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reinforcements that were never sent; his death-bed, when he prayed for strength to despise good fortune and
not to fear adversity. Ideals may fade, but the memories of those who realise them are the world's abiding
possession.
If we ask what results of a more tangible sort remained from the Crusades, when the service of the Holy
Sepulchre had become a legend, and the name of Crusade a byeword for whatever enterprises are most
impractical and visionary, the answer must be, that they affected Europe chiefly in a negative sense and
through indirect channels. They helped to discredit the conception of the Church militant; they relieved
Europe of a surplus population of feudal adventurers; and they accelerated the impoverishment of those other
feudal families which took an occasional part in the Holy War. It has never been proved that they led to
wholesale emancipation of serfs, or wholesale enfranchisement of towns; though it is true that all such
expeditions meant an increased demand for ready money. To Western civilisation they contributed very little,
the truth being that there was little to be learned from the Mohammedans in Syria. It is through Palermo and
Toledo, where Christianity and Islam met and mixed in peaceful intercourse, that the knowledge of Arab
science and philosophy filtered into Europe. The Fourth Crusade was an exception to the general rule; it is no
accident that Venetian art and architecture developed rapidly when the republic was brought into close and
friendly relations with Constantinople. Through these relations, and through studying the masterpieces
brought home by the Crusaders, Venetian artists recovered the antique feeling for pure form, and founded a
school which was classical in spirit, Christian only in external and unessential features. The learning and
literature which the Eastern Empire inherited from Rome and Athens had no attraction for Venetian merchant
princes. But north of the Alps, and especially at Paris, the thirteenth century saw an increasing interest in the
Greek language, and in Greek books, so far as they were useful to theologians or scholastic disputants.
Politically the Fourth Crusade is memorable for its effect upon the Italian balance of power. It gave Venice an
advantage over her commercial rivals, Pisa and Genoa, which she never lost; it gave her also a unique
position as an intermediary between East and West; and it placed her at the head of an empire comparable to
those of Athens and of Carthage, the great sea-powers of antiquity. But the nation-states of Northern
Europe, who had borne the burden and heat of the Crusades, were less affected by them, politically or
otherwise, than were the city-states of Italy.
IX. THE FREE TOWNS
Scattered broadcast over the territory of every medieval state are towns endowed with special privileges, and
ruled by special magistrates. Some of these towns particularly in Italy, Southern France, and the
Rhineland stand on the sites, and even within the walls, of ancient municipia, those miniature Homes which
the statecraft of the Empire had created as seats of government and schools of culture. But, even in Italy, the
medieval town is indebted to classical antiquity for nothing more than mouldering walls and aqueducts and
amphitheatres and churches. The barbarians had ignored the institutions of the municipium, though it often
served them as a fortress or a royal residence or a centre of administration. The citizens were degraded to the
level of serfs; they became the property of a king, a bishop, or a count, and were governed by a bailiff
presiding over a seignorial court. Only at the close of the Dark Ages, with the development of handicrafts and
a commercial class, was it found necessary to distinguish between the town and the manorial village; and to a
much later time the small town preserved the characteristics of an agricultural society. Many a burgess
IX. THE FREE TOWNS 53
 Medieval Europe
supplemented the profits of a trade by tilling acres in the common fields and grazing cattle on the common
pastures; pigs and poultry scavenged in the streets; the farmyard was a usual adjunct of the burgage tenement.
Whether small or great, the town was a phenomenon sufficiently unfamiliar to vex the soul of lawyers reared
upon Teutonic custom. They recognised that they were dealing with a new form of community; but they were
not prepared to define it or to generalise about it. They preferred to treat each town as sui generis, an
awkward anomaly, a privileged abuse.
Indeed, definition was no easy matter, for medieval towns differed infinitely in size, in government, and in
the ingredients of their population. In one respect they are all alike; the most energetic and influential, though
not necessarily the greater number, of the inhabitants are artisans or traders. But side by side with the
industrial colony stand older interests, which often struggle hard against the ascendancy of commerce. In the
town or near it there may be an abbey or a castle or a cathedral or a royal palace, to which the very existence
of the burgess community is due. The townsmen, profiting by the custom and the protection of the great, have
grown rich and independent; they have bought privileges or have usurped them. But they have still to reckon
with the servants, the retainers, and the other partisans of a superior always on the watch to recover his lost
rights of property and jurisdiction; the forces of the common enemy are permanently encamped within the
walls. Again, if the town lies on a frontier or in newly-conquered country, it will be as much a fortress as a
mart; a number of the residents will be knights or men-at-arms who hold their lands by the tenure of
defending the town; and these burgesses will be naturally indifferent to the interests of the traders. Finally, in
the Mediterranean lands, with their long tradition of urban society, we find the nobles of the neighbourhood
resorting to the town, building town-houses, and frequently caballing among themselves to obtain control of
the town's government. Often a long time elapses before the class which conceived the idea of municipal
liberty is able to get the better of these hostile forces; and still more often the hardly-won privileges are
wrested from those for whom they were intended, are cancelled, or are made the monopoly of an oligarchic
ring.
Still, the aims of the medieval burgess are more uniform, from one place to another and from one generation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]