The Law of Civilization and Decay/Chapter III

by Brooks Adams

Until the mechanical arts have advanced far enough to cause the attack in war to predominate over the defence, centralization cannot begin; for when a mud wall can stop an army, a police is impossible. The superiority of the attack was the secret of the power of the monied class who controlled Rome, because with money a machine could be maintained which made individual resistance out of the question, and revolt difficult. Titus had hardly more trouble in reducing Jerusalem, and dispersing the Jews, than a modern officer would have under similar circumstances.

As the barbarians overran the Roman provinces, and the arts declined, the conditions of life changed. The defence gained steadily on the attack, and, after some centuries, a town with a good garrison, solid ramparts, and abundant provisions had nothing to fear from the greatest king. Even the small, square Norman tower was practically impregnable. As Viollet-le-Duc has explained, these towers were mere passive defences, formidable to a besieger only because no machinery existed for making a breach in a wall. The beleaguered nobles had only to watch their own men, see to their doors, throw projectiles at the enemy if he approached too near, counter-mine if mined, and they might defy a great army until their food failed. Famine was the enemy most feared.(1)

By the eleventh century these towers had sprung up all over the West. Even the convents and churches could be defended, and every such stronghold was the seat of a count or baron, an abbot or bishop, who was a sovereign because no one could coerce him, and who therefore exercised all the rights of sovereignty, made war, dispensed justice, and coined money. In France alone there were nearly two hundred mints in the twelfth century.

Down to the close of the Merovingian dynasty the gold standard had been maintained, and contraction had steadily gone on; but, for reasons which are not understood, under the second race, the purchasing power of bullion temporarily declined, and this expansion was probably one chief cause of the prosperity of the reign of Charlemagne. Perhaps the relief was due to the gradual restoration of silver to circulation, for the coinage was then reformed, and the establishment of the silver pound as the measure of value may be considered as the basis of all the monetary systems of modern Europe.

The interval of prosperity was, however, brief; no permanent addition was made to the stock of precious metals, and prices continued to fall, as is demonstrated by the rapid deterioration of the currency. In this second period of relapse disintegration reached its limit.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries the Northmen infested the coasts of France, and sailed up the rivers burning and ravaging, as far as Rouen and Orléans. Even the convents of Saint Martin of Tours and Saint Germain des Près were sacked. The Mediterranean swarmed with Saracenic corsairs, who took Fraxinetum, near Toulon, seized the passes of the Alps, and levied toll on travel into Italy. The cannibalistic Huns overran the Lower Danube, and closed the road to Constantinople. Western Europe was cut off from the rest of the world. Commerce nearly ceased—the roads were so bad and dangerous, and the sea so full of pirates.

The ancient stock of scientific knowledge was gradually forgotten, and the imagination had full play. Upon philosophy the effect was decisive; Christianity sank to a plane where it appealed more vividly to the minds of the surrounding pagans than their own faiths, and conversion then went on rapidly. In 912 Rollo of Normandy was baptized; the Danes, Norwegians, Poles, and Russians followed; and in 997 Saint Stephen ascended the throne of Hungary and reopened to Latin Christians the way to the Sepulchre.

Perhaps the destiny of modern Europe has hinged upon the fact that the Christian sacred places lay in Asia, and therefore the pilgrimage brought the West into contact with the East. But the pilgrimage was the effect of relic-worship, and relic-worship the vital principle of monasticism. In these centuries of extreme credulity monasticism had its strongest growth. A faculty for scientific study was abnormal, and experimental knowledge was ascribed to sorcery. The monk Gerbert, who became pope as Sylvester II., was probably the most remarkable man of his generation. Though poor and of humble birth, he attracted so much attention that he was sent to Spain, where he studied in the Moorish schools at Barcelona and Cordova, and where he learned the rudiments of mathematics and geography. His contemporaries were so bewildered by his knowledge that they thought it due to magic, and told how he had been seen flying home from Spain, borne on the back of the demon he served, and loaded with the books he had stolen from the wizard, his master. Sylvester died in 1003, but long afterwards anatomy was still condemned by the Church, and four separate councils anathematized experimental medicine, because it threatened to destroy the value of the shrines. The ascendency of Cluny began with Saint Hugh, who was chosen abbot in 1049, the year of Leo's election. The corporation then obtained control of Rome, and in another twenty-five years was engaged in its desperate struggle with the remains of the old secular police power. But though Hildebrand crushed Henry, the ancient materialism was too deeply imbedded to be eradicated in a single generation, and meanwhile the imagination had been brought to an uncontrollable intensity. A new and fiercer excitement seethed among the people—a vision of the conquest of talismans so powerful as to make their owners sure of heaven and absolute on earth.

