command right forward into the press. He found against him the
Sultan’s nephew, who opened his ranks and closed them after the small
body of knights had crashed through. Raymond found himself with his
companions cut off far forward. He hacked his way out through the
mass of the Arab horses, and rode with his few companions straight
for Tyre. There fell upon him a stupor, and later a frenzy, to see
Christendom thus ruined. In a few weeks he was dead.
The footmen, the ill-trained levies from the towns, the half-armed
peasantry, had already suffered massacre or surrendered in great
groups of thousands. The struggle had not lasted the day long. It was
perhaps hardly noon when one small remnant of the Christian host,
crowding round the king, still held out. Of the fully armed men there
were but one hundred and fifty: with their followers a few score
more. The central point which they were guarding was the fragment of
the Holy Cross, and what they were defending was a little mound on
which there still stood the great red tent of the king. It fell, and
the last of the fight was over.
That evening, in the tent of Saladin (which he caused to be pitched
right in the heart of the battlefield), there took place an encounter
of the two spirits of Europe and of Asia--of Western chivalry and of
Oriental hate face to face.
This is what happened. The conqueror caused to be seated upon his
right the broken King of Jerusalem, half dead with the thirst and
the heat of that day. Saladin gave him the first water he had tasted
for many hours. There stood also before him Reginald of Chatillon,
whom he had so hated with the violence of a religious hate for his
audacity, his splendid courage, and, above all, for his threat to
the holy cities of Islam. This man was now in his power, and the
Sultan acted as Asia acts in such a pass. He abused him violently,
reminded him of the unforgivable crime--that he had dared approach
Mecca--dragged in the excuse of the raided caravans, and then fell
upon the unarmed man himself to murder him, but not before he had
heard the knight tell him that he would not save his life at the
cost of faith, and answering with the pride of a man completely
indifferent to death. This furious and horrible thing was not
sufficient. Reginald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak, was dragged out,
still alive, and hacked to death by the guards. Then the conqueror
gave orders that the most gallant and the strongest of his prisoners,
those most symbolic of the faith which he hated--I mean the Knights
of the Hospital and of the Temple--should be massacred. He knew that
they always refused ransom. There were two hundred of these men.
They were butchered before the victorious army in a public place.
This was the end of the fight which decided the vast affair between
our people and those of the East. Thenceforward, point by point,
we lost the mastery of the Mediterranean; we admitted the stranger
everywhere. We sowed that harvest of tragedy which is to-day the
Balkans, the Dardanelles, the isolation of the Slav. Spain only we
recovered. And as for the fragment of the Cross, they carried it away
to Damascus. Jerusalem was theirs that autumn. Whose is it to-day?
CHÂTEAU GAILLARD
(_March 6, 1204_)
Philip Augustus, the King of France, sat upon a stone; it was a rough
block of stone that lay, not yet used by the builders, on the rampart
of his lines before Château Gaillard.
The huge building lay before him like a town--but such a town
as no sight we see to-day can recall. Mass upon mass of sheer
masonry--worked limestone--carefully jointed, and towering wall
within and above wall, angle conflicting with angle in a hundred
ways, and the whole an effort of shoulders and of rock. These things
were (their ruins are) a sort of sacrament in human strength. What
man can do to defend himself against man was there visible and
tangible and amenable to common standards: apparent to a child as
much as to a mathematician. And it was not only a sacrament of
strength and of defence appalling in its dumb solidity and hugeness,
but also a sacrament of labour, of energy manifest and achieved. It
was also new and white.
Philip Augustus, the king, was an engineer. Every trace of the ditch,
of the three circumvallations, of bastion and of angle, meant for
him just what it should mean. He understood the co-relation of every
part in that vast whole. It was for him what a score of music is to
those rare men who can read and take pleasure in music from its mere
printed signs though no instrument is sounding. And as he meditated
the attack he admired. His creative soul was full of that creation
which another such soul had ordered--Richard, the Angevin, the Lion
Heart, now dead.
