The Close of the Middle Ages

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PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

General Editor—ARTHUR HASSALL, M.A.,

Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

The object of this series is to present in separate Volumes a comprehensive and trustworthy account of the general development of European History, and to deal fully and carefully with the more prominent events in each century.

The Volumes embody the results of the latest investigations, and contain references to and notes upon original and other sources of information.

No such attempt to place the History of Europe in a comprehensive, detailed, and readable form before the English Public has previously been made, and the Series forms a valuable continuous History of Mediæval and Modern Europe.

Period I.—The Dark Ages. 476-918.

By C. W. C. Oman, M.A., Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. 6s. net.

Period II.—The Empire and the Papacy. 918-1273.

By T. F. Tout, M.A., Professor of Mediæval and Modern History at the Owens College, Victoria University, Manchester. 6s. net.

Period III.—The Close of the Middle Ages. 1272-1494.

By R. Lodge, M.A., Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. 6s. net.

Period IV.—Europe in the 16th Century. 1494-1598.

By A. H. Johnson, M.A., Historical Lecturer to Merton, Trinity, and University Colleges, Oxford. 6s. net.

Period V.—The Ascendancy of France. 1598-1715.

By H. O. Wakeman, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 6s. net.

Period VI.—The Balance of Power. 1715-1789.

By A. Hassall, M.A., Student of Christ Church, Oxford. 6s. net.

Period VII.—Revolutionary Europe. 1789-1815.

By H. Morse Stephens, M.A., Professor of History at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A. 6s. net.

Period VIII—Modern Europe. 1815-1899.

By W. Alison Phillips, M.A., formerly Senior Scholar of St. John’s College, Oxford. 6s. net.

THE DARK AGES, 476-918

By C. W. C. OMAN, M.A., Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford.

Forming Volume I. of Periods of European History.

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THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY, 918-1273

By T. F. TOUT, M.A., Professor of Mediæval and Modern History at the Owens College, Victoria University, Manchester.

Forming Volume II. of Periods of European History.

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‘Altogether Professor Tout has given us a most trustworthy adjunct to the study of mediæval times, which all who may be called upon to interpret those times to others may safely recommend and themselves profit by.’—English Historical Review.

THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES, 1273-1494

By R. LODGE, M.A., Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh.

Forming Volume III. of Periods of European History.

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EUROPE IN THE 16th CENTURY, 1494-1598

By A. H. Johnson, M.A., Historical Lecturer at Merton, Trinity, and University Colleges, Oxford.

Forming Volume IV. of Periods of European History.

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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1598-1715

By H. O. Wakeman, M.A., Late Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Forming Volume V. of Periods of European History.

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‘Mr. Wakeman has produced an excellent sketch, both clear and concise.’—Oxford Magazine.

‘Mr. Wakeman’s book is a sound, able, and useful one, which will alike give help to the student, and attract the cultivated general reader.’—Manchester Guardian.

‘A thoroughly scholarly and satisfactory monograph.’—Leeds Mercury.

THE BALANCE OF POWER, 1715-1789

By A. Hassall, M. A., Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

Forming Volume VI. of Periods of European History.

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‘The author has struggled manfully with the difficulties of his subject, and not without a distinct measure of success. He has availed himself of the latest researches on the period, and his narrative is well ordered and illustrated by excellent maps and some useful appendices.’—Manchester Guardian.

REVOLUTIONARY EUROPE, 1789-1815

By H. Morse Stephens, M.A., Professor of History at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A.

Forming Volume VII. of Periods of European History.

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MODERN EUROPE, 1815-1899

By W. Alison Phillips, M.A., formerly Senior Scholar of St. John’s College, Oxford.

Forming Volume VIII. of Periods of European History.

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THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

1272-1494

BY

R. LODGE, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

PERIOD III

RIVINGTONS

34 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN

LONDON

1906

Third Edition. Fourth Impression

All Rights Reserved

PREFACE

The period treated in this volume is one of unique interest and significance in the history of Europe. Within these two centuries the political and social conditions of the so-called Middle Ages came to an end, and the states system of Modern Europe took its rise. But the importance of the period is more than equalled by the almost superhuman difficulty of narrating its events in anything like orderly and intelligible sequence. Such unity as had been given to Western Europe by the mediæval Empire and Papacy disappeared with the Great Interregnum in the middle of the thirteenth century; and such unity as was afterwards supplied by the growth of formal international relations cannot be said to begin before the invasion of Naples by Charles VIII. of France at the end of the fifteenth century. In the interval between these two dates there is apparent chaos, and only the closest attention can detect the germs of future order in the midst of the struggle of dying and nascent forces. It is easy to find evidence of astounding intellectual activity and instances of brilliant political and military achievement, but the dominant characteristic of the age is its diversity, and it is hard to find any principle of co-ordination. A cursory glance over some of the most striking episodes of the period will serve to illustrate the multiplicity of its interests. The hundred years’ war between England and France; the rise and fall of the House of Burgundy; the struggle of old and new conceptions of ecclesiastical polity in the Papal schism, in the Councils of Constance and Basel, and in the Hussite movement; the marvellous achievements of the republic of Venice, and of Florence under both republican and Medicean rule; the revival of art and letters, not only in one or two great centres, but in numerous petty states which would otherwise be wholly obscure; the growth and decline of unique corporations, such as the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Order; the extension and gradual union of the Christian states of Spain at the expense of Mohammedanism, and at the same time the gloomy story of the conquest of the Eastern Empire by the Turks;—all these episodes might well be treated in a volume apiece, but it is difficult to arrange them within the compass of a book which should deal with the general development of Europe. No doubt it may be held that some of these events are of more permanent importance than others, and that the essential fact to grasp in the period is the rise of great and coherent states like France, Spain, and England. But it is equally true that the important events are unintelligible without some knowledge of the less important events with which they are connected; that in this period Germany and Italy are more prominent than Spain and England, or even than France; and that Germany and Italy are not coherent states at all. The former is a bundle of states, and the latter can hardly be said to be as much. And it may be urged with some force that German history in the fourteenth century cannot be studied without some attention being paid to Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; that the history of Venice and Florence cannot be isolated from that of Genoa and Pisa; and that even in tracing the growth of states which achieved some measure of unity it is necessary to note the absorption of the formerly distinct and independent provinces.

I have stated the difficulty, which is indeed sufficiently obvious, but I cannot claim to have found a thoroughly satisfactory solution. My endeavour has been to make the narrative as clear and intelligible as the conflicting needs of conciseness and of frequent transitions will admit. I may perhaps point out to my readers that in an age in which dynastic interests and claims become of greater and greater importance, in which royal marriages are a prominent factor in international politics and vitally affect the growth of the greatest states, a careful study of genealogy is imperatively necessary. This will explain and justify the insertion of a number of genealogical tables in the Appendix, which the student of the period may find not the least useful part of the volume.

R. Lodge.

Edinburgh, April 1901.

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS

At end of Book

1. France, to show the Additionst to the Monarchy between 1273 and 1494.

2. Possessions and Claims of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 1467-1477.

3. Italy in the Fifteenth Century.

4. The Swiss Confederation.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

[The following list has no pretensions to be an exhaustive bibliography of the period, nor does it profess to include all the authorities consulted by the author. It is merely compiled with the object of offering suggestions to any student who wishes to read more widely, either on the whole period, or on any part of it. Those books which cannot be classed under any of the great European states are placed under the head of ‘General.’]

General—

Lavisse et Rambaud, Histoire Générale du IV^e. Siècle à nos jours, Tome III.

Creighton, History of the Papacy during the Reformation, Vols. I.-III.

Froissart, Chroniques. [A popular and useful selection from the translation of Lord Berners has been published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. in the ‘Globe’ Series. The most complete edition is that by Kervyn de Lettenhove.]

Leroux, Recherches Critiques sur les relations politiques de la France avec l’Allemagne.

Fournier, Le Royaume d`Arles.

Oman, History of War in the Middle Ages.

H. C. Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages.

R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Medieval Thought.

