Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

indistinguishable from the laity in dress. Most of the Taborites

deduced communism from millennarianism: Christ would soon come to

establish His Kingdom on earth; in that Kingdom there would be no

property, no Church or state, no class distinctions, no human laws, no

taxes, no marriage; surely it would please Christ, when he came, to

find such a heavenly utopia already established by His worshipers.

At Tabor and some other towns these principles were put into practice;

there, said a contemporary professor in the University of Prague, "all

is held in common, no one owns anything for himself alone; so to own

is considered a deadly sin. They hold that all should be equal

brothers and sisters." `060813

A Bohemian peasant turned philosopher, Peter Chelcicky, went

further, and wrote in vigorous Czech a series of Tolstoian tracts

advocating a pacifistic anarchism. He attacked the powerful and the

rich, denounced war and capital punishment as murder, and demanded a

society without lords or serfs, or laws of any kind. He bade his

followers take Christianity literally as they found it in the New

Testament: to baptize only adults, to turn their backs upon the

world and its ways, upon oaths and learning and class distinctions,

upon commerce and city life; and to live in voluntary poverty,

preferably tilling the land, and completely ignoring "civilization"

and the state. `060814 The Taborites found this pacifism unsuited to

their temperament. They divided into moderate and advanced radicals

(these preached nudism and a communism of women), and the two factions

passed from argument to war. In the course of a few years unequal

abilities developed inequalities of power and privilege, finally of

goods; and the apostles of peace and freedom were replaced by ruthless

lawgivers wielding despotic force. `060815

Christendom heard with horror of this supposedly communistic

Christianity. The baronial and burgher Hussites in Bohemia began to

yearn for the Church of Rome as the only organization strong enough to

stop the imminent dissolution of the existing social order. They

rejoiced when the Council of Basel invited reconciliation. A

delegation from the Council, without papal authorization, came to

Bohemia, and signed a series of "Compacts" so worded that

complaisant Hussites and Catholics could interpret them as accepting

and rejecting the Four Articles of Prague (1433). As the Taborites

refused to recognize these Compacts, the conservative Hussites

joined with the surviving orthodox groups in Bohemia, attacked and

defeated the divided Taborites, and put an end to the communistic

experiment (1434). The Bohemian Diet made its peace with Sigismund,

and accepted him as king (1436).

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But Sigismund, accustomed to crowning his victories with futility,

died in the following year. During the chaos that ensued, the orthodox

party secured the upper hand in Prague. An able provincial leader,

George of Podebrad, organized an army of Hussites, captured Prague,

restored the Utraquist Jan Rokycana to the archiepiscopal see, and

established himself as governor of Bohemia (1451). When Pope

Nicholas V refused to recognize Rokycana the Utraquists meditated a

transfer of their allegiance to the Greek Orthodox Church, but the

fall of Constantinople to the Turks ended the negotiations. In 1458,

seeing that Podebrad's excellent administration had restored order and

prosperity, the Diet chose him king.

He turned his energies now to reconstituting religious peace. With

the approval of the Diet he sent to Pius II (1462) an embassy

requesting papal ratification of the Compacts of Prague. The Pope

refused, and forbade the laity anywhere to receive the Eucharist in

both kinds. On the advice of Gregor Heimburg, a German jurist,

Podebrad in 1464 invited the monarchs of Europe to form a permanent

federation of European states, with its own legislature, executive,

and army, and a judiciary empowered to settle current and future

international disputes. `060816 The kings did not reply; the

reinvigorated papacy was too strong to be defied by a League of

Nations. Pope Paul II declared Podebrad a heretic, freed his

subjects from their oaths of obedience, and called upon Christian

powers to depose him (1466). Matthias Corvinus of Hungary undertook

the task, invaded Bohemia, and was crowned king by a group of Catholic

nobles (1469). Podebrad offered the throne to Ladislas, son of King

Casimir IV of Poland. Then, worn out with war and dropsy, he died,

aged fifty-one (1471). Bohemia, now Czechoslovakia, honors him as,

next to Charles IV, her greatest king.

The Diet accepted Ladislas II, and Matthias retired to Hungary.