The King of France, thus sitting alone (for he would not be
accompanied in such a meditation), watched the big thing with his
chin upon his hand. He was a man in his fortieth year; his broad,
square, somewhat flat face already definitely marked with the fixed
passions of the mind and the habits of his long effort of recovery
and of triumph. His eyes were a little cautious for those of a
soldier, but very steady, and had in them that sort of secret smile
which goes with the certitude of delayed achievement. His thin nose,
and the slight sneer about his pressed lips, betrayed the same
emotion as he pondered. His great head, rather bald for his age, was
bare, and did not move in his contemplation of the mighty problem
before him.
The foundations of the work were below him, as were its vast
surrounding ditch and its first low containing wall. But the turrets
and the battlements, with their wooden, jutting platforms, stood
immensely above him, and higher still that enormous central keep
which was the stake of the entire concern. It stood inhumanly large
up against the keen March air, and the wind blew upon it from down
the broad river valley and the distant sea. It had in it all the
magnificence of Normandy. Down below, hundreds of feet, where the
wide river ran, the Seine, he could see the burnt timber houses of
Lesser Andelys, surrounded by its wall which he had stormed months
before; the ruins also of the outworks upon the island by which he
had approached across the stream. He heard, but did not see, the
carts in perpetual rumble and the footmen tramping across his bridge
of boats below. He heard the hammering of wood and the sawing of
stone in his own lines, and in his mind he recalled, as he so sat,
the long business of the siege.
Here was the test! This place, once fallen, he had forced the
gate of Normandy, the last province which could defy his arms and
his sovereignty. For now three hundred years and more it had
been a kingdom almost apart from his own, though in feudal tenure
responsible to him and to his house. John the Angevin, last Duke of
Normandy, no longer the young man but still the great soldier, had
abandoned the Normans--now five months ago. He was back in England.
And here, before Philip, Roger of Lascy, with his superb little
garrison, was still holding out, and until the castle fell there
was no passing north into the Caux country or into the Calvados, no
seizing of rich Caen or of Rouen, the mistress of all that land.
Philip, the king, remembered the long adventure. The advance up the
wide valley of the Seine until, a march away, he first saw, whiter
than the white scars of chalk on which it stood, the splendid new
work of Richard gleaming far off like a challenge. He remembered the
storming of the outworks on the island, the laborious fighting into
Andelys, the rush of the refugees into the castle. He remembered the
abominable winter, and his alignment of the strict blockade: the
sentries calling to each other round the lines through the long,
frozen nights. He remembered, not with pleasure, that awful day in
which Roger of Lascy had turned out all the useless mouths, the
refugees from the town below--the old men, and the children, and the
women; their helpless panic, stumbling to and fro between the outer
wall and his own lines; their hideous famine, and the blood, and
at last his own clemency, and his permission that they should pass
through and be fed.
Now the first breath of spring had come, and still the strict
blockade was of no avail. Five months had gone, and nothing had been
done save to contain that little band within, which still mounted
guard surely in regular fashion, whose taunts could still be heard
in the rough jibes shouted by night against his sentinels, and whose
arrows, when they went down wind, sometimes just reached his lines,
and had cost him men here and there. As he sat there he determined,
for all great odds and risks, that an assault must be delivered
even against so tremendous a body of resistance. Much lay in that
decision; but Philip, the soldier, was a man who would arrive at a
plan with increasing swiftness of judgment, and, having arrived at
it, would as suddenly execute his desire.
There went through the lines the order for the attack, and the whole
aspect of the camps surrounding the castle, one great oval linked by
continuous works, was changed. The business was now no longer to
starve but to destroy--and the murder of Arthur of Brittany should be
avenged in violence.
* * * * *
First they made a great way, very broad and hardened everywhere with
stone, along which the engines and the wooden towers could be hauled.
Then, at night, they threw into the first outer main ditch earth
and faggots from the woods on the hill above and all the refuse of
the camp, and they began that week to struggle against the corner
bastion of the outer wall. It was undermined in its foundations--the
sappers’ work defended by vigorous fire from the causeway against
the battlements of the tower, and by the repeated shocks from the
catapults and the rams, until, in some few days, the hard chalk rock
having been tunnelled thoroughly, down came a whole segment of the
outer wall, and the first circuit was in the hands of the king. Next,
in the same fashion, was the second circuit attempted; and this, far
less extended, concentrating its men more thoroughly, resisted with
greater power. The engines did nothing against it. It seemed that the
assault must fail.
