of their refinement than of their purity. It was the pride of a knight to redress wrongs and injuries; but in that honourable employment he made small account of those he committed; and it was easy to expiate the greatest offences by a penance or a pilgrimage, which furnished only a new opportunity for adventurous exploit.

4. Chivalry, whether it began with the Moors or Normans, attained its perfection at the period of the crusades, which presented a noble object of adventure, and a boundless field for military glory. Few, it is true, returned from those desperate enterprises, but those few had a high reward in the admiration of their countrymen. The bards and romancers sung their praises, and recorded their exploits, with a thousand circumstances of fabulous embellishment.

5. The earliest of the old romances (so termed from the Romance language, a mixture of the Frank and Latin, in which they were written) appeared about the middle of the twelfth century, the period of the second crusade. But those more ancient compositions did not record contemporary events, whose known truth would have precluded all liberty of fiction or exaggeration. Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the author who assumed the name of Archbishop Turpin, had free scope to their fancy, by celebrating the deeds of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the exploits of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers; and from the fruitful stock of those first romances sprung a numerous offspring, equally wild and extravagant.

6. Philosophers have analyzed the pleasure arising from works of fiction, and have endeavoured, by various hypotheses, to account for the interest we take in the description of an event or scene which we know to be utterly impossible. We may account thus simply for the phenomenon: Every narration is in some degree attended with a dramatic deception. We enter for the time into the situation of the persons concerned. Adopting their passions and their feelings, we lose for a moment all sense of the absurdity of their cause, whilst we see the agents themselves hold it for reasonable and adequate. The most incredulous sceptic may sympathize strongly with the feelings of Hamlet at the sight of his father's spectre.

7. Thus powerfully affected as we are by sympathy, even against the conviction of our reason, how much greater must have been the effect of such works of the imagination in those days, when popular superstition gave full credit to the reality, or at least the possibility of all that they described! And hence we must censure, as both unnecessary and improbable, that theory of Dr. Hurd, which accounts for all the wildness of the old romances, on the supposition that their fictions were entirely allegorical; which explains the giants and savages into the oppressive feudal lords and their barbarous dependants; as M. Mallet construes the serpents and dragons which guarded the

enchanted castles, into their winding walls, fossés, and battlements. It were sufficient to say, that many of those old romances are inexplicable by allegory. They were received by the popular belief as truths, and even their contrivers believed in the possibility of the scenes and actions they described. In latter ages, and in the wane of superstition, yet while it still retained a powerful influence, the poets adopted allegory as a vehicle of moral instruction: and to this period belong those poetical romances which bear an allegorical explanation; as the Faery Queen of Spenser, the Orlando of Ariosto, and the Gierusalemme Liberato of Tasso.

8. In more modern times the taste for romantic composition declined with popular credulity; and the fastidiousness of philosophy affected to treat all supernatural fiction with contempt. But it was at length perceived that this refinement had cut off a source of very high mental enjoyment. The public taste now took a new turn; and this moral revolution is at present tending to its extreme. We are gone back to the nursery to listen to tales of hobgoblins; a change which we may safely prognosticate can be of no long duration.

SECTION XIX.

STATE OF EUROPE IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH

CENTURIES.

1. [CONSTANTINOPLE taken, as we have seen, by the crusaders in 1202, was governed by Latin emperors for sixty years, when it was recovered by Michael Palæologus, a Greek noble, raised to the throne of Nice during the minority of John Lascaris, whom he afterwards blinded and banished. In the reign of his son Andronius, the famous Othman forced the passes of Mount Olympus, and founded the Ottoman Turkish empire, 1299. The contentions and civil wars of the Greeks favoured the final subversion of the empire. Orkhan, the son of Othman, conquered Bithynia, Nicomedia, and Gallipoli, and established the Turkish power in Europe, 1353. His son Amurath subdued Adrianople in 1360, which he made his capital. He organized the regular troops called Janizaries, selected from the European captives, and subdued Thrace, Macedonia, and fell in the battle of Cossova, which was fatal to the independence of the Servians and other Sclavonian tribes, 1389. His son and successor, the renowned Bajazet I., united the Turkish sovereignties in Asia Minor, and established his power from Boursa to Adrianople, and from the Danube to the Euphrates. He conquered Macedonia and Thessaly, and penetrated into Greece. He then turned his arms against Hungary, and defeated the Hungarians, Wallachians, Ger

mans, and French, in the great battle of Nicopolis in 1396. The empire of Constantinople was then comprised within its walls, which were invested by sea and land, and must inevitably have been overthrown had not Bajazet been called away to oppose a savage more powerful than himself. The invasion of Syria by Tamerlane delayed the fall of Constantinople and the extinction of the Eastern Empire for fifty-three years.]