Germany—

Nitzsch, Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes.

Lorenz, Deutsche Geschichte im 13-14 Jahrhunderte.

Zeller, Histoire de l’Allemagne.

Droysen, Geschichte der preussischen Politik, Vols. I. and II.

Dierauer, Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft.

Palacky, Geschichte von Böhmen.

Loserth, Hus und Wiclif (translated).

Sartorius, Geschichte des Ursprunges der Deutschen Hanse.

Schäfer, die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von Dänemark.

Treitschke, Das Deutsche Ordensland Preussen, Historische und politische Aufsätze, Vol. II.

Italy—

Villani, Croniche.

Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques italiennes du moyen âge.

Cipolla, Storia delle Signorie Italiane, dal 1313 al 1530.

Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter (translated).

Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia.

H. F. Brown, Venice, an Historical Sketch.

Machiavelli, Storia Fiorentina.

Perrens, Histoire de Florence.

Guido Capponi, Storia della republica di Firenze.

Napier, Florentine History.

Villari, Machiavelli (translated), Vol. I.

Von Reumont, Lorenzo de’ Medici (translated).

Armstrong, Lorenzo de’ Medici.

J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy.

France and the Netherlands—

Martin, Histoire de France.

Michelet, Histoire de France.

Langlois, Le règne de Philippe le Hardi.

Boutaric, La France sous Philippe le Bel.

Perrens, Étienne Marcel.

S. Luce, Histoire de la Jacquerie.

Vanderkindere, Le siècle des Arteveldes.

Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII.

Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII.

Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont.

P. Clément, Jacques Cœur et Charles VII.

Philippe de Commines, Mémoires.

Barante, Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne.

Kirk, History of Charles the Bold.

Clamageran, Histoire de l’Impôt en France.

Gasquet, Précis des Institutions Politiques et Sociales de l’ancienne France.

Spain—

Lafuente, Historia general de España.

Burke, History of Spain, 2 vols.

Schäfer und Schirrmacher, Geschichte von Spanien.

Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella.

Fall of the Greek Empire—

Gibbon, Decline and Fall.

Finlay, Byzantine and Greek Empires

La Jonquière, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

[This table has been drawn up in order to bring together in their chronological sequence those events in different parts of Europe which are necessarily treated in the text under the head of different states. The chief events in English History are inserted to serve as guide-posts, even though in some cases no direct reference may be made to them in the following pages.]

CHAPTER I
GERMANY AND THE EMPIRE AFTER THE INTERREGNUM, 1273-1313

The Empire—German divisions—The Interregnum—Rudolf of Hapsburg—His War with Ottokar—Adolf of Nassau—His relations with France—His fall—Albert I.—The Succession in Hungary and Bohemia—The Election of Henry VII.—His Italian Expedition—His Concessions to the Princes—His son John and the Bohemian Crown—The French seizure of Lyons—The importance of the Period 1273-1313 in German History

Ever since A.D. 962 the German monarchy had been combined |The Empire and the German monarchy.| with the Roman Empire, and the union proved harmful to both offices. The universal authority of the Emperor could hardly fail to become shadowy and unreal, but it was rendered more distasteful to non-German princes and peoples by the immediate association of the Empire with a distinct kingdom, with which they might have causes of quarrel. And as the Empire became more and more localised, so the German kingship became steadily weaker. The shadowy character of the higher dignity tended to produce the same impression as to the more real and practical office. The princes who held their lands of the German king aimed more and more at the independence of the external kings and rulers, who, in feudal theory, held of the Emperor. The imperial claims brought the Empire into collision with the Papacy, and the German monarchy suffered from the blows which the Emperor’s power received in the great Contest of Investitures. Moreover, the Empire carried with it the crown of Italy; and the constant waste of money and men in the vain attempt to establish a real dominion in the southern peninsula, not only weakened individual German rulers, but also led to constant absences from Germany which gave occasion to their northern vassals to acquire independence. Above all the Empire was, by tradition and by the very conception of the office, elective. Thus the German kings were deprived of all the advantages which normal hereditary succession gave to the rulers of England and France. Not only did disputed elections give rise to civil war with all its evils, but the constant change from one family to another rendered impossible any consistent policy of strengthening the central power. When at last the Hapsburgs obtained quasi-hereditary possession of the imperial dignity, disunion had made such progress that it was too late to apply a remedy.

The decline of the central power and the consequent rise |German divisions.| of a large number of semi-independent political units, each with a separate existence of its own, though held together by certain common duties and interests, make German history in this period peculiarly difficult and complicated. And the number of these units was far greater in the thirteenth century than would have seemed likely at an earlier date. The great duchies formed by the Karolings had, by the policy of subsequent rulers, been broken up or allowed to become extinct. The great duchy of Swabia, for instance, came to an end with the Hohenstaufen, and was never revived. But the extinction of each duchy brought with it an immense increase of the number of tenants-in-chief. Every noble, town, and even village which had previously held of the duke, now claimed to hold directly of the Emperor; and though many of the weaker units fell victims to the greed of powerful neighbours, yet some, like the original members of the Swiss Confederation, succeeded in retaining the coveted position. In Germany, too, primogeniture was in those days a rare exception, and the practice of equal partition among brothers necessarily led to a great increase in the number of princely tenants of the Emperor.

It is, of course, impossible in this volume to attempt to |The lay princes.| trace the separate history of the various principalities and states which fill the rather ill-defined territory known as Germany. But it is necessary at starting to have a clear conception of some of the chief families which play so important a part in subsequent history. The four most prominent princely houses in the middle of the thirteenth century were those of Ascania, Welf, Wittelsbach, and Wettin. The first was sub-divided into two lines, descended from the two sons of Albert the Bear. The elder son had held the marks of Brandenburg in the north, which, since 1267, were split up among several brothers. The younger son, Bernard, had in 1180 received from Frederick Barbarossa the diminished duchy of Saxony, which was now held by his grandson, Albert II. (1261-1298). The great family of Welf, so powerful in the previous century, was now confined to the duchy of Brunswick, afterwards sub-divided into Lüneburg (Hanover) and Wolfenbüttel (Brunswick). The House of Wittelsbach was represented by two brothers, Lewis II., who combined the duchy of Upper Bavaria with the Palatine county (Pfalzgrafschaft) of the Rhine, and Henry, who held the duchy of Lower Bavaria. Henry of Wettin, whose descendants acquired Saxony in the fifteenth century and retain it to the present day, was at this time Margrave of Meissen and Landgrave of Thuringia. But the most powerful individual prince at this time was Ottokar, ruler of the Slav kingdom of Bohemia, which was brought by geography and history into close connection with Germany. To Bohemia, which he inherited in 1253 from his father, Wenzel I., Ottokar had added by marriage and diplomacy Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and thus held a secure predominance in south-eastern Germany. There were also three lesser families, as yet insignificant, and not regarded as belonging to the princely class, which were destined within this period to rise to importance in Germany, while two of them have taken a position among the greatest dynasties Europe has ever seen. The House of Luxemburg, in the thirteenth century the lords of a petty county near the western frontier, produced in the next century four Emperors, and founded a territorial power which survived the family which had created it. The Hapsburgs, hitherto known only as active and successful nobles in Swabia, within this period built up a considerable state in south-eastern Germany, and succeeded to the position which the Luxemburgs had founded. Finally, the Hohenzollerns, who in the thirteenth century combined scattered territories in Franconia with the office of Burggraf of Nürnberg, acquired the electorate of Brandenburg in the fifteenth century, and though their power grew more slowly than that of the Luxemburgs and Hapsburgs, yet it rested on a surer foundation, owed more to ability and policy than to fortune, and may prove in the end both more brilliant and more durable.

