III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY…

III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY

Almost at the moment that the Crusades broke out, an institution commenced its aggrandisement which has, perhaps, contributed more than any other to the formation of modern society, and to the fusion of all the social elements into two powers, the government and the people,--the institution of Royalty.--GUIZOT.[m]

[Sidenote: [1180-1270 A.D.]]

Philip Augustus, Louis’ son and successor, who was about fifteen years of age when he began to reign, was already the nursling of court adulation and homage. His predecessors had not attained dignity sufficient to expose them to this bane of the royal nature. Congratulations, couched in the language of oriental hyperbole, had greeted his birth. He was styled the Dieu-donné, “the God-given”; and self-constituted laureates began already to celebrate the majesty of the monarch of the French. Formerly, the surrounding nobles had disdained to dispute court favour or influence; but the first years of Philip’s reign were taken up with the rivalry of the houses of Flanders and Champagne, which each sought to be the masters and ministers of the young sovereign. Henry II of England gave his support to the counts of Champagne, and the partisans of Flanders were obliged to retire from Paris. They formed a league, and menaced war; but Philip, with the English monarch’s aid, easily overcame the malcontents. Henry showed generosity on this occasion. Instead of profiting by the divisions of the French, and keeping them alive, he frankly supported the young king against his refractory barons. He was king himself, and sympathised with royalty. Philip ill repaid this kindness: he imitated his father’s policy in seducing the sons of the English monarch from their allegiance; and their frequent ingratitude at length broke the heart of the sensitive and passionate monarch. Richard, duke of Aquitaine, known as Cœur de Lion, and his father’s successor on the throne, was the especial friend and ally of Philip in these quarrels; and for a long time the princes shared the same tent and the same bed.

Meantime a third crusade began to be preached. This prevalent enthusiasm, like the rebellions of an oppressed yet brave people, was sure to arouse itself and reawaken as soon as time had elapsed sufficient to allow the disasters of the past to be forgotten. Saladin had recently taken Jerusalem. Fugitives instantly filled Europe with the dismal tidings. The cry for a crusade became general: it was no longer, however, the church that called a council to debate and decide upon the question; another power had arisen to rob the clergy of their initiative. The king called a parliament (parlement) of his barons at Gisors, and there a third crusade was determined upon. Cœur de Lion was the first to assume the cross; and king Philip, only hurt at being anticipated, followed his example. Frederick Barbarossa also took the same resolution.

[Sidenote: [1190-1194 A.D.]]

In June of the year 1190, Philip Augustus received the pilgrim’s scrip and staff from the hands of the abbot of St. Denis. Richard received his at Tours; and it was remarked, as an omen, that, as he leaned on the staff, it broke under his weight. In order to avoid the disasters of former crusades, they were to proceed to Palestine by sea. The two kings wintered in Sicily on their voyage thither, and there laid the foundation of their future jealousy and hate. The crusaders found the barons of Syria engaged in the siege of Acre. Their arrival hastened its surrender, and at the same time marked it with crime. Richard caused upwards of two thousand captives to be massacred in cold blood, and Philip was guilty of a similar piece of cruelty. The monarchs, indeed, had some slight breach of stipulations to allege, or might excuse their conduct as a reprisal for that of Saladin, who put to death many of the prisoners whom he made at the battle of Tiberias, more especially all those whose tonsure marked them to belong to the order of the Templars. It was thus that the ferocity of oriental manners came to alloy the more generous spirit of chivalry. In Palestine the French learned to be merciless towards their religious enemies, and hence it was that the fair page of their history was soon afterwards stained by the massacre of those whom they called heretics at home.

[Sidenote: [1194-1200 A.D.]]

Philip Augustus could not long endure the superior renown and prowess of Cœur de Lion. He seized the pretext of an illness to quit Palestine and abandon the field of glory to his rival. Returning home, he besought the pope to release him from the oath which bound him to respect the rights and territories of a brother crusader. The pontiff refused; but Philip felt himself sufficiently absolved by the Macchiavellian law of monarchical policy: and fortune, in making Richard fall captive to the duke of Austria, on his return from the Holy Land, seemed to favour the envious designs of the French monarch. Philip no sooner was informed of Richard’s captivity, than he leagued with his brother John, and invaded Normandy. He took several towns and castles, but was repulsed from before Rouen. At length Richard was released, or, as Philip wrote to his confederate, “the devil broke loose.” We expect on this occasion to read of a furious war betwixt the sovereigns. And yet no brilliant feat, no general engagement, marked that which ensued. Petty treason and short truce, varied by a skirmish or a marauding party, were all the effects produced by the envy of Philip and the resentment of the lion-hearted king. The death of the latter by an arrow-shot, as he besieged a castle in the Limousin, left a less formidable rival to Philip in the person of King John (1199). The writer of fiction never imagined a baser character than that of John. His cowardice and meanness form a phenomenon and an exception in the feudal ages. The nullity of such a rival converted Philip Augustus from the powerless intriguer to the conqueror and the hero.[b]

PRINCE ARTHUR OF BRITTANY

[Sidenote: [1200-1204 A.D.]]

Although Richard on his death-bed declared John to be his heir, the crown of England descended by right of primogeniture to the young prince Arthur, son of Geoffrey, duke of Brittany and the elder brother of John; the latter seized it. But Anjou, Poitou, and Touraine, weary of English domination, declared for Arthur, and invoked Philip’s protection. The king of France took up Arthur’s cause and then abandoned it (1200), after obtaining from John the advantage his political selfish policy was seeking.[c]

But Arthur had been accepted by the Bretons at his birth as a liberator and avenger. Old Eleanor, alone, held out against her grandson, for her son John, and for the unity of the English realm, which the accession of Arthur would have divided. Arthur, in fact, held that unity very cheap. He offered the king of France to cede Normandy to him, provided he might have Brittany, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, and Aquitaine. John would have been reduced to the possession of England alone. Philip willingly assented to this, put his own garrisons in Arthur’s best fortresses, and demolished them when he had no hope of maintaining his position in them. John’s nephew, thus betrayed by his ally, turned once more to his uncle; then he came back to the party of France, invaded Poitou, and besieged his grandmother, Eleanor, in Mirebeau. It was nothing new in that family to see the sons armed against their parents. Meanwhile, John came to the rescue, delivered his mother, defeated Arthur, and took him prisoner with most of the great lords of his party. What became of the captive? This has never been clearly ascertained. Matthew Paris[j] alleges that John treated him well at first, but was afterwards alarmed by the threats and the obstinacy of the young Breton. “Arthur disappeared,” he says, “and God grant that it may not have been as malicious rumour reports.” But Arthur had excited too many hopes to allow of the popular imagination resigning itself to this uncertainty. It was confidently affirmed that John had caused him to be put to death, and it was soon added that he had killed him with his own hand. The chaplain of Philip Augustus relates, as if he had seen it with his own eyes, that John took Arthur in a boat, stabbed him twice with a dagger, and threw him into the river three miles from the castle of Rouen. The Bretons placed the scene of the tragedy in their own country near Cherbourg, at the foot of those ill-omened cliffs that present a line of precipices all along the ocean. Thus the tradition went on enlarging in details, and in dramatic interest, and at last Shakespeare makes Arthur a helpless young child, whose gentle and innocent words disarmed the most brutal assassin.[d]

Philip was in the meantime checked in his projects by the court of Rome, which had laid an interdict upon him, on account of his divorce from Ingeborg (Ingeburge) of Denmark. And the preaching of a fifth crusade,[8] which eventually led to the establishment of the Frankish empire of Romania, about the same time took from him the interest and the aid of many nobles and chevaliers. He was, during the same interval, engaged in the conquest of Normandy, which the imbecility and cowardice of John delivered to his arms without defence. Roger de Lascy held the fortress of Les Andelys for several months against the French, and was the only valiant servitor of an unworthy monarch. The barons and warriors of England disdained to fight under his banner. There was as yet none of that rivalry which afterwards sprang up betwixt the nations. The monarchs of both were French princes, speaking the French tongue; and, although subsequent historians have given a national colour to the combats and conquests of Philip, the struggle was almost purely personal. Rouen, the capital of Normandy, surrendered to him (1204), without John’s making a single effort to preserve it. And thus a few years of the reign of one weak prince more than counterbalanced the long-established superiority of the monarchs of England.

[Sidenote: [1204-1208 A.D.]]

It has been seen what use the French monarchs made of their courts of peers, and of the judicial supremacy allowed them, in extending their authority over barons heretofore independent. Philip dared to apply the same principle to the dukes of Normandy, which his father had successfully done with regard to the counts of Bourbon and Auvergne. He summoned John before his suzerain court, to answer for the murder of Arthur and other crimes. Henry II, or Richard, would have given fit answer to such a summons. The Norman princes always held their homage to be that by parade or courtesy, not homage-liège. But John had neither the sense of his dignity, nor the spirit to maintain it. He allowed the jurisdiction of Philip’s court, though he feared to obey his summons; and he thus seemed to allow a legal right to the usurpations of Philip. The latter, indeed, appeared to feel the want of dignity in the assessors of his court. All nobles holding their lands directly of the king were peers in his parliament; and thus the petty lords of the counties of Paris and Orleans ranked equally with the dukes of Burgundy or the counts of Flanders. Philip remedied this, by appointing twelve great peers, or rather by pretending that such a number had always existed since the twelve paladins of Charlemagne. Of these, six were clerics, six laics; the latter being the dukes of Normandy, of Aquitaine, of Burgundy, the counts of Toulouse, of Flanders, and of Champagne. This division of the aristocracy in the high and low nobility, was, however, as yet but nominal; the lesser barons still continued to consider themselves as the peers of the greater, and to have an equal voice in the royal courts. It is important for the reader to mark the rise of this feudal institution, and equally so to mark the difference of its fate and progress in France and in England. In the former country, the parliament became amalgamated with lawyers, and preserved to the last its judicial functions, whilst its legislative authority became but a shadow. In England, on the contrary, it guarded the more precious privilege of legislation, abandoning a considerable portion of its judicial rights.

By the discomfiture of John, Philip Augustus united to the monarchy of France not only Normandy, but the provinces of Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou. Artois he had acquired as the dowry of his wife, Isabella of Hainault. The counties of the south remained still independent of his sway. They looked to the king of Aragon as their suzerain; and there existed far more congeniality of feelings and habits betwixt the Spaniards and Provençals, than betwixt the Provençals and French. Certain events of the reign of Philip, which we are about to relate, destroyed the independence of the people of the south, as well as their connection with the Aragonese, and extended the authority of the French monarch to the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees.

THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

While Philip Augustus adroitly wrested Normandy and its dependencies from the hands of John, a series of events took place in Languedoc which had the effect of destroying its independence, and of bringing that fine region not only nominally, as it had hitherto been, but really under the dominion of the kings of France.[b]

At this period the southern part of France held but distant relations with the north. Two powerful houses, that of Barcelona and that of Toulouse, shared dominion over it, with the exception of Aquitaine, which extended to the Pyrenees. This isolation naturally gave the south a separate existence, character, and interest. The tongue, that of the Limousin or of Provence, resembling more the Aragonese than the French of Paris, had become, thanks to the troubadours, a literary language. The cities contained a large bourgeois element, which had become wealthy through commerce.

It was in the midst of this people, active, ardent, isolated from most of their neighbours by political as well as natural barriers, corrupted moreover by the refinements of an equivocal civilisation and by the enervating literature of the troubadours, that there broke forth, at the end of the twelfth century, the Albigensian heresy, a powerful one, that having long undermined the ground, ended by being a menace to Catholic beliefs, the church, and society itself.

Several heretical sects dating from the early Christian time had not ceased to have their obscure upholders in France. Such were the Manichæans or Paulicians who believed in the co-existence of a principle of good and a principle of evil. It was the Paulicians who were condemned to be burned at Orleans by King Robert (1022). During the time of the crusaders, the sect, revived by frequent intercourse with the Orient where it had originated, spread all over the centre of France. It is thought that this extension was the work of the emigrants who arrived from Bulgaria; at last the heretics received the name of Bulgarians or Boulgres, and it was rumoured that they had a mysterious chief, or, as they said, a resident pope in that country. They were called Albigenses because they were especially numerous in the vicinity of Albi, and by this last name they have been preserved in history.

Some of their doctrines are known: they regarded the devil, or principle of evil, as the first author of the creation; they rejected the sacraments; they interpreted the Scriptures in a different way from the Catholic tradition. Also they possessed a kind of sacerdotal college whose members, called “the perfect ones,” performed special rites. It is very difficult to form any idea of their dogmas as a whole, for they had no theologian, no teacher, and they have left no writings. One can judge the basis of this heresy, and the sects belonging to it, only indirectly by the writings of the authors and teachers who fought them. These writers have attacked above all the strangeness of their practices and the vulgarity of their superstitions.

[Sidenote: [1208-1209 A.D.]]

But the dominant character of all these sects was their hatred of the church. They pretended to re-establish the primitive simplicity of the religion, which the church had corrupted, and among themselves they were known as cathares, or “the pure ones.”[e]

For a long time the holy see seemed not alive to the importance of this sect. It was Pope Innocent III who first perceived its dangerous tendency, and who took certain steps for its destruction. He issued interdicts against such princes as should favour them, and offered the spoil of the heretic to whoever should subdue and slay him. The principal lord of the south of France was at that time Raymond VI, count of Toulouse; and he at least tolerated the Albigenses, as those primitive reformers were called, aware of their moral purity and sincere devotion. Peter of Castelnau, the pope’s legate, reproached the count of Toulouse with his want of zeal, and was indignant at his forbearance to extirpate the new opinions by fire and sword. The legate used no measured language; he not only excommunicated Raymond, but insulted him in his court, and then took his departure. The count of Toulouse expressed his indignant feelings before his followers as Henry II did after the insolence of Thomas à Becket, and with the same fatal effect. On the day after, Peter of Castelnau fell under the dagger of a gentleman of the count, in a hostelry on the Rhone, where he had stopped.

Pope Innocent was driven to transports of rage on learning the assassination of his legate. He not only excommunicated the count of Toulouse, but promulgated a crusade against him. He called on all the nobles of France, on its princes, and its prelates, to join in the “holy” war, to assume the cross, as being engaged against infidels. And the same privileges and indulgences were granted to the crusader of this civil war, that previously were bestowed on those who embarked fortune and life in the perilous attempt to rescue the Holy Land from the Saracen. Spoil, wealth, and honour in this world, together with certain salvation in the next, were now offered at too cheap a rate to be refused. Crowds of adventurers flocked to the standard; and a formidable army was assembled at Lyons in the spring of 1209, under the command of the legate commander, Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux. The pope at the same time created a new ecclesiastical militia for the destruction of heresy. The order of St. Dominic, or of the friars inquisitors, was instituted; and these infernal missionaries were let loose in couples upon the hapless Languedoc, like bloodhounds, to scent their prey and then devour it.

[Sidenote: [1209-1217 A.D.]]

Raymond, count of Toulouse, had neither the force nor the courage to oppose so formidable an invasion. He repaired to the crusaders’ army, delivered up his fortresses and cities, and suffered the humiliating penance of a public flogging in the church of St. Giles. The count’s relative and feudatory, Raymond Roger, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, regions infected with the heresy of the Albigenses, came also to make submission. The abbot of Cîteaux, who was prudent enough to accept that of the count of Toulouse, feared to lose all his prey. He refused to admit the exculpation of the viscount of Béziers, and plainly told him that his only chance was to defend himself to the utmost. The young viscount courageously accepted the advice. He summoned the most faithful of his vassals, abandoned the open country as well as towns of lesser consequence to the enemy, and restricted his efforts to the defence of Béziers and of Carcassonne. He shut himself up in the latter. The fury of the crusaders fell first upon Béziers: they had scarcely sat down before the unfortunate town, when a sally of the garrison was repulsed with such vigour that the besiegers entered the town together with the routed host of the citizens. Word of this unexpected success was instantly brought to the abbot of Cîteaux, and his orders were demanded as to how the innocent were to be distinguished from the guilty. “Slay them all,” exclaimed the legate of the vicar of Christ; “the Lord will know his own.” The entire population was in consequence put to the sword; nor woman nor infant was spared. Upwards of twenty thousand human beings perished in the massacre--the sanguinary first-fruits of modern persecution. Carcassonne was next invested, bravely attacked, and as valiantly defended; the young viscount distinguishing himself in defence of his rights, while Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, was the most prominent warrior of the crusaders. At length the legate grew weary of the viscount’s obstinacy, and offered him terms. He gave him a safe-conduct, sanctioned by his own oath and that of the barons of his army. Raymond Roger came with three hundred of his followers to the tent of the legate. “Faith,” said the latter, “is not to be kept with those who have no faith”; and he ordered the viscount and his friends to be put in chains. The inhabitants of Carcassonne found means to fly. In a general assembly of the crusaders, the lordships of Béziers and Carcassonne were given to Simon de Montfort, in reward of his zeal and valour; and to make the gift sure, it was accompanied with the person of his rival. The unfortunate viscount, the victim of the legate’s perfidy, soon after perished in prison.

