BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM, Litt.D. , LL.D. F.A.I.A., A.N.A., F.R.G.S. ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1916 Copyright, 1915, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS —— Published October, 1915 [Image unavailable.] TO E. S. C. WHO SOME DAY MAY KNOW THE HEART OF EUROPE AND TO WHOM THIS BOOK MAY BE A DIM RECALLING “OF OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS AND BATTLES LONG AGO” WHITEHALL 29 AUGUST, 1915     The author wishes to express his great sense of personal obligation to Miss Gertrude Schirmer and Mr. Emil P.

B ETWEEN the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghe

I T is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following the fall of Rome, this little country—or the men that made it great—was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible influence from

I N a study such as this tries to be, it is, of course, impossible to consider in any degree the history of those portions of the chosen territory that joined themselves to, or were by force incorporated in, the great surrounding states. The Rhineland, in spite of its minor vicissitudes of lordship, is and has always been Germanic, and its annals are part and parcel of those of the Teutonic Holy Roman Empire and of the German Empire that succeeded it. The marshes of the mouth of the Rhine early

W HEN Philip II came to the throne there was a new king in France, Henry II, who forthwith broke the peace Charles V had engineered, and proceeded to invade both Italy and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in the north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so disastrous a fashion that hardly any one but Nevers and Condé escaped. It was in gratitude for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that Philip built the palace of the Escorial. Trying again the next year, Henry did indeed, through the

B ETWEEN Paris and Cologne, Strasbourg and Bruges lies, in little, nearly the whole history of northern architecture from Charlemagne to the last Louis of France, when it ceased to be an art and became a fashion. The greater part of Normandy lies, it is true, across the Seine, and is, for the time, beyond our field of vision, but, barring Caen, architectural significance is well concentrated in the triangle, Rouen, Dieppe, le Havre. The same is true of the old Royaume of France; though Chartres

T WO monuments there are to the east of the Seine that form the realisation of the dim but dominant ideal toward which Christian society in France was tending even from the days of St. Germer and Jumièges, through the intermediate and progressive steps of Noyon, Soissons, Laon-Amiens, and Reims. Equal in fame, counting no others in their own category save only Chartres and Bourges, the one remains, the other has passed for ever. It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch from afar the slow

T HE great civic halls were those of Audenaarde, Brussels, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and Arras, and each of these cities was as well full of wonderful old houses, some private residences, some quarters for the various guilds. It is impossible to discriminate between past and present tense in describing them; some are wholly gone, as Ypres and Arras, others we suppose still remain, but how long this may be true one cannot say. If we lose what we have lost in the onrush of

A CROSS the face of Europe stretched a great scar, even before the war; a scar that reached from Picardy and Artois across Brabant and the Rhineland far into Westphalia. It was an open wound, creeping gangrenously outward, and yearly involving more and more of what once was healthy and fair in its progressive putrefaction. It was an area of darkness that had taken the place of light; of burrowings far down in the earth where men (and women and children once) grubbed dully and breathlessly for po

S TILL farther to the north, at the confluence of the Scheldt and the Lys, is Ghent, the proud and turbulent metropolis of the fifteenth century, the city-state that was so preposterously democratic it could never get along with its neighbours, nor even with itself; the city of De Conninck and Breidel and the Van Artevelds, of sudden and heroic courage, of irresponsible turnings from one side to the other, and a characteristic vacillation in public policy that kept it always in hot water and was

T HE historians always call her Marguerite of Austria, but this is hardly fair, for even if she were a daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian she did not come into her own until she took up her residence in a beautiful castle in Malines and made that own the fortune and the destinies and the happiness of the Flemish people who had been given her. On both her father’s side and her mother’s she was English, if you go back far enough, her great, great, great-grandfather having been that “John

T HE history, the principles, the motives, the methods of that mode of art which expresses itself in pictorial form are involved in more error and misrepresentation than happens in the case of any of its allies. For this the nineteenth century, and particularly the Teutonic nineteenth century, with its inability to understand art in any form save that of music, is chiefly responsible. Every effort has been made to isolate it as an independent form of art, to confine it to “easel painting” on pan

L ONG before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known—that of Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a centre, the s

T HE debt of Europe to the region we are considering is as great in the case of the so-called “minor arts” as it is elsewhere. Even the language preserves the record: Arras has given its name to the tapestries for which it was famous, linen woven in regular patterns is called diaper, or “linge d’Ypres,” cambric is simply the product of Cambrai, gauntlet preserves the fame of Ghent for its gloves, while the lost city of Dinant was once so famous for its work in copper, brass, bronze, and gilded m

F ROM Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and then in the Île de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long delaye

W HERE the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; Roman Bel

I HAVE tried to give some idea of the contributions of the lands and the peoples in the western theatre of the war in certain of the fields of art; to note the development of culture, the direction of human happenings, the bearing of great men and women who were leaders in Europe, through an abbreviation of historical records, to justify the giving to the region between the Seine and the Rhine, the Alps and the sea, the name of “Heart of Europe.” Such a survey of such a territory must, of necess