The active benevolence of St. Louis was not confined to this paternal care for the private interests of such subjects as approached his person; he was equally attentive and zealous in the case of measures called for by the social condition of the times and the general interests of the kingdom. Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, seven, at the least, are great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances, and abuses of the feudal system. Many other of St. Louis's legislative and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois, or in similar collections, and the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still remaining unpublished in various archives. As for the large collection of legislative enactments known by the name of Etailissements de Saint Louis, it is probably a lawyer's work, posterior, in great part at least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of law of St. Louis's date and collected by his order, although the paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and as if it had been dictated by him.

Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, as having originated with St. Louis. Its object is, first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules, internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict "the exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the Church of our kingdom." The authenticity of this act, vigorously maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his Defense de la Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682, chap. ix. t. xliii. p. 26), and in our time by M. Daunou (in the Histoire litteraire de la France, continuee par des Hembres de l'Institut, t. xvi. p. 75, and t. xix. p. 169), has been and still is rendered doubtful for strong reasons, which M. Felix Faure, in his Histoire de Saint Louis (t. ii. p. 271), has summed up with great clearness. There is no design of entering here upon an examination of this little historical problem; but it is a bounden duty to point out that, if the authenticity of the Pragmatic Sanction, as St. Louis's, is questionable, the act has, at bottom, nothing but what bears a very strong resemblance to, and is quite in conformity with, the general conduct of that prince. He was profoundly respectful, affectionate, and faithful towards the papacy, but, at the same time, very careful in upholding both the independence of the crown in things temporal, and its right of superintendence in things spiritual. Attention has been drawn to his posture of reserve during the great quarrel between the priestdom and the empire, and his firmness in withstanding the violent measures adopted by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. against the Emperor Frederick II. Louis carried his notions, as to the independence of his judgment and authority, very far beyond the cases in which that policy went hand in hand with interest, and even into purely religious questions. The Bishop of Auxerre said to him one day, in the name of several prelates, "'Sir, these lords which be here, archbishops and bishops, have told me to tell you that Christianity is perishing in your hands.' The king crossed himself and said, Well, tell me how that is made out!' 'Sir,' said the bishop, 'it is because nowadays so little note is taken of excommunications, that folk let death overtake them excommunicate without getting absolution, and have no mind to make atonement to the Church. These lords, therefore, do pray you, sir, for the love of God and because you ought to do so, to command your provosts and bailiffs that all those who shall remain a year and a day excommunicate be forced, by seizure of their goods, to get themselves absolved.' Whereto the king made answer that he would willingly command this in respect of the excommunicate touching whom certain proofs should be given him that they were in the wrong. The bishop said that the prelates would not have this at any price, and that they disputed the king's right of jurisdiction in their causes. And the king said that he would not do it else; for it would be contrary to God and reason if he should force folks to get absolution when the clergy had done them wrong. As to that,' said the king, 'I will give you the example of the Count of Brittany, who for seven years, being fully excommunicate, was at pleas with the prelates of Brittany; and he prevailed so far that the pope condemned them all. If, then, I had forced the Count of Brittany, the first year, to get absolution, I should have sinned against God and against him.' Then the prelates gave up; and never since that time have I heard that a single demand was made touching the matters above spoken of." (Joinville, chap. xiii. p. 43.)

One special fact in the civil and municipal administration of St. Louis deserves to find a place in history. After the time of Philip Augustus there was malfeasance in the police of Paris. The provostship of Paris, which comprehended functions analogous to those of prefect, mayor, and receiver-general, became a purchasable office, filled sometimes by two provosts at a time. The burghers no longer found justice or security in the city where the king resided. At his return from his first crusade, Louis recognized the necessity for applying a remedy to this evil; the provostship ceased to be a purchasable office; and he made it separate from the receivership of the royal domain. In 1258 he chose as provost Stephen Boileau, a burgher of note and esteem in Paris; and in order to give this magistrate the authority of which he had need, the king sometimes came and sat beside him when he was administering justice at the Chatelet. Stephen Boileau justified the king's confidence, and maintained so strict a police that he had his own godson hanged for theft. His administrative foresight was equal to his judicial severity. He established registers wherein were to be inscribed the rules habitually followed in respect of the organization and work of the different corporations of artisans, the tariffs of the dues charged, in the name of the king, upon the admittance of provisions and merchandise, and the titles on which the abbots and other lords founded the privileges they enjoyed within the walls of Paris. The corporations of artisans, represented by their sworn masters or prud'hommes, appeared one after the other before the provost to make declaration of the usages in practice amongst their communities, and to have them registered in the book prepared for that purpose. This collection of regulations relating to the arts and trades of Paris in the thirteenth century, known under the name of Livre des Metiers d'Etienne Boileau, is the earliest monument of industrial statistics drawn up by the French administration, and it was inserted, for the first time in its entirety, in 1837, amongst the Collection des Documents relatifs d l'Histoire de France, published during M. Guizot's ministry of public instruction.

St. Louis would be but very incompletely understood if we considered him only in his political and kingly aspect; we must penetrate into his private life, and observe his personal intercourse with his family, his household, and his people, if we would properly understand and appreciate all the originality and moral worth of his character and his life. Mention has already been made of his relations towards the two queens, his mother and his wife; and, difficult as they were, they were nevertheless always exemplary. Louis was a model of conjugal fidelity, as well as of filial piety. He had by Queen Marguerite eleven children, six sons and five daughters; he loved her tenderly, he never severed himself from her, and the modest courage she displayed in the first crusade rendered her still dearer to him. But he was not blind to her ambitious tendencies, and to the insufficiency of her qualifications for government. When he made ready for his second crusade, not only did he not confide to Queen Marguerite the regency of the kingdom, but he even took care to regulate her expenses, and to curb her passion for authority. He forbade her to accept any present for herself or her children, to lay any commands upon the officers of justice, and to choose any one for her service, or for that of her children, without the consent of the council of the regency. And he had reason so to act; for, about this same time, Queen Marguerite, emulous of holding in the state the same place that had been occupied by Queen Blanche, was giving all her thoughts to what her situation would be after her husband's death, and was coaxing her eldest son, Philip, then sixteen years old, to make her a promise on oath to remain under her guardianship up to thirty years of age, to take to himself no counsellor without her approval, to reveal to her all designs which might be formed against her, to conclude no treaty with his uncle, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and to keep as a secret the oath she was thus making him take. Louis was probably informed of this strange promise by his young son Philip himself, who got himself released from it by Pope Urban IV. At any rate, the king had a foreshadowing of Queen Marguerite's inclinations, and took precautions for rendering them harmless to the crown and the state.

As for his children, Louis occupied himself in thought and deed with their education and their future, moral and social, showing as much affection and assiduity as could have been displayed by any father of a family, even the most devoted to this single task. "After supper they followed him into his chamber, where he made them sit down around him; he instructed them in their duties, and then sent them away to bed. He drew their particular attention to the good and evil deeds of princes. He, moreover, went to see then in their own apartment when he had any leisure, informed himself as to the progress they were making, and, like another Tobias, gave them excellent instructions. . . . On Holy Thursday his sons used to wash, just as he used, the feet of thirteen of the poor, give them a considerable sum as alms, and then wait upon them at table. The king having been minded to carry the first of the poor souls to the Hotel-Dieu, at Compiegne, with the assistance of his son-in- law, King Theobald of Navarre, whom he loved as a son, his two eldest sons, Louis and Philip, carried the second thither." They were wont to behave towards him in the most respectful manner. He would have all of them, even Theobald, yield him strict obedience in that which he enjoined upon them. He desired anxiously that the three children born to him in the East, during his first crusade, John Tristan, Peter, and Blanche, and even Isabel, his eldest daughter, should enter upon the cloistered life, which he looked upon as the safest for their salvation. He exhorted them thereto, especially his daughter Isabel, many and many a time, in letters equally tender and pious; but, as they testified no taste for it, he made no attempt to force their inclinations, and concerned himself only about having them well married, not forgetting to give them good appanages, and, for their life in the world, the most judicious counsels. The instructions, written with his own hand in French, which he committed to his eldest son, Philip, as soon as he found himself so seriously ill before Tunis, are a model of virtue, wisdom, and tenderness on the part of a father, a king, and a Christian.

