottomans, perhaps a hardier people than the Seljuks, because they had more lately been leading the nomadic, wandering life, supported their kinsmen and hosts, and it ended in the Ottomans becoming the leaders of the Turks in Asia Minor. The Greeks were only a little more united and efficient than the Seljuks, and before the middle of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had the whole of Asia Minor in their hands.

Their fighting force was much increased by the formation of a standing army, called the Janissaries. They numbered some 12,000 at this time, though this number was more than quadrupled in later centuries. The force was chiefly composed of Christian captives. But these troops had such large privileges allowed them that there was no difficulty in filling their ranks.

Mayors of the Palace

And then happened that which we have seen occurring again and again in course of the story. Just as the Vandals were invited into Africa, just as the Moslems were invited into Spain, and just as both these guests stayed a great deal longer and made themselves much more at home than their hosts had expected, so now the Ottomans were invited into Europe to assist the Mayor of the Palace, as he was called, in Constantinople, who had seized the Government. This title of Mayor of the Palace, for the chief officer or prime minister, was taken from the Frankish court. The power of these Mayors of the Palace became, as we have seen, very great among the Franks, and the office often passed from father to son. The first of the Capets had been Mayor of the Palace to the last Carolingian.

The Ottomans accepted the invitation. They crossed into Europe. They established the usurper on the throne. They drove his enemies right up into the Balkans. And, for the time being, they returned to their own land. But they had learnt that this corner of Europe was a desirable territory and that it was undefended by any effective force. Bulgarians, Serbians, Bosnians, and Albanians held the lands, or nearly those same lands, that you will see marked under their names on any map of Europe made before the Great War. By the end of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had overrun all these countries and had organised them under Turkish rule. They had taken Adrianople, the city of second importance in the Eastern Empire. They had spread terror westerly in Europe by a great victory won over a Christian army of twice the number of the Ottoman force at Kossovo. and again by a victory, in which many crusading knights were killed, at Nicopolis. At the very end of the century they were besieging Constantinople itself: but for a while the capital of the Empire was delivered from their hands. Partly by the stubborn courage of the besieged forces in the city, partly by bribery, and partly by a new danger appearing on the eastern border of their own kingdom in Asia, they were induced to raise the siege.

The new danger came, as ever, from the east. It was really Timur, or Tamerlane, with his Tartar hordes, who saved Constantinople, the capital city of Eastern Christendom, for another half-century from the Turks.

Turks take Constantinople

The Tartars came in irresistible numbers. They swept over nearly all Asia Minor and down into Egypt where the Caliph, the religious head of Mohammedanism, ruled. And then, as always before, they went back again. The ravaged countries were left to recover as best they could, and the Ottomans resumed their campaign in Europe.

Constantinople, again besieged in 1422, was again saved for a while by the appearance of a rival claimant to the Sultanship of Turkey. But the Turks pushed northwards into Hungary, where the Hungarians opposed them with a resolute resistance. Battles were fought with varying result, until, again on the fatal battlefield of Kossovo, the Moslem won another great victory. The siege of Constantinople was recommenced with more vigour than ever. In 1453 the long-deferred end came. The city was taken by assault. The Christian Church of St. Sophia became the Moslem mosque.

There is little more to say, to complete the story of the Turks in this south-eastern corner of Europe. They did not rest content with their conquests, but were constantly pushing northward and westward. The Christian nations generally, but by no means always, united to oppose them. They fought their conquering way as far north as Poland, and for a while we find Poland in alliance with the Moslem power. Yet fighting broke out afresh, and a large portion of Poland was laid waste. Peace was again made between the two in the first year of the sixteenth century, and it was a peace that had some permanence, but it enlarged still further the bounds of the Turkish possessions.

In the midst of all this fighting by land in Europe, the Turks had found leisure to attend to naval matters and to the building and outfit of a large fleet. And with a fleet thus in constant readiness for action in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean Sea, there was one power, at least, with which it was certain to come into collision—the great naval power of Venice.

Ever since the fourth Crusade in which Constantinople had been taken, largely by the aid of the Venetian navy, Venice had held many of the islands in the Ægean Sea and had a hold on cities on the Levantine coast.

She was not the only Italian State, as we have seen, to be powerful at sea. There was Genoa, on the western side of the peninsula. We have also seen why the situation of Venice was the more favourable—because she looked eastward, and so was the gate by which the wealth of the East came into Western Europe. It was largely by the help of the Genoese navy that the Greeks had retaken Constantinople, in 1261, from the Latins. Naval encounters between the fleets of these two rival Italian States were many during the next century and a half. Now one had the victory and now the other. But always the greater resources and wealth were on the side of Venice.

