IN a study such as this tries to be, it is, of course, impossible to consider in any degree the history of those portions of the chosen territory that joined themselves to, or were by force incorporated in, the great surrounding states. The Rhineland, in spite of its minor vicissitudes of lordship, is and has always been Germanic, and its annals are part and parcel of those of the Teutonic Holy Roman Empire and of the German Empire that succeeded it. The marshes of the mouth of the Rhine early differentiated themselves both from Germany and from the Gallic provinces farther south; Dutch they were and Dutch they will ever remain; their history and their culture and their art are by themselves. The same is true of Champagne, Picardy, Burgundy, Bar, and of the lands between them and the Seine. This is France, and its history is the history of France even if its art takes enduring colour from a persistent quality in its people that is its own and not simply that of the Franks and{38} Normans and Celts who coalesced around the old ?le de France to the building of one of the great peoples and one of the great states in history. Each gave more than it received when it became a part of a state that was slowly building itself out of assembling races and peoples, but each was like the daughter of a house; however much she might bring to some alliance, of fortune or character or power, she became merged in her new family, forsaking her name and accepting that of her chosen spouse, together with his ambitions, his interests, and his fortunes. We may then consider the outlying lands of our central district as so many fair daughters who have allied themselves with suitors from neighbouring territories; remembering them with affection, taking pride in the dowries they have carried with them, but confining ourselves to the fortunes of the men of the line who have preserved the family name and defended its honour in the field. In this sense Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg are the three princes to whom was given the defence of the patrimony that has been theirs from the ancient times of the earliest beginnings of the house amongst the Gallic and Germanic tribes of the Rhine valley, the meadows{39} and uplands of the Scheldt and the Meuse and the Sambre, and in the Forest of Ardennes.
As the Heart of Europe gradually became parcelled out between the great adjoining empires, each taking its colour more or less from the central influences, while in every instance contributing something in its turn to the sum that made up the varying greatness of both, the essential qualities of the original Belg? seemed to concentrate in the little province of Flanders, which, during the whole of the Middle Ages, played a part in Europe strikingly disproportionate to its size, which was less than half that of the State of Connecticut, though it contained over 1,200,000 people and counted cities like Ghent with 250,000 population, Ypres with 200,000, Bruges and Courtrai with 100,000 each. At the same time London could boast only 35,000 citizens. In trade, industry, wealth, culture, and the standard of living Flanders was far in advance of the rest of northern Europe, while it was marked by a perfect passion for liberty not only for the state but for each individual member thereof.
Every portion of the land we are considering made its own contribution, early or late, to the great sum of medi?valism, but it would be im{40}possible to consider, even superficially, the gifts of Champagne, Burgundy, the Rhineland. This book does not assume to be a history, it is only a sequence of notes on the lost or imperilled art of the Heart of Europe, with just so much of history as may serve to suggest what lay behind and gave this art its peculiar and unmatched quality.
The great elements that entered into this art and this civilisation that were pre-eminently the art and civilisation of Christianity were primarily two: northern blood and monastic fervour. To the worn-out vitality of the Mediterranean races came in the fresh vigour of the North, Lombard, Germanic, Norman, Frank, while the monastic impulse imparted by St. Benedict broke the spell of the Dark Ages, made possible the “false dawn” of Carolingian civilisation, and then, through its successors, the monks of Cluny in the eleventh century and the Cistercians in the twelfth, brought to perfection and to complete fulness of expression all the latent possibilities in the clean new blood that had been transfused into the hardening veins of an Europe already dangerously near dissolution.
These elements of new blood were chiefly supplied by the Franks (both of the East and the{41} West), the Burgundians, and the Normans, the latter being descendants of the Vikings from the Baltic. The Belg? were a subdivision of the Franks, and made up of several tribes, Trevii, Eburones, Nervii, etc. Generally speaking, they were Germanic, with a considerable Celtic admixture. The Cluniac and Cistercian reforms came from Burgundy, which is partially within the limits of our study, though later they received great accessions of strength from natives of Flanders, Brabant, the Rhineland, and Champagne. During the eleventh century Normandy was the spiritual centre, the dynamic force, of Europe, while in the twelfth century the leadership was assumed by the ?le de France, as wholly under the inspiration of the Cistercians as Normandy had been under that of the Cluniacs. It was during these two centuries that the great burst of Norman and of Gothic architecture occurred in the ?le de France, in Normandy, and in Champagne.
