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THE KINGDOM OF BURGUNDY OR ARLES
FROM
THE ELEVENTH TO THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The region, whose history from the eleventh to the end of the
fifteenth century forms the subject of this chapter, has been known by
different names in turn. It was called regnum Burgundiae after the
people who occupied it at the time of the barbarian invasions; its ruler was
known also as rex Iurensis, rex Austrasiorum, or even rex Alamannorum
et Provinciae. It is not until the twelfth century that we meet with the
expression “kingdom of Arles” (regnum Arelatense) to which “and of
Vienne” is often added as well. In the course of this chapter the term “kingdom
of Burgundy” will be employed for the earlier period, and “kingdom of Arles and
Vienne” for the later.
The history of this kingdom is the
history of a part of Gaul which derived extreme importance from its
geographical situation. On the south it was bounded by the sea, from the
western mouth of the Rhone to the neighbourhood of Ventimiglia. Its eastern
frontier, starting from the coast, coincided at first with the modern frontier
between France and Italy, except that it included the valley of Aosta, now part
of Italy. From there the line ran to the St Gotthard, and thence north to the
Aar and the Rhine, thus bringing into the kingdom not only French Switzerland,
but also an important stretch of territory with a Germanspeaking population.
Basle marked the most northerly point of this region, in which the principal
towns were Geneva, Lausanne, Sion, and Solothurn. Next the line passed through
the gap of Belfort to the southern Vosges, and then turned back to the Saône,
following its course almost exactly, but relinquishing to France that part of
the county of Châlon which lay on the left bank of the river. On the other
hand, it crossed the Saône lower down, so as to include the town and county of
Lyons and the county of Forez. Farther south, it diverged from the Rhone to
embrace Tournon, Annonay, Viviers, and the Vivarais, afterwards following the
course of the river to the Mediterranean. The kingdom thus comprised western
Switzerland and that part of modern France which corresponds to the Free County
of Burgundy, Savoy, the Lyonnais, Dauphiné, Vivarais, and Provence.
It is obvious that this kingdom was
composed of two distinct elements: in the West, a region varying in width, made
up of the valleys of the Saône and the Rhone and adjacent lowlands; in the
East, a mountainous region of the Alps and the Jura, containing the loftiest
peaks in Europe. The plain was one of the great arteries of the Western world,
thanks to the roads which, from ancient times, followed the course of the Rhone
and then continuing north along the Saône brought the Mediterranean into touch
with the fairs of Champagne, with North and East France, and with Alsace; to
these must be added the transverse routes crossing the great rivers at
different points, such as Avignon and Lyons, and linking up southern Gaul and
the Spanish peninsula with Italy and with Switzerland. These lowlands by
themselves alone appeared a most desirable domain, and, if we can credit
Gervase of Tilbury, who wrote at the beginning of the thirteenth century, one
quite easy to master. They are, he says, lands blessed by heaven, spreading out
in fertile champaigns rich in the gifts of nature, filled with trading towns,
inhabited by a population mentally alert and excitable, who are active or
listless as the impulse takes them but, when circumstances demand, ready to
endure hardship and suffering. These peoples, Gervase adds, need a kind
and upright master; for they are prone to submit to any power which will
display sufficient energy to make itself feared.
The highlands, however, were a far more difficult conquest.
Thanks to their configuration and their rugged character, the inhabitants had
been able to retain their independence for a much longer period against the
Roman conqueror; while the feudal lords who held sway there in the Middle Ages
were not disposed to submit to the authority of a distant sovereign, however
great the prestige of his title, and, in spite of the ban of temporal and spiritual
authority alike, they were well able to bar their passes against any who
refused to pay what they deemed to be an adequate toll.
How powerful, then, would that ruler have been, in the Middle
Ages, who could have exercised an uncontested authority over mountain and plain
alike! He could have penetrated without difficulty into the lands of the King
of France from the north of the county of Burgundy, the traditional route of
invaders. He would have had control of the passes of the Jura and the Alps, and
the opening of the gates into Italy, France, and Switzerland would have been
subject to his pleasure. Master of the Mediterranean ports, be could easily
have dominated this sea, in which Latins, Byzantines, and Arabs were to dispute
the hegemony of the world, and he could have held at his disposal the routes by
which the crusaders went to the attack on Syria and Egypt. On several occasions
during the Middle Ages it looked as though such a kingdom was on the point of
being established. The following pages will describe how and why this
consummation failed of its realisation.
With the break-up of the Carolingian Empire there came into
being, as is well-known, two new kingdoms. The one, Jurane or Upper Burgundy,
had Swiss Burgundy as its core; the other, Provence, of which at first Vienne
was the political centre, extended over the valley of the Rhone from Lyons to
the sea. The frontier between these two kingdoms varied with the change of
circumstances and as each was powerful in turn. Now, between 920 and 930, it happened
that the King of Upper Burgundy, Rodolph II, and the ruler of Provence, Hugh,
were in turn tempted with the prospect of bringing the Italian peninsula
beneath their sway. Rodolph II was the first to make the attempt; but after
some short-lived successes he had to recognise his powerlessness and to
withdraw. Hugh was more fortunate; but, to avoid the danger of a fresh
enterprise on Rodolph’s part, he bought him off by abandoning to him the
greater part of his rights in Provence. After various changes of fortune, the
son of Rodolph II, Conrad the Pacific, was able to unite the two kingdoms under
his rule. Thus was established a State which was to exist for three-quarters of
a century, nominally, at any rate, under the control of Conrad and his son Rodolph
III, the Sluggard.
The formation of this kingdom was due neither to geography,
nor to ethnography, nor to commercial relations; it was the product of a purely
political contrivance. The numerous peoples scattered throughout its parts were
united by no permanent bond. So artificial was the structure that, as has been
seen, some considerable time elapsed before the kingdom received a definite and
regular name. And not only a title, but also the reality of power, was lacking
to the monarchy; without an army of its own at its disposal, without financial
resources regularly assured, and without an organised and trained body of
officials, its existence was halfstifled by the rapid development of
ecclesiastical principalities and lay powers. By the side of the great
ecclesiastical lordships of Besançon, Lyons, and Vienne—to mention only the
most important—there were to be found the domains of secular dynasties,
especially those of Otto-William in the County of Burgundy (Franche Comté), of
Guigues in the Viennois, of Humbert Whitehands in Maurienne, and of the counts
and marquesses of Provence in the valley of the lower Rhone. It was to these
local lords far more than to the king that the people looked for protection
from the incursions of the Saracens, raiding from their Alpine strongholds or
landing upon the Mediterranean shores. The real authority rested with these
local rulers, and only the shadow remained to the monarchy.
Wandering up and down their territories, the kings dwelt
where they could. Hardly ever were they to be seen at Arles, in spite of the
stillsurviving tradition which gave this city exalted rank in the hierarchy of
the towns of Gaul. On the other hand, they frequently resided at Vienne, the
rival of Arles and proud, like it, of its Roman memories, where they long
retained domains of their own; also in Jurane Burgundy, where were the best
part of the lands belonging to the royal focus—often they settled in the
lake-district of western Switzerland and in Savoy. On different occasions they
had lived at Basle, and sometimes too they had taken up their residence in
great abbeys such as Payerne; above all, at St Maurice-en-Valais (Agaune),
whose history was closely bound up with that of the royal house. These weak
kings further aggravated their weakness by grants from their domains to the
nobles. In truth, the kingship of the rulers of this kingdom, which had no name
and no capital, no treasure and no army, and resembled in many respects that of
the later Carolingians, was an illusion rather than a reality.
In the beginning of September 1032, the cathedral of Lausanne
received the mortal remains of Rodolph III. This prince left no legitimate
issue, and it had for some time seemed that the succession was bound to fall to
the Emperor Henry II, who was the nearest relative in the collateral line.
