IT is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country—or the men that made it great—was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of medi?valism, even though for its full manifestation you must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia.
The great empires of to-day, England, France, Germany, Italy, two of which have eaten steadily into its territories until only a tiny Luxembourg remains, together with a small new state with a{16} novel name made greater and more lasting by the events of a year than those of its predecessors, have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, taking to themselves at the same time credit, that is none of theirs, for men and happenings that made ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory, the high achievements of the small old states are forgotten. And yet, out of these little dukedoms and counties and free cities came the men who made France and Germany, who determined the genius of medi?valism, imparted to it the high soul and the swift hand of its peculiar personality, and gave to the world the memory and tradition of faith and heroism, together with so much of that inimitable art that was its perfect showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible monument of its accomplishment.
National unity this territory and these peoples have never possessed. During the Roman dominion they formed the provinces of Germania and Belgica, in the diocese of Gaul; under the Merovings all was comprised in the Frankish kingdom, the old line between the Roman provinces remaining to divide Austrasia and Neustria, as the northern and southern sections came to be called under the Carolings. With the disruption of the{17} empire of Charlemagne, Austrasia went to the kingdom of the East Franks, Neustria to that of the West Franks, the former becoming (west of the Rhine) the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine, the latter (east of the Seine) Flanders and Champagne. When Otto the Great restored the Holy Roman Empire in A. D. 962, the Lorraines of course formed a part. These comprised all that is now (or was, in June, 1915) Germany west of the Rhine, together with all of Belgium except Flanders, Luxembourg, and a strip of territory along the northeast frontier of France. Westward to the Seine the land was divided into many feudal holdings, Flanders, which then comprised not only northern Belgium but the present French departments of Nord and Pas de Calais; Champagne, Amiens, Vermandois, Laon, Reims, Chalons. During the Middle Ages Lower Lorraine became the duchy of Brabant and the county of Hainault. Upper Lorraine, Luxembourg and Bar, southern Flanders, Artois. Picardy and Valois became entities, and the great bishoprics of Cologne, Trèves, Strasbourg, Cambray, Liége acquired more and more land until they were principalities in themselves.
During the fifteenth century the magnificent{18} efforts of the dukes of Burgundy to create for themselves an independent state between France and the Empire, and reaching from the Rhine to the Aisne, from the Alps to the sea, resulted in a partial and temporary unification of the old Belgian lands, but with the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482, the whole territory became more and more closely knit into the Empire, France losing even her claim to suzerainty over Flanders; all the lands west of the Meuse and over the Rhine as far as the Ems became the Netherlands, comprising roughly what is now Holland and Belgium. The duchies of Luxembourg, Bar, and Lorraine, with the Palatinate, shared all that lay between the Meuse and the Rhine, save what the great bishoprics had assumed to themselves, while Burgundy (except the Franche-Comté) and Lorraine were definitively merged in France.
Then came the Spanish dominion over the whole territory, barring the duchy of Julich along the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the severing of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine from the Spanish territories; finally, in 1715, after 160 years of ruinous domination, Spain was driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders,{19} Brabant, and Luxembourg, maintaining herself there until the time of Napoleon a century later, when for a few years everything as far as the Rhine, together with the Netherlands on the other side, was incorporated in France. With the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic empire, Holland and Belgium, as we know them now, came into existence, the lands of the duchy of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to Bavaria. Luxembourg was reduced to its existing area and the French frontier delimited as it is now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost in 1870.