The victory of the crusaders was of course followed by executions at the stake and on the scaffold. The friars inquisitors of the order of St. Dominic did not relax their zeal. A general revolt against De Montfort was the consequence, in which the people of Toulouse joined. The Provençal army was headed by Pedro king of Aragon, the uncle of the late viscount of Béziers. It was he who had persuaded the unfortunate viscount to trust himself to the legate, and to him in consequence fell the duty of taking vengeance. The cross, however--the profaned cross--was still successful. The Provençals were routed by Simon de Montfort at the battle of Muret, and the king of Aragon was slain. This victory seemed to establish the power of De Montfort in Languedoc. He took possession of all the provinces of his rival, even of the town of Toulouse; and an assembly of prelates sanctioned the usurpation. But the cruel spirit of De Montfort would not allow him to rest quiet in his new empire. Violence and persecution marked his rule; he sought to destroy the Provençal population by the sword or the stake, nor could he bring himself to tolerate the liberties of the citizens of Toulouse. In 1217 the Toulousans again revolted, and war once more broke out betwixt Count Raymond and Simon de Montfort. The latter formed the siege of the capital, and was engaged in repelling a sally, when a stone from one of the walls struck him and put an end to his existence. The death of De Montfort was of course considered a martyrdom by the clergy, and his fame in their chronicles far outshines that of Godfrey de Bouillon or of Richard the Lion-hearted.

LEAGUE AGAINST PHILIP AUGUSTUS

King Philip was in the meantime pursuing his darling object, the humbling the power of the princes of England. He had already driven John from the west of France. That monarch, at variance with his barons, and at the same time excommunicated by the church, seemed an easy prey to Philip. The French king meditated the conquest of England. He leagued with the malcontents of that country, and formed a powerful army for the purposes of invasion. John, to ward off the blow, not only became reconciled to the Roman see, but made himself and his kingdom feudatory to the pope. A papal legate immediately took John under his protection; and the French monarch, rather than risk a quarrel with the church, turned his armies towards Flanders, which he wasted and plundered impitiably, from hatred to its count.

The emperor Otto, then in alliance with King John against France, came to the relief of the Flemings; and thus, for the first time since the accession of the new dynasty, the armies of France and Germany found themselves arrayed against each other in national hostility, each commanded by its respective monarch. The rival hosts met at Bouvines, in the month of August, 1214. Twenty thousand combatants on either side, together with the presence of two monarchs, gave gravity and importance to the meeting.[b]

The Battle of Bouvines (1214 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1214 A.D.]]

The two armies remained for a time a short distance apart, not daring to begin operations; and the French were retreating over the bridge of Bouvines to march upon Hainault, when the enemy, attacking the rearguard, obliged them to turn about.

The chaplain, William le Breton,[k] who during the action remained beside the king singing psalms, says: “Philip was resting under a tree near a chapel, his armour laid aside. At the first sound of combat he entered the church for a short prayer, armed hastily, and mounted his steed with as great enthusiasm as though on his way to a wedding or a feast. Loud shouts resounded from the field: ‘To arms, men of war, to arms!’ together with the blare of trumpets. The king rode to the front, not waiting for his banner--the oriflamme of St. Denis, a flag of scarlet silk, that day carried by Gallon de Montigny, a brave man. The bishop-elect of Senlis, Guérin, ordered the battle so that the French had the sun behind them, while the enemy fought with the sun in their eyes. Three hundred mounted peasants of Soissons, vassals of the abbot of St. Médard, opened action on the right wing, boldly charging the Flemish cavalry. The latter hesitated to engage with their inferiors, but the cry, ‘Death to the French!’ raised by one among them proved decisive; and the Burgundians, led by their duke, arriving to reinforce those of Soissons, there was a furious combat. On this side Count Ferrand of Flanders fought.”

When the battle began the militia had already crossed the bridge; they recrossed in haste, rallied under the royal standard, and took position in the centre in front of the king and his guard. The German cavalry, among whom rode the emperor Otto, charged and penetrated their ranks, and had almost reached the king when they were checked by the prompt action of his officers. In the midst of this encounter arrived the German infantry. These dragged Philip from his horse, and before he could recover his feet attempted to thrust at him through the visor of his helmet or a flaw in his armour. Montigny, who carried the colours, waved his banner frantically for assistance; some horse- and foot-soldiers hastened up. These rescued the king, set him on his horse, and he again plunged into the mêlée.

Otto in his turn was near to being captured. William des Barres, the bravest and ablest of the French cavaliers, the fortunate adversary of Richard the Lion-hearted, whom he had twice overcome, had the emperor by the helmet, and was thrusting at him furiously when overwhelmed by a torrent of the enemy. Unable to make him loose his hold or to close with him, they killed his horse under him; but disentangling himself he succeeded, alone and on foot, in clearing with his sword and his poniard an ample space around him. Otto escaped.

On the right Ferrand, count of Flanders, had fallen wounded into the hands of the French; in the centre the emperor and his German princes had taken to flight: but on the left Renaud de Boulogne and the English held firm. They had overcome the men of Dreux, of Perche, of Ponthieu, and of Vimeu. “Whereupon,” says the poet-chronicler, “Philip de Dreux, bishop of Beauvais, happening to have in his hand a club, and forgetting in his rage and grief the dignity of his office, struck down the English commander and with him many others, spilling no blood but breaking many bones. He enjoined upon those about him the necessity of taking upon themselves the credit of this deed, that he might not fall under reproach for violating the traditions of his office.”

The English were soon completely routed with the exception of Renaud de Boulogne, who had drawn up a double circle of infantry bristling with spears. He charged therefrom as from a fort, and there returned for refuge and to recover breath. At last his horse was wounded; he fell and was captured. Five other counts and twenty-five knights-banneret had been taken.

The return of the king to Paris was a march of triumph. All along the route the churches dispersed indulgences, and the hymns of the choirs mingled with the clash of war implements. The houses were hung with draperies; the roads strewn with branches and fresh flowers. Men and women, children and old people ran to the crossroads to see the count of Flanders who, wounded and in chains, was carried in a litter; some among them crying: “Ferrand, bound and in irons (ferré), no longer shalt thou kick against the pricks and hurl defiance at thy masters.”

At Paris the townspeople, with a multitude of clerks and students, burst into songs and hymns on the arrival of the king. The day not sufficing for the jubilation, they festooned the dark with innumerable lanterns, so that the night was brilliant as the day. The students kept holiday for a week. In the midst of these rejoicings the troops, which had comported themselves so creditably in the strife, delivered to the provost of Paris the prisoners in their charge. The king left them a certain number to be ransomed and imprisoned the rest. Ferrand was lodged in the new tower of the Louvre, where he remained for thirteen years. Near Senlis was built Victory Abbey, whose ruins are still to be seen.[c]

LAST YEARS AND INFLUENCE OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS

[Sidenote: [1214-1224 A.D.]]

The brilliant success of Bouvines seems to have contented and allayed the hitherto restless ambition of Philip. In a year or two after, the barons of England, discontented with John, offered their crown to Louis, the son of Philip Augustus. The old monarch hesitated; he dreaded the anathema with which the pope threatened him, if he attacked his vassal, John of England. Prince Louis was obliged to undertake the expedition with but scanty aid from his parent. He was at first successful. Almost all England owned his sovereignty. The castle of Dover alone held out. But the death of John, and the proclaiming of his son, Henry III, soon obliged the French prince to abandon his claim and his conquests in England.

In the south, Philip Augustus showed himself equally dead to enterprise and lost in spirit. Amaury de Montfort, son of Simon, offered to cede to the king all his rights in Languedoc, which he was unable to defend against the old house of Toulouse. Philip hesitated to accept the important cession, and left the rival houses to the continuance of a struggle carried feebly on by either side. He at length expired, in 1223, after a reign of forty-three years. This period of half a century was one of uninterrupted progress to the French monarchy, and to its sovereign power. Though much of this was due to the age, to circumstances, and to the natural development of the country’s political system, still much remains due to the personal character of Philip--to his activity, his prudence, foresight, and courage. The mere list of the provinces which he subdued and united to the monarchy forms the fittest monument to his fame. These were Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou, wrested from John; Picardy and Auvergne, won in the commencement of his reign; Artois, acquired by his marriage with Isabella of Hainault; and, finally, the influence over Languedoc which the crusaders brought him, and which nothing but Philip’s age and declining strength prevented him from converting into sovereignty. In minor matters the active spirit of Philip Augustus equally displayed itself. He put the police on an efficient footing; he walled and paved Paris and the principal towns under his sway; he built and fortified; he encouraged literature by the foundation of professorships; improved the discipline of the army; and, with all his enterprises and expenses, so ordered his finances as to leave a considerable treasure at his death.

LOUIS VIII (1223-1226 A.D.)

When Louis VIII succeeded his father Philip on the throne, it was remarked with joy by the lovers of legitimacy that he was descended by his mother, Isabella of Hainault, from Charles of Lorraine, the last prince of Charlemagne’s blood, and that he thus united the rights of Carlovingian and Capetian. He was feeble in person, and is said not to have been endowed with much capacity; but the sage policy of Philip Augustus, together with the impulse he had given to affairs, continued to direct them, and to render France triumphant over her enemies. Henry III lost the towns of Niort and La Rochelle, and was driven by Louis from Poitou; yet so little did the English feel the loss of this province, that it is scarcely noticed by the historians of the island. The barons were so much occupied with jealousy of their sovereign and of his power, that Henry could procure or send no aid to his French provinces. A feeble expedition was at length fitted out, which preserved Gascony to England, but recovered nothing.

A singular cause of contention arose about this time in Flanders. Baldwin, its last count, had been one of the leaders of the Fifth Crusade, which, in the commencement of the century, took Constantinople from the Greeks. He had been elected emperor of Romania, and had been the first of the Latin dynasty which reigned over it. Soon after, in the year 1205, he had been taken prisoner by the Bulgarians, and had not since been heard of. His daughter Joan succeeded to the county of Flanders, and had married Ferdinand (Ferrand), prince of Portugal, who had opposed Philip Augustus, and who was taken prisoner by that monarch at the battle of Bouvines. Joan took no steps to liberate her husband, or to pay his ransom, when an aged man appeared in Flanders, calling himself Count Baldwin, and giving an account of his long captivity and recent escape from the Bulgarians. Joan denied the identity of this person with her father; Louis VIII was of her opinion; while Henry III treated and allied himself with him as the veritable Baldwin. The self-entitled count appeared before King Louis at Péronne, offering proofs of his identity; but unfortunately he could not recall the place where he had done homage to Philip Augustus, nor the place where he had been knighted, nor yet the place and day of his marriage. Whether he really could not make answer to these questions, or whether age had troubled his memory, the old man was condemned as a pretender, and the countess Joan soon after caused him to be hanged. The common people still persisted in giving credit to his identity with Count Baldwin, and looked on Joan as the murderer of her father. Henry III in no way supported this his unfortunate ally.

[Sidenote: [1204-1226 A.D.]]

The sovereignty over Languedoc was still undecided. King Louis was anxious to undertake a crusade in that country, with all the indulgences and advantages of a warlike pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The hostilities with England and the fickleness of the pope delayed the execution of this purpose. Both obstacles were removed at length. Amaury de Montfort being driven from the conquests of his father by the sons of Count Raymond, reanimated the zeal of the pope and the old crusaders. Amaury retired to Paris, and made cession of his claims to King Louis, who, in return, promised him the office of constable. A new crusade was preached against the Albigenses; and Louis marched towards Languedoc at the head of a formidable army in the spring of the year 1226. The town of Avignon had proffered to the crusaders the facilities of crossing the Rhone under her walls, but refused entry within them to such an host. Louis, having arrived at Avignon, insisted on passing through the town: the Avignonais shut their gates and defied the monarch, who instantly formed the siege. One of the rich municipalities of the south was almost a match for the king of France. He was kept three months under its walls, his army a prey to famine, to disease, and to the assaults of a brave garrison. The crusaders lost twenty thousand men. The people of Avignon at length submitted, but on no dishonourable terms. This was the only resistance that Louis experienced in Languedoc. Raymond VII dared not meet the crusaders in the field, nor durst one of his towns or châteaux remain faithful to him. All submitted. Louis retired from his facile conquest; he himself, and the chiefs of his army, stricken by an epidemy which had prevailed in the conquered regions. The monarch’s feeble frame could not resist it: he expired at Montpensier in Auvergne, in November, 1226.[b]

LOUIS IX, CALLED ST. LOUIS (1226-1270 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1226-1236 A.D.]]

Now we come to the true hero of the Middle Ages, a prince pious as he was brave; who was devoted to feudalism and yet struck it the most telling blows; who venerated the church yet knew how to resist its head; who respected law yet placed justice above it; a frank and gentle soul and loving heart filled with Christian charity, yet one that condemned to torture the body of the sinner for the salvation of his soul; who on earth looked only towards heaven and made of his kingly office a magistracy of order and equity. Rome has canonised him, and the people still see him seated under the oak of Vincennes dispensing justice to all comers. This saint, this man of peace, did more in the simplicity of his heart for the advancement of royalty than the most subtle counsellors or ten fighting monarchs, because the king, in after time, appeared to the people as the incarnation of Justice.[9]

For more than a century the sword of royalty, so far as it pertained to France, had been valiantly carried. But the son of Louis VIII was a child of eleven years. A coalition of the most powerful vassals was formed at once to profit by his minority. The regent, his mother, Blanche of Castile, won to her side one of the confederates, Thibaut, the powerful count of Champagne, sent the royal army to save him from the attack of his former allies and obtained from him, when he inherited the kingdom of Navarre, the important counties of Blois, Chartres, and Sancerre. A treaty, signed in 1229, assured to one of the king’s brothers the succession of the county of Toulouse and a marriage arranged between a second brother of St. Louis and the heiress of Provence prepared the way, at a future date, for the union of that country with France. Already the royal seneschals were established at Beaucaire and Carcassonne, by which the king found himself master, through himself or his brothers, of a large part of southern France. The king’s majority was proclaimed in 1236, but the wise regent still held the greatest influence over her son and the direction of affairs.

The great pontificate of Innocent III had given new energy to the church and to religious sentiment. The spirit of the Crusades which had been extinguished during the rivalry of Philip Augustus with Richard Cœur de Lion and John Lackland was rekindled. In 1235 preaching the “holy war” was recommenced in France, and, as on too many other occasions, the movement was begun by the massacre of those whose ancestors had nailed the sainted victim to the cross of Golgotha. Everywhere the Jews were slaughtered, until the Council of Tours was obliged to take these unhappy people under their protection. Heretics found even less mercy. Thibaut of Champagne burned 183 of them on Mount Aimé near Vertus. This crusade, in which Thibaut himself, the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany took part, was not successful. The crusaders were beaten at Gaza in Palestine, and those who returned brought back with them nothing but the honour of having broken a few lances in the Holy Land.

[Sidenote: [1236-1259 A.D.]]

Up to his war with England St. Louis gave little sign of activity; but in 1241 the emperor Frederick II detained the French prelates who had gone to Rome to attend a council, and Louis demanded with great firmness that they be set at liberty.

“Since the prelates of our realm have for no reason deserved their detention,” he writes the emperor, “may it please your grace to set them at liberty. You will thus appease us, for we regard their detention as an insult, and our royal majesty would lose respect if we could keep quiet under such circumstances. May your imperial prudence not go so far as to allege your power or your will, since the kingdom of France is not so weak that it will resign itself to be trampled under your feet.” The emperor released his prisoners. Some time before Louis, on behalf of himself and one of his brothers, refused the imperial crown of Frederick II which the pope had offered him, and he had also refused the pontiff’s request to modify a royal ordinance of 1234 restraining the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical tribunals--a necessary measure, since these courts had come to judge many more civil cases than the lay tribunals.

This man who spoke so firmly acted in the same manner when forced to take up arms. Attacked in 1242 by the English, who sustained several of his rebellious barons, St. Louis beat them at Taillebourg and at Saintes. Perhaps he would have been able to drive them out of France, but he refused to push his victory. Acquisitions made in the last half century had tripled the extent of the royal domain, but they seemed to him tainted with violence because they were the gain of two confiscations. Through conscientious scruples he left the king of England, in a treaty which he did not sign until his return from the crusade in 1259 [The Treaty of Abbeville], the duchy of Guienne, that is to say Bordeaux, Limoges, Périgueux, Cahors, Agen, Saintonge to the south of the Charente, and Gascony, on condition of homage to the crown. And to prevent perjury he obliged the lords who held fiefs from both crowns to choose between the two sovereigns. The limits of the kingdom were equally uncertain on the south; he fixed them at a convention with the king of Aragon, and the county of Barcelona ceased to be dependent on the French crown.

In 1245, Pope Innocent IV, driven out of Italy by the emperor Frederick II, took refuge at Lyons and there held in the cathedral church of St. John of that city the thirteenth ecumenical council at which 140 bishops assisted. The pope solemnly deposed the emperor and exhorted all Christian princes to march to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre.

The spirit of the Crusades, which had been extinguished during the rivalry of Philip Augustus and Richard Cœur de Lion, was rekindled. The Spaniards had their crusade against the Moors, the Germans against the Slavs, and the knights of Italy fought against the cities; but in France, in spite of the great satiety of war from the Albigensian troubles, there remained sufficient martial spirit to undertake new crusades. In 1239 many had gone; we know with what success. Jerusalem, which Frederick II had bought back from the hands of the infidels (1229) had now come again under the power of Khwarismian barbarians (1239).

