Chapter IV: Philip III to the House of Valois (2)

The young king was beset with difficulties which required a wise head and an established authority to deal with them. A war threatened him already. Count Robert of Flanders hesitated and refused to render the homage due to the king of France on his accession. Philip would have avenged such frowardness by sequestrating the county of Nevers, held by the eldest son of the count of Flanders. But the prince appeared at the French court, and was well received. The war could only be carried on by feudal levies; when these were summoned, the noblesse of the different provinces sent in their grievances in lieu of their contingents. His legists would have counselled Philip the Fair to resist such demands; but his son had surrounded his person, not with legists, but with barons, and these remained acquiescent with the demands of their brother nobles. Of course what was granted to one could not be refused to another. But under the date of this one year, 1315, the French statute book is filled with ordinances regranting their old privileges to the noblesse, and rescinding a large portion of the voluminous legislation [such as abandoning the ancient courts of justice, abolishing the judiciary duel, the right of private war, and procedure by written deposition which had made lawyers necessary] of the French monarchs during the preceding century.[i] The general demand was that the king should hold no relations with the barons’ men. But at the same time Louis, in order to get money, made a solemn statement that “according to the law of nature every man should be born free”; from which he concluded that all Frenchmen being by nature free, the serfs of the royal domain could ransom themselves.

Serfdom began to decline from this moment, in contrast with the state of affairs in preceding centuries; freedom now became the prevailing condition amongst rural populations, as it had long been among the inhabitants of the towns--while serfdom was the exception.[b]

Whilst the monarch made these large concessions to his noblesse, he seems to have derived from them no efficient aid in the prosecution of the war with Flanders. To raise money for this purpose, he was obliged to compound with the Lombard merchants of Paris; they consented to pay so much a pound on their importations. The Jews, too, were again permitted to reside in certain cities on the payment of a tax. Louis Hutin was the first king who formally borrowed money on the credit of the state, his successors being obliged to devote to the purpose of repayment all the sums that might accrue from forfeiture and confiscation.

With an army raised at these pains and costs, Louis marched into Flanders. The Flemings were in the neighbourhood of Lille, and the French king encamped opposite to them, with a river running between the armies. The monarch had not an opportunity of putting his own valour and that of his soldiers to the proof. For the elements put a stop to hostilities, the rain pouring down in unusual torrents, flooding the camps, and destroying provisions and crops. This unsuccessful campaign flung the country into anarchy, the barons levying war wherever they could foresee profit from it; and those who had right of coinage, Charles of Valois included, making exorbitant use of it to enrich themselves at the expense of the country. The king suspended this right, but his order was set at naught; and he then strove to regulate the nature and fineness of the coin which each grandee might issue.

Whilst Charles of Valois was thus employed, the king despatched his brother, Philip, count of Poitiers, to Avignon, to hasten the election of the pope. He was there when tidings reached him that Louis Hutin had expired at Vincennes on the 5th of July, 1316. After heating himself at ball-playing, the king had descended to the cellar to quench his thirst, an imprudence that proved fatal.

PHILIP (V) THE TALL (1316-1322 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1316-1322 A.D.]]

Philip immediately hastened to Paris, and took possession of the royal palace. Charles of Valois thought at first of disputing the regency; but the armed citizens of Paris, whom Louis had enrolled for the Flemish war, with the constable at their head, drove Charles’ followers out of the Louvre. Clemence, the young widow of Louis Hutin, now announced her pregnancy. In addition to this posthumous child, Louis had left a daughter, Joan, by Marguerite of Burgundy. The duke of Burgundy, although he had been unable or unwilling to protect Marguerite, maintained the rights of her daughter, and pleaded that Philip the Fair had acknowledged her legitimacy.

Soon afterwards the queen gave birth to a son, who was christened John; but the child lived only a few days. Philip lost no time in at once claiming the rank of king, and appointing no distant day in January, 1317, for his coronation at Rheims. Charles of Valois, who was at the head of the noblesse, already began to entertain well-founded hopes of the royal succession accruing to his own family. The duke of Burgundy was pacified by obtaining one of Philip’s daughters in marriage, with a considerable sum of money in dowry, as well as Franche-Comté. Joan, daughter of Louis Hutin, whose claims the duke thus abandoned, was affianced to the only son of the count of Évreux.