Among the great territorial princes of Germany must be |The Bishops.| reckoned the very numerous ecclesiastical tenants-in-chief of the Empire. A large area of German soil, especially along the valleys of the Rhine and the Main, was held by bishops and monasteries. Of these clerical princes the most powerful and prominent were the Rhenish archbishops of Mainz, Köln, and Trier. In former times the bishops had been severed from the secular princes by class interests and traditions, and the separation had been encouraged by many of the Emperors, whose policy was to exalt themselves by playing one off against the other. But after the middle of the thirteenth century this distinction tends to become obscured. The rivalry between Emperors and Popes, though it does not disappear, ceases to be the dominant factor in German relations; and during the papal residence in Avignon (1305-1376) the German bishops become to some extent alienated from the Papacy. The result is that the German princes, both clerical and secular, come to form a fairly united class; and the most obvious interest which binds them together is the desire to strengthen their own independence, their ‘liberty,’ as they call it, by weakening the central power. On the other hand, the lesser tenants-in-chief below the princely rank, known in later history as the Ritterschaft, or knights, are impelled to cling to the monarchy for support against the constant danger of princely encroachments.

Besides the princes and knights, there is a very important |The imperial cities.| body of tenants-in-chief—the Reichstädte, or imperial cities. These had risen to importance, partly through the economic conditions which gave them wealth, and partly through the policy of several of the Emperors, who had encouraged the growth of municipal life as a source of revenue and as a check upon the power of the princes. German cities may be divided roughly into two great groups: those in the south, like Augsburg, Nürnberg, Ratisbon, etc., which obtained importance from their position on the great commercial routes leading from Venice and Genoa to different parts of Europe; and those in the north, on the Baltic and the German Ocean, whose function was to carry on the trade between the east and the west of Northern Europe, and to exchange at Bruges the products of the north for the commodities brought by the southern merchants (see p. [422]). The strength of the towns lay in their wealth and their walls; their weakness in their isolation and mutual jealousy. This weakness the southern cities never overcame; their leagues for common objects were never durable, and therefore never effectual. But the northern towns were left more to themselves: they came into contact with less developed states, and they were subject to the pressure of more constant and more immediate political interests. The necessity of securing trade privileges in the countries lying to the east and west of the Baltic, and the duty of defending their commercial routes against the aggressive Scandinavian state of Denmark, which commanded the outlets from the Baltic, forced the northern towns into a semi-federal union, and the Hanseatic League became for a time a great political power in the north. In the end the northern cities also succumbed, owing mainly to a great change in trade routes, and partly to the growing predominance of the princes. But at the beginning of this period the future destiny of the German towns was unknown, and to contemporaries it seemed quite possible that cities like Nürnberg and Augsburg, or Lübeck and Hamburg, might obtain an independence and a power not markedly inferior to that which was actually acquired at this time by Venice and Florence, which were in theory equally tenants-in-chief of the Empire, though further removed from the exercise of imperial authority.

The decline of the German kingship had begun in the |The Interregnum and its results.| eleventh century, but a partial revival had been effected by the great Hohenstaufen Emperors, Frederick Barbarossa, Henry VI., and Frederick II. With the fall of the Hohenstaufen both Empire and monarchy sank lower than they had ever done before. During the Great Interregnum (1256-1273), two rival kings, the Englishman Richard of Cornwall, and the Castilian king, Alfonso X., had secured the nominal adherence of conflicting parties in Germany, but neither had attempted to rule the country. In these years not only did the tenants-in-chief enjoy complete independence of any external authority, but the imperial domains were either annexed by the princes, or squandered by the two royal claimants in the attempt to purchase adherents. This rendered it impossible to revive the old monarchy, and produced changes which seemed to render German unity for ever hopeless. Hitherto the elected Emperor had resigned his hereditary dominions, and had supported himself on the domain-lands, travelling about from one estate to another. This was no longer possible. The only way in which a future king could hope to secure any respect or obedience was to acquire such a territorial power as would make him formidable. Such a policy, consistently pursued by a line of hereditary kings, might have resulted in the gradual formation of a territorial monarchy like that of France. But the princes made use of their right of election, at first to prevent the kingship passing to successive members of the same family, and always to impose conditions which should secure their own independence. The evil results became abundantly plain in the century which followed the Interregnum. Each successive Emperor set himself, not so much to strengthen the monarchy, as to aggrandise his own family; and the more successful he was, the more dangerous and objectionable did that family become to his successor. The same conditions which produced nepotism in the Papacy, led to the adoption of a consistent policy of dynastic aggrandisement by all the Emperors from Rudolf of Hapsburg onwards.

In 1272 the death of Richard of Cornwall forced his |Election of Rudolf I.| adherents to consider the question of a new election, and at the same time Pope Gregory X., alarmed by the excessive power of the House of Anjou in Italy, and afraid lest German disunion might give occasion for French aggression north of the Alps, used all his influence to urge on the unanimous choice of a new king in Germany. For a long time the right of election had tended to fall into fewer hands. The early German kings were selected by the chief men and approved by the acclamations of a mass meeting of all freemen. Gradually the form of popular approval disappeared, and the princely tenants-in-chief assumed an absolute power of nomination. Since then the practice had grown up of a preliminary choice by some of the chief princes, to be ratified by the rest. But in the thirteenth century the idea arose that certain princes could elect without any further ceremony. Superstition and custom seem to have combined to suggest the number seven for these electors, as they came to be called. But there were several contending claimants for the right to be included in the favoured seven, and it was not till the next century that these disputes were finally settled. On the present occasion the lead was taken by the great Rhenish princes, the Count Palatine with the three Archbishops. The only chance of securing a general adhesion of the princes was to choose a king who was not so strong as to excite either fear or jealousy. Mainly through the exertions of Frederick III. of Hohenzollern, Burggraf of Nürnberg, the choice of the electors fell upon his cousin Rudolf, Count of Hapsburg, who was crowned at Aachen on October 24, 1273. It is not a little curious that the election of the first Hapsburg was brought about by the influence of a Hohenzollern.

Rudolf’s position was no easy one when, at the age of |Rudolf’s policy.| fifty-five, he was called from his successful career in the petty politics of Swabia[^[1]] to assume the German kingship. He had a large family of daughters, whose marriages served to gain him adherents. At the coronation ceremony one had been married to Lewis of Wittelsbach, and another to Albert of Saxony. But such a tie was insufficient to secure the docile obedience of his sons-in-law if he endeavoured to exercise any real authority over them. Alfonso of Castile retained the title of king of the Romans, and though for the time he was powerless, his pretensions might easily serve as a pretext for malcontents. A more formidable opponent was Ottokar of Bohemia, whose claim to a voice in the election had been disregarded, and who refused to acknowledge the ‘pauper count’ of Hapsburg. In these circumstances Rudolf showed all the prudence and foresight that had already won him a reputation. He realised that it was no longer possible to revive the pretensions of the Hohenstaufen. He could not afford to alienate the Pope or to aim at the recovery of an Italian kingdom. He must content himself with obtaining what reality he could for the royal power in Germany, and must find a territorial basis for that power. The most obvious method of doing this was the restoration of the duchy of Swabia in his own family, which would enable him to achieve the aims which he had hitherto pursued. But such a step would involve a quarrel with Lewis of Wittelsbach, who claimed to be regarded the heir of the Hohenstaufen. Rudolf could not venture on such a risk, and he fell back on the plan of wresting from Ottokar the German fiefs in the south-east, which the latter had seized during the Interregnum. Before attempting this, Rudolf had to gain over the Pope, the close ally of the Bohemian king. Through the agency of Frederick of Hohenzollern he concluded a concordat with Gregory X., by which he confirmed all previous concessions of Italian territory to the Papacy, and recognised the Angevin kingdom of Naples and Sicily. These promises were subsequently confirmed in a personal interview with Gregory at Lausanne (October, 1275). In March 1280 Rudolf made a direct treaty with Charles of Anjou, by which he confirmed his possession of Provence, and agreed to marry his daughter Clementia to Charles’s grandson. Thus the policy of Frederick II. was finally abandoned. To secure undisturbed freedom of action in Germany, Rudolf resigned Italy to the Pope and the House of Anjou.

