MIDDLE AGES. - Term used in the historiography of European civilization to indicate the centuries that ran between antiquity and the modern age.
I. HISTORY.
I. THE VALUE OF THE TERM
The term is sanctioned by a now centuries-old tradition to indicate the period which, in the historical development of Romano-European civilization, lies between antiquity and the modern age. Already in the Renaissance there emerges an awareness of the separation existing between classical civilization and its renewal, separated by an intermediate age marked by the ruin of the Roman Empire and of the whole of ancient civilization, by the decline of letters and the arts, by the invasions of barbarian peoples. Thus, between the splendors of Greco-Roman civilization and those of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages was judged as an age not only of transition, but also of barbarism, ignorance and darkness. This negative judgment was rejected by the historicism of the 19th century, which judged the Middle Ages an age full of spiritual and economic activities of the highest value, an age rich in a laborious but precious constructive travail, fundamental for the development of civilization. The idea must therefore be rejected that the term Middle Ages can be used to indicate ages of transition and darkness existing in the course of other civilizations (Egyptian, Japanese, etc.); such a use, determined by remote and fallacious analogies, is altogether inadvisable because of the errors and misunderstandings it entails.
II. CHRONOLOGICAL LIMITS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
The chronological limits of the Roman-European M. are still a subject of discussion among scholars of so-called periodization, dictated by religious, political or economic premises. The German scholar Christoph Keller (Cellarius), who it seems was the first, in 1688, to publish a Historia Medii Aevi, placed it between the age of Constantine and the Turkish conquest of Constantinople (313-1453), joining two dates of different value, one religious and one political. In other schemes of periodization, none of them of absolute value, the date used for the beginning is that of the cessation of the Roman emperors of Ravenna (476) or that of the descent of the Lombards into Italy (568), the beginning of the political fragmentation of the peninsula, or that of the triumph of Islam in the Mediterranean (c. 700); for the end of the period the date usually used is that of the descent of Charles VIII into Italy (1494) or that of the discovery of America (1492) or of Luther's religious revolution (1517) or of the Peace of Cambrai (1529).
On the other hand, modern studies have shown the impossibility of admitting a break in continuity between the M. and the epoch that follows and precedes it. For Fustel de Coulanges there is continuity between the imperial age and that of the Romano-barbarian monarchies; for Dopsch the barbarian invasions do not break the historical process of Germanism between Caesar and Charlemagne; for Pirenne only in the 8th century would there have been in the Mediterranean that economic revolution which would have determined the true M., that is, the age of a natural economy, without outlets. Thus between the M. and the Renaissance, links previously ignored are seen today, on account of the religiosity characteristic of the Renaissance, and of certain Renaissance attitudes of the M.; thus too the Catholic "Reform" and the Lutheran "pseudo-reform" show vital links with the M.
III. CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES
The problem of continuity is closely bound up with the more serious one of a medieval age having its own clear and unmistakable characteristics. For the study of the period apparently reveals aspects that are opposed to one another and even contradictory, as well as the succession of ages having characteristics of their own: the age of the Romano-barbarian monarchies, of the Carolingian Empire, of feudalism, of the communes and of monarchies of a national type. Nevertheless there seems no doubt that the medieval age has, on the whole, a unitary character: the close union existing in it between Roman civilization and the Christian religion, whereby upon the new faith comes to rest the continuation of the Romanization of European society in all its public and private manifestations.
The unity of the Roman world perpetuates itself in the Middle Ages, but it is no longer justified by the arms and the law of Rome, but rather by the new religion which transforms the old vaporous ethical universalism of Stoicism into a new religious universalism springing from the universal brotherhood in the love of God, the common Father. The Christianized Romania overflows the imperial limes and tends to embrace all the barbarian peoples reached by the faith of Christ. In the period in which the ancient age and the medieval age are still confounded (4th-5th centuries), Christianity presents itself as the Roman religion par excellence, the imperial religion which the Roman State supports and from which it receives support, but already a new halo of Christian sub-Roman civilization surrounds the old imperial world. In 476 the emperors of Ravenna disappear with their political organization of the tradition directly descended from Rome; now the great Roman capital of the East sees the eyes and minds of all Christian populations, Roman and barbarian, turned toward itself.
The passage from the ancient to the medieval age is marked by the formation of this Constantinopolitan politico-religious scheme: the ecclesiastical organization is contained within the frameworks of the imperial organization, just as the new Romano-barbarian political organisms align themselves in juridical and moral dependence on the imperial power of Constantinople. This Romano-Christian unity is, however, undermined by the tendency of the barbarian kingdoms to assert themselves in independence and by the formation of the Arian national Churches, against whose opposition the attempt of the emperor Justinian to reconstitute imperial unity comes to shatter. The consequence of this conflict is the deep fracture that manifests itself in Romania in the 8th century: Rome is set against Byzantium, Latinity resists Hellenism; alongside the Slavic-Byzantine world there appears the Latin-Germanic world in which the Romano-Italian traditions of language, writing, letters, arts, law and economy persist most strongly.
IV. ROMANO-GERMANIC RELATIONS
In this Romanized environment live the Germanic populations mingled with the Roman populations: they mingle, but they do not fuse. Certainly the barbarian invasions of the 5th century were of great importance: the Roman cultural centers were in large part destroyed; the provincial peoples were deprived of the possibility of rising again by their own forces from the chaos in which the Empire found itself, so as to move toward the constitution of a harmonious community of the Roman and Romanized peoples. After the invasions, Romans and Germans live together, tolerating one another, each people preserving its own laws and customs; the Roman economic system, in which the Germans install themselves without destroying or transforming it, associates them.
On the relations between the two races in the Middle Ages two opposing conceptions contend for the field. The Germanists affirm that in the face of the putrefaction of Roman civilization only the Germanic ethnic elements could bring that fresh and vigorous vitality to which is owed whatever is alive and new in medieval civilization. The Romanists oppose them, denying the Germanization: the Roman populations would have preserved their traditions of life and civilization; the invasions would not have brought about Germanization but only a barbarization, a return to the conditions of those who were no longer the Germanic peoples admired by Caesar and Tacitus, but only the remnants of the long struggles that for centuries had ravaged the northern countries and that had escaped the storm of the Hunnic invasion. At present there is a tendency toward a more equitable judgment: the influence of Germanism would differ according to the zones: strong in countries of no or superficial Romanization, less perceptible and even negligible in countries of deep Romanization.