The grounds for this exclusion of females from the throne of France are not to be found in any law, but in the circumstance of Joan’s mother having been stricken with infamy, with no staunch friend to defend her, whilst Philip was in possession of the royal authority, of which it would have required a civil war to dispossess him. With respect to the old Salic law afterwards invoked, it related but to fiefs and military service, and yet in fiefs it had been so generally set aside, that women succeeded to lands and to noble property in all the provinces of France. It must have been evident to the noblesse, as to others, that the descent of a fief, much more of the crown, to females weakened it for a time, and eventually rendered it liable to become the prey of personages, perhaps foreigners, who had not the interest of the kingdom at heart. The accession of Philip the Tall, therefore, and the exclusion of the daughters of Louis Hutin, were popular with the citizens, not displeasing to the noblesse, and not against the interest of the princes of the blood. And thus was it decided that the kingdom of France, instead of being considered as a patrimony that descended to direct heirs, even if female, was a high function which it required a prince to fill.

The reign of Philip the Tall was marked by no chivalrous enterprise or military feat. French and Flemings were disposed more to negotiate than fight. The chief object of Philip the Tall’s efforts and edicts was to organise a regular administration. He ordered, first, that a certain number of the members of the great council should be always with the king, a provision afterwards repeated in the order that the small or privy council (_l’estroit conseil_) should meet every month. [In this council cruel persecutions of the Jews and lepers were organised.] He established the chamber of accounts, and regulated the issues of the treasury, no payment to be made without the king’s own signature. The abuses of Philip’s predecessors are chiefly known by his efforts to amend them. Philip regulated parliaments, their number and their sitting. No prelate was to sit in that of Paris unless he belonged also to the king’s council. Parliament should always be attended by a baron or two. It was empowered to send commissioners into the provinces to judge causes instead of bringing the parties to Paris and thereby creating expenses. The king forbade (1316) nobles to sell fiefs or feudal property to non-nobles.[i]

Like his grandfather Philip III, Philip the Tall gave titles of nobility to people of common origin, an innovation which, by renewing the aristocratic body, assured its longevity, but at the same time altered its character. In the beginning, nobility was a personal matter; feudalism had made it an attribute of the military fief; here were the kings separating it. It is a serious change; for one day these letters of nobility will be bought, and there will be no real nobility when all the world may be noble with the power of money.

Thus threatened from above by the kings, feudalism was also threatened from below by the people. The development of the towns continued: that of the country began; the bourgeois obtained from Philip V permission to have their own military organisations; each town had a captain for its citizen companies, each bailiwick a captain-general; and it was in this century, if not in this reign, that the ecclesiastical parishes became civil communities. The country people, formerly completely isolated, were being brought more and more together, at first around the church and the castle under the surveillance of the seigniorial intendant, later under a syndic or mayor always appointed by the lord and who brought the people together to discuss their common interests.

This was the beginning of municipal organisation in country places.[b]

One of the latest schemes of Philip, much too advanced for his time, was to establish but one measure and one money throughout the kingdom. He calculated that this could not be done without great expense, and he proposed taking the fifth part of the goods of all his subjects for the purpose. But the townsfolk objected to the tax, whilst the nobles who had the right of coinage persisted in retaining so profitable a privilege. Philip was seized in the same year with dysentery and intermittent fever, which terminated in languor and confined him for months to his couch. The people did not fail to attribute his disease to the unheard-of exactions and extortions that he meditated. Philip the Tall did not live to accomplish them; he expired in January, 1322.

CHARLES (IV) THE FAIR (1322-1328 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1322-1328 A.D.]]

No one put forward any claim on the part of the daughters of Philip the Tall to the regal succession. Charles, the youngest son of Philip the Fair, was at once hailed as king; and so incontestably, that he seems to have dispensed with the ceremony of coronation. The first object with Charles, called, like his father, the Handsome or the Fair, was to leave an heir to the throne. Less cruel than Louis Hutin, he obtained a papal dispensation or divorce from his wife Blanche, not on account of the adultery of which she had been convicted, but on the plea of consanguinity. Charles immediately married Mary of Luxemburg, daughter of the late emperor Henry VII. This queen produced no heir, dying in premature childbirth within two years, when Charles married his cousin Joan, daughter of the count d’Évreux.