The contributions of the land we now know as Belgium were quite different; they were at the same time a product of medi?val culture and one of its causes, for they grew out of the deep and vital impulses beneath the whole epoch, while they seemed to determine many of its{42} manifestations. The first of these, the Crusades, has already been referred to; the second, the great guild system, with its concomitant, the commune, and its result, a desire for personal, civic, and national liberty that became a passion, needs some consideration, since it is from this that came so much of the later medi?val art of Flanders and Brabant that is so priceless and so appallingly in danger of destruction.
Just how and why the Flemings should have become a nation of weavers, merchants, and traders is hard to say, but even in the tenth century, weaving had become so important an industry a charter was granted the guild of weavers by Count Baldwin. The supply of wool came overseas from England, where an important market for the finished wares was also found, and as a result a close community of interests sprang up between Flanders and East Anglia. Without natural protection of any kind, the land lying open to any invasion, walled cities became imperative, as well as unions for self-defence, and so came the great and rich and defiant cities such as Ghent and Bruges, Ypres and Courtrai. When the nobles and knights flocked off on crusade, the citizens remained at home, and they{43} were not slow to seize the opportunity offered them of acquiring, almost without protest, the civil power that, elsewhere, under a dominant and universal feudalism, remained in the hands of the barons.
By this time the development of the guilds had reached enormous proportions, and the members were so numerous, so highly organised, and so defiant of molestation they were almost irresistible. In Ghent, for example, there were more than 50,000 enrolled craftsmen and artificers in the thirteenth century; in Bruges there were the four great trading guilds of wool merchants, linen merchants, mercers, and brewers, and in addition no less than fifty-two guilds of craftsmen. These guilds were not only for the protection of the interests of their members, they equally aimed at maintaining the highest possible standard in their products (so differentiating themselves sharply from the contemporary trade-union), while they demanded and received civic rights and privileges unheard of before and elsewhere. Finally they were military as well as civil in their nature, all the members being trained to arms and under competent military direction. The actual power they could exert is shown by the fact that at one{44} time the weavers in Ghent put an efficient army of 40,000 men into the field. Every man was bound to answer the alarm-bell of his own guild on the instant, and so came the great bell-towers that stood not only as the source of warning and the rallying-place, but also as visible evidences of the liberty of the men who obeyed the summons from their great bourdons.
Never before or since has skilled labour occupied a more advantageous position than in Flanders in the thirteenth century; wages were high, life liberal and self-respecting, comforts and even luxuries common to all, while the high standard of workmanship made labour dignified and enjoyable, and close union of interests guaranteed the protection of all against the aggressions of the nobles and the feudal system.
Offsetting the gains were corresponding losses. Successful industry, through group action, together with the consequent development of the town unit, resulted in a general loss of any national or racial spirit. The interests of each man were those of his guild or town, and during the entire Middle Ages there was the most kaleidoscopic grouping and regrouping of towns and provinces, now against the Empire, now against
France, Burgundy, England, now against each other or some count or duke working in his turn for dynastic or political dominance. Another cause of dissension was the complicated absurdity of feudal tenure, whereby the French-speaking people of Brabant and Lorraine were united to the Empire, the Flemings to France, while, as happened in the case of the Count of Flanders, a prince might be one of the Twelve Peers of France, and a vassal of the King, and yet be vassal to the Emperor for portions of his land. The process of progressive unification which was taking place elsewhere was here reversed, and by the end of the twelfth century Brabant had been broken up into five counties, while as far as the Seine were small and involved feudal domains and bishoprics, such as Hainault, Vermandois, Ponthièvre, Amiens, Reims, Coucy, Beauvais.
