We have seen that Philip Augustus laid the foundations of a strong French monarchy, but his death was followed by feudal reaction, the nobles struggling in every way by fraud or violence to recover the independence that they had lost.

Louis VIII, the new king, in order to checkmate their designs, determined to divide his lands amongst his sons, all the younger paying allegiance to the eldest, but each directly responsible for the administration of his own province. Perhaps at the time this was the most obvious means of ruling in the interests of the crown a kingdom that, in its rapid absorption of Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Toulouse, had outrun the central government. Yet it was in truth a short-sighted policy for, since these ‘appanages’, or royal fiefs, were hereditary, they ended by replacing the old feudal nobility with a new, the more arrogant in its ambitions because it could claim kinship with the House of Capet.

Louis VIII did not live long enough to put his plan into execution; and Louis IX, a boy of twelve at the time of his accession, though accepting later the provision made for his younger brothers in his father’s will, was enabled, partly by the administrative ability of his mother and guardian, Queen Blanche, partly by his own personality, to maintain his supremacy undiminished. On one occasion his brother, the Count of Anjou, had imprisoned a knight, in anger that the man should have dared to appeal to the king’s court against a judicial decision he himself had given. ‘I will have but one king in France,’ exclaimed Louis when he heard, and ordered the knight to be released and that both he and the count should bring their case to Paris for royal judgement.

Heavy penalties were also inflicted by Louis on any promoters of private warfare, while the baronage was restricted in its right to coin money. At this time eighty nobles besides the King are said to have possessed their own mints. Louis, who knew the feudal coinage was freely debased, forbade its circulation except in the province where it had been minted; while his own money, which was of far higher value, was made current everywhere. Men and women naturally prefer good coins to bad in exchange for merchandise; and so the King hoped that the debased money, when restricted in use, would gradually be driven out of existence.

If Louis believed in his rights as an absolute king, he had an equally high conception of the duties that such rights involved. ‘Make thyself beloved by thy people,’ he said to his son, ‘for I would rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and governed my subjects well and equitably than that thou shouldst govern them badly.’

Royal justice, like the coinage, must be superior to any other justice; and so the chroniclers tell us that Louis selected as his bailiffs and seneschals those who were ‘loyal and wise, of upright conduct and good reputation, above all, men with clean hands’. Knowing the ease with which even well-meaning officials could be corrupted by money and honours, he ordered his deputies neither to receive nor give presents, while he warned his judges always to lean rather to the side of the poor than of the rich in a case of law until evidence revealed the truth.

Philip Augustus had followed justice because he believed that it paid, and his subjects had feared and respected him. His grandson, with his keen sense of honour, shrank from injustice as something unclean; and we are told that the people ‘loved him as men love God and the Saints’.

Like nearly all the kings of France, Louis was a devout son of the Church, and it was under his protection that Innocent IV resided safely at Lyons when Frederick II had driven him from Rome.24 Nevertheless the King’s sincere love of the Faith, that later won him canonization as a Saint, never hindered his determination that he would be master of all his subjects, both lay and ecclesiastical. If the clergy sinned after the manner of laymen he was firm that they should be tried in the lay courts; and while his contemporary, Henry III of England, remained a feeble victim of papal encroachments, Louis boldly declared, ‘It is unheard of that the Holy See, when it is in need, should impose subsidies on the Church of France, and levy those contributions on temporal goods that can only be imposed by the King.’

No storm of protest was aroused, for the Papacy in its bitter struggle with the Empire was largely dependent on French support; while Louis’s transparent purity of motive in maintaining his supremacy disarmed indignation. An Italian friar, who saw him humbly sharing the meal of some Franciscan brethren, described him as ‘more monk than king’. This assumption was at first sight borne out by his daily life: his simple diet and love of sombre clothes; his habit of rising from his bed at midnight and in the early mornings to share in the services of the Church; his hatred of oaths, lying, and idle gossip; his almost reckless charity; the eager help he offered in nursing the sick amongst his Paris slums and in washing the feet of the most repulsive beggars who crowded at his gate. ‘He was frail and slender,’ says the same Italian, ‘with an angelic expression, and dove’s eyes full of grace.’

Perhaps, if Louis had not been called to the life of a king, he might have become a friar; but living in the world he loved his wife and children, and would sometimes tease the former by protesting, when she complained how poorly he dressed, that if he put on gaudy clothes to please her she also must go in drab attire to please him.

