. 'Jgipe • >o&-, ¦rf a > CotoHf 'Y^LE«¥MPfEI&SinrY« iLiiiBiaamr DIVINITY SCHOOL TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY Cen epochs of Cfmrrf) fltstorp C&iteo b£ Tot YIL Ten Epochs of Church History edited by JOHN FULTON, D.D., LL.D. A series of hand-books, giving a popular, comprehensive and authoritative church history. Price, $2.00 each, net. Arrangement of Volumes 1. The Apostolic Age. By J. Vernon Bartlet, M.A. 2. The Post-Apostolic Age. By Lucius Waterman, D.D., with an introduction by Rt. Rev. H. C. Potter, D.D., LL.D. 3. The Ecumenical Councils. By Prof. W. P. Du Bose, with an introduction by Rt. Rev. T. F. Gailor, D.D. 4. The Age of Charlemagne. By Prof. Charles L. Wells, Ph.D. 5. The Age of Hildebrand. By Prof. Marvin R. Vincent, D.D. 6. The Age of the Crusades. By J. M. Ludlow, D.D. 7. The Age of the Renaissance. By Paul van Dyke, with an introduction by Henry van Dyke, D.D. 8. The Age of the Great Western Schism. By Clinton Locke, D.D. 9. The Reformation. By Prof. Williston Walker, Ph.D., D.D. 10. The Anglican Reformation. By Prof. William Clark, M.A., LL.D., D.C.L. £en d&pocfye of Cfyuvcfy 3E)t6fore THE AGE OF THE RENASCENCE AN OUTLINE SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE PAPACY FROM THE RETURN FROM AVIGNON TO THE SACK OF ROME (1377-1527) BY PAUL VAN DYKE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY VAN DYKE (TrwiuridiB Reference lifirar?) 1 a/lt — — 11 \/ »•'/».. ..¦>;Cr/' 1900 Copyright, 1896-1897, by The Christian Literature Co. THE CAXTON PRESS NEW YORK. AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY VAN DYKE AN INTRODUCTION. IIHEN the writing of this book was pro posed to me, some years ago, I under took it with alacrity, on account of the interest in the subject which I had long cherished, and yet with some grave mis givings lest the pressure of other work, already prom ised, but not performed, should rob me of the time needed to accomplish this task with thoroughness and precision. For I knew the Age of the Renascence well enough, through previous studies from the lit erary, artistic, and philosophic points of view, to see that a man could not hope to make even an outline sketch of the Church in this complex period without much labor and steady thought. The very brevity of the book proposed was an added difficulty. It is hard to be concise without be coming inaccurate. To make the results of study clear when the lack of space compels the omission of its processes ; to justify conclusions without giving au thorities; to condense volumes of reading into a chapter of writing, and that chapter again into a paragraph, and that paragraph into a single sentence ; to select the characters of men who really embody viii An Introduction. the tendencies of their age ; and to find adjectives which shall be equivalent to biographies, distinct and vivid, without being unjust or violent; — in short, to draw a convincing picture, not of a single generation only, but of a movement which pervaded many gen erations and races, and to do this within the compass of a few hundred pages, is an enterprise not to be effected without serious toil. Facing such a task as this, realizing its difficulties more and more sharply as the plan of the book took shape, and feeling at the same time the ever-increas ing demands of other duties and literary engage ments, I sought and gratefully welcomed the consent of my brother to make this volume a joint labor of fraternal authorship. Together we surveyed the field, marked out its limitations, rejoiced in the rich ness of its promise, and groaned a little, yet not de spondently, at the prospect of the many hard places and obstacles. On this preliminary journey of exploration we found ourselves in the full harmony of intellectual comradeship. The purpose, the method, the guiding principles of such a book as we wished to write seemed to us plain and self-evident. Abstract theo ries of the nature of the Church troubled us little. Special pleading for or against the Papacy disturbed us even less. The question of absorbing interest was not, What ought the Church to be in a correct scheme of doctrine ? but, What was the Church in the actual unfolding of human life ? What part did the eccle siastical institution play in the conflicts of the Renas cence ? What did the idea of the Papacy mean as a An Introduction. positive force, cooperating or conflicting with the other forces of the age ? How far did it affect, and how far was it affected by, the influences which pro duced the great awakening of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? What was the real relation of the Church as an organization to Christianity as a spiritual life? How potently did that spiritual life make itself felt in the progress of the world ? The answer to these questions was not a matter of theory, but of fact. We felt sure that it was not to be found in the books of dogmatic theology or ecclesiastical history, nor in the decrees of councils, nor in the bulls of Popes, nor in the theses of reformers — except in so far as all of these were veritable details in the great panorama of life. Their value lay, not in what they professed or claimed, but in what they actually rep resented. They were worth precisely what they expressed, reduced to the terms of reality. The answer to our questions must be sought chiefly in the character of men and the history of nations. The type of ecclesiastical society produced by the contests between Pope and Antipope, the fashion of moral amelioration effected by the Reforming Coun cils, the style of humanity in which the spreading tree of Humanism bore its fruit — these were the things which we were drawn to study, and from which we hoped to derive some real and definite knowledge, to clarify our conception of the past, to broaden our judgment of the present, and to enlighten our vision of the future. But as the work proceeded it became evident that An Introduction. the lion's share of it must fall to my brother. And of this, for several reasons, I was very glad; chiefly because I was sure that his leisure, his industry, and his long previous studies in the special department of ecclesiastical history fitted him for the more careful and complete accomplishment of our design. More over, there was a mortgage of other engagements, particularly in connection with the Lectures on Preaching at Yale University, in 1896, which more than covered all my time and strength. To his hands, therefore, the final execution of our plan was committed. The collection of materials, the workmanship, the filling in of the outline, are all his. Such consultations as we have held in regard to the work are not to be considered as in any sense edi torial or executive. The book as it stands belongs altogether to him. Whatever credit it deserves for scholarship, for clearness, for candor (and I hope that is not small), must be given entirely to him. For myself, it remains only to add this brief intro duction, which I gladly do at his request, in order that the formative ideas of the work may not be mis understood, nor its limitations overlooked. It is a serious misfortune for a book when people come to the reading of it without a perception of what it offers to them. But it is a still greater misfortune when they come with an expectation of finding what it was never meant to offer; for in the latter case they are inclined to lay upon the author the blame of a disappointment which belongs more properly to the reader, and to criticise as defects those necessary omissions which belong to a consistent plan. An Introduction. xi Let it be understood, then, at the outset, that this was not intended to be a small church history in the technical sense, nor even a fragment of a larger church history. The plan of the book was of a dif ferent nature. It was to give as graphic a view as possible of a single act in the great life-drama of humanity. This act was the crisis of the Papal Church in that period of intellectual and social reconstruction called the Age of the Renascence, which transformed the mediaeval into the modern world. The scene opens with the return of the Pope from Avignon to Rome in 1377. It closes with the sack of Rome by the Spanish- German army, under the Due de Bourbon, in 1527. Between these two points lies the dramatic story of a corrupt ecclesiastical body stubbornly resisting all attempts at reform from within and without, and at last succumbing to the pressure of great social and moral world-forces, which it was too prejudiced to comprehend, too proud to acknowledge, except for brief intervals, and too im potent to withstand, save with the fatal obstinacy of inherent weakness. In sketching this story it was not intended to give full details of the various events and the manifold conflicts between nations and dynasties and parties and schools which entered into it. The exigencies of space would not permit this, even if the nature of the plan demanded it. Nor was it intended that the book should present references and lists of authori ties to support its conclusions. Much as this might have been desired, it would be manifestly impossible An Introduction. in such a brief compass. Not even all of the great features of the Age of the Renascence could be in cluded. The development of university life