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BOOK VIII
RIVALRY BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. (1066-1453)
CHAPTER XXV.
PROGRESS OF THE
ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE FROM PHILIP AUGUSTUS TO PHILIP OF VALOIS.
Internal
administration of Philip Augustus.—Louis VIII (1223) and the regency of Blanche
of Castile. Saint Louis, his ascendancy in Europe; treaties with England
(1259), and with Aragon (1258).— Government of Saint Louis. Progress of the
royal authority.—New character of politics, Philip III (1270), Philip IV
(1285), new war with England (1294).—A new struggle between the Papacy and the
State (1296-1304). The Papacy at Avignon (1309-1376).—Condemnation of the
Templars (1307) .—Administration of Philip IV; reign of his three sons (1314-1328).
Philip Augustus had reigned gloriously for forty-three years; he
had doubled the royal domain by the acquisition of Vermandois,
Amiens, Artois, Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, and a part of
Auvergne, which he divided into 78 provostships, under the superintendence of
bailiffs; he had attacked feudalism in its most odious right, the right of
waging private wars, by establishing the quarantaine-le-roy ( an enforced truce for forty
days between a murder or other acts
of violence and the taking of vengeance by the party injured. In the interval
passions might be appeased, the king might interfere, and justice be
done)
and the asseurement ( a guarantee of
the royal protection to anyone who referred the decision of a
private quarrel to the king’s court instead of appealing
to arms himself); he had adorned and paved Paris, surrounded it with a wall,
and given it markets and a better police ; the Louvre had been begun and the
University of Paris had been established with great privileges, and the
Archives had been started ; the authority of the court of the peers had been
established by a memorable example, the condemnation of the king of England
and, last of all, the royalty reappeared in the light of a legislative power,
and its ordinances were considered as applying to the
whole state, which had not been the case since the capitularies of Charles the
Simple. He had made the royal power entirely independent, to the great
advantage of order, industry, and commerce, which he encouraged, that is to the
advantage both of the royal power and of the people.
This
prince had nevertheless incurred the censures of Rome. He had married as his
second wife Ingeborg of Denmark (1193); but repudiated her the very day after
the marriage. A council of bishops pronounced this union null and void, and
Philip immediately married Agnes of Meran. It
naturally created a great scandal, that a man, because he was king, should make
sport of the honor of a woman, a foreigner who was without help or protection.
Philip thought that the sentence of the bishops would end all discussion. But
Ingeborg appealed to the Pope, and Innocent III took up,
in behalf of outraged morality and religion, the cause of
the poor woman who had been abandoned by everyone
else. Philip resisted his decrees, and the Pope
hurled an interdict against his kingdom. All religious services ceased, and the
people were left without prayers and "Consolation. In vain did the King
expel from their sees all the bishops who observed
the interdict; he was obliged to yield to the universal discontent, which endangered his crown. He sent away
Agnes of Meran, who died of grief, and took back
Ingeborg, in 1201. Another great example had been given to the world, and one
such as Christianity alone was capable of giving.
Philip
showed wisdom in yielding in this case; another time he showed equal wisdom in
resisting : In 1203 he invaded the fiefs which John Had lost by his treachery.
Innocent III threatened him with the anathemas of the Church if he advanced a
step farther; but Philip, after assuring himself of the co-operation of his
great vassals, and having received from them in Writing their promise to uphold
him in this cause against everyone else, even against the Pope, went on with
his undertaking.
In
these two cases the Pope and the king appealed in turn to public opinion and
justice; the one by interesting the people in the cause of morality, the other
by interesting the barons in the legitimate prerogatives of the crown. This
shows some progress, and that we are beginning to leave behind us the times
when force alone was of any avail.
In
his short reign the son of Philip Augustus completed the work
begun by his father. During the lifetime of his father,
Louis VIII had been proclaimed king, for a short
time, by the revolted English barons, and had also made two crusades
against the Albigenses. On becoming king of France he
continued these two wars. He conquered from the English the
part of
Poitou which had escaped Philip Augustus, Aunis,
Rochelle, Limoges, and Perigueux,
and took Avignon in Languedoc.
The
country extending from the Rhone to within four leagues of
Toulouse made submission to him, and he stationed
seneschals or bailiffs at Beaucaire, Carcassonne, and Beziers. Thus all the country west of the Rhone,
with the exception of Guienne and Toulouse, recognized the
royal authority. France was no longer divided into two
countries, and the work of establishing territorial unity was
constantly advancing. But the south of France was avenged by an epidemic which decimated the army and carried off the king.
For
the whole of the last century the sword of royalty, that is, of
France, had been valiantly worn; but the son of Louis
VIII was a child of only eleven years. The barons claimed
that the regency could not be entrusted to a woman, and refused to
make the queen mother, Blanche of Castile, regent. They declared that the king should
not be consecrated unless guarantees were given them against the court of
peers and against the recent encroachments of the royal authority. Here was
then already a strong feudal reaction. Theobald, Count of Champagne, Peter of Dreux, the Duke of Brittany, Hugh of Lusignan, Count of La
Marche, Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, and Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, formed
a league, with Enguerrand, Sire of Coucy, at its head. But the Capetian dynasty was not yet to
undergo the fate suffered by the Carolingians. Their dynasty was founded firmly on its own domain, and on the sympathies of the people, even in the
states of its vassals. It was also sustained by the great authority of the
Papacy, without which neither the usurpation of the Carolingians or that of
the Capetians would have succeeded. The cardinal legate of Saint-Ange was in
the service of Blanche of Castile, and helped her with his advice; while she
herself gained over to her cause the Count of Champagne, the famous
trouvère whose heart she had touched. Louis IX was consecrated in 1227, and the
treaty of Saint-Aubin du Cormier in 1231 brought the war to an end, with all the advantage on the side of the royal power.
Languedoc
had revolted during these events, in which the new
Count of Toulouse, Raymond VII, was secretly concerned. A
last expedition, aided by the Inquisition, brought about the treaty of Paris in
1229, by which the conquests of the last few years were regulated. Raymond
formally abandoned to France all lower Languedoc, which was made into the two divisions
of Beaucaire and Carcassonne under the jurisdiction
of seneschals. He only retained half of the diocese of Toulouse, Agenois, and Rouergue, and
merely a life interest in those, on the condition of their being the dowry of his
only daughter, who was betrothed to Alfonso, the second brother of the king.
