4th century

“ Another instructive theme which this Institution proposes, on a future occasion, to embrace in its course of lectures, is the history of the 16th century. Passing over the Reformation—the great event certainly of this period—it was about this time that the struggles among the different nations of Europe gave rise, and by degrees gave consolidation, to the system of the balance of power. ”

“ My darlings, this morning we will glance at some of the relics of what was once called the 'Christian Era,' subsequently designated by historians as 'The Age of Blood and Malevolence,' but which is, nevertheless, always of importance in the world's library from its having been the first link in the long unbroken chain of eras of civilization. If time will permit we will take from the twenty-first century to the fifteenth. ”

“ The period at which this History commences,—the beginning of the sixteenth century,—when compared with the ages which had preceded it, since the fall of the Roman empire, was one of unprecedented brilliancy and activity. It was a period very fruitful in great men and great events, and, though stormy and turbulent, was favorable to experiments and reforms. The nations of Europe seem to have been suddenly aroused from a state of torpor and rest, and to have put forth new energies in every department of life. ”

“ Properly considered, the eighth century is the most important and memorable which Europe has ever seen. During its course the geographical limits, the ecclesiastical polity, and the feudal system within and under which our western group of nations was destined to live for five or six centuries, were provisionally settled and determined. ”

“ So far have we followed the memorable fifth century, the century, I repeat, in whose first years, if at any time, modern history begins, the century at whose end the existing nations of Europe are still not in being, but at whose beginning they have taken, so to speak, the first feeble steps towards coming into being. ”

“ Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in 1800 was radiantly clear to all men—the glory and the wonder, the endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity. ”

“ Just as the history of the church and the world as a whole is distributed into ancient and modern, so the special history of the Germano-Roman world can and must be distributed into ancient and modern, the dividing boundary of which is the Reformation of the 16th century. ”

“ The historian may busy himself deciphering hieroglyphics on an Egyptian obelisk, describing a mediæval monastery, enumerating the Mongol emperors of Hindustan or the battles of Napoleon. He may explain how the Roman Empire was conquered by the German barbarians, or why the United States and Spain came to blows in 1898, or what Calvin thought of Luther, or what a French peasant had to eat in the eighteenth century. We can know something of each of these matters if we choose to examine the evidence which still exists; they all help to make up history. ”

“ The centuries prior to the age of Gregory VII and of William the Conqueror may, on account of their disorder and ignorance, be properly called the "dark ages," although they beheld some important stages in the transformation of Europe. The later Middle Ages, on the contrary, were a time of rapid and unmistakable progress in almost every line of human endeavor. Indeed by the end of the thirteenth century a great part of those changes were well under way which serve to make modern Europe so different from the condition of western Europe under the Roman Empire. ”

“ It is dangerous to attempt to characterise the work of whole centuries in single phrases; but there are cases, and this seems to be one of them, where the progress of a movement can be marked out with approximate accuracy, and its stages defined, in such a way. The three centuries, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth, with which we have been principally occupied, had each its special form of contribution to the movement which we have called the Christian Renaissance. The fifteenth century was the age of collection: the documents were brought together, and the great libraries formed. ”

“ If we could affix to each century as characteristic a presentment as those portraits do of the steel-clad hero of Towton, or the be-wigged, be-buckled courtier of George the Second, our object would be gained. We should see a whole history in a glance at a century’s face. If it were peculiarly marked by nature or accident, so much the more easy would it be to recognise the likeness. If the century was a warlike, quarrelsome century, and had scars across its brow ”

“ In a newly emancipated State, say the kingdom of Greece or any other, some part of its areas, some classes of its people, will really belong to the nineteenth century, while other parts, other classes, will practically belong to the fourteenth or some earlier century. Now a country which has reached, say the level of England in the fourteenth century, if it stands by itself, out of sight, so to speak, of the nineteenth century, may, if it has inborn life and a spirit of progress, develop in a steady and wholesome way from the starting-point of the fourteenth century. ”

“ It was hardly till the seventeenth century that the presence of a new age, as different from the middle ages as from the ages of Greece and Rome, was fully realised. It was then that the triple division of ancient, medieval, and modern was first applied to the history of western civilisation. Whatever objections may be urged against this division, which has now become almost a category of thought, it marks a most significant advance in man's view of his own past. ”

“ The sixteenth century was drawing to its close,—a century marked by the ravages of religious revolution, and destined to be for ever honoured or deplored according as men may think of it as the age of reformation or of decay. ”

“ The noted historians of Europe, in describing the conditions, manners, politics, learning and culture, in all their aspects, of early, medieval and modern times, unanimously record that during the ten centuries constituting the Middle Ages, from the beginning of the sixth century of the Christian era till the close of the fifteenth, Europe was in every respect and to an extreme degree, barbaric and dark. ”

“ In the widespread shifting of levels which has taken place in the last hundred years, affecting directly and indirectly the moral progress of all classes of society, certain important elements have entered which cannot be overlooked in the present discussion, and which in future ages must stand as preëminently characteristic of the nineteenth century and the Anglo-Saxon ascendency. ”