Rudolf’s alliance with the Pope made him strong enough |War with Ottokar.| to take active measures against Ottokar, whose refusal to recognise the election on the ground that his vote had been rejected irritated the German princes. At successive diets, in 1274 and 1275, he was summoned to justify his occupation of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and on his refusal was called upon to resign these fiefs. In 1276 Rudolf collected an imperial army and advanced into Austria, where he was welcomed by a general rising of the German nobles against Slav rule. Vienna capitulated, and Ottokar, finding resistance hopeless, made peace on November 21. On condition that Bohemia and Moravia should be secured to him, he resigned the German provinces. The treaty was to be confirmed by a double marriage of his daughter to Rudolf’s son Hartmann, and of his son Wenzel to one of Rudolf’s numerous daughters. Rudolf was so confident in the results of his victory, that he hastened to disband his army. But Ottokar had no intention of carrying out the treaty of Vienna, and he succeeded in gaining over many of the chief German princes by representing the danger of allowing a strong Hapsburg power to be established on the Danube. The result was a renewal of the struggle in 1278 under widely altered conditions. The death of Gregory X. (1276) had deprived Rudolf of much of the advantage gained by his concordat with the Papacy. The Archbishops of Mainz and Köln turned against him. Lewis of Wittelsbach remained obstinately neutral. Henry of Lower Bavaria, whom Rudolf had gained over in 1276 by a politic marriage, openly supported Ottokar, who was also aided by the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg. In place of the imposing army of 1276, the only German princes who sent active aid to Rudolf were Frederick of Hohenzollern and the Bishop of Basel. But the balance was turned in his favour by the alliance of Ladislaus IV. of Hungary and by the support of the Austrian and Styrian nobles, whom Ottokar had failed to conciliate. In a great battle on the Marchfeld, the victory was decided by a charge of the heavy-armed cavalry under Frederick of Hohenzollern, and Ottokar himself perished on the field (August 26, 1278). His death made Rudolf’s victory decisive. Otto of Brandenburg, who undertook the guardianship of the young king of Bohemia, Wenzel II., negotiated a treaty in October which renewed the stipulations of 1276 as to the cession of the Austrian provinces and the double marriage between the Hapsburg and Bohemian families. In December 1282 Rudolf formally invested his sons, Albert and Rudolf, with the imperial fiefs of Austria, Styria, and Carniola. The duchy of Carinthia was given to Meinhard, Count of Tyrol, whose daughter was married to Albert of Austria.

The establishment of the Hapsburg dynasty in Austria is |Rudolf in later years.| an important event in German history. It was the great achievement of Rudolf’s reign, and it was his last notable success. His later attempts to strengthen the central monarchy in Germany were, in the main, fruitless. A series of edicts to secure the public peace by restricting the practice of private war, gained the grateful approval of the towns and the lesser nobles, but were rendered ineffectual by the absence in Germany of an efficient system of jurisdiction and police. An ordinance prohibiting the creation of any new county (Grafschaft) without royal consent illustrates the general aim of Rudolf’s government, but proved little more than a dead letter. The recovery of the lost imperial domains, which Rudolf had pledged himself to undertake at his election, was a task beyond his strength. Even the towns, on whose support he reckoned, were alienated by his attempt to raise an imperial revenue by their taxation; and the appearance of a number of pretenders claiming to be Frederick II. showed a tendency to contrast Rudolf’s government with that of his predecessor, who had been enabled to spare his German subjects by the wealth which he extracted from Italy. A still more serious difficulty was the obstinate refusal of the electors to choose his son Albert as his successor during his own lifetime. This was the most pressing object of Rudolf’s last years, and it was unfulfilled when he died on July 15, 1291, at the age of seventy-three. If he had lived two centuries earlier, he might have ranked among the greatest of German kings; as it is, he will always be remembered as the founder of the greatest of German dynasties.

The objection to Albert of Austria rested on the considerable |Adolf of Nassau.| territories, both in the east and in Swabia, which he inherited from his father. The same motives which had induced the electors in 1273 to choose Rudolf, led them to look for a successor whose position should be still more humble than Rudolf’s had been. The influence of the Archbishop of Mainz, Gerhard von Eppenstein, secured the election of another ‘poor count,’ Adolf of Nassau (May 5, 1292). He had purchased votes by promises, which he could only fulfil by pawning the scanty remnants of the imperial domains. But Adolf’s ambition was greater than his material power, and he had no intention of reigning as the submissive puppet of the electors. No sooner had he received the crown at Aachen (June 24) than he led an army against Albert, and forced him to do homage and to surrender the royal insignia which he had retained on his father’s death. To repress the great princes, Adolf set himself to conciliate the towns and the lesser nobles. Taking advantage of the death of Frederick of Meissen and Thuringia, he claimed those territories as vacant imperial fiefs, and prepared to found there a hereditary principality as his predecessor had done on the Danube. Still more noteworthy was the attitude which he assumed towards France. The kingdom of Arles or Burgundy, |Relations with France.| founded by Rudolf I. (888-912) and enlarged by Rudolf II. (912-937) had, after the death of Rudolf III. (1032), fallen to the German king, Conrad II. Since then the crown of Arles had been regarded as one of the three crowns, with those of Germany and Italy, which passed on election to successive kings of the Romans. But as the German monarchy declined, the supremacy in Burgundy became more and more nominal, and many Emperors neglected the ceremony of coronation at Arles altogether. The kingdom split up into a number of quasi-independent provinces, of which the chief were the free county of Burgundy (Franche-comté), Savoy, Dauphiné, the Lyonnais, and Provence. These provinces, though in theory they were held as fiefs of the Empire, were gradually subjected to systematic aggressions from the side of France, and Philip IV. (1285-1314) pursued this policy of absorption more boldly and openly than any of his predecessors. Adolf sought to strengthen himself by posing as the champion of the unity of the Empire, and in 1294 concluded a treaty with Edward I. of England by which the two princes pledged themselves not to lay down their arms until Philip had withdrawn from the territories he was trying to wrest from both of them. But the war which followed only brought out clearly the disunion and military impotence of Germany. The German princes cared nothing for the border provinces as compared with their own interests and independence. It was easy for Philip IV. to stir up opposition to Adolf, and when peace was negotiated by Boniface VIII. in 1298, no satisfaction was given to the imperial claims.

Meanwhile the electors and princes had been seriously |Adolf’s fall.| alarmed by Adolf’s alliance with the lesser nobles and towns, and by his temporary successes in Thuringia. To put down the prince whom they had chosen, they turned to Albert of Austria whom they had rejected. Albert, who had already formed a close alliance with Wenzel II. of Bohemia, and had been in communication with the French king, was eager to strike a blow for his father’s crown. The Archbishop of Mainz summoned a meeting of princes to Frankfort on May 1, 1298, and Albert set out to attend it with an army at his back. Adolf, however, collected troops from his supporters among the lesser nobles, and prepared to dispute his passage. By superior strategy Albert marched round his opponent to the south, and succeeded in reaching Mainz, whither the meeting was transferred. Here the electors formally declared Adolf’s deposition (June 23), but the irregular proposal of Albert of Saxony to elect Albert of Austria on the spot met with no support. The army of the princes now advanced against the king, and after a desperate struggle near Göllheim, Adolf was slain—struck from his horse, it was said, by the hand of his rival (July 2). He had made a brief but creditable attempt to rule as a German king, but was too weak to face the hostile coalition of the princes. His schemes in Thuringia and Meissen perished with him, and the House of Wettin recovered its territories.

After Albert’s victory as champion of the electors, the |Albert I.| latter could no longer avoid choosing him to fill the vacant throne; but they soon had ample reason to recognise the wisdom of their previous refusal. Albert inherited his father’s policy, with more restless energy and greater military capacity. What he might have done for the Hapsburg dynasty and the German monarchy if his career had not been prematurely cut short by assassination it is impossible to say, but the ten years of his reign are full of great enterprises, most of which promised successful results. The reputation for cruelty which he bears in history is mainly due to the sternness of his manner and appearance, increased by the loss of an eye, and to the fables which have grown up round him in the more than dubious traditions of the Swiss.