Between the upper and nether millstones of France and the Empire, the Heart of Europe for fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments of ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into unity, but producing ever in spite of political chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifestations of the vigour and nobility of race, great figures to uphold and enforce the lofty principles that have made so much of the brilliant history of medi?val Europe, and all centring around the lands of the many tribes who from earliest times were known as the Belg?.{20}
They enter well into history, these Belg?, in the fifty-seventh year before the birth of Christ, Nervii, Veromandri, Atrobates, from the valleys of the Meuse and the Sambre, as C?sar found and declared, “that day against the Nervii,” when the battle for the winning of this new land was his by hardly more than a chance. The tribes were hard and free, and they died in the end almost to a man, five hundred remaining out of fifty thousand warriors. But C?sar was magnanimous, as always, and by no means without appreciation of his adversaries, so Allies of Rome, with full claim on her protection, they became, with the rank and title of a free people, as they have remained at heart ever since. In seven years the last of the tribes had surrendered and Belgium became a flourishing colony as well as the advance-guard of Roman civilisation in its progress against the savage Germans of the Rhine. By the fall of the Empire a great and united people had come into being between Gaul and Germania, divided into four great sections with their several capitols at Trèves, Reims, Mainz, and Cologne.
Meanwhile the Franks had come on the scene, though their name is rather a rallying-cry than{21} a mark of race, meaning only that certain of the tribes of Gaul, with others of the Belg?, were determined to be free—as they became shortly and as they have generally remained ever since. Now the Salian Franks were the dwellers in Flanders and Brabant and under their Duke Clodion had extended their borders as far as Soissons. Clodion’s successor, Merov?us, was grandfather of Clovis, the first Christian king of the north. The Merovings, then, are neither strictly of Gaul nor of Germany, but of the Heart of Europe itself, and their blood, like that of their followers, a mingling of Germanic and Celtic and Roman strains.
Chalons saw them allied with the Romans and driving back the fierce tide of the earlier Huns that threatened to beat out the last flicker of light in Europe: Tolbiac saw them hurl back the savage Allemanni, in the year 496, again preserving the European tradition from submergence under barbarian hordes, nor was this the last time they were to perform this service. Already Clovis had married Clotilde, niece of the Duke of Burgundy, so bringing another region into close contact with his own, and now, after the successful issue of the battle of Tolbiac, when{22} he had first called on the God of Christians, he presented himself before the Archbishop of Reims, St. Remi, for baptism, where he heard the significant words: “Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian! destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed.”
Whatever the motive, and however inadequate the performance of his new obligations by Clovis, his baptism is one of the crucial events in history, marking the end of paganism as a controlling force, and with the conquest of Italy by Theodoric and the promulgation of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, the beginning of the great Christian era of culture and civilisation that was to endure, unimpaired, for a thousand years.
The dominion of Clovis comprised all that is now France south to the Loire and Burgundy, with Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Bavaria, but his capital was at Tournai, and he was in fact even more a Belgian than a French sovereign. Under him all the Franks were united and his power was such that the Emperor at Constantinople made him patrician, consul, and Augustus. With his death in 511 began a long era of division and reunion, of internecine warfare and the plotting of jealous women, two of whom, Frede{23}gonde personifying the Gallic influence, Brunhilde the Germanic, fostered a conflict that hardly came to an end before the fall of the dynasty.
Little by little the Merovings broke away from their racial Belgic affiliations, Soissons became the capital rather than Tournai, and at last by a dramatic turn of fate another Belgian race brought the decrepit line to its term and founded a new and a nobler house. Pepin of Landen, in the province of Liége, became mayor of the palace and the active influence in royal affairs, somewhere about the year 620, and it was a son of his daughter, Pepin of Herstel (a town also in the province of Liége) who was father of Charles Martel, who in his turn was the grandfather of Charlemagne.
