Europe: A History (69 page)
The schism between East and West, Christendom’s major scandal, has never been repaired. From 1054 onwards there were not only two supposedly universal.
MISSA
T
HE
Christian liturgy has never been static. The Divine Office of hymns, psalms, lessons, homilies, responsories, canticles, and collects began to crystallize from the fifth century. The Canonical Hours, which enabled monks to spread out their recital of the 150 psalms, once recited daily, were instituted by St Benedict. Prudentius, Bishop of Troyes (d. 861) is credited with an early Breviary or summary of approved liturgical texts.
The most solemn of the Christian sacraments, the Mass or
missa
, assumed definitive form slightly later. Variously known as the Eucharist or ‘Rite of Thanksgiving’, as the ‘Communion’, or as the commemoration of ‘the Lord’s Supper’, it was customarily separated from the rest of the Divine Office. The earliest Missal or ‘Order of the Mass’ dates from the tenth century. The central act of Communion occurs when the priest consecrates bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, and offers them to the communicants. From the thirteenth century to 1965, the Roman Church restricted the chalice of wine to the priestly celebrant. But now, as originally, it offers ‘Communion in Both Kinds’. The theological implications of the Eucharist, notably the Thomist doctrine of transubstantiation, caused immense controversy during the Reformation.
The custom of setting key parts of the Mass to music had far-reaching consequences. The Propers, or items whose words vary according to the occasion, were usually recited or chanted. They include the Introit, the Gradual, the Offertory, and the Communion Anthem. But the Ordinaries, whose text was invariable, opened the way for elaborate musical inventions. The Ordinaries include: the
Kyrie Eleison
(‘Lord Have Mercy’), an ancient imprecation borrowed from sun worship; the
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
(‘Glory to God on High’), a hymn usually omitted during Lent; the
Credo
or Nicene Creed; the
Sanctus
(‘Holy, Holy, Holy’), an adorational hymn which prefaces the Communion; the
Agnus Dei
(‘0 Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world’); and finally the Dismissal,
Ite, missa est
(‘Go in peace; the Mass is ended’).
Setting the Ordinaries for two or more voices, and then for choirs with instrumental accompaniment, presented the principal challenge of medieval polyphony. A complete Mass cycle was composed by Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and similar compositions were common by the Renaissance. The supreme masters were undoubtedly Palestrina (d. 1594) and his contemporary, William Byrd (1543–1623), a Catholic in Anglican service. Palestrina’s highly original
Missa Papae Marcellae
(1555) followed the instructions of the Council of Trent in giving maximum clarity to the words,
[CANTUS]
The impact of the Mass on musical history was incalculable. Just as incantation had transformed the spiritual and aesthetic effect of the
liturgy, so the choral and instrumental arrangements of the Mass profoundly influenced Europe’s evolving musical tradition. ‘The liturgical text forms the portal through which music enters into the cultural history of the Western Christian world.’
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The stupendous Mass in B minor (1738) of J. S. Bach initiated a stage where musical performances of the Mass could be divorced from religious ceremony. Haydn wrote fourteen such masses, among them the Drum Mass (1796) and the Wind-Band Mass (1802). Mozart wrote eighteen, including the sublime, unfinished Requiem (1791). Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in D (1823) may be regarded as the zenith of the series, to be followed in Romantic style by those of Liszt, Gounod, Bruckner, and Janáček. In the twentieth century the Mass survived both the dilution of Christian belief and the disintegration of traditional musical form. Frederick Delius composed a choral Mass of Life (1909) based on anti-religious texts by Nietzsche. Stravinsky’s Mass for Chorus and Wind Instruments (1948) experiments with neo-polyphonic techniques modelled on Machaut.
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Yet sung and unsung masses can be heard every day in Catholic and Orthodox churches around the world. Both the religious tradition and the musical genres descended from it are very much alive.
Christian Empires; there were two supposedly universal and orthodox Christian Churches. Three hundred years earlier, the principal line of division in Europe lay between the Christian lands of the south and the heathen lands of the north. From now on, it lay between the Catholic lands of the West and the Orthodox lands of the East. (See Map 3.)