Henry, doubtless estimating none too highly the efficacy of an appeal to
hereditary right, had taken his precautions during Rodolph’s lifetime by
occupying Basle; further,Rodolph had bound himself in solemn conventions to
bequeath to him the succession. The prospect of the accession to the Burgundian
kingdom of a powerful sovereign—the most powerful in Europe—had alarmed many of
the local nobles. Possibly they were reassured by the death of Henry, whom
Rodolph outlived. If so, their security did not last long. They soon learnt in
Burgundy that the German crown had fallen into the hands of an able and
determined ruler, Conrad II, who, as his object was to reconstitute the Empire
of Charlemagne, could not relinquish the task undertaken by his predecessor in
Burgundy; he had all the more excuse for continuing it as he too was a near
relative of King Rodolph III. Actually, in the order of affinity, Conrad’s
hereditary claims were inferior to those of a powerful French baron, Odo II,
Count of Chartres, Blois, and Tours. But Conrad had been able in 1027 to
persuade Rodolph III to set aside the rights of the next of kin; a convention
assured to him the succession to the feeble sovereign. In accordance with this
agreement, on Rodolph’s death a Burgundian deputation had to bring to the
Emperor the emblems of the kingship, the royal diadem and the lance of St
Maurice, the patron saint who was as popular in the northern part of the Rhone
valley as St Denis and St Martin were in France. On various occasions Count Odo
tried to win his heritage by force of arms; but the Emperor Conrad II was able,
by diplomacy or force, to foil his attempts and to obtain general recognition
as the successor of the last of the Burgundian kings. Legally, then, the
kingdom which was ultimately to be known as the kingdom of Arles became in this
way united to the Empire, which was to retain it, nominally at any rate, until
its own dissolution under the blow dealt it by the victories of Napoleon I.
The uneasiness aroused in the local nobility by the accession
of the new king of Burgundy was, in fact, well founded. If we picture to ourselves
the juridical position of these nobles, we see that they were either great
prelates or counts descended from Frankish officials. In either case, by virtue
of their titles they were not necessarily vassals of the king; they were,
indeed, bound to him by the general obligation of obedience and fealty which
was imposed on all subjects, but there was no other obligation than this. Such
a bond was a slender one, as the nobles had clearly demonstrated to Rodolph III
and his predecessors; in order to strengthen it, the royal policy aimed at
transforming into vassals bound by definite obligations under feudal law those
persons who could be ranked in the category of allodial nobles.
The question was whether the Emperors, having become direct
rulers of the country, could change this ancient state of affairs to their
advantage. Just at the time when the crown of Rodolph III was passing to them,
a personage closely in touch with affairs in the Empire, the imperial chaplain
Wipo, was stressing the risks that his master’s sovereignty had to face in the
newly-acquired territories. “O king,” he said to Conrad II, “Burgundy has
called for you. Arise, come in haste.... Profoundly true is the old saying: Out
of sight, out of mind. Though Burgundy now enjoys peace because of you, it
wishes to contemplate in your person the author of this peace, and to feast
its eyes on the sight of the king.” This is to be the appeal, often uttered and
almost always in vain, of the imperial partisans in Burgundy: the Emperor was
too far off; let him appear at last and take in his own hands the direction of
the country’s affairs.
If Conrad II formed the design of responding to these
appeals, he had not the time to carry it into effect. He died a few years after
his acquisition of Rodolph’s kingdom. His son Henry III, whom he had caused to
be recognised as king in his own lifetime by the grandees of the kingdom, endeavoured
to satisfy the wishes of his partisans. Not only did he organise for Burgundy a
special chancery, at the head of which he appointed as arch-chancellor one of
his supporters, Archbishop Hugh of Besançn; besides this, he visited the
country himself on several occasions. In 1042, he was at St Maurice-en-Valais
at the head of an army, and there received numerous submissions; on three
occasions he held diets at Solothurn; in 1042 he visited Franche Comté, and
again in 1043 it was at Besançon that he celebrated his betrothal with Agnes of
Aquitaine, who was related to Count Rainald I of Burgundy; in 1044 he repressed
by force of arms an insurrection of the Counts of Burgundy and Genevois.
Meanwhile he did not neglect to establish his influence over the ecclesiastical
principalities. He could, of course, count on the Archbishop of Besançon;
after two successive vacancies, he himself nominated the Archbishop of Lyons;
finally, in 1046, when he went to Rome to obtain the imperial crown, he was
accompanied not only by the Archbishop of Besançon but by those of Lyons and
Arles as well. This was clearly significant, and the conclusion could be drawn
that the Emperor was basing his power in Burgundy on the influence of the
higher clergy; moreover, this was the line that he, like his predecessors,
followed in Germany. It was a course of action imposed upon him; for he could
not count on the lay nobles, who were anxious to preserve independence both for
themselves and for their descendants. Only Count Humbert Whitehands of
Maurienne was faithful to him, and he was rewarded for his fidelity by a
considerable extension of his domains. The others displayed an attitude of
indifference towards the Emperor, when they did not shew themselves openly
hostile.
On the death of Henry III, the kingdom of Burgundy passed
without trouble to his son, the future Emperor Henry IV. His mother Agnes, who
governed during his minority, doubtless distrusted her own capacity to play an
effective part in Burgundy. It is to her initiative that is due the first
example of an institution which later Emperors were to copy, the rectorate of
Burgundy. The rector had to play the part of a viceroy, and Agnes entrusted
this duty to a great Transjurane noble, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, who also became
her son-in-law. It does not appear that Rudolf’s rectorate fulfilled the
expectations of the Empress, or that it left any mark on the history of
Burgundy.
The policy followed by Henry IV during the early years of his
reign differed little from that adopted by Henry III. But since the king relied
on the bishops, it was essential that no conflict of principle should provoke a
breach between Church and State; it was essential that, while bestowing his
favour on the Church, the king should not seek to hold it in thrall, and
thereby pave the way for a reaction which would be fatal to his authority.
Henry IV was not wise enough to avoid this grievous error; the history of the
Investiture Struggle shows how he became implicated in it and with what
persistence he pursued it. The consequences were disastrous to imperial
authority in the former kingdom of Rodolph III. The lay nobles in general,
while refraining from imitating the Count of Burgundy, gave no support to the
Emperor. As for the clergy, its leaders showed themselves for the most part
faithful to the cause of the Church. One of them, Hugh, Bishop of Die and later
Archbishop of Lyons, was, as legate of the Apostolic See, a devoted auxiliary
of Gregory VII and an active worker in the cause of ecclesiastical reform with
which that Pope’s name is associated. Later, when Paschal II was prepared to
concede lay investiture to Henry V, it was in the valley of the Rhone, at a
council held at Vienne in 1112 under the presidency of the archbishop, Guy of
Burgundy, that the concession was condemned with more vehemence than it had
been some months earlier at the council in the Lateran; it is significant that
it was this same Guy, Archbishop of Vienne, who in 1119 was elected to the
papal throne as Calixtus II. If this was the prevailing opinion in this region,
it is not surprising that Henry IV coming to Canossa was looked on rather as a
criminal than a king, and that the chancery of Burgundy had become a sinecure.
The most important questions, such as the division of Provence in 1185 between
the Berengars and the house of Toulouse, were settled, apparently, without the
parties concerned thinking of obtaining the consent of their sovereign, the
Emperor. The habit of referring to the royal authority had been lost; and this
was the more dangerous for the Empire as the best part of Burgundy, the Rhone
provinces, were attracted towards France, to which they were linked by the ties
of custom, of kinship, of language, and of literature. From this time, the
current which drew these provinces Francewards, and which had been accelerated
by the religious wars, had gathered too much strength to be checked by the
feeble measures to which the Emperors were reduced, such as the reconstitution
of the Burgundian chancery or the granting of charters which shewed a royal
authority more nominal than real.
Perhaps a ruler of considerable energy, personally resident
in the kingdom, might have arrested the decline. Such a task presented the
gravest difficulties; nevertheless, it attracted the Emperors of the twelfth to
the fourteenth centuries who succeeded the Franconian dynasty. The most active
in this undertaking were, it is not surprising to find, the princes of the
house of Swabia. But they were to have no better success than their predecessors.
