The Spell of Belgium Part 4

Transalpine Gaul was, by its conqueror, formed into a single province, of which the land of the Belgae was the northern part, but under Augustus it was divided into three provinces, the most distant one named Belgica. The people of southern Belgica, being nearer to the Roman civilization of Gaul, lost their primitive customs, their energy and courage. The people of the north, less under the influence of the conquerors, kept their love of independence, their frugal, industrious habits, added trade with England to their fisheries as a means of livelihood, and developed a strong stock, to which the future growth of the country was due.

Three hundred years after Caesar's conquest, the Salian Franks, a confederacy of German tribes, invaded the country and settled between the Rhine and the Waal. They were resisted by most of the Gauls but welcomed by the Menapians of the Belgic coast.

There was, however, no real bond of union between the peaceful, hard-working people of the lowlands and the warlike Franks. The sh.o.r.e dwellers north of the Rhine formed with the tribes on the coasts of the German Ocean the Saxon League, which after a time renewed the warfare between Frank and Saxon, a warfare destined to endure till the twentieth century and to be waged then as fiercely as in the fourth. Driven by the Saxons from the coast districts, the Franks gradually made themselves masters of southern Belgica and northern Gaul, and the Romanized people of that section were submerged. Finally, toward the end of the fifth century, Clovis, King of the Franks, succeeded in extending his rule over the greater part of Gaul.

At this early date the limits were already sharply marked out of the two great divisions of Belgium that have persisted until today--Flanders and the Walloon country. Flanders received continual additions from the German tribes who, worsted in the struggle with Rome, fled across the Rhine, and became the land of the Flemings (the "e" at first p.r.o.nounced long), or fugitives. Retaining their Teutonic traits, these kept steadily at their difficult task of winning comfort and civilization from the hard conditions in which they were placed. Even today they cling tenaciously to their Flemish tongue, which is a variety of Low German, differing but little from Dutch.

The Franks of southern Belgica, on the other hand, like their neighbours in Gaul, became to all intents and purposes, transformed into French, and adopted for their language not a corrupt French, as we understand that term, but a dialect of the _langue d'ol_, the old Romance tongue which was the speech of Gaul in that age.

The successors of Clovis had many a struggle with the people of the Low Countries, but gradually the Frankish, or Merovingian, kings yielded to the Roman luxury that surrounded them and became a race of "do-nothings." Then arose those mayors of the palace, of whom Pepin of Heristall, the Belgian, was the father of Charles Martel, the "Hammer"

whose vigorous blows crushed the Saracens and drove them from French soil.

The year 800 found Charlemagne, mightiest of the Franks, in possession of the Western Empire. The steady progress of the Netherlands was seen in the rise of the towns of Bruges, Ghent, Courtrai and Antwerp, not alone as trading centers but as seats of manufacture. The system of dikes for the protection of the lowlands from the sea had at that time been established by the united efforts of all the people of the region, who had thereby learned in some measure the value of cooperation.

Christianity, introduced in the reign of Clovis, had gained much power.

It is impossible to overestimate the work of monks and nuns, whose religious houses were at once schools, hospitals, book marts and universities. Tournai and Liege were the seats of bishops, who were even more powerful than the counts who played such a great part in the history of the period.

The count was at first only an officer of the king, not an hereditary n.o.ble, and received as his salary the revenue of the lands which he held during his term of office. The tenants on these estates were completely in his power. If he could muster a sufficient force of armed men he might even defy the king, and thus retain his office for a longer time.

About the middle of the ninth century, Baldwin, a Fleming of great power, who had defended the coast against the Normans, carried off Judith, daughter of the French king, Charles the Bald. Much against his will, Charles was obliged to give his consent to the marriage, and settled upon Baldwin all the land between the Scheldt and the Somme.

Baldwin, named _Bras-de-fer_ (of the Iron Arm), was thus the first Count of Flanders. Some authorities consider this the oldest hereditary t.i.tle of n.o.bility in Europe. It is borne today by the second son of the King.