GENOA
GENOA

Thus it happened that in the very last year of the fifteenth century, when war with Turkey broke out again, we see the curious spectacle of the Pope himself, of the Emperor, and of the rulers of three other great states of Italy, Naples, Florence, and Milan, all, in some degree, favouring the Turkish and Moslem Sultan in his fight against the Italian and Christian ruler of Venice. Less than fifty years earlier, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the Pope had imposed and endeavoured to collect a tax of one-tenth of the value of all benefices—or of all paid offices in the Church—in order to raise a force to evict the Turks. But now he had come to regard the Moslem Turk as a less dangerous enemy than the Venetian Christian.

In that final year, moreover, the Turks gained their first really crippling naval victory over the Venetians at Sapienza; and for Venice it was the beginning of the end of her great power.

Thus at the opening of the sixteenth century we find the Turk established nearly as far in Europe as it was his destiny to plant himself. He had all that country of the Balkans which various races of the Slavs had held before him and which they again now hold, after him; and he had parts of what before, and also later again, were Austria. Therefore of those Balkans and of those Austrian provinces, he was in no more than temporary possession.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE NEW DAWN

In every part of the Western world we see the leading nations settling down at the beginning of the sixteenth century within boundaries nearly the same as those which define them at the beginning of the twentieth. And for the most part those boundaries remain, in spite of the upheaval caused by the Great War.

There is, however, one notable exception, namely Italy. The very idea of a united Italy does not seem to have been in men's minds until later. The country which we now know by that name was then, as we have seen, divided between five principal States, Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal State, and Naples with Sicily.

Government in the rich and powerful cities was constantly changing hands. In Rome itself, where the situation was made more difficult and complicated than anywhere else, because of the Pope and his claim to governing power, the changes were bewildering. The power of the aristocracy was much broken in the middle of the fourteenth century when Rienzi, "Last of the Tribunes," led the democracy. Rienzi was the friend of Petrarch, and Bulwer Lytton has made him the hero of an exciting novel. But the Pope returned to Rome from Avignon in 1367, and though there were for a while rival Popes in Avignon and in Rome, yet by the end of the century the republican government of Rome had been overthrown and the Pope had gained supremacy.

He never really lost it. At one moment in the fifteenth century the forces of the King of Naples took and sacked Rome itself. At another the Pope had to flee before his own barons. But he soon came back. One of his successors only saved himself from these same barons, or their descendants, by the aid of Naples. Nevertheless by the end of the century, which is the date of the end of the present story, the power of the nobles had received what really was its death blow. In Florence and in Rome their chiefs were simultaneously massacred. The Papal power was finally established.

Venice, as we have seen, was for a while by far the strongest and the most wealthy of the Italian States. But now the new naval power in the Mediterranean, the power of the Turks, was limiting and diminishing her strength, and shortly before the end of the fifteenth century two Portuguese navigators made a discovery of which the effect was to limit and diminish her wealth. If you will look at the map of the world you will see how far the Continent of Africa extends southwards, and you must understand that at the time about which our story is telling us now, no one knew how far southward this Continent stretched. Hitherto no navigator had come to its southern end. Many had gone sailing, sailing, south, but still that land was always there, on their left hand, on the eastern side, until these Portuguese navigators, Bartolomeo Diaz and Vasco da Gama, sailed yet further than any before them, came to the southern end of the great Continent, and found an open sea over which they might sail eastward. They had rounded what afterwards was named the Cape of Good Hope.

And what difference did that make to Venice? It made this difference—that whereas she had been the gate from the East, the port by which the riches and products of the East came into the Western world, this discovery that man could go sailing eastward, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, meant the opening of a new door through which those rich products could be brought to Western Europe. And it was a more convenient way of bringing them, because it did not require all the old long overland travel, perhaps from India through Asia Minor, and then the putting of the merchandise on shipboard to be carried to Venice, and then again the unshipping at Venice and the overland carriage again. This overland route was one way. Another was by way of ports on the Red Sea and thence across the Isthmus of Suez to the Mediterranean. Instead of all this complicated business, there might now be the one shipping in some port, say of India, and the unshipping, perhaps in Lisbon.

India and America

Thus the East was opened to the West, and almost at the same moment a new and further West was opened with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (after whom that great land is sometimes called Columbia) and by that Vespucci, whose baptismal name was Amerigo, after whom it is more commonly called.