has been barely touched; the artistic revival has been alto gether passed over — to my own regret, but doubtless for good reasons. This wholesale process of omission was necessary in order to make room on the small canvas for the picture which we had in mind. Details which were not essential must be left out, lest they should ob scure the vital features. A process of negative ex aggeration must be used to arrive at a clear view o( the positive truth. It would be better, for example, to omit the ar ticles of many treaties, and the chronicles of many dynastic wars, and the records of many synods and councils, than to fail to give a vivid presentment of such men as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poggio, and Filelfo, in Italy; Pierre d'Ailly, John of Gerson, and Faber Stapulensis, in France; Wiclif, Colet, More, and Tyndale, in England ; Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hut ten, in Germany ; and Erasmus, that great intellec tual cosmopolite. These men, and others like them, were, in fact, the makers of a new world in letters, in morals, in manners. It is impossible to know any thing about the Age of the Renascence without get ting at least a glimpse of these men as they lived and moved and had their intellectual being. Nor can the varying and tragic fortunes of the Papacy during that eventful period be understood without a clear, though swift, glance into the interior life and personality of such popes as Nicholas V.. the An Introduction. first Humanist Pontiff; Pius II., the clever litterateur and diplomatist; Sixtus IV., the terrible man with many nephews ; Alexander VI., the Pontif ex Maximus of gallantry, whose patron goddess was Venus ; Julius II., who ruled and fought under the sign of Mars; and Leo X., whose tutelary deity was Pallas Athene. From the first conception of this book it was intended to give more space to the graphic depiction of these and other like typical figures than to the formal narration of what is ordinarily called ecclesiastical history. But it was foreseen at the outset that the actors in the drama would be found divided, by the crisis of events, into two classes, antagonistic, irreconcilable, and often apparently incapable of understanding each other. And so, in fact, it has proved to be in the writing of the book. Here they stand, distinctly marked — the two great parties that have always contended for the guidance of mankind : the men of institutions, and the men of ideas ; the men whose supreme allegiance binds them to an organization, and the men whose ultimate loy alty is to the truth ; Wiclif and Huss and Savonarola and Hutten and Luther and Zwingli, against the Roman Curia and its defenders. Many of the men whose intellectual sympathies drew them to the party of ideas were bound by the deeper links of character to the party of institutions. To this class belong Reuchlin and Erasmus, Colet and More, Gerson and d'Ailly, and most of the elder Humanists. They were too fond of ancient order, too timid of change and confusion and possible misrule, ever to break with xiv An Introduction. the Church, which obstinately resisted the reforming influence of ideas. But their personal hesitations were impotent to prevent the inevitable results of their work. Reuchlin might plead with his nephew Melancthon to beware of friendship with the heret ical Martin Luther, but the affectionate solicitation went for nothing against the irresistible impulses of an awakened reason, a new-born scholarship, and a liberated conscience. The younger Humanists, almost to a man, de serted the party of institutions for the party of ideas. The Bible was set free from the bondage of tradition and given to the common people — in German by Luther (1522), in French by Faber Stapulensis (1523), and in English by William Tyn dale (1525). Thus the issue was clearly defined: Must a man believe what the Church teaches, no matter what the Bible says? or must the Church teach what men really believe, reading the Bible anew in the light of reason and the moral sense ? Around this point the warfare of the Reformation was waged. It was the chief service of the Renascence as an in tellectual and social movement that it brought this point of irrepressible conflict into distinct view, made it plain and distinct, and produced, in the service of literature and philosophy, the weapons which were at last used for the emancipation of faith. In tracing the preliminary skirmishes of this mighty conflict, and describing the preparation of the arma ment with which it was to be fought, it was intended that this book should be impartial without being in vertebrate. Our intention was to lay aside prejudices, An Introduction. xv but not to conceal convictions; to do justice to the character of men like Hadrian of Corneto, and the Cardinal Ximenes, and Adrian VI., without justify ing their position. For, both in its conception and in its execution, this book proceeds from the stand point that ideas are above institutions, and that lib erty of reason and conscience is more precious than orthodoxy of doctrine. Glancing forward over the contents of the volume as my brother has written it, I see that the composi tion of the picture, under his hands, has taken such a simple and natural form that it may be easily de scribed in a few paragraphs. First we have a brief review of the three forces which had changed the face of the world when the Pope came back to Rome from the Babylonian Cap tivity in France. The new patriotism, the new de mocracy, and the new learning — these were the equipollent and inseparable factors of the Renascence, now fully in action; and with these the Catholic Church had to reckon, if she would maintain her su premacy, or even her existence. Then we have an account of the earnest efforts which were made to reform the Church from within. These efforts proceeded from four chief springs : I. The revivals of religion in Italy, under the lead ership of such enthusiasts as St. Catherine of Siena and Savonarola. 2. The national movement for reform in England, inspired by the teaching and influence of Wiclif and the Lollards. 3. The powerful after-echo of this movement in XVI An Introduction. Bohemia, under the guidance of John Huss and Je rome of Prague. 4. The party of Conciliar Supremacy in the Catholic Church, resisting the encroachments of Papal absolution, and demanding, through men like Gerson and d'Ailly, " the reform of the Church in head and members." At the Council of Constance we see the last two of these forces falling foul of each other; and in the stories of Huss and Savonarola and the followers of Wiclif we read the fate of the men who dreamed that the Papacy could be reformed without the shedding of blood. The four movements for the purification of the Church from within failed because they were essen tially ecclesiastical. The tremendous momentum of the corrupt machine was too great to be checked by any resistance, save one which should have a firm foothold outside of the body to be checked, and abun dant sources of independent strength. The ground for such a resistance was being prepared in Germany, in France, and in England during all the years of turmoil and shame and despair while the Papacy was punishing the passionate endeavors of the best mem bers of the Church to reform it, and rewarding the successful conspiracies of its worst members to dis grace it. The instrument of this preparation was the Re nascence. It was not so much a mechanical alteration of the structure of human thought and society as it was a chemical change in the very elements of their composition. It transformed the scattered fragments An Introduction. xvii of knowledge into the solid rock of scholarship. It metamorphosed the thoughts and feelings of men with the ardent heat of the love of learning, and crystallized their imaginations by the introduction of the historic spirit. It loosened, at least for a time, the solidarity of European Christendom; but it substituted for the treacherous debris of the failing sentiment of universal brotherhood, which no longer afforded a trustworthy footing, new points of coher ence and support, in the sentiments of nationality and the patriotic enthusiasms which were begotten and intensified by the spread of historic knowledge and by the increase of once barbarous countries in wisdom, wealth, and power. The book traces this process — hastily, of course, and in mere outline, and yet, it seems to me, with a true comprehension of its deep significance and far- reaching results. The endeavor of the writer is not to show what the Reformation added to the Renas cence ; that is another story, and belongs to a later volume. But this book is an attempt to exhibit what the Renascence did for the Reformation. There can be no question whatever, and I think it can be seen from this book, that the two movements which were actually crowned with some measure of success in the purification of Christian faith and life — namely, the Protestant Reformation under Luther and Zwingli and Calvin, and the Catholic Reaction in the latter half of the sixteenth century— were both the legitimate offspring of the Renascence. If there had been no liberty of scholarship there never would have been an open Bible. If there had been no re- An Introduction. vival of patriotism the Germans never would have backed Luther against the world to defend his right of interpreting the Scriptures. And so if the book is to have a lesson drawn from it, it must be this : The fortunes of the Church as an institution depend upon the same laws which God has implanted in all human society, and through which He continually manifests His presence and power. There is no ecclesiastical history apart from secular history. The Church which rests upon authority alone must take its chances with the other dynasties. No appeal to the supernatural can shield its preten sions from the searching tests of reason and conscience. The Christianity which is to survive and maintain its claims in the face of the world must be in harmony with the primal moral forces, love of liberty, love of truth, love of real goodness. Henry van Dyke. New York, July 22, 1897. CONTENTS. PERIOD I. From the Return from Avignon to the Accession of Nicholw V. (J377-J447). Introductory Retrospect. CHAP. I.