l men
had been equal and had been responsible for the welfare and safety of
the entire community.

But after they had settled down and some had become rich and others had
grown poor, the government was apt to fall into the hands of those
who were not obliged to work for their living and who could devote
themselves to politics.

I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in Mesopotamia and in
Greece and in Rome. It occurred among the Germanic population of western
Europe as soon as order had been restored. The western European world
was ruled in the first place by an emperor who was elected by the seven
or eight most important kings of the vast Roman Empire of the German
nation and who enjoyed a great deal of imaginary and very little actual
power. It was ruled by a number of kings who sat upon shaky thrones. The
every-day government was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelets.
Their subjects were peasants or serfs. There were few cities. There was
hardly any middle class. But during the thirteenth century (after an
absence of almost a thousand years) the middle class--the merchant
class--once more appeared upon the historical stage and its rise
in power, as we saw in the last chapter, had meant a decrease in the
influence of the castle folk.

Thus far, the king, in ruling his domains, had only paid attention to
the wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But the new world of trade
and commerce which grew out of the Crusades forced him to recognise
the middle class or suffer from an ever-increasing emptiness of his
exchequer. Their majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes)
would have as lief consulted their cows and their pigs as the good
burghers of their cities. But they could not help themselves. They
swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded, but not without a
struggle.

In England, during the absence of Richard the Lion Hearted (who had gone
to the Holy Land, but who was spending the greater part of his crusading
voyage in an Austrian jail) the government of the country had been
placed in the hands of John, a brother of Richard, who was his inferior
in the art of war, but his equal as a bad administrator. John had begun
his career as a regent by losing Normandy and the greater part of the
French possessions. Next, he had managed to get into a quarrel with
Pope Innocent III, the famous enemy of the Hohenstaufens. The Pope had
excommunicated John (as Gregory VII had excommunicated