Now there was in King Philip’s army a soldier called Bogis, an
obscure man loving ruse, and he found that in certain wooden outworks
of the place there was an entry to be made by those who could
cunningly avoid the sentinels, and he, with a small band, went in
there. But just as they thought to hold this entry, the besieged
caught them, and, as being the quickest way to drive them out,
set fire to this little building. It was a ruinous plan. Both had
they--the besieged themselves--to retire from the fierceness of the
flame, and also they were, by the effect of the fire when it was over
and done, left with a gap in their defences, so that though the first
intruders had been beaten back, Philip’s men could pour through the
charred breach.
They were at the third wall, the high wall round the donjon keep,
and this was taken by mere strength and at vast loss and at storm.
But of Lascy’s very loyal band not two hundred remained, and all of
them defending the wall, so that when they were cut off by the many
thousands of Philip Augustus, the king, they could not post even
a rearguard to defend the rush into the keep itself, though that
was but a few yards behind; and so, upon the Saturday, the 6th of
March, 1204, those that had not fallen in the fight were taken each
separately between the wall and the tower. And the Saucy Castle,
Richard the Lion Heart’s eldest daughter, so young and so strong, had
fallen.
* * * * *
It was the greatest feat of arms, almost, of the Middle Ages. It
was to the French monarchy and the re-constitution of the land what
Wattignies, six hundred years later, was to be for the defence and
the survival of the Revolution. It was the opening of Normandy and
the advent of all the host into the rich province of the north; the
most stalwart, the most lengthily organized of all the feudal things
that had proposed to withstand the re-integration of France. Through
that breach in Château Gaillard’s wall, as through a break in a dike,
the flood of France poured through, armed, into the deep pasturage,
the loaded wealth, the granaries, and the orchards of Normandy. And
with Normandy so held under, that summer France was made again. And
Philip Augustus, the king, became something almost more than a king
as kings were accounted in that time. For he became a strict ruler
over not one fief or two of his own, but over fief after fief that
had formerly been bound only by plea and service, not in subjection,
to his fathers. And it almost seemed as though Rome were returning.
This conqueror so conquering had about him, as he entered the Norman
towns after his victory, a physical character of conquest, and there
was a monk away in Tours, a canon of St. Martin’s there, who saw him
and knew him, and tells us well enough what he was:--
“A man high coloured, of a nature driven to good cheer, and to women
and to wine, large to his friends, sparing to those who displeased
him, an engineer, in faith Catholic, cautious for the future,
stubborn in a resolution formed; he judged at once and directly.
Fortune loved him, though he was too careful of his life. He was
easily both roused and appeased. He loved to be served by the many
and to think himself a tamer of the proud. Of the Church he was a
good protector, and he nourished the poor.”
THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING
(1245–1250)
St. Louis, the king, loved quiet speech, meeting the speech of
others. He loved rallying and conversed with all as though with
peers. Pomp wearied him, even where it was necessary for the dignity
of so great a state. Those jests which complete a question and leave
no more to be said he was amused to hear. Also he himself observed
men with very great wisdom, often silently; and his eyes, which were
a little weary even in youth from too much questioning of himself and
of the world, and from too much business of fighting of every kind
within and without, were always luminous and often smiled. His body,
which was spare, exercised by continual chivalry and by the weight
of arms, but a little wasted by solicitude, by mortification, and by
occasional disease, suited his gesture and the holy irony with which
he salted life.
