By the Dyle, at Mechlin.By the Dyle, at Mechlin.BY THE DYLE, AT MECHLIN.Click to view larger image.
BY THE DYLE, AT MECHLIN.
Click to view larger image.
But if there are no authentic chronicles of the lives of the early saints of Brabant, we know that their lives were not lived in vain; the bountiful harvest which was reaped by after generations bears witness to the excellence of the seed which these men had sown, and to the care and the diligence with which they and their successors had tended it; and after all theecclesiastical seal of canonisation has been in most cases, especially in these early days, the outcome rather than the cause of popular devotion. As Taine shrewdly notes, man is too envious and too egoistical to lavish gratitude where none is due, and the estimation in which they were held by the people is sufficient proof of their sterling worth. We see them pale, shadowy, vague, like the white cloud which hovered over the battlefield of Louvain, but the victors saw in that white cloud, 'la benoite vierge Marie et Saint Lambert avec Monsieur Saint Pierre semblant de vouloir secourir le peuple Chrétien,' and so heartened were they by the vision that they put to flight the Pagan host, and no less fruitful in results are the forgotten lives and the forgotten labours of those great pioneers of civilisation who to-day are for us but as beautiful phantoms.
The victory of Louvain (Sept. 10, 891) marks an epoch in the history of Brabant. The Danes under Rolf the Ganger, who later on became first Duke of Normandy, were utterly routed, and though they succeeded in rallying their forces and for a few months continued their devastations in the Ardennes, Brabant at least was free of them, and after the storming of 'a certain stronghold newly constructed upon an exceeding high mountain whither a vast multitude of them had taken refuge,' the Pagan host was disbanded and as if by enchantment melted away.
Perhaps the peasants, descendants of men who had been driven to the font, had at first lent assistance to the invaders, and that now at last convinced that Thor was not mighty enough to withstand Christ they had withdrawn their co-operation.
For well-nigh a century the storm had raged and the brunt of its fury had fallen on the Church, for it was not greed alone which had driven forth these fierce pirates from their homes in the north, but, and in the first place perhaps, a fiery zeal for their time-honoured traditions and their time-honoured faith: they would have rebuilt their broken altars and brought back the old gods to the lands from which they had been banished.
It was toward the close of the year 880 that the Danes, who had ere this made themselves masters of Holland and Friesland, for the first time visited Brabant.Coming up the Scheldt in their long black boats, they presently ascended the Dyle as far as 'a place called Lovon,' as a contemporary writer has it, where the river ceases to be navigable. This is the first time that Louvain is mentioned in history; it was then what its name signifies—forest and fen. Here they made camp on a little island formed by two branches of the stream, and the site of the future capital of Brabant became their headquarters. From thence they issued daily, and the usual consequences followed—churches and monasteries went up in flames, altars were cast down, and those who served them tortured and slain; whilst the most cherished objects of Christian worship were profaned and trampled in the dust.
In the vast diocese of Liége, which embraced at this time the whole country between the Meuse and the Dyle, hardly a sacred building was left standing. At Mechlin, the only one of the five great towns of Brabant which had as yet begun to exist, there was not a church but was reduced to ashes. So, too, further afield at Tongres, St. Trond, Maestricht, where the Danes had another camp. In the episcopal city itself they fired the church and the monastery of St. Caprais, and cut the throats of the monks. The monks of St. Peter's fared worse: they were nailed by their heads to the walls of their cloister, and there left to die. The Cathedral of St. Lambert, too, was invaded, rifled for treasure, and then burnt to the ground; and a host of other sanctuaries shared a like fate. As for Francon, the bishop, though after events showed that he was in reality no coward, when he heard that the Danes were approaching, he packed up his relics and his treasures, and made for Huy, on the banks of the Meuse between Liége and Namur, where there was an impregnable fortress.