The nobles took advantage of the youthful weakness of the King to

consolidate their economic and political power, to reduce the

representation of towns and burghers in the Diet, and to debase into

serfdom the peasantry that had just dreamed of utopia. Thousands of

Bohemians, during this period of revolution and reaction, fled to

other lands. *06026 In 1485 the Catholic and Utraquist parties

signed the Treaty of Kutna Hora, pledging themselves to peace for

thirty years.

In eastern Bohemia and Moravia the followers of Chelcicky formed

(1457) a new Christian sect, the Jednota Bratrska, or Church of the

Brotherhood, dedicated to a simple agricultural life on the principles

of the New Testament. In 1467 it renounced the authority of the

Catholic Church, consecrated its own priests, rejected purgatory and

the worship of saints, anticipated Luther's doctrine of

justification by faith, and became the first modern church to practice

Christianity. By 1500 it claimed 100,000 members. These "Moravian

Brethren" were almost exterminated in the fury of the Thirty Years'

War; they survived through the leadership of John Comenius; they still

exist, in scattered congregations in Europe, Africa, and America,

astonishing a violent and skeptical world with their religious

toleration, their unassuming piety, and their peaceful fidelity to the

principles they profess.

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IV. POLAND: 1300-1505

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The maintenance of peace is difficult even in regions deriving unity

and protection from geographical barriers; consider how much more

difficult it is in states exposed on one or more borders to

neighbors always avid, sometimes tempting, sometimes powerful.

Poland in the fourteenth century was half stifled by Teutonic Knights,

Lithuanians, Hungarians, Moravians, Bohemians, and Germans pressing

upon her frontiers. When Ladislas the Short became grand prince of

Lesser- southern- Poland (1306), he faced a multitude of enemies.

The Germans in Greater- western- Poland rejected his authority; the

Knights seized Danzig and Pomerania; the margrave of Brandenburg

plotted to destroy him; and Wenceslaus III of Bohemia claimed the

Polish throne. Ladislas fought his way through this sea of troubles by

arms, diplomacy, and marriage, united Lesser and Greater Poland into a

coherent kingdom, and had himself crowned at Cracow, his new capital

(1320). Dying at seventy-three (1333), he bequeathed his uneasy throne

to his only son, Casimir the Great.

Some might begrudge Casimir III this title, since he preferred

negotiation and compromise to war. Resigning Silesia to Bohemia, and

Pomerania to the Knights, he consoled himself by acquiring Galicia,

around Lwow, and Mazovia, around Warsaw. He devoted his reign of

thirty-seven years to administration, bringing his varied

territories under one law, "that the state might not look like a

many-headed monster." `060818 Under his direction a group of jurists

unified the divergent legislation and customs of the provinces into

the "Statutes of Casimir"- the first codification of Polish laws,

and a model of humanitarian moderation by comparison with contemporary

codes. Casimir protected Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and other racial or

religious minorities, encouraged education and the arts, established

the University of Cracow (1364), and built so extensively that men

said he had found a Poland of wood and had rebuilt it in stone. He

so wisely promoted all phases of the nation's economy that farmers

hailed him as "the peasants' king," merchants throve in the security

of peace, and all classes called him Great.

Having no male heir, he left his crown to his nephew Louis the Great

of Hungary (1370), hoping to win for his country the protection of a

strong monarchy, and a share in the cultural stimulus that the Angevin

dynasty had brought from Italy and France. But Louis was absorbed in

Hungary, and neglected Poland. To keep the proud nobles loyal to him

in his absence he granted them, by the "Privilege of Kassa" (1374),

exemption from most taxes, and a monopoly of high offices. A war of

succession followed his death (1382). The Seym or Parliament

recognized his daughter Jadwiga, eleven years old, as "king"; but

disorder ended only when Jagello, Great Prince of Lithuania, married

Jadwiga (1386), uniting his spacious realm with Poland, and bringing a

masterful personality to the government.