First Crusade of St. Louis (1248-1254 A.D.)

St. Louis had not listened to the appeal of the Fathers of the Council of Lyons to assume the cross, but during an illness which, in 1244, brought him to the edge of the grave, he made a vow to go to the Holy Land. His mother and counsellors struggled in vain against this imprudent resolution. Louis left his power again in the hands of Queen Blanche and embarked at Aigues-Mortes, a little city which at that time was joined to the Mediterranean by a canal across the swamps and salt marshes. The king bought it from the monks of Psalmodi Abbey in order to have a port of his own upon that sea, for Marseilles belonged to his brother the count of Provence. Many crusaders embarked at the latter city, among them the king’s friend the seneschal of Champagne and the sire de Joinville, who, with Villehardouin, is the first in point of date, as in merit, of the old French prose writers. It was not without many misgivings that he determined to follow his master. In setting out to join him he passed near his own castle, “but,” he said, “I dare not turn my face towards Joinville, for fear that my heart would fail me in leaving my two children and my fine castle which are so dear to me.” On the banks of the Rhone he saw the ruins of a castle which the king had had destroyed because its lord had a bad name for stripping and robbing all the merchants and pilgrims who passed by.

[Sidenote: [1249-1270 A.D.]]

St. Louis had been collecting for two years a large store of provisions on the island of Cyprus. The army left there in eighteen hundred ships, large and small, for Egypt. Damietta, at one of the mouths of the Nile, was captured (June 7th, 1249), but precious time was lost before marching upon Cairo. Five months and a half of delay stoutened the hearts of the mamelukes. The crusaders took a month to cover the five leagues which separated them from the town of Mansurah. A badly directed fight at the same place cost the lives of a large number of knights and of St. Louis’ brother the count of Artois. When the prior of the Hospital, says Joinville,[i] came to ask of St. Louis if he had any news of his brother, the king replied that he had, that he knew his brother was in heaven. The prior tried to comfort him in praising the valour the prince had always shown and the glory he had gained that day, and the good king replied that God was adored in all that he had done. And then he began to shed great tears, at which many people who were looking on were oppressed by grief and compassion (February, 1250).

Soon the army was surrounded by enemies and decimated by pest. Joinville was stricken down, and equally so his poor chaplain. One day it happened that he was chanting mass before the seneschal’s bedside; when the priest was at the sacrament Joinville perceived him to be so ill that with his own eyes he saw him faint. The seneschal got up and ran to raise him and then he managed to finish the mass, but never said it again, and died. The retreat was disastrous and finally they had to surrender. “The good, saintly man, the king,” did honour to his captivity by his courage and inspired even his enemies with respect for his virtues. They released him for a large ransom. Once free he made his way to Palestine and stayed there three years, employing his influence and zeal in maintaining harmony among the Christians and his resources in repairing the fortifications of the places they still occupied.

The news of these disasters only served to increase the king’s popularity in France. The people would not see his faults and thought only of the virtues he had shown. The prelates and lords had deserted and betrayed him, they said; it would take the humble people to rescue him, and an immense crowd of serfs and peasants gathered together to cross the sea and go to the king’s help. This was the Shepherds’ Crusade. These people lived, on the way, by pillage--even murders were committed. It was necessary to deal harshly with them, and they were scattered like wild beasts.

The news of the regent’s death (December, 1252) recalled Louis at last to France. In passing Cyprus the king’s galley grazed a rock, which carried away fully eighteen feet of her keel. Louis was advised to change ships, and according to Joinville[i] said, “If I leave the ship, five or six hundred people who are on it and who value their life as I do mine will be afraid to stay behind and will land at Cyprus with no hope or means of ever returning to their own country. I prefer to place myself, my wife, and children in danger under the protection of God, than to bring such misfortune on so many people.”

Last Years and Death of St. Louis

It was after his return to France that St. Louis made treaties with England and Aragon to determine definitely the boundaries of the three kingdoms. He hoped in making substantial sacrifices to strengthen his hold on the provinces he kept for himself and to prevent the war so frequently provoked by uncertainty with regard to frontiers. This solicitude to do justice to all caused him to be chosen as arbitrator between the king of England and his barons in the controversy over the provisions of Oxford (1264). Louis pronounced in favour of the king, and this time was not successful, for the barons did not hold to his decision, and deposed Henry III. More fortunate elsewhere, he settled a dispute of succession which delivered Flanders from civil war. In the year 1270 St. Louis undertook another crusade in which his faithful Joinville this time refused to engage.[f]

[Sidenote: [1270 A.D.]]

A pacific expedition which should merely intimidate the king of Tunis and induce him to become a convert was not what suited the Genoese in whose vessels St. Louis was making his passage. Most of the crusaders preferred violence; it was said that Tunis was a rich town, the pillage of which might indemnify them for their dangerous expedition. The Genoese, regardless of the voice of St. Louis, began hostilities by seizing the vessels they found before Carthage. The landing took place without obstacle. The Moors only showed themselves to provoke the Christians, and make them waste their strength in fruitless pursuits. After spending some weary days on the burning shore, the Christians advanced towards the castle of Carthage. All that remained of the great rival of Rome was a fort guarded by two hundred soldiers, and the Saracens who had retreated into the vaults or subterranean chambers were butchered or suffocated by smoke and flames. The king found the ruins full of corpses, which he had removed, that he might take up his quarters there with his followers. He had to wait at Carthage for his brother, Charles of Anjou, before marching on Tunis.

The greater part of the army remained under the African sun, tormented by the thick dust swept from the desert by the winds, and surrounded by the festering remains of the dead. The Moors prowled all around, continually cutting off some stragglers. There were no trees, no vegetable food; for water there was nothing but fetid marshes and cisterns full of disgusting insects. In eight days the plague had broken out. The counts of Vendôme, de la Marche and Viane, Walter de Nemours, marshal of France, the sires de Montmorency, Piennes, Brissac, St. Briçon, and d’Apremont were already dead.

The legate soon followed them. The survivors being no longer able to bury them, they were thrown into the canal, till they covered the whole surface of the water. Meanwhile, the king and his sons were attacked by the malady; the youngest died in his vessel, and it was not till eight days afterwards that the confessor of St. Louis took on himself to acquaint him with the mournful event. The deceased was the most beloved of his children, and his death announced to a dying father was, to the latter, one tie less to earth, a call from God, a temptation to die. Accordingly, without perturbation or regret, he accomplished that last work of a Christian life, making the responses to the litanies and the psalms, dictating a noble and affecting instruction for his son, and receiving even the ambassadors of the Greeks, who came to entreat his intervention in their favour with his brother Charles of Anjou, whose ambition menaced them. He spoke to them with kindness, and promised to exert himself with zeal, if he lived, to keep them in peace; but the next day he himself entered into the peace of God.

That last night of his life he desired them to raise him from his bed and lay him on ashes; and so he died, with his arms constantly folded in the form of a cross. “And on Monday the blessed king stretched his folded hands towards heaven, and said, ‘Good Lord God, have mercy on this people that here remaineth, and lead it into its country, that it fall not into the hand of its enemies, and that it be not constrained to renounce thy holy name!’ In the night before he deceased, whilst he was reposing, he sighed, and said in a low voice, ‘O Jerusalem! O Jerusalem!’”[d]

In his lifetime the contemporaries of St. Louis suspected in their simplicity that he was already a saint, and more saintly than the priests. Says the king’s confessor, Geoffrey de Beaulieu:[l] “Whilst he lived a word might be said of him which is said of St. Hilary, ‘O most perfect layman whose life priests even desire to imitate.’ For many priests and laymen desired to be like the blessed king in his virtues and his morals; for it is even thought that he was a saint in his lifetime.”[d]

The French during this reign accomplished a great achievement without the help of royalty. Charles of Anjou, count of Provence, summoned by the pope against King Manfred, son of the emperor Frederick II, conquered the kingdom of Naples in 1266. But the Latins had five years before lost Constantinople which the Greeks had taken possession of. It was to the interested advice of Charles of Anjou that was due the direction taken by the last crusade, since the submission of the king of Tunis would free Sicily from the constant attempts of the Saracens upon that island.[f]

Hallam’s Estimate of St. Louis

[Sidenote: [1226-1270 A.D.]]

Louis IX had methods of preserving his ascendency very different from military prowess. That excellent prince was perhaps the most eminent pattern of unswerving probity and Christian strictness of conscience that ever held the sceptre in any country. There is a peculiar beauty in the reign of St. Louis, because it shows the inestimable benefit which a virtuous king may confer on his people, without possessing any distinguished genius. For nearly half a century that he governed France, there is not the smallest want of moderation or disinterestedness in his actions; and yet he raised the influence of the monarchy to a much higher point than the most ambitious of his predecessors.

To the surprise of his own and later times, he restored great part of his conquests to Henry III, whom he might naturally hope to have expelled from France. It would indeed have been a tedious work to conquer Guienne, which was full of strong places, and the subjugation of such a province might have alarmed the other vassals of his crown. But it is the privilege only of virtuous minds to perceive that wisdom resides in moderate counsels; no sagacity ever taught a selfish and ambitious sovereign to forego the sweetness of immediate power. An ordinary king, in the circumstances of the French monarchy, would have fomented, or at least have rejoiced in the dissensions which broke out among the principal vassals; Louis constantly employed himself to reconcile them. In this, too, his benevolence had all the effects of far-sighted policy. It had been the practice of his last three predecessors to interpose their mediation in behalf of the less powerful classes--the clergy, the inferior nobility, and the inhabitants of chartered towns. Thus the supremacy of the crown became a familiar idea; but the perfect integrity of St. Louis wore away all distrust, and accustomed even the most jealous feudatories to look upon him as their judge and legislator. And as the royal authority was hitherto shown only in its most amiable prerogatives, the dispensation of favour, and the redress of wrong, few were watchful enough to remark the transition of the French constitution from a feudal league to an absolute monarchy.

It was perhaps fortunate for the display of St. Louis’ virtues that the throne had already been strengthened by the less innocent exertions of Philip Augustus and Louis VIII. A century earlier, his mild and scrupulous character, unsustained by great actual power, might not have inspired sufficient awe. But the crown was now grown so formidable, and Louis was so eminent for his firmness and bravery, qualities without which every other virtue would have been ineffectual, that no one thought it safe to run wantonly into rebellion, while his disinterested administration gave no one a pretext for it. Not satisfied with the justice of his own conduct, Louis aimed at that act of virtue which is rarely practised by private men, and had perhaps no example among kings--restitution. Commissaries were appointed to inquire what possessions had been unjustly annexed to the royal domain during the last two reigns. These were restored to the proprietors, or, where length of time had made it difficult to ascertain the claimant, their value was distributed among the poor.

It has been hinted already that all this excellence of heart in Louis IX was not attended with that strength of understanding which is necessary, we must allow, to complete the usefulness of a sovereign. During his minority, Blanche of Castile, his mother, had filled the office of regent with great courage and firmness. But after he grew up to manhood, her influence seems to have passed the limit which gratitude and piety would have assigned to it; and, as her temper was not very meek or popular, it exposed the king to some degree of contempt. He submitted even to be restrained from the society of his wife Marguerite, daughter of Raymond, count of Provence, a princess of great virtue and conjugal affection.

But the principal weakness of this king, which almost effaced all the good effects of his virtues, was superstition. It would be idle to sneer at those habits of abstemiousness and mortification which were part to the religion of his age, and, at the worst, were only injurious to his own comfort. But he had other prejudices, which, though they may be forgiven, must never be defended. No man was ever more impressed than St. Louis with a belief in the duty of exterminating all enemies to his own faith. With these he thought no layman ought to risk himself in the perilous ways of reasoning, but to make answer with his sword as stoutly as a strong arm and a fiery zeal could carry that argument. Though, fortunately for his fame, the persecution against the Albigenses, which had been the disgrace of his father’s short reign, was at an end before he reached manhood, he suffered a hypocritical monk to establish a tribunal at Paris for the suppression of heresy, where many innocent persons suffered death.[g]

Piety and Christianity of St. Louis

The natural piety of St. Louis but strengthened with his growth. His Christian life, or to reduce the statement to its simplest terms, his daily Christianity, which edified his own century, might very easily fill ours with a sense of shock. But whatever it may leave of such an impression, the history would be incomplete which passed over in silence, or only vaguely indicated, that which filled so large a part in his life. Let us not, therefore, endeavour to build up for ourselves a St. Louis in accordance with our present-day tastes. Nothing is beautiful but the true, and that truth which the saintly king sought in all things is alone worthy to retrace the likeness of him which should endure.

According to those of his historians who were most intimate with him--the chaplain who accompanied him on one and another of the Crusades, the confessor whom he kept beside him for twenty years, the confessor of his wife Marguerite--he seemed to live for God alone. The offices were read in the king’s chapel; almost it might have been the chapel of a monastery or the choir of a cathedral. There he had the Hours sung to him, the Office for the Dead being added by his command. He heard two masses, sometimes three or four; and when the grandees grumbled at his wasting so much time on masses and sermons, he retorted that if he were to lose twice as much time over gaming and hunting no one would complain: a remark which scarcely silenced the murmurs; the barons made no complaint against thus wasting their time with him.

The holy Scriptures and the Fathers were his study. Marguerite’s confessor tells us that he caused a candle three feet or thereabouts in height to be lighted, and so long as it lasted read the Bible. He remained for so long a time upon his knees that sometimes his sight and his wits became confused, and, rising up quite dazed, he would ask: “Where am I?” Led back to his room, he would go to bed, but at midnight he was up again and had matins sung by his chaplains (it was no sinecure being king’s chaplain in those days!). He would, however, grant to his attendants the repose he refused for himself. So softly did he rise that on several occasions they did not hear him, or, awakened too late, ran after him barefoot.

Every Friday he made his confession, after which he made his confessor administer “the discipline” to him. This discipline was composed of five small iron chains, which he enclosed in an ivory box and carried about with him. He had similar boxes made, with similar contents, and presented them to his children and his friends, counselling them to make use of them. When his confessor struck him too lightly, he urged him to use more force. This advice was not always needed. He had one confessor so full of zeal (solicitus sibi) who struck the king in such a manner as to terribly lacerate his flesh, which was extremely delicate. St. Louis, however, held his peace; he never mentioned the matter so long as the confessor lived, but afterwards he spoke of it laughingly to another. His confessors, one should add, were not commonly so zealous, and they reprimanded him for austerities which threatened his delicate health, and urged him to substitute for them alms, which, as a fact, the king did not stint; and they ended by forcing him to renounce the hair-shirt which he wore during Advent and Lent and on the vigils of certain feasts. He renounced it only to wear occasionally a girdle of horse-hair next his skin.

On Good Friday he would visit all the churches barefoot; to keep up appearances he wore shoes from which the soles had been removed. For the adoration of the cross he removed his upper garments, retaining only his vest and coat. With bare feet and uncovered head he advanced a short distance on his knees, bowed himself in prayer, then advanced a little further, and the third time arrived at the cross, prostrated himself as though he too were crucified, and kissed it, bathed in tears. Fervently did he desire the gift of tears. When in singing the litanies the verse was reached: “Grant us a fountain of tears” (Ut fontem lacrymarum nobis dones), he used to say: “Lord, I dare not ask of thee a fount of tears, but only a few drops to refresh my parched and sterile heart.”

Are all these details, which have perhaps provoked the pitying smiles of more than one reader, the marks of a feeble intelligence, or do they rather bear witness to a powerful mind that has perfected self-control by keeping the senses in sternest bondage? One can only truly judge of things by their results. His singleness of speech and his aversion to coarse or equivocal language bore eloquent witness to the purity of his heart. Not only did he detest the licentiousness of contemporary poetry, he was also filled with loathing for the popular songs, and innocently recommended one of his equerries who sang them to learn instead the Ave Maris Stella. His modesty was excessive. The purity of his youth had never been shadowed by the slightest hint of license, and marriage only served to throw his chastity into higher relief. He demanded moral uprightness from all in his household, and banished without mercy whoso offended against a virtue so dear to his heart.

On feast days he would bid to his palace two hundred beggars, and himself serve them at table. On the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of Advent and Lent, and every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year, he would send for thirteen of them into his own or a neighbouring room and give them food with his own hand, without disgust at their dirtiness. If one among the number was blind the king would give the piece of bread into one of his hands, and guide the other to the bowl containing his portion. If this consisted of fish, he would remove the bones, dip it in the sauce and place the morsel in the blind man’s mouth. Before the meal he gave to each person twelve deniers or more according to his need; and if a mother was there with her child, he added more for the little one. On Saturdays he would choose three of the most decrepit, most miserable among the poor, and leading them into his dressing-room, where towels and three basins of water were in readiness, he washed their feet. With reverence he would dry and kiss those feet, whatever their deformity, however hardened by daily contact with the ground; then, kneeling, he would offer them water to wash their hands, give to each forty deniers, and kiss their hands. Nor was this all. Every day, in all weathers, he sent for thirteen other beggars and from among them chose out the three most repulsive, whom he seated at a table drawn up close beside his own.

