CHAPTER IV. PHILIP III TO THE HOUSE OF VALOIS

Of all epochs of French history, the second half of the thirteenth century appears to be that in which the subordination (of the people to the crown) was most complete.--DARESTE.[k]

PHILIP (III) THE BOLD (1270-1285 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1270-1285 A.D.]]

Little is known of the reign of St. Louis’ eldest son in spite of its length of fifteen years. It began under the walls of Tunis whence Philip III brought home his father’s body, after forcing a treaty upon the Mohammedans in which they recognised themselves tributary to the king of Sicily and agreed to pay the costs of the war. One can, however, still follow the ascending march of royalty under this prince, who, without any new war, and by extinction of several feudal lineages, reunited to his domain Valois, Poitou, and the counties of Toulouse and Venaissin. But Philip gave up to the pope this last fief and half of Avignon. The count of Foix, vanquished and a prisoner in his own capital, was compelled to promise faithful obedience and cede a portion of his territory. The dominion of the king of France thus approached the Pyrenees; and it finally crossed them. Philip made a match between his eldest son and the heiress of Navarre and if he did not succeed in placing on the throne of Castile a prince subservient to his influence, or in setting the crown of Aragon on the head of his second son Charles, at least he showed his arms in Catalonia where he took the stronghold of Gerona. Thus the Capetian dynasty, triumphant at home since the days of Louis VI, tried to become so abroad. But the time for this was not ripe.

The expedition to Catalonia, which turned out badly, had no other motive than that of family interest. Philip wished to punish Don Pedro, king of Aragon, for his support of the rebellious Sicilians against Charles of Anjou after the massacre of all the French citizens in the island, which had taken place during vespers on Easter Monday. (“The Sicilian Vespers,” 1282.)

An ordinance of Philip III, drawn up in 1274, obliged the advocates in the royal courts to take oath each year that they would defend none but just cases. The first example of a commoner made noble by the king will be found in the letters of ennoblement issued by Philip III to his silversmith Raoul, in 1272, if the fact is absolutely certain.

PHILIP (IV) THE FAIR (1285-1314 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1285-1300 A.D.]]

Philip IV, surnamed the Fair, was but seventeen when he succeeded his father in 1285. He ridded himself, as far as possible by treaties, of futile wars, and occupied himself in place of conquest with increasing his domains by acquisitions within his reach. His marriage with the heiress of Navarre and Champagne had only been worth two great provinces to him. A decree of parliament which despoiled the heirs of Hugh de Lusignan secured him La Marche and Angoumois. Then his second son married the heiress of Franche-Comté; thus through marriage, escheat, or conquest all France came little by little into the royal domain. But powerful vassals still remained--the duke of Brittany, the count of Flanders, and especially the duke of Guienne. Philip began by attacking the last. He was a formidable adversary since he was at the same time king of England.

Fortunately Edward I, who had just subdued the Welsh and was now threatening the independence of Scotland, was too much occupied in his own island to come over to the continent, and owing to this the royal army was able to make rapid progress in Guienne. A French fleet went to pillage Dover; and another army led by the king in person made its way into Flanders, where the count had declared for the king of England, and beat the Flemings at Furnes (Veurne) (1297). The intervention of Pope Boniface VIII established a peace between the two kings which was sealed by a marriage. A daughter of Philip the Fair wedded the son of Edward I and gave the English house rights to the throne of France which Edward III in due time asserted (1299). By this peace the two kings gave up their allies, Philip the Scotch, and Edward the count of Flanders. The latter in terror hastened to place himself under the protection of Philip and Flanders was reunited to the domain (1300).

[Illustration: PHILIP III]

[Sidenote: [1300-1302 A.D.]]

The whole French court went to visit the new acquisition. It was received with great pomp; the Flemings, to do honour to their noble visitors, donned their best attire and displayed all their riches. The entrance into Bruges was especially magnificent. The bourgeois wives showed such gold and jewels in their toilets that the queen felt her woman’s vanity wounded. “I thought,” she said, “there was but one queen of France; now I see six hundred.” Flanders was in truth the richest country in Europe because it was there that the people worked hardest. In that fruitful land men had sprung up like crops, towns were numerous, and the population active and industrious, devoted, like the Guienne towns--especially Bordeaux, because the English bought their wines--to England, whence came the wool necessary to their manufactures. Flemish cloth sold throughout the whole of Christendom as far as Constantinople, and the towns of the Low Countries formed the market where the productions of the north from the Baltic were exchanged for those of the south brought from Venice and the east of Italy down the Rhine.

On a soil which it had taken a thousand canals to rescue from the sea, among the scores of stoutly walled cities, with a population accustomed to hard work, but none the less proud of its numbers, strength, and wealth, chivalry had had small chance to play its game, and there was little feudalism in Flanders. Every town had its privileges and it was not safe to tamper with them.