Those of his subjects who saw Louis on the battle-field describe him as ‘the finest knight ever seen’, and recount tales of their difficulty in restraining his hot courage, that would carry him into the fiercest hand-to-hand conflict without any thought of personal danger. Yet this king was a lover of peace in his heart. He wished to be friends with all his Christian neighbours, and, well content with the lands that already belonged to the French crown, he negotiated a treaty by which he recognized English claims to the Duchy of Guienne. Less successful was his effort to act as mediator between popes and emperors; but if he could not secure peace he determined at least to remain as neutral in the struggle as possible, refusing the imperial crown when the Pope deposed Frederick II. Nor would he reap advantage out of the anarchy that followed on that emperor’s death.

War between Christians was hateful to Louis because it prevented any combined action against the Turks; for in him, as in Innocent III, burned the old crusading spirit that had never quite died out in France.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century a French peasant lad, Stephen, had preached a new crusade, saying that God had told him in a vision that it was left for Christian children to succeed where their elders had failed in recovering the Holy Sepulchre. Thousands of boys and girls, some of them only twelve or thirteen years of age, collected at Marseilles in eager response to this message. They expected that a pathway would be opened to them across the sea as in the days of Moses and the Chosen People, and when they had waited for some time in vain for this miracle, they allowed themselves to be entrapped by false merchants, who, though Christian in name, would allow nothing to stand in the way of the gold that they coveted. Enticed on board ship, disarmed, bound, and manacled, the unfortunate young crusaders were sold in the market-places of Egypt and Syria to become the slaves of the Moslems whom they had hoped to conquer.

When he had first heard of the Children’s Crusade, Innocent III had exclaimed, ‘The children shame us indeed!’ and St. Louis, the inheritor of their spirit, felt that his kingship would be shamed unless he used his power and influence to convert and overthrow the Turk.

One of his subjects, who loved him, the Sieur de Joinville, has left a graphic personal account of the expedition undertaken against Egypt. From Cyprus, the head-quarters of the crusaders, a fleet of some one thousand eight hundred vessels, great and small, sailed to Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile; and Louis, seeing his ensign borne ashore, would not be restrained, but leaped himself into the water, lance in hand, shouting his battle-cry of ‘Mont-joie St. Denys!’

Before the impetuosity of an army inspired by this zeal the town soon fell; but the mediaeval mind had reckoned little with difficulties of climate, and soon the unhealthy mists that hung over the delta of the Nile were decimating the Christian ranks with fever and dysentery, while many of the best troops perished in unimportant skirmishes into which daring rather than a wise judgement had led them. The advance once checked became a retreat, the retreat a rout; and St. Louis, refusing to desert his rear-guard, was taken prisoner by the Mahometans.

The disaster was complete, for only on the surrender of Damietta and the payment of a huge ransom was the King released, but his patience and chivalry redeemed his failure from all stain of ignominy. Instead of returning to France he sailed to the Holy Land; where, though Jerusalem had again fallen to the Turks after Frederick II’s temporary possession of it, yet a strip of seaboard, including the port of Acre, remained to the Christians.

Louis believed that, unless he persevered in fulfilling his vow, crusaders of a lesser rank would lose their hope and courage, and so, enfeebled by disease, he stayed for three years in Palestine, until the death of his mother, Queen Blanche, whom he had left as regent in France, compelled him to return home. Joinville relates how on this voyage, because of the fierceness of the storm, the sailors would have put the King ashore at Cyprus, but Louis feared a panic amongst the terrified troops if he agreed. ‘There is none’, he said, ‘that does not love his life as much as I love mine, and these peradventure would never return to their own land. Therefore I like better to place my own person ... in God’s hands than to do this harm to the many people who are here.’

Louis reached France in safety, but, chafing at his crusading failures, he once more took the Cross, against the advice of his barons, in 1270. It was his aim to regain Tunis, and so to free part of North Africa at least from Mahometan rule. To this task he brought his old religious enthusiasm, but France was weary of crusades, and many of those who had fought willingly in Syria and Egypt now refused to follow him, leaving the greater part of his army to be composed of mercenaries, tempted only by their pay.

