Part 21
Yet Francis Bernadone belonged as truly to the mediaeval world as St. Dominic or St. Bernard of Clairvaux. In his spirit was mingled the self-denial of the ‘Poor Men of Lyons’ and the romance of the Provençal singers. These troubadours sang of knights whose glory and boast were the life-service of some incomparable lady. Francis exulted in his servitude to ‘My Lady Poverty’, his soul aflame with a chivalry in contrast to which the conventional devotion of poets burned dim.
In honour of ‘My Lady Poverty’ the rich merchant’s son had cast away his father’s affection, his military ambitions, his comfortable home and gay clothes; and because of the strength and depth of his devotion the surrender left no bitterness, only an intense joy that found beauty amid the rags, disease, and filth of the most sordid surroundings.
[Sidenote: The Franciscan Order]
For some time it never occurred to Francis to found an Order from amongst the men who, irresistibly drawn by his sincerity and joy, wished to become his followers and share his privations and work amongst the poor and sick. When they asked him for a ‘rule of life’, such as that possessed by the monastic foundations, he led them to the nearest church. In the words of a chronicler:
‘Commencing to pray (because they were simple men and did not know where to find the Gospel text relating to the renouncing of the world), they asked the Lord devoutly that He would deign to show them His will at the first opening of the Book.
‘When they had prayed, the blessed Francis, taking in his hands the closed Book, kneeling before the Altar opened it, and his eye fell first upon the precept of the Lord, “If thou wouldst be perfect, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven”: at which the blessed Francis was very glad and gave thanks to God.’
Thus, in dedication to the service of ‘My Lady Poverty’, the Order of the ‘Lesser Brethren’ (Minorites), or the ‘Poor Men of Assisi’, was founded and received permission from Innocent III to carry on its work amongst lepers and outcasts, though it was not till 1223 that formal sanction for an Order was received from Rome.
Three years later St. Francis died, and the Friars who had lived with him declared that he had followed Christ so closely that in his hands and feet were found the ‘stigmata’ or marks of the wounds his Master had endured in the agony of crucifixion. Tales have been handed down of his humility and gentleness, of how, in the early days of the Order, he would go himself and beg the daily bread for his small community rather than send his companions to encounter possible insults; of how, in an age that set little store even by human lives, he would rescue doves in their cages that lads carried about for sale, and set them free; and of how, because he read something of God’s soul in every creature that had life, he preached to the birds as well as to men.
Brotherhood to the friar of Assisi meant the union not only of all human souls but of all creation in the praise of God, and daily he offered thanks for the help of his brothers, the sun, the fire, and the wind; and for his sisters, the moon and the water; and for his mother, the earth. It was his love of nature, most strange to the thirteenth century, that is one of the strongest bonds between St. Francis and the men and women of to-day.
‘He told the brother who made the garden’, says his chronicler, ‘not to devote all of it to vegetables, but to have some part for flowering plants, which in their season produce “brother flowers” for love of Him who is called “Flower of the Field” and “Lily of the Valley”. He said, indeed, that Brother Gardener always ought to make a beautiful patch in some part of the garden and plant it with all sorts of sweet-smelling herbs, and herbs that produce beautiful flowers, so that in their season they may invite men, seeing them, to praise the Lord. For every creature cries aloud, “God made me for thy sake, O Man!”’
Once the true beauty of St. Francis’s life was recognized, his followers increased rapidly and no longer had to fear insult or injury when they begged. Crowds, indeed, collected to hear them preach and to bring them offerings. Some Franciscans settled in France and Germany, and others went to England during the reign of Henry III and lived amid the slums of London, Oxford, and Norwich, wherever it seemed to them that they could best serve ‘Lady Poverty’.
St. Francis himself before he died had been puzzled and almost alarmed by the popularity he had never courted, and he confessed sadly that, instead of living the lives of Saints, some of those who professed to follow him were ‘fain to receive praise and honour by rehearsing and preaching the works that the Saints did themselves achieve’.
He was right in his fear for the future. Rules are a dead letter without the spirit of understanding that gives them a true obedience; and the secret of his joyous and unassuming self-denial Francis could only bequeath to a few. Preaching, not for the sake of helping man and glorifying God, but in order to earn the wealth and esteem their founder had held as dross--this was the temptation to which the ‘Grey Brethren’ succumbed, even within the generation that had known St. Francis himself. Avarice and self-satisfaction, following their wide popularity, soon led the Franciscans into quarrels with the other religious Orders and with the lecturers of the Universities and the secular clergy. These looked upon the ‘Mendicants’ as interlopers, trying to thieve congregations, fees, and revenues to which they had no right.