On many of these points he would not to-day have won the same universal approbation. It is, however, difficult for us to reinvest his figure with the atmosphere by which it must be surrounded before we can form a just judgment; it is far more difficult to place ourselves at the necessary point of view from which we can see him clearly. The modern historian is ofttimes reduced to pleading extenuating circumstances for the saints; for the saints, and St. Louis among them, have this much in common with the Saviour, that in more than one case they could say with him: “Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”[h]

St. Louis built the asylum of the Quinze Vingts for the blind, several hospitals, and the church of Vincennes. To provide a place for the crown of thorns which the Venetians had turned over to his keeping, he had built by Pierre de Montereau within the precinct of his palace, now the Palais de Justice, the Sainte Chapelle, a shrine of open-work stone. His confessor Robert de Sorbon founded a community under the title of Congrégation des pauvres maîtres étudiants en théologie. This congregation became the Sorbonne, the theological faculty so famous throughout the entire Christian world that Mézeray calls it “the permanent council of the Gauls.”

Progress of the Monarchy under St. Louis

The house of Capet had made such progress that no lord now dared say to his vassal, “Come fight under my banner against the lord, our king,” much as this anarchial privilege was still recognised in the so-called “Establishments” of St. Louis, a compilation of customs in vogue in Orleans. The counts of Flanders and of Brittany and the duke of Guienne, were about the only ones who had not degenerated to the condition of docile vassals; yet feudalism still preserved some immense prerogatives and St. Louis attacked these in the name of justice and religion.

In holding to a strict execution of the ordinances of quarantaine-le-roi[10] and asseurement (inviolability) he suppressed nearly all private wars. As a Christian he did not approve of these wars which sent to God so many souls ill-prepared to appear before him. As a prince he wished to stop the devastation throughout the country, “the fires and the obstacles placed in the ways of tilling the fields.” He forbade in his domains the duel judiciare which gave over the settlement and right to the chances of skill and strength. The king’s justice usurped the place of individual violence, and proof by witnesses and procedure by writ replaced justice by battle, for “battle is not the path of right.”

The lords still dispensed justice throughout their domains. The villein could not escape this judgment, but the vassal had the rights of appeal to the sovereign from the judgment of his lord “in default of right,” when the lord refused to render justice; for “false judgments” when the condemned believed himself to have been injured by an unjust sentence. Now the king favoured the custom of direct appeal to his court, which subordinated the lord’s justice to that of his own which was final; “for,” says Beaumanoir,[j] “since he is sovereign, his court is sovereign”; and the “Establishments” explain why there could be no appeal from the royal decision: “There is no one who can have this right, since the king gets his power from no one but God and himself.” The duke of Brittany also retained the final appeal. When a case brought to the justice of the lords interested the king, in whatever way it may be, the bailiff raised the “conflict” as we would say nowadays and laid claim to the judgment, the king not being under the jurisdiction of a lord. These cases were the “royal cases.” Legists were most careful to define them so as not to deprive the king’s officials of any pretexts for interfering in trials before the feudal courts. It was easy to multiply these at that time and the officials did not fail to do so--taking as much as possible from the province of the lord’s justice and adding it to the king’s.

At the same time the king’s bourgeoisie was established. An inhabitant of a piece of seigniorial land might under certain conditions of establishment and residence in a royal city acquire the condition of “king’s bourgeois.” “I am a king’s bourgeois” was equivalent to “I am a Roman citizen.” The Roman citizen could only be judged at Rome. The king’s bourgeois could not be tried except by the king’s officials.

The king’s court was on this account much more occupied than formerly. It continued to accumulate every possible prerogative. It was a court of exchequer, and, if it pleased the king, a political council; but it was above all things, in the days of St. Louis, a court of justice. The royal finances were always of a very simple nature; in case of crusades, captivity of the king, knighthood conferred upon the king’s eldest son or his marriage, feudal aid was demanded. The revenues of the domain, if well administered, were quite sufficient for royalty to live upon. When it had greater needs and it was necessary to increase revenues of all sorts, the financial prerogatives of the court became more important. The office of the exchequer was detached from it; but in the time of St. Louis justice was the court’s business.

But even in this court considerable changes were taking place. The rôle of the great vassals and the crown officials was diminishing, that of the legists was beginning. Now, since judgment was pronounced on written procedures, it was not the knights who had sufficient knowledge and application of mind to deal with the stability of proof and the obscurities of the black-book. The lawyer was necessary to them. At first the barons disdainfully made these plebeian personages sit at their feet, on stools. But in the meeting of ignorance and knowledge the latter quickly asserted its sovereignty. The baron, who had nothing but nonsense to talk, kept quiet before the learned counsellors, and upon these latter soon devolved the direction of judgment; and the fate of the guilty, even of the noblest station, lay in their hands. The king’s court, which was always held at Paris, had regular sessions, usually four times a year; and it kept a record of its deliberations which under the name of “Olim” was the beginning of royal jurisprudence.

In the administration of the provinces, St. Louis protected his own power and that of his subjects against any abuses his officials might practice. He forbade bailiffs and seneschals to make presents to the members of the council or receive money from those dependent on them or to loan such any, or to take part in sales, markets, or leases held in the king’s name. They were forbidden to purchase any property within their jurisdiction or to marry their sons and daughters without the king’s permission. If they disobeyed they were punished both in their property and their persons. When going out of office they were obliged to live forty days within their territory, in order to reply to their successors or to royal inquiries in any charge of misconduct that might be brought against them.

St. Louis sent into the provinces commissioners or royal inquirers, a custom adopted from Charlemagne. These inquirers defended the king’s rights and those of his subjects as well. The care which they took to protect the latter against exaction, won them the name of enquesteurs aux restitutions. In all these measures can be recognised the influence of the legists and echoes of Roman administration.

We have noted the organisation of provostships. That of Paris demanded large funds. Therefore several officials joined together to farm it out, and these provosts, according to Joinville, trampled upon the people, sustained their families by the “outrages” they committed, let themselves be corrupted by the rich, and took no notice whatever of the robbers and malefactors who infested Paris and its vicinity.

The king resolved to give in the future “great and high wages to those who should look after his provostship,” and sought for someone “who would give good and stiff justice.” He chose Étienne Boileau who maintained so well the provostship that no malefactor, robber, or cut-throat dared come to Paris but he was at once hanged and exterminated; and neither lineage, gold, nor silver could save him. Justice and policing were the principal functions of the provost of Paris, who commanded the watch and presided at the tribunal of the Châtelet.

St. Louis struck hard blows at feudalism by the suppression of judiciary duels, the interdiction of private wars, and the establishment of appeal; but he was not for all this a revolutionary king in the sense of Philip the Fair. He repeated constantly that none must “take away any one’s rights; but it is,” so he said at the head of an ordinance, “the duty of royal power to assure peace and happiness to our subjects.” Besides he had that same spirit of justice that is found in Roman law, and which united so well with the principles of Christianity. When he condemns, for example, the duel, he does it because “battle is not the way to determine right”--here is the Roman spirit; and because it “criminally tempts God”--here is the spirit of Christ.

He expected that all would submit to what it seemed to him he was charged by God to establish. His brother the count of Anjou, had, on trial, condemned a knight; and the latter, on appealing to the king’s court, was imprisoned by the count. The king let his brother know that there was but one king in France and although Charles was his brother, he would not be treated in any different ways as regarded justice. The count of Anjou had to release his prisoner and came in person to oppose the appeal at the king’s court, which, however, was decided in favour of the knight.

One of the most powerful lords of the realm, the lord of Coucy, caused three young men to be hanged for offence against the hunting laws, and although all the barons pleaded for him he was ordered a heavy fine. A lord cried with irony, “If I were king I would hang all the barons; for the first step taken, the second costs nothing.” The king heard and called him back. “How, Jean, you say that I should hang all my barons. Certainly I shall not do it, but I will punish them if they do wrong.” We have seen how the reputation for equity of the good king was so well established that the English barons in revolt against their king chose Louis as arbitrator, an example followed by the counts of Bar and Luxemburg.

The right of coinage belonged to more than eighty lords who sometimes made bad money. St. Louis decided that his own should have circulation throughout the entire kingdom and alone should be legal tender in the royal domain and those whose lords had not the right of coinage; that the seigniorial coinage should only be legal in the province of the lord who issued it and that this lord could only strike off the tournois, and parisis,[11] and other coins whose legal value was fixed by relation to the tournois in the ordinance. Thus the king ruled, in absolute power, in his own domain. He recognised elsewhere seigniorial rights, but limited them in the interest of the subjects whose protector he was. His money circulated everywhere.

It only remained for the king to coin better parisis and better tournois than those of the lords; which he did. His money, like his justice, was worth more than his vassal’s. Another measure was extremely useful to commerce. It made the lords responsible for the policing of the roads through their domains. In Paris he established the royal watch and had drawn up by the provost, Étienne Boileau, the ancient rules concerning the hundred trades which existed in the town, in order to infuse peace and order into industry as he had done in the country. These trades grouped themselves into great corporations; in the fifteenth century all the Parisian merchants formed six bodies of “arts and trades.”

St. Louis showed a respectful firmness towards papal authority; we have seen that he did not recognise the pope’s right to dispose of crowns. There has even been attributed to him a pragmatic sanction, the foundation of the liberties of the Gallican church, which would have confirmed the liberty of canonical elections, restrained to the most urgent necessities the impositions which the court of Rome could levy upon the French churches and contained the king’s vow that they should be established. This ordinance is not authentic, but its principles are those of the government. When the bishops demanded that the king force the excommunicated to submit, he declared that he could not do so without knowing the reasons for excommunication, which made him a judge of the bishops.

St. Louis’ lively faith assured him against all fear of the church’s wrath; and led him besides to severe practices which seem to us of to-day barbaric. “No one,” he said, “unless he be learned clerk or perfect theologian, should dispute with the Jews, but may do so with the layman who is heard to slander the Christian faith, and defend it not only with words but with his good drawn sword, striking the miscreant across the body or even letting it cut him.” He punished blasphemers by running red-hot irons through their tongues.

He loved to recall that on one occasion during his minority, when pursued up to the very walls of Paris by rebel vassals, he had been saved by the city soldiers who came to his rescue. He always took great interest in the welfare of the large towns, but without sacrificing to them the new needs of society. He conferred a number of charters, and amended others. Communal independence never seemed to him better than feudal liberties, and he favoured the transformation of the communes into royal cities which were dependent on and watched over by the supreme power, while their internal affairs were attended to by officials chosen in free election. An ordinance of 1256 prescribes that the communes name four candidates among themselves from whom the king shall choose a mayor who shall come to Paris once a year to give account of his stewardship.

Thus little by little was established the principle that it was the king’s prerogative to deal with the communes and that all owed him allegiance above everyone else. Thus the communes gradually disappeared and with them the proud sentiments, the strong ideas of right and liberty which sustained the men who had founded and defended them. The “third estate” was beginning.

Through his undermining of feudal and communal independence, and through his strong ruling with regard to the church, St. Louis pointed the way of absolute power to French royalty. He rendered it still another service. The remembrance of his virtues did not perish with him. Venerated in his lifetime as a saint, he was canonised after death. He put the seal of sanctification, so to speak, upon French royalty, and his descendants were fond of invoking at the head of their decrees the name and example of “Monsieur St. Louis.”[f]

ASPECTS OF THIRTEENTH CENTURY CIVILISATION

[Sidenote: [1100-1270 A.D.]]

In proportion as the Middle Ages advanced, national individuality took more definite shape. Intellectual life had been during a protracted period confined almost exclusively to religious circles, and had been given expression in the universal language--Latin. Accordingly the beginning of the thirteenth century saw only three active established literatures--in Germany, in the north and in the south of France; the last having preceded the others and served them as models. This was the literature of the langue d’oc, also called Provençal, which overflowed the Pyrenean borders into Christian Europe, passed over the Alps into the whole of Italy, and awakened the muse that lay sleeping on the banks of the Ebro, as on those of the Po and the Arno. Brilliant, sonorous, harmonious, full of imagery and movement, it was unexcelled as the language of love and battle songs. Bernard de Ventadour, Bertram de Born, and Richard Cœur de Lion moulded it with a skill and ardour worthy of Tyrtæus. The songs of Bertram de Born, above all, were like swords, dazzling and penetrating; the passion of war flamed in them like fire. This language of the south, into which something of the Arabian accent has passed, lent itself gracefully to the requirements of the courts of love presided over by ingenious tribunals of noble dames.

But the continued development of the north of France gave the preponderance to its idiom. The Normans carried it into Italy, where it failed to establish itself; and to England, where it prevailed during three centuries. By the crusaders it was everywhere disseminated. While the intellectual fame of Paris attracted there the eminent minds of the whole Catholic world, the vulgar tongue which the doctors disdained extended its empire well beyond the frontiers. We must add also that French genius, so often accused of epic sterility, poured over into the adjacent countries a flood of great poetry. The troubadours had been mute since the Albigensian crusade had drowned in blood the civilisation of the langue d’oc; and no more were heard the virile accents of Bernard de Ventadour or of Bertram de Born, nor the melodious lyrics of the jeux partis.[12] But north of the Loire the trouvères still composed heroic songs--veritable epics, which were translated or imitated in Italy, England, and Germany.

But these epic cycles were exhausted: the heroic ode disappeared. Robert Wace, “clerk of Caen,” composed about 1155 the Roman de Brut, a legendary history of Britain. Christian de Troyes, who wrote after 1160, spun out a diluted version of the Arthurian legend in a long poem in lines of eight syllables, while the same tale was given a religious twist by another school of poets by adding the history of the Holy Grail. The aspect of the times was mirrored in the poem with its double face--chivalry and piety. The naïve inspiration of the song of Roland was lost; the new school subtilised, ran after novelties, or rummaged among the classics. The story of Ulysses and that of the Argonauts, borrowed from The Thebaid of Statius, furnished tales which could not fail to please those Christian Ulysseses whom the Crusades had sent wandering in Asia. The Trojan War, the sorceress Medea, and Alexander, attracted the trouvères of this period. They had already begun to imitate the style of the ancients. Thus the nature of the epic was altered and a transition took place from primitive composition to the diverse styles of advanced civilisation. The epic was divided: the elements dealing with the passions were blended into allegorical romance; the narrative elements, into prose history. Analysis and realism took the place of spontaneous and poetic inspiration.

Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, began the famous Roman de la Rose, whose personages were abstract qualities--Reason, Good-will, Danger, Treason, Baseness, Avarice. Jean de Meun continued it later, after another transformation had given birth to satire. The fable flourished already, having derived its origin from that very romance: animals played the rôles of passions, of social conditions; and the tale of Renard, developed in its turn from the others, made its appearance, in 1236, as the comedy of the period. Rutebœuf offers the first example of the professional poet, ill remunerated, perishing with cold, agape with hunger; yet, in the depths of this misery, gay, daring, caustic, he wrote upon all sorts of subjects in the frank, open style which heralded Villon. Language acquires in his hands skill and power; it is more mellow and more tender than that of Guillaume de Lorris or from the lips of the famous count of Champagne or of Marie of France.

The most noteworthy event in French literature in the thirteenth century was the appearance of prose. The first prose writers were not, be it understood, professional historians, but two noblemen, both involved in the events they depicted. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, has left us the history of the Fourth Crusade in the Conquête de Constantinople, in which he himself figured. He writes as a soldier, his style being firm and brief, not without a touch of military stiffness; he invents little, goes straight ahead, from one attack to the next, with a brief exclamation when encountering some object which astonishes him. The lord of Joinville, also seneschal of Champagne, exhibits in his Mémoires a greater suppleness of style, a more marked refinement of mind; he observes, reflects, and talks upon all subjects, discussing his personal sentiments as freely as the events of war. He was the foreshadowing of Froissart, as only the councillor and friend of the pious and excellent Louis IX could be.[c] “In point of time,” says Villemain, “the narrative of Joinville is perhaps the first monument of genius in the French language,--a work of genius being, as I understand it, one having a high degree of originality of diction; a characteristic and expressive physiognomy; in short, a work that has been done by one man and that could not have been done by another. Such is the book of Joinville.”[o]

France was indebted to St. Louis for the multiplication of manuscripts. It is remarkable that he should first, while in the East, have resolved to establish a library at Paris. Hearing that the soldan of Egypt was indefatigably collecting from all parts, and causing to be transcribed or translated, the works of the ancient philosophers, “he was afflicted,” says a chronicler of the times, “to perceive more wisdom in the sons of darkness than in the children of light.” He began to collect manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments, and of the fathers, which he caused to be multiplied by transcription; all these he placed in the royal chapel at Paris, making them accessible to professors and students. The same liberality was shown by the Dominicans of Toulouse, by the bishops of Beauvais and Paris, by the archbishop of Narbonne, by many chapters, and by more monasteries. The professors of the University of Paris, too, were eminent enough to draw students from all parts of Europe: in fact, such names as Alexander de Hales, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Buonaventura, would have conferred splendour on any establishment. With inferior fame, but probably with equal utility, the universities of Bourges, Toulouse, Orleans, and Angers--foundations of this century--imitated the example of the capital.[n]

The thirteenth century marks the triumph of the style of architecture so improperly called Gothic. Its characteristic is the arch. This form, at no other time and in no other country employed with such profusion and prominence as in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, has been attributed primarily to the Goths, whence its name; afterwards, with as little justification, to the Arabs. Undoubtedly pilgrims to the Orient, among them many ecclesiastics, brought back from their travels impressions and souvenirs which left their traces upon Christian edifices; numerous churches were built after the pattern of the Holy Sepulchre. Mosaic and colour alternation appear also to be importations from the East. As to the arch, if it is much in evidence in the Arabian style, it is also prominent in that of the Byzantines; it is of all times and all countries, from the tomb of Atreus and the gates of the Pelasgian cities in Italy to the constructions of the savages of Nubia and America. It is simply an elementary form and easy to construct in building vaulted roofs, which require more precision than science.

