Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the False Decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman code, and the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of modern iurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law. Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.

Yet neither any one of these answers, taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. By the term "renaissance," or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.

How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries after Christ, to speak roughly, humanity awoke as it were from slumber and began to live? That is a question which we can but imperfectly answer. The mystery of organic life defeats analysis. Whether the subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the commencement of a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or a new phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point out what are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover, we must be careful not to be carried away by words of our own making. Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we find it convenient to name; while history itself is one and continuous, so that our utmost endeavors to regard some portion of it, independently of the rest, will be defeated.

A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after the dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there was no possibility of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had deluged Europe had to absorb their barbarism; the fragments of Roman civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated; the Germanic nations had to receive culture and religion from the effete people they had superseded. It was further necessary that the modern nationalities should be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated, before the indispensable milieu for a resurrection of the free spirit of humanity could exist. The first nation which fulfilled these conditions was the first to inaugurate the new era. The reason why Italy took the lead in the Renaissance was that Italy possessed a language, a favorable climate, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, at a time when other nations were still semibarbarous. Where the human spirit had been buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins of that Empire; and the papacy—called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated, throned, and crowned, upon the ashes thereof—to some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.

Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the Renaissance was intellectual—that it was the emancipation of the reason for the modern world—we may inquire how feudalism was related to it. The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration before the idols of the Church—dogma and authority and scholasticism. Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate, without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved for humanity during the Middle Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was done unconsciously—that it was a gradual and instinctive process of becoming. The reason, in a word, was not awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles more idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle were alive, but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to bid them speak with voice intelligible to the modern mind. It is no less pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of humanity sweeping from all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but unavailing foam upon the shores of Palestine, whole nations laying life down for the chance of seeing the walls of Jerusalem, worshipping the sepulchre whence Christ had risen, loading their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the sacred earth, while all the time, within their breasts and brains, the spirit of the Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of freedom which ere long was destined to restore its birthright to the world.

Meanwhile the Middle Age accomplished its own work. Slowly and obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters, and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed. The qualities which render modern society different from that of the ancient world were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity, by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further phase. After the nations had been moulded, their monarchies and dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany numerous principalities sprang into preeminence; and though the nation was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of which the king could say, "L'etat c'est moi." England developed her complicated constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of transformation. The papacy became more autocratic. Like the king the pope began to say, "L'Eglise c'est moi." This merging of the mediaeval state and mediaeval church in the personal supremacy of king and pope may be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism which preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary milieu was prepared. The organization of the five great nations, and the levelling of political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.

Meanwhile it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms. Far from that, within the Middle Age itself, over and over again, the reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their sway. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites—heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by the Church.

We have to commemorate the vast conception of the emperor Frederick II, who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophytic members of half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.

Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art, conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal of antique culture as the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race, his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the Renaissance—its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of freedom. His conception of human existence as a joy to be accepted with thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering, familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semipagan gladness that marked the real Renaissance.

In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived; but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain. With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of the world, the goodliness of youth, and strength and love and life, unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.

It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had lost, indeed, the heroic spirit which we admire in her communes of the thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fibre of the men who were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the same time the period of satiety was still far off.

Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are not blunted, nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing is more remarkable than the fulness of the life that throbbed in them. Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning has written of Sordello's temperament:

"A footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices, mere decay Produces richer life, and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose."

During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like St. Bernard travelling along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the waters nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule—even like this monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life—these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.

An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with the ancient mind, which followed upon what is called the Revival of Learning. The fall of the Greek empire in 1453, while it signalized the extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under all manifestations was generated. Men found that in classical as well as biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to be one.

The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the world and the discovery of man. Under these two formulas may be classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The discovery of the world divides itself into two branches—the exploration of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is in fact what we call science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been added to civilization.

In like manner, it is worth while to pause a moment and consider what is implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system. The world, regarded in old times as the centre of all things, the apple of God's eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars, suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable suns, attended each by a cortege of planets, and scattered—how, we know not—through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples? The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology.

Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth God could not be worshipped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new meaning had been given to the words "God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The reason of man was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a part, and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious, but also incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life, and then considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the first-born of the spirit of the modern world.

Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable world, and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations, illustrated by pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations, illustrated by biblical antiquity: these are the two regions, at first apparently distinct, afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms he saw around him.

But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of physical perfection, and to introduce un bel corpo ignudo into the composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.

Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went further, and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.

Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the prose of Boethius—and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints—together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship Litterae Humaniores ("the more human literature"), the literature that humanizes.

