Mediaeval Europe. (814-1300)

M E D I A E VA t JpJ R 5 BE 814-1300 BY EPHRAIM EMERTON, PH. D. WINN PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY, EMERITUS CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1934 1894, 1912, BY EPHRAIM EME1VTON All rights reserved PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS t. h CAJvt BRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A. TO Cbarles Carroll Everett THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED PREFACE. THE present volume - owes its origin to repeated requests, coming from widely scattered and widely different sources, that I would go on with the history of continental Europe from the point where it was left at the close of a little book published in the year 1888. That earlier book, An Intro duction to the Study of the Middle Ages, was written in the hope that it might fill a place, at that time unoccupied, between the manuals of Roman history and those upon mediaeval times. This hope has been fairly realized, and the many kind expressions of good-will it has brought me have given me confidence for this new venture. When I began the former volume I had in mind a reader of about fifteen years of age but this person grew insensibly older as the work progressed, and, in fact, the book has found its chief use in the earlier stages of college teaching. This second book will assume a certain familiarity with the period covered by the former, a period now, happily, to be studied in more than one excellent manual. It has for its subject the period extending from the death of Charlemagne to about the middle of the thirteenth century, and it seems important to justify in some way this selection of limits. The division of history into periods is at best a very doubtful matter. Any attempt of the sort must seem to violatethe first great canon of historical science that history admits of no breaks in its continuity. All division must needs be arbitrary, and one principle of division is better than another only in so far as it does less violence to that fundamental idea of an vi PREFACE. organic unity. The least dangerous system would be that which should try to define each period by some quality plainly peculiar to it, not shared by others, or at least not in the same degree, a something which is common to the whole of the given period and distinguishes it from every other. Is there such a criterion by which the true limits of the mediaeval period may be determined The conventional use of the term mediaeval is, judged by this standard, most misleading. It includes a period of about a thousand years, in which the most divergent phases of human life are presented. Between the civilization of Italy in the seventh and in the fifteenth centuries, there is less in common than between the life of Athens and that of Boston. If, under such a division, we speak of mediaeval art, do we mean the mosaics of Ravenna, the illuminations of Charles the Balds missal or the canvases of Raphael Does mediaeval litera ture mean the treatises of Abelard, the songs of the trouba dours, the monastic chronicles or the splendid vacuities of the Renaissance Shall we look for mediaeval law in the early barbaric codes, or in the coutumcs of the thirteenth, or in the corpus juris of the sixteenth century Used in this way, the term mediaeval means so much that it comes to mean nothing. One is continually forced to re-define the word in order to be intelligible. Yet there is a period of history to which this word maybe applied withoutmuch fear of error. From the beginning of the Germanic migrations to the time of Charlemagne the only significant word to describe the character of European history is transition. It is precisely that fact of a pas sage from one strongly marked set of institutions to another that gives its stamp to the period. After Charlemagne, how ever, the new institutions, feudal society, the Roman church system, the theological control of learning, have so plainly PREPACK Vil gained upon the declining institutions of ancient Rome, that we are really in a new Europe...… (more)