At first, indeed, very little resistance seems to have been made; at all events, there was no organised and concerted action, and in some cases no opposition whatever was offered. Panic laid hold of whole populations, and not only clerks and monks, but stalwart knights and sturdy burghers, turned tail and fled. Presently, Charles the Fat was summoned from Italy in order to prevent, if might be, the complete demoralisation of the people; but though in due course that weak and vacillating monarch arrived with the largest army that had ever been seen in the Pays de Liége, he showed himself utterly unable to cope with the situation, and it was not till the advent of his successor, Arnulph I., that matters began to mend. In 884, after more than one engagement, in which his troops had not been worsted, Charles had made terms with the Norsemen, and the invading host had withdrawn; but the following spring saw their long black boats once more on the Dyle, soon the marauders were again encamped 'in the place called Lovon,' and soon they were again vexing the surrounding country. But for some reason or other the natives now seem to have plucked up their courage. In the skirmishes, which were of almost daily occurrence, they were sometimes able to hold their own; and when presently the Emperor Arnulph appeared at the head of an army of Germans, so great was the enthusiasm of the urban populations that crowds of townsfolk flocked to his standard—Francon of Liége amongst the rest, and his example was followed by a host of monks and not a few of his canons. 'He was the first of our bishops to draw the sword,' notes an old Liége chronicler; but when the excitement was over and the battle had been won, Francon's conscience pricked him, and he sent messengers to Rome begging to be relieved of his episcopal functions. 'It were not meet,' he said, 'thathands stained with blood should have the administration of holy things.'
Great was the joy of the men of Lotharingia at the triumph of Louvain, and King Arnulph ordained that on the first day of October 'solemn litanies should be chanted by way of thanksgiving, and he himself and his whole army joined in the procession, singing praises to God who had given them the victory.'
Though cities had been pillaged and the country laid waste, though heaps of ashes and tottering walls were all that remained of the monuments with which Charlemagne and his successors had adorned the cradle of their race, though art and culture had been well-nigh wiped out, the Church laid low and the State shattered almost beyond hope of repair, there was one body of men in the old kingdom of Lotharingia whose interests had been singularly favoured by the coming of the Danes—the great lay proprietors. Thrifty men who for years past by purchase, by marriage, by promises of protection, by means of loans in times of stress, by hook or by crook, by fair means sometimes, and sometimes by foul, had been gradually gathering into their own hands the freehold tenements of their weaker brethren; strong men who, instead of turning tail when Hungarian or Dane threatened them, bared their breasts to the foe, and with their swords in their hands defended alike their own property and the property of their neighbours; astute men, who knew very well, from personal experience, what an exceedingly profitable pastime it sometimes is to fish in troubled waters. For them the coming of the Danes had been almost a godsend; at all events, a blessing in disguise; and their departure left them free to reap the rich harvest which these rude northerners had unwittingly sown—to obtain, that is, a vast increase of their landed estates and a no less vast increaseof privileges, immunities, authority, and of political and social prestige.
In the first place they had little difficulty in making themselves masters, in fact if not in name, of the abbey lands. Many of the monks had been slain or had fled, and so fearful were the remnant that remained of further depredation that they were glad enough to hand over the administration of their estates to the only men who were strong enough to defend them. Thus, by the close of the eight hundreds almost all the monastic domains of Lotharingia had in reality become the property of laymen who, as the monks'avouésor stewards, took up their abode in their cloisters, received and expended their revenues, became participators in their rights and immunities, and exercised jurisdiction in their name over their vassals and dependants.
To obtain control of the secular clergy was a matter no less easy of accomplishment, for although the cathedral chapters still retained the right to choose their own bishops, so great was the power and influence of the landowners that they had become practically irresistible, and were almost always able to secure the election of their own nominees, and thus were enabled, through them, to rule the Church.
But this was not all, such of them as were invested with civil authority now began to exercise it in their own names, and the emperors, whose power and prestige had long ago been impaired by the fratricidal strife of the children of Louis the Mild, had been so enfeebled by the recent invasions that they were unable to offer any effectual resistance. Thus were laid on the ruins of Imperialism the foundations of that feudal system which was destined later on to play so great a part in the civilisation of Europe.
Foremost among the landowners, who at this time were laying the foundations of dynasties, was Régnier au Long Col, the great ancestor of the Counts of Hainault and of the Counts of Brussels and Louvain, the man to whom all the sovereigns of Brabant, from Lambert Longbeard to Francis II., traced their descent:2the son of one Count Giselbert, who, in the middle of the eight hundreds, had made his fortune by carrying off a daughter of the Emperor Lothaire, he was the owner of vast estates in Hainault, in Hesbaye, in Ardennes, and lay-abbot to boot of three great monastic domains. Of the vassals and serfs who dwelt on his lands some, then, were Teutons and some were Celts, and he himself, who spoke the language of each race, was perhaps unable to say to which stock he belonged, and herein lay his strength: he was a man whose nationality was merged in the great feudal chief.