There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho—absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those long buried amphorae of inspiration.

What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture. Popes and princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde alike became scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription "Julia, Daughter of Claudius," and inside the coffer lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed—so goes the legend—to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description. She was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.

Then came the third age of scholarship—the age of the critics, philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries. There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.

This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his Adagia in 1500 marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation, comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic culture was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world, and emancipated from the thraldom of improved traditions. The force to judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity to a reaction—in the North, of Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously imperilled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially retarded by the reaction it produced.

The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom, is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon, or as a mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits, in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science—the recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is the true philosophy of history.

The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its mediaeval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church successfully combated in North Italy, in France, and in Bohemia were the precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type—Reuchlin in Germany, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as a humanist—contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part, incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity as distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between humanity and God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. The principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous. Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other side with intolerance of mere authority, it led to what has since been named rationalism—the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the conceptions of the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism of the Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the eighteenth century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how, through education, to render culture accessible to all—to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity, from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God has made him.

It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was first made of cotton in Europe about 1000 and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.

In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared. But it must never be forgotten that, as a matter of history, the true Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediaeval world were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has collected, centralized, and diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But if we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to organize the various elements of the modern spirit, and to set the fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and live.



THE BLACK DEATH RAVAGES EUROPE

A.D. 1348

J. F. C. HECKER[51] GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

Different parts of the oriental world have been mentioned as the probable locality of the first appearance of the plague or pestilence known as the "black death," but its origin is most generally referred to China, where, at all events, it raged violently about 1333, when it was accompanied at its outbreak by terrestrial and atmospheric phenomena of a destructive character, such as are said to have attended the first appearance of Asiatic cholera and other spreading and deadly diseases; from which it has been conjectured that through these convulsions deleterious foreign substances may have been projected into the atmosphere.

But while for centuries the nature and causes of the black death have been subjects of medical inquiry in all countries, it remained for our own time to discover a more scientific explanation than those previously advanced. The malady is now identified by pathologists with the bubonic plague, which at intervals still afflicts India and other oriental lands, and has in recent years been a cause of apprehension at more than one American seaport.

It is called bubonic—from the Greek boubon ("groin")—because it attacks the lymphatic glands of the groins, armpits, neck, and other parts of the body. Among its leading symptoms are headache, fever, vertigo, vomiting, prostration, etc., with dark purple spots or a mottled appearance upon the skin. Death in severe cases usually occurs within forty-eight hours. Bacteriologists are now generally agreed that the disorder is due to a bacillus identified by investigators both in India and in western countries.

The first historic appearance of the black death in Europe was at Constantinople, A.D. 543. But far more widespread and terrible were its ravages in the fourteenth century, when they were almost world-wide. Of the dreadful visitation in Europe then, we are fortunate to have the striking account of Dr. Hecker, which follows.

The name "black death" was given to the disease in the more northern parts of Europe—from the dark spots on the skin above mentioned—while in Italy it was called la mortalega grande ("the great mortality"). From Italy came almost the only credible accounts of the manner of living, and of the ruin caused among the people in their more private life, during the pestilence; and the subjoined account of what was seen in Florence is of special interest as being from no less an eye-witness than Boccaccio.

J. F. C. HECKER

The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain intelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries of Asia. Here it showed itself as the oriental plague with inflammation of the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China—that is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion; a contagion that in ordinary pestilences requires immediate contact, and only under unfavorable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated by the mere approach to the sick.

The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague over the whole earth was certainly very great; and the opinion that the black death might have been excluded from Western Europe, by good regulations, similar to those which are now in use, would have all the support of modern experience, provided it could be proved that this plague had been actually imported from the East; or that the oriental plague in general, whenever it appears in Europe, has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a proof, however, can by no means be produced so as to enforce conviction. The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by the bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground for supposing that it sprung up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth; influences which peculiarly favor the origin of severe diseases. We need not go back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it had half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.

If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that in countries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in a milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it had appeared for the last time, were particularly favorable to its unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in this eventful year also, the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe, which might be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations. Thus, at least in part, the black plague may have originated in Europe itself. The corruption of the atmosphere came from the East; but the disease itself came not upon the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increased by the atmosphere where it had previously existed.

