Innocent III. at first employed against the heretics of Southern France only spiritual and legitimate weapons. Before proscribing, he tried to convert them; he sent to them a great number of missionaries, nearly all taken from the order of Citeaux, and of proved zeal already; many amongst them had successively the title and power of legates; and they went preaching throughout the whole country, communicating with the princes and laic lords, whom they requested to drive away the heretics from their domains, and holding with the heretics themselves conferences which frequently drew a numerous attendance. A knight "full of sagacity," according to a contemporary chronicler, "Pons d'Adhemar, of Rodelle, said one day to Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse, one of the most zealous of the pope's delegates, 'We could not have believed that Rome had so many powerful arguments against these folk here.' 'See you not,' said the bishop, 'how little force there is in their objections?' 'Certainly,' answered the knight. 'Why, then, do you not expel them from your lands?' 'We cannot,' answered Pons; 'we have been brought up with them; we have amongst them folk near and dear to us, and we see them living honestly.'" Some of the legates, wearied at the little effect of their preaching, showed an inclination to give up their mission. Peter de Castelnau himself, the most zealous of all, and destined before long to pay for his zeal with his life, wrote to the pope to beg for permission to return to his monastery. Two Spanish priests, Diego Azebes, Bishop of Osma, and his sub-prior Dominic, falling in with the Roman legates at Montpellier, heard them express their disgust. "Give up," said they to the legates, "your retinue, your horses, and your goings in state; proceed in all humility, afoot and barefoot, without gold or silver, living and teaching after the example of the Divine Master." "We dare not take on ourselves such things," answered the pope's agents; "they would seem sort of innovation; but if some person of sufficient authority consent to precede us in such guise, we would follow him readily." The Bishop of Osma sent away his retinue to Spain, and kept with him only his companion Dominic; and they, taking with them two of the monks of Citeaux, Peter de Castelnau and Raoul,—the most fervent of the delegates from Rome,—began that course of austerity and of preaching amongst the people which was ultimately to make of the sub-prior Dominic a saint and the founder of a great religious order, to which has often, but wrongly, been attributed the origin, though it certainly became the principal agent, of the Inquisition. Whilst joining in humble and pious energy with the two Spanish priests, the two monks of Citeaux, and Peter de Castelnau especially, did not cease to urge amongst the laic princes the extirpation of the heretics. In 1205 they repaired to Toulouse to demand of Raymond VI. a formal promise, which indeed they obtained; but Raymond was one of those undecided and feeble characters who dare not refuse to promise what they dare not attempt to do. He wished to live in peace with the orthodox Church without behaving cruelly to a large number of his subjects. The fanatical legate, Peter de Castelnau, enraged at his tergiversation, instantly excommunicated him; and the pope sent the count a threatening letter, giving him therein to understand that in case of need stronger measures would be adopted against him. Raymond, affrighted, prevailed on the two legates to repair to St. Gilles, and he there renewed his promises to them; but he always sought for and found on the morrow some excuse for retarding the execution of them. The legates, after having reproached him vehemently, determined to leave St. Gilles without further delay, and the day after their departure (January 15th, 1208), as they were getting ready to cross the Rhone, two strangers, who had lodged the night before in the same hostelry with them, drew near, and one of the two gave Peter de Castelnau a lance-thrust with such force, that the legate, after exclaiming, "God forgive thee, as I do!" had only time to give his comrade his last instructions, and then expired.

Great was the emotion in France and at Rome. It was barely thirty years since in England, after an outburst of passion on the part of King Henry II., four knights of his court had murdered the Archbishop Thomas-a- Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Was the Count of Toulouse, too, guilty of having instigated the shedding of blood and the murder of a prelate? Such was, in the thirteenth century, the general cry throughout the Catholic Church and the signal for war against Raymond VI.; a war undertaken on the plea of a personal crime, but in reality for the extirpation of heresy in Southern France, and for the dispossession of the native princes, who would not fully obey the decrees of the papacy, in favor of foreign conquerors who would put them into execution. The crusade against the Albigensians was the most striking application of two principles equally false and fatal, which did more than as much evil to the Catholics as to the heretics, and to the papacy as to freedom; and they are, the right of the spiritual power to claim for the coercion of souls the material force of the temporal powers, and its right to strip temporal sovereigns, in case they set at nought its injunctions, of their title to the obedience of their people; in other words, denial of religious liberty to conscience and of political independence to states. It was by virtue of these two principles, at that time dominant, but not without some opposition, in Christendom, that Innocent III., in 1208, summoned the King of France, the great lords and the knights, and the clergy, secular and regular, of the kingdom to assume the cross and go forth to extirpate from Southern France the Albigensians, "worse than the Saracens;" and that he promised to the chiefs of the crusaders the sovereignty of such domains as they should win by conquest from the princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics.

Throughout all France, and even outside of France, the passions of religion and ambition were aroused at this summons.

Twelve abbots and twenty monks of Citeaux dispersed themselves in all directions preaching the crusade; and lords and knights, burghers and peasants, laymen and clergy, hastened to respond. "From near and far they came," says the contemporary poet-chronicler, William of Tudela; "there be men from Auvergne and Burgundy, France and Limousin; there be men from all the world; there be Germans, Poitevines, Gascons, Rouergats, and Saintongese. Never did God make scribe who, whatsoever his pains, could set them all down in writing, in two months or in three." The poet reckons "twenty thousand horsemen armed at all points, and more than two hundred thousand villeins and peasants, not to speak of burghers and clergy." A less exaggerative though more fanatical writer, Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, the chief contemporary chronicler of this crusade, contents himself with saying that, at the siege of Carcassonne, one of the first operations of the crusaders, "it was said that their army numbered fifty thousand men." Whatever may be the truth about the numbers, the crusaders were passionately ardent and persevering: the war against the Albigensians lasted fifteen years (from 1208 to 1223), and of the two leading spirits, one ordering and the other executing, Pope Innocent III. and Simon de Montfort, neither saw the end of it. During these fifteen years, in the region situated between the Rhone, the Pyrenees, the Garonne, and even the Dordogne, nearly all the towns and strong castles, Beziers, Carcassonne, Castelnaudary, Lavaur, Gaillac, Moissae, Minerve, Termes, Toulouse, &c., were taken, lost, retaken, given over to pillage, sack, and massacre, and burnt by the crusaders with all the cruelty of fanatics and all the greed of conquerors. We do not care to dwell here in detail upon this tragical and monotonous history; we will simply recall some few of its characteristics. Doubt has been thrown upon the answer attributed to Arnauld-Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, when he was asked, in 1209, by the conquerors of Beziers, how, at the assault of the city, they should distinguish the heretics from the faithful: "Slay them all; God will be sure to know His own." The doubt is more charitable than reasonable; for it is a contemporary, himself a monk of Citeaux, who reports, without any comment, this hateful speech. Simon de Montfort, the hero of the crusade, employed similar language. One day two heretics, taken at Castres, were brought before him; one of them was unshakable in his belief, the other expressed a readiness to turn convert: "Burn them both," said the count; "if this fellow mean what he says, the fire will serve for expiation of his sins, and, if he lie, he will suffer the penalty for his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore fell upon them right eagerly and slew them on the spot. Further, the count caused stones to be heaped upon the lady of the castle, Amaury's sister, a very wicked heretic, who had been cast into a well. Finally our crusaders, with extreme alacrity, burned heretics without number."

In the midst of these atrocious unbridlements of passions supposed to be religious, other passions were not slow to make their appearance. Innocent III. had promised the crusaders the sovereignty of the domains they might win by conquest from princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics. After the capture, in 1209, of Beziers and Carcassonne, possessions of Raymond Roger, Viscount of Albi, and nephew of the Count of Toulouse, the Abbot of Citeaux, a legate of the pope, assembled the principal chiefs of the crusaders that they might choose one amongst them as lord and governor of their conquests. The offer was made, successively, to Eudes, Duke of Burgundy, to Peter de Courtenay, Count of Nevers, and to Walter de Chatilion, Count of St. Paul; but they all three declined, saying that they had sufficient domains of their own without usurping those of the Viscount of Beziers, to whom, in their opinion, they had already caused enough loss. The legate, somewhat embarrassed, it is said, proposed to appoint two bishops and four knights, who, in concert with him, should choose a new master for the conquered territories. The proposal was agreed to, and, after some moments of hesitation, Simon de Montfort, being elected by this committee, accepted the proffered domains, and took imdiate possession of them on publication of a charter conceived as follows: "Simon, Lord of Montfort, Earl of Leicester, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne. The Lord having delivered into my hands the lands of the heretics, an unbelieving people, that is to say, whatsoever He hath thought fit to take from them by the hand of the crusaders, His servants, I have accepted humbly and devoutly this charge and administration, with confidence in His aid." The pope wrote to him forthwith to confirm him in hereditary possession of his new dominions, at the same time expressing to him a hope that, in concert with the legates, he would continue to carry out the extirpation of the heretics. The dispossessed Viscount, Raymond Roger, having been put in prison by his conqueror in a tower of Carcassonne itself, died there at the end of three months, of disease according to some, and a violent death according to others; but the latter appears to be a groundless suspicion, for it was not to cowardly and secret crimes that Simon de Montfort was inclined.

