The Eighteen Christian Centuries

This latter pontiff was intended by nature for a leader of Free Lances, to live forever in “the joy of battle,” and must have felt a little out of his element as the head of the Christian Church. However, he rapidly discovered that he was a secular prince as well as a spiritual teacher, and cast his eyes in the former capacity with ominous ill will on the industrious Republic of Venice. The fishermen and fugitives of many centuries before, who had settled among the Adriatic lagoons, had risen into the position of princes and treasurers of Europe. By their possessions in the East, and their trading-factories established along the whole route from India to the Mediterranean, they had made themselves the intermediaries between the barbaric pearls and gold, the silks and spices, of the Oriental regions, and the requirements of the West. Their galleys were daily bringing them the commodities of the Levant, which they distributed at an exorbitant profit among the nations beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Mercantile wealth and maritime enterprise elevated the taste and confidence of those Venetian traffickers, till their whole territory, amid the lifeless waters of their canals, was covered with stately palaces, and their fleets assumed the dominion of the inland seas. On the mainland they had stretched their power over Dalmatia and Trieste, and in their own peninsula over Rimini and Ferrara and a great part of the Romagna. Two ruling passions agitated the soul of Julius the Second: one was to recover whatever territory or influence had once belonged to the Holy See; the other was to expel the hated barbarian, whether Frenchman, or Swiss, or Austrian, from the soil of Italy. To achieve this last object he would sacrifice any thing except the first; and to unite the two was difficult. He made his approaches to Venice in a gentle manner at first. He asked her to restore the lands she had lately won, which he claimed as appendages of his chair, because they had been torn unjustly from the original holders by Cæsar Borgia, the son of Alexander the Infamous; and if she had agreed to this he would no doubt have proceeded with his further scheme of banishing all ultramontane invaders. But as the commercial council of the great emporium hesitated at giving up what they had entered in their books as fairly their own, he altered his note in a moment, put on the insignia of his holy office, and, denouncing the astonished republic as rebellious and ungrateful to Mother Church, he called in the aid of the very French whom he was so anxious to get quit of, to execute his judgment upon the offending State. Venice was rich, and France at that time was poor and at all times is greedy. So preparations were made for an assault with the readiness and glee with which a party of freebooters would make a descent on the Bank of England. The temptation also was too great to be resisted by other kings and princes, who were as hungry for spoil and as attached to religion as the French. So in an incredibly short space of time the league of Cambrai was joined by Maximilian, the Emperor of Germany, and Ferdinand of Spain, and dukes and marquesses of less note. There were few of the Southern potentates, indeed, who had not some cause of complaint against the haughty Venetians. |A.D. 1508.|Some (as the German Maximilian) they had humbled by defeat; others they had insulted by their purse-proud insolence; others, again, by superiority in commercial skill; and all, by the fact of being wealthy and, as they fancied, weak.

Louis the Twelfth of France was first in the field. He conquered at Agnadello, and, forcing his way to the shore, alarmed the marble halls of the Venetians with the sound of his harmless cannonade. The Pope was next, and took possession of the towns he wanted. The Duke of Ferrara laid hold of some loose articles in the confusion, and the Marquis of Mantua got back some villages which his grandfather had lost. Maximilian was disconsolate at not being in time for the general pillage, and had to content himself with Padua and Vicenza and Verona. Maximilian was a gentleman in difficulties, who has the misfortune to be known in history as Max the Penniless. The Venetians sent to tell him they were ready to acknowledge his suzerainty as emperor, and to pay him a tribute of fifty thousand ducats. The man would have forgiven them a hundred times their offences for half the money, and was anxious to close with their offer. But they had made no similar proposition to the French king, nor to Ferdinand, nor even of a ten-pound note to the Mantuan Marquis or the Magnifico of Ferrara. Wherefore they all began to hate the emperor. Louis declined to give him any more assistance. Julius sent a secret message to the Venetians that Holy Church was not inexorable; and Venice, relying on the placability of Rome, hung out her flag against her secular foes in prouder defiance than ever. She knelt at the feet of the Pope, and allowed him to retain his acquisitions in Romagna and elsewhere; and as his first object, the enrichment of his domain, was accomplished, he lost no time in carrying out the second. |A.D. 1510.|By the fortunate possession of an unlimited power of loosing mankind from unpleasant oaths and obligations, he astonished his late confederates by publishing a sentence releasing the Venetians from the censures of the Church and the Allies from the covenants of the Treaty of Cambrai. He then joined the pontifical forces to the troops of Venice, and in hot haste made a rush upon the French. He bought over Ferdinand of Spain to the cause by giving him the investiture of Naples, hired a multitude of Swiss mercenaries, and, drawing the sword like a stout man-at-arms as he was, he laid siege to Mirandola. In spite of his great age,—he was now past seventy,—he performed all the offices of an active general, visited the trenches, encouraged his army, and after a two months’ bombardment disdained to enter the city by the opened gate, but was triumphantly carried in military pomp through a breach in the shattered wall. His perfidy as a statesman and audacity as a soldier were too much for the Emperor and the King of France. |A.D. 1511.