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and was entirely submissive to the Pope.
The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the death of Louis the Pious and the
split between the French-speaking Franks and the German-speaking Franks
widened. The next emperor to arise was Otto, the son of a certain Henry the
Fowler, a Saxon, who had been elected King of Germany by an assembly of German
princes and prelates in 919. Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned emperor
there in 962. This Saxon line came to an end early in the eleventh century and
gave place to other German rulers. The feudal princes and nobles to the west
who spoke various French dialects did not fall under the sway of these German
emperors after the Carlovingian line, the line that is descended from
Charlemagne, had come to an end, and no part of Britain ever came into the
Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King of France and a number of
lesser feudal rulers remained outside.
In 987 the Kingdom of France passed out of the possession of the Carlovingian
line into the hands of Hugh Capet, whose descendants were still reigning in
the eighteenth century. At the time of Hugh Capet the King of France ruled
only a comparatively small territory round Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an invasion of the
Norwegian Northmen under King Harold Hardrada and by the Latinized Northmen
under the Duke of Normandy. Harold King of England defeated the former at the
battle of Stamford Bridge, and was defeated by the latter at Hastings. England
was conquered by the Normans, and so cut off from Scandinavian, Teutonic and
Russian affairs, and brought into the most intimate relations and conflicts
with the French. For the next four centuries the English were entangled in the
conflicts of the French feudal princes and wasted upon the fields of France.
XLVI. The Crusades and the Age of Papal Dominion
IT is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the Caliph
Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid of the Arabian Nights. It is recorded
that Haroun-al-Raschid sent ambassadors from Bagdad-which had now replaced
Damascus as the Moslem capital-with a splendid tent, a water clock, an
elephant and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This latter present was admirably
calculated to set the Byzantine Empire and this new Holy Roman Empire by the
ears as to which was the proper protector of the Christians in Jerusalem.
These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth century was still a
weltering disorder of war and pillage, there flourished a great Arab Empire in
Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more civilized than anything Europe could show.
Here literature and science still lived; the arts flourished, and the mind of
man could move without fear or superstition. And even in Spain and North
Africa where the Saracenic dominions were falling into political confusion
there was a vigorous intellectual life. Aristotle was read and discussed by
these Jews and Arabs during these centuries of European darkness. They guarded
the neglected seeds of science and philosophy.
North-east of the Caliph's dominions was a number of Turkish tribes. They had
been converted to Islam, and they held the faith much more simply and fiercely
than the actively intellectual Arabs and Persians to the south. In the tenth
century the Turks were growing strong and vigorous while the Arab power was
divided and decaying. The relations of the Turks to the Empire of the
Caliphate became very similar to the relations of the Medes to the last
Babylonian Empire fourteen centuries before. In the eleventh century a group
of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk Turks, came down into Mesopotamia and made the
Caliph their nominal ruler but really their captive and tool. They conquered
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Armenia. Then they struck at the remnants of the Byzantine power in Asia
Minor. In 1071 the Byzantine army was utterly smashed at the battle of
Melasgird, and the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule
remained in Asia. They took the fortress of Nicaea over against
Constantinople, and prepared to attempt that city.
The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror. He was already
heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman adventurers who had seized
Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish people, the Petschenegs, who were raiding
over the Danube. In his extremity he sought help where he could, and it is
notable that he did not appeal to the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome
as the head of Latin Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII, and his
successor Alexius Comnenus wrote still more urgently to Urban II.
This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the Latin and Greek
churches. That controversy was still vividly alive in men's minds, and this
disaster to Byzantium must have presented itself to the Pope as a supreme
opportunity for reasserting the supremacy of the Latin Church over the
dissentient Greeks. Moreover this occasion gave the Pope a chance to deal with
two other matters that troubled western Christendom very greatly. One was the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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