The
more the royal power increased, the larger grew the territory directly subject
to it. In 1234 Theobald of Champagne, who had become King of
Navarre by the death of his wife’s father, started off to conquer his
inheritance, and sold the counties of Blois,
Chartres, and Sancerre to the crown of France.
The
majority of Saint Louis was proclaimed in 1236.
We
have now come to the true hero of the Middle Ages, a prince who was as devout as
he was brave, who loved feudalism and yet struck some telling blows against it,
who revered the Church but knew when it was necessary to resist its head; who
respected all rights, but yet pursued the course of justice; who had a gentle,
loving, and sincere heart, filled with Christian charity, and condemning the
method of torturing the body of a sinner in order to save his soul; a man who
lived on earth as if heaven were always before his eyes, and who made his royal
office into a magistracy of order and justice. Rome has canonized him, and the
people still think of him as sitting under the oak at Vincennes administering
justice to all who came to him. This saint, this man of peace, in the
simplicity of his heart did more to extend the royal authority than the wisest
counsellors or than ten warlike kings could have done, because after his time
the king seemed to the people the incarnation of order and justice. He found
the royal authority all the more firmly established from its having just made a
trial of its strength. Another Philip Augustus would have used the many
forces which were ready to his hand to advance still farther in the same
direction, and, with great advantage to the kingdom, would have driven the
English from Guienne which they still held in France;
Saint Louis, on the contrary, checked the progress of the royal authority, but
also gave it a sacred character. The French royalty seemed very admirable at
this time, as wrapped in its robe of blue sprinkled with fleur-de-lis, pure and
upright, it took the part of arbiter between the sovereigns of Europe, and yet
was brave and valiant in repelling any attack made upon it. In the place of the
old feudalism which was hostile to it, it was surrounded by a new feudalism
which was still easily controlled because it had first sprung from the royal
family itself.
After
having rooted out the old feudalism, the royal family spread itself over all
France. Robert, the oldest brother of the king, had been made Count of Artois
(1237), and had succeeded in attaching the northern provinces to the
kingdom by the alliances which he formed. The royal
house gained the southern provinces in the same way. Alfonso, Count
of Poitou and Auvergne, was heir to the great county of
Toulouse, which extended as far as the Pyrenees. Charles, who
received Anjou and Maine in 1246, became Count of Provence by
his marriage with its heiress Beatrice, and extended
the French influence as far as the Mediterranean. With the support of this
family , feudalism and of his lawful rights, Saint Louis was invincible, at
least within his own provinces.
Until
the time of his war with the English, he was not very active, but he
already showed the firmness of a prince who never draws back because he never
advanced further than was just. In 1241, when the Emperor Frederick II detained
the French prelates who were on their way to a council at Rome, Saint Louis
demanded that they should be set at liberty, and wrote: “Since the prelates of
our kingdom in no way have deserved this detention, it is just that your
Highness should set them at liberty; in that way you will appease us, for we
regard their detention as an injury, and the royal majesty would lose its
consideration if we were silent under such circumstances... May your imperial
prudence not be content with pleading your power or your will as an excuse, for
the kingdom of France is not so weak as to be resigned to being
trodden underfoot by you.” The Emperor released his prisoners. Shortly before
this Louis had refused to receive for himself or for one of his brothers the imperial crown of Frederick II, which was
offered him by the Pope. He had also refused to allow the bishops to use
his royal authority in constraining excommunicated persons to submit within a
year and a day, unless he himself were made judge of the causes of the
excommunications.
Louis showed
as much firmness in his actions when he was forced to take up arms, as he had
done in his words. In 1241 the lords of Aquitaine, who had
always been hostile to France, formed a coalition against her. The kings of
England, Aragon, and Navarre were included in it, and the Count of Toulouse
hoped to break the treaty of 1229. The Count of La
Marche began the war by refusing to pay homage to his suzerain
Alfonso, Count of Poitiers. Louis IX demanded arms and supplies of the
communes, and wisely provided himself with tents, wagons, machines, and ammunition,
and brought a fine army into the field. Henry III of England, who was
ill-supported by his barons, came to meet him with
an army of French soldiers. Louis rapidly entered Poitou and La Marche, forced
a passage from Charente to Taillebourg (1242), and
gained a complete victory near Saintes, which he entered. Henry III took to
flight and the French lords submitted to the king. Shortly afterwards the
English king asked for a truce, and the war ended in 1243.
The following year, Saint Louis made a vow to go
to the Holy Land, which vow he performed in 1248. This crusade has already been
described.
This
prince was as anxious to prevent quarrels between states as between private
individuals. As he amicably settled the disputes of his subjects, under the
oak at Vincennes, so too he tried to prevent all wars, those disputes
which cost the people so dear, in blood and tears. With this view he tried to
introduce an exactness and frankness into the relations of the States to each
other, and even when it was his own loss, to do away with all rival
pretensions. On his victory in 1242 he could have forced all the barons to
submit to him; he preferred to leave them free, but told them that they could
not serve two masters, and that all those who held fiefs
both from him and from the king of England must choose the one or the other.
Later he carried this delicacy even farther,—much farther than is customary in
politics, and even farther than was favorable to the legitimate
interests of France. He hardly knew what to think of the conquests of his
predecessors. Perhaps the lack of success of his first crusade
seemed to him a punishment sent by God for some fault into which
he must inquire and from which he must purify himself. “His
conscience pricked him,” on hearing the unceasing complaints of Henry III; and
he consented in 1259 to sign a treaty by which he gave up, or made over to the
king of England, whom he had defeated in a just war, Limousin, Perigord, Quercy,
Agenois, a part of Saintonge, and the duchy of Guienne,
on the condition of receiving liege homage. In return, he was acknowledged
undisputed master of Normandy, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, and of Maine. He thus
gained a right over the provinces retained by him which was of more value in his eyes
than the simple right of conquest.