_New War with Flanders (1302-1304 A.D.)_

Philip had appointed James de Châtillon governor of Flanders--a man who did not know how to treat a conquered people, especially such a rich one. The people, rather intolerant and accustomed to more consideration from their counts, rebelled. In Bruges alone three thousand French were put to death. Philip sent Robert of Artois with a large army to avenge this deed. Twenty thousand Flemings awaited it bravely behind a canal near Courtrai. Before the fight the Flemings confessed their sins, the priest said high mass, and all, bowing down, took some earth and put it in their mouths, swearing thus to fight to the death for their country’s freedom. This gathering of a whole army usually augurs badly for its assailants. The latter advanced in bad order, sure of victory and not giving those common people the credit of believing that they would dare look them in the face. In vain the constable Raoul de Nesle cautioned prudence. He was asked if he was afraid. “Sir,” he replied to Count Robert, “if you come where I go, you will be well in the front,” and he spurred his horse forward at all speed. They did not even take the precaution to reconnoitre the Flemings’ position. The first ranks of the heavy columns of knights, advancing at full speed, had no sooner fallen into the canal that covered the enemy’s lines than those just behind pressed by the rear were precipitated upon them, and then the Flemings had only to plunge their long lances into the confused mass of men and horses to kill with perfect safety to themselves. A sortie which they made from the two ends of the canal completed the rout. Two hundred nobles of high degree and six thousand soldiers perished. And what was most humiliating was that the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Saint-Pol and Clermont, with two thousand hauberts, fled, leaving the constable, count of Artois, and so many noble warriors, beaten, maimed, and killed in the hands of the common people (1302).

The battle of Mansurah had already shown the undisciplined impetuosity and military incapacity of the knights, but this occurred in the Orient and distance had helped to preserve the reputation of the vanquished; but the battle of Courtrai, lost by the flower of French chivalry to the common people, made a great sensation without, however, curing the nobility of their mad presumption. The defeats of Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt came from the same causes. Stripped by royalty of its privileges, the feudal nobility lost on the battle-field the prestige with which it had long been surrounded and saw, to complete its own ruin, arise at its very side another army--that of the king and the people.

Philip the Fair took energetic measures to repair the disaster of Courtrai. He forced nobles and bourgeois to bring to the royal mint their gold and silver plate, for which he paid in debased coinage. He ordered each property yielding 100 livres of rent to provide one horseman, every one hundred villein families to provide six foot-sergeants, and every commoner having 25 livres income to serve in person. He sold many serfs their freedom and many commoners titles of nobility. By this means he collected in two months ten thousand mounted and sixty thousand men on foot. It was a royal effort and it was a great one, but that of the people was greater still. From the Flemish towns there issued this time eighty thousand fighters. With two such opposing armies the contest must be terrible and decisive; they felt this and not wishing to take any risks, the year 1302 was spent in trying to get thoroughly acquainted with the situation. Philip was then at the height of his quarrel with Boniface VIII and a new defeat would be fatal to him; he even let the Flemings take the offensive the following year (1303). But the pope died the same year and Philip attacked Flanders by land and sea. His fleet defeated the Flemish at Zieriksee and he himself avenged at Mons-en-Pévêlle, or Mons-en-Puelle, the defeat of Courtrai. He thought the enemy exterminated, but in a few days they were back as numerous as ever, asking a new battle. “But it rains Flemings,” cried the king. He preferred to treat rather than fight again. They promised him money and ceded Douai, Lille, Béthune, Orchies with all Walloon--that is to say French-speaking Flanders between the Lys and the Schelde. To this the king gave them back their count, who promised nothing more than feudal homage.

Thus French royalty receded before Flemish democracy as did German royalty almost at the same period before Swiss democracy. The communes of France remained isolated, and succumbed; in Flanders and in Switzerland they united and triumphed.[b]

_The Quarrel between Philip and Boniface VIII_

[Sidenote: [1296-1304 A.D.]]

The complaints made by a certain section of the French clergy to the holy see in 1296, against what they designated as the exactions of Philip the Fair, met with a far better reception than did similar complaints from England, where Edward was employing much more vigorous methods than those of his rival to obtain subsidies from the clergy.

It was a great opportunity for Pope Boniface VIII, and he did not let it slip. The bull, _Clericis laïcos_ (1296), was familiar throughout Christendom. This bull, forbidding the clergy to pay taxes to temporal rulers, was too sweeping to be enforced. Boniface realised that, and forestalled the objections that it could not fail to raise. All that was too peremptory in the preceding bull was corrected in the one beginning _Ineffabilis amor_. The king might raise subsidies among the clergy, with the pope’s consent, who, if the kingdom were menaced, would order them to contribute to its defence even unto the selling of the sacred vessels. In the same bull Boniface demanded an explanation of the prohibition recently made by the king against exporting gold, silver, and merchandise out of the kingdom, a prohibition which threatened to dry up one of the principal sources of revenue of Rome.

The edict which is universally regarded as Philip’s retort to the bull _Clericis laïcos_, was not aimed at the pope, for it was issued in the month of April, a few days after the drawing up of the bull and before its contents could possibly have become known to the king of France. It did not apply solely to money, but forbade also the exportation of arms, horses, and other things, its object being to damage England and Flanders with which Philip was at war. Similar edicts were issued on several occasions during this reign. In this same bull Boniface threatened Philip with excommunication. The king and his councillors were furious at this liberty.