Flanders retained a certain unstable unity, and against this Philip Augustus of France set himself in his comprehensive policy of unification; after his first invasion Ferrand of Portugal, who had married the heiress of the last Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, took the lead in forming an alliance with England and the Empire for the crushing of France and the division of the{46} kingdom. Bouvines saw the ending of the ambitious plot, and as well the beginnings of modern France. Later came the League of Grammont and the second attempt to destroy France, which failed also; but at the battle of Courtrai by the Lys, the Flemish army of 25,000 utterly defeated a French force of double the number, with the loss of the proudest blood in France. A thousand knights fell, with 20,000 squires and men-at-arms, and in the Church of Our Lady of Courtrai, 700 gold spurs, from the heels of dead knights, were hung to the glory of the great victory.
So through the thirteenth century incessant fighting went on both in Flanders and Brabant, and in the great bishopric of Liége, the net result being the complete downfall of feudalism in advance of the rest of Europe and the solidifying of the popular passion for personal liberty and self-government.
The fourteenth century was the golden age of the communes and as well of renewed resistance to the continuous encroachments of France, when the brief period of the commercial alliance with England under Edward III came to an end. This English alliance, prompted by both commercial and political considerations, had been{47} the dream of the first Van Artevelde, Jacques by name, the leader of the weavers of Ghent. For nine years he had laboured for the interests of his fellow guildsmen and Ghentois, supporting King Edward III in his claims on the crown of France, plotting and planning to preserve the independence of Flanders. He fell a victim, however, to the spirit of irresponsible faction which already had been the inevitable outcome of the democratic, socialistic, and selfishly greedy elements inherent in an unhampered guild system, and was murdered by his own followers in the streets of Ghent.
In the meantime Louis de Male, had become Count of Flanders, in succession to his father, Louis de Nevers, while Wenceslas of Luxembourg, son of the King of Bohemia, who had married one of the daughters of John III, became Duke of Brabant. Here, as in Flanders, the various guilds had gained a control that was periodically contested by the nobles, particularly in Louvain, where the disorders continued for twenty years. In the end the cities were defeated, for they had used their power ill, determining their action by superhuman cruelty and greed, oppressing the weaker communes whenever they threatened their{48} trade, fighting amongst themselves, splitting up into factions, and vacillating between sudden enthusiasms and corresponding treachery. Already the tendency was setting in away from the medi?val looseness, mobility, and even democracy in government, and toward that centralisation coupled with autocracy which was to be the contribution of the Renaissance to the science of government and was to end in the absolutism of Henry VIII, Philip of Spain, and Louis XIV. Even if the guilds had shown a high standard of morals and of statesmanship, if the communes had been truly patriotic and national in their aims and methods, they could hardly have stood against a tendency already clearly defined and marking the new era, now coming to birth, as their high beginnings had marked that already drawing to its close.
Louis made war against Brabant, lost, but regained Malines, which he had sold to his father-in-law of Brabant, and then turned his attention to a final suppression of Ghent, the last stronghold of the declining democracy of Flanders. It was in 1279 that Bruges asked for a canal to the Lys to make amends for the silting up of her only outlet to the sea. Ghent protested, fearing loss{49} of her own trade, and took up arms when Louis granted the canal. The “White Hoods” defeated the forces sent against them, whereupon the fickle burgers of Bruges and Ypres went over to their side and long, hard fighting followed, until Louis found himself besieged in Audenaarde by some 60,000 “White Hoods” and was only saved by the intervention of his son-in-law Charles of Burgundy. Retreating to France, with headquarters at Lille, he reorganised his forces, renewed the attack, captured Ypres, and, one after the other, all the cities of Flanders except Ghent, to which he laid siege. At this last crisis in its fortunes Ghent turned to Philip, son of Jacques van Artevelde, who took command, organised a force of 5,000 men, led them against Count Louis’ army of 40,000, attacked near Bruges, and defeated it utterly, Louis escaping only in the clothes of his servant. Bruges was occupied and its walls destroyed, Ypres and Courtrai joined in with Ghent, and Bruges itself turned against its count.