Between the houses of Franconia and Swabia came one
intermediary reign, that of Lothar III of Supplinburg. Lothar was soon forced
to recognise his almost complete lack of authority, when the members of the
Burgundian and Provençal nobility refrained from answering his summons. “You
have paid no heed to them,” he wrote; “you have thus marked in most impudent
fashion your contempt for our supreme power.” Except for the Archbishop of
Besançon, no noble in the kingdom of Arles appeared at an imperial diet or took
part in the campaigns of Lothar; moreover, on the occasion of his expedition
into Italy in 1136, the Emperor had to subdue one of them, Count Amadeus III
of Maurienne, who had been bold enough to make common cause with the enemies of
his sovereign. A few years later, it was the turn of Rainaid III, who had
succeeded William the Child as Count of Burgundy and paid little heed to the
imperial rights; Lothar decided to replace him by a powerful Swiss noble,
Conrad of Zahringen. He went farther still, following the example set in the
reign of Henry IV, and made Conrad, as a loyal subject whom he could trust, not
only the successor of Rainald in Franche Comté, but also the governor, with the
title of rector, of the whole of Cisjurane and Transjurane Burgundy. Doubtless
he hoped to find in him an able and energetic representative, such as his
predecessors had never known. But, in spite of Lothar’s orders and threats, the
scheme was a failure; Rainaid maintained his hold on Franche Comte, and Conrad
was unable to assert his authority on the western side of the Jura.
Nothing had been done, then, by the time of the accession in
1143 of Conrad III, the first king of the Swabian house. In the course of his
reign, he indicated his policy with regard to the kingdom of Arles in two ways:
firstly, he granted privileges to members of the higher clergy, especially
Archbishop Humbert of Vienne, whom he thus attached to his cause; secondly, he
intervened, without much success, on behalf of the head of an important Provencal
family, Raymond of Baux, who on the death of Count Berengar-Raymond tried to
make good the claims of his house to the county of Provence, and approached the
king to obtain his support. The action of Conrad III was not fruitful in
results, but at any rate it revived a twofold policy which his successors did
not fail to pursue: of seeking the support of the leading prelates, and of
taking the opportunity to intervene in all the dissensions which arose among
thelay nobility. This was the old tradition of imperial policy.
Since the death of Rodolph III, the imperial authority had
made but feeble progress in the old Burgundian kingdom. Then to Conrad III succeeded
Frederick Barbarossa, a young prince of keen intelligence, of active will,
eager for fame, and fired with the ambition of re-establishing the universal
monarchy of Charlemagne. He was not long in realising that, to attain this end,
he must first bring effectively under his control the kingdom of Arles; he
turned his attention to this quarter even before occupying himself with Italy.
At the very beginning of his reign, he recognised, as the
result of a fresh and again unsuccessful effort, that no useful results were to
be expected from the viceroyalty of Berthold, the son of Conrad of Zahringen.
So a reversal of Frederick’s former policy in this region soon became evident;
having given to the house of Zahringen, by way of compensation, the advocacies
of the churches of Lausanne, Geneva, and Sion, he came to terms with the
comital house of Burgundy and married the young Beatrice, who had recently
inherited Franche Comte on the death of Rainaid III. At once Barbarossa
acquired in Burgundy an advantage which his predecessors had never had—a firm
basis and devoted adherents. The fruits of this policy can be seen in 1157.
Frederick appeared at Besançon, and held a diet there at which all the
magnificence of the imperial court was displayed; among those who hastened to
attend their sovereign were, as well as the Archbishop of Besancpn, the
Archbishops of Lyons, Vienne, and Tarantaise, and a number of bishops and
secular nobles. The Emperor was justified in announcing to his faithful
minister, Abbot Wibald of Stablo, “the magnificent success” of his affairs in
Burgundy. Certainly the imperial chancery distributed numerous privileges, and
their general effect was theoretical rathei' than practical. But the Emperor
did not limit himself to this expedient; he did not hesitate to intervene in
several disputes which broke out at Lyons or in Provence. In fact, he shewed
plainly that he understood how to play the king. The King of France, Louis VII,
realised this so clearly that he took umbrage, slipped away from a conference
which had been arranged between him and Frederick, and assembled in Champagne
considerable forces, so that for some time there was danger of war between the
two sovereigns. The fact was that the Capetian monarchy had now become powerful
enough to resent the establishment in the south-east of Gaul of a power which
was not subject to its influence.
Meanwhile, the Emperor, thinking to follow in the Carolingian
tradition, had attempted to establish his authority over the Roman Church. The
result of his attempt is well known—his rupture with Alexander III and the
election of an anti-Pope, Victor IV. In the struggle which ensued, the Emperor
asked for help from his subjects in the kingdom of Arles, and for some years he
met with open friendship or at any rate latent sympathy there. This development
was only fully revealed when the news arrived of the memorable expedition of
1162, which culminated in the destruction of Milan; the prestige of the Emperor
rose to the summit, and with it the terror that he inspired. Several of the
prelates, and among them the most important, were won over to the side of
Frederick and his anti-Pope. And not only in Tranche Comte could Barbarossa
reckon on adherents; he could pride himself on having Guigues, the Dauphin of
Viennois, in his train, and even, for a time, Raymond-Berengar II, the Count of
Provence. Leaving minor nobles out of account, the only personage who eluded
his influence was Humbert III, Count of Maurienne. It even seemed in 1162 that
the moment had come when he would succeed in associating with his religious
policy the King of France, Louis VII.
Once more, at the last moment, Louis withdrew, and refused to
abandon the cause of Alexander III. His decision had important repercussions in
Burgundy throughout the Rhone district. Louis quite soon found himself the
leader of a considerable party in the east and south-east of Gaul; the various
elements of discontent rallied round him; he became the recognised protector of
that section of the higher clergy which still remained faithful to Alexander
III; and, moreover, the members of this party now began to raise their heads
once more. A visit paid by the Emperor with his wife Beatrice to Burgundy did
not perceptibly improve the situation for him; and it became definitely worse
after the disaster which brought his expedition into Italy in 1167 to an end;
Frederick himself, on his return, in order to assure his retreat, had to
solicit, and to pay heavily for, the goodwill of the Count of Maurienne.
As a result of all this, Barbarossa was destined to see his
influence decline in Burgundy; it is not surprising that, during the last years
of his struggle with Alexander III, his interference in this region was less
frequent and less effective. To attempt to revive his authority, he had to
wait until 1177 when he had bent the knee to Alexander III and concluded peace
with him; then he thought it necessary to make a fresh and a striking
manifestation of his sovereignty in the kingdom of Arles. He went to Arles,
attended by a numerous train, and in the cathedral of St Trophimus, which was
resplendent with all the brilliance of the court, he had himself crowned king,
after the ancient tradition, by the metropolitan, Raymond of Bollene, assisted
by the Archbishops of Vienne and Aix and five bishops of neighbouring dioceses.
Besides these prelates there were numerous lay nobles, among them Raymond of St
Gilles, who held the marquessate of Provence and the French county of Toulouse.
The nobles, lay and ecclesiastical, who came to greet their
sovereign, either at Arles or at different points in his progress through the
country, were rewarded by numerous grants of various kinds: privileges,
confirmation of immunities, grants of the title of prince of the Empire,
tolls, guardianship of the Jews, and ageneral settlement of disputes. The
prelates seem to have appreciated these favours. During the last years of
Barbarossa’s reign, they are often to be found on the look-out for similar
grants, and for that purpose hastening to different diets summoned by the
Emperor in North Italy. Frederick, moreover, followed the policy ofhis predecessors
in giving his protection to the bishops: he took up the cause of the Bishop of
Geneva who was engaged in a contest with the Count of Genevois, and
particularly that of the Archbishop of Tarantaise and the Bishop of Sion
against the claims of Count Humbert III of Maurienne; also, that of the Bishops
of Valence and Die against the Counts of Valentinois. Meanwhile, he did not
neglect, whenever possible, to win over the lay nobles; he always preserved a
nucleus of loyalty in Franche Comte, he acquired vassals in Bresse, and he
strengthened the tie which held the Dauphin of Viennois to his side.
