If the Crusades had strengthened the power of the Church, they had at
the same time brought about an expansion of thought which was
undermining it. Men were beginning to think, to inquire, and then to
doubt. How could sensuality and vice at Rome be reconciled with a
divine infallibility? If the ballad-poetry of Provence satirized the
lives and manners of the priests, was it not dealing with what was true?
During the reign of Philip's father, a pale studious youth was pacing
the cloisters on the banks of the Seine, by the side of Notre Dame. He
was thinking upon these things. And "as he mused the fire burned."
This was Abelard. The intellectual awakening brought about by the
lectures of this most learned and accomplished man of his time produced
an epoch. He spoke to his disciples in the open air, as no building
could hold the thousands who hung upon his lips. This movement became
localized; a faubourg of students was created with their multiform
activities. It became a quarter by itself--a noisy, turbulent,
agitated quarter--where the only luxury enjoyed was an expanding
thought, and where Latin was the spoken language. And so it happened
that the _Quartier Latin_ came into existence.
But while the place remains, the man quickly passed off the scene. He
was silenced, his teachings condemned by a Church council at Soissons,
and he immured for life in the Monastery of Cluny, to be treasured in
the heart of humanity as a martyr to truth, and as the lover of Eloise,
in that sad romance of the twelfth century.
After a brief reign of three years Louis VIII., son and successor of
Philip, was dead, and Louis IX., under the regency of his mother,
"Blanche of Castile," was proclaimed king. The same family, which
later gave Isabella to Spain, also bestowed upon France this wise,
intrepid woman at a critical time.
With a boy of eleven and a woman of thirty-eight years upon the throne,
the time seemed propitious for the barons to recover the power Philip
had wrung from them, and to reduce kingship to its former humble
position.
With this purpose a powerful coalition was formed, embracing the barons
north and south, chief among whom was Raymond of Toulouse. By force of
arms, and by diplomacy, Blanche of Castile met this crisis with
astonishing courage and address. The free cities sprang to her
assistance; and not only was the coalition broken, but there was formed
a bond between the crown and the people, leaving the throne stronger
than before.
Blanche showed great political wisdom in arranging for the marriage of
her son with the daughter of the Count of Provence; thus capturing and
securing the loyalty of this most powerful and disaffected state, which
was making common cause with Toulouse against the king. And it is with
mingled pity and rejoicing that we hear of Raymond VII. of Toulouse,
once champion of the Albigenses--warrior, poet, troubadour, and
heretic--scourge in hand and barefooted, at the porch of Notre Dame,
doing penance for his sins against the Church.
With Louis IX. on the throne a new day had dawned for France. Louis
was not a great soldier. His reign was not one of territorial
expansion but of wise administration, giving permanence and solidity to
what already existed. We are apt to think of Philip's heavenly minded
grandson chiefly as a saint. But his service to the state was enduring
and of the first magnitude, because it dealt with the sources of
things. When he established a King's Court, which was a court of
appeal from the rude justice, or injustice, of feudal counts, he
undermined the foundation of feudal power. In bestowing the _right of
appeal_, his protecting hand reached down to the poorest man in the
realm. And when bewildered barons heard the uncomprehended language of
the law-courts, and heard men not of their own order declaring private
wars punishable by death, they felt their power slipping from under
them, and that they were coming into a new sort of a world.
One of the greatest acts of this reign was the abolishing of the double
allegiance, which had wrought such trouble since the Duke of Normandy's
conquest of England. Feudal proprietors were forbidden to hold
territory under a foreign king; and henceforth no conquered province
could acknowledge allegiance to an English king; nor would an English
king again be vassal to a king of France.
But in so fortifying his throne, this best of kings, and of men, would
have been surprised had he been told that he was preparing the way for
the greatest tragedy in history; that he was creating an absolute
despotism which five hundred years later would require a revolution of
unprecedented horror for its removal. Such was the fact. Every wise
act in this reign was prompted by the spirit of fairness and justice.
And if at the same time these acts were drawing all the forces in the
state to a central point, under the control of a single hand, it was
the best development for France under existing conditions.
Saint though he was, and almost fanatic in his devotion to the Church,
Louis resisted the pope or the bishop, if unjust, with as much energy
as one of his own barons; and, in the same spirit of fairness, would
punish his own too zealous defenders who had infringed upon the feudal
rights of the peerage.
This was Louis the king. But it is Louis the saint who holds the eye
on the world's canvas. The real life was to him the life of the soul.
Francis Assisi himself did not live in an atmosphere of greater
spiritual exaltation than this devout and heavenly grandson of Philip
Augustus! No monk in the Dark Ages attached such sanctity to relics!
When a portion of the crown of thorns was sent to him from Jerusalem,
he built that exquisite _Sainte Chapelle_ for its reception; and
barefooted, bare-headed, carried it himself in solemn procession from
Vincennes to Paris, placing it with reverent hands in that shrine we
may visit to-day.
