Europe: A History (73 page)
Frederick was living in a maelstrom that was not entirely of his own making. A papal ward in his youth, he had only been given Sicily on papal lease, and he was only raised to the Empire at the end of a twenty-year baronial war in Germany, where the Pope took against the previous incumbent and papal client, Otto of Brunswick. He was not present at the fateful battle of Bouvines in Flanders, when the French crushed Otto’s anti-papal coalition. It was an irony of the political carousel that the Papacy would then take against him. In 1235 he restored order in Germany by force, banishing his elder son Henry in favour of the younger Conrad. In 1236–7 he crushed the Lombard cities at Cortenuova and marched through Cremona with a parade of elephants. In 1241, having sunk a papal fleet off Genoa, he took a bevy of hostile archbishops and abbots hostage. But in 1248, after the abortive siege of Parma, he lost his harem. No power on earth, it seems, could have restrained the partisan hatreds of Guelph and Ghibelline.
After Frederick’s death, his son, Conrad IV (r. 1250–4), and grandson, Conradin (d. 1268), failed to enforce the Hohenstaufen succession, and the Empire was crippled once again by an extended interregnum (1254–73). The Papacy promptly reclaimed its overlordship of Sicily, which was turned over to the French Angevins. The popes, nominally victorious, were being pushed ever closer towards dependence on the kingdom of France. Under Gregory X (Tedaldo Visconti, 1271–6), arrangements were finalized for ensuring swift and effective papal elections,
[CONCLAVE]
It was France which benefited most from the Empire’s distress. In the eleventh century the Capetian kings had been masters only of the tiny royal domain in the lle de France round Paris; elsewhere, the prerogatives of kingship had been virtually abandoned to the constituent fiefs. But as from Louis VI (r. 1108–37) a series of long-lived monarchs greatly enhanced the substance of France. In this they were assisted by a remarkable demographic boom, especially in the northern provinces, by the growth of prosperous communes, and by important territorial acquisitions, notably in the Midi. Louis VII (r. 1137–80) was strong enough to marshal the entire nobility of France for the Second Crusade, and later to leave the realm in peace during private pilgrimages to Compostela and to Canterbury.
After repudiating his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who promptly married his vassal, Henry II of England, he was mortified to watch the assemblage of a rival Plantagenet realm stretching from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees. But the crisis passed; and the Capetians were to recover their supremacy. (See Appendix III, p. 1244.)
[GOTHIC]
In this period, French and English affairs remained intimately entangled. The Angevin or ‘Plantagenet’ Dynasty came into being through the Anglo-Norman marriage of William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, Matilda, with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Their son, Henry II (r. 1154–89) put an end to the prevailing anarchy of Stephen’s reign, and stayed long enough with his queen, Eleanor, to procreate a line of monarchs that were to hold the English throne until 1399. His reign was marked by judicial reform, by the English invasion of Ireland, by incessant travelling to all points between Northumberland and Gascony, and by a conflict between Church and State culminating in the murder of Archbishop Becket (1170). His elder surviving son, Richard Coeur de Lion (r. 1189–99) was totally preoccupied with crusading. Richard’s brother, John Lackland (r. 1199–1216) lost his subjects’ trust through repeated acts of tyranny, lost the Duchy of Normandy through defeat at the Battle of Bouvines (1214), and lost the initiative in English politics through the concessions of
Magna Carta
(1215). John’s son, Henry III (r. 1216–72) was a long survivor, relegated by Dante ‘to the limbo of ineffectual souls’. (See Appendix III, p. 1252.)
Those early Plantagenet decades also saw the initial English incursions into Ireland. A band of Anglo-Norman adventurers led by Richard ‘Strongbow’, Earl of Pembroke, conspired to support the deposed king of Leinster. Their mailed knights made such advances following their landings in Wexford in 1169 that Henry II felt obliged to follow them and to receive the joint homage of the leading Irish kings. From then on, the English never left. John Lackland obtained the title of
Dominus Hiberniae
, ‘Lord of Ireland’, in his father’s lifetime. In 1210 he set up a regular English colony at Dublin, forming a cluster of counties governed by English law and by English justiciars. Under Henry III, the first discriminatory moves were made to legally separate the newcomers from the natives and to exclude the Irish from positions of power.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) was perhaps the outstanding personality of the age. She made her mark not only as a woman of remarkable spirit but as a political and cultural patron of immense influence. She was the indomitable heiress to a great duchy. Married at 15, she had to be brought back from the Second Crusade under arrest for defying her royal husband. Divorced at 28, she remarried within two months, having engineered the dynastic coup of the century. Separated in her late forties through her second husband’s liaison with the Fair Rosamund of Godstow, she returned to rule in style in her native Poitiers. Among her children and grandchildren, she lived to see one emperor, three kings of England, kings of Jerusalem and Castile, a duke of Brittany, and another
queen of France. At Poitiers, at the head of a like-minded band of ladies, she became ‘the Queen of the Troubadours’:
Domna vostre sui e serai,
Del vostre servizi garnitz.