Pass we from the king's family to the king's household, and from the children to the servitors of St. Louis. We have here no longer the powerful tie of blood, and of that feeling, at the same time personal and yet disinterested, which is experienced by parents on seeing themselves living over again in their children. Far weaker motives, mere kindness and custom, unite masters to their servants, and stamp a moral character upon the relations between them; but with St. Louis, so great was his kindness, that it resembled affection, and caused affection to spring up in the hearts of those who were the objects of it. At the same time that he required in his servitors an almost austere morality, he readily passed over in silence their little faults, and treated them, in such cases, not only with mildness, but with that consideration which, in the humblest conditions, satisfies the self-respect of people, and elevates them in their own eyes. "Louis used to visit his domestics when they were ill; and when they died he never failed to pray for them, and to commend them to the prayers of the faithful. He had the mass for the dead, which it was his custom to hear every day, sung for them." He had taken back an old servitor of his grandfather, Philip Augustus, whom that king had dismissed because his fire sputtered, and John, whose duty it was to attend to it, did not know how to prevent that slight noise. Louis was, from time to time, subject to a malady, during which his right leg, from the ankle to the calf, became inflamed, as red as blood, and painful. One day, when he had an attack of this complaint, the king, as he lay, wished to make a close inspection of the redness in his leg; as John was clumsily holding a lighted candle close to the king, a drop of hot grease fell on the bad leg; and the king, who had sat up on his bed, threw himself back, exclaiming, "Ah! John, John, my grandfather turned you out of his house for a less matter!" and the clumsiness of John drew down upon him no other chastisement save this exclamation. (Vie de Saint Louis, by Queen Marguerite's confessor; Recueiz des Historiens de France, t. xx. p. 105; Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. v. p. 388.)

Far away from the king's household and service, and without any personal connection with him, a whole people, the people of the poor, the infirm, the sick, the wretched, and the neglected of every sort occupied a prominent place in the thoughts and actions of Louis. All the chroniclers of the age, all the historians of his reign, have celebrated his charity as much as his piety; and the philosophers of the eighteenth century almost forgave him his taste for relics, in consideration of his beneficence. And it was not merely legislative and administrative beneficence; St. Louis did not confine himself to founding and endowing hospitals, hospices, asylums, the Hotel-Dieu at Pontoise, that at Vernon, that at Compiegne, and, at Paris, the house of Quinze-Vingts, for three hundred blind, but he did not spare his person in his beneficence, and regarded no deed of charity as beneath a king's dignity. Every day, wherever the king went, one hundred and twenty-two of the poor received each two loaves, a quart of wine, meat or fish for a good dinner, and a Paris denier. The mothers of families had a loaf more for each child. Besides these hundred and twenty-two poor having out-door relief, thirteen others were every day introduced into the hotel, and there lived as the king's officers; and three of them sat at table at the same time with the king, in the same hall as he, and quite close." . . . "Many a time," says Joinville, "I saw him cut their bread, and give them to drink. He asked me one day if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. 'Sir,' said I, 'what a benefit! The feet of those knaves! Not I.' 'Verily,' said he, 'that is ill said, for you ought not to hold in disdain what God did for our instruction. I pray you, therefore, for love of me accustom yourself to wash them.'" Sometimes, when the king had leisure, he used to say, "Come and visit the poor in such and such a place, and let us feast them to their hearts' content." Once when he went to Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, a poor old woman, who was at the door of her cottage, and held in her hand a loaf, said to him, "Good king, it is of this bread, which comes of thine alms, that my husband, who lieth sick yonder indoors, doth get sustenance." The king took the bread, saying, "It is rather hard bread." And he went into the cottage to see with his own eyes the sick man.



When he was visiting the churches one Holy Friday, at Compiegne, as he was going that day barefoot according to his custom, and distributing alms to the poor whom he met, he perceived, on the yonder side of a miry pond which filled a portion of the street, a leper, who, not daring to come near, tried, nevertheless, to attract the king's attention. Louis walked through the pond, went up to the leper, gave him some money, took his hand and kissed it. "All present," says the chronicler, "crossed themselves for admiration at seeing this holy temerity of the king, who had no fear of putting his lips to a hand that none would have dared to touch." In such deeds there was infinitely more than the goodness and greatness of a kingly sold; there was in them that profound Christian sympathy which is moved at the sight of any human creature suffering severely in body or soul, and which, at such times, gives heed to no fear, shrinks from no pains, recoils with no disgust, and has no other thought but that of offering some fraternal comfort to the body or the soul that is suffering.

He who thus felt and acted was no monk, no prince enwrapt in mere devoutness and altogether given up to works and practices of piety; he was a knight, a warrior, a politician, a true king, who attended to the duties of authority as well as to those of charity, and who won respect from his nearest friends as well as from strangers, whilst astonishing them at one time by his bursts of mystic piety and monastic austerity, at another by his flashes of the ruler's spirit and his judicious independence, even towards the representatives of the faith and Church with whom he was in sympathy. "He passed for the wisest man in all his council." In difficult matters and on grave occasions none formed a judgment with more sagacity, and what his intellect so well apprehended he expressed with a great deal of propriety and grace. He was, in conversation, the nicest and most agreeable of men; "he was gay," says Joinville, "and when we were private at court, he used to sit at the foot of his bed; and when the preachers and cordeliers who were there spoke to him of a book he would like to hear, he said to them, 'Nay, you shall not read to me, for there is no book so good, after dinner, as talk ad libitum, that is, every one saying what he pleases.' "Not that he was at all averse from books and literates: "He was sometimes present at the discourses and disputations of the University; but he took care to search out for himself the truth in the word of God and in the traditions of the Church. . . . Having found out, during his travels in the East, that a Saracenic sultan had collected a quantity of books for the service of the philosophers of his sect, he was shamed to see that Christians had less zeal for getting instructed in the truth than infidels had for getting themselves made dexterous in falsehood; so much so that, after his return to France, he had search made in the abbeys for all the genuine works of St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, and other orthodox teachers, and, having caused copies of them to be made, he had them placed in the treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. He used to read them when he had any leisure, and he readily lent them to those who might get profit from them for themselves or for others. Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon meal, he sent for pious persons with whom he conversed about God, about the stories in the Bible and the histories of the saints, or about the lives of the Fathers." He had a particular friendship for the learned Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, whose idea was a society of secular ecclesiastics, who, living in common and having the necessaries of life, should give themselves up entirely to study and gratuitous teaching. Not only did St. Louis give him every facility and every aid necessary for the establishment of his learned college, but he made him one of his chaplains, and often invited him to his presence and his table in order to enjoy his conversation. "One day it happened," says Joinville, "that Master Robert was taking his meal beside me, and we were talking low. The king reproved us, and said, 'Speak up, for your company think that you may be talking evil of them. If you speak, at meals, of things which should please us, speak up; if not, be silent.' "Another day, at one of their reunions, with the king in their midst, Robert of Sorbon reproached Joinville with being "more bravely clad than the king; for," said he, "you do dress in furs and green cloth, which the king doth not." Joinville defended himself vigorously, in his turn attacking Robert for the elegance of his dress. The king took the learned doctor's part, and when he had gone, "My lord the king," says Joinville, "called his son, my lord Philip, and King Theobald, sat him down at the entrance of his oratory, placed his hand on the ground and said, 'Sit ye down here close by me, that we be not overheard;' and then he told me that he had called us in order to confess to us that he had wrongfully taken the part of Master Robert; for, just as the seneschal [Joinville] saith, ye ought to be well and decently clad, because your womankind will love you the better for it, and your people will prize you the more; for, saith the wise man, it is right so to bedeck one's self with garments and armor that the proper men of this world say not that there is too much made thereof, nor the young folk too little." (Joinville, ch. cxxxv. p. 301; ch. v. and vi. pp. 12 16; t. v. pp. 326, 364, and 368.)

Assuredly there was enough in such and so free an exercise of mind, in such a rich abundance of thoughts and sentiments, in such a religious, political, and domestic life, to occupy and satisfy a soul full of energy and power. But, as has already been said, an idea cherished with a lasting and supreme passion, the idea of the crusade took entire possession of St. Louis. For seven years, after his return from the East, from 1254 to 1261, he appeared to think no more of it; and there is nothing to show that he spoke of it even to his most intimate confidants. But, in spite of apparent tranquillity, he lived, so far, in a ferment of imagination and a continual fever, resembling in that respect, though the end aimed at was different, those great men, ambitious warriors or politicians, of natures forever at boiling point, for whom nothing is sufficient, and who are constantly fostering, beyond the ordinary course of events, some vast and strange desire, the accomplishment of which becomes for them a fixed idea and an insatiable passion. As Alexander and Napoleon were incessantly forming some new design, or, to speak more correctly, some new dream of conquest and dominion, in the same way St. Louis, in his pious ardor, never ceased to aspire to a re-entry of Jerusalem, to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, and to the victory of Christianity over Mohammedanism in the East, always flattering himself that some favorable circumstance would recall him to his interrupted work. It has already been told, at the termination, in the preceding chapter, of the crusaders' history, how he had reason to suppose, in 1261, that circumstances were responding to his desire; how he first of all prepared, noiselessly and patiently, for his second crusade; how, after seven years' labor, less and less concealed as days went on, he proclaimed his purpose, and swore to accomplish it in the following year; and how at last, in the month of March, 1270, against the will of France, of the pope, and even of the majority of his comrades, he actually set out—to go and die, on the 25th of the following August, before Tunis, without having dealt the Mussulmans of the East even the shadow of an effectual blow, having no strength to do more than utter, from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, the cry of Jerusalem! Jerusalem! and, at the last moment, as he lay in sackcloth and ashes, pronouncing merely these parting words: "Father, after the example of our Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!" Even the crusader was extinct in St. Louis; and only the Christian remained.

