merely these parting words: "Father, after the example of our Divine
Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!"  Even the crusader was
extinct in St. Louis; and only the Christian remained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE SICILIAN VESPERS----156]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE TOWN AND FORTRESS OF LILLE----164]

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

[Illustration: The Battle of Courtrai----167]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip the Handsome had been nine years king when Boniface VIII. became
pope.  On his accession to the throne he had testified an intention of
curtailing the privileges and power of the Church.  He had removed the
clergy from judicial functions, in the domains of the lords as well as in
the domain of the king, and he had everywhere been putting into the hands
of laymen the administration of civil justice.  He had considerably
increased the percentage to be paid on real property acquired by the
Church (called possessions in mortmain), by way of compensation for the
mutation-dues which their fixity caused the State to lose.  At the time
of the crusades the property of the clergy had been subjected to a
special tax of a tenth of the revenues, and this tax had been several
times renewed for reasons other than the crusades.  The Church recognized
her duty of contributing towards the defence of the kingdom, and the
chapter-general of the order of Citeaux wrote to Philip the Handsome
himself, "On all grounds of natural equity and rules of law we ought to
bear our share of such a burden out of the goods which God hath given
us."  In every instance, the question had been as to the necessity for
and the quota of the ecclesiastical contribution, which was at one time
granted by the bishops and local clergy, at another expressly authorized
by the papacy.  There is nothing to show that Boniface VIII., at the time
of his elevation to the Holy See, was opposed to these augmentations and
demands on the part of the French crown; he was at that time too much
occupied by his struggle against his own enemies at Rome, the family of
the Colonnas, and he felt the necessity of remaining on good terms with
France; but in 1296, Philip the Handsome, at war with the King of England
and the Flemings, imposed upon the clergy two fresh tenths.  The bishops
alone were called upon to vote them; and the order of Citeaux refused to