On a general consideration of the facts that have been
detailed above, it will be seen that Frederick took his title of king in
Burgundy and Provence quite seriously. He employed favourable circumstances to
assure the obedience of subjects who had disregarded it hitherto. Furthermore,
he laboured to supply the indispensable machinery for his government by
reorganising the chancery, over which he placed the Archbishop of Vienne as
arch-chancellor, and by sending to the various districts trusty representatives—legati
curiae imperiallis, legati domini imperatoriy iusticiarii— whose functions
cannot precisely be stated, but who certainly had as their mission to make the
royal government’s action and its control felt, a thing unknown before in
Burgundy and Provence. A few years before his death Frederick gave a further
proof of his care for the royal authority in those districts. On 27 April 1186,
when he was holding his court in Milan on the occasion of the marriage of his
son Henry, King of the Romans, with the heiress of the Norman kings of Sicily,
after Henry, in the basilica of St Ambrose, had received the crown of Italy
from the Patriarch of Aquileia, Frederick had himself crowned anew as King of
Arles by the Archbishop of Vienne. There was nothing in the repetition of the
coronation to appear strange to the Middle Ages; but it is a testimony to the
importance Barbarossa attached to the royal authority in those regions.
Henry VI, who succeeded his father Frederick Barbarossa as
Emperor in 1190, had been concerned, before his accession, with affairs in the
kingdom of Arles. It was he who had arranged the closer alliance of the Emperor
with the Dauphin of Viennois; he too who had conducted the campaign which the
Emperor had to undertake against Humbert III, Count of Maurienne and Savoy. To
be better informed of the state of these regions, he had returned from Lombardy
by the Mont-Cenis or the Mont-Genevre, and had stayed at various places,
notably at Lyons. It is impossible to know what impression this journey left
upon him. But, since the ambition of his race seemed incarnate in his being,
since too he considered himself the universal monarch, allowing no considerations
to qualify his pretensions, it is certain that he was prepared to yield none of
his rights or of his claims over Burgundy or Provence.
However, the sustained effort which was necessary in order to
bind more closely these provinces to the Empire, and so to make good the work
of his father, was ill-suited to the temperament of the new sovereign. He
preferred to begin and end this task in one stroke by placing at the head of
these provinces, as a king dependent upon him, a personage who, he hoped, would
subserve his policy. This was a renewal on a grander scale of the Zahringen
rectorate which had been so unsuccessful. The person he chose was no other than
Richard Coeur-de-Lion.
To explain his choice, it is important to notice that, during
the early years of Henry’s reign, the King of France had pushed to extremes his
attack on England, and so had aroused the uneasiness not only of the Welf party
in Germany, but also of the Emperor, who had to take account of this party,
although it was hostile to his policy. In 1192, Richard, on his return from the
Holy Land, in defiance of the principles of public law in the Middle Ages, was
captured and thrown into prison by the Duke of Austria. Henry VI caused the
prisoner to be handed over to him, and found him a valuable pawn in the game
that he was playing, which was, as at least he hoped, to result for him in the
hegemony of the West. His first thought was to turn Richard’s captivity to
account by rendering a service to Philip Augustus for which he would not have
failed to require payment; but in this way he would have irritated the Welfs,
the traditional friends of the English sovereigns. By itself this
consideration might perhaps not have been sufficient to modify Henry’s plans,
but he had also taken umbrage at the alliance contracted at about the same time
by the King of France with Denmark, an alliance which was consolidated by
Philip’s unhappy marriage with Ingeborg. Denmark was in Henry’s eyes his enemy,
because its king had refused to recognise his supremacy.
So the Emperor suddenly veered round and decided to satisfy
the Welfs, who threatened him with civil war if he took the side of France against
England. At the diet of Worms in 1193, he made Richard surrender to him his
kingdom and receive it back as a fief of the Empire. By such infeudations,
which thrilled his imagination and which he took pains to effect as often as he
could, Henry thought to make himself, in appearance if not in fact, the master
of the world. The diet of Worms was followed by a period of complicated
negotiations, in which the only detail that concerns us here is that, about the
end of 1193, the Emperor, holding to the English alliance, wished after his
fashion to mark his favour to his new ally. Perhaps it was due to the suggestion
of Savaric, Bishop of Bath, who was related to the house of Hohenstaufen and
later became chancellor of Burgundy1, that he offered to Richard to
enfeoff him not only with England but also with Arles, Vienne and Viennois,
Lyons, and all the country up to the Alps—that is to say, the kingdom of Arles
and Vienne together with the Hohenstaufen possessions in Burgundy. Roger of
Howden, to whom we owe our knowledge of this scheme, adds that the infeudation
was to extend to other territories situated in Languedoc and not subject to
Henry’s overlordship, which appears most unlikely. However, it is none the
less true that the Emperor was reviving, in a different form, the plan
conceived by his predecessor Lothar of Supplinburg on behalf of the house of
Zahringen, which had been abandoned by Barbarossa. Had he been able to carry
it into effect, he would have been freed from the task of having to govern
directly provinces where he was really powerless; the responsibility of
governing would have been transferred to a bold and active prince, who would
still be his feudal subordinate. Moreover, the scheme entailed a further
advantage in that it removed the kingdom of Arles from the sphere of French
influence, which was regarded as dangerous to the Empire. Richard, for his
part, could not fail to realise that to his possessions in the west of France
he would be uniting the valuable and wealthy provinces of the east, and that he
would also have the prospect of stifling in his grip the nascent power of his
Capetian rivals.
Unfortunately for the Empire, a scheme of this kind belonged,
not to the sphere of practical politics, but to the visionary world in which
Henry VI was living. It was soon abandoned; contemporary documents have left no
trace of any measure destined to carry it into realisation.
The register of Henry’s acts shows a great poverty as far as
the kingdom of Arles is concerned. He could not hope for any effective
assistance from his incapable younger brother, Otto, Count of Burgundy (Franche
Comté), and in the course of his short reign he seems to have gradually lost
interest in these regions, after he had come to recognise the failure of his
plan of entrusting them to Richard as his viceroy*
During the years which followed the death of Henry VI, and
which in the Empire were taken up with the rivalry between Philip of Swabia and
Otto of Brunswick, the first-named was able at certain times to count on quite
a considerable number of supporters in the Burgundian territories; Otto’s
influence, on the other hand, appears to have been very slight. It is not,
however, until the reign of Frederick II that the ruler of the Empire is again
found to be following a clearly defined policy.
It is not possible here to describe in detail the very
complicated policy of Frederick II in the kingdom of Arles and Vienne, but only
to denote some of its characteristic traits. In the early years of his reign he
followed in the footsteps of his predecessors. He reverted to the practice of
viceroys, and nominated two, or perhaps three, in turn: William of Baux, Duke
Odo of Burgundy (though there is doubt in his case), and Marquess William of
Montferrat. These attempts were no more successful than the preceding ones. At
the same time, as the register of his acts attests, he was not sparing in his
favours to the prelates. Thus, in a conflict between the bishop and the
townsfolk of Marseilles, he took the bishop’s side without reserve, and in
resounding proclamations he put the town under the ban of the Empire and
threatened the freedom and the privileges of its commerce in the Mediterranean
world. This threat, coming from a ruler who was master of Sicily and counted
numerous adherents in Italy, did not fail to agitate the people of Marseilles;
but it did not decide them to abandon the struggle. The Emperor was too much
occupied in these years with affairs in Italy and his crusade to the Holy Land,
and he could not back his proclamations by effective action. Another sign of
this is seen in the cautious nature of his protests when the French crusading
army, led by Louis VIII, occupied an imperial town, Avignon, after a siege of
several months.