From this time forth the war in Southern France changed character, or, rather, it assumed a double character; with the war of religion was openly joined a war of conquest; it was no longer merely against the Albigensians and their heresies, it was against the native princes of Southern France and their domains that the crusade was prosecuted. Simon de Montfort was eminently qualified to direct and accomplish this twofold design: sincerely fanatical and passionately ambitious; of a valor that knew no fatigue; handsome and strong; combining tact with authority; pitiless towards his enemies as became his mission of doing justice in the name of the faith and the Church; a leader faithful to his friends and devoted to their common cause whilst reckoning upon them for his own private purposes, he possessed those natural qualities which confer spontaneous empire over men and those abilities which lure them on by opening a way for the fulfilment of their interested hopes. And as for himself, by the stealthy growth of selfishness, which is so prone to become developed when circumstances are tempting, he every day made his personal fortunes of greater and greater account in his views and his conduct. His ambitious appetite grew by the very difficulties it encountered as well as by the successes it fed upon. The Count of Toulouse, persecuted and despoiled, complained loudly in the ears of the pope; protested against the charge of favoring the heretics; offered and actually made the concessions demanded by Rome; and, as security, gave up seven of his principal strongholds. But, being ever too irresolute and too weak to keep his engagements to his subjects' detriment no less than to stand out against his adversaries' requirements, he was continually falling back into the same condition, and keeping off attacks which were more and more urgent by promises which always remained without effect. After having sent to Rome embassy upon embassy with explanations and excuses, he twice went thither himself, in 1210 and in 1215; the first time alone, the second with his young son, who was then thirteen, and who was at a later period Raymond VII. He appealed to the pope's sense of justice; he repudiated the stories and depicted the violence of his enemies; and finally pleaded the rights of his son, innocent of all that was imputed to himself, and yet similarly attacked and despoiled. Innocent III. had neither a narrow mind nor an unfeeling heart; he listened to the father's pleading, took an interest in the youth, and wrote, in April, 1212, and January, 1213, to his legates in Languedoc and to Simon de Montfort, "After having led the army of the crusaders into the domains of the Count of Toulouse, ye have not been content with invading all the places wherein there were heretics, but ye have further gotten possession of those where-in there was no suspicion of heresy. . . . The same ambassadors have objected to us that ye have usurped what was another's with so much greed and so little consideration that of all the domains of the Count of Toulouse there remains to him barely the town of that name, together with the castle of Montauban. . . . Now, though the said count has been found guilty of many matters against God and against the Church, and our legates, in order to force him to acknowledgment thereof, have excommunicated his person, and have left his domains to the first captor, nevertheless, he has not yet been condemned as a heretic nor as an accomplice in the death of Peter de Castelnau, of sacred memory, albeit he is strongly suspected thereof. That is why we did ordain that, if there should appear against him a proper accuser, within a certain time, there should be appointed him a day for clearing himself, according to the form pointed out in our letters, reserving to ourselves the delivery of a definitive sentence thereupon: in all which the procedure hath not been according to our orders. We wot not, therefore, on what ground we could yet grant to others his dominions which have not been taken away either from him or from his heirs; and, above all, we would not appear to have fraudulently extorted from him the castles he hath committed to us, the will of the Apostle being that we should refrain from even the appearance of wrong."

But Innocent III. forgot that, in the case of either temporal or spiritual sovereigns, when there has once been an appeal to force, there is no stopping, at pleasure and within specified limits, the movement that has been set going and the agents which have the work in hand. He had decreed war against the princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics; and he had promised their domains to their conquerors. He meant to reserve to himself the right of pronouncing definitive judgment as to the condemnation of princes as heretics, and as to dispossessing them of their dominions; but when force had done its business on the very spot, when the condemnation of the princes as heretics had been pronounced by the pope's legates and their bodily dispossession effected by his laic allies, the reserves and regrets of Innocent III. were vain. He had proclaimed two principles—the bodily extirpation of the heretics and the political dethronement of the princes who were their accomplices or protectors; but the application of the principles slipped out of his own hands. Three local councils assembled in 1210, 1212, and 1213, at St. Gilles, at Arles, and at Lavaur, and presided over by the pope's legates, proclaimed the excommunication of Raymond VI., and the cession of his dominions to Simon de Montfort, who took possession of them for himself and his comrades. Nor were the pope's legates without their share in the conquest; Arnauld Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, became Archbishop of Narbonne; and Abbot Foulques of Marseilles, celebrated in his youth as a gallant troubadour, was Bishop of Toulouse and the most ardent of the crusaders. When these conquerors heard that the pope had given a kind reception to Raymond VI. and his young son, and lent a favorable ear to their complaints, they sent haughty warnings to Innocent III., giving him to understand that the work was all over, and that, if he meddled, Simon de Montfort and his warriors might probably not bow to his decisions. Don Pedro II., king of Aragon, had strongly supported before Innocent III. the claims of the Count of Toulouse and of the southern princes his allies. "He cajoled the lord pope," says the prejudiced chronicler of these events, the monk Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, "so far as to persuade him that the cause of the faith was achieved against the heretics, they being put to distant flight and completely driven from the Albigensian country, and that accordingly it was necessary for him to revoke altogether the indulgence be had granted to the crusaders. . . . The sovereign pontiff, too credulously listening to the perfidious suggestions of the said king, readily assented to his demands, and wrote to the Count of Montfort, with orders and commands to restore without delay to the Counts of Comminges and of Foix, and to Gaston of Beam, very wicked and abandoned people, the lands which, by just judgment of God and by the aid of the crusaders, he at last had conquered." But, in spite of his desire to do justice, Innocent III., studying policy rather than moderation, did not care to enter upon a struggle against the agents, ecclesiastical and laic, whom he had let loose upon Southern France. In November, 1215, the fourth Lateran council met at Rome; and the Count of Toulouse, his son, and the Count of Foix brought their claims before it. "It is quite true," says Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, "that they found there—and, what is worse, amongst the prelates—certain folk who opposed the cause of the faith, and labored for the restoration of the said counts; but the counsel of Ahitophel did not prevail, for the lord pope, in agreement with the greater and saner part of the council, decreed that the city of Toulouse and other territories conquered by the crusaders should be ceded to the Count of Montfort, who, more than any other, had borne himself right valiantly and loyally in the holy enterprise; and, as for the domains which Count Raymond possessed in Provence, the sovereign pontiff decided that they should be reserved to him, in order to make provision, either with part or even the whole, for the son of this count, provided always that, by sure signs of fealty and good behavior, he should show himself worthy of compassion."

This last inclination towards compassion on the part of the pope in favor of the young Count Raymond, "provided he showed himself worthy of it," remained as fruitless as the remonstrances addressed to his legates; for on the 17th of July, 1216, seven months after the Lateran council, Innocent III. died, leaving Simon de Montfort and his comrades in possession of all they had taken, and the war still raging between the native princes of Southern France and the foreign conquerors. The primitive, religious character of the crusade wore off more and more; worldly ambition and the spirit of conquest became more and more predominant; and the question lay far less between catholics and heretics than between the old and new masters of the country, between the independence of the southern people and the triumph of warriors come from the north of France, that is to say, between two different races, civilizations, and languages. Raymond VI. and his son recovered thenceforth certain supports and opportunities of which hitherto the accusation of heresy and the judgments of the court of Rome had robbed them; their neighboring allies and their secret or intimidated partisans took fresh courage; the fortune of battle became shifty; successes and reverses were shared by both sides; and not only many small places and castles, but the largest towns, Toulouse amongst others, fell into the hands of each party alternately. Innocent III.'s successor in the Holy See, Pope Honorius III., though at first very pronounced in his opposition to the Albigensians, had less ability, less perseverance, and less influence than his predecessor. Finally, on the 20th of June, 1218, Simon de Montfort, who had been for nine months unsuccessfully besieging Toulouse, which had again come into the possession of Raymond VI., was killed by a shower of stones, under the walls of the place, and left to his son Amaury the inheritance of his war and his conquests, but not of his vigorous genius and his warlike renown.



The struggle still dragged on for five years with varied fortune on each side, but Amaury de Montfort was losing ground every day, and Raymond VI., when he died in August, 1222, had recovered the greater part of his dominions. His son, Raymond VII., continued the war for eighteen months longer, with enough of popular favor and of success to make his enemies despair of recovering their advantages; and, on the 14th of January, 1224, Amaury de Montfort, after having concluded with the Counts of Toulouse and Foix a treaty which seemed to have only a provisional character, "went forth," says the History of Languedoc, "with all the French from Carcassonne, and left forever the country which his house had possessed for nearly fourteen years." Scarcely had he arrived at the court of Louis VIII., who had just succeeded his father, Philip Augustus, when he ceded to the King of France his rights over the domains which the crusaders had conquered by a deed conceived in these terms: "Know that we give up to our Lord Louis, the illustrious King of the French, and to his heirs forever, to dispose of according to their pleasure, all the privileges and gifts that the Roman Church did grant unto our father Simon of pious memory, in respect of the countship of Toulouse and other districts in Albigeois; supposing that the pope do accomplish all the demands made to him by the king through the Archbishop of Bourges, and the Bishops of Langres and Chartres; else, be it known for certain that we cede not to any one aught of all these domains."

