The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

had their own holy books, which they declared to have been

revealed; they established convents, and nunneries, and

splendid temples, adorned with images, and served by priests

with shaven heads, who repeated prayers upon rosaries, and who

taught that happiness in a future state could best be obtained

by long prayers and by liberal presents to the Church. In the

Eastern or Greek world, Christianity in no way assisted

civilisation, but in the Latin world it softened the fury of

the conquerors, it aided the amalgamation of the races. The

Christian priests were reverenced by the barbarians, and these

priests belonged to the conquered people.

 

The Church, it is true, was divided by a schism; Ulphilas, the apostle of

The Goths, was an Arian; the dispute which had arisen in a lecture-room at Alexandria, between a bishop and a presbyter, was

continued on a hundred battlefields. But the Franks were

Catholics, and the Franks became supreme. The Arians were

worsted in the conflict of swords as they had formerly been

worsted in the conflict of words. The Empire of the West was

restored by Charlemagne, who spread Christianity among the

Saxons by the sword, and confirmed the spiritual supremacy of

Rome. He died, and his dominions were partitioned among kings

who were royal only in the name. Europe was divided into

castle-states. Savage isolation, irresponsible power: such was

the order of the age. Yet still there was a sovereign whom all

acknowledged, and whom all to a certain extent obeyed. That

sovereign was the Pope of Rome. The men who wore his livery

might travel throughout Europe in safety, welcome alike at

cottage and castle, paying for their board and lodging with

their prayers. If there is a Great Being who listens with

pleasure to the prayers of men, it must have been in the Dark

Ages that he looked down upon the earth with most satisfaction.

That period may be called The Age of the Rosary. From the

Shetland Islands to the shores of China, prayers were being

strung, and voices were being sonorously raised. The Christian

repeated his Paternosters and his credos on beads of holy clay

from Palestine; the Persian at Teheran, the negro at Timbuctoo;

the Afghan at Kabul, repeated the ninety-nine names of God on

beads made of camel bones from Mecca. The Indian prince by the

waters of the Ganges muttered his devotions on a rosary of

precious stones. The pious Buddhist in Ceylon, and in Ava, and

in Pekin, had the beads ever between his fingers, and a prayer

ever between his lips.

 

By means of these great and cosmopolitan religions, all of which

possessed their sacred books, all of which enjoined a pure morality,

all of which united vast masses of men of different and even hostile

nationalities beneath the same religious laws, beneath the same

sceptre of an unseen king; all of which prescribed pilgrimage and travel

as a pious work, the circulation of life in the human body was promoted;

men congregated together at Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and

Benares. Their minds and morals were expanded. Religious

enthusiasm united the scattered princes of Europe into one

great army, and poured it on the East. The dukes and counts and

barons were ruined; the castle system was extinguished: and the

castle serfs of necessity were free. The kings allied

themselves with the free and fortified cities, who lent troops

to the crown, but who officered those troops themselves; who

paid taxes to the crown, but who voted those taxes in

constitutional assemblies, and had the power to withhold them

if they pleased. Those towns now became not only abodes of

industry and commerce, but of learning and the arts. In Italy

the ancient culture had been revived. In Italy the towns of the

Western Empire had never quite lost their municipal

prerogatives. New towns had also arisen, founded in despair and

nurtured by calamity. These towns had opened a trade with

Constantinople, a great commercial city in which the Arabs had

a quarter and a mosque. The Italians were thus led forth into a

trade with the Mohammedans, which was interrupted for a time by

the Crusades only to be afterwards resumed with redoubled

vigour and success. For then new markets were opened for the

spices of the East. Pepper became a requisite of European life;

and pepper could be obtained from the Italians alone. The

Indian trade was not monopolised by a single man, as it was in

the lands of the East. It was distributed among an immense

population. Wealth produced elegance, leisure, and refinement.

There came into existence a large and active-minded class,

craving for excitement, and desirous of new things. They

hungered and thirsted after knowledge; they were not content

with the sterile science of the priests. And when it was

discovered that the world of the ancients lay buried in their

soil, they were seized with a mania resembling that of

treasure-seekers in the East, or of the gold-hunters in the New

World.

 

The elements of the Renaissance were preserved partly in

Rome and the cities of the West, partly in Constantinople, and

partly in the East. The Arabs, when they conquered Alexandria,

had adopted the physical science of the Greeks, and had added

to it the algebra and arithmetic of India. Plato and Aristotle,

Galen and Hippocrates, Ptolemy and Euclid, had been translated

by the Eastern Christians into Syriac, and thence into the

Arabic. But the Arabs had not translated a single Greek

historian or poet. These were to he found at Constantinople,

where the Greek of the ancients was still spoken in its purity

at the court and in the convents though not by the people of

the streets. The Greeks also had preserved the arts of their

forefathers; though destitute of genius, they at least retained

the art of laying on colours, of modelling in clay, and of

sculpturing in stone. The great towns of Italy, desirous to

emulate the beauties of St. Sophia, employed Greeks to build

them cathedrals, and to paint frescoes on their convent walls,

and to make them statues for their streets. These Greek

strangers established academies of art; and soon the masters

were surpassed by their pupils. The Italians disdained to

reproduce the figures of the Greek school, with their meagre

hands, and sharp pointed feet, and staring eyes. Free

institutions made their influence felt even in the arts; the

empire of authority was shaken off. The fine arts spread beyond

the Alps; they were first adopted and nurtured by the Church,

afterwards by the Town. Oil-painting was invented in the North.