As the Huns and the Allemanni had been rolled back from their savage incursions by the aid of men of Belgic nationality, so now the greater threat of an onrushing Mohammedanism was to be dispelled by another and a greater personality, Charles the Hammer, a soldier of consummate ability, the real ruler of all the Franks, and the victor at the battle of Tours when final decision was reached as to whether Europe was for the future to be Moslem or Christian.{24}
Charles Martel died when only fifty years of age, and his son Pepin succeeded him as mayor of the palace. The fiction of Meroving kingship could no longer be maintained; the stock was hopelessly degenerate; the people demanded an end, the Pope sanctioned it, and so, after a most orderly fashion Childeric III betook himself to a convenient cloister, Pepin was raised on the shields of the Gallic soldiers, then decently crowned in St. Denis, and the dynasty of the Carolings began. For sixteen years he reigned as kings had not been wont to reign for many centuries; Saxony, Brittany, Languedoc were added to the Frankish dominions, Rome twice saved from the Lombard invaders, and the Papacy made the faithful ally and defender of the Frankish kingdom, then the one great power in Europe.
There were more reasons than that of policy for this alliance. Practically abandoned by the Roman Emperors in the east, Italy had been the prey of tribe after tribe of northern savages, and the Papacy was the only centre of order and authority. In spite of this the Popes still shrank from severing themselves wholly from the imperial centre, but the iconoclastic controversy had resulted in what was both heresy and schism on{25} the part of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and communion was no longer possible. Moreover, all the other northern tribes that had accepted Christianity—Goths, Vandals, Lombards—had adopted the Arian heresy and were therefore even more distasteful to Rome than unconverted heathen. This condition of things justified the Papacy in its attitude of intolerance, and when Pepin came to the throne, it was almost at the last gasp, through persecution, spoliation, and outrage at the hands of the Teutonic Arians. The Frankish kingdom alone was Catholic, and enthusiastically Catholic, and it is small wonder that to the Pope the rise of a great and powerful and Catholic nation under the dominating Carolings came as a special mercy from heaven—as, indeed, it was.
With the death of Pepin and the accession of his son Charles—known now for all time as Charlemagne—the curtain rose on one of the most brilliant dramas of history. The Lombards had again revolted; Pope Hadrian called on the Franks in despair; King Charles hurled his armies into Italy like an avalanche, captured and deposed Desiderius, last of the Lombard kings, proclaimed himself King of Lombardy, pressed{26} on to Rome, and was welcomed there by the Supreme Pontiff as the saviour of Christendom.
He would, however, accept no formal honours save that of patrician, and returned to the north to continue the work of his father in consolidating and extending the kingdom. For twenty-four years he was engaged in innumerable wars, in eager efforts to restore education, political order, ecclesiastical righteousness, and even some small measure of genuine culture, with results that seem miraculous in the light of what had been before for so many centuries. Finally, in the year 799, he went again to Rome, where Leo III now sat in the chair of Peter, and at mass on Christmas Day, A. D. 800, the Pope came suddenly behind him as he was kneeling before the altar in St. Peter’s and, placing a crown on his head, cried in a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, crowned by the hand of God!” and after three centuries and more of anarchy, barbarism, and hopeless degeneration, the empire was restored as the Holy Roman Empire, in the person of a Frankish warrior of the lands of the Belg?, and destined to endure for another thousand years.
Aix-la-Chapelle is the very centre of the land{27} and the people that built up the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages, and it was here that Charlemagne fixed his chief place of residence. During his lifetime it was the very, and the only, centre of order and of culture in Europe. A great warrior, he was an even greater administrator, while as the restorer of learning and the patron of art and letters he was perhaps greatest of all. When he came to the throne there lay behind him nearly four centuries of absolute anarchy and barbarism, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the marches of the Teutonic savages. What he built he built from the ground upward, and though his was only the “false dawn” that heralds the day, passing utterly, so far as one could see, within a generation after his death, it was the saving of Europe, the preservation of the succession, that, the second Dark Ages overpassed, guaranteed the coming in of the great era that began with the millennial year of Christianity and lasted for five full centuries.
Under his direction a complete administrative system was established over the unwieldy empire; local governments were set up, with a system of regular visitations from the central authority,{28} and in this way the foundations were laid for the counties of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, into which, together with Vermandois, Valois, Amiens, and Champagne, this territory of our survey was divided during the Middle Ages.