Vulgar and irregular at first, the arch became monumental little by little--by natural progression, by a gradual refinement of line, by a greater diversity of ornament, by the ribs and columns which began to adorn it. It lent itself marvellously, moreover, as a delineation of the celestial vault, to the mysticism of the Christians and to the passionate soaring of their souls toward heaven: thus soared the mass of Gothic columns, straight, bold, fearfully light, and appearing higher in proportion as the vaulted roof was less open. It was not in the formal Roman Midi, it was in the mystic North that the Gothic spread and attained perfection.

The new style, born north of the Loire, crossed the Channel, the Rhine, and the Alps; and the colonies of French artists transplanted it to Canterbury, to Utrecht, to Milan, to Cologne, to Strasburg, to Ratisbon--even into Sweden. A crude but ingenuous statuary adorned portals, galleries, and cloisters; and the art of glass-painting possessed, for the production of magic effects on glazed windows, secrets which we are only just beginning to recover. Miniature paintings adorned the missals, and the books of Hours have preserved to us some exquisite masterpieces.

Astrology was one of the fads of this period; it reached its highest development in the sixteenth century, and was not wholly extinguished till the seventeenth. The astrologers pretended to read in the stars the destiny of human lives. Another folly was the search of the alchemists for the philosopher’s stone--that is to say, the method of creating gold by the transmutation of metals. These dreams, however, led to happy results: the astrologers from much star-gazing discovered the laws that governed the movements of those bodies; the alchemists found in their crucibles--not gold, indeed, but new substances, or new properties of those already known. So were discovered the process of forming salts by distillation, powerful acids, enamels, and convex glasses leading to the making of spectacles.[c]

FOOTNOTES

[8] [This is called by many historians the Fourth Crusade.]

[9] [“St. Louis,” says Guizot,[m] “was above all a conscientious man, a man who before acting weighed the question to himself of the moral good or evil, the question as to whether what he was about to do was good or evil in itself, independently of all utility, of all consequences. Such men are rarely seen and still more rarely remain upon the throne. Truly speaking, there are hardly more than two examples in history, one in antiquity, the other in modern times: Marcus Aurelius and St. Louis. These are, perhaps, the only two princes who, on every occasion, have formed the first rule of their conduct from their moral creeds--Marcus Aurelius, a stoic, St. Louis, a Christian.”]

[10] [Custom had permitted that when anyone had murdered, wounded, or beaten another the victim or his relatives might immediately avenge themselves by killing, wounding, or beating the offender or any of his relatives, even if the latter were ignorant of what had occurred. The ordinance of quarantaine-le-roi, forbade the injured to attack any of the offender’s family until after the lapse of forty days (une quarantaine). During the interval the offender himself was alone held answerable for his action. Furthermore, if either victim or offender chose to submit his cause to his suzerain he could secure inviolability (asseurement), for his goods and person, until a judicial decision had been given. When this inviolability had been demanded its breach was punishable by death.]

[11] [The livres of Tours and of Paris; their values being 20 and 25 sous respectively.]

[12] The disquisitions of the troubadours or the trouvères on questions of gallantry were called jeux partis; whence grew those “courts of love” in which were tried, before tribunals of noble ladies, complicated cases and subtle questions. These “courts of love” were of course but a poetical fiction, never a serious or permanent institution.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. PHILIP III TO THE HOUSE OF VALOIS

Of all epochs of French history, the second half of the thirteenth century appears to be that in which the subordination (of the people to the crown) was most complete.--DARESTE.[k]

PHILIP (III) THE BOLD (1270-1285 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1270-1285 A.D.]]

Little is known of the reign of St. Louis’ eldest son in spite of its length of fifteen years. It began under the walls of Tunis whence Philip III brought home his father’s body, after forcing a treaty upon the Mohammedans in which they recognised themselves tributary to the king of Sicily and agreed to pay the costs of the war. One can, however, still follow the ascending march of royalty under this prince, who, without any new war, and by extinction of several feudal lineages, reunited to his domain Valois, Poitou, and the counties of Toulouse and Venaissin. But Philip gave up to the pope this last fief and half of Avignon. The count of Foix, vanquished and a prisoner in his own capital, was compelled to promise faithful obedience and cede a portion of his territory. The dominion of the king of France thus approached the Pyrenees; and it finally crossed them. Philip made a match between his eldest son and the heiress of Navarre and if he did not succeed in placing on the throne of Castile a prince subservient to his influence, or in setting the crown of Aragon on the head of his second son Charles, at least he showed his arms in Catalonia where he took the stronghold of Gerona. Thus the Capetian dynasty, triumphant at home since the days of Louis VI, tried to become so abroad. But the time for this was not ripe.

The expedition to Catalonia, which turned out badly, had no other motive than that of family interest. Philip wished to punish Don Pedro, king of Aragon, for his support of the rebellious Sicilians against Charles of Anjou after the massacre of all the French citizens in the island, which had taken place during vespers on Easter Monday. (“The Sicilian Vespers,” 1282.)

An ordinance of Philip III, drawn up in 1274, obliged the advocates in the royal courts to take oath each year that they would defend none but just cases. The first example of a commoner made noble by the king will be found in the letters of ennoblement issued by Philip III to his silversmith Raoul, in 1272, if the fact is absolutely certain.

PHILIP (IV) THE FAIR (1285-1314 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1285-1300 A.D.]]

Philip IV, surnamed the Fair, was but seventeen when he succeeded his father in 1285. He ridded himself, as far as possible by treaties, of futile wars, and occupied himself in place of conquest with increasing his domains by acquisitions within his reach. His marriage with the heiress of Navarre and Champagne had only been worth two great provinces to him. A decree of parliament which despoiled the heirs of Hugh de Lusignan secured him La Marche and Angoumois. Then his second son married the heiress of Franche-Comté; thus through marriage, escheat, or conquest all France came little by little into the royal domain. But powerful vassals still remained--the duke of Brittany, the count of Flanders, and especially the duke of Guienne. Philip began by attacking the last. He was a formidable adversary since he was at the same time king of England.

Fortunately Edward I, who had just subdued the Welsh and was now threatening the independence of Scotland, was too much occupied in his own island to come over to the continent, and owing to this the royal army was able to make rapid progress in Guienne. A French fleet went to pillage Dover; and another army led by the king in person made its way into Flanders, where the count had declared for the king of England, and beat the Flemings at Furnes (Veurne) (1297). The intervention of Pope Boniface VIII established a peace between the two kings which was sealed by a marriage. A daughter of Philip the Fair wedded the son of Edward I and gave the English house rights to the throne of France which Edward III in due time asserted (1299). By this peace the two kings gave up their allies, Philip the Scotch, and Edward the count of Flanders. The latter in terror hastened to place himself under the protection of Philip and Flanders was reunited to the domain (1300).

[Sidenote: [1300-1302 A.D.]]

The whole French court went to visit the new acquisition. It was received with great pomp; the Flemings, to do honour to their noble visitors, donned their best attire and displayed all their riches. The entrance into Bruges was especially magnificent. The bourgeois wives showed such gold and jewels in their toilets that the queen felt her woman’s vanity wounded. “I thought,” she said, “there was but one queen of France; now I see six hundred.” Flanders was in truth the richest country in Europe because it was there that the people worked hardest. In that fruitful land men had sprung up like crops, towns were numerous, and the population active and industrious, devoted, like the Guienne towns--especially Bordeaux, because the English bought their wines--to England, whence came the wool necessary to their manufactures. Flemish cloth sold throughout the whole of Christendom as far as Constantinople, and the towns of the Low Countries formed the market where the productions of the north from the Baltic were exchanged for those of the south brought from Venice and the east of Italy down the Rhine.

On a soil which it had taken a thousand canals to rescue from the sea, among the scores of stoutly walled cities, with a population accustomed to hard work, but none the less proud of its numbers, strength, and wealth, chivalry had had small chance to play its game, and there was little feudalism in Flanders. Every town had its privileges and it was not safe to tamper with them.

New War with Flanders (1302-1304 A.D.)

Philip had appointed James de Châtillon governor of Flanders--a man who did not know how to treat a conquered people, especially such a rich one. The people, rather intolerant and accustomed to more consideration from their counts, rebelled. In Bruges alone three thousand French were put to death. Philip sent Robert of Artois with a large army to avenge this deed. Twenty thousand Flemings awaited it bravely behind a canal near Courtrai. Before the fight the Flemings confessed their sins, the priest said high mass, and all, bowing down, took some earth and put it in their mouths, swearing thus to fight to the death for their country’s freedom. This gathering of a whole army usually augurs badly for its assailants. The latter advanced in bad order, sure of victory and not giving those common people the credit of believing that they would dare look them in the face. In vain the constable Raoul de Nesle cautioned prudence. He was asked if he was afraid. “Sir,” he replied to Count Robert, “if you come where I go, you will be well in the front,” and he spurred his horse forward at all speed. They did not even take the precaution to reconnoitre the Flemings’ position. The first ranks of the heavy columns of knights, advancing at full speed, had no sooner fallen into the canal that covered the enemy’s lines than those just behind pressed by the rear were precipitated upon them, and then the Flemings had only to plunge their long lances into the confused mass of men and horses to kill with perfect safety to themselves. A sortie which they made from the two ends of the canal completed the rout. Two hundred nobles of high degree and six thousand soldiers perished. And what was most humiliating was that the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Saint-Pol and Clermont, with two thousand hauberts, fled, leaving the constable, count of Artois, and so many noble warriors, beaten, maimed, and killed in the hands of the common people (1302).

The battle of Mansurah had already shown the undisciplined impetuosity and military incapacity of the knights, but this occurred in the Orient and distance had helped to preserve the reputation of the vanquished; but the battle of Courtrai, lost by the flower of French chivalry to the common people, made a great sensation without, however, curing the nobility of their mad presumption. The defeats of Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt came from the same causes. Stripped by royalty of its privileges, the feudal nobility lost on the battle-field the prestige with which it had long been surrounded and saw, to complete its own ruin, arise at its very side another army--that of the king and the people.

Philip the Fair took energetic measures to repair the disaster of Courtrai. He forced nobles and bourgeois to bring to the royal mint their gold and silver plate, for which he paid in debased coinage. He ordered each property yielding 100 livres of rent to provide one horseman, every one hundred villein families to provide six foot-sergeants, and every commoner having 25 livres income to serve in person. He sold many serfs their freedom and many commoners titles of nobility. By this means he collected in two months ten thousand mounted and sixty thousand men on foot. It was a royal effort and it was a great one, but that of the people was greater still. From the Flemish towns there issued this time eighty thousand fighters. With two such opposing armies the contest must be terrible and decisive; they felt this and not wishing to take any risks, the year 1302 was spent in trying to get thoroughly acquainted with the situation. Philip was then at the height of his quarrel with Boniface VIII and a new defeat would be fatal to him; he even let the Flemings take the offensive the following year (1303). But the pope died the same year and Philip attacked Flanders by land and sea. His fleet defeated the Flemish at Zieriksee and he himself avenged at Mons-en-Pévêlle, or Mons-en-Puelle, the defeat of Courtrai. He thought the enemy exterminated, but in a few days they were back as numerous as ever, asking a new battle. “But it rains Flemings,” cried the king. He preferred to treat rather than fight again. They promised him money and ceded Douai, Lille, Béthune, Orchies with all Walloon--that is to say French-speaking Flanders between the Lys and the Schelde. To this the king gave them back their count, who promised nothing more than feudal homage.

Thus French royalty receded before Flemish democracy as did German royalty almost at the same period before Swiss democracy. The communes of France remained isolated, and succumbed; in Flanders and in Switzerland they united and triumphed.[b]

The Quarrel between Philip and Boniface VIII

[Sidenote: [1296-1304 A.D.]]

The complaints made by a certain section of the French clergy to the holy see in 1296, against what they designated as the exactions of Philip the Fair, met with a far better reception than did similar complaints from England, where Edward was employing much more vigorous methods than those of his rival to obtain subsidies from the clergy.

It was a great opportunity for Pope Boniface VIII, and he did not let it slip. The bull, Clericis laïcos (1296), was familiar throughout Christendom. This bull, forbidding the clergy to pay taxes to temporal rulers, was too sweeping to be enforced. Boniface realised that, and forestalled the objections that it could not fail to raise. All that was too peremptory in the preceding bull was corrected in the one beginning Ineffabilis amor. The king might raise subsidies among the clergy, with the pope’s consent, who, if the kingdom were menaced, would order them to contribute to its defence even unto the selling of the sacred vessels. In the same bull Boniface demanded an explanation of the prohibition recently made by the king against exporting gold, silver, and merchandise out of the kingdom, a prohibition which threatened to dry up one of the principal sources of revenue of Rome.

The edict which is universally regarded as Philip’s retort to the bull Clericis laïcos, was not aimed at the pope, for it was issued in the month of April, a few days after the drawing up of the bull and before its contents could possibly have become known to the king of France. It did not apply solely to money, but forbade also the exportation of arms, horses, and other things, its object being to damage England and Flanders with which Philip was at war. Similar edicts were issued on several occasions during this reign. In this same bull Boniface threatened Philip with excommunication. The king and his councillors were furious at this liberty.

In 1297, came a fresh prohibition to export gold and silver, fresh fears on the part of the pope, fresh explanations from Philip. In the midst of all this the French bishops wrote to Boniface praying him to grant the king a tithe on all the churches. The clergy began to realise that they could not abstain from contributing to the defence of the country. Abandoned by a portion of the French clergy, Boniface made fresh concessions. In the bull beginning Romana mater ecclesia he even granted permission to raise, in cases of necessity, ecclesiastical tithes, with the consent of the clergy but without consulting the holy see. The bull Noveritis nos went still farther: it handed over to the king, if he had attained his majority, and to his council if he were still a minor, the responsibility of deciding as to which were cases of necessity, and the right of taxing the clergy even though the pope had not first been consulted. It concluded by declaring that the holy see had never had any intention of making an attempt upon the rights, liberties, freedoms, and customs of the kingdom, the king, or the barons. This compliance on the part of Boniface VIII, his sudden sweetness, must not be attributed altogether to feelings of benevolence towards Philip the Fair; they are explained principally by the difficult position in which the pope found himself in his own states.

Harmonious relations continued between the king and the pope; nevertheless certain incidents occurred to mar them. Boniface had summoned the bishop of Laon to Rome to give account of his administration; the king thereupon affected to consider his benefice as vacant and proceeded to appropriate to himself the revenues according to the royal prerogative. A fresh cause for reciprocal discontent was found in the complaints made by the bishops against the collection of the first-fruits granted to the king.

One event to which no one attached any importance took place about that time, changing the already unsettled feelings of Boniface into hostility. This was the alliance formed at Vaucouleurs in 1299 between Philip and Albert, king of the Romans, who had been excommunicated for having dethroned Adolphus of Nassau--a very threatening alliance for the papacy. The news of the negotiations between Philip and Albert spread consternation in Rome; a false rumour announcing a rupture between them was received with joy. Boniface conceived the idea of holding a conference with the kings of France and England and the count of Flanders--the only means, in his eyes, by which to establish peace on a solid basis. He did not dream of summoning them to Rome. He knew Philip and Edward well enough to be aware that they would regard it simply as officious interference on his part. So he determined to go himself to some neutral territory. He had even got so far as to make overtures to Philip the Fair under these conditions when a serious malady, which caused him excessive pain, coupled with his great age, compelled him to renounce the scheme.

The Flemish ambassadors judged this moment to be a favourable one for making themselves heard, by flattering the pope’s notions of supremacy and exciting his suspicions against Philip the Fair. They forwarded to Boniface a memorial in which they prayed his support and intervention, and sought to reassure him as to the mightiness of this sovereign power which they attributed to him by appeals to the holy Scriptures. Boniface was only too ready to listen to insinuations which fell in with his own hopes and ambitions.

[Sidenote: [1301-1303 A.D.]]

However, causes of complaint against Philip continued to accumulate, among others being his usurpation of the county of Melgueil, which belonged to the bishop of Maguelonne, and the refusal of the viscount of Narbonne to do homage to the archbishop who was his over-lord. The pope let drop some severe remarks, and despatched Bernard de Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, to invite the king to restore the consecrated land. Philip, exasperated by the bishop of Pamiers, allowed him to return to his diocese; but he instituted a secret inquiry about him to which evidence was contributed by the bishops and barons of the south. He was accused of having purloined Languedoc from the crown for the purpose of re-uniting it to Aragon; his real offence was his hatred of the king. Bernard was arrested at Pamiers by the vidame of Amiens, and arraigned before the king and an assembly of barons at Senlis, October 14th, 1301. So haughty was his defence that the whole assembly rose to its feet and clamoured for his death. Within an ace of being massacred, he flung himself on the compassion of the archbishop of Narbonne, his metropolitan, who was present, as well as the bishops of Béziers and Maguelonne. The archbishop took him under his protection and made himself answerable for him. This proceeding of Philip was contrary to the laws of the church: a bishop cannot be brought up for judgment before a lay court; in the same way, the councils have not the right to judge him without the intervention of the pope, who must authorise the proceedings.