The imperial policy took a different form in 1230. Freed from
his embarrassments in Lombardy and the East, and reconciled again with Pope
Gregory IX, Frederick took in hand the pacification of the kingdom of Arles, in
order to be able to draw from it the contingents and the subsidies which he
needed for his Italian expeditions. In the valley of the Rhone his subjects
were divided into two camps: at the head of one party, besides the Bishop of
Marseilles, was Raymond-Berengar IV, Count of Provence; at the head of the
other were the townsfolk of Marseilles and Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. For
four years Frederick set himself to support the bishop and Raymond-Berengar. He
did not confine himself to action from a distance; he entrusted the duty of
representing him in this region, first of all to the Archbishop of Arles, Hugh
Béroard, then to one of his intimate counsellors, an Italian by origin, Quaglia
of Gorzano. He was able in this way to increase his influence in the Provencal
area, but he did not succeed in re-establishing peace. At any rate a proof of
this influence was to be seen at the end of 1235, when there appeared at the
side of the Emperor, in the assembly of Hagenau, the Counts of Provence and
Valentinois and Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, to whom in the previous year
Frederick had given a diploma granting him, in defiance of the claims of the
Roman Church, the restitution of the Venaissin, which had been taken from him
as a result of Louis VIII’s crusade.
At Hagenau was clearly betokened the radical change of
imperial policy which took place at this time. It is impossible here to
investigate the causes of this volte-face; it must suffice to say that
Frederick had already been irritated by the friendly relations between St Louis
and his own intractable son, Henry (VII), King of the Romans, and that he was
offended by the marriage of the French king with the daughter of
Raymond-Berengar IV. Henceforward he made common cause with Count Raymond VII
of Toulouse, and bitterly opposed the Count of Provence. Raymond VII, who was
suspected of favouring heresy, was the leader of the anticlerical party
throughout this region; around him were gathered, not only those lay nobles who
were hostile to the clergy, but also the associations or confraternities which,
in the towns, combated its influence. There were henceforward in the kingdom of
Arles two great parties, the one favourable to the Church, the other opposed
to it; and with all the forces of which it could dispose the imperial power
supported the latter party.
The facts are too complex to be mentioned here in detail. All
that can be said is that, in order to sustain the struggle, which he pursued
with ardour, Frederick on different occasions sent confidential agents, taken
from his Italian entourage, to watch over his interests and rally his
supporters: for instance, Henry of Revello, who came in 1237, and later
Sopramoute Lupo, Torello of Strada, and finally Count Berardo of Loreto; these
agents bore the title either of imperial nuncio or imperial vicar, and norite
of Frederick’s predecessors had taken so much trouble about the kingdom of
Arles. Thus, while fortune favoured him, his authority in these regions
continued to increase; in 1238 he was able to count, in his army in Lombardy,
contingents from Provence, Dauphine, Valentinois, and Savoy.
At the moment when everything seemed to smile on Frederick,
fortune turned traitor. The army failed before Brescia, and the check was anything
but fortunate for the Emperor’s prestige in the kingdom of Arles, Meanwhile he
persisted in his policy; amid all the conflicts which raged in Provence he
fought the partisans of the Roman Church; and when in 1245 the Pope, who had
taken refuge at Lyons, assembled there the episcopate of the Latin Church, the
Emperor, thanks to the assistance of the Dauphin Guigues VII and Amadeus IV,
Count of Savoy, prepared an attack by force of arms upon this city. A rising of
the Guelfs at Parma, however, prevented him from carrying out his design. About
the same time, by the death of Raymond-Berengar IV, the county of Provence
passed to his other son-in-law Charles of Anjou, St Lou is’ brother, who was a
far more redoubtable enemy for Frederick than the father-in-law had been. A few
years later, in 1249, the death of Raymond VII deprived the Emperor of an
ally, and gave him a new adversary in the person of another brother of the
French king, Alphonse of Poitiers, to whom was assigned the Venaissin.
Frederick none the less persisted in his anti-clerical policy, and up to his
death in 1250 he was in Provence as elsewhere the leader of all the enemies of
the clergy.
The period of the Great Interregnum which followed the death
of Frederick was an age of imperial decadence; and it was particularly so in
the kingdom of Arles, where the imperial power, in spite of the efforts of
several sovereigns of the house of Swabia, had never become solidly established.
If one of the claimants to Empire, Alfonso of Castile, tried to form connexions
within the kingdom, he gained no advantage thereby; he could not, still less
could his rival, exercise authority there. The bankruptcy of imperial prestige
resulted naturally in profit to the France of St Louis and Philip the Bold, as
can be seen at this time by what happened in Savoy and Dauphine, and also by
other similar negotiations.
When Rudolf of Habsburg came to Lausanne at the beginning of
his reign, he was received there by a few prelates of the kingdom of Arles.
These adhesions could not create in him any illusions as to the extent of his
influence in the kingdom; for at this time the most important of the lay
nobles, starting with the Count of Savoy, Philip, the rival of the Habsburgs in
the Swiss territories, were hostile to him; and others were at least neutral.
The work essayed by Barbarossa and Frederick II had all to be done over again.
It would seem that Rudolf was not attracted by a policy which meant a slow
piecemeal recovery of the kingdom of Arles. He preferred a line of action
similar to that of his predecessors who had wished to put over the kingdom a
ruler bound by close ties to the Empire; it was no longer a question of a
rector, a kind of viceroy, but of a vassal king as had been Henry VI’s dream.
Projects of this kind, formed in the reign of Rudolf of Habsburg and his
successors, were to occupy the attention of the chanceries of Europe for half a
century.
The first of these plans came into being in 1278 as the
result of a rapprochement between the Empire and England; this in its
turn had arisen out of a negotiation in which Rudolf had shown himself
favourable to the claims of Margaret, St Louis’ widow, to the succession in
Provence, for at the French court Margaret was the leader of the English party
and hostile to that of Charles of Anjou. A marriage was arranged between
Rudolf’s son Hartmann and Joan, the daughter of Edward I of England. Hartmann
was to wear the crown of Arles, and hold it as a fief from the Empire.
Apparently, however, none of the parties concerned took any steps to carry this
somewhat chimerical plan into execution.
If the crown of Arles was to be revived, it could only be by
agreement with the leading figure in that region, who was then playing the
chief role on the political stage in the West—Charles of Anjou. From the
beginning of his rule in Provence he had evinced his ambition of wearing the
crown. This is proved by the conventions which he made in 1257 with the head of
the house of Baux to yield to him the rights to the kingdom of Arles which that
family could base on the grant accorded them by Frederick II in 1215. Later, in
1309, Charles II of Anjou renewed this convention with the Prince of Orange,
Bertrand II de Baux. The Angevin dynasty had the idea firmly rooted in their
minds that, if the kingdom of Arles was to be revived, it must only be done on
their behalf.
During the reign of Rudolf of Habsburg, Pope Nicholas III had
been solicitous to reconcile the king with Charles I of Anjou, and so to establish
a balance of power which would produce peace in Italy. One of the terms in the
arrangement proposed by him, and accepted, was the marriage of Charles Martel,
the grandson of Charles of Anjou, with Rudolfs daughter Clementia; the dowry
she was to bring with her was nothing less than the kingdom of Arles, which was
to be reconstituted for the Prince of Salerno, Charles’ eldest son; and he was
to pass it on immediately to the young couple, whose marriage was to inaugurate
a new system of alliances in Europe. The scheme raised lively alarm in Burgundy
and Provence; Count Philip of Savoy, the Count-Palatine Otto IV of Franche Comté,
Duke Robert of Burgundy, and others used every effort to make it fail. Whether
they would have succeeded, we shall never know. For the catastrophe of the
Sicilian Vespers soon put an end to the soaring ambition of the house of Anjou.
Henceforward the question for Charles was to maintain his Sicilian kingdom, not
to acquire a new one.
A similar project was to be raised thirty years later. Once
more it was a question of reconciling Guelf and Ghibelline, the Emperor Henry
VII and King Robert of Naples; the reconciliation was by no means displeasing
to Pope Clement V, since it would have furnished him with a means of support
against the imperious demands of Philip the Fair. One of the conditions of the
scheme was the re-establishment of the kingdom of Arles for one of King
Robert’s sons, who was to marry a daughter of’ Henry VII. The project seems to
have been seriously discussed during the year 1310, both at the court of
Avignon and in the chanceries of Naples and the Empire.
