Chapter IV: , VII (28)

On Rodolph's death (1291), his son Albert of Austria was a
candidate for the crown. The Electors rejected him and ejected
another poor noble, Adolphus of Nassau; but Adolphus
displeased them after a few years, and they decreed his
deposition, electing Albert in his place. War followed and
Adolphus was killed. Albert's reign was one of vigor, but he
accomplished little of permanent effect. He planted one of his
sons on the throne of Bohemia, where the reigning family had
become extinct; but the new king died in a few months, much
hated, and the Bohemians resisted an Austrian successor. In
1308, Albert was assassinated, and the electors raised Count
Henry of Luxemburg to the throne, as Henry VII. Henry VII. was
the first king of Germany since the Hohenstaufens who went to
Italy (1310) for the crown of Lombardy and the crown of the
Cæsars, both of which he received. The Ghibelline party was
still strong among the Italians. In the distracted state of
that country there were many patriots--the poet Dante
prominent among them--who hoped great things from the
reappearance of an emperor; but the enthusiastic welcome he
received was mainly from those furious partisans who looked
for a party triumph to be won under the new emperor's lead.
When they found that he would not let himself be made an
instrument of faction in the unhappy country, they turned
against him. His undertakings in Italy promised nothing but
failure, when he died suddenly (1313), from poison, as the
Germans believed. His successor in Germany, chosen by the
majority of the electors, was Lewis of Bavaria; but Frederick
the Fair of Austria, supported by a minority, disputed the
election, and there was civil war for twelve years, until
Frederick, a prisoner, so won the heart of Lewis that the
latter divided the throne with him and the two reigned
together.

France under the Capetians.

While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were
thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into
the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of
the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of
authority and law which creates stable and substantial power.
France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian
kings, had made little progress to that end. At the accession
(1103) of the fourth of those kings, namely, Louis VI., it is
estimated that the actual possessions of the Crown, over which
it exercised sovereignty direct, equalled no more than about
five of the modern departments of France; while twenty-nine
were in the great fiefs of Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne,
Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Vermandois, and Boulogne, where the
royal authority was but nominal; thirty-three, south of the
Loire, were hardly connected with the Crown, and twenty-one
were then dependent on the Empire. The actual "France," as a
kingdom, at that time, was very small. "The real domain of
Louis VI. was almost confined to the five towns of Paris,
Orleans, Estampes, Melun, and Compiegne, and to estates in
their neighbourhood." But the strengthening of the Crown was
slightly begun in the reign of this king, by his wise policy
of encouraging the enfranchisement of the communes, as noted
before, which introduced a helpful alliance between the
monarchy and the burgher-class, or third estate, as it came to
be called, of the cities, against the feudal aristocracy.

But progress in that direction was slight at first and slowly
made. Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired
momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his
marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her,
and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King
of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by
inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in
Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the
great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a
larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the
French king.

French recovery of Normandy and Anjou,

But the next king in France, Philip, called Augustus (1180),
who was the son of Louis VII., wrought a change of these
circumstances. He was a prince of remarkable vigor, and he
rallied with rare ability all the forces that the Crown could
command. He wrested Vermandois from the Count of Flanders, and
extorted submission from the rebellious Duke of Burgundy.
Suspending his projects at home for a time, to go crusading to
the Holy Land in company with King Richard of England, he
resumed them with fresh energy after Richard's death. The
latter was succeeded by his mean brother John, who seems to
have been hated with unanimity. John was accused of the murder
of his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who disputed the
inheritance from Richard. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, John,
though King of England, was nevertheless a vassal of the King
of France. Philip summoned him, on charges, to be tried by his
peers. John failed to answer the summons, and the forfeiture
of his fiefs was promptly declared. The French king stood well
prepared to make the confiscation effective, while John, in
serious trouble with his English subjects, could offer little
resistance. Thus the Norman realm of the English kings--their
original dominion--was lost beyond recovery, and with it Anjou
and Maine. They held Guienne and Poitou for some years; but
the bases of the French monarchy were broadened immensely from
the day when the great Norman and Angevin fiefs became royal
domain.

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The Albigenses.

Events in the south of France, during Philip's reign, prepared
the way for a further aggrandisement of the Crown. Ancient
Latin civilization had lingered longer there, in spirit, at
least, than in the central and northern districts of the
kingdom, and the state of society intellectually was both
livelier and more refined. It was the region of Europe where
thought first showed signs of independence, and where the
spiritual despotism of Rome was disputed first. A sect arose
in Languedoc which took its name from the district of Albi,
and which offended the Church perhaps more by the freedom of
opinion that it claimed than by the heresy of the opinions
themselves. These Albigeois, or Albigenses, had been at issue
with the clergy of their country and with the Papacy for some
years before Innocent III., the pontifical autocrat of his
age, proclaimed a crusade against them (1208), and launched
his sentence of excommunication against Raymond, Count of
Toulouse, who gave them countenance if not sympathy. The
fanatical Simon de Montfort, father of the great noble of like
name who figures more grandly in English history, took the
lead of the Crusade, to which bigots and brutal adventurers
flocked together. Languedoc was wasted with fire and sword,
and after twenty years of intermittent war, in which Peter of
Aragon took part, assisting the Albigeois, the Count of
Toulouse purchased peace for his ruined land by ceding part of
it to the king of France, and giving his daughter in marriage
to the king's brother Alphonso,--by which marriage the
remainder of the country was transferred, a few years later,
to the French crown.