This source of the black plague was not, however, the only one; for, far more powerful than the excitement of the latent elements of the plague by atmospheric influences was the effect of the contagion communicated from one people to another, on the great roads, and in the harbors of the Mediterranean. From China, the route of the caravans lay to the north of the Caspian Sea, through Central Asia to Tauris. Here ships were ready to take the produce of the East to Constantinople, the capital of commerce and the medium of connection between Asia, Europe, and Africa. Other caravans went from India to Asia Minor, and touched at the cities south of the Caspian Sea, and lastly from Bagdad, through Arabia to Egypt; also the maritime communication on the Red Sea, from India to Arabia and Egypt, was not inconsiderable. In all these directions contagion made its way; and doubtless Constantinople and the harbors of Asia Minor are to be regarded as the foci of infection; whence it radiated to the most distant seaports and islands.

To Constantinople the plague had been brought from the northern coast of the Black Sea, after it had depopulated the countries between those routes of commerce and appeared as early as 1347, in Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles, and some of the seaports of Italy. The remaining islands of the Mediterranean, particularly Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, were visited in succession. Foci of contagion existed also in full activity along the whole southern coast of Europe, when, in January, 1348, the plague appeared in Avignon, and in other cities in the South of France and North of Italy, as well as in Spain.

The precise days of its eruption in the individual towns are no longer to be ascertained; but it was not simultaneous; for in Florence the disease appeared in the beginning of April; in Cesena, the 1st of June; and place after place was attacked throughout the whole year; so that the plague, after it had passed through the whole of France and Germany, where, however, it did not make its ravages until the following year, did not break out till August in England; where it advanced so gradually that a period of three months elapsed before it reached London. The northern kingdoms were attacked by it in 1349; Sweden, indeed, not until November of that year, almost two years after its eruption in Avignon. Poland received the plague in 1349, probably from Germany, if not from the northern countries; but in Russia it did not make its appearance until 1351, more than three years after it had broken out in Constantinople. Instead of advancing in a northwesterly direction from Tauris and from the Caspian Sea, it had thus made the great circuit of the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, Southern and Central Europe, England, the northern kingdoms and Poland, before it reached the Russian territories; a phenomenon which has not again occurred with respect to more recent pestilences originating in Asia.

We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages of the black plague. Let us go back for a moment to the fourteenth century. The people were yet but little civilized. Human life was little regarded; governments concerned not themselves about the numbers of their subjects, for whose welfare it was incumbent on them to provide. Thus, the first requisite for estimating the loss of human life—namely, a knowledge of the amount of the population—is altogether wanting.

Cairo lost daily, when the plague was raging with its greatest violence, from ten thousand to fifteen thousand, being as many as, in modern times, great plagues have carried off during their whole course. In China, more than thirteen millions are said to have died; and this is in correspondence with the certainly exaggerated accounts from the rest of Asia. India was depopulated. Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea, none was left alive. On the roads, in the camps, in the caravansaries, unburied bodies were seen; and a few cities only remained, in an unaccountable manner, free. In Aleppo, five hundred died daily; twenty-two thousand people and most of the animals were carried off in Gaza within six weeks. Cyprus lost almost all its inhabitants; and ships without crews were often seen in the Mediterranean, as afterward in the North Sea, driving about and spreading the plague wherever they went on shore. It was reported to Pope Clement, at Avignon, that throughout the East, probably with the exception of China, twenty-three million eight hundred and forty thousand people had fallen victims to the plague.

Luebeck, which could no longer contain the multitudes that flocked to it, was thrown into such consternation on the eruption of the plague that the citizens destroyed themselves, as if in frenzy. When the plague ceased, men thought they were still wandering among the dead, so appalling was the livid aspect of the survivors, in consequence of the anxiety they had undergone, and the unavoidable infection of the air. Many other cities probably presented a similar appearance; and small country towns and villages, estimated at two hundred thousand population, were bereft of all their inhabitants.

In many places in France not more than two out of twenty of the inhabitants were left alive. Two queens, one bishop, and great numbers of other distinguished persons fell a sacrifice to it, and more than five hundred a day died in the Hotel-Dieu, under the faithful care of the religious women, whose disinterested courage, in this age of horror, displayed the most beautiful traits of human virtue.

The church-yards were soon unable to contain the dead, and many houses, left without inhabitants, fell to ruins. In Avignon, the Pope found it necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown into the river without delay, as the church-yards would no longer hold them.

In Vienna, where for some time twelve hundred inhabitants died daily, the interment of corpses in the church-yards and within the churches was forthwith prohibited, and the dead were then arranged in layers, by thousands, in six large pits outside the city. In many places it was rumored that plague patients were buried alive, and thus the horror of the distressed people was everywhere increased. In Erfurt, after the church-yards were filled, twelve thousand corpses were thrown into eleven great pits; and the like might be stated with respect to all the larger cities. Funeral ceremonies, the last consolation of the survivors, were everywhere impracticable.