2. [The death of the emperor Henry VI. of Germany, in 1198, was followed by a general war throughout the empire. The Italian cities, whose right to self-government and the administration of their own finances, by the treaty of Constance, (1183) were involved in the contest of the rival factions, known by the name of Guelphs and Ghibelines, which ended in the loss of liberty to the greater number of these communities. The Guelphs were the partisans of the popes, and the Ghibelines of the emperors, the former elected Otho IV., duke of Bavaria and Saxony, king of the Romans; and the latter, Philip I., duke of Swabia, and brother of Henry VI. The contest between them was prolonged to 1212, when Philip was assassinated. Otho was then acknowledged by the Germans, and passed into Italy to receive the imperial crown from pope Innocent III. But desirous of retaining the imperial prerogatives, he offended the pope, who, rather than abate any of his pretensions, raised against the Guelph emperor the heir of theGhibeline house, Frederick II. grandson of Frederick I. (Barbarossa), hardly eighteen years of age, and till then reigning under the pope's tutelage over the Two Sicilies. The civil war continued until the death of Otho in 1218, when no attempt was made to despoil his rival of his hereditary possessions. The death of pope Innocent III., two years before, broke the unnatural alliance between the Ghibeline emperor and the pope, which involved him in contention with them during his life]. His opposition to four successive popes was avenged by excommunication and deposition; yet he kept possession of his throne, and vindicated his authority with great spirit. Frequent attempts were made against his life, by assassination and poison, which he openly attributed to papal resentment. On his death (1250), the splendour of the empire was for many years obscured. [His son Conrad IV., king of Germany, did not feel himself sufficiently strong to appear in Italy, and embarked in Istria for Naples, that he might secure that kingdom, 1251. The remainder of his life was passed in subduing the Neapolitan Guelphs. After his death in 1254], the empire was a prey to incessant factions and civil war, the fruit of contested claims of sovereignty; yet the popes gained nothing by its disorders; for the troubles of Italy were equally hostile to their ambition. We have seen the turbulent state of England; France was equally weak and anarchical; Spain ravaged by the contests of the Moors and Christians. Yet, distracted as appears the situation of Europe, the crusades gave a species of union to this

discordant mass. [Manfred, the natural brother of Conrad IV., succeeded by his courage and activity in recovering the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which pope Innocent IV. had invaded with the view of annexing it to the temporal power of the Holy See. The successors of Innocent, uneasy at the growing power of the Ghibeline party and the establishment of their power in the Two Sicilies under the heroic Manfred, gave the investiture of Naples and Sicily to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX. of France, who appeared at the head of a numerous army, defeated and killed Manfred in the bloody battle of Benevento in 1266, and treated the inhabitants with great cruelty.] The Sicilians revenged this act of usurpation and cruelty by the murder, in one night, of every Frenchman in the island. This shocking massacre, termed the Sicilian Vespers, happened on Easter Sunday, 1282. It was followed by every evil that comes in the train of civil war and revolution.

3. The beginning of the thirteenth century had been signalized by a new species of crusade. The Albigenses, inhabitants of Alby in the Pays de Vaud, were bold enough to dispute many of the tenets of the Catholic church, as judging them contrary to the doctrines of Scripture. Innocent III. established a holy commission at Thoulouse, with power to try and punish these heretics. The Count of Thoulouse opposed this persecution, and was for the punishment of his offence compelled by the pope to assist in a crusade against his own vassals. The famous Simon de Montfort was the leader of this pious enterprise, which was marked by the most atrocious cruelties, and thousands of the Albigenses were burned or massacred without mercy. The benefits of the holy commission were judged by the popes to be so great, that it became from that time a permanent establishment, known by the name of the Inquisition.

4. The rise of the house of Austria may be dated from 1273, when Rodolph Count of Hapsburg, a prince of very ancient family and of considerable possessions, as well in Switzerland as upon each bank of the Upper Rhine, was elected emperor of Germany. He owed his elevation to the jealousies of the electoral princes, who, could not agree in the choice of any one of themselves. Ottocar II., king of Bohemia, to whom Rodolph had been steward of the household, could ill brook the supremacy of his former dependant; and refusing him the customary homage for his Germanic possessions, Rodolph stripped him of Austria, which, as a vacant fief, he conferred with the consent of the diet upon his son Albert in 1283. These provinces remaining ever since in the family of its conquerors.

5. The Italian states of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, were at this time flourishing and opulent, while most of the kingdoms of Europe (if we except England under Edward I.) were exhausted, feeble, and disorderly. A dawning of civil liberty began to appear in France under Philip IV. (the Fair), who summoned

the deputies of towns as a third estate to the national assemblies, which had hitherto consisted of the nobility and clergy, 1302. It was the same prince who established perpetual courts of judicature in France, under the name of parliaments. Over these the parliament of Paris possessed a jurisdiction by appeal; but it was not till later times that it assumed any authority in matters of state.

6. The parliament of England had before this era begun to assume its present constitution. The Commons, or the representatives of counties and boroughs, were first called to parliament by Henry III.; before that time, this assembly consisted only of the greater barons and clergy. But of the rise and progress of the constitution of England we shall afterwards treat more particularly in a separate section.

7. The spirit of the popedom, zealous in the maintenance and extension of its prerogatives, continued much the same in the thirteenth and the fourteenth, as we have seen it in the three preceding centuries. Philip the Fair had subjected his clergy to bear their share of the public taxes, and prohibited all contributions to be levied by the pope in his dominions. This double offence was highly resented by Boniface VIII., who expressed his indignation by a sentence of excommunication and interdict, and a solemn transference of the kingdom of France to the emperor Albert. Philip, in revenge, sent his general Nogaret to Rome, who threw the pope into prison. The French however, were overpowered by the papal troops; and the death of Boniface put an end to the quarrel.

8. It is less easy to justify the conduct of Philip the Fair to the Knights Templars than his behaviour to pope Boniface. The whole of this order had incurred his resentment, from suspicion of harbouring treasonable designs, but principally on account of their great wealth and the irregularity of their lives. He had influence with pope Clement V. to procure a papal bull, warranting their extirpation from all the Christian kingdoms: and this infamous proscription was carried into effect all over Europe. These unfortunate men were solemnly tried, not for their real offence, but for pretended impieties and idolatrous practices, and many of them were committed to the flames, 1309—1312.

SECTION XX.

REVOLUTION OF SWITZERLAND, 1308 TO 1415.

1. THE beginning of the fourteenth century was distinguished by the revolution of Switzerland, and the rise of the Helvetic republic. [It had been dependent on the kingdom of Burgundy until 1218, when it became a province of the empire. It was