It was easy to foresee the opposition this scheme was likely
to encounter. It had to reckon with the hostility of divers rulers whose
domains formed part of the kingdom; as they were in fact independent, they were
not anxious for this new suzerainty to which they were expected to submit. But
above all the opposition of the King of France was to be anticipated. The plan
of the treaty did, indeed, lay down that any king appointed by Henry VII “ez
aisles ou ez frontieres du royaume de France” should bind himself by oath to be
“bienveillant du roy de France ou allié a lui.” This was not enough to disarm
Philip the Fair; he was not anxious to see the organisation of a regime which
would have the effect of consolidating, to his own detriment, the power of his
cousins of Anjou in the south-east of Gaul. We know how vigorously his
ambassadors protested at the court of Avignon, towards the end of the year
1310, against the reconstruction of the kingdom of Arles, “if kingdom it be.”
They did not fail to impress on the timid Clement V that their king would hold
him responsible for this untoward creation. It was inevitable that the project
should be silently dropped when the Pope declared that he refused his adhesion
to it; moreover, the reconciliation of Henry VII and King Robert was to remain
in the realm of things unattainable. On the other hand, negotiators on both
sides worked for several years to bring about an accord between Philip the Fair
and the Emperor; this also came to nothing, and it seems highly probable that
the policy pursued by the King of France on his eastern and south-eastern
frontiers contributed no little to the failure.
Philip the Fair had not hesitated to declare his opposition
to the accession of an Angevin prince to the crown of Arles. Four years later,
however, he was himself working to place this crown on the head of one of his
own sons, probably the future Philip the Tall. Now, besides the opposition of the
Angevins of Naples, the Dauphin of Viennois, John II, and Amadeus V, Count of
Savoy, forgot their rivalry to make common cause against this project. What
became of it we do not know. For Philip the Fair died the same year, and his
ambitions vanished with him.
Ten years later, the kingdom of Arles became the object of a
new scheme, contrived once again for the advantage not of the Angevins but of
the Capetians of France. The author of this scheme was no other than Henry’s
son, John of Luxemburg, the King of Bohemia. He had one end in view, to win
over the King of France, Charles the Fair, to the policy of restoring the house
of Luxemburg to the imperial throne, which at the moment was in dispute between
the houses of Bavaria and Habsburg. To attain this end, it was necessary to
give France something in return; and the proposal was to hand over the kingdom
of Arles to Charles, Count of Valois, the brother of Philip the Fair and uncle
of the reigning monarch. The misfortune was that this ingenious scheme encountered
the opposition of Robert of Anjou, King of Naples and Count of Provence, in
spite of the tie which linked him with Charles of Valois in the marriage of
Charles’ daughter with Charles of Calabria, the heir-presumptive of Naples. The
Angevin king would not renounce, even in Charles’ favour, the hope so long
entertained of acquiring the crown of Arles for himself and his line.
A similar project was put forward in 1332, once again on the
initiative of John of Bohemia. The idea was to obtain the election of an
Emperor favourable to the house of Luxemburg in place of Lewis of Bavaria, and
to establish for John a hereditary kingdom in Italy. In return for these
advantages, which were of the greatest importance to the Luxemburgs, the
imperial authority would invite the King of France, Philip of Valois, to
undertake the government of the kingdom of Arles and Vienne; and assent to this
had already been given by Duke Henry of Lower Bavaria, who was to be Emperor
under the scheme. The plan could only succeed provided that Lewis of Bavaria
would bring himself to abdicate. From this course Lewis was dissuaded by
certain powerful influences: first of all, Michael of Cesena and his
associates, the Spiritual Franciscans; secondly, King Robert of Naples, the
head of a house of which several members professed a lively sympathy with this
Franciscan sect; and, finally, the aged Cardinal Napoleon Orsini, whose body
still lies in the lower basilica at Assisi, and who in his day played an
important role in the politics of the time. Thus the second of John of
Bohemia’s schemes was ruined.
These failures had not discouraged the ambition of the King
of France; he had his eyes constantly fixed upon the rich domains of Burgundy
and the valley of the Rhone. To bar the road to him, Lewis of Bavaria, two
years after the essays of John of Bohemia, tried to block Philip’s policy by
creating a King of Arles who would not be a Capetian. At that time Dauphine was
governed by Humbert II, the last descendant of three lines to which this county
had belonged in turn. He had been brought up at the brilliant court of Naples,
and his imagination was filled with magnificent dreams that could never come
true; to Lewis of Bavaria he appeared to be just the man whose ardent ambition
could be tempted. So he dispatched an embassy to offer him, in the name of the
Empire, the crown of Arles and Vienne. Humbert’s pride was certainly flattered
by this brilliant perspective; but, dreamer as he was, he could not fail to
realise that he would encounter the energetic resistance of the powerful King
of France. Besides, he had also to reckon with the determined opposition of
Pope John XXII. The Pope could not be expected to support a project for the
creation of a kingdom put forward by a ruler who had been banned by the Church
and was in open revolt against its power. Guided by common prudence as well as
by religious sentiments, the dauphin had to bring himself to decline the offer
of Lewis of Bavaria.
These numerous negotiations, the different authors of which
aimed at settling at one stroke the fate of the kingdom of Arles, had continued
for half a century without producing any resultant advantage either to the
French princes, the Angevin princes, or any other claimants. However, in the
course of the same period, the firm and persistent pressure of the policy of
the Capetian kings on different parts of the kingdom of Arles had brought some
partial, but at the same time quite substantial, advantages to France, which
promised a still more successful prospect for the future.
In the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the French
monarchy, putting forward the claim that in making war on Aragon it was serving
the cause of the Church, had obtained from the Holy See a tenth of the revenues
of all benefices; and now, by a special favour, the Popes had assigned the
French kings a tenth from various dioceses in the kingdom of Arles, though
these were not dependent on the French Crown. It goes without saying that this
favour was revoked during the quarrel of Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair;
but it remains a fact that for a certain number of years, as far as the payment
of tenths was concerned, the clergy of this region had been treated as French
clergy.
This assimilation Philip the Fair and his successors were
only too anxious to push still farther, as can be seen from the way in which
they acted with regard to the temporalities of certain bishoprics in the
kingdom of Arles. The temporalities of the archbishopric of Lyons formed an
important principality on which the city was dependent. To subordinate this to
the royal authority was an aim that had long been pressed by French policy; as
is well known, Philip the Fair, assisted by the townsfolk of Lyons, laboured
actively to this end, and succeeded, in 1312, in reaching the desired goal,
though not without causing grave ill-feeling in the Church as well as in the
Empire. Some years earlier, in 1305 and in 1307, conventions made with the
Bishops of Viviers gave the king an overriding influence in the domains of that
bishopric; he formed a portage, or association, with the bishop, which in the
nature of things meant that the royal authority was really dominant. On the
other side of the Rhone there extended an ecclesiastical principality of
considerable importance, the temporality of the Archbishop of Vienne. The king
could certainly not lay hands on this domain; but he kept a close watch on it,
and, in order to make his presence felt, Philip VI constructed opposite Vienne
at Sainte-Colombe one of those fortified bridge-heads which he regarded as so
useful on the French bank of the Rhone. The clergy of Vienne well understood
the intentions of their powerful neighbour, and they were anything but pleased
by them.
It was not only the ecclesiastical temporalities that stirred
the ambition of the French monarchy. At the end of the thirteenth century,
Philip the Fair had acquired a dominance over the County of Burgundy (Franche
Comté) which no local resistance could shake. By the marriage of his son, the
future Philip the Tall, with the heiress to the county, a French dynasty was
installed there to the great injury of imperial authority. Farther south, the
French king had brought the Count of Valentinois under his influence. Moreover,
by skilfully making use of the traditional rivalry between the Count of Savoy
and the Dauphin of Viennois, he had made his support necessary to one or other
of them, according to circumstances, sometimes to both at once. The time came
when the Dauphin Humbert II, having no direct heir and being hopelessly
encumbered with financial difficulties, was prepared to sell his dominions.
Philip of Valois, as is well known, bought them from him and put in Humbert’s
place the eldest son of the King of France, who was to take the title of
dauphin without there being any actual change in the subordinate relation of
Dauphine to the ruler of the Empire; although he belonged to the French royal
house, the dauphin was to remain, in law, a prince of the Empire.