‘None of the Faithful’, says a contemporary Benedictine sourly, ‘believe they can be saved unless they are under the direction of the Preachers or Minorites.’ The power of the Franciscans, as of the Dominicans, was encouraged by the majority of Popes, who, like Innocent III, recognized in their enthusiasm a new weapon with which to defend Rome from accusations of worldliness and corruption. In return for papal sympathy and support the Friars became Rome’s most ardent champions, and in defence of a system rather than in devotion to an ideal of life they deteriorated and accepted the ordinary religious standard of their day.
Once more a wave of reform had swept into the mediaeval Church in a cleansing flood, only to be lost in the ebb tide of reaction. Yet this ultimate failure did not mean that the force of the wave was spent in vain. St. Francis could not stem the corruption of the thirteenth century; but his simple sincerity could reveal again to mankind an almost-forgotten truth that the road to the love of God is the love of humanity.
‘The Benedictine Order was the retreat from the World, the Franciscan the return to it.’ These words show that the mediaeval mind, with its suspicion and dread of human nature, was undergoing transformation. Already it showed a gleam of that more modern spirit that traces something of the divine in every work of God, and therefore does not feel distrust but sympathy and interest.
To St. Augustine the way to the _Civitas Dei_ had been a precipitous and narrow road for each human soul, encompassed by legions of evil in its struggle for salvation. To St. Francis it was a pathway, steep indeed and rough, but bright with flowers, and so lit by the joy of serving others that the pilgrim scarce realized his feet were bleeding from the stones.
In the dungeons of Perugia the mirth of Francis Bernadone had been called by his companions ‘craziness’, and to those whose eyes read evil rather than good in this world his message still borders on madness. Yet the Saint of Assisi has had his followers in all ages since his death, distinguished not necessarily by the Grey Friar’s robe, but by their silent spending of themselves for others and their joyous belief in God and man.
_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._
Roger Bacon 1214-92 Peter Abelard 1079-1142 Thomas Aquinas 1227-74 Arnold of Brescia (burned) 1155 St. Dominic 1170-1221 The Albigensian Crusade 1209 Louis VIII of France 1223-6 St. Francis of Assisi 1182-1226 Foundation of Franciscan Order 1223
XVII
FRANCE UNDER TWO STRONG KINGS
We have seen that Philip Augustus laid the foundations of a strong French monarchy, but his death was followed by feudal reaction, the nobles struggling in every way by fraud or violence to recover the independence that they had lost.
Louis VIII, the new king, in order to checkmate their designs, determined to divide his lands amongst his sons, all the younger paying allegiance to the eldest, but each directly responsible for the administration of his own province. Perhaps at the time this was the most obvious means of ruling in the interests of the crown a kingdom that, in its rapid absorption of Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Toulouse, had outrun the central government. Yet it was in truth a short-sighted policy for, since these ‘appanages’, or royal fiefs, were hereditary, they ended by replacing the old feudal nobility with a new, the more arrogant in its ambitions because it could claim kinship with the House of Capet.
[Sidenote: Louis IX]
Louis VIII did not live long enough to put his plan into execution; and Louis IX, a boy of twelve at the time of his accession, though accepting later the provision made for his younger brothers in his father’s will, was enabled, partly by the administrative ability of his mother and guardian, Queen Blanche, partly by his own personality, to maintain his supremacy undiminished. On one occasion his brother, the Count of Anjou, had imprisoned a knight, in anger that the man should have dared to appeal to the king’s court against a judicial decision he himself had given. ‘I will have but one king in France,’ exclaimed Louis when he heard, and ordered the knight to be released and that both he and the count should bring their case to Paris for royal judgement.
Heavy penalties were also inflicted by Louis on any promoters of private warfare, while the baronage was restricted in its right to coin money. At this time eighty nobles besides the King are said to have possessed their own mints. Louis, who knew the feudal coinage was freely debased, forbade its circulation except in the province where it had been minted; while his own money, which was of far higher value, was made current everywhere. Men and women naturally prefer good coins to bad in exchange for merchandise; and so the King hoped that the debased money, when restricted in use, would gradually be driven out of existence.
If Louis believed in his rights as an absolute king, he had an equally high conception of the duties that such rights involved. ‘Make thyself beloved by thy people,’ he said to his son, ‘for I would rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and governed my subjects well and equitably than that thou shouldst govern them badly.’
Royal justice, like the coinage, must be superior to any other justice; and so the chroniclers tell us that Louis selected as his bailiffs and seneschals those who were ‘loyal and wise, of upright conduct and good reputation, above all, men with clean hands’. Knowing the ease with which even well-meaning officials could be corrupted by money and honours, he ordered his deputies neither to receive nor give presents, while he warned his judges always to lean rather to the side of the poor than of the rich in a case of law until evidence revealed the truth.
