_The Rise of the Capetian Kings and the Growth of Feudal Paris_
From 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the
Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers at
Paris were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[39] grandson and
great-grandson of Robert the Strong. They revolutionized the ideal of
kingship and founded the line of kings of France which stretches
onward through history for a thousand years until the guillotine of
the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom Dante, following
a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of Paris, and whom he
hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust and purging their
avarice in the fifth cornice of Purgatory.
[Footnote 39: The surname Capet is said to have originated in the
_capet_ or hood of the abbot's mantle which Hugh wore as lay Abbot of
St. Martin's, having laid aside the crown after his coronation.]
Their patrimony was a small one--the provinces of the Isle de France,
La Brie, La Beauce, Beauvais and Valois; but their sway extended over
the land of the Langue d'oil, with its strenuous northern life, _le
doux royaume de la France_, the sweet realm of France, whose head was
Paris, cradle of the great French Monarchy and home of art, learning
and chivalry. The globe of the earth, symbol of universal empire,
gives way to the hand of justice as the emblem of kingship. The Capets
were, it is true, at first little more than seigneurs over other
seigneurs, some of whom were almost as powerful as they; but that
little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were consecrated of the
Church, and the support of the French jurists, contained within them a
promise and potency of future grandeur. They were the Lord's anointed,
supported by the Lord's Vicar on earth: to disobey them was to disobey
God: tribal sovereignty was to give way to territorial sovereignty.
The people, long forsaken by their emperors, had in their turn
forsaken them, in order "not to be at the mercy of all the great ones
they surrendered themselves to one of the great ones" and in exchange
for protection gave troth and service. Cities, churches and
monasteries now assumed a new aspect. Paris had demonstrated the value
of a walled city, and during the latter part of the Norman terror,
from all parts of North France, monks and nuns and priests had brought
their holy relics within it as to a city of refuge. Gone were its
lines of villas from Gallo-Roman times extending freely into the
country. The ample spaces within gave place to crowded houses and
narrow streets held in a rigid ring of walls and moats. The might of
the archbishops, bishops and abbots increased: they sat in the
councils of kings and dominated the administration of justice; the
moral, social and political life of the country centred around them.
Armed with the sword and the cross they held almost absolute sway over
their little republics, coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small
armies and went to the chase in almost regal state.
The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in
Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the
end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life.
Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful
penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers
poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night
of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the
bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath
of God, the old world "seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast
off her outworn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white
vesture of new churches." Everywhere in Europe, and especially in
Paris and in France, men strove in emulation to build the finest
temples to God. The wooden roofs of the Merovingian and Carlovingian
basilicas had ill withstood the ravage of war and fire. Stone took the
place of wood, the heavy thrust of the roof led to increased mural
strength, walls were buttressed, columns thickened. Massive towers of
defence, at first round, then polygonal, then square, flanked the west
fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred vessels and relics might be
preserved and defended in case of attack. Soon spaces are clamant for
decoration and the stone soars into the beauty of Gothic vaulting and
tracery.
The growth of Paris is more intimately associated with the Capets than
with any of the earlier dynasties, and at no period in its history is
the ecclesiastical expansion more marked. Under the long reign of
Hugh's son, King Robert the Pious, no less than fourteen monasteries
and seven churches were built or rebuilt in or around the city; a new
and magnificent palace and hall of Justice, with its royal chapel
dedicated to St. Nicholas, rose on the site of the old Roman basilica
and palace in the Cite. The king was no less charitable than pious;
troops of the poor and afflicted followed him when he went abroad, and
he fed a thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his
munificent piety, he was early made to feel the power of the Church.
His union with Queen Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he
had married a year before his accession, was condemned by the pope as
incestuous, and he was summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved
his wife dearly, resisted the papal authority, and excommunication and
interdict followed.[40] Everyone fled from him; only the servants are
said to have remained, who purged with fire all the vessels which were
contaminated by the guilty couple's touch. The misery of his people at
length subdued the king's spirit, and he cast off his faithful and
beloved queen.
[Footnote 40: A dramatic representation of the delivery of the papal
bull, painted by Jean Paul Laurens, hangs in the museum of the
Luxembourg.]
The beautiful and imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor,
proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the
anathemas of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from
her southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes,
invaded the court at Paris and shocked the austere piety of the king.
He perceived the corrupting influence on the simple manners of the
Franks of their licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute
lives, but was powerless to dismiss them. The tyrannous temper of his
new consort became the torment of his life. He was forced even to
conceal his acts of charity. One day, on returning from prayers,
Robert perceived that his lance by the queen's orders had been adorned
with richly chased silver. He looked around his palace and was not
long in finding a poor, tattered wretch whom he ordered to search for
a tool, and the pair locked themselves in a room; the silver was soon
stripped from the lance, the king hastily thrust it into the beggar's
wallet and bade him escape before the queen discovered the loss. The
poor whom he admitted to his table, despite the angry protests of the
queen, at times ill repaid his charity. On one occasion a tassel of
gold was cut from his robe, and on the thief being discovered the
king simply remarked: "Well, perhaps he has greater need of it than I,
may God bless its service to him." The very fringe was sometimes
stripped from his cloak as he walked abroad, but he never could be
induced to punish any of these poor spoilers of his person. It is in
King Robert's reign that we read of one of the earliest revolts
against the institution of slavery, which was regarded as an integral
part of the divine order of things. It was the custom of the Church at
Paris to send serfs to the law courts to give evidence for their
bishop or prior, or to do battle for them in the event of a judicial
duel. The freemen in the eleventh century began to rebel against
fighting with a despised serf, and refused the duel, whereupon early
in the next century the king and his court decided that the serfs
might lawfully testify and fight against freemen, and whoso refused
the trial by battle should lose his suit and suffer excommunication.