Christian knighthood had reached its one perfect flower in Louis; and
the Crusades fittingly closed with the life of the most saintly
crusader. His first Crusade was disastrous, occupying years of his
life; his mother, Blanche of Castile, dying during his absence. His
second and last was more costly still. Near the ruins of Carthage,
where he was in conflict with a Mohometan band, he was stricken with
fever and died (1270).
Louis's brother, Charles of Anjou, is said to have led him into this
fatal attempt, for his own purposes. Charles, of very different
memory, was at this time, by invitation of the pope, occupying the
double throne of Naples and Sicily. And he it was who provoked by his
cruelties that frightful outbreak known as the "Sicilian Vespers," in
1283.
The Crusades had lasted from 1095 to 1270. The purpose for which they
were undertaken had signally failed. Jerusalem, captured in the first
Crusade, was lost in the second, and never recovered. And so
ineffectual had been the expenditure of life, fortune, and enthusiasm
that the last Crusade was not even fought in Palestine, but on the
shores of North Africa.
But something had been accomplished which none had foreseen: a result
of greater magnitude than territorial possession of the Holy Land.
Through the broadening of men's views, and the common heritage of a
great experience, a group of isolated kingdoms had been drawn into
fraternal relations, and a European civilization had commenced.
There had been many surprises. Close contact had softened prejudices.
The infidel had found that the crusader was something more than the
most brutal and stupid of barbarians, as he had supposed; and the
crusader, that the profaning infidel was not the monster he expected to
find. In fact, the European discovered that in the Saracen and the
Greek they met a civilization much more advanced, more learned, and
more polished than their own. More civilization was brought out of the
East than was carried into it by its Christian invaders. And it was
through this strange and disastrous experience that the art and the
thought of Europe received its first impulse toward a great future.
During the fifteen years of the reign of Louis's son, Philip III.,
France moved on under the momentum received from his father. But the
succeeding reign of Philip IV. was epoch-making. That imperious,
strong-willed son of Saint Louis demanded that the clergy should share
the state's burden by contributing to its revenue. Pope Boniface
VIII., imperious and strong-willed as he, immediately issued a bull,
forbidding the clergy to pay, or the officers to receive, such taxes.
The answer to this was a royal edict forbidding the exportation of
precious metals (of course including money) from France to Italy, thus
cutting off from the pope the large revenue from the Church in France.
The quarrel resolved itself at last into a question of the relative
authority of king and pope in the kingdom. In order to fortify his
position, and perhaps to show his contempt for clergy and barons alike,
Philip took a step which profoundly affected the future of France. At
a great council summoned to consider these papal claims, he commanded
the presence not only of the ecclesiastics and nobles, the two
governing estates, but also summoned the representatives of the towns
and cities--the _Tiers État_! Prelate, baron, and bourgeois for the
first time met in a Council of State.
A king who was the impersonation of absolutism had created the
_States-General_ (1302); had forged the instrument which would
eventually effect for France a deliverance from monarchy itself!
The cause of the king was sustained by the council; the claims of the
pope were rejected. Still not satisfied, Philip then audaciously
proposed a general ecclesiastical council to determine whether Boniface
legitimately wore the triple crown. When the old man died, as is said
from the shock of this attempt, the king was master of the situation.
Gifts had already been distributed among corrupt cardinals in the
conclave. The papacy was at his feet, and might be in his hand. The
most dissolute of his own archbishops was selected as his tool, and, as
Clement V., succeeded to the chair of St. Peter. The centre of the
ecclesiastical world was then removed from Rome to Avignon, where it
could be under Philip's immediate direction, and the astonishing period
in the history of the papacy, known as the _Babylonian Captivity_,
which was to last for seventy years, under seven popes, had commenced.
The Knights Templar, those appointed guardians of the Holy Sepulchre
and defenders of Jerusalem, it is to be supposed were not in sympathy
with these things. Whatever the cause, their extermination was
decreed. Accused of impossible crimes, the whole brotherhood was
arrested in one day, and, at a summary trial, condemned, Philip
himself, in that old palace on the island in the Seine, giving orders
for the fagots to be laid, and the immediate execution of the grand
master and many others.
Philip's death, occurring as it did soon after this sacrilege, was
popularly believed to be a manifestation of God's wrath; and the death
of his three sons, Louis, Philip, and Charles, who successively reigned
during a period of only fourteen years, leaving the family extinct,
seemed a further proof that a curse rested upon the house.
The question of the succession, for the first time since Hugh Capet,
was in doubt. By the existing Salic Law only male descendants were
eligible to the throne of France. The three sons of Philip IV. had
died, leaving each a daughter, so the son of Charles of Valois, only
brother of Philip IV., was the nearest in descent from Hugh Capet; and
thus the crown passed to the _Valois_ branch of the family in the
person of Philip VI. (1328).