He
followed the same principles in his negotiations with the king of Aragon,
yielding him irrevocably the full sovereignty of Catalonia and Rousillon, but obliging him to abandon all suzerainty over
the fiefs of Auvergne and Languedoc which had been held from him (1258). A
departure was thus made from all the vague and concurrent rights
which had resulted from the confused origin of the feudal
system, and the states froth this time were free in
their movements and less likely to embarrass and interfere with each other.
The
reputation for integrity possessed by Saint Louis caused him to be chosen
arbiter of the dispute between the king of England and his barons, over the
Provisions of Oxford (1264). He pronounced in favor of the king, but this time
unsuccessfully, for the barons paid no heed to this sentence and overthrew King
Henry III. He was fortunate elsewhere and settled a question of succession
in Flanders which was involving the country in civil
war.
In
the south the French influence was extended even into Italy by Charles of
Anjou, the brother of the king, who by his marriage had become master of
Provence, and who had taken advantage of the continual intercourse between his
new subjects and Italy to interfere in the affairs of that country, where he
finally became king. We have also seen that this prince, after mounting
the throne of Sicily, directed, in his own interest the second
crusade of Saint Louis against Tunis.
In spite of
the ill-success of his two crusades Saint Louis continued the work of Philip Augustus: and under him the
power of France grew apace. His expeditions beyond the
sea showed him to be a truly devout man; and
he merited his name of Saint even more by the wisdom of his internal
government, by his solicitude for the welfare of
his people, and by his beneficent reforms. He felt that it was his mission to substitute peace and order for
this social confusion of his times, and to replace with a true,
impartial, and deliberate justice the mere forms of feudal justice which hardly
concealed the right of force. In 1245 he renewed the ordinance of Philip Augustus which prescribed a
truce between the accuser and the accused during 40 days
(quarantaine-le-roy),
and gave the weaker party the right of making a requisition of the asseurement of the king. He also made
a marked distinction between the judgments of the royal
courts and the judgments of the feudal courts; he abolished throughout
bis domains the judicial duel, which was one of the greatest
evils of the age: “whoever would prove his case
by the combat shall prove it either by witnesses or
written documents” (1258).
The use of
witnesses and written evidence instead of the
lists was the beginning of a revolution. The knights themselves, skilled only in the arts of war, had not sufficient keenness, learning, or
powers of application to find their way through the
subtleties of proofs and the confusion of
documents. They called the lawyers to their aid, who
belonged to a new profession versed in the laws, and especially in
Roman law. At first the barons made these plebeians sit on little benches at
their feet, but before long, in this intercourse between ignorance
and learning, the latter took its rightful place, and the barons, whose words
were of no avail, were silent before their counsellors. The whole direction of
the trial, and the fate of the guilty, even of the highest
noble, was in the hands of the lawyers. They were admitted to all the different
degrees of jurisdiction, to the parliament of the barons, which served the
king as a council, and to the feudal courts presided over by royal bailiffs.
They everywhere tried to enforce the observance of the principles of Roman law,
and to make the French royalty the heir of the imperial
maxims. The quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem was soon
exactly translated into Whatever the king wills, the law wills, and, in
spite of his respect for established rights, Saint Louis did not hesitate to
make laws to be enforced even on the lands of vassals: “Know ye (1257) that on
the deliberation of our council, we have prohibited all wars within our kingdom,
all destruction by fire, and all prevention of agriculture.” In the same way
many suits were transferred from the feudal courts to the
court of the king. By straining a little the right of faussement de jugement which was contained in the feudal customs, and by carrying cases under it to
the suzerain, the lawyers were able to make these appeals
very frequent. They also enlarged the number of royal
cases, that is, the causes in which the jurisdiction was reserved to the king.
The establishment of the royal enquesteurs,
who were something like the missi of Charlemagne,
the fixing of the standard of the king’s money at the definite figure of 79
grains to a silver sou, and its enforced circulation through the provinces,
concurrent with the feudal moneys, all were inspired by a spirit which wished
to extend the royal authority as far as possible, and at the same time to have
its intervention felt everywhere as a benefit.
Saint
Louis was the first king to summon simple burghers to his council, to consult with
them “concerning questions of finance,” and consequently of commerce. He enfranchised
many of the serfs on his domains, and remembered, what feudalism had forgotten,
that “in a Christian kingdom, all men are brothers.” He only founded one commune,
that of Aigues-Mortes, and he abolished those of
Rheims and Beauvais. He had no understanding of political
liberty, which was not even dreamed of by the men of his times, and he was
strongly impressed with the rights of the royal authority, of which
he certainly made a very good use. This same conviction of the
legitimacy of his rights made him ready to defend them at every point. It is, however,
an error to attribute to him, as was formerly done, a pragmatic sanction, which
would have fixed a limit to the pretensions of the Pope, restored to the
cathedral churches and abbeys the right of electing their prelates, repressed
the encroachments of the clergy upon the temporal authority, and restricted
the impositions that could be laid by the papal court upon the churches of
France, to times of most urgent necessity.
The same
principle on which all the virtues of Saint Louis were founded forbade the
possession of one virtue unknown to the Middle Ages; that of tolerance. Saint
Louis was without mercy for Jews and heretics.
Two great
legislative monuments, which, however, are only private collections without
royal sanction, have been attributed to him : 1. Les Etablissements selon l'usage de Paris et d'Orleans, a kind of civil and criminal code which was
compiled in 1272-3, and divided into two books, the first of which hardly did
more than confirm the customary and feudal rights, while the second constantly
refers back to the Roman law : 2. Les Etablissements des metier de Paris, which contains the statutes
of one hundred trades, revised by the provost Stephen Boileau in 1258.