The negotiations for this cession of Dauphine were begun during
the reign of Lewis of Bavaria, who was not consulted at all; they were concluded
during the first years of his successor, Charles IV of Bohemia, whose consent
was similarly not asked for. There was nothing abnormal in such a procedure at
this time. Charles IV was entirely disregarded in 1348 when Queen Joanna of
Provence sold the imperial town of Avignon to the Holy See, and again in 1355
when the French dauphin and the Count of Savoy concluded a treaty which
profoundly altered the territorial constitution of their respective States.
Meanwhile, in 1350, the county of Burgundy passed to a minor, Philip of
Rouvres, who by his mother’s second marriage became the step-son of King John.
Further, in the course of these years, the French king, having consolidated his
position in Dauphine, tried by a similar arrangement to make himself master of
Provence. This ambitious scheme was premature, it is true; but it was certainly
the case that from this time, during the second half of the fourteenth century,
the royal government and especially its representatives in Dauphine, the
governor and the delphinal council, worked assiduously to transfer the control
of Provence from the Angevins of Naples to the French royal house. This was a
scheme which must not be lost from sight if the history of the policy pursued
by France in these regions is to be properly elucidated.
The situation in the kingdom of Arles during the early
years of his reign could not fail to cause grave anxiety to the Emperor Charles
IV. Undoubtedly he aimed at recovering the iura Imperii which were being
seriously compromised by the encroachments, especially of France, but the
question was how this programme was to be realised. Charles was not possessed
at all of the chivalrous traits which distinguished his father John of Bohemia,
the hero of Crécy, and his grandfather Henry VII; his qualities were in the
spheres of diplomacy and public business. Meticulous, suspicious, and at the
same time cold and calculating by nature, he was endowed with consummate
patience, which enabled him to leave to time the solution of many difficulties.
To make war on France on behalf of the kingdom of Arles was perhaps in his
mind; there is a sign of this in the pact he made in June 1348 with the King of
England, Edward III, in which he stipulated to hike no part in the struggle
between Edward and Philip of Valois, unless he decided to enter into war with
France pro iuribus Imperii nostri. This eventuality was never realised:
it was consonant neither with Charles’ own character nor with his relations
with the French rulers.
Meanwhile, he renounced none of his claims to sovereignty
over a considerable portion of ancient Gaul, and especially over the kingdom
of Arles. At the beginning of his reign he had manifested this intention by
giving his uncle Baldwin, Archbishop of Trèves, the function of acting as his
representative, in the capacity of arch-chancellor of the kingdom, a title
retained by the archbishops of Trèves up to the seventeenth century. But these
claims, which he affirmed at intervals and of which he sometimes liked to make
a show, were especially maintained by him in a diplomatic contest, at times
somewhat stormy, with intervals of comparative calm, at times displayed in
public acts which are as contradictory as the tendencies which inspired them.
The present writer has already attempted to disentangle the threads of this
story, in a book published more than forty years ago1. A detailed
account would exceed the limits of this chapter, and it must suffice to denote
the main points which mark the conduct of the Emperor in relation to the
kingdom of Arles.
Charles viewed himself as being the legal embodiment of all
secular sovereignty in the kingdom; it resulted that there were no rightful
powers other than those emanating from the plenitude of jurisdiction possessed
by him. In the secular world, apart from him, the princes could appeal only to
claims that were open to dispute; this was a defect in an age more keenly
concerned than our own with the ideas of justice and right. It is not
surprising, too, that on various occasions he refused to recognise the validity
of important acts which had been carried through without his consent, such as
the cession of Dauphine or the treaty between the dauphin and Savoy in 1355.
Nor is it surprising to find a large number of charters issuing from his
chancery to ecclesiastical or lay nobles from whom he exacted homage, to
religious establishments, or to towns in the kingdom, granting rights of
jurisdiction, municipal organisation, coinage, fairs and markets, even the
creation of universities. He never ceased to act as sovereign, and he used the
language of his part when he claimed feudal homage from rulers such as the
Counts of Burgundy, Savoy, and Provence, the dauphin, or the holders of the
great episcopal sees; he received it when they had an interest in approaching
the imperial court, or wished to regularise their position in the eyes of the
law. His diplomas undoubtedly possessed, both for the grantor and for the
recipients, a moral and a legal interest; but the beneficiaries were
experienced enough to know that the Emperor would not employ force to give them
sanction.
So numerous are the manifestations of this that if anyone
were to cast a hasty glance over the register of Charles IV’s acts he might
easily be led to imagine that the author of them enjoyed an undisputed
authority in these parts. Two instances will be sufficient to illustrate the
point.
First of all, the imperial diet held at Metz in December
1356, a few months after the battle of Poitiers. It was a brilliant gathering,
and the Cardinal of Perigord was there to represent the Holy See. The great
nobles thronged the court, bringing to the sovereign the unequivocal testimony
of their obedience. It was an event quite out of the common in the annals of
the Empire when on 22 December 1356 the young Dauphin Charles, regent of France
for his father John, who was a captive in English hands, presented himself at
the gates of Metz to discharge his duties as a prince of the Empire. He entered
the city escorted by a brilliant cavalcade; a period of festivities and
negotiations commenced, in the course of which the dauphin decided to yield to
the ruler of the Empire what his father John the previous year had hesitated to
do. It was undoubtedly under the dauphin’s influence that the young Philip of
Rouvres paid to the Emperor’s representative the homage which had long been
demanded for the county of Burgundy; while, for his part, the regent of France
personally did homage to Charles IV for Dauphiné, and obtained from him in
exchange the investiture of this province and the confirmation of his
privileges.
Nine years later the Emperor gave a still more striking
display of his rights over the kingdom. In 1365 he went to Provence to revive
the solemn ceremony of royal coronation which had lapsed for two centuries. The
inhabitants of Geneva, of Savoy, and of Dauphine gave him a magnificent
reception cn route, such as it was their duty to give to their acknowledged
sovereign. After a stay with Pope Urban V at Avignon, where he met the Dukes of
Berry and Anjou, he continued his journey and arrived at Arles surrounded by a
numerous escort, including the Duke of Bourbon and Count Amadeus VI of Savoy.
On 4 June, the basilica of St Trophimus witnessed for the last time the
splendours of this ceremony, in which the Emperor received from Archbishop
William de la Garde the royal crown of Arles and Vienne. This journey was the
occasion of numerous grants of privileges, which were bestowed upon prelates,
lay nobles, and the new universities of Geneva and Orange; added to this was
the creation by diploma of a special coinage. It seemed that Charles IV, in
such circumstances, could perform all the functions necessary to display, at
any rate in theory, his sovereignty over the kingdom.
Nor did he limit himself to displays such as these. On
several occasions in the course of his long reign he went farther and tried to
make his authority more real by delegating it. His method was to create
imperial vicars, whom he instituted in the kingdom of Arles as in other parts
of his dominions, notably in Italy. In 1349, at the moment when the Capetian
dynasty had just acquired Dauphine, Charles, who bore this with an ill grace,
appointed the Count of Valentinois as his vicar in the kingdom; he delegated
the supreme jurisdiction to him, and by the same act put him in a position
transcending that of the bishops and great nobles who till then had been his
peel's. Later, by virtue of various diplomas, the first of which is dated July
1356, Count Amadeus VI of Savoy, known as the “Green Count,” was deputed, as
vicar, to hold sovereign imperial rights not only in his hereditary estates,
but also in the dioceses of Lausanne, Sion, Geneva, Belley, Ivrea, Turin, and
in various neighbouring districts; it was as though the Emperor, by this act,
was wishing to Contribute to the formation of a vast territorial sovereignty
iii favour of the house of Savoy. At the end of this same year, 1356, on the
occasion of the diet of Metz, Charles, the son of King John of France, obtained
the same favour for the domains which he had acquired from the Dauphin Humbert
II.