The first years of the reign of Charles the Fair were chiefly marked by a trial in which severity was at least warranted by justice, and in which the king and court were above sparing culprits even of the highest connection. Jourdan de Lille, lord of Casaubon, in Gascony, having married the niece of Pope John XXII, considered himself above restraint. Accused of eighteen crimes each worthy of death, the king had spared him, out of consideration for the pope; but Casaubon resumed his old habits. No traveller or merchant was safe from his rapine, nor damsel nor even man from his violence. Summoned to appear before the court of parliament to answer some of these acts, the Gascon lord beat with his own mace the royal sergeant who bore the summons. He came to Paris, nevertheless, with a noble suite, bravely reckoning on impunity. He was, however, committed to prison, tried, condemned to death, and hanged.[i]

Contemporary writers tell us little of the life of Charles IV, or of his government. We know that he paid visits to various parts of his realm, and that while so doing he confirmed the charters of certain cities of the south of France. We know, too, that in his earlier years Charles aspired to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and that for a time circumstances seemed to favour his ambition. He had the support of the pope and of the two most powerful German houses, those of Austria and of Luxemburg. But the Germans as a nation were opposed to the idea of a French emperor, and the negotiations to this end were abandoned on the death of Leopold of Austria in 1326.[k]

It would appear from the ordinances and other acts of Charles the Fair that the party of the noblesse, dominant under Louis Hutin, but repressed under Philip the Tall, recovered full authority under Charles. The Valois, who put themselves forward as the representatives of the chivalry of the age and as the enemy of the legists, appear dominant. They led an expedition against Guienne, threatened Flanders, and aided Mortimer and Isabella in the struggle which terminated in the murder of Edward II. The ordinances of Charles the Fair do not interfere with the noblesse, except to shield them from the encroachments of the king’s _baillis_: the lords of Auvergne and Brittany obtained especial immunities of this kind. Although armies were raised from Flemish and for Gascon war, the nobles were apparently not called upon to contribute to them except by feudal service; whilst the Parisians were called upon to keep up a body of two hundred men-at-arms, and to levy a tax on sales to meet this expenditure. Towns which had not the privileges of _communes_, and were without mayors or sheriffs, were ordered not to pay _taille_, but, instead of it, the tax on sales, of one denier in the livre, which tax was not to be levied on the produce sent to market by either nobles or clergy. Money continued to be the great trouble and principal anxiety of government, the middle and civic classes being singled out as the only ones which could regularly furnish it, except when some rich and privileged body offered itself to the greed of the spoiler.

The same fate which had carried off his brother at so young an age awaited Charles. Taken ill at Christmas, he expired at the end of January, 1328. “Thus was the entire progeny of Philip the Fair, and finer was not to be found in the kingdom of France, completely exterminated in the space of fourteen years.”[i]

ASPECTS OF CIVILISATION

The Middle Ages themselves at this moment, at least in France, were near their end, for the things they were attached to--the Crusades, chivalry, feudalism--were gone, or fast passing away; the papacy, scoffed at in the days of Boniface VIII, was captive at Avignon; the successor of Hugh Capet was a despot, and the sons of villeins were sitting in the states-general of the realm, opposite the nobles and the clergy.[b]

Two or three centuries before, France had seen a great movement accomplished in her midst, called the communal revolution. The greater part of the cities had acquired--be it pacifically, be it at the cost of struggles against the land-owners, or by dissensions and intestine wars--municipal rights combined with independent jurisdiction. Some of them had acquired a veritable sovereignty. At present, under King John, this sovereignty existed no longer. The cities had gradually returned to the royal administration, although each retained its charter; it may be said, in a general way, that they had again become dependent, since St. Louis in regard to finance, since Philip the Fair in regard to tribunals, and for the levying of militia since Philip the Tall. But, in spite of this change which took from them the character of independent republics, to make them members of a great state, they had retained considerable liberty and power of action. Their citizens formed a third order, having like the clergy or the nobility their own peculiar privileges and correlative obligations. They possessed a great and fruitful initiative for their commercial interests and their industries. They aspired to exercise a rightful influence over the government, and the states-general offered them an obvious means.

