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HEART OF EUROPE

A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE

Between the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche-Comt?; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Li?ge; Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblentz, and Tr?ves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Caesar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names.

And in all these places, and by all these men , two thousand years had wrought their visible manifestation in abbey, church, and cathedral; in manor and palace and castle, in trade hall and civic hall, and in library and seminary and school.

Wars, great and small, have swept it from river to river, but much has been free for a century and all of it free for forty years. Under every oppression and every adversity it has thriven and grown rich, not in material things alone, but in those commodities that have actual intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was the most prosperous, peaceful, and industrious quarter of Europe. Whatever the war, however violent the opposing agencies, its priceless records of architecture and other acts were piously or craftily spared, except when the madness of the French Revolution swept over its convents and cloisters, leaving Coxyde, Villers, St. Bavon, St. Jean des Vignes, the Abbaye des Lys, dead witnesses of the faith that had built them and the spared monuments as well.

And now a thing calling itself the highest civilisation in Europe, with the name of God in its mouth, again sweeps the already well-swept land. In defiance of Peace Palaces and Conferences; in spite of the bankers of the world and their double-knotted purse-strings; in spite of a socialism that said war should not happen again, and an evolutionary philosophy that said it could not happen again , the world is at war, and the old arena of Europe flames as at Armageddon, while those things too sacred for pillage and destruction by the armies and the commanders of five centuries are given over to annihilation in order that the peril of the Slav, on the other side of Europe, may not menace the treasured civilisation of the West, whose vestiges even now are blazing pyres, or cinders and ashes!

It is significant that thus far the heavy hand of the pursuer has fallen notably on two things: the school and the church; for these are two of the three things he most fears and hates. Not the school, as with him, where secularism, through economic materialism and a sinister philosophy, breeds a race as unprincipled as it is efficient and fearless, nor the church, as with him, where intellectualism ousts faith, expediency morals, and God is glad "ably to support" the victorious battalions of a crown prince. Quite otherwise; the school that teaches both independence and regard for law, with religion as the only basis for right conduct, and the Church that teaches humility and the reality of sin, and the subservience of all rulers, whether king or parliament, to the religion and the authority of a living Christ speaking to-day as He spoke on the Mount of Olives.

When the University of Louvain passed in the smoke and flame of a murdered city; when the Church of St. Pierre and the Cathedral of Malines and the Shrine of Our Lady of Reims were shattered by bombs and swept by devouring fire, there was something in it all other than the grim necessity of a savage war; there was the symbol of a new thing in the world, built on all Louvain, Malines, and Reims had denied, and destroying the very outward show of what could not exist on earth side by side with its potent and dominant negation.

Thus far, of the great cities, Li?ge, Louvain, Malines, Ypres, Arras, and Reims are gone, with the greater part of their treasured art, while Laon, Soissons, and Namur have been grievously wrecked. Apparently, Amiens, Noyon, Bruges, and Ghent are now safe, but endless opportunities open for destruction and pillage, and we may well be prepared for irreparable loss before the invader is hurled back across his natural river frontier. Let us consider, not what already has been annihilated, but the kind of art it was, so measuring, in a degree, the quality of our loss--and of what we still may lose.

First of all, there are the towns themselves, for all art is not concentrated in h?tel de ville and cathedral; it shows itself sometimes in more appealing guise in the river villages and proud cities, and its testimony to a great past is here equally potent. Ypres, Malines, Dinant, Termonde, and Huy, all of which are gone, were treasures that belonged to all the world; Namur and Plombi?res we could not spare, and as for Bruges and Ghent, even apart from their exquisite architecture and their treasures of painting, the soul shudders at what might happen there were they involved in the retreat of a disorganised army, when one considers what happened to Li?ge and Louvain in its victorious advance. All Belgium and Luxembourg, all Picardy and Champagne are, or were, rich with lovely little towns and villages, each a work of art in itself; they are shrivelling like a garden under the first frost, and, it may be, in a little while none will remain.

The major architecture of this unhappy land falls into three classes and three periods of time. Oldest and most priceless are the churches, and these are of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the ages when religion was one and secure and was building a great civilisation that we would fain see equalled again. Then come the town halls and guildhalls of the fifteenth century, each speaking for the proud freedom of merchant and burgher, when the hold of religion was weakening a little, and the first signs were showing themselves of what, in the end, was to have issue in this war of wars; finally come the town houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in all their quaint individuality and their overriding self-esteem, though fine still, and with hints of the great art that already had passed.