The world has seen upon the throne greater captains, more profound politicians, vaster and more brilliant intellects, princes who have exercised, beyond their own lifetime, a more powerful and a more lasting influence than St. Louis; but it has never seen a rarer king, never seen a man who could possess, as he did, sovereign power without contracting the passions and vices natural to it, and who, in this respect, displayed in his government human virtues exalted to the height of Christian. For all his moral sympathy, and superior as he was to his age, St. Louis, nevertheless, shared, and even helped to prolong, two of its greatest mistakes; as a Christian he misconceived the rights of conscience in respect of religion, and, as a king, he brought upon his people deplorable evils and perils for the sake of a fruitless enterprise. War against religious liberty was, for a long course of ages, the crime of Christian communities and the source of the most cruel evils as well as of the most formidable irreligious reactions the world has had to undergo. The thirteenth century was the culminating period of this fatal notion and the sanction of it conferred by civil legislation as well as ecclesiastical teaching. St. Louis joined, so far, with sincere conviction, in the general and ruling idea of his age; and the jumbled code which bears the name of Etablissements de Saint Louis, and in which there are collected many ordinances anterior or posterior to his reign, formally condemns heretics to death, and bids the civil judges to see to the execution, in this respect, of the bishops' sentences. In 1255 St. Louis himself demanded of Pope Alexander IV. leave for the Dominicans and Franciscans to exercise, throughout the whole kingdom, the inquisition already established, on account of the Albigensians, in the old domains of the Counts of Toulouse. The bishops, it is true, were to be consulted before condemnation could be pronounced by the inquisitors against a heretic; but that was a mark of respect for the episcopate and for the rights of the Gallican Church rather than a guarantee for liberty of conscience; and such was St. Louis's feeling upon this subject, that liberty, or rather the most limited justice, was less to be expected from the kingship than from the episcopate. St. Louis's extreme severity towards what he called the knavish oath (vilain serment), that is, blasphemy, an offence for which there is no definition save what is contained in the bare name of it, is, perhaps, the most striking indication of the state of men's minds, and especially of the king's, in this respect. Every blasphemer was to receive on his mouth the imprint of a red-hot iron. "One day the king had a burgher of Paris branded in this way; and violent murmurs were raised in the capital and came to the king's ears. He responded by declaring that he wished a like brand might mark his lips, and that he might bear the shame of it all his life, if only the vice of blasphemy might disappear from his kingdom. Some time afterwards, having had a work of great public utility executed, he received, on that occasion, from the landlords of Paris numerous expressions of gratitude. 'I expect,' said he, 'a greater recompense from the Lord for the curses brought upon me by that brand inflicted upon blasphemers than for the blessings I get because of this act of general utility.' "(Joinville, chap. cxxxviii.; Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. p. 300.)

Of all human errors those most in vogue are the most dangerous, for they are just those from which the most superior minds have the greatest difficulty in preserving themselves. It is impossible to see, without horror, into what aberrations of reason and of moral sense men otherwise most enlightened and virtuous may be led away by the predominant ideas of their age. And the horror becomes still greater when a discovery is made of the iniquities, sufferings, and calamities, public and private, consequent upon the admission of such aberrations amongst the choice spirits of the period. In the matter of religious liberty, St. Louis is a striking example of the vagaries which may be fallen into, under the sway of public feeling, by the most equitable of minds and the most scrupulous of consciences. A solemn warning, in times of great intellectual and popular ferment, for those men whose hearts are set on independence in their thoughts as well as in their conduct, and whose only object is justice and truth.

As for the crusades, the situation of Louis was with respect to them quite different and his responsibility far more personal. The crusades had certainly, in their origin, been the spontaneous and universal impulse of Christian Europe towards an object lofty, disinterested, and worthy of the devotion of men; and St. Louis was, without any doubt, the most lofty, disinterested, and heroic representative of this grand Christian movement. But towards the middle of the thirteenth century the moral complexion of the crusades had already undergone great alteration; the salutary effect they were to have exercised for the advancement of European civilization still loomed obscurely in the distance; whilst their evil results were already clearly manifesting themselves, and they had no longer that beauty lent by spontaneous and general feeling which had been their strength and their apology. Weariness, doubt, and common sense had, so far as this matter was concerned, done their work amongst all classes of the feudal community. As Sire de Joinville, so also had many knights, honest burghers, and simple country-folks recognized the flaws in the enterprise, and felt no more belief in its success. It is the glory of St. Louis that he was, in the thirteenth century, the faithful and virtuous representative of the crusade such as it was when it sprang from the womb of united Christendom, and when Godfrey de Bouillon was its leader at the end of the eleventh. It was the misdemeanor of St. Louis, and a great error in his judgment, that he prolonged, by his blindly prejudiced obstinacy, a movement which was more and more inopportune and illegitimate, for it was becoming day by day more factitious and more inane.

In the long line of kings of France, called Most Christian Kings, only two, Charlemagne and Louis IX., have received the still more august title of Saint. As for Charlemagne, we must not be too exacting in the way of proofs of his legal right to that title in the Catholic Church; he was canonized, in 1165 or 1166, only by the anti-pope Pascal III., through the influence of Frederick Barbarossa; and since that time, the canonization of Charlemagne has never been officially allowed and declared by any popes recognized as legitimate. They tolerated and tacitly admitted it, on account, no doubt, of the services rendered by Charlemagne to the papacy. But Charlemagne had ardent and influential admirers outside the pale of popes and emperors; he was the great man and the popular hero of the Germanic race in Western Europe. His saintship was welcomed with acclamation in a great part of Germany, where it had always been religiously kept up. Prom the earliest date of the University of Paris, he had been the patron there of all students of the German race. In France, nevertheless, his position as a saint was still obscure and doubtful, when Louis XI., towards the end of the fifteenth century, by some motive now difficult to unravel, but probably in order to take from his enemy, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, who was in possession of the fairest provinces of Charlemagne's empire, the exclusive privilege of so great a memory, ordained that there should be rendered to the illustrious emperor the honors due to the saints; and he appointed the 28th of January for his feast-day, with a threat of the penalty of death against all who should refuse conformity with the order. Neither the command nor the threat of Louis XI. had any great effect. It does not appear that, in the Church of France, the saintship of Charlemagne was any the more generally admitted and kept up; but the University of Paris faithfully maintained its traditions, and some two centuries after Louis XI., in 1661, without expressly giving to Charlemagne the title of saint, it loudly proclaimed him its patron, and made his feast-day an annual and solemn institution, which, in spite of some hesitation on the part of the parliament of Paris, and in spite of the revolutions of our time, still exists as the grand feast-day throughout the area of our classical studies. The University of France repaid Charlemagne for the service she had received from him; she protected his saintship as he had protected her schools and her scholars.

The saintship of Louis IX. was not the object of such doubt, and had no such need of learned and determined protectors. Claimed as it was on the very morrow of his death, not only by his son Philip III., called The Bold, and by the barons and prelates of the kingdom, but also by the public voice of France and of Europe, it at once became the subject of investigations and deliberations on the part of the Holy See. For twenty-four years, new popes, filling in rapid succession the chair of St. Peter (Gregory X., Innocent V., John XXI., Nicholas III., Martin IV., Honorius IV., Nicholas IV., St. Celestine V., and Boniface VIII.), prosecuted the customary inquiries touching the faith and life, the virtues and miracles, of the late king; and it was Boniface VIII., the pope destined to carry on against Philip the Handsome, grandson of St. Louis, the most violent of struggles, who decreed, on the 11th of August, 1297, the canonization of the most Christian amongst the kings of France, and one of the truest Christians, king or simple, in France and in Europe.

St. Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III., a prince, no doubt, of some personal valor, since he has retained in history the nickname of The Bold, but not otherwise beyond mediocrity. His reign had an unfortunate beginning. After having passed several months before Tunis, in slack and unsuccessful continuation of his father's crusade, he gave it up, and re-embarked in November, 1270, with the remnants of an army anxious to quit "that accursed land," wrote one of the crusaders, "where we languish rather than live, exposed to torments of dust, fury of winds, corruption of atmosphere, and putrefaction of corpses." A tempest caught the fleet on the coast of Sicily; and Philip lost, by it several vessels, four or five thousand men, and all the money he had received from the Mussulmans of Tunis as the price of his departure. Whilst passing through Italy, at Cosenza, his wife, Isabel of Aragon, six months gone with child, fell from her horse, was delivered of a child which lived barely a few hours, and died herself a day or two afterwards, leaving her husband almost as sick as sad. He at last arrived at Paris, on the 21st of May, 1271, bringing back with him five royal biers, that of his father, that of his brother, John Tristan, Count of Nevers, that of his brother-in-law, Theo- bald King of Navarre, that of his wife, and that of his son. The day after his arrival he conducted them all in state to the Abbey of St. Denis, and was crowned at Rheims, not until the 30th of August following. His reign, which lasted fifteen years, was a period of neither repose nor glory. He engaged in war several times over in Southern France and in the north of Spain, in 1272, against Roger Bernard, Count of Foix, and in 1285 against Don Pedro III., King of Aragon, attempting conquests and gaining victories, but becoming easily disgusted with his enterprises and gaining no result of importance or durability. Without his taking himself any official or active part in the matter, the name and credit of France were more than once compromised in the affairs of Italy through the continual wars and intrigues of his uncle Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, who was just as ambitious, just as turbulent, and just as tyrannical as his brother St. Louis was scrupulous, temperate, and just. It was in the reign of Philip the Bold that there took place in Sicily, on the 30th of March, 1282, that notorious massacre of the French which is known by the name of Sicilian Vespers, which was provoked by the unbridled excesses of Charles of Anjou's comrades, and through which many noble French families had to suffer cruelly.