In all Germany there seem to have died only one million two hundred and forty-four thousand four hundred and thirty-four inhabitants; this country, however, was more spared than others. Italy was most severely visited. It is said to have lost half its inhabitants; in Sardinia and Corsica, according to the account of John Villani, who was himself carried off by the black plague, scarcely a third part of the population remained alive; and the Venetians engaged ships at a high rate to retreat to the islands; so that, after the plague had carried off three-fourths of her inhabitants, their proud city was left forlorn and desolate. In Florence it was prohibited to publish the numbers of the dead and to toll the bells at their funerals, in order that the living might not abandon themselves to despair.

In England most of the great cities suffered incredible losses; above all, Yarmouth, in which seven thousand and fifty-two died; Bristol, Oxford, Norwich, Leicester, York, and London, where, in one burial-ground alone, there were interred upward of fifty thousand corpses, arranged in layers, in large pits. It is said that in the whole country scarcely a tenth part remained alive. Morals were deteriorated everywhere, and public worship was, in a great measure, laid aside, in many places the churches being bereft of their priests. The instruction of the people was impeded, covetousness became general; and when tranquillity was restored, the great increase of lawyers was astonishing, to whom the endless disputes regarding inheritances offered a rich harvest. The want of priests, too, throughout the country, operated very detrimentally upon the people. The lower classes were most exposed to the ravages of the plague, while the houses of the nobility were, in proportion, much more spared. The sittings of parliament, of the king's bench, and of most of the other courts were suspended as long as the malady raged.

Ireland was much less heavily visited than England. The disease seems to have scarcely reached the mountainous districts of that kingdom; and Scotland, too, would, perhaps, have remained free had not the Scots availed themselves of the misfortune of the English, to make an irruption into their territory, which terminated in the destruction of their army, by the plague and by the sword, and the extension of the pestilence, through those who escaped, over the whole country.

In England the plague was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among the cattle. Of what nature this murrain may have been can no more be determined than whether it originated from communication with the plague patients or from other causes. There was everywhere a great rise in the price of food. For a whole year, until it terminated in August, 1349, the black plague prevailed and everywhere poisoned the springs of comfort and prosperity. In other countries it generally lasted only half a year, but returned frequently in individual places. Spain was uninterruptedly ravaged by the black plague till after the year 1350, to which the frequent internal feuds and the wars with the Moors not a little contributed. Alfonso XI, whose passion for war carried him too far, died of it at the siege of Gibraltar, March 26, 1350. He was the only king in Europe who fell a sacrifice to it. The mortality seems to have been less in Spain than in Italy, and about as considerable as in France.

The whole period during which the black plague raged with destructive violence in Europe was, with the exception of Russia, from 1347 to 1350. The plagues which in the sequel often returned until 1383, we do not consider as belonging to the "great mortality."

The premature celebration of the Jubilee, to which Clement VI cited the faithful to Rome 1350, during the great epidemic, caused a new eruption of the plague, from which it is said that scarcely one in a hundred of the pilgrims escaped. Italy was, in consequence, depopulated anew; and those who returned spread poison and corruption of morals in all directions.

The changes which occurred about this period in the North of Europe are sufficiently memorable. In Sweden two princes died—Haken and Canute, half-brothers of King Magnus; and in Westgothland alone four hundred and sixty-six priests. The inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland found in the coldness of their inhospitable climate no protection against the southern enemy who had penetrated to them from happier countries. The plague wrought great havoc among them. In Denmark and Norway, however, people were so occupied with their own misery that the accustomed voyages to Greenland ceased.

In Russia the black plague did not break out until 1351, after it had already passed through the South and North of Europe. The mortality was extraordinarily great. In Russia, too, the voice of nature was silenced by fear and horror. In the hour of danger, fathers and mothers deserted their children, and children their parents.

Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe, the most probable is that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants were carried off. It may be assumed, without exaggeration, that Europe lost during the black death twenty-five million inhabitants.

That her nations could so quickly recover from so fearful a visitation, and, without retrograding more than they actually did, could so develop their energies in the following century, is a most convincing proof of the indestructibility of human society as a whole. To assume, however, that it did not suffer any essential change internally, because in appearance everything remained as before, is inconsistent with a just view of cause and effect. Many historians seem to have adopted such an opinion; hence, most of them have touched but superficially on the "great mortality" of the fourteenth century. We for our part are convinced that in the history of the world the black death is one of the most important events which have prepared the way for the present state of Europe.