The prelates exchanged serfs, used them as substitutes in times of
war, allowed them to marry outside their church or abbey only by
special permission and on condition that all children were equally
divided between the two proprietors. If a female serf married a
freeman he and their children became serfs. Serfs were only permitted
to make a will by consent of their master; every favour was paid for
and liberty bought at a great price. Merchants even and artizans in
towns owed part of their produce to the seigneur. In the eleventh
century burgesses as well as serfs and Jews were given to churches,
exchanged, sold or left in wills by their seigneurs. The story of
mediaeval Paris is the story of the efforts of serf and burgess to win
their economic freedom.
The declining years of King Robert were embittered by the impiety of
rebellious sons, who were reduced to submission only at the price of a
protracted and bloody campaign in Burgundy. The broken-hearted father
did not long survive his victory. He died in 1031, and the benisons
and lamentations of the poor and lowly winged his spirit to its rest.
If we may believe some writers, pious King Robert's memory is
enshrined in the hymnology of the Church, which he enriched with some
beautiful compositions. He was often seen to enter St. Denis in regal
habit to lead the choir at matins, and would sometimes challenge the
monks to a singing contest.
In 1053, towards the end of Henry I.'s almost unchronicled reign, an
alarming rumour came to Paris. The priests of St. Ermeran at Ratisbon
claimed to have possession of the body of St. Denis, which they
alleged had been stolen from the abbey in 892 by one Gisalbert. The
loss of a province would not have evoked livelier emotion, and Henry
at once took measures to convince France and Christendom that the true
body was still at St. Denis. Before an immense concourse of bishops,
abbots, princes and people, presided over by the king, his brother and
the archbishops of Rheims and of Canterbury, the remains of St. Denis
and his two companions were solemnly drawn out of the silver coffers
in which they had been placed by Dagobert, together with a nail from
the cross and part of the crown of thorns, all locked with two keys in
a chest richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in
a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession
they were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored
to their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests of Ratisbon,
fortified with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to
the possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the
devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations
to the relics at St. Denis.
The chief architectural event of Henry's reign at Paris was the
rebuilding on a more magnificent scale of the Merovingian church and
abbey of St. Martin in the Fields (des Champs), whose blackened walls
and desolate lands were eloquent of the Norman terror. The buildings
stood outside Paris about a mile beyond the Cite on the great Roman
road to the north, where St. Martin on his way to Paris healed a
leper. The foundation, which soon grew to be one of the wealthiest in
France, included a hostel for poor pilgrims endowed by Philip I. with
a mill on the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an
oven.[41] In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was
secularised, the abbot was patron of twenty-nine priories, three
vicarates and thirty-five parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some
of the old building has been incorporated in the existing
Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. The Gothic Priory chapel, with its
fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a machinery-room, and the
refectory, one of the most precious and beautiful creations attributed
to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.
[Footnote 41: The possession of an oven was a lucrative monopoly in
mediaeval times. The writer has visited a village in South Italy where
this curious privilege is still possessed by the parish priest, who
levies a small indemnity of a few loaves, made specially of larger
size, for each use of the oven.]
Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a
depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became
king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and
dishonour his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and
brigandage. Early in his career he followed the evil counsels of his
provost Etienne, and purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St.
Germain des Pres to pay for his dissolute pleasures. "As the
sacrilegious pair," says the chronicler, "drew near the relics,
Etienne was smitten with blindness and the terrified Philip fled."
Philip after a reign void of honour or profit to France left his son
Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to little
more than a baronage over a few _comtes_, whose cities of Paris,
Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by
insolent and rebellious vassals. Many of the great seigneurs were but
freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and lawlessness of these
and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail on merchants and
travellers, made commerce almost impossible. Corruption, too, had
invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the thrones of bishops, and
a dual effort was made by king and Church to remedy the evils of the
times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the
Church might be purged of wolves in sheep's clothing: the Capetian
monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent
and powerful vassals to law and obedience.
In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of
Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort
on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held
up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out--"Where is
the archbishop?" he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse,
gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was
transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging
permission to kiss the old man's hand and to offer him a noble escort
to safeguard him through his territory. It was the moral influence of
prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the
hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the
bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices
from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money,
and to make and unmake kings.
The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw
the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France,
religious houses--the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Citeaux,
Clairvaux--sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all
stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord,
"adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by
their purity and righteousness."