All those, or nearly all, who came about the king--men themselves,
for the most part, much grosser in temper or much less subtle in
observation--felt this play of his intelligence upon theirs, and
when he was dead remembered it most vividly. Nor were the words of
St. Louis and his manner things very conscious. They surrounded his
personality like an air, impossible to define, easy to taste. They
were a perfume. Some who thus received his influence wrote down a
little clumsily what they remembered, and the things they wrote down,
after so many catastrophes and such vast changes in Europe, stand
to-day quite neat and clear. So that when you read of St. Louis it is
like looking out of a little window, unglazed, in a tower, and seeing
through it, framed in the stones of the wall, a well-ordered, sunlit
landscape, particular, vivid, and defined; full of small brilliant
things, exact in outline.
One day in that good thirteenth century, when all was new, amid the
new white buildings, upon the new ordered roads, when even the grass
was new (for it was Pentecost), the king, Louis the Saint, was in
Corbeil with eighty of his knights and certain others of his train.
And when he had eaten the morning meal (which was at nine o’clock,
for that was their hour), he went down to the field below the chapel
to speak at the door with Count John of Brittany, and with him was
the Seneschal of Champagne and others, younger and older men. And
as the groups stood there at the door in the spring sunlight,
treading the spring grass, mown smooth, Robert of Cerbon (the same
that founded the great college of Sorbonne, so that his name stands
everywhere to-day for learning) took the young seneschal’s coat and
pulled him by it towards the king. And the seneschal said,--
“What would you with me, Master Robert?”
Robert said,--
“I wish to ask you this: If the king were to sit himself down in this
field, and you were to sit down without leave on the same bench, and
higher than he, would you not be to blame?”
“Yes,” said the seneschal, “I should.”
“Then,” said Robert, “you are to blame now. For even now you are far
more nobly clad than the king, for your coat is of many colours, and
embroidered nobly with green, and the king does not go so clothed.”
Louis, hearing this dispute, smiled at them but did not speak. And
the seneschal answered sharply,--
“Master Robert, saving your grace, I am not to blame at all, though
I do dress in ’broidery and in green. For this cloak was left to me
by my father and my mother, who were noble. But you are to blame. For
you are the son of a serf, and your mother was a serf as well, and
you have given up the clothes that were left you by your father and
your mother, and you are dressed in rich woollens much grander than
the king’s.”
And the seneschal, growing livelier still, took Robert of Cerbon’s
coat, and took the hem of the king’s coat, and held them up side by
side, and said triumphantly,--
“There! See if I do not speak the truth. Look how much grander is the
stuff you wear than the stuff that clothes the king.”
Then King Louis spoke, and first he put his hand upon the sward and
sat him down at the gate of the chapel, and said to his sons, who
were there, young men,--
“Come, sit down beside me on the grass that we may hear each other
the plainer.”
And they answered,--
“Sire, we would not dare.”
Then he said to the seneschal,--
“Seneschal, do you sit so.”
And so did the seneschal. He sat so close that their two cloaks
touched.
Then said St. Louis to his sons,--
“You have done very wrong in that you did not obey at once, you, my
sons.”
And then he said to the seneschal,--
“You did wrong to speak thus to Master Robert, and when I saw how
shamed you made him, I at once knew that it was my business to defend
him; and as to dress, this is my counsel: you all of you should dress
well and decently, in order that your women may love you more, and
that your household may respect you; for the wise man says that we
ought to dress ourselves and to arm ourselves in such a manner that
neither shall the good men of this world blame us for extravagance
nor the young blades for meanness.”
And upon another time, when they were sailing upon the sea, it being
night, the ship was struck violently and lay over, and the storm
rose so that it was thought she could not live. Then St. Louis,
understanding that death was at hand, went as he was, half-clad, to
where the Blessed Sacrament was kept, and there expected death.
But when the storm as suddenly abated, and the morning was come, and
danger was passed, he asked by what name that wind was called which
had nearly wrecked the King of France and all his people. To which
the master mariner answered that this wind was no great wind, not one
of the major winds of the world, not one of the cardinal winds, but
a little side wind that hardly had a name, though some called it the
little Gerbin wind.
When St. Louis heard this, he said to one of those about him,--
“See how great is God, and how He shows us His power. Since one
of His little unimportant winds, which hardly has a name, all but
destroyed the King of France, his children, and his wife, and all his
household, in peril of the sea.”