In 1297, came a fresh prohibition to export gold and silver, fresh fears on the part of the pope, fresh explanations from Philip. In the midst of all this the French bishops wrote to Boniface praying him to grant the king a tithe on all the churches. The clergy began to realise that they could not abstain from contributing to the defence of the country. Abandoned by a portion of the French clergy, Boniface made fresh concessions. In the bull beginning _Romana mater ecclesia_ he even granted permission to raise, in cases of necessity, ecclesiastical tithes, with the consent of the clergy but without consulting the holy see. The bull _Noveritis nos_ went still farther: it handed over to the king, if he had attained his majority, and to his council if he were still a minor, the responsibility of deciding as to which were cases of necessity, and the right of taxing the clergy even though the pope had not first been consulted. It concluded by declaring that the holy see had never had any intention of making an attempt upon the rights, liberties, freedoms, and customs of the kingdom, the king, or the barons. This compliance on the part of Boniface VIII, his sudden sweetness, must not be attributed altogether to feelings of benevolence towards Philip the Fair; they are explained principally by the difficult position in which the pope found himself in his own states.

Harmonious relations continued between the king and the pope; nevertheless certain incidents occurred to mar them. Boniface had summoned the bishop of Laon to Rome to give account of his administration; the king thereupon affected to consider his benefice as vacant and proceeded to appropriate to himself the revenues according to the royal prerogative. A fresh cause for reciprocal discontent was found in the complaints made by the bishops against the collection of the first-fruits granted to the king.

One event to which no one attached any importance took place about that time, changing the already unsettled feelings of Boniface into hostility. This was the alliance formed at Vaucouleurs in 1299 between Philip and Albert, king of the Romans, who had been excommunicated for having dethroned Adolphus of Nassau--a very threatening alliance for the papacy. The news of the negotiations between Philip and Albert spread consternation in Rome; a false rumour announcing a rupture between them was received with joy. Boniface conceived the idea of holding a conference with the kings of France and England and the count of Flanders--the only means, in his eyes, by which to establish peace on a solid basis. He did not dream of summoning them to Rome. He knew Philip and Edward well enough to be aware that they would regard it simply as officious interference on his part. So he determined to go himself to some neutral territory. He had even got so far as to make overtures to Philip the Fair under these conditions when a serious malady, which caused him excessive pain, coupled with his great age, compelled him to renounce the scheme.

The Flemish ambassadors judged this moment to be a favourable one for making themselves heard, by flattering the pope’s notions of supremacy and exciting his suspicions against Philip the Fair. They forwarded to Boniface a memorial in which they prayed his support and intervention, and sought to reassure him as to the mightiness of this sovereign power which they attributed to him by appeals to the holy Scriptures. Boniface was only too ready to listen to insinuations which fell in with his own hopes and ambitions.

[Sidenote: [1301-1303 A.D.]]

However, causes of complaint against Philip continued to accumulate, among others being his usurpation of the county of Melgueil, which belonged to the bishop of Maguelonne, and the refusal of the viscount of Narbonne to do homage to the archbishop who was his over-lord. The pope let drop some severe remarks, and despatched Bernard de Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, to invite the king to restore the consecrated land. Philip, exasperated by the bishop of Pamiers, allowed him to return to his diocese; but he instituted a secret inquiry about him to which evidence was contributed by the bishops and barons of the south. He was accused of having purloined Languedoc from the crown for the purpose of re-uniting it to Aragon; his real offence was his hatred of the king. Bernard was arrested at Pamiers by the vidame of Amiens, and arraigned before the king and an assembly of barons at Senlis, October 14th, 1301. So haughty was his defence that the whole assembly rose to its feet and clamoured for his death. Within an ace of being massacred, he flung himself on the compassion of the archbishop of Narbonne, his metropolitan, who was present, as well as the bishops of Béziers and Maguelonne. The archbishop took him under his protection and made himself answerable for him. This proceeding of Philip was contrary to the laws of the church: a bishop cannot be brought up for judgment before a lay court; in the same way, the councils have not the right to judge him without the intervention of the pope, who must authorise the proceedings.

[Illustration: ANCIENT CHURCH NEAR ROUEN, BUILT IN THE ROCK]

Philip despatched Peter de Flotte to Rome to demand the punishment of Saisset. The ambassador declared that his master did not wish to avail himself of his right to punish a man whose crimes rendered him unworthy of the priesthood and of the protection accorded to the clergy; but that he desired to show the pope a token of deference and respect by handing over to him the charge of avenging the insult offered to God as the author of all legitimate authority, to the king as a son of the church, and to the kingdom as a very considerable portion of Christendom. He further requested Boniface to declare Bernard stripped of his episcopal dignity and of all clerical privileges. It was in vain that Flotte urged and demanded a reply; he received none, and returned raging to France.

Boniface suspended the privileges accorded by himself and his predecessors to the crown of France, and convoked, for November 1st, 1302, a general council at Rome, in order to put an end to the oppressions endured by the French clergy. The king was invited either to attend in person or to send someone to defend him. The bull _Ausculta fili_ indicated the superiority claimed by Boniface over Philip. “God, in laying upon us the yoke of apostolic servitude, has placed us above kings and empires, to uproot, destroy, annihilate, disperse, build and plant in his name; dearly beloved son, do not allow yourself to be persuaded that you are not subject to the supreme head of the church, for such an opinion would be folly.” He further accused the king of tyrannising over his subjects, oppressing the church, and offending the nobles. In conclusion he invites him to turn his attention to the deplorable condition of the Holy Land and to prepare a crusade. Another bull, _Secundum divina_, enjoined Philip to set Saisset at liberty and let him return to Rome. The king drove him out of France, and prepared to obtain a great demonstration in his own favour, in opposition to the pretensions of Boniface, by summoning the first states-general. By acting in this manner Philip was only defending his crown: his right was obvious, he needed but to claim it and exercise it with dignity. His cause was good, but he had the misfortune to sully it by falsehood and violence; in this, doubtless, following the advice of the lawyers who surrounded him.