Such a one could alone command the confidence of the mixed race which inhabited Lotharingia, and when presently the Emperor Arnulph set up a German king in the person of his illegitimate son, Zwentibold (895), and Régnier unfurled the standard of revolt, the discontented feudal lords to a man rallied round him.
A stranger in a strange land, without the means to purchase the goodwill and support of the native chiefs, since their fathers had already received in bribes the whole of the royal domains, from the first the newsovereign had to fight for his throne, and from the first the issue of the conflict was a foregone conclusion. Zwentibold fell in an obscure skirmish on August 13, 900, and Régnier became virtual ruler of Lotharingia, and though he had no legal sanction for the authority which he exercised, before his death he had so consolidated his power that when that event tooktookplace (915) his son Giselbert stepped quietly into his shoes, and presently the reigning Emperor Henry I. acknowledged him Duke and gave him the hand of his daughter Gerberge, and with it, by way of dowry, large estates, including among other tenements, the castles of Brussels and Louvain. If Henry believed that he had thereby definitely bound his redoubtable vassal to the imperial house, he little knew with whom he had to deal. A contemporary chronicler has left us his portrait, and it is not a flattering one. 'Giselbert,' he tells us, 'was small of stature but strongly built, always in movement, and with eyes so keen and so shifty that no man knew their colour. Eaten up with ambition, audacious, crafty, false, he cared not what means he took to compass his ends.' The goal that he was striving for was, in all probability, a royal crown: the darling wish of his heart was to re-establish the kingdom of Lotharingia. His whole life had hitherto been one long course of treachery and intrigue, and though after his marriage he kept faith with Henry, when that prince died he soon showed that he was still the same Giselbert as of yore; in spite of an oath of allegiance, and in spite of his imperial wife, he proved himself as false to Otho the Great, the son of his benefactor, as he had been in former days to Rodolphe of Burgundy and to Charles the Simple of France.
Of this last act of treason the outcome was death. Surprised by the imperial forces at Andernach, on the Rhine, and hemmed in on all sides, he made his horseplunge into the water, hoping to reach the further bank and so make his escape, but the current was too strong for him, and horse and rider were swept away. Thus died Duke Giselbert (939), and at his death the star of his house for a while waned. His only son, an infant whom Otho placed under ward, died shortly afterwards, and though his nephew, Régnier III. of Hainault, seized his widow's dower, he was not strong enough to grasp the reins of government, and presently the Emperor Otho conferred the duchy on Conrad the Red, a native of Franconia, who, like his predecessor, was allied by marriage to the imperial house (944). Conrad was an energetic and capable man, but rude, passionate, vindictive, and, as the issue showed, untrustworthy. At first, however, all went well: the new duke rigidly enforced order, any attempt at rebellion he crushed with an iron hand, and for some ten years the land had peace; and then, having taken it into his head that Otho had treated him badly, he himself turned rebel. Whereat Régnier of Hainault, and the rest who had experienced Conrad's lash, taking heart, banded together against him and drove him from their midst (953). If Régnier believed that the Emperor would recompense his services by restoring him to the throne of his ancestors, he was doomed to signal disappointment. Otho was in no way deceived by the specious loyalty of his Lotharingian vassals. He knew very well that, in helping him to crush Conrad, they had in reality made him the instrument of their vengeance against one whom they hated, not on account of his recent rebellion, but because of his zeal for law and order and his former loyal service, and he refused to reward these lawless men by setting over them a chief as lawless as themselves, and one too, who, by reason of his popularity, would have all the more power towork mischief; nor would he confer the duchy on another German vassal, for such would be not unlikely to follow the example of Conrad. Henceforth he would govern Lotharingia by means of the Church.
True, the Church had ceased to be the power which she had been in Charlemagne's day. Her authority was no longer enhanced by the glamour of wealth and the glamour of learning and the glamour of political prestige. Her spiritual life had waned. She had lost much of her pristine fervour, something of her child-like faith. Her sanctuaries had been ruined; she had been robbed of her treasure; a considerable portion of her landed property had been appropriated by laymen, and it needed all her tact and all her vigilance to safeguard the rest, a task the more difficult from the fact that many bishops owed their appointment to harpies eager to despoil them. But for all that she was still a power to be reckoned with—an ally whose friendship was not to be despised. If only she could be freed from the feudal incubus which was strangling her, she might yet do yeoman service for the Crown.