The Battle of Bouvines.

Philip Augustus, in whose reign this brutal crushing of
Provençal France began, took little part in it, but he saw
with no unwillingness another too powerful vassal brought low.
The next blow of like kind he struck with his own hand. John
of England had quarreled with the mighty Pope Innocent III.;
his kingdom had been placed under interdict and his subjects
absolved from their allegiance. Philip of France eagerly
offered to become the executor of the papal decree, and
gathered an army for the invasion of England, to oust John
from his throne. But John hastened now to make peace with the
Church, submitting himself, surrendering his kingdom to the
Pope, and receiving it back as a papal fief. This
accomplished, the all-powerful pontiff persuaded the French
king to turn his army against the Count of Flanders, who had
never been reduced to a proper degree of submission to his
feudal sovereign. He seems to have become the recognized head
of a body of nobles who showed alarm and resentment at the
growing power of the Crown, and the war which ensued was quite
extraordinary in its political importance. King John of
England came personally to the assistance of the Flemish
Count, because of the hatred he felt towards Philip of France.
Otho, Emperor of Germany, who had been excommunicated and
deposed by the Pope, and who was struggling for his crown with
the young Hohenstaufen, Frederick II., took part in the melee,
because John was his uncle, and because the Pope was for
Philip, and because Germany dreaded the rising power of
France. So the war, which seemed at first to be a trifling
affair in a corner, became in fact a grand clearing storm, for
the settlement of many large issues, important to all Europe.
The settlement was accomplished by a single decisive battle,
fought at Bouvines (1214), not far from Tournay. It
established effectively in France the feudal superiority and
actual sovereignty of the king. It evoked a national spirit
among the French people, having been their first national
victory, won under the banners of a definite kingdom, over
foreign foes. It was a triumph for the Papacy and the Church
and a crushing blow to those who dared resist the mandates of
Rome. It sent King John back to England so humbled and
weakened that he had little stomach for the contest which
awaited him there, and the grand event of the signing of Magna
Charta next year was more easily brought about. It settled the
fate of Otho of Germany, and cleared the bright opening of the
stormy career of Frederick II., his successor. Thus the battle
of Bouvines, which is not a famous field in common knowledge,
must really be numbered among the great and important battles
of the world.

When Philip Augustus died in 1223, the regality which he
bequeathed to his son, Louis VIII., was something vastly
greater than that which came to him from his predecessors. He
had enhanced both the dignity and the power, both the
authority and the prestige, of the Crown, and made a
substantial kingdom of France. Louis VIII. enlarged his
dominions by the conquest of Lower Poitou and the taking of
Rochelle from the English; but he sowed the seeds of future
weakness in the monarchy by creating great duchies for his
children, which became as troublesome to later kings as
Normandy and Anjou had been to those before him.

Saint Louis.

Louis IX.--Saint Louis in the calendar of the Catholic
Church--who came to the throne in 1226, while a child of
eleven years, was a king of so noble a type that he stands
nearly alone in history. Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor, and
King Alfred of England, are the only sovereigns who seem
worthy to be compared with him; and even the purity of those
rare souls is not quite so simple and so selfless, perhaps, as
that which shines in the beautiful character of this most
Christian king. His goodness was of that quality which rises
to greatness--above all other measures of greatness in the
distinction of men. It was of that quality which even a wicked
world is compelled to feel and to bend to as a power, much
exceeding the power of state-craft or of the sword. Of all the
kings of his line, this Saint Louis was probably the one who
had least thought of a royal interest in France distinct from
the interest of the people of France; and the one who
consciously did least to aggrandize the monarchy and enlarge
its powers; but no king before him or after him was so much
the true architect of the foundations of the absolute French
monarchy of later times. His constant purpose was to give
peace to his kingdom and justice to his people; to end
violence and wrong-doing.
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In pursuing this purpose, he gave a new character and a new
influence to the royal courts,--established them in public
confidence,--accustomed his subjects to appeal to them; he
denounced the brutal senselessness of trials by combat, and
commanded their abolition; he gave encouragement to the study
and the introduction of Roman law, and so helped to dispel the
crude political as well as legal ideas that feudalism rested
on. His measures in these directions all tended to the
undermining of the feudal system and to the breaking down of
the independence of the great vassals who divided sovereignty
with the king. At the same time the upright soul of King
Louis, devotedly pious son of the Church as he was, yielded
his conscience to it, and the just ordinances of his kingdom,
no more than he yielded to the haughty turbulence of the great
vassals of the crown.

The great misfortunes of the reign of Saint Louis were the two
calamitous Crusades in which he engaged (1248-1254, and 1270),
and in the last of which he died. They were futile in every
way--as unwisely conducted as they were unwisely conceived;
but they count among the few errors of a noble, great life.
Regarded altogether, in the light which after-history throws
back upon it, the reign of Louis IX. is more loftily
distinguished than any other in the annals of France.

Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface.