The Sunday after Candlemas (February, 1302) the king solemnly burned the bull _Ausculta fili_. The defeat of the French army at Courtrai, in the month of July, gave confidence to Boniface without disheartening Philip. In the month of December Philip sent the bishop of Auxerre to Rome to signify to Boniface that, in conjunction with the king of England, he had renounced his arbitration. Outwardly Philip was most deferential towards the pope. While all this was going on grave news came from Rome. The council summoned by Boniface had met on All Saints’ Day, 1302, several French bishops having responded to the pope’s summons, despite the king’s prohibitions. Philip had seized all their worldly goods, and a decree issued November 18th, doubtless at the instigation of the council, ratified the doctrine of the papal superiority.

Boniface directed those French bishops who had not taken part in the council to present themselves at Rome within three months’ time. Philip forbade them to leave the kingdom, and set guards at all the passes into Germany and Italy. By the king’s wish Cardinal de Saint-Marcellin (the pope’s legate) summoned a council in France. Boniface recapitulated all his grievances against Philip, and called upon him to clear himself. He accused him among other things of coining false money and of burning the bull _Ausculta fili_. Philip’s answer was moderate and conciliatory. He expressed his wish to maintain, as his ancestors had done, the union between France and the holy see, and concluded by entreating Boniface not to meddle with him in the legitimate exercise of his rights; he offered to refer the matter to the decision of the duke of Brittany or of the duke of Burgundy, who were particularly agreeable to him. The pope declared this answer to be insufficient, and complained bitterly of it to the bishop of Auxerre and to the king’s brother, Charles of Valois, who for nearly two years had lived in Italy with the title “champion of the holy see,” and whom Philip had lately recalled.

On the 12th of March, 1303, an assembly of barons, prelates, and lawyers was held at the Louvre in the presence of the king. William de Plasian (or, according to Dareste[k] and Martin,[c] the chancellor, William de Nogaret) read aloud a document in which were set forth accusations against Boniface:

“He is a heretic; he does not believe in the immortality of the soul or in the life everlasting: he has said that he would sooner be a dog than a Frenchman; he does not believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. He has approved of a book by Armand de Villeneuve, which book has been condemned and burned; he has set up images of himself in the churches to the end that he may be worshipped; he has a familiar spirit who advises him; he consults sorcerers; he has openly preached that the pope cannot be guilty of simony; he traffics in benefices; he sows strifes everywhere; he has said that the French are of the Patarins (Albigenses); he has ordered murders; he has forced priests to reveal confessions; he has nourished a bitter hatred of the king of France. Before his election he was heard to say that if he did become pope he would destroy Christianity or lower the French pride; he has prevented peace between England and France; he has urged the king of Sicily to massacre all French; he strengthened the king of Germany on condition of his humbling the arrogance of the French, who, he pretended, boasted that they recognised no superior in temporal matters, in which they lied in their throats; that if an angel from heaven were to tell him that France was not subject to him, he would shriek curses against both him and the emperor. He has brought about the ruin of the Holy Land, having confiscated all the money intended for its aid, that he might give it to his relatives, of whom he has made marquises, counts, and barons, and for whom he has built castles; he has driven out the nobility of Rome; he has broken up marriages; he has made a cardinal of one of his nephews who is but an ignorant fellow and who was married, and has forced the wife to take the veil in a convent; he has done Celestine, his predecessor, to death in prison.”

On the 13th of April Boniface declared Philip to be excommunicate if he persisted in not submitting himself to the holy see. He commissioned Nicholas de Bienfaite, archdeacon of Coutances, to bear to Cardinal de Saint-Marcellin the bull which cut off the king from communion with the church. But the king, warned of the archdeacon’s mission, had him arrested at Troyes and thrown into prison. His bull was taken from him; in point of fact it was not to have been fulminated except in the case of Philip’s remaining deaf to a final summons. In vain the legate protested; no one listened to him; the goods of all prelates absent from the kingdom were sequestrated. Realising that he compromised himself uselessly by remaining any longer, he quitted France.

On the 31st of May Boniface, who had pardoned Albert of Austria and had recognised him as king of the Romans, launched a bull in which the nobles, churches, and _communes_ of the metropolises of Lyons, Tarantaise, Embrun, Besançon, Aix, Arles, and Vienne, of Burgundy, Barrois, Dauphiné, Provence, of the county of Forcalquier, the principality of Orange, and the kingdom of Arles, provinces held of the kingdom, were ordered to break such ties of vassalage and obedience as they had been able to contract prejudicial to the emperor, and to release themselves from such oaths of obedience as they had sworn.

It was almost equivalent to dismembering France. On the 13th of June a great assembly took place at the Louvre at which the king was present. The counts of Évreux, Saint-Pol, and Dreux, and William de Plasian, demanded that the church should be governed by a legitimate pope. Boniface was charged anew with all the old crimes and infamies. The king was entreated, in his capacity as “defender of the faith,” to work for the convoking of a general council. To this he consented. On the 24th of June, St. John Baptist’s Day, an immense crowd of people gathered in the palace gardens; there the king’s challenge to the future council was read.

