FRANCE UNDER PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND ST. LOUIS (1180–1270)[32]
Home Policy of Philip Augustus—The Fall of the Angevins and the
Conquest of Normandy and Anjou—The Albigensian Crusade—The
establishment of Simon of Montfort in Toulouse, and the
Reaction under Raymond VII.—The Relations of Philip and his
People—Paris—Administrative Reforms—Death and Character of
Philip—Reign of Louis VIII.—The Conquest of Poitou and the Renewal
of the Albigensian Crusade—The Regency of Blanche of Castille and
the Feudal Reaction—The Treaty of Meaux—Character of St. Louis—His
Personal Government—The Settlement of the South and West—Battle of
Saintes and Treaty of Lorris—Alfonse in Poitou and Toulouse—Charles
in Anjou and Provence—Foreign Policy of St. Louis—His Relations to
Pope and Emperor—France the Chief Power of Europe—Home Policy
of St. Louis—The Administrative System—Baillages and
Sénéchaussées—Enquesteurs—The Parliament of Paris—Finance, Coinage,
Trade, Towns—Last Years and Death of St. Louis—The Position of
France.
We have already dealt with the external history of France up to the time
of the battle of Bouvines. We have witnessed Philip Augustus’ early
struggles with Henry of Anjou, his participation in the Third Crusade,
his matrimonial difficulties, the struggle they involved him in with
Innocent III., and the subsequent league between himself and the great
Pope which contributed so powerfully towards the abasement of the
Guelfs. It remains now to speak of Philip Augustus’ reign as affecting
France itself, and to show how, by the defeat and disruption of the
Angevin monarchy, the royal domain was enormously extended, how by the
identification of the monarchical cause with the orthodox Crusade
against the Albigensian heretics the way was paved for the subjection of
the Langue d’oc to the Langue d’oil, and how the beginnings of the
centralised administration of the monarchy, and the establishment of the
first modern capital, increased the power of the French state, even more
than Philip’s conquests increased the extent of its dominions.
[Sidenote: Home policy of Philip Augustus, 1180–1223.] Under Philip’s
son, Louis VIII., and his grandson, Louis IX., the same principles of
external growth and internal organisation were still further worked out,
so that when the collapse of Frederick II. left vacant the hegemony of
Europe, the France of St. Louis was more than ready to step into the
place left empty by the fall of the Hohenstaufen.
[Sidenote: The Fall of the Angevins.]
With the return of Philip II. from the Crusade, the interrupted struggle
between France and the Angevin monarchy was at once resumed. Despite the
advantages which the blundering knight-errantry of Richard I. offered to
his more politic antagonist, Philip was not yet in a sufficiently strong
position to reap much fruit from his enemy’s mistakes. Richard’s new
castle of Chateau Gaillard blocked the way to the invasion of Normandy,
and the South was still a strange region to the King of Paris. In 1199
Richard perished in an obscure contest with a petty lord of the
Limousin, and Philip at once swooped down on Evreux and conquered it
with little difficulty. But very soon Philip’s quarrel with Innocent
III. made him glad to accept the proposals of John’s mother, the aged
Eleanor of Aquitaine, to revert to his ancient alliance with John. A
treaty was signed by which Philip’s son Louis was married to Blanche of
Castile, the daughter of King Alfonso VIII. and John’s sister Eleanor.
Evreux, with Philip’s other Norman conquests, were made over to the
bridegroom as the lady’s marriage portion. Before long, however, the
wilful and capricious tyranny of John created a widespread discontent in
his French dominions, of which Philip was skilful enough to avail
himself to the full. No sooner had the French monarch made a partial
peace with the Pope than he listened to the complaints of the barons of
Poitou, headed by the indignant Hugh of Lusignan, Count of La Marche,
whose betrothed, Isabella, the heiress of Angoulême, had been carried
off from him and wedded to the English King. In 1202 Philip summoned
John to answer before his suzerain’s court at Paris the complaints of
the Poitevin lords. The English King refused to appear, and was
sentenced in default to lose all his French fiefs. The murder of Arthur
of Brittany still further increased the ill-will felt against John, and
the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine soon afterwards deprived him of his
wisest counsellor. In the course of 1203–4 Philip gradually conquered
all Normandy, and the Norman barons, disgusted at John’s inactivity in
defending them, were gradually alienated from his side. Anjou, Touraine,
and Maine were won with even less difficulty. [Sidenote: The conquest of
Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou.] After Arthur’s death, Brittany passed over
from the Angevin to the Capetian obedience, and, after a brief period of
French occupation, a new line of Breton began in 1213 with Peter
Mauclerc, which, if not very faithful to France, at least acknowledged
no other overlord. After Eleanor’s death the personal loyalty of
Aquitaine to the house of the Guilhems was greatly relaxed, and before
1213 most of Poitou had passed over to Philip Augustus. It was John’s
wish to win back Poitou that led him to interfere actively in the
general European struggle that centred round the contest between his
nephew Otto and Frederick of Sicily. The victory of Bouvines assured for
Philip the permanent domination over Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine,
and Poitou. Only the south of Aquitaine remained in the hands of John
and his successors. These enormous additions to the monarchy were, for
the most part, kept within the royal domain. Their acquisition was the
more significant because of the rapidity with which the barons and
people of the Angevin dominions accepted the rule of the King of France.
Even in England Philip’s triumph produced so little irritation that the
opposition to John cheerfully called in his son Louis to be their king
in the place of the hated tyrant.[33] Though, after John’s death, Louis
was forced in 1217 to return to France and renounce his English throne
in favour of the little Henry III., his presence in England, and the
long war that preceded and attended it, made impossible any real efforts
to win back the Angevin inheritance. [Sidenote: Louis in England.
1215–1217.] The fall of the English power in France first made possible
a real French nation united in common obedience to the Capetian
monarchs. It was no less vital in fostering a similar national life
beyond the Channel. Henceforth England and France were separate and
antagonistic though closely inter-related nationalities. Their common
destiny, which had begun with the Norman Conquest, was now rudely
shattered. The fragments of the Aquitanian heritage that still remained
faithful to its English dukes belonged to the feudal and
anti-monarchical South. All that England’s kings had once ruled in the
Langue d’oil was now transferred to Philip, who became henceforward not
only the supreme monarch, but the direct feudal lord of the most
vigorous and most patriotic regions that constituted his kingdom.
[Sidenote: Philip II. and the South.]