There is little to distinguish the reign of St. Louis' son,
Philip III., "le Hardi," "the Rash" (1270-1285), though the
remains of the great fief of Toulouse were added in his time
to the royal domain; but under the grandson of St. Louis, the
fourth Philip, surnamed "le Bel," there was a season of storms
in France. This Philip was unquestionably a man of clear, cold
intellect, and of powerful, unbending will. There was nothing
of the soldier in him, much of the lawyer-like mind and
disposition. The men of the gown were his counsellors; he
advanced their influence, and promoted the acceptance in
France of the principles of the Roman or civil law, which were
antagonistic to feudal ideas. In his attitude towards the
Papacy--which had declined greatly in character and power
within the century past--he was extraordinarily bold. His
famous quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. resulted in
humiliations to the head of the Church from which, in some
respects, there was no recovery. The quarrel arose on
questions connected chiefly with the taxing of the clergy. The
Pope launched one angry Bull after another against the
audacious king, and the latter retorted with Ordinances which
were as effective as the Bulls. Excommunication was defied;
the Inquisition was suppressed in France; appeal taken to a
General Council of the Church. At last Boniface suffered
personal violence at the hands of a party of hired ruffians,
in French pay, who attacked him at his country residence, and
received such indignities that he expired soon after of shame
and rage. The pope immediately succeeding died a few months
later, and dark suspicions as to the cause of his death were
entertained; for he gave place (1305) to one, Clement V., who
was the tool of the French king, bound to him by pledges and
guarantees before his election. This Pope Clement removed the
papal residence from Rome to Avignon, and for a long
period--the period known as "the Babylonish Captivity"--the
Holy See was subservient to the monarchy of France.

In this contest with the Papacy, Philip threw himself on the
support of the whole body of his people, convoking (1302) the
first meeting of the Three Estates--the first of the few
general Parliaments--ever assembled in France.

Destruction of the Templars.

A more sinister event in the reign of Philip IV. was his
prosecution and destruction of the famous Order of the Knights
Templars. The dark, dramatic story has been told many times,
and its incidents are familiar. Perhaps there will never be
agreement as to the bottom of truth that might exist in the
charges brought against the Order; but few question the fact
that its blackest guilt in the eyes of the French King was its
wealth, which he coveted and which he was resolved to find
reasons for taking to himself. The knights were accused of
infidelity, blasphemy, and abominable vices. They were tried,
tortured, tempted to confessions, burned at the stake, and
their lands and goods were divided between the Crown and the
Knights of St. John.

Flemish Wealth and Independence.

The wilful king had little mercy in his cold heart and few
scruples in his calculating brain. His character was not
admirable; but the ends which he compassed were mostly good
for the strength and independence of the monarchy of France,
and, on the whole, for the welfare of the people subject to
it. Even the disasters of his reign had sometimes their good
effect: as in the case of his failure to subjugate the great
county of Flanders. Originally a fief of the Kings of France,
it had been growing apart from the French monarchy, through
the independent interests and feelings that rose in it with
the increase of wealth among its singularly industrious and
thrifty people. The Low Countries, or Netherlands, on both
sides of the Rhine, had been the first in western Europe to
develop industrial arts and the trade that goes with them in a
thoroughly intelligent and systematic way. The Flemings were
leaders in this industrial development. Their country was full
of busy cities,--communes, with large liberties in
possession,--where prosperous artisans, pursuing many crafts,
were organized in gilds and felt strong for the defense of
their chartered rights. Ghent exceeded Paris in riches and
population at the end of the thirteenth century. Bruges was
nearly its equal; and there were many of less note. The
country was already a prize to be coveted by kings; and the
kings of France, who claimed the rights of feudal superiority
over its count, had long been seeking to make their
sovereignty direct, while the spirit of the Flemings carried
them more and more toward independence.

In 1294, Philip IV. became involved in war with Edward I. of
England over Guienne. Flanders, which traded largely with
England and was in close friendship with the English king and
people, took sides with the latter, and was basely abandoned
when Philip and Edward made peace, in 1302. The French king
then seized his opportunity to subjugate the Flemings, which
he practically accomplished for a time, mastering all of their
cities except Ghent. His need and his greed made the burden of
taxes which he now laid on these new subjects very heavy and
they were soon in revolt. By accident, and the folly of the
French, they won a fearfully decisive victory at Courtray,
where some thousands of the nobles and knights of France
charged blindly into a canal, and were drowned, suffocated and
slaughtered in heaps. The carnage was so great that it broke
the strength of the feudal chivalry of France, and the French
crown, while it lost Flanders, yet gained power from the very
disaster.

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In 1314, Philip IV. died, leaving three sons, who occupied the
throne for brief terms in succession: Louis X, surnamed Hutin
(disorder), who survived his father little more than a year;
Philip V., called "the Long" (1316-1322), and Charles IV.,
known as "the Fair" (1322-1328). With the death of Charles the
Fair, the direct line of the Capetian Kings came to an end,
and Philip, Count of Valois, first cousin of the late kings,
and grandson of Philip III., came to the throne, as Philip
VI.--introducing the Valois line of kings.

Claims of Edward III. of England.

The so-called Salic law, excluding females, in France, from
the throne, had now, in the arrangement of these recent
successions, been affirmed and enforced. It was promptly
disputed by King Edward III. of England, who claimed the
French crown by right of his mother, daughter of Philip IV.
and sister of the last three kings. His attempt to enforce
this claim was the beginning of the wicked, desolating
"Hundred Years War" between England and France, which
well-nigh ruined the latter, while it contributed in the
former to the advancement of the commons in political power.