Difficult, moreover, if not impossible, is the evaluation of ethnic contributions in a new civilization so original as the medieval one: ethnic difference slowly fades into a simple distinction of social classes; in the 8th century, in Italy as in Gaul, there are no longer victors and vanquished, but only landowners. Indeed the Roman landed organization persists: the Middle Ages, like antiquity, continues to be the dominion of landed and military aristocracies over masses of coloni, serfs, and small landowners.
V. THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH AND THE PAPACY
In the leveling of peoples and classes, a preeminent function is performed by the Catholic Church through its center, the Papacy, and through the episcopate of the provinces. Crushed by the Arian Germanic monarchies, the various Churches of the West lean not on Constantinople but on the Apostolic See of Rome, whose superiority now appears as a refuge and a defense. Thus Romanity and Catholicity come to correspond perfectly, distinguishing themselves both from Byzantine Romania and from Arian barbarism: a new Roman unity comes to be formed in the West: the community of all peoples who venerate in the pope of Rome the teacher of the faith and the moral head. The apostolic tradition had already made the Roman See the guardian of the purest orthodoxy: holding the spiritual powers, it asserted itself as the inexhaustible source of a new life, animating and consoling populations deprived of the juridical guidance of the emperors.
This Western Latin Romania undergoes great transformations between the 7th and 8th centuries. Old imperial provinces such as Africa, Spain, Sicily and Sardinia are overwhelmed by the Islamic wave; the Arian Churches of Italy, of Spain, and of Gaul also disappear; the missionary work begun by the Roman See under the impulse of Gregory the Great brings new Germanic masses of the faithful into the Church; new episcopal provinces arise beyond the Rhine and the Danube, united to Rome by the sole oath of fidelity that the bishops swear to the pope.
Thus a new Christian world takes shape in which countries of Roman traditions and countries of Germanic tradition are associated: a religious empire, a Res publica christiana, heir and continuator of the Res publica romana, prefiguration of the future Europe divided politically but united morally. The Roman Papacy dominates in it through its magisterium and its spiritual powers, but then the inadequacy of the public powers and the imperial concessions received from Constantine to Justinian - right of property, fiscal immunity, privilege of forum - lead it to exercise a preeminent political function in European society. The formation of the temporal State in Rome contributed greatly to strengthening this function, sustained by the patrimonial wealth of the Roman Church, by the moral and religious prestige of the popes, and by their social and humanitarian activity. The hierocratic government that thus arises in Rome (to which the false "donation of Constantine," composed between 750 and 760, will give a particular juridical foundation) becomes the basis and guarantee of the Catholic jurisdictional system and finds the impulse to extend its authority over all the countries that obey its bishops.
VI. THE EMPIRE
In the shadow of this Roman religious universalism, the Christian Roman Empire of Charlemagne was constituted at the end of the 8th century. The Romano-barbarian political organizations that had attempted to reconcile Roman juridical conceptions with Germanic individualism had in fact fallen: everywhere their incapacity for internal organization and external defense had been made evident.
All the Roman and Germanic countries of the West became part of the great territorial complex created by the Franks with arms: Charlemagne sought to justify his conquests by asserting a civilizing religious mission. The Carolingian Empire, despite the coronation in Rome at Christmas of 800, had of Roman only outward and vague attitudes; it was instead, as it were, the lay externalization of papal Christian universalism.
The problem of the relations between the two powers, civil and religious, already discussed in the post-Constantinian age, now presented itself again. Once more the dualistic principle of Gelasius I was affirmed: Church and Empire are the two aspects of the same political reality, because religious life and civil life are the two modes of being of social life. However, above this dualism the Church affirmed the supreme necessity of ordinatio ad unum: the otherworldly ideal, the supreme goal of life and of society, brings the apparent dualism to substantial unity; the Church, after the disappearance of Charlemagne and the incapacity of his successors to preserve the program, claimed to dominate the Empire, which must be reduced to purely ministerial functions, since from the pope, vicar of Christ, descends the authority of princes and kings. The unity that the Empire allowed to slip away was gathered up by the Papacy, and under Nicholas I there was the prefiguration of Christendom such as the 11th century was to bring about.
Charlemagne for his part advanced clearly caesaropapist claims, according to the Justinianic Byzantine tradition, but his successors did not succeed in preserving this program in the face of the Papacy: Nicholas I proclaimed the papal mission as the supreme defense of peace and justice, and the Pseudo-Isidorian texts of the mid-9th century were then adduced as proof of the antiquity of this conception of primacy.
The Carolingian Empire fell apart, after having lived less than a hundred years (800-888), without having succeeded in resolving the problem of the political organization of the Christian world and that of social order. The plurality of the populations associated within it had been matched by the plurality of national laws. The administrative organization of the counties and marches of Merovingian origin had not been able to strengthen the cohesion of so vast a State. Order and social discipline were consequently entrusted to the formation and development of those personal bonds between the powerful and the weak upon which the feudal system was built in the 9th century. From the Frankish zone in which it first developed, this system spread to all the countries of Western Europe, assuming there attitudes and colorings conformable to local tendencies and needs. The feudal organization, however, if in appearance it is state disintegration, in reality is an arrangement and coordination of the fundamental social cells for the future political and economic formation of Europe; it is furthermore a school of social discipline: observance of duties, inviolability of sworn commitments, loyalty in the execution of freely assumed contracts.
In the shattering of the Carolingian Empire, its territories regrouped into agglomerations headed by descendants of the great Emperor; France, Germany, Italy, and Burgundy formed dynastic units that preluded the European monarchies with national tendencies of the succeeding age. Feudal life, with its dense development, veiled the authority and power of these dynasties, but preserved their juridical value. From the 10th century the European Christian world presented the two characteristics that it would preserve for several centuries: political disintegration, religious-moral unity through the work of the Catholic Church. The Empire was in fact revived through the work of the German Otto I in 962, but it now embraced only the Germanic and Italian countries and — after 1032 — Burgundian ones. The German emperors aspired in vain to resume the unifying mission of Christian society according to the Carolingian tradition.