Brussels is full of these, and Antwerp; Louvain had them, and Ypres, Termonde, Arras, and Charleville, only a few months ago; in Bruges and Ghent they fill whole streets and stand in silent accusation of what we of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have offered as our contribution to the housing of civilisation.

Of the civic halls the list is endless: Brussels, Malines, Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, Antwerp, Mons, Audenaarde, Termonde and Li?ge; Compi?gne, St. Quentin, Arras, Valenciennes; ranging from the grave solemnity of the enormous and wide-spread Ypres to the lacy fantasticism of Louvain and Audenaarde. Architecture has gone far from the Salle Synodale of Sens and the Merveille of Mont-St.-Michel, and it has not gone altogether well, but how significant these stone fancies are of the abounding life and the splendid pride and the open-handed beneficence of the fifteenth-century burghers, who loved their towns and bent the rebellious masonry to their will, working it into a kind of stony lace and embroidery to the glory of trade and civic spirit! If we should lose them now, as we almost lost Louvain, standing in the midst of the roaring flame and drifting smoke, while tall churches and rich universities and fair old houses crumbled and died around it, what should we not lose?

And the churches, those matchless monuments, four, five, and six centuries old, where generations have brought all their best to glorify God, where glass and sculpture, tapestries and fretted woodwork, pictures, and gold and silver wrought cunningly into immortal art--how are we to speak of these, or think of them, with St. Pierre of Louvain and St. Rombaut of Malines still smoking with their dying fires, while piece by piece the calcined stone falls in the embers, and while Reims, one of the wonders of the world, stands gaunt and shattered, wrecked by bombs, swept by fire, its windows that rivalled Chartres split into irremediable ruin, its statues devastated that once stood on a level with the sculptures of Greece?

Those that cry loudest for the sanctity of human life and its priority before art and letters, most insistently hurl a hundred thousand lives against inevitable death, and spread black starvation over myriads of women and children, in order that their privilege of selling inferior and unnecessary products to far-away savages may be preserved intact. Against this set the cathedrals and universities and the exquisite art of France and Belgium and the Rhine; consider what it meant once, what it means even now, what for the future it is destined to mean as never before.

For the old passes: the old that began with Machiavelli and is ending with von Bernhardi. It is not alone Prussia that will be purged by the fire of an inevitable conflict, nor Germany, nor all the Teuton lands; it is the whole world, that sold its birthright for a mess of pottage and now, in terror of the price at last to be paid, denounces the infamous contract and fights to the death against the armies of the Moloch it helped to fashion. And when the field is won, what happens but the coming into its own again of the very power that made Reims and Louvain, the recovery of the old and righteous and Christian standard of values, the building on the ruins of five centuries of a new civilisation where whatever art that remains will play its due part as the revealer of that Absolute Truth that brought it into being, forgotten now for very long? Then the pictures of Flanders and Umbria and Tuscany, the sculpture of France, the music of Teuton and Slav, the "minor arts" of all mediaevalism, the architecture of Bourges and Amiens and Chartres will both reveal and inspire with doubled power.

And in all and through all, Reims in its ruin will be a more potent agency of regeneration than the perfection of Chartres or the finality of Bourges.

I should like to consider, though briefly and in the light of a very real unity that negatived the political disunity that has always prevailed, the art of these lands where for a twelvemonth millions of men have fought after a fashion never known before, while around them each day saw the irreparable destruction of the best that man could do for the love of God, and better than he can do now. In spite of constantly changing

frontiers and dynastic vicissitudes, the great unity of mediaevalism blends the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Artois, Champagne, Eastern Normandy, Eastern France, into a consistent whole, so far as all real things are concerned. In spite of its bickerings and fightings and jealousies and plots and counterplots, Europe was really more united, more a working whole, during the Middle Ages than ever it has been since. One religion and one philosophy did for the fluctuant states what the Reformation, democracy, and "enlightenment" could only undo, and in this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest history man can record, we find the dynamic force, the creative power, of a culture and a civilisation that took little count of artificial barriers between perfectly artificial nations, but included all in the greatest and most beneficent syntheses Europe has ever known.