|They collected as many troops as they could, and threatened to summon a general council; for what excommunication as an instrument of offence was to the popes, a general council was to the civil power. The French clergy met at Tours, and supported the Crown against Julius. The German emperor was still more indignant. He published a paper of accusations, in which the bitterness of his penniless condition is not concealed. “The enormous sums daily extracted from Germany,” he says, “are perverted to the purposes of luxury or worldly views, instead of being employed for the service of God or against the Infidels. So extensive a territory has been alienated for the benefit of the Pope that scarcely a florin of revenue remains to the Emperor in Italy.” Louis and the French appeared triumphant in the field; but their triumphs threw them into dismay, for their protean adversary, when defeated as temporal prince, thundered against them as successor of St. Peter, and taught them that their victories were impiety and their acquisitions sacrilege. A hard case for Louis, where if he retreated his territories were seized, and if he advanced his soul was in danger. The war, which had begun as a combination against Venice, was now converted into a holy league in defence of Rome. Spaniards came to the rescue; and Henry, the youthful champion of England, and all who either thought they loved religion or who really hated France, were inspired as if for a crusade. |A.D. 1512.|And Maximilian himself, poor and friendless,—how was it possible for him to continue obstinately to reject the overtures of the Pope, the purse of the Venetians, or the far more tempting whisperings of Ferdinand of Aragon, who said to him, “Julius is very old. Would it not be possible to win over the cardinals to make your majesty his successor?” Such a golden dream had never suggested itself to the pauperized emperor before. He swallowed the bait at once. He determined to bribe the Sacred College, and, to raise the necessary funds, pawned the archducal mantle of Austria to the rich merchants, the Fuggers of Antwerp, for a large sum, and wrote to his daughter Margaret, “To-morrow I shall send a bishop to the Pope, to conclude an agreement with him that I may be appointed his coadjutor and on his death succeed to the Papacy, that you may be bound to worship me,—of which I shall be very proud.” This may appear a rather jocular announcement of so serious a design; but there is no doubt that the project was entertained. Matters, however, advanced at too rapid a pace for the slow calculations of politicians. The French, by a noble victory at Ravenna, established their fame as warriors, and roused the fear of all the other powers. Maximilian grasped at last the Venetian ducats which had been offered him so long before, and turned suddenly against his ally. Ferdinand and Henry pressed forward on France itself on the side of the Pyrenees. Foot by foot the land of Italy was set free from the French invaders, and Julius the Second, dying before the emperor’s plans were matured, left the tangled web of European politics to be unravelled by a younger hand.

We have dwelt on this strange contest, where many sovereign states combined to overthrow a colony of traders, and failed in all their attempts, because it is the last great appearance that Venice has made in the general history of the world. From this time her power rapidly decayed. Her galleys lay rotting at their wharves, and the marriage of her Doge to the Sea was a symbol without a meaning. The discovery of a passage to India by the Cape, which we saw announced to Europe by Vasco da Gama in the last year of the late century, was a sentence of death to the carriers of the Adriatic. Commerce sought other channels and enriched other lands. Wherever the merchant-vessels crowded the harbour, whether with the commodities of the East or West, the war-ship was sure to follow, and the treasures gained in traffic to be guarded by a navy. All the ports of Spain became rallying-places of wealth and power in this century. Portugal covered every sea with her guns and galleons; Holland rose to dignity and freedom by her heavy-armed marine; and England began the career of enterprise and liberty which is still typified and assured by the preponderance of her commercial and royal fleets. Questions are asked—which the younger among us, who may live to see the answer, may amuse themselves by considering—as to the chance of Venice recovering her ancient commerce if the pathway of Eastern trade be again traced down the Mediterranean, when the Isthmus of Suez shall be cut through by a canal or curtailed by a railway. In former times the whole civilized world lay like a golden fringe round the shores of that one sea, and the nation which predominated there, either in wealth or arms, was mistress of the globe. But the case is altered now. If the Gates of Hercules were permanently closed, the commerce of the world would still go on; and, so far from a Mediterranean supremacy indicating a universal pre-eminence, it is perhaps worthy of remark that the only Mediterranean nations which have in later times been recognised as of first-rate rank in Europe have had their principal ports upon the Atlantic and in the Channel.