The age of
sentiment breathed its last with Saint Louis. The general council of Lyons
(1274) decreed a crusade, which no one performed; a decree and a result which
were often repeated. Dynastic interests and struggles for political influence
will henceforth govern the external relations of the Europeans states, and the
crusades and Jerusalem were forgotten in the endeavor to organize these states
in a more regular way. In this new era France plays the principal rôle. For the next half century she was possessed of that
preponderance of power in Europe, which had been formerly claimed by the
emperor; and within her limits the work of organization went on more vigorously
and rapidly than anywhere else. At this time the lead in revolution was taken
by the king, as in the time of Hugh Capet it had been by the aristocracy, and
as after Louis XIV it was to be by the people. The French royalty, which
formerly had been limited to the four or five counties possessed by Philip I,
had already broken down many barriers and was now marching with great strides
toward absolute power. It had already imposed upon its turbulent vassals the
king’s peace, the king's justice, and the king’s money, and had assumed the
right of making laws for all.
Philip III, the
son of Saint Louis, found himself the arbiter of the destiny of the whole South
of Europe. By the death of his brother Alfonso, whose body he brought back from
Africa, he inherited the county of Toulouse and Rouergue,
which were joined to the crown; the county Venaissin,
a part of his inheritance, and half of Avignon, he ceded to the Pope.
A defeat
suffered by the Count of Foix, who, on being made prisoner in his capital, was
forced to promise faithful obedience to the king and to give up part of his
lands, served as a lesson to the unruly lords of the Pyrenees; the creation of
a parliament at Toulouse, though it had only a short existence, showed that the
royal authority was not to be excluded from the South. The sway of the king of
France extended to the Pyrenees, and even beyond them. Philip married his son
to the heiress of the kingdom of Navarre, which thus came into the possession
of the house of France; and though he failed in his attempts to have a prince
who was completely under his influence proclaimed king of Castile, and to
obtain the crown of Aragon for his second son Charles, he at least carried his
arms as far as Catalonia, where he took the fortress of Girona. The Capetian
royalty, which had been steadily successful within the kingdom since Louis VI,
was already trying to extend its conquests without. Such attempts were,
however, premature as there was still much to be done within the kingdom before
outside conquest could really be begun. This mistake of the Capetians was
repeated by the Valois when Charles VIII wished to conquer Naples instead of
Flanders, and by the Bourbons when Louis XIV gave Spain to his grandson instead
of gaining the Netherlands for France.
This
unsuccessful expedition to Catalonia was moreover undertaken in pursuance
of a merely family interest. Philip wished to punish Don Pedro, king of Aragon,
for the support he had given to the Sicilians in their revolt against Charles
of Anjou. Philip died on his return from this expedition. The new king, Philip
the Fair (1285), was the lawyer’s king. All he accomplished
was done through them, and he seemed to think any usurpation permissible which
could be made by means of a judicial decree. Philip IV was at first obliged to
continue the war in Spain, but he brought it to
an end as soon as possible. The treaty of Tarascon, which was signed in 1291, allowed France
to withdraw from the ambitious pretensions she had raised across the Pyrenees,
and also to retain Navarre.
Philip
the Fair was wise enough to realize that these external wars were only
injurious as long as internal warfare was not put down, and that the king had
still much to conquer inside his kingdom. He had received Quercy from Edward I, king of England, in consideration of his paying him three
thousand livres rent; which, however, he did not pay. This only tempted him to
take more. A quarrel broke out in 1292 between some sailors of Normandy and of
England, and there was soon war between the seamen of the two countries.
Instead of taking up arms, Philip began proceedings in his capacity of suzerain
by ordering his civil officers pacifically to take possession of Guienne. The English garrisons drove them out; for this
misdeed Philip summoned the king of England before his court, and the latter
consented to a forty days’ sequestration of his province. When forty days
passed and Philip did not give it up, Edward indignantly took up arms against
his suzerain, a crime deserving the punishment of forfeiture. The lawyers
immediately decreed the confiscation of the fiefs of the king of England. In
the end the appeal had to be made to arms, but Philip had the advantage of
having at least the appearance of law on his side.
In
this war, which can be considered as the prelude to those of the next century,
we must notice the alliance of Philip with the Welsh and the Scotch, and that
of Edward with the Count of Flanders and Adolf of Nassau, king of the Romans.
This combination of allies continued for a long time.
The events
of this war resulted in favor of the French king. He
formed an alliance with the Duke of Brittany, which closed that approach to
France, which had become very convenient and so often thrown open to the
English. He had nothing to fear from Adolf of Nassau,
and even concluded a remarkable treaty of alliance with the latter s rival,
Albert of Austria by which it was said France stipulated for the
recognition of the Rhine as her boundary. If his party
in Scotland fell with Balliol, it arose again with Wallace. He himself
invaded Flanders with complete success (1297), while another
French army held Guienne. Edward was kept in England
by the Scotch, and begged for a truce, which was concluded under the mediation
of Pope Boniface VIII on most favorable terms to France (1298). The two kings
delivered up their allies into each other’s hands; and Edward defeated and
killed Wallace, while Philip sent Guy, the Count of Flanders, to the castle of
the Louvre, and took possession of all his country with the exception of
Ghent. He promised to increase the liberties of the burghers, but they
were imprudent enough to reveal their wealth by the magnificence of their
dress. “I have seen six hundred queens,” said the queen of France with
displeasure. Flanders was in fact the richest country in Europe, for it was the
country where the most work was done. In this fertile country population and
wealth had rapidly increased. There were many cities, containing an active and
industrious population, who were attached to England from the fact that the
wool used in their manufactures was derived from there, as were the cities of Guienne, especially Bordeaux, because England furnished
them with a steady market for their wines. The cloths of Flanders were sold
throughout all Christendom, even as far as Constantinople, and the cities of
the Netherlands were the markets where the products of the North, brought
thither from the Baltic, were exchanged for those, of the South, which came
from Venice and Italy by the Rhine.
Philip
appointed James Chatillon governor over them; he overwhelmed them with taxes,
which incited them to revolt. The French nobles hastened thither under Robert
of Artois, to restore order and to pillage these peasants. With the imprudence
which they have so often shown, they plunged head first into a ditch with which
the Flemings had protected their front, and more than 6000 were massacred.
