Chapter VIII: Part II: Voyage and Discovery 337 (7)

These suspicions, perhaps well founded, were natural to the daughter of the untrustworthy Alexius Commenus, who trusted nobody. Hating to entertain at his court so many well-armed and often insolent strangers, yet fearing in his heart to aid their advance lest they should set up a rival kingdom to his own, the Emperor, having cajoled the leaders into promises of homage for any conquests they might make, at length transported them and their followers across the Hellespont.

The Christian campaign began with the capture of Nicea in 1097, followed by a victorious progress through Asia Minor. For nearly a year the crusaders besieged and then were in their turn besieged in Antioch, enduring tortures of hunger, thirst, and disease. When courage flagged and hope seemed nearly dead, it was the supposed discovery, by one of the chaplains, of the lance that had pierced Christ’s side as he hung upon the Cross that kept the Christians from surrender. With this famous relic borne in their midst by the papal legate, the crusaders flung the gates of Antioch wide and issued forth in a charge so irresistible in its certainty of victory that the Turks broke and fled. The defeat became a rout, and Antioch remained as a Christian principality under Bohemund, when the crusaders marched southwards along the coast route towards Jerusalem.

They came in sight of this, the goal of their ambitions, on 7th June, 1099, not garbed as knights and soldiers but barefooted as humble pilgrims, kneeling in an ecstasy of awe upon the Mount of Olives. This mood of prayer passed rapidly into one of fierce determination, and on 15th June Godfrey de Bouillon and his Lorrainers forced a breach in the massive walls, and, hacking their way with sword and spear through the streets, met their fellow crusaders triumphantly entering from another side. The scene that followed, while in keeping with mediaeval savagery, has left a shameful stain upon the Christianity it professed to represent. Turks, Arabs, and Jews, old men and women, children and babies, thousands of a defenceless population, were deliberately butchered as a sacrifice to the Christ who, dying, preached forgiveness. The crusaders rode their horses up to the knees in the blood of that human shambles. ‘There might no prayers nor crying of mercy prevail,’ says an eyewitness. ‘Such a slaughter of pagan folk had never been seen nor heard of. None knew their number, save God alone.’

Their mission accomplished, the majority of crusaders turned their faces homewards, but before they went they elected Godfrey de Bouillon to be the first ruler of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with Antioch and Edessa in the north as dependent principalities.

Godfrey reigned for almost a year, bearing the title ‘Guardian of the Holy Grave’, since he refused to be crowned master of a city where Christ had worn a wreath of thorns. His protest is typical of the genuine humility and love of God that mingled so strangely in his veins with pride and cruelty. When he died he left a reputation for courage and justice that wove around his memory romance and legends like the tales of Charlemagne.

[Sidenote: The Military Orders]

His immediate successors were a brother and nephew, and it is in the reign of the latter that we first hear mention of the Military Orders, so famous in the crusading annals of the Middle Ages. These were the ‘Hospitallers’ or ‘Knights of St. John’, inheritors of the rents and property belonging to the old ‘Hospital’ founded for pilgrims in Jerusalem, and the ‘Templars’, so called from their residence near the sight of Solomon’s Temple.

Both Orders were bound like the monks by the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity; but the work demanded of them, instead of labour in the fields, was perpetual war against the infidel. ‘When the Templars are summoned to arms,’ said a thirteenth-century writer, ‘they inquire not of the number but of the position of their foe. They are lions in war, lambs in the house: to the enemies of Christ fierce and implacable, but to Christians kind and gracious.’

Yet a third Order, that of the Teutonic Knights, was founded in the twelfth century, arising like that of the Knights of St. John out of a hospital, but one that had been built by German merchants for crusaders of their own race. At the end of the thirteenth century the Order removed to the southern Baltic, and on these cold inhospitable shores embarked on a crusade against the heathen Lithuanians. It is of interest to students of modern history to note that in the sixteenth century the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became converted to the doctrines of Luther, suppressed his Order, and absorbed the estates into an hereditary fief, the Duchy of Brandenburg. On the ‘Mark’[15] and Duchy of Brandenburg, both founded with entirely military objects, was the future kingdom of Prussia built.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187) survived for more than three-quarters of a century. That it had been established with such comparative ease was due not only to the fighting quality of the crusaders, but also to the feuds that divided Turkish rulers of the House of Seljuk. The Turks far outnumbered the Christians, and whenever the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cairo should sink their rivalries, or one Moslem ruler in the East gain supremacy over all others, the days of the small Latin kingdom in Palestine would be numbered. In the meantime the Latins maintained their position with varying fortune, now with the aid of fresh recruits from Europe and Genoese and Venetian sailors, capturing coast towns, now losing land-outposts there were insufficient garrisons to protect.

It was the loss of Edessa that roused Europe to its Second Crusade, this time through the eloquence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who persuaded not only Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor, but also the at first reluctant Emperor Conrad III, to bind the Cross on their arms and go to the succour of Christendom. ‘The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure if he is slain.’