He who studies the human mind with attention, and forms a deliberate judgment on the intellectual powers which set people and states in motion, may, perhaps, find some proofs of this assertion in the following observations. At that time the advancement of the hierarchy was, in most countries, extraordinary; for the Church acquired treasures and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the crusades; but experience has demonstrated that such a state of things is ruinous to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced on this occasion.

After the cessation of the black plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable; marriages were prolific; and double and treble births were more frequent than at other times. After the "great mortality" the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before; at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers have felt surprise. Some writers of authority published their opinions on this subject. Others copied from them, without seeing for themselves, and thus the world believed in the miracle of an imperfection in the human body which had been caused by the black plague.

The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings which they had undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten; and in the stirring vicissitudes of existence the world belonged to the living.

The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the black plague is without parallel and beyond description. In the eyes of the timorous, danger was the certain harbinger of death; many fell victims to fear on the first appearance of the distemper, and the most stout-hearted lost their confidence. The pious closed their accounts with the world; their only remaining desire was for a participation in the consolations of religion. Repentance seized the transgressor, admonishing him to consecrate his remaining hours to the exercise of Christian virtues. Children were frequently seen, while laboring under the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayer and songs of thanksgiving. An awful sense of contrition seized Christians everywhere; they resolved to forsake their vices, to make restitution for past offences, before they were summoned hence, to seek reconciliation with their Maker, and to avert, by self-chastisement, the punishment due to their former sins.

Human nature would be exalted could the countless noble actions which, in times of most imminent danger, were performed in secret, be recorded for future generations. They, however, have no influence on the course of worldly events. They are known only to silent eye-witnesses, and soon fall into oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad undaunted; they desecrate what is noble, they pervert what is divine, to the unholy purposes of selfishness; which hurries along every good feeling in the false excitement of the age. Thus it was in the years of this plague.

In the fourteenth century the monastic system was still in its full vigor, the power of the religious orders and brotherhoods was revered by the people, and the hierarchy was still formidable to the temporal power. It was, therefore, in the natural constitution of society that bigoted zeal, which in such times makes a show of public acts of penance, should avail itself of the semblance of religion. But this took place in such a manner that unbridled, self-willed penitence degenerated into luke-warmness, renounced obedience to the hierarchy, and prepared a fearful opposition to the Church, paralyzed as it was by antiquated forms.

While all countries were filled with lamentations and woe, there first arose in Hungary, and afterward in Germany, the Brotherhood of the Flagellants, called also the Brethren of the Cross, or Cross-bearers, who took upon themselves the repentance of the people for the sins they had committed, and offered prayers and supplications for the averting of this plague. This order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class, who were either actuated by sincere contrition or who joyfully availed themselves of this pretext for idleness and were hurried along with the tide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods gained in repute, and were welcomed by the people with veneration and enthusiasm, many nobles and ecclesiastics ranged themselves under their standard; and their bands were not unfrequently augmented by children, honorable women, and nuns.

They marched through the cities with leaders and singers, their heads covered as far as the eyes, their look fixed on the ground, with every token of contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back, and cap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers and magnificent banners of velvet and cloth of gold were carried before them; wherever they made their appearance they were welcomed by the ringing of bells, and the people flocked from all quarters to listen to their hymns and witness their penance.

In 1349 two hundred Flagellants first entered Strasburg, where they were hospitably lodged by the citizens. Above a thousand joined the brotherhood, which now separated into two bodies, for the purpose of journeying to the north and to the south. Adults and children left their families to accompany them; till, at length, their sanctity was questioned and the doors of houses and churches were closed against them. At Spires two hundred boys, of twelve years of age and under, constituted themselves into a brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation of the children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at the instigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering the Holy Sepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were carried away by the delusion; they conducted the strangers to their houses with songs of thanksgiving, to regale them for the night. The women embroidered banners for them, and all were anxious to augment their pomp; and at every succeeding pilgrimage their influence and reputation increased.

All Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders did homage to them; and they at length became as formidable to the secular as to the ecclesiastical power. The influence of this fanaticism was great and threatening. The appearance, in itself, was not novel. As far back as the eleventh century many believers in Asia and Southern Europe afflicted themselves with the punishment of flagellation.