The attraction of Palestine had been very early felt, for in 333 a guide-book had been written, called the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, which gave the route through the valley of the Danube, together with an excellent account of the Holy Land. In those days, before the barbaric inroads, the journey was safe enough; but afterwards communication nearly ceased, and when Stephen was baptized in 997, the relics of Jerusalem had all the excitement of novelty. Europe glowed with enthusiasm. Sylvester proposed a crusade, and Hildebrand declared he would rather risk his life for the holy places "than rule the universe."

Each year the throngs upon the road increased, convents sprang up along the way to shelter the pilgrims, the whole population succoured and venerated them, and by the time Cluny had seized the triple crown, they left in veritable armies. Ingulf, secretary to William the Conqueror, set out in 1064 with a band seven thousand strong.

In that age of faith no such mighty stimulant could inflame the human brain as a march to Jerusalem. A crusade was no vulgar war for a vulgar prize, but an alliance with the supernatural for the conquest of talismans whose possession was tantamount to omnipotence. Urban's words at Clermont, when he first preached the holy war, have lost their meaning now; but they burned like fire into the hearts of his hearers then, for he promised them glory on earth and felicity in heaven, and he spoke in substance thus: No longer do you attack a castle or a town, but you undertake the conquest of the holy places. If you triumph, the blessings of heaven and the kingdoms of the East will be your share; if you fall, you will have the glory of dying where Christ died, and God will not forget having seen you in His holy army.(2)

Urban told them "that under their general Jesus Christ . . . they, the Christian, the invincible army," would march to certain victory. In the eleventh century this language was no metaphor, for the Cluniac monk spoke as the mouthpiece of a god who was there actually among them, offering the cross he brought from the grave, and promising them triumphs: not the common triumphs which may be won by man's unaided strength, but the transcendent glory which belongs to beings of another world.

So the crusaders rode out to fight, the originals of the fairy knights, clad in impenetrable armour, mounted on miraculous horses, armed with resistless swords, and bearing charmed lives.

Whole villages, even whole districts, were left deserted; land lost its value; what could not be sold was abandoned; and the peasant, loaded with his poor possessions, started on foot with his wife and children in quest of the Sepulchre, so ignorant of the way that he mistook each town upon the road for Zion. Whether he would or no, the noble had to lead his vassals or be forsaken, and riding at their head with his hawks and hounds, he journeyed towards that marvellous land of wealth and splendour, where kingdoms waited the coming of the devoted knight of God. Thus men, women, and children, princes and serfs, priests and laymen, in a countless, motley throng, surged toward that mighty cross and tomb whose possessor was raised above the limitations of the flesh.

The crusaders had no commissariat and no supply train, no engines of attack, or other weapons than those in their hands, and the holy relics they bore with them. There was no general, no common language, no organization; and so over unknown roads, and through hostile peoples, they wandered from the Rhine to the Bosphorus, and from the Bosphorus to Syria.

These earlier crusades were armed migrations, not military invasions, and had they met with a determined enemy, they must have been annihilated; but it chanced that the Syrians and Egyptians were at war, and the quarrel was so bitter that the caliph actually sought the Christian alliance. Even under such circumstances the waste of life was fabulous, and, had not Antioch been betrayed, the starving rabble must have perished under its walls. At Jerusalem, also, the Franks were reduced to the last extremity before they carried the town; and had it not been for the arrival of a corps of Genoese engineers, who built movable towers, they would have died miserably of hunger and thirst. Nor was the coming of this reinforcement preconcerted. On the contrary, the Italians accidentally lost their ships at Joppa, and, being left without shelter, sought protection in the camp of the besiegers just in time.

So incapable were the crusaders of regular operations, that even when the towers were finished and armed, the leaders did not know how to fill the moat, and Raymond of Saint Gilles had nothing better to propose than to offer a penny for every three stones thrown into the ditch.

On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem was stormed; almost exactly three years after the march began. Eight days later Godfrey de Bouillon was elected king, and then the invaders spread out over the strip of mountainous country which borders the coast of Palestine and Syria, and the chiefs built castles in the defiles of the hills, and bound themselves together by a loose alliance against the common enemy.