This battle of Courtray (1302) was a terrible revelation
to the French lords; it showed them that villeins could have as much courage as
nobles, and, like them, knew how to fight. Philip the Fair, who had lost his
brother Robert of Artois and his chancellor Peter Flotte in this battle, marched upon Flanders with an army raised by means of forced
contributions. He was victorious at Mons-en-Puelle (1304), but the Flemings still resisted. To put an
end to the war he restored Flanders to her count, and only retained French
Flanders, Lille, Douai, Orchies, and Bethune.
Thus
the French royalty was forced to draw back before the Flemish democracy, but
the German royalty almost at same time was obliged to retreat before the Swiss
democracy. The isolated communes of France succumbed; in Flanders and in
Switzerland, they joined forces and were triumphant.
Philip
the Fair, in order to rule far and wide as he wished to do, required a great deal
of money. The expenses of the administration, the army, the
fleet, and the subsidies to foreigners became enormous while the resources
remained just what they were under the feudal system, that is they amounted to
almost nothing. The result was that the kings grew perfectly indifferent to the
means employed as long as money was raised. Philip pillaged the Jews, but in
this he only followed the ancient tradition. He also gradually lowered the
standard of the money, and imposed taxes upon the clergy. This latter course
raised a storm, which proved nothing less than the renewal of the quarrel
between the Papacy and the Empire.
The
quarrel between Pope and Emperor is too often represented as a struggle between
Italy and Germany, while these two countries were merely the
principal theater of hostilities. It extended throughout the
whole of Europe, because it really was the struggle between the
spiritual and temporal powers, which has lasted almost to the present day. In
the time of Gregory VII and Innocent IV it was carried on mainly by the Pope
and the Emperor; in the time of Boniface VIII the king of
France was the opponent of the Holy See.
Boniface
VIII, a native of Anagni, had been a canon at Paris and at Lyons. When he was
elected Pope, on the abdication of Celestin V, the great family of the Colonna,
the Ghibellines of Rome, accused him of having forced the abdication; he immediately banished them. The world had greatly changed since the time of
the Innocents and the Gregorys, but none the less did
Boniface resume their projects. The day of his installation his horse was led by the
kings of Sicily and of Hungary, and during the banquet
they waited upon him at table, with their crowns on their
heads. In the Bull Unam sanctam his language even surpasses
that of Innocent III; for instead of being content with acknowledging the
existence of two powers, the spir and the temporal, of which one is
inferior to the other, he seemed to attempt to absorb the latter and to completely
subordinate the royal power to the tiara.
Great
force was given to his pretensions by the fact that as under Justinian the corpus
juris civilis had been drawn up by collecting the
edicts of the emperors and the opinions of their jurisconsults, and in this
way they had been made imperishable, so since the time of Gregory IX, or even
earlier, the corpus juris canonici, or the
canon law, had been forming by writing the pontifical decretals and
rescripts in a collection which grew unceasingly.
This
ecclesiastical law was interpreted by the canonists, and as, in the
interpretation of any law, the spirit of the legislator is always what is
sought for, the jurisconsults, in studying this law, encountered first of all
the spirit of papal dominion which had inspired it; for
instance, the right of deposing kings and emperors, which could be read in
every line of it. Therefore they tried to make this spirit prevail. Thus the
Papacy possessed in all the Christian states advocates who maintained the
cause of its ambition.
In
right of these same principles of canonical law, the Pope was able not only to
impose religious laws, but also to exempt from them; he possessed the
right of granting dispensations, a right which cost the Papacy very dear in
later times. He also claimed the right of disposing of ecclesiastical
benefices, at first of a certain number. Honorius III only asked that each
church should have two prebendaries appointed by the Holy
See, but later Clement IV, Boniface VIII, and Clement V introduced the theory
that to the Pope, as universal patron, belonged the distribution of all
benefices. Under Henry III England was in a manner invaded by Italian priests.
The pretension to the right of disposing of the ecclesiastical revenues of all
Christendom followed as a natural consequence; and from 1199 Innocent III
levied from the whole Christian clergy a fortieth of their income, which he had
collected by his own agents. Under various pretexts his successors renewed and
multiplied orders of this kind, and we must not forget that during the Middle
Ages the clergy possessed about one-third of Germany and a fifth each of France
and England.
The
princes were made uneasy by this great wealth of the clergy, and some of them
felt the danger of it and took measures to restrict the increase of this wealth
by limiting by law the right of the clergy to acquire any landed property
which should come into mortmain, that is, where any future change of ownership
became impossible, and where the land was exempt from public charges. This was
a right which, in a time when land was the only capital, insured an enormous
power to the united and disciplined body into whose possession it came. Such
was, among others, the object of the law published in England in 1279 under the
title of the Statute of Mortmain.
The
ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the fortunate rival of the civil jurisdictions,
had made a like progress. It was not the clergy alone who were removed from lay
tribunals, but many persons by means of a simple religious vow, or by a promise
to go on a crusade, acquired the same privilege, and a great many suits were
carried at once before the ecclesiastical tribunals. At first the secular power
was not opposed to this, and several kings favored the progress of the ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, undoubtedly because the feudal justice lost more than the royal
justice by this progress. In England, however, this extension of the
jurisdiction of the clerical tribunals had been in the twelfth century the
cause of a bloody conflict between the temporal power and the
clergy. But Thomas à Becket, though dying, was triumphant. Whatever the clergy
and the bishop had acquired in the matter of jurisdiction, the Holy See now
tried to obtain by means of appeals to the court of Rome, just as it was trying
to obtain, by levies of money, a part of the wealth they had acquired.
Armed
with the canons of the Church, which seemed to put the law on his side, and
sustained by the clergy and by the great army of mendicant friars, how could
Boniface VIII fail to think that the head of a Church which possessed so much
wealth, such a system of land, and so extended a jurisdiction,
was the superior of kings? In 1300, he would have smiled at any doubt on the
subject, when at the great jubilee appointed by him, he appeared, it was said,
before the numberless Christians who had gathered at Rome, in the imperial
ornaments and preceded by two swords, and when the treasures of Europe were
poured out before the altar of St. Peter. Three years later the whole scene had
changed, and the temporal power, after so many defeats, had suddenly triumphed,
and it was definitely decided that Europe was not to become a
theocracy. This blow to the papal power was struck by France.
