All citizens were free

Within the city, there were now no slaves, no serfs, no abject and outlaw caste of any kind, except the Jews who formed a separate city of their own. All citizens were free: all without exception had rights of some kind. The churches, monasteries, hospitals, and schools existed, in original design, mainly for the poor, the wretched, and the diseased. Christ loved the weak and the suffering.

And the doors of His house stood ever open to the .weak, the suffering, the halt, the blind, and the lame. The church of the Middle Ages suffered little children to come unto Him. The poorest, the weakest, the most abject, were welcome there. The Priest, the Monk, the Nun taught, clothed, and nursed the children of the poor, and the suffering poor. The leper was tended in lazar-houses, even it might be by kings and princesses, with the devotion of Christian self-sacrifice. For the first time in history there were schools, hospitals, poor-houses, for the most lowly, compassion for the most miserable, and consolation in Heaven for those who had found earth a Hell city tours istanbul.

The old Greek and Roman religion

The old Greek and Roman religion of external cleanness was turned into a sin. The outward and visible sign of sanctity now was to be unclean. No one was clean: but’ the devout Christian was unutterably foul. The tone of the Middle Ages in the matter of dirt was a form of mental disease.

Cooped up in castles and walled cities, with narrow courts and sunless alleys, they would pass day and night in the same clothes, within the same airless, gloomy, windowless, and pestiferous chambers; they would go to bed without night clothes, and sleep under uncleansed sheepskins and frieze rugs; they would wear the same leather, fur, and woollen garments for a lifetime, and even for successive generations; they ate their meals without forks, and covered up the orts with rushes; they flung their refuse out of the window into the street or piled it up in the back-yard; the streets were narrow, unpaved, crooked lanes through which, under the very palace turrets, men and beasts tramped knee-deep in noisome mire.

This was at intervals varied with fetid rivulets and open cesspools; every church was crammed with rotting corpses and surrounded with graveyards, sodden with cadaveric liquids, and strewn with disinterred bones. Round these charnel houses and pestiferous churches were piled old decaying wooden houses, their sole air being these deadly exhalations, and their sole water supply being these polluted streams or wells dug in this reeking soil. Even in the palaces and castles of the rich the same bestial habits prevailed. Prisoners rotted in noisome dungeons under the banqueting hall; corpses were buried under the floor of the private chapel; scores of soldiers and attendants slept in gangs for months together in the same hall or guard-room where they ate and drank, played and fought.

It is one of those problems which still remain for .historians to solve — how the race ever survived the insanitary conditions of the Middle Ages, and still more how it was ever continued — what was the normal death-rate and the ‘ normal birth-rate of cities? The towns were no doubt maintained by immigration, and the rural labourer had the best chance of life, if he could manage to escape death by violence or famine.