The bourgeoisie was not hostile to seigneurial aristocracy as several historians have represented, but it had different interests and different aims, since it owed its wealth and power to industry and commerce. As for industry, it is well known that the corporations of crafts assured a monopoly more or less extensive to their members, of more or less regular revenues, and the perpetuity of hereditary influence. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recall how the development of these corporations was hampered by their own laws, and if there were already some of great wealth, like those of the butchers of Paris, they were the exception. Industries were restricted in their nature in proportion as they were reduced to the usual crafts, and this was generally the case. They employed only the raw materials produced in the country, like flax, wool, or hides. They worked in iron and other metals, but having no knowledge of large machinery they had little use for coal, the principal agent of metallic production. In general, also, they produced only enough for home consumption. Exportations were confined principally to the textiles manufactured in the south which had a market in the Levant, to the woollen stuffs, serges, and tapestries of Arras, to the linens of Rheims and Picardy. Thanks to this circumstance the towns of the latter province began to rival the large industrial cities of the Netherlands.

The progress of industry was genuine, but would only follow that of commerce. Now it was principally the progress of commerce which amazed the fourteenth century. The use of the compass, of which no traces can be found before St. Louis, in permitting longer voyages, established connections, used more than formerly, between the coasts of the Mediterranean and those of the ocean and the English Channel. The commerce of the two seas, by the straits of Gibraltar, rare enough before the year 1300, took, at the beginning of that epoch, a rapid stride forward. On the other hand the triumph of Christianity and civilisation in the northern districts along the tributaries of the Baltic, accompanied by the establishment of German settlements along the coasts of that sea in Prussia and Livonia, opened to the merchants northern Europe, long infested by pirates and long difficult of access. Now began a regular exchange of the products of the north and those of the south. Amiens, whose ordinary commerce had long been restricted to Flanders, England, Scotland, and Ireland, now extended the circumference of her commerce to the Hanseatic countries and their towns, to the Scandinavian kingdoms and those of the Spanish peninsula. All these towns prospered, and following more or less the movement of the Flemish cities became store-houses for the products of northern or southern Europe and even of the merchandise of the Orient.

Bruges and Antwerp were at that period markets of great importance. The whole world seemed to gather there; the influx of strangers was unceasing. The Hanseatics, the Venetians, the Genoese elbowed the English and the merchants of all the states of the continent. This favoured that commercial movement begun in the thirteenth century, and largely increased during the first years of the fourteenth, when the cloth industry of Flanders took such a rapid stride and became powerful enough to lay down the law to the governments, a thing which has hardly been seen before. In effect it gained thereby numerous markets for the sale of its products, and abundant capital to increase its operations.

The commercial movement which had its centre in Flanders extended to a certain distance, and made itself felt in the towns of northern France. All these towns had treaties with the Flemish cities. Paris was even affiliated with the Hanseatic League, of which Bruges was the principal warehouse. The safety of navigation and maritime commerce preoccupied the French government in the fourteenth century. In order that the ownership of cargoes might be guaranteed to the ship-owners, Philip the Fair created special tribunals of _commissionaires examinateurs_, charged with judging the questions of flotsam and jetsam on the coasts; these tribunals were the originals of the admiralties. The government also undertook to fight piracy and restrain the usage of letters of marque. It was customary for the proprietors of a vessel robbed by pirates, if they could not obtain satisfaction from the town to which the pirates belonged, to indemnify themselves by selling for their own profit the property of foreigners of the same nation established in the realm. International conventions alone could destroy this barbarous custom. The maritime wars against England were far from being favourable to its suppression; but they helped to restrain and submit its exercise to regulations. Treaties to that effect were signed with several foreign rulers. One council, assembled in Paris in 1314, proscribed letters of marque, as contrary to religion and morals.

