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                               THE END OF
                            THE MIDDLE AGES

                    ESSAYS AND QUESTIONS IN HISTORY




                                   BY
                          A. MARY F. ROBINSON
                      (_Madame James Darmesteter_)




                                 LONDON
                             T FISHER UNWIN
                         26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
                              MDCCCLXXXIX




[Illustration]




                              DEDICATION.

[Illustration]


MY DEAR MR. SYMONDS,—_I send you a little book; different from the many
volumes, plump with documents and the dignity of History, which I
intended for you long ago. But, since I have no better thing to offer,
take—dear Master—these rough and scattered pages. For to whom, if not to
you, should I dedicate the book? When I look back, I see you at my side
in all my studies; for the last ten years, there is not one of them
which has not been confided to you, and, most of all, my dreams of
History. So that whatever I write belongs in some sort to you; but
especially this little volume of which we talked so much in your study
at Davos two years ago. Do you remember how you guided me through the
innumerable pages of Litta and of Muratori in quest of the secret of the
French Claim to Milan? We did not find much of that, but we found so
many better things; and, best of all, the happy hours which you
illuminated! Hours in which you evoked for me, as we plunged deeper and
deeper into your Chronicles, the great figures of the Past. At first
they rose before me, pale and mute—silent and immaculate as the white
recesses of your Alps; but, at the touch of your wand, they assumed
their ancient colour and consistence—the very smile, the gait, the
accent, the passions, that had moved them once beneath this sun that has
survived them; their voices magically issued out of the silent yellow
pages; the sound of their battles clashed anew along your windless
valleys and eagle-haunted mountain tops. And, once alive, they remained
alive for me._

_As I sat and wondered, a new desire awoke in me, an eager wish to seize
these brilliant apparitions, to strip them of their faded purple, to
strip them of their form and colour, to lay them bare to their innermost
tissue and catch the reason and the secret of their being._

_And, first of all, to understand exactly what they did, and when, and
why. Our beautiful chronicles were not always quite precise. I began to
see that what I wanted must be sought in manuscripts and foreign
archives. And, half afraid, I told you of my project for exchanging a
cheerful holiday in Switzerland against a week or two of dull research
in Paris. Since then I have worked long and hard, in Paris, in London,
in Florence, and the writing of dead hands has grown familiar to me; but
I have never forgotten that it was first in the solitude of your lofty
valley, that my task grew plain before my mind. And now to whom, if not
to you should I offer these scattered ruins of the thing undone—these
first ineffectual sketches of that_ History of the French in Italy,
_which still I mean to write? From Davos they took their flight; let
them seek the nest again!_

_If I had better profited by your lessons and your example, it would not
have been a mere sheaf of fragments that I should have offered you
to-day, but a Book, a solid and coherent whole consistently animated, in
all the complexity and the unity of its subject, by an epoch, an idea, a
man, or an event. Nothing else is really durable, permanently useful. It
is true that I have tried (and may the candour of this avowal excuse its
weakness!)—yes, I have tried, after the manner of essayists, to give an
apparent unity to my fragments by means of a title, large and
comfortable as the cloak of charity which covers in its vague expanse a
host of strangers._

_For, after all, what has Schwester Katrei to do with Charles VIII., or
Isotta of Rimini with Mechtild of Magdeburg? Shall I avow that the
volume is really the fragmentary essays towards two unwritten
histories—one of the house of Hohenstaufen, the other of the French in
Italy? Also I can imagine you remarking that, from the thirteenth
century to the sixteenth, my Middle Ages take long a-dying:_

           “_Les gens que vous tuez se portent assez bien._”

_And you might add that in a book on the end of the Middle Ages, it is
strange to find not a line on the Loss of Constantinople, and not a
chapter on the invention of Printing or the Discovery of America._

_What can I do but acknowledge my incompleteness? Nay, I will even
confess to you that I have my private doubts whether the Middle Ages are
over yet—