Feudal disintegration, territorial monarchies, and the Romano-Germanic Empire constituted grave difficulties for the religious universalism defended by the Roman Church. Against these dangers the Church began in the 11th century the most tenacious struggle. It fought for its liberty, for its independence from political organizations, from the feudalization that gagged it, from the Germanic conception of the private church that destroyed hierarchical bonds. The Church now had at its disposal a great force: monasticism in a phase of renewal, which likewise sought to escape the bonds of feudal society.
VII. MONASTICISM
Monasticism, which arose in the Roman era as an affirmation of absolute evangelical spiritualization against the superficiality of the Christianity of the converted masses, preserves in the Latin Middle Ages, in the forms of Italian Benedictinism, all its fresh originality.
Within the Catholic-Roman system it accomplishes a work of capital importance: not only does it serve the elevation of those who aspire to the sublimation of their own spirit, but through prayers and penances it attends to the formation of that treasury of graces which must be the basis of the eternal salvation of the community. A mystical function, but in a certain sense already a social one: to it is added the further function of acting within European society through cultural, economic and charitable activity. In this way monasticism represents the penetration in depth, into the masses, of the faith, there where the episcopal organization could attend only to a predominantly external disciplinary action (v. MONACHESIMO). The new Benedictine congregations that arise from the 10th century onward — the Cluniacs first, then the Carthusians and thereafter the Cistercians — represent new attempts to preserve the faithful interpretation of the master's rule while adapting to the spiritual and material needs of European society. Thus St. Francis and St. Dominic will not hesitate to break, in appearance, the old rigid frameworks of the ecclesiastical tradition, consecrating in new rules the Christian program of an exemplary social preaching, in which vibrate all the impulses of the youngest European generations.
VIII. THE CHURCH'S STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM
But meanwhile monasticism pervades the whole Church with its spirit, imposes on it its own conceptions, its own program of liberty and spiritual independence, countering the corrupting influences of the profane world and of political society. This purer religious spirit drives the Church in the 11th century to renew itself profoundly. The movement is presided over by the Roman Papacy: the Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII, on whatever grounds it may have been written, represents the program that the Roman Church intended to carry out in order to lead Christian society back to the evangelical principles, as it interprets and applies them.
The first point of the program is the affirmation of Roman primacy over the whole Church, tempering the traditional claims of autocephaly of certain great episcopal sees such as Ravenna, Milan, Reims.
More arduous is the undertaking of freeing the secular and regular clergy from the bonds of lay investiture. The struggle against such investiture is preached and intensified, as the primary cause of simony and Nicolaitism; the anti-Catholic conception of the particular Church is assailed; the Papacy frees itself, in the Roman Council of 1059, from all dependence on the Empire, then proclaims and imposes in the grave struggle with Henry IV and Henry V its theocratic principle. The Concordat of Worms (1122) showed, however, the impossibility for the Church of abandoning its ties with political organization through the feudal institution: European society remained faithful to the tradition of the double religious and civil character and demanded the preservation of the bonds between Church and State, bringing about between them new conflicts over superiority and over the dominion of the world. Through the new struggles with the Empire, the Roman Papacy directs in the 12th century its action toward the complete subjection to religious principles of all manifestations of social life: its ideal is the absolute fusion of the Church and political society, that is, the realization in worldly life of the Civitas Dei.
To this end the solemnly proclaimed theocracy must serve; the most important means is the administration of spiritual goods; the communion of the faithful is civil society itself; whoever withdraws from the authority of the Church is deprived of the enjoyment of the charisms and finds himself at one and the same time outside the Church and outside society. Such is the function of the system of excommunications and interdicts. Into it falls the struggle against every theory that deforms orthodoxy; the presence of heretics in a region is a danger of disintegration for the episcopal organization and consequently for civil and state life.
Heresy is combated first by the local religious and civil authorities, then arises the centralized inquisitorial organization, entrusted generally to the two new religious Orders: of the Franciscans and, even more, of the Dominicans, while the civil power is limited to the merely ministerial function (secular arm) on the basis of imperial constitutions (Frederick I, Frederick II) that rest on the ancient Justinian legislation.
The consciousness of having to defend the justice of God and social peace justifies the Church in its program of substituting itself for the state organisms deficient in the necessary work of repressing the anarchy resulting from private feudal wars. From the episcopal organization, already invigorated by the monastic spirit, proceeds the search for means of pacification, consecrating immunity from every offense of war, not only of ecclesiastics, but also of the weak (widows, orphans, pilgrims, merchants) with the "Peace of God," and suspending the operations of war in certain periods of the year with the "Truce of God."
Thus the humanization of war is sought by imposing on combat the defense of persons and of religious principles, establishing as it were a religious and moral code of chivalry, to which war is pointed out only as the defense of truth and justice.
IX. THE EXPANSION OF THE CHURCH
But the Church is concerned to bring the fervor of the faithful to the cause of the propagation of the Faith. To recover the territories lost in the preceding centuries to the Islamic revolution is the program proclaimed in the 11th century and summed up in the Crusade for the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre (1099); but it is surrounded by the struggles to check the expansion of the Muslims in the Italian islands and in the Iberian peninsula. Meanwhile the work for the conversion of the Scandinavian peoples of the north and of the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe is fervent; the German episcopate, supported by the German feudal nobility, attends to it; there arises a hierarchical episcopate depending directly on Rome; the monastic Orders such as the Cistercians spread their religious-economic system there. The boundaries of Roman Catholicism expand as far as what will be the limits of modern Europe. The Crusades of Syria, on the other hand, fail, whence the Latin element is expelled entirely before the 13th century ends (fall of Acre: 1291); their only fruit is the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire (Fourth Crusade: 1204), but in the Balkan regions papal hegemony is fleeting, because it disappears with the progressive withdrawal of the Latin dominions; yet the revival of Byzantine civilization through the work of the Palaeologi is also fleeting, for they will disappear before the triumph of the Ottoman Turks (fall of Constantinople: 1453).
Of the Crusading movement, once the military and conquering framework had fallen, there is preserved, however, what had been its fundamental idea, the propagation of the faith, in the peaceful missions that the Franciscans and Dominicans begin under the direction of the Papacy on the Asian continent toward the middle of the 13th century. The preaching of the Gospel from Mongolia to China, and to Japan itself, appears at the end of the 13th century destined for great results and pushes the problem of the Holy Land into second place.