England after the Norman Conquest.

The England of the reign of Edward III., when the Hundred
Years War began, was a country quite different in condition
from that which our narrative left, at the time it had yielded
(about 1071) to William the Norman conqueror. The English
people were brought low by that subjugation, and the yoke
which the Normans laid upon them was heavy indeed. They were
stripped of their lands by confiscation; they were disarmed
and disorganized; every attempt at rebellion failed miserably,
and every failure brought wider confiscations. The old
nobility suffered most and its ranks were thinned. England
became Norman in its aristocracy and remained English in its
commons and its villeinage.

Modified Feudalism in England.

Before the Conquest, feudalism had crept into its southern
parts and was working a slow change of its old free Germanic
institutions. But the Normans quickened the change and widened
it. At the same time they controlled it in certain ways,
favorably both to the monarchy and the people. They
established a feudal system, but it was a system different
from that which broke up the unity of both kingdoms of the
Franks. William, shrewd statesman that he was, took care that
no dangerous great fiefs should be created; and he took care,
too, that every landlord in England should swear fealty direct
to the king,--thus placing the Crown in immediate relations
with all its subjects, permitting no intermediary lord to take
their first allegiance to himself and pass it on at second
hand to a mere crowned overlord.

The effect of this diluted organization of feudalism in
England was to make the monarchy so strong, from the
beginning, that both aristocracy and commons were naturally
put on their defence against it, and acquired a feeling of
association, a sense of common interest, a habit of alliance,
which became very important influences in the political
history of the nation. In France, as we have seen, there had
been nothing of this. There, at the beginning, the feudal
aristocracy was dominant, and held itself so haughtily above
the commons, or Third Estate, that no political cooperation
between the two orders could be thought of when circumstances
called for it. The kings slowly undermined the aristocratic
power, using the communes in the process; and when, at last,
the power of the monarchy had become threatening to both
orders in the state, they were separated by too great an
alienation of feeling and habit to act well together.

It was the great good fortune of England that feudalism was
curbed by a strong monarchy. It was the greater good fortune
of the English people that their primitive Germanic
institutions--their folk-moots, and their whole simple popular
system of local government--should have had so long and sturdy
a growth before the feudal scheme of society began seriously
to intrude upon them. The Norman conqueror did no violence to
those institutions. He claimed to be a lawful English king,
respecting English laws. The laws, the customs, the
organization of government, were, indeed, greatly modified in
time; but the modification was slow, and the base of the whole
political structure that rose in the Anglo-Norman kingdom
remained wholly English.

Norman Influences in England.

The Normans brought with them into England a more active,
enterprising, enquiring spirit than had animated the land
before. They brought an increase of learning and of the
appetite for knowledge. They brought a more educated taste in
art, to improve the building of the country and its
workmanship in general. They brought a wider acquaintance with
the affairs of the outside world, and drew England into
political relations with her continental neighbors, which were
not happy for her in the end, but which may have contributed
for a time to her development. They brought, also, a more
powerful organization of the Church, which gave England
trouble in later days.

The Conqueror's Sons.

When the Conqueror died (1087), his eldest son Robert
succeeded him in Normandy, but he wished the crown of England
to go to his son William, called Rufus, or "the Red." He could
not settle the succession by his will, because in theory the
succession was subject to the choice or assent of the nobles
of the realm. But, in fact, William Rufus became king through
mere tardiness of opposition; and when, a few months after his
coronation, a formidable rebellion broke out among the Normans
in England, who preferred his wayward brother Robert, it was
the native English who sustained him and established him on
the throne. The same thing occurred again after William Rufus
died (1100). The Norman English tried again to bring in Duke
Robert, while the native English preferred the younger
brother, Henry, who was born among them. They won the day.
Henry I., called Beauclerc, the Scholar, was seated on the
throne. Unlike William Rufus, who had no gratitude for the
support the English gave him, and ruled them harshly, Henry
showed favor to his English subjects, and, during his reign of
thirty-five years, the two races were so effectually
reconciled and drawn together that little distinction between
them appears thereafter.

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Henry acquired Normandy, as well as England, uniting again the
two sovereignties of his father. His thriftless brother,
Robert, had pledged the dukedom to William Rufus, who lent him
money for a crusading expedition. Returning penniless, Robert
tried to recover his heritage; but Henry claimed it and made
good the claim.

Anarchy in Stephen's Reign.

At Henry's death, the succession fell into dispute. He had
lost his only son. His daughter, Matilda, first married to the
Emperor Henry V., had subsequently wedded Count Geoffrey of
Anjou, by whom she had a son. Henry strove, during his life,
to bind his nobles by oath to accept Matilda and her son as
his successors. But on his death (1135) their promises were
broken. They gave the crown to Stephen of Blois, whose mother
was Henry's sister; whereupon there ensued the most dreadful
period of civil war and anarchy that England ever knew.
Stephen, at his coronation, swore to promises which he did not
keep, losing many of his supporters for that reason; the
Empress Matilda and her young son Henry had numerous
partisans; and each side was able to destroy effectually the
authority of the other. "The price of the support given to
both was the same--absolute licence to build castles, to
practise private war, to hang their private enemies, to
plunder their neighbours, to coin their money, to exercise
their petty tyrannies as they pleased." "Castles innumerable
sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled
with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined. The feudal
spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even
party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own
behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its
triumph ensured its fall" (Stubbs).

