DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63447#0179
THE CRUSADES.
163
mercial territories. The Jew and the Lombard were
ever willing to advance what was immediately necessary,
and to promise more. The scanty notices that remain
prove to us the exorbitant rates of interest at which these
sums were placed. The great abbeys, too, probably the
wealthiest agricultural corporations ever known, were at
hand to purchase, or to grant annuities on seigneurial
fiefs, the owners of which were willing to try fortune in
a brighter clime ; consequently the land was parcelled
out into smaller holdings. The men who remained un-
moved by the whirlwind of fashion, fanaticism, and
ambition, were precisely those unobtrusive, but calm and
steady votaries of rational improvements, of which half
savage countries stand so much in need to till the soil,
plant the orchard, erect the mill, and seek for the mine.
Accordingly we soon begin to discern an era of relative
improvement in all useful arts in France, immediately
after the first Crusade.
Besides this, the experiences of the Crusaders, under
circumstances fair or foul, as they struggled towards the
East, were calculated to bridge over the chasm which
had hitherto existed between lord and vassal, a chasm,
even under the Christian dispensation, which we can
hardly now conceive, and could hardly credit, but for
the unquestioned written evidence of law, and the still
more undeniable traces of its worst features which have
but recently been redeemed at great personal sacrifices,
even in Italy believed to be the foster-mother of civiliza-
tion.1
The life of the serf existed then pretty much at the
mercy or will of his lord. He might be tortured without
a question being asked, or plundered without a word of
sympathy. Centuries after the first Crusade, one of the
demands of the serfs in the “peasant war” of Germany
was “ the free permission to commit suicide ”; that is, that
the family and property of the suicide should not suffer by
1 The feudal rights, in all their revolting brutality, were in full force In
the Abruzzi under the late king, and the women of Campobasso
ransomed themselves formally for half a million of francs.
163
mercial territories. The Jew and the Lombard were
ever willing to advance what was immediately necessary,
and to promise more. The scanty notices that remain
prove to us the exorbitant rates of interest at which these
sums were placed. The great abbeys, too, probably the
wealthiest agricultural corporations ever known, were at
hand to purchase, or to grant annuities on seigneurial
fiefs, the owners of which were willing to try fortune in
a brighter clime ; consequently the land was parcelled
out into smaller holdings. The men who remained un-
moved by the whirlwind of fashion, fanaticism, and
ambition, were precisely those unobtrusive, but calm and
steady votaries of rational improvements, of which half
savage countries stand so much in need to till the soil,
plant the orchard, erect the mill, and seek for the mine.
Accordingly we soon begin to discern an era of relative
improvement in all useful arts in France, immediately
after the first Crusade.
Besides this, the experiences of the Crusaders, under
circumstances fair or foul, as they struggled towards the
East, were calculated to bridge over the chasm which
had hitherto existed between lord and vassal, a chasm,
even under the Christian dispensation, which we can
hardly now conceive, and could hardly credit, but for
the unquestioned written evidence of law, and the still
more undeniable traces of its worst features which have
but recently been redeemed at great personal sacrifices,
even in Italy believed to be the foster-mother of civiliza-
tion.1
The life of the serf existed then pretty much at the
mercy or will of his lord. He might be tortured without
a question being asked, or plundered without a word of
sympathy. Centuries after the first Crusade, one of the
demands of the serfs in the “peasant war” of Germany
was “ the free permission to commit suicide ”; that is, that
the family and property of the suicide should not suffer by
1 The feudal rights, in all their revolting brutality, were in full force In
the Abruzzi under the late king, and the women of Campobasso
ransomed themselves formally for half a million of francs.