So the medieval world was a strangely static place, rather like a waxworks. People stayed in the place where they were born – unless they happened to be peddlers – because there was no reason to go anywhere else. Besides, travel was very difficult because there was almost no money in circulation. Only the great lords handled gold – and even they only occasionally. In his own castle he had no need for gold; his tenants brought him the produce he needed, and the beef came from his own herds. The common people made their own clothes, ate their own eggs and cabbages, drank their own milk and cider. It was the crusades that changed all that. If a crusader was making his way to the Holy Land, he needed gold – he could hardly take a dozen cartloads of cabbages and eggs to pay his way.
Italy, of course, had gold, for – apart from Byzantium – it war the most cosmopolitan place in the world. The pope owned vast estates – far too vast for his tenants to pay him in produce; he had to be paid in gold. So when the crusaders made their way through Italy, they took advantage of the Italian banking system. A bank (or bane) was a table, behind which sat a moneylender prepared to give gold (or, as the system became more sophisticated, letters of credit) in exchange for mortgages or documents that promised repayment with interest. Some crusaders paid for their passage by placing their soldiers and horses at the disposal of the banker. In the fourth crusade, the crusaders first of all stormed the city of Zara, an Adriatic port, and returned it to the Venetians, then went on and stormed Constantinople, sacked the city and gave half the spoils to Venice. The cities of Italy that lay on the route of the crusaders became very rich during the nine crusades. But their development was not entirely to the advantage of the popes. For riches bring luxury and leisure – as in ancient Rome – and leisure brings a need for excitement, for travel, for new ideas. The ‘wonder of the world’, Emperor Frederick II, had spent his childhood and youth in Sicily acquiring his taste for learning and freethinking in that island where Arabs and Christians had lived in harmony for two centuries. This is why he was not unduly perturbed when the pope excommunicated him; he was relatively certain that the Church is not essential to salvation – for if it is, then all those highly intelligent Muslims are damned, and that cannot be true.
And now we can begin to see what an extraordinary cataclysm was about to occur. Scepticism like Frederick’s was as far as it could be from the total belief of the popes. Absurd as it sounds, Frederick’s guardian during his early years had been Pope Innocent III, one of the most fanatical of the crusading popes. He believed in his spiritual mission with a grim, humourless intensity, and took it for granted that one of his major tasks was to crush all unbelievers. He reserved his deepest loathing for a sect called the Cathars – one of those ‘purist’ reform movements that had sprung up in opposition to the obvious corruption of the Church. Cathars were not unlike the Quakers of a later century; their observances were simple, their lives rather ascetic. Like the Persian prophet Mani, they believed that everything to do with the spirit is good and everything to do with the world is evil. In which case, of course, God could never have created the world; it must be a creation of the Evil One. Jesus could not have had a physical body, and the crucifixion must have been some kind of mirage. These doctrinal differences, which strike us as harmless enough – there are a dozen modern Christian sects with far stranger views – seemed to Innocent III a guarantee of damnation. Toulouse was the centre of this heresy, and the pope excommunicated its ruler, Count Raymond. He sent inquisitors to sniff out heresy, and one of Count Raymond’s men assassinated the papal legate (or ambassador). For two days, the pope was so angry that he could not speak (a sure sign of a Right Man). When he recovered his voice, he shouted for a crusade against the heretics. This was unheard of – a crusade against Christians. The king of France refused to have anything to do with it. But dozens of knights thought it would make excellent sport – especially as it was only to last forty days. They besieged the town of Beziers and massacred its twenty thousand inhabitants, although many were not Cathars. Town after town was reduced in the same way – including Toulouse itself. The ‘crusade’ dragged on for decades, and ended with the siege of the fortress of Montsegur in 1243 and the burning alive of two hundred people who refused to renounce their faith. The Church stamped out Catharism as the Nazis tried to stamp out the Jews – by mass extermination.
So it is one of the ironies of history that Innocent III should have been the guardian of the young Frederick, and no doubt direct contact with that dogmatic and narrow-minded old man convinced Frederick that the Church could not possibly be the only repository of truth. Frederick was the first sign of a new intellectual attitude; he was, in fact, the first of the ‘Renaissance men’. His attitudes and those of the pope were as far apart as fire and ice. Sooner or later, there was bound to be an enormous explosion. It is satisfactory to record that when Frederick came to power he flatly declined to burn heretics, or even to allow priests freedom from taxation and from the jurisdiction of civil courts.
This particular battle ended, of course, with the death of Innocent in 1216, but continued a decade later with equally violent clashes between Frederick and Gregory IX then with his successor Innocent IV. But the real struggle was between two different currents of human evolution: religious authoritarianism and scientific enquiry. There can be no doubt that the great religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Islam – had taken mankind an immense step beyond the kind of mindless materialism that had been the downfall of Rome. But all religions begin like a mountain stream, and slowly turn into a rather muddy river. The ‘crusade’ against the Cathars was a sign of how far Christianity had turned into a kind of ‘closed shop’, a merely authoritarian dogma. Innocent III was the first pope to establish Inquisitors – the Dominicans – to root out heresy and burn the rebels. He was, in effect, screwing down the lid of a pressure-cooker. Sooner or later, it was bound to explode.
Another ‘purist’, St Francis of Assisi, succeeded in remaining within the fold – although it was touch-and-go for a while and some of his followers were later burnt as heretics in Marseilles. But one of the stories concerning St Francis helps to pinpoint precisely what was happening in the final years of the Middle Ages. Francis Bernadone was the son of a rich businessman of Assisi – a member of the newly rising class that would undermine the Church. Legend declares that he fell in love with a beautiful woman, but that when he pressed his suit she pulled down her dress and revealed that one of her breasts was eaten away with cancer. It made him aware of the vanity of human desires and took him a step closer to recognising his mission. We find it easy enough to understand his reaction. He had, in effect, been converted from frivolity to seriousness. He felt an urge to turn his back on his futile life of dandyism and find some purpose into which he could channel his enormous energies. We can also see that his reaction might have been to seek out the best physician he could find and study the problem of cancer. (As it was, he spent three years tending lepers.) Instead, he created his movement of ‘poor friars’; he had, in effect, taken a backward step to the hermits in the desert. And this same retrogressive tendency is also symbolised by his positive loathing of money; when his friars brought donations, they had to bring them in their mouths and drop them into a heap of dung, to remind themselves that money was no more than excrement. We can understand his point – his father was probably obsessed by money and he took the opposite stance – and we can also see that he was taking his dislike too far. The circulation of money was the greatest single factor in freeing the mind of man from the stagnation of the Middle Ages. Francis’s heart was in the right place; it was his head that needed examining.
And while popes were hurling excommunications, Dominicans were torturing suspected heretics and Franciscan friars were walking the roads, the really important changes were taking place on another level. Inventions were transforming human existence. The plough of the ancient world was basically a pointed stick, which was attached to some kind of frame behind an ox; then it was pulled along to scratch the surface of the ground. In the Middle Ages, someone realised that a knife would cut much deeper. A deep cut on its own would be of no particular use, but if some kind of twisted board could follow behind the knife, it would split open the cut and turn the earth sideways. And the long furrows that resulted allowed the water to drain away, so that a field could be ploughed even when it was wet.