Certain ports were opened to foreigners. Harfleur to the merchants of Aragon, of Majorca, Castile, and Portugal who had also free entrance into the Seine; Le Crotoy and Abbeville were opened to those of Castile who had the entrée to the Somme. Philip of Valois made the agreement to maintain these ports, to suppress the taxes which hindered commerce, and to accord various privileges to foreigners, among others that of having consuls and judges of their own nationality. At Harfleur the Spaniards were included among the inhabitants, and participated in the rights of the bourgeoisie. At Rouen they occupied a particular quarter. The Italians received, in 1315, definite privileges from Louis X, in four cities--Paris, St. Omer, La Rochelle, and Nîmes. The Venetian fleet, which came annually to the port of Bruges, stopped generally at Dieppe.

_The Great Fairs_

The fourteenth century is the epoch of the prosperity of the great fairs. The fairs were then to the towns of considerable importance and for certain parts of France what they still are to the villages. At these fairs were bought and sold all such articles as were not common; these purchases and sales could be made only there and at certain times of the year. Since individual commerce offered a great deal of difficulty, and lacked the most indispensable elements of security, it became necessary for the merchants to agree upon the transportation of their merchandise, and to unite in order to insure the fairness, often even the simple possibility, of transactions.

The most important fairs in the fourteenth century were those of St. Denis, and the Lendit, of which the origin was in Merovingian times; those of Champagne, held at Troyes, Provins, Lagny, Rheims, and Bar-sur-Aube, protected by the regulations of Philip the Fair and Philip of Valois, those of Beaucaire in the south. They served as marts for the principal foreign productions, the linens of Holland, which were still an object of luxury; the woollens of England; the silks of Italy; the hides and leathers of Spain; the cloths of Flanders, whose superiority was recognised everywhere; the Italian stuffs, ornamented with embroidery and woven with gold; the wines of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. At Troyes were to be met the merchants of Germany and the countries of the north. To Beaucaire came those of the southern countries, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Berbers, Egyptians; the Genoese came to Beaucaire to buy the cloths woven at Narbonne, Perpignan, and Toulouse, and destined for exportation. Ordinarily the merchants of the same nation, sometimes those of the same town, formed a syndicate. At the fair of the Lendit every town had for its negotiations its particular place, as is the custom to-day in our great expositions.

All the kings, from Philip the Bold, strove to attract foreign merchants by giving them new privileges, that is to say, in multiplying the guarantees which they needed. They were exempted from certain tolls. International treaties were made to assure the free land passage of merchandise transported from one realm to another. We have a remarkable example of this sort of treaty. It was a stipulation, signed in 1327 by the kings of France, England, Spain, Aragon, Sicily, and Majorca.

The fairs of Champagne were the objects of regulations which it was aimed to make as definite and at the same time as favourable as possible. The tariff was fixed for the taxes which were collected there. Royal commissioners were chosen for the police, for brokers, and notaries, in order to assume the sincerity of transactions and of guards to certify to the quality of the merchandise sold. To the merchants of each nation was conceded the right to elect their national judges, and to submit to these judges the regulation of their disputes, except in case of appeal, which could be carried to the tribunal of fairs as a first resort, and as a second resort to the chamber of accounts. Guarantees were also accorded to foreign merchants against deterioration of money and arbitrary confiscations. In order to define the point where usury began, which the laws continued to fight, interest on commercial matter was fixed at fifteen per cent., and the stipulations of private persons were tolerated up to this figure. The importance of the fairs, and the pains taken by the government to make them popular, could not but be favourable to public wealth. A rich and enlightened bourgeoisie was founded in the large cities, at Rouen, Amiens, Rheims, Troyes, Orleans. All these towns and others enlarged their areas, raised façades of cut stone in their principal streets, constructed arcades, galleries, porticoes, and municipal buildings; but Paris already dominated them all. Her population rose to two or three hundred thousand souls. She already possessed some sort of a monopoly for the fabrication of articles of luxury.