At the same time, the celebrated Italian Admiral Roger de Loria inflicted, by sea, on the French party in Italy, the Provincal navy, and the army of Philip the Bold, who was engaged upon incursions into Spain, considerable reverses and losses. At the same period the foundations were being laid in Germany and in the north of Italy, in the person of Rudolph of Hapsburg, elected emperor, of the greatness reached by the House of Austria, which was destined to be so formidable a rival to France. The government of Philip III. showed hardly more ability at home than in Europe; not that the king was himself violent, tyrannical, greedy of power or money, and unpopular; he was, on the contrary, honorable, moderate in respect of his personal claims, simple in his manners, sincerely pious and gentle towards the humble; but he was at the same time weak, credulous, very illiterate, say the chroniclers, and without penetration, foresight, or intelligent and determined will. He fell under the influence of an inferior servant of his house, Peter de la Brosse, who had been surgeon and barber first of all to St. Louis and then to Philip III., who made him, before long, his chancellor and familiar counsellor. Being, though a skilful and active intriguer, entirely concerned with his own personal fortunes and those of his family, this barber-mushroom was soon a mark for the jealousy and the attacks of the great lords of the court. And he joined issue with them, and even with the young queen, Maria of Brabant, the second wife of Philip III. Accusations of treason, of poisoning and peculation, were raised against him, and, in 1276, he was hanged at Paris, on the thieves' gibbet, in presence of the Dukes of Burgundy and Brabant, the Count of Artois, and many other personages of note, who took pleasure in witnessing his execution. His condemnation, "the cause of which remained unknown to the people," says the chronicler William of Nangis, "was a great source of astonishment and grumbling." Peter de la Brosse was one of the first examples, in French history, of those favorites who did not understand that, if the scandal caused by their elevation were not to entail their ruin, it was incumbent upon them to be great men.

In spite of the want of ability and the weakness conspicuous in the government of Philip the Bold, the kingship in France had, in his reign, better fortunes than could have been expected.

The death, without children, of his uncle Alphonso, St. Louis's brother, Count of Poitiers and also Count of Toulouse, through his wife, Joan, daughter of Raymond VII., put Philip in possession of those fair provinces. He at first possessed the count-ship of Toulouse merely with the title of count, and as a private domain which was not definitively incorporated with the crown of France until a century later. Certain disputes arose between England and France in respect of this great inheritance; and Philip ended them by ceding Agenois to Edward I., King of England, and keeping Quercy. He also ceded to Pope Urban IV. the county of Venaissin, with its capital Avignon, which the court of Rome claimed by virtue of a gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, and which, through a course of many disputations and vicissitudes, remained in possession of the Holy See until it was reunited to France on the 19th of February, 1797, by the treaty of Tolentino. But, notwithstanding these concessions, when Philip the Bold died, at Perpignan, the 5th of October, 1285, on his return from his expedition in Aragon, the sovereignty in Southern France, as far as the frontiers of Spain, had been won for the kingship of France.

A Flemish chronicler, a monk at Egmont, describes the character of Philip the Bold's successor in the following words: "A certain King of France, also named Philip, eaten up by the fever of avarice and cupidity." And that was not the only fever inherent in Philip IV., called The Handsome; he was a prey also to that of ambition, and, above all, to that of power. When he mounted the throne, at seventeen years of age, he was handsome, as his nickname tells us, cold, taciturn, harsh, brave at need, but without fire or dash, able in the formation of his designs, and obstinate in prosecuting them by craft or violence, by means of bribery or cruelty, with wit to choose and support his servants, passionately vindictive against his enemies, and faithless and unsympathetic towards his subjects, but from time to time taking care to conciliate them, either by calling them to his aid in his difficulties or his dangers, or by giving them protection against other oppressors. Never, perhaps, was king better served by circumstances or more successful in his enterprises; but he is the first of the Capetians who had a scandalous contempt for rights, abused success, and thrust the king-ship, in France, upon the high road of that arrogant and reckless egotism which is sometimes compatible with ability and glory, but which carries with it in the germ, and sooner or later brings out in full bloom, the native vices and fatal consequences of arbitrary and absolute power.

Away from his own kingdom, in his dealings with foreign countries, Philip the Handsome had a good fortune, which his predecessors had lacked, and which his successors lacked still more. Through William the Conqueror's settlement in England and Henry II.'s marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Kings of England had, by reason of their possessions and their claims in France, become the natural enemies of the Kings of France, and war was almost incessant between the two kingdoms. But Edward I., King of England, ever since his accession to the throne, in 1272, had his ideas fixed upon, and his constant efforts directed towards, the conquests of the countries of Wales and Scotland, so as to unite under his sway the whole island of Great Britain. The Welsh and the Scotch, from prince to peasant, offered an energetic resistance in defence of their independence; and it was only after seven years' warfare, from 1277 to 1284, that the conquest of Wales by the English was accomplished, and the style of Prince of Wales became the title of the heir to the throne of England. Scotland, in spite of dissensions at home, made a longer and a more effectual resistance; and though it was reduced to submission, it was not conquered by Edward I. Two national heroes, William Wallace and Robert Bruce, excited against him insurrections which were often triumphant and always being renewed; and after having, during eighteen years of strife, maintained a precarious dominion in Scotland, Edward I. died, in 1307, without having acquired the sovereignty of it. But his persevering ardor in this two-fold enterprise kept him out of war with France; he did all he could to avoid it, and when the pressure of circumstances involved him in it for a time, he was anxious to escape from it. Being summoned to Paris by Philip the Handsome, in 1286, to swear fealty and homage on account of his domains in France, he repaired thither with a good grace, and, on his knees before his souzerain, repeated to him the solemn form of words, "I become your liegeman for the lands I hold of you this side the sea, according to the fashion of the peace which was made between our ancestors." The conditions of this peace were confirmed, and, by a new treaty between the two princes, the annual payment of fifty thousand dollars to the King of England, in exchange for his claims over Normandy, was guaranteed to him, and Edward renounced his pretensions to Querey in consideration of a yearly sum of three thousand livres of Tours. In 1292, a quarrel and some hostilities at sea between the English and Norman commercial navies grew into a war between the two kings; and it dragged its slow length along for four years in the south-west of France. Edward made an alliance, in the north, with the Flemish, who were engaged in a deadly struggle with Philip the Handsome, and thereby lost Aquitaine for a season; but, in 1296, a truce was concluded between the belligerents, and though the importance of England's commercial relations with Flanders decided Edward upon resuming his alliance with the Flemish, when, in 1300, war broke out again between them and France, he withdrew from it three years afterwards, and made a separate peace with Philip the Handsome, who gave him back Aquitaine. In 1306, fresh differences arose between the two kings; but before they had rekindled the torch of war, Edward I. died at the opening of a new campaign in Scotland, and his successor, Edward II., repaired to Boulogne, where he, in his turn, did homage to Philip the Handsome for the duchy of Aquitaine, and espoused Philip's daughter Isabel, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Europe. In spite, then, of frequent interruptions, the reign of Edward I. was on the whole a period of peace between England and France, being exempt, at any rate, from premeditated and obstinate hostilities.

In Southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, Philip the Handsome, just as his father, Philip the Bold, was, during the first years of his reign, at war with the Kings of Aragon, Alphonso III. and Jayme II.; but these campaigns, originating in purely local quarrels, or in the ties between the descendants of St. Louis and of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies, rather than in furtherance of the general interests of France, were terminated in 1291 by a treaty concluded at Tarascon between the belligerents, and have remained without historical importance.