X. CHURCH AND EMPIRE
At the end of the 13th century, that civilized Europe which was to endure until the modern age appears completely formed under the direction of the Roman See: it was made up of three groups of peoples — Romance, Germanic, Slavic — which drew from the spirit of Catholicism the first elements of their religious and moral life. Now the fruits were visible of that romanization of the masses which, in the Christian spirit, had taken place before the year 1000. Every region, every city was the center of a lively activity of its own, characteristic. While the Church preserved Latin as its official language and supported a Latin literary activity that was fundamentally a continuation of the classical one, everywhere, as a manifestation of this vitality, the new vernacular tongues were taking shape; in the 12th century literary activity in the vernacular appears in various zones, the first affirmation of the nation that had slowly been forming; richer and more substantial in the 13th century.
While the Holy Roman Empire fails in its program of political unification of the Christian world and is reduced to being a mere juridical institution of scant practical importance, contested even in the theoretical sphere, old and new feudal dynasties become the initiators and organizers of vast state organisms: France, England, Scotland, Portugal, Aragon, Sicily, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden.
The Roman Church, while fighting the Empire over its domineering claims, favors the rise of territorial monarchies, which however it seeks to bind to itself by feudal ties; by virtue of the ratio peccati it asserts the right to intervene as supreme tribunal in conflicts between monarchs, substituting its judgment based on religious and moral concepts for the crude conception of the ordalia (judgment of God)
on which the justification of medieval war substantially rested.
European Christian unity has its period of greatest splendor in the first half of the 13th century, between the pontificate of Innocent III and that of Innocent IV. It is the moment when the Papacy decides the Empire between Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick; it raises up Otto IV and then brings him down, raises up Frederick II and then excommunicates him, deposes and replaces him, destroys the Hohenstaufen and replaces them in Sicily, while it favors a new imperial schism in Germany that strikes the Holy Roman Empire a mortal blow in its prestige.
XI. CULTURE
Under the auspices of the Roman Church, Christian cultural life reached its highest peaks in that half century. After the collapse of cultivated Roman society in the age of the barbarian invasions, culture, books and teaching had taken refuge in the monastic schools and then in the cathedral schools; the educated class had become one with the clergy. In the 12th century the great Studia of Bologna and Paris were formed, and in the following century the Universities multiplied, embracing the various faculties: alongside Roman law now stood canon law, alongside theology, philosophy and the arts. The Church protected these great institutions of culture, regarding them as a manifestation of her own vitality: culture in the 13th century is still distinctly ecclesiastical; at the Studium of Paris the Franciscan and Dominican masters, inspired by the principles dominant in their Orders, brought new and fruitful methods, concepts and sentiments.
But the attempt to gather within the bosom of the Church all the forms of European social life is fleeting: it vanishes in its very realization. If the Church admitted, with due reservations, the study of Aristotelian thought, and St. Thomas Aquinas represents the reconciliation of ancient thought with Christian thought, so as to be, as it were, the supreme culmination of the triumph of the Roman Church, already in the very age of St. Thomas - the second half of the 13th century - culture tends to become lay, to pass into the hands of an educated class that lives outside the Church; from the University of Bologna the knowledge of Roman law spread throughout Europe, just as from Paris the new Aristotelian philosophy, freed from the patristic tradition, spread, and the two influences, joining together, formed the theoretical basis of European society in the late Middle Ages. A new class of jurists, in the service of the feudal monarchies, aims to loosen them from the bonds of the Christian conception. Now a new formula is raised aloft: Rex in regno suo est imperator. Every prince therefore has in his kingdom the same prerogatives of absolute sovereignty that the Roman tradition attributed to the emperor; thus the Aristotelian naturalism taught by the neo-Aristotelians leads to the affirmation of the most complete autonomy of the State, in its activity and in its ends, from every religious presupposition. These new conceptions came to clash sharply with the demands of the Church as a universal religious and moral organization, as the regulator of all political activities in order to direct them toward the ultimate ends of human society. The European monarchies, armed with the new thought, were led to reject all dependence on the Church, to confine within the framework of their political interests all the moral and economic activities of their subjects. This is the meaning of the conflict between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, which ended with the defeat of the Papacy (Anagni 1303), on the morrow, one might say, of the publication of the bull Unam Sanctam (1302), which was the most solemn and absolute proclamation of papal theocracy. On the other hand, the struggles between Clement V and Henry VII, between John XXII and Louis the Bavarian, represent the dissolution of medieval political-religious universalism in its two antithetical forms, Papacy and Empire.
Having freed itself of its ideological-political superstructures, Christian universalism nonetheless remains the pivot of European society in its religious essence. It is strengthened, indeed, by the Franciscan religious movement, which appeals to the inexhaustible source of sentiments of love and piety of the Christian faith, softening whatever was angular and harsh in the old episcopal organization, which preserved, by evident necessity, its ties with worldly interests, fiefs and monarchies. Now that religious society and civil society are absolutely differentiated and grow ever more distant from one another, now that the relations of the Papacy with the monarchies are loosening, Franciscanism, by resuming in the realm of sentiment the work of popular penetration abandoned by the old monastic orders, which had become too isolated from the world, accomplishes an action of the greatest importance.
XII. NEW SPIRIT AND NEW HORIZONS
The last two centuries of the Middle Ages, from the middle of the 13th century to the middle of the 15th, present a Europe already entirely transformed. The economic environment displays an extremely lively activity. Large-scale commerce opens new routes across the continent; all regions are renewed in their local economic life, opened to the European commercial movement; where previously there was the small market and the economy of barter, now one enters the framework of commerce based on money. The merchants of Lombardy and Tuscany, those of Flanders, of the Hanseatic cities transport goods across all of Europe; their traffic is the beginning of banking organizations and of the traffic in money; the appearance after the middle of the 13th century of the Florentine gold coin (florin) and then of the Venetian one (ducat) transforms the European market; the Christian economic conceptions of the just price and of the prohibition against deriving profit from money lent give way to the great natural law that governs the relationship between demand and supply: there arises a new economic life that will favor the development of the modern bourgeois spirit, skeptical, egoistic, anticlerical par excellence, and soon the echoes of this new life will be felt also in the national literatures, to the detriment of the influences of religion and morality.