This then was the task which Otho set himself to perform, and the method which he adopted to accomplish it was a bold and an effectual one: he rendered it henceforth impossible for his vassals to interfere with episcopal elections by naming the bishops himself, and at the same time he took good care to appoint none but worthy, capable and reliable men, entirely devoted to his interests. But this was not all; if the bishops were to hold their own in their perennial conflict with the barons, their hands would have to be strengthened; and henceforth it became Otho's policy, and the policy too of his successors, as opportunity offered, to gradually enlarge their boundaries, to endow them with fresh sources of revenue, to increase their temporal authority, and to shower on them all sorts of civil and political rights.
Nor was the result disproportionate to the Emperor's expectations—the bishops of Lotharingia became their most faithful and devoted servants. 'If the Emperor were to pluck out my right eye,' cried Bishop Wazon of Liége (1042-1048) in an outburst of enthusiastic loyalty, 'I would still use the left in his honour and service.'3That was the spirit which animated all of them, and for a hundred and fifty years they were able to keep the wolf at bay.
The man on whose head Otho now placed the ducal crown was his brother Bruno, a clerk in holy orders, on whom he also conferred the metropolitan See of Cologne, which included among its suffragans Utrecht, Liége and Cambrai, thus making him supreme alike in Church and State (953). The success of Otho's policy in Lotharingia was in great measure, if not entirely, due to the energy, the perseverance, the courage, and, above all, to the consummate tact and the marvellous administrative capacity of this great man. His work was essentially a constructive one, out of chaos he brought order, and his success as an organiser and administrator was only equalled by his success as an educator. 'His schools at Cologne,' says M. Pirenne, 'were frequented not only by clerks who aspired to ecclesiastical dignities, but also by young nobles—for many of the feudal lords confided their sons to his care—and all of them returned reconciled to the Empire and entirely subjugated by the charm of the Archbishop-Duke.'4In the twelve years during which he governed Lotharingia—he died in 965—he succeeded not only in pacifying that rebellious province, but, if we may trust his biographer, in working a marvellous change in the lives and morals of its inhabitants:'he found them,' says Ruotger, 'rugged and fierce, and he left them gentle and tame'; and though the conversion of the vast majority was sufficiently short-lived—when the benign influence of Bruno was withdrawn they soon relapsed into their old blood-thirsty and lawless ways—the grandeur of his work is sufficiently appreciable when we compare such ruffians as Régnier au Long Col, for instance, or his slippery son Giselbert, with one who came immediately under Bruno's influence, whose character, indeed, he formed—his friend and disciple Ansfried, Count of Louvain, who, after having been for long years a faithful and devoted servant of the Emperor, at last took orders, became Bishop of Utrecht, and died in the odour of sanctity; or to men like Godfrey of Verdun, the most perfect type of those nobles whom Bruno had reconciled to the imperial cause, a man who had no more sympathy for feudal aspirations than had Bruno himself, and whose staunch loyalty may be gauged from the message he sent to his wife when he was a captive in a French prison, and which has been preserved for us in the Memoirs of Gerbert—who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II. (997-1003)—whom he charged to deliver it:—'Remain staunch in your fidelity to the ever august Empress and her son. Make no truce with the French; hold your forts firm against their king, and let not the hope of restoring your husband and your son to liberty diminish the energy of your resistance.'5
I.—Genealogical Table of the House of Long-Col
Régnier au Long-Col.,d.915 | +-----------+-+------+ | | | Louis d'Outremer, = Gerberge =Gislebert, Régnier II. | King of France | (daughter | Duke of | | | of Henry | Lotharingia, | a daughter = Bérenger, | the |d.939 | Count of | Fowler) | | Namur | a son | +-----------+--+d.in infancy | | | | Lothaire,Charles, Duke of Régnier III.d.958 King of Lower Lotharingia, | (in exile in France,d.992 | Bohemia)d.987 | | | | +--------+-------+ +---------+----------+ | | | |Otho, Duke of Gerberge =Lambert Longbeard,Régnier IV., Count Lower Lotharingia, first hereditary of Hainault,d.1012 Count of Louvain,d.1013d.1015
Table I.