Other powerful va.s.sals of this period were the counts of Louvain and Namur. Still mightier was the Bishop of Liege, who felt himself so strong that he even made an attempt--unsuccessful, however--to seize the domain of the Count of Louvain.

Under Baldwin II, son of _Bras-de-fer_, who married the daughter of Alfred the Great of England, the cities of Bruges, Ghent, Courtrai and Ypres were fortified, and thus insured the opportunity of becoming the great mediaeval centers of freedom and progress.

After cloth weaving was begun, the first markets were opened at Ghent, Courtrai and Bruges. The word _kermesse_, the Belgian name for fair or fete, is linked in an interesting way with these markets of the Middle Ages. They were called _kerk_ (church) _messe_ (market), because held around the church or cathedral, and only the inconvenient letter _k_ needed to be dropped out to give the word _kermesse_.

At first sight, the history of the Netherlands from about the tenth century down to the nineteenth appears a confused and confusing story of wars and uprisings, of conspiracies and persecutions--count against bishop, city against city, n.o.bles and even, in one instance, a king, against the Emperor. But if we look more closely, we discern, three great forces at work through all the turmoil. These were feudalism, the Crusades, and the rise of the towns, or _communes_. A fourth influence, the power of the Church, was closely a.s.sociated with these, sometimes as a direct impelling force, sometimes as a guiding or restraining hand, and again battling for its own temporal power with little more regard for the well-being of the ma.s.ses than was manifested by the lay barons themselves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COMTE DE FLANDRE, SECOND SON OF KING ALBERT.]

After the break-up of the Roman Empire, when there were no strong central governments in Europe, when practically the only law was the will of the strongest, it was inevitable that a vast number of petty chieftains should gather about them as many followers as possible, both in order to protect themselves and to plunder others. The ablest of these, by waging a continual warfare, either killed off many of their rivals and took possession of their lands, or reduced them to submission and made them tenants of their own. These tenants held their land only on condition of furnis.h.i.+ng a certain number of men for their lord's wars and paying certain taxes, later called "aids," for his support. When this state of society became finally organized as the feudal system, the king or emperor was the overlord, the counts swore allegiance to him, the petty n.o.bles and knights were tenants in their turn. By the twelfth century, the counts and bishops were little kings in their own domains. They had gradually acquired all the rights of the crown. They coined money, established markets, acquired the rights of fis.h.i.+ng, hunting, brewing and milling, and collected the tolls. They were va.s.sals of the king in little more than name.

Below this landed aristocracy were the two cla.s.ses of villains and serfs, who led a miserable existence, possessing scarcely one of what we consider the inalienable rights of man. Both villains and serfs were slaves, bound to the soil, but the servitude of the latter was hopeless and irremediable. Serfs must always be serfs. But the villains had the privilege of earning their freedom.

When Peter the Hermit, a Walloon of the province of Liege, made his impa.s.sioned appeals to Christendom to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Saracen, it was G.o.dfrey of Bouillon, another Walloon, who laid aside his t.i.tles and sold his possessions that he might equip an army for the conquest of the Holy Land. G.o.dfrey was made "Advocate" of Jerusalem, and was the first Western ruler of the sacred city. His brother Baldwin became King of Edessa, in Mesopotamia, and his descendants were kings of Jerusalem. Next to G.o.dfrey, both as knight and leader, stood Count Robert of Flanders.

It is told of Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, that he challenged and defeated a mighty Saracen in single combat. The device on his s.h.i.+eld, which Philip bore away as a trophy, was a black lion on a field of gold. This became the emblem of Flanders.

But Philip of Alsace was noted not alone for his prowess in battle; he was an enlightened ruler for his age. He resigned the privileges of "mainmorte" and "half-have." By "mainmorte," if a man died without leaving direct heirs, his property went to the count. By "half-have,"

half of all the property left by any of his va.s.sals went to the count.