The issue was now fairly joined between commons and knights; Louis de Male made his cause that of order and the nobility against anarchy and the proletariat, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy joined him, and under Oliver,{50} constable of France, 80,000 men, amongst whom no communal levies were admitted, marched on Ghent and its allies. Against this force Philip van Artevelde mustered 40,000 men who advanced to the attack with a mad confidence born of their recent victory over Louis. In a thick fog they hurled themselves in a solid body on the centre of the enemy, broke it, saw victory before them, and then, the fog lifting, found themselves flanked on both sides by the constable’s horse, and abandoned themselves to a panic that ended in the slaughter of more than half their number, including Van Artevelde himself, whose brief day of success and glory had lasted exactly eleven months.
The French sacked Courtrai and went home, whereupon Ghent again took heart of hope, and, aided by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, with 3,000 men, defied Louis and laid siege to Ypres, which was relieved by the returning French, and a truce was finally signed at Calais.
It was the end of the democratic communes, not only in Flanders but in Brabant, where Duke Wenceslas at the same time had defeated the communes at Louvain, and as well in France, where the growing spirit of communal
independence was wiped out by a king who had found in Flanders the proof that this cannot co-exist with a strong and centralised monarchy.
Already industrial decline had set in; the country had been harried by French armies and by civil wars, many had gone overseas to England to establish there a rival industry that slowly sapped the prosperity of Flanders and Brabant. The Black Death had decimated the remaining population, and Bruges, Courtrai, Ypres, indeed nearly all the great towns but Ghent, slowly lost their population until hardly a tenth was left. Still a large degree of prosperity remained, and wealth was as much desired and as successfully attained as before, only within narrower lines and by a far smaller number of people.
When Louis de Male died, shortly after the victory of his French allies over the communes, his son-in-law, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, became Count of Flanders, and the fifteenth century was dominated by Burgundian efforts to build up a strong central kingdom when it became evident that it could not control the destinies of France. Flanders, Brabant, and Namur were all incorporated in Burgundy, and later Holland and Hainault, so that it seemed for a{52} time that a great central state might arise between the Empire and the kingdom of France.
Philip’s first efforts were to wean Flanders from its friendship with England in order that he might use the country for the invasion he had planned to bring about. He died in 1404 before he could carry out his schemes and was succeeded by his son, John the Fearless, whose aim was the French crown, in opposition to the Duke of Orleans who had become supreme in Paris. He marched on the capital, which opened its gates to him, while Orleans took refuge in the south but returned and too confidingly patched up some kind of a peace with Burgundy, who had him assassinated in the streets of Paris in the following year. Out of his murder grew the league of the partisans of Orleans, the “Armagnacs,” who took their name from Count d’Armagnac, father-in-law of one of the daughters of the murdered duke, and the warfare between them and the house of Burgundy.
In the meantime Henry V had laid claim to the French throne, had invaded France, and fought the battle of Agincourt. Thus far John the Fearless had kept out of the fight, but now he allied himself with the Dauphin and went to{53} meet him at Montereau to seal his allegiance. Here he was in turn slain by the Armagnacs in revenge for his own murder of the Duke of Orleans, and his son, Philip the Good, at once threw himself into the arms of England, against France, and it was he who handed over the B. Jeanne d’Arc to the Bishop of Beauvais, after her capture at Compiègne in 1430, as a witch and sorceress.
Philip was more devoted to his new possessions than to his native Burgundy, and under him Bruges and Ghent took precedence of his old capital of Dijon. Philip also was the founder of the Order of the Golden Fleece on the occasion of one of his numerous marriages, this time in Bruges and to the Countess of Nevers. The marriage was a great event in many ways, for to it came the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, he being then Regent of France for the English king and realising that the triumphant career of Jeanne d’Arc was having results that urged him to make the most of the Duke of Burgundy, the only friend left to his royal master. The Golden Fleece, the oldest order on the Continent, was instituted in particular honour of Flanders, and especially the city of Bruges, the world centre of{54} the wool trade. There were to be but twenty-four knights, under the leadership of the duke, and they were granted extraordinary privileges, amongst them immunity from all other states, princes and laws, being subject only to their sovereign master, though they remained citizens of their respective states, whatever those may have been. Philip II of Spain did away with this intolerable anomaly, and in 1725 the order was divided between Spain and Austria, so losing wholly its original and most distinctive quality as a signal honour especially pertaining to Flanders.