The author of the solemn processions of the Flagellants is said to have been St. Anthony of Padua (1231). In 1260 the Flagellants appeared in Italy as Devoti. "When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ fell upon all; noble and lowly, old and young, and even children of five years of age marched through the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leathern thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not only during the day, but even by night and in the severest winter, they traversed the cities with burning torches and banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. The melancholy chant of the penitent alone was heard; enemies were reconciled; men and women vied with each other in splendid works of charity, as if they dreaded that divine omnipotence would pronounce on them the doom of annihilation."

But at length the priests resisted this dangerous fanaticism, without being able to extirpate the illusion, which was advantageous to the hierarchy, as long as it submitted to its sway.

The processions of the Brotherhood of the Cross undoubtedly promoted the spreading of the plague; and it is evident that the gloomy fanaticism which gave rise to them would infuse a new poison into the already desponding minds of the people.

Still, however, all this was within the bounds of barbarous enthusiasm; but horrible were the persecutions of the Jews, which were committed in most countries with even greater exasperation than in the twelfth century, during the first crusades. In every destructive pestilence the common people at first attribute the mortality to poison. On whom, then, was vengeance so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the strangers who lived at enmity with the Christians? They were everywhere suspected of having poisoned the wells[52] or infected the air, and were pursued with merciless cruelty.

These bloody scenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth century, are a counterpart to a similar mania of the age which was manifested in the persecutions of witches and sorcerers; and, like these, they prove that enthusiasm, associated with hatred and leagued with the baser passions, may work more powerfully upon whole nations than religion and legal order; nay, that it even knows how to profit by the authority of both, in order the more surely to satiate with blood the swords of long-suppressed revenge.

The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October, 1348, at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and in Freiburg, in 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince the world; and the persecution of the abhorred culprits thus appeared justifiable.

Already in the autumn of 1348 a dreadful panic, caused by this supposed poisoning, seized all nations; in Germany, especially, the springs and wells were built over, that nobody might drink of them or employ their contents for culinary purposes; and for a long time the inhabitants of numerous towns and villages used only river and rain-water. The city gates were also guarded with the greatest caution: only confidential persons were admitted; and if medicine or any other article which might be supposed to be poisonous was found in the possession of a stranger—and it was natural that some should have these things by them for private use—he was forced to swallow a portion of it. By this trying state of privation, distrust, and suspicion the hatred against the supposed poisoners became greatly increased, and often broke out in popular commotions, which only served still further to infuriate the wildest passions.

The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their protectors, of whom the number was so small that throughout all Germany but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not regarded as outlaws and martyred and burned. Solemn summonses were issued from Bern to the towns of Basel, Freiburg in Breisgau, and Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as poisoners. The burgomasters and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basel the populace obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews and to forbid persons of that community from entering their city for the space of two hundred years. Upon this, all the Jews in Basel, whose number could not have been inconsiderable, were enclosed in a wooden building, constructed for the purpose, and burned, together with it, upon the mere outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which, indeed, would have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place at Freiburg.

A regular diet was held at Bennefeld, in Alsace, where the bishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the Jews; and when the deputies of Strasburg—not, indeed, the bishop of this town, who proved himself a violent fanatic—spoke in favor of the persecuted, as nothing criminal was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed their buckets? A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the populace, who obeyed the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burned they were at least banished; and so being compelled to wander about, they fell into the hands of the country people, who, without humanity and regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword.

At Eslingen, the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their synagogue; and mothers were often seen throwing their children on the pile, to prevent their being baptized, and then precipitating themselves into the flames. In short, whatever deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice, and desperation, in fearful combination, could instigate mankind to perform, were executed in 1349, throughout Germany, Italy, and France, with impunity and in the eyes of all the world. It seemed as if the plague gave rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning and grief; and the greater part of those who, by their education and rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves led on the savage mob to murder and to plunder.

The humanity and prudence of Clement VI must on this occasion also be mentioned to his honor. He not only protected the Jews at Avignon, as far as lay in his power, but also issued two bulls in which he declared them innocent, and he admonished all Christians, though without success, to cease from such groundless persecutions. The emperor Charles IV was also favorable to them, and sought to avert their destruction wherever he could; but he dared not draw the sword of justice, and even found himself obliged to yield to the selfishness of the Bohemian nobles, who were unwilling to forego so favorable an opportunity of releasing themselves from their Jewish creditors, under favor of an imperial mandate. Duke Albert of Austria burned and pillaged those of his cities which had persecuted the Jews—a vain and inhuman proceeding which, moreover, is not exempt from the suspicion of covetousness; yet he was unable, in his own fortress of Kyberg, to protect some hundreds of Jews, who had been received there, from being barbarously burned by the inhabitants.