Landing near Carthage, the crusaders soon found themselves outnumbered, and were blockaded by their foes amid the ruins of the town. Pestilence swept the crowded, insanitary camp, and one of the first to fall a victim was the delicate king. ‘Lord, have pity on Thy people whom I have led here. Send them to their homes in safety. Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, nor let them be forced to deny Thy Holy Name.’

The dying words of the saint are characteristic of his love of the Faith and of his people; and everywhere in the camp and in France, when the news of his death reached her, there was mourning for this king among kings who had sacrificed his life for his ideals. Yet the flame of enthusiasm he had tried to keep alight quickly flickered out into the darkness, and his son and successor, Philip III, made a truce with the Sultan of Tunis that enabled him to withdraw his army and embark for home. The only person really annoyed by this arrangement was the English prince Edward, afterwards Edward I, who arrived on the scene just at the time of St. Louis’s death, thirsting for a campaign and military glory; but owing to the general indifference he was forced to give up the idea of war in Africa and continue his journey alone to the Holy Land.

Philip III of France has left little mark on history. He stands, with the title of ‘the Rash’, between two kings of dominant personality—his father, canonized as a saint before the century had closed, and his son Philip IV, ‘the Fair’, anything but a saint in his hard, unscrupulous dealings with the world, but yet one of the strongest rulers that France has known.

Philip IV was only seventeen when he became king. From his nickname ‘le Bel’ it is obvious that he was handsome, but no kindly Joinville has left a record of his personal life and character. We can only draw our conclusions from his acts, and these show him ruthless in his ambitions, mean, and vindictive.

In his dealings with the Papacy Philip’s conduct stands contrasted with the usual affectionate reverence of his predecessors; but this contrast is partly accounted for by the fact that, at the end of the quarrel between Empire and Papacy, Rome found herself regarding France from a very changed standpoint to the early days of that encounter.

Ever since the time of Gregory VII the Hohenstaufen emperors had loomed like a thunder-cloud on the papal horizon, but with the execution of Conradin, the last of the royal line,25 this threatening atmosphere had cleared. The Empire fell a prey to civil war during the Great Interregnum, that is, during the seventeen years when English, Spanish, and German princes contended without any decisive results for the imperial crown. Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who at last emerged triumphant, had learned at least one diplomatic lesson, that if he wished to have a free hand in Germany he could do so best as the friend of the Pope, not as his enemy. One of his earliest acts was to ratify a concordat with Rome in which he resigned all those imperial claims to the lands belonging to the Holy See that Frederick II had put forward. He also agreed to acknowledge Count Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis and the Pope’s chief ally, as Count of Provence and King of Naples and Sicily.

Italy was thus freed from German intervention, but her cities remained torn by the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines; and the iron hand of the French lay as heavily on ‘The Kingdom’ as ever the Hohenstaufen’s despotic sceptre. The Sicilians, restless under the yoke, began to mourn Frederick, who, whatever his sins, had been born and bred in the south, the son of a southern princess; while these French were cruel with the indifferent ferocity of strangers who despised those whom they oppressed.

Out of the sullen hatred of the multitude, stirred of a sudden to white heat by the assault of a French soldier on a woman of Palermo, sprang the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the rebellion and massacre of an Easter Monday night, when more than four thousand of the hated strangers, men, women, and children, were put to death and their bodies flung into an open pit. Charles of Anjou prepared a fitting revenge for this insult to his race, a revenge that he intended to exact to the uttermost farthing, for he had little of his brother’s sense of justice and tender heart; but while he made his preparations a Spanish prince, Peter III of Aragon, came to the rescue of the Sicilians with a large fleet. A fierce war followed, but in spite of defeats, treaties that would have sacrificed her to the interests of kings, and continuous papal threats, Sicily clung staunch to her new ally, gaining at last as a recognized Aragonese possession a triumphant independence of the Angevin kingdom of Naples.

Rome, under a pope who was merely the puppet of Charles of Anjou, had hurled anathemas at Peter III; but his successors of more independent mind envied the Sicilians. It was of little use for Rome to throw off Hohenstaufen chains if she must rivet in their stead those of the French House of Anjou. This was the fear that made her look with cold suspicion on her once well-beloved sons the kings of France, whose relations of the blood-royal were also kings of Naples.