Vostr’om sui juratz e plevitz,
E vostre m’era des abans.
E vos etz lo meus jois primers,
E si seretz vos lo derrers,
Tan com la vida m’er durans.
(Lady, I’m yours and yours shall be, I Vowed to your service constantly. I This is the oath of fealty 11 pledged to you this long time past. I As my first joy was all in you, I So shall my last be found there too, I So long as life in me shall last.)
27
Hostile French comment tried to blacken Eleanor’s reputation with tales of poisoning and incest. But she stands as the central figure in the cultural history of a land which her enemies were about to destroy.
For Aquitaine formed the central sector of a distinct cultural and linguistic region now known as Occitania. The
langue d’oc
, whose speakers said
oc
for ‘yes’, was quite separate from the
langue d’oïl
the ‘French’ language of northern Gaul. It was spoken right across the Midi from Catalonia to Provence. It transcended all poUtical frontiers from the Kingdom of Aragón to the Arélate (Kingdom of Burgundy-Aries), which still belonged to the Empire. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, on the eve of the French advance, it was the scene of one of Europe’s most brilliant civilizations.
Philippe-Auguste (r. 1180–1223) gave the French monarchy its decisive impetus. Whilst tripling the size of the royal domain, he drew great advantage by playing off the rivalries of Empire and Papacy. He laid the foundations of a national army and, through the system of
baillis
or royal bailiffs, of a centralized administration. He was then able to withstand the eternal intrigues of the tenants-in-chief, and to destroy the Plantagenet challenge. Having stripped John Lackland of his legal rights in France through charges of breaching feudal obligation, he followed up the courtroom’s decision with the sword. From 1202 he smoothly annexed Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and most of Poitou. In 1214, at Bouvines, where he was unhorsed and saved by his vassals, he destroyed France’s imperial and Plantagenet foes on the same field.
His grandson, Louis IX (r. 1226–70), gave France the moral prestige which military and economic success could not. Having inherited the extended kingdom which his father, Louis VIII, had just secured in Aquitaine and Languedoc, he did not need to wage war on his neighbours. He personified the highest ideals of a Christian king, as then conceived, and his life by Jean, Sire de Joinville, presents an entrancing portrait. ‘Mon cher fils,’ he told his eldest son, ‘I beg you to love the people … For in truth, I would prefer that a Scotsman should… govern the people well and loyally, than that you should be seen to rule the kingdom badly.’
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Louis had spent his youth under the regency of his mother, Eleanor’s grand-daughter, Blanche of Castile, when
a dangerous feudal reaction arose. But his integrity and his limitless bank of marriageable relatives drew the great fiefs back into partnership with the Crown. In an age of intense litigiousness, he was the chosen arbiter of many a royal or feudal dispute, dispensing justice under the Oak of Vincennes. His treatment of the Jews and of the Midi was less than saintly. Yet towards the end of his long reign, St Louis was without contest the first prince of Christendom.
GOTHIC
V
ISITORS
to the abbey of St Denis near Paris are shown the pointed arches in the apse which Abbot Suger completed in 1143 or 1144, and which are said to have initiated the Gothic style. Whether or not the work at St Denis preceded the Gothic vaulting at the cathedral of Sens, which was under construction during the same years, is a matter for debate. But France’s senior basilica, the site of numerous royal coronations and burials and home of the
oriflamme
, would be á fitting place for such a momentous event; and it certainly preceded both Notre-Dame de Paris, the masterpiece of the ‘transitional style’, and the glories of Chartres, Reims, and Amiens.
From its beginnings in France, the Gothic spread far and wide throughout the Catholic world to become the archetypal style for medieval church-building north of the Alps. Scores of Gothic cathedrals were built, from Seville in the west to Dorpat in the east, from Lund in the north to Milan in the south. They were imitated in thousands of parish churches.
Many experts would argue that the ultimate aesthetic effect was achieved at the Sainte-Chapelle, which was completed in Paris on the orders of St Louis on 25 April 1248. Smaller than the great cathedrals, it is an edifice of exquisite delicacy and light, its tall, slender windows filled with brilliant expanses of stained glass.