By 1435 Philip, whose affection for England had been at the best lukewarm, could bear no longer the appalling misery of France and the excesses of the English armies. All north of the Loire had become a wilderness and even in the later Middle Ages pity was a feeling still easily aroused. By the treaty of Arras Burgundy finally separated itself from the English alliance and joined Charles VII, the immediate result being a letting-up of the war in France and a transferring of hostilities to Flanders. The duke led an enthusiastic force of Flemings against Calais, failed to capture it, and then discovered
the erratic nature of his Flemish subjects, for they forthwith turned against him as suddenly as they had deserted the English alliance, and Philip proceeded forthwith to break their spirit, or rather the frantic independence of their cities. He succeeded, and yet Flanders prospered in spite of the sporadic internecine warfare. Prosperity somehow came back and wealth increased, while Memling, the Van Eycks and their great line of successors, together with other masters of art in allied fields, gave a glory to the time that will endure for ever. Then followed years of strife and turbulence, of shifting alliances and of sympathies as ready to turn as to be aroused. Philip died, was succeeded by his son, Charles the Bold, and the disorders broke out afresh so successfully that at first he was forced to give back all the communal privileges his father had taken away. In addition to his domestic troubles he found himself the object of the serpentine plots of Louis XI now King of France. Charles was equal to the occasion, however; he married Margaret of York, sister to the English King, so acquiring a new ally; marched against Liége, the centre of the local disaffection, captured it triumphantly, then turned on the crafty and unscrupu{56}lous Louis and proceeded to beat him at his own game. In the midst of this enviable adventure, Liége revolted once more, and this time Charles, dragging Louis at his heels, captured the city again, now showing none of the mercy he had before exhibited. The whole city was sacked, only the churches and monasteries being spared, and the ruins were given to the flames. In spite of the exemption accorded religious property, the destruction of the great city was too manifestly a violation of the common decencies of Christian conduct to be neutrally endured by the Pope, who at that time (it was almost five centuries ago) did not fear to take a strong stand for righteousness when occasion offered, and Charles had to make his peace with the head of the Church as best he could.
The policy of “frightfulness” had its advantages to its perpetrator, however, and the other rebellious cities surrendered at discretion, losing their treasured liberties and becoming simply communities in a united and centralised state. In the end Charles lost, for Louis XI was a schemer of such profound duplicity that only the devil himself could have matched him in the long run, and on even terms. The duke met failure at{57} every turn: in his effort to co-ordinate his unruly provinces into a working organism, in his ambition to become King of Burgundy instead of duke, in his last war against the Swiss when he was utterly defeated and slain. He was succeeded by his daughter, the famous Mary of Burgundy, who also became a victim of the royal spider of France, but countered on him by suddenly marrying Maximilian, son of the Emperor, and so beginning that train of events that severed Burgundy from its French associations and brought its several parts into a relationship with Germany that continued for nearly three centuries.
Young, beautiful, clever, and immensely popular, Mary of Burgundy seemed destined to accomplish what her father had failed to bring about, the unification and restoration of a great Burgundian state, but after only five years of rule she was killed by a fall from her horse while hunting, and Philip, her infant son, became duke in name, and the old political troubles rose to a climax that in the end brought in the Spanish dominion and the ruin that followed in its wake.