— The Growth of Patriotism or the Sense of Nationality. i CHAP. II. — New Theories of the Seat of Sovereignty and the Rising Tide of Democracy. 1 1 CHAP. III. — The New Learning — Petrarch, the Pro totype of the Humanists 20 CHAP. IV. — The Condition in which the Returning Pope Found Italy and the Patrimony of St. Peter — The Beginning of the Great Schism — Two Vicars of Christ Fight for the Tiara 35 CHAP. V. — John Wiclif of England, and his Protest against Papal War 46 CHAP. VI. — Pope and Antipope — The White Penitents at Rome — The Siege of Avignon— The Followers of Petrarch, the Humanists, or Men of the New >> Learning . 59 xix Contents. PAGE CHAP. VII.— Orthodox Demands for Union and Re form: (i) Catherine of Siena and the Ascetic Pro phets of Righteousness ; (2) The Party of Conciliar Supremacy 69 CHAP. VIII. — The Council of Pisa Makes the Schism Triple — The Protest of John Huss of Bohemia 79 CHAP. IX. — The Council of Constance and Triumph of the Party of Conciliar Supremacy: (i) They Depose the Popes and Force Union; (2) They Repudiate the Bohemian Protest and Burn Huss; (3) They Fail to Determine the Reform of the Church in Head and Members 90 CHAP. X. — The Papal Reaction — The Struggle for the Patrimonium — Martin V. and Eugenius IV. Reestab lish the Papal Supremacy without Granting Re form — The Protest and Abortive Schism of the Council of Basle m CHAP. XI. — The Spread of Humanism 122 PERIOD n. From the Accession of the First Humanist Pope to the French Invasion of Italy (J447-t494). CHAP. XII.— jJiCHOLAS V., the First Humanist Pope, Makes Rome the Home of the Muses — The War of the Monks and the Humanists 151 CHAP. XIII. — Calixtus III., the Old Spaniard, his Family Pride and his Zeal against the Infidel — Pms TT.t the Cultured Man of the World who Died a Crusader — Paul II., the Splendor-loving Vene tian Nepot 164 CHAP. XIV. — The New Learning Crosses the Alps — Its Spread in France — The Forerunners of German Humanism 176 CHAP. XV. — The Man of the Renascence on the Throne of St. Peter — Sixtus IV., the Terrible 193 CHAP. XVI. — Innocent VIII., the Sultan's Jailer— TSvlexander VI., the Handsome Spanish Nepot — The French Invasion. , 206 Contents. PAGE CHAP. XVII — Savonarola and Freedom 217 period m. From the French Invasion to the Sack of Rome (1494- J527). CHAP. XVIII. — The Household of Alexander VI. — The Prophet of Righteousness and the Vicar of Christ 299 CHAP. XIX. — The Fall of the House of Borgia 248 CHAP. XX. — Humanism in Europe from the Accession of fiLjjgjsjy. to the Death of Alexander VI. (1471- 1503) — The Florentine Academy and the Oxford School — Faber Stapulensis and his Pupils at Paris — John Reuchlin and the Older Humanists of Ger many — Erasmus , 262 CHAP. XXI. — Jm.Tfls IT. tun T.Tr.n X. — The Nephew of Sixtus IV. and the Son of Lorenzo the Magnificent become Popes 286 CHAP. XXII. — Transalpine Humanism under Julius and Leo — (1) The Battle of the Books about John Reuchlin ; (2) The Three Disciples of the Philosophy of Christ ; (3) The Pupils of Faber Stapulensis ; (4) Ulrich Zwingli 302 CHAP. XXIII.— The Court of Leo X. — Humanism in Italy and Spain — The Three Boy Kings 321 CHAP. XXIV. — The North Loses Patience with the Papacy — The Leaders of Revolt in Germany, Switzerland, France, and England 339 CHAP. XXV.— Adrian VI., the Honest Orthodox Ec clesiastic — The Older Humanists of the North Stand by the Church — The Younger Appeal to the New Testament — Clsjienx—SJII., the Heir of the Medici 356 CHAP. XXVI.— The Sack of Rome 366 A List of the Popes and Antipopes 379 A List of the Humanists Mentioned 380 PERIOD I. FROM THE RETURN FROM AVIGNON TO THE ACCESSION OF NICHOLAS V. (1377-1447)- INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT. (CHAPTERS I., IL, III.) THE FORCES THAT HAD CHANGED THE CONDI TIONS OF POWER DURING THE SEVENTY YEARS OF THE PAPAL ABSENCE FROM ROME. CHAPTER I. THE GROWTH OF PATRIOTISM OR THE SENSE OF NATIONALITY. JN the 17th of January, 1377, all Rome was early afoot, and a great crowd streamed across the fields of Mount Aventinus to the gate of St. Paul, open ing toward the sea. There the clergy of the city were gathered in festal array to receive the Pope. Landing from his galley, which had ascended the river from Ostia and lain at anchor all night just below the great Basilica of St. Paul without the Walls, Gregory XI. heard mass, and the festal procession started to enter the gate. Two thousand men-at- arms, commanded by his nephew, Raymond, Vicomte The Age of the Renascence. of Turenne, guarded the gorgeous train. Behind the great banner of the Church, borne by the gray-haired Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, came the Pope, riding on a splendidly caparisoned palfrey be neath a baldachin carried by Roman nobles. Around him moved a glittering cavalcade of cardinals and bishops, and a company of white-robed clowns and tumblers, the usual companions of all stately proces sions, heralded his approach. In the gate stood the Senator of Rome in full armor, with the councillors and captains, waiting to put into Gregory's hands the keys of the city. As he passed on his long journey through the fields and streets to the other side of the circle of walls, the entire population greeted him with shouts of joy. Every bell was ringing, and from the crowded roofs and windows of the houses wreaths and flowers were showered into streets hung with tapestry and banners. It was evening before the slow procession reached St. Peter's, brilliant with eighteen thousand lamps, and the exhausted Pope could at last kneel by the tomb of the apostles to give thanks to God for his return to the city of the Church. So after a willing exile of seventy years the successor of St. Peter came back from the huge new palace on the banks of the Rhone to the ancient Vatican on the banks of the Tiber. It was the end of the alliance of the Papacy with the house of France, called by all but those who caused and profited by it the " Babylonian Captivity of the Church." Five successive Popes, each bishop of the bishops because he was Bishop of Rome, had never entered their cathedral of the Lateran, and Introductory Retrospect. Christendom rejoiced when Gregory had returned to his first duty. But while the Popes had been neglecting their own city to become the allies and then the vassals of the kings of France, three generations had made a new world, and the opportunities and conditions of power were changed. Old institutions were decayed, and new social, political, and religious forces were finding expression. The first of these great forces limiting the power of the Papacy was the newly developed sense of na tionality. In order to appreciate the bearing of this new force on problems of the government of the Church we must recall by suggestion the past rela tions of the Papacy to the political organization of Europe. When Christianity was made the religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine it became part of an ideal in which all nations were to form a single social organism holding one faith and obeying one government. And even when the barbarian inva sion had broken the wall of Trajan and overrun Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Africa, men still mistook memories for hopes and looked to see order brought out of chaos by the reestablishment of the law of the empire. The very conquerors gazed with awe upon the mighty social organization they had overthrown. Able to destroy, but not to create, they respected the Roman law and the Roman Church, and permitted their sub jects to be judged by the one and consoled by the other. And as successive waves of invasion poured in till it seemed as if the richest and most civilized lands of the ancient world were to become the desolate The Age of the Renascence. possessions of predatory tribes, the thoughts of men turned with increasing desire toward the unity and peace which had been the ideal of the empire. So when the Franks had beaten back the Saracens from the plain of Tours, saving Europe, like the Greeks before them, from slavery to Asia, they aspired to the yet greater task of reestablishing the Empire of the West to give peace and justice from the Medi terranean to the Baltic and from the ocean to the Danube. Charles the Great, perhaps the one