Whilst this cruel war lasted Philip Augustus would not take any part in it. Not that he had any leaning towards the Albigensian heretics on the score of creed or religious liberty; but his sense of justice and moderation was shocked at the violence employed against them, and he had a repugnance to the idea of taking part in the devastation of the beautiful southern provinces. He took it ill, moreover, that the pope should arrogate to himself the right of despoiling of their dominions, on the ground of heresy, princes who were vassals of the King of France; and, without offering any formal opposition, he had no mind to give his assent thereto. When Innocent III. called upon him to co-operate in the crusade, Philip answered, "that he had at his flanks two huge and terrible lions, the Emperor Otho, and King John of England, who were working with all their might to bring trouble upon the kingdom of France; that, consequently, he had no inclination at all to leave France, or even to send his son; but it seemed to him enough, for the present, if he allowed his barons to march against the disturbers of peace and of the faith in the province of Narbonne." In 1213, when Simon de Montfort had gained the battle of Muret, Philip allowed Prince Louis to go and look on when possession was taken of Toulouse by the crusaders; but when Louis came back and reported to his father, "in the presence of the princes and barons who were, for the most part, relatives and allies of Count Raymond, the great havoc committed by Count Simon in the city after surrender, the king withdrew to his apartments without any ado beyond saying to those present, 'Sirs, I have yet hope that before very long Count de Montfort and his brother Guy will die at their work, for God is just, and will suffer these counts to perish thereat, because their quarrel is unjust.'" Nevertheless, at a little later period, when the crusade was at its greatest heat, Philip, on the pope's repeated entreaty, authorized his son to take part in it with such lords as might be willing to accompany him; but he ordered that the expedition should not start before the spring, and, on the occurrence of some fresh incident, he had it further put off until the following year. He received visits from Count Raymond VI., and openly testified good will towards him. When Simon de Montfort was decisively victorious, and in possession of the places wrested from Raymond, Philip Augustus recognized accomplished facts, and received the new Count of Toulouse as his vassal; but when, after the death of Simon de Montfort and Innocent III., the question was once more thrown open, and when Raymond VI., first, and then his son Raymond VII., had recovered the greater part of their dominions, Philip formally refused to recognize Amaury de Montfort as successor to his father's conquests: nay, he did more; he refused to accept the cession of those conquests, offered to him by Amaury de Montfort and pressed upon him by Pope Honorius III. Philip Augustus was not a scrupulous sovereign, nor disposed to compromise himself for the mere sake of defending justice and humanity; but he was too judicious not to respect and protect, to a certain extent, the rights of his vassals as well as his own, and, at the same time, too discreet to involve himself, without necessity, in a barbarous and dubious war. He held aloof from the crusade against the Albigensians with as much wisdom, and more than as much dignity, as he had displayed, seventeen years before, in withdrawing from the crusade against the Saracens.

He had, in 1216, another great chance of showing his discretion. The English barons were at war with their king, John Lackland, in defence of Magna Charta, which they had obtained the year before; and they offered the crown of England to the King of France, for his son, Prince Louis. Before accepting, Philip demanded twenty-four hostages, taken from the men of note in the country, as a guarantee that the offer would be supported in good earnest; and the hostages were sent to him. But Pope Innocent III. had lately released King John from his oath in respect of Magna Charta, and had excommunicated the insurgent barons; and he now instructed his legate to oppose the projected design, with a threat of excommunicating the King of France. Philip Augustus, who in his youth had dreamed of resuscitating the empire of Charlemagne, was strongly tempted to seize the opportunity of doing over again the work of William the Conqueror; but he hesitated to endanger his power and his kingdom in such a war against King John and the pope. The prince was urgent in entreating his father: "Sir," said he, "I am your liegeman for the fief you have given me on this side of the sea; but it pertains not to you to decide aught as to the kingdom of England; I do beseech you to place no obstacle in the way of my departure." The king, "seeing his son's firm resolution and anxiety," says the historian Matthew Paris, "was one with him in feeling and desire; but, foreseeing the dangers of events to come, he did not give his public consent, and, without any expression of wish or counsel, permitted him to go, with the gift of his blessing." It was the young and ambitious Princess Blanche of Castille, wife of Prince Louis, and destined to be the mother of St. Louis, who, after her husband's departure for England, made it her business to raise troops for him and to send him means of sustaining the war. Events justified the discreet reserve of Philip Augustus; for John Lackland, after having suffered one reverse previously, died on the 19th of October, 1216; his death broke up the party of the insurgent barons; and his son, Henry III., who was crowned on the 28th of October, in Gloucester cathedral, immediately confirmed the Great Charter. Thus the national grievance vanished, and national feeling resumed its sway in England; the French everywhere became unpopular; and after a few months' struggle, with equal want of skill and success, Prince Louis gave up his enterprise and returned to France with his French comrades, on no other conditions but a mutual exchange of prisoners, and an amnesty for the English who had been his adherents.

At this juncture, as well as in the crusade against the Albigensians, Philip Augustus behaved towards the pope with a wisdom and ability hard of attainment at any time, and very rare in his own: he constantly humored the papacy without being subservient to it, and he testified towards it his respect, and at the same time his independence. He understood all the gravity of a rupture with Rome, and he neglected nothing to avoid one; but he also considered that Rome, herself not wanting in discretion, would be content with the deference of the King of France rather than get embroiled with him by exacting his submission. Philip Augustus, in his political life, always preserved this proper mean, and he found it succeed; but in his domestic life there came a day when he suffered himself to be hurried out of his usual deference towards the pope; and, after a violent attempt at resistance, he resigned himself to submission. Three years after the death of his first wife, Isabel of Hainault, who had left him a son, Prince Louis, he married Princess Ingeburga of Denmark, without knowing anything at all of her, just as it generally happens in the case of royal marriages. No sooner had she become his wife than, without any cause that can be assigned with certainty, he took such a dislike to her that, towards the end of the same year, he demanded of and succeeded in obtaining from a French council, held at Compiegne, nullity of his marriage on the ground of prohibited consanguinity. "O, naughty France! naughty France! O, Rome! Rome!" cried the poor Danish princess, on learning this decision; and she did in fact appeal to Pope Celestine III. Whilst the question was being investigated at Rome, Ingeburga, whom Philip had in vain tried to send back to Denmark, was marched about, under restraint, in France from castle to castle and convent to convent, and treated with iniquitous and shocking severity. Pope Celestine, after examination, annulled the decision of the council of Compiegne touching the pretended consanguinity, leaving in suspense the question of divorce, and, consequently, without breaking the tie of marriage between the king and the Danish princess. "I have seen," he wrote to the Archbishop of Sens, "the genealogy sent to me by the bishops, and it is due to that inspection and the uproar caused by this scandal that I have annulled the decree; take care now, therefore, that Philip do not marry again, and so break the tie which still unites him to the Church." Philip paid no heed to this canonical injunction; his heart was set upon marrying again; and, after having unsuccessfully sought the band of two German princesses, on the borders of the Rhine, who were alarmed by the fate of Ingeburga, he obtained that of a princess, a Tyrolese by origin, Agnes (according to others, Mary) of Merania, that is, Moravia (an Austrian province, in German Moehren, out of which the chroniclers of the time made Meranie or Merania, the name that has remained in the history of Agnes). She was the daughter of Berthold, Marquis of Istria, whom, about 1180, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had made Duke of Moravia. According to all contemporary chronicles, Agnes was not only beautiful, but charming; she made a great impression at the court of France; and Philip Augustus, after his marriage with her in June, 1196, became infatuated with her. But a pope more stern and bold than Celestine III., Innocent III., had just been raised to the Holy See, and was exerting himself, in court as well as monastery, to effect a reformation of morals. Immediately after his accession, he concerned himself with the conjugal irregularity in which the King of France was living. "My predecessor, Celestine," he wrote to the Bishop of Paris, "would fain have put a stop to this scandal, but he was unsuccessful; as for me, I am quite resolved to prosecute his work, and obtain by all and any means fulfilment of God's law. Be instant in speaking thereof to the king on my behalf; and tell him that his obstinate refusals may probably bring upon him both the wrath of God and the thunders of the Church." And indeed Philip's refusals were very obstinate; for the pride of the king and the feelings of the man were equally wounded. "I had rather lose half my domains," said he, "than separate from Agnes." The pope threatened him with the interdict,—that is, the suspension of all religious ceremonies, festivals, and forms in the Church of France. Philip resisted not only the threat, but also the sentence of the interdict, which was actually pronounced, first in the churches of the royal domain, and afterwards in those of the whole kingdom. "So wroth was the king," says the chronicle of St. Denis, "that he thrust from their sees all the prelates of his kingdom, because they had assented to the interdict." "I had rather turn Mussulman," said Philip; "Saladin was a happy man, for he had no pope." But Innocent III. was inflexible; he claimed respect for laws divine and human, for the domestic hearth and public order. The conscience of the nation was troubled. Agnes herself applied to the pope, urging her youth, her ignorance of the world, the sincerity and purity of her love for her husband. Innocent III. was touched, and before long gave indisputable evidence that he was, but without budging from his duty and his right as a Christian. For four years the struggle went on. At last Philip yielded to the injunction of the pope and the feeling of his people; he sent away Agnes, and recalled Ingeburga. The pope, in his hour of victory, showed his sense of equity and his moral appreciation; taking into consideration the good faith of Agnes in respect of her marriage, and Philip's possible mistake as to his right to marry her, he declared the legitimacy of the two children born of their union. Agnes retired to Poissy, where, a few months afterwards, she died. Ingeburga resumed her title and rights as queen, but without really enjoying them. Philip, incensed as well as beaten, banished her far from him and his court, to Etampes, where she lived eleven years in profound retirement. It was only in 1212 that, to fully satisfy the pope, Philip, more persevering in his political wisdom than his domestic prejudices, restored the Danish princess to all her royal station at his side. She was destined to survive him.