Angevin Kings of England.

At length, in 1153, peace was made by a treaty which left
Stephen in possession of the throne during his life, but made
Henry, already recognized as Duke of Normandy, his heir.
Stephen died the following year, and Henry II., now twenty-one
years old, came quietly into his kingdom, beginning a new
royal line, called the Angevin kings, because of their descent
from Geoffrey of Anjou; also taking the name Plantagenets from
Geoffrey's fashion of wearing a bit of broom, Planta Genista,
in his hat.

Henry II. proved, happily, to be a king of the strong
character that was needed in the England of that wretched
time. He was bold and energetic, yet sagacious, prudent,
politic. He loved power and he used it with an unsparing hand;
but he used it with wise judgment, and England was the better
for it. He struck hard and persistently at the lawlessness of
feudalism, and practically ended it forever as a menace to
order and unity of government in England. He destroyed
hundreds of the castles which had sprung up throughout the
land in Stephen's time, to be nests of robbers and strongholds
of rebellion. He humbled the turbulent barons. He did in
England, for the promotion of justice, and for the enforcement
of the royal authority, what Louis IX. did a little later in
France: that is, he reorganized and strengthened the king's
courts, creating a judicial system which, in its most
essential features, has existed to the present time. His
organizing hand brought system and efficiency into every
department of the government. He demanded of the Church that
its clergy should be subject to the common laws of the
kingdom, in matters of crime, and to trial before the ordinary
courts; and it was this most just reform of a crying
abuse--the exemption of clerics from the jurisdiction of
secular courts--which brought about the memorable collision
of King Henry with Thomas Becket, the inflexible archbishop of
Canterbury. Becket's tragical death made a martyr of him, and
placed Henry in a penitential position which checked his great
works of reform; but, on the whole, his reign was one of
splendid success, and shines among the epochs that throw light
on the great after-career of the English nation.

Aside from his importance as an English statesman, Henry II.
figured largely, in his time, among the most powerful of the
monarchs of Europe. His dominions on the continent embraced
much more of the territory of modern France than was ruled
directly by the contemporary French king, though nominally he
held them as a vassal of the latter. Normandy came to him from
his grandfather; from his father he inherited the large
possessions of the House of Anjou; by his marriage with
Eleanor of Aquitaine (divorced by Louis VII. of France, as
mentioned already) he acquired her wide and rich domain. On
the continent, therefore, he ruled Normandy, Maine, Touraine,
Anjou, Guienne, Poitou and Gascony. He may be said to have
added Ireland to his English kingdom, for he began the
conquest. He held a great place, in his century, and
historically he is a notable figure in the time.

His rebellious, undutiful son Richard, Cœur de Lion, the
Crusader, the hard fighter, the knight of many rude
adventures, who succeeded Henry II. in 1189, is popularly
better known than he; but Richard's noisy brief career shows
poorly when compared with his father's life of thoughtful
statesmanship. It does not show meanly, however, like that of
the younger son, John, who came to the throne in 1199. The
story of John's probable murder of his young nephew, Arthur,
of Brittany, and of his consequent loss of all the Angevin
lands, and of Normandy (excepting only the Norman islands, the
Jerseys, which have remained English to our own day) has been
briefly told heretofore, when the reign of Philip Augustus of
France was under review.

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The whole reign of John was ignominious. He quarreled with the
Pope--with the inflexible Innocent III., who humbled many
kings--over a nomination to the Archbishopric of Canterbury
(1205); his kingdom was put under interdict (1208); he was
threatened with deposition; and when, in affright, he
surrendered, it was so abjectly done that he swore fealty to
the Pope, as a vassal to his suzerain, consenting to hold his
kingdom as a fief of the Apostolic See. The triumph of the
Papacy in this dispute brought one great good to England. It
made Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, and thereby
gave a wise and righteous leader to the opponents of the
king's oppressive rule. Lords and commons, laity and clergy,
were all alike sufferers from John's greed, his perfidy, his
mean devices and his contempt of law. Langton rallied them to
a sober, stern, united demonstration, which awed King John,
and compelled him to put his seal to Magna Charta--the grand
Charter of English liberties (1215). A few weeks later he
tried to annul what he had done, with encouragement from the
Pope, who anathematized the Charter and all who had to do with
it. Then certain of the barons, in their rage, offered the
English crown to the heir of France, afterwards Louis VIII.;
and the French prince actually came to England (1216) with an
army to secure it. But before the forces gathered on each side
were brought to any decisive battle, John died. Louis'
partisans then dropped away from him and the next year, after
a defeat at sea, he returned to France.

Henry III. and the Barons' War.