The growth of Lithuania was a major phenomenon of the fourteenth

century Gedymin and his son Olgierd brought under their pagan rule

nearly all western Russia: Polotsk, Pinsk, Smolensk, Chernigov,

Volhynia, Kiev, Podolia, and the Ukraine; some of these were glad to

find, under the Great Princes, a refuge from the Tatar Golden Horde

that held eastern Russia in fief. When Jagello succeeded Olgierd

(1377) the Lithuanian Empire, governed from Wilno, reached from the

Baltic to the Black Sea, and almost to Moscow itself. This was the

gift that Jagello brought to Jadwiga, or Poland was the dowry that she

brought to him. She was only sixteen at their marriage; she had been

reared as a Roman Catholic in the finest culture of the Latin

Renaissance; he was thirty-six, illiterate and "heathen"; but he

accepted baptism, took the Christian name of Ladislas II, and promised

to convert all Lithuania.

It was a timely union, for the eastward advance of the Teutonic

Knights was endangering both the wedded states. The "Order of the

Cross," originally dedicated to Christianizing the Slavs, had become a

band of martial conquerors, taking by the sword whatever terrain

they could snatch from pagan or Christian, and establishing a harsh

serfdom over lands once tilled by a free peasantry. In 1410 the

Grand Master, from his capital at Marienburg, ruled Esthonia, Livonia,

Courland, Prussia, and eastern Pomerania, shutting Poland off from the

sea. In a ferocious "Northern War" the Grand Master's army and that of

Jagello- each, we are told, 100,000 strong- met in battle near

Grunewald or Tannenberg (1410). The Knights were defeated and fled,

leaving behind them 14,000 prisoners and 18,000 slain- among these the

Grand Master himself. From that day the Order of the Cross rapidly

declined, until in the Peace of Thorn (1466) it ceded Pomerania and

western Prussia to Poland, with the free port of Danzig as a door to

the sea.

During the reign of Casimir IV (1447-92) Poland attained the apex of

her spread, her power, and her art. Though himself quite illiterate,

Casimir ended the knightly scorn of letters by giving his sons a

thorough education. Queen Jadwiga, dying, left her jewels to finance

the reopening of Cracow University- which, in the next century,

would teach Copernicus. Literature, as well as science and philosophy,

used the Latin tongue; in Latin Jan Dlugosz wrote his classic History

of Poland (1478). In 1477 Veit Stoss of Nuremberg was invited to

Cracow; he stayed there seventeen years, and raised the city to a high

place in the art of the time. For the Church of Our Lady he carved 147

choir stalls, and an enormous altarpiece, forty feet by

thirty-three, with a central shrine of the Assumption as impressive as

Titian's painting, and with eighteen panels depicting the life of Mary

and her Son- panels almost worthy, though in wood, to bear

comparison with the bronze doors that Ghiberti had made for the

Florentine Baptistery a generation before. For the cathedral of

Cracow, Stoss cut in red mottled marble a superb tomb for Casimir

IV. With these works Gothic sculpture in Poland reached its crown

and end. In the reign of Casimir's son Sigismund I (1506-48) Polish

art accepted the style of the Italian Renaissance. Lutheranism

seeped in from Germany, and a new age began.

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CHAPTER IX: The Ottoman Tide: 1300-1516

I. SECOND BLOOMING IN BYZANTIUM: 1261-1373

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THE Byzantine Empire, bloodlessly restored under a new Palaeologus

dynasty in 1261, survived despite itself for almost two centuries. Its

territory was reduced by the advance of the Moslems in Asia and

Europe, by the expansion of the Slavs in its rear, and by scattered

fragments of its former self retained by the Christian enemies who had

sacked Constantinople in 1204- Normans, Venetians, and Genoese.

Industry lingered in the towns of the Empire, but its products were

carried in Italian vessels that paid no revenue into the treasury.

Of the once numerous middle class only a fringe remained. Above it

were luxurious nobles and prelates gorgeously garbed, who had

learned nothing from history and had forgotten everything but their

privileges. Below were turbulent layers of monks who salted piety with

politics, and peasant proprietors lapsing into tenancy, and tenant

farmers slipping into serfdom, and proletaires dreaming of

egalitarian utopias. A revolution at Salonika (1341) expelled the

aristocracy, pillaged palaces, and set up a semi-communistic

republic that ruled for eight years before it was suppressed by troops

from the capital. `06091 Constantinople was still a bustling nexus

of commerce, but a Moslem traveler in 1330 noted "many destroyed

houses, and sown fields within the city walls"; and the Spanish

diplomat Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, about 1409, wrote: "Everywhere

throughout the capital are great palaces, churches, and monasteries,

but most of them are in ruins." `06092 The glory had departed from the

Queen of the Bosporus.