The decentralization of the colony was almost incredible. The core of the kingdom was the barony of Jerusalem, which extended only from the Egyptian desert to a stream just north of Beyrout, and inland to the Jordan and the spurs of the hills beyond the Dead Sea, and yet it was divided into more than eighteen independent fiefs, whose lords had all the rights of sovereignty, made war, administered justice, and coined money.(3)

Beside these petty states, the ports were ceded to the Italian cities whose fleets helped in the conquest. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa held quarters in Ascalon, Joppa, Tyre, Acre, and Beyrout, which were governed by consuls or viscounts, who wrangled with each other and with the central government.

Such was the kingdom over which Godfrey reigned, but there were three others like it which together made up the Frankish monarchy. To the north of the barony of Jerusalem lay the county of Tripoli, and beyond Tripoli, extending to Armenia, the principality of Antioch. To the east of Antioch the county of Edessa stretched along the base of the Taurus Mountains and spread out somewhat indefinitely beyond the Euphrates.

Thus on the north Edessa was the outwork of Christendom, while to the south the castle of Karak, which commanded the caravan road between Suez and Damascus, held a corresponding position among the hills to the east of the Dead Sea.

Beyond the mountains the great plain sweeps away into Central Asia, and in this plain the Franks never could maintain their footing. Their failure to do so proved their ruin, for their position lay exposed to attack from Damascus; and it was by operating from Damascus as a base that Saladin succeeded in forcing the pass of Banias, and in cutting the Latin possessions in two at the battle of Tiberias.

A considerable body of Europeans were thus driven in like a wedge between Egypt and the Greek Empire, the two highest civilizations of the Middle Ages, while in front lay the Syrian cities of the plain, with whom the Christians were at permanent war. The contact was the closest, the struggle for existence the sharpest, and the barbaric mind received a stimulus not unlike the impulse Gaul received from Rome; for the interval which separated the East from the West, at the beginning of the twelfth century, was probably not less than that which divided Italy from Gaul at the time of Caesar.

When Godfrey de Bouillon took the cross, the Byzantine Empire was already sinking. The Eastern trade which, for so many centuries, had nourished its population, was beginning to flow directly from Asia into Italy, and, as the economic aristocracy of the capital lost its nutriment, it lost its energy. Apparently it fell in 1081, in the revolution which raised Alexius Comnenus to the throne. Because Alexius sacked Constantinople with a following of mongrel Greeks, Slavs, and Bulgarians, he has been called the first Greek emperor, but in reality the pure Greek blood had long since perished. The Byzantine population at the end of the eleventh century was the lees of a multitude of races,—a mixture of Slavs, Armenians, Jews, Thracians, and Greeks; a residuum of the most tenacious organisms, after all that was higher had disappeared. The army was a mixed horde of Huns, Arabs, Italians, Britons, Franks; of all in short who could fight and were for sale, while the Church was servile, the fancy dead, and art and literature were redolent of decaying wealth.

Nevertheless, ever since the fall of Rome, Constantinople had been the reservoir whence the West had drawn all its materialistic knowledge, and therefore, it was during the centuries when the valley of the Danube was closed, that the arts fell to their lowest ebb beyond the Alps and Rhine. After pilgrimages began again in the reign of Stephen, the Bosphorus lay once more in the path of travel, and as the returning palmers spread over the West, a revival followed in their track; a revival in which the spirit of Byzantium may yet be clearly read in the architecture of Italy and France. Saint Mark is a feeble imitation of Saint Sophia, while Viollet-le-Duc has described how long he hesitated before he could decide whether the carving of Vézelay, Autun, and Moissac was Greek or French; and has dwelt upon the laborious care with which he pored over all the material, before he became convinced that the stones were cut by artists trained at Cluny, who copied Byzantine models.(4)

But the great gulf between the economic and the imaginative development, separated the moribund Greek society from the semi-childhood of the Franks; a chasm in its nature impassable because caused by a difference of mind, and which is, perhaps, seen most strikingly in religious architecture; for religious architecture, though always embodying the highest poetical aspirations of every civilization, yet had in the East and West diametrically opposite points of departure.

Saint Sophia is pregnant with the spirit of the age of Justinian. There was no attempt at mystery, or even solemnity, about the church, for the mind of the architect was evidently fixed upon solving the problem of providing the largest and lightest space possible, in which to display the functions of a plutocratic court. His solution was brilliantly successful. He enlarged the dome and diminished the supports, until, nothing remaining to interrupt the view, it seemed as though the roof had been suspended in the air. For his purpose the exterior had little value, and he sacrificed it.