Several other princes and counts, among whom was Ruprecht of the Palatinate, took the Jews under their protection, on the payment of large sums; in consequence of which they were called "Jew-masters," and were in danger of being attacked by the populace and by their powerful neighbors. These persecuted and ill-used people—except, indeed, where humane individuals took compassion on them at their own peril, or when they could command riches to purchase protection—had no place of refuge left but the distant country of Lithuania, where Boleslav V, Duke of Poland, 1227-1279, had before granted them liberty of conscience; and King Casimir the Great, 1333-1370, yielding to the entreaties of Esther, a favorite Jewess, received them, and granted them further protection; on which account that country is still inhabited by a great number of Jews, who by their secluded habits have, more than any people in Europe, retained the manners of the Middle Ages.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

When the evil had become universal in Florence, the hearts of all the inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They fled from the sick and all that belonged to them, hoping by these means to save themselves. Others shut themselves up in their houses, with their wives, their children and households, living on the most costly food, but carefully avoiding all excess. None was allowed access to them; no intelligence of death or sickness was permitted to reach their ears; and they spent their time in singing and music and other pastimes.

Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to excess, amusements of all descriptions, the indulgence of every gratification, and an indifference to what was passing around them as the best medicine, and acted accordingly. They wandered day and night from one tavern to another, and feasted without moderation or bounds. In this way they endeavored to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned their houses and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had already tolled.

Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority of every law, human and divine, vanished. Most of those who were in office had been carried off by the plague, or lay sick, or had lost so many members of their families that they were unable to attend to their duties; so that thenceforth everyone acted as he thought proper. Others, in their mode of living, chose a middle course. They ate and drank what they pleased, and walked abroad; carrying odoriferous flowers, herbs, or spices, which they smelt at from time to time, in order to invigorate the brain and to avert the baneful influence of the air, infected by the sick and by the innumerable corpses of those who had died of the plague. Others carried their precaution still further, and thought the surest way to escape death was by flight. They therefore left the city; women as well as men abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and retiring into the country. But of these, also, many were carried off, most of them alone and deserted by all the world, themselves having previously set the example.

Thus it was that one citizen fled from another—a neighbor from his neighbors—a relation from his relations; and in the end, so completely had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling that the brother forsook the brother, the sister the sister, the wife her husband, and at last even the parent his own offspring, and abandoned them, unvisited and unsoothed, to their fate. Those, therefore, that stood in need of assistance fell a prey to greedy attendants; who, for an exorbitant recompense, merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained with them in their last moments, and then not unfrequently became themselves victims to their avarice, and lived not to enjoy their extorted gain.

Propriety and decorum were extinguished among the helpless sick. Females of rank seemed to forget their natural bashfulness, and committed the care of their persons, indiscriminately, to men and women of the lowest order. No longer were women, relatives or friends, found in the houses of mourning, to share the grief of the survivors; no longer was the corpse accompanied to the grave by neighbors and a numerous train of priests, carrying wax tapers and singing psalms, nor was it borne along by other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without a friend to comfort them in their last moments; and few indeed were they who departed amid the lamentations and tears of their friends and kindred.

Instead of sorrow and mourning, appeared indifference, frivolity, and mirth; this being considered, especially by the females, as conducive to health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants; and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, hirelings of the lowest of the populace undertook the office for the sake of gain; and accompanied by only a few priests, and often without a single taper, it was borne to the very nearest church, and lowered into the first grave that was not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes, and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings or in the immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended their lives in the streets by day and by night.

The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the houses and laid before the doors, where the early morn found them in heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was no longer possible to have a bier for every corpse—three or four were generally laid together; husband and wife, father and mother, with two or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier; and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals; so that instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment.



FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN EUROPE

TURKS SEIZE GALLIPOLI

A.D. 1354

JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL[53]

During the early years of the fourteenth century a new Mahometan realm was established on the ruins of the Seljukian and Byzantine power in Asia Minor. Osman,[54] or Othman, the founder of this realm, which is regarded as the original Ottoman empire, subdued a great part of Asia Minor, and in the year of his death 1326, his son Orkhan captured Prusa (now Brusa) and Nicomedia. In 1330 he took Nicaea—then second only to Constantinople in the Greek or Byzantine empire—and six years later he defeated the Turkish Prince of Karasi, the ancient Mysia, and annexed his territory, including the capital, Berghama, the ancient Pergamus, to the Ottoman dominions, thus securing nearly the whole of North-western Asia Minor.