Between Régnier of Hainault, that half-tamed leader of rebels, and the gentle scholar and polished gentleman, Saint Bruno of Cologne—men whose dispositions were so different and whose interests and ideals were so diametrically opposed, the one the incarnation of feudal chaos and feudal license, and the other the representativeof imperial liberty and imperial law, each of them endowed with unflagging perseverance, and an indomitable will—no treaty of peace would have been possible, even if Régnier had not believed that the Emperor had ungratefully bestowed on Bruno the inheritance which was lawfully his, and from the first they were at daggers drawn.
As was natural, the man who had been rejected did all in his power to thwart his successful rival and to frustrate his projects of reform. For three years the conflict continued and then Bruno was able to pluck the thorn from his side. Fortune delivered his tormentor into his hands and he forthwith banished him to Bohemia and detained him there until he went the way of all flesh. But the house of Long Col was not extinguished by the death of its chief—the old count had two sons, Régnier and Lambert, who, when their father was captured and his estates confiscated, found an asylum in France at the Court of King Lothaire. The French monarchs, as direct heirs of Charlemagne, had always regarded Lotharingia as their own inheritance, and Lothaire himself and his brother Charles were the sons of Duke Giselbert's widow Gerberge by her second husband, Louis d'Outremer.
Thus ties of kindred and a common grievance disposed the French king to befriend the children of Régnier of Hainault, and at his Court they remained for fifteen years nourishing their enmity against Bruno and the Emperor, and praying for an opportunity of vengeance. At last the day of reckoning came. The strong and gentle hand of Bruno had been removed by death in 965, and Otho the Great was gathered to his fathers in 973.
Taking advantage of the confusion incident on this last event Charles of France now claimed his mother's dowry, and Régnier and Lambert their father's estates,and presently they invaded Lotharingia to make good their demands at the sword's point.
Welcomed by the feudal chiefs and backed by the power of France, so formidable were the invaders that Otho II. deemed it prudent to treat with them and at last restored their paternal heritage to Régnier and Lambert and conferred the duchy on Charles. Two considerations made him the more ready to grant this last concession. Charles on his father's side was a descendant of Charlemagne and as such was likely to be apersona gratato the nobles, many of whom had Carolingian blood in their veins, and through his mother he was the grandson of Henry the Fowler, thus first cousin to Otho himself, and hence there was reason to believe that he would prove a loyal vassal.
Otho's hopes, however, were only partly realised. He had no reason to suspect Charles's good faith, but the feudal chiefs, with Régnier and Lambert at their head, so far from acknowledging the new duke, did all in their power to second the desperate efforts which Lothaire was making to annex Lotharingia, efforts which in despite of his allies were doomed to disappointment. True he at one time succeeded in reaching the imperial palace at Aachen, and there 'had the satisfaction of eating a dinner which had been prepared for Otho himself,' but he was forced to beat a hasty retreat, and his death, which took place shortly afterwards, followed as it was by the death of his only son, left the Emperor master of the situation (987), and Duke Charles heir to a crown which he was never able to wear. Hugh Capet, who for years past had been drawing nearer and nearer to the French throne, had himself proclaimed king at Noyon, and though Charles fought valiantly for his heritage, and there seemed every likelihood that his efforts would meet with success, he failed, almost in the hour of triumph:treacherously delivered into the hands of the usurper by the Bishop of Laon, he was cast into prison at Orléans where he shortly afterwards died (992).
This unfortunate prince is the first ruler whose name is intimately associated with Brussels. Tradition says that he was born there, and he certainly made it his chief place of abode. His palace was situated on a little island between two branches of the Senne, somewhere about the site now occupied by the Place Saint Géry, and that little island contained the whole of the settlement called Brussels, for in those days Brussels was not a town, it was little more than a castle and a cluster of huts:—the dwellings of such of the ducal servants and court officials as were not lodged in the castle itself and of those who catered for the ducal household and maybe also the homesteads of a few farmers whom a sense of greater security had induced to settle there.
Charles was succeeded in the Duchy of Lotharingia by his only son Otho, and when he died childless twenty years afterwards (1012), Lambert Long Col, who had married Charles's eldest daughter Gerberge, claimed his heritage as next-of-kin. He did not obtain the dukedom—that dignity fell to Godfrey of Ardennes, the son of Bruno's pupil, Godfrey the Captive—but he managed to make good his claim to a very considerable portion of his father-in-law's maternal heritage—the rich dowry which Henry the Fowler had bestowed on his daughter, the elder Gerberge, on her marriage with Duke Giselbert, and which later the Emperor Otho II. had granted to Duke Charles, her son by her second marriage. The castles of Louvain and Vilvorde and Brussels, and all the adjoining territory, fell to Lambert's share, and this vast and rich domain, called until the close of the century sometimes the county of Brussels, more often the county of Louvain, was the nucleus of the Duchy of Brabant.