The pictures of the glories of martyrdom and of earthly conquests painted by the famous monk were so vivid that on one occasion he was forced to tear up his own robes to provide sufficient crosses for the eager multitude, but the triumph to which he called so great a part of the populations of France and Germany proved the beckoning hand of death and failure.

Both the King and Emperor reached Palestine--Louis VII even visited Jerusalem--but when they sailed homewards they had accomplished nothing of any lasting value. Edessa remained under Mahometan rule and the Christians had been forced to abandon the siege of Damascus that they had intended as a prelude to a victorious campaign. What was worse was that Louis and Conrad had left the chivalry of their armies in a track of whitening bones where they had retreated, victims not merely of Turkish prowess and numbers but of Christian feuds, Greek treachery, the failure of food supplies, and disease.

The Byzantine Empire owed to the first crusaders large tracts of territory recovered from the Turks in Asia Minor; but, angered by broken promises of homage on the part of Latin rulers, the Greeks repaid this debt in the Second Crusade by acting as spies and secret allies of the Mahometans. On occasions they were even to be found fighting openly side by side with the Turks, yet more merciless than these pagans in their brutal refusal to give food and drink to the stragglers of the Latin armies whom they had so basely betrayed.

The widows and orphans of France and Germany, when their rulers returned reft both of glory and men-at-arms, reviled St. Bernard as a false prophet; but though he responded sternly that the guilt lay not with God but in the worldliness of those who had taken the Cross, he was sorely troubled at the shattering of his own hopes.

‘The Sons of God’, he wrote wearily, ‘have been overthrown in the
desert, slain with the sword, or destroyed by famine. We promised
good things and behold disorder. The judgements of the Lord are
righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him
blessed who is not scandalized therein.’

[Sidenote: Fall of Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem]

For some years after the Second Crusade Western Europe turned a deaf ear to entreaties for help from Palestine, and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to decline steadily not only in territory but in its way of life. The ennervating climate, the temptations to an unhealthy luxury that forgot Christian ideals, the almost unavoidable intermarriage of the races of East and West: all these sapped the vitality and efficiency of the crusading settlers; while the establishment of a feudal government at Jerusalem resulted in the usual quarrels amongst tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants. In these feuds the Hospitallers and Templars joined with an avaricious rivalry unworthy of their creed of self-denial.

By 1183 Guy de Lusignan, who had succeeded in seizing the crown of Jerusalem by craft on the failure of the royal line, could only count on the lukewarm support of the majority of Latin barons. Thus handicapped he found himself suddenly confronted by a union of the Turks of Egypt and Syria under Saladin, Caliph of Cairo, a leader so capable and popular that the downfall of divided enemies was inevitable.

At Hattin, near the Lake of Tiberias, on a rocky, waterless spot, the Christians and Mahometans met for a decisive battle in the summer of 1187. The Latins, hemmed in by superior numbers, and tortured by the heat and thirst, fought desperately beneath the relic of the True Cross that they had borne with them as an incitement to their courage; but the odds were too great, and King Guy himself was forced to surrender when the defeat of his army had turned into a rout.

In the autumn of the same year Jerusalem, after less than a month’s siege, opened her gates to the victor. Very different was the entry of Saladin to that of the first crusaders; for instead of a general massacre the Christian population was put to ransom, the Sultan and his brother as an ‘acceptable alms to Allah’ freeing hundreds of the poorer classes for whom enough money could not be provided.

[Sidenote: The Third Crusade]

Europe received the news that the Holy Sepulchre had returned to the custody of the infidel with a shame and indignation that was expressed in the Third Crusade. This time, however, no straggling bands of enthusiasts were encouraged; and though the expedition was approved by the Pope, neither he nor any famous churchman, such as Peter the Hermit or St. Bernard of Clairvaux, were responsible for the majority of volunteers.

The Third Crusade was in character a military campaign of three great nations: of the Germans under the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, or the ‘Red Beard’; of the French under Philip II; and of the English under Richard the ‘Lion-Heart’. Other princes famous enough in their lands for wealth and prowess sailed also; and had there been union in that great host Saladin might well have trembled for his Empire. He was saved by the utter lack of cohesion and petty jealousies of his enemies as well as by his statecraft and military skill.

While English and French rulers still haggled over the terms of an alliance that would allow them to leave their lands with an easy mind, Frederick Barbarossa, the last to take the Cross, set out from Germany, rapidly crossed Hungary and Bulgaria, reduced the Greek Emperor to hostile inactivity by threats and military display, and began a victorious campaign through Asia Minor. Here fate intervened to help the Mahometans, for while fording a river in Cilicia the Emperor was swept from his horse by the current and drowned. So passed away Frederick the ‘Red Beard’, and with him what his strong personality had made an army. Some of the Teutons returned home, while those who remained degenerated into a rabble, easy victims for their enemies’ spears and arrows.