Philip despatched Peter de Flotte to Rome to demand the punishment of Saisset. The ambassador declared that his master did not wish to avail himself of his right to punish a man whose crimes rendered him unworthy of the priesthood and of the protection accorded to the clergy; but that he desired to show the pope a token of deference and respect by handing over to him the charge of avenging the insult offered to God as the author of all legitimate authority, to the king as a son of the church, and to the kingdom as a very considerable portion of Christendom. He further requested Boniface to declare Bernard stripped of his episcopal dignity and of all clerical privileges. It was in vain that Flotte urged and demanded a reply; he received none, and returned raging to France.

Boniface suspended the privileges accorded by himself and his predecessors to the crown of France, and convoked, for November 1st, 1302, a general council at Rome, in order to put an end to the oppressions endured by the French clergy. The king was invited either to attend in person or to send someone to defend him. The bull Ausculta fili indicated the superiority claimed by Boniface over Philip. “God, in laying upon us the yoke of apostolic servitude, has placed us above kings and empires, to uproot, destroy, annihilate, disperse, build and plant in his name; dearly beloved son, do not allow yourself to be persuaded that you are not subject to the supreme head of the church, for such an opinion would be folly.” He further accused the king of tyrannising over his subjects, oppressing the church, and offending the nobles. In conclusion he invites him to turn his attention to the deplorable condition of the Holy Land and to prepare a crusade. Another bull, Secundum divina, enjoined Philip to set Saisset at liberty and let him return to Rome. The king drove him out of France, and prepared to obtain a great demonstration in his own favour, in opposition to the pretensions of Boniface, by summoning the first states-general. By acting in this manner Philip was only defending his crown: his right was obvious, he needed but to claim it and exercise it with dignity. His cause was good, but he had the misfortune to sully it by falsehood and violence; in this, doubtless, following the advice of the lawyers who surrounded him.

The Sunday after Candlemas (February, 1302) the king solemnly burned the bull Ausculta fili. The defeat of the French army at Courtrai, in the month of July, gave confidence to Boniface without disheartening Philip. In the month of December Philip sent the bishop of Auxerre to Rome to signify to Boniface that, in conjunction with the king of England, he had renounced his arbitration. Outwardly Philip was most deferential towards the pope. While all this was going on grave news came from Rome. The council summoned by Boniface had met on All Saints’ Day, 1302, several French bishops having responded to the pope’s summons, despite the king’s prohibitions. Philip had seized all their worldly goods, and a decree issued November 18th, doubtless at the instigation of the council, ratified the doctrine of the papal superiority.

Boniface directed those French bishops who had not taken part in the council to present themselves at Rome within three months’ time. Philip forbade them to leave the kingdom, and set guards at all the passes into Germany and Italy. By the king’s wish Cardinal de Saint-Marcellin (the pope’s legate) summoned a council in France. Boniface recapitulated all his grievances against Philip, and called upon him to clear himself. He accused him among other things of coining false money and of burning the bull Ausculta fili. Philip’s answer was moderate and conciliatory. He expressed his wish to maintain, as his ancestors had done, the union between France and the holy see, and concluded by entreating Boniface not to meddle with him in the legitimate exercise of his rights; he offered to refer the matter to the decision of the duke of Brittany or of the duke of Burgundy, who were particularly agreeable to him. The pope declared this answer to be insufficient, and complained bitterly of it to the bishop of Auxerre and to the king’s brother, Charles of Valois, who for nearly two years had lived in Italy with the title “champion of the holy see,” and whom Philip had lately recalled.

On the 12th of March, 1303, an assembly of barons, prelates, and lawyers was held at the Louvre in the presence of the king. William de Plasian (or, according to Dareste[k] and Martin,[c] the chancellor, William de Nogaret) read aloud a document in which were set forth accusations against Boniface:

“He is a heretic; he does not believe in the immortality of the soul or in the life everlasting: he has said that he would sooner be a dog than a Frenchman; he does not believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. He has approved of a book by Armand de Villeneuve, which book has been condemned and burned; he has set up images of himself in the churches to the end that he may be worshipped; he has a familiar spirit who advises him; he consults sorcerers; he has openly preached that the pope cannot be guilty of simony; he traffics in benefices; he sows strifes everywhere; he has said that the French are of the Patarins (Albigenses); he has ordered murders; he has forced priests to reveal confessions; he has nourished a bitter hatred of the king of France. Before his election he was heard to say that if he did become pope he would destroy Christianity or lower the French pride; he has prevented peace between England and France; he has urged the king of Sicily to massacre all French; he strengthened the king of Germany on condition of his humbling the arrogance of the French, who, he pretended, boasted that they recognised no superior in temporal matters, in which they lied in their throats; that if an angel from heaven were to tell him that France was not subject to him, he would shriek curses against both him and the emperor. He has brought about the ruin of the Holy Land, having confiscated all the money intended for its aid, that he might give it to his relatives, of whom he has made marquises, counts, and barons, and for whom he has built castles; he has driven out the nobility of Rome; he has broken up marriages; he has made a cardinal of one of his nephews who is but an ignorant fellow and who was married, and has forced the wife to take the veil in a convent; he has done Celestine, his predecessor, to death in prison.”

On the 13th of April Boniface declared Philip to be excommunicate if he persisted in not submitting himself to the holy see. He commissioned Nicholas de Bienfaite, archdeacon of Coutances, to bear to Cardinal de Saint-Marcellin the bull which cut off the king from communion with the church. But the king, warned of the archdeacon’s mission, had him arrested at Troyes and thrown into prison. His bull was taken from him; in point of fact it was not to have been fulminated except in the case of Philip’s remaining deaf to a final summons. In vain the legate protested; no one listened to him; the goods of all prelates absent from the kingdom were sequestrated. Realising that he compromised himself uselessly by remaining any longer, he quitted France.

On the 31st of May Boniface, who had pardoned Albert of Austria and had recognised him as king of the Romans, launched a bull in which the nobles, churches, and communes of the metropolises of Lyons, Tarantaise, Embrun, Besançon, Aix, Arles, and Vienne, of Burgundy, Barrois, Dauphiné, Provence, of the county of Forcalquier, the principality of Orange, and the kingdom of Arles, provinces held of the kingdom, were ordered to break such ties of vassalage and obedience as they had been able to contract prejudicial to the emperor, and to release themselves from such oaths of obedience as they had sworn.

It was almost equivalent to dismembering France. On the 13th of June a great assembly took place at the Louvre at which the king was present. The counts of Évreux, Saint-Pol, and Dreux, and William de Plasian, demanded that the church should be governed by a legitimate pope. Boniface was charged anew with all the old crimes and infamies. The king was entreated, in his capacity as “defender of the faith,” to work for the convoking of a general council. To this he consented. On the 24th of June, St. John Baptist’s Day, an immense crowd of people gathered in the palace gardens; there the king’s challenge to the future council was read.

At last, on September 8th, Boniface, in the bull Petri solio excelso, pronounced against Philip the excommunication he had courted. All the world knows how, in defiance of public liberties, Boniface was arrested at Anagni, on the evening before the very day on which the excommunication of the French king was to have been publicly posted.[d]

One of Philip’s agents, William (Guillaume) de Nogaret whose grandfather had been burned as an Albigensian, had been sent to Italy. He came to an understanding with Sciarra Colonna, a Roman noble and the pope’s mortal enemy. Boniface was at that time in his native city of Anagni. By dint of money Nogaret won over the chief of the military forces of Anagni, and one morning entered the place with four hundred mounted armed men and some hundreds of foot-soldiers. At the noise they made in the town and the cries of “Death to the pope!” “Long live the king of France!” Boniface believed his last hour had come. But showing in spite of his age (he was eighty-six years old) an uncommon degree of agility, he got into his pontifical robes, and seated himself on his throne, the tiara on his head, the cross in one hand and the keys of St. Peter in the other. Thus he awaited his assassins. The latter called upon him to abdicate. “Here is my neck and here is my head,” he replied; “betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like him at least I shall die a pope.” A story ran that Sciarra Colonna dragged him from his throne, struck him across the face with his gauntlet, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered, saying: “Oh thou wretched pope, witness and consider the goodness of my lord, the king of France, who, far from thee as is his kingdom, guards and defends thee through me.” [But the story of Colonna’s violence seems quite unfounded.[13]]

[Sidenote: [1303-1308 A.D.]]

Nogaret hesitated, however, about dragging the old man out of Anagni. The people had time to recover from their astonishment. The townspeople armed themselves, the peasants rushed in, and the French were driven from the town. The pope, fearing they had put poison in his food, remained three days without eating. A short time after, he died of shame and anger, at the humiliating insults he had received. His successor, Benedict XI, tried to avenge him by excommunicating Nogaret, Colonna, and all those who had helped them. The excommunication reached up to the king. A month after the publication of the bull, Benedict died, perhaps poisoned. This time Philip took measures to make himself master of the election of the new pontiff. Bertrand d’Agoust (de Goth), archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected after he had promised the king to comply with the royal wishes. The new pope, who took the name of Clement V, caused himself to be consecrated at Lyons, and abandoning Rome, fixed his residence in 1308 at Avignon, a possession of the holy see beyond the Alps, where he soon found himself under the hand and will of the king of France. His successors remained there until 1376. The sojourn of the popes at Avignon, which so upset the church, has been called the Babylonish Captivity. This sojourn was memorable in connection with the history of Philip IV.

Sentence of the Templars (1307 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1307 A.D.]]

Villani relates a mournful scene--the ominous interview between pope and king in the forest of St. Jean d’Angély where one sold his tiara and the other bought it. This meeting did not take place, but conditions were certainly proposed and accepted. One of them was nothing less than the destruction of the military order of the Templars. The wealth of these warrior monks, now of no use to them since it was no longer expended in armament against the infidel, had tempted the king’s greed, always keen-scented for money, and their powers stood in the way of his despotism. There were 15,500 knights with a great multitude of servant knights, brothers and their dependents, so that if gathered together they could defy all the royal armies of Europe; and their strong organisation, under the hand of the grand-master, made them seem more formidable than did their numbers and their wealth.

They possessed throughout Christendom more than ten thousand establishments, and a number of fortresses, among them the temple at Paris where Philip had once found a safe asylum from a riot which stormed and raged in vain around its thick walls. In the treasury of the order there were 150,000 gold florins not counting silver or precious vessels. The world never knew what went on in their houses. Everything was secret, but there were vague rumours of orgies, scandals, and impieties, and no profane eye had ever penetrated the mysteries. Knights had disappeared, because, it was said, they had threatened compromising revelations. The pride of the order irritated the people, who charged it with the most odious crimes; but they were guilty only of great laxity of morals, and their religious ceremonies were perhaps mingled in the East with some impure alloy and strange customs.

The 14th of September, 1307, the seneschals and bailiffs were given notice to hold themselves in arms for the 12th of October, and they received at the same time sealed letters not to be opened until the night of the 12th and 13th of October. The surprised knights had no time to resist or gather together. Torture drew from them such statements as torture always draws. It was Philip’s desire to associate the whole nation with this great trial, as he had associated it with his dispute with Boniface VIII. The states-general assembled at Tours; the accusations and statements were put before it and the deputies pronounced the knights deserving of death. Provincial councils likewise condemned them. That of Paris consigned to the flames in one day, in the faubourg St. Antoine, fifty-four Templars, who retracted what they had avowed under torture. Nine were burned at Senlis and there certainly were other executions. The pope pronounced at the Council of Vienne the dissolution of the order throughout all Christendom, and ordered their great wealth turned over to the Hospitallers (knights of Rhodes). But the royal fist did not readily release what it held. All the money found in the temples, two-thirds of the personal property, credits, and a considerable amount of lands remained in the hands of the king. In Italy, England, Spain, and Germany, the order of the Temple was abolished and its wealth in part confiscated by the princes. But there were no executions except in France. The memory of Philip IV must alone bear the burden of these atrocities.

[Sidenote: [1307-1312 A.D.]]

This same Council of Vienne condemned several errors, born within the Franciscan order--the heresy of the “Spirituels” who regarded St. Francis almost as a new reincarnation of Jesus; that of the “Beguins” or “Beghards,” who exempted mankind, perfect according to their ideas, from any judgment by human standards. And finally that of the Fraticelli who [inquisitors tell us] abolished property and declared that everything should be in common, family as well as property. We see these wild doctrines are very old.[b]

Philip’s Fiscal Policy

Nothing satiated the royal exchequer, neither the spoils of the Templars, nor the tithes collected under pretext of the “holy war,” nor the taxes levied for the knighting of the king’s sons and the marriage of his daughter--that fatal marriage, from which sprang Edward III. Even the maltôtes did not suffice.

The maltôte, an illegal exaction, which, to a certain extent placed all subjects in the position of serfs taxable at their owner’s will and pleasure, was at least openly arbitrary and illegal; but the “mutable currencies” were treacherously sprung upon the citizens in the midst of their transactions and money exchanges, and brought dismay upon society at every turn, doing his subjects a wrong out of all proportion to the benefit gained by their ruler. In all of this there was as much ignorance as perversity, and one has difficulty in conceiving the ineptitude shown in the government financial business by legal men, ordinarily so clever. Philip the Fair’s statutes regarding the currency are a genuine chaos: sometimes the king takes the paternal tone, and pretends to so contrive the rate of exchange that his subjects shall suffer as little as possible; sometimes he throws off the mask, and prohibits the testing and weighing of the royal moneys issued, on pain of forfeiting the coins submitted to the test and of “being both body and goods at the king’s disposal.” No one could obtain either silver or copper but at the royal mints. The importation of the Florentine golden florin and other foreign coins was forbidden under the same penalty (for fear of comparison). Next Philip withdrew from circulation half of his own current coins, under the pretext of their having been counterfeited and tampered with by others--coiners, Lombards, etc. The Jews and the Lombards were always convenient scapegoats for the royal iniquities. They were again expelled in 1311-1312, with the usual confiscations. In 1310 there was a grand re-coining of all the moneys; everyone was forced to give in all he possessed to the directors of the royal mints, who gave out in exchange new money, much inferior in weight and purchasing power to the value attributed to it. The king was anxious to gain popularity at the expense of the money-lenders, and issued orders that all liabilities should be discharged in the new money, in spite of every previous stipulation to the contrary. To the same end, after having fixed a maximum (15 to 20 per cent. per annum!) for the exorbitant interest charged on silver, he ended by prohibiting all usury, which is to say all interest. If the rates of usury were scandalous, one must lay the blame of them on the king’s persecution of capitalists, Jews, and Italian bankers: naturally the rate of interest increased in proportion to the chances of loss incurred by the lender. By these means Philip raised fresh barriers to trade and swelled the public discontent.

[Sidenote: [1312-1314 A.D.]]

A statute enacted in June, 1313, surpassed in audacity all others that had preceded it. The king was no longer satisfied with managing his own money as he would; he wished to handle that of the barons also, and asserted himself to be the only coiner of the realm. By friendly transactions, by usurpations, by every possible means, he had already reduced by more than half their number the nobles who minted money. In the preamble to his statute he now announced his intention of restoring all French moneys “to their ancient currency and status” (of the time of St. Louis, apparently), and forbade all prelates and barons to mint fresh money until further orders. He was acting, he said, under the advice of “the whole caboodle of decent people in every decent town in his kingdom,” and he looked to the bourgeoisie to uphold him against the resentment of the nobles. As a matter of fact, at another time the bourgeoisie would have been only too pleased to see the nobles deprived of the right of coining money, a right which they grossly abused; but under Philip the Fair, would they gain much by it? This very statute of June, 1313, introduced mutations more disastrous than any heretofore. It hit all classes of society, and all were equally irritated, with the exception of the lawyers and certain large tradesmen who constituted themselves overseers, farmers, or coiners on the king’s account.

Execution of Jacques de Molay (1314 A.D.)

Philip defied public discontent by redoubling his brutalities. The smallest murmur was reported to the king’s spies, and punished by his tyrants. One saw everywhere people flogged and pilloried; every lay and ecclesiastical court robed itself in pitiless severity. In the Place de Grève they burned, in 1313, a nun of Hainault, Marguerite de la Porette, the Mystic. Shortly after a more celebrated execution startled Paris and the whole of France. For more than six years the foremost members of the order of the Temple, the grand-master, the “visitor” of France, and the masters of Aquitaine and Normandy, had languished in the king’s dungeons; they could not be left to die unjudged in darksome cells. At last the pope, who had reserved the decision of their fate to himself, appointed a commission consisting of the cardinal D’Albano and two other cardinals. The archbishop of Sens and various doctors of divinity and of canonical law joined them. Brought before their judges, the four captives reiterated, it is said, the confessions made by themselves and their comrades. It was wished to mark their arrest with great solemnity and to “read a lesson” to the public, as the saying is. The court therefore held its sitting in the open space before Notre Dame de Paris, upon a scaffold draped in scarlet. The four accused were led to the foot of the scaffold, where they repeated their confession before all the people. Their sentence was then pronounced--they were to be immured for life. “But just when,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “the cardinals believed they had ended the affair, the grand-master, Jacques de Molay, and the master from Normandy, Guy, brother of the dauphin of Auvergne, suddenly retracted their confession, denying it in toto, and stubbornly defended themselves against the cardinal who had ‘pointed the moral’ and the archbishop of Sens, to the immense surprise of everybody.”