Nevertheless,
since France existed, she had never been unworthy of the title of eldest
daughter of the Roman Church. Under Clovis she had been the right arm of the
Church against the Arians, under the Carolingians against the, Lombards, the
Greeks, and the idolators of Germany, and later still against the Albigenses.
France had sent many men to the crusades, and had given shelter to fugitive
popes. She was covered with monasteries, and her University of Paris, her
doctors, and her Saint Bernard, were among the lights of Catholicism. It was
with great reluctance that the popes had excommunicated Philip I and Philip
Augustus for flagrant sins against the moral law. They had given to the house
of France the kingdom of Sicily, of which it had taken possession, and that of
Aragon, which it was unable to gain. Even Boniface praised the family of the Capets on every occasion. But the interests of the two
powers, which had been united so long, now became opposed to each
other, and war broke out under a hard, merciless man, who allowed no
considerations to interfere with his projects.
The
difference between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII began in 1296, over the
question of the taxes imposed by the king on the churches of France for
the needs of the war. By the Bull Clericis laicos the
Pope advanced the pretension that no tax could be imposed upon ecclesiastics
without the consent of the Holy See. He excommunicated every clergyman who paid
a tax without the order of the Pope, and all who should establish such taxes
“whoever they might be” (1296). This was to exempt the immense
land of the Church from the action of the local governments in behalf of the
national needs ; it was to constitute a separate State within the State. The
French royalty, which had been occupied for the last century in trying to
re-establish the unity of authority which had been broken down by the feudal
system, could not permit one-fifth of the French territory to be removed from
its control.. Philip replied in his defense by forbidding by law all foreigners
to sojourn in France, which expelled all the Roman priests and the bearers of
the bull, and by not allowing any money to go out of the country without his
permission, which was intended to intercept the revenue of the Holy See. The
Pope was intimidated by the anger of the king, and took a step
backward. He incited him to be on his guard against the treacherous counsellors
who surrounded him, and besought him to treat the Church mildly, who, whenever she should see him in danger, would spare no means to help him, “not
even the cross and the chalice.” This, however, was not enough for Philip; he
claimed that as the clergy were citizens of the State as well as members of the
Church they should contribute to its defense, if not by taking up arms at least
by giving subsidies. The Pope authorized the levying of certain tithes,
recognizing the right of the royal power to impose such taxes, and only
reserving for himself the right of preventing extortions. Peace seemed to be
re-established, and Boniface VIII sealed his reconciliation by pronouncing
the canonization of Saint Louis the following year. But in 1301 the quarrel
was revived by the supercilious interference of the Pope in the internal
affairs of the country. One of his legates, Bernard Saisset,
the bishop of Pamiers, defied the king to his face.
The king had him arrested on the pretext of a conspiracy against his authority,
and began a suit against him. However, he did not dare strike a blow against a
man who was clothed with an ecclesiastical office, and asked the archbishop of
Narbonne, his metropolitan, to degrade him canonically. The archbishop referred
the matter to the Pope, who convoked a council at Rome, and threatened the king
with excommunication for having dared lift his hand against a bishop. At the
same time he promulgated the Bull Ausculta fili, in which he reproached the king with overwhelming
his people, both the clergy and the laity, with exactions, with disturbing them
by changing the value of their money, with encroaching on the ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, with annulling the effect of episcopal sentences, and, finally,
with swallowing up the revenues of vacant churches under the abusive pretexts
of the right of regale. Moreover, the pretension of the Pope that there
was within the kingdom a power above that of the king’s, that of the Holy See,
was discernible in his words : “God has placed us, unworthy though we be, over
kings and kingdoms, in order that we shall root out, destroy, disperse, edify,
and plant in his name and by his doctrine. Do not allow yourself to think that
you have no superior, and that you are not subject to the head of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy. Whoever thinks this is a madman; whoever supports
him in this belief is a heretic.”
The reproaches
of the Pope on the subject of the bad administration of Philip the Fair were
well founded; but, as we have already seen, neither the king nor the Pope had
any very clear idea of the limits of the temporal authority of the former or
the spiritual authority of the latter. As every evil deed was a sin, the
pontiff thought that he had a right to judge and punish the reprehensible acts
of the prince, and the prince on his side, guided by lawyers, who followed the
spirit of the Roman law and recognized the absolute
authority of the king, believed that he had a right to interfere in the
administration of the churches, and desired that the bishops, like the rest of
his subjects, should be under the jurisdiction of his officers and his
tribunals, just as they were at the time of the Roman emperors and of
Charlemagne. These rival pretensions were the cause of a bitter quarrel. Philip
declared in full court that he would disinherit his children if they
condescended to recognize any power above them, in temporal affairs, except
that of God.
As the
pontifical bull contained certain home truths, Philip had it publicly burned
(1302). His famous chancellor, Peter Flotte, then
composed and distributed to the public what was supposed to be an extract from
this bull, in which the original terms of the Pope, in claiming the temporal
as well as the spiritual power, were exaggerated; and he also composed a reply
to this false bull in the same style: “Philip, King of the French, by the
grace of God, to Boniface who calls himself Pope, little or no greeting. Let
your very great fatuity know that—etc.” This was putting himself in the wrong
as far as the outside appearances went, though he was
in the right as to the main matter.
The
king must have felt entirely supported by the opinion of the nation to dare
advance so far in the direction of violence and outrage. This was in fact the
case, and he wished to prove it. On the 10th of April, 1302, he assembled in
the Church of Notre Dame a parliament, to which for the first time deputies
from communes were admitted, and which for this reason is considered as the
first assemblage of the States General. Clergy,
barons, and commoners all pronounced in favor of the king, and in an address,
which was supposed to come from the deputies of the third estate, spoke thus to
the king: “To you, most noble prince, to you, our lord Philip, the people of
your kingdom present this entreaty and demand, that you shall preserve the
sovereign freedom of this state, which will not permit you to recognize as your
sovereign on earth, in your temporal affairs, any other than God.” Thus the
first word spoken by the people of France was a cry for national independence.