In the year 1200, Baldwin, Count of Hainault and Flanders, led the fifth crusade. Turning aside from the road to Jerusalem, he captured Constantinople, and was crowned Emperor in St. Sophia. During the fifty years that Baldwin and his descendants reigned in Constantinople, s.h.i.+ps from Flanders brought the luxuries of the Orient to Western Europe. Many cargoes of silks and spices, of linen, damask and carpets, and other Eastern products, were landed on the wharves of Ghent and Bruges, which became the greatest centers of European commerce.

The influence of the Crusades upon social progress in Belgium was not less marked than upon commerce. Shrewd townsmen who furnished their lord with means to equip his followers exacted in return a pledge of additional freedom. While the powerful n.o.bles were in the Holy Land, moreover, their tenants were relieved from their demands, and made progress in all the arts of life.

When, after the death of Charlemagne, the river Scheldt was made the boundary of France, to the west of that river lay West Francia, which became France; to the east stretched Lotharingia, shortened to Lorraine, the land of Lothaire, a narrow strip separating France and Germany. As the various counts who possessed the Netherlands grew stronger the Duchy of Lorraine grew weaker. Flanders especially, under the rule of counts descended from Baldwin the Iron-Armed, made great progress--lowlands were protected by dikes, forests were cleared away, and towns were built. It was easily the most powerful part of Belgium. The Normans, who for a century had been the terror of the Netherlands, now visited Flemish towns to dispose of the booty they had won upon the sea, and Bruges became the chief seat of this trade.

The townspeople of this period fared rather better than those in the rural districts. Many of the towns had originated as a cl.u.s.ter of peasants' huts, grouped around a monastery for protection. The inhabitants were tenants of the abbot, who in time became one of the powerful lords of the land. But the necessary organization of town life gave the citizens the habit, to some extent, of working together.

Consequently, when a body of townsmen presented their plea for more privileges, they were able to obtain better terms than could be gained by single peasants pleading separately.

So great was the prosperity of the towns that, by the year 1066, Flanders was able to a.s.sist William the Conqueror, who had married Matilda, daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, and Flemish knights fought side by side with the Normans at Hastings. On the famous Bayeux tapestry--which, however, is not real tapestry--wrought by Matilda, is pictured the story of the Conquest of England.

Woolen cloths, the work of Flemish weavers, were already famous throughout Europe, and were carried by the sailors of the Netherlands to western and southern ports, with the jewelry, corn and salt, also produced in Flanders.

But the st.u.r.dy people of these thriving towns were very jealous of the fundamental rights which had come down to them from their German ancestors. A painting by the Belgian artist, Hennebicq, depicts a landmark in the history of the Netherlands--Baldwin VI, Count of Flanders, granting a charter of rights to the citizens of Grammont, whose representatives stand before him with drawn swords. Baldwin, a kingly, dignified figure, stands on a low platform, his left hand resting on his sheathed sword, while the townsmen before him swear allegiance in return for the guarantee of their liberties. The story is this: Count Baldwin bought the land belonging to one Baron Gerard, and laid it out as a town, to which the name Grammont was given, meaning Gerard's Mont, or hill. To the men of this town the Count gave, in 1068, the first charter of liberties ever granted in Europe. Not until 1215 was England's Magna Charta wrung from King John.

By the charter were granted "(1) individual liberty; (2) the right to hold, buy, sell, inherit, or devise property; (3) the privilege of being judged by a tribunal of '_echevins_' (councillors) elected in accordance with local statutes, of giving evidence and of being exempt from the judicial ordeals that still obtained throughout Belgium." The townsmen were also allowed the owners.h.i.+p of the neighbouring forest and the use of the meadows to pasture their cattle. A single reading of this summary, while it shows how very elementary were these provisions, yet makes it plain that this was the germ of those later charters guaranteeing the fundamental rights of man.

In the words of an eminent writer, the Belgian _commune_ of this period was essentially "a confederacy of the inhabitants of a town, living within the gates, who bound themselves by an oath to lend advice and a helping hand and to be true to one another, mutually and individually."