At last, on September 8th, Boniface, in the bull _Petri solio excelso_, pronounced against Philip the excommunication he had courted. All the world knows how, in defiance of public liberties, Boniface was arrested at Anagni, on the evening before the very day on which the excommunication of the French king was to have been publicly posted.[d]

One of Philip’s agents, William (Guillaume) de Nogaret whose grandfather had been burned as an Albigensian, had been sent to Italy. He came to an understanding with Sciarra Colonna, a Roman noble and the pope’s mortal enemy. Boniface was at that time in his native city of Anagni. By dint of money Nogaret won over the chief of the military forces of Anagni, and one morning entered the place with four hundred mounted armed men and some hundreds of foot-soldiers. At the noise they made in the town and the cries of “Death to the pope!” “Long live the king of France!” Boniface believed his last hour had come. But showing in spite of his age (he was eighty-six years old) an uncommon degree of agility, he got into his pontifical robes, and seated himself on his throne, the tiara on his head, the cross in one hand and the keys of St. Peter in the other. Thus he awaited his assassins. The latter called upon him to abdicate. “Here is my neck and here is my head,” he replied; “betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like him at least I shall die a pope.” A story ran that Sciarra Colonna dragged him from his throne, struck him across the face with his gauntlet, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered, saying: “Oh thou wretched pope, witness and consider the goodness of my lord, the king of France, who, far from thee as is his kingdom, guards and defends thee through me.” [But the story of Colonna’s violence seems quite unfounded.[13]]

[Sidenote: [1303-1308 A.D.]]

Nogaret hesitated, however, about dragging the old man out of Anagni. The people had time to recover from their astonishment. The townspeople armed themselves, the peasants rushed in, and the French were driven from the town. The pope, fearing they had put poison in his food, remained three days without eating. A short time after, he died of shame and anger, at the humiliating insults he had received. His successor, Benedict XI, tried to avenge him by excommunicating Nogaret, Colonna, and all those who had helped them. The excommunication reached up to the king. A month after the publication of the bull, Benedict died, perhaps poisoned. This time Philip took measures to make himself master of the election of the new pontiff. Bertrand d’Agoust (de Goth), archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected after he had promised the king to comply with the royal wishes. The new pope, who took the name of Clement V, caused himself to be consecrated at Lyons, and abandoning Rome, fixed his residence in 1308 at Avignon, a possession of the holy see beyond the Alps, where he soon found himself under the hand and will of the king of France. His successors remained there until 1376. The sojourn of the popes at Avignon, which so upset the church, has been called the Babylonish Captivity. This sojourn was memorable in connection with the history of Philip IV.

_Sentence of the Templars (1307 A.D.)_

[Sidenote: [1307 A.D.]]

Villani relates a mournful scene--the ominous interview between pope and king in the forest of St. Jean d’Angély where one sold his tiara and the other bought it. This meeting did not take place, but conditions were certainly proposed and accepted. One of them was nothing less than the destruction of the military order of the Templars. The wealth of these warrior monks, now of no use to them since it was no longer expended in armament against the infidel, had tempted the king’s greed, always keen-scented for money, and their powers stood in the way of his despotism. There were 15,500 knights with a great multitude of servant knights, brothers and their dependents, so that if gathered together they could defy all the royal armies of Europe; and their strong organisation, under the hand of the grand-master, made them seem more formidable than did their numbers and their wealth.

They possessed throughout Christendom more than ten thousand establishments, and a number of fortresses, among them the temple at Paris where Philip had once found a safe asylum from a riot which stormed and raged in vain around its thick walls. In the treasury of the order there were 150,000 gold florins not counting silver or precious vessels. The world never knew what went on in their houses. Everything was secret, but there were vague rumours of orgies, scandals, and impieties, and no profane eye had ever penetrated the mysteries. Knights had disappeared, because, it was said, they had threatened compromising revelations. The pride of the order irritated the people, who charged it with the most odious crimes; but they were guilty only of great laxity of morals, and their religious ceremonies were perhaps mingled in the East with some impure alloy and strange customs.

[Illustration: A TEMPLAR]

The 14th of September, 1307, the seneschals and bailiffs were given notice to hold themselves in arms for the 12th of October, and they received at the same time sealed letters not to be opened until the night of the 12th and 13th of October. The surprised knights had no time to resist or gather together. Torture drew from them such statements as torture always draws. It was Philip’s desire to associate the whole nation with this great trial, as he had associated it with his dispute with Boniface VIII. The states-general assembled at Tours; the accusations and statements were put before it and the deputies pronounced the knights deserving of death. Provincial councils likewise condemned them. That of Paris consigned to the flames in one day, in the faubourg St. Antoine, fifty-four Templars, who retracted what they had avowed under torture. Nine were burned at Senlis and there certainly were other executions. The pope pronounced at the Council of Vienne the dissolution of the order throughout all Christendom, and ordered their great wealth turned over to the Hospitallers (knights of Rhodes). But the royal fist did not readily release what it held. All the money found in the temples, two-thirds of the personal property, credits, and a considerable amount of lands remained in the hands of the king. In Italy, England, Spain, and Germany, the order of the Temple was abolished and its wealth in part confiscated by the princes. But there were no executions except in France. The memory of Philip IV must alone bear the burden of these atrocities.

[Sidenote: [1307-1312 A.D.]]