While Philip was thus conquering the Angevin North, a North-French
Crusade was indirectly preparing the way for the direct rule of the
Capetian kings over the South. There had long been three chief political
and intellectual centres of South French nationality. Two of these, the
duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Toulouse [see pp. 90–91], were
within the limits of the French kingdom. The third, the county of
Provence, was beyond the Rhone, and, as a part of the ancient Arelate,
subject to none save the Emperor. It was, however, a sufficiently
representative stronghold of Southern ideas for the term Provençal to be
used as an equivalent to the tongue and literature of Oc. At these three
courts chiefly flourished the subtle and exquisite literature of the
Troubadours, whose delicate lyrics first showed the literary capacity of
the vernacular Romance tongues, despite the limitations of their
subjects, and the rigid fetters of their metric forms. [Sidenote: The
Albigensian Heresy and the Troubadours.] The end of the twelfth century,
the age of Richard the Lion Heart, of Bertrand of Born, and of Bernard
of Ventadour, was the palmiest time in the history of the Troubadours,
and the most flourishing period of the brilliant, corrupt, stormy,
attractive civilisation of the Languedoc. The heresy, at once social and
religious, of the Albigenses [see pp. 216–217], took a deep hold in
these wild regions, where the fiercest acts of feudal violence and the
hot-house growth of a premature culture stood over-against each other in
the strangest contrast. While elsewhere the wild misbelief of the
twelfth century easily melted away before the steady influence of the
Church, in Languedoc and Provence alone it bade fair to become the faith
of a whole people. Toulouse and its neighbourhood were full of open foes
of Church and clergy; the barons of the land were either heretics
themselves, or favourers of heresy. The clergy were so unpopular that
when they went abroad they carefully concealed their tonsure. ‘I had
rather be a chaplain,’ became a popular form of speech in cases where a
good Christian had been wont to say, ‘I had rather be a Jew.’ ‘If Black
Monks,’ wrote the poet Peire Cardinal, ‘may win salvation of God by much
eating and by the keeping of women, White Monks by fraud, Templars and
Hospitallers by pride, Canons by lending money on usury, then for fools
I hold St. Peter and St. Andrew, who suffered for God such grievous
torments. Kings, emperors, counts, and knights were wont to rule the
world, but now I see clerks holding dominion over it by robbery, deceit,
hypocrisy, force, and exhortation.’[34] The freebooting barons took this
state of feeling as an excuse for laying violent hands on the property
of the Church. Moral excesses, wilder than the ordinary immorality of a
brutal age, became widespread. The whole land was filled with the tumult
and licence of a premature revolution.
[Sidenote: Raymond VI. of Toulouse.]
Since the absorption of Aquitaine within the Angevin dominions, the
court of Toulouse had become more important than ever as a centre of
Languedocian life. Raymond VI., the great-grandson of Raymond IV., of
Saint Gilles, the hero of the First Crusade, was then Count of Toulouse.
He was a prince of wide connections, extensive dominions, and
considerable personal capacity. Through his mother, Constance, daughter
of Louis VI., he was the first cousin of Philip Augustus. His marriage
with Joan of Anjou, the sister of Richard I. and John, had secured him
peace with his hereditary foe. He ruled not only over Toulouse and its
dependencies; as Duke of Narbonne he was lord of the Rouergue and the
great coast region that extended from the frontiers of Roussillon to the
right bank of the Rhone; as Marquis of Provence, he ruled over a fertile
portion of the Arelate on the left bank of the Rhone, extending farther
north than Valence, and including the important town of Avignon. He was
a notorious enemy of the clergy, and abettor of heretics, and only less
conspicuous in the same policy was his vassal Raymond Roger, Viscount of
Béziers. Feeble efforts had long been made by the Church to grapple with
the growing heresy, but the only response in Languedoc was fresh murders
of priests, and expulsions of bishops from their dioceses, and of abbots
from their monasteries. So far back as 1184 Lucius III. had ordered all
bishops to make inquiries as to the presence of heretics within their
jurisdictions, a step from which the earlier or Episcopal Inquisition
first arose. But little was actually effected until the accession of
Innocent III. marked the beginning of a more vigorous line of action. In
1198 two Cistercian monks were sent with the position of apostolic
legates to win back the Toulousan heretics to the Church. For years they
laboured incessantly, wandering and preaching throughout the land, and
their unwearied zeal soon led a small band of enthusiasts to join them
in their work. Innocent gave further powers to Peter of Castelnau, and
Amaury, abbot of Cîteaux. In 1206 accident further associated with them
the Spanish canon Dominic (see chapter xviii.), who for ten long years
preached with infinite perseverance, but little success, and carefully
kept himself free from share in the violent measures that ere long
supplemented the legitimate propaganda of orthodoxy.
[Sidenote: Murder of Peter of Castelnau, 1208.]
Peaceful means had availed little to win over the Albigenses. Accident
rather than design led Innocent III. to fall back on force as well as
persuasion. In 1207 Peter of Castelnau excommunicated Raymond VI. for
refusing to restore certain churches on which he had laid violent hands.
Like his father-in-law against Becket, Raymond spoke sharp words against
the meddlesome priest, and one of his knights, taking him at his word,
went to Saint-Gilles and murdered the legate in January 1208. This deed
of blood was soon amply avenged. Innocent III. deposed Raymond and
preached a Crusade against him and his heretic subjects, whom he
pronounced worse than Saracens. A twenty years’ struggle then began in
the South, which did not end until Languedoc lay ruined and helpless at
the mercy of the North.
[Sidenote: The Albigensian Crusade and Simon de Montfort.]
A swarm of North French warriors took the cross in obedience to the
papal appeal, though Philip Augustus prudently withheld from the whole
movement. Some of the greatest of his feudatories, including the Duke of
Burgundy, were there, while among the lesser lords, the unbending will
and fierce religious zeal of Simon, Count of Montfort, soon gave him the
claim for the first position among the leaders of the holy war, though
Abbot Amaury of Cîteaux, the Pope’s legate, directed the policy of the
whole expedition. Raymond quailed before the storm. He submitted himself
absolutely to the legate, paid a severe penance for his crime before the
abbey church of Saint-Gilles, surrendered his castles, and promised to
chastise the heretics that he had favoured. In June 1209 he was
absolved, and suffered to take the cross against his own subjects.
Raymond Roger of Béziers scorned to share in his overlord’s submission.
The full fury of the Crusaders was turned against him, and after fearful
bloodshed his dominions were overrun. After two refusals from greater
lords, the legate prevailed upon Simon of Montfort to accept the
territory of the heretic viscount, which the Pope had pronounced
forfeited. The Crusaders now went home, and the second act of the long
struggle began when Montfort began to govern the dominions which his
good sword and papal favour had won for him.
After the return of the Northern armies, the cowed Southerners again
plucked up courage, and Montfort soon found that he had to hold Béziers
and Carcassonne against the hostility of a whole people. The war now
assumed a political as well as a religious character, for Simon was
resisted not only by reason of his orthodoxy, but as a Northern
interloper who had made religious zeal a pretext for personal
aggrandisement. Before long Raymond VI. forgot his humiliation, and gain
took arms. As the result, a second Crusade was proclaimed in 1211, and
once more the South was deluged in blood. [Sidenote: Peter of Aragon and
the battle of Muret, 1213.] Peter II. of Aragon, a famous Crusader
beyond the Pyrenees, at last proposed his mediation, but so strongly did
the lust for Southern estates sharpen the religious zeal of the army of
the Church that, though Innocent III. was willing to accept his offers,
the French themselves insisted on continuing the Crusade. Irritated at
the rejection of his offer, Peter himself intervened on behalf of the
Count of Toulouse, but in 1213 he lost his army and his life at the
battle of Muret, where Montfort’s clever tactics won a decided victory.
This settled the fate of the South. Raymond VI. abandoned Toulouse, and
was glad to save his life by another abject submission. [Sidenote: Simon
de Montfort, Count of Toulouse.] Simon de Montfort became Count of
Toulouse and Duke of Narbonne. He divided his new territories amongst
Northern lords who stipulated to follow the ‘customs of France,’ that
is, of their own homes. It was even a favour that some of the less
guilty vassals, such as the Counts of Foix and Comminges, were allowed,
at the price of a complete humiliation, to receive back their lands as
his subjects. As a still greater favour a mere fragment of Toulouse and
the imperial marquisate of Provence were conferred on Raymond VII., the
son of the deposed Count, who was glad to abdicate in his favour. In the
midst of the storms of war, the heresy of the Albigenses was slowly
stamped out, and with it perished all that was most distinctive of
Languedocian civilisation. The stern, brutal, effective rule of the
Northern Count prepared the way for direct royal government. The
dependence of the South on the North had begun.