In religion, education, and art Charlemagne went far beyond his predecessors for five centuries, so far as the form and re-creation are concerned. Separated at last from the church in the East, now definitely schismatic, heretical, and Erastian, the Papacy was in a position to go on unhindered in its development, and Charlemagne became not only a defender but a zealous and enthusiastic reformer. Monasticism was universally strengthened and extended, new bishoprics were founded, the state of the Holy See purified, while schools were established in connection with cathedrals and monasteries throughout the Empire. Charles had a great passion for scholars and artists, gathering them from Italy, Spain, England, wherever, indeed, they were to be found, and for a time his court was the nucleus of culture in the West. Architecture was reborn, all the ravelled threads from Rome, Constantinople, Ravenna, Syria were gathered up and knit together, and though few authentic works from{29} among the myriads of the Emperor’s creation still remain, we know from what we have, and chiefly the royal chapel at Aix, that the result was the restoring once more of a line of continuity after the vast vacancy of the Dark Ages, and the initiation of a new vitality that, after the second Dark Ages, was to serve as the energising power that brought Romanesque art into existence and made possible the great glory of Gothic.
Great as he was, Charlemagne had all the weaknesses of his racial tradition, and by yielding to these his era was his alone, nor could it outlast his personal influence. Divided between his successors, the Empire rapidly and naturally fell to pieces during the lifetime of Louis le Debonnaire, who for a brief period had succeeded in uniting it again, and during the second Dark Ages, from 850 to 1000 A. D., there is no more of note to record in this region than in any other part of Europe. The era had culminated under Charlemagne; it was now to sink to its end, as always had happened before, as always, so far as we can see, must continue to happen. Not until the turn of the tide at the year 1000 could a real recovery begin. In the meantime history is little more than a series of personal contests, but out of these{30} certain beginnings are made that are to have issue in great things, and amongst these are the appearance of the first Baldwin of Flanders and the establishing of the first hereditary title, and therefore the oldest in Europe. Baldwin of the Iron Arm successfully fought the Vikings, driving them west until they were forced to content themselves with the land they ultimately made immortal as Normandy. His son married a daughter of Alfred the Great, so establishing a certain connection between England and Flanders, and by fortifying Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, and Courtrai, he did much toward fixing these cities as centres of municipal life and of that fierce independence that marked them for so many generations.
With the opening of the new era, at the beginning of the eleventh century, a new vitality shows itself in the land. William of Normandy had become the son-in-law of Baldwin V, and from Flanders many knights joined the Conqueror for his invasion of England, one becoming first Earl of Northumberland, another first Earl of Chester. Under Baldwin VI complete peace was restored to the distracted provinces, while the Charter of Grammont is a landmark in that development
of personal and civil liberty which is one of the great glories of medi?valism. The Tribunal of Peace, established by the Bishop of Liége, is another shining sign of the times, while the defeat of France in its attacks on Flemish independence assured a long period of splendid development.
This was enhanced by the Crusades, and here, particularly in the first, the Heart of Europe showed the quality of the blood that was its life. Whatever the Crusades may have become after long years, they were in their earliest impulse supreme examples of human faith, unselfishness, devotion, heroism, and piety. The redemption of the Holy Places of Christianity from the infidel became a passion, and the protagonist, the moving and vitalising spirit, was one Peter the Hermit, of the province of Liége, who, crucifix in hand, toiled through eastern France, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, as well as through his own country, exhorting prince and peasant to take up arms for the freeing of the Holy Land from the Saracen.
His success was almost miraculous, for the great adventure appealed to every instinct of the time—piety, reverence, chivalry, romance,{32} the passion for a new and venturesome and knightly quest—and in less than two years the Pope himself set his seal of approbation on the First Crusade. In Clermont, in the year 1095, surrounded by four hundred bishops and mitred abbots, he cried to the waiting multitudes of Europe: “Are we called upon to see in this century the desolation of Christianity and to remain at peace the while our holy religion is given over into the hands of the oppressor? Here is a lawful war; go, defend the House of Israel!” Almost with a single voice Europe made answer with the rallying-cry: “God wills it!” Every scarlet garment was shredded in pieces to furnish crosses which were sewn to the shoulders; some even branded themselves with the sign of the cross by means of red-hot irons.