1054–1268
Whereas, in the age of the Vikings and Magyars, it was the West and Centre of Europe that had borne the brunt of the turmoil, it was the East that sustained the havoc when first the Seljuk Turks and then the Mongols appeared on the scene. Indeed, from the second half of the eleventh century onwards, Latin Christendom entered an era of reform and revitalization. In that same period the Eastern Empire entered a stage of irreversible decline. As shown by the Crusades, the two movements were not unrelated.
At the time of the Schism between East and West, the Byzantine Empire was preoccupied with a series of petty upheavals caused by wars on the frontier and strife in the palace. Indeed, the revolts of generals, the ambitions of the Patriarch, and the intrigues of the empresses proved no less disruptive than the Normans in Italy, the Pechenegs on the Danube, and the Seljuk Turks in Armenia. The death
of the ageing Theodora in 1057, which ended the Macedonian dynasty, distracted the Empire at the moment it faced its greatest challenge.
The Saljuqs or Seljuks had crossed the Oxus in 1031, gaining mastery over Persia in the 1040s, Armenia in the 1060s, and Jerusalem in 1070. They came within a hair’s breadth of capturing Baghdad. Their sultans, Tughril Beg (r. 1038–63), the ‘Reviver of Islam’, and Alp Arslan (r. 1063–72), infused the fighting spirit which mobilized a motley following. Their entourage included Persian administrators, Greek advisers, and a rich company of philosophers, mathematicians, and poets:
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me, singing in the Wilderness—
And wilderness is Paradise enow.
’Tis all a chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for pieces plays,
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
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Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), whose Persian quatrains would be turned in translation into one of the favourite items of English literature, served as astronomer and calendarist at the Seljuk court under Alp Arslan, the architect of their greatest triumph. On 19 August 1071, at Manzikert near Lake Van, the Seljuks turned a border contest into an imperial rout. The Byzantine army was utterly destroyed. The Emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, was captured. The Empire’s heartland in Asia Minor was overrun, serving thenceforth as the base for the Turkish emirate of Rum. The Empire’s population and economic resources were drastically reduced.
Byzantium never fully recovered. From now on, the emperors were seeking to defend the shrinking foreground of Fortress Constantinople. The Seljuks, too, had shot their bolt. They soon lost the guardianship of Jerusalem to the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt; and the wars of rival emirs gave the Empire some respite. The energetic young Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (r. 1081–1118) held the line by a mixture of valour and dubious financial expedients, such as seizing the Church’s treasure. He repulsed the Normans from Greece, and recovered a valuable stretch of the Pontic and Aegean shore. But a return to the status quo ante was out of the question. Under Manuel I (r. 1143–80), a certain ‘Comnenian Renaissance’ bloomed, especially in scholarship, theology, and architecture. Grandiose schemes for reuniting with Rome or for conquering Egypt came to nought. The growing influence of the Latins, with whom Manuel packed his court, led to increasing friction, especially with the Venetians. The degenerate Andronicus Comnenus (r. 1183–5) was tortured to death by a mob which followed his own example. The façade of greatness was still intact. Constantinople was still the
richest and most civilized city of Christendom: its trade, its ceremonies, its intense religious devotions continued in full swing. But the substance was ebbing away. Its body politic awaited the shock which in 1204 would all but kill it dead.
Byzantium’s distress produced serious repercussions in the Orthodox Slav lands. There was neither the will nor the means whereby the Greek Patriarch could exercise the same control over Bulgars, Serbs, or Kievans as the Papacy was now beginning to exercise in the West. In the century after Manzikert, the Balkans descended once more into turmoil. The Pechenegs, who reached the walls of Constantinople for a second time in 1090, were not subdued until 1122. Long campaigns had to be fought in the north-west to hold Serbia from the Magyars. In 1186 the Bulgars broke free once more to found their ‘Second Empire’.
Kievan Rus’ was largely left to its own devices. Jaroslav the Wise (r. 1019–54), successor to St Volodymyr, had taken Red Ruthenia from the Poles, had defeated the Pechenegs, and had even sent a major naval expedition against Constantinople. But on his death, the state disintegrated into warring principalities—Halicz and Volhynia in the west; Kiev, Turov, Chernigov in the south; Novgorod, Polotsk, and Smolensk in the north; Tver, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Ryazan on the upper Volga. The dissensions of Rus’ were cleverly fanned by the Byzantines, and might well have been exploited by the neighbouring Poles had the Polish kingdom itself not fallen likewise into an extended period of fragmentation after 1138. The primitive kingdoms of the Slavs stood in considerable disarray long before the arrival of the Mongols.
