BOOK VII.
FROM THE ELECTION OF INNOCENT III TO THE DEATH
OF BONIFACE VIII,
A.D. 1198-1303.
CHAPTER III.
FROM THE ELECTION OF POPE ALEXANDER IV TO THE DEATH OF
LEWIS IX OF FRANCE. A.D. 1254-1270.
The successor of Innocent IV was Reginald, bishop of
Ostia, a member of the Franciscan order, and nephew of Gregory IX. He took the
name of Alexander IV, and began his pontificate by issuing a circular letter to
all bishops, in which he requested the benefit of their prayers; but the favourable
expectations which this produced were somewhat disappointed by the sequel of
his pontificate. Alexander, although he wished to follow the same policy as his
predecessor, was far inferior to Innocent in ability, and without his strength
of character; and while he is praised for his piety and for his kindly
disposition, he is said to have been a dupe of flatterers, and a tool of those
who made the Roman court odious by their rapacity and extortion.
Manfred, a prince of great talents and brilliant
accomplishments, was able, by his political skill and by the popular graces of
his character, to extend his influence, and in this he was the more readily
successful, because, unlike his Hohenstaufen ancestors, he did not rely on the
arms of the Germans, who were more hated by the Italians than even the infidel
Saracens. Within two years he regained for his nephew Conradin the kingdom of
Apulia and Sicily, having been urged on to make himself master of the whole
by the pope’s refusal to ratify a treaty which proposed a division of the
territory. A cry arose that he should be king, and about the same time a report
was spread that Conradin had died in Germany. Manfred, without closely
inquiring into the truth of this report (of which, indeed, his enemies suppose
him to have been the inventor), resolved to accept the dignity which was
pressed on him, and on the nth of August 1258 he was crowned at Palermo. In
answer to a remonstrance from Conradin’s mother, he told her envoys that he
held the kingdom by a personal title—by the success of his arms and the choice
of his people; that it would be inexpedient to endanger the Hohenstaufen
interest by leaving it in the hands of women and children; but that, as he
himself had no other heir, he would gladly make Conradin his successor: and he
invited him to the Sicilian court, in order that he might prepare himself for
the duties of royalty by acquiring the manners of his future subjects and by
gaining their affection. In the meantime, he took strong measures against all
who professed to adhere to the cause of Conradin.
The pope endeavoured to carry out his predecessor’s
scheme for establishing the English prince Edmund on the throne of Sicily, and
in 1255 the boy was formally invested in the kingdom by a bishop who had been
sent to England for the purpose. But the English were shocked at finding that a
crusade was preached against Manfred with the offer of the same indulgences and
immunities as the enterprise of delivering the Holy Land from the Saracens,
while the Holy Land itself was neglected in its urgent need; nay, that the
money which was so largely extorted from them under the pretence of a crusade,
was not even spent for Edmund’s interest, but was diverted to the pope’s own
secular purposes. A strong opposition arose, both in parliament and throughout
the country, to the exactions of the papal collector, Rostand; and the pope, on
making complaints of Henry’s supineness in the affair, and of his backwardness
in supplying money found that the source on which he had mainly relied for the
supply of his exigencies was likely to dry up. In alarm at this prospect, he
made overtures to Manfred, whom he had before excommunicated and declared to be
deprived not only of the Sicilian kingdom but of the principality of Taranto;
but the negotiation was ended by Manfred’s refusing to dismiss his Saracen
soldiery, and declaring, in answer to the proposal, that he would fetch as many
more from Africa. Manfred had taken into his own hands the appointment of
archbishops and bishops. The goodness of his administration won for him a
strength which enabled him to defy the papal censures; and in order to counteract
the money which the pope extorted from the English clergy, he held himself at
liberty to supply his needs by invading the property of churches and monasteries.