As the struggle proceeded, Philip Augustus gradually departed from his
careful policy of non-intervention. In 1213 he allowed his son Louis to
take the cross, and helped Montfort to destroy the feudal castles of the
South. Philip himself willingly invested Simon with the fief which his
sword had won. But in a very few years Raymond VII. strove to win back
for the house of Saint-Gilles its ancient position, and the Languedoc
rose enthusiastically in his favour. The younger Raymond was as orthodox
as Montfort, and under his influence the struggle became a mere
political contest. As such it waged with varying fortunes for more than
thirteen years. [Sidenote: The Languedocian reaction, Amaury de
Montfort, and Raymond VII.] Simon was slain in 1218 as he strove to
storm revolted Toulouse, and his eldest son, Amaury, who had few of his
great gifts, was soon hard pressed by the triumphant Raymond. In 1219
Louis of France again led a Crusade in his favour. The death of the
suspected Raymond VI. in 1222 was a further advantage to the Southern
cause. Amaury soon saw that his chances were hopeless. When the French
king died in 1223, Amaury had already offered to resign his claims in
favour of his suzerain.
Thus Philip Augustus by force and cunning made France a great State.
There was no longer any vassal of the crown whose power overshadowed
that of his sovereign, and the strongest feudatories of the monarchy now
found it prudent to be on good terms with their mighty overlord. To them
Philip was courteous and friendly. He had so much work to do in
absorbing his conquests that he might well leave his vassals a good deal
to themselves. [Sidenote: Philip II.’s dealings with barons, clergy, and
towns.] Yet he never neglected an opportunity for extending his power,
and systematically strove to establish direct relations with all the
tenants of his vassals whom he could draw within his reach. Over his own
tenants he exercised a constant and watchful superintendence. By the
perfection of the administration of his domains, and by the gradual
extension of the sphere of the royal courts, he was able to pose as the
protector of peace, the friend of the poor, and the champion of the
independence and integrity of the nation. The humiliated feudalists took
his pay and fought his battles. The conciliated clergy glorified his
liberality and piety. Yet all his friendship with Pope and prelates did
not prevent Philip from keeping a tight hand over the great dignitaries
of the Church. He forced the prelates to pay their full share of suit
and service. He strove to minimise the constant interference of the
papal authority, even when his interests and his principles forbade him
to openly set himself against it. He was a good friend to the townsmen.
He felt himself so strong that he could abandon the feeble and tentative
policy of his predecessors, and boldly strike an alliance with the
communes, though still discouraging the more revolutionary aspects of
the communal movement. He was thus able to put even cities outside his
domain under the royal protection. Nor did he content himself with
giving towns charters of liberties. He loved to strengthen their
fortifications, rebuild their walls, encourage their industries, and
protect their commerce. He encouraged foreign merchants to attend French
markets and purchase French goods. [Sidenote: Growth of Paris.] Under
his fostering care Paris, already a great city, became the first modern
capital of a centralised national state. He built a strong wall, taking
in the schools of the south bank of the Seine, the royal residence and
the cathedral in the island city, and the busy town of merchants and
manufactures that was soon to make the north bank of the Seine the
largest district of the capital. He ordered that the whole city should
be paved with hard and firm stones. In his days the University of Paris
received its first royal charters of privilege. Under him a crowd of
fair buildings, conspicuous among them the cathedral of the capital,
grew up in that new Gothic style that was soon to spread from the Isle
of France all over the Western world. As the seat of the most famous
schools north of the Alps, as the centre of the only centralised
continental monarchy, and as the special haunt of the traders of
Northern Gaul, Paris now took a unique place, not only among French
towns, but among the cities of Western Europe.
[Sidenote: Philip’s administrative reforms.]
Philip was a soldier and diplomatist rather than an administrator or a
legislator. His mission was to endow the monarchy with adequate force
rather than to organise it or to govern it after new fashions. Yet the
circumstances of his position compelled him to make new departures in
the administrative history of France, and thus to lay the foundation of
the system which was perfected by his famous grandson. The burdens
thrown upon the royal court were now such that they could no longer be
adequately discharged by casual assemblies of ignorant feudalists. The
delicate functions of the chief officers of state could no longer be put
into the hands of the baron in whose hands happened to lie the
hereditary sergeanty. Hence, under Philip, we observe a further
specialisation of an official class of knights and clerks whose skill
and training could supplement the haphazard and uncertain services of
the great barons. The system of administration that was enough for the
scanty domains of his predecessors would have broken down under the
responsibilities involved by the conquest of Normandy and Anjou, had not
Philip, before his departure for the Crusade, constituted a new class of
royal officials called _baillis_, who were to act as supervisors and
directors of the feudal provosts who had hitherto administered the royal
domain. Each bailli took charge of a large area of territory, within
which he held monthly assizes to render justice in the king’s name to
all his subjects. From time to time he appeared at Paris, where he
handed in an account of their administration, and paid into the
exchequer the sums levied by him in his provinces. But the growth of the
royal revenue was hardly commensurate with the increased strain on it,
and Philip found that success rather added to than diminished his
difficulties. [Sidenote: Character of Philip Augustus.] He was a
hot-tempered, strong, and active man, ‘easy to anger and easy to
appease,’ whose boisterous joviality, free living, and robust, vigorous
temperament did something to make him popular, but whose complete
personal impression it is hard to grasp, even in the scanty measure in
which it is safe to individualise the shadowy statesmen of the Middle
Ages. In his sudden gusts of passion he could be pitilessly cruel, but
he was more commonly to be condemned for his violence, his cunning, and
his unscrupulous way of overreaching his enemies. Yet his panegyrist
could say of him that he ‘loved justice as his own mother, strove to
exact mercy above judgment; was ever a follower of the truth, and
surpassed all kings in conjugal chastity.’ Such statements show that the
contemporary standard was not very high. But even after time had soured
Philip’s temper and brutalised his passions, he still laboured manfully
to the last. He was the first French king whose power was so firmly
established that there was no need for him to crown his son king in his
own lifetime. He was almost the only king of his age whose son worked
faithfully and ungrudgingly in his service, and was content to bide the
time when nature should call him to his father’s kingdom.
[Sidenote: Louis VIII., 1223–1226.]
Philip II.’s successor was already six-and-thirty years of age, a tried
soldier, a successful statesman, and a man whose private virtues far
outshone those of his father, though he was much less able. Louis
VIII.’s weak health and cold disposition made him the very opposite of
Philip. His piety, his chastity, his love of truth and justice, were
certain. Despite his poor physique, his personal prowess gave him the
surname of the Lion. He had been long schooled in the execution of his
father’s policy, and as king he had no wish but to carry it out still
further. Louis’ short reign of three years is therefore but a
continuation of the reign of Philip Augustus. His simple mission was to
gather the fruits of his predecessor’s labours. His whole reign was
occupied in turning to the profit of the crown the results of the
collapse of the Angevin power and of the triumph of the Albigensian
Crusade.
