Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/27

 themselves were already undermined by the canker of authority, had no longer the strength to resist. They opened their gates to the King.

And then, the Mongols had conquered and devastated Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century and an Empire was springing up out there in Moscow, under the protection of the Tartar Khans and the Russian Christian Church. The Turks had come and settled in Europe, and pushed as far as Vienna in 1453, devastating everything on their path; and powerful States were being constituted in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and in the centre of Europe.… While at the other extremity, the war of extermination against the Moors in Spain allowed of another powerful Empire to constitute itself in Castille and Aragon, supported by the Roman Church, and the inquisition—the sword and the stake.

As the communes themselves were becoming little States, the little States were inevitably doomed to be swallowed up by the big ones.…

The victory of the State over the communes and the federalist institutions of the Middle Ages did not take place straight way. At one time the State was so threatened that its victory seemed doubtful.

A great popular movement—religious in form and expression, but eminently communistic in its aspirations and striving at equality—originated in the towns and rural parts of central Europe.

Already in the fourteenth century (in 1358 in France and in 1381 in England), two great similar movements had taken place. Two powerful revolts, that of the Jacquerie, and that of Wat Tyler had shaken society to its foundations. Both, however, had been principally directed against feudal lords. Both were defeated; but the peasant revolt in England completely put an end to serfdom, and the Jacquerie in France so checked it in its development that henceforth the institution of serfdom could only vegetate, without ever attaining the development it subsequently attained in Germany and in Eastern Europe.

Now, in the sixteenth century, a similar movement took place in Central Europe. Under the name of "Hussite" in Bohemia, "Anabaptist" in Germany, in Switzerland and in the Netherlands, and of "Troubled Times" in Russia (at the beginning of the next century), it was over and above a struggle against feudal lords—a complete revolt against Church and State, against Canonic and Roman law, in the name of primitive Christianity.