he Crescent
faced each other, like hostile armies, across the sea. The temporary
expansion of the Frankish Empire ceased with the life of Charlemagne,
and under his successors formidable enemies closed it in on every hand.
Barbarian Slav and Saxon pressed upon the eastern frontier, while the
hated Moslem, from the vantage of Spain and Africa, infested the
Mediterranean and threatened the Holy City. Even the Greek Empire,
natural ally of Christendom, deserted it, going the way of heresy and
schism.

Danger from without was accompanied by disorganization within. In the
tenth century the political edifice so painfully constructed by
Charlemagne was in ruins. The organization of the Roman Empire and the
Gregorian ideal of a Catholic Church, now little more than a lingering
tradition, was replaced by the feudal system. Seigneurs, lay and
ecclesiastic, warring among themselves for the shadow of power, had
neither time nor inclination for the ways of peace or the life of the
spirit. Learning all but disappeared; the useful arts were little
cultivated; cities fell into decay and the roads that bound them
together were left in unrepair; the life of the time, barren alike in
hovel and castle, was supported by the crude labor of a servile class.
To be complete within itself, secure from military attack and
economically self-supporting, were the essential needs which determined
the structure of the great fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far
afield, while the "rural population lived in a sort of chrysalis state,
in immobility and isolation within each seigneury."

But the feudal regime, well suited to a period of confusion, could not
withstand the disintegrating effects of even the small measure of peace
and prosperity which it secured. Increase in population and the
necessities of life liberated those expansive social forces, in politics
and industry, in intellectual life, in religious and emotional
experience, which produced the civilization of the later Middle Ages;
that wonderful thirteenth century which saw the rise of industry and the
towns, the foundation of royal power in alliance with a moneyed class,
the revival of intellectual activity which created the universities and
the scholastic philosophy, the intensification of the religious spirit
manifesting itself in such varied and perfect forms,--in the simple
life of a St. Francis or the solemn splendor of a Gothic cathedral.

Of this new and expanding life, the most