ioma_, that of _oil_, or Northern France,
was easily predominant. The Norman conquest of England carried it to
London: the Norman conquest of Sicily carried it to Palermo: the
Crusades carried it to Jerusalem. With it you might have travelled most
of the mediaeval world from end to end. It was the language of courts;
it was the language of chansons; it was the language of all lay culture.
It was the language of England, France, and Italy; and St. Francis
himself had delighted in his youth in the literature which it enshrined.

The linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was thus Latin, either in
its classical or in its vulgar form. There were of course other
languages, and some of these had no small vogue. Just before the period
of which we are treating--the period which extends from 1050 to
1300--Icelandic had a wide scope. It might have been heard not only in
Scandinavia and the Northern Isles, but in a great part of the British
Islands, in Normandy, in Russia--along the river-road that ran to
Constantinople--and in Constantinople itself. But the fact remains that
the linguistic basis of mediaeval thought and literature was a Latin
basis. The Romance University of Paris was the capital of learning: the
Romance tongue of Northern France was the tongue of society. And as the
linguistic basis of mediaeval civilization was Romance, so, too, was
mediaeval civilization itself. The genius of Latin Christianity was the
source of its inspiration: the spirit of the Romance peoples was the
breath of its being. The souvenir of the old Roman Empire provided the
scheme of its political ideas; and the Holy Roman Empire, if a religious
consecration had given it a new sanctity, was Roman still. Yet the
irruption of the Teutons into the Empire had left its mark; and the
emperor of the Middle Ages was always of Teutonic stock. It was perhaps
at this point that the unity of the mediaeval scheme betrayed a fatal
flaw. It would be futile to urge that the dualism which showed itself in
the struggles of papacy and empire had primarily, or even to any
considerable extent, a racial basis. Those struggles are struggles of
principles rather than of races; they are contentions between a secular
and a clerical view of life, rather than between the genius of Rome and
the genius of Germany. Hildebrand stood for a free Church--a Church free
from secular power because it was controlled by the papacy. Henry IV
stood for the right of the secular power