The most striking prerogatives of this free a.s.sociation, says the same author, were "(1) a munic.i.p.al counting-house; (2) a common house, or town hall; (3) a seal; (4) a belfry (_belfort_ in Flemish), a lofty tower which contained the town bell, and which ordinarily served as a prison or a repository for the archives; and (5) an a.r.s.enal."

Besides these communal rights, there were individual, property and judicial rights guaranteed by the charters of the towns, as was mentioned in connection with the charter of Grammont. Serfs became freemen. The vexatious _droit de halle_ was done away with, by which all kinds of goods must be sold in a given place and were subject to heavy duties. From this came, it is said, those immense _halles_, most of which were built before the towns received their charters. Henceforward, justice was to be administered by councillors drawn from the wealthy burghers and "juries" representing the trade guilds, and fines and penalties were no longer arbitrary impositions but were fixed by law.

It was this same Baldwin VI who granted the charter of Grammont of whom the old chroniclers wrote: "He might be seen riding across Flanders with a falcon or hawk on his wrist; he ordered his bailiffs to carry a white staff, long and straight, in sign of justice and clemency; no one was allowed to go out armed; the labourer could sleep without fear with his doors open, and he could leave his plow in the fields without apprehension of being robbed."

When the King of France, the nominal overlord of the greater part of Flanders, interfered in their government in 1071, the citizens quickly sprang to arms. Their count had died, and the King of France chose to the vacant place his widow, Richilde, also Countess of Hainault and Namur in her own right. The n.o.bility and the people of the higher grounds submitted to this French intervention, but the townsmen of the lowlands rallied to the banner of Robert the Frisian, brother of their late count, and inflicting upon those professional soldiers a crus.h.i.+ng defeat, they wrested from the Countess Richilde not only Flanders but also Namur and Hainault. This battle has come down to us as the victory of Ca.s.sel, in which "street men" showed that they could defend their freedom.

The Flemish burghers of the twelfth century have the honour of initiating a mighty forward step in civilization. In every country of Europe, up to that time, when one man had wronged another the injured party took justice into his own hands and punished his enemy himself.

The Church had, by the Truce of G.o.d, prohibited these blood feuds on Friday, Sat.u.r.day and Sunday of every week, and also on certain holy days, but Philip of Alsace was the first ruler who did away with this relic of barbarism and ordered that henceforth every man should bring his quarrel for trial to the juries chosen by the townsmen. The glory of demanding this reform belongs, however, to the Flemish burghers.

By 1260, the cities of Flanders had become so strong that they dared to resist their count, and pa.s.sed from his rule to that of the French king, whose aid they had sought. Forty years later, they rose against this new master. The townsmen of Bruges slaughtered the French garrison, and the following year won the "battle of the spurs" at Courtrai, after which seven hundred golden spurs were picked up on the field. Early that morning, twenty thousand artisans of Bruges, in their working dress and armed with boar-spears or plowshares set in long clubs, received on their knees the blessing of the Church, raised a bit of Flemish soil to their lips, kissed it, and vowed to die for their country, then gave battle to sixty thousand of the steel-clad knights and men-at-arms of France.

A few years later, Brabant compelled its duke to grant it an a.s.sembly which should transact all legal and judicial business, and should consist of fourteen deputies, four chosen from the n.o.bles and the other ten from the people. The towns soon began to join their forces. Brabant and Flanders formed a sort of union. But the burghers owed allegiance not to a country but only to a small bit of a country, each to his own town. Their confederacy was bound together by self-interest alone. Ghent was jealous of Bruges, and failed to lend a.s.sistance when the Brugeois rebelled against their count. For lack of this support the latter were crushed.

We speak of the cities of the Netherlands, but in the thirteenth century they bore little resemblance to the cities of today. They were walled towns, to be sure, but the walls were generally ramparts of earth with an outside covering of thick planking. Within the walls the better cla.s.s of people lived in low wooden dwellings roofed with thatch, the churches and the houses of the n.o.blemen and the chief citizens were often built of stone, but the poor, we may imagine, found shelter in rude mud huts.