most necessary and indispensable man in the history of the Western races, gathered together all the forms of law and religion in which there seemed a pos sibility of life, and on Christmas day of the year 800 was crowned by Pope Leo III. Emperor of the West. The ideal which this ceremony expressed is clearly shown in a mosaic designed by order of the Pope. Christ appears in it twice : above, as Saviour, surrounded by the apostles, whom he is sending forth to preach ; below, seated as ruler of the world. On his right kneels Pope Sylvester, on his left the Em peror Constantine ; to the one he is handing the keys of heaven and hell, to the other the banner of the Cross. In the opposite arch the Apostle Peter sits, with Leo and Charles kneeling on either hand to re ceive the pallium of an archbishop and the banner of the Church militant. The circumscription is, " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all men of good will." The makers of that mosaic hoped they had founded a divine institution with two heads, one supreme in spiritual, the other in temporal things, and both holding their power of God. The Church and the Empire. But the double eagle of Russia is not more impos sible in the animal kingdom than the realization of this ideal in the realm of practical politics. The mediaeval Church was so much of an empire, and the mediaeval empire so much of a church, that neither seems to have been able to maintain its power for any long period without the aid of the other. But in spite of this common need it is difficult to find any pair of a great Pope and a great emperor who could dwell together in peace. When the empire was weak the undefended Papacy became the prey of the fierce factions of the Roman nobility, and Popes who disgraced the throne of St. Peter sank to every conceivable depth of infamy. When a strong emperor defended by Teutonic sol diers the purity of elections and placed upon the throne a man worthy the office, he or his successor began a desperate struggle to secure those rights of appointing or investing bishops and abbots which the Emperor claimed for himself. In this struggle the Papacy had two favorite weapons: first, to stir up rebellion in the empire by means of the interdict and excommunication; and second, to create out side of the bounds of the empire a system of states whose rulers were willing to acknowledge, what the successors of Charles always denied, that the Popes not only consecrated, but conferred their authority and crowns. This policy, begun under Sylvester II. (999-1003), created, by direct gift of the crown through the Pope as the Vicar of Christ and ruler of rulers, a tier of kingdoms between the borders of the Eastern and Western empires : Hungary, 1000, Po- The Age of the Renascence. land soon after, Croatia, 1076, Servia and Bulgaria in the thirteenth century. Then the Popes turned to the south and west to create the kingdoms of Naples, Aragon, Portugal, the Island of Man, the kingdoms of Scotland, Norway, the double kingdom of Corsica- Sardinia, and the kingdom of Trinacria. The Eng lish King became a feudal vassal of the Pope, and some of his successors paid tribute in a subjection considered so complete that a legate who took off his cap in the presence of the King was much blamed at the Papal court. Clement VI., going out into the unknown, even created (1344) for Louis of Castile a kingdom of the yet undiscovered Fortunate Isles. The swords of the vassals of the Papacy and the power to give the sanctions of religion to every re bellious vassal of the empire made the Popes too strong for the emperors. The last members of the imperial house of Hohenstaufen died in a vain attempt to maintain their power over the kingdom of Sicily, which the Popes had given to Charles of Anjou to be held as a fief of the Church. For sixty years there was no emperor, and when Henry VII., half by force and half by entreaty, received the crown at the Lat eran from the hands of a cardinal in a ceremony shorn of many of its ancient rites, his rebellious Italian subjects held St. Peter's, and the bolts of their crossbows fell among the guests at the imperial banquet. The end and aim of the Papal policy was clearly shown when Boniface VIII. changed the ancient mitre for the modern triple Papal crown and appeared before the pilgrims of the jubilee of 1 300 one day in Papal Servitude to France. the Papal, the next in the imperial robes, shouting aloud, "I am Caesar — I am Emperor!"1 But in destroying the empire and trusting their defence to the system of Papal States they had cre ated, the Popes had prepared a weapon that could be turned against themselves. Kings, once grown strong, were as unwilling as emperors to submit to Papal control. France, from whom came the blow which revealed the hollowness of this Papal politics, was not, indeed, a member of the system of Papal States. Her kings had grown great without becom ing vassals of the throne of St. Peter. But as against the empire she had always been closely allied to it, and the brother of King Louis had done homage to Clement IV. (1265) for the kingdom of Sicily, and become the protagonist in the fight against the em pire which extinguished the race of Hohenstaufen. Philip the Hardy, however, cared little for past alliances, and his final answer to the pretensions of Boniface was to assault him in his own palace at Anagni (1303) by a band of mercenaries — a degrada tion so bitter to the proud old man that he died in a few weeks. His successor ruled a little more than a year, and after a conclave of nine months, the lobbying of Philip elected a Pope who transferred the chair of St. Peter to the banks of the Rhone. During the seventy years it remained there the preponderance of French 1 There is some doubt as to the exactness of this anecdote, but none about the bull Unam Sanctam, which in 1302 asserted: " There are two swords, the temporal and the spiritual ; both are in the power of the Church, but one is held by the Church herself, the other by kings only with the assent and by sufferance of the Sovereign Pontiff. Every human being is subject to the Roman Pontiff, and to believe this is necessary for salvation." 8 The Age of the Renascence. influence became steadily more evident. The pro portion of Frenchmen in the College of Cardinals in creased. Now it was thirteen out of eighteen, now it rose to twenty-five out of twenty-eight, and again to nineteen out of twenty-one. In one short space of a few years the Papacy and the Pope's brother lent 3,500,000 florins (probably equal in purchasing power to $40,000,000) to the French court. From a Vicar of Christ who had abandoned the ancient capital of the world to become the tool of a French king men turned instinctively to the eternal King he represented, and the victorious English sol diers at Poictiers showed the error of the Papacy and the drift of events when they sang : " If the Pope is French, Christ is English." In England this Papal subservience to the interests of France strengthened the ancient opposition to the interference of the Pope in English affairs. And in particular Englishmen resented the sale of ecclesias tical offices to foreign incumbents, who without ever visiting their charges drew the rents and incomes by proxies and spent them in the luxurious Papal court at Avignon. England had thrilled at the letter of good old Robert of Lincoln protesting against the order of the Pope bestowing a canonry in his cathedral upon an Italian, Frederick of Lavagna (1253). He declined to obey it as unapostolic, declaring it to be, " not a cure, but a murder of souls," " when those who are appointed to a pastoral charge only use the milk and the wool of the sheep to satisfy their own English and German Patriotism. 9 bodily necessities." And one hundred years later the Parliament (1351-53) forbade by statute the in troduction into England of provisors or Papal bulls which interfered with the filling of English ecclesias tical offices by Englishmen, and forbade appeals to Rome by which causes involving the persons or prop erty of ecclesiastics could be freed from the law of England. It was that revolt of patriotism against ecclesiastical encroachment, often felt by those en tirely faithful to the spiritual teaching of the Catholic Church, which found its classic expression, eight generations later, in the words which Shakespeare put into the mouth of King John : " No Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; But as we under Heaven are supreme head, So under him, that great supremacy, Where we do reign we will alone uphold, Without the assistance of a mortal hand. So tell the Pope ; all reverence set apart, To him and his usurped authority. " Even in Germany, a prey to the greed of rapacious princelings whose people were to wait five hundred years for national unity, the assumptions of a Pope who seemed to use temporal control as a tool of the French King called out the spirit of patriotism with out the form thereof. Pope John XXII. (1316-34) longed to free Italy from foreign influence and unite the entire peninsula under the political headship of the Papacy. He endeavored to accomplish this by diplomacy, and as a move in his deep and dangerous game of politics it became needful to depose Lewis of Bavaria from the kingship of