Despite the earlier conquests of Philip and Louis, the authority of the
crown was still but partially established over Poitou. Hugh of Lusignan,
though now step-father of the little Henry III., still played a
treacherous and ambiguous game, and for the moment again declared
himself on the French side. [Sidenote: The Conquest of Poitou.] Louis
assembled a great army at Tours and led it on a triumphant progress from
the Loire to the Dordogne. The regents of the English king did little
but enter into ineffective negotiations. Louis meanwhile took Niort,
Saint Jean d’Angely, and La Rochelle, after which the barons of the
Limousin, Saintonge, and Périgord made their submission to him. ‘Save
the Gascons, who dwell beyond the Garonne,’ boasted a French chronicler,
‘all the princes of Aquitaine now promised fealty to King Louis, and
then he went back to France.’
The renewal of the Albigensian Crusade now called Louis to the South.
Amaury de Montfort had already fled from his heritage, and had vainly
implored the help of Philip Augustus. Louis VIII. now showed the
fugitive greater consideration than his father had done. He had already
fought as a Crusader against the Southern heretics. His piety was
kindled by the renewed appeals of the legate of Honorius III., while the
helplessness of Amaury indicated that the results of success were bound
to fall to the crown. Early in 1226 Louis again took the cross, and
Raymond VII. was again excommunicated and deposed. Amaury abdicated his
rights in favour of the king. The clergy provided funds, and the
Catholic chivalry of the North soon flocked to the crusading banners.
[Sidenote: The revival of the Albigensian Crusade.]
In the early summer of 1226, Louis with his Crusaders marched southwards
down the Rhone valley, overrunning the marquisate of Provence. He met no
opposition until he approached Avignon, a city long known to be a hotbed
of heresy. The townsmen refused him a passage over the Rhone, and it was
therefore necessary to conquer the city before Languedoc could be
entered. After an obstinate struggle Avignon was captured, and Louis
continued his triumphal march up to the gates of Toulouse. But the
crusading army broke up before the capital of Raymond had surrendered.
The barons were tired of the long and weary marches, and sickness had
devastated the host. Louis himself was prostrated by sickness, and after
providing for the administration of his conquests hurried back to the
North. He had only reached Auvergne when he was carried off by a deadly
fever. He had done enough for the monarchy by the great march which had
first brought home to the Languedoc the majesty of the Capetian king.
[Sidenote: The Regency of Blanche of Castile and the feudal reaction,
1226–1235.]
A severe feudal reaction followed the unexpected death of Louis VIII. He
had left a numerous family by Blanche of Castile, but the eldest child,
who was crowned Louis IX. within three weeks of his father’s death, was
only twelve years of age, and it required all the skill and courage of
his mother to preserve for him even the semblance of authority. The
dispositions of her husband’s will did not make matters any better.
Breaking with the tradition of the early Capetians, Louis VIII. assigned
by his testament a large territorial appanage to each of his younger
children. Great slices were to be cut out of the royal domain that
Robert the second son might be Count of Artois, Alfonse the third Count
of Poitou, and Charles the youngest Count of Anjou and Maine. A new race
of feudal potentates was thus supplied from the bosom of the royal house
itself. The error involved in such a policy is one of the commonplaces
of history, and for the next two centuries the hostility to the crown of
younger branches of the Capetian family was often to prove almost as
formidable as that of the ancient separatist seigneurs. But the fault of
Louis has perhaps been unduly censured. Neither the resources of a
mediæval monarch, nor the conditions of the time, made it possible for
the king to permanently appropriate to himself an indefinite extent of
domain, nor to deprive his kinsmen of the state due to their exalted
birth. If the policy of Louis lost Artois to France for many centuries,
it made it possible for Alfonse and Charles to act as the most efficient
pioneers of the Capetian monarchy in the South. The rule of a royal
prince over his appanage was often the best transition from pure
independence towards complete incorporation with the monarchy.
A great feudal coalition soon formed against Blanche of Castile. She was
a foreigner, haughty and unsympathetic, and strong enough to excite
fierce personal antipathy. ‘A woman in sex she was,’ says Matthew Paris,
‘a man in counsel, worthy to be compared with Semiramis.’ The younger
members of the royal house, headed by Philip Hurepel, Count of Boulogne,
the legitimised son of Philip II. and Agnes of Meran, joined with his
kinsman Peter Mauclerc of Brittany, whose skill and courage soon made
him the head of the league. The persecuted Raymond of Toulouse plucked
up courage to unite himself with the coalition. Hugh of La Marche
deserted the falling cause of royalty, and again became friendly with
his step-son, Henry of England, who saw in the distress of the young
king a chance of winning back his lost territories in France. Theobald
IV. of Champagne, alone of the great feudatories, remained faithful to
the royal cause.
The barons demanded the reversal of the policy of the last two reigns,
and the restitution of their ancient rights. What power they were
willing to leave the crown was to be placed in the hands of Philip of
Boulogne, and the Spanish queen was to be sent back to her native
country. Blanche did not quail before the storm. She appealed from the
barons to the clergy and people. She secured the neutrality of Frederick
II., and the open support of Honorius III. By the rapidity and unity of
her movements she sought to break up the unwieldy and disorganised
levies of her opponents. When she could no longer hold her own in the
Isle of France, she went with her young son to Troyes, and threw herself
on the protection of the Count of Champagne. Having failed in the first
great blow, the feudal coalition slowly dissolved. It kept France in a
state of anarchy for several years, but it was not strong enough to do
more. Peter of Brittany strove hard to get English support, but it was
not until 1230 that the young Henry III. came to France, and then, after
an abortive march through Poitou, the English went home again, and the
feudalists were as far from success as ever. Next year Peter failed in
an intrigue to win over Theobald of Champagne to his side. He finally
strove to stir up a revolt against Theobald in favour of Alice, queen of
Cyprus, the daughter of Theobald’s uncle, Henry, king of Jerusalem. But
this also failed, and the queen of Cyprus renounced her claims. In 1234
Theobald attained the climax of his power by succeeding to the kingdom
of Navarre as the heir of his uncle Sancho. Philip of Boulogne was dead.
Peter of Brittany sullenly made his peace with the triumphant Castilian.
The monarchy of Philip Augustus had proved strong enough to survive a
minority and the rule of a foreign woman.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Meaux and the extension of the royal domain to
the Mediterranean, 1229.]
A notable result of the triumph of the crown was the settlement of the
question of Toulouse by a compromise that was all in favour of the
monarchy. The Albigensian Crusade had died away amid the storms of civil
war, and against so orthodox a prince as Raymond VII. it had never been
more than a sorry pretext for aggression. In 1229 Raymond concluded the
Treaty of Meaux with the regent, by which he retained, though on
humiliating conditions, a portion of his sovereignty. He yielded up to
the crown the duchy of Narbonne, the eastern part of his dominions, from
the Rhone to beyond Carcassonne, and was confirmed in his possession of
the county of Toulouse. He was, however, to rase the walls of his
capital and thirty other towns, to admit a royal garrison into the
castle of Toulouse, to wage war against the heretics, to provide
orthodox doctors to teach the true faith at Toulouse, and go on
pilgrimage to Palestine. He was to marry his daughter and heiress to
Blanche’s younger son Alfonse, and so secure to the Capetians the
ultimate succession to all his dominions. Another result of the treaty
was the organisation of a systematic effort to stamp out the last
remnants of the Albigensian heresy. [Sidenote: The Inquisition.]
