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family (for we must now adopt a modern idiom), and his military service was under the neighbouring counts of Boulogne, the heroes of the first crusade. But he soon relinquished the sword and the world; and, if it be true that his wife, however noble, was aged and ugly, he might withdraw, with the less reluctance, from her bed to a convent, and at length to an hermitage. In this austere solitude, his body was emaciated, his fancy was inflamed; whatever he wished, he believed; whatever he believed, he saw in dreams and revelations. From Jerusalem the pilgrim returned an accomplished fanatic; but, as he excelled in the popular madness of the times, Pope Urban the Second received him as a prophet, applauded his glorious design, promised to support it in a general council, and encouraged him to proclaim the deliverance of the Holy Land. Invigorated by the approbation of the Pontiff, his zealous missionary traversed, with speed and success, the provinces of Italy and France. His diet was abstemious, his prayers long and fervent, and the alms which he received with one hand, he distributed with the other; his head was bare, his feet naked, his meagre body was wrapt in a coarse garment; he bore and displayed a weighty crucifix; and the ass on which he rode was sanctified in the public eye by the service of the man of God. He preached to innumerable crowds in the churches, the streets, and the high-ways: the hermit entered with equal confidence the palace and the cottage; and the people, for all was people, were impetuously moved by his call to repentance and arms. When he painted the sufferings of the natives and pilgrims of Palestine, every heart was melted to compassion; every breast glowed with indignation, when he challenged the warriors of the age to defend their brethren and rescue their Saviour: his ignorance of art and language was compensated by sighs, and tears, and ejaculations; and Peter supplied the deficiency of reason by loud and frequent appeals to Christ and his mother, to the saints and angels of paradise, with whom he had personally

word of Peter the Hermit instigating Pope Urban, nor is he mentioned as present at the Council of Clermont. The story first appears in Albert of Aix and a little later in the Chanson d'Antioche (of the Pilgrim Richard, c. 1145), which has been edited by P. Paris, 1848. See Hagenmeyer, Peter der Eremite, 1879. After the Council of Clermont Peter was active in preaching the Crusade in his own country in the north-east of France, as we know from Guibertus.]

conversed. The most perfect orator of Athens might have envied the success of his eloquence: the rustic enthusiast inspired the passions which he felt, and Christendom expected with impatience the counsels and decrees of the supreme

Pontiff.

3

in the

Placentia.

March

The magnanimous spirit of Gregory the Seventh had already Urban II. embraced the design of arming Europe against Asia; the council of ardour of his zeal and ambition still breathes in his epistles. A.D. 1096, From either side of the Alps, fifty thousand Catholics had enlisted under the banner of St. Peter; and his successor reveals his intention of marching at their head against the impious sectaries of Mahomet. But the glory or reproach of executing, though not in person, this holy enterprise was reserved for Urban the Second, the most faithful of his disciples. He undertook the conquest of the East, whilst the larger portion of Rome was possessed and fortified by his rival, Guibert of Ravenna, who contended with Urban for the name and honours of the pontificate. He attempted to unite the powers of the West, at a time when the princes were separated from the church, and the people from their princes, by the excommunication which himself and his predecessors had thundered against the emperor and the king of France. Philip the First, of France, supported with patience the censures which he had provoked by his scandalous life and adulterous marriage. Henry the Fourth, of Germany, asserted the right of investitures, the prerogative of confirming his bishops by the delivery of the ring and crosier. But the emperor's party was crushed in Italy by the arms of the Normans and the Countess Mathilda; and the long quarrel had been recently envenomed

3 Ultra quinquaginta millia, si me possunt in expeditione pro duce et pontifice habere, armatâ manu volunt in inimicos Dei insurgere, et ad sepulchrum Domini ipso ducente pervenire (Gregor. vii. epist. ii. 31, in tom. xii. p. 322, Concil.).

See the original lives of Urban II. by Pandulphus Pisanus and Bernardus Guido [in his Vitae Pontificum Romanorum; Bernard flourished at the beginning of the 14th century], in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. tom. iii. pars i. p. 352, 353. [The continuation of the Liber Pontificalis from Gregory VII. to Honorius II. was ascribed by Baronius to Pandulfus of Pisa, and this view was adopted in Muratori's edition. But Giesebrecht has shown that the lives of Gregory VII., Victor III., and Urban II. are independent compositions and probably the work of the Cardinal Petrus Pisanus. The lives of Gelasius II., Calixtus II., and Honorius II. were written by Pandulf, the nephew of Hugh of Alatri. See Giesebrecht, Allgemeine Monatschrift, 1852, p. 260 sqq., and Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, iii. p. 1067-8 (5th ed.).—On Urban II. cp. M. F. Stern, Biographie des Papstes Urban II.,