Within another year an army of 100,000 men had been gathered together, under the leadership of Peter, himself, and it poured across Europe as far as Constantinople, a disorganised and impotent mob. It met its fate as soon as it had crossed the Bosporus into Saracen territory, and only a shattered remnant, including the originator of the mad venture, ever returned to its home. In the meantime, however, a greater{33} captain than Peter the Hermit, and of the same race, was gathering the enormous host that succeeded where he had failed. Godfrey of Bouillon, of the province of Liége, a great scholar and greater soldier, gathered 90,000 knights and men-at-arms in Flanders and Brabant, and set out for Jerusalem on the 10th of August, 1096. A month later the French under command of the King’s brother, and the Flemings under Robert, Count of Flanders, followed in his track. Baldwin of Bourg, the Counts of Hainault, Namur, Grez, Audenaarde, and Ypres, with knights of Dixmude, Alost, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Tournai were amongst the leaders, and a concentration was effected at Constantinople when there were no less than 600,000 in all. Crossing into Asia, the great host swept onward from one victory to another; the battle of Doryl?um, fought on the 4th of July, 1097, proved them invincible. Tarsus and Antioch fell, and nothing lay between them and Jerusalem. The city was besieged and finally carried by assault, the attack beginning on the 14th of July, and after a week of incessant fighting on the walls and through the streets, Jerusalem was wholly in the hands of the Crusaders. But the host that set out from its many{34} sources in Europe had vanished and only a tenth of the original number remained to fight the relieving army from Egypt at Ascalon, and to organise the victory. Five hundred thousand men had perished on the long march, died of disease, or fallen in battle.
Godfrey of Bouillon became the first King of Jerusalem, the choice resting between him and Robert of Flanders. He reigned only a year, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who had made himself Count of Edessa, and whose descendants continued on the throne for several generations.
In all the succeeding Crusades, Flanders and Brabant, Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy played leading parts, and in the fifth, when the arms of the knights were turned from the relief of Jerusalem to the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, another Baldwin of Flanders was leader, and, after the fall of Constantinople, became the first Latin Emperor of the East, his dynasty continuing on the throne for fifty years.
Amazing as were the results of the Crusades, with the conquering of the Saracens in the Holy Land, and the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, a Walloon being crowned first King of Jerusalem{35} and a Fleming first Latin Emperor of Byzantium, the local results had no permanency, Jerusalem falling again to the Mussulmans after a century and a half, Constantinople reverting to the Eastern line at about the same time. In Europe, however, the results had been of profound import; directly, the Crusades had had a vast influence in determining the temper and the course of medi?valism, indirectly they had laid the foundations of the industrial supremacy of the Belgian cities and of the emancipation of the people from feudalism. The Saracen of the twelfth century was the antithesis of the Ottoman Turk of to-day, and from him the Crusaders learned much to their advantage, while from the Eastern Empire came new impulses toward the development of a broader culture than the West alone could have achieved. So far as the cities of Flanders, Brabant, and Lorraine were concerned, the absence of their martial and turbulent knights was by no means an unmixed catastrophe. The vast expeditions demanded vast expenditures: money came generally into use in place of barter; the common people who remained at home developed their industries, increased their wealth, and in the end took into their own hands much of the business{36} of the government. The habit and tradition of independence and liberty which so grew up, maintained itself steadily against all assaults, nor has it lapsed or waned, as the last year has gloriously proved, and many of the tall towers that became the recognised symbol of civic independence still stand in testimony, though one by one they are falling before the armed negation of all they rose to proclaim.