In Germany, William of Holland became lawful king by
the death of Conrad, nor during the short remainder of his life was he opposed
by any rival; although, when invited by the pope to repair to Rome for
coronation as emperor, he found himself neither strong enough nor
rich enough to undertake the expedition. By his death in a battle
against the Frisians, in 1256, the kingdom was again vacant. The claims of
Conradin were peremptorily set aside by the pope, who wrote to the
ecclesiastical electors, dilating on the misdeeds of the Swabian family, and
forbidding them under pain of excommunication to choose the boy, whose age he
also represented as a personal disqualification. The idea of a real kingship
had died out among the princes of Germany, so that each of them was intent on
promoting his own interests by weakening the power of the crown. A foreigner,
therefore, appeared preferable to a native prince; and while one party, headed
by the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, chose Richard of Cornwall, another,
under the archbishop of Treves, set up Alfonso “the Wise”, of Castile, a
grandson of Philip of Swabia. Richard was crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle, on
Ascension-day 1257, and by large gifts to his chief supporters gained a
stronger influence than Alfonso, who never showed himself in Germany; but
neither of the rivals was able to acquire the reality of power. Pope Alexander
and his successors contrived to hold the balance skillfully between the two, acknowledging the title of each, and professing to reserve the
decision between them for a further inquiry; and thus, without committing
themselves to the cause of either claimant, they were able to impress on the
Germans a belief that the decision of such questions belonged to the Roman see.
In northern Italy there were great commotions. The
city of Florence was distracted by the furious enmities of its Guelf and
Ghibelline factions; and at one time, when the Ghibellines were triumphant, it
would have been destroyed by their allies of Pisa and Siena, but for the
patriotic resistance of the Ghibelline chief, Farinata degli Uberti. The proud independence of the
republican cities was giving way to the ascendency of lords who succeeded in
establishing their domination over them. Among these lords (or tyrants), Eccelino da Romano, of Padua, a zealous partisan of the
imperial interest, has earned a remembrance above the rest by a career of
unequalled atrocity. After twenty years of triumphant cruelty and oppression,
he was overcome and taken prisoner in September 1259 by a crusading force under
a papal legate, Philip, archbishop of Ravenna. His behaviour in prison was
sullenly ferocious; on being asked to confess his sins, he answered that he had
nothing to repent of, except that he had not destroyed more of his enemies, and
that he had led his troops badly. He refused food and drink, tore the bandages from
his wounds, and was found dead on the eleventh day after his capture. Among the
chief leaders of the crusade, under archbishop Philip, was John of Vicenza, a
Dominican friar, who a quarter of a century earlier had distinguished himself
as a preacher of universal peace, and had at one time acquired a sort of
despotic power in his native city and at Verona, being supposed, in addition to
his power of eloquence, to possess the gift of miracles, so as even to raise
the dead.
In 1260—a year which had a peculiar significance
according to the systems of abbot Joachim and other apocalyptic teachers—a
strange fanaticism burst out at Perugia, and spread both southward to Rome, and
in the opposite direction to northern Italy, and even beyond the Alps to France
and the Rhine, to Hungary, Silesia and Poland. This movement was said to have
been begun in obedience to visions, or to the counsel of a blind and mysterious
hermit, and is not apparently traceable to the influence of any preacher. In
every city, vast multitudes—men, women, and children down to the age of
five—paraded the streets, with their faces covered, but their bodies naked to
the waist, gesticulating wildly, and pitilessly scourging themselves with
whips, while they shouted the invocation, “Holy lady Mary, receive us sinners,
and pray Jesus Christ to spare us!”. Some of them, wrought up to a pitch of
frenzy, dashed themselves on the ground, in mud or in snow, and screamed out,
“Mercy! Mercy! Peace! Peace!”. At first this spectacle excited ridicule; but
gradually the feeling of sin impelled many to join the penitents; and, with
clergy or monks at their head, bands of them moved from city to city,
everywhere communicating their enthusiasm. Any one who held out against the contagion
was noted by his neighbors as a “man of the devil”,
and it was believed that the impiety of such persons was punished by judgments
of heaven. The chroniclers tell us that the movement produced good effects in
the reconciliation of enemies and of political factions; that usurers abandoned
their practices, that unjust gains were restored, that prisoners were set free,
and that for the time there was a general reformation of morals. But in the
progress of the movement, circumstances appeared which suggested doubts as to
its religious tendency—such as a contempt of the ordinary means of grace, and a
proneness to denounce the clergy. The pope declined to encourage it; Manfred
refused to admit the flagellants into his kingdom; some of the authorities of
northern Italy erected gibbets on their frontiers, as an indication of the fate
which awaited any flagellant who should attempt to enter their territories; and
in Germany the duke of Bavaria and the bishops were strong in their opposition.
Under these discouragements from both temporal and spiritual authorities, and
probably also through the natural decay of such enthusiasm, the flagellant
revival (as it would now be styled) in no long time died utterly away.