This same Council of Vienne condemned several errors, born within the Franciscan order--the heresy of the “Spirituels” who regarded St. Francis almost as a new reincarnation of Jesus; that of the “Beguins” or “Beghards,” who exempted mankind, perfect according to their ideas, from any judgment by human standards. And finally that of the Fraticelli who [inquisitors tell us] abolished property and declared that everything should be in common, family as well as property. We see these wild doctrines are very old.[b]

_Philip’s Fiscal Policy_

Nothing satiated the royal exchequer, neither the spoils of the Templars, nor the tithes collected under pretext of the “holy war,” nor the taxes levied for the knighting of the king’s sons and the marriage of his daughter--that fatal marriage, from which sprang Edward III. Even the _maltôtes_ did not suffice.

The maltôte, an illegal exaction, which, to a certain extent placed all subjects in the position of serfs taxable at their owner’s will and pleasure, was at least openly arbitrary and illegal; but the “mutable currencies” were treacherously sprung upon the citizens in the midst of their transactions and money exchanges, and brought dismay upon society at every turn, doing his subjects a wrong out of all proportion to the benefit gained by their ruler. In all of this there was as much ignorance as perversity, and one has difficulty in conceiving the ineptitude shown in the government financial business by legal men, ordinarily so clever. Philip the Fair’s statutes regarding the currency are a genuine chaos: sometimes the king takes the paternal tone, and pretends to so contrive the rate of exchange that his subjects shall suffer as little as possible; sometimes he throws off the mask, and prohibits the testing and weighing of the royal moneys issued, on pain of forfeiting the coins submitted to the test and of “being both body and goods at the king’s disposal.” No one could obtain either silver or copper but at the royal mints. The importation of the Florentine golden florin and other foreign coins was forbidden under the same penalty (for fear of comparison). Next Philip withdrew from circulation half of his own current coins, under the pretext of their having been counterfeited and tampered with by others--coiners, Lombards, etc. The Jews and the Lombards were always convenient scapegoats for the royal iniquities. They were again expelled in 1311-1312, with the usual confiscations. In 1310 there was a grand re-coining of all the moneys; everyone was forced to give in all he possessed to the directors of the royal mints, who gave out in exchange new money, much inferior in weight and purchasing power to the value attributed to it. The king was anxious to gain popularity at the expense of the money-lenders, and issued orders that all liabilities should be discharged in the new money, in spite of every previous stipulation to the contrary. To the same end, after having fixed a maximum (15 to 20 per cent. per annum!) for the exorbitant interest charged on silver, he ended by prohibiting all usury, which is to say all interest. If the rates of usury were scandalous, one must lay the blame of them on the king’s persecution of capitalists, Jews, and Italian bankers: naturally the rate of interest increased in proportion to the chances of loss incurred by the lender. By these means Philip raised fresh barriers to trade and swelled the public discontent.

[Sidenote: [1312-1314 A.D.]]

A statute enacted in June, 1313, surpassed in audacity all others that had preceded it. The king was no longer satisfied with managing his own money as he would; he wished to handle that of the barons also, and asserted himself to be the only coiner of the realm. By friendly transactions, by usurpations, by every possible means, he had already reduced by more than half their number the nobles who minted money. In the preamble to his statute he now announced his intention of restoring all French moneys “to their ancient currency and status” (of the time of St. Louis, apparently), and forbade all prelates and barons to mint fresh money until further orders. He was acting, he said, under the advice of “the whole caboodle of decent people in every decent town in his kingdom,” and he looked to the _bourgeoisie_ to uphold him against the resentment of the nobles. As a matter of fact, at another time the bourgeoisie would have been only too pleased to see the nobles deprived of the right of coining money, a right which they grossly abused; but under Philip the Fair, would they gain much by it? This very statute of June, 1313, introduced mutations more disastrous than any heretofore. It hit all classes of society, and all were equally irritated, with the exception of the lawyers and certain large tradesmen who constituted themselves overseers, farmers, or coiners on the king’s account.

_Execution of Jacques de Molay (1314 A.D.)_

Philip defied public discontent by redoubling his brutalities. The smallest murmur was reported to the king’s spies, and punished by his tyrants. One saw everywhere people flogged and pilloried; every lay and ecclesiastical court robed itself in pitiless severity. In the Place de Grève they burned, in 1313, a nun of Hainault, Marguerite de la Porette, the Mystic. Shortly after a more celebrated execution startled Paris and the whole of France. For more than six years the foremost members of the order of the Temple, the grand-master, the “visitor” of France, and the masters of Aquitaine and Normandy, had languished in the king’s dungeons; they could not be left to die unjudged in darksome cells. At last the pope, who had reserved the decision of their fate to himself, appointed a commission consisting of the cardinal D’Albano and two other cardinals. The archbishop of Sens and various doctors of divinity and of canonical law joined them. Brought before their judges, the four captives reiterated, it is said, the confessions made by themselves and their comrades. It was wished to mark their arrest with great solemnity and to “read a lesson” to the public, as the saying is. The court therefore held its sitting in the open space before Notre Dame de Paris, upon a scaffold draped in scarlet. The four accused were led to the foot of the scaffold, where they repeated their confession before all the people. Their sentence was then pronounced--they were to be immured for life. “But just when,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “the cardinals believed they had ended the affair, the grand-master, Jacques de Molay, and the master from Normandy, Guy, brother of the dauphin of Auvergne, suddenly retracted their confession, denying it in toto, and stubbornly defended themselves against the cardinal who had ‘pointed the moral’ and the archbishop of Sens, to the immense surprise of everybody.”