In the meantime Richard of England (1189-99) and Philip of France had clasped the hand of friendship, and, having levied the Saladin Tithe, a tax of one-tenth of the possessions of all their subjects, in order to pay their expenses, set sail eastwards from Marseilles. Both were young and eager for military glory; but the French king could plot and wait to achieve the ultimate success he desired while in Richard the statesman was wholly sunk in the soldier of fortune.

To mediaeval chroniclers there was something dazzling in the Lion-Heart’s physical strength, and in the sheer daring with which he would force success out of apparently inevitable failure, or realize some dangerous enterprise.

‘Though fortune wreaks her spleen on whomsoever she pleases, yet
was he not drowned for all her adverse waves.’

‘The Lord of Ages gave him such generosity of soul and endued him
with such virtues that he seemed rather to belong to earlier times
than these.’

‘To record his deeds would cramp the writer’s finger joints and
stun the hearer’s mind.’

Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions the obvious sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the men who fought beside him.

A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself, and with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone-slingers, Richard turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack of diplomacy and tact. Of gifts such as these, that are one-half of kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He ‘willed’ to do things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain.

‘The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang
thieves and robbers on ... deeming it no matter of what country
the criminals were, he considered every man as his own and left no
wrong unavenged.’

This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, ‘winked at the wrongs his men inflicted and received,’ but he gained friends, while Richard’s progress was a series of embittered feuds, accepted light-heartedly without any thought of his own future interests or of those of the crusade.

Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before they had left the French coasts through Richard’s repudiation of his ally’s sister, to whom he had been bethrothed, since the English king was now determined on a match with Berengaria, the daughter of the King of Navarre.

In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had battered one of the rivals, the Norman, Tancred, into an outwardly submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the Emperor Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying it.

From Cyprus Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen; and thus, adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern Emperor to his list of foes, arrived at last in Palestine, in the summer of 1191, just in time to join Philip II in the siege of Acre.

‘The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other.’ So the tale runs in the contemporary chronicle; and when Acre at last surrendered the feuds between the English and French had grown so irreconcilable that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard in his heart because of an insult to his banner, that, planted on an earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung into the ditch below.

The Lion-Heart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror to the Turks, who would use his name to frighten their unruly children into submission; but though he remained fourteen months, the jealousies and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend, kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in diplomacy.

News came that Philip II and the Emperor Henry VI were plotting with his brother John for his ruin at home, and Richard, weary at heart and sick in health, agreed to a three years and eight months’ truce that left the Christians in the possession of the seaports of Jaffa and Tyre, with the coastal territory between them, and gave pilgrims leave to visit Jerusalem untaxed. He himself refused with tears in his eyes even to gaze from a distant height on the city he could not conquer; but, vowing he would return, he set sail for the West in the autumn of 1192, and with his departure the Third Crusade ended.

There were to be many other crusades, but none that expressed in the same way as these first three expeditions the united aspirations of Western Europe for the recovery of the land of the Holy Sepulchre. National jealousies had ruined the chances of the Third Crusade, and with every year the spirit of nationality was to grow in strength and make common action less possible for Europe.

There is another reason also for the changing character of the Crusades, namely, the loss of the religious enthusiasm in which they had their origin. Men and women had believed that the cross on their arms could turn sinners into saints, break down battlements, and destroy infidels, as if by miracle. When they found that human passions flourished as easily in Palestine as at home and that the way of salvation was, as ever, the path of hard labour and constant effort, they were disillusioned, and eager multitudes no longer clamoured to go to the East. The Crusades did not stop suddenly, but degenerated with a few exceptions into mere political enterprises, patronized now by one nation, now by another: the armies recruited by mere love of adventure, lust of battle, or the desire for plunder.

If Western Christendom had gained no other blessing by them, the early Crusades at least freed the nations at a critical moment from a large proportion of the unruly baronage that had been a danger to commerce and good government. England paid heavily in gold for the Third Crusade; but the money supplied by merchants and towns was well spent in securing from the Lion-Heart privileges and charters that laid the foundations of municipal liberty.

In France the results of the Second Crusade had been for the moment devastating. Whole villages marched away, cities and castles stood empty, and in some provinces it was said ‘scarce one man remained to seven women’. In the orgy of selling that marked this exodus lands and possessions rapidly changed hands, the smaller fiefs tending to be absorbed by the larger fiefs and many of these in their turn by the crown. Aided also by other causes, the King of France with his increased demesnes and revenues came to assume a predominant position in the national life.

Perhaps the chief effect of the Crusades on Europe generally was the stimulus of new influences. Men and women, if they live in a rut and feed their brains continually on the same ideas, grow prejudiced. It is good for them to travel and come in contact with opposite views of life and different manners and customs, however much it may annoy them at the time. The Crusades provided this kind of stimulus not only to the commerce of Mediterranean ports but in the world of thought, literature, and art. The necessity of transport for large armies improved shipbuilding; the cunning of Turkish foes the ingenuity of Christian armourers and engineers; the influence of Byzantine architecture and mosaics the splendour of Venice in stone and colour.