Alexander had been much disquieted in Rome by the
partisans of Manfred, and in 1257 had been driven by Brancaleone, on his escape
from his second imprisonment, to take refuge at Viterbo. His hopes of
restoration on the death of Brancaleone were disappointed; the parties of Rome
continued their discords, and the pope, after having resided for some time at Anagni, returned to Viterbo, where he died on the 25th of
May 1261.
About the same time the Latin empire of Constantinople
came to an end. Almost from its foundation, this unfortunate power had been
continually sinking. Its limits had shrunk until it was confined to the city;
the emperor, Baldwin II, was reduced to the most pitiable expedients for the
means of maintaining his position—selling the lead from the roofs of churches,
and even giving his own son as a pledge to the Venetians for the repayment of a
loan; and the Latin patriarch was supported by the alms of the pope. While the
Venetians were in league with the Latin emperor, their rivals of Genoa allied
themselves with the Greeks, and their force contributed to the victory of
Alexius Strategopulus, who in 1261 wrested
Constantinople from the Latins for the emperor Michael Palaeologus of Nicaea.
The dispossessed Baldwin spent the remainder of his days in vainly soliciting
assistance from the sovereigns of the west. But the Greek reconquest, instead
of bringing fresh vigour to the empire, did little else than restore it to the
same condition of decrepitude which had prepared it to fall a prey to the
western crusaders fifty-seven years before.
Alexander had allowed the number of cardinals to
dwindle down to eighteen, and these were for three months unable to agree in
the choice of a successor, until James Pantaleon, patriarch of Jerusalem,
arrived at Viterbo, where they were assembled, and was raised by them to the
papacy under the name of Urban IV. The new pope, who was the son of a cobbler
at Troyes, had chiefly owed his success in life to his skill as a negotiator,
which had been shown in many important missions; and he carried on the traditional
policy of the papacy with greater vigour than his predecessor. But as he was
prosecuting the contest with Manfred, he had the mortification of finding that
he was unable to prevent a marriage between the heir of Aragon and one of
Manfred’s daughters; nay, that even the saintly Lewis of France, although
restrained for a time by scruples, allowed one of his sons to marry into the
family which had been thus contaminated by a connection with one whom the Roman
church regarded as a bastard, an usurper, and an excommunicate. The pope cited
Manfred to appear before him, personally or by proxy, on Maundy Thursday 1263,
and answer for his heavy crimes against God and man—his connections with
Saracens, whom he was accused of preferring to Christians, the celebration of
Divine offices in interdicted places,, the murder of some of his subjects, and
other grievous offences. But a difference arose as to the terms of the safe
conduct which Manfred required, and, as he did not obey the summons, the pope,
without heeding his excuses, renewed his excommunication.
As no further supplies of money were to be expected
from England, Urban resolved to set aside the claim of prince Edmund to the
Sicilian crown, which he offered to Lewis of France for one of his sons. But
Lewis, on account of the claims of Conradin and of Edmund, felt scruples which
were not to be overcome by the pope’s assurance that they were groundless, and
the offer was transferred to the king’s brother, Charles of Anjou. Charles, who
was then forty-two years of age, was of a character utterly unlike that of
Lewis. He was stern, ambitious, rapacious, and unscrupulous. His valor had been shown in the late disastrous crusade, from
which he had returned before his brother to take the chief share in the regency
of France; he was urged on to accept the offer of Sicily by the pride of his
wife, the youngest daughter of Raymond Berenger, who had brought him the county
of Provence as her dowry, and was discontented at being inferior in rank to her
sisters, the queens of France, England and Germany. As Lewis still hesitated
to sanction the acceptance of the Sicilian crown by a prince of his house, the
archbishop of Cosenza was sent to negotiate with Henry III for the cession of
Edmund’s pretensions. Henry represented the vast amount of treasure which he
had spent for the object which he was now desired to forego; but he was in the
middle of his great struggle with the barons under Simon de Montfort, and in
such circumstances he could not afford to alienate the pope by a refusal. The
claim of Edmund to Sicily, therefore, was formally relinquished; and by way of
recompense the censures of the Roman church were dealt forth against the earl
of Leicester and his partisans. The crusade against Manfred was preached in
France under the pope’s authority, and the French clergy were exhorted to aid
it with a tenth of their income.