In obtaining legal recognition of his right to the county of Louvain, Lambert I., as we must now call him, had accomplished something, but the house of Long Col had not yet realised, nor was it ever to wholly realise, the darling dream of its ambition—the establishment in Lotharingia of an independent realm, although that cherished wish did, in later days, receive some measure of fulfilment: in their long contest with the Empire the triumph of the barons was presently assured, and with the title of Duke the Counts of Louvain at last obtained practical independence.
It was on the Church, as we have seen, that the emperors mainly relied for the maintenance of their authority in Lotharingia, and by a strange irony of fate it was to the Church that the overthrow of that authority was in great measure due. Not that the bishops belied their trust: against tremendous odds they held the fortress which had been confided to their keeping for over a hundred years, and only at last surrendered when their master's breach with the papacy gave to his turbulent vassals what had before been lacking to them—a legitimate excuse for rebellion. Given the conjunction of events, no other issue was possible. The bishops had no choice: the quarrel concerning investiture broke the back of imperial rule.
Amongst the clergy the monks alone had succeeded in endearing themselves to the native population, and the power which they wielded was immense. The bishops—learned, capable, God-fearing men as most of them undoubtedly were, had never been able togain the confidence of the people: save to the higher clergy, whom they had formed, and to a handful of the lay aristocracy who had received their education at Liége or Cologne, they were almost unknown to them. It could hardly have been otherwise, they were strangers in a strange land, they were the standard-bearers of order amid a barbarous people, whose lawlessness filled them with horror and contempt, and of whose very language they were in many cases ignorant. Well might they bewail their lot in the words of Tetdon of Cambrai, for a moment cast down at the hopelessness of the task before him, 'O wretched man that thou art, in vain didst thou quit thy native land for this land of savages!'
The lot of the regular clergy, and the conditions under which they laboured were altogether different. The strong man who by his marvellous energy, his burning zeal, his eloquence, his sweetness, his piety, and, above all, by the example of his stainless life, had made of the undisciplined rabble, who, calling themselves monks, scoffed at the Evangelical counsels, and hardly believed in the Gospel, an army of humble, hard-working men, ever ready to spend themselves and be spent in the service of Christ, was himself nurtured in the bosom of feudalism: Gerard of Brogne wore a coat of mail before he put on the monk's frock. One day out hunting in his own domain along with his master, Count Bérenger of Namur, a son-in-law of Régnier au Long Col, he had turned into a wayside chapel to pray, whilst the rest of the party were dining. Presently he fell asleep, and dreamed that St. Peter bid him build a church there and dedicate it to St. Eugène. That was the origin of the famous abbey of Brogne, and Gerard became its first abbot (923). Presently the rumour spread abroad that a band of monks who kept their rule had establishedthemselves in the Forest of Namurois, and that their leader was a saint. Strangers flocked from far and wide to see if such things could be, and Brogne became a place of pilgrimage. Soon the fame of Gerard's holiness outstepped the borders of Namur: at the request of Duke Giselbert (915-939) he reformed the abbeys of Lotharingia; later on (965-976) summoned to Cambrai by Bishop Tetdon, and to Flanders by Arnulph the Great,6he accomplished a like work in their domains; before his death, towards the close of the century, there was hardly a religious house from the Meuse to the sea which he had not set in order. Nor was this all, so great was his influence with the feudal lords that many of them who held ecclesiastical appointments resigned them, and everywhere the right of free election was restored; a host of new monasteries were founded, some due to the munificence of the feudal aristocracy, others to that of their political opponents, the bishops; and so great was the religious enthusiasm of the people that they gave their time and labour freely for the erection of these buildings. Gerard was crowned with the aureole of sanctity—that was the secret of his success: he loved God with his whole heart and his neighbour as himself; he was inspired by 'that wisdom which proceedeth from the mouth of the Most High, and reacheth from end to end, and mightily and sweetly setteth all things in order.'
