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 documentary evidence for every assertion may be rather inclined to attribute to that influence little or nothing. The dissolution of feudalism, the development of towns, the growth of scholasticism, all these and much more have been ascribed to the Crusades, when in truth they were concomitants rather than results, or at any rate, if in part the results of the Crusades, were in far larger part the results of other things. At most, therefore, it may be admitted that the Crusades contributed to the dissolution of feudalism by putting property on the market and disturbing the validity of titles; that they aided the development of towns by vastly increasing the volume of trade; and that they furthered the growth of scholasticism by bringing the West into contact with the mind of the East. If we seek the peculiar and definite results of the Crusades, we must turn to narrower issues. In the first place, the Crusades represent the attempt of a feudal system, bound under the law of primogeniture to dispose of its younger sons. They are attempts at feudal colonization; and as such they resulted in a number of colonies—the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdom of Cyprus, the Latin empire of Constantinople. They resulted too in a number of “chartered companies”—that is to say, the three military orders, which, beginning as charitable societies, developed into military clubs, and developed again from military clubs into chartered companies, possessed of banks, navies and considerable territories. In the second place, as has already been noticed, the Crusades represent the attempt of Western commerce to find new and more easy routes to the wealth of the East; and in this respect they led to various results. On the one hand they led to the establishment of emporia in the East—for instance, Acre, and after the fall of Acre Famagusta, both in their day great centres of Levantine trade. On the other hand, the commodities which poured into Venice and Genoa from the East had to find a route for their diffusion through Europe. The great route was that which led from Venice over the Brenner and up the Rhine to Bruges; and this route became the long red line of municipal development, along which—in Lombardy, Germany and Flanders—the great towns of the middle ages sprang to life. Partly as a result of this trade, ever pushing its way farther east, and partly as a result of the Asiatic missions, which were themselves an accompaniment and effect of the Crusades, a third great result of the Crusades came to light in the 13th century—the discovery of the interior of Asia, and an immense accession to the sphere of geography. When one remembers that missionaries like Piano Carpini, and traders like the Venetian Polos, either penetrated by land from Acre to Peking, or circumnavigated southern Asia from Basra to Canton, one realizes that there was, about 1300, a discovery of Asia as new and tremendous as the discovery of America by Columbus two centuries later. At the same time the old knowledge of nearer Asia was immensely deepened. It has already been noticed how military reconnaissances of the routes to Egypt came to be made; but more important were the guide-books, of which a great number were written to guide the pilgrims from one sacred spot of Bible history to another. There were medieval Baedekers in abundance for the use of the annual flow of tourists, who were carried every Easter by the vessels of the Italian towns or of the Orders to visit the Holy Land and to bathe in Jordan, to gather palms, and to see the miracle of fire at the Sepulchre.

Colonization, trade, geography—these then are three things closely connected with the history of the Crusades. The development of the art of war, and the growth of a systematic taxation, are two debts which medieval Europe also owed to the Crusades. Partly by contact with the Byzantines, partly by conflict with the Mahommedans, the Franks learned new methods

both of building and of attacking fortifications. The concentric castle, with its rings of walls, began to displace the old keep and bailey with their single wall, as the crusaders brought back news from the East. The art of the sapper and miner, the use of siege instruments like the mangonel, and the employment of various “fires” as missiles, were all known among the Mahommedans; and in all these respects the Franks learned from their enemies. The common use of armorial bearings, and the practice of the tournament, may be Oriental in their origin; the latter has its affinities with the equestrian exercises of the Jerid, and the former, though of prehistoric antiquity, may have received a new impulse from contact with the Arabs. The military development which sprang from the Crusades is thus largely a matter of borrowing; the financial development is independent and indigenous in the West. As early as 1147 Louis VII. had imposed a tax in the interests of the Crusades; and that tax had been repeated by Louis, and imitated by Henry II. in 1166, while it had been still further extended in the Saladin tithe of 1188. The taxation of 1166 is important as the first to fall on “moveables”; the whole scheme of taxation may be regarded as the beginning of a modern system of taxation. But it was not only to the lay power that the Crusades gave an excuse for taxation; the papacy also profited. Tithes for the Crusades were first imposed on the clergy by Innocent III. at the Lateran council of 1215; and clerical taxation was thus part of the whole statesmanlike project of the Fifth Crusade as it was sketched by the great pope. Henceforth tithes for the Crusades are regular; under Gregory IX. they become a great part of the papal resources in the Crusade against the Hohenstaufen; and in the 16th century they are still a normal part of the government of the Church.

In many other ways the Europe over which the Crusades had passed was different from the Europe of the 11th century. In the first place, many political changes had been wrought, largely under its influence. Always in large part French, the Crusades had on the whole contributed to exalt the prestige of France, until it stood at the end of the 13th century the most considerable power in Europe. It was France which had colonized the Levant; it was the French tongue which was used in the Levant; and the results of the ancient and continuous connexion with the East are still to be traced to-day. Of the other great powers of Europe, England and Germany had been little changed by the Crusades, save that Germany had been extended towards the East by the conquests of the Teutonic Order; but the Eastern empire had been profoundly modified, and the papacy had suffered a great change. The Eastern empire had been for a time annihilated by the movement which in 1095 it had helped to evoke; and if it rose from its ashes in 1261 for two centuries of renewed life, it was never more than the shadow of its old self, with little hold on Asia Minor and less on Greece and the Archipelago, which the Latins still continued to occupy until they were finally conquered by the Ottoman Turks. The papacy, on the other hand, had grown as a result of the Crusades. Popes had preached them; popes had financed them; popes had sent their legates to lead them. Through them the popes had deposed the emperors of the West from their headship of the world, partly because through the Crusades the popes were able to direct the common Christianity of Europe in a foreign policy of their own without consultation with the emperor, partly because in the 13th century they were ultimately able to direct the Crusade itself against the empire. Yet while they had magnified, the Crusades had also corrupted the papacy. They became an instrument in its hands which it used to its own undoing. It cried Crusade when there was no Crusade; and the long Crusade against the Hohenstaufen, if it gave the papacy an apparent victory, only served in the long run to lower its