John left a son, a lad of nine years, who grew to be a better
man than himself, though not a good king, for he was weak and
untruthful in character, though amiable and probably
well-meaning. He held the throne for fifty-six years, during
which long time, after his minority was passed, no minister of
ability and honorable character could get and keep office in
the royal service. He was jealous of ministers, preferring
mere administrative clerks; while he was docile to favorites,
and picked them for the most part from a swarm of foreign
adventurers whom the nation detested. The Great Charter of his
father had been reaffirmed in his name soon after he received
the crown, and in 1225 he was required to issue it a third
time, as the condition of a grant of money; but he would not
rule honestly in compliance with its provisions, and sought
continually to lay and collect heavy taxes in unlawful ways.
He spent money extravagantly, and was foolish and reckless in
foreign undertakings, accepting, for example, the Kingdom of
Sicily, offered to his son Edmund by the Pope, whose gift
could only be made good by force of arms. At the same time he
was servile to the popes, whose increasing demands for money
from England were rousing even the clergy to resistance. So
the causes of discontent grew abundantly until they brought it
to a serious head. All classes of the people were drawn
together again, as they had been to resist the aggressions of
John. The great councils of the kingdom, or assemblies of
barons and bishops (which had taken the place of the
witenagemot of the old English time, and which now began to be
called Parliaments), became more and more united against the
king. At last the discontent found a leader of high capacity
and of heroic if not blameless character, in Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon de Montfort was of foreign
birth,--son of that fanatical crusader of the same name, who
spread ruin over the fair country of the Albigeois. The
English earldom of Leicester had passed to his family, and the
younger Simon, receiving it, came to England and became an
Englishman. After some years he threw himself into the
struggle with the Crown, and his leadership was soon
recognized. In 1258, a parliament held at London compelled the
king to consent to the appointment of an extraordinary
commission of twenty-four barons, clothed with full power to
reform the government. The commission was named at a
subsequent meeting of parliament, the same year, at Oxford,
where the grievances to be redressed were set forth in a paper
known as the Provisions of Oxford. From the twenty-four
commissioners there were chosen fifteen to be the King's
Council. This was really the creation of a new constitution
for the kingdom, and Henry swore to observe it. But ere long
he procured a bull from the Pope, absolving him from his oath,
and he began to prepare for throwing off the restraints that
had been put upon him. The other side took up arms, under
Simon's lead; but peace was preserved for a time by referring
all questions in dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX. of
France. The arbiter decided against the barons (1264) and
Montfort's party refused to abide by the award. Then followed
the civil conflict known as the Barons' War. The king was
defeated and taken prisoner, and was obliged to submit to
conditions which practically transferred the administration of
the government to three counsellors, of whom Simon de Montfort
was the chief.

Development of the English Parliament;

In January, 1265, a memorable parliament was called together.
It was the first national assembly in which the larger element
of the English Commons made its appearance; for Montfort had
summoned to it certain representatives of borough towns, along
with the barons, the bishops and the abbots, and along,
moreover, with representative knights, who had been gaining
admittance of late years to what now became a convocation of
the Three Estates. The parliamentary model thus roughly shaped
by the great Earl of Leicester was not continuously followed
until another generation came; but it is his glory,
nevertheless, to have given to England the norm and principle
on which its unexampled parliament was framed. By dissensions
among themselves, Simon de Montfort and his party soon lost
the great advantage they had won, and on another appeal to
arms they were defeated (1265) by the king's valiant and able
son, afterwards King Edward I., and Montfort was slain. It was
seven years after this before Edward succeeded his father, and
nine before he came to the throne, because he was absent on a
Crusade; but when he did, it was to prove himself, not merely
one of the few statesmen-kings of England, but one large
enough in mind to take lessons from the vanquished enemies of
the Crown. He, in reality, took up the half-planned
constitutional work of Simon de Montfort, in the development
of the English Parliament as a body representative of all
orders in the nation, and carried it forward to substantial
completion. He did it because he had wit to see that the
people he ruled could be led more easily than they could be
driven, and that their free-giving of supplies to the Crown
would be more open-handed than their giving under compulsion.
The year 1295 "witnessed the first summons of a perfect and
model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops,
deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned
severally in person by the king's special writ, and the
commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing
them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two
elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from
each borough" (Stubbs).
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Two years later, the very fundamental principle of the English
Constitution was established, by a Confirmation of the
Charters, conceded in Edward's absence by his son, but
afterwards assented to by him, which definitely renounced the
right of the king to tax the nation without its consent. Thus
the reign of Edward I. was really the most important in the
constitutional history of England. It was scarcely less
important in the history of English jurisprudence; for Edward
was in full sympathy with the spirit of an age in which the
study and reform of the law were wonderfully awakened
throughout Europe. The great statutes of his reign are among
the monuments of Edward's statesmanship, and not the least
important of them are those by which he checked the
encroachments of the Church and its dangerous acquisition of
wealth.

At the same time, the temper of this vigorous king was warlike
and aggressive. He subdued the Welsh and annexed Wales as a
principality to England. He enforced the feudal supremacy
which the English kings claimed over Scotland, and, upon the
Scottish throne becoming vacant, in 1290, seated John Baliol,
as a vassal who did homage to him. The war of Scottish
Independence then ensued, of which William Wallace and Robert
Bruce were the heroes. Wallace perished on an English scaffold
in 1305; Bruce, the next year, secured the Scottish crown, and
eventually broke the bonds in which his country was held.