In the 14th century feudal and communal atomism has already disappeared, leaving room for the nations that find expression in the speech that has imposed itself among all the dialects and that represents the aspirations and interests of an ever wider band of regions. The new nations are a support for the great monarchies that rapidly perfect the central and peripheral organs of government, making use of noble and bourgeois elements with indifference, because the principle of the search for technical competences now dominates. Across the continent a dense network of international relations takes shape: each State sets itself a policy of cordial or hostile relations with neighboring States according to dynastic, territorial and economic requirements; the difficulty of resolving problems directly leads to the establishment of diplomacy that negotiates in peacetime, to the creation of armies stably organized for the action of war, to the formation of diplomatic and military coalitions that at first are fleeting, then tend, as the problem persists, to assume a character of continuity.
Meanwhile the Papacy, which by the European political situation has been forced into a long exile in French territory (Avignon captivity: 1305-77), upon its return to Italy suffers the grave shock of the great schism produced by the clash between the various national tendencies that penetrate the Church. At the Council of Constance there manifests itself the clash between the centralizing, monarchical tendency of the Papacy and the centrifugal, disintegrating one, directed at making councils assembled at fixed periods the fundamental governing organ of the Church. The Papacy succeeds in overcoming the opposition of the councils, but by leaning on the European princes with whom it initiates the dangerous system of concordats that divide authority over the local Churches between the Roman Curia and the monarchy. Already in the Avignon period the Papacy had known how to create a robust juridical-financial organization of its own, on which its authority over the entire ecclesiastical organization now rests; with new religious Orders or with the transformation of the old Orders it seeks to save and strengthen the most precious of authorities, that over souls; responding to the demands already manifested in the 14th century and then with greater liveliness and anxiety in the 15th century for a reform of the organization and of morals in capite et in membris. Opposed to this tendency, on the other hand, is the other one to which the Roman Curia obeys in the 15th century, of a transformation of papal authority in a more rigidly monarchical sense.
Despite internal crises, deficiencies, spiritual rebellions, wars, there persists in Europe the consciousness of belonging to a whole that is still Christian and Roman, that is still the res publica christiana. Christianity is considered as an essential characteristic of all European peoples, as a bond that binds them and that differentiates them from unbelieving peoples.
For individual questions see then the entries: CHIESA; IMPERO; FEUDALESIMO; COMUNI; COSTANTINOPOLI; CROCIATE; GERMANIA; RINASCIMENTO.
Bibliography6 works
it., Bari 1938, pp. 53-85. On the Church in the Middle Ages: G. Schnürer, Kirche und Kultur im Mittelalter, 3 vols., Paderborn 1914-29. On the Empire in the Middle Ages: H. Fisher, The medieval Empire, London 1898; J. Bryce, Il Sacro Romano Impero, Italian trans., Milan 1907; A. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, Italian trans., Messina 1933. On Charlemagne and his Empire: A. Kleinclausz, L'Empire carolingien et ses transformations, Paris 1902; L. Halphen, Charlemagne et l'empire carolingien, ibid. 1947. On medieval political thought: R. W. and A. I. Carlyle, A history of medieval political theory in the West, Edinburgh 1903-36; G. Tellenbach, Libertas, Kirche und Weltordnung, Stuttgart 1936; W. Pewesni, Imperium, Ecclesia universalis, in Geistige Grundlagen der römischen Kirchenpolitik, Stuttgart 1937; A. Passerin, The medieval contribution to political thought, Oxford 1939; G. Tabacco, La relazione tra i concetti di potere spirituale e di potere temporale nella tradizione cristiana fino al sec. XIV, Turin 1950. On the relations between Romans and Germans: C. Cipolla, Della supposta fusione degli Italiani con i Germani, in Reudiconti Acc. Lincei, 1901; G. Volpe, Lombardi e Romani nelle campagne e nelle città, in Studi storici, 13 (1904), pp. 53-81; 167-82; 241-315; 369-416; 14 (1905), pp. 123-43; id., Alberi della nazione italiana, in Momenti di storia italiana, Florence 1925, pp. 1-58. On the crisis of the Middle Ages: J. Rivière, Le probleme de l'Eglise et de l'Etat au temps de Philippe le Bel, Louvain 1926; B. Labdry, L'idée de chrétienté chez les scolastiques du XIIIe siècle, Paris 1929; G. de Lagarde, La naissance de l'esprit laïque, St-Paul-Trois Châteaux 1934; G. Miglio, La crisi dell'universalismo politico medievale, in Marsilio da Padova. Studi raccolti nel VI centenario della morte, edited by A. Cecchini and N. Bobbio, Padua 1942. On the formation of modern nations: F. Bock, Imperium und Nationalstaaten im späteren Mittelalter, in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 27 (1937); K. Bierbach, Kurie und nationale Staaten im früheren Mittelalter, Dresden 1938. On the end of the Middle Ages: W. Goetz, Mittelalter und Renaissance, in Historische Zeitschrift, 98 (1907), pp. 30-54; J. Huizinga, Das Problem der Renaissance, Munich 1930; id., Autunno del m., Italian trans., Florence 1940; F. Chabod, Il Rinascimento nelle recenti interpretazioni, in Bull. of Intern. Committee of Hlth. science, 19 (1933); H. Bainton, Changing ideas and ideals in the sixteenth century, in Journal of modern history, 8 (1936), pp. 417-43; F. Heer, Aufgabe Europas. Ein Studie zu den Zusammenhängen zwischen politischer Religiosität, Frömmigkeit und dem Werden Europas, Zurich-Vienna 1949.
Francesco Cognasso
XIII. ART
1. Origins
Roman compendiary painting (from the Flavian age onward) tends to sum up the visible world (the spectacle) in a few detached notes (to stenograph it), whereas in reality it consists of an uninterrupted series of chiaroscuro and chromatic transitions; it tends to replace gradations with blots. This is a rapid and fanciful procedure of vision and representation, which differs from the slow and diligently imitative one of more properly classical art and constitutes, to be sure, a first rupture of figurative morphology, a first disarticulation of the connections of normal vision. Hence a sort of impressionism, of which many examples also appear in the catacombs. It is an innovative art that clashes with common taste and provokes the censure of traditionalists from Vitruvius to Petronius and, probably, of Horace himself.