Amid this political decay the ever-cherished heritage of ancient

Greek literature and philosophy combined with the Byzantine-Oriental

tradition in architecture and painting to compose the cultural swan

song of the Eastern Roman Empire. The schools still expounded Plato,

Aristotle, and Zeno the Stoic, though they shunned Epicurus as an

atheist; and scholars revised and commented upon classical texts.

Maximus Planudes, Byzantine envoy to Venice, edited the Greek

Anthology, translated Latin classics into Greek, and rebuilt a

cultural bridge between Byzantium and Italy. The career of Theodorus

Metochites illustrates this Palaeologian Renaissance. Prime minister

to Andronicus II, he was at the same time one of the most learned

and prolific scholars of his time. Nicephoras Gregoras, himself savant

and historian, wrote of him: "From morning to evening he was wholly

and eagerly devoted to public affairs, as if scholarship were quite

irrelevant to him; but late in the evening, after having left the

palace, he became absorbed in studies to as high a degree as if he

were a scholar with absolutely no connection with any other

interest." `06093 Theodorus composed history, poetry, astronomy, and

philosophy, of an excellence unmatched by any Greek of that fourteenth

century. In the revolution that dethroned his master, he forfeited

position, fortune, and home, and was cast into prison; but, falling

ill, he was allowed to end his days in the monastery of St. Saviour

"in Chora" (i.e., in the fields), whose walls he had ennobled with

some of the fairest mosaics in Byzantine history.

In philosophy the old contest between Platonists and Aristotelians

recaptured the stage. Emperor John VI Cantacuzene defended

Aristotle, while Plato remained the god of Gemistus Pletho. This

most renowned of the new Greek Sophists studied philosophy at Brusa in

Asia Minor, when that city was already the capital of the Ottoman

advance. From a Jewish teacher there he learned the lore of the

Zoroastrians; and when he returned to his native Peloponnesus- then

renamed Morea- he had probably abandoned the Christian faith. Settling

down at Mistra, he became both a judge and a professor. In 1400 he

wrote a treatise bearing Plato's title, The Laws, in which he

proposed the replacement of both Christianity and Mohammedanism by the

religion of ancient Greece, merely transforming all the Olympians

but Zeus into symbolic personifications of creative processes or

ideas; Pletho did not know that religions are born, not made.

Nevertheless pupils gathered around him eagerly; one of them, Johannes

Bessarion, was destined to become a humanist cardinal in Italy. Both

Gemistus and Bessarion accompanied Emperor John VIII to Ferrara and

Florence (1438) to attend the council in which the Greek and Roman

churches were for a moment reconciled in theology and politics. At

Florence Gemistus lectured on Plato to an elite audience, and almost

touched off the Italian Renaissance. It was there that he added the

cognomen Pletho (complete) to his name, playing upon both gemistos

(full) and Platon. Returning to Mistra he subsided theologically,

became an archbishop, and died at ninety-five (1450).

The revival of art was as marked as the rejuvenation of letters. The

themes and figures were still ecclesiastical; but now and then a touch

of landscape, a breath of naturalism, a new warmth of color and line

gave life to the mosaics. Those recently uncovered in the Chora

monastery (the Kahriye-Jami Mosque) have so much vitality that Western

historians profess to see in them some fresh Italian influence. In the

frescoes that increasingly replaced expensive mosaics in the

decoration of churches and palaces, the ecclesiastical hold relaxed,

and figures of vivid fantasy and secular story appeared beside the

legends of the saints. The icon-makers, however, clung to the old

hieratic style- forms thinned, faces burning with a puritanic piety

strikingly absent from the morals of the time. Byzantine miniature

painting suffered now a sharp decline, but the weaving of pictorial

designs into silk still produced masterpieces unrivaled in the Western

world. The so-called "Dalmatic of Charlemagne" dates from the

fourteenth or fifteenth century; on a base of blue-dyed silk an artist

designed, a skillful artisan wove in silk threads of silver and

gold, scenes from the life of Mary, Christ, and divers saints. Similar

splendors of textile painting took form in this age in Salonika,

Serbia, Moldavia, and Russia.