There can be little doubt but that the affection of Philip Augustus for Agnes of Merania was sincere; nothing can be better proof of it than the long struggle he maintained to prevent separation from her; but, to say nothing of the religious scruples which at last, perhaps, began to prick the conscience of the king, great political activity and the government of a kingdom are a powerful cure for sorrows of the heart, and seldom is there a human soul so large and so constant as to have room for sentiments and interests so different, both of them at once, and for a long continuance. It has been shown with what intelligent assiduity Philip Augustus strove to extend, or, rather, to complete the kingdom of France; what a mixture of firmness and moderation he brought to bear upon his relations with his vassals, as well as with his neighbors; and what bravery he showed in war, though he preferred to succeed by the weapons of peace. He was as energetic and effective in the internal administration of his kingdom as in foreign affairs. M. Leopold Delisle, one of the most learned French academicians, and one of the most accurate in his knowledge, has devoted a volume of more than seven hundred pages octavo to a simple catalogue of the official acts of Philip Augustus, and this catalogue contains a list of two thousand two hundred and thirty-six administrative acts of all kinds, of which M. Delisle confines himself to merely setting forth the title and object. Search has been made in this long table to see what part was taken by Philip Augustus in the establishment and interior regulation of the communes, that great fact which is so conspicuous in the history of French civilization, and which will before long be made the topic of discourse here. The search brings to light, during this reign, forty-one acts confirming certain communes already established, or certain privileges previously granted to certain populations, forty-three acts establishing new communes, or granting new local privileges, and nine acts decreeing suppression of certain communes, or a repressive intervention of the royal authority in their internal regulation, on account of quarrels or irregularities in their relations either with their lord, or, especially, with their bishop. These mere figures show the liberal character of the government of Philip Augustus, in respect of this important work of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Nor are we less struck by his efficient energy in his care for the interests and material civilization of his people. In 1185, "as he was walking one day in his palace, he placed himself at a window whence he was sometimes pleased, by way of pastime, to watch the Seine flowing by. Some carts, as they passed, caused the mud with which the streets were filled to emit a fetid smell, quite unbearable. The king, shocked at what was as unhealthy as it was disgusting, sent for the burghers and provost of the city, and ordered that all the thoroughfares and streets of Paris should be paved with hard and solid stone, for this right Christian prince aspired to rid Paris of her ancient name, Lutetia (Mud-town)." It is added that, on hearing of so good a resolution, a moneyed man of the day, named Gerard de Poissy, volunteered to contribute towards the construction of the pavement eleven thousand silver marks. Nor was Philip Augustus less concerned for the external security than for the internal salubrity of Paris. In 1190, on the eve of his departure for the crusade, "he ordered the burghers of Paris to surround with a good wall, flanked by towers, the city he loved so well, and to make gates thereto;" and in twenty years this great work was finished on both sides of the Seine. "The king gave the same orders," adds the historian Rigord, "about the towns and castles of all his kingdom; "and indeed it appears from the catalogue of M. Leopold Delisle, at the date of 1193, "that, at the request of Philip Augustus, Peter de Courtenai, Count of Nevers, with the aid of the church-men, had the walls of the town of Auxerre built." And Philip's foresight went beyond such important achievements. "He had a good wall built to enclose the wood of Vincennes, heretofore open to any sort of folk. The King of England, on hearing thereof, gathered a great mass of fawns, hinds, does, and bucks, taken in his forests in Normandy and Aquitaine; and having had them shipped aboard a large covered vessel, with suitable fodder, he sent them by way of the Seine to King Philip Augustus, his liege-lord at Paris. King Philip received the gift gladly, had his parks stocked with the animals, and put keepers over them." A feeling, totally unconnected with the pleasures of the chase, caused him to order an enclosure very different from that of Vincennes. "The common cemetery of Paris, hard by the Church of the Holy Innocents, opposite the street of St. Denis, had remained up to that time open to all passers, man and beast, without anything to prevent it from being confounded with the most profane spot; and the king, hurt at such indecency, had it enclosed by high stone walls, with as many gates as were judged necessary, which were closed every night." At the same time he had built, in this same quarter, the first great municipal market-places, enclosed, likewise, by a wall, with gates shut at night, and surmounted by a sort of covered gallery. He was not quite a stranger to a certain instinct, neither systematic nor of general application, but practical and effective on occasion, in favor of the freedom of industry and commerce. Before his time, the ovens employed by the baking trade in Paris were a monopoly for the profit of certain religious or laic establishments; but when Philip Augustus ordered the walling in of the new and much larger area of the city "he did not think it right to render its new inhabitants subject to these old liabilities, and he permitted all the bakers to have ovens wherein to bake their bread, either for themselves, or for all individuals who might wish to make use of them." Nor were churches and hospitals a whit less than the material interests of the people an object of solicitude to him. His reign saw the completion, and, it might almost be said, the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris, the frontage of which, in particular, was the work of this epoch. At the same time the king had the palace of the Louvre repaired and enlarged; and he added to it that strong tower in which he kept in captivity for more than twelve years Ferrand, Count of Flanders, taken prisoner at the battle of Bouvines. It would be a failure of justice and truth not to add to these proofs of manifold and indefatigable activity on the part of Philip Augustus the constant interest he testified in letters, science, study, the University of Paris, and its masters and pupils. It was to him that in 1200, after a violent riot, in which they considered they had reason to complain of the provost of Paris, the students owed a decree, which, by regarding them as clerics, exempted them from the ordinary criminal jurisdiction, so as to render them subject only to ecclesiastical authority. At that time there was no idea how to efficiently protect freedom save by granting some privilege.

A death which seems premature for a man as sound and strong in constitution as in judgment struck down Philip Augustus at the age of only fifty-eight, as he was on his way from Pacy-sur-Eure to Paris to be present at the council which was to meet there and once more take up the affair of the Albigensians. He had for several months been battling with an incessant fever; he was obliged to halt at Mantes, and there he died on the 14th of January, 1223, leaving the kingdom of France far more extensive and more compact, and the kingship in France far stronger and more respected than he had found them. It was the natural and well-deserved result of his life. At a time of violence and irregular adventure, he had shown to Europe the spectacle of an earnest, far-sighted, moderate, and able government, and one which in the end, under many hard trials, had nearly always succeeded in its designs, during a reign of forty-three years.

He disposed, by will, of a considerable amount amassed without parsimony, and even, historians say, in spite of a royal magnificence. We will take from that will but two paragraphs, the first two:—

"We will and prescribe first of all that, without any gainsaying, our testamentary executors do levy and set aside, out of our possessions, fifty thousand livres of Paris, in order to restore, as God shall inspire them with wisdom, whatsoever may be due to those from whom they shall recognize that we have unjustly taken or extorted or kept back aught; and we do ordain this most strictly."

"We do give to our dear spouse Isamber (evidently Inyeburya), Queen of the French, ten thousand livres of Paris. We might have given more to the said queen, but we have confined ourselves to this sum in order that we might make more complete restitution and reparation of what we have unjustly levied."

There is in these two cases of testamentary reparation, to persons unknown on the one hand and to a lady long maltreated on the other, a touch of probity and honorable regret for wrong-doing which arouses for this great king, in his dying hour, more moral esteem than one would otherwise be tempted to feel for him.