There is a circumstance which we may observe as characteristic of many of the European states at this time,—the desire of combination and consolidation at home even more than of foreign conquest. In Spain the cessation of the oligarchy of kingships had established a national crown. The hopes of recasting the separated and mutilated limbs of ancient Latium into a gigantic Italy were rife in that sunny land of high resolves and futile acts. In Germany, the official supremacy of the emperor was insufficient to prevent the strong definement of the corporate nationalities. Holland secured its individuality by unheard-of efforts; and in England the great thought took possession of the political mind of a union of the whole island. Visions already floated before the statesmen on both sides of the Tweed of a Great Britain freed from intestine disturbance and guarded by undisputed seas. But the general intelligence was not yet sufficiently far advanced. |A.D. 1502.|The Scotch were too Scotch and the English too English to sink their national differences; and we can only pay homage to the wisdom which by a marriage between the royal houses—James the Fourth, and Margaret of England—planted the promise which came afterwards to maturity in the junction of the crowns in 1603, and the indissoluble union of the countries in 1707.

Meantime, the wooing was of the harshest. The last great battle, Flodden, that marked the enmity of the kingdoms, was decided in this century, and has left a deep and sorrowful impression even to our own times. There is not a cottage in Scotland where “The Fight of Flodden” is not remembered yet. And its effects were so desolating and dispiriting that it may be considered the death-bed to the feeling of equality which had hitherto ennobled the weaker nation. From this time England held the position of a virtual superior, regulating her conduct without much regard to the dignity or self-respect of her neighbour, and employing the arts of diplomacy, and the meaner tricks of bribery and corruption, only because they were more easy and less expensive than the open method of invasion and conquest. “Scotland’s shield” was indeed broken at Flodden, but her character for courage and honour remained. It was the treachery of Solway Moss, and the venality of most of the surviving nobility, that were the real causes of her weakness, and of the subordinate place which at this time she held in Europe.

Thus the object which in other nations had been gained by a union of crowns was attained also in our island by the absence of opposition between the peoples. Flodden and Pinkie may therefore be looked upon with kindlier eyes if they are regarded as steps to the formation of so great a realm. No nation retained its feudal organization so long as Scotland, or so completely departed from the original spirit of feudalism. Instead of being leaders and protectors of their dependants, and attached vassals of the kings, the barons of the North were an oligarchy of armed conspirators both against the crown and the people. Few of the earlier Stuarts died in peaceful bed; for even those of them who escaped the dagger of the assassin were hunted to death by the opposition and falsehood of the chiefs. Perpetually engaged in plots against the throne or forays against each other, the Scottish nobility weakened their country both at home and abroad. Law could have no authority where mailed warriors settled everything by the sword, and no resistance could be offered to a foreign enemy by men so divided among themselves. Down to a period when the other nations of Europe were under the rule of legal tribunals, the High Street of Edinburgh was the scene of violence and bloodshed between rival lords who were too powerful for control by the civil authority. A succession of foolishly rash or unwisely lenient sovereigns left this ferocity and independence unchecked; and though poetry and patriotism now combine to cast a melancholy grace on the defeat at Flodden, from the Roman spirit with which the intelligence was received by the population of the capital, the unbiassed inquirer must confess that, with the exception of the single virtue of personal courage, the Scottish array was ennobled by no quality which would have justified its success. It was ill commanded, ill disciplined, and ill combined. The nobility, as usual, were disaffected to the king and averse to the War. But the crown-tenants and commonalty of the Lowlands were always ready for an affray with England; and James the Fourth, the most chivalrous of that line of chivalrous and unfortunate princes, merrily crossed the Border and prepared for feats of arms as if at a tournament. |A.D. 1513.