The Flemish were the people with whom Philip the Handsome engaged in and kept up, during the whole of his reign, with frequent alternations of defeat and success, a really serious war. In the thirteenth century, Flanders was the most populous and the richest country in Europe. She owed the fact to the briskness of her manufacturing and commercial undertakings, not only amongst her neighbors, but throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Hungary, in Russia, and even as far as Constantinople, where, as we have seen, Baldwin I., Count of Flanders, became, in 1204, Latin Emperor of the East. Cloth, and all manner of woollen stuffs, were the principal articles of Flemish production, and it was chiefly from England that Flanders drew her supply of Wool, the raw material of her industry. Thence arose between the two countries commercial relations which could not fail to acquire political importance. As early as the middle of the twelfth century, several Flemish towns formed a society for founding in England a commercial exchange, which obtained great privileges, and, under the name of the Flemish hanse of London, reached rapid development. The merchants of Bruges had taken the initiative in it; but soon all the towns of Flanders—and Flanders was covered with towns—Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Courtrai, Furnes, Alost, St. Omer, and Douai, entered the confederation, and made unity as well as extension of liberties in respect of Flemish commerce the object of their joint efforts. Their prosperity became celebrated; and its celebrity gave it increase. It was a burgher of Bruges who was governor of the hanse of London, and he was called the Count of the Hanse. The fair of Bruges, held in the month of May, brought together traders from the whole world. "Thither came for exchange," says the most modern and most enlightened historian of Flanders (Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre, t. ii. p. 300), "the produce of the North and the South, the riches collected in the pilgrimages to Novogorod, and those brought over by the caravans from Samarcand and Bagdad, the pitch of Norway and the oils of Andalusia, the furs of Russia and the dates from the Atlas, the metals of Hungary and Bohemia, the figs of Granada, the honey of Portugal, the wax of Morocco, and the spice of Egypt; whereby, says an ancient manuscript, no land is to be compared in merchandise to the land of Flanders." At Ypres, the chief centre of cloth fabrics, the population increased so rapidly that, in 1247, the sheriffs prayed Pope Innocent IV. to augment the number of parishes in their city, which contained, according to their account, about two hundred thousand persons. So much prosperity made the Counts of Flanders very puissant lords. "Marguerite II., called the Black, Countess of Flanders and Hainault, from 1244 to 1280, was extremely rich," says a chronicler, "not only in lands, but in furniture, jewels, and money; and, as is not customary with women, she was right liberal and right sumptuous, not only in her largesses, but in her entertainments, and whole manner of living; insomuch that she kept up the state of queen rather than countess." Nearly all the Flemish towns were strongly organized communes, in which prosperity had won liberty, and which became before long small republics sufficiently powerful not only for the defence of their municipal rights against the Counts of Flanders, their lords, but for offering an armed resistance to such of the sovereigns their neighbors as attempted to conquer them or to trammel them in their commercial relations, or to draw upon their wealth by forced contributions or by plunder. Philip Augustus had begun to have a taste of their strength during his quarrels with Count Ferdinand of Portugal, whom he had made Count of Flanders by marrying him to the Countess Joan, heiress of the countship, and whom, after the battle of Bouvines, he had confined for thirteen years in the tower of the Louvre. Philip the Handsome laid himself open to and was subjected by the Flemings to still rougher experiences.

At the time of the latter king's accession to the throne, Guy de Dampierre, of noble Champagnese origin, had been for five years Count of Flanders, as heir to his mother, Marguerite II. He was a prince who did not lack courage, or, on a great emergency, high-mindedness and honor; but he was ambitious, covetous, as parsimonious as his mother had been munificent, and above all concerned to get his children married in a manner conducive to his own political importance. He had by his two wives, Matilda of Bethune and Isabel of Luxembourg, nine sons and eight daughters, offering free scope for combinations and connections, in respect of which Guy de Dampierre was not at all scrupulous about the means of success. He had a quarrel with his son-in-law, Florent V., Count of Holland, to whom he had given his daughter Beatrice in marriage; and another of his sons-in-law, John I., Duke of Brabant, married to another of his daughters, the Princess Marguerite, offered himself as mediator in the difference. The two brothers-in-law went together to see their father-in-law; but, on their arrival, Guy de Dampierre seized the person of the Count of Holland, and would not release him until the Duke of Brabant offered to become prisoner in his place, and found himself obliged, in order to obtain his liberty, to pay his father-in-law a tough ransom. It was not long before Guy himself suffered from the same sort of iniquitous surprise that he had practised upon his sons-in-law. In 1293 he was secretly negotiating the marriage of Philippa, one of his daughters, with Prince Edward, eldest son of the King of England. Philip the Handsome, having received due warning, invited the Count of Flanders to Paris, "to take counsel with him and the other barons touching the state of the king-dom." At first Guy hesitated; but he dared not refuse, and he repaired to Paris, with his sons John and Guy. As soon as he arrived he bashfully announced to the king the approaching union of his daughter with the English prince, protesting, "that he would never cease, for all that, to serve him loyally, as every good and true man should serve his lord." "In God's name, Sir Count," said the enraged king, "this thing will never do; you have made alliance with my foe, without my wit; wherefore you shall abide with me;" and he had him, together with his sons, marched off at once to the tower of the Louvre, where Guy remained for six months, and did not then get out save by leaving as hostage to the King of France his daughter Philippa herself, who was destined to pass in this prison her young and mournful life. On once more entering Flanders, Count Guy oscillated for two years between the King of France and the King of England, submitting to the exactions of the former, at the same time that he was privily renewing his attempts to form an intimate alliance with the latter. Driven to extremity by the haughty severity of Philip, he at last came to a decision, concluded a formal treaty with Edward I., affianced to the English crown-prince the most youthful of his daughters, Isabel of Flanders, youngest sister of Philippa, the prisoner in the tower of the Louvre, and charged two ambassadors to go to Paris, as the bearers of the following declaration: "Every one doth know in how many ways the King of France hath misbehaved towards God and justice. Such is his might and his pride, that he doth acknowledge nought above himself, and he hath brought us to the necessity of seeking allies who may be able to defend and protect us. . . . By reason whereof we do charge our ambassadors to declare and say, for us and from us, to the above said king, that because of his misdeeds and defaults of justice, we hold ourselves unbound, absolved, and delivered from all bonds, all alliances, obligations, conventions, subjections, services, and dues whereby we may have been bounden towards him."



This meant war. And it was prompt and sharp on the part of the King of France, slow and dull on the part of the King of England, who was always more bent upon the conquest of Scotland than upon defending, on the Continent, his ally, the Count of Flanders. In June, 1297, Philip the Handsome, in person, laid siege to Lille, and, on the 13th of August, Robert, Count of Artois, at the head of the French chivalry, gained at Furnes, over the Flemish army, a victory which decided the campaign. Lille capitulated. The English re-enforcements arrived too late, and served no other purpose but that of inducing Philip to grant the Flemings a truce for two years. A fruitless attempt was made, with the help of Pope Boniface VIII., to change the truce into a lasting peace. The very day on which it expired, Charles, Count of Valois, and brother of Philip the Handsome, entered Flanders with a powerful army, surprised Douai, passed through Bruges, and, on arriving at Ghent, gave a reception to its magistrates, who came and offered him the keys. "The burghers of the towns of Flanders," says a chronicler of the age, "were all bribed by gifts or promises from the King of France, who would never have dared to invade their frontiers, had they been faithful to their count." Guy de Dampierre, hopelessly beaten, repaired, with two of his sons, and fifty- one of his faithful knights, to the camp of the Count of Valois, who gave him a kind reception, and urged him to trust himself to the king's generosity, promising at the same time to support his suit. Guy set out for Paris with all his retinue. On approaching the City-palace which was the usual residence of the kings, he espied at one of the windows Queen Joan of Navarre, who took a supercilious pleasure in gazing upon the humiliation of the victim of defeat. Guy drooped his head, and gave no greeting. When he was close to the steps of the palace, he dismounted from his horse, and placed himself and all his following at the mercy of the king. The Count of Valois said a few words in his favor, but Philip, cutting his brother short, said, addressing himself to Guy, "I desire no peace with you, and if my brother has made any engagements with you, he had no right to do so." And he had the Count of Flanders taken off immediately to Compiegne, "to a strong tower, such that all could see him," and his comrades were distributed amongst several towns, where they were strictly guarded. The whole of Flanders submitted; and its principal towns, Ypres, Audenarde, Ter-monde, and Cassel, fell successively into the hands of the French. Three of the sons of Count Guy retired to Namur. The constable Raoul of Nesle "was lieutenant for the King of France in his newly-won country of Flanders." Next year, in the month of May, 1301, Philip determined to pay his conquest a visit; and the queen, his wife, accompanied him. There is never any lack of galas for conquerors. After having passed in state through Tournai, Courtrai, Audenarde, and Ghent, the King and Queen of France made their entry into Bruges. All the houses were magnificently decorated; on platforms covered with the richest tapestry thronged the ladies of Bruges; there was nothing but haberdashery and precious stones. Such an array of fine dresses, jewels, and riches, excited a woman's jealousy in the Queen of France: "There is none but queens," quoth she, "to be seen in Bruges; I had thought that there was none but I who had a right to royal state." But the people of Bruges remained dumb; and their silence scared Philip the Handsome, who vainly attempted to attract a concourse of people about him by the proclamation of brilliant jousts. "These galas," says the historian Villani, who was going through Flanders at this very time, "were the last whereof the French knew aught in our time, for Fortune, who till then had shown such favor to the King of France, on a sudden turned her wheel, and the cause thereof lay in the unrighteous captivity of the innocent maid of Flanders, and in the treason whereof the Count of Flanders and his sons had been the victims." There were causes, however, for this new turn of events of a more general and more profound character than the personal woes of Flemish princes. James de Chiltillon, the governor assigned by Philip the Handsome to Flanders, was a greedy oppressor of it; the municipal authorities whom the victories or the gold of Philip had demoralized became the objects of popular hatred; and there was an outburst of violent sedition. A simple weaver, obscure, poor, undersized, and one-eyed, but valiant, and eloquent in his Flemish tongue, one Peter Deconing, became the leader of revolt in Bruges; accomplices flocked to him from nearly all the towns of Flanders; and he found allies amongst their neighbors. In 1302 war again broke out; but it was no longer a war between Philip the Handsome and Guy de Dampierre: it was a war between the Flemish communes and their foreign oppressors. Everywhere resounded the cry of insurrection: "Our bucklers and our friends for the lion of Flanders! Death to all Walloons! "Philip the Handsome precipitately levied an army of sixty thousand men, says Villani, and gave the command of it to Count Robert of Artois, the hero of Furnes. The forces of the Flemings amounted to no more than twenty thousand fighting men. The two armies met near Courtrai. The French chivalry were full of ardor and confidence; and the Italian archers in their service began the attack with some success. My lord," said one of his knights to the Count of Artois, "these knaves will do so well that they will gain the honor of the day; and, if they alone put an end to the war, what will be left for the noblesse to do?" "Attack, then!" answered the prince. Two grand attacks succeeded one another; the first under the orders of the Constable Raoul of Nesle, the second under those of the Count of Artois in person. After two hours' fighting, both failed against the fiery national passion of the Flemish communes, and the two French leaders, the Constable and the Count of Artois, were left, both of them, lying on the field of battle amidst twelve or fifteen thousand of their dead. "I yield me! I yield me!" cried the Count of Artois; but, "We understand not thy lingo," ironically answered in their own tongue the Flemings who surrounded him; and he was forthwith put to the sword. Too late to save him galloped up a noble ally of the insurgents, Guy of Namur. "From the top of the towers of our monastery," says the Abbot of St. Martin's of Tournai, "we could see the French flying over the roads, across fields and through hedges, in such numbers that the sight must have been seen to be believed. There were in the outskirts of our town and in the neighboring villages, so vast a multitude of knights and men- at-arms tormented with hunger, that it was a matter horrible to see. They gave their arms to get bread."