Philip Augustus had followed justice because he believed that it paid, and his subjects had feared and respected him. His grandson, with his keen sense of honour, shrank from injustice as something unclean; and we are told that the people ‘loved him as men love God and the Saints’.
Like nearly all the kings of France, Louis was a devout son of the Church, and it was under his protection that Innocent IV resided safely at Lyons when Frederick II had driven him from Rome.[24] Nevertheless the King’s sincere love of the Faith, that later won him canonization as a Saint, never hindered his determination that he would be master of all his subjects, both lay and ecclesiastical. If the clergy sinned after the manner of laymen he was firm that they should be tried in the lay courts; and while his contemporary, Henry III of England, remained a feeble victim of papal encroachments, Louis boldly declared, ‘It is unheard of that the Holy See, when it is in need, should impose subsidies on the Church of France, and levy those contributions on temporal goods that can only be imposed by the King.’
No storm of protest was aroused, for the Papacy in its bitter struggle with the Empire was largely dependent on French support; while Louis’s transparent purity of motive in maintaining his supremacy disarmed indignation. An Italian friar, who saw him humbly sharing the meal of some Franciscan brethren, described him as ‘more monk than king’. This assumption was at first sight borne out by his daily life: his simple diet and love of sombre clothes; his habit of rising from his bed at midnight and in the early mornings to share in the services of the Church; his hatred of oaths, lying, and idle gossip; his almost reckless charity; the eager help he offered in nursing the sick amongst his Paris slums and in washing the feet of the most repulsive beggars who crowded at his gate. ‘He was frail and slender,’ says the same Italian, ‘with an angelic expression, and dove’s eyes full of grace.’
Perhaps, if Louis had not been called to the life of a king, he might have become a friar; but living in the world he loved his wife and children, and would sometimes tease the former by protesting, when she complained how poorly he dressed, that if he put on gaudy clothes to please her she also must go in drab attire to please him.
Those of his subjects who saw Louis on the battle-field describe him as ‘the finest knight ever seen’, and recount tales of their difficulty in restraining his hot courage, that would carry him into the fiercest hand-to-hand conflict without any thought of personal danger. Yet this king was a lover of peace in his heart. He wished to be friends with all his Christian neighbours, and, well content with the lands that already belonged to the French crown, he negotiated a treaty by which he recognized English claims to the Duchy of Guienne. Less successful was his effort to act as mediator between popes and emperors; but if he could not secure peace he determined at least to remain as neutral in the struggle as possible, refusing the imperial crown when the Pope deposed Frederick II. Nor would he reap advantage out of the anarchy that followed on that emperor’s death.
War between Christians was hateful to Louis because it prevented any combined action against the Turks; for in him, as in Innocent III, burned the old crusading spirit that had never quite died out in France.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century a French peasant lad, Stephen, had preached a new crusade, saying that God had told him in a vision that it was left for Christian children to succeed where their elders had failed in recovering the Holy Sepulchre. Thousands of boys and girls, some of them only twelve or thirteen years of age, collected at Marseilles in eager response to this message. They expected that a pathway would be opened to them across the sea as in the days of Moses and the Chosen People, and when they had waited for some time in vain for this miracle, they allowed themselves to be entrapped by false merchants, who, though Christian in name, would allow nothing to stand in the way of the gold that they coveted. Enticed on board ship, disarmed, bound, and manacled, the unfortunate young crusaders were sold in the market-places of Egypt and Syria to become the slaves of the Moslems whom they had hoped to conquer.
When he had first heard of the Children’s Crusade, Innocent III had exclaimed, ‘The children shame us indeed!’ and St. Louis, the inheritor of their spirit, felt that his kingship would be shamed unless he used his power and influence to convert and overthrow the Turk.
[Sidenote: The Seventh Crusade]
One of his subjects, who loved him, the Sieur de Joinville, has left a graphic personal account of the expedition undertaken against Egypt. From Cyprus, the head-quarters of the crusaders, a fleet of some one thousand eight hundred vessels, great and small, sailed to Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile; and Louis, seeing his ensign borne ashore, would not be restrained, but leaped himself into the water, lance in hand, shouting his battle-cry of ‘Mont-joie St. Denys!’
Before the impetuosity of an army inspired by this zeal the town soon fell; but the mediaeval mind had reckoned little with difficulties of climate, and soon the unhealthy mists that hung over the delta of the Nile were decimating the Christian ranks with fever and dysentery, while many of the best troops perished in unimportant skirmishes into which daring rather than a wise judgement had led them. The advance once checked became a retreat, the retreat a rout; and St. Louis, refusing to desert his rear-guard, was taken prisoner by the Mahometans.
