806 



MIDDLE AGES. 



the time, became so universal, that, almost every- 

 where, persons of the same trade or profession were 

 closely united, and had certain laws and regulations 

 among themselves. Knowledge itself, in the univer- 

 . was obliged to do homage to this spirit, and 

 the liberal arts themselves, in the latter part of the 

 middle ages, were fettered by the restraints of cor- 

 porations (see Master-singers), so that knowledge as 

 well as arts was prevented from attaining that per- 

 fection which the secure life of the city seemed to 

 promise them ; for nothing more impedes their pro- 

 gress than that pedantry, those prescriptive and com- 

 pulsory rules, that idolatrous veneration for old institu- 

 tions, which are inseparable from such associations. 



So also the most remarkable institution of that 

 time, its characteristic production chivalry exhi- 

 bited all the peculiarities of the corporations. War 

 was the profession of the nobles. No one of their 

 order, who was not a knight, could bear a lance or 

 command cavalry; and the services of years, as an 

 attendant or squire, were necessary to entitle even 

 one of the highest order to be dubbed a knight. But 

 squire, knight, and baron were all inspired with the 

 same spirit of honour, pride, love, and devotion. 

 The religious zeal of the middle ages produced actions 

 almost inconceivable to the cooler spirit of our time. 

 We see hundreds of youths and maidens, in the 

 flower of their age, shutting themselves up in gloomy 

 walls, or retiring to wild deserts, and spending their 

 lives in prayer and penance; we yearly see thousands 

 barefoot and fasting, travelling many hundred miles, 

 over sea and land, to pray at the grave of their 

 Master ; we see hundreds of thousands thronging 

 thither, from age to age, with the cross and sword, 

 at the risk of life, to deliver the Holy Land from the 

 pollution of infidels. 



This enthusiastic spirit was peculiarly suitable to 

 soften the ferocity of the age ; but ambitious men 

 artfully turned it to their own selfish purposes. In- 

 tolerance, the destruction of the Jews and heretics, 

 the luxurious splendour of the papal court, and the 

 all-embracing system of the hierarchy, were the 

 unhappy fruits of this mistaken spirit. In opposition 

 to tne secular power, resting on the feudal system, 

 and supported only by armies of vassals, the pope 

 formed, from the archbishops, bishops and priests, 

 still more from the generals of religious orders, pro- 

 vincials, abbots and monks, an immense army, invin- 

 cible through its power over the conscience, and 

 through the spiritual weapons which belonged to it 

 and to its head. From the general belief in his 

 possession of the power to make happy and unhappy 

 in both worlds, to bind and loose for eternity, the 

 pope ruled, with absolute sway, the minds of Chris- 

 tians. All the kings of the West acknowledged 

 him as the living vicegerent of Christ. Many were 

 vassals to him ; many tributary ; almost all obedient 

 and subject to him, or, in a short time, victims of a 

 vain resistance. At the time in which little idea was 

 entertained of restraining princes by constitutional 

 laws, and when the spirit of the times allowed them 

 to dare whatever they could do, it was an inestima- 

 ble advantage that the pope aided the people for 

 centuries in opposition to their usurpations ; but the 

 luxury, cruelty, ambition, and hostility to the diffusion 

 of knowledge, which pervaded the clergy, from the 

 pope down to the lowest mendicant friar, has left a 

 deep stain upon these times. In vain did men like 

 Arnold of Brescia and the Waldenses, Wickliffe, 

 Huss, and their followers, endeavour to overthrow 

 the hierarchy by reminding the people of the sim- 

 plicity and purity of the primitive church. They 

 found their contemporaries accustomed to the su- 

 premacy of the church, not yet ripe for freedom of 

 mind, and inattentive to their remonstrances ; and 



their noble endeavours, in a great measure, failed. 

 The hierarchy was able to erect new bulwarks against 

 new enemies ; mendicant orders and the inquisition 

 were instituted to prevent the dawning light of the 

 thirteenth century from entering the kingdom of 

 darkness ; excommunications and interdicts held 

 Christendom in terror ; till at length, when the signs 

 of the times, the diffusion of a free spirit of investi- 

 gation, the establishment of a more rational order in 

 monarchies, and the cooling of religious enthusiasm, 

 announced that the middle ages were drawing to a 

 close, Luther proclaimed that Europe would no longer 

 be held in leading-strings. 



The ages of which we have been speaking, so full 

 of battles and adventures, of pride and daring, of 

 devotion and love, must have been poetic times. 

 The knights were particularly disposed to poetic 

 views by lives spent between battle and love, festive 

 pomp and religious exercises. Hence we see poets 

 first appearing among the knights in the twelfth 

 century. In southern France, where chivalry was 

 first established, we see the first sparks of modern 

 poetry. The Provengal Troubadours, who princi- 

 pally sung at the court of Berengarius of Toulouse, 

 are the founders of it. Soon after them, the French 

 Trouv&res (menetriers} and the German Minnesingers 

 sang in their mother tongue ; the Italians at first, 

 from mistrust of their vulgar tongue, in the Proven- 

 gal ; and the English, from the same cause, in the 

 French language. But the minstrels soon formed, 

 among the latter also, a national poetry ; and the. 

 Italians, at a later period, after the great Dante 

 brought the Tuscan dialect into honour, obtained, by 

 the improvement of it, a high poetic fame. In Spain, 

 the Catalonian poetry was the same as the Provengal, 

 but the Castilian and Portuguese borrowed more from 

 the Arabians. With lyric poetry the epic was also 

 developed in great beauty and power. Its mystic 

 tone, its indefinite longing for something more ele- 

 vated, than the realities of earth, entitle us to distin- 

 guish this epic from the ancient, by the name of 

 romantic. See Romantic. 



The romantic epics of the middle ages are mostly 

 confined to three cycles of stories. Italy remained 

 a stranger to these, but her great Dante was worth 

 them all, and stood high above them, though the 

 tone of love and devotion which predominates in his 

 poem sprang from the character of the times. The 

 first of these cycles of stories is the truly German 

 Nibelungen, and the stories of Siegfried, Attila, 

 Dietrich, of Berne, Otnit, Hugdietrich and tVolf- 

 dietrich, and other heroes of the time of the general 

 migration of the nations, which belong to it. Next 

 to these stories stand the equally old tales of the Brit- 

 ish king Arthur, his Round Table, and the Sangraal, 

 which, in accordance with old British or Cymric fa- 

 bles, were sung in France, and afterwards by German 

 minstrels, and to which Titurel, Parzival, Tristan, 

 Iwain, Lohengrin, Gawain, Daniel of Blumcnthal, 

 the Enchanter Merlin, and others belong. To these 

 two was added a third, originally French, collection 

 of stories, of Charlemagne and his Peers, of Roland, 

 the Enchanter Malegys, and the Four Sons of Hay- 

 mon. The romance of Amadis de Gaul belongs pe- 

 culiarly to the Spanish, and to neither of these three 

 collections. See Chivalry. 



Besides these subjects, the poetic appetite of the 

 middle ages seized upon the historic events of ancient 

 and modern times, particularly the deeds of Alexan- 

 der the Great, and the crusades, likewise upon Scrip- 

 ture history, and even upon the subjects of the ancient 

 epics of Homer and Virgil, for new poetical works. 

 But whether from political causes, or, as we believe, 

 from the downfall of chivalry, and from an increasing 

 spirit of reflection, the last centuries of the middle 