A French knight, covered with wounds, whose name has remained unknown, hastily scratched a few words upon a scrap of parchment dyed with blood; and that was the first account Philip the Handsome received of the battle of Courtrai, which was fought and lost on the 11th of July, 1302.

The news of this great defeat of the French spread rapidly throughout Europe, and filled with joy all those who were hostile to or jealous of Philip the Handsome. The Flemings celebrated their victory with splendor, and rewarded with bounteous gifts their burgher heroes, Peter Deconing amongst others, and those of their neighbors who had brought them aid. Philip, greatly affected and a little alarmed, sent for his prisoner, the aged Guy de Dampierre, and loaded him with reproaches, as if he had to thank him for the calamity; and, forthwith levying a fresh army, "as numerous," say the chroniclers, "as the grains of sand on the borders of the sea from Propontis to the Ocean," he took up a position at Arras, and even advanced quite close to Douai; but he was of those in whom obstinacy does not extinguish prudence, and who, persevering all the while in their purposes, have wit to understand the difficulties and clangers of them. Instead of immediately resuming the war, he entered into negotiations with the Flemings; and their envoys met him in a ruined church beneath the walls of Douai. John of Chalons, one of Philip's envoys, demanded, in his name, that the king should be recognized as lord of all Flanders, and authorized to punish the insurrection of Bruges, with a promise, however, to spare the lives of all who had taken part in it. "How!" said a Fleming, Baldwin de Paperode; "our lives would be left us, but only after our goods had been pillaged and our limbs subjected to every torture!" "Sir Castellan," answered John of Chalons, "why speak you so? A choice must needs be made; for the king is determined to lose his crown rather than not be avenged." Another Fleming, John de Renesse, who, leaning on the broken altar, had hitherto kept silence, cried, "Since so it is, let answer be made to the king that we be come hither to fight him, and not to deliver up to him our fellow-citizens;" and the Flemish envoys withdrew. Still Philip did not give up negotiating, for the purpose of gaining time and of letting the edge wear off the Flemings' confidence. He returned to Paris, fetched Guy de Dampierre from the tower of the Louvre, and charged him to go and negotiate peace under a promise of returning to his prison if he were unsuccessful. Guy, respected as he was throughout Flanders on account of his age and his long misfortunes, failed in his attempt, and, faithful to his word, went back and submitted himself to the power of Philip. "I am so old," said he to his friends, "that I am ready to die whensoever it shall please God." And he did die, on the 7th of March, 1304, in the prison of Compiegne, to which he had been transferred. Philip, all the while pushing forward his preparations for war, continued to make protestation of pacific intentions. The Flemish communes desired the peace necessary for the prosperity of their commerce; but patriotic anxieties wrestled with material interests. A burgher of Ghent was quietly fishing on the banks of the Scheldt, when an old man acosted him, saying sharply, "Knowest thou not, then, that the king is assembling all his armies? It is time the Ghentese shook off their sloth; the lion of Flanders must no longer slumber." In the spring of 1304, the cry of war resounded everywhere. Philip had laid an impost extraordinary upon all real property in his kingdom; regulars and reserves had been summoned to Arras, to attack the Flemings by land and sea. He had taken into his pay a Genoese fleet commanded by Regnier de Grimaldi, a celebrated Italian admiral; and it arrived in the North Sea, and blockaded Zierikzee, a maritime town of Zealand. On the 10th of August, 1304, the Flemish fleet which was defending the place was beaten and dispersed. Philip hoped for a moment that this reverse would discourage the Flemings; but it was not so at all. A great battle took place on the 17th of August between the two land armies at Mons-en-Puelle (or, Mont-en-Pevele, according to the true local spelling), near Lille; the action was for some time indecisive, and even after it was over both sides hesitated about claiming the victory; but when the Flemings saw their camp swept off and rifled, and when they no longer found in it, say the chroniclers, "their fine stuffs of Bruges and Ypres, their wines of Rochelle, their beers of Cambrai, and their cheeses of Bethune," they declared that they would return to their hearths; and their leaders, unable to restrain them, were obliged to shut themselves up in Lille, whither Philip, who had himself retired at first to Arras, came to besiege them. When the first days of downheartedness were over, and at sight of the danger which threatened Lille and the remains of the Flemish army assembled within its walls, all Flanders rushed to arms. "The labors of the workshop and the field were everywhere suspended," say contemporary Historians: "the women kept guard in the towns: you might traverse the country without meeting a single man, for they were all in the camp at Courtrai, to the number of twelve hundred thousand, according to popular exaggeration, swearing one to another that they would rather die fighting than live in slavery." Philip was astounded. "I thought the Flemings," said he, "were destroyed; but they seem to rain from heaven; "and he resumed his protestations and pacific overtures. Circumstances were favorable to him: old Guy de Dampierre was dead; Robert of Bethune, his eldest son and successor, was still the prisoner of Philip the Handsome, who set him at liberty after having imposed conditions upon him. Robert, timid in spirit and weak of heart, accepted them, in spite of the grumblings of the Flemish populations, always eager to recommence war after a short respite from its trials. The burghers of Bruges had made themselves a new seal, whereon the old symbol of the bridge of their city on the Reye was replaced by the lion of Flanders wearing the crown and armed with the cross, with this inscription: "The lion hath roared and burst his fetters "(Rugiit leo, vincula fregit). During ten years, from 1305 to 1314, there was between France and Flanders a continual alternation of reciprocal concessions and retractations, of treaties concluded and of renewed insurrections, without decisive and ascertained results. It was neither peace nor war; and, after the death of Philip the Handsome, his successors were destined, for a long time to come, to find again and again amongst the Flemish communes deadly enmities and grievous perils.

At the same time that he was prosecuting this interminable war against the Flemings, Philip was engaged, in this case also beyond the boundaries of his kingdom, in a struggle which was still more serious, owing to the nature of the questions which gave rise to it and to the quality of his adversary. In 1294 a new pope, Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani, had been elected under the name of Boniface VIII. He had been for a long time connected with the French party in Italy, and he owed his elevation to the influence, especially, of Charles II., King of Naples and Sicily, grandson of St. Louis and cousin-german of Philip the Handsome. Shortly before his election, Benedetto Gaetani said to that prince, "Thy pope (Celestine V.) was willing and able to serve thee, only he knew not how; as for me, if thou make me pope, I shall be willing and able and know how to be useful to thee." The long quarrel between the popes and the Emperors of Germany, who, as Kings of the Romans, aspired to invade or dominate Italy, had made the Kings of France natural allies of the papacy, and there had been a saying ever since, arising from a popular instinct, which had already found its way into poetry,—

"'Tis a goodly match as match can be, To marry the Church and the fleurs-de-lis: Should either mate a-straying go, Then each—too late—will own 'twas so."

Boniface VIII. did not seem fated to withdraw from this policy; he was old (sixty-six); his party-engagements were of long standing; his personal fortune was made; three years before his election he possessed twelve ecclesiastical benefices, of which seven were in France; by his accession to the Holy See his ambition was satisfied; and as legate in France in 1290 he had made the acquaintance there of the young king, Philip the Handsome, and had conceived a liking for him. King Philip must have considered that he had ground for seeing in him a faithful and useful ally.