The commission, struck dumb with astonishment and a sort of fear by this unlooked-for incident, did not know how to decide. They adjourned till the morrow to deliberate at their leisure, and handed over the grand-master and his companions to the guardianship of the royal warder of Paris till the next day. The news of what had taken place outside Notre Dame was promptly carried to the king, who was at that time at the Palais de la Cité. Philip, seized with a dread only equalled by his anger, sent in haste for his most trusty advisers, “without summoning the scholars” (_i.e._, the commission). The determination he had arrived at was the boldest and most atrocious that can be imagined. At night-fall he had the two Templars conveyed to a small island in the Seine, “between the garden of the Palais de la Cité and the church of the Frères-Hermites,” and there had them burned together. “They helped,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “to prepare the fagots with so stout and resolute a heart, persisting to the end in their denials with so great steadfastness, that they left those who witnessed their torment filled with admiration and stupefaction.” (March 11th, 1314.)

The ecclesiastical powers swallowed this outrage as many another, demanding from the king no account for the double murder of two offenders who did not come within his jurisdiction, and whose backsliding he had dealt with on his own authority alone. Indeed Clement V was already failing, and did not long survive the unfortunates whom he had sold to their persecutor. He died on April 20th. An Italian historian, Ferretus or Fereti of Vicenza, asserts that Jacques de Molay, from the midst of his fagots, cited the king and the pope to appear before the tribunal of God, Clement within forty days and Philip within a year.

Philip was in truth nearing the end of his sinister career. The last year of his reign will be seen to be the most bloody. France was horrified by more hideous scenes than any she had hitherto witnessed, more hideous even than the murder of the Templars, and this time the tragedy was enacted at the foot of the throne among the royal family. Philip’s three sons, Louis Hutin, king of Navarre, and count of Champagne and of Brie, Philip, count of Poitiers, and Charles, count of La Marche, had married--the first Marguerite, sister of Hugh V, duke of Burgundy; and the other two Joan and Blanche, daughters of Otto or Othelin, count of Burgundy or of Franche-Comté. In the spring of 1314 the young wives of the king’s three sons were suddenly arrested on a charge of scandalous conduct. Marguerite, queen of Navarre, and Blanche, countess of La Marche, were accused of frequent acts of adultery, “even on the most holy days,” with Philip and Walter d’Aulnai, young Norman knights in their service. The Aulnai brothers were not allowed to challenge to a duel in defence of their innocence and that of their mistresses; confession of guilt was wrung from them by torture, and the princesses, “stripped,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “of all temporal honours, after receiving the tonsure, were imprisoned, Marguerite in Château Gaillard d’Andely, and Blanche in the abbey of Maubuisson, where, after strict seclusion, and deprived of all human consolation, they ended their days in despair.”

The fate of their lovers was even more terrible. They were conducted to the place du Martroi St. Jean, in Paris, and there flayed alive and mutilated; they were not beheaded until every means had been exhausted that an infernal science could devise to prolong the victim’s sufferings without actually killing him.

Joan of Burgundy, countess of Poitiers, more fortunate than her sisters Blanche and Marguerite of Navarre, was declared chaste and not guilty by a parliament in which sat the king’s brothers and the great nobles: she was “reconciled to her husband.” Joan of Burgundy was heiress to Franche-Comté: it was not possible to condemn her as an adulteress and annul her marriage without renouncing the wealth she had brought to the royal house; perhaps her riches had something to say as to her innocence.[c]

The general oppression nearly caused an insurrection when Philip ordered a new tax on the sale of all merchandise. There was, from the first, a union between the nobles and the bourgeoisie similar to the league which in England laid the foundations of the people’s liberty and imposed the Magna Charta on John Lackland. Philip, this time, withdrew, and cancelling the obnoxious tax he summoned representatives of forty of the largest towns to a conference at Paris at which he promised to coin henceforth nothing but honest money.

But this ill-starred man, this king, the harshest France had had up to this time, although but forty-six years of age, had already reached the end of his days. He expired November 29th, 1314.[b] The exact cause of Philip’s early demise has never been perfectly understood. The commonly accepted account is that it resulted from an accident that occurred during a stag hunt. “He saw the stag coming and drew his sword, and clapped spurs to his horse and thought to strike the stag; but his horse carried him so violently against a tree that the good king fell to the ground, and was very severely hurt in the heart, and was carried to Corbeil. There his malady grew very sore.”[f] But this narrative bears the date 1572. “The contemporary French historian” [the continuator of William de Nangis[g]] says Michelet[e] “does not speak of this accident. He says that Philip sank without fever or visible malady, to the great astonishment of the physicians.” Nevertheless there was a contemporary rumour of an accident during a hunt of the wild boar, for Dante[h] writing exactly at the time of Philip’s death speaks contemptuously of him as “The false coiner who died of a blow from a pig’s skin” (_i.e._, a boar).[a]

_Political Progress in Philip’s Reign_

[Sidenote: [1285-1314 A.D.]]

Whether or not Philip the Fair was a wicked man or a bad king, there is no denying that his reign is the grand era from which we date civil order in France and the foundation of the modern monarchy.[e] Under this reign the royal domain made important acquisitions, some of which, unfortunately, were not lasting; the counties of La Marche, Angoumois, Champagne, Franche-Comté, Lectoure, a portion of Flanders (Lille, Douai, and Orchies), Quercy, the great city of Lyons and a part of Montpellier. The count of Bar had been compelled to do homage to the French crown for all his land situated west of the Maas.