Germany. Taking 10 The Age of the Renascence. advantage of the party strifes of the German princes, the Pope drove him by ban and interdict to the utmost straits. But when Lewis, in despair, was on the point of surrendering his claim to the crown, the publication of a single fact put all Germany for the moment behind him. His rival had secretly agreed to pledge the ancient kingdom of Arelat to France as security for costs incurred by the King in acting as mediator between the empire and the Pope. A storm of wrath denounced the bargain. Then the Pope issued a bull separating the Italian lands of the empire from all connection with the kingdom of Germany. All Germany rose at the insult, and for the first time in generations almost every German city and prince and bishop joined in common action. By the vote of six of the great princes, confirmed by a Reichstag at Frankfort, dis ordered and disunited Germany declared that " the imperial dignity and power proceeded from of old directly through the Son of God. . . . Because, nevertheless, some, led by ambition and without understanding of Scripture, . . . falsely assert that the imperial dignity comes from the Pope, . . . and by such pestiferous dogmas the ancient enemy moves discord . . . and brings about seditions, therefore we declare that by the old right and custom of the empire, after any one is chosen emperor ... he is in consequence of the election alone to be called true king and emperor of the Romans, and ought to be obeyed by all subjects of the empire." INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT. CHAPTER II. NEW THEORIES OF THE SEAT OF SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RISING TIDE OF DEMOCRACY. HIS political change, by which during the thirteenth century the peoples became conscious of their national aspirations, found expression in theories concerning the seat of authority and the nature of power. Literature, which in the hands of the school men had become the advocate of Papal claims, be gan to express the strongest and most searching criticism of them. About the court of the Emperor gathered a little knot of men of different nations, whose brilliant polemic writings attracted attention by the boldness and skill with which they attacked the whole logical edifice of the scholastic theory of Papal Supremacy. The English Franciscan, William of Occam, the most distinguished philosopher of his day; the Fleming, Jean of Jandun, celebrated dia lectician of the Paris schools; the Italian, Michael of Cesena, General of the Franciscans ; Brother Bona- gratia, the distinguished theologian and jurist ; the German, Henry of Thalheim, and others, formed the strongest literary coterie of the age, with Marsilius 1 2 The Age of the Renascence. of Padua, a well-known lawyer and physician, as their brightest star. His book, " The Defender of Peace against the Usurped Jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff," was a daring arraignment and reversal of traditional judgments about the source of authority in Church and State. For instance, he asserts that " church " in its apostolic use means the entire body of Christian men, and that all Christians, be they clergy or laymen, are churchmen. Temporal pains and penalties do not belong to the law of the Gospel, which is not a law at all, but a doctrine. "Bishop" and " priest " are used interchangeably in the New Testament. The popedom, a useful symbol of the unity of the Church, is an institution begun later than the apostolic age, whose historical growth is clearly traceable. The bishops of Rome gained pre eminence, not as St. Peter's successors, but from the connection of their see with the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. The sovereignty of the State rests with the people. By them the laws are properly made, and their validity comes from the people's sovereignty. The community of the citizens, or their majority, expressing its will by representatives, is supreme. Government requires a unity of office, not necessarily of number. But if, as is usually wisest, a king be chosen, he must be supported by enough force to overpower the riotous few, but not the mass of the nation. In the ecclesiastical organization, also, the authority rests not with the hierarchy, but is derived from the whole Church, and the priestly class are only their executives, responsible to a General Council formed of clergy and laity alike. The clergy The Tide of Democracy. 13 are the executives of the Church only in spiritual affairs. Their property and incomes are as much subject to the civil law as those of their lay brethren. His office does not change the responsibility of a clergyman to the civil law, for if he should steal or murder, who would say that these were to be re garded as spiritual acts? These opinions were formally condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, and Marsilius was denounced as a radical innovator who would destroy Church and State. Such bold denials of the theories which had been formed to support the social and ecclesiastical insti tutions of the middle ages had but little direct effect outside of the circle of clerks and theologians to whom they were addressed, but they were dimly felt and half- unconsciously formulated during the fourteenth century in political changes by which the feudal power and privileges of civil and ecclesi astical lords were in some places checked, in others destroyed, by the efforts of a middle class of burgher merchants or manufacturers and small landed freeholders. And behind and beneath these politi cal changes there could be heard the half- articulate murmur of the rising tide of democracy, with its claim that men are equal before God and the laws, and its hope of a society so organized and governed that none should ever want but the idle and vicious. It has been well said that mediaeval man was chiefly occupied with the acquisition or defence of privileges. Feudal society was divided into very strictly separated classes, and the unwritten principle at its foundation was that all rights not ex- 14 The Age of the Renascence. pressly granted to a lower class were reserved for the higher. Time had been when the enjoyment of these privileges meant the performance of certain necessary duties. The castle of the lord, around which the wattled mud huts of the peasants clung like swallows' nests, may have been the abode of tyranny, but it was also a refuge from robbery. To be unbound to any community, large or small, which thus possessed a leader and the means of self-protection, was to be exposed to unlimited outrage in a time when every man did that which was right in his own eyes to all who did not belong to his own community. And it came to pass that to be a landless man was to be thought an outlaw, and to be a lordless man a thief. But as society became more orderly and private war less incessant, these privileges became oppressive to a people no longer bound to their superiors by perils shared, or grateful for defence against danger. And peasant and burgher, chafing under the bondage of those to whom they were compelled to render ser vices without service in return, began everywhere to long passionately for legal equality or freedom. A single circumstance gave force to this long- cherished desire. Misery alone is sterile, and the dead weight of injustice will either crush a people to a servile temper or provoke a despair that perishes by its own ferocity. The conscious ness of power is needed to animate a useful revo lution. And during the fourteenth century this consciousness was diffused among the common people in some parts of western Europe by the demonstration of the irresistible force on the battle-field of a properly The Flemish Burghers. 15 drilled and handled infantry. So long as the knight, with a couple of esquires and a score of professional men-at-arms cased in steel, mounted on heavy horses, and trained to ride and fence, was more than a match for the men of a dozen villages who had never learned how to march or to hold the simplest formation, re volt among the lower classes meant only the treach erous and useless murder of some isolated oppressors. It was just at the turn of the thirteenth century (1302) when the shock of Courtrai sounded through the world. Twenty thousand Flemish artisans were brought to bay in a great plain by the much larger army of France. The few dispossessed nobles who were their military leaders killed their horses and knighted thirty merchants as a sign of fellowship, and shouting their war-cry of "Shield and friend!" the solid mass of men stood stoutly with boar-spears and iron-shod clubs against the French charge. In two hours fifteen thousand fallen men-at-arms choked the ditch which guarded their front, or were scattered over the plain. They covered the walls of the ca thedral of Courtrai with the gilded spurs of the knights, and the roll of the dead sounds like a mus ter of the nobility of France — " fallen," as the chroni cler laments, "by the hands of villeins." This con sciousness of power gave hope, and from hope came effort. Therefore the fourteenth century is marked in many "parts of the world by desperate struggles for liberty on the part of the peasant and artisan classes rising out of a half-servile condition. ) The relation