The commission, struck dumb with astonishment and a sort of fear by this unlooked-for incident, did not know how to decide. They adjourned till the morrow to deliberate at their leisure, and handed over the grand-master and his companions to the guardianship of the royal warder of Paris till the next day. The news of what had taken place outside Notre Dame was promptly carried to the king, who was at that time at the Palais de la Cité. Philip, seized with a dread only equalled by his anger, sent in haste for his most trusty advisers, “without summoning the scholars” (i.e., the commission). The determination he had arrived at was the boldest and most atrocious that can be imagined. At night-fall he had the two Templars conveyed to a small island in the Seine, “between the garden of the Palais de la Cité and the church of the Frères-Hermites,” and there had them burned together. “They helped,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “to prepare the fagots with so stout and resolute a heart, persisting to the end in their denials with so great steadfastness, that they left those who witnessed their torment filled with admiration and stupefaction.” (March 11th, 1314.)

The ecclesiastical powers swallowed this outrage as many another, demanding from the king no account for the double murder of two offenders who did not come within his jurisdiction, and whose backsliding he had dealt with on his own authority alone. Indeed Clement V was already failing, and did not long survive the unfortunates whom he had sold to their persecutor. He died on April 20th. An Italian historian, Ferretus or Fereti of Vicenza, asserts that Jacques de Molay, from the midst of his fagots, cited the king and the pope to appear before the tribunal of God, Clement within forty days and Philip within a year.

Philip was in truth nearing the end of his sinister career. The last year of his reign will be seen to be the most bloody. France was horrified by more hideous scenes than any she had hitherto witnessed, more hideous even than the murder of the Templars, and this time the tragedy was enacted at the foot of the throne among the royal family. Philip’s three sons, Louis Hutin, king of Navarre, and count of Champagne and of Brie, Philip, count of Poitiers, and Charles, count of La Marche, had married--the first Marguerite, sister of Hugh V, duke of Burgundy; and the other two Joan and Blanche, daughters of Otto or Othelin, count of Burgundy or of Franche-Comté. In the spring of 1314 the young wives of the king’s three sons were suddenly arrested on a charge of scandalous conduct. Marguerite, queen of Navarre, and Blanche, countess of La Marche, were accused of frequent acts of adultery, “even on the most holy days,” with Philip and Walter d’Aulnai, young Norman knights in their service. The Aulnai brothers were not allowed to challenge to a duel in defence of their innocence and that of their mistresses; confession of guilt was wrung from them by torture, and the princesses, “stripped,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “of all temporal honours, after receiving the tonsure, were imprisoned, Marguerite in Château Gaillard d’Andely, and Blanche in the abbey of Maubuisson, where, after strict seclusion, and deprived of all human consolation, they ended their days in despair.”

The fate of their lovers was even more terrible. They were conducted to the place du Martroi St. Jean, in Paris, and there flayed alive and mutilated; they were not beheaded until every means had been exhausted that an infernal science could devise to prolong the victim’s sufferings without actually killing him.

Joan of Burgundy, countess of Poitiers, more fortunate than her sisters Blanche and Marguerite of Navarre, was declared chaste and not guilty by a parliament in which sat the king’s brothers and the great nobles: she was “reconciled to her husband.” Joan of Burgundy was heiress to Franche-Comté: it was not possible to condemn her as an adulteress and annul her marriage without renouncing the wealth she had brought to the royal house; perhaps her riches had something to say as to her innocence.[c]

The general oppression nearly caused an insurrection when Philip ordered a new tax on the sale of all merchandise. There was, from the first, a union between the nobles and the bourgeoisie similar to the league which in England laid the foundations of the people’s liberty and imposed the Magna Charta on John Lackland. Philip, this time, withdrew, and cancelling the obnoxious tax he summoned representatives of forty of the largest towns to a conference at Paris at which he promised to coin henceforth nothing but honest money.

But this ill-starred man, this king, the harshest France had had up to this time, although but forty-six years of age, had already reached the end of his days. He expired November 29th, 1314.[b] The exact cause of Philip’s early demise has never been perfectly understood. The commonly accepted account is that it resulted from an accident that occurred during a stag hunt. “He saw the stag coming and drew his sword, and clapped spurs to his horse and thought to strike the stag; but his horse carried him so violently against a tree that the good king fell to the ground, and was very severely hurt in the heart, and was carried to Corbeil. There his malady grew very sore.”[f] But this narrative bears the date 1572. “The contemporary French historian” [the continuator of William de Nangis[g]] says Michelet[e] “does not speak of this accident. He says that Philip sank without fever or visible malady, to the great astonishment of the physicians.” Nevertheless there was a contemporary rumour of an accident during a hunt of the wild boar, for Dante[h] writing exactly at the time of Philip’s death speaks contemptuously of him as “The false coiner who died of a blow from a pig’s skin” (i.e., a boar).[a]

Political Progress in Philip’s Reign

[Sidenote: [1285-1314 A.D.]]

Whether or not Philip the Fair was a wicked man or a bad king, there is no denying that his reign is the grand era from which we date civil order in France and the foundation of the modern monarchy.[e] Under this reign the royal domain made important acquisitions, some of which, unfortunately, were not lasting; the counties of La Marche, Angoumois, Champagne, Franche-Comté, Lectoure, a portion of Flanders (Lille, Douai, and Orchies), Quercy, the great city of Lyons and a part of Montpellier. The count of Bar had been compelled to do homage to the French crown for all his land situated west of the Maas.

Vassals were bound to serve their sovereign, in his court, by their advice and justice. The king’s feudal court had a double character, for in it the king called upon his barons for advice and sentences. With the further evolution of royalty the functions of the king’s court developed, and a division became necessary; there was the political court or grand council, and the judiciary court or parliament. Under St. Louis the functions of the parliament were not yet clearly defined. Philip the Fair perfected its organisation. He caused this court to be held at Paris twice a year for two months in the Palais de la Cité, which later bore the name of the Palais de Justice (1303). This sovereign court of justice which claimed to exercise its jurisdiction over the entire kingdom was destined to be the great instrument employed by future kings to bring the whole of France under their absolute authority. Philip also established two échiquiers[14] at Rouen and two grands jours at Troyes and placed these provincial courts under the control of the parliament. The office of public prosecutor (ministère public) charged with defending in all causes the rights of the king and society, seems to date from the time of Philip the Fair.

As the king had formed the parliament from the grand council, so he formed the chamber of accounts (chambre des comptes) from the parliament of which it first was a part but later became a separate institution. Thus there were three great divisions in the high administrative department of the country--the judiciary parliament; the financial, chamber of accounts; and the political, the grand council.

The many ordinances of Philip which have been preserved prove his activity in organising the new administration, which was the debt of royalty to the country, since it had substituted its own powers for those of the feudal lords. If these laws often bear the stamp of a despotic and taxing spirit, they sometimes show a knowledge of the true principles of government. One of them prohibited private war and judicial duels during wars of the crown. This was done to disarm feudalism.

A most important event of Philip’s administration was the convocation in 1302 of the first states-general. Brought by his violences face to face with a great peril, and ruined by his constant disastrous undertakings, the most despotic of the French kings was compelled [as we have seen] to call around him the deputies of the nation, in order to obtain the assistance of which he stood in need and to fortify himself in his quarrel with the pope, with the assent of France. But in discussing before them the prerogatives of his crown and of the tiara, he recognised by implication the ancient right of national sovereignty so deeply obscured for centuries. Philip doubtless asked nothing but what he was sure of obtaining, but the men who, in 1302, fought for the king against the pope and in 1326 disposed of the crown, would later on be emboldened to the attempt to lay hands on the crown itself.[b]

The states-general consisted of a strictly national assembly which the barons, bishops, abbeys, provosts, and deans of chapters were invited to attend in person, and to which each city of the realm was invited to send two or three deputies or representatives. This was not the first time that the crown had consulted the nobles and the prelates; but it does not appear that until now the deputies of the third estate had taken part in such a council. If they had been previously consulted on rare occasions, it was in regard to special matters such as the regulation of the currency, and even then certain determinate cities were represented.

The states-general thus called together by Philip the Fair, and which assembled the 12th of April, 1302, in the church of Notre Dame at Paris, was convoked, to be sure, with a specific aim and under extraordinary circumstances. Its unique object was to show the pope that the country upheld the king (see p. 80). But none the less does this meeting stamp the year 1302 as an important date in French history.[15] Through this representative assembly France, as such, takes part for the first time in its own government; an intervention already necessary, and which is destined soon to become consistent and regular.[k]

LOUIS (X) THE QUARRELSOME (1314-1316 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1314-1316 A.D.]]

Philip the Fair had mingled little with the chivalry of his time. He forbade tournaments, and, after the fashion of oriental despots, kept his sons secluded. The eldest, known as Louis X, called Hutin or the Quarrelsome, was fond of rude pastimes. In 1305 he had been crowned king of Navarre at Pamplona, and succeeded at the same time to the county of Champagne. His uncle Charles, count of Valois, had much influence over him, a prince who had shown eagerness, but not perseverance, to tread in the adventurous and ambitious path of Charles of Anjou.

Charles entertained an aversion for all his brother’s councillors. He accused his chancellor Latilly, bishop of Châlons, with having caused the death of the king by means of sorcery. Latilly’s obvious interest had been to keep Philip alive; but Charles caused him, nevertheless, to be imprisoned and tortured under the accusation. Raoul de Presle, another of Philip’s legists, was implicated in the same crime, and underwent similar persecution.

But Enguerrand de Marigny, Philip’s prime minister, was the chief object of hatred to the king’s uncle. Charles blamed Marigny for the depreciation of the coin; but for this crime, even if considered guilty, Louis Hutin thought him not worthy of punishment more severe than banishment to the isle of Cyprus. Charles seemed unable to bring against Marigny himself the accusation of sorcery; he however accused his wife of employing others to make the terrible images of wax. All of those thus implicated were brought, not before parliament, but in the presence of the king, of Charles, and of some barons at Vincennes. The councillors of Philip had set the example of creating courts of justice in whatever way suited their convenience. It was now the turn of the barons, and they condemned Marigny to be hanged on a gibbet; the king, on hearing of sorcery, abandoning his previous efforts to save him (1315).

Another murder was that of Marguerite, wife of Louis, who had been sent to seclusion in the château Gaillard.

The young king was beset with difficulties which required a wise head and an established authority to deal with them. A war threatened him already. Count Robert of Flanders hesitated and refused to render the homage due to the king of France on his accession. Philip would have avenged such frowardness by sequestrating the county of Nevers, held by the eldest son of the count of Flanders. But the prince appeared at the French court, and was well received. The war could only be carried on by feudal levies; when these were summoned, the noblesse of the different provinces sent in their grievances in lieu of their contingents. His legists would have counselled Philip the Fair to resist such demands; but his son had surrounded his person, not with legists, but with barons, and these remained acquiescent with the demands of their brother nobles. Of course what was granted to one could not be refused to another. But under the date of this one year, 1315, the French statute book is filled with ordinances regranting their old privileges to the noblesse, and rescinding a large portion of the voluminous legislation [such as abandoning the ancient courts of justice, abolishing the judiciary duel, the right of private war, and procedure by written deposition which had made lawyers necessary] of the French monarchs during the preceding century.[i] The general demand was that the king should hold no relations with the barons’ men. But at the same time Louis, in order to get money, made a solemn statement that “according to the law of nature every man should be born free”; from which he concluded that all Frenchmen being by nature free, the serfs of the royal domain could ransom themselves.

Serfdom began to decline from this moment, in contrast with the state of affairs in preceding centuries; freedom now became the prevailing condition amongst rural populations, as it had long been among the inhabitants of the towns--while serfdom was the exception.[b]

Whilst the monarch made these large concessions to his noblesse, he seems to have derived from them no efficient aid in the prosecution of the war with Flanders. To raise money for this purpose, he was obliged to compound with the Lombard merchants of Paris; they consented to pay so much a pound on their importations. The Jews, too, were again permitted to reside in certain cities on the payment of a tax. Louis Hutin was the first king who formally borrowed money on the credit of the state, his successors being obliged to devote to the purpose of repayment all the sums that might accrue from forfeiture and confiscation.

With an army raised at these pains and costs, Louis marched into Flanders. The Flemings were in the neighbourhood of Lille, and the French king encamped opposite to them, with a river running between the armies. The monarch had not an opportunity of putting his own valour and that of his soldiers to the proof. For the elements put a stop to hostilities, the rain pouring down in unusual torrents, flooding the camps, and destroying provisions and crops. This unsuccessful campaign flung the country into anarchy, the barons levying war wherever they could foresee profit from it; and those who had right of coinage, Charles of Valois included, making exorbitant use of it to enrich themselves at the expense of the country. The king suspended this right, but his order was set at naught; and he then strove to regulate the nature and fineness of the coin which each grandee might issue.

Whilst Charles of Valois was thus employed, the king despatched his brother, Philip, count of Poitiers, to Avignon, to hasten the election of the pope. He was there when tidings reached him that Louis Hutin had expired at Vincennes on the 5th of July, 1316. After heating himself at ball-playing, the king had descended to the cellar to quench his thirst, an imprudence that proved fatal.

PHILIP (V) THE TALL (1316-1322 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1316-1322 A.D.]]

Philip immediately hastened to Paris, and took possession of the royal palace. Charles of Valois thought at first of disputing the regency; but the armed citizens of Paris, whom Louis had enrolled for the Flemish war, with the constable at their head, drove Charles’ followers out of the Louvre. Clemence, the young widow of Louis Hutin, now announced her pregnancy. In addition to this posthumous child, Louis had left a daughter, Joan, by Marguerite of Burgundy. The duke of Burgundy, although he had been unable or unwilling to protect Marguerite, maintained the rights of her daughter, and pleaded that Philip the Fair had acknowledged her legitimacy.

Soon afterwards the queen gave birth to a son, who was christened John; but the child lived only a few days. Philip lost no time in at once claiming the rank of king, and appointing no distant day in January, 1317, for his coronation at Rheims. Charles of Valois, who was at the head of the noblesse, already began to entertain well-founded hopes of the royal succession accruing to his own family. The duke of Burgundy was pacified by obtaining one of Philip’s daughters in marriage, with a considerable sum of money in dowry, as well as Franche-Comté. Joan, daughter of Louis Hutin, whose claims the duke thus abandoned, was affianced to the only son of the count of Évreux.

The grounds for this exclusion of females from the throne of France are not to be found in any law, but in the circumstance of Joan’s mother having been stricken with infamy, with no staunch friend to defend her, whilst Philip was in possession of the royal authority, of which it would have required a civil war to dispossess him. With respect to the old Salic law afterwards invoked, it related but to fiefs and military service, and yet in fiefs it had been so generally set aside, that women succeeded to lands and to noble property in all the provinces of France. It must have been evident to the noblesse, as to others, that the descent of a fief, much more of the crown, to females weakened it for a time, and eventually rendered it liable to become the prey of personages, perhaps foreigners, who had not the interest of the kingdom at heart. The accession of Philip the Tall, therefore, and the exclusion of the daughters of Louis Hutin, were popular with the citizens, not displeasing to the noblesse, and not against the interest of the princes of the blood. And thus was it decided that the kingdom of France, instead of being considered as a patrimony that descended to direct heirs, even if female, was a high function which it required a prince to fill.

The reign of Philip the Tall was marked by no chivalrous enterprise or military feat. French and Flemings were disposed more to negotiate than fight. The chief object of Philip the Tall’s efforts and edicts was to organise a regular administration. He ordered, first, that a certain number of the members of the great council should be always with the king, a provision afterwards repeated in the order that the small or privy council (l’estroit conseil) should meet every month. [In this council cruel persecutions of the Jews and lepers were organised.] He established the chamber of accounts, and regulated the issues of the treasury, no payment to be made without the king’s own signature. The abuses of Philip’s predecessors are chiefly known by his efforts to amend them. Philip regulated parliaments, their number and their sitting. No prelate was to sit in that of Paris unless he belonged also to the king’s council. Parliament should always be attended by a baron or two. It was empowered to send commissioners into the provinces to judge causes instead of bringing the parties to Paris and thereby creating expenses. The king forbade (1316) nobles to sell fiefs or feudal property to non-nobles.[i]

Like his grandfather Philip III, Philip the Tall gave titles of nobility to people of common origin, an innovation which, by renewing the aristocratic body, assured its longevity, but at the same time altered its character. In the beginning, nobility was a personal matter; feudalism had made it an attribute of the military fief; here were the kings separating it. It is a serious change; for one day these letters of nobility will be bought, and there will be no real nobility when all the world may be noble with the power of money.

Thus threatened from above by the kings, feudalism was also threatened from below by the people. The development of the towns continued: that of the country began; the bourgeois obtained from Philip V permission to have their own military organisations; each town had a captain for its citizen companies, each bailiwick a captain-general; and it was in this century, if not in this reign, that the ecclesiastical parishes became civil communities. The country people, formerly completely isolated, were being brought more and more together, at first around the church and the castle under the surveillance of the seigniorial intendant, later under a syndic or mayor always appointed by the lord and who brought the people together to discuss their common interests.