During the reign of Orkhan the Ottomans made frequent passages of the Hellespont for the purpose of extending their power into Europe. After fifteen invasions without any permanent conquest, in 1354 Orkhan and his son Suleiman perceived an opportunity by which they prepared themselves to profit—civil war was raging in the Byzantine empire, where John Palaeologus was striving to deprive the emperor Cantacuzenus of his throne.

The plan whereby the Ottomans secured a foothold in Europe which soon enabled them to establish a permanent sovereignty on the peninsula of Gallipoli was executed by Suleiman with a military skill which gave his name a conspicuous place in Turkish history.

On the meridional shore of the Sea of Marmora, at the entrance of the Hellespont, is perceived the peninsula of Kapoutaghi—the ancient, almost insular Cyzicus, a Milesian colony. At the neck of the isthmus, where it joins the mainland, there where are seen to-day the ruins of Aidindjik, formerly arose Cyzicus, a city celebrated in the history of Persia and of Rome, of ancient Greece and of the Byzantine empire. This port, one of the most commercial of the Asiatic coast, possessed, like Rhodes, Marseilles, and Carthage, two military arsenals and an immense granary, each placed under the special superintendence of an architect. The annals of this town have been enriched by the passage of the Argonauts and of the Goths, by the siege of Mithridates and by the assistance received from the Romans under the leadership of Lucullus.

Granted its freedom by the latter as a reward for its fidelity, Cyzicus was shortly afterward deprived of its privileges for having neglected the service of the temple of Augustus. Under the Byzantines it became the capital of the province of Hellespont and the metropolitan see of Mysia and of all the territory of Troy. On Mount Dyndimos, at the gates of Cyzicus, arose the temple of the great mother, the goddess Ida, whose worship had been established by the Argonauts, and who was venerated at Cyzicus as at Pessinunte, in the form of an aerolite, a sacred stone, which under the reign of King Attalus was carried to Rome, and installed in the city by all the matrons, preceded by Scipio the Younger. The inhabitants of the peninsula adored also Cybele, Proserpine, and Jupiter, who, according to a fabulous tradition, had given the town of Cyzicus to the wife of Pluto, as dower. Emperor Hadrian embellished this town with the largest and the finest of the temples of paganism. The columns of this edifice, all of one piece, were four ells (fifteen and one-half feet) in circumference and fifty ells (one hundred and ninety-five feet) in height.

In 1354 Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, Governor of ancient Mysia, a province recently conquered by the Turks, was seized with admiration by the aspect of the majestic ruins of Cyzicus. The broken columns, the marbles prone on the sward, recalled to him the ruins of the palace of the Queen of Saba Balkis, erected by the order of Solomon, the remains of Istakhr (Persepolis), and of Tadmor (Palmyra). One evening when seated by the sea-shore, he saw, by the light of the moon (Aidindjik, the crescent moon), the porticoes and peristyles reflected in the waves. Clouds passed along the surface of the sea, and he imagined that he saw these ruined palaces and temples arise from the deep, and a fleet navigate the waters. Around him arose mysterious voices whose sound mingled with the murmur of the waves, while the moon, which at this moment shone in the east, seemed to unite Asia and Europe by a silver ribbon. It was she who, emerging formerly from the bosom of Edebali,[55] had come to hide herself in that of Osman. The remembrance of the fantastic vision, which had presaged a universal domination to his ancestor, inflamed the courage of Suleiman, and made him resolve to unite Europe and Asia by transporting the Ottoman power from the shores of Asia Minor to the strands of the Greek empire, and thus to realize the dream of Osman.

Suleiman consulted immediately with Adjebeg, Ghazi-Fazil, Ewrenos, and Hadji-Ilbeki, ancient vizier of the Prince of Karasi, who had been his assistants in the government of Mysia. All confirmed him in his resolution. Adjebeg and Ghazi-Fazil the same night went to Gouroudjouk and took ship to make a reconnaissance in the environs of Tzympe, situated a league and a half from Gallipoli, opposite Gouroudjouk. A Greek prisoner whom they brought with them to Asia informed Suleiman of the abandoned and unprepared state of the place, and offered himself as a guide to surprise the garrison. Suleiman immediately had two rafts constructed of trees united by thongs of bull skins, and made the attempt the following night, with thirty-nine of his most intrepid companions in arms. Arrived before the fortress, they scaled the walls by mounting on an immense dung-heap, and took possession of it easily, owing to the inhabitants being all absent in the fields engaged in harvesting. Suleiman then hastened to send to Asia all the ships which he found in the port, to transport soldiers to Tzympe; and three days after, the fortress contained a garrison of three thousand Ottomans.