94

OXFORD ENGLISH PRIZE ESSAY,

FOR 1827.

The Influence of the Crusades on the Arts and Literature of Europe.

"To these wild expeditions, the effect of superstition and folly, we owe the first gleams of light which tended to dispel barbarism and ignorance.”—Robertson, Charles V.

ARGUMENT.-Introduction. Difference of opinion on the present question, to be reconciled by a distinction between the direct and the indirect influence of the Crusades on the arts and literature of Europe.

1. The direct influence of the Crusades shown to have been subordinate to that of other circumstances, and comparatively unimportant. Causes assigned for the positive and negative character of this influ

ence.

2. The indirect influence of the Crusades shown to have been beneficial to the arts and literature of Europe. §. 1. By the excitation and concentration of feeling. §. 2. By the removal of obstacles connected with the feudal system. §. 3. By the eventual substitution of commercial for military habits. This change, in its progress, favorable to useful arts; in its effects, to elegant arts and literature.

Objections to this view of the subject, examined. Conclusion, adverting to the comparative refinement of Europe and the East at this time, as contrasted with that of each in the age of the Crusades. THE intellectual character of nations has often derived advantage from times of political convulsion or military excitement. The powers, which have been stimulated by one motive, are easily sustained by another; and the first impulse, therefore, as it is not generally the best, should be such as effectually to awaken, but not permanently to engross, the mind. The enthusiasm of war, and the agitations of party spirit, are precisely of this animating, but transient nature; while the attractions of knowlege, more durable, though less dazzling, than the triumphs of military or political pre-eminence, are those most likely to give the ultimate direction to feelings and energies, which they were not originally strong enough to inspire. In Greece, the habits of mental exertion, which led to intellectual, no less than to political, dominion, were formed by the emergencies of a foreign invasion; the genius of the Augustan age was matured in the civil wars which preceded it; and the restoration of arts and literature to Europe was accelerated by an event, which, in the keenness and universality of the interest promoted by it, has no parallel in the history of former times. The attempt of the Christians in Western Europe to recover the Holy Land was the first great subject, after the fall of

the Roman empire, which inflamed the passions, and transformed the characters of men, too powerfully to admit of a relapse into apathy and its attendant ignorance.

The

In assuming that the influence of the Crusades on the arts and iterature of Europe was at once extensive and beneficial, refeence has been made to remote and accidental, rather than to immediate consequences. Effects, the slowest in progress, are often the surest in operation; especially when differing wholly in character from the cause with which they are connected. Crusades, from their nature, could only have occasioned a revolution in the intellectual state of Europe by introducing a preparatory change of feelings and habits. Their influence, therefore, on arts and literature, so far as it was complete and universal, must necessarily have been mediate and progressive.

With this distinction in view, it will not be difficult to reconcile, in some measure, the apparently opposite conclusions, at which writers on the present subject have arrived. Errors of opinion have here, as elsewhere, been mutually repelled into extremes. The influence of the Crusades has been greatly exaggerated by some, and altogether denied by others. The generality have been more prone to remark the political and social, than the intellectual results of the Crusades. But in asserting the existence of the one, they have implied that of the other. No great change in the condition of man, as a member of society or of a political community, has ever taken place without a corresponding effect on the character of his intellectual operations.

Here, then, in a mean between two extremes of opinion, the truth will probably be found. Europe was neither wholly active, nor wholly passive, in the change from barbarism to refinement. She acted at once spontaneously, and under the effect of impressions produced by external circumstances. Among these, however, it is impossible not to assign the foremost rank to that remarkable project, which has conferred a name, as it stamped a character, on its age. But the intimations of history confirm the suggestions of antecedent probability in warranting the assertion, that the Crusades were not so much a cause of actual knowlege, introduced by their direct influence into Europe, as of those awakened feelings and altered habits, by which the useful arts in the first instance, and eventually the elegant arts and literature, were indisputably promoted. "The natural genius and intellectual habits of men," it has been of old remarked, "are more easily repressed than recalled;" and it was no single event, however interesting, nor age, however fertile of impressions, that could effectually have restored the mental powers of Europe after five

1 66

"Ingenia studiaque hominum oppresseris facilius quam revocaveris."-Tac.

centuries of ignorance and prejudice. Accordingly we find between the Crusades and the revival of learning an interval of two centuries; and that too, a period so generally devoid of intellectual cultivation, and so fertile in concurrent causes of knowlege, as to withhold from the Crusades all primary and exclusive claims to the merit of restoring European arts and literature. To fix then the permanent advantages of those expeditions on their remote, indirect, and accidental influence, as well as to ascertain the nature and extent of their immediate effects, will be the object of the present discussion.

The immediate benefits of the Crusades we naturally look for in the arts and literature of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. But this period we find to differ in no important point from the preceding. Original literature is still, throughout the whole of this long interval, confined principally to works of imagination, and knowlege of classical antiquity to a minute, but trivial, acquaintance with the Aristotelian philosophy; medicine, geometry, and arithmetic,' are in these, as in former centuries, the studies pursued in the schools of Cordova and Salerno; to the general absence of useful arts some exceptions begin at length to appear in the manufacture of silk, and the construction of windmills; while, of elegant arts, architecture alone continues to be cultivated with success.