At Rome a contest arose in August 1263 as to the
election of a senator. The citizens were divided between Charles of Anjou and
Manfred; but the partisans of Charles prevailed. The pope, afraid that a
secular prince established in Rome might have greater power than himself,
required Charles to bind himself by oath to certain conditions—that he would
not accept the senatorship for more than five years,
and if within that time he should get possession of the Sicilian kingdom, he
would, if required by the pope, absolutely resign the senatorship.
To these proposals Charles acceded; but he used the opportunity to make better
terms than before as to the Sicilian kingdom;—that he was to enjoy those parts
of it which the pope had wished to reserve for himself, with the exception of
the city of Benevento; that his yearly tribute should be lessened; that the
succession should be extended beyond the four heirs to whom it had been
limited in the earlier scheme; and that females as well as males should be
admitted to inherit.
The pope was the more willing to concede because
Manfred still continued to make progress, and gained possession of the greater
part of the papal territory. Urban, finding himself threatened in his capital,
withdrew to Perugia, and there died on the day after his arrival, the 2nd of
October 1264.
Urban had been careful to recruit the college of
cardinals with men favourable to his own policy; and their choice fell on Guy Fulcodi, who took the name of Clement IV. The new pope, who
was of a noble family in Languedoc, had in early life borne arms, but
afterwards became eminent for his learning both in civil and in canon law, and
had assisted Lewis IX in his legislation. He had been married, and had two
daughters, but after his wife's death he entered into holy orders, and became
successively bishop of Le Puy, archbishop of Narbonne, and cardinal-bishop of
Sabina. As pope, he was especially careful to discourage his near relations
from conceiving ambitious hopes on account of their connection with him; he
refused to let his daughters or his niece marry above his own original rank,
and warned his nephews not to come to the papal court, or to expect anything
from his favour. At the time of his election, he was engaged in a legation to
England; and he was obliged, from fear of the Ghibellines, to make his way to
Rome in the disguise of a simple monk.
Clement, as a native of southern France, was naturally
disposed to favour the interest of Charles of Provence, who sailed from
Marseilles about Easter 1265, and proceeded, chiefly by sea, to Rome, where he
was received with great pomp, and was invested in the office of senator. But
the pope, who was then at Viterbo, found great cause to be uneasy and
displeased. Charles had brought with him but few men and no money; he was
distressed even for food and clothing, which the Romans refused to supply
without payment; and he wished to borrow on the pope’s security, while Clement
had pledged his credit so deeply that he could not raise money for his own
necessities, and throughout his whole pontificate was unable to venture to Rome
on account of the debts which he owed. The pope declared that he could do
nothing for Charles except by a miracle, and that his merits were not sufficient
to work a miracle. Charles’s violence, also, in taking possession of the
Lateran palace drew forth strong remonstrances from Clement, who told him that
he could not give up either of his palaces to him, and that in a city where
large houses were so plentiful the senator could not be at a loss for a
suitable lodging. As the pope’s support was too valuable to be thrown away for
such an object, Charles removed from the Lateran; but Clement was still obliged
to complain of the exactions which were made in his name. The pope, however,
declared Edmund of England to have forfeited the Sicilian crown by neglecting
to perform the conditions annexed to the offer of it; he granted it to Charles,
who was formally invested in it; and a new agreement was drawn up as to the
terms on which it should be held. In default of lawful issue of Charles or of
his successors, the kingdom was to revert to the papacy. It was not to be held
with the empire, with Germany, Lombardy, or Tuscany. On getting possession of
it, Charles was to pay the pope 50,000 ounces of gold. A tribute of 8000 ounces
was to be paid every year, and a white palfrey every third year. And the king
bound himself to respect all ecclesiastical and monastic property.
The crusade against Manfred was actively preached,
with the offer of indulgence for crimes to all who should join it; and thus a
host of ruffians was gathered, in addition to the troops which Charles had
enlisted in France, and whose acts of violence, as they proceeded on the way to
join him at Rome—extortion, plunder, arson, sacrilege, murder—drew forth fresh
complaints and reproofs from Clement. By this increase of strength Charles was
enabled to press more effectually than before his suit for the coronation of
himself and his wife as king and queen of Sicily; and the ceremony —the first
coronation of any one below the imperial dignity that had ever taken place in
St. Peter’s—was performed by a commission of cardinals on the festival of the
Epiphany 1266.