Neither of the two sovereigns took into account the changes that had come, during two centuries past, over the character of their power, and of the influence which these changes must exercise upon their posture and their relations one towards the other. Louis the Fat in the first instance, and then in a special manner Philip Augustus and St. Louis, each with very different sentiments and by very different processes, had disentangled the kingship in France from the feudal system, and had acquired for it a sovereignty of its own, beyond and above the rights of the suzerain over his vassals. The popes, for their part, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. amongst others, had raised the papacy to a region of intellectual and moral supremacy whence it looked down upon all the terrestrial powers. Gregory VII., the most disinterested of all ambitious men in high places, had dedicated his stormy life to establishing the dominion of the Church over the world, kings as well as people, and also to reforming internally the Church herself, her morals and her discipline. "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; and that is why I am dying in exile," he had said on his death-bed: but his works survived him, and a hundred years after him, in spite of the troubles which had disturbed the Church under eighteen mediocre and transitory popes, Innocent III., whilst maintaining, only with more moderation and prudence, the same principles as Gregory VII. had maintained, exercised peacefully, for a space of eighteen years, the powers of the right divine, whilst Philip Augustus was extending and confirming the kingly power in France. This parallel progress of the kingship and the papacy had its critics and its supporters. Learned lawyers, on the authority of the maxims and precedents of the Roman empire, proclaimed the king's sovereignty in the State; and profound theologians, on the authority of the divine origin of Christianity, laid down as a principle the right divine of the papacy in the Church and in the dealings of the Church with the State.

Thus, at the end of the thirteenth century, there were found face to face two systems, one laic and the other ecclesiastical, of absolute power. But the teachers of the doctrine of the right divine do not expunge from human affairs the passions, errors, and vices of the individuals who put their systems in practice; and absolute power, which is the greatest of all demoralizers, entails before long upon communities, whether civil or religious, the disorders, abuses, faults, and evils which it is the special province of governments to prevent or keep under. The French kingship and the papacy, the representatives of which had but lately been great and glorious princes, such as Philip Augustus and St. Louis, Gregory VII. and Innocent III., were, at the end of the thirteenth century, vested in the persons of men of far less moral worth and less political wisdom, Philip the Handsome and Boniface VIII. We have already had glimpses of Philip the Handsome's greedy, ruggedly obstinate, haughty and tyrannical character; and Boniface VIII. had the same defects, with more hastiness and less ability. The two great poets of Italy in that century, Dante and Petrarch, who were both very much opposed to Philip the Handsome, paint Boniface VIII. in similar colors. "He was," says Petrarch (Epistoloe Ramiliares, bk. ii. letter 3), "an inexorable sovereign, whom it was very hard to break by force, and impossible to bend by humility and caresses; "and Dante (Inferno, canto xix. v. 45 57) makes Pope Nicholas III. say, "Already art thou here and proudly upstanding, O Boniface? Hast thou so soon been sated with that wealth for which thou didst not fear to deceive that fair dame (the Church) whom afterwards thou didst so disastrously govern? "Two men so deeply imbued with evil and selfish passions could not possibly meet without clashing; and it was not long before facts combined to produce between them an outburst of hatred and strife which revealed the latent vices and fatal results of the two systems of absolute power of which they were the representatives.

Philip the Handsome had been nine years king when Boniface VIII. became pope. On his accession to the throne he had testified an intention of curtailing the privileges and power of the Church. He had removed the clergy from judicial functions, in the domains of the lords as well as in the domain of the king, and he had everywhere been putting into the hands of laymen the administration of civil justice. He had considerably increased the percentage to be paid on real property acquired by the Church (called possessions in mortmain), by way of compensation for the mutation-dues which their fixity caused the State to lose. At the time of the crusades the property of the clergy had been subjected to a special tax of a tenth of the revenues, and this tax had been several times renewed for reasons other than the crusades. The Church recognized her duty of contributing towards the defence of the kingdom, and the chapter-general of the order of Citeaux wrote to Philip the Handsome himself, "On all grounds of natural equity and rules of law we ought to bear our share of such a burden out of the goods which God hath given us." In every instance, the question had been as to the necessity for and the quota of the ecclesiastical contribution, which was at one time granted by the bishops and local clergy, at another expressly authorized by the papacy. There is nothing to show that Boniface VIII., at the time of his elevation to the Holy See, was opposed to these augmentations and demands on the part of the French crown; he was at that time too much occupied by his struggle against his own enemies at Rome, the family of the Colonnas, and he felt the necessity of remaining on good terms with France; but in 1296, Philip the Handsome, at war with the King of England and the Flemings, imposed upon the clergy two fresh tenths. The bishops alone were called upon to vote them; and the order of Citeaux refused to pay them, and addressed to the pope a protest, with a comparison between Philip and Pharaoh. Boniface not only entertained the protest, but addressed to the king a bull (called Clericis laicos, from its first two words), in which, led on by his zeal to set forth the generality and absoluteness of his power, he laid down as a principle that churches and ecclesiastics could not be taxed save with the permission of the sovereign pontiff, and that "all emperors, kings, dukes, counts, barons, or governors whatsoever, who should violate this principle, and all prelates or other ecclesiastics who should through weakness lend themselves to such violation, would by this mere fact incur excommunication, and would be incapable of release therefrom, save in articulo mortis, unless by a special decision of the Holy See." This was going far beyond the traditions of the French Church, and, in the very act of protecting it, to strike a blow at its independence in its dealings with the French State. Philip was mighty wroth, but he did not burst out; he confined himself to letting the pope perceive his displeasure by means of divers administrative measures, amongst others by forbidding the exportation from the kingdom of gold, silver, and valuable articles, which found their way chiefly to Rome. Boniface, on his side, was not slow to perceive that he had gone too far, and that his own interests did not permit him to give so much offence to the King of France. A year after the bull Clericis laicos, he modified it by a new bull, which not only authorized the collection of the two tenths voted by the French bishops, but recognized the right of the King of France to tax the French clergy with their consent and without authorization from the Holy See, whenever there was a pressing necessity for it. Philip, on his side, testified to the pope his satisfaction at this concession by himself making one at the expense of the religious liberty of his subjects. In 1292 he had ordered the seneschal of Carcassonne to place limits to the power of the inquisitors in Languedoc by taking from them the right of having their sentences against heretics executed without appeal; and in 1298 he issued an ordinance to the effect that "to further the proceedings of the Inquisition against heretics, for the glory of God and for the augmentation of the faith, he laid his injunctions upon all dukes, counts, barons, seneschals, bailiffs, and provosts of his kingdom, to obey the diocesan bishops and the inquisitors deputed by the Holy See in handing over to them, whenever they should be requested, all heretics and their creed-fellows, favorers, and harborers, and to see to the immediate execution of sentences passed by the judges of the Church, notwithstanding any appeal and any complaint on the part of heretics and their favorers."

Thus the two absolute sovereigns changed their policy and made temporary sacrifice of their mutual pretensions, according as it suited them to fight or to agree. But there arose a question in respect of which this continual alternation of pretensions and compromises, of quarrels and accommodations, was no longer possible; in order to keep up their position in the eyes of one another, they were obliged to come to a deadly clash; and in this struggle, perilous for both, Boniface VIII. was the aggressor, and with Philip the Handsome remained the victory.

On the 2d of February, 1300, Boniface VIII., who had much at heart the lustre and popularity of the Holy See, published a bull which granted indulgences to the pilgrims who should that year, and every centenary to come, visit the church of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome. At this first celebration of the centenarian Christian jubilee the concourse was immense; the most moderate historians say that there were never fewer than a hundred thousand pilgrims at Rome; others put the numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well as history has celebrated this pious assemblage of Christians of every nation, language, and age around the tomb of their fathers in the faith. "The old man with white hair goeth far away," says Petrarch (Sonnet xiv.), "from the sweet haunts where his life hath been passed, and from his little family astonished to find their dear father missing. As for him, in the last days of his age, broken down by weight of years and a-weary of the road, he draggeth along as best he may by force of willing spirit his old and tottering limbs, and cometh to Rome to fulfil his desire of seeing the image of Him whom he hopeth to see ere long up yonder in the heavens." The success of the measure and the solemn homage of Christendom filled with joy and proud confidence the heart of the septuagenarian pontiff. He had three years before decreed to Louis IX., the most Christian of the Kings of France, the honors of canonization and the title of Saint. Being chosen as mediator, in 1298, by the Kings of France and England in a war which pressed heavily on both, the decree of arbitration which he pronounced, favorable rather to Philip than to Edward I., had been accepted by both of them; and the pope, on laying his injunctions upon them with some severity of language, had exhibited authority in a manner salutary for both kingdoms. Everything seemed at that time to smile on Boniface, and to invite him to believe himself the real sovereign of Christendom.