Edward I. died in 1307, and his kingly capability died with
him. He transmitted neither spirit nor wisdom to his son, the
second Edward, who gave himself and his kingdom up to foreign
favorites, as his grandfather had done. His angry subjects
practically took the government out of his hands (1310), and
confided it to a body of twenty-one members, called Ordainers.
His reign of twenty years was one of protracted strife and
disorder; but the constitutional power of Parliament made
gains. In outward appearance, however, there was nothing to
redeem the wretchedness of the time. The struggle of factions
was pushed to civil war; while Scotland, by the great blow
struck at Bannockburn (1314), made her independence complete.
In 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whose descent was as royal
as the king's, but who headed the opponents of Edward and
Edward's unworthy favorites, was defeated in battle, taken
prisoner, and brought to the block. This martyrdom, as it was
called, embalmed Lancaster's memory in the hearts of the
people.

Edward III. and his French Claims.

The queen of Edward II., Isabella of France, daughter of
Philip the Fair, made, at last, common cause with his enemies.
In January, 1327, he was forced to formally resign the crown,
and in September of the same year he was murdered, the queen,
with little doubt, assenting to the deed. His son, Edward
III., who now came to the throne, founded claims to the crown
of France upon the rights of his mother, whose three brothers,
as we have seen, had been crowned in succession and had died,
bringing the direct line of royalty in France to an end. By
this claim the two countries were plunged into the miseries of
the dreadful Hundred Years War, and the progress of
civilization in Europe was seriously checked.

Recovery of Christian Spain.

Before entering that dark century of war, it will be necessary
to go back a little in time, and carry our survey farther
afield, in the countries of Europe more remote from the center
of the events we have already scanned. In Spain, for example,
there should be noticed, very briefly, the turning movement of
the tide of Mahometan conquest which drove the Spanish
Christians into the mountains of the North. In the eighth
century, their little principality of Asturia had widened into
the small kingdom of Leon, and the eastern county of Leon had
taken the name of Castella (Castile) from the number of forts
or castles with which it bristled, on the Moorish border. East
of Leon, in the Pyrenees, there grew up about the same time the
kingdom of Navarre, which became important in the eleventh
century, under an enterprising king, Sancho the Great, who
seized Castile and made a separate kingdom of it, which he
bequeathed to his son. The same Navarrese king extended his
dominion over a considerable part of the Spanish March, which
Charlemagne had wrested from the Moors in the ninth century,
and out of this territory the kingdom of Aragon was presently
formed. These four kingdoms, of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and
Aragon, were shuffled together and divided again, in changing
combinations, many times during the next century or two; but
Castile and Leon were permanently united in 1230. Meantime
Portugal, wrested from the Moors, became a distinct kingdom;
while Navarre was reduced in size and importance. Castile,
Aragon, and Portugal are from that time the Christian Powers
in the Peninsula which carried on the unending war with their
Moslem neighbors. By the end of the thirteenth century they
had driven the Moors into the extreme south of the peninsula,
where the latter, thenceforth, held little beyond the small
kingdom of Granada, which defended itself for two centuries
more.

Moorish Civilization and its Decay.

The Christians were winners and the Moslems were losers in
this long battle, because adversity had disciplined the one
and prosperity had relaxed and vitiated the other. Success
bred disunion, and the spoils of victory engendered
corruption, among the followers of Mahomet, very quickly in
their career. The middle of the eighth century was hardly
passed when the huge empire they had conquered broke in twain,
and two Caliphates on one side of the Mediterranean, imitated the
two Roman Empires on the other. We have seen how the Caliphate
of the East, with its seat at Bagdad, went steadily to wreck;
but fresh converts of Islam, out of deserts at the North, were
in readiness, there, to gather the fragments and construct a
new Mahometan power. In the West, where the Caliphs held their
court at Cordova, the same crumbling of their power befell
them, through feuds and jealousies and the decay of a sensuous
race; but there were none to rebuild it in the Prophet's name.
The Moor gave way to the Castilian in Spain for reasons not
differing very much from the reasons which explain the
supplanting of the Arab by the Turk in the East.

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While its grandeur lasted in Spain,--from the eighth to the
eleventh centuries--the empire of the Saracens, or Moors, was
the most splendid of its age. It developed a civilization
which must have been far finer, in the superficial showing,
and in much of its spirit as well, than anything found in
Christian Europe at that time. Its religious temper was less
fierce and intolerant. Its intellectual disposition was
towards broader thinking and freer inquiry. Its artistic
feeling was truer and more instinctive. It took lessons from
classic learning and philosophy before Germanized Europe had
become aware of the existence of either, and it gave the
lessons at second hand to its Christian neighbors. Its
industries were conducted with a knowledge and a skill that
could be found among no other people. Says Dr. Draper: "Europe
at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement,
more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of
which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs.
Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. Their houses
were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by
furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by
underground pipes from flower beds. They had baths, and
libraries, and dining halls, fountains of quicksilver and
water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of
dancing to lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and
gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern neighbors, the
feasts of the Saracens were marked with sobriety."

The brilliancy of the Moorish civilization seems like that of
some short-lived flower, which may spring from a thin soil of
no lasting fertility. The qualities which yielded it had their
season of ascendancy over the deeper-lying forces that worked
in the Gothic mind of Christian Spain; but time exhausted the
one, while it matured the other.

Mediæval Spanish Character.