The great reformer's interpretation of the rule of St. Benedict, a rule which leaves much to the discretion of local superiors, was large, mild, tolerant, without exaggerated asceticism. His disciples, like their master, in touch with baron and bishop, were careful not to compromise their good relations with the Episcopate by any expression of sympathy with theideals of feudalism. Indeed, St. Gerard's anonymous biographer, who most likely was a monk of his own abbey at Brogne, does not even spare Duke Giselbert, his master's chief benefactor, averring that his untimely end was a just punishment for his rebellion:—'Sicque completur vaticinium psalmigraphi qui dicitHomo cum in honore esset, non intellexit. Ob ambitionem quipe regni circa eos istud obvenit.'
Such was the monasticism of Gerard of Brogne and such was the spirit which for half a century after his death inspired his disciples. The work which they accomplished was immense. The influence which they exercised is almost incredible. The Low Countries became for the time more devout than any other region of Europe; in the eyes of the people the monk alone was the true servant of God, the incarnation in his own person of the mystical body of Christ. A wave of religious enthusiasm swept over the land, and it prepared men's minds to receive later on a more drastic reform of which the consequences were momentous.
Lavish in alms-deeds, given to hospitality, a loyal friend to the poor and oppressed, upright, virtuous, dogged, keen, ever ready to do battle for justice sake, contemned and worshipped, beloved and loathed, such was the monk of Cluny. Uncompromising in his championship of the rights of the clergy and of the rights of the apostolic See, clerical laxity and lay interference alike stank in his nostrils, for him the bishop whom the Emperor had named was a Simonist, and the married clerk an adulterer. Gentle to others sometimes, always stern to himself, strait was the gate and narrow the way by which he went to Paradise. To fast, to labour, to keep silence, to submit, these things were to him meat and drink; his one earthly consolation was in the sweetness of his psalmody and the splendour of hisritual, and in magnifying the glory of the priesthood collectively he perhaps found some compensation for his complete abasement of self. His manner of life, he averred, was in strict accord with the spirit of the old Benedictine rule, he alone of the monks of his day had discovered its true meaning, but for better or worse the reform of Cluny constituted in fact a new order, for one essential feature of Benedictine life, the family tie, was all but blotted out: wherever Cluniac discipline prevailed the local abbot ceased to be his own master, he obeyed the Abbot of Cluny, and the monk no longer regarded his own monastery as his only home—he was a member of a vast international community, and in each of the hundred homes of his Order he was sure of a welcome as a son of the house.
Inaugurated at the beginning of the nine hundreds by William of Aquitaine, who had exchanged a ducal coronet for a monk's cowl, perfected by a series of capable rulers, who were possessed of that faith which removes mountains and whose consistency of life inspired respect, the new order rapidly spread from province to province and realm to realm till at length it became a power in Christendom.
Early in the ten hundreds 'the sweet savour of its good report' began to fascinate the monks of the Netherlands, and though some of the elder brethren who remembered St. Gerard or had been trained by his immediate disciples had little liking for these new-fangled French ways, monastery after monastery adopted them. A wave of enthusiasm swept the land and bore down all opposition. The people from honest conviction were heart and soul with the movement, the lay lords who saw in Clunyism a weapon to further their own ends favoured it with no less zeal; the bishops, in spite of their imperialism, were carried along with the stream, and by the close of the centurythere was hardly a religious house in the Netherlands which had not adopted the new rule.
Notwithstanding their conversion to Clunyism the bishops were still at heart true to their old political creed, or may be their ingrained loyalty to the Empire was stronger than their religious belief, certain it is that they did not at first translate their new theories into action. When the investiture quarrel broke out, they were among the staunchest of the Emperor's adherents, but as the relations between their master and the Holy See became more and more strained they began to falter, uncertain which road to take, and at last the time came when no further choice was left them—in spite of themselves they were constrained to separate their cause from his: the lay aristocracy were in open rebellion, the people aroused by the preaching of the monks were raging against the married clergy and 'those Simonists the bishops,' with a violence past belief; Godfrey the Hunchback, the one man who might perhaps have quelled the storm, had been struck down by the hand of an assassin.
If that rickety, misshapen dwarf had lived, the course of events might have been different. Duke Godfrey was a man of marvellous enterprise, undaunted courage and indomitable will; a man, too, of infinite tact—shrewd, long-headed, keen, and withal a convinced believer in the justice of the imperial cause. Through good report and evil report he had been true to Henry; he was his intimate counsellor and devoted friend, and the only man who had any influence over him for good. He always showed himself a staunch supporter of the bishops, and during the six years of his government of Lotharingia (1070-1076), with their aid he had kept the feudal lords at bay. If he had lived out his days he might perhapshave been able to curb alike the violence of Henry and of his vassals, and thus have averted the terrible chastisement which afterwards overtook his master's misdeeds. He was the last Duke of Lotharingia who exercised, as such, any real power in the land, and his death was the deathblow of imperialism in this quarter of Europe, but the agony was not a short one: it was prolonged for thirty years, and then came the funeral.