Masterpieces of the ancients were discovered in the South. Then

the artists ceased to paint Madonnas, and children, and saints,

and crucifixions. They were touched with the breath of

antiquity; they widened their field; their hands were inspired

by poetical ideas. It is a significant fact that a Pope should

himself conceive the project of pulling down the ancient

Basilica of St. Peter, every stone of which was consecrated by

a memory, and of erecting in its stead a church on the model of

a pagan temple.

 

The Pope was also urged to set on foot a crusade; not to rescue the

sepulchre from the hands of the infidels, but in the hope that the lost

writings of the Greeks and Romans might be discovered in the East. For

now had arrived the book-hunting age. In the depth of the Dark Ages

there had always been ecclesiastics who drew the fire of their genius

from the immortal works of the pagan writers. There were also

monks who had a passion for translating the writings of the

Greeks into Latin; who went to Constantinople and returned with

chests full of books, and who, if Greek manuscripts could not

otherwise be procured, travelled into Arab Spain, settled at

Cordova, and translated the Greek from the Arabic version,

together with the works of Averroes and Avicenna. The Greeks,

frequently visiting Italy, were invited to give lectures on

their literature, and lessons in their language. The revival of

Greek was commenced by Boccacio, who copied out Homer with his

own hand; and a Greek academy was established at Florence.

Petrarch revived the literature of Rome he devoted his life to

Cicero and Virgil; he wrote the epitaph of Laura on the margin

of the Aeneid; he died with his head pillowed on a book. The

Roman law was also revived; as Greeks lectured on literature in

Italy, so Italians lectured on law beyond the Alps.

 

And now began the search for the lost. Pilgrims of the antique wandered

through Europe, ransacking convents for the treasures of the

past. At this time whatever taste for learning had once existed

among the monks appears to have died away. The pilgrims were

directed to look in lofts, where rats burrowed under heaps of

parchment; or to sift heaps of rubbish lying in the cellar. In

such receptacles were found many of those works which are yet

read by thousands with delight, and which are endeared to us

all by the associations of our boyhood. It was thus that

Quintilian was discovered, and, to use the language of the

time, was delivered from his long imprisonment in the dungeons

of the barbarians. Lucretius was disinterred in Germany; a

fragment of Petronius in Britain. Cosmo de’ Medici imported

books in all languages from all parts of the world. A copyist

became Pope, founded the Library of the Vatican, and ordered

the translation of the Greek historians and philosophers into

Latin. A great reading public now existed; the invention of

printing, which a hundred years before would have been useless,

spread like fire over Europe, and reduced, by four-fifths, the

price of books. The writings of the classical geographers

inspired Prince Henry and Columbus. The New World was

discovered; the sea-route to India was found. Cairo and

Baghdad, the great broker cities between India and Europe, were

ruined. As the Indian Ocean, at first the centre of the world,

had yielded to the Mediterranean, so now the basin of the

Mediterranean was deserted, and the Atlantic became supreme.

Italy decayed; Spain and Portugal succeeded to the throne. But

those countries were ruined by religious bigotry and commercial

monopolies. The trade of Portugal did not belong to the

country, but to the court. The trade of Spain was also a

monopoly shared between the Crown and certain cities of

Castile. The Dutch, the English, and the French obtained free

access to the tropical world, and bought the spices of the East

with the silver of Peru. And then the great movement for

Liberty commenced. All people of the Teutonic race; the

Germans, the Swiss, the Dutch, the English and the Scotch, the

Danes and the Swedes, cast off the yoke of the Italian

supremacy, and some of the superstitions of the Italian creed.

 

But now a new kind of servitude arose. The kings reduced the

burghers of Europe to subjection. The constitutional monarchies

of the Middle Ages disappeared. In England alone, owing to its

insular position, a standing army was not required for the

protection of the land. In England, therefore, the

encroachments of the Crown were resisted with success. Two

revolutions established the sovereignty of an elected

parliament, and saved England from the fate of France. For in

that land tyranny had struck its roots far down into the soil,

and could not be torn up without the whole land being rent in

twain. In Spain, despotism might rule in safety over ignorance;

but the French had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, and they

demanded to eat of the Tree of Life. A bread riot became a

rebellion; the rebellion became a revolution. Maddened by

resistance, frenzied with fear, they made their revolution a

massacre. Yet, in spite of mummeries and murders, and

irreligious persecutions; in spite of follies perpetrated in

the name of Reason, and cruelties committed in the