The cities of Flanders and Brabant turned again to France, in a frantic effort to regain their lost liberties, while Maximilian, who had been{58} crowned King of Rome, and was of course next in succession to the Empire, fought again and again to restore his supremacy, and regain his infant son, the future Philip the Fair, who had been sent to France to be educated and to get him out of the hands of his father. In the end he defeated the ring-leading cities, Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, and was acknowledged regent. In 1493 Frederick died and Maximilian succeeded him as Emperor, proclaiming Philip as Count of Flanders, marrying him out of hand to Joanna, Infanta of Castile, and betrothing his sister to Don John, heir to the crown of Spain. The sudden rise of a great new power in the Iberian Peninsula had overturned all the old alignments; the driving of the Moors from Spain and the union of Aragon and Castile in Ferdinand and Isabella had revealed a new force that might be used against France, and more dependable than England, and the new Emperor was not slow to recognise his opportunity. His sister never married Don John, who died before the projected wedding, and was followed by his sister, the Queen of Portugal, so suddenly the Count of Flanders and his countess became heirs to the throne of Spain. They gained little advantage{59} from this, although after the death of Queen Isabella in 1505 they went to Spain, and were proclaimed as king and queen, but their glory was short-lived, for in the following year Philip met a sudden and untimely end, his queen went mad through grief, and the Emperor became the dominating influence in Spain as well as in Flanders through the guardianship of his five-year-old grandson, the future Charles V.
During his minority his aunt, Margaret of Austria, had acted as regent, and with a wisdom and a benevolence her male predecessors had never shown, so that when in 1515 Charles became actual ruler of Flanders, he found himself in possession of a calm and contented community. Carefully educated by his admirable aunt, Charles, the heir to seventeen kingdoms, could speak the language of each, and he had, moreover, the enormous advantage of being tutored by the great Erasmus of Rotterdam. Hardly had he become King of Spain through the death of Ferdinand, when his grandfather died, and he became Emperor as well. Practically all Europe, and America also, were his, and after his war with France which ended at Pavia with the capture of Francis I (when all was “lost save honour”),{60} he was the temporal Lord of the World, except England alone, while the spiritual power of the Papacy was his only rival on the Continent, and the Pope himself was his old tutor, Adrian, Archbishop of Toledo.
Charles was as able as he was universal in his sovereignty; he organised his vast empire on practical lines under well-chosen regents, none of whom was more excellent than Margaret of Austria, under whom the country prospered exceedingly. She was as shrewd and far-seeing as she was admirable in character; a poet in her own right, she fostered art, letters, and general culture, and her death in 1530 was a loss to Flanders and also to the Emperor, who immediately appointed his sister Mary regent in her place, a lady of less distinguished abilities, but a good and faithful servant for a quarter of a century.
Charles V estimated Luther, and the Reformation generally, at something of their true value; he saw the menace as well as the merit of the budding revolution and opposed it firmly because of its dangerous elements, which were already revealing themselves. The great era of the Middle Ages had come to an end, carrying with it in its fall many of those elements of righteousness in{61} thought and action for which Charles cared almost passionately. He was of the older age rather than of the new, and in the end the conviction that he had failed to stem the tide, coupled with the progressive ruin of the old religion, the old philosophy, the old order of life, led him to abdicate what was almost the throne of the world and seek refuge in a monastery, where he devoted the brief remainder of his life to prayer, meditation, and the making of watches.
In the meantime, however, he had done Europe inestimable services, amongst them the beating back of the Moslem host, the recovery to Christianity of Hungary, the conquest of Tunis, and the general blocking of the double lines of Mohammedan advance. He was successful in his new crusade against the Eastern infidels, but he could not arrest the progress of heresy and anarchy in the West, and he finally abandoned the fight in despair, turning over to others a royalty too heavy to be borne. To his son Philip were given Spain, the American possessions, and the “Low Countries,” which then comprised all Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg as well as Artois and Cambrai. So began the Spanish dominion over the very centre of the Heart of Eu{62}rope. It was the richest state in the world; when Philip II became sovereign there were seventeen provinces with 208 great walled towns, 150 boroughs and more than 6,000 villages. The products were infinitely varied and were famous throughout the world: woollen cloth, linen, silk, velvet, damask, embroideries, gloves, metal-work of every kind. Antwerp was in the lead in commerce, and it is said that the city had a population of 250,000, with 1,000 resident foreign merchants; 500 ships entered the port daily, and 300 wagons from across the frontiers of France and the Empire, while more business was transacted there in a week than in two years in Venice, her great commercial rival in the South. Such were the lands that came to Philip of Spain: the richest prize that Europe could afford.