About the middle of January, as the necessities of his
army urged him to proceed without delay, Charles set out from Rome for the
south. Manfred had attempted to negotiate with him by means of envoys; but they
were repelled with the answer, “Tell the sultan of Nocera,
that either I shall send him to hell or he shall send me to heaven.” Yet even
at this time it would seem that the pope, in his disgust at the disorders of
the French, was inclined to relent towards Manfred. Manfred, reduced to stand
on his defence, exerted himself with energy to meet the invaders, whose advance
into his territory was favoured by a season of unusual mildness; but his
counsel and valour were displayed in vain. Surprised and deserted through
treachery, he fell in the thickest of the fight at the battle of Benevento, on
the 26th of February 1266. His body, which was not recognized until two days
later, was excluded from Christian burial, as that of an excommunicate person,
and was interred by the victor’s command near the bridge of Benevento, where
the French, in a generous feeling of respect for a brave and unfortunate enemy,
heaped up a cairn over it, each casting a stone. But the archbishop of Cosenza,
by command of the pope, afterwards caused the corpse to be cast out of this
resting-place, as being unworthy to find sepulture within the territory of the church, and it was again committed, without any
religious rites, to a grave in a remote valley of the Abruzzi. The ruffians
whom the pope had invested with the character of crusaders again excited his
indignation, by plundering his city of Benevento with circumstances of
atrocious outrage and excess.
The whole of the south now submitted to Charles, and
throughout Italy the overthrow of Manfred struck terror into the Ghibellines,
so that many who had until then held out submitted to the church. The widowed
queen, a princess of the Comnenian family, fell into
the victor’s hands, with her children, who spent many years—and some of them
the whole remainder of their lives—in strict and hopeless captivity. Manfred’s
adherents were cruelly punished, and the country was subjected to a grinding taxation
and to oppressions of all sorts by the new officials who took the place of
those employed under the late reign. The pope remonstrated vehemently, both as
to Charles’s treatment of his new subjects, and as to his neglect of the
conditions by which he had bound himself to the Roman see. Yet when the king
visited Rome in 1267, Clement on Palm Sunday bestowed on him the golden rose,
and to this gift he added the titles of Vicar of the Empire and Pacificator of
Tuscany.
Even those of Charles’s subjects who had been opposed
to Manfred now learnt to regret the change of rulers, and a general feeling
arose in favour of Conradin, who was invited to attempt the recovery of the
Sicilian throne. The heir of the Hohenstaufen, who had been left fatherless at
the age of two, was now fifteen, and had grown up into a handsome, spirited,
and accomplished youth. When the Sicilian enterprise was proposed, his mother
and the more cautious of his counsellors endeavoured to dissuade him, but
Conradin was filled with the thought of the great things which had been
achieved by his grandfather Frederick, to whose earlier history his own seemed
thus far to bear a likeness. Despising the threats by which the pope endeavoured
to deter him, he crossed the Alps in the autumn of 1267, with a force of about
10,000 men, which, notwithstanding some desertions occasioned by his want of
money, continually increased as he went on. At Pisa and Siena he was welcomed
with much splendour; and, as he passed Viterbo, where the pope was, he
displayed his forces before the walls, but disdained to make any attack on him.
Clement had from the beginning spoken of the young prince’s expedition with
contemptuous denunciations, foretelling that he would pass away like a smoke,
and on Maundy Thursday 1268 he anathematized him, with his partisans, and
summoned him to submit to penance. But when Conradin entered Rome, having been
invited by an embassy of the citizens, the streets were hung with garlands, and
the general magnificence of his reception put to shame that which under the
papal auspices had greeted Charles of Anjou. Henry, the brother of Alfonso of
Castile, after many adventures in Africa and Sicily, had been chosen senator,
partly through the influence of Charles, who was his nephew; but the two had
now quarrelled, and both at Rome and in Sicily Henry supported the young
Hohenstaufen with all his power. He unscrupulously laid the treasures of
churches under contribution for his service, and incurred a share of the pope’s
denunciation for his sake. Conradin advanced into Apulia; the fleet of Pisa,
which was in his interest, had defeated the Provencal fleet; Sicily was won by
his partisans, and the Saracens of Nocera rose in his behalf. On the 23rd of
August, the young adventurer’s army encountered that of Charles at Scurcola, near Tagliacozzo. Fora
time success appeared to be with Conradin; but by too readily believing that
his opponent was defeated and slain, he exposed himself to Charles, who surprised
him by breaking from an ambush, and inflicted on him a total overthrow.