His son, Louis VIII., inherited a great kingdom, an undisputed crown, and a power that was respected. It was matter of general remark, moreover, that, by his mother, Isabel of Hainault, he was descended in the direct line from Hermengarde, Countess of Namur, daughter of Charles of Lorraine, the last of the Carlovingians. Thus the claims of the two dynasties of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet were united in his person; and, although the authority of the Capetians was no longer disputed, contemporaries were glad to see in Louis VIII. this two-fold heirship, which gave him the perfect stamp of a legitimate monarch. He was, besides, the first Capetian whom the king his father had not considered it necessary to have consecrated during his own life so as to impress upon him in good time the seal of religion. Louis was consecrated at Rheims no earlier than the 6th of August, 1223, three weeks after the death of Philip Augustus; and his consecration was celebrated, at Paris as well as at Rheims, with rejoicings both popular and magnificent. But in the condition in which France was during the thirteenth century, amidst a civilization still so imperfect and without the fortifying institutions of a free government, no accidental good fortune could make up for a king's want of personal merit; and Louis VIII. was a man of downright mediocrity, without foresight, volatile in his resolves and weak and fickle in the execution of them. He, as well as Philip Augustus, had to make war on the King of England, and negotiate with the pope on the subject of the Albigensians; but at one time he followed, without well understanding it, his father's policy, at another he neglected it for some whim, or under some temporary influence. Yet he was not unsuccessful in his wax-like enterprises; in his campaign against Henry III., King of England, he took Niort, St. Jean d'Angely, and Rochelle; he accomplished the subjection of Limousin and Perigord; and had he pushed on his victories beyond the Garonne, he might perhaps have deprived the English of Aquitaine, their last possession in France; but at the solicitation of Pope Honorius III., he gave up this war, to resume the crusade against the Albigensians. Philip Augustus had foreseen this mistake. After my death," he had said, "the clergy will use all their efforts to entangle my son Louis in the matters of the Albigensians; but he is in weak and shattered health; he will be unable to bear the fatigue; he will soon die, and then the kingdom will be left in the hands of a woman and children; and so there will be no lack of dangers." The prediction was realized. The military campaign of Louis VIII. on the Rhone was successful; after a somewhat difficult siege, he took Avignon; the principal towns in the neighborhood, Nimes and Arles, amongst others, submitted; Amaury de Montfort had ceded to him all his rights over his father's conquests in Languedoc; and the Albigensians were so completely destroyed or dispersed or cowed that, when it seemed good to make a further example amongst them of the severity of the Church against heretics, it was a hard matter to rout out in the diocese of Narbonne one of their former preachers, Peter Isarn, an old man hidden in an obscure retreat, from which he was dragged to be burned in solemn state. This was Louis VIII.'s last exploit in Southern France. He was displeased with the pope, whom he reproached with not keeping all his promises; his troops were being decimated by sickness; and he was deserted by Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, after serving, according to feudal law, for forty days.

Louis, incensed, disgusted, and ill, himself left his army, to return to his own Northern France; but he never reached it, for fever compelled him to halt at Montpensier, in Auvergne, where he died on the 8th of November, 1226, after a reign of three years, adding to the history of France no glory save that of having been the son of Philip Augustus, the husband of Blanche of Castille, and the father of St. Louis.

We have already perused the most brilliant and celebrated amongst the events of St. Louis's reign, his two crusades against the Mussulmans; and we have learned to know the man at the same time with the event, for it was in these warlike outbursts of his Christian faith that the king's character, nay, his whole soul, was displayed in all its originality and splendor. It was his good fortune, moreover, to have at that time as his comrade and biographer, Sire de Joinville, one of the most sprightly and charming writers of the nascent French language. It is now of Louis in France and of his government at home that we have to take note. And in this part of his history he is not the only royal and really regnant personage we encounter: for of the forty-four years of St. Louis's reign, nearly fifteen, with a long interval of separation, pertained to the government of Queen Blanche of Castille rather than that of the king her son. Louis, at his accession in 1226, was only eleven; and he remained a minor up to the age of twenty-one, in 1236, for the time of majority in the case of royalty was not yet specially and rigorously fixed. During those ten years Queen Blanche governed France; not at all, as is commonly asserted, with the official title of regent, but simply as guardian of the king her son. With a good sense really admirable in a person so proud and ambitious, she saw that official power was ill suited to her woman's condition, and would weaken rather than strengthen her; and she screened herself from view behind her son. He it was who, in 1226, wrote to the great vassals, bidding them to his consecration; he it was who reigned and commanded; and his name alone appeared on royal decrees and on treaties. It was not until twenty-two years had passed, in 1248, that Louis, on starting for the crusade, officially delegated to his mother the kingly authority, and that Blanche, during her son's absence, really governed with the title of regent, up to the 1st of December, 1252, the day of his death.

During the first period of his government, and so long as her son's minority lasted, Queen Blanche had to grapple with intrigues, plots, insurrections, and open war, and, what was still worse for her, with the insults and calumnies of the crown's great vassals, burning to seize once more, under a woman's government, the independence and power which had been effectually disputed with them by Philip Augustus. Blanche resisted their attempts, at one time with open and persevering energy, at another dexterously with all the tact, address, and allurements of a woman. Though she was now forty years of age, she was beautiful, elegant, attractive, full of resources, and of grace in her conversation as well as her administration, endowed with all the means of pleasing, and skilful in availing herself of them with a coquetry which was occasionally more telling than discreet. The malcontents spread the most odious scandals about her. It so happened that one of the most considerable amongst the great vassals of France, Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, a brilliant and gay knight, an ingenious and prolific poet, had conceived a passion for her; and it was affirmed not only that she had yielded to his desires, in order to keep him bound to her service, but that she had, a while ago, in concert with him, murdered her husband, King Louis VIII. In 1230, some of the greatest barons of the kingdom, the Count of Brittany, the Count of Boulogne, and the Count of St. Pol formed a coalition for an attack upon Count Theobald, and invaded Champagne. Blanche, taking with her the young king her son, went to the aid of Count Theobald, and, on arriving near Troyes, she had orders given, in the king's name, for the barons to withdraw: "If you have plaint to make," said she, "against the Count of Champagne, present before me your claim, and I will do you justice." "We will not plead before you," they answered, "for the custom of women is to fix their choice upon him, in preference to other men, who has slain their husband." But in spite of this insulting defiance, the barons did withdraw. Five years later, in 1235, the Count of Champagne had, in his turn, risen against the king, and was forced, as an escape from imminent defeat, to accept severe terms.

An interview took place between Queen Blanche and him; and "'Pardie, Count Theobald,' said the queen, 'you ought not to have been against us; you ought surely to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would fain have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.' The count cast a look upon the queen, who was so virtuous and so beautiful that at her great beauty he was all abashed, and answered her, 'By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.' Thereupon he went his way full pensively, and often there came back to his remembrance the queen's soft glance and lovely countenance. Then his heart was touched by a soft and amorous thought. But when he remembered how high a dame she was, so good and pure that he could never enjoy her, his soft thought of love was changed to a great sadness. And because deep thoughts engender melancholy, it was counselled unto him by certain wise men that he should make his study of canzonets for the viol and soft delightful ditties. So made he the most beautiful canzonets and the most delightful and most melodious that at any time were heard." (Histoire des Dues et des Comtes de Champagne, by M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, t. iv. pp. 249, 280; Chroniques de Saint-Denis, in the Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de France, t. xxi. pp. 111, 112.)

Neither in the events nor in the writings of the period is it easy to find anything which can authorize the accusations made by the foes of Queen Blanche. There is no knowing whether her heart were ever so little touched by the canzonets of Count Theobald; but it is certain that neither the poetry nor the advances of the count made any difference in the resolutions and behavior of the queen. She continued her resistance to the pretensions and machinations of the crown's great vassals, whether foes or lovers, and she carried forward, in the face and in the teeth of all, the extension of the domains and the power of the kingship. We observe in her no prompting of enthusiasm, of sympathetic charitableness, or of religious scrupulousness, that is, none of those grand moral impulses which are characteristic of Christian piety, and which were predominant in St. Louis. Blanche was essentially politic and concerned with her temporal interests and successes; and it was not from her teaching or her example that her son imbibed those sublime and disinterested feelings which stamped him the most original and the rarest on the roll of glorious kings. What St. Louis really owed to his mother —and it was a great deal—was the steady triumph which, whether by arms or by negotiation, Blanche gained over the great vassals, and the preponderance which, amidst the struggles of the feudal system, she secured for the kingship of her son in his minority. She saw by profound instinct what forces and alliances might be made serviceable to the kingly power against its rivals. When, on the 29th of November, 1226, only three weeks after the death of her husband, Louis VIII., she had her son crowned at Rheims, she bade to the ceremony not only the prelates and grandees of the kingdom, but also the inhabitants of the neighboring communes; wishing to let the great lords see the people surrounding the royal child. Two years later, in 1228, amidst the insurrection of the barons, who were assembled at Corbeil, and who meditated seizing the person of the young king during his halt at Montlhery on his march to Paris, Queen Blanche had summoned to her side, together with the faithful chivalry of the country, the burghers of Paris and of the neighborhood; and they obeyed the summons with alacrity. "They went forth all under arms, and took the road to Montlhery, where they found the king, and escorted him to Paris, all in their ranks and in order of battle. From Montlhery to Paris, the road was lined, on both sides, by men-at-arms and others, who loudly besought Our Lord to grant the young king long life and prosperity, and to vouchsafe him protection against all his enemies. As soon as they set out from Paris, the lords, having been told the news, and not considering themselves in a condition to fight so great a host, retired each to his own abode; and by the ordering of God, who disposes as he pleases Him of times and the deeds of men, they dared not undertake anything against the king during the rest of this year." (Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. i. pp. 429, 478.)