Western Europe continued to hate the East; but she could not live without her silks, spices, and perfumes, nor forget to dream of the fabulous wonders of Cathay. Thus the age of the Crusades will be seen at last to merge its failures in the successes of an age of discovery, that were to lay bare a new West and another road to the Orient.

XIII

THE MAKING OF FRANCE

Amongst those who took the Cross during the Second Crusade had been Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor. They were an ill-matched pair, the King of mediocre ability, weak, peace-loving, and pious; Eleanor, like all the House of Aquitaine, to which she belonged, imperious, fierce-willed, and without scruples where she loved or hated. Restless excitement had prompted her journey to Palestine; and Louis was impelled by the scandal to which her conduct there gave rise, and also by his annoyance that they had no son, to divorce her soon after they returned home.

The foolishness of this step from a political point of view can be gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the twelfth century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country in name, Louis as feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small block round Paris, while away to the north, east, and south were the provinces of tenants-in-chief three or four times as extensive in area as those of the royal House of Capet. By marrying Eleanor, Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the middle and south-west of France as well as of his own crown demesnes, but when he divorced his wife he at once forfeited her possessions.

[Sidenote: Henry II of England]

Worse from his point of view was to follow; for Eleanor made immediate use of her freedom to marry Henry, Count of Anjou, a man fourteen years her junior, but the most important tenant-in-chief of the King of France and therefore, if he chose, not unlikely to prove that king’s most dangerous enemy. This Henry, besides being Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, was also Duke of Normandy and King of England, for he was a grandson of Henry I, and had in 1154 succeeded the feeble Stephen, of the anarchy of whose reign we gave a slight description in another chapter.[16]

Before dealing with the results of Henry’s marriage with the heiress of Aquitaine it is well to note his work as King of England, for this was destined to be the greatest and most lasting of all the many tasks he undertook. In character Henry was the exact opposite of Stephen. Where the other had wavered he pressed forward, utterly determined to be master of his own land. One by one he besieged the rebel barons, and levelled with the ground the castles they had built in order to torture and oppress their neighbours. He also took from them the crown lands which Stephen had recklessly given away in the effort to buy popularity and support. When he found that many of these nobles had usurped the chief offices of state he replaced them as quickly as he could by men of humble rank and of his own choosing. In this way he appointed a Londoner, Thomas Becket, whom he had first created Chancellor, to be Archbishop of Canterbury; but the impetuous choice proved one of his few mistakes.

Henry was so self-confident himself that he was apt to underrate the abilities of those with whom life brought him in contact and to believe that every other will must necessarily bow to his own. It is certain that he found it difficult to pause and listen to reason, for his restless energy was ever spurring him on to fresh ambitions, and he could not bear to waste time, as he thought, in listening to criticisms on what he had already decided. Chroniclers describe how he would fidget impatiently or draw pictures during Mass, commending the priest who read fastest, while he would devote odd moments of his day to patching his old clothes for want of something more interesting to do.

in the reign of HENRY II]

Henry II was so able that haste in his case did not mean that his work was slipshod. He had plenty of foresight, and did not content himself with destroying those of his subjects who were unruly. He knew that he must win the support of the English people if he hoped to build up his estates in France, and this, though destined to bear no lasting fruit, was ever his chief ambition. Henry II was one of the greatest of English kings, but he had been brought up in France and remained more of an Angevin than an Englishman at heart.

Instead of driving his barons into sulky isolation Henry summoned them frequently to his _Magnum Concilium_, or ‘Great Council’, and asked their advice. When they objected to serving with their followers in France as often as he wished, he arranged a compromise that was greatly to his advantage. This was the institution of ‘Scutage’, or ‘Shield-money’, a tax paid by the barons in order to escape military service abroad. With the funds that ‘scutage’ supplied Henry could hire mercenary troops, while the feudal barons lost a military training-ground.

Besides consulting his ‘Great Council’, destined to develop into our national parliament, Henry strengthened the _Curia Regis_, or ‘King’s Court’, that his grandfather, Henry I, had established to deal with questions of justice and finance. The barons in the time of Stephen had tried to make their own feudal courts entirely independent of royal authority; but Henry, besides establishing a central Court of Justice to which any subject who thought himself wronged might appeal for a new trial, greatly improved and extended the system of ‘Itinerant Justices’ whose circuits through the country to hold ‘Pleas of the Crown’ had been instituted by Henry I.

This interference he found was resented not only by the feudal courts but also by the Sheriffs of the County Courts, the Norman form of the old ‘shire-moots’, a popular institution of Anglo-Saxon times. Of late years the latter courts had more and more fallen under the domination of neighbouring landowners, and in order to free them Henry held an ‘Inquest’ into the doings of the Sheriffs, and deposed many of the great nobles who had usurped these offices, replacing them by men of lesser rank who would look to him for favour and advice.

Other sovereigns in Europe adopted somewhat similar means of exalting royal authority; but England was fortunate in possessing such popular institutions as the ‘moots’ or ‘meetings’ of the shire and ‘hundred’, through which Henry could establish his justice, instead of merely through crown officials who would have no personal interest in local conditions.