Thus immensely, in two opposite directions, was the scene of the great story extended. And the discoveries to which men's minds were turned were not only those about the geography of the world they lived in, and the way in which its continents and its seas were shaped. Their minds began to turn with a new interest to art, to learning and to the beauty of the world.

All through this great story we have seen how wonderfully Rome, in spite of perpetual changes in her government and continual fighting between the various parties trying to get the upper hand, led the world, at one time dominating all by the organisation of her Empire, at another bending the spirits of men and directing their actions by the influence of the Church.

All over Italy, for many a century, the like contentions and changes in government were frequent, and it was in the very midst of the turbulence and of the fighting of city against city that Dante, greatest of Italian poets, and among the very greatest of all time, came into fame and wrote his "Divine Comedy." He was chief magistrate of Florence in 1300, born of a family that favoured the Guelphs and married to a lady of a family very strongly disposed to the Ghibellines. So he had his full share in the troubles of the times.

COLUMBUS.
COLUMBUS.

Though the new birth of literature was thus delayed, some of the greatest of the Italian painters were hard at work during the fifteenth century. Cimabue, indeed, who may be said to have been the first of the real Italian painters, since all before him had followed the stiff Byzantine style, dates back to the latter half of the thirteenth. Ghirlandajo, his pupil, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, the great Venetian painter, and many more of great fame, were at work before the fifteenth century closed.

Even in a story sketched in its most bare outlines, as is this, and told with as few names and as few dates as possible, it seemed necessary to mention some of these glorious artists and to realise that the end was at hand of those Middle Ages which have also been called Dark Ages, because of the dark ignorance and barbarity in which humanity at that time was plunged. Some of the goldsmith's and silversmith's work of the day was very finely executed, and many of the finest painters and sculptors themselves did not scorn to work at the jeweller's craft. But the real glory which lightens the general darkness of the Middle Ages, is the splendour of the architecture—the cathedrals and churches, the public buildings and the palaces of the great nobles. The richness of the church architecture in our own country we have shortly noticed already, and all over the world beautiful and noble structures were raised in those troubled ages when most of the arts were little studied. Generally the building is in one or other of the successive varieties of the Gothic style. In Spain we see many traces of the Eastern taste of the Moslems for towers and domes and "minarets," as those slender towers with their balconies for prayer are called. Asiatic influence is found, though far less often, in some Italian buildings also.

The nations in 1500 A.D.

Now we may do well to take a look round the world, the scene of this greatest of all stories, and see to what condition we have traced its progress at this point of time—say A.D. 1500 or a year or two before or after that central date. We see, regarding it as a whole, that the nations have been engaged, after the break-up that followed the ruin of the Roman Empire, in framing their territories into something like the shape which we may find on the map now. And generally they have followed the same course, have gone through the same struggles and changes, in their way towards assuming that shape. For at first they split up into a number of small independent bodies, each under the rule of a lord. Nominally there was an overlord, but his sovereignty for a while was not very effective. It was but gradually that he made it real. Some of the nations differed from others in their local conditions. Thus Spain, rather cut off by the Pyrenees from the main story, had its own peculiar difficulties with the Moslems. The sovereignty of Italy, with its five principal States, was complicated by the claims of Pope and Emperor, of Guelph and Ghibelline and of the different city States asserting each its independence. But on the whole, what we are able to see is a tendency for the sovereign overlord gradually to make his power good over the lesser lords, and so to produce something like those national unities which we find now.

The position of Spain, to take that outlying part of the big story first, is that she has just succeeded in overthrowing the Moors in their last Spanish stronghold in Granada. She has almost completed national unity by the marriage of Isabella, the Queen of Castile, with Ferdinand, the King of Aragon. Then, with all her long sea-coast and the sea-going habits of its inhabitants, she will become for a while the greatest naval power in the world and play a leading part in the story. Portugal is independent of her and is opening up the trade with the East round the Cape of Good Hope.

Italy, as we have seen, is split into the five principal States, and has far to go yet before she can be one nation.

France has unified herself, and so has England, but we have to notice this difference between the conditions of the one and of the other, that in France the king has made himself despotic over his nobles and all his people.

England, no longer hampered by the possession of any territory on the Continent except the single city of Calais, which will be lost to her in the course of the century to follow, is more fortunate than France in that her nobles have won from the king a more liberal constitution, based upon Magna Carta. She will attain a freedom equal to that of France by less terrible means, though not without wars of Royalists and Puritans and the beheading of a king.

Scandinavian countries have for a time, as we have seen, been of the greatest importance in our story, pouring forth swarms of Northmen to make settlement and conquest in all quarters of the known world, but it has not been as nations, but rather in companies of sea-going raiders, that they have so wrought. For the moment those nations are not in the forefront of the world story.

