Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843

From the sixteenth century, the writers of history begin to assume a different character from that of their predecessors. During the middle ages, the elements of society were fewer and less diversified. Before that time the people were nothing. Popes, emperors, kings, nobles, bishops, knights, are the only materials about which the writer of history cared to know or enquire. Perhaps some exception to this rule might be found in the historians of the free towns of Italy; but they are few and insignificant. After that period, not only did the classes of society increase, but every class was modified by more varieties of individual life. Even within the last century, the science of political economy has given a new colouring to the thoughts and actions of large communities, as the different opinions held by its votaries have multiplied them into distinct and various classes. Modern historians, therefore, may be divided into two classes; the one describing a state of society in which the elements are few; the other the times in which they were more numerous. As a specimen of the first order, he selects Bede. Bede was born in 674, fifty years after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca. He died in 755, two or three years after the victory of Charles Martel over the Saracens. His ecclesiastical history, in five books, describes the period from Augustine's arrival in Kent, 597.

Dr Arnold's dissertation on Bede involves him in the discussion of a question on which much skill and ability have been exercised. We allude to the question of miracles. "The question," says he, "in Bede takes this form—What credit is to be attached to the frequent stories of miracles or wonders which occur in his narrative?" He seizes at once upon the difficulty, without compromise or evasion. He makes a distinction between a wonder and a miracle: "to say that all recorded wonders are false, from those recorded by Herodotus to the latest reports of animal magnetism, would be a boldness of assertion wholly unjustifiable." At the same time he thinks the character of Bede, added to the religious difficulty, may incline us to limit miracles to the earliest times of Christianity, and refuse our belief to all which are reported by the historians of subsequent centuries. He then proceeds to consider the questions which suggest themselves when we read Matthew Paris, or still more, any of the French, German, or Italian historians of the same period:—

"The thirteenth century contains in it, at its beginning, the most splendid period of the Papacy, the time of Innocent the Third; its end coincides with that great struggle between Boniface the Eighth and Philip the Fair, which marks the first stage of its decline. It contains the reign of Frederick the Second, and his long contest with the popes in Italy; the foundation of the orders of friars, Dominican and Franciscan; the last period of the crusades, and the age of the greatest glory of the schoolmen. Thus, full of matters of interest as it is, it will yet be found that all its interest is more or less connected with two great questions concerning the church; namely, the power of the priesthood in matters of government and in matters of faith; the merits of the contest between the Papacy and the kings of Europe; the nature and character of that influence over men's minds which affected the whole philosophy of the period, the whole intellectual condition of the Christian world."—P. 138.

The pretensions and corruptions of the Church are undoubtedly the chief object to which, at this period, the attention of the reader must be attracted. "Is the church system of Innocent III. in faith or government the system of the New Testament?" Is the difference between them inconsiderable, such as may be accounted for by the natural progress of society, or does the rent extend to the foundation? "The first century," says Dr Arnold, "is to determine our judgment of the second and of all subsequent centuries. It will not do to assume that the judgment must be interpreted by the very practices and opinions, the merits of which it has to try." As a specimen of the chroniclers, he selects Philip de Comines, almost the last great writer of his class. In him is exemplified one of the peculiar distinctions of attaching to modern history the importance of attending to genealogies.

"For instance, Comines records the marriage of Mary, duchess of Burgundy, daughter and sole heiress of Charles the Bold, with Maximilian, archduke of Austria. This marriage, conveying all the dominions of Burgundy to Maximilian and his heirs, established a great independent sovereign on the frontiers of France, giving to him on the north, not only the present kingdoms of Holland and Belgium, but large portions of what is now French territory, the old provinces of Artois and French Flanders, French Hainault and French Luxemburg; while on the east it gave him Franche Comté, thus yielding him a footing within the Jura, on the very banks of the Saône. Thence ensued in after ages, when the Spanish branch of the house of Austria had inherited this part of its dominions—the long contests which deluged the Netherlands with blood, the campaigns of King William and Luxembourg, the nine years of efforts, no less skilful than valiant, in which Marlborough broke his way through the fortresses of the iron frontier. Again, when Spain became in a manner French by the accession of the House of Bourbon, the Netherlands reverted once more to Austria itself; and from thence the powers of Europe advanced, almost in our own days, to assail France as a republic; and on this ground, on the plains of Fleurus, was won the first of those great victories which, for nearly twenty years, carried the French standards triumphantly over Europe. Thus the marriage recorded by Comines has been working busily down to our very own times: it is only since the settlement of 1814, and that more recent one of 1830, that the Netherlands have ceased to be effected by the union of Charles the Bold's daughter with Maximilian of Austria"—P. 148.

Again, in order to understand the contest which Philip de Comines records between a Frenchman and a Spaniard for the crown of Naples, we must go back to the dark and bloody page in the annals of the thirteenth century, which relates the extinction of the last heir of the great Swabian race of Hohenstauffen by Charles of Anjou, the fit and unrelenting instrument of Papal hatred—the dreadful expiation of that great crime by the Sicilian Vespers, the establishment of the House of Anjou in Sicily, the crimes and misfortunes of Queen Joanna, the new contest occasioned by her adoption—all these events must be known to him who would understand the expedition of Charles VIII. The following passage is an admirable description of the reasons which lend to the pages of Philip de Comines a deep and melancholy interest:—

"The Memoirs of Philip de Comines terminate about twenty years before the Reformation, six years after the first voyage of Columbus. They relate, then, to a tranquil period immediately preceding a period of extraordinary movement; to the last stage of an old state of things, now on the point of passing away. Such periods, the lull before the burst of the hurricane, the almost oppressive stillness which announces the eruption, or, to use Campbell's beautiful image—

'The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below,'—

are always, I think, full of a very deep interest. But it is not from the mere force of contrast with the times that follow, nor yet from the solemnity which all things wear when their dissolution is fast approaching—the interest has yet another source; our knowledge, namely, that in that tranquil period lay the germs of the great changes following, taking their shape for good or for evil, and sometimes irreversibly, while all wore an outside of unconsciousness. We, enlightened by experience, are impatient of this deadly slumber; we wish in vain that the age could have been awakened to a sense of its condition, and taught the infinite preciousness of the passing hour. And as, when a man has been cut off by sudden death, we are curious to know whether his previous words or behaviour indicated any sense of his coming fate, so we examine the records of a state of things just expiring, anxious to observe whether, in any point, there may be discerned an anticipation of the great future, or whether all was blindness and insensibility. In this respect, Comines' Memoirs are striking from their perfect unconsciousness: the knell of the middle ages had been already sounded, yet Comines has no other notions than such as they had tended to foster; he describes their events, their characters, their relations, as if they were to continue for centuries. His remarks are such as the simplest form of human affairs gives birth to; he laments the instability of earthly fortune, as Homer notes our common mortality, or in the tone of that beautiful dialogue between Solon and Crœsus, when the philosopher assured the king, that to be rich was not necessarily to be happy. But, resembling Herodotus in his simple morality, he is utterly unlike him in another point; for whilst Herodotus speaks freely and honestly of all men, without respect of persons, Philip de Comines praises his master Louis the Eleventh as one of the best of princes, although he witnessed not only the crimes of his life, but the miserable fears and suspicions of his latter end, and has even faithfully recorded them. In this respect Philip de Comines is in no respect superior to Froissart, with whom the crimes committed by his knights and great lords never interfere with his general eulogies of them: the habit of deference and respect was too strong to be broken, and the facts which he himself relates to their discredit, appear to have produced on his mind no impression."