An opportunity for a splendid confirmation of his universal supremacy in the Christian world came to tempt him. A quarrel had arisen between Philip and the Archbishop of Narbonne on the subject of certain dues claimed by both in that great diocese. Boniface was loud in his advocacy of the archbishop against the officers of the king: "If, my son, thou tolerate such enterprises against the Churches of thy kingdom," he wrote to Philip (on the 18th of July, 1300), "thou mayest thereafter have reasonable fear lest God, the author of judgments and the King of kings, exact vengeance for it; and assuredly His vicar will not, in the long run, keep silence. Though he wait a while patiently, in order not to close the door to compassion, there will be full need at last that he rouse himself for the punishment of the wicked and the glory of the good." Nor did Boniface content himself with writing: he sent to Paris, to support his words, Bernard de Saisset, whom he, on his own authority, had just appointed Bishop of Pamiers. The choice of bishops was not yet, at that time, subject to any fixed and generally recognized rule: most often it was the chapter of the diocese that elected its bishop, with a subsequent application for the approbation of the king and the pope; sometimes the king and also the pope made such appointments directly and independently. Boniface VIII. had quite recently created a new bishopric at Pamiers in order to immediately appoint to it Bernard de Saisset, hitherto simple Abbot of St. Antonine in that city. Bernard, who was devoted to his patron, was, further, a passionate Languedocian and a foe to the dominion of the French kings of the North over Southern France; and he gave himself out as a personal descendant of the last Counts of Toulouse. On arriving in Paris as the pope's legate, he made use there of violent and inconsiderate language; he even affirmed, it was said, that St. Louis had predicted the disappearance of his line in the third generation, and that King Philip was only an illegitimate descendant of Charlemagne. He was accused of having incessantly labored to excite revolts against the king in the south, at one time for the advantage of the local lords, at another in favor of foreign enemies of the kingdom. Being summoned before the king and his council at Senlis (October 14, 1301), he denied, but with an air of arrogance and aggression, the accusations against him. Philip had, at that time, as his chief councillors, lay-lawyers, servants passionately attached to the kingship. They were Peter Flotte his chancellor, William of Nogaret, judge-major at Beaucaire, and William of Plasian, Lord of Vezenobre, the two latter belonging, as Bernard de Saisset belonged, to Southern France, and determined to withstand, in the south as well as the north, the domination of ecclesiastics. They, in their turn, rose up against the doctrine and language of the Bishop of Pamiers. He was arrested and committed to the keeping of the Archbishop of Narbonne; and Philip sent to Rome his chancellor Peter Flotte himself and William of Nogaret, with orders to demand of the pope "that he should avenge the wrongs of God, the king, and the whole kingdom, by depriving of his orders and every clerical privilege that man whose longer life would taint the places he inhabited; and this in order that the king might make of him a sacrifice to God in the way of justice, for there could be no hope of his amendment if he were suffered to live, seeing that, from his youth up, he had always lived ill, and that baseness and abandonment only became more and more confirmed in him by inveterate habit."

To this violent and threatening language Boniface replied by changing the venue to his own personal tribunal in the case of the Bishop of Pamiers. "We do bid thy majesty," he wrote to the king, "to give this bishop free leave to depart and come to us, for we do desire his presence. We do warn thee to have all his goods restored to him, not to stretch out for the future thy rapacious hands towards the like things, and not to offend the Divine Majesty or the dignity of the Apostolic See, lest we be forced to employ some other remedy; for thou must know that, unless thou canst allege some excuse founded on reason and truth, we do not see how thou shouldest escape the sentence of the holy canons for having laid rash hands on this bishop."

"My power,—the spiritual power,"—said the pope to the Chancellor of France, "embraces the temporal, and includes it." "Be it so," answered Peter Flotte; "but your power is nominal, the king's real."

Here was a coarse challenge hurled by the crown at the tiara: and Boniface VIII. unhesitatingly accepted it. But, instead of keeping the advantage of a defensive position by claiming, in the name of lawful right, the liberties and immunities of the Church, he assumed the offensive against the kingship by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy See in things temporal as well as spiritual, and by calling upon Philip the Handsome to acknowledge it. On the 5th of December, 1301, he addressed to the king, commencing with the words, "Hearken, most dear son" (Ausculta, carissime fili), a long bull, in which, with circumlocutions and expositions full of obscurity and subtlety, he laid down and affirmed, at bottom, the principle of the final sovereignty of the spiritual power, being of divine origin, over every temporal power, being of human creation. "In spite of the insufficiency of our deserts," said he, "God hath established us above kings and kingdoms by imposing upon us, in virtue of the Apostolic office, the duty of plucking away, destroying, dispersing, dissipating, building up and planting in His name and according to His doctrine; to the end that, in tending the flock of the Lord, we may strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken limbs, raise the fallen, and pour wine and oil into all wounds. Let none, then, most dear son, persuade thee that thou hast no superior, and that thou art not subject to the sovereign head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; for he who so thinketh is beside himself; and if he obstinately affirm any such thing, he is an infidel, and hath no place any longer in the fold of the good Shepherd." At the same time Boniface summoned the bishops of France to a council at Rome, "in order to labor for the preservation of the liberties of the Catholic Church, the reformation of the kingdom, the amendment of the king, and the good government of France."

Philip the Handsome and his councillors did not misconceive the tendency of such language, however involved and full of specious reservations it might be. The final supremacy of the pope in the body politic, and over all sovereigns, meant the absorption of the laic community in the religious, and the abolition of the State's independence, not in favor of the national Church, but to the advantage of the foreign head of the universal Church. The defenders of the French kingship formed a better estimate than was formed at Rome of the effect which would be produced by such doctrine on France, in the existing condition of the French mind; they entered upon no theological and abstract polemics; they confined themselves entirely to setting in a vivid light the pope's pretensions and their consequences, feeling sure that, by confining themselves to this question, they would enlist in their opposition not only all laymen, nobles, and commoners, but the greater part of the French ecclesiastics themselves, who were no strangers to the feeling of national patriotism, and to whom the pope's absolute power in the body politic was scarcely more agreeable than the king's. In order to make a strong impression upon the public mind, there was published at Paris, as the actual text of the pope's bull, a very short summary of his long bull, "Hearken, most dear Son," in the following terms: "Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of the French. Fear thou God, and keep His commandments. We would have thee to know that thou art subject unto us in things spiritual and temporal. The presentation to benefices and prebends appertaineth to thee in no wise. If thou have the keeping of certain vacancies, thou art bound to reserve the revenues of them for the successors to them. If thou have made any presentations, we declare them void, and revoke them. We consider as heretics all those who believe otherwise." Together with this document there was put in circulation the king's answer to the pope, in the following terms: "Philip, by the grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who giveth himself out for sovereign pontiff, little or no greeting. Let thy Extreme Fatuity know that we be subject to none in things temporal, that the presentation to churches and prebends that be vacant belongeth to us of kingly right, that the revenues therefrom be ours, that presentations already made or to be made be valid both now and hereafter, that we will firmly support the possessors of them to thy face and in thy teeth, and that we do hold as senseless and insolent those who think otherwise." The pope disavowed, as a falsification, the summary of his long bull; and there is nothing to prove that the unseemly and insulting letter of Philip the Handsome was sent to Rome. But, at bottom, the situation of affairs remained the same; indeed, it did not stop where it was. On the 11th of February, 1302, the bull, Hearken, most dear Son, was solemnly burned at Paris in presence of the king and a numerous multitude. Philip convoked, for the 8th of April following, an assembly of the barons, bishops, and chief ecclesiastics, and of deputies from the communes to the number of two or three for each city, all being summoned "to deliberate on certain affairs which in the highest degree concern the king, the kingdom, the churches, and all and sundry." This assembly, which really met on the 10th of April, at Paris, in the church of Notre-Dame, is reckoned in French history as the first "states-general." The three estates wrote separately to Rome; the clergy to the pope himself, the nobility and the deputies of the communes to the cardinals, all, however, protesting against the pope's pretensions in matters temporal, the two laic orders writing in a rough and threatening tone, the clergy making an appeal "to the wisdom and paternal clemency of the Holy Father, with tearful accents, and sobs mingled with their tears." The king evidently had on his side the general feeling of the nation: and the news from Rome was not of a kind to pacify him. In spite of the king's formal prohibition, forty-five French bishops had repaired to the council summoned by the pope for All Saints' day, 1302, and, after this meeting, a papal decree of November 18 had declared, "There be two swords, the temporal and the spiritual; both are in the power of the Church, but one is held by the Church herself, the other by kings only with the assent and by sufferance of the sovereign pontiff. Every human being is subject to the Roman pontiff; and to believe this is necessary to salvation." Philip made a seizure of the temporalities of such bishops as had been present at that council, and renewed his prohibition forbidding them to leave the kingdom. Boniface ordered those who had not been to Rome to attend there within three months; and the cardinal of St. Marcellinus, legate of the Holy See, called a fresh council in France itself, without the king's knowledge. On both sides, there were at one time words of conciliation and attempts to keep up appearances of respect, at another new explosions of complaints and threats; but, amidst all these changes of language, the struggle was day by day becoming more violent, and preparations were being made by both parties for something other than threats.