Eight years later, in 1236, Louis IX. attained his majority, and his mother transferred to him a power respected, feared, and encompassed by vassals always turbulent and still often aggressive, but disunited, weakened, intimidated, or discredited, and always outwitted, for a space of ten years, in their plots.

When she had secured the political position of the king her son, and as the time of his majority approached, Queen Blanche gave her attention to his domestic life also. She belonged to the number of those who aspire to play the part of Providence towards the objects of their affection, and to regulate their destiny in everything. Louis was nineteen; he was handsome, after a refined and gentle style which spoke of moral worth without telling of great physical strength; he had delicate and chiselled features, a brilliant complexion, and light hair, abundant and glossy, which, through his grandmother Isabel, he inherited from the family of the Counts of Hainault. He displayed liveliness and elegance in his tastes; he was fond of amusements, games, hunting, hounds and hawking-birds, fine clothes, magnificent furniture. A holy man, they say, even reproached the queen his mother with having winked at certain inclinations evinced by him towards irregular connections. Blanche determined to have him married; and had no difficulty in exciting in him so honorable a desire. Raymond Beranger, Count of Provence, had a daughter, his eldest, named Marguerite, "who was held," say the chronicles, "to be the most noble, most beautiful, and best educated princess at that time in Europe. . . . By the advice of his mother and of the wisest persons in his kingdom," Louis asked for her hand in marriage. The Count of Provence was overjoyed at the proposal; but he was somewhat anxious about the immense dowry which, it was said, he would have to give his daughter. His intimate adviser was a Provencal nobleman, named Romeo de Villeneuve, who said to him, "Count, leave it to me, and let not this great expense cause you any trouble. If you marry your eldest high, the more consideration of the alliance will get the others married better and at less cost." Count Raymond listened to reason, and before long acknowledged that his adviser was right. He had four daughters, Marguerite, Eleanor, Sancie, and Beatrice; and when Marguerite was Queen of France, Eleanor became Queen of England, Sancie Countess of Cornwall and afterwards Queen of the Romans, and Beatrice Countess of Anjou and Provence, and ultimately Queen of Sicily. Princess Marguerite arrived in France escorted by a brilliant embassy, and the marriage was celebrated at Sens, on the 27th of May, 1234, amidst great rejoicings and abundant largess to the people. As soon as he was married and in possession of happiness at home, Louis of his own accord gave up the worldly amusements for which he had at first displayed a taste; his hunting establishment, his games, his magnificent furniture and dress, gave place to simpler pleasures and more Christian occupations. The active duties of the kingship, the fervent and scrupulous exercise of piety, the pure and impassioned joys of conjugal life, the glorious plans of a knight militant of the cross, were the only things which took up the thoughts and the time of this young king, who was modestly laboring to become a saint and a hero.

There was one heartfelt discomfort which disturbed and troubled sometimes the sweetest moments of his life. Queen Blanche, having got her son married, was jealous of the wife and of the happiness she had conferred upon her; jealous as mother and as queen, a rival for affection and for empire. This sad and hateful feeling hurried her into acts as devoid of dignity as they were of justice and kindness. "The harshness of Queen Blanche towards Queen Marguerite," says Joinville, "was such that Queen Blanche would not suffer, so far as her power went, that her son should keep his wife's company. Where it was most pleasing to the king and the queen to live was at Pontoise, because the king's chamber was above and the queen's below. And they had so well arranged matters that they held their converse on a spiral staircase which led down from the one chamber to the other. When the ushers saw the queen-mother coming into the chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came running into his chamber, so that his mother might find him there; and so, in turn, did the ushers of Queen Marguerite's chamber when Queen Blanche came thither, so that she might find Queen Marguerite there. One day the king was with the queen his wife, and she was in great peril of death, for that she had suffered from a child of which she had been delivered. Queen Blanche came in, and took her son by the hand, and said to him, 'Come you away; you are doing no good here.' When Queen Marguerite saw that the queen-mother was taking the king away, she cried, 'Alas! neither dead nor alive will you let me see my lord; and thereupon she swooned, and it was thought that she was dead. The king, who thought she was dying, came back, and with great pains she was brought round."

Louis gave to his wife consolation and to his mother support. Amongst the noblest souls and in the happiest lives there are wounds which cannot be healed and sorrows which must be borne in silence.

When Louis reached his majority, his entrance upon personal exercise of the kingly power produced no change in the conduct of public affairs. There was no vain seeking after innovation on purpose to mark the accession of a new master, and no reaction in the deeds and words of the sovereign or in the choice and treatment of his advisers; the kingship of the son was a continuance of the mother's government. Louis persisted in struggling for the preponderance of the crown against the great vassals; succeeded in taming Peter Mauclerc, the turbulent Count of Brittany; wrung from Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, the rights of suzerainty in the countships of Chartres, Blois, and Sancerre, and the viscountship of Chateaudun, and purchased the fertile countship of Macon from its possessor. It was almost always by pacific procedure, by negotiations ably conducted, and conventions faithfully executed, that he accomplished these increments of the kingly domain; and when he made war on any of the great vassals, he engaged therein only on their provocation, to maintain the rights or honor of his crown, and he used victory with as much moderation as he had shown before entering upon the struggle. In 1241, he was at Poitiers, where his brother Alphonso, the new Count of Poitou, was to receive, in his presence, the homage of the neighboring lords whose suzerain he was. A confidential letter arrived, addressed not to Louis himself, but to Queen Blanche, whom many faithful subjects continued to regard as the real regent of the kingdom, and who probably continued also to have her own private agents. An inhabitant of Rochelle, at any rate, wrote to inform the queen-mother that a great plot was being hatched amongst certain powerful lords, of La Marche, Saintonge, Angoumois, and perhaps others, to decline doing homage to the new Count of Poitou, and thus to enter into rebellion against the king himself. The news was true, and was given with circumstantial detail. Hugh de Lusignan, Count of La Marche, and the most considerable amongst the vassals of the Count of Poitiers, was, if not the prime mover, at any rate the principal performer in the plot. His wife, Joan (Isabel) of Angouleme, widow of the late King of England, John Lackland, and mother of the reigning king, Henry III., was indignant at the notion of becoming a vassal of a prince himself a vassal of the King of France, and so seeing herself—herself but lately a queen, and now a king's widow and a king's mother—degraded, in France, to a rank below that of the Countess of Poitiers. When her husband, the Count of La Marche, went and rejoined her at Angouleme, he found her giving way alternately to anger and tears, tears and anger. "Saw you not," said she, "at Poitiers, where I waited three days to please your king and his queen, how that when I appeared before them, in their chamber, the king was seated on one side of the bed, and the queen, with the Countess of Chartres, and her sister, the abbess, on the other side: They did not call me nor bid me sit with them, and that purposely, in order to make me vile in the eyes of so many folk. And neither at my coming in nor at my going out did they rise just a little from their scats, rendering me vile, as you did see yourself. I cannot speak of it, for grief and shame. And it will be my death, far more even than the less of our land which they have unworthily wrested from us; unless, by God's grace, they do repent them, and I see them in their turn reduced to desolation, and losing somewhat of their own lands. As for me, either I will lose all I have for that end or I will perish in the attempt." Queen Blanche's correspondent added, "The Count of La Marche, whose kindness you know, seeing the countess in tears, said to her, 'Madam, give your commands: I will do all I can; be assured of that.' 'Else,' said she, 'you shall not come near my person, and I will never see you more.' Then the count declared, with many curses, that he would do what his wife desired."

And he was as good as his word. That same year, 1241, at the end of the autumn, "the new Count of Poitiers, who was holding his court for the first time, did not fail to bid to his feasts all the nobility of his appanage, and, amongst the very first, the Count and Countess of La Marche. They repaired to Poitiers; but, four days before Christmas, when the court of Count Alphonso had received all its guests, the Count of La Marche, mounted on his war-horse, with his wife on the crupper behind him, and escorted by his men-at-arms also mounted, cross-bow in hand and in readiness for battle, was seen advancing to the prince's presence. Every one was on the tiptoe of expectation as to what would come next. Then the Count of La Marche addressed himself in a loud voice to the Count of Poitiers, saying, 'I might have thought, in a moment of forgetfulness and weakness, to render thee homage; but now I swear to thee, with a resolute heart, that I will never be thy liegeman; thou dost unjustly dub thyself my lord; thou didst shamefully filch this countship from my step-son, Earl Richard, whilst he was faithfully fighting for God in the Holy Land, and was delivering our captives by his discretion and his compassion.' After this insolent declaration, the Count of La Marche violently thrust aside, by means of his men-at-arms, all those who barred his passage; hasted, by way of parting insult, to fire the lodging appointed for him by Count Alphonso, and, followed by his people, left Poitiers at a gallop." (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. i. p. 347.)