|The cautious Earl of Surrey, the leader of the English army, availed himself of the knightly prepossessions of his enemy, and sent a herald, in all the frippery of tabard and cross, to challenge him to battle on a set day, when Lord Thomas Howard would run a tilt with him at the head of the English van. James fell into the snare, and regulated his movements, in fact, by the direction of his opponent. When, in a momentary glimpse of common sense, he established his quarters on the side of a hill, from which it would have been impossible to dislodge him, Surrey relied on the absurd generosity of his character, and sent a message to complain that he had placed himself on ground “more like a fortress or a camp than an ordinary battle-field.” James pretended to despise the taunt, and even to refuse admission to the herald; but it worked on his susceptible and fearless nature; for we find that he allowed the English to pass through difficult and narrow ways, which were commanded by his guns, and when they were fairly marshalled on level ground he set fire to his tents and actually descended the hill to place himself on equal terms with the foe. Such a beginning had the only possible close. Strong arms and sharp swords are excellent supports of generalship, but cannot always be a substitute for it. Never did the love of fight so inherent in the Scottish character display itself more gallantly than on this day. Again and again the Scottish earls dashed forward against the English squares. These were composed of the steadiest of the pikemen flanked by the wondrous archers who had turned so many a tide of battle. Fain would the veteran warriors have kept their men in check; fain would the commanders of the French auxiliaries have restrained the Scottish advance. But the Northern blood was up. Onward they went, in spite of generalship and all the rules of discipline, and with a great crash burst upon the wall of steel. It was magnificent, as the Frenchmen said at Balaklava, but it was not war. Repelled by the recoil of their own impetuous charge, they fell into fragments and encumbered the gory plain. Very few fled, very few had the opportunity of flying; for the cloth-yard shaft never missed its aim. There was no crying for quarter or sparing of the flashing blade. Both sides were irritated to madness. James pushed on, shouting and waving his bloody sword, and was wounded by an arrow and gashed with a ponderous battle-axe when he had forced himself within a few paces of Surrey. Darkness was now closing in. The king’s death was rapidly known, but still the struggle went on. At length the wearied armies ceased to kill. The Scotch retreated, and in the dawn of the next morning a compact body of them was seen still threatening on the side of a distant hill. But the day was lost and won. The chivalry of Scotland received a blow from which it never recovered. What Courtrai had been to the French, and Granson and Nanci to the Burgundians, and Towton and Tewkesbury to the English, the 9th of September, 1513, was to the peerage of the North. Thirteen earls were killed, fifteen barons, and chiefs and members of all the gentle houses in the land. Some were stripped utterly desolate by this appalling slaughter; and from many a hall, as well as from humble shieling, rose the burden of the tearful ballad, “The flowers o’ the forest are a’ wedd awa’.” There were ten thousand slain in the field, the gallant James cut off in the prime of strength and manhood, and the sceptre which required the grasp of an Edward the First left to be the prize of an unprincipled queen-mother, or any ambitious cabal which could conspire to seize it. James the Fifth was but a year or two old, and the country discouraged and demoralized.

But Henry the Eighth was destined to some other triumphs in this fortunate year. First there was the victory which his forces won at Guinegate, near Calais, where the French chivalry fled in the most ignominious manner, and struck their rowels into their horses’ flanks, without remembering that they carried swords in their hands. This is known in history as the second Battle of the Spurs,—not, as at Courtrai, for the number of those knightly emblems taken off the heels of the dead, but for the amazing activity they displayed on the heels of the living. And, secondly, he could boast that the foremost man in Christendom wore his livery and pocketed his pay; for Maximilian the Penniless, successor of Charlemagne and Constantine and Augustus, enlisted and did good service as an English trooper at a hundred crowns a day. Let Henry rejoice in these achievements while he may; for the time is drawing near when the old sovereigns of Europe are to be moved out of the way and France and Spain are to be governed by younger men and more ambitious politicians than himself. Evil times indeed were at hand, when it required the strength of youth and wisdom of policy to guide the bark not only of separate states, but of settled law and Christian civilization. For, however pleasant it may be to trace Henry through his home-career and Francis and Charles in their national rivalries, we are not to forget that the real interest of this century is that it is the century of the Reformation,—a movement before whose overwhelming importance the efforts of the greatest individuals sink into insignificance,—an upheaving of hidden powers and principles, which in truth so altered all former relations between man and man that it found the most influential personage in Europe, not in the Apostolic Emperor, or the Christian King, or the Defender of the Faith, but in a burly friar at Wittenberg, whose name had never been heard before.