Conradin fled to Rome, but was refused admittance into the Capitol by Guy of
Montefeltro, who commanded for the senator Henry. He then attempted to escape
by sea to Sicily, but was arrested near Astura by one
of the Frangipani—a family which had been loaded with benefits by the Swabian
princes, but had lately been won to the papal side by large concessions—and,
after having been imprisoned for a time at Palestrina, he was carried by
Charles to Naples. Although a promise of safety had been given in the name of
Charles—whether without authority or treacherously—Conradin was brought to
trial; and, although one only of his judges could be brought to pronounce for
death that sentence was approved by Charles, and the last heir of the great
Hohenstaufen family, with ten of his chief companions in his enterprise,
perished on the scaffold. His fate excited throughout Christendom a general
feeling of pity and horror. The pope had exhorted Charles to mercy, but in
vain; and Clement himself survived only a month the execution of Conradin—dying
at Viterbo on the 29th of November, 1268.
The reign of Lewis IX of France, after his return from
the Holy Land, had been distinguished by the display of high kingly qualities,
of personal sanctity, and of that strong sense of the rights of royalty and
law, as opposed to the assumptions of Rome, which is the more remarkable on
account of the devout and ascetic piety with which it was combined. Warned,
perhaps, by the history of Henry II of England, he did not attempt to interfere
by his own authority with the immunities to which the clergy pretended; but he
gained the substantial acknowledgment of the rights of the state by prevailing
on Alexander IV, in 1260, to allow that the king’s officials should not be
liable to excommunication for arresting criminal clerks in flagrant delict,
provided that they held them at the disposal of the ecclesiastical courts. The
national rights were still further asserted in the “Pragmatic Sanction” of the
year 1269. The only article, indeed, of this document which is in direct
opposition to Rome, is one which forbids the exaction of money by the Roman
court except with the sanction of the king and the church of France. But the
whole tone of it is anti-papal, and accords with the declaration in the king’s
“Establishments” that the king of France “holdeth of
no one save God and himself.” In a like spirit was the answer of Lewis, when
the bishop of Auxerre, in the name of the clergy, represented to him that
excommunication was despised (as was indeed natural, from the frequency with
which it was pronounced for all manner of trifling causes), and that many
excommunicate persons died without seeking absolution. For these reasons the
bishop desired that the spiritual sentence might be enforced by civil
penalties. The king replied that he would consent, if it were certain that the
excommunicates were in the wrong. The clergy objected that it was not for
secular courts to determine such a question; but Lewis adhered to his
declaration, and the clergy did not venture to renew their proposal. Thus the
saintly reputation of the king enabled him to assert with success, and almost
without question, principles which would have drawn on any ordinary sovereign
charges of impiety and of hostility to the church; and to him is chiefly due
the foundation of those liberties by which the Gallican church was for
centuries distinguished.
Amidst the labours of government at home, Lewis had
never forgotten his crusading vow. While the popes, although they affected to
keep the cause of the holy war before men’s eyes, were bestowing all their
energies and all the treasures that they could collect on the destruction of
the Hohenstaufen, the disasters which were continually reported from the east
filled the pious king with sorrow. In May 1267 he appeared at an assembly of
his nobles, holding in his hand the relic which was reverenced as the crown of
thorns, and in pathetic terms exhorted them to the holy war. After a
cardinal-legate had addressed the assembly, Lewis set the example of taking
the cross, and in this he was followed by his three sons, by the king of
Navarre, and by many others, whose motive was rather attachment to their
sovereign than any religious enthusiasm. Yet many hung back—among them the
biographer Joinville, who remembered the oppressions which the officers of the
kings of France and Navarre had inflicted on his people during his absence on
the former crusade, and reflects severely on those counsellors who advised the
king to undertake the new expedition, without regard either to the interests of
his kingdom or to his own enfeebled health. The pope granted for the enterprise
a tenth of the income of the French clergy for three years, and, although they
cried out that the impost was sacrilegious, and that they would rather be
excommunicated than pay, it was rigidly exacted of them. The crusade was
preached in other countries with some success. Edward, the heir of England,
pledged Gascony to the French king in order to raise the means of joining it.