St. Bernard, the terror of mothers and of wives, by his austerity, his
loving-kindness,[42] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his
absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate
eloquence, carried all before him and became the dictator of
Christendom. He it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father,
his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of
Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the
beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the
very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and
comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than
seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth
century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to
wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting
garments[43] looked like harlots rather than monks.
[Footnote 42: He was said to be "kind even to Jews."]
[Footnote 43: The indignant scribe is most precise: they walked abroad
_artatis clunibus et protensis natibus_.]
In the polluting atmosphere of Philip's reign matters had grown worse.
St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as "a house of
Satan, a den of thieves." "The walls of the churches of Christ were
resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish;
their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to
charm the eyes of the rich."
In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fosses at
Paris seemed so hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather
than imperil his soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In
1107 the bishop of Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey
of St. Eloy and extirpate the evils there flourishing, for the nuns,
it was reported, had so declined in grace, owing to the proximity of
the court and intercourse with the world, that they had lost all sense
of shame and lived in open sin, breaking the bonds of common decency.
The scandal was so great that the bishop determined to cut them off
from the house of the Lord; the abbey was reduced to a priory and
given over to the abbot of the now reformed monastery of St. Maur, and
its vast lands were parcelled out into several parishes.[44] The
rights of the canons of Notre Dame were to be maintained; on St.
Eloy's day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish them with six pigs,
two and a half measures of wine and three of fine wheat, and on St.
Paul's day with eight sheep, the same quantity of wine, six crowns and
one obole. The present Rue de la Cite and the Boulevard du Palais give
approximately the east and west boundaries of the suppressed abbey,
part of whose site is now occupied by the Prefecture de Police.
[Footnote 44: The reformers always discover the nunneries to be so
much more corrupt than the monasteries, but it is a little suspicious
that in every case the former are expropriated to the latter. The
abbot of St. Maur evidently had some qualms concerning the
expropriation of St. Eloy, and wished to restore it to the bishop.]
But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris,
1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting,
against the majority of the Council, the pope's decrees excluding
married clerics from the churches, and the reform of the canons of
Notre Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent
in 1128 to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and
canons, supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was
stripped of his revenues and hastened back to his metropolitan, the
archbishop of Sens. The archbishop laid Paris under interdict and the
influence of St. Bernard himself was needed to compose the quarrel.
On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the
abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor[45] at Paris were
ambushed and the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of
Louis VII., Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the
troubles excited at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia, and
celebrated mass before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve.
The canons had stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on
which the pontiff's knees might rest, and when he retired to the
sacristy to disrobe, his officers claimed the carpet, according to
usage. The canons and their servants resisted, there was a bout of
fisticuffs and sticks, the king intervened, anointed majesty himself
was struck, and during the scuffle which ensued the carpet was torn to
shreds in a tug-of-war between the claimants. Here was urgent need for
reform. The pope decided to introduce the new discipline and appointed
a fresh set of canons. The dispossessed canons met them with insults
and violence, drowned their voices by howling and other indignities,
and only ceased on being threatened with the loss of their eyes and
other secular penalties.
[Footnote 45: _See_ note 2, p. 63.]
Louis VI., the _noble damoiseau_ as he is called by the Chronicle of
St. Denis, enthroned in 1108, was the pioneer of the great French
Monarchy, ever on the move, hewing his way, sword in hand, through his
domains, subduing the violence, and burning and razing the castles of
his insolent and disobedient vassals. The famous Suger, abbot of St.
Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, who led the Church to make
common cause with him and lend her diocesan militia. The king would
have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and
merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary,
destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword
from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage
in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of
the people with that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant
soldier-king, destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of
the Church, the vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of
France from the mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just
government.
It is in Louis' reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme
(golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin's
cloak as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a
formidable army was menacing the land. Louis rallied all his friends
to withstand him and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. Pope
Eugene and Abbot Suger received Louis, who fell prostrate before the
relics. Suger then took from the altar the standard--famed to have
been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by the first liege man of
the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery was in danger of
attack--and handed it to the king: the pope gave him a pilgrim's
wallet. The sacred banner was fashioned of silk in the form of a
gonfalon, of the colours of fire and gold, and was suspended at the
head of a gilded lance.[46]
[Footnote 46: A modern reproduction may be seen in the church of St.
Denis, but the exact shape is doubtful, no less than three different
forms being known to antiquarians.]
The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris,
which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king
and the seat of his government. The market which from Roman times had
been held at the bifurcation of the northern road near the fields
(Champeaux), belonging to St. Denis of the Prison, was extended.
William of Champeaux founded the great abbey of St. Victor,[47] famed
for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas of
Canterbury, whose hair shirt was long preserved there, and St. Bernard
lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife Adelaide, the king built a
nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed it with lands, ovens, the
house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some shops and a
slaughter-house in Paris, and a small _bourg_, still known as Bourg la
Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of fishing
at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings yearly from
the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of Ste.
Genevieve la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying of
the plague of the burning sickness (_les ardents_); of St. Jacques de
la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Boeufs, so named from the heads
of oxen carved on the portal, were also built.
[Footnote 47: The abbey was suppressed at the time of the Revolution
and the site is now occupied by the Halle aux Vins.]