Vassals were bound to serve their sovereign, in his court, by their advice and justice. The king’s feudal court had a double character, for in it the king called upon his barons for advice and sentences. With the further evolution of royalty the functions of the king’s court developed, and a division became necessary; there was the political court or grand council, and the judiciary court or parliament. Under St. Louis the functions of the parliament were not yet clearly defined. Philip the Fair perfected its organisation. He caused this court to be held at Paris twice a year for two months in the Palais de la Cité, which later bore the name of the Palais de Justice (1303). This sovereign court of justice which claimed to exercise its jurisdiction over the entire kingdom was destined to be the great instrument employed by future kings to bring the whole of France under their absolute authority. Philip also established two _échiquiers_[14] at Rouen and two _grands jours_ at Troyes and placed these provincial courts under the control of the parliament. The office of public prosecutor (_ministère public_) charged with defending in all causes the rights of the king and society, seems to date from the time of Philip the Fair.

As the king had formed the parliament from the grand council, so he formed the chamber of accounts (_chambre des comptes_) from the parliament of which it first was a part but later became a separate institution. Thus there were three great divisions in the high administrative department of the country--the judiciary parliament; the financial, chamber of accounts; and the political, the grand council.

The many ordinances of Philip which have been preserved prove his activity in organising the new administration, which was the debt of royalty to the country, since it had substituted its own powers for those of the feudal lords. If these laws often bear the stamp of a despotic and taxing spirit, they sometimes show a knowledge of the true principles of government. One of them prohibited private war and judicial duels during wars of the crown. This was done to disarm feudalism.

A most important event of Philip’s administration was the convocation in 1302 of the first states-general. Brought by his violences face to face with a great peril, and ruined by his constant disastrous undertakings, the most despotic of the French kings was compelled [as we have seen] to call around him the deputies of the nation, in order to obtain the assistance of which he stood in need and to fortify himself in his quarrel with the pope, with the assent of France. But in discussing before them the prerogatives of his crown and of the tiara, he recognised by implication the ancient right of national sovereignty so deeply obscured for centuries. Philip doubtless asked nothing but what he was sure of obtaining, but the men who, in 1302, fought for the king against the pope and in 1326 disposed of the crown, would later on be emboldened to the attempt to lay hands on the crown itself.[b]

The states-general consisted of a strictly national assembly which the barons, bishops, abbeys, provosts, and deans of chapters were invited to attend in person, and to which each city of the realm was invited to send two or three deputies or representatives. This was not the first time that the crown had consulted the nobles and the prelates; but it does not appear that until now the deputies of the third estate had taken part in such a council. If they had been previously consulted on rare occasions, it was in regard to special matters such as the regulation of the currency, and even then certain determinate cities were represented.

The states-general thus called together by Philip the Fair, and which assembled the 12th of April, 1302, in the church of Notre Dame at Paris, was convoked, to be sure, with a specific aim and under extraordinary circumstances. Its unique object was to show the pope that the country upheld the king (see p. 80). But none the less does this meeting stamp the year 1302 as an important date in French history.[15] Through this representative assembly France, as such, takes part for the first time in its own government; an intervention already necessary, and which is destined soon to become consistent and regular.[k]

LOUIS (X) THE QUARRELSOME (1314-1316 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1314-1316 A.D.]]

Philip the Fair had mingled little with the chivalry of his time. He forbade tournaments, and, after the fashion of oriental despots, kept his sons secluded. The eldest, known as Louis X, called Hutin or the Quarrelsome, was fond of rude pastimes. In 1305 he had been crowned king of Navarre at Pamplona, and succeeded at the same time to the county of Champagne. His uncle Charles, count of Valois, had much influence over him, a prince who had shown eagerness, but not perseverance, to tread in the adventurous and ambitious path of Charles of Anjou.

[Illustration: LOUIS X

(From an old French print)]

Charles entertained an aversion for all his brother’s councillors. He accused his chancellor Latilly, bishop of Châlons, with having caused the death of the king by means of sorcery. Latilly’s obvious interest had been to keep Philip alive; but Charles caused him, nevertheless, to be imprisoned and tortured under the accusation. Raoul de Presle, another of Philip’s legists, was implicated in the same crime, and underwent similar persecution.

But Enguerrand de Marigny, Philip’s prime minister, was the chief object of hatred to the king’s uncle. Charles blamed Marigny for the depreciation of the coin; but for this crime, even if considered guilty, Louis Hutin thought him not worthy of punishment more severe than banishment to the isle of Cyprus. Charles seemed unable to bring against Marigny himself the accusation of sorcery; he however accused his wife of employing others to make the terrible images of wax. All of those thus implicated were brought, not before parliament, but in the presence of the king, of Charles, and of some barons at Vincennes. The councillors of Philip had set the example of creating courts of justice in whatever way suited their convenience. It was now the turn of the barons, and they condemned Marigny to be hanged on a gibbet; the king, on hearing of sorcery, abandoning his previous efforts to save him (1315).

Another murder was that of Marguerite, wife of Louis, who had been sent to seclusion in the château Gaillard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ASPECTS OF CIVILISATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_The Great Fairs_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FOOTNOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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