The art of this land--or these lands, if you like--should be so considered; not as an interesting and even stimulating by-product of social, industrial, and political evolution, with only an accidental relationship to them, and only an empirical interest for the men of to-day, but as the most perfect material expression of the great reality that existed through and by these agencies that were in themselves nothing; the character that emerged through the turmoil of human activity, as it shows itself in the men and women of the time, and expresses itself in their art.

To do this fully is impossible; every province would require a volume, every art a series of volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the more salient qualities of the greater masterpieces, and try to co-ordinate them into some outward semblance of that essential unity they both promised and expressed.

THE FORGING OF MEDIAEVALISM

It is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country--or the men that made it great--was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of mediaevalism, even though for its full manifestation you must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia.

The great empires of to-day, England, France, Germany, Italy, two of which have eaten steadily into its territories until only a tiny Luxembourg remains, together with a small new state with a novel name made greater and more lasting by the events of a year than those of its predecessors, have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, taking to themselves at the same time credit, that is none of theirs, for men and happenings that made ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory, the high achievements of the small old states are forgotten. And yet, out of these little dukedoms and counties and free cities came the men who made France and Germany, who determined the genius of mediaevalism, imparted to it the high soul and the swift hand of its peculiar personality, and gave to the world the memory and tradition of faith and heroism, together with so much of that inimitable art that was its perfect showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible monument of its accomplishment.

National unity this territory and these peoples have never possessed. During the Roman dominion they formed the provinces of Germania and Belgica, in the diocese of Gaul; under the Merovings all was comprised in the Frankish kingdom, the old line between the Roman provinces remaining to divide Austrasia and Neustria, as the northern and southern sections came to be called under the Carolings. With the disruption of the empire of Charlemagne, Austrasia went to the kingdom of the East Franks, Neustria to that of the West Franks, the former becoming the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine, the latter Flanders and Champagne. When Otto the Great restored the Holy Roman Empire in A. D. 962, the Lorraines of course formed a part. These comprised all that is now Germany west of the Rhine, together with all of Belgium except Flanders, Luxembourg, and a strip of territory along the northeast frontier of France. Westward to the Seine the land was divided into many feudal holdings, Flanders, which then comprised not only northern Belgium but the present French departments of Nord and Pas de Calais; Champagne, Amiens, Vermandois, Laon, Reims, Ch?lons. During the Middle Ages Lower Lorraine became the duchy of Brabant and the county of Hainault. Upper Lorraine, Luxembourg and Bar, southern Flanders, Artois. Picardy and Valois became entities, and the great bishoprics of Cologne, Tr?ves, Strasbourg, Cambray, Li?ge acquired more and more land until they were principalities in themselves.

During the fifteenth century the magnificent efforts of the dukes of Burgundy to create for themselves an independent state between France and the Empire, and reaching from the Rhine to the Aisne, from the Alps to the sea, resulted in a partial and temporary unification of the old Belgian lands, but with the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482, the whole territory became more and more closely knit into the Empire, France losing even her claim to suzerainty over Flanders; all the lands west of the Meuse and over the Rhine as far as the Ems became the Netherlands, comprising roughly what is now Holland and Belgium. The duchies of Luxembourg, Bar, and Lorraine, with the Palatinate, shared all that lay between the Meuse and the Rhine, save what the great bishoprics had assumed to themselves, while Burgundy and Lorraine were definitively merged in France.

Then came the Spanish dominion over the whole territory, barring the duchy of Julich along the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the severing of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine from the Spanish territories; finally, in 1715, after 160 years of ruinous domination, Spain was driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg, maintaining herself there until the time of Napoleon a century later, when for a few years everything as far as the Rhine, together with the Netherlands on the other side, was incorporated in France. With the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic empire, Holland and Belgium, as we know them now, came into existence, the lands of the duchy of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to Bavaria. Luxembourg was reduced to its existing area and the French frontier delimited as it is now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost in 1870.

Between the upper and nether millstones of France and the Empire, the Heart of Europe for fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments of ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into unity, but producing ever in spite of political chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifestations of the vigour and nobility of race, great figures to uphold and enforce the lofty principles that have made so much of the brilliant history of mediaeval Europe, and all centring around the lands of the many tribes who from earliest times were known as the Belgae.