By the Assize of Clarendon it was decreed that twelve men from each hundred and four from each township should decide in criminal cases who amongst the accused were sufficiently implicated to be justly sentenced by the royal judges. Local representatives also were employed on other occasions during Henry’s reign in assisting his judges in assessing taxes and in deciding how many weapons and of what sort the ordinary freeman might fittingly carry to the safety of his neighbours and of himself. In civil cases, as when the ownership of land or personal property was in dispute, twelve ‘lawful men’ of the neighbourhood, or in certain cases twelve Knights of the Shire, were to be elected to help the Sheriff arrive at a just decision. In this system of ‘recognition’, as it was called, lay the germ of our modern jury.

It is probable that the knights and representatives of the hundreds and townships grumbled continually at the trouble and expense to which the King’s legislation put them; for neither they nor Henry II himself would realize that they were receiving a splendid education in the A B C of self-government that must be the foundation of any true democracy. Yet a few generations later, when Henry’s weak grandson and namesake Henry III misruled England, the Knights of the Shire were already accepted as men of public experience, and their representatives summoned to a parliament to defend the liberties of England.

Henry II used popular institutions and crown officials as levers against the independence of his baronage, but the chief struggle of his reign in England was not with the barons so much as with the Church. Thomas Becket as Chancellor had been Henry’s right hand in attacking feudal privileges: he had warned his master that as a leading Churchman his love might turn to hate, his help to opposition. The King refused to believe him, thrust the burden of the archbishopric of Canterbury on his unwilling shoulders, and then found to his surprise and rage that he had secured the election of a very Hildebrand, who held so high a conception of the dignity of the Church that it clashed with royal demands at every turn.

[Sidenote: The Becket Controversy]

One of the chief subjects of dispute was the claim of the Church to reserve for her jurisdiction all cases that affected ‘clerks’, that is, not only priests, but men employed in the service of the Church, such as acolytes or choristers. The King insisted that clerks convicted in ecclesiastical courts of serious crimes should be handed over to the royal courts for secular punishment. His argument was that if a clerk had committed a murder the ecclesiastical judge was not allowed by Canon law to deliver a death-sentence, and so could do no more than ‘unfrock’ the guilty man and fine or imprison him. Thus a clerk could live to commit two murders where a layman would by command of the royal judges be hung at the first offence.

Becket, on his side, would not swerve from his opinion that it was sacrilege for royal officials to lay hands on a priest or clerk whether ‘criminous’ or not; and when Henry embodied his suggestions of royal supremacy in a decree called the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Archbishop publicly refused to sign his agreement to them. Threats and insults were heaped upon him by angry courtiers, and one of his attendants, terrified by the scene, exclaimed, ‘Oh, my master, this is a fearful day!’ ‘The Day of Judgement will be yet more fearful,’ answered the undaunted Becket, and in the face of his fearlessness no one at the moment dared to lay hands on him.

Shortly afterwards Becket fled abroad, hoping to win the support of Rome, but the Pope to whom he appealed did not wish to quarrel with the King of England, and used his influence to patch up an agreement that was far too vague to have any binding strength. Thomas Becket returned to Canterbury, but exile had not modified his opinions, and he had hardly landed before he once more appeared in open opposition to Henry’s wishes, excommunicating those bishops who had dared to act during his absence without his leave.

The rest of the story is well known--the ungovernable rage of the Angevin king at an obstinacy as great as his own, his rash cry, ‘Is my house so full of fools and dastards that none will avenge me on this upstart clerk?’ and then his remorse on learning of the four knights who had taken him at his word and murdered the Archbishop as he knelt, still undaunted, on the altar steps of Canterbury Cathedral.

So great was the horror and indignation of Europe, even of those who were devoted to Henry’s cause, that the King was driven to strip and scourge himself before the tomb of Thomas the Martyr, as a public act of penance, and all question of the supremacy of the state over the Church was for the time dropped.

One of the many pilgrims who in the next few years visited the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury in the hope of a miracle was Louis VII of France, and the miracle that he so earnestly desired was the recovery of his son and heir, Philip Augustus, from a fever that threatened his life. With many misgivings the old king crossed the Channel to the land of a ruler with whom he had been at almost constant war since Eleanor of Aquitaine’s remarriage; but his faith in the vision of the Martyr that had prompted his journey was rewarded. Henry received him with ‘great rejoicing and honour’ after the manner of a loyal vassal, and when the French king returned home he found his son convalescent.

The sequel to this journey, however, was the sudden paralysis and lingering death of Louis himself, and the coronation of the boy prince in whom France was to find so great a ruler. When the bells of Paris had rung out the joyous tidings of his birth one hot August evening fourteen years before, a young British student had put his head out of his lodging window and demanded the news. ‘A boy,’ answered the citizens, ‘has been given to us this night who by God’s grace shall be the hammer of your king, and who beyond a doubt shall diminish the power and lands of him and his subjects.’ One-half of the reign of Philip Augustus, _le Dieu-donné_, or ‘God-given’, was the fulfilment of this prophecy.