The conception of the architects of France was the converse of this, for it was highly emotional. The gloom of the lofty vaults, dimly lighted by the subdued splendour of the coloured windows, made the interior of the Gothic cathedral the most mysterious and exciting sanctuary for the celebration of the miracle which has ever been conceived by man; while without, the doors and windows, the pinnacles and buttresses, were covered with the terrific shapes of demons and the majestic figures of saints, admonishing the laity of the danger lurking abroad, and warning them to take refuge within.

But if the Greeks and the Franks had little affinity for each other, the case was different with the Saracens, who were then in the full vigour of their intellectual prime, and in the meridian of their material splendour.

In the eleventh century, when Paris was still a cluster of huts cowering for shelter on the islands of the Seine, and the palace of the Duke of Normandy and King of England was the paltry White Tower of London, Cairo was being adorned with those masterpieces which are still the admiration of the world.

Prisse d'Avennes considered that, among the city gates the Bab-el-Nasr stands first in "taste and style," and the famous Bab-el-Zouilyeh is of the same period. He also thought the mosque of Teyloun a "model of elegance and grandeur," and observed, when criticising the mosque of the Sultan Hassan, built in 1356, that though imposing and beautiful, it lacks the unity which is only found in the earlier Arabic monuments, such as Teyloun.(5) Indeed, the signs are but too apparent that, from the twelfth century, the instinct for form began to fail in Egypt, the surest precursor of artistic decay.

The magnificence of the decoration and furnishing of the Arabic palaces and houses has seldom been surpassed, and a few extracts from an inventory of a sale of the collections of the Caliph Mostanser-Billah, held in 1050, may give some idea of its gorgeousness.

Precious Stones.—A chest containing 7 Mudds of emeralds; each of these worth at least 300,000 dynars, which makes in all at the lowest estimation, 36,000,000 francs.

A necklace of precious stones worth about 80,000 dynars.

Seven Waïbah of magnificent pearls sent by the Emir of Mecca.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Glass,—Several chests, containing a large number of vases . . . of the purest crystal, chased and plain.

Other chests filled with precious vases of different materials.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Table Utensils.—A large number of gold dishes, enamelled or plain, in which were incrusted all sorts of colours, forming most varied designs.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

One hundred cups and other shapes, of bezoar-stone, on most of which was engraved the name of the Caliph Haroun-el-Raschid.

Another cup which was 3½ hands wide and one deep.

Different Articles.—Chests containing inkstands of different shapes, round or square, small or large, of gold or silver, sandal wood, aloe, ebony, ivory, and all kinds of woods, enriched with stones, gold and silver, or remarkable for beauty and elegance of workmanship.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Twenty-eight enamel dishes inlaid with gold, which the Caliph Aziz had received as a present from the Greek emperor and each of which was valued at 3000 dynars.

Chests filled with an enormous quantity of steel, china, and glass mirrors, ornamented with gold and silver filagree; some were bordered with stones, and had cornelian handles, and others precious stones. One of them had quite a long and thick handle of emeralds. These mirrors were enclosed in cases made of velvet or silk or most beautiful wood; their locks were of gold or silver.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Four hundred large cases, ornamented with gold and filled with all sorts of jewels.

Various silver household goods, and six thousand gold vases, in which were put narcissus or violets.

Thirty-six thousand pieces of crystal, among them a box ornamented with figures in relief, weighing 17 roks.

A large number of knives which, at the lowest price, were sold for 36,000 dynars.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

A turban enriched with precious stones, one of the most curious and valuable articles in the palace: it was said to be worth 130,000 dynars. The stones which covered it, and whose weight was 17 roks, were divided between two chiefs, who both claimed it. One had in his share a ruby weighing 23 mitqâls, and in the share which fell to the other were 100 pearls each of which weighed 3 mitqâls. When the two generals were obliged to fly from Fostat, all these valuables were given up to pillage.

A golden peacock enriched with the most valuable precious stones: the eyes were rubies, the feathers gilded enamel representing all the colours of peacock feathers.

A cock of the same metal, with a comb of the largest rubies covered with pearls and other stones; the eyes also were made of rubies.

A gazelle whose body was covered all over with pearls and the most precious stones; the stomach was white and composed of a series of pearls of the purest water.