Meanwhile the Franks had come on the scene, though their name is rather a rallying-cry than a mark of race, meaning only that certain of the tribes of Gaul, with others of the Belgae, were determined to be free--as they became shortly and as they have generally remained ever since. Now the Salian Franks were the dwellers in Flanders and Brabant and under their Duke Clodion had extended their borders as far as Soissons. Clodion's successor, Merovaeus, was grandfather of Clovis, the first Christian king of the north. The Merovings, then, are neither strictly of Gaul nor of Germany, but of the Heart of Europe itself, and their blood, like that of their followers, a mingling of Germanic and Celtic and Roman strains.

Ch?lons saw them allied with the Romans and driving back the fierce tide of the earlier Huns that threatened to beat out the last flicker of light in Europe: Tolbiac saw them hurl back the savage Allemanni, in the year 496, again preserving the European tradition from submergence under barbarian hordes, nor was this the last time they were to perform this service. Already Clovis had married Clotilde, niece of the Duke of Burgundy, so bringing another region into close contact with his own, and now, after the successful issue of the battle of Tolbiac, when he had first called on the God of Christians, he presented himself before the Archbishop of Reims, St. Remi, for baptism, where he heard the significant words: "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian! destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed."

Whatever the motive, and however inadequate the performance of his new obligations by Clovis, his baptism is one of the crucial events in history, marking the end of paganism as a controlling force, and with the conquest of Italy by Theodoric and the promulgation of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, the beginning of the great Christian era of culture and civilisation that was to endure, unimpaired, for a thousand years.

The dominion of Clovis comprised all that is now France south to the Loire and Burgundy, with Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Bavaria, but his capital was at Tournai, and he was in fact even more a Belgian than a French sovereign. Under him all the Franks were united and his power was such that the Emperor at Constantinople made him patrician, consul, and Augustus. With his death in 511 began a long era of division and reunion, of internecine warfare and the plotting of jealous women, two of whom, Fredegonde personifying the Gallic influence, Brunhilde the Germanic, fostered a conflict that hardly came to an end before the fall of the dynasty.

Little by little the Merovings broke away from their racial Belgic affiliations, Soissons became the capital rather than Tournai, and at last by a dramatic turn of fate another Belgian race brought the decrepit line to its term and founded a new and a nobler house. Pepin of Landen, in the province of Li?ge, became mayor of the palace and the active influence in royal affairs, somewhere about the year 620, and it was a son of his daughter, Pepin of Herstel who was father of Charles Martel, who in his turn was the grandfather of Charlemagne.

As the Huns and the Allemanni had been rolled back from their savage incursions by the aid of men of Belgic nationality, so now the greater threat of an onrushing Mohammedanism was to be dispelled by another and a greater personality, Charles the Hammer, a soldier of consummate ability, the real ruler of all the Franks, and the victor at the battle of Tours when final decision was reached as to whether Europe was for the future to be Moslem or Christian.

There were more reasons than that of policy for this alliance. Practically abandoned by the Roman Emperors in the east, Italy had been the prey of tribe after tribe of northern savages, and the Papacy was the only centre of order and authority. In spite of this the Popes still shrank from severing themselves wholly from the imperial centre, but the iconoclastic controversy had resulted in what was both heresy and schism on the part of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and communion was no longer possible. Moreover, all the other northern tribes that had accepted Christianity--Goths, Vandals, Lombards--had adopted the Arian heresy and were therefore even more distasteful to Rome than unconverted heathen. This condition of things justified the Papacy in its attitude of intolerance, and when Pepin came to the throne, it was almost at the last gasp, through persecution, spoliation, and outrage at the hands of the Teutonic Arians. The Frankish kingdom alone was Catholic, and enthusiastically Catholic, and it is small wonder that to the Pope the rise of a great and powerful and Catholic nation under the dominating Carolings came as a special mercy from heaven--as, indeed, it was.

With the death of Pepin and the accession of his son Charles--known now for all time as Charlemagne--the curtain rose on one of the most brilliant dramas of history. The Lombards had again revolted; Pope Hadrian called on the Franks in despair; King Charles hurled his armies into Italy like an avalanche, captured and deposed Desiderius, last of the Lombard kings, proclaimed himself King of Lombardy, pressed on to Rome, and was welcomed there by the Supreme Pontiff as the saviour of Christendom.