of this struggle to religion, and to the social and moral conditions with which religion 1 6 The Age of the Renascence. is concerned, may best be illustrated by the English peasant revolt of 1 38 1, which, long misjudged through the reports of its enemies, apparently a failure, is now recognized as one of the most remarkable and success ful of revolutions. In the middle of the century the power of the English peasant was suddenly increased by a singular cause. The black death, starting in those crowded cities of Asia which have always been the homes of pestilence, spread slowly but steadily over Europe. It is difficult to appreciate the horror of its visit in an age when the simplest rules of sanitary science were unknown and medical practice little more than superstition. Cautious judges concede that twenty-five millions of people perished. In England alone a conservative estimate allows that eight hun dred thousand people, one third of the total popula tion, died by a " foul death," which smote the children of the king and the children of the slave, so that there was not a house where there was not one dead. As a consequence labor became so scarce that the price of it rose at once. The noble whose crop cost to harvest £l 135. gd. the year before the plague had to pay ;£i2 igs. lod. the year after. This situation hastened the process of freeing the nativi, or serfs, which had begun years before. For those personal services, such as ploughing one day every week in the year, gathering the lord's nuts, making the lord's park walls over against his land, carrying the lord's corn home every fortnight on the Saturday, which reminded the tenants of their descent from bondsmen and thralls, were then quite largely commuted by the impoverished lords for money payments. But the landowners who farmed by bailiffs were The English Peasants. 1 7 not disposed to see their profits impaired and their rents lowered without a struggle. And as soon as the cessation of the plague enabled Parliament to meet, they passed the Statute of Laborers, which stood on the books for two hundred and fifty years. It provided that every able-bodied man or woman under sixty must work for any employer who sought him for suitable service at the wages of the year 1347, prohibited him from leaving his employer be fore the end of his term of service, forbade his em ployer to pay him higher wages, and provided penalties of fine or imprisonment for disobedience. It even forbade the employer to fulfil contracts for higher wages made before the passing of the act. This law was met by the establishment of a vast secret combination of artisans and peasants, — the first trade-union, — which was so successful that twenty years after the plague the price of harvest labor was double that enforced by the statute. Then the lords, in despair, attempted to reverse the com mutations to their ancient equivalents in forced labor. The result was to them a tremendous astonishment. The villeins of all England rose in revolt. For this they had been partly prepared by preaching, which gave the sanction of religion to their demand for justice. Men like John Ball, a priest of Kent, out of whose sermons were made such popular rhymes as : " When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? " had for years been denouncing the wickedness of the rich and the injustice of social and political con ditions. They were now reinforced by priests armed 1 8 The Age of the Renascence. with the new knowledge of the Bible which was spreading rapidly from the teaching of the friends and pupils of Wiclif. And many a hamlet heard the stern appeals of the prophets from tyranny to God applied to their own times. So it was that when the southern force of the insurgents, entering London by the help of their sympathizers among the citizens, fired the palace of the Duke of Lancaster, they flung a plunderer caught with a silver cup back into the flames saying " they were seekers of truth and justice, not thieves." It was this moral and religious basis of the rising which made the northern army of insurgents, when London lay at their mercy, receive the simple promise of their boy King to " free them and their lands forever, that they should be no more called serfs," with shouts of joy, and to quietly disperse to their homes with charters which, before the ink was dry, their King was secretly promising his councillors to wash out in blood. But though the insurrection was conquered by treachery, and its leaders died by hundreds on the gallows, it did not fail. Parliament revoked the concessions of the King and professed a willingness to perish all together in one day rather than grant " liberties and manumis sions to their villeins and bond-tenants," but the peril had been too great for a second risk. From that day to this many English-speaking men have ground the face of the poor; but since 1381, when the peasants were taught by the Poor Priests 1 to use 1 It is not established that Wiclif gave any personal encouragement to the rising, but rather the contrary. There is, however, an unmis takable spiritual resemblance between it and his teaching. The Tide of Democracy. 19 their power in the demand for the rights of humanity in the name of God and justice, no one has attempted to make serfs of the English laborers. And this spirit of democracy, the desire for freedom or equal rights before God and the laws, appealing against every caste and privilege in Church or State to con science and the Bible, had during the seventy years of the Papal absence from Rome become a force which had everywhere to be reckoned with. INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT. CHAPTER III. THE NEW LEARNING. PETRARCH, THE PROTOTYPE OF THE HUMANISTS. HE general movement of the human spirit during the fourteenth century, producing patriotism, new theories of the seat of authority, and the desire for freedom, found a special expression for itself in Italy in the beginnings of the New Learning or the movement of the Humanists. This used, by a nar rowness of thought and diction, to be called the Renascence, but is now rightly regarded as only the intellectual centre of that broad movement which affected every side of life. To define so complex a movement as the New Learning is impossible. It can best be made clear in a sketch of the work and character of Petrarch, the prophet and prototype of Humanism, who died at Arqua, near Padua, three years before the return of the Papacy from Avignon. His father was a Florentine notary, banished by the same decree with Dante, who finally settled at Avignon to practise his profession in the neighbor- Petrarch and Virgil. 21 hood of the Papal court. In the jurists' library were some manuscripts of Cicero, and as soon as Petrarch could read he loved them. Doubtless his father, who destined the lad for the law, smiled approval at such appropriate tastes. But he soon found out his mistake. This youngster with a voice of extraordinary power and sweetness, who loved to play his lute and listen to the song of the birds, was not seeking in the works of the great Roman lawyer legal information. It was the majestic swing, the noble music, of the Ciceronian Latin which charmed him, and as the years went on he suffered the pangs which have been common in all ages to the lovers of the Muses held by parental worldly wisdom to the study of the law. Bad reports came back from the tutors of Montpellier and Bologna. Reproaches and excuses ended in a parental raid, which discovered under the bed a hidden treasure of tempting manu scripts. They were promptly condemned to the flames, and only the tears of the lad saved a Virgil and one speech of Cicero, to be, as the father said, smiling in spite of himself at the desperate dismay of the convicted sinner, one for an occasional leisure hour, the other a help in legal studies. And Virgil and Cicero became to Petrarch lifelong companions. The copy of the ^Eneid thus saved from the flames had been made by his own hand, and he wrote in it the date of the death of his son, his friends, and the woman he loved. It was stolen from him once, and returned after ten years, and he wrote in it the day of its loss and the day of its return. To Petrarch Virgil was " lord of language," a char- 22 The Age of the Renascence. acter noble as his genius, half poet and half saint, a divine master. But to say this was only to repeat Dante, and Petrarch did little for the influence of the Mantuan — could not, indeed, escape from that habit of allegorical interpretation which thought of a poet as a riddle-maker whose object was not to make truth clear and beautiful, but obscure. But Petrarch may with truth be called the modern discoverer of Cicero. Not, indeed, that Cicero's name was before unknown, but that Cicero's works were little read and still less understood. Many of his finest pieces had not been seen for generations. And from his youth up Petrarch followed like a sleuth- hound every possible trace of a lost manuscript. When, riding along the roads, he caught sight of an old cloister, his first thought was, " Is there a Cicero manuscript in the library?" In the midst of a journey he suddenly determined to stop at Liege, because he heard there were many old books in the city, and his reward was two unknown speeches of Cicero. He not only hunted himself, but as his circle of friends and his means increased, he spread his efforts to Germany, Greece, France, Spain, and Britain — wherever any chance of a find was suggested. Of course he had his disappointments. Once he imagined he had secured the lost " Praise of Philos ophy " ; but though the style was Cicero's, he could read nothing in it to account for Augustine's enthu siasm, which had first put him on the track. At last the doubt was ended, for he found a quotation in another writing of Augustine's which was not in his manuscript. He was the victim of a false title. And Petrarch and Cicero. 