This was the beginning of municipal organisation in country places.[b]

One of the latest schemes of Philip, much too advanced for his time, was to establish but one measure and one money throughout the kingdom. He calculated that this could not be done without great expense, and he proposed taking the fifth part of the goods of all his subjects for the purpose. But the townsfolk objected to the tax, whilst the nobles who had the right of coinage persisted in retaining so profitable a privilege. Philip was seized in the same year with dysentery and intermittent fever, which terminated in languor and confined him for months to his couch. The people did not fail to attribute his disease to the unheard-of exactions and extortions that he meditated. Philip the Tall did not live to accomplish them; he expired in January, 1322.

CHARLES (IV) THE FAIR (1322-1328 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1322-1328 A.D.]]

No one put forward any claim on the part of the daughters of Philip the Tall to the regal succession. Charles, the youngest son of Philip the Fair, was at once hailed as king; and so incontestably, that he seems to have dispensed with the ceremony of coronation. The first object with Charles, called, like his father, the Handsome or the Fair, was to leave an heir to the throne. Less cruel than Louis Hutin, he obtained a papal dispensation or divorce from his wife Blanche, not on account of the adultery of which she had been convicted, but on the plea of consanguinity. Charles immediately married Mary of Luxemburg, daughter of the late emperor Henry VII. This queen produced no heir, dying in premature childbirth within two years, when Charles married his cousin Joan, daughter of the count d’Évreux.

The first years of the reign of Charles the Fair were chiefly marked by a trial in which severity was at least warranted by justice, and in which the king and court were above sparing culprits even of the highest connection. Jourdan de Lille, lord of Casaubon, in Gascony, having married the niece of Pope John XXII, considered himself above restraint. Accused of eighteen crimes each worthy of death, the king had spared him, out of consideration for the pope; but Casaubon resumed his old habits. No traveller or merchant was safe from his rapine, nor damsel nor even man from his violence. Summoned to appear before the court of parliament to answer some of these acts, the Gascon lord beat with his own mace the royal sergeant who bore the summons. He came to Paris, nevertheless, with a noble suite, bravely reckoning on impunity. He was, however, committed to prison, tried, condemned to death, and hanged.[i]

Contemporary writers tell us little of the life of Charles IV, or of his government. We know that he paid visits to various parts of his realm, and that while so doing he confirmed the charters of certain cities of the south of France. We know, too, that in his earlier years Charles aspired to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and that for a time circumstances seemed to favour his ambition. He had the support of the pope and of the two most powerful German houses, those of Austria and of Luxemburg. But the Germans as a nation were opposed to the idea of a French emperor, and the negotiations to this end were abandoned on the death of Leopold of Austria in 1326.[k]

It would appear from the ordinances and other acts of Charles the Fair that the party of the noblesse, dominant under Louis Hutin, but repressed under Philip the Tall, recovered full authority under Charles. The Valois, who put themselves forward as the representatives of the chivalry of the age and as the enemy of the legists, appear dominant. They led an expedition against Guienne, threatened Flanders, and aided Mortimer and Isabella in the struggle which terminated in the murder of Edward II. The ordinances of Charles the Fair do not interfere with the noblesse, except to shield them from the encroachments of the king’s baillis: the lords of Auvergne and Brittany obtained especial immunities of this kind. Although armies were raised from Flemish and for Gascon war, the nobles were apparently not called upon to contribute to them except by feudal service; whilst the Parisians were called upon to keep up a body of two hundred men-at-arms, and to levy a tax on sales to meet this expenditure. Towns which had not the privileges of communes, and were without mayors or sheriffs, were ordered not to pay taille, but, instead of it, the tax on sales, of one denier in the livre, which tax was not to be levied on the produce sent to market by either nobles or clergy. Money continued to be the great trouble and principal anxiety of government, the middle and civic classes being singled out as the only ones which could regularly furnish it, except when some rich and privileged body offered itself to the greed of the spoiler.

The same fate which had carried off his brother at so young an age awaited Charles. Taken ill at Christmas, he expired at the end of January, 1328. “Thus was the entire progeny of Philip the Fair, and finer was not to be found in the kingdom of France, completely exterminated in the space of fourteen years.”[i]

ASPECTS OF CIVILISATION

The Middle Ages themselves at this moment, at least in France, were near their end, for the things they were attached to--the Crusades, chivalry, feudalism--were gone, or fast passing away; the papacy, scoffed at in the days of Boniface VIII, was captive at Avignon; the successor of Hugh Capet was a despot, and the sons of villeins were sitting in the states-general of the realm, opposite the nobles and the clergy.[b]

Two or three centuries before, France had seen a great movement accomplished in her midst, called the communal revolution. The greater part of the cities had acquired--be it pacifically, be it at the cost of struggles against the land-owners, or by dissensions and intestine wars--municipal rights combined with independent jurisdiction. Some of them had acquired a veritable sovereignty. At present, under King John, this sovereignty existed no longer. The cities had gradually returned to the royal administration, although each retained its charter; it may be said, in a general way, that they had again become dependent, since St. Louis in regard to finance, since Philip the Fair in regard to tribunals, and for the levying of militia since Philip the Tall. But, in spite of this change which took from them the character of independent republics, to make them members of a great state, they had retained considerable liberty and power of action. Their citizens formed a third order, having like the clergy or the nobility their own peculiar privileges and correlative obligations. They possessed a great and fruitful initiative for their commercial interests and their industries. They aspired to exercise a rightful influence over the government, and the states-general offered them an obvious means.

The bourgeoisie was not hostile to seigneurial aristocracy as several historians have represented, but it had different interests and different aims, since it owed its wealth and power to industry and commerce. As for industry, it is well known that the corporations of crafts assured a monopoly more or less extensive to their members, of more or less regular revenues, and the perpetuity of hereditary influence. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recall how the development of these corporations was hampered by their own laws, and if there were already some of great wealth, like those of the butchers of Paris, they were the exception. Industries were restricted in their nature in proportion as they were reduced to the usual crafts, and this was generally the case. They employed only the raw materials produced in the country, like flax, wool, or hides. They worked in iron and other metals, but having no knowledge of large machinery they had little use for coal, the principal agent of metallic production. In general, also, they produced only enough for home consumption. Exportations were confined principally to the textiles manufactured in the south which had a market in the Levant, to the woollen stuffs, serges, and tapestries of Arras, to the linens of Rheims and Picardy. Thanks to this circumstance the towns of the latter province began to rival the large industrial cities of the Netherlands.

The progress of industry was genuine, but would only follow that of commerce. Now it was principally the progress of commerce which amazed the fourteenth century. The use of the compass, of which no traces can be found before St. Louis, in permitting longer voyages, established connections, used more than formerly, between the coasts of the Mediterranean and those of the ocean and the English Channel. The commerce of the two seas, by the straits of Gibraltar, rare enough before the year 1300, took, at the beginning of that epoch, a rapid stride forward. On the other hand the triumph of Christianity and civilisation in the northern districts along the tributaries of the Baltic, accompanied by the establishment of German settlements along the coasts of that sea in Prussia and Livonia, opened to the merchants northern Europe, long infested by pirates and long difficult of access. Now began a regular exchange of the products of the north and those of the south. Amiens, whose ordinary commerce had long been restricted to Flanders, England, Scotland, and Ireland, now extended the circumference of her commerce to the Hanseatic countries and their towns, to the Scandinavian kingdoms and those of the Spanish peninsula. All these towns prospered, and following more or less the movement of the Flemish cities became store-houses for the products of northern or southern Europe and even of the merchandise of the Orient.

Bruges and Antwerp were at that period markets of great importance. The whole world seemed to gather there; the influx of strangers was unceasing. The Hanseatics, the Venetians, the Genoese elbowed the English and the merchants of all the states of the continent. This favoured that commercial movement begun in the thirteenth century, and largely increased during the first years of the fourteenth, when the cloth industry of Flanders took such a rapid stride and became powerful enough to lay down the law to the governments, a thing which has hardly been seen before. In effect it gained thereby numerous markets for the sale of its products, and abundant capital to increase its operations.

The commercial movement which had its centre in Flanders extended to a certain distance, and made itself felt in the towns of northern France. All these towns had treaties with the Flemish cities. Paris was even affiliated with the Hanseatic League, of which Bruges was the principal warehouse. The safety of navigation and maritime commerce preoccupied the French government in the fourteenth century. In order that the ownership of cargoes might be guaranteed to the ship-owners, Philip the Fair created special tribunals of commissionaires examinateurs, charged with judging the questions of flotsam and jetsam on the coasts; these tribunals were the originals of the admiralties. The government also undertook to fight piracy and restrain the usage of letters of marque. It was customary for the proprietors of a vessel robbed by pirates, if they could not obtain satisfaction from the town to which the pirates belonged, to indemnify themselves by selling for their own profit the property of foreigners of the same nation established in the realm. International conventions alone could destroy this barbarous custom. The maritime wars against England were far from being favourable to its suppression; but they helped to restrain and submit its exercise to regulations. Treaties to that effect were signed with several foreign rulers. One council, assembled in Paris in 1314, proscribed letters of marque, as contrary to religion and morals.

Certain ports were opened to foreigners. Harfleur to the merchants of Aragon, of Majorca, Castile, and Portugal who had also free entrance into the Seine; Le Crotoy and Abbeville were opened to those of Castile who had the entrée to the Somme. Philip of Valois made the agreement to maintain these ports, to suppress the taxes which hindered commerce, and to accord various privileges to foreigners, among others that of having consuls and judges of their own nationality. At Harfleur the Spaniards were included among the inhabitants, and participated in the rights of the bourgeoisie. At Rouen they occupied a particular quarter. The Italians received, in 1315, definite privileges from Louis X, in four cities--Paris, St. Omer, La Rochelle, and Nîmes. The Venetian fleet, which came annually to the port of Bruges, stopped generally at Dieppe.

The Great Fairs

The fourteenth century is the epoch of the prosperity of the great fairs. The fairs were then to the towns of considerable importance and for certain parts of France what they still are to the villages. At these fairs were bought and sold all such articles as were not common; these purchases and sales could be made only there and at certain times of the year. Since individual commerce offered a great deal of difficulty, and lacked the most indispensable elements of security, it became necessary for the merchants to agree upon the transportation of their merchandise, and to unite in order to insure the fairness, often even the simple possibility, of transactions.

The most important fairs in the fourteenth century were those of St. Denis, and the Lendit, of which the origin was in Merovingian times; those of Champagne, held at Troyes, Provins, Lagny, Rheims, and Bar-sur-Aube, protected by the regulations of Philip the Fair and Philip of Valois, those of Beaucaire in the south. They served as marts for the principal foreign productions, the linens of Holland, which were still an object of luxury; the woollens of England; the silks of Italy; the hides and leathers of Spain; the cloths of Flanders, whose superiority was recognised everywhere; the Italian stuffs, ornamented with embroidery and woven with gold; the wines of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. At Troyes were to be met the merchants of Germany and the countries of the north. To Beaucaire came those of the southern countries, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Berbers, Egyptians; the Genoese came to Beaucaire to buy the cloths woven at Narbonne, Perpignan, and Toulouse, and destined for exportation. Ordinarily the merchants of the same nation, sometimes those of the same town, formed a syndicate. At the fair of the Lendit every town had for its negotiations its particular place, as is the custom to-day in our great expositions.

All the kings, from Philip the Bold, strove to attract foreign merchants by giving them new privileges, that is to say, in multiplying the guarantees which they needed. They were exempted from certain tolls. International treaties were made to assure the free land passage of merchandise transported from one realm to another. We have a remarkable example of this sort of treaty. It was a stipulation, signed in 1327 by the kings of France, England, Spain, Aragon, Sicily, and Majorca.

The fairs of Champagne were the objects of regulations which it was aimed to make as definite and at the same time as favourable as possible. The tariff was fixed for the taxes which were collected there. Royal commissioners were chosen for the police, for brokers, and notaries, in order to assume the sincerity of transactions and of guards to certify to the quality of the merchandise sold. To the merchants of each nation was conceded the right to elect their national judges, and to submit to these judges the regulation of their disputes, except in case of appeal, which could be carried to the tribunal of fairs as a first resort, and as a second resort to the chamber of accounts. Guarantees were also accorded to foreign merchants against deterioration of money and arbitrary confiscations. In order to define the point where usury began, which the laws continued to fight, interest on commercial matter was fixed at fifteen per cent., and the stipulations of private persons were tolerated up to this figure. The importance of the fairs, and the pains taken by the government to make them popular, could not but be favourable to public wealth. A rich and enlightened bourgeoisie was founded in the large cities, at Rouen, Amiens, Rheims, Troyes, Orleans. All these towns and others enlarged their areas, raised façades of cut stone in their principal streets, constructed arcades, galleries, porticoes, and municipal buildings; but Paris already dominated them all. Her population rose to two or three hundred thousand souls. She already possessed some sort of a monopoly for the fabrication of articles of luxury.

Paris had grown with the monarchy. To the advantage of a very considerable commerce, of extended and special industries, were joined others not less important. It was an ecclesiastical and literary centre. A whole quarter was occupied by the population of the schools. Her universities, at the same time French and European, could not fail to play an important rôle in the revolutions of the country and in the discussion of the great interests of the church. Finally, Paris was the seat of parliament, that of the highest administration, the centre of government, and the residence of the court. The greater part of the provinces possessed in the quarter of the Louvre or the quarter of St. Paul, hôtels, where they lived surrounded by guards and numerous servitors, which very often occupied vast spaces with their gardens and out-houses. Ever since then the merchants from the interior or from foreign countries, able workmen, clerks, writers, the nobility, have thronged into the great capital. The bourgeoisie of Paris had more learning, more wealth, and also more pretensions than those of other towns. Their chief and natural representative, the provost of merchants, was one of the powers of the state.

The idea of a national representation, with fixed conditions and attributes, is a modern one, and was almost unknown in the Middle Ages. There were no written constitutions in existence, except civic charters, which had a purely local character. The government on its part, without being absolute, admitted of no binding control. In the meantime, public opinion was being consulted, as it became necessary to reckon with it, and the independence which asserted itself everywhere. In the thirteenth century deputies from the cities were convoked and consulted separately; in the fourteenth they were combined with those of the clergy or the nobility of the provincial estates or the states-general. But no fixed rule was followed. It was the king and his officers who determined each time the conditions and the forms of the election.[k]

FOOTNOTES

[13] [Boutaric,[d] who has made a special study of the reign of Philip the Fair, bases his account of the remarkable events at Anagni on the narratives of Rinaldo de Supino and of Nogaret[l] himself rather than on those of Giovanni Villani[m] and Walsingham,[n] the source of most modern historians. Nogaret’s alleged speech is from the chronicle of St. Denis.[o]

Nogaret says that Philip had sent him to Rome to demand the summoning of a council, but Boniface in fear of the hostile population had retired to his native Anagni. Nogaret learned of the impending excommunication of his master and determined to prevent it at all costs. The Ghibellines of Romagna listened to his plan, and Rinaldo de Supino, their leader and his friend, agreed to accompany Nogaret to Anagni and bring Boniface to terms.

But Nogaret was compelled to take full leadership and promise the protection of France, from all consequences, temporal or spiritual, to his allies. Sciarra Colonna, the pope’s mortal enemy, now joined the scheme. All of this would indicate that Nogaret acted on his own responsibility in the matter of the descent on Anagni, wishing only to protect the king of France from the curse of excommunication, and that the latter was in no way connected with the conception of the affair. As to the events at Anagni, Boutaric says:

“There are fables that Colonna struck the pope in the face with his gauntlet; that he was tied to a donkey with his face toward its tail and paraded through Anagni in the midst of insults; but all these stories should be rejected. It seems certain that the person of Boniface was respected. Nogaret contented himself with holding him captive and pestering him to consent to the convoking of the council. Boniface was immovable; Nogaret was at his wits’ end. After a lapse of three days the people, ashamed of their treachery, came to demand Boniface. Nogaret was obliged to flee.” Dareste[k] holds Colonna guiltless of violence but thinks that others might have injured the pope but for Nogaret.]

[14] The échiquier of Rouen was the ancient feudal court of the dukes of Normandy; it was held alternately at Rouen, Falaise, and Caen. Philip the Fair put royal magistrates at its head and fixed it at Rouen, where it met twice a year at Easter and Michaelmas, whence the expression les deux échiquiers. The grands jours were presided over by a judicial commission appointed by the king, but like the échiquier of Rouen it was a local institution that had already long existed.

[15] [Perhaps Guizot’s[p] slightly dissenting view is worth quoting. He says: “It has often been asserted that Philip the Fair was the first who called the third estate to the states-general of the kingdom. The phrase is too grand, and the fact was not new. Under St. Louis deputies of towns were called around the king to deliberate upon certain legislative acts. There are other examples of this. Philip the Fair, then, had not the honour of the first call; and, with regard to assemblies of this kind which occur under his reign, far too great an idea of them is formed. These meetings were very brief, almost accidental, without influence upon the general government of the kingdom, and deputies of towns held but a very inferior place in them. Nevertheless under Philip the Fair they became more frequent than before.”]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us