Aix-la-Chapelle is the very centre of the land and the people that built up the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages, and it was here that Charlemagne fixed his chief place of residence. During his lifetime it was the very, and the only, centre of order and of culture in Europe. A great warrior, he was an even greater administrator, while as the restorer of learning and the patron of art and letters he was perhaps greatest of all. When he came to the throne there lay behind him nearly four centuries of absolute anarchy and barbarism, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the marches of the Teutonic savages. What he built he built from the ground upward, and though his was only the "false dawn" that heralds the day, passing utterly, so far as one could see, within a generation after his death, it was the saving of Europe, the preservation of the succession, that, the second Dark Ages overpassed, guaranteed the coming in of the great era that began with the millennial year of Christianity and lasted for five full centuries.

Under his direction a complete administrative system was established over the unwieldy empire; local governments were set up, with a system of regular visitations from the central authority, and in this way the foundations were laid for the counties of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, into which, together with Vermandois, Valois, Amiens, and Champagne, this territory of our survey was divided during the Middle Ages.

In religion, education, and art Charlemagne went far beyond his predecessors for five centuries, so far as the form and re-creation are concerned. Separated at last from the church in the East, now definitely schismatic, heretical, and Erastian, the Papacy was in a position to go on unhindered in its development, and Charlemagne became not only a defender but a zealous and enthusiastic reformer. Monasticism was universally strengthened and extended, new bishoprics were founded, the state of the Holy See purified, while schools were established in connection with cathedrals and monasteries throughout the Empire. Charles had a great passion for scholars and artists, gathering them from Italy, Spain, England, wherever, indeed, they were to be found, and for a time his court was the nucleus of culture in the West. Architecture was reborn, all the ravelled threads from Rome, Constantinople, Ravenna, Syria were gathered up and knit together, and though few authentic works from among the myriads of the Emperor's creation still remain, we know from what we have, and chiefly the royal chapel at Aix, that the result was the restoring once more of a line of continuity after the vast vacancy of the Dark Ages, and the initiation of a new vitality that, after the second Dark Ages, was to serve as the energising power that brought Romanesque art into existence and made possible the great glory of Gothic.

Great as he was, Charlemagne had all the weaknesses of his racial tradition, and by yielding to these his era was his alone, nor could it outlast his personal influence. Divided between his successors, the Empire rapidly and naturally fell to pieces during the lifetime of Louis le Debonnaire, who for a brief period had succeeded in uniting it again, and during the second Dark Ages, from 850 to 1000 A. D., there is no more of note to record in this region than in any other part of Europe. The era had culminated under Charlemagne; it was now to sink to its end, as always had happened before, as always, so far as we can see, must continue to happen. Not until the turn of the tide at the year 1000 could a real recovery begin. In the meantime history is little more than a series of personal contests, but out of these certain beginnings are made that are to have issue in great things, and amongst these are the appearance of the first Baldwin of Flanders and the establishing of the first hereditary title, and therefore the oldest in Europe. Baldwin of the Iron Arm successfully fought the Vikings, driving them west until they were forced to content themselves with the land they ultimately made immortal as Normandy. His son married a daughter of Alfred the Great, so establishing a certain connection between England and Flanders, and by fortifying Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, and Courtrai, he did much toward fixing these cities as centres of municipal life and of that fierce independence that marked them for so many generations.

With the opening of the new era, at the beginning of the eleventh century, a new vitality shows itself in the land. William of Normandy had become the son-in-law of Baldwin V, and from Flanders many knights joined the Conqueror for his invasion of England, one becoming first Earl of Northumberland, another first Earl of Chester. Under Baldwin VI complete peace was restored to the distracted provinces, while the Charter of Grammont is a landmark in that development

of personal and civil liberty which is one of the great glories of mediaevalism. The Tribunal of Peace, established by the Bishop of Li?ge, is another shining sign of the times, while the defeat of France in its attacks on Flemish independence assured a long period of splendid development.

This was enhanced by the Crusades, and here, particularly in the first, the Heart of Europe showed the quality of the blood that was its life. Whatever the Crusades may have become after long years, they were in their earliest impulse supreme examples of human faith, unselfishness, devotion, heroism, and piety. The redemption of the Holy Places of Christianity from the infidel became a passion, and the protagonist, the moving and vitalising spirit, was one Peter the Hermit, of the province of Li?ge, who, crucifix in hand, toiled through eastern France, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, as well as through his own country, exhorting prince and peasant to take up arms for the freeing of the Holy Land from the Saracen.