Analogous is the function of the deep holes of shadow, sudden descents in place of soft undulations, which the drill technique introduces into sculpture. Through the breach of this first disconnection, ever vaster and deeper strains upon the morphological and syntactical order break in, culminating in a veritable expressionism. A process, moreover, running from academic modes to impressionistic ones and from these to expressionistic ones, which repeats itself, identically, in modern art.
The first clear signs of expressionistic taste appear in the paintings of the seasons in the catacombs of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus (De Witt). In sculpture the process, already begun decades earlier, might be said to be complete in Tetrarchic art - coinage - and above all, after notable anticipations, in the Roman art of Provence (Le Blant), in the Constantinian parts of the Arch of Constantine (L'Orange, Castelfranco, Bovini, etc.). The spiritual motives behind these figurative outcomes are many, including ones of a general character and in parallel with the other activities: 1) the anti-academic reaction of taste, according to the usual oscillations of "fashion." 2) The continual re-emergence, especially under the impulse of the socially inferior strata, of anti-classical tendencies, rich in popular spontaneity and rooted in the deepest and most ancient attitudes of Roman spirituality insofar as it is Italic. 3) The general process from "haptic" or tactile vision to "optic" vision, from the plastic to the pictorial, so well (even if perhaps a little too mechanistically) outlined by Riegl. 4) And above all the irresistible impulse of the new Christian spirituality, which works from within toward the disintegration and renewal of the old pagan mentality.
The abhorrence of "aphrodisiac" nature undoubtedly enters into the formation of Christian taste. Whether it was revolution or evolution as regards the figurative arts, historians ask (v. especially Dvořák); probably both together. The new Christian spirituality completely shifts the relationship between the scene and the light. In ancient vision the spectacle, the world, the "thing" is placed "beneath" the light, "facing" the light. Hence precisely the prevalence of plastic values. In Christian spirituality the spectacle is placed "against" the light; the world is referred to the background of supernatural luminosity, the sole goal of the soul, and upon it the world is projected as a shadow.
This explains many things: the crystallization of the human figure into a fundamental schema, to which all the infinite variations of attitude are more or less reduced and which is, in substance, nothing but the mimetic transposition of the subject's state of mind, a sort of "confession" of the author, in an act of adoration, motionless in the ecstatic fixity of enormous wide-open eyes. The changing of mosaic backgrounds from blue (the reality of sky) to white and gold (the symbol of light). Upon this gold, once the ambiguity and incongruity of the ancient spatial relationships between foreground and background planes have been overcome, the representation of space is nevertheless integrally realized, because the indefinite becomes the infinite, the mist becomes splendor; and the world no longer has thickness, no longer has weight, but only vibrations of light, limits of lines and planes of color.
The new Christian basilica undoubtedly assimilates many elements and motifs from various types of pagan buildings, but it transforms them all into a decidedly original organism, determined by the spiritual foundations and the requirements of the new liturgical practice: the convergence of attention, the unity of feeling of all the people gathered toward that moment and that point which is the supreme goal of the "ecclesia," where the rite is celebrated.
And this too is, in a certain sense, an "expressionistic" outcome. And this holds also for the rather rare but now well-established type, especially in Illyria, of the "basilica discoperta" (Digwe).
With an ever more intimate and precise understanding of liturgical requirements and with the introduction of a symbolism, then clear and eloquent, intended to recall the sacred mysteries even in the architectural members, religious building, in its tendency to unify into a single organism spaces originally distinct and aggregated, gradually assumes an ever more particular physiognomy, in the period from Constantine to Theodosius, in which so many distinguished figures of the Roman ruling class transferred their activity from the civil and political field to the ecclesiastical one, such as St. Ambrose and St. Paulinus of Nola and St. Augustine. And it is precisely to these great men of government that a powerful impulse to the construction of sacred buildings is owed, as recent research is revealing (De Capitani d'Arzago, Arslan, Villa, Chierici), both for the Pauline churches at Nola and for the Ambrosian ones in the Milanese capital.
2. Byzantine architecture
That "position of the object against the light" already mentioned also clarifies many things concerning that particular development of Roman-Christian building which is Byzantine architecture (v. BIZANTINA, ARTE).
Like a geode, a poor pebble on the outside, which has at its heart a shining cavern lined with amethysts or rubies or sapphires, the Byzantine building, with a rough and almost unadorned outer shell, encloses within itself treasures not only of precious and gleaming materials, but also incomparable magnificences of truly highly poetic and suggestive architectural imaginings. Then the golden glitter of the mosaics transfers the source of light to the interior of the spaces, transforming the wall into a simple diaphanous screen. An ambiguous limit; one might say an unlimited or "infinite" limit; a fusion with the infinite; a limit ideally, indeed visibly though not tactilely, surpassable. And here again is a figurative element (the wall plane) placed against the light and, in the end, absorbed into the light. In the sublime effort to transcend matter, to attain directly the Divinity by sensibly expressing the ineffable, which unites architecture with the other medieval arts, the mosaic thus becomes, in its chromatic and luministic values, a necessary element of the Byzantine architectural organism, just as, but in a diametrically opposite sense, that is, plastic, the column had been for the Greeks.
3. Figurative Expressionism
The expressionistic violence that is so large a part of the art of late antiquity and of the earliest Christian times finds still more exacerbated developments on the periphery of the cultured world. Not so much in that Balkan art (s. Soldaten Kunst, "art along the Danube," etc.) which is perhaps simply protobarbaric, and below the level of art (perhaps with the sole exception of the stele of Scarabantia and the Tropaion of Adamkissi), as in Egypt, where, under the strongest pressure of elements of popular and indigenous tradition, it gives rise to Coptic art; with an ever greater tendency toward the disintegration of figurative morphology and syntax and toward an ever more accentuated abstract decorativism, now calligraphic, now chromatic (beautiful effects of stain in fabrics). Also through the ever more penetrating suggestion of the neighboring Islamic art; and it still lives, or rather vegetates, according to traditional formulas after more than a millennium and a half in Ethiopian land.