Though circumstances had compelled the bishops to withdraw their support from the Emperor, there was one amongst them, Otbert of Liége, who clung to him to the bitter end. Cut off from the society of Christian men, deserted by his wife, a fugitive from his own son, it was in Otbert's episcopal city that the old Emperor found a refuge during the closing months of his chequered career. Inspired by their bishop, the men of Liége banded together to defend him, and with such success that they drove young Henry from the town. Nor was this all. So great was their pity for the misfortunes of the fallen Emperor that they altogether forgot the follies and the crimes which had produced them. In their eyes, the sinner had become a saint; and when he died they pressed round his coffin to touch his poor lifeless body as though it were some holy thing, and strewed over it their seed-corn, firmly convinced that by so doing they would insure a bountiful harvest. Henry was excommunicate, and as such it was impossible to give him Christian burial. They laid him to rest in a small unconsecrated chapel beyond the city walls, without dirge or requiem, and his mournful funeral, to quote the words of Pirenne, was the funeral of imperial rule in Lotharingia.
When Duke Godfrey the Hunchback died in 1076, Henry IV., perhaps because at that time he mistrusted Godfrey of Bouillon, the late Duke's nephew, and the next in the line of succession, had conferred theDuchy of Lotharingia on his own son Conrad, a child of two years old, thus, to all intents and purposes, leaving the throne vacant—a false move, which Henry himself recognised too late: when, in 1089, he set the crown on the head of the rightful heir, the feudal lords, who for thirteen years had been accustomed to the sweets of anarchy, refused to acknowledge him, Godfrey, who lacked what had always been the mainstay of his predecessors—episcopal co-operation, was not strong enough to coerce them, and the old imperial dukedom became little more than an empty title. The man who held it was almost a nonentity in his own dominions; and when, in 1096, he set out on that eastern expedition which gave him a name, and from which he never returned, the barons were left to their own devices for over five years, and then at last Henry set over them his namesake, Henry of Limbourg, almost the only one of his Lotharingian vassals who kept faith with him to the end. This man, when Henry V. put on his father's crown, refused to acknowledge the usurper, who in consequence deprived him of his duchy and conferred it on the fallen Emperor's direst foe, Count Godfrey of Louvain—this was only a few weeks before the elder Henry's death—and, at the same time, he gave him the March of Antwerp, 'the land of Ryen,' as it was then called, an imperial fief which had been held by the Dukes of Lotharingia since the days of Godfrey the Hunchback certainly, and most likely since the days of his grandfather, Gothelon I., and which brought the territory of the Counts of Louvain right up to the banks of the Scheldt. Henceforth that territory was known as the Duchy of Brabant, and the man who owned it styled himself Duke of Brabant and Lotharingia. Thus at last did the house of Long Col obtain the title its chiefs had so long coveted, and for whichthroughout so many generations they had intrigued and fought. It was nothing more than an empty title now—a mere name, which, perhaps from old-time associations, added something to Godfrey's prestige, but gave him no increase of territory, and in no way augmented his power. He was the most redoubtable prince in the Netherlands, but he owed his strength to his mighty hand and his outstretched arm, not to his phantom duchy. Presently the Emperor deprived him of it in favour of the rival house of Limbourg (1128). Matter of little moment to either dynasty: in Louvain the imperial mandate was ignored, and in Limbourg it had long ago been anticipated, and for more than a hundred and fifty years the chiefs of each house continued to use the illusory title. Then, at last, the fortunes of war gave Limbourg to John the Victorious, and henceforth the Dukes of Brabant were the only Dukes of Lotharingia (1288).
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II.—Genealogical Table of theCounts of Louvain
Lambert Longbeardd.1015. (SeeTable I.) | +------------------+------------------+ | |Henry I.,Lambert II.(Balderic),d.1038d.1063 | |Otho,Henry II.,d.1041d.1079 |Henry III.,d.1095 |Godfrey Longbeard, Count of Louvain from 1095, Duke of Brabant from 1106,d.January 15th, 1140