The disaster was complete, for only on the surrender of Damietta and the payment of a huge ransom was the King released, but his patience and chivalry redeemed his failure from all stain of ignominy. Instead of returning to France he sailed to the Holy Land; where, though Jerusalem had again fallen to the Turks after Frederick II’s temporary possession of it, yet a strip of seaboard, including the port of Acre, remained to the Christians.
Louis believed that, unless he persevered in fulfilling his vow, crusaders of a lesser rank would lose their hope and courage, and so, enfeebled by disease, he stayed for three years in Palestine, until the death of his mother, Queen Blanche, whom he had left as regent in France, compelled him to return home. Joinville relates how on this voyage, because of the fierceness of the storm, the sailors would have put the King ashore at Cyprus, but Louis feared a panic amongst the terrified troops if he agreed. ‘There is none’, he said, ‘that does not love his life as much as I love mine, and these peradventure would never return to their own land. Therefore I like better to place my own person ... in God’s hands than to do this harm to the many people who are here.’
Louis reached France in safety, but, chafing at his crusading failures, he once more took the Cross, against the advice of his barons, in 1270. It was his aim to regain Tunis, and so to free part of North Africa at least from Mahometan rule. To this task he brought his old religious enthusiasm, but France was weary of crusades, and many of those who had fought willingly in Syria and Egypt now refused to follow him, leaving the greater part of his army to be composed of mercenaries, tempted only by their pay.
Landing near Carthage, the crusaders soon found themselves outnumbered, and were blockaded by their foes amid the ruins of the town. Pestilence swept the crowded, insanitary camp, and one of the first to fall a victim was the delicate king. ‘Lord, have pity on Thy people whom I have led here. Send them to their homes in safety. Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, nor let them be forced to deny Thy Holy Name.’
The dying words of the saint are characteristic of his love of the Faith and of his people; and everywhere in the camp and in France, when the news of his death reached her, there was mourning for this king among kings who had sacrificed his life for his ideals. Yet the flame of enthusiasm he had tried to keep alight quickly flickered out into the darkness, and his son and successor, Philip III, made a truce with the Sultan of Tunis that enabled him to withdraw his army and embark for home. The only person really annoyed by this arrangement was the English prince Edward, afterwards Edward I, who arrived on the scene just at the time of St. Louis’s death, thirsting for a campaign and military glory; but owing to the general indifference he was forced to give up the idea of war in Africa and continue his journey alone to the Holy Land.
Philip III of France has left little mark on history. He stands, with the title of ‘the Rash’, between two kings of dominant personality--his father, canonized as a saint before the century had closed, and his son Philip IV, ‘the Fair’, anything but a saint in his hard, unscrupulous dealings with the world, but yet one of the strongest rulers that France has known.
Philip IV was only seventeen when he became king. From his nickname ‘le Bel’ it is obvious that he was handsome, but no kindly Joinville has left a record of his personal life and character. We can only draw our conclusions from his acts, and these show him ruthless in his ambitions, mean, and vindictive.
In his dealings with the Papacy Philip’s conduct stands contrasted with the usual affectionate reverence of his predecessors; but this contrast is partly accounted for by the fact that, at the end of the quarrel between Empire and Papacy, Rome found herself regarding France from a very changed standpoint to the early days of that encounter.
Ever since the time of Gregory VII the Hohenstaufen emperors had loomed like a thunder-cloud on the papal horizon, but with the execution of Conradin, the last of the royal line,[25] this threatening atmosphere had cleared. The Empire fell a prey to civil war during the Great Interregnum, that is, during the seventeen years when English, Spanish, and German princes contended without any decisive results for the imperial crown. Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who at last emerged triumphant, had learned at least one diplomatic lesson, that if he wished to have a free hand in Germany he could do so best as the friend of the Pope, not as his enemy. One of his earliest acts was to ratify a concordat with Rome in which he resigned all those imperial claims to the lands belonging to the Holy See that Frederick II had put forward. He also agreed to acknowledge Count Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis and the Pope’s chief ally, as Count of Provence and King of Naples and Sicily.
Italy was thus freed from German intervention, but her cities remained torn by the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines; and the iron hand of the French lay as heavily on ‘The Kingdom’ as ever the Hohenstaufen’s despotic sceptre. The Sicilians, restless under the yoke, began to mourn Frederick, who, whatever his sins, had been born and bred in the south, the son of a southern princess; while these French were cruel with the indifferent ferocity of strangers who despised those whom they oppressed.
[Sidenote: The Sicilian Vespers]