There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and
religions in the peninsula affected the character of the
Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill,
than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened
and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures
they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a
lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered
and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some
likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the
partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. It
tended to put bigotry in the place of piety--religious rancor
in the place of charity--priests and images in the place of
Christ--much more among the Spaniards than among other
peoples; for they, alone, were Crusaders against the Moslem
for eight hundred years.

Early Free Institutions in Spain.

The political effects of those centuries of struggle in the
peninsula were also remarkable and strangely mixed. In all the
earlier stages of the national development, until the close of
the mediæval period, there seems to have been as promising a
growth of popular institutions, in most directions, as can be
found in England itself. Apparently, there was more good
feeling between classes than elsewhere in Europe. Nobles,
knights and commons fought side by side in so continuous a
battle that they were more friendly and familiar in
acquaintance with one another. Moreover, the ennobled and the
knighted were greatly more numerous in Spain than in the
neighboring countries. The kings were lavish of such honors in
rewarding valor, on every battlefield and after every campaign.
It was impossible, therefore, for so great a distance to widen
between the grandee and the peasant or the burgher as that
which separated the lord and the citizen in Germany or France.
The division of Christian Spain into several petty kingdoms,
and the circumstances under which they were placed, retarded
the growth of monarchical power, and yet did not tend to a
feudal disintegration of society; because the pressure of its
perpetual war with the infidels forced the preservation of a
certain degree of unity, sufficient to be a saving influence.
At the same time, the Spanish cities became prosperous, and
naturally, in the circumstances of the country, acquired much
freedom and many privileges. The inhabitants of some cities in
Aragon enjoyed the privileges of nobility as a body; the
magistrates of other cities were ennobled. Both in Aragon and
Castile, the towns had deputies in the Cortes before any
representatives of boroughs sat in the English Parliament; and
the Cortes seems to have been, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, a more potent factor in government than any
assembly of estates in any other part of Europe.

But something was wanting in Spain that was not wanting in
England and in the Netherlands, for example, to complete the
evolution of a popular government from this hopeful beginning.
And the primary want, it would seem, was a political sense or
faculty in the people. To illustrate this in one particular:
the Castilian Commons did not grasp the strings of the
national purse when they had it in their hands, as the
practical Englishmen did. They allowed the election of
deputies from the towns to slip out of their hands and to
become an official function of the municipalities, where it
was corrupted and controlled by the Crown. In Aragon, the
popular rights were more efficiently maintained, perhaps; but
even there the political faculty of the people must have been
defective, as compared with that of the nations in the North
which developed free government from less promising germs.
And, yet, it is possible that the whole subsequent failure of
Spain may be fully explained by the ruinous prosperity of her
career in the sixteenth century,--by the fatal gold it gave
her from America, and the independent power it put into the
hands of her kings.

Northern and North-eastern Europe.

While the Spaniards in their southern peninsula were wrestling
with the infidel Moor, their Gothic kindred of Sweden, and the
other Norse nations of that opposite extremity of Europe, had
been casting off paganism and emerging from the barbarism of
their piratical age, very slowly. It was not until the tenth
and eleventh centuries that Christianity got footing among
them. It was not until the thirteenth century that unity and
order, the fruits of firm government, began to be really fixed
in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas.

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The same is substantially true of the greater Slavic states on
the eastern side of Europe. The Poles had accepted
Christianity in the tenth century, and their dukes, in the
same century, had assumed the title of kings. In the twelfth
century they had acquired a large dominion and exercised great
power; but the kingdom was divided, was brought into collision
with the Teutonic Knights, who conquered Prussia, and it fell
into a disordered state. The Russians had been Christianized
in the same missionary century--the tenth; but civilization
made slow progress among them, and their nation was being
divided and re-divided in shifting principalities by
contending families and lords. In the thirteenth century they
were overwhelmed by the fearful calamity of a conquest by
Mongol or Tartar hordes, and fell under the brutal domination
of the successors of Genghis Khan.

Latin Conquest of Constantinople.

At Constantinople, the old Greek-Roman Empire of the East had
been passing through singular changes since we noticed it
last. The dread with which Alexius Comnenius saw the coming of
the Crusaders in 1097 was justified by the experience of his
successors, after little more than a hundred years. In 1204, a
crusade, which is sometimes numbered as the fourth and
sometimes as the fifth in the crusading series, was diverted
by Venetian influence from the rescue of Jerusalem to the
conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly in the interest of a
claimant of the Imperial throne. The city was taken and
pillaged, and the Greek line of Emperors was supplanted by a
Frank or Latin line, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was
the first. But this Latin Empire was reduced to a fraction of
the conquered dominion, the remainder being divided among
several partners in the conquest; while two Greek princes of
the fallen house saved fragments of the ancient realm in Asia,
and throned themselves as emperors at Trebizond and Nicæa. The
Latin Empire was maintained, feebly and without dignity, a
little more than half a century; and then (1261) it was
extinguished by the sovereign of its Nicæan rival, Michael
Palæologus, who took Constantinople by a night surprise,
helped by treachery within. Thus the Greek or Byzantine Empire
was restored, but much shorn of its former European
possessions, and much weakened by loss of commerce and wealth.
It was soon involved in a fresh struggle for life with the
Turks.

The Thirteenth Century.