CHAPTER VIL 



JOURNEYS AND MARKETS. 



THE habit of travel was, from many causes, far more fre- 

 quent in the fourteenth than in later centuries; and journeys 

 were constantly undertaken for the purposes of religion and 

 business. 



During the fourteenth century the whole of Western Europe 

 professed the same faith, and treated the head of the Church 

 with reverential deference. Partly from the fact that a system 

 of legal procedure had been long practised at the Roman 

 court, which the policy, the fears, the rivalries of European 

 communities recognised and accepted; partly because much 

 real power lay in the hands of the pope, in consequence of 

 his great comparative wealth; partly because this spiritual 

 monarch, by the concurrence of a variety of circumstances, 

 constantly arbitrated on international questions, and really 

 upheld the balance of power in Europe, the Roman curia was 

 frequently visited in order to transact legal business, and to 

 further political intrigues. That interpretation of the great 

 influence possessed by the medieval popes, which assigns their 

 power to the mingled effects of arrogance on the one side 

 and irrational superstition on the other, is shewn, on a careful 

 estimate of the facts, to be childish and unphilosophical. 

 Such deference as was shewn to the pope must have been 

 accorded from the ordinary human motives of confidence, of 

 interest, or of necessity. We find the power of the popes 

 decline when the municipal laws of each country were de- 