Immediately after the treaty a systematic Episcopal Inquisition, such as
Lucius III. had contemplated in 1184, was set up in every diocese of
Languedoc. In 1233 it was supplemented by a Papal Inquisition,
established by Gregory IX. This latter gave unity to persecution by
overstepping the rigid diocesan limits. Its direction was given to the
followers of the same Dominic who had preached so long in vain in
Toulouse. But Gregory did not put his whole trust in the fires of the
inquisitors. At the same time that he created their grim tribunal, he
established the University of Toulouse, the first _studium generale_ set
up by papal bull, and thus gave wider currency to the orthodox teaching
which the care of Honorius had already established there. The faculty of
theology passed at once into Dominican hands, and the orthodox dialectic
of the schoolmen soon replaced the lay and lax culture of the
troubadours. Only in the county of Provence did the troubadours still
continue their songs. The independence of the South was at an end, and
the royal domain for the first time touched the Mediterranean. But the
greater sympathy now shown for the Southern people came out in the
reversal of Montfort’s rude efforts to introduce the customs of the
North.
[Sidenote: Character of St. Louis.]
Louis IX.’s personal government began in 1235, when his mother laid down
the regency in his favour. Though nurtured amidst the storms of
rebellion, and exposed to all the temptations of one who was a king from
early boyhood, Blanche had so carefully provided for his education that
his simple, just, and straightforward disposition was allowed full scope
for its development. He early became an example of piety to all his
realm. He regularly frequented the canonical hours of the Church, rising
from his bed, like a monk, to attend matins at midnight, and again in
the early morning for prime. His fasts, his discipline, his rigid
self-denial, were beyond all ordinary measure. The length of his private
devotions exhausted the patience of his nobles, and even wearied his
confessor; but he told the barons that they wasted more time every day
in gambling and hunting, and shame compelled them to be silent. His
devotion was not merely one of outward forms. His fervent and exalted
piety shone through every action of his simple and well-ordered life. He
was the soul of honour and chastity. He ate and drank very sparingly,
always mixing his wine with water, and consuming whatever meats happened
to be set before him. Though on solemn occasions he was clad in gold and
rich stuffs, his ordinary garments were of simple cut and sober colour.
He detested oaths, violent and impure speech, idle gossip, lies, and
tale-bearing. His patience was unending, and his good temper unruffled.
His humility was extreme and quite without ostentation. His charity was
immense and unbounded. He was not only a great giver of alms and founder
of churches, monasteries, and hospitals. He daily fed the poor at his
table, and visited the sick and wretched at their own abodes. He washed
the feet of repulsive beggars and cripples. He did not shrink from
contact with the lepers. His simple enthusiasm for good works powerfully
affected the rough barons with whom he was brought into contact. ‘To see
or hear him,’ we are told, ‘brought comfort and calm to the most
troubled spirit.’
With all his piety and simplicity, there was nothing weak or puerile in
Louis’ character. His extreme asceticism had no touch of the gloomy
moroseness or inhumanity of the baser type of mediæval devotees. His
habits were as robust, as manly, as they were simple. He enjoyed
vigorous health. His tall, well-knit frame, bright, keen eye, fair
flowing hair, and good-humoured blonde face, made him the model of a
high-born knight. Not, perhaps, endowed with any high measure of
intellectual capacity, he had a firm will, a sane judgment, a shrewd
sense of his own limitations, and the strong common-sense that makes a
good man of affairs. He was pleasant and easy of access, delighting in
unrestrained intercourse with his friends, and reckless of the etiquette
and ceremony that were beginning to hedge even a feudal court. With all
his ambition to live a ‘regular’ life, he did not scorn the married
state nor neglect the softer domestic virtues, and his love for his
children caused him early to abandon a hope he at one time entertained
of entering a monastery. As a young man he delighted in the chase, in
well-trained hawks and high-mettled horses, and could entertain his
barons with sumptuous and regal hospitality. He was one of the bravest
of soldiers, preserving a rare coolness in the fierce hand-to-hand
struggle of a mediæval battle, and never losing hope or cheerfulness. He
was as good a king as he was a man, tenacious of all royal rights that
had been handed down from his forefathers, and constantly striving to
uphold his authority as the best guarantee of the peace and prosperity
of his people. He made his own the policy of his grandfather, though in
his hands it lost its original taint of fraud and violence. He was the
friend of the clerk, the friar, the monk, the simple knight, and the
burgess. He depressed the great feudalists the more completely since he
was scrupulous to allow them every power that law or custom recognised
to be theirs. He enlarged his dominions the more securely since his
scrupulous conscience forbade him taking unfair advantage even of his
enemy. He could withstand the aggressions of a greedy pope or a
self-seeking bishop the more effectively since his devotion to the
Church and his zeal for her just rights were patent to all men. He could
build up a new administrative system adequate for the government of his
vast realm since it was common fame that his motive was not
self-aggrandisement, but the well-being of his whole people. As a
Christian and as a man, as a statesman and as a warrior, he was the
exemplar of all that was best in his age. After his death he was raised
to the honours of sanctity, and subsequent ages have revered in St.
Louis the very ideal of a loyal knight and Christian king.
[Sidenote: The settlement of the South-west.]
The first care for the young king was the completion of the conquest of
the South-west. His way had already been made smooth for him. Raymond of
Toulouse, curbed by the Dominicans and the French garrison, was no
longer dangerous, and the greater part of his old dominions were ruled
by the royal seneschals of Beaucaire and Carcassonne. In 1237 his
heiress Joan was married to Louis’s brother, Alfonse, who, on his
father-in-law’s death, was thus destined to become Count of Toulouse.
Though Alfonse was thus nobly provided for, Louis’ strict fidelity to
his father’s will conferred upon him and his brothers the rich appanages
which the previous king had bequeathed to them in their cradles. In 1241
he held a great court at Saumur, where, clad in blue satin and red
mantle lined with ermine, he royally feasted with the chief barons of
France in the noble hall built by Henry of Anjou. [Sidenote: Alfonse,
Count of Poitou and Auvergne, 1241.] There he made Alfonse a knight, and
afterwards, taking him to Poitiers, invested him with the counties of
Poitiers and Auvergne. For the moment all was well. Hugh of Lusignan had
banqueted at Saumur, and had sworn fealty to Alfonse at Poitiers. But
before long his wife, the former queen of England, stirred him up to
resist his liege lord and fall back upon his ancient alliance with his
step-son. The Poitevin barons met at Parthenay, eager to oppose the
crown. ‘The French,’ they declared, ‘have always hated the Poitevins,
and will always continue to do so. They would fain trample us under
their feet, and use us more contemptuously than the Normans or the
Albigeois. In Champagne and Burgundy the king’s servants carry all
before them, and the nobles dare do nothing without their leave. We had
better die than live such a slavish life.’ A league was soon formed; the
English seneschal of Bordeaux sent immediate help. Even Raymond of
Toulouse ventured to revolt, and his subjects murdered inquisitors and
chased away the Dominican theologians of the University. All the old
spirits of disorder were aroused, and in 1242 Henry of England landed in
Saintonge with a considerable army, joyfully profiting by the
opportunity to vindicate his ancient claims to Poitou.
[Sidenote: Battle of Saintes, and final defeat of the English and
Poitevins, 1242.]
Louis IX. was now forced to appear at the head of an army in the South.