At first sight it would seem as though Henry II of England entered the lists against his overlord the Champion of France with overwhelming odds in his favour. Ruler of a territory stretching from Scotland, his dependency, to the Pyrenees, he added to his lands and wealth the brain of a statesman and the experience of long years of war and intrigue. What could a mere boy, fenced round even in his capital of Paris by turbulent barons, hope to achieve against such strength?

Yet the weapons of destruction lay ready to his hand, in the very household of the Angevin ruler himself. Legend records that the blood of some Demon ancestress ran in the veins of the Dukes of Aquitaine, endowing them with a ferocity and falseness strange even to mediaeval minds; and the sons whom Eleanor bore to her second husband were true to this bad strain if to nothing else. ‘Dost thou not know’, wrote one of them to his father who had reproached him for plotting against his authority, ‘that it is our proper nature that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive with brother and son against father? I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right and seek to rob us of our nature.’

Louis VII, in order to weaken Henry II, had encouraged this spirit of treachery, and even provided a refuge for Becket during his exile: his policy was continued by Philip Augustus, who kept open house at Paris for the rebellious family of his tenant-in-chief whenever misfortune drove them to fly before their father’s wrath or ambition brought them to hatch some new conspiracy.

Could Henry have once established the same firm grip he had obtained in England over his French possessions, he might have triumphed in the struggle with both sons and overlord; but in Poitou and Aquitaine he was merely regarded as Eleanor’s consort, and the people looked to his heirs as rulers, especially to Richard his mother’s favourite. Yet never had they suffered a reign of greater licence and oppression than under the reckless and selfish Lion-Heart.

After much secret plotting and open rebellion, Henry succeeded in imprisoning Eleanor, who had encouraged her sons to defy their father, but with Richard supported by Philip Augustus and the strength of southern France he was forced to come to terms towards the end of his reign. Though only fifty-six, he was already failing in health, and the news that his own province of Maine was fast falling to his enemies had broken his courage. Cursing the son who had betrayed him, he sullenly renewed the oath of homage he owed to Philip, and promised to Richard the wealth and independence he had demanded. The compact signed he rode away, heavy with fever, to his castle of Chinon, and there, indifferent to life, sank into a state of stupor. News was brought him that his youngest son John, for whom he had carved out a principality in Ireland, had been a secret member of the League that had just brought him to his knees. ‘Is it true,’ he asked, roused for the minute, ‘that John, my heart ... has deserted me?’ Reading the answer in the downcast faces of his attendants, he turned his face to the wall. ‘Now let things go as they will ... I care no more for myself or the world.’ Thus the old king died.

[Sidenote: Richard I of England]

In 1189 Richard the False succeeded his father, and by his prowess in Palestine became Richard ‘Cœur-de-Lion’. How he quarrelled with Philip II we have seen in the last chapter, and that Philip, after the siege of Acre, returned home in disgust at the other’s overbearing personality.

Philip Augustus does not cut the same heroic figure on the battle-field as his rival: indeed there was no match in Europe for the ‘Devil of Aquitaine’, who knew not the word fear, and the glamour of whose feats of arms has outlasted seven centuries. It is in kingship that Philip stands pre-eminent in his own age, ready to do battle at the right moment, but still more ready to serve France by patient statecraft. While Richard remained in Palestine, Philip plotted with the ever-treacherous John for their mutual advantage at the absent king’s expense; but their enmity remained secret until the joyful news arrived that the royal crusader had been captured in disguise on his way home by the very Leopold of Austria whose banner he had once contemptuously cast into a ditch.

Now the Duke of Austria’s overlord was the Emperor Henry VI, whose claims to Sicily Richard had often derided; and the Lion-Heart, passing from the dungeon of the vassal to that of the overlord, did not escape until his subjects had paid a huge ransom and he himself had promised to hold England as a fief of the Empire. ‘Beware, the Devil is loose’, wrote Philip to John, when he heard that their united efforts to bribe Henry VI into keeping his prisoner permanently had failed.

The next few years saw a prolonged struggle between the French armies that had invaded Normandy and the forces of Richard, who, burning for revenge, proved as terrible a rival to Philip in the north of France as he had been in the East; and the duel continued until a poisoned arrow pierced the Lion-Heart’s shoulder, causing his death. ‘God visited the land of France,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘for King Richard was no more.’

From this moment Philip Augustus began to realize his most cherished ambitions, slowly at first, but, thanks to the ‘worst of the English kings’, with ever-increasing rapidity. John, who had succeeded Richard, was neither statesman nor soldier. To meaningless outbursts of Angevin rage he added the treachery and cruelty of the House of Aquitaine and a sluggish disregard of dignity and ordinary decency peculiarly his own. Soon all his subjects were banded together against him in fear, hatred, and scorn: the Church, on whose privileges he trampled; the barons, whose wives and daughters were unsafe at his court, and whose lands he ravaged and confiscated; the people, whom his mercenaries tortured and oppressed. How he quarrelled with the Chapter of Canterbury over its choice of an archbishop, defied Pope Innocent III, and then, brought to his knees by an interdict, did homage to the Holy See for his possessions; these things, and the signing of Magna Charta, the English Charter of Popular Liberties, at Runymede, are tales well known in English history.