23 when he discovered that what he had was aa extract of the "Academica," he always afterward rated it as one of the least valuable -of Cicero's works. Then he thought that b.e had found the treatise on "fame." "He loaned the volume which contained it, and neither he nor the world has ever seen it since — surely the costliest book loan on record.1 But no disappointment damped his enthusiasm. When the manuscript of Homer was sent to him as a present from Constantinople, though he could read no word of Greek, nor find any one who could, he knew that this was the book beloved of Horace and Cicero. He took it in his arms and kissed it. How great must have been his joy when, in the cathedral library of Verona, he unexpectedly stumbled on an old half-decayed manuscript of some of Cicero's let ters ! He was sick and tired, but he would trust his frail treasure to no copyist. He announced his find to Italy in an epistle to Cicero himself, and hence forth he enriched literature by a stream of citations whose source, warned by experience, he never trusted out of his own hands. Why he never allowed it to be copied during his lifetime can best be explained by those collectors who dislike to have replicas made of their pictures. Nor was he content with the writings of antiquity. The portraits of Roman emperors on coins excited his imagination. Others had collected coins and medals as rarities, but he was the first modern to understand their value as historical monuments. 1 Voigt says there is no proof that it really was the treatise on " Fame." But his doubt seems based only on the general principle that a lost fish increases in size— which is not always true. 24 The Age of the Renascence. From the great men of the past he learned to ex ercise a common-sense criticism on the methods and results of the traditional learning of his time. In scorn and enthusiasm he flung himself with all his powers on the scholastic system of instruction, and denounced the universities as nests of ignorance, adorning fools with pompous degrees of master and doctor. In particular he objected to the division of disciplines. If he were asked what art he professed he would answer that there was but one art, of which he was a humble disciple : the art of truth and virtue, which made the wisdom of life. But he was not content with vague denunciation. The professors of every discipline — history, arithmetic, music, astron omy, philosophy, theology, and eloquence — heard his voice accusing them of an empty sophistry with out real relation to life. The objects of his first and bitterest attacks were astrology and alchemy, whose pretensions then flat tered the ear of princes and dazzled the hopes of peasants. He denounced astrology, stamped with the authority of a teacher's chair at Bologna and Padua, as a baseless superstition, and, in the very spirit of Cicero toward the augurs, related with glee how a court astrologer of Milan had told him that, though he made a living out of it, the whole science was a fraud. He accused the physicians also of being charlatans. When Pope Clement VI. was ill, Petrarch wrote a letter warning him against them. He was wont to say that no physician should cross his thresh old, and when custom compelled him to receive them in his old age, wrote with humor of his persistence in Petrarch the Critic of Scholasticism. 25 neglecting all their orders and his consequent return to health. But he made far more effective attacks than any mere witty expression of a personal mood. To his friend the distinguished physician Giovanni Dondi he gave strong reasons for his scorn of the ordinary practitioner. He did not deny that there might be a science of medicine. He suggested that the Arabs had made the beginnings of it. But he denied to the empirics and pretenders who were imposing on the people by wise looks and long words every title of real learning. And he pointed out as the path to a science of health and disease the entirely different method of modern medicine. The lawyers so hated in his youth felt the lash of his invective. He called them mere casuists, split ting hairs in a noble art once adorned by the learn ing and eloquence of Cicero, but sunk to a mere way of earning bread by clever trickery in the hands of men ignorant and careless of the origin, history, and relations of the principles of law. And he took a keen delight in pointing out the blunders in history and literature made by the greatest jurist of his time. But it was in philosophy that he came into sharp est conflict with the scholastic method, which hung like a millstone around the neck of learning. To make dialectics an end instead of a means he called putting the practice of boys into the place of the fin ished wisdom of men. Logic was only an aid to rhetoric and poetry, and ideas worth far more than the words which the schoolmen put in their place. When they hid behind the shield of Aristotle, Petrarch was not dismayed. In the pamphlet " Concerning 26 The Age of the Renascence. his Own Ignorance and that of Many Others " he dared to say that Aristotle was a man and there was much that even he did not know. And he finally asserted that, while no one could doubt the great ness of Aristotle's mind, there was in all his writings no trace of eloquence — a word which took as much courage to cast as the stone from the shepherd's sling that freed Israel. It was the word of an independent. And this in dependence, this assertion of his personal individual judgment, marks the second service of Petrarch. He was not only a critic of scholastic methods and an instaurator of learning, but he threw a high light on the value of the individual. We have seen why the mediaeval man instinctively regarded himself as one of a class. The serf or bur gher, noble or ecclesiastic, was a member of a great cor poration, and his chances and duties were limited not only by circumstances and abilities, but by obligations joining him to his fellows in every direction. The ne cessities of a half-barbarous condition had made the social unit, not the man or his family, but the com munity. And the ideal of the feudal system was a single great organization, ruled in ascending stages by a civil hierarchy of overlords, with every detail of life guided and directed by the spiritual hier archy of the clergy, who bound or loosed the oaths that held society together, directed consciences by the confessional, and, by denying the means of grace in the sacrament, could cast any man out from the fellowship of God and man in this world and the next. Hence mediaeval society lacked the mobility Petrarch and Individuality. 27 and freedom needed to develop individuality. In those days travelling was difficult. For the most part a man expected to die where he was born, and do his duty in that rank of life to which God had called him, unless, indeed, his relation to the social corporation drew him from his home on war or pilgrimage. As against the overwhelming pressure of this corporate sense there was little to develop the consciousness of the ego. Even if the man of the middle ages went to the university, travelled, and mingled with his fel lows, his mind was still confined. He found there no chance or impulse to measure the heights and depths of his own nature, or to investigate freely the world without. The authority of tradition defined the objects and methods of study, and in every uni versity of the middle of the thirteenth century the " freedom of academic teaching " was limited with a strictness from which even the narrowest denomi national institutions of learning would shrink to-day. The organized discipline of study had largely sunk into a base mechanic exercise, a mere gymnastic of the mind. In this social and intellectual atmosphere it was difficult for man to know himself. The literary instinct of Petrarch has presented in dramatic form the moment when he first broke these bonds and realized the value of self. That love of nature which appears in his sonnets in such close connection with his power of self-analysis gave the occasion. So far as we know, Petrarch was the first modern man to climb a mountain for the sake of looking at the view. About the year 1336, when he was thirty-two years old, he and his brother 28 The Age of the Renascence. Gerard set out from Vaucluse to climb Mount Ventoux. Gerard was evidently very much bored, and remained all day in that state of subacute ir ritation common to men who have been seduced by the enthusiasm of a friend into a tiresome ex pedition for which they have no taste. But Petrarch wrote: "I stood astonished on the top. Under my feet floated the clouds; before my eyes the snow- covered heads of the Alps towered over the beloved plains of Italy. I knew them, alas! far from me, and yet they seemed so near that I could almost touch them. Then I remembered the past. I ran over in thought my student years in Bologna, and saw how wishes and tastes had indeed changed, but vices and faults remained unchanged or were grown worse. Again I turned my gaze on the wonderful spectacle of nature that had drawn me to the top of the mountain, saw round about me mountains and valleys, land and sea, and rejoiced at the view. Thus gazing, now singling out some single object, now letting my sight range far into the distance, now raising eyes and soul to heaven, I unconsciously drew out of my pocket Augustine's ' Confessions,' a book I always carry with me, and it opened at this passage : ' Men go to wonder at the peaks of the mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad rivers, the great ocean, the circles of the stars, and for these things forget themselves.' I trembled at these words, shut the book, and fell into a rage with myself for gaping at earthly things when I ought to have learned long ago, even from heathen philosophers, that the soul is the only great and astonishing thing. Silent I left Petrarch the Poseur. 