His success was almost miraculous, for the great adventure appealed to every instinct of the time--piety, reverence, chivalry, romance, the passion for a new and venturesome and knightly quest--and in less than two years the Pope himself set his seal of approbation on the First Crusade. In Clermont, in the year 1095, surrounded by four hundred bishops and mitred abbots, he cried to the waiting multitudes of Europe: "Are we called upon to see in this century the desolation of Christianity and to remain at peace the while our holy religion is given over into the hands of the oppressor? Here is a lawful war; go, defend the House of Israel!" Almost with a single voice Europe made answer with the rallying-cry: "God wills it!" Every scarlet garment was shredded in pieces to furnish crosses which were sewn to the shoulders; some even branded themselves with the sign of the cross by means of red-hot irons.

Within another year an army of 100,000 men had been gathered together, under the leadership of Peter, himself, and it poured across Europe as far as Constantinople, a disorganised and impotent mob. It met its fate as soon as it had crossed the Bosporus into Saracen territory, and only a shattered remnant, including the originator of the mad venture, ever returned to its home. In the meantime, however, a greater captain than Peter the Hermit, and of the same race, was gathering the enormous host that succeeded where he had failed. Godfrey of Bouillon, of the province of Li?ge, a great scholar and greater soldier, gathered 90,000 knights and men-at-arms in Flanders and Brabant, and set out for Jerusalem on the 10th of August, 1096. A month later the French under command of the King's brother, and the Flemings under Robert, Count of Flanders, followed in his track. Baldwin of Bourg, the Counts of Hainault, Namur, Grez, Audenaarde, and Ypres, with knights of Dixmude, Alost, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Tournai were amongst the leaders, and a concentration was effected at Constantinople when there were no less than 600,000 in all. Crossing into Asia, the great host swept onward from one victory to another; the battle of Dorylaeum, fought on the 4th of July, 1097, proved them invincible. Tarsus and Antioch fell, and nothing lay between them and Jerusalem. The city was besieged and finally carried by assault, the attack beginning on the 14th of July, and after a week of incessant fighting on the walls and through the streets, Jerusalem was wholly in the hands of the Crusaders. But the host that set out from its many sources in Europe had vanished and only a tenth of the original number remained to fight the relieving army from Egypt at Ascalon, and to organise the victory. Five hundred thousand men had perished on the long march, died of disease, or fallen in battle.

Godfrey of Bouillon became the first King of Jerusalem, the choice resting between him and Robert of Flanders. He reigned only a year, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who had made himself Count of Edessa, and whose descendants continued on the throne for several generations.

In all the succeeding Crusades, Flanders and Brabant, Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy played leading parts, and in the fifth, when the arms of the knights were turned from the relief of Jerusalem to the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, another Baldwin of Flanders was leader, and, after the fall of Constantinople, became the first Latin Emperor of the East, his dynasty continuing on the throne for fifty years.

Amazing as were the results of the Crusades, with the conquering of the Saracens in the Holy Land, and the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, a Walloon being crowned first King of Jerusalem and a Fleming first Latin Emperor of Byzantium, the local results had no permanency, Jerusalem falling again to the Mussulmans after a century and a half, Constantinople reverting to the Eastern line at about the same time. In Europe, however, the results had been of profound import; directly, the Crusades had had a vast influence in determining the temper and the course of mediaevalism, indirectly they had laid the foundations of the industrial supremacy of the Belgian cities and of the emancipation of the people from feudalism. The Saracen of the twelfth century was the antithesis of the Ottoman Turk of to-day, and from him the Crusaders learned much to their advantage, while from the Eastern Empire came new impulses toward the development of a broader culture than the West alone could have achieved. So far as the cities of Flanders, Brabant, and Lorraine were concerned, the absence of their martial and turbulent knights was by no means an unmixed catastrophe. The vast expeditions demanded vast expenditures: money came generally into use in place of barter; the common people who remained at home developed their industries, increased their wealth, and in the end took into their own hands much of the business of the government. The habit and tradition of independence and liberty which so grew up, maintained itself steadily against all assaults, nor has it lapsed or waned, as the last year has gloriously proved, and many of the tall towers that became the recognised symbol of civic independence still stand in testimony, though one by one they are falling before the armed negation of all they rose to proclaim.

FLANDERS AND BRABANT

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