The "streets" were usually mere crooked cart tracks, the dumping ground for the rubbish of the community, in which boards and straw were thrown down in an effort to bridge the numerous holes and pools of muddy water.

In Bruges and Ghent, as we learn from the ancient records, the princ.i.p.al streets were paved with stone from the quarries near the Meuse. The squares were, perhaps, not unlike the "common" of a New England village, open gra.s.sy places in which were pumps--the common source of water supply for the inhabitants--and drinking troughs for the domestic animals that were allowed to roam through the streets. There was the ever present danger of fire in cities so rudely built, and the fires often became great conflagrations in which whole cities were consumed.

What with the bad roads, the blackness of the unlighted streets, and the presence in these towns of many ignorant, riotous workmen and seamen from foreign ports, we can understand that the citizen who sallied forth without escort for an evening stroll, having only his lantern for protection, might well be risking his life in a dangerous adventure.

Edward III of England now laid claim to the crown of France. Jacob van Artevelde, the Brewer of Ghent, rallied the Flemings against the tyranny of their count, who was supported by France, and threw off his yoke.

Among the petty jealousies and rivalries of that mediaeval time, the Great Brewer--so called only because he was registered in the brewers'

guild--stands out as the lone statesman of his land. (Van Artevelde at first belonged to the aristocratic clothmakers' guild, and perhaps changed to that of the brewers in order to ally himself more closely with the democracy of the city.) His outlook was broader than the narrow circle of munic.i.p.al interests. He endeavoured to unite the cities into one commonwealth, and formed an alliance with Edward. In his first public utterance he said, "It is necessary for us to be friends with England, for without her we cannot live." He added, "I do not mean that we should go to war with France. Our course is to remain neutral."

The combined English and Flemish fleets gained the great naval victory of Sluys over the French. The Great Brewer was made ruward, or conservator of the peace, of Flanders, and used his almost kingly power to strengthen the alliance with England and to favour the trade with that country. But he was too great a man for his time, and the traders of his native city were easily stirred by a trumped-up charge that he was plotting to deliver Flanders to the Black Prince. He met his death in 1345, at the hands of a mob, before his own doorway.

The confederacy of Flemish towns still held together for a while. They a.s.sisted Edward in the siege and capture of Calais, and when he left them to their own resources, they compelled their young Count, Louis de Maele, to recognize their right to govern themselves, and still maintained their independence of France. The wiles of Louis and the fierce hatred between Gantois and Brugeois once more plunged the counts.h.i.+p into a state of anarchy, and Ghent, in danger of starvation, turned in despair to Philip van Artevelde, son of the Great Brewer. He led his fellow-townsmen against the Count's forces, and took the town of Bruges. But Charles VI of France came with a large army to punish the rebels of Ghent, and in the battle of Roosbeke, in 1382, completely crushed them. Philip van Artevelde was among the slain. Two years later, by the death of Louis de Maele, Flanders pa.s.sed to Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who had married Louis' daughter.

In the period between the two Arteveldes, the Joyous Entry became the bulwark of the liberties of Brabant and afterward of the whole country.

Duke John III of Brabant summoned to Louvain, in 1354, representatives of all the cities of Brabant and Limburg, and, announcing the marriage of his daughter Johanna and Wenzel of Luxembourg, asked that they might be confirmed as rulers of the duchy after his death. The delegates were shrewd traders. They granted his request only in consideration of a corresponding grant on his part of a liberal charter to Brabant. The Joyous Entry became the t.i.tle of the charter because it was not proclaimed until Johanna and Wenzel made their entrance into Brussels with great pomp and ceremony and took a solemn oath to carry out its provisions. Down to Leopold II every succeeding ruler was obliged to swear conformity to this famous doc.u.ment.

CHAPTER V

BATTLING FOR A KINGDOM