In 1294 Pope Boniface VIII, sometimes called ‘the last of the mediaeval Popes’ because any hopes of realizing the world-wide ambitions of a Hildebrand or of an Innocent III died with him, was elected to the Chair of St. Peter. His jubilee, held at Rome in 1300 to celebrate the new century, was of a splendour to dazzle the thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe who poured their offerings into his coffers; but its glamour was delusive.

Already he had suffered rebuffs in encounters with the kings of England and France: for, when he published a Bull, Clericis Laicos, that forbade the clergy to pay taxes any longer to a lay ruler, Edward I at once condemned the English Church to outlawry, until from fear of the wholesale robbery of their lands and goods his bishops consented to a compromise that made the Bull a dead letter. Philip IV of France, on his part, was even more violent, for he retaliated by ordering his subjects to send no more contributions to Rome of any kind.

A wiser man than Boniface might have realized from his failures that the growth of nationality was proving too strong for any theories of world-government, whether papal or imperial; but, old and stubborn, he could not set aside his Hildebrandine ideals. When one of his legates, a Frenchman, embarked on a dispute with Philip IV, Boniface told him to meet the King with open defiance, upon which Philip immediately ordered the ecclesiastic’s arrest, and that his archbishop should degrade him from his office. Boniface then fulminated threats of excommunication and deposition, to which the French king replied by an act of open violence.

The agent he chose to inflict this insult was a certain Nogaret, grandson of an Albigensian heretic who had been burned at the stake, and this man joined himself to some of the nobles of the Roman Campagna, who had equally little reverence for the Head of Christendom. Heavily armed, they appeared in the village of Anagni, where Boniface VIII was staying, and demanded to see him. Outside in the street their men-at-arms stood shouting ‘Death to the Pope!’

Boniface could hear them from his audience-chamber, but though he was eighty-six his courage did not fail him. Clad in his full pontifical robes, his cross in one hand, his keys of St. Peter in the other, he received the intruders. Nogaret roughly demanded his abdication. ‘Here is my head! Here is my neck!’ he replied. ‘Betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like Him I will at least die Pope.’ At this one of the Roman nobles struck him across the face with his mailed glove, felling him to the ground, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered. It was the ProvenÇal’s mission to intimidate rather than to murder, and while he argued with the Italians a hostile crowd assembled to rescue their Vicar, and the French agents were forced to fly.

The proud old man survived the indignities he had suffered only by a few weeks, and his successor, having dared to excommunicate those who took part in the scene at Anagni, died also with mysterious suddenness. No definite suspicion attached to Philip IV, but rumour whispered the fatal word ‘poison’, and the conclave of cardinals spent ten uneasy months in trying to find a new pope. At last a choice emerged from the conclave, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with the title of Clement V. He was crowned at Lyons, and never ventured into Italy, choosing as his residence the city of Avignon in Provence.

Here for just over seventy years, during the ‘Babylonish Captivity’ as it was usually called, a succession of popes reigned under French influence, having exchanged the imperial yoke for one still more binding.

Philip IV at once made use of this French Head of Christendom to condemn the Order of Templars, which from their powerful organization and extensive revenues he had long regarded with dislike and envy.

The crusades at an end, the Templars had outlived the object of their foundation; while the self-denial imposed upon them and their roving, uncloistered life, exposed them to constant temptations to which many of the less spiritual succumbed. Thus their suppression was probably wise; but Philip IV, a pitiless enemy, did not merely suppress, he pursued the Knights of the Temple with vindictive cruelty. Hundreds were thrown into dungeons, and there tortured into confessing crimes, the committal of which they afterwards recanted in vain; while their principal officers were burned at the stake in the market-places of the large French towns. By papal commands the revenues of the Templars passed into the exchequer of the Knights of St. John, who still guarded one of the outposts of Christendom, the island of Rhodes; but the French king took care that a substantial part of the money confiscated in France went instead to his own treasury.

Philip was indeed in serious financial straits, for the revenues of the royal demesnes were proving quite inadequate to meet the expenses of a government that now extended its sway over the length and breadth of France. Philip tried many expedients to meet the deficiency, most of them bad. Such were the frequent debasement of the coinage and the imposition of the gabelle, that is of a tax on the sale of goods. This was justly hated because instead of encouraging commerce it penalized industry by adding to the price of nearly every commodity put on the market. Thus a gabelle imposed on grain would mean that a man must pay a tax on it three times over, first in the form of grain, then of flour, and finally as bread.