by the revolt of his son Conrad, and the shame of his wife,5 who, in the synods of Constance and Placentia, confessed the manifold prostitutions to which she had been exposed by an husband regardless of her honour and his own. So popular was the cause of Urban, so weighty was his influence, that the council which he summoned at Placentia was composed of two hundred bishops of Italy, France, Burgundy, Swabia, and Bavaria. Four thousand of the clergy, and thirty thousand of the laity, attended this important meeting; and, as the most spacious cathedral would have been inadequate to the multitude, the session of seven days was held in a plain adjacent to the city. The ambassadors of the Greek emperor, Alexius Comnenus, were introduced to plead the distress of their sovereign, and the danger of Constantinople, which was divided only by a narrow sea from the victorious Turks, the common enemy of the Christian name. In their suppliant address, they flattered the pride of the Latin princes; and, appealing at once to their policy and religion, exhorted them to repel the barbarians on the confines of Asia rather than to expect them in the heart of Europe. At the sad tale of the m and perils of their Eastern brethren, the assembly burst into tears; the most eager champions declared their readiness to march; and the Greek ambassadors were dismissed with the assurance of a speedy and powerful succour. The relief of Constantinople was included in the larger and most distant project of the deliver

5 She is known by the different names of Praxes, Eupræcia, Eufrasia, and Adelais [generally called Praxedis in the sources]; and was the daughter of a Russian prince [Vsevlad of Kiev], and the widow of a Margrave of Brandenburg. Struv. Corpus Hist. Germanice, p. 340.

6 Henricus odio eam cœpit habere: ideo incarceravit eam, et concessit ut plerique vim ei inferrent; imo filium hortans ut eam subagitaret (Dodechin, Continuat. Marian. Scot. [i.e. the Annales S. Disibodi falsely ascribed to a certain Abbot Dodechin and erroneously supposed to be a continuation of the Chronicle of Marianus Scotus] apud Baron. A.D. 1093, No. 4). In the synod of Constance, she is described by Bertholdus, rerum inspector: quæ se tantas et tam inauditas fornicationum spurcitias, et a tantis passam fuisse conquesta est, &c. And again at Placentia satis misericorditer suscepit, eo quod ipsam tantas spurcitias non tam commississe quam invitam pertulisse pro certo cognoverit Papa cum sanotâ synodo. Apud Baron. A.D. 1093, No. 4, 1094, No. 3. A rare subject for the infal lible decision of a Pope and council! These abominations are repugnant to every principle of human nature, which is not altered by a dispute about rings and crosiers. Yet it should seem that the wretched woman was tempted by the priests to relate or subscribe some infamous stories of herself and her husband.

7 See the narrative and acts of the synod of Placentia, Concil. tom. xii. p. 821, &c. [Mansi, Concil. xx. p. 804, and cp. Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., 8, p. 474, for a notice appended to the Acts.]

8

ance of Jerusalem; but the prudent Urban adjourned the final decision to a second synod, which he proposed to celebrate in some city of France in the autumn of the same year. The short delay would propagate the flame of enthusiasm; and his firmest hope was in a nation of soldiers, still proud of the preeminence of their name, and ambitious to emulate their hero Charlemagne, who, in the popular romance of Turpin,10 had achieved the conquest of the Holy Land. A latent motive of affection or vanity might influence the choice of Urban. He was himself a native of France, a monk of Clugny, and the first of his countrymen who ascended the throne of St. Peter. The Pope had illustrated his family and province. Nor is there perhaps a more exquisite gratification than to revisit, in a conspicuous dignity, the humble and laborious scenes of our youth.

Clermont.

November

It may occasion some surprise that the Roman pontiff Council of should erect, in the heart of France, the tribunal from whence A.D. 1095, he hurled his anathemas against the king; but our surprise will vanish, so soon as we form a just estimate of a king of France of the eleventh century." Philip the First was the great-grandson of Hugh Capet, the founder of the present race, who, in the

Guibert, himself a Frenchman, praises the piety and valour of the French nation, the author and example of the crusades: Gens nobilis, prudens, bellicosa, dapsilis, et nitida.-Quos enim Britones, Anglos, Ligures, si bonis eos moribus videamus, non illico Francos homines appellemus? (p. 478). He owns, however, that the vivacity of the French degenerates into petulance among foreigners (p. 483), and vain loquaciousness (p. 502).