What is important to emphasize here in a European history is the contrast of the unpopularity that John had gained for himself amongst all classes of his own subjects at the very moment that Philip Augustus seemed, in French eyes, to be indeed their ‘God-given’ king.

[Sidenote: French Conquest of Normandy]

While John feasted at Rouen messengers brought word that Philip was conquering Normandy. ‘Let him alone! Some day I will win back all he has taken.’ So answered the sluggard, but when he at last raised his standard it was already too late. The English barons would have followed ‘Cœur-de-Lion’ on the road to Paris: they were reluctant to take sword out of scabbard for John: the very Angevins and Normans were beginning to realize that they had more in common with their French conquerors than with any king across the Channel. Aquitaine, it is true, looked sourly on Philip’s progress, but the reason was not that she loved England, but that she feared the domination of Paris, and made it a systematic part of her policy for years to support the ruler who lived farthest away, and would therefore be likely to interfere the least in her internal affairs.

In 1214 John made his most formidable effort, dispatching an army to Flanders to unite with that of the powerful Flemish Count Ferrand, one of Philip’s tenants-in-chief, and with the Emperor Otto IV, in a combined attack on the northern French frontier. At Bouvines the armies met, Philip Augustus, in command of his forces, riding with a joyful face ‘no less than if he had been bidden to a wedding’.

The battle, when it opened, found him wherever the fight was hottest, wielding his sword, encouraging, rallying, until by nightfall he remained victor of the field, with the Count of Flanders and many another of his chief enemies, including the English commander, prisoners at his mercy.

Philip carried Count Ferrand behind him in chains on his triumphal march to Paris, while all the churches along the way rang their bells, and the crowds poured forth to cheer their king and sing _Te Deums_.

‘The Battle of Bouvines was perhaps the most important engagement ever fought on French soil.’ So wrote a modern historian before the war of 1914.

In the days of Louis VII the Kings of France had stood dwarfed amid Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and Counts of Flanders and Anjou. Now the son of Louis had defeated an emperor, thrown one rebellious tenant-in-chief into a dungeon, and from another, the Angevin John, gained as the reward of his victory all the long-coveted provinces north of the Loire. Even the crown treasury, once so poor, was replete for the time with the revenues of the confiscated Norman and Angevin estates of English barons, who had been forbidden by their sovereign to do homage any more to a French overlord.

Philip Augustus had shown himself Philip ‘the Conqueror’; but he was something far greater--a king who, like Henry II of England, could build as well as destroy. During his reign the menace of the old feudal baronage was swept away, and the government received its permanent stamp as a servant of the monarchy.

In his dealing with the French Church Philip followed the traditions of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, yet gratifying as were his numerous gifts to monasteries and convents, they were dovetailed into a scheme of combining the liberal patron with the firm master. That good relations between the king and clergy resulted was largely due to Philip’s policy of replacing bishops belonging to powerful families by men of humble origin accustomed to subservience. Also he would usually support the lesser clergy in their frequent quarrels with their ecclesiastical superiors, thus weakening the leaders while he won the affection of the rank and file.

[Sidenote: Innocent III and France]

Like John he came into collision with the iron will of Pope Innocent III, but on a purely moral question, his refusal to live with the Danish princess Ingeborg, to whom he had taken a violent and unaccountable dislike on his wedding-day. The bride was a girl of eighteen; she could speak no French, her husband’s bishops were afraid to uphold her cause whatever their secret opinions, but in appealing to the Pope for help she gained an unyielding champion.

In other chapters we shall see Innocent III as a politician and a persecutor of heretics: here he stands as the moral leader of Europe; and no estimate of his character and work would be fair that neglected this aspect. It was to Innocent’s political advantage to please the French king, whose help he needed to chastise the English John and to support a crusade against an outburst of heresy in Languedoc. Moreover, he had no armies to compel a king who accused his wife of witchcraft to recognize her as queen. Yet Innocent believed that Philip was in the wrong; and when the French king persuaded his bishops to divorce him and then promptly married again, papal letters proceeded to denounce the divorce as a farce and the new marriage as illegal.

‘Recall your lawful wife,’ wrote Innocent, ‘and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this no power shall move us to right or left until justice be done.’ This letter was followed by threats of excommunication, and after some months by an interdict that reduced Philip to a promise of submission in return for a full inquiry into his case. The promise so grudgingly given remained but a promise, and it was not until 1213, nearly twenty years since he had so cruelly repudiated Ingeborg, that, driven by continual papal pressure and the critical state of his fortunes, Philip openly acknowledged the Danish princess as his wife and queen.