Let us see what was the general condition of the Romish Chair before the outburst of its enemies at this time. One thing is very observable: that its claims to supremacy and obedience were, ostensibly at least, almost universally acquiesced in. From Norway to Calabria the theory of a Universal Church, divinely founded and divinely sustained, in possession of superhuman power and uncommunicated knowledge, governed by an infallible chief, and administered by an uninterrupted line of priests and bishops, who had given up the vanities of the world, satisfier of doubts, and sole instrument of salvation,—this seemed so perfect and so natural an organization that it had been accepted from time immemorial as incapable of denial. If a voice was heard here and there in an Alpine valley or in a scholastic debating-room impugning these arrangements or asking proof from history or revelation, the civil power was let loose upon the gainsayer, with the general consent of orthodox men, and the Vaudois were murdered with sword and spear and the inquiring student chained in his monkish cell. The theory and organization of the Universal Church were, in fact, never so well defined as at the moment when its reign was drawing to a close. Nobody doubted that a general Father, clothed in infallible wisdom, and armed with powers directly committed to him for the guidance or punishment of mankind, was the Heaven-sent arbiter of differences, the rewarder of faithful kings, the corrector of unruly nations; and yet the spectacle was presented, to the believers in this ideal, of a series of wicked and abandoned rulers sitting in Peter’s chair, and only imitating the apostle in his furiousness and his denial; cardinals depraved and worldly beyond the example of temporal princes; a priesthood steeped, for the most part, in ignorance and vice, and monks and nuns the opprobria of all nations where they were found. Never were claims and performances brought into such startling contrast before. The Pope was the representative upon earth of the Saviour of men; and he poisoned his guests, like Borgia, slew his opponents, like Julius, or led the life of an intellectual epicure, like Leo the Tenth. In former times the contrariety between doctrine and practice would have been slightly known or easily reconciled. Few comparatively visited Rome; cardinals were seldom seen; priests were not more ignorant than their parishioners, and monks not more wicked than their admirers. All believed in the miraculous efficacy of the wares in which even the lower order of the clergy dealt, and their rule in country places was so lax, their penances so easily performed or commuted, their relations with their people so friendly and on such equal terms, that in the rural districts the voice of complaint was either unheard or neglected. In Italy, the head-quarters of the faith, the excesses of priestly rule were the most glaring and wide-spread. Rome itself was always the seat of turbulence and disaffection. The lives of professedly holy men were known, and the vices of popes and prelates pressed heavily on the people, who were the first victims of their avarice or cruelty. But the utmost extent of their indignation never reached to a questioning of the foundation of the power from which they suffered. An Italian crushed to the earth by the extortion of his Church, irritated perhaps by the personal wickedness of his director, sought no escape from such inflictions in disbelieving either the temporal or spiritual authority of his oppressor. Rather he would have looked with savage satisfaction on the fagot-fire of any one who hinted that the principles of his Church required the slightest amendment; that the absolution of his sensual confessor was not altogether indispensable; that the image he bowed down to was common wood, or that the relics he worshipped were merely dead men’s bones. Perhaps, indeed, in those luxurious regions, a bare and unadorned worship would not seem to be worship at all. With his impassioned mind and glowing fancy, the Spaniard or Italian must pour out his whole being on the object of his adoration. He loves his patron saint with the warmth of an earthly affection, and thinks he undervalues her virtues or her claims if he does not heap her shrine with his offerings and address her image with rapture. He must make external demonstration of his inward feelings, or nobody will believe in their existence. The crouchings and kneelings, therefore, which our colder natures stigmatize as idolatry, are to him nothing more than the outward manifestation of affection and thankfulness. He does the same to his master or his benefactor without degradation in the eyes of his countrymen. Without these bowings and genuflections his conduct would be thought ungrateful and disrespectful. That this amount of warm-hearted sincerity is wasted upon such unworthy objects as his saints and relics is greatly to be deplored; but wide allowances must be made for peculiarities of situation and disposition; and we should remember that whereas in the North a religion of forms and ceremonies would be a body without a soul, because there would be no inward exaltation answering to the outward manifestation, the Southern heart sees a meaning where there is none to us, is conscious of a sense of trust and reverence where we only see slavishness and imposture, and a feeling of divine consolation and hope in services which to us are histrionic and absurd. Religious belief, in the sense of a true and undivided faith in the doctrines of Christianity, had no recognised existence at the period we have reached. But this absence of religious belief was combined, however strange the statement may appear, with a most implicit trust in the directions and authority of the Church. Sunny skies might have shone forever over the political abasement and slightly Christianized paganism of the inhabitants of the two peninsulas and the Southeast of Europe, but a cloud was about to rise in the North which dimmed them for a time, but which, after it burst in purifying thunder, has refreshed and cleared the atmosphere of the whole world.