Per viam quam jamdudum Carolus Magnus, mirificus rex Francorum [leg. Franciae], aptari fecit usque C. P. (Gesta Francorum, p. 1, Robert. Monach. Hist. Hieros. 1. i. p. 33, &c.).

10 John Tilpinus, or Turpinus, was Archbishop of Rheims, A.D. 773. After the year 1000, this romance was composed in his name by a monk of the borders of France and Spain; and such was the idea of ecclesiastical merit that he describes himself as a fighting and drinking priest! Yet the book of lies was pronounced authentic by Pope Calixtus II. (A.D. 1122), and is respectfully quoted by the abbot Suger, in the great Chronicles of St. Denys (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. medii Ævi, edit. Mansi, tom. iv. p. 161). [The most important critical work on Turpin's romance (Historia de vita Caroli Magni et Rolandi eius nepotis, is the title) is that of Gaston Paris, De Pseudo-Turpino (1865), who makes it probable that the first part (cc. 1-5) was composed in the 11th century by a Spaniard, and the second part (c. 1110) by a monk at Vienne. The most recent edition is that of F. Castets, 1880. There were several old French translations. One, for instance, was edited by F. A. Wulff (Chronique dite de Turpin, 1881), and two others by T. Auracher (1876, 1877). There is an English translation by T. Rodd (History of Charles the Great and Orlando ascribed to Turpin, 1812, 2 vols.).]

11 See Etat de la France, by the Count de Boulainvilliers, tom. i. p. 180-182, and the second volume of the Observations sur l'Histoire de France, by the Abbé de Mably.

VOL. VI.-18

decline of Charlemagne's posterity, added the regal title to his patrimonial estates of Paris and Orleans. In this narrow compass he was possessed of wealth and jurisdiction; but, in the rest of France, Hugh and his first descendants were no more than the feudal lords of about sixty dukes and counts, of independent and hereditary power, 12 who disdained the control of laws and legal assemblies, and whose disregard of their sovereign was revenged by the disobedience of their inferior vassals. At Clermont, in the territories of the count of Auvergne, 13 the pope might brave with impunity the resentment of Philip; and the council which he convened in that city was not less numerous or respectable than the synod of Placentia. Besides his court and council of Roman cardinals, he was supported by thirteen archbishops and two hundred and twenty-five bishops; 15 the number of mitred prelates was computed at four hundred; and the fathers of the church were blessed by the saints, and enlightened by the doctors, of the age. From the adjacent kingdoms a martial train of lords and knights of power and renown attended the council,16 in high expectation of its resolves; and such was the ardour of zeal and curiosity that the city was filled, and many thousands, in the month of November, erected their tents or huts in the open field. A session of eight days produced some useful or edifying canons for the reformation of manners; a severe censure was pronounced against the licence of private war; the Truce of God 17 was confirmed, a suspension of hostilities

12 In the provinces to the south of the Loire, the first Capetians were scarcely allowed a feudal supremacy. On all sides, Normandy, Bretagne, Aquitain, Burgundy, Lorraine, and Flanders contracted the name and limits of the proper France. See Hadrian. Vales. Notitia Galliarum.

13 These counts, a younger branch of the dukes of Aquitain, were at length despoiled of the greatest part of their country by Philip Augustus. The bishops of Clermont gradually became princes of the city. Mélanges tirés d'une grande Bibliothèque, tom. xxxvi. p. 288, &c.

14 See the acts of the council of Clermont, Concil. tom. xii. p. 829, &c. [Mansi, Concilia, xx. p. 815 sqq.]

15 [Thirteen archbishops, eighty bishops, and ninety abbots, Giesebrecht, op. cit., iii. p. 667, following Cencius Camerarius (Mansi, xx. 908), and the Pope himself (ib., 829).]

16 Confluxerunt ad concilium e multis regionibus viri, potentes et honorati, innumeri quamvis cingulo laicalis militiæ superbi (Baldric, an eye-witness, p. 86-88. Robert. Mon. p. 31, 32. Will. Tyr. i. 14, 15, p. 639-641. Guibert, p. 478-480. Fulcher. Caront. p. 382).

17 The Truce of God (Treva, or Treuga Dei) was first invented in Aquitain, A.D. 1032; blamed by some bishops as an occasion of perjury, and rejected by the Normans as contrary to their privileges (Ducange, Gloss. Latin. tom. vi. p. 682-685). [Kluckhohn, Geschichte des Gottesfriedens.]

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