To coerce Pope Boniface VIII., who refused to acknowledge |Albert’s policy.| his election, Albert concluded a treaty with Philip IV. of France, who had a quarrel of his own with the Papacy, and thus abandoned the attempt of Adolf to defend the Burgundian frontiers. In December, 1299, he had a personal interview with Philip, and arranged a marriage between the French princess Blanche and his eldest son Rudolf. In German politics he set himself to favour the towns against the princes, and infuriated the latter by an edict abolishing all tolls on the Rhine imposed since the death of Frederick II. in 1250. The death of the Count of Holland and Zealand (October, 1299) gave him an opportunity to claim these provinces as vacant imperial fiefs in opposition to John of Hainault, who claimed the inheritance through his mother. This scheme, however, proved a failure, and the House of Avesnes succeeded in adding Holland and Zealand to Hainault. Encouraged by Albert’s check in the north-west, the Rhenish archbishops and the Elector Palatine, furious at the threatened loss of their tolls, formed a league against the king whom they had voted for two years before. But Albert was not so powerless as Adolf had been. Backed by the enthusiastic support of the cities and aided by French auxiliaries, he took the aggressive against his opponents, and compelled them not only to abolish the tolls, but to recognise the right of the towns to receive burghers of the pale (Pfahlbürger)—that is, to confer the privileges and immunities of citizenship on residents in the suburbs outside the walls. Few German kings since Henry III. had been so successful in coercing their powerful vassals as was Albert in these campaigns of 1301 and 1302.

For the next few years Albert’s attention was mainly |Succession in Hungary.| absorbed in eastern affairs. The death of Andrew III., the last male of the Arpad dynasty in Hungary, left that kingdom without any obvious heir. There were two candidates, who were descended from the royal family through females—Otto of Lower Bavaria, and Charles Robert or Carobert, the grandson of Charles II., the Angevin king of Naples. But the Magyar nobles passed over both, and offered the crown to Wenzel II. of Bohemia, who accepted it for his son Wenzel III. Such an accession of power to the Premyslides was entirely opposed to Albert’s interests, both as King of Germany and as Duke of Austria. As he had no love for the Wittelsbachs in Lower Bavaria, he did not hesitate to espouse the cause of Carobert, the son of his sister Clementia, and the candidate supported by Boniface VIII., with whom Albert had reconciled himself in 1302. For a time the Bohemian power proved too strong, but the death of Wenzel II. (June, 1305) and the growing discontent in Hungary with the conduct of the young king, enabled Carobert to secure the crown, though his title was disputed for a time by Otto of Wittelsbach.

In the next year (August, 1306) the murder of the young |Succession in Bohemia.| Wenzel III. left the Bohemian crown itself vacant. The sister of the late king had married Henry of Carinthia and Tyrol, the brother of Albert’s wife.[^[2]] In spite of this relationship Albert claimed the kingdom as a vacant fief, and conferred it upon his eldest son Rudolf. The consent of the Bohemian nobles was extorted or purchased, and an agreement that Rudolf’s brothers should succeed if he himself died childless, seemed to secure to the Hapsburgs the permanent possession of a kingdom which, added to their Austrian territories, would make them all-powerful on the eastern frontier of Germany. This was the greatest of Albert’s achievements, and, if the acquisition had been permanent, would have made his reign as important in Hapsburg history as his father’s had been. But his last years were clouded with disappointment. An attempt to renew his predecessor’s claims upon Meissen and Thuringia was repulsed by Frederick of Wettin, who defeated the royal army, under Frederick of Hohenzollern, near Altenburg (May 31, 1307). This defeat was followed by the sudden death, on July 4, of the youthful Rudolf of Bohemia. The Bohemians had tired of Hapsburg rule, and in spite of the agreement made at Rudolf’s election, they now offered the crown to Henry of Carinthia. Albert had already made one incursion into Bohemia, and was preparing another, |Albert’s death.| when he was treacherously murdered by his nephew, John (May 1, 1308).

John was the son of Albert’s brother Rudolf and Agnes, daughter of Ottokar, and seems to have resented his uncle’s refusal either to support his candidature for the Bohemian crown, or to give him any share of the Hapsburg territories. The assassination, therefore, was the result of mere personal pique, but it was as important as if it had arisen from a deep-laid political scheme. If Albert had lived longer he would very probably have established his son Frederick in Bohemia, and rendered his election to the German kingship inevitable. In that case the Hapsburgs might have founded a territorial monarchy in Germany, and the House of Luxemburg would never have risen from obscurity. The complaint that Albert neglected to enforce imperial pretensions in Italy is well founded, but should rather be set to the credit of his political capacity. The Italian connection was fatal to the best interests of Germany. A far more serious criticism is his failure to resist the aggressions of France. He aided the House of Anjou to acquire the crown of Hungary in addition to that of Naples, and although for the moment Charles Robert’s candidature was opposed by Philip IV., it was certain that in the long-run the Angevin and Capet interests would combine the two families. He made no opposition to the transference of the papal residence from Rome to Avignon, though the disadvantage to Germany was obvious when Clement V. filled the Rhenish archbishoprics with partisans of France.

It resulted from these changes that French influence was |Election of Henry VII.| very prominent in the election of 1308, and was strong enough to secure the exclusion of Albert’s heir, Frederick the Handsome. Philip IV.’s brother, Charles of Valois, came forward as a candidate and was openly supported by the Pope. But the secular princes were strong enough to resist such a sacrifice of German interests to ecclesiastical pressure, although their own interests prevented them from supporting the Hapsburg. At this juncture, the Archbishop Baldwin of Trier (appointed in 1307) suggested as a compromise the choice of his brother, Henry of Luxemburg. He was the descendant of the counts of Limburg and Arlon, who had acquired Luxemburg by marriage in 1214. His territorial power was too small to inspire jealousy in Germany, while he was connected with France by education and by military service in the war against Edward I. As no other candidate had any chance of election, Henry VII. was chosen without opposition on October 28, 1308. The Hapsburgs found it necessary to acknowledge the new king on condition of receiving confirmation of their fiefs.

The personal career of Henry VII. belongs rather to the |Italian expedition.| history of Italy than that of Germany, and will be considered in the following chapter. From the first he seems to have looked on Germany as a foreigner, and abandoned the policy of his predecessor for the wild dream of reviving the imperial power of the Hohenstaufen in Italy at the head of the Ghibelline party. In 1310 he set out on his southern expedition, which resulted in little beyond his coronation in Rome (June 29, 1312). He never returned to Germany. But before his departure he took some steps which were fraught with future consequence. To conciliate the princes he withdrew the concessions by which Albert had purchased the support of the towns. In 1310 |Concessions to the princes.| he prohibited the creation of pfahlbürger, and restored their tolls to the Rhenish princes. In the same year he seized the opportunity to obtain a great acquisition for his family. The Bohemians were in rebellion against Henry of Carinthia, and offered the crown to Henry VII.’s son, John, on condition that he should marry Elizabeth, |John of Bohemia.| daughter of Wenzel II. The offer was accepted; but so little did Henry care even for his family interests in comparison with his chimerical schemes, that he did not delay his advance into Italy, and left the securing of his son’s throne to the Archbishop of Mainz, Peter von Aspelt. Fortunately, the enterprise did not require his presence. Henry of Carinthia was expelled, and John of Luxemburg was firmly seated on the Bohemian throne.

During the Italian expedition, which ended in Henry VII.’s |France seizes Lyons.| death near Siena (August 24, 1313), the interests of the German monarchy were neglected, the princes were left in complete independence, and Philip IV. was enabled to carry on his aggressions with impunity. In 1310 he took advantage of a dispute between the archbishop and the citizens of Lyons to send French troops into the city, and in 1312 the former was compelled to make a treaty by which he acknowledged the suzerainty of France.