We have seen something of Philip’s dealings with his greater tenants-in-chief; but such achievements as the conquest of Normandy and Anjou and the victory of Bouvines were but the fruits of years of diplomacy, during which the royal power had permeated the land, like ether the atmosphere, almost unnoticed. In lending a sympathetic ear to the complaints of Richard and his brothers against their father, Philip was merely carrying out the policy we have noticed in his treatment of the Church.

‘He never began a new campaign without forming alliances that might support him at each step’, says Philip’s modern biographer; and these allies were often the sub-tenants of large feudal estates to whom in the days of peace he had given his support against the claims of their feudal overlords. Sometimes he had merely used his influence as a mediator, at others he had granted privileges to the tenants, or else he had called the case in dispute before his own royal court for judgement. By one means or another, at any rate, he had made the lesser tenants feel that he was their friend, so that when he went out to battle they would flock eagerly to his banner, sometimes in defiance of their overlord.

One danger to the crown lay, not in the actual feudal baronage, but in the _prévôts_, officials appointed by the king with power to exact taxes, administer the laws, and judge offenders in his name in the provinces. When the monarchy was weak these _prévôts_, from lack of control, developed into petty tyrants, and it was fortunate for Philip that their encroachments were resented by both nobles and clergy, so that a system of reform that reduced them again to a subordinate position was everywhere welcomed.

Gradually a link was established between local administration and the king’s council, namely, officials called in the north of France _baillis_, in the south _sénéchals_, whose duty was to keep a watch over the _prévôt_ and to depose or report him if necessary. The _prévôt_ was still to collect the royal revenues as of old, but the _bailli_ would take care that he did not cheat the king, and would forward the money that he received to the central government: he would also hold assizes and from time to time visit Paris, where he would give an account of local conditions and how he had dealt with them.

In these reforms, as in those of Henry II of England, a process that was gradually changing the face of Europe can be seen at work, first the crumbling of feudal machinery too clumsy to keep pace with the needs and demands of dawning civilization, and next its replacement by an official class, educated in the intricacies of finance, justice, and administration, and dependent not on the baronage but on the monarchy for its inspiration and success.

The chief nobles of France in early mediaeval times had regarded such titles as ‘Mayor of the Palace’, ‘Seneschal’, ‘Chamberlain’, ‘Butler’, &c., as bestowing both hereditary glory and also political power. With the passing of years some of the titles vanished, while under Philip Augustus and his grandson Louis IX those that remained passed to ‘new’ men of humbler rank, who bore them merely while they retained the office, or else, shorn of any political power, continued as honours of the court and ballroom. In effect the royal household, once a kind of general servant ‘doing a bit of everything inadequately’ as in the days of Charlemagne, had now developed into two distinct bodies, each with their separate sphere of work: the great nobles surrounding their sovereign with the dignity and ceremonial in which the Middle Ages rejoiced, the trained officials advising him and carrying out his will.

[Sidenote: French Communes]

In his attitude to the large towns, except on his own crown lands where like other landowners he hesitated to encourage independence, Philip II showed himself sympathetic to the attempts of citizens to throw off the yoke of neighbouring barons, bishops, and abbots. Many of the towns had formed ‘communes’, that is, corporations something like a modern trade union, but these, though destined to play a large part in French history, were as yet only in their infancy. They had their origin sometimes in a revolutionary outburst against oppression, but often in a real effort on the part of leading townsmen to organize the civil life on profitable lines by means of ‘guilds’, or associations of merchants and traders with special privileges and laws. Some of the privileges at which these city corporations aimed were the right to collect their own taxes, to hold their own law-courts for deciding purely local disputes, and to protect their trade against fraud, tyranny, and competition from outside. It all sounds natural enough to modern ears, but it awoke profound indignation in a French writer of the twelfth century.

‘The word “commune”, he says, ‘is new and detestable, for this is
what it implies; that those who owe taxes shall pay the rent that
is due to their lord but once in the year only, and if they commit
a crime against him they shall find pardon when they have made
amends according to a fixed tariff of justice.’

Except within his own demesnes Phillip II readily granted charters confirming the ‘communes’ in their coveted rights, and he also founded ‘new’ towns under royal protection, offering there upon certain conditions a refuge to escaped serfs able to pay the necessary taxes.

[Sidenote: Achievements of Philip II]

In Paris itself his reign marks a new era, when, instead of a town famed according to a chronicler of the day chiefly for its pestiferous smells, there were laid the foundations of one of the most luxurious cities of Europe. The cleansing and paving of the filthy streets, the building of fortifications, of markets, and of churches, and above all of that glory of Gothic architecture, Nôtre Dame de la Victoire, founded to celebrate the triumph of Bouvines: such were some of the works planned or undertaken in the capital during this reign. Over the young University of Paris the King also stretched out a protecting hand, defending the students from the hostility of the townsfolk by the command that they should be admitted to the privileges enjoyed by priests. For this practical sympathy he and his successors were well repaid in the growth of an educated public opinion ready to exalt its patron the crown by tongue and pen.