Neither have the German States formed themselves as yet into any formidable nation. The power, always rather vague and ill-defined, of the Emperor has much decreased, and Switzerland and other States have shaken themselves free of it.

The Turk is pressing Austria and Hungary very hard. He holds, for a time, large provinces which had been Austria's, and which will be hers again, and, besides, he has established himself in that territory which is now the Balkan States and Greece, and is in possession of all that he now has of Asia Minor, with Egypt and the northern African coast in addition.

Poland, though she too has felt the Turkish pressure, has become a strong kingdom, and Russia, from her capital of Moscow, is growing in power after combining with those Tartar tribes which at one time threatened to destroy her.

And in all the years of the story with which this volume deals, we see that there has been one force constantly working, through all the time and over all the scene except where the Moslem has prevailed—the force of the Church. It is a divided force, for Eastern Christendom looks to the Patriarch of the Greek Church as its head; but the more important and powerful West looks to the Pope at Rome.

The new dawn

We have brought the story through some of the darkest times that mankind has known. Art and culture have nearly been destroyed under the barbarian invasions and the years of fighting. Now the Renaissance, the new birth of learning and of art, is at hand. Already we have seen hints of it and hopes of it, like flowers coming out in early spring, only to be nipped by late frost. There was that wonderful music of the troubadours of the Langue d'oc in the thirteenth century, with the ruder and less accomplished art of the trouvères in Northern France, of the minnesingers in Germany, and of the English minstrels.

But it is in Italy only that we can say that the Renaissance has arrived—in that land where the great painters have been at work, where Dante has sung his divine comedy, where Petrarch has written his sonnets, and where the despots of the cities have employed artists and architects to adorn the little States over which they tyrannised. Moreover, through nearly all Europe, and even in the gloom of the Dark Ages itself, there has been the most wonderful building of churches and cathedrals, of abbeys and ecclesiastical edifices, here and there of kings' palaces and of buildings for public use. Our England, too, has had her poets, of whom the chief is Chaucer rhyming his "Canterbury Tales," his "Romaunt of the Rose," and other beautiful pieces.

A SHIP OF THE TIME OF COLUMBUS. (From <i>The History of Everyday Things</i> (Quennell), by permission of Messrs. B. T. Batsford, Ltd.)
A SHIP OF THE TIME OF COLUMBUS.
(From The History of Everyday Things (Quennell),
by permission of Messrs. B. T. Batsford, Ltd.)

INDEX

Adrian, English Pope, 152

Adrianople, battles at, 28, 220

Africa, Count of, 34 et seq.

Agincourt, battle at, 199

Albigenses, the, 161, 172 et seq.

Alfred the Great, 118 et seq.

Alphonso VII., 179

Amerigo, 227

Angevins, the, 150

Angli, 38

Anglo-Saxons, the, 39 et passim

Angora, 218

Aragon, 179

Architecture, in Dark Ages, 230

Armour, changes in, 187

Attila at Chalons, 36

Augusti, the two, 24

Augustine, St., 61

Austria, 144, 214 et seq.

Avars, 143

Avebury, 98

Bagdad, Caliphs at, 74, 75

Baldwin, Eastern Emperor, 167

Bannockburn, battle at, 184

Barbarians, the, 8, 17 et seq.

Basques, the, 38

Belisarius, 44, 47, 49, 53

Berbers, 68, 73

Birmingham, 114

Black Death, the, 185

Boadicea, 38

Boccaccio, 192, 229

Bosworth Field, battle at, 202

Britain, 2 et passim

Bruce, Robert, 184

Brythons, 3

Burgundi, 49, 53

Burgundy, boundaries of, 160

Burgundy, Duke of, 160; murdered, 200

Byzantium, 2 et passim

Cade, Jack, 201

Cærleon, 11

Cæsar, Julius, 2

Cæsars, the two, 24

Caliphs, the, 71

Canterbury, a great city, 112

Canute, 121

Cape of Good Hope, 226

Capets, the, 128

Carthage, 35

Castile, kingdom of, 177

Caxton, 229

Chapmen, the, 111

Charlemagne, 52, 64, 77, 90 et passim

Charles Martel, 87

Charles the Bold, 204

Chaucer, 192, 229

Chester, 11

Church, the, its power, 129 et passim; its growing wealth, 130, 131; its favour to Crusades, 131; its increasing strength, 169; evils in the, 172

Celts, the, 3 et passim

Ceorls, 20, 107 et seq.