Forty years had now elapsed since the close of the Great |Importance of period 1273-1313 in German history.| Interregnum. The kingly office had been revived, and had been held by four princes, each of whom had shown considerable vigour and capacity. But the absence of hereditary succession had rendered impossible the pursuit of any efficient scheme for the enforcement of central authority and the repression of princely independence. The greatest successes in this direction had been gained by Albert I., but they had been rendered nugatory by his untimely death and by his successor’s absorption in dreams of reviving the universal empire. Germany in 1313, as in 1273, was a mere bundle of states under a nominal head, while its neighbours England and France had been receiving a strong national organisation under the capable rule of Edward I. and Philip IV. That Germany escaped for a century from the worst consequences of her disunion was mainly due to the jarring interests of the neighbouring states which led to the Hundred Years’ War.

But it is misleading to regard the history of these forty years as a mere chronicle of heroic efforts ending in hopeless failure. The very divisions of Germany, while they weakened its nationality, gave greater scope and variety to local development. From this period we date the rise to greatness of the two vigorous dynasties of Luxemburg and Hapsburg. To it we have also to look for the first origins of the Swiss Confederation [see chap. [vii].], for the rise of the Hanseatic League [see chap. [xviii].], and for the establishment of a great territorial power in Prussia by the Teutonic Order [see chap. xix.]. It is necessary to follow the fortunes of the monarchy in order to understand why German development was so different from that of other contemporary states, but the real interest of German history is to be found in the vigorous growth of these political organisations on the extremities rather than in the declining vitality of the central power.

CHAPTER II
ITALY AND THE PAPACY, 1273-1313

Italy in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries—Causes of Italian disunion—The Guelfs and Ghibellines—The Italian towns—The House of Anjou in Naples—The Sicilian Vespers—The Popes and their States—Celestine V. is succeeded by Boniface VIII.—The last of the Mediæval Popes—The difficulties of Benedict XI. and Clement V.—The retirement of Clement V. to Avignon and beginning of the ‘Babylonish Captivity’—The condition of Tuscany—The Florentine Constitution—Genoa and Milan—The Venetian Constitution—Henry VII. makes an Expedition into Italy—Its failure—Death of Henry VII.

The two centuries which are treated in this volume constitute |Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.| the most brilliant period in Italian history since the age of Augustus. The absence of any central authority, which disappeared even more completely in Italy than in Germany, opened the way for the growth of a number of political organisations, whose history is as fascinating as their variety is bewildering. In addition to the great dynasties of Anjou, Visconti, and Medici, we have to watch the fortunes of the great republics of Venice, Florence, and Genoa, of the temporal states of the Church, and of a number of lesser families, such as the House of Este in Ferrara, the della Scalas in Verona, the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Montefeltri in Urbino, whose kaleidoscopic changes are narrated with such wealth of detail in the volumes of Sismondi. But what gives its special importance to the history of this period is that in it Italy becomes the teacher of Europe. It is to Italy that we trace that great movement, known as the Renaissance, which began with the revival of classical learning, but led on to the growth of national literatures, to the rise of a new spirit in the arts of painting and sculpture, and to the enfranchisement of human thought from the fetters of superstition, routine, and the formulas of scholasticism. In the fifteenth century, Italy originated the art of writing history as distinguished from the compilation of mediæval chronicles. And finally, Italy instructed Europe in politics as well as in letters and art. The foremost European rulers of the sixteenth century learnt the maxims of government from Italian princes and Italian writers: the great states of modern times learnt from Italy the practices of diplomacy and the theory of the balance of power. Political science, which had made no progress since the days of Aristotle, was revived by the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

Yet Italy profited less than any other state from the lessons which she taught. France, England, and Spain, all of them the pupils of Italy, became strong, united, and wealthy states, while Italy herself, in the very middle of an intellectual and artistic activity which has remained the wonder of the world, subsided into political insignificance, and only finds a place in subsequent history as the stage on which other nations fight out their quarrels. The solution of this crucial problem, the combination of intellectual progress with political decadence, can only be found in a careful study of the conditions which |Causes of Italian disunion.| prevented the people of Italy from following the normal tendencies of the period, and becoming a nation. The causes of disunion are too numerous and deep-seated to be summed up in a few sentences. But it may be instructive to form a clear conception, at starting, of some of the most notable conditions which influenced the course of Italian history in the period which we have to consider. In the first place, geography in Italy, as in Greece, tended to disunion. The Apennines cut off the Lombard plain from the rest of Italy, and divided the latter into two unequal parts which were again split up by the lateral offshoots into divisions, not quite so small as those of Greece, but almost equally marked off. The nominal subjection to an elective emperor, who was also king of Germany, rendered impossible the rise of any strong native power which could weld together the separate political units. The influence of the Papacy, which in the thirteenth century combined the sovereignty of an Italian state with the spiritual headship of Latin Christendom, proved almost as great an obstacle as the Empire to national union. The great length of Italy, by increasing isolation, hindered the growth of common interests. The leagues occasionally founded for common aims, such as the Lombard league against Frederick Barbarossa and the league of Venice against Charles VIII., were never more than temporary alliances, and fell to pieces as soon as their immediate object was gained.

The long quarrel between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen |Guelfs and Ghibellines.| Emperors bequeathed a fatal heritage to Italy in the party feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines. These famous factions not only set one state against another, but also gave rise to violent discord within each state. And the parties lasted long after the original cause of quarrel had come to an end. When the Hohenstaufen had perished with Manfred and Conradin, when Rudolf of Hapsburg had abandoned all imperial claims over central and southern Italy, when the Papacy itself had quitted Italy to find a home on the further boundary of Provence, it seemed as if party feuds must inevitably die out for want of the fuel which had originally kindled them. But the blaze of mutual hatred continued to rage as fiercely as ever. The famous strife of the Bianchi and Neri in Florence, which drove Dante into exile from his native city, was fought out when Albert I. and Boniface VIII. were in close alliance. These stereotyped and quasi-hereditary feuds were not only destructive of all sense of nationality, but they were strong enough to overpower the far stronger and more local sentiment of common citizenship.

Perhaps the strongest of all the disruptive forces in Italy was the development, in the northern and central provinces, of the municipality or commune as the normal |The Commune as a political unit.| unit of political life. This applies not only to the republics proper, but also to those cities whose liberties were overthrown by the rise of some dominant family. The subjection of lesser cities by more powerful neighbours did not create a state in which all subjects stood in an equal relation of submission to a despotic government, but one in which subject communes were enslaved by a dominant commune, and were excluded by it from all voice in the government. The citizens of Pavia and Cremona were not the direct subjects of the Visconti on a level with the Milanese themselves. They were the subjects of Milan, and were ruled by Milanese governors, just as Pisa and Pistoia were ruled by Florentines. The absorption of the lesser cities continued, until in the fifteenth century Italy practically consisted of five dominant states—Naples, Milan, Venice, Florence, and the Papacy. The result was the creation of a large subject population, deprived of that share in politics which Italian citizens had learnt in earlier times to consider their dearest right, and constituting a permanent and dangerous element of discontent. It was from this population that the condottieri recruited those mercenary armies to which Italian writers agree in attributing the disasters that befel their country, and it was this population which welcomed foreign invasion as a chance of escaping from domestic oppressions. Commines tells us that the Italians ‘welcomed as saints’ the French army that followed Charles VIII. to Naples, and the phrase is significant of the unsoundness of the political condition of Italy and of the utter absence of any sense of nationality.

The quarrel between Frederick II. and the Popes had been embittered by the former’s possession of Naples and Sicily, which brought him into threatening proximity to the territories in central Italy which the Popes claimed to rule. To drive the Hohenstaufen from Italian soil the Popes did not hesitate to call in foreign assistance. After a vain attempt to draw England into the quarrel, the crown of Sicily was offered as a papal fief to |The House of Anjou in Naples.| Charles of Anjou, the brother of Louis IX., and Count of Provence through his wife Beatrix. At the battle of Grandella near Benevento (February 26, 1266) Manfred, the illegitimate son of Frederick II., was slain; and the still more famous battle of Tagliacozzo (August 23, 1268) was followed by the capture and execution of Conradin, the last male representative of the House of Hohenstaufen. These two victories secured Charles’s possession of Naples and Sicily, though the marriage of Manfred’s daughter, Constance, to Peter III. of Aragon created a rival claim which proved a source of subsequent danger.