A sardonyx table, with conical feet of the same substance; it was large enough for several people to eat there at the same time.

A garden, the soil made of chased and gilt silver and yellow earth. There were silver trees, with fruits made of precious materials.

A golden palm-tree enriched with superb pearls. It was in a golden chest and its fruit was made of precious stones representing dates in every stage of ripeness. This tree was of inestimable value. (6)

About the time the monk Gerbert was accused of sorcery because he understood the elements of geometry, the Caliph Aziz-Billah founded the university of Cairo, the greatest Mohammedan institution of learning. This was two hundred years before the organization of the university of Paris, and the lectures at the mosque of El-Azhar are said to have been attended by twelve thousand students. Munk was of opinion that Arabic philosophy reached its apogee with Averrhoës, who was born about 1120.(7) Certainly he was the last of a famous line which began at Bagdad three centuries earlier; and Hauréau, in describing the great period of Saint Thomas at Paris, dwelt upon the debt Western learning owed to the Saracens.

The splendour of Haroun-al-Raschid is still proverbial. The tales of his gold and silver, his silks and gems, almost surpass belief, and even in his reign the mechanical arts were so advanced that he sent a clock to Charlemagne.

Humboldt considered the Arabs as the founders of modern experimental science, and they were relatively skilful chemists, for they understood the composition of sulphuric and nitric acid, and of aqua regia, beside the preparation of mercury and of various oxides of metals. As physicians they were far in advance of Europe. While the Church healed by miracles, and put experimental methods under her ban, the famous Rhazes conducted the hospitals of Bagdad, and in the tenth century wrote a work in ten books, which was printed at Venice as late as 1510. Practitioners of all nations have used his treatise on small-pox and measles; he introduced mild purgatives, invented the seton, and was a remarkable anatomist. He died in 932.

William of Tyre stated that the Frankish nobles of Syria preferred the native or Jewish doctors; and though Saladin sent his physician to Richard, Richard never thought of sending an Englishman to Saladin when afterwards attacked by illness.

Even as late as the middle of the thirteenth century little advance seems to have been made in Europe, for one of the most curious phenomena of the crusades was the improvement in the health of the army of Saint Louis after it surrendered. During the campaign various epidemics had been very fatal; but when the soldiers were subjected to the sanitary regulations of the Egyptian medical staff, disease disappeared.

The Arabs had a strong taste for mathematics, and were familiar with most of the discoveries which have been attributed to astronomers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

As early as 1000 spherical trigonometry was in use, and Aboul-Hassan wrote an excellent treatise on conic sections. In 833 the Caliph El-Mamoun, having founded observatories at Bagdad and Damascus, caused a degree to be measured on the plain of Palmyra. By the thirteenth century the Arabic instruments were comparatively perfect. They had the astrolabe, the gnomon, the sextant, and the mariner's compass, and Aboul-Wafa determined the third lunar variation six hundred years before Tycho Brahe.

To enumerate all the improvements in agriculture and manufactures which came from the mediaeval pilgrimage would take a separate treatise. A French savant thought of writing a book upon the flora of the crusades alone. The mulberry and the silkworm were brought from Greece, the maize from Turkey, the plum from Damascus, the eschalot from Ascalon, and the windmills with which, down to the present century, corn was ground, were one of the importations from the Levant.

It might almost be said that all the West knew of the arts was learned on the road to the sepulchre. The Tyrians taught the Sicilians to refine sugar, and the Venetians to make glass; Damascus steel was a proverb, Damascus potters were the masters of the potters of France; the silk, brocades, and carpets of Syria and Persia were in the twelfth century what they have been down to the present day, at once the admiration and despair of Western weavers, while there can be little doubt that gunpowder was the invention of the chemists of the East.

All the evidence tends to prove that the ogive came from the Levant, and without the ogive Gothic architecture could never have developed.(8) Prior to the council of Clermont the pointed arch was practically unknown west of the Adriatic; but the Arabs had long used it, and it may still be seen in the ninth century mosque of Teyloun.