Worse even than the gabelle was Philip’s method of ‘farming’ the taxes, that is, of selling the right to collect them to some speculator, who would make himself responsible to the government for a round sum, and then squeeze what extra money he could out of the unfortunate populace in order to repay his efforts.

It is not, then, for any improved financial administration that the reign of Philip IV is worthy of praise. His was no original genius, but rather a practical ability for developing the schemes invented by his predecessors. Like them he hated and distrusted his insubordinate baronage; and, seeking to impose his fierce will upon them, turned for advice and obedience to men of lesser rank, employing as the main instrument of his government the lawyer class that Philip Augustus and Louis IX had introduced in limited numbers amongst the feudal office-holders at their court.

The employment of trained workers in the place of amateurs resulted in improved administration, so it followed that under Philip IV the French government began to take a definitely modern stamp and became divided into separate departments for considering different kinds of work. Thus it was the duty of the Conseil du Roi, or King’s Council, to give the Sovereign advice; of the Chambre des Comptes, or Chamber of Finance, to deal with financial questions; of the Parlement, or chief judicial court, to sit in Paris for two months at least twice a year to hold assizes and give judgements.

The Parlement de Paris resembles the English Parliament somewhat in name; but except for a right, later acquired, of registering royal edicts, its work was entirely judicial, not legislative. The body in France that most nearly corresponded to the English Parliament was the ‘States-General’, composed of representatives of the three ‘Estates’ or classes, of clergy, nobles, and citizens. The peasants of France, who composed the greater part of her population, were not represented at all.

Philip IV summoned the ‘States-General’ several times to approve his suggestions; but, unlike the ‘Model Parliament’ called by his English contemporary Edward I for similar reasons, it never developed into a legislative assembly that could act as a competent check upon royal tyranny, but existed merely as it seemed to accept responsibility for its ruler’s laws and financial demands, whether good or bad. Its weakness arose partly from the fact that it often sat only for a day at a time and so had no leisure to discuss the measures laid before it, but still more owing to the class selfishness that prevented the three classes from combining to insist on reforms before they would vote any taxes.

This was very unfortunate for France, since on the one occasion that the nobles and burghers actually did combine in refusing to submit to an especially obnoxious gabelle that hit both their pockets, Philip IV was forced to yield, reluctantly enough because the loss of the money led to his failure in a war in Flanders.

Flanders was a fief of the French crown, and because its count, his tenant-in-chief, had dared to rebel against him, Philip had flung him into prison and declared his lands confiscated. Then with his queen he had ridden north to visit this territory now owning direct allegiance to himself, in the belief that he had nothing to do but to give orders to its inhabitants and await their immediate fulfilment. The chroniclers tell us that the royal pair were overcome with astonishment at the display of fine clothes and jewels made by the burghers of Bruges to do them honour.

‘I thought that there was only one Queen in France,’ exclaimed Philip’s consort discontentedly. ‘Here I see at least six hundred.’ The King, always with an eye to the main chance, regarded the brilliant throng more philosophically. They seemed to him very suitable subjects for taxation; but the Flemings had won their wealth by a sturdy independence of spirit both in the market-place and on the high seas: they had been indifferent to the fate of their count, but at any time preferred the risks of rebellion to being plucked like geese by the King of France.

On the field of Courtrai, where Philip brought his army to punish their insolence, the Flemish burghers taught Europe, as their Milanese fellows had at Legnano in the twelfth century, that citizen levies could hold their own against heavily-armed feudal troops; and though the King’s careful generalship redeemed this defeat two years later, he found the victory he obtained barren of fruit. Within a few weeks of the burghers’ apparent collapse yet another citizen army had rallied to attack the royal camp, and Philip, declaring angrily that ‘it rained Flemings’, was driven to conclude a peace.

Besides hating the independence of the Flemings, Philip IV grudged the English supremacy over the Duchy of Guienne that his grandfather had so willingly acknowledged. To his jealous eyes it ran its wedge like an alien dagger into the heart of his kingdom; and watching his opportunity until Edward I was involved in wars with Wales and Scotland, Philip crossed the borders of the Duchy, and by force or craft obtained control of the greater number of its fortresses. There is little doubt that had he lived he would gradually have absorbed the whole of the southern provinces; but when only forty-six he died, mourned by few of his subjects, and yet one of the kings who had set his stamp with the most lasting results upon the government of France.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.