To
this assembly of France Boniface VIII opposed one of the Church. Forty-five
prelates left the kingdom to go to a synod at Rome, in spite of the threats of
Philip, who seized their goods and commenced legal proceedings against them.
Boniface now promulgated the famous Bull Unam Sanctam.
In this he declared that the Church is a single body and has but a single head; that
it possesses the two swords, one spiritual, the other temporal; the formers could
be used by the Church, the latter for the Church ; the former was in the hands
of the priesthood, the latter in those of the barons and kings, but
was only to be used when and in what manner the priesthood should permit. After
this declaration Boniface excommunicated Philip, who persisted in his hostile
measures.
Philip,
however, had again assembled his States General (1303), putting his trust in
the firm support which he had found in the representatives of his country. The
lawyers showed great feeling against the Pope. William of Nogaret,
professor of law at Toulouse, accused him of simony, heresy, and of the most
infamous vices. Another lawyer, William of Plasian,
proposed that the king should convoke a general council and summon Boniface to
appear before it. Both these men were from the south, and undoubtedly sore old
Albigensian leaven stirred them up against the papal
power,—the
executioner of their country: the grandfather of Nogaret had been burned as a heretic. One of the counsellors who had the most influence
with the King, Peter Dubois, went even further and demanded the suppression of
the temporal power of the Pope ; the proposition of Plasian was adopted. It was necessary to seize the person of the Pope in
order to arraign him before the tribunal by which he was to be condemned.
William of Nogaret went to Italy, where he came to an
understanding with Sciarra Colonna, a Roman noble,
who was a mortal enemy of the Pope. Boniface was then in his native city, Anagni.
By means of money Nogaret gained over the chief
of the soldiers of Anagni, and entered the place one night with four hundred
men at arms and several hundred foot-soldiers. On hearing the noise they made
in entering the city, and their cries of “Death to the Pope! Long
live the King of France!”. Boniface thought his last hour had come. The active
old man (he was eighty-six years old) showed no weakness. He clothed himself in
his pontifical garments, seated himself on his apostolic chair with the tiara
on his head, the cross in one hand and the keys of St. Peter in the other, and
thus awaited his murderers. They called on him to abdicate, and Colonna cried:
“Son of Satan, give up the tiara you have usurped!”. He replied: “Here is my
head, here my neck ; betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like Him, at
least I will die as Pope.” Sciarra Colonna dragged
him from his throne, struck him with his iron glove, and would have killed him.
if Nogaret had not prevented him. “O wretched Pope,”
said this grandson of the Albigenses, “consider and see the kindness of my lord
the King of France, who, in spite of the distance of his kingdom, preserves and
defends you through me.” In this way at least the scene was described.
Nevertheless Nogaret hesitated to drag the old man away from
Anagni. He allowed the people time to recover, from their stupor. The citizens
armed themselves, and the peasants collected and together they drove the French
from the city. The Pope, for fear that poison should be mixed with his food,
had remained three days without eating, and shortly afterward died of shame and
anger at the unworthy insults he had endured.
With
Boniface VIII fell the haughty power of the Roman pontiff, which two centuries
before had kept the emperor, the supreme representative of the temporal power,
standing barefoot in the snow for three days. This vengeance, however, was not
taken by the emperor, but by the king of France, who now held almost the same
place in Europe that was formerly held by the emperor, and who represented
more than any other sovereign the principle of the separation of nationalities,
which the pontifical government had desired wholly to eradicate, and also that
of the independence of the temporal government, which the Holy See had wished
to subordinate to the ecclesiastical power.
Philip
the Fair had failed in his attempts against the Flemish soldiers, a new power,
but he had succeeded against the Papacy, a power of former days. He did not
feel that his success was complete until he had the Papacy completely under his
control.
The
one thought of the successor of Boniface, Benedict XI, in his short pontificate
of seven months, was to reconcile the two ancient allies, the Papacy and
France, and he revoked all the excommunications pronounced by Boniface except
those against Nogaret, Colonna and the authors of the attack on Anagni. His death has sometimes been attributed
to poison, but that is improbable. Philip, however, took measures to gain
control of the election of the new pontiff; and Bertrand de Goth,
archbishop of Bordeaux, was proclaimed pope, with the name
of Clement V, after having promised the king to follow
all his wishes.
The
Papacy, from the time when it became a power notoriously
subordinate to the king of France, lost much of its moral
authority over the Christian world. Clement V did not
dare appear at Rome; he was crowned at Lyons (1305), and took up his residence at Avignon, a possession of the Holy
See to the west of the Alps, where both by his manner of life and his weak
subserviency to the king of France, he gave great
cause for scandal. After him even popes resided
in this city, and were completely under the influence of France (1309-1376). This
was the time of the Babylonian captivity, which unsettled the Church and
prepared the way for the great schism of the West, which itself was the
precursor of the Reformation.
Philip
was never content with half a vengeance. After Boniface’s death, he wished to
have his memory condemned and his bones burned like those of a heretic, in
order to give success to his cause and to remove the effects produced
throughout Christendom by his violent deeds. In vain
did Clement V use all his complaisance and his efforts to escape from the
false position in which he had placed himself. He succeeded in avoiding
pronouncing the sentence himself, but was obliged to summon an ecumenical
council to judge a cause which was in reality that of the Papacy itself. The
council met at Vienne in 1311, and declared that Boniface VIII had always been
orthodox, but that Philip had not committed any sin against the Church.
Villani
describes a dark scene, the sinister interview between the Pope and the king in
the forest of St. Jeand’Angely, where the latter
sold the tiara and the former bought it. This interview really never took
place, but certain conditions were undoubtedly made and accepted. One of these
was no less a thing than the destruction of the Order of the Templars. This
military order, the living reminder of the crusades, was an obstacle and a
danger in the path of the royal power by its devotion
to the Holy See, its intimate connection with all the nobility
of Europe, especially with that of France, from which it was mainly recruited, its popularity gained by valor, its
extension throughout Christendom, where it possessed more than 10,000 manors
and a number of impregnable castles, and finally its firm union
in an organization which placed the knights under the control of a grand master.