In Palestine the Franks were surrounded by Saracenic buildings, and employed Saracenic masons, and the attention of Western architects seems no sooner to have been drawn to the possibilities of the ogive, than they saw in it the solution of those problems which had before defied them. An arch formed by two intersecting segments of a circle could be raised to any height from any base, and was perfectly adapted to vaulting the parallelograms formed by the columns of the nave. Therefore, contemporaneously with the building of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the period of transition between the Romanesque and the Gothic opened in France. The two most important transition buildings were the abbey of Saint Denis and the cathedral of Noyon, and, while the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 1149, the abbey was completed in 1144, and the cathedral was begun almost immediately after.(9)

Thenceforward the movement was rapid, and before the year 1200. Christian sacred architecture was culminating in those marvels of beauty, the cathedrals of Paris, of Bourges, of Chartres, and of Le Mans. Yet, though sacred architecture tells the story of the rise of the imagination as nothing else can, if it be true that centralization hinges on the preponderance of the attack in war, the surest way of measuring the advance toward civilization of rude peoples must be by military engineering.

In the eleventh century, north of the Alps, this science was rudimentary, and nothing can be more impressive than to compare the mighty ramparts of Constantinople with the small square tower which William the Conqueror found ample for his needs in London.

When the crusaders were first confronted with the Greek and Arabic works, they were helpless; nor were their difficulties altogether those of ignorance. Such fortifications were excessively costly, and a feudal State was poor because the central power had not the force to constrain individuals to pay taxes. The kingdom of Jerusalem was in chronic insolvency.

The life of the Latin colony in Syria, therefore, hung on the development of some financial system which should make the fortification of Palestine possible, and such a system grew up through the operation of the imagination, though in an unusual manner.

Fetish worship drew a very large annual contribution from the population in the shape of presents to propitiate the saints, and one of the effects of the enthusiasm for the crusades was to build up conventual societies in the Holy Land, which acted as standing armies. The most famous of the military orders were the Knights of the Temple and the Knights of Saint John. William of Tyre has left an interesting description of the way in which the Temple came to be organized:—

"As though the Lord God sends his grace there where he pleases, worthy knights, who were of the land beyond the sea, proposed to stay for ever in the service of Our Lord, and to live in common, like regular canons. In the hand of the patriarch they vowed chastity and obedience, and renounced all property. . . . The king and the other barons, the patriarch and other prelates of the Church, gave them funds to live on and to clothe themselves. . . . The first thing which was enjoined on them in pardon for their sins was to guard the roads by which the pilgrims passed, from robbers and thieves, who did great harm. This penance the patriarch and the other bishops enjoined. Nine years they remained thus in secular habit, wearing such garments as were given them by the knights and other good people for the love of God. In the ninth a council was assembled in France in the city of Troyes. There were assembled the archbishops of Rheims and Sens and all their bishops. The bishop of Albano especially was there as papal legate, the abbots of Citean and Clairvaux, and many other of the religious.

"There were established the order and the rules by which they were to live as monks. Their habit was ordered to be white, by the authority of Pope Honorius and the patriarch of Jerusalem. This order had already existed nine years, as I have told you, and there were as yet only nine brothers, who lived from day to day on charity. From that time their numbers began to increase, and revenues and tenures were given them. In the time of Pope Eugenius it was ordered that they should have sewn upon their copes and on their robes a cross of red cloth, so that they should be known among all men. . . . From thence have their possessions so increased as you can see, that the order of the Temple is in the ascendant. . . . Hardly can you find on either side of the sea a Christian land where this order has not to-day houses and brethren, and great revenues." (10)

The council of Troyes was held in 1128, and in the next fifty years, in proportion as the feudal organization of the Latin kingdom decayed, the military orders increased in wealth and power. The Hospital held nineteen thousand manors in Europe, the Temple nine thousand, and each manor could maintain a knight in the field.

At Paris the house of the Temple filled a whole quarter; its donjon was one of the most superb buildngs of the Middle Ages; at a later period, when the corporation took to banking, it served as a place of deposit for both public and private treasure, and in times of danger the king himself was glad to take shelter within its walls.

The creation of this monastic standing army was evidently due to the inferiority of the attack to the defence, which made the civil power incapable of coercing the individual who refused to pay taxes. The petty barons who built the castles throughout Palestine were too poor to erect fortifications capable of resisting the superior engines used in the East. Therefore the whole burden of the war was thrown upon the Church, and in all modern history nothing is more wonderful than the way in which this work was done.

Within fifty years after the conquest the feudal machinery was in ruin, and the strategic points, one after another, passed into the hands of the strongest force of the age, the force which was incarnate imagination.

The fortresses built by the monks were the ramparts of Christendom, and among the remains which have survived the past, perhaps none are more impressive than the huge castles of the crusaders in the gorges of the Syrian mountains; nor do any show so clearly whence came the rationalistic stimulus which revolutionized Europe, shattered the Church, and brought in the economic society which has ruled Europe since the Templars passed away.