Paris had grown with the monarchy. To the advantage of a very considerable commerce, of extended and special industries, were joined others not less important. It was an ecclesiastical and literary centre. A whole quarter was occupied by the population of the schools. Her universities, at the same time French and European, could not fail to play an important rôle in the revolutions of the country and in the discussion of the great interests of the church. Finally, Paris was the seat of parliament, that of the highest administration, the centre of government, and the residence of the court. The greater part of the provinces possessed in the quarter of the Louvre or the quarter of St. Paul, hôtels, where they lived surrounded by guards and numerous servitors, which very often occupied vast spaces with their gardens and out-houses. Ever since then the merchants from the interior or from foreign countries, able workmen, clerks, writers, the nobility, have thronged into the great capital. The bourgeoisie of Paris had more learning, more wealth, and also more pretensions than those of other towns. Their chief and natural representative, the provost of merchants, was one of the powers of the state.

The idea of a national representation, with fixed conditions and attributes, is a modern one, and was almost unknown in the Middle Ages. There were no written constitutions in existence, except civic charters, which had a purely local character. The government on its part, without being absolute, admitted of no binding control. In the meantime, public opinion was being consulted, as it became necessary to reckon with it, and the independence which asserted itself everywhere. In the thirteenth century deputies from the cities were convoked and consulted separately; in the fourteenth they were combined with those of the clergy or the nobility of the provincial estates or the states-general. But no fixed rule was followed. It was the king and his officers who determined each time the conditions and the forms of the election.[k]

FOOTNOTES

[13] [Boutaric,[d] who has made a special study of the reign of Philip the Fair, bases his account of the remarkable events at Anagni on the narratives of Rinaldo de Supino and of Nogaret[l] himself rather than on those of Giovanni Villani[m] and Walsingham,[n] the source of most modern historians. Nogaret’s alleged speech is from the chronicle of St. Denis.[o]

Nogaret says that Philip had sent him to Rome to demand the summoning of a council, but Boniface in fear of the hostile population had retired to his native Anagni. Nogaret learned of the impending excommunication of his master and determined to prevent it at all costs. The Ghibellines of Romagna listened to his plan, and Rinaldo de Supino, their leader and his friend, agreed to accompany Nogaret to Anagni and bring Boniface to terms.

But Nogaret was compelled to take full leadership and promise the protection of France, from all consequences, temporal or spiritual, to his allies. Sciarra Colonna, the pope’s mortal enemy, now joined the scheme. All of this would indicate that Nogaret acted on his own responsibility in the matter of the descent on Anagni, wishing only to protect the king of France from the curse of excommunication, and that the latter was in no way connected with the conception of the affair. As to the events at Anagni, Boutaric says:

“There are fables that Colonna struck the pope in the face with his gauntlet; that he was tied to a donkey with his face toward its tail and paraded through Anagni in the midst of insults; but all these stories should be rejected. It seems certain that the person of Boniface was respected. Nogaret contented himself with holding him captive and pestering him to consent to the convoking of the council. Boniface was immovable; Nogaret was at his wits’ end. After a lapse of three days the people, ashamed of their treachery, came to demand Boniface. Nogaret was obliged to flee.” Dareste[k] holds Colonna guiltless of violence but thinks that others might have injured the pope but for Nogaret.]

[14] The _échiquier_ of Rouen was the ancient feudal court of the dukes of Normandy; it was held alternately at Rouen, Falaise, and Caen. Philip the Fair put royal magistrates at its head and fixed it at Rouen, where it met twice a year at Easter and Michaelmas, whence the expression _les deux échiquiers_. The _grands jours_ were presided over by a judicial commission appointed by the king, but like the _échiquier_ of Rouen it was a local institution that had already long existed.

[15] [Perhaps Guizot’s[p] slightly dissenting view is worth quoting. He says: “It has often been asserted that Philip the Fair was the first who called the third estate to the states-general of the kingdom. The phrase is too grand, and the fact was not new. Under St. Louis deputies of towns were called around the king to deliberate upon certain legislative acts. There are other examples of this. Philip the Fair, then, had not the honour of the first call; and, with regard to assemblies of this kind which occur under his reign, far too great an idea of them is formed. These meetings were very brief, almost accidental, without influence upon the general government of the kingdom, and deputies of towns held but a very inferior place in them. Nevertheless under Philip the Fair they became more frequent than before.”]