29 the mountain and turned my view from the things without me to that within." And this dramatic announcement marks the be ginning of the modern habit of introspection. Nat urally he developed the defects of his qualities, and complains constantly of a° spiritual malady he calls acedia. Melancholy, the mood of heavy indifference to all objects of thought and feeling, — the malaria of the soul, — had long been known. The early fathers denounced it, and the mediaeval theolo gians, who saw much of it in the cloisters, ranked it among the deadly sins. But a single trait of Pe trarch's character developed this old-fashioned mel ancholy into the modern Weltschmerz. He was the victim of a ceaseless appetite for fame which no praise could satisfy — a passion which tormented most of the early Humanists and spread from them to the whole society of Italy during the fifteenth century. This passion led him constantly to do things he de spised and made such a gulf between his knowledge of what he was and his ideal of what he ought to be that he despaired at times of himself and the world. For no sketch of Petrarch is complete which fails to show him not only as an instaurator of learning and an asserter of individuality, but also as a hum bug. Even Napoleon, with the resources of France to help him, could not pose with the ceaseless sub tlety and variety of Petrarch. Every strong and true passion of his soul was mingled with self-seeking and self-consciousness. He was a lover of nature and of solitude ; but he always took care to se lect an accessible hermitage and to let all the 30 The Age of the Renascence. world know where it was. When he dwelt in his house by the fountain of Vaucluse, with an old house keeper and two servants to look after him, and an old dog to lie at his feet, he describes his life among the simple peasants as that of one busily content with watching the beauties of nature and reading the words of the mighty dead, who was willing to let the striving world wag on as it will. But in reality it was that of a scholar listening eagerly to every echo of his fame which reached him from the outer world, and counting the pilgrims drawn to his solitude by his growing reputation. He was fond of beginning his letters, " In the stillness of dusky night," or, " At the first flush of sunrise," and perfectly conscious of the interest aroused by the suggested figure of the pale student bent over his books in mysterious and noble loneliness. With that curious weakness which leads inveterate vanity to find pleasure in betraying itself, Petrarch has written that when he fled from cities and society to his quiet houses at Vaucluse or Arqua, he had done it to impress the imaginations of men and to increase his fame ; which, like all the acts and words of a poseur, was probably about half true and half false. One who thus enthroned and adored his own genius demanded, of course, tribute from his friends. And in all the letters he exchanges with his inti mates we find that the topic is never their concerns, but always the concerns of Petrarch. He is fond of decorating his epistles to them with Ciceronian phrases on the nobility of friendship. All the great men of antiquity had friends. But he who stepped Petrarch Serving Two Masters. 31 aside from the part of playing chorus to Petrarch's role of hero did so at his peril. To criticise his writ ing even in the smallest was to risk a transference to the ranks of his enemies. His love for Laura was undoubtedly genuine. There is a breath of real pain in his answer to a teas ing friend : " Oh, would that it were hypocrisy, and not madness ! " But Petrarch was not unaware that all the world loves a lover. No one felt more acutely than he did the patient dignity conferred by a hopeless passion for an unattainable woman. As his fountain of Vaucluse became more beautiful to him because he had made it famous, so he loved Laura more because he had sung his love for all the world to hear. Petrarch was religious, and in spite of his admira tion for Plato and Cicero, wrote that he counted the least in the kingdom of heaven as greater than they. He is continually denouncing the profligacy of the Papal court at Avignon, whose members deserted their duties at home to live in luxury on the income of benefices they never visited. But Petrarch Kim- self was priest, canon, and archdeacon without ever preaching a sermon or saying a mass, residing near his cathedral, or caring for the poor. And no man of his time was more persistent in the attempt to increase his income by adding new benefices to the ones whose duties he already neglected. He who runs may read this in a mass of begging letters, where pride and literary skill ill conceal the eagerness of the request and the wrath and bitterness of disappoint ment. He was a lover of freedom, whose praises he 32 The Age of the Renascence. sang with all his skill. But he shocked even his most faithful friends by accepting the hospitality and mak ing gain of the favor of the Visconti, whose unscrupu lous power was threatening every free city of North Italy. His devouring ambition, the appetite for success as symbolized by fame or wealth, appears perhaps most plainly in his attitude to the memory of Dante. This became so notorious that it was openly ascribed to envy, and his friend Boccaccio bravely wrote to tell him of the slander, expressing in the letter his own boundless admiration for the great dead. Petrarch's reply is cold. He does not use Dante's name. It is the charge of envy which troubles him. How could he be charged with envy of one who had written nobly, indeed, but in the common speech and for the common people, while he had only used it in his youth and half in play ? How could he who did not envy even Virgil envy Dante? This egotism was fed by such a banquet of admi ration as has been spread for few men. The cities of Italy did not wait for his death to rival each other in honoring him. A decree of the Venetian Senate said that no Christian philosopher or poet could be compared to him. The city of Arezzo greeted him with a triumphal procession and a decree that the house of his birth might never be altered. Florence bought the confiscated estates of his father and pre sented them to the man " who for centuries had no equal and could scarcely find one in the ages to come," "in whom Virgil's spirit and Cicero's elo quence had again clothed themselves in flesh." Petrarch Crowned at Rome. 33 Wherever he went men strove who should do him most honor. An old schoolmaster made a long journey to Naples to see him, and, arriving too late, followed over the Apennines to Parma, where he kissed his head and hands. Letters and verses in basketfuls brought admiration from every part of Italy, from France, Germany, England, and even from Greece. Per haps the most prized of all these symbols of admira tion was the bestowal of the poet's crown — a re vival of a traditional and seldom-practised rite. At the age of thirty-six two invitations to receive it reached him on the same day: one from the Uni versity of Paris, and one from the Roman Senate. He chose Rome as the inheritor of imperial dig nity, the true centre of Christendom. Led by a stately procession through the city to the Capitol, he received the crown from the hand of a Senator, delivered a festal speech, and went in procession to St. Peter's, where he knelt before the altar of the apostles and laid his wreath upon it. The day closed with a great banquet in the house of the chief of the Roman nobles. And these distinctions, sentimental as was their form, exaggerated as was the rhetoric in which they were phrased, were the tributes for great service to humanity. Not that Petrarch discovered anew classic literature, the rights of criticism, or the value of the individual. He ac complished little that was definite in criticism or history. Roger Bacon was a more original reformer of the methods of science, and there were men before Petrarch. But he came in the fulness of time, and by the force of genius gathered together and ex-