In a short, one-sided campaign he carried all before him. He secured the
passage of the Charente by driving the Anglo-Poitevin host from the
bridge of Taillebourg, and on 22nd July won a decisive victory outside
the walls of Saintes. He pressed on to Blaye on the Gironde, where a
sudden sickness alone prevented him from crossing over to the siege of
Bordeaux. But he had gained all that he sought. Hugh of La Marche made a
humiliating submission, and his sons sought a freer and more adventurous
career with their half-brother in England. The Count of Toulouse yielded
before the seneschal of Carcassonne in time to avert a new Crusade.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Lorris, and the final humiliation of Raymond
VII., 1243.] In 1243 the Peace of Lorris renewed the humiliating
conditions of the Treaty of Meaux. ‘Henceforth,’ says William of Nangis,
‘the barons no longer attempt to do anything against their king, the
Lord’s anointed, seeing clearly that the hand of the Lord was with him.’
[Sidenote: Alfonse of Poitiers, Count of Toulouse, 1249.]
Nothing now remained but to gather up the spoils. The careful
administration of Alfonse at Poitiers prepared the way for the direct
absorption of the lands between Loire and Garonne within the royal
domain. In 1249 the beaten Raymond VII. died, and his son-in-law quietly
succeeded to his heritage. Northern laws and manners gradually permeated
the South. The improvements of administration which St. Louis had
established in his domain were adopted by his intelligent brother. A
single parliament or high law court was created for all Alfonse’s fiefs,
and the South for the first time felt the advantages of law and order.
The Langue d’oc receded before the new court tongue of the Langue d’oil.
‘Bastides’ and ‘Villeneuves’ were set up as new centres of trade and to
diminish the importance and prosperity of the older separatist
towns.[35] Vast castles of the northern type kept down the disobedient.
Gothic minsters, like the cathedral of Limoges and the choir of
Toulouse, were reared by North French workmen side by side with the
indigenous Romanesque that had lingered as long in the South as in the
Rhineland. When Alfonse died without heirs in 1271, his counties of
Toulouse and Poitiers and his land of Auvergne quietly devolved on his
nephew Philip III.
There still remained the danger of the English dukes of Gascony, but
Henry III. was now Louis’ good friend and brother-in-law, and too
occupied in quarrels with his subjects to concern himself overmuch with
the affairs of Aquitaine. Henry remained, however, tenacious of his
rights, and the vigorous rule of his brother-in-law, Simon of Montfort,
the younger,[36] showed what a source of strength Aquitaine might become
in competent hands. Here St. Louis’ moderation and sense of justice
stood him in good stead, and led him to make one of the greatest
sacrifices ever made by a strong king in the interests of peace.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Paris and the settlement with Henry III.,
1259.] He persuaded the English king to yield up his vain claims on
Normandy and Anjou in return for the cession of considerable districts
in the South, long conquered and quietly ruled by Louis’ seneschals. He
yielded at the moment ‘all the rights which he had in the three
bishoprics of Limoges, Cahors, and Périgueux, in fiefs and in domains,’
that is to say, the homages of the barons of those regions, for Louis’
domains there were insignificant. He also promised on the death of
Alfonse, to yield to Henry Saintonge south of the Charente, the Agenais,
and lower Quercy. The treaty was drawn up at Abbeville in 1258 and
finally sealed at Paris in the following year. It was the last act in
the long struggle for Normandy and Poitou, the legal limitation of the
English kings’ land in France to a small fragment of their Aquitanian
heritage. The good faith of St. Louis was not strictly followed by his
successor, and Edward I. found some difficulty in obtaining the cessions
promised on Alfonse’s death. At last, in the treaty of Amiens, 1279,
matters were compromised by the cession of the Agenais.[37] Future
disputes between the French kings and the Aquitanian dukes were in due
course to arise, but they turned on fresh questions. The loyalty of St.
Louis had entirely ended the ancient grounds of dispute between overlord
and vassal.
[Sidenote: The King and the northern feudalists. Appanages of the royal
house.]
No overwhelming growth of the royal domain in Northern France marked the
reign of Louis, but the vast acquisitions of Philip II. were quietly
absorbed, and their inhabitants became good Frenchmen. Four fiefs of the
first order now alone remained in the north, and only two of
these—Flanders and Brittany—retained a separatist character. Despite
their extension of power over the Pyrenees, the house of Blois-Champagne
was ever friendly to Louis, and his purchase of Macon had kept Burgundy
in check. No great harm to the central power followed, when in 1237
Louis made his brother Robert Count of Artois, and in 1245 his youngest
brother Charles became Count of Anjou and Maine, especially as, in the
latter case, Touraine, the ancient dependency of Anjou, was retained
within the royal domain. At the later date Louis also granted appanages
to his younger sons, Peter becoming Count of Alençon, and Robert Count
of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. But the subsequent marriage of Robert to the
heir of Bourbon brought another great fief under the control of the
royal house. Charles’s early government of Anjou was vigorous and
successful, and did something to reconcile the ancient county to its
practical loss of independence. But Charles soon found a better sphere
for his energies in the imperial lands adjacent to the French kingdom.
He strove for a time to establish himself in the county of Hainault, as
the ally of Margaret of Flanders. He finally found a more fruitful field
in the Arelate, where he proved a worthy brother to Alfonse of Poitiers,
as the precursor of Northern influence over the South.
[Sidenote: Provence under Raymond Berengar V.]
The fall of Toulouse left the county of Provence the one great centre of
the South French national spirit. Though technically no part of the
French kingdom, it was one in language, manners, and sympathies with the
county of Toulouse, whose princes had indeed acquired possession of the
so-called March of Provence, between the Durance and the Isère. So long
as the Languedocian civilisation was strong, the hereditary animosities
of the Counts of Provence and the Counts of Toulouse did much to weaken
the political cohesion of two kindred peoples. In the face of the wave
of Northern aggression, signs were not wanting that the ancient feuds of
the courts of Aix and Toulouse were abating. Raymond Berengar V. had
been Count of Provence since 1209. By his marriage with Beatrix,
daughter of Thomas, Count of Savoy, he had established a close union
with the active and aggressive house that was beginning to make itself a
formidable power in the upper region of the ancient Arelate. But four
daughters only were the offspring of the union, and were not some
special precautions taken there was the danger lest Raymond Berengar
should be the last of his race to rule in Provence. [Sidenote: Marriages
of his daughters.] The astute Provençal looked out early for wealthy
husbands for his daughters. The eldest, Margaret, became the wife of St.
Louis himself in 1234. Two years later Eleanor, the second, was wedded
to Henry III. of England. The third, Sanchia, was espoused in 1244 to
Richard earl of Cornwall, the future King of the Romans. The youngest,
Beatrice, was the destined heiress of Provence, and everything depended
upon her choice of a husband. During the crisis of the struggle in the
south-west, Raymond VII. repudiated his Spanish wife and became a suitor
for the hand of Beatrice. Had such a union been accomplished, it would
have been easy to cheat Alfonse of Poitiers of the Toulouse succession,
and a brilliant prospect was opened out of a great national state in
southern Gaul, formed by the union of Toulouse and Provence, which would
have surrounded the royal Sénéchaussées of Beaucaire and Carcassonne,
and might well have proved strong enough to ward off the aggressions of
the northerners. But with the collapse of the English power at Saintes
and the submission of Raymond at Lorris, this glowing vision vanished
for ever. It was too late in the day to stem the tide that had already
overflowed. Raymond Berengar died in 1245, and soon after the marriage
of Beatrice to Charles of Anjou established a Northern court at Aix as
well as at Poitiers.
[Sidenote: Charles of Anjou, Count of Provence, 1245–1265.]
