THE STATE and pyramidal authority. The rich and the poor alike asked for a saviour. When the saviour presented himself, when the king, who had become enriched far from the Forum, in some town of his creation, leaning on the wealthy Church, and followed by vanquished nobles and peasants, knocked at the city gates, promising the "lower orders" his protection against the rich, and the obedient rich his protection against the rebellious poor, the towns, which themselves were already under., mined by the canker of authority, had no longer the strength to resist, They opened their gates to the King. The Mongols had conquered the devastated Eastern Euro_pein the thirteenth century and an Empire was springing up in Moscow, under the protection of the Tartar Khans and the Russian Christian Church. The Turks had settled in Europe, and pushed as far as Vienna in 1453, devastating everything on their path; and powerful States were being constituted in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and in the centre of Europe. At the other extremity, the war of extermina'- tion against the Moors in Spain allowed another powerful Empire to "Constituteitself in Castille and Aragon, supported by the Roman Church and the inquisition, the sword and the stake. As the communes themselves were becoming little States, so these little States were inevitably doomed to be swallowed up by the big ones. VII. The victory of the State over the communes and the federalist institutions of the Middle Ages did not take place straightway. At one time the State was so threatened that its victory seemed doubtful. A great popular movement-religious in form and expression, but eminently communistic in its aspirations and striving at equality~ originated in the towns and rural parts of central Europe. Already in the fourteenth century (in 1358 in France and in 1381 in England), two great similar movements had taken place. Two powerful revolts, that of the Jacquerie and that of Wat Tyler, had shaken society to its foundations. Both, however, had been principally directed against feudal lords. Both were defeated; but the peasant revolt in England completely destroyed serfdom, and the Jacquerie in France so checked its development that it never attained the develop~ ment it subsequently reached in Germany and in Eastern Europe. In the sixteenth century, a similar movement took place in central Europe. Under the name of "Hussite" in· Bohemia, "Anabaptist" in• Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and of "Troubled Times" in Russia (at the beginning of the next century), it was above all a struggle against feudal lords-a complete revolt against Church and State, against Canon and Roman law, in the name of primitive Christianity. 29 Biblioteca Gino Bianco I
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