To what, then, we proceed to inquire, are we to ascribe this elementary and superficial knowlege? Not certainly in any great degree to the Crusades; for it is found to have existed in the preceding century. To the reign of Charlemagne, probably, and the dispersion of the Normans, we are to look for some of the earliest causes of reviving intellect. But for the traces of Oriental knowlege, (with which we are now more immediately concerned,) we must refer to the Saracenic conquests in Spain, and the intercourse subsequently maintained by the travels of Gerbert more especially, between that country and the rest of Europe. Nor must we omit, as a powerful cause of the same taste for Oriental literature, the visits, devotional or commercial, of individuals to Palestine. This knowlege continued from the ninth to the fifteenth century to flow into Europe; and it is often difficult or impossible to ascertain exactly the proportion due to each separate cause of connexion with the East. The light of learning and civilisation was so gradually and imperceptibly diffused, that we often fail in attempting to separate its collected rays, and to assign a determinate color and force to each.

But the arts and literature of Europe, in the age of the Crusades and that which immediately followed, although in kind scarcely

distinguishable from those in the preceding century, were widely different in degree. Poetry and fiction were already more interesting in materials, and more systematic in form; the Aristotelian philosophy lent its aid more generally to the spirit of scholastic disputation; and considerable accessions had been made to the mathematical, arithmetical, and medicinal knowlege of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In Architecture, changes had been introduced from the East which to some have appeared fundamental. But the progress which, from specimens in our own country, we know that this art had previously made, forbids us to regard the improvements derived from Palestine as sufficiently novel in character to justify an exception to a rule elsewhere so generally applicable.

Thus then we gather, that the effects produced immediately by the Crusades on the Arts and Literature of Europe were chiefly of a subordinate and supplemental character. They tended to strengthen and extend pre-existing impressions; to confirm, rather than to originate knowlege. For any considerable diffusion of arts and literature, unknown before the Crusades, we look in vain till the fifteenth century. The enlargement of geographical knowlege, on which some have insisted, seems too little a consequence of the Crusades, as distinguished from any other distant expedition, to demand attention; and, in fact, as the means of future acquisitions in arts and literature, rather than the exemplification of a direct intellectual influence, may be referred, like the corresponding effect of the Crusades on Commerce, to the second division of our subject. Nor does it seem necessary, in a comprehensive view of the question like the present, to dwell on certain comparatively unimportant arts,2 brought to perfection soon after the Crusades, which have been by some thought sufficient to give a primary character to the influence of those expeditions. We must here and elsewhere distinguish as well between effects and mere coincidences, as between knowlege directly introduced from the East by the Crusades, and that which was attendant on a reviving spirit of industry in Europe, whether due to the Crusades or to other causes.

Two inquiries here naturally suggest themselves: why and in what manner were the Crusades productive of any immediate influence on the arts and literature of Europe? and why were they not productive of more?

That the Crusades should have exercised some direct influence

1 Quart. Review, Aug. 1809.

2 The use of the sugar cane, and the knowlege and application of particular drugs. Likewise the manufacture of silk; but there is no certainty, nor sometimes even probability, that any of these improvements were introduced by the Crusades. See Robertson, Charles V. note 30. VOL. XXXVIII. Cl. Jl. NO. LXXV. G

on the arts and literature of Europe, we might reasonably have expected from the character, the duration, and the locality of the holy wars. However generally unconnected with the motives and designs, whether of the assailants or of the assailed, the communication or the admission of knowlege may hereafter be proved to have been, some traces of national refinement, whether in Asia or at Constantinople, could scarcely fail, during a protracted intercourse with the West, to have been displayed and imparted. To the knowlege of the Aristotelian philosophy in Europe, the Crusaders were involuntary contributors, by introducing one additional treatise' of the Stagirite. Again, in Architecture and Poetry, we shall easily reconcile with our preconceived notions the appearance of a still more decided effect. The religious nature of the enterprise will account for its influence on the first; its imaginative and enthusiastic character for a peculiar adaptation to the second. Every part, indeed, of the Crusader's project was poetical; its plan, its accompaniments, its object. The poet and the romance writer exult in the sacrifice of self-interest to hazard and imagination; of the dull and monotonous realities of common life to the bright visions of the hero and the enthusiast. By intercourse, too, with the proper land of fiction, the ideal world of poetry was peopled with new beings, and embellished by new combinations of images. Nor is fact wanting to justify our argument. We know from history that Minstrels formed an important part of the Crusade retinue; and thus was accomplished a more than imaginary union between the exploits of the warrior and the conceptions of the poet. Hence, to the latest posterity, the recollection of the Crusades always summoned up a train of associa, tions highly favorable to poetic incident. Yet, even in this point, (the only one in which the character of the Crusades was obviously connected with literature,) we have no reason to believe that they exercised immediately more than an auxiliary influence.

Closely interwoven with the history of the Crusades, and such, indeed, as in estimating their effects on arts and literature, wę must consider an integral part of the holy wars, was the temporary reign of the Latins at Constantinople. From the comparatively peaceful nature of this connexion; from the greater facilities which it afforded, by proximity of situation, to the intercourse of the East and West; from the more intimate (however incomplete) resemblance of languages and national habits, we might reasonably have expected that this partial union of Eastern with Western Europeans would have occasioned a greater and more extensive benefit to the unenlightened nations of the West, than the tumultuous sojourn in the Holy Land. But any such pleasing anticipations are disappointed by the event. The reign of the Latin

The Metaphysics. Mills, History of the Crusades.