This meant war; and it burst out at the commencement of the following spring. It found Louis equally well prepared for it and determined to carry it through. But in him prudence and justice were as little to seek as resolution; he respected public opinion, and he wished to have the approval of those whom he called upon to commit themselves for him and with him. He summoned the crown's vassals to a parliament; and, "What think you," he asked them, "should be done to a vassal who would fain hold land without owning a lord, and who goeth against the fealty and homage due from him and his predecessors?" The answer was, that the lord ought in that case to take back the fief as his own property. "As my name is Louis," said the king, "the Comet of La Marche doth claim to hold land in such wise, land which hath been a fief of France since the days of the valiant King Clovis, who won all Aquitaine from King Alaric, a pagan without faith or creed, and all the country to the Pyrenean mount." And the barons promised the king their energetic co-operation.

The war was pushed on zealously by both sides. Henry III., King of England, sent to Louis messengers charged to declare to him that his reason for breaking the truce concluded between them was, that he regarded it as his duty towards his step-father, the Count of La Marche, to defend him by arms. Louis answered that, for his own part, he had scrupulously observed the truce, and had no idea of breaking it; but he considered that he had a perfect right to punish a rebellious vassal. In this young King of France, this docile son of an able mother, none knew what a hero there was, until he revealed himself on a sudden. Near two towns of Saintonge, Taillebourg and Saintes, at a bridge which covered the approaches of one and in front of the walls of the other, Louis, on the 21st and 22d of July, delivered two battles, in which the brilliancy of his personal valor and the affectionate enthusiasm he excited in his troops secured victory and the surrender of the two places. "At sight of the numerous banners, above which rose the oriflamme, close to Taillebourg, and of such a multitude of tents, one pressing against another and forming as it were a large and populous city, the King of England turned sharply to the Count of La Marche, saying, 'My father, is this what you did promise me? Is yonder the numerous chivalry that you did engage to raise for me, when you said that all I should have to do would be to get money together?' 'That did I never say,' answered the count. 'Yea, verily,' rejoined Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III.: 'for yonder I have amongst my baggage writing of your own to such purport.' And when the Count of La Marche energetically denied that he had ever signed or sent such writing, Henry III. reminded him bitterly of the messages he had sent to England, and of his urgent exhortations to war. 'It was never done with my consent,' cried the Count of La Marche, with an oath; 'put the blame of it upon your mother, who is my wife; for, by the gullet of God, it was all devised without my knowledge.'"

It was not Henry III. alone who was disgusted with the war in which his mother had involved him; the majority of the English lords who had accompanied him left him, and asked the King of France for permission to pass through his kingdom on their way home. There were those who would have dissuaded Louis from compliance; but, "Let them go," said he; "I would ask nothing better than that all my foes should thus depart forever far away from my abode." Those about him made merry over Henry III., a refugee at Bordeaux, deserted by the English and plundered by the Gascons. "Hold! hold! said Louis; "turn him not into ridicule, and make me not hated of him by reason of your banter; his charities and his piety shall exempt him from all contumely." The Count of La Marche lost no time in asking for peace; and Louis granted it with the firmness of a far-seeing politician and the sympathetic feeling of a Christian. He required that the domains he had just wrested from the count should belong to the crown, and to the Count of Poitiers, under the suzerainty of the crown. As for the rest of his lands, the Count of La Marche, his wife and children, were obliged to beg a grant of them at the good pleasure of the king, to whom the count was, further, to give up, as guarantee for fidelity in future, three castles, in which a royal garrison should be kept at the count's expense. When introduced into the king's presence, the count, his wife, and children, "with sobs, and sighs, and tears, threw themselves upon their knees before him, and began to cry aloud, 'Most gracious sir, forgive us thy wrath and thy displeasure, for we have done wickedly and pridefully towards thee.' And the king, seeing the Count of La Marche such humble guise before him, could not restrain his compassion amidst his wrath, but made him rise up, and forgave him graciously all the evil he had wrought against him."

A prince who knew so well how to conquer and how to treat the conquered might have been tempted to make an unfair use, alternately, of his victories and of his clemency, and to pursue his advantages beyond measure; but Louis was in very deed a Christian. When War was not either a necessity or a duty, this brave and brilliant knight, from sheer equity and goodness of heart, loved peace rather than war. The successes he had gained in his campaign of 1242 were not for him the first step in an endless career of glory and conquest; he was anxious only to consolidate them whilst securing, in Western Europe, for the dominions of his adversaries, as well as for his own, the benefits of peace. He entered into negotiations, successively, with the Count of La Marche, the King of England, the Count of Toulouse, the King of Aragon, and the various princes and great feudal lords who had been more or less engaged in the war; and in January, 1213, says the latest and most enlightened of his biographers, "the treaty of Lorris marked the end of feudal troubles for the whole duration of St. Louis's reign. He drew his sword no more, save only against the enemies of the Christian faith and Christian civilization, the Mussulmans." (Histoire de St. Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. i. p. 388.)

Nevertheless there was no lack of opportunities for interfering with a powerful arm amongst the sovereigns his neighbors, and for working their disagreements to the profit of his ambition, had ambition guided his conduct. The great struggle between the Empire and the Papacy, in the persons of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany, and the two popes, Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., was causing violent agitation in Christendom, the two powers setting no bounds to their aspirations of getting the dominion one over the other, and of disposing one of the other's fate. Scarcely had Louis reached his majority when, in 1237, he tried his influence with both sovereigns to induce them to restore peace to the Christian world. He failed; and thenceforth he preserved a scrupulous neutrality towards each. The principles of international law, especially in respect of a government's interference in the contests of its neighbors, whether princes or peoples, were not, in the thirteenth century, systematically discussed and defined as they are nowadays with us; but the good sense and the moral sense of St. Louis caused him to adopt, on this point, the proper course, and no temptation, not even that of satisfying his fervent piety, drew him into any departure from it. Distant or friendly, by turns, towards the two adversaries, according as they tried to intimidate him or win him over to them, his permanent care was to get neither the State nor the Church of France involved in the struggle between the priesthood and the empire, and to maintain the dignity of his crown and the liberties of his subjects, whilst employing his influence to make prevalent throughout Christendom a policy of justice and peace.

That was the policy required, in the thirteenth century more than ever, by the most urgent interests of entire Christendom.

She was at grips with two most formidable foes and perils. Through the crusades she had, from the end of the eleventh century, become engaged in a deadly struggle against the Mussulmans in Asia; and in the height of this struggle, and from the heart of this same Asia, there spread, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, over Eastern Europe, in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, a barbarous and very nearly pagan people, the Mongol Tartars, sweeping onward like an inundation of blood, ravaging and threatening with complete destruction all the dominions which were penetrated by their hordes. The name and description of these barbarians, the fame and dread of their devastations, ran rapidly through the whole of Christian Europe. "What must we do in this sad plight?" asked Queen Blanche of the king, her son. "We must, my mother," answered Louis (with sorrowful voice, but not without divine inspiration, adds the chronicler), "we must be sustained by a heavenly consolation. If these Tartars, as we call them, arrive here, either we will hurl them back to Tartarus, their home, whence they are come, or they shall send us up to Heaven." About the same period, another cause of disquietude and another feature of attraction came to be added to all those which turned the thoughts and impassioned piety of Louis towards the East. The perils of the Latin empire of Constantinople, founded, as has been already mentioned, in 1204, under the headship of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, were becoming day by day more serious. Greeks, Mussulmans, and Tartars were all pressing it equally hard. In 1236, the emperor, Baldwin II., came to solicit in person the support of the princes of Western Europe, and especially of the young King of France, whose piety and chivalrous ardor were already celebrated everywhere. Baldwin possessed a treasure, of great power over the imaginations and convictions of Christians, in the crown of thorns worn by Jesus Christ during His passion. He had already put it in pawn at Venice for a considerable loan advanced to him by the Venetians; and he now offered it to Louis in return for effectual aid in men and money. Louis accepted the proposal with transport. He had been scared, a short time ago, at the chance of losing another precious relic deposited in the abbey of St. Denis, one of the nails which, it was said, had held Our Lord's body upon the cross. It had been mislaid one ceremonial day whilst it was being exhibited to the people; and, when he recovered it, "I would rather," said Louis, "that the best city in my kingdom had been swallowed up in the earth." After having taken all the necessary precautions for avoiding any appearance of a shameful bargain, he obtained the crown of thorns, all expenses included, for eleven thousand livres of Paris, that is, they say, about twenty-six thousand dollars of our money. Our century cannot have any fellow-feeling with such ready credulity, which is not required by Christian faith or countenanced by sound criticism; but we can and we ought to comprehend such sentiments in an age when men not only had profound faith in the facts recorded in the Gospels, but could not believe themselves to be looking upon the smallest tangible relic of those facts without experiencing an emotion and a reverence as profound as their faith. It is to such sentiments that we owe one of the most perfect and most charming monuments of the middle ages, the Holy Chapel, which St. Louis had built between 1245 and 1248 in order to deposit there the precious relics he had collected. The king's piety had full justice and honor done it by the genius of the architect, Peter de llontreuil, who, no doubt, also shared his faith.