Far away, the castle chapel of the Holy Trinity in Lublin, between Vistula and Bug, is one of those cultural orientation points which enable one to see Europe as a whole. Built in pure Gothic style by King Władystaw Jagiełło (d. 1434), for a Polish-Lithuanian capital that never developed, it is a distant, rustic echo of the Sainte-Chapelle. At the same time, like the neighbouring Gothic cathedral of Sandomierz, its interior walls were painted in rich Byzantine splendour with murals designed by artists imported either from Ruthenia or possibly from Ottoman-occupied Macedonia. It lies at the point where the architecture of the West coincides with the decorative style of the East. The date of its completion is recorded, at the end of a long Cyrillic dedication in Old Church Slavonic, as St Lawrence’s Day, 1418.
The career of the Gothic style did not end, however, with medieval church-building. It was revived as the favourite architectural style of the Romantic era, which sought to recover its prestigious aesthetic appeal and to apply it to all manner of secular structures. Manchester City Hall, King Ludwig’s fantasy castle at Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, and the Austrian waterworks in Cracow are all descendants of Abbot Suger’s apse at the terminus of Metro Line 13.
All modern interpretations of Gothic style are coloured by those nineteenth-century enthusiasms. The theories of Schlegel, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc were as crude as their propensity for ‘improving’ the medieval originals, including St Denis. From being a term of ‘unmitigated contempt’ for ‘savageness’, to use Ruskin’s words, Gothic became the object of unrestrained adulation.
1
Goethe’s essay ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’
(On German Architecture)
, which mythologized the origins of Strasbourg Cathedral and its builder, Erwin von Steinbach, was an inspiration to many others. In due course it tempted German scholars to claim Gothic as their own. In fact, Gothic was one of the most international of styles, with numerous regional variants. It is one of the many strands on which theories about the unity of European culture might easily be built.
2
In England, a normal baronial war produced an abnormal outcome. Henry III Plantagenet (r. 1216–72), Lackland’s son, had made himself unpopular with his barons by giving preference to his Poitevin, Savoyard, and Lusignan relatives, by an unsuccessful French war, and by extravagant building projects such as the renovation of Westminster Abbey. In 1258 a reforming faction emerged under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, son of the Albigensian crusader (see below). By withholding a grant to solve the King’s financial problems, the reformers pushed through the Provisions of Oxford whereby the King’s administration was to be supervised by their nominees. When the King reneged, Simon waged war, and in the battle of Lewes succeeded in capturing the King, the King’s eldest son, and the King’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, King of Germany. In the following year the royal party rallied, and Simon was slain at Evesham (1265). In the interval, in January 1265, a new sort of Parliament had been summoned—not just from the magnates and prelates, but from the knights of the shires and from the burgesses of selected boroughs. For constitutionalists it was an important precedent, a decisive step on the road to limited monarchy—the first appearance of the House of Commons.
Yet it is doubtful whether England or France had any sense of their later national identities. In the thirteenth century the kingdom of England was still bound up with its Continental possessions. Its ruling class was still tied to the culture and ambitions of their French relations. France itself had only just acquired the territorial base, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, on which its future fortunes would be forged. There were many things about England which were considerably more ‘French’ than many parts of the new France.
The obsession with the recovery of the Holy Land lasted for 200 years and ended in failure. Between 1096 and 1291 there were seven major Crusades and numerous minor ones. The First Crusade (1096–9), led by the barons Godfroi de Bouillon, Raymond de St Gilles, Count of Toulouse, and Hugues de Vermandois, brother of the King of France, succeeded in capturing Jerusalem, massacring its inhabitants, and establishing a Latin kingdom in Palestine. The Second Crusade (1147–9), preached by St Bernard and led jointly by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, achieved little except the incidental seizure of Lisbon from the Moors by an English fleet. The Third Crusade (1189–92), mounted by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philippe Auguste of France, and Richard Cceur de Lion of England, failed to retake Jerusalem. The Fourth Crusade (1202–4), diverted by the ambitions of the Doge of Venice, succeeded in capturing Constantinople, massacring its inhabitants, and establishing a Latin empire in Byzantium—which was not the point of the exercise. The Fifth (1218–21), Sixth (1248–54), and Seventh (1270) Crusades ended up in Egypt or in Tunis, where St Louis of France himself died of the plague. When the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land fell at Acre in 1291, there was no coherent response.