Divergences among the east Slavs now became evident. Kiev remained a commercial and religious centre; but it was exposed to the whims of the Pechenegs (Patzinaks) and Polovtsians (Cumans) on the steppes, and had all but lost political control. In the twelfth century the name
Ukraina
, meaning ‘On the edge’ or ‘the frontier’, was first applied to the lands round Kiev. Halicz (Galicia), first noted in 1140, and Volhynia passed under the Romanowicz dynasty. Daniel Romanowicz (r. 1235–65) received his crown from a papal legate, but later renounced the Catholic connection. According to one chronicle, he was urged to side with the people in suppressing the boyars. ‘You cannot eat the honey’, he was told, ‘until you have killed the bees.’
The north-eastern principalities of Rus’ attracted an important peasant migration into the forest zone of the upper Volga, which helped the growth of cities. The settlement of Moscow on the River Moskva was first recorded in 1146. In 1169 Andrei Bogulyubsky, Prince of Vladimir, was strong enough to sack Kiev. In 1185 Prince Igor of Sever led a famous expedition against the Polovtsians. The city of Novgorod began its career as an independent republic from 1126. Its
veche
, an assembly of its free citizens, elected both the chief administrator and the archbishop. It set the terms of the contract which limited the powers of the ruling prince. Huge territories in the north, as far as the monastery of St Michael the Archangel on the White Sea, were subject to Novgorod’s writ. Alexander Nevsky (c.1220–63), Prince of Vladimir and Novgorod, repelled both the Swedes on the Neva (1240) and the Teutonic knights on the ice of Lake Peipus.
[NOVGOROD]
Another clear beneficiary of Byzantium’s decline was the fledgeling kingdom of Hungary. Protected to the north by the Carpathians, and safely distanced both from Constantinople and from the German Empire, Hungary could consolidate its hold on the Danube basin without serious opposition. In 1004 it took control of Transylvania, and after 1089 of Croatia and Dalmatia, opening an important corridor to the sea. In the twelfth century it absorbed the beautiful mountain-girt province of Bosnia. In all the peripheral territories, including Upper Hungary (Slovakia), Magyar nobles of the Latin faith were established on vast estates largely inhabited by Slavs, Germans, or Romanians. On the eastern borders, a lengthy military zone was permanently settled by conquered Cumans. Paganism was eradicated. Under the ‘soldier king’, St Ladislas or Laszlo (r. 1077–95) and his nephew Coloman I or Kálmán (r. 1095–1116), both of whom had close family ties with Constantinople, the pioneering tasks of St Stephen were concluded. As early as 1222, in the ‘Golden Bull’ of Andreas II, the Hungarian king confirmed the immunity of the nobles and high clergy, who formed a national assembly armed with the formal right of resistance.
The Byzantine retreat also led to important changes in Transcaucasia. The Bagratid state of Greater Armenia, based on Ani near Kars, which had flourished since the ninth century, was submerged by the Seljuks. Many Armenians were driven into exile, some as far afield as Poland. A rump state of ‘Little Armenia’ was set up in the south, in the former province of Cilicia; and it survived for three centuries more.
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But Georgia broke free: under David the Renovator (r. 1089–1125), the Seljuks were repulsed from Tbilisi. Under Queen Tamara (r. 1184–1213) a brilliant court culture flourished, the native Christian element blending with Turkish, Persian, and Arab infusions. The poet Shot’ha Rust’aveli, who was educated in Greece, gained international renown. His epic poem,
Knight in a Tiger Skin
, dedicated to Tamara, has been optimistically classified as ‘the first breath of the Renaissance’.
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Medieval society remained overwhelmingly rural. Life was centred on the feudal estates, and on the timeless relations of lord and serf. The emergence of cities in embryo, therefore, did not change the overall scene; but it was important, not merely for the future but for the organization of trade and the spread of culture.