St. Louis, the king, loved also to tell this tale:--
There was a master in divinity, one who had disputed for the Faith,
and he came to Bishop William of Paris in great distress, and said
that he was full of doubt, and that his heart would not bend to
believe in the Sacrament of the Altar, and that this mood, sent by
the Enemy, pressed him sore.
To whom Bishop William answered,--
“And does this please you?”
To which the argufier answered vehemently,--
“Not at all! I am tormented thereby!”
“Sir,” said the bishop again, “would you be pleased that these new
doubts should conquer?”
“I would rather,” said the poor man, “that my limbs should be torn
from my body.”
“Why, then,” said Bishop William, “I will give you a parable. You
know that the King of France wars now with the King of England, and
that on the front of this war stands the castle of Rochelle, which is
in the country of Poitiers. Now, if the king had given you Rochelle
to guard, upon the edges of the war where the fighting is, but to me
the hill of Laon, peaceably in the heart of his kingdom, which would
be honour most--to whom would he give the greater reward?”
“To the man,” said the doubter, “who held Rochelle.”
“Well, then,” said Bishop William, “let me tell you that my heart is
not even like the hill of Laon, but rather like the little hill of
Montlheri, near Paris, with its tower, for I have never doubted at
all. So where God gives me in reward one measure, he will give you
four.”
St. Louis said that one should never speak ill of any man, and those
who listened closely to his talk never remembered his speaking ill of
any man; on which account also he would never so much as mention the
name of the Devil.
Also one day, when he was in Cyprus, on Crusade, he said to a
companion that put water into his wine,--
“Why do you put water into your wine?”
Then that companion, who was a young man, answered,--
“For two reasons. First, because the physicians have warned me to do
so; and secondly, because I do not wish to get drunk.”
To which St. Louis answered,--
“You do well. For if you do not learn this custom in youth you will
not practise it in age, and if in age you drink your wine unmixed,
you will, without doubt, be drunk every evening of your life; which
is a horrible thing to see in a valiant man.”
And thinking of this, he said again,--
“Would you be honoured in this world, and then have Paradise?”
And the young man said “Yes.”
Then the king said,--
“This is the rule: Neither say nor do what you would fear that all
men should know.”
And another time the king said to this young man, when they were on
Crusade in the East,--
“Tell me which you would rather be--a leper, or in mortal sin.”
And the young man, who was afraid to lie to the king, answered,--
“I would much rather have committed thirty or forty mortal sins than
be a leper.”
And the king did not answer him; but the next day he said to the
young man,--
“Come here and sit at my feet.” Which the young man did, and then St.
Louis said, “You spoke yesterday like a wild man in a hurry, for all
ills of the body are cured in a little time, when a man dies; but
if your soul is tarnished, and you cannot be certain that God has
pardoned you, that evil will last for ever as long as God sits in
Paradise.”
And then he asked the young man suddenly whether he ever washed the
feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday, and the young man answered,--
“Sire, far be it from me to wash the feet of poor men! No! Never will
I do this thing!”
And the king said to him,--
“You are wrong again--thinking yourself too grand to do what God did
for our enlightenment. Now I pray you, for the love of God and for
the love of me, get yourself into the habit of washing poor men’s
feet.”
For this king loved all kinds of men, whatsoever kind God had made
and Himself loved.
On which account also he would give castles to guard to men that had
no claim on him, if they had renown in good deeds. And he would have
at his table men of any birth for the same reason. And so seated
once at table he said to a companion,--
“Tell me the reasons that a ‘loyal gentleman’ is so good a thing to
be called.”
Then they all began disputing and defining, and at the end the king
said, giving no reasons and turning to Robert of Cerbon, the same
whom he had defended for dressing well,--
“Master Robert, this is what I think upon the matter: I desire to be
called by men a ‘loyal gentleman,’ but much more to know that I am
one. And if you would leave me that, you might take all the rest; for
that title is so great a thing, and so good a thing, that merely to
name it fills my mouth.”
THE DEATH OF ST. LOUIS
(_August 25, 1270_)