“ No century had ever witnessed so great a change in manners and position as this. In others we have seen a gradual widening-out of thought and tendencies, all, however, subdued by the universal shadow in which every thing was carried on. But in this the progress was by a sudden leap from darkness into light. In ancient times Europe was held together by certain communities of interest and feeling, of which the chief undoubtedly was the centralization of the spiritual power in Rome. ”

“ The general characteristic features of each period are the same, although the provincial character sometimes seems to preponderate; the character of each century, at all events, is the same all over Europe, and may also be easily remembered, and as a matter of fact is never forgotten. ”

“ The basis of Europe’s progress and civilization was actually laid in the fifteenth century of the Christian era, and from that time on, all her present evident culture has been, under the stimulus of great minds and as a result of the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge and the exertion of energetic and ambitious efforts, in the process of development. ”

“ But that we may be better able to comprehend the point at which we stand in the world's history, and to escry the ideals which are to be our guides for the future, let us look more closely at the political changes and activities that have occupied the four or five centuries since the Middle Ages came to an end. ”

“ It has been said that the seventeenth century saw Versailles; the eighteenth century saw the Earth; and the nineteenth century saw Humanity. Then the very pertinent question is asked, “Which century will see Life?” ”

“ Pre-Renaissance Period: Incidental historical study made in connection with the study of biography and literature.
2. Renaissance Period: Historical studies pursued as auxiliary to the interpretation of the classics.
3. Post-Renaissance Period in Europe.
(a) Heraldry and local, contemporary historical incidents and events taught in Ritterakedemien after 1648.
(b) In Germany, the systematic study of history in schools really dates from about 1806, though an independent status was given history in the universities (particularly in Göttingen) in the 18th century. ”

“ The fifteenth century, the last century of an age, was a backwater in education as in literature. The great revival was to come. The fifteenth century was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under the almost placid surface of continuity and conformity, there were forces of revolt at work, probing, accumulating knowledge and experience, perhaps unconsciously, for the day of liberation and change. ”

“ Again, it is true of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century and during the greater part of the sixteenth, a period usually called ‘the Renaissance’, or time of ‘New Birth’, because then it became apparent that the old mediaeval outlook and ways of life had vanished, while others much more familiar and easy to understand had taken their place: the Modern World had been called into being. ”

“ Conscious choice and force of habit made Europeans cling to the basic pattern of twelfth-century civilization for generations, even though new activities and ideas forced modification of some of its details. There are important differences between the early and late Middle Ages, but these differences represent different stages in the development of a single civilization. From the fifth to the eighth century the wreckage of an older civilization was slowly cleared away. ”

“ If we consider the condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the prevalence of abuses and corruption left by the ignorance or vice of preceding years, and reflect at the same time upon the progressive nature of the people, the practical habit of their minds, and the moral earnestness which they never wholly lost, it is not surprising to find that the century is one of reforms. ”

“ It was Eastern philosophy, unquestionably false, that influenced the most powerful institution that existed in Europe for above a thousand years,—an institution which all the learning and eloquence of the Reformers of the sixteenth century could not subvert, except in Protestant countries. ”

“ The Revolution which had so lately preceded the opening of the century, and the far more pregnant and eventful Revolution which convulsed Europe at its close, had both of them many bearings, though of course in very different ways, upon the development of religious and ecclesiastical thought in this country. ”

“ But the eighteenth century, notwithstanding its nearness in time, and the immense mass of information that we have about it, appears strangely remote, separated from us as it is by the great gulf of the French Revolution. The century of which men still vigorous have known many living representatives impresses us as markedly different in temper and point of view from our own. ”

“ While engaged in these scholarly pursuits, our variant of the pattern--western civilization--has been passing through the customary life cycle. If we read the signs correctly, western civilization reached the high point in its cycle toward the end of the last century. ”

“ And let those who think the twelfth century too late an age to be interesting, who wish for the law of more primitive times, consider how sound a base for their studies these records are. If once we were certain of our twelfth century we might understand Domesday, if once we understood the state of England on the day when the Confessor was alive and dead, then we might turn with new hopes of success to the Anglo-Saxon dooms and land-books. ”

“ In some cases, as in France, the change in institutions was immediate and sweeping; in others, as in Germany and Italy, the transformation was more gradual; but in all, the old state of things was doomed.
The thirty years or so just preceding the Revolution are those that most concern us in this study, though we shall often have occasion to look back to the early eighteenth century — and sometimes to the seventeenth.
To realize the conditions under which men lived in the eighteenth century is not easy. ”

“ But this anterior and superior civilization, resting largely as it does on vague tradition, and preserved to our knowledge in general allusions rather than in detail, may, like the native condition since the conquest, be utilized to the best advantage here as illustrative of the later and better-known, if somewhat inferior civilization of the sixteenth century, described by the conqueror, the missionary, and the Spanish historian. ”

“ Further, from the fifth century after Christ until the fifteenth, that period defined as the Middle Ages, such terrible struggles and fierce upheavals, such ruthless encounters and horrifying acts, were the rule among the peoples of Europe, that the Europeans rightly describe those ten centuries as the Dark Ages. ”