The king of Aragon also offered to go; but the pope had already reproved him
for adultery, had indignantly disallowed the plea that his lawful wife was a
leper, and now told him that he must forsake his sinful life before taking part
in the holy work. In the meantime tidings reached the west that Antioch had
fallen into the hands of the infidels, with a vast loss of Christians slain or
taken prisoners.
On the 14th of March 1270, Lewis, although so weak
that he could neither bear armor nor endure to sit
long on horseback, took the oriflamme from the altar
of St. Denys, and set out on his second crusade. He celebrated Easter at Cluny,
and thence made his way to Aigues Mortes, where the
expedition was to embark. But there the troops were obliged to wait for the
arrival of the Genoese vessels which were engaged to transport them; and this
delay was unfortunate, both from the effect of the pestilential air, and
because it gave time for the old jealousy between the northern and the southern
French to break out into bloody quarrels. At length, on the 1st of July, the
expedition sailed, and, after some dangers at sea, a meeting took place off the
Sardinian coast, where a descent on Tunis was resolved on. It is supposed that
this resolution had been suggested by the king’s brother Charles in order to
punish the sultan of Tunis for refusing to continue the tribute which he had
paid to former kings of Sicily. Lewis had already corresponded on friendly
terms with the sultan, Muley Montanza, and had hoped
to act as sponsor at his baptism—for the sight of which he declared that he
would gladly endure captivity in a Saracen dungeon for the remainder of his
days. But on landing in Africa, these sanguine visions were dissipated. The
sultan’s troops attacked and harassed the crusaders, and speedily the baleful
climate, the want of water and of wholesome food, began to produce their
effects. Among those who were early carried off was the pope’s legate. John
Tristan, count of Nevers, the son who had been born during the captivity of
Lewis on his former crusade, sank, and died on the 3rd of August; and the king
himself, from whose already weakened constitution the disease met with no
resistance, died on the 25th of the same month, after having signally displayed
in his last hours the piety which had throughout marked his life.
The new king, Philip, was himself so ill at the time
of his father’s death that he gave up all hope of recovery, and appointed a
regency for the expected minority of his son. Charles of Sicily, on whose
co-operation the crusaders had relied, arrived too late to find his brother
alive, but undertook the military conduct of the expedition; and, after two
bloody engagements, forced from the sultan a peace, which included liberty of
religion, permission to preach Christianity, compensation for the cost of the war,
release of captives, and a yearly tribute to the Sicilian crown. Having secured
these advantages, the survivors of the crusade left the African coast,
professing that, after having recruited their strength in France, they would
resume the expedition to the East; but a storm in which many of them perished
was very generally regarded as a judgment on them for having “sold the holy war
for money”. King Philip recovered his health; but as he returned through Italy,
he had to carry with him the remains of his father, of his brother, of his
queen, who died at Cosenza, of one of his own children, and of his
brother-in-law, king Theobald of Navarre. At Viterbo he found the cardinals
assembled for the election of a pope, and witnessed the murder of Henry, son of
Richard of Germany. Henry March 13, had accompanied his cousin prince Edward on
the crusade, but had been sent back by him with the intention that he should
act as his representative at home; and at Viterbo he unhappily fell in the way
of Guy and Simon de Montfort, the sons of the late earl of Leicester, who, to
avenge their father’s death on the family by whose partisans he had been slain,
stabbed the unsuspecting prince in the cathedral at the moment of the elevation
of the Host. Philip, after having made the passage of Mont Cenis with
difficulty, celebrated the obsequies of his father at St. Denys, carrying on
his own shoulders the coffin which contained the bones of the saintly king.
Edward of England had been delayed so that he was
unable to join the crusade at Aigues Mortes, and did
not reach Tunis until after the departure of Philip and his companions. On
learning the result of the expedition, he made for Sicily, where Charles was
unable to persuade him to relinquish his intention of proceeding to the east,
or to share in the money which had been got from the Saracens. After spending
the winter in Sicily, he sailed for Acre, and displayed his valour in the defence
of that city—now the only remaining possession of the Latins in Syria—and in
several encounters with the infidels. But the smallness of his force prevented
any considerable achievements, and the object of the crusades appeared to be as
distant as it had been before St. Lewis took arms in the sacred cause.
