Ferdinand of Arragon

It may surprise some readers to treat the thirteenth century as the virtual close of the Middle Ages, an epoch which is usually placed in the latter half of the fifteenth century, in the age of Louis xi., Henry VII., and Ferdinand of Arragon. But the true spirit of Feudalism, the living soul of Catholicism, which together make up the compound type of society we call mediaeval, were, in point of fact, waning all through the thirteenth century. The hurly-burly of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries was merely one long and cruel death agony. Nay, the inner soul of Catholic Feudalism quite ended in the first generation of the thirteenth century — with St. Dominic, St. Francis, Innocent in., Philip Augustus, and Otto iv., Stephen Langton, and William, Earl Mareschal.

The truly characteristic period of mediaeval- ism is in the twelfth, rather than the thirteenth, century, the period covered by the first three Crusades from 1094, the date of the Council of Clermont, to 1192, when Coeur- de-Lion withdrew from the Holy Land. Or, if we put it a little wider in limits, we may date true mediaevalism from the rise of Hildebrand, about 1070, to the death of Innocent HI. in 1216, or just about a century and a half. St. Louis himself, as we read Joinville’s Memoirs, seems to us a man belated, born too late, and almost an anachronism in the second half of the thirteenth century sofia city tour.

We know that in the slow evolution of society the social brilliancy of a movement is seldom visible, and is almost never ripe for poetic and artistic idealisation until the energy of the movement itself is waning, or even it may be, is demonstrably spent. Shakespeare prolonged the Renascence of the fifteenth century, the Renascence of Leonardo and Raphael, into the seventeenth century, when Puritanism was in full career; and Shakespeare — it is deeply significant — died on the day when Oliver Cromwell entered college at Cambridge. And so, when Dante, in his Vision of 1300, saw the heights and the depths of Catholic Feudalism, he was looking back over great movements which were mighty forces a hundred years earlier. Just so, though the thirteenth century contained within its bosom the plainest proofs that the mediaeval world was ending, the flower, the brilliancy, the variety, the poetry, the soul of the mediaeval world, were never seen in so rich a glow as in the thirteenth century, its last great effort.

Thirteenth century as a whole

In a brief review of each of the dominant movements which give so profound a character to the thirteenth century as a whole, one begins naturally with the central movement of all — the Church. The thirteenth century was the era of the culmination, the over-straining, and then the shameful defeat of the claim made by the Church of Rome to a moral and spiritual autocracy in Christendom. There are at least five Popes in that one hundred years — Innocent HI., Gregory ix., Innocent iv., Gregory x., and Boniface vm.—whose characters impress us with a sense of power or of astounding desire of power, whose lives are romances and dreams, and whose careers are amongst the most instructive in history. He who would understand the Middle Ages must study from beginning to end the long and crowded Pontificate of Innocent HI. In genius, in commanding nature, in intensity of character, in universal energy, in aspiring designs, Innocent HI. has few rivals in the fourteenth centuries of the Roman Pontiffs, and few superiors in any age on any throne in the world.

His eighteen years of rule, from 1198 to 1216, were one long effort, for the moment successful, and in part deserving success, to enforce on the kings and peoples of Europe a higher morality, respect for the spiritual mission of the Church, and a sense of their common civilisation. We feel that he is truly a great man with a noble cause, when the Pope forces Philip Augustus to take back the wife he had so insolently cast off, when the Pope forces John to respect the rights of all his subjects, laymen or churchmen, when the Pope gives to England the best of her Primates, Stephen Langton, the principal author of our Great Charter, when the Pope accepts the potent enthusiasm of the New Friars and sends them forth on their mission of revivalism.