As the acknowledged head of the Guelf party, which was for the moment supreme, Charles of Anjou seemed likely to establish his ascendency over the greater part of Italy. The Pope, claiming supremacy during the Interregnum, appointed him imperial vicar and senator of Rome, while a number of cities in Tuscany and Lombardy acknowledged his lordship. But his ambitious schemes were suddenly checked by the very power of which he posed as the champion. The Papacy discovered that it had called in a protector who might prove as dangerous a neighbour as the Hohenstaufen. Gregory X. and Nicolas III., secured in their position by the concessions of Rudolf of Hapsburg, did not hesitate to oppose the further progress of the Neapolitan kings by a policy of mediation between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. The election of Martin IV. (February 24, 1281), a creature of Charles, seemed to offer a new opportunity for Angevin aggression. The ascendency of the Guelf faction was revived, and Charles was planning an enterprise against Constantinople, when he was arrested by the news of a great disaster. The |Sicilian Vespers, 1282.| Sicilians had long resented the harshness of French rule, and John of Procida, an old partisan of the Hohenstaufen, had returned from his refuge in Aragon to encourage the malcontents and to secure for them foreign assistance. His plans were still incomplete, when a sudden rising at Palermo was provoked by a brutal insult offered to a woman by a French soldier during a procession on Easter Monday (March 30, 1282). The people rose with shouts of ‘Death to the French!’ and more than four thousand men, women, and children were massacred that evening. The whole of Sicily joined in the rebellion, and offered the crown to Peter III. of Aragon. When Peter arrived in August he found that Charles, thirsting for vengeance, had already laid siege to Messina. But the Catalan |House of Aragon in Sicily.| fleet under Roger di Loria, the most distinguished naval commander of his time, was too formidable to be faced by the mere transport vessels with which Charles was provided. Sicily was perforce evacuated, and was never recovered by the House of Anjou. The Sicilian Vespers gave rise to a twenty years’ struggle, which concerns the history of France and Spain as well as Italy. The Pope decreed Peter’s deposition, both in Sicily and in Aragon, and offered the latter crown to Charles of Valois, the second son of Philip the Fair. But papal bulls failed to overcome Aragonese obstinacy and Sicilian devotion. In 1283 Charles’s son of the same name was captured in a naval battle by Roger di Loria, and remained a prisoner for the next five years. In 1285 Charles I. of Anjou died (January 7), after a career which had known no failure till towards its close. The same year witnessed the successive deaths of Pope Martin IV. (March 12) and of Peter III. (November 11). The latter was succeeded in Aragon by his eldest son Alfonso, and in Sicily by his second son James. In 1288 the mediation of Edward I. of England resulted in the conclusion of a treaty by which Charles II. of Anjou was released to take possession of the Neapolitan crown, and Sicily was confirmed to the House of Aragon. But the treaty was never observed. No sooner was Charles II. free than Nicolas IV. absolved him from his obligations, recognised him as king of the Two Sicilies on the same terms as his father, and renewed the excommunication against James. The war continued without a break. In 1291 Alfonso died, and James succeeded to the crown of Aragon. Wearied of the long struggle, and anxious to free his Spanish kingdom from the attacks of Charles of Valois, James agreed to renounce the crown of Sicily. But the Sicilians refused to return to French rule, and raised to the throne Frederick, the youngest son of Peter III., who continued the struggle even in opposition to his own brother. At last, in 1302, after an unsuccessful attack on Sicily by Charles of Valois, peace was concluded. Frederick was to marry Charles II.’s sister Eleanor, and to retain the kingdom of Sicily during his lifetime, but on his death it was to revert to the House of Anjou. This last stipulation was never fulfilled, and Sicily and Naples remained under separate rulers till 1435, when they were reunited under an Aragonese king. The only other notable event in the reign of Charles II. of Naples was the acquisition of the Hungarian crown by his grandson, Carobert, which has been already narrated (see p. [15]). In 1309 Charles II. died, and the crown of Naples passed to his second son, Robert, the superior hereditary claims of Carobert of Hungary being passed over. For the next thirty-four years Robert was the acknowledged head of the Guelf party in Italy.

To the north of the kingdom of Naples lay the temporal |The Papal States.| dominions which the Popes claimed by virtue of real or pretended donations from Emperors and others. These territories had by this time reached the boundaries which they retained to the present century. They included the whole of Romagna, the Pentapolis, the March of Ancona, and the Patrimony of St. Peter, with the city of Rome and the Campagna. The concordat with Rudolf of Hapsburg abolished all imperial suzerainty over these districts, and thus secured to the Papacy a territorial principality which Frederick II. had threatened to annihilate. But the victory, great as it appeared, was in reality deceptive. It had been won with the aid of the House of Anjou, whose protection might easily be converted into an oppressive patronage. And the difficulties of temporal rule were a serious addition to those of the spiritual oversight of Christendom, especially as the Popes were usually elected in advanced years, and their tenure of office was necessarily brief. More than two centuries elapsed before papal suzerainty in central Italy developed into direct papal government; and during that period the absorption in secular interests not only diverted the attention of the Popes from their higher duties, but also tended to lower their estimation in the eyes of Europe. The localisation of the Papacy in central Italy, while it gave some appearance of security to the papal power, really degraded it, just as the identification with the German monarchy degraded the dignity of the Empire.

There is little reason to linger over the history of the |The Popes, 1272-1290.| individuals who fill the papal chair from the end of the Interregnum till the departure to Avignon. Gregory X. (1271-1276), elected after a vacancy of nearly three years, was a man of high character and ability, but he did not rule long enough to accomplish any great ends. He set himself to restore order in Germany, to put an end to party strife in Italy, and to check the arrogant ambition of Charles of Naples. The council which he held at Lyons in 1274 is chiefly notable for the regulations drawn up to prevent delays and external intervention in papal elections. Ten days after the death of a Pope, the cardinals present on the spot were to be shut up in conclave, and were to remain excluded from intercourse with the outside world until they had agreed on the choice of a successor. Gregory’s short-lived successors were mainly occupied with their relations with Naples, with party struggles in Italy, and with the growth of the noble families in Rome. Temporal dominion, in which hereditary succession was impossible, brought with it the vice of nepotism, the desire to make the most of a short tenure of office for the aggrandisement of relatives. Nicolas III. (1277-1280) bestowed lavish grants on the great House of Orsini, to which he belonged; Martin IV. (1281-1285) was a mere puppet of Charles of Anjou, and resided in his company at Viterbo; Honorius IV. (1285-1287) was a Savelli, and exalted his family at the expense of the Orsini; while Nicolas IV. (1288-1292) raised the Colonna as a counterpoise to the other two families. From this time the history of Rome was filled with the feuds of these great baronial houses, and they exercised a most disastrous influence on the spiritual as well as on the temporal position of the Popes.

On the death of Nicolas IV. these baronial factions were so |Celestine V., 1294.| predominant and so evenly balanced in the conclave that no election could take place for two years. At last, in 1294, a sudden impulse induced the cardinals to throw aside all secular considerations and to offer the highest ecclesiastical dignity to a man whose only claim was his reputation for sanctity. Celestine V. had for years lived a hermit’s life in a cave near Sulmona. His election was a unique experiment in papal history, and it was unsuccessful. Personal piety was no sufficient substitute for the worldly wisdom and experience required for the occupant of the papal chair. After five months he was persuaded to abdicate, and ultimately died (May, 1296) in a prison to which he was consigned by his successor, Boniface VIII.