Greece was now again a center of great art. As the thirteenth

century neared its end the Franks who had dotted the classic sites

with picturesque castles made way for the revived Byzantine power.

In 1348 the Emperor John VI sent his son Manuel to be despotes of

the Morea. He established his provincial seat on a hill overlooking

the ancient Sparta. To the new capital came nobles, patrons, monks,

artists, scholars, and philosophers. Magnificent monasteries were

built, and three of them have kept in their churches some of their

medieval frescoes: the Metropolis and Peribleptos abbeys from the

fourteenth century, the Pantanassa from the early fifteenth. These are

the finest murals in the long history of Byzantine art. In their

precise draftsmanship, in the flowing grace of their figures, in the

depth and glow of their colors, they compare with the best frescoes of

the same period in Italy; indeed, they may owe some of their novel

grace to Cimabue, Giotto, or Duccio- who all owed so much to

Byzantium.

On the eastern coast of Greece, high on the promontory of Mount

Athos, monasteries had been raised in the tenth century, and in most

centuries since: in the fourteenth the majestic Pantocrator, in the

fifteenth St. Paul's. Of the murals in these retreats an

eighteenth-century Greek Guide to Painting ascribed the best to

Manuel Panselinos of Salonika, who "showed such brilliance and skill

in his art that he was raised above all painters ancient or

modern." `06094 But of Manuel's dates or works there is no

certainty; he may have belonged to the eleventh or the sixteenth

century; and no one can say which of the paintings on Mount Athos

are from his hand.

While Byzantine art experienced this final ecstasy, the Byzantine

government declined. The army was in disorder, the navy in decay;

Genoese or Venetian vessels controlled the Black Sea, and pirates

roamed the Greek archipelago. A band of mercenaries from Catalonia-

the "Catalan Grand Company"- captured Gallipoli (1306), mulcted the

commerce of the Dardanelles, and set up a republic of robbers in

Athens (1310); no government succeeded in suppressing them, and they

were left to be consumed by their own violence. In 1307 Pope Clement V

joined France, Naples, and Venice in a plot to recapture

Constantinople. The plot fell apart, but for many years the

Byzantine emperors were so fearful of the Christian West that they had

no energy or courage to resist the Moslem advance. When that fear

subsided the Ottoman Turks were at the door.

Some of the emperors bought their own destruction. In 1342 John VI

Cantacuzene, involved in civil war, asked aid of Orkhan, Sultan of the

Ottomans; Orkhan sent him ships and helped him take Salonika; the

grateful Emperor gave him his daughter Theodora as an extra wife;

the Sultan sent him 6,000 additional troops. When John Palaeologus

undertook to depose him, John Cantacuzene robbed the churches of

Constantinople to pay Orkhan for 20,000 more Turks, and promised the

Sultan a fortress in the Thracian Chersonese. In the hour of his

apparent victory the people of Constantinople turned against him as

a traitor, and revolution transformed him overnight from an emperor

into an historian (1355). He retired to a monastery, and wrote the

history of his times as a last attempt to overwhelm his enemies.

John V Palaeologus found no ease on the throne. He went to Rome as a

suppliant (1369), and offered, in return for help against the Turks,

to bring his people into obedience to the papacy. Before the high

altar of St. Peter's he abjured the Greek Orthodox Church. Pope

Urban V promised aid against the infidels, and gave him letters to the

princes of Christendom. But these were busy with other affairs.

Instead of receiving assistance, John was held at Venice as a

hostage for the payment of Greek debts. His son Manuel brought the

money; John returned to Constantinople poorer than before, and was

denounced by his people for forswearing the Orthodox creed. Failing in

a second attempt to get succor from the West, he recognized Sultan

Murad I as his suzerain, agreed to provide military aid to the Ottoman

army, and gave his beloved Manuel as hostage for the fulfillment of

his pledge. `06095 Appeased for the moment, Murad spared Byzantium,

and turned to subjugate the Balkans.

II. THE BALKANS MEET THE TURKS: 1300-96

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Hitherto the fourteenth century had been for the Balkans a peak in

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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