It was after the purchase of the crown of thorns and the building of the Holy Chapel that Louis, accomplishing at last the desire of his soul, departed on his first crusade. We have already gone over the circumstances connected with his determination, his departure, and his life in the East, during the six years of pious adventure and glorious disaster he passed there. We have already seen what an impression of admiration and respect was produced throughout his kingdom when he was noticed to have brought back with him from the Holy Land "a fashion of living and doing superior to his former behavior, although in his youth he had always been good and innocent and worthy of high esteem." These expressions of his confessor are fully borne out by the deeds and laws, the administration at home and the relations abroad, by the whole government, in fact, of St. Louis during the last fifteen years of his reign. The idea which was invariably conspicuous and constantly maintained during his reign was not that of a premeditated and ambitious policy, ever tending towards an interested object which is pursued with more or less reasonableness and success, and always with a large amount of trickery and violence on the part of the prince, of unrighteousness in his deeds, and of suffering on the part of the people. Philip Augustus, the grandfather, and Philip the Handsome, the grandson, of St. Louis, the former with the moderation of an able man, the latter with headiness and disregard of right or wrong, labored both of them without cessation to extend the domains and power of the crown, to gain conquests over their neighbors and their vassals, and to destroy the social system of their age, the feudal system, its rights as well as its wrongs and tyrannies, in order to put in its place pure monarchy, and to exalt the kingly authority above all liberties, whether of the aristocracy or of the people. St. Louis neither thought of nor attempted anything of the kind; he did not make war, at one time openly, at another secretly, upon the feudal system; he frankly accepted its principles, as he found them prevailing in the facts and the ideas of his times. Whilst fully bent on repressing with firmness his vassals' attempts to shake themselves free from their duties towards him, and to render themselves independent of the crown, he respected their rights, kept his word to them scrupulously, and required of them nothing but what they really owed him. Into his relations with foreign sovereigns, his neighbors, he imported the same loyal spirit. "Certain of his council used to tell him," reports Joinville, "that he did not well in not leaving those foreigners to their warfare; for, if he gave them his good leave to impoverish one another, they would not attack him so readily as if they were rich. To that the king replied that they said not well; for, quoth he, if the neighboring princes perceived that I left them to their warfare, they might take counsel amongst themselves, and say, 'It is through malice that the king leaves us to our warfare; then it might happen that by cause of the hatred they would have against me, they would come and attack me, and I might be a great loser there-by. Without reckoning that I should thereby earn the hatred of God, who says, 'Blessed be the peacemakers!' So well established was his renown as a sincere friend of peace and a just arbiter in great disputes between princes and peoples that his intervention and his decisions were invited wherever obscure and dangerous questions arose. In spite of the brilliant victories which, in 1212, he had gained at Taillebourg and Saintes over Henry III., King of England, he himself perceived, on his return from the East, that the conquests won by his victories might at any moment become a fresh cause of new and grievous wars, disastrous, probably, for one or the other of the two peoples. He conceived, therefore, the design of giving to a peace which was so desirable a more secure basis by founding it upon a transaction accepted on both sides as equitable. And thus, whilst restoring to the King of England certain possessions which the war of 1242 had lost to him, he succeeded in obtaining from him in return "as well in his own name as in the names of his sons and their heirs, a formal renunciation of all rights that he could pretend to over the duchy of Normandy, the countships of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and, generally, all that his family might have possessed on the continent, except only the lands which the King of France restored to him by the treaty and those which remained to him in Gascony. For all these last the King of England undertook to do liege-homage to the King of France, in the capacity of peer of France and Duke of Aquitaine and to faithfully fulfil the duties attached to a fief." When Louis made known this transaction to his counsellors, "they were very much against it," says Joinville. "It seemeth to us, sir," said they to the king, "that, if you think you have not a right to the conquest won by you and your antecessors from the King of England, you do not make proper restitution to the said king in not restoring to him the whole; and if you think you have a right to it, it seemeth to us that you are a loser by all you restore." "Sirs," answered Louis, "I am certain that the antecessors of the King of England did quite justly lose the conquest which I hold; and as for the land I give him, I give it him not as a matter in which I am bound to him or his heirs, but to make love between my children and his, who are cousins-german. And it seemeth to me that what I give him I turn to good purpose, inasmuch as he was not my liegeman, and he hereby cometh in amongst my liegeman." Henry III., in fact, went to Paris, having with him the ratification of the treaty, and prepared to accomplish the ceremony of homage. "Louis received him as a brother, but without sparing him aught of the ceremony, in which, according to the ideas of the times, there was nothing humiliating any more than in the name of vassal, which was proudly borne by the greatest lords. It took place on Thursday, December 4, 1259, in the royal enclosure stretching in front of the palace, on the spot where at the present day is the Place Dauphine. There was a great concourse of prelates, barons, and other personages belonging to the two courts and the two nations. The King of England, on his knees, bareheaded, without cloak, belt, sword, or spurs, placed his folded hands in those of the King of France his suzerain, and said to him, 'Sir, I become your liegeman with mouth and hands, and I swear and promise you faith and loyalty, and to guard your right according to my power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your bailiff, to the best of my wit.' Then the king kissed him on the mouth and raised him up."



Three years later Louis gave not only to the King of England, but to the whole English nation, a striking proof of his judicious and true-hearted equity. An obstinate civil war was raging between Henry III. and his barons. Neither party, in defending its own rights, had any notion of respecting the rights of its adversaries, and England was alternating between a kingly and an aristocratic tyranny. Louis, chosen as arbiter by both sides, delivered solemnly, on the 23d of January, 1264, a decision which was favorable to the English kingship, but at the same, time expressly upheld the Great Charter and the traditional liberties of England. He concluded his decision with the following suggestions of amnesty: "We will also that the King of England and his barons do forgive one another mutually, that they do forget all the resentments that may exist between them; by consequence of the matters submitted to our arbitration, and that henceforth they do refrain reciprocally from an offence and injury on account of the same matters." But when men have had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise. In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued in England; but Louis did not seek any way to profit by it so as to extend, at the expense of his neighbors, his own possessions or power; he held himself also from their quarrels, and followed up by honest neutrality ineffectual arbitration. Five centuries afterwards the great English historian, Hume, rendered him due homage in these terms: "Every time this virtuous prince interfered in the affairs of England, it was invariably with the view of settling differences between the king and the nobility. Adopting an admirable course of conduct, as politic probably as it certainly was just, he never interposed his good offices save to put an end the disagreements of the English; he seconded all the measures which could give security to both parties, and he made persistent efforts, though without success, to moderate the fiery ambition of the Earl of Leicester." (Hume, History of England, t. ii. p. 465.)

It requires more than political wisdom, more even than virtue, to enable a king, a man having in charge the government of men, to accomplish his mission and to really deserve the title of Most Christian; it requires that he should be animated by a sentiment of affection, and that he should, in heart as well as mind, be in sympathy with those multitudes of creatures over whose lot he exercises so much influence. St. Louis more perhaps than any other king was possessed of this generous and humane quality: spontaneously and by the free impulse of his nature he loved his people, loved mankind, and took a tender and comprehensive interest in their fortunes, their joys, or their miseries. Being seriously ill in 1259, and desiring to give his eldest son, Prince Louis, whom he lost in the following year, his last and most heartfelt charge, "Fair son," said he, "I pray thee make thyself beloved of the people of thy kingdom, for verily I would rather a Scot should come from Scotland and govern our people well and loyally than have thee govern it ill." To watch over the position and interests of all parties in his dominions, and to secure to all his subjects strict and prompt justice, this was what continually occupied the mind of Louis IX. There are to be found in his biography two very different but equally striking proofs of his solicitude in this respect. M. Felix Faure has drawn up a table of all the journeys made by Louis in France, from 1254 to 1270, for the better cognizance of matters requiring his attention, and another of the parliaments which he held, during the same period, for considering the general affairs of the kingdom and the administration of justice. Not one of these sixteen years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year 1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament. (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. pp. 120, 339.) Side by side with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a moral proof taken from Joinville's often-quoted account of St. Louis's familiar intervention in his subjects' disputes about matters of private interest. "Many a time," says he, "it happened in summer that the king went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against an oak, and made us sit down round about him. And all those who had business came to speak to him without restraint of usher or other folk. And then he demanded of them with his own mouth, 'Is there here any who hath a suit?' and they who had their suit rose up; and then he said, 'Keep silence, all of ye; and ye shall have despatch one after the other.' And then he called my Lord Peter de Fontaines and my Lord Geoffrey de Villette (two learned lawyers of the day and counsellors of St. Louis), and said to one of them, 'Despatch me this suit.' And when he saw aught to amend in the words of those who were speaking for another, he himself amended it with his own mouth. I sometimes saw in summer that, to despatch his people's business, he went into the Paris garden, clad in camlet coat and linsey surcoat without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety round his neck, hair right well combed and without coif, and on his head a hat with white peacock's plumes. And he had carpets laid for us to sit round about him. And all the people who had business before him set themselves standing around him; and then he had their business despatched in the manner I told you of before as to the wood of Vincennes." (Joinville, chap. xii.)