Now the French monarchy had for a century been striving to
expel foreign dynasties, including its kinsmen of Naples, from the kingdom of
Arles and Vienne, with the clear intention of acquiring it for itself. The
granting of the vicariate, which was common in the second half of the
fourteenth century, seemed to members of the French government a means of
realising the acquisition, while in appearances safeguarding imperial sovereignty,
which would thus become a mere outward show. In 1355, before the diet of Metz,
the dauphin’s council had claimed for him, not indeed the whole kingdom of
Arles, but a delegation of imperial sovereignty over his own domains in
Dauphine, over Vienne and its castles, over the counties of Provence,
Forcalquier, Valentinois, and Genevois, over the temporalities of the churches
of Valence, Die, Sion, Lausanne, and Geneva, and in addition the advocacy of
several important monasteries in those parts. The diploma granted to the
dauphin on the occasion of his journey to Metz, since it restricted the
vicariate to Dauphine, was far from satisfactory to the extensive ambitions of
the French government. Those who directed its policy, with their characteristic
tenacity, were later to take the project in hand again.
In 1365, when Charles IV stopped at Grenoble on his way to
Arles for the coronation, the governor who represented the king-dauphin Charles
V had the task of requesting, on behalf of his master, from the Emperor a
delegation very similar to that asked for ten years previously, but including
also the marquessate of Saluzzo on the other side of the Alps. The negotiations
that were begun on this point came to nothing. Charles was evidently not
prepared to make concessions of this character; they would have seriously
compromised his relations with the Count of Savoy, whose vicariate, moreover,
he revoked in 1366.
It was a different story thirteen years later, when Charles
IV, realising the dangers that threatened his dynasty after his death, wished
to form a close tie with his relatives at the French court, and paid Charles V
the famous visit which caused such agitation in the chanceries of the western
kingdoms. The Emperor, who was a skilful negotiator, certainly neglected no
means of winning the favour of his host. We do not know exactly the promises he
obtained from Charles V, who was a ruler as discreet as himself. What we can
say is that, in the matter of his own concessions to France, the Emperor held
out expectations of his support against England, that he consented to recognise
the Franco-Hungarian alliance, which was to be cemented by the marriage of the
king’s younger son Louis of Valois (later Louis of Orleans), with the heiress
of Hungary and finally, which is most to the purpose here, that he handed over
to the French dauphin the vicariate of the whole kingdom of Arles with the
exception of Savoy.
This grant was made effective by various solemn diplomas
issuing from the imperial chancery at Paris in January 1378. In the whole
kingdom of Arles, from Franche Comté to Provence, except the county of Savoy,
the young dauphin, Charles, the eldest son of the King of France, received,
with the title of Vicar of the Empire, the delegation of most of the attributes
of sovereign power—supreme jurisdiction, the rights of pardon and amnesty, of
declaring war, of exercising the ecclesiastical patronage and the feudal
suzerainty of the Emperor, of coining money, of instituting tolls, fairs, and
markets; in short, practically the sum total of regalian rights. All
concessions were revoked which conflicted with the diploma conferring the
vicariate for his lifetime on the young dauphin.
Actually this grant did not produce throughout the whole
kingdom of Arles the effect which the French court might perhaps have been led
to imagine. But it was effective in the Rhone region at any rate. The governor
of Dauphiné hoisted the standard of the vicar and, by virtue of the powers
which he derived from the title conferred on his master, compelled the allodial
lords, especially bishops who had previously relied on the immunities granted
them by charter, to recognise the superior authority of the dauphin acting in
the Emperor’s name; the Archbishop of Vienne, the Bishop of Valence, the Count
of Valentinois all discovered this to their cost. To resist with effect the
encroachment of the delphinal government required force that they could not
muster; but others possessed it and made use of it, for instance the regents
of Provence for the children of Louis I of Anjou.
Charles IV did not long survive his grant of the imperial
vicariate to the French dauphin. His immediate successor, his son Wenceslas,
and after him Rupert of the Palatinate, were too far off and too much occupied
with other things; they seem to have paid little heed to the kingdom of Arles.
It was different with the Emperor Sigismund, another of Charles IV’s sons.
During the first part of his reign (which began in 1410), he displayed on
several occasions, as his father had done, his claim to sovereignty. The
journey he undertook at the end of 1415 to Perpignan to meet Pope Benedict
XIII, whose abdication he wished to obtain, gave the peoples of the Rhone
valley the opportunity once more to render the honours due to their lawful
sovereign. He himself, like his father, was prodigal of grants and diplomas,
among which may be mentioned the one that raised Amadeus VIII, Count of Savoy,
to the rank of duke1, aud the confirmation of privileges to the
towns of Valence and Vienne; further, he made the Bishop of Valence his vicar,
and renewed the grant again in 1426. The representatives of the King of France
in Dauphine took offence at this. Sigismund certainly was at pains to appease
them, for, on the occasion of his journey to Perpignan, he described himself
as the fervent friend of Charles VI. This friendship did not survive the visit
of the Emperor, a few months later, to the English court, where the glories of
Agincourt were still fresh. He made a rapid volte-face, characteristic
of his fickle temperament, and embraced an alliance with Henry V, becoming his
warm partisan. He went so far as to form a plan to unite his forces with those
of the victor of Agincourt, and to make France feel his strength, by taking
from her the regions which he accused her of having usurped from him. Of these
regions he placed Dauphiné in the forefront, claiming that the Empire had never
ratified the agreement made between Philip of Valois and the Dauphin Humbert
II; and he did not hide his intention of giving it, after he had won it back,
to a prince of the English royal family. This design, which caused some
uneasiness in France, was not to be put into execution; it was one of those
fanciful ideas that one finds on so many pages of the history of the kingdom of
Arles.
Later, influenced doubtless by the French victories,
Sigismund changed his point of view once more. The grant of the imperial
vicariate had been limited to the lifetime of Charles V’s eldest son, Charles
VI; so, on his death in 1422, it legally
came to an end. Later on, it became known in the entourage of Charles VII that
Sigismund was returning to his father’s policy and might be inclined to renew
this grant in favour of France. The question whether there was any advantage
from such an arrangement was discussed in the royal council and decided in the
negative. The monarchy felt itself strong enough in the east and south-east of
France to stand on its own feet. It was obvious that the imperial power was
getting more and more feeble in those regions, and that it could cause no alarm
to France. Another power was growing and needed to be watched with care, and if
need be forcibly opposed, by the Valois kings, though in the meanwhile it
served a useful purpose on the eastern frontiers by preventing any advance on
the part of the Habsburg Emperors. This was Burgundy under its second ducal
house, which in the course of the fifteenth century came near to changing the
whole future of the Capetian monarchy. The battle of Nancy (1477), as is well
known, at one stroke put an end to the life of the “Grand Duke of the West,”
and also to his ambitious schemes.
Though his chief preoccupation was to combat the policy of
Charles the Bold, Louis XI did not abandon the traditional designs of his predecessors
upon the kingdom of Arles. While still dauphin, he had retired into his Alpine
domains, wishing to emancipate himself from his father’s control; having in
consequence incurred the wrath of Charles VII, he had taken refuge in Flanders,
leaving his principality to come under his father’s direct and absolute rule.
When he became king, Louis did not dream of making Dauphine autonomous again.
As dauphin and as king,he completed the work begun by his ancestors, and
succeeded in finally establishing his suzerainty over the Archbishop of Vienne
and the Bishop of Gap, whose allodial position was transformed into one of
vassalage. At the end of his reign, in 1481, he was able to acquire the jewel
so long coveted in vain—Provence; and from this time its destiny was linked
with that of France. Henceforward, the king was master of Lyons, of Dauphine,
to which Valentinois had been added in the first half of the fifteenth century,
of Vivarais, and of Provence; he kept a watch over Avignon from his fortress at
Villeneuve; and so in the chief part of the kingdom of Arles he was unquestionably
the dominant power. Savoy and the districts of French Switzerland certainly
remained independent, and for two centuries to come Franche Comte avoided the
sovereignty of France. But the French king was master of the fertile valley of
the Rhone, of Lyons, a commercial town of the first rank, and of the great port
of Marseilles, which introduced French influence into the Mediterranean. A
splendid share had come to the kingdom of the fleurs-de-lis; this was the due
reward of a far-seeing and patient policy, which made it possible to look
forward to the future with confidence and with security.
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