Twenty-five miles due west of Homs, at the point where the Lebanon melts into the Ansarieh range, the mountains open, and two passes lead by easy descents to the sea. Through the southern runs the road to Tripoli, through the northern that to Tortosa. Between them, on a crag a thousand feet above the valleys, still stands the castle of the Krak des Chevaliers, ceded by Count Raymond of Tripoli to the Hospital in 1145. Towering above the plain it can be seen for miles, and no description can give an idea of its gigantic size and power. Coucy and Pierrefonds are among the largest fortresses of Europe, and yet Clucy and Pierrefonds combined are no larger than the Krak.

Compared with it, the works then built in the West were toys, and the engineering talent shown in its conception was equalled by the magnificence of its masonry. The Byzantine system was adopted. A double wall, the inner commanding the outer, with a moat between; and three enormous towers rising from the moat, formed the donjon. There were stone machicoulis and all the refinements of defence which appeared in France under Saint Louis and his son, and a study of this stupendous monument shows plainly whence Europeans drew their military instruction for a century to come.

The Krak was the outwork dominating the plain where the Christians never made their footing good, and stood at the apex of a triangle of fortresses as remarkable as itself. From its ramparts the great white tower of Chastel-Blanc can be seen, midway between the outpost commanding the mountain passes and the base upon the sea held by the Temple; and from that tower the troop of Templars rode to relieve the knights of Saint John, on the day when the crusaders routed the conqueror Nour-ed-Din, and cut his army to pieces as it fled toward the Lake of Homs, which lies in the distance.

But the white tower is unlike the donjons of other lands, and bears the imprint of the force which built it, for it is not a layman's hold, but a church, whose windows are cut in walls thirteen feet thick, whence the dim light falls across the altar where the magicians wrought their miracles.

Within easy supporting distance lay Tortosa, a walled town, the outwork of a donjon at least as strong as the Krak, and built with a perfection of workmanship, and a beauty of masonry, which proves at once the knowledge and the resources of the order. No monarch of the West could, probably, at that time have undertaken so costly an enterprise, and yet Tortosa was but one of four vast structures which lie within a few miles of each other. The place was ceded to the Temple in 1183, just at the beginning of the reign of Philip Augustus, before men dreamed of the more important French fortifications.

At Margat, a day's journey to the north, the Hospital had their base upon the sea: a stronghold whose cost must have been fabulous, for it is perched upon a crag high above the Mediterranean, and so inaccessible that it is not easy to understand how the materials for building were collected. Viollet-le-Duc, who was lost in admiration at Coucy, declared that it was colossal enough to befit a race of giants, and yet Coucy could have stood in the courtyard of Margat.

The Arabs, who were excellent engineers, deemed it a masterpiece, and the Sultan Kalaoun could not endure the thought of injuring it. After he had mined the great tower and was sure of victory, he proved to the garrison his power to destroy it, in order to induce them to accept most liberal terms of surrender, and let him have the prize. Perhaps the best description ever given of the work is in a letter written by the Sultan of Hamah to his vizier to announce its fall:

"The devil himself had taken pleasure in consolidating its foundations. How many times have the Mussulmans tried to reach its towers and fallen down the precipices! Markab is unique, perched on the summit of a rock. It is accessible to relief, and inaccessible to attack. The eagle and the vulture alone can fly to its ramparts." (11)

Footnotes

(1) Dictionnaire de l'Architecture, v. 50.

(2) Annales Ecclesiastici, Baronious, year 1095.

(3) Les Familles d'Outre-Mer, ed. Rey, 3.

(4) Dictionnaire de l'Architecture, viii. 108.

(5) L'Art Arabe, 111 et seq.

(6) L'Art Arabe, 203.

(7) Mélanges, 458

(8) See Dictionnaire de L'Architecture, Viollet-le-Duc, vi. 446.

(9) See Les Églises de la Terre Sainte, Vogüé, 217; Notre Dame de Noyon; Études sur l'Histoire de l'Art, Vitet, ii. 122; Dictionnaire de L'Architecture, Viollet-le-Duc, ii. 301.

(10) Hist. des Croisades, xii. 7.

(11) See, on the Syrian castles, Étude sur les Monuments de l'Architecture Militaire des Croisés en Syrie, Rey.