Besides all these considerations they were very rich ; in the treasury of the
order there were 150,000 gold florins, without counting all the silver and the
precious vessels.
Nothing
was known of what happened in the houses of the order. Everything was kept
secret ; but vague rumors spoke of orgies, scandals, and impieties. Philip
could with the same blow overthrow these men who were so much to be feared, and
gain possession of rich spoils.
On
the morning of the thirteenth of October, 1307, the Templars were arrested
throughout all France. This was an iniquitous deed, but it shows the power of
the king, and with what promptness he was obeyed. His influence was so great
that he caused all the sovereigns of Europe to make the same arrests. In vain
did Clement V try to call this formidable process before his own court; Philip
maintained that in this affair he was acting as the champion of the Church.
The charges brought against the Templars were of secret impiety and of a
profound immorality, and they did not succeed in clearing themselves entirely
from these accusations, to which some weight was given by their constant
intercourse with the East. Torture was used with the usual result of extorting
all sorts of avowals, both false and true. Philip, by an assembly of the States General, convoked at Tours, declared that the
knights were worthy of death (t3o8). Provincial councils were then assembled to
judge them; that of Paris was presided over by Marigney,
the archbishop of Sens, and brother of the king’s first minister. Fifty-four
Templars were here condemned to die at the stake, and this frightful sentence
was carried out (1310). Two years later Clement V, in the Council of Venice,
pronounced the abolition of the order. After this Philip the Fair assumed the
cross and promised to go in their place to the Holy .Land. Finally, in
1314, James du Molay, the Grand
Master of the Temple, and several other dignitaries,
were brought from prison, where they had suffered fearful things from torture
and from the dampness of their cells. The Grand Master and the Commander
of Normandy, after having retracted their previous avowals, were condemned to
the flames; they died protesting their innocence. A popular legend was founded
on their death : it was rumored that the Grand Master had summoned the Pope and
the king to appear before the throne of God, the one at the end of forty days,
the other at the end of the year. Philip died on November 29, 1314.
During
this reign two new elements of the government either made their
appearance or were organized, namely, the States General and the Parliaments. An ordinance of 1303 decree that twice a year the
parliament should be held at Paris, the echiquier at Rouen, and the grands jours at Troyes. The
parliament of Paris was permanently fixed in that city, where, indeed, it had
always been the custom to hold it. The institution of the ministère public, or of magistrates who were
charged to defend the rights of the king, and later the rights of society in
general, in all suits, seems to date back to Philip the
Fair.
Philip
IV often changed the value of the money, and he made it so difficult for the
lords to coin money that they preferred to sell their right to do so to the
king. As he needed money at whatever price he had
to pay for it, he freed many of his serfs, disguising his interested motives
under fine words, concerning the “freedom of every human creature.” He imposed
taxes on everything, even on the hay sold in the market, which caused in 1304 a
great rising in Paris. Money became a power, and its increased rapidity of
circulation demanded the institution in 1305 of fourteen bureaus of exchange in
different parts of the kingdom and of the creation in the parliament of a
chamber of accounts. This indicated a great social change. War had already
lost its feudal character and began to be carried on by mercenaries. Philip the
Fair-defeated the Flemish fleets by Genoese galleys.
Three
sons of Philip the Fair ruled after him. Under the first, Louis
X, the nobility were in active opposition to the
lawyers; they formed confederations and demanded the restoration of the “good
customs of the time of Saint Louis,” and dragged the king
with them in this reaction, of which the victims were the ministers
of Philip the Fair, Enguerrand de Marigny and Raoul de Presle (1315). Louis X continued to give
freedom to serfs, “ because in the country of the Francs no one
should be a serf.” But he obliged them to buy their liberty, which greatly
lessened the boon,—firstly, because it must be paid for; and
secondly, because they were not free to refuse it.
At
the death of Louis X (1316), as he only left one daughter, Jane, and as his
wife was pregnant, the question as to the succession of women came up for the
first time. The barons, especially the Duke of Burgundy, Jane’s uncle, wished
that the crown should be given to the daughter of the king, in case the queen
did not give birth to a son. The queen gave birth to a son, but he only live few
days. At once Philip V, the brother of Louis X, who was invested with the
regency, was crowned at Rheims, and he caused the clergy and the bourgeoisie of
Paris, who were assembled in the market-place, to declare that “a woman never
could succeed to the crown of France,”—an entirely new principle, and one
nowhere to be found in the Salic law, to which it has
so often been referred.
The
reign of Philip V was a strange mixture of wise ordinances for the
administration of the rivers and forests, and for the establishment of a unity
of weights and measures throughout the kingdom, and at the same time of
persecutions of the Franciscans, lepers, and Jews, of accusations of
witchcraft, and of bloody massacres. When the people saw Philip V die, in his
turn, without male issue, they thought that a curse hung over the family of
Philip the Fair (1322).
The
reign of Charles IV, called the Fair, was very much like that of his brother.
The persecutions and executions continued; the members of the parliament grew
bolder and bolder, and had a lord of the south, Jourdain de l’Isle, who
was famous for his cruelty, hung on “ the common gallows.”
Besides
this, he favored the revolution in England that deposed Edward II, and received
the homage of the latter’s son for Guienne and
Ponthieu. He almost succeeded in gaining the imperial crown of
Germany. But a certain fatality was attached to this house. These tall and handsome
princes, who all seemed to have the promise of a long career, died in the prime
of life,—Philip the Fair at forty-six, Louis X at twenty-seven, Philip the Long
at twenty-eight, and Charles the Fair at thirty-four. The people considered
these early deaths as a sign of the vengeance of Heaven on the family who had
laid violent hands upon Boniface VIII, who perhaps had poisoned Benedict X.,
and who had burned the Templars.
The
Middle Ages are now drawing to their close, especially in France, for all that
had most flourished in them, the crusades, chivalry, and feudalism, had either
come to an end or were very near it. The Papacy, baffled in Boniface
VIII, was a prisoner in Avignon; the successor of Hugh Capet was a despot, and
the sons of villeins sat in the States General along with
the nobles and the clergy.
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