For the next twenty years (1245–1265) Charles of Anjou carried on in
Provence the same work that Alfonse had long been doing at Poitiers and
was soon to begin at Toulouse. The ablest, strongest, fiercest, and most
unscrupulous of the sons of Louis VIII., the new Count of Provence
thoroughly established Northern methods of government and Northern
ideals of life in the last home of the civilisation of the Troubadours.
Charles’s success was brilliant and lasting. The great churchmen, like
the archbishop of Arles, ceased to be temporal sovereigns. The feudal
nobles lost their independence when their leader, Barral des Baux,
despairing of holding his rock-built stronghold against his suzerain,
gave up his pursuit of feudal freedom and became one of Charles’s most
trusted ministers. The cities, which had hitherto vied with their
Italian neighbours in their love of absolute autonomy, saw their
municipal franchises destroyed when revolted Marseilles was starved into
submission, while the care Charles showed for its commercial interests
soon did something to reconcile the wealthy citizens to the loss of
their liberties. Master of every order of his subjects, Charles welded
all Provence together by the skilful execution of good laws. As a result
of his careful policy, he was gradually able to dispense with his
Northern followers and intrust administration and arms to his Provençal
subjects. The last of the Troubadours fled to the more congenial courts
of Aragon and northern Italy. The successes of Charles began that long
series of French aggressions on the Arelate, which only ceased when
Savoy itself became French less than forty years ago. This was the
natural and inevitable result of the development of the idea of
nationality and the decay of the imperial principle. As the Provençal
lands could not form a national state of their own, they ultimately
found their salvation in incorporation with the more vigorous
nationality of the Langue d’oil.
[Sidenote: Foreign Policy of St. Louis.]
The foreign policy of St. Louis was inspired by the same spirit of
justice and peace that regulated his dealings with his feudatories. We
have seen his watchful care of the just rights of the English king. His
Treaty of Corbeil of 1258, with James I., king of Aragon, was based on
the same principles as the Treaty of Paris with Henry III. [Sidenote:
His relations to Spain.] By it Louis renounced all rights over the
county of Barcelona, in return for James’s abandonment of his claims
over Foix and all lands north of Roussillon. By an almost nominal
concession, Louis thus broke the close tie between the kindred
civilisations north and south of the Pyrenees which, in the days of the
Albigensian Wars, had threatened to counterbalance the growing influence
of the French crown over the south. By the marriage of Louis’s eldest
son, Philip, to James’s daughter, Isabella of Aragon, the personal tie
between the two realms was made the stronger. Two daughters of Louis
were wedded to Spanish princes, one to the son of the king of Castile,
another to Theobald the Young, king of Navarre and count of Champagne.
Even the establishment of the most faithful of the great feudatories in
the little kingdom of Navarre helped, rather than hindered, the progress
of the French monarchy. The Champenois Joinville became the most
attached follower, the most enthusiastic biographer of St. Louis.
[Sidenote: Louis and the Empire.]
The long quarrel of Papacy and Empire gave ample opportunities for an
ambitious prince to draw profit to France from their dissensions. The
anti-clerical policy of Frederick II. afforded plenty of pretexts to so
pious a king as Louis for putting himself on the papal side and making
what annexations he could at the expense of Frederick’s weakness. But
though troubled by the Emperor’s ecclesiastical attitude, Louis did not
forget Frederick’s forbearance in the days when Blanche of Castile was
struggling single-handed against the feudal party, and he was by no
means satisfied with the rancorous attitude of the Papacy. He therefore
strove to take up a strict neutrality between Pope and Emperor. He
rejected the offer of the imperial crown which Gregory IX. made to
Robert of Artois. He refused to receive Innocent IV. when he fled from
Italy, and disregarded the deposition of the Emperor at Lyons. He strove
hard at Cluny to reconcile Innocent and Frederick. The only occasion
when he prepared to uphold the Pope was when it was believed that
Frederick was crossing Mont Cenis with a great army in full march for
Lyons. This judicious policy was especially pursued by him since he
realised that the essential condition of a new Crusade was the
friendship of Cæsar and the Pope. When the last chances of
reconciliation were ended, he went, in 1248, to Egypt, to fight
single-handed for the cause which he had at heart. On his return in
1254, he found Frederick dead and the Empire as good as destroyed. Yet
during the weary years of the Great Interregnum, he never, as we shall
see, departed from the ancient strictness of his policy. He had no wish
that his brother-in-law, Richard of Cornwall, should revive the ancient
alliance of England and Germany. He preferred to recognise Alfonso of
Castile, but he took no direct action to sustain his preference. The
position of Richard in Germany removed his last scruples about the
Sicilian inheritance. He allowed Charles of Anjou to accept in 1265 the
Sicilian throne, and marred his later policy by his undue deference to
his unscrupulous brother. The deviation of the Crusade of 1270 to Tunis
was the result of Charles’s wish to strengthen his Italian position.
Louis’s death was thus in a measure due to the influence of the prince
who had become the evil spirit of the French royal house.
[Sidenote: France the chief Power of Europe.]
Towards the end of his reign Louis was incontestably the first prince of
Europe. The collapse of the Hohenstaufen, the weakness of his English
brother-in-law, the position of his own brethren in the South and in
Italy; the degradation of the feudatories, all contributed to make the
power of Louis great, but the unique position which the French monarch
now held was due not so much to his authority and resources as to the
ascendency won by his personal character and virtues. His reputation for
impartiality and his recognised love of peace and justice made him the
natural arbiter in every delicate question, the general peace-maker in
every European quarrel. Louis’s arbitration between Henry III. and his
barons, if the least successful of his interventions, was but one
example of his activity in this direction, both with regard to foreign
princes and his own feudatories. It was too much to expect that even the
best of kings would decide otherwise than in favour of a brother monarch
against an aristocracy whose avowed object was the transference of the
royal authority to a committee of barons. It speaks strongly for Louis
that the English barons should ever have consented to submit to his
decision.
[Sidenote: Home Policy of St. Louis.]
The internal government of Louis IX. must now be considered. His
attitude towards the feudal barons has been already illustrated. The
narrowness of his vision and the justness of his character combined to
make it impossible for him to adopt an anti-feudal policy like that of
his grandson, Philip the Fair. He was the defender of all existing
lawful authority, but if he intervened to protect the oppressed barons
from the zeal of his too active officials, he more often used his
influence to make the barons exercise towards their dependants the same
rigid justice he was ever willing to manifest to them. His forbidding of
private war, the judicial duel, and the tournaments which were often
little better than thinly disguised war, were the result of his love of
peace and order; but they cut at the root of feudal ideas, with which
indeed any real measure of peace and order were almost incompatible.
[Sidenote: Louis and the Church.]
Louis’s relations to the Church bring out strongly the best sides of his
character. No king was ever so anxious to give the Church its due, and
to protect churchmen from grasping barons or greedy crown officials. He
regarded his rights of patronage and his custody of the temporalities of
vacant sees as sacred trusts, and he strove, so far as he could, to
prevail upon his barons to follow in his footsteps. Guided by the wise
counsels of William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris for the first twenty
years of his reign, he safeguarded the interests of the monarchy as well
as the interests of the Church. It was in his reign that the married
clerks engaged in commerce were, at Louis’s instance, abandoned to the
jurisdiction of the lay tribunals, and yet Louis more than once
associated himself with his barons in protesting against the growing
aggressions of the ecclesiastical courts. It was under Louis that the
French clergy first felt the weight of regular and systematic taxation.
