feudalism with sword and diplomacy. Philip’s son was the first of the Capets who was not crowned during his father’s lifetime; a fact clearly showing that the principle of heredity had now been established beyond discussion.
Louis VIII.’s short reign was but a prolongation of Philip’s
in its realization of his two great designs: the recovery from
Henry III. of England of Poitou as far as the Garonne;
and the crusade against the Albigenses, which with
small pains procured him the succession of Amaury
Louis VIII.
(1223–1226).
de Montfort, and the Languedoc of the counts of
Toulouse, if not the whole of Gascony. Louis VIII. died on
his return from this short campaign without having proved his
full worth.
But the history of France during the 11th and 12th centuries does not entirely consist of these painful struggles of the Capet dynasty to shake off the fetters of feudalism. France, no longer split up into separate fragments, now began to exercise both intellectual and military influence Universal French activity. over Europe. Everywhere her sons gave proof of rejuvenated activity. The Christian missions which others were reviving in Prussia and beginning in Hungary were undertaken on a vaster scale by the Capets. These “elder sons of the Church” made themselves responsible for carrying out the “work of God,” and French pilgrims in the Holy Land prepared the great movement of the Crusades against the infidels. Religious faith, love of adventure, the hope of making advantageous conquests, anticipations of a promised paradise—all combined to force this advance upon the Orient, which though failing to rescue the sepulchre of Christ, the ephemeral kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus, the dukedom of Athens, or the Latin empire of Constantinople, yet gained for France that prestige for military glory and religious piety which for centuries constituted her strength in the Levant (see Crusades). At the call of the pope other members of the French chivalry also made victorious expeditions against the Mussulmans, and founded the Christian kingdom of Portugal. Obeying that enterprising spirit which was to take them to England half a century later, Normans descended upon southern Italy and wrested rich lands from Greeks and Saracens.
In the domain of intellect the advance of the French showed a no less dazzling and a no less universal activity; they sang as well as they fought, and their epics were worthy of their swordsmanship, while their cathedrals were hymns in stone as ardent as their soaring flights of Intellectual development. devotion. In this period of intense religious life France was always in the vanguard. It was the ideas of Cluniac monks that freed the Church from feudal supremacy, and in the 11th century produced a Pope Gregory VII.; the spirit of free investigation shown by the heretics of Orleans inspired the rude Breton, Abelard, in the 12th century; and with Gerbert and Fulbert of Chartres the schools first kindled that brilliant light which the university of Paris, organized by Philip Augustus, was to shed over the world from the heights of Sainte-Geneviève. In the quarrels of the priesthood under the Empire it was St Bernard, the great abbot of Clairvaux, who tried to arrest the papacy on the slippery downward path of theocracy; finally, it was in Suger’s church of St Denis that French art began that struggle between light against darkness which, culminating in Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, was to teach the architects of the world the delight of building with airiness of effect. The old basilica which contains the history of the monarchy sums up the whole of Gothic art to this day, and it was Suger who in the domain of art and politics brought forward once more the conception of unity. The courteous ideal of French chivalry, with its “delectable” language, was adopted by all seigniorial Europe, which thus became animated, as it were, by the life-blood of France. Similarly, in the universal movement of those forces which made for freedom, France began the age-long struggle to maintain the rights of civil society and continually to enlarge the social categories. The townsman enriched by commerce and the emancipated peasant tried more or less valiantly to shake off the yoke of the feudal system, which had been greatly weakened, if not entirely broken down, by the crusades. Grouped around their belfry-towers and organized within their gilds, they made merry in their free jocular language over their own hardships, and still more over the vices of their lords. They insinuated themselves into the counsels of their ignorant masters, and though still sitting humbly at the feet of the barons, these upright and well-educated servitors were already dreaming of the great deeds they would do when their tyrants should have vacated their high position, and when royalty should have summoned them to power.
By the beginning of the 13th century the Capet monarchy
was so strong that the crisis occasioned by the sudden death
of Louis VIII. was easily surmounted by the foreign
woman and the child whom he left behind him. It
is true that that woman was Blanche of Castile, and
Louis IX.
(1226–1270).
that child the future Louis IX. A virtuous and very
devout Spanish princess, Blanche assumed the regency of the
kingdom and the tutelage of her child, and carried them on for
nine years with so much force of character and capacity
for rule that she soon impressed the clamorous and
disorderly leaders of the opposition (1226–1235). By
the treaty of Meaux (1229), her diplomacy combined with the
influence of the Church to prepare effectually for the annexation
Blanche of Castile.
of Languedoc to the kingdom, supplementing this again by a
portion of Champagne; and the marriage of her son to Margaret
of Provence definitely broke the ties which held the country
within the orbit of the German empire. She managed also to keep
out of the great quarrel between Frederick II. and the papacy
which was convulsing Germany. But her finest achievement
was the education of her son; she taught him that lofty religious
morality which in his case was not merely a rule for private
conduct, but also a political programme to which he remained
faithful even to the detriment of his apparent interests. With
Louis IX. morality for the first time permeated and dominated
politics; he had but one end: to do justice to every one and to
reconcile all Christendom in view of a general crusade.
The oak of Vincennes, under which the king would sit to
mete out justice, cast its shade over the whole political action
of Louis IX. He was the arbiter of townspeople, of feudal
lords and of kings. The interdiction of the judicial
duel, the “quarantaine le roi,” i.e. “the king’s truce
Louis IX.’s policy
of arbitration.
of forty days” during which no vengeance might
be taken for private wrongs, and the assurement,[1]
went far to diminish the abuses of warfare by allowing his
mediation to make for a spirit of reconciliation throughout his
kingdom. When Thibaud (Theobald), count of Champagne,
attempted to marry the daughter of Pierre Mauclerc, duke of
Brittany, without the king’s consent, Louis IX., who held the
county of Champagne at his mercy, contented himself with
exacting guarantees of peace. Beyond the borders of France,
at the time of the emperor Frederick II.’s conflict with a papacy
threatened in its temporal powers, though he made no response
to Frederick’s appeal to the civil authorities urging them to
present a solid front against the pretensions of the Church, and
though he energetically supported the latter, yet he would not
admit her right to place kingdoms under interdict, and refused the
imperial crown which Gregory IX. offered him for one of his
brothers. He always hoped to bring about an honourable
agreement between the two adversaries, and in his estimation
- ↑ The assurement (assecuratio, assecuramentum) differed from the truce, which was a suspension of hostilities by mutual consent, in so far as it was a peace forced by judicial authority on one of the parties at the request of the other. The party desiring protection applied for the assurement, either before or during hostilities, to any royal, seigniorial or communal judge, who thereupon cited the other party to appear and take an oath that he would assure the person, property and dependents of his adversary (qu’il l’assurera, elle et les siens). This custom, which became common in the 13th century, of course depended for its effectiveness on the degree of respect inspired in the feudal nobles by the courts. It was difficult, for instance, to refuse or to violate an assurement imposed by a royal bailli or by the parlement itself. See A. Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises (Paris, 1892), p. 233.—W. A. P.