In the new heart, or rather brain, of the Byzantine Empire, on the other hand, the ancient subtle spirit of the Greeks and the persistent taste for typifying idealization work upon the new figurative heritage that had taken concrete form in the expressionistic, "Plutonic" moment, assume it as a given, as a motif, as a "world," and proceed to elaborate it into precious stylistic refinements, into formulas more rigid than those of the old canons. They create the new "ideal beauty" (codified in famous manuals) with the contents of "characteristic ugliness."
Certainly the panorama of Byzantine art is less uniform than was believed until recently, since metropolitan and provincial currents differentiate it in space, and in time the succession of the two golden ages: the Justinianic and the Macedonian, divided by the great iconoclastic crisis, to which one may add, though lesser, the third, that of the Comneni. But it is perhaps still an obscure impulse of atavistic Oriental forms that thus finds its stately systematization.
4. Islamic Art
Beyond the eastern and southern frontiers of the Empire the Islamic world seethes and soon overflows, in a phase of powerful expansion and rapid growth, cultural as well. Following the more properly Oriental taste, it directs the impulse toward abstraction into schemes of pure ornamentation.
An eminently decorative taste that is realized entirely on the surface, resolving sculpture into embroidery (famous example: Mšattā); painting into pure linear development (the arabesque, precisely) or into a mere juxtaposition of colors or of values (carpet). Architecture too obeys the same impulses, for it shuns a synthetic and syntactic organization of space, unfolding the architectural discourse in paratactic form, with a series of similar members succeeding one another without conclusion: coordination and not subordination of the elements: an example is the Mosque of Cordova.
Richer in historical contents, and therefore in naturalistic representations, is painting — especially Persian miniature painting (influenced by the Far East), certainly known to the West as well.
5. Barbarian Art
On the northeastern frontiers the barbarian world reveals the same impulses at work, with regard to art — if indeed it is possible to speak of art in the barbarian world in the proper sense of the word (v. BARBARICA, ARTE). The barbarian has no figurative world of his own, neither historical nor logical: and his language is a stammering, largely under the impulse of an automatism that takes concrete form in the "horror vacui," of fragments drawn from classical culture and often distorted with absolute incomprehension of the model. Decorative automatism is evident in a large part of Scythian goldsmithing, which is perhaps the greatest pride of barbarian production, with the repeated punching, on the body and at the edges of the object, of the few motifs, by now fixed, of whole animals or of limbs. On the other hand, even the famous flechtbandornament, the entrelac, or interlace, is nothing but a vulgarization of classical motifs (braid), or Byzantine ones (basket capitals), rather than Coptic.
Nor is it accurate, as is often repeated to explain the almost total lack of the human figure, that barbarian art tends to express itself in an abstract language through the representation of a world reducible to pure elements and geometric relations in contempt of every naturalistic reference. And although in the initial stages there is evident rather a process of decline and disintegration of misunderstood naturalistic forms (which assimilates Gothic and Lombard fibulae to bracteates), in the final stage one can often find the imprint of a vigorous fantastic power.
Executed often with great refinement, this style appears in Scandinavian goldsmithing and nielli and later in the ships of Oseberg; whence the supposition that this conquest of barbarian art belongs to the more Nordic Germanic world. But as regards Oseberg we find ourselves in a relatively late period: certainly later than that of certain admirable creations of that miniature painting which was considered Irish but which the convincing research of Masai indicates rather as pertaining to that high level of culture to which the Romanist Christianity of Northumbria had attained.
Not only in the happy and inexhaustible fertility of ornamental inventions, but also in the representation, however rare, of the human or animal figure (symbols of the Evangelists, Crucifixion), this art succeeds in grafting decorative rhythms onto naturalistic motifs with a stylistic rigor and an inventive impetus of stupendous effectiveness in the exacerbated expressionistic intensity of the transfiguration. And with autonomous means and highly original results in enamel, it develops the suggestions of technique. It is only through contact with an elevated Christian spirituality, in this first fruitful encounter, that the obscure forces of barbarian feeling find the light of a truly and highly artistic expression and become a new powerful contribution of civilization.
The Lombards, who are ignorant of the later and more complex developments of this style, monotonously repeat its most elementary formulas. A modest kindling of interest in the arts manifests itself precisely toward the decline of Lombard power with Liutprand and the last kings, and with the dukes, especially those of Friuli.
6. Carolingian Art and the "magistri comacini." — Carolingian art (v. CAROLINGIA, ARTE) reaches, especially in miniature painting, ivory carvings, and goldsmithing, a high level in the service of an evidently political program. A splendid flowering without doubt, but undeniably artificial; a planned culture. This is clearly confirmed by the variety of orientations (all of them derivative) of the various schools or workshops. A certain revival of building activity, which culminates in the Palatine Chapel of Aachen, plainly harks back to Ravenna models.
Moreover, that the art of building, for two centuries in almost complete abandonment between the middle of the 6th and the middle of the 8th century approximately, remained alive only through the nourishment of a thin current of Roman tradition — more manual than artistic — is, by several indications, not only probable but obvious.
The "magistri comacini" (v. COMACINI, MAESTRI), who constituted true building enterprises recorded by Lombard sources, are nothing but the continuators of the craftsmen of the era of greatest splendor of Roman Milan, in the period when it was capital of the West. After the capital passed to Ravenna, there also moved the center of greatest building activity which there, owing to its geographical position and its contacts with the East, although going back to the common Roman sources, developed with a particular accent.
It is very probable that the conquest and the brief Lombard domination of Ravenna caused these Ravennate craftsmen to flow back into the rest of the Po Valley and spread that particular accent. The only two buildings that are with some probability usually assigned to the second half of the 8th century (more particularly to the time of Desiderius), S. Salvatore in Brescia and the tempietto of Cividale, display constructive and decorative peculiarities of so markedly Ravennate, and indeed late Roman, a character as even to suggest the hypothesis (which, however, for historical reasons is hardly acceptable) that they might even go back to the 6th century. Ravennate forms which, as Fiocco rightly saw, penetrate and endure longer along the upper Adriatic coasts, in the art he suggestively defined as "exarchal."