The extraordinary favour which he showed to the Mendicants cost him
something of the good wishes of the secular clergy and of the older
orders. Franciscans and Dominicans were his chaplains and confessors,
his habitual companions, and the instruments even of his secular policy.
Their influence over him contributed towards the establishment of the
Mendicants in a strong position in the University of Paris, despite
violent secular opposition. Through the Mendicants Louis was ever
inclined to ally himself with the Pope against the secular clergy. Yet
that alliance had, as we have seen, its limits. The champions of
Gallican liberties in the fifteenth century were not altogether at fault
in regarding St. Louis as the first upholder of the national freedom of
the French Church. The so-called ‘Pragmatic Sanction of St. Louis’ is
indeed a forgery of the fifteenth century, but the hostility it
expresses to simony, to papal taxation, to the temporal claims of Rome
and the abuses of ecclesiastical elections, do not go far beyond his
practice. It was, however, quite impossible for a pious churchman of the
thirteenth century to formulate the doctrines of national independence
that were afterwards upheld by the fathers of Constance and Basel.
[Sidenote: Louis’s Administrative System.]
The greatest result of St. Louis’s home government was the enlargement
and definition of the administrative system which first sprang up as the
result of the expansion of the monarchy under Philip II. This arose from
the same necessities as the Anglo-Norman system, which had been
perfected by Henry of Anjou, and in many details presents remarkable
analogies to the polity already established beyond the Channel. The king
was the centre of the whole system. His advisers were no longer the
hereditary functionaries of the primitive monarchy. The royal household
(_l’hôtel du roi_) now consisted of a band of clerks and knights, the
chaplains, the scribes, the advisers and defenders of the king, and of
the subordinate servants, who discharged purely menial and domestic
functions. From the powerful body of clerks and knights of the household
sprang the official class which represented the monarchy throughout the
kingdom. Though many of the clerks were doubtless trained lawyers, the
ministers of St. Louis were far from showing that pettifogging and
litigious spirit that inspired king and household alike in the days of
Philip the Fair.
[Sidenote: Baillages and Sénéchaussées.]
All France was divided into great provinces, and at the head of each was
placed a royal official, called a _bailli_ in the north and a _sénéchal_
in the south, who roughly corresponded to, though they governed a
greater extent of territory than, the sheriffs of the English crown.
They nominated the provosts and inferior officers; they administered
justice; collected the royal revenue; and were charged with the
superintendence of the royal relations to the neighbouring feudatories
as well as with the administration of their own districts. [Sidenote:
Enquesteurs.] Their annual visits to the Exchequer connected them with
the central government, and a further link between the central and local
administration was found in the regular institution by St. Louis of
_enquesteurs_, the _missi dominici_, or the itinerant justices of the
Capetian monarchy, who, though casually employed by earlier kings, were
now made a permanent element in the administrative system.
[Sidenote: The Differentiation of the Royal Council.]
Under St. Louis a process of differentiation similar to that which had
evolved the Exchequer, Curia Regis, and other courts from the great
councils of the Anglo-Norman kings, divided into three bodies the royal
court of the Capetian kings. The _Grand Conseil_ became the
administrative and political assembly; the _Parlement_ grew into the
judicial mouthpiece of the crown; and _Maîtres des Comptes_ received and
regulated the royal revenue. While the political Council still followed
the king in the ceaseless wanderings of a mediæval sovereign, the
Parliament gradually settled down permanently at Paris. With the
elaboration of its organisation came an extension of its competence.
Churchmen and lawyers agreed in believing that the king was the sole
source of justice. Appeals to the king’s court became, under St. Louis,
the substitute for the trial by combat, which he abolished. Not only
were the inferior courts of the _baillage_ or _prévôté_ subordinate to
the king’s court. It became usual for appeals to be taken to Paris from
the highest courts of the greatest feudatories of the realm. The
doctrine of the _cas royal_, the plea reserved exclusively for the
cognisance of the crown, materially aided the extension of the
Parliament of Paris. [Sidenote: The Parliament of Paris and the
Extension of the Royal Jurisdiction.] Alfonse of Poitiers, as we have
seen, imitated in his own fief the example of his sovereign and brother.
The financial reforms of St. Louis, though important, were not so
radical as his judicial changes. The _Gens des Comptes_ in session at
the Temple in Paris prepared the way for the organisation of the
_Chambre des Comptes_ under Philip the Fair. But almost alone of
mediæval sovereigns, St. Louis was well able ‘to live of his own,’ and
the ordinary revenue of the crown left a surplus for his religious and
charitable foundations. [Sidenote: Finance and the Coinage.] Only the
rare great wars, and the two Crusades of the king, necessitated recourse
to exceptional taxation. Yet Louis was able to carry out a thoroughgoing
reform of the coinage, and carefully upheld the value and purity of the
circulating medium. In 1263 he issued an ordinance by which he gained
for the royal mints the monopoly of supplying the monetary needs of the
royal domain. Wherever no seignorial money was coined, there the royal
money was to circulate exclusively. All that was allowed to the
seignorial currency was that it should be accepted concurrently with the
king’s money in those fiefs where the lord had an established right of
mintage. It was, however, to be so struck that every one might see that
it plainly differed from the products of the mints of the crown. This
reform in itself was a great encouragement to trade. The protection of
the communes by the king, the sound peace which enabled merchants to buy
and sell without molestation, and the establishment of new towns,
especially in the south, all furthered the growth of commerce.
[Sidenote: The Towns and Trade.] The _ville_ of Carcassonne, whose plan
to this day preserves the right lines and measured regularity of an
American city, and which, with its Gothic churches and its busy
industries stands to this day in such vivid contrast to the desolate
_cité_ on the height, the witness of departed military glories, is an
example of the numerous class of _Villeneuves_ and _Villefranches_
founded by St. Louis in his newly won domains in the Languedoc. Louis’s
Christian zeal, no less than his hatred of usury, caused him to deal
with excessive rigour with the Jews. [Sidenote: Jews and Cahorsins.] He
was almost as intolerant of the Lombard and Cahorsin usurers, who had
now begun to rival with the Israelites in finance. One of the least
pleasing sides of the saint’s character was his cruel severity to
blasphemers, heretics, and unbelievers. The same zeal led St. Louis
twice to abandon France while he went on crusade. [See chapter xix.] But
neither his long sojourn in Egypt and Syria nor his death at Tunis
destroyed the effect of his work for his kingdom. Queen Blanche resumed
her vigorous rule of France as regent during Louis’s absence from 1248
to her death in 1253, the year before his return. [Sidenote: The
Pastoureaux.] The chief trouble Blanche had was with the strange popular
gathering of the _Pastoureaux_, which, assembled under the pretext that
shepherds and workmen were to supply the remissness of lords and knights
and rescue St. Louis from the Egyptians, soon became a wild carnival of
brigandage, which the regent had considerable difficulty in suppressing
(1251). In 1270 Philip the Bold, the saint’s dull, but pious, docile,
hard-fighting, and well-meaning son, succeeded as easily in the camp at
Tunis as he could have done in Paris itself. The work of St. Louis was
quietly and unostentatiously continued during the first years of Philip
III.’s reign. In his later years the baleful influence of Charles of
Anjou turned the heir of St. Louis to a more active and greedy policy
that prepared the way for the extraordinary success of Philip the Fair,
whose triumphant reign marks the end of the process that had begun with
the early Capetians.
[Illustration: FRANCE AND ITS NEIGHBOUR LANDS IN 1270]