7. Ottonian art (v.). — After that of Anglo-Irish illumination, the other great contribution of the early Middle Ages to figurative civilization is that of Ottonian art. And with far greater variety and richness of attitudes, even within a great unity of taste and style, and with far deeper and broader effectiveness in space and time. One may well say that here lie the foundations of a new language, the complete and lucid expression of that synthesis of various and at times contrasting impulses which, after so much travail, marks a new season of the human spirit: that of the full Middle Ages, which in the figurative arts is usually called Romanesque.
And it is once again the spiritual climate of Christian religiosity that, loosening the knot of barbarism, allows these obscure primitive forces to find the path of expressive capacity, and the brute impulses of a violent passionality to clarify themselves in the light of poetry. An impetus and a warmth of rude, virile, heroic sentiments, overflowing in dramatic vivacity, stirs mystical aspirations from the depths and, with an overwhelming dynamism, transforms the fixed paleochristian and even Byzantine ecstasy into exasperated visionary hallucination.
Certainly, just as the expressionism or even surrealism of these artists can be traced back to the Carolingian vein of Reims and Corbie, so especially in the moments of greatest entanglement of the politics of the two Empires through the marriage of Otto II to Theophano, Ottonian art also feeds on contemporary cultural contributions from aulic Byzantium, which after iconoclasm was in its second flowering (whence, for example, the coexistence of the two styles in the Codex Aureus Escurialensis). On the other hand, especially as regards mural painting, not without effectiveness are the examples that, on the stock of the very old paleochristian tradition, the wide-ranging and exquisitely cultured activity of the Benedictine fresco painters (S. Angelo in Formis) and Roman fresco painters (S. Clemente) elaborates in new forms, as is clear, for example, in the Oberzell of Reichenau.
8. Romanesque art
In the 11th century, partly because of the irrepressible rise of social life and partly because of the necessary reparation of the last barbarian devastations, the Hungarian ones, there is in the West an almost sudden, impetuous, imposing revival of building activity. Thus it happens simultaneously in Italy and especially in the Po Valley as in Germany, France, and Spain where, in the non-Arabized part, Asturias, there had been a singular flowering parallel to the Carolingian one, but with characteristics of marked originality (S. Maria de Naranco). The limit and condition of this activity becomes the preeminent problem of the roofing of large church buildings.
If the Byzantine East, always firm in its preference for centralized types, still labors at the construction of domes, but, with the bulk of the building generally reduced, now takes pleasure in the decorative chiseling even of the exterior walls with polychromies and brick facings; and if Armenia bizarrely multiplies spatial articulations, with schemes that are claimed, not without exaggeration, to have influenced the West; if Rome generally remains faithful to the old basilical type with trussed roofing, in the Po Valley of Italy the first large-scale experiments in stone roofing with barrel vaults seem to take shape. In this fervor of works, characteristics of the artistic process begin to appear that will become essential in the further historical development, and indeed decisive, of the Renaissance: above all, the reaffirmation of the artistic "consciousness," which is to say of the "personality" of individuals, though harmoniously coordinated within collective work.
a) Painting. - As, moreover, in the cycles of frescoes already mentioned of central and southern Italy, regions bound by closer ties now religious, now political, to the papal See, there appears a sense of measure in representation, a cordiality of motifs that differentiate them clearly, whether from the subtle intellectualism and refined abstractions of Byzantine art (which in Italy asserts its most precise dominion in the mosaics of Sicily, from the solemn models of Daphni, and of the upper Adriatic), or from the pathetic exaggerations of Nordic expressionism. And in this balanced concreteness, in this respect for and understanding of the human person, as motif and as representation, as model and as module, it is possible to recognize the distinctive character of Italic or one might say Latin art in general and of this period in particular, a full and perfect realization in the realm of the imagination and in particular in the figurative arts, of the most wise doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church.
b) Architecture. - Then in architecture, perhaps also because of the suggestion of the old traditional type of the basilica, always present to Italian builders, schemes of simple, clear, relatively slender partitioning prevail. Florentine architecture, even in its decoration, goes back to paleochristian models; Pisan architecture to Ravennate ones (not without Oriental touches). But the Lombard builders too, though all attentive to the problem of vaults and to the systems consequent upon its solution, always aim at spatial clarity.
But particularly in France and Germany the great religious authorities, whether secular episcopal or monastic, seem to seek a tangible manifestation of their power in the complicated grandiosity of enormous buildings extraordinarily rich in articulations; already from the second half of the 10th century, and for this reason it has been said that the Romanesque is rooted in the Ottonian. One need only think of the complexity and the effort achieved by Cluny (v.) of the last phase; of the vastness and movement of masses of a St-Riquier, of the massive imposingness of those buildings, rather citadels than churches, which are the Rhenish cathedrals of Worms, Speyer, Mainz.
c) Sculpture. - While, in France, a curious current of Orientalism asserts itself in the Périgord, Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Provence (in close ties, particularly St-Gilles, with Pisa) draw largely, at times slavishly for the decoration of the members, on the heritage of provincial Romanity. An almost classicistic taste that in Aquitaine and Provence also entirely dominates sculpture, from Toulouse to Moissac, from Arles to St-Gilles; not without some singular exotic vein as in the Indianisms of Souillac. In Burgundy, for example, Autun, alongside the strict classicistic imitation of architectural modules, the figures lengthen and twist with a pathetic intensity that foreshadows the Gothic.
Thus the great German sculpture develops expressionistic modes of Ottonian illumination and carving, in works of spare essentiality, of exceptional dramatic power in anatomical accentuations such as many crucifixes, or the bronzes of Hildesheim.
9. Gothic art
Thus, through the natural evolution of taste and the continuous elaboration of ever-new solutions to the problem of the vault, the modes of pictorial decoration and of sculpture are also determined. But within the womb of the Romanesque the Gothic is being born; for despite recent denials (which instead assert the purely ornamental-aesthetic and not structural value of the Gothic and its derivation from Oriental motifs), the interpretation of Viollet-le-Duc, who derives the entire Gothic system from the arcus augiva (perhaps of Lombard origin), may still be considered valid. A Gothic system that, born and developed in the Ile de France in the second half of the 12th century, established itself in the 13th century by creating the series of marvelous cathedrals and spread rapidly throughout Europe (v. GOTICA, ARTE). - See plates XXXV-XXXVII.