The pontificate of Boniface VIII. is by far the most important |Boniface VIII., 1294-1303.| of this period. He has been called the last of the mediæval Popes. He was certainly the last who attempted to exercise that general authority over Christendom which Gregory VII. had claimed and Innocent III. had acquired. His complete failure proved how little the Papacy really profited by its victory over the Empire. In order to weaken the authority of the Emperors, the Popes had encouraged the growing nationality of the outlying kingdoms, forgetful that they were forging a weapon which might be used against themselves. Honorius III. and Innocent IV. had waged a desperate struggle against Frederick II. But the defeat of the Hohenstaufen did not, as they expected, leave the Papacy supreme. Boniface VIII. found equally formidable opponents in Edward I. of England and Philip IV. of France. The Papacy might defeat the Empire, because the latter was opposed to all the tendencies of the age, but it was powerless against the force of national development. To coerce the French and English kings, who refused to submit to his arbitration, Boniface issued the bull Clericis laicos which forbade the clergy to pay taxes to the secular power. Edward I. replied by outlawing the clergy, and forced them to acknowledge their membership of the state and to contribute to its support. Philip IV. retaliated by prohibiting the export of money from France, and thus cut off French contributions to Rome. When the Pope claimed Scotland as a papal fief and forbade any further English invasions, Edward I. brought the bull before a parliament at Lincoln (1301), which decreed that the king should not answer before the Pope on any question concerning his temporal rights. Philip IV. met the exorbitant papal pretensions by a similar protest from the national representatives at a meeting of the States-General (1302). And the French king did not content himself with verbal protests. Taking advantage of the discontent of the Colonnas, French troops entered Anagni, where Boniface was residing, and for a few days kept him a prisoner. This insult was a terrible blow to the proud Pope, and a few weeks later he died (October, 1303).

Benedict XI., the new Pope, had a difficult task to avoid |Benedict XI., 1303-1304.| either a degrading submission to France or a new quarrel with Philip IV. and the Colonnas. To escape intimidation he withdrew to Perugia, and for a time succeeded in maintaining a conciliatory but not dishonourable attitude. At last he found it necessary to issue a bull against the chief authors of the outrage at Anagni (June 29, 1304). Four weeks later the Pope was dead, and contemporaries were almost unanimous in attributing his death to poison. The posthumous reputation of Boniface VIII. was now the vital question at issue, and the cardinals were almost evenly divided into a French party which condemned him, and an Italian party which anathematised his assailants. So irreconcilable were the two parties that the cardinals, though shut up in the palace at Perugia in accordance with the constitution of Gregory X., spent ten months in the vain attempt to choose a new Pope. At last the deadlock was terminated by a strange compromise. The supporters of Boniface were to name three non-Italian prelates, and the hostile party was to choose one of them. One of the three was the Archbishop of Bordeaux, whose diocese lay within the dominions of Edward I. His selection was due to the belief that he was the bitter enemy of the French king. But tradition maintained that Philip IV. contrived to buy him over to his side, |Clement V., 1305-1313.| and he was chosen Pope as Clement V. The coronation ceremony took place at Lyons, and the new Pope never ventured into Italy. His pontificate was one long struggle to avoid or to moderate the concessions which Philip expected from him. The charges against Boniface were ultimately referred to a council at Vienna, which exonerated his memory. But on most points Clement had to follow the wishes of the French king, especially in the condemnation of the Templars. In 1309 Clement V. fixed his residence at Avignon, which was not then a French town, and was probably chosen partly for that reason, and partly for its neighbourhood to the Venaissin, already a papal possession. But Avignon was in Provence, which was held by the House of Anjou, and it was only separated from France by the Rhone. As long as the Popes continued to live there, they were exposed to overwhelming French influence, and could hardly escape the charge, made both from England and Germany, that they were mere vassals of the king of France. It says much for the vitality of the papal system that the ‘Babylonish captivity,’ as the next seventy years have been called, did not result in the complete loss, not only of the Italian provinces, but of all spiritual authority in Europe.

The district of Tuscany, which lies to the north-west of the Papal States, had been split up since the death of the |Tuscany.| Countess Matilda into a number of city states, mostly republics, but which from time to time were subject to native or foreign despots. Siena, which became in the fifteenth century mistress of southern Tuscany, had not yet risen into prominence and never ranked among the great states of Italy. Pisa, hitherto the most powerful of the Tuscan communes and one of the greatest of Italian ports, began to decline when the restoration of the Eastern Empire (1261) established the ascendency of Genoa in the Levant. In the naval struggle which followed, the two republics were fairly evenly balanced; but a great Genoese victory off the island of Meloria (1284) inflicted a blow from which Pisa never recovered, though she retained her independence for another century. Lucca rose to some importance under Castruccio Castracani, and from time to time successfully resisted the aggressions of Florence, but has no continuous history that attracts attention. By far the most important of the Tuscan cities was Florence, destined to be |Florence.| for a brilliant period the chief home of Italian art and literature, to acquire the supremacy over the whole of Tuscany, and to become for a few years in the present century the capital of an Italian kingdom. It is at the end of the thirteenth century that the foundation was laid of the Florentine constitution, which has always attracted special attention on account both of its own peculiarities and of the greatness of the city in which it grew up.

No city in Italy had been more convulsed than Florence |Constitution of Florence.| by the struggle between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and these factions were the more embittered against each other by their coincidence with class distinctions. The feudal nobles, although by no means united, were preponderantly Ghibelline, while the wealthy burghers were inclined to the cause of the Papacy and Charles of Anjou. After the defeat of Manfred in 1266 the supremacy of the Guelfs was established, and was never overthrown from that date. For some years the government was moderate and pacific, but the news of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 frightened the Guelfs into an attempt to secure their power by constitutional changes. The existing magistrates were superseded |The ‘Priori.’| by the ‘Priori delle Arti,’ at first three and afterwards six in number. These constituted the signory and held the chief executive power. They were chosen from the seven greater guilds (arti maggiori) and held office for two months at a time, re-election being forbidden (divieto) until after an interval of two years. The greater guilds, which had long existed as trade corporations before their rise to political importance, consisted of the Calimala, or cloth merchants, the wool-weavers, the bankers, the silk manufacturers, physicians, furriers and lawyers. About the same time a number of lesser guilds (arti minori) were organised, and their number increased within the next sixteen years to fourteen. Henceforth we can trace the existence of four main divisions of the people of Florence: (1) the grandi, or nobles; (2) the popolo grasso, the members of the seven greater guilds; (3) the popolo minuto, or members of the fourteen lesser guilds; (4) the ciompi, though this name is of later origin, including those citizens who had no guild organisation, and therefore no machinery either for self-government or for influencing the conduct of public business.

By the constitution of 1282 the nobles were not excluded from office, but if they wished to qualify themselves for it they had to enter a guild. Many of them fulfilled this condition, and several nobles held the office of prior during the next ten years. But class jealousies continued to create domestic quarrels, and in 1293 Giano della Bella, himself of noble origin, proposed and carried the famous |Ordinances of Justice, 1293.| ‘Ordinances of Justice.’ To qualify for office a man must really practise the trade or craft to which he belonged. The grandi were not only to be excluded from any share in the government, but they were subjected to serious social disqualifications. In time of disorder they were confined to their houses on penalty of exile. A noble could not accuse a citizen or bear witness against him without the consent of the signory, and the severest penalties were imposed on a noble who wounded or killed a citizen. The duty of enforcing these ordinances was intrusted to a specially created official, the gonfalonier of justice, who |The Gonfalonier.| was to be appointed every two months and was to be a member of the signory. The gonfalonier, who was intrusted with the command of a large force of infantry, became the most dignified officer of the state, though his actual powers were not greater than those of the priors. From this time one of the harshest penalties was to confer nobility upon a political offender, and the greatest reward that could be conferred upon a deserving grande was to degrade him to the rank of a citizen. To protect the signory from attack a fortified Palazzo Pubblico was built for their reception, a building which is now famous as the Palazzo Vecchio.

Although the actual government of Florence from 1293 may be considered to be a plutocracy, in that the actual conduct of affairs was monopolised by the wealthy burghers, yet the constitution possessed a real democratic basis. The ultimate power of making any constitutional change rested with the parlamento, a mass meeting |The Parliament.| of all citizens in the great piazza. Such a meeting could at any time appoint a balia, i.e. a committee with full powers to alter the laws; and it was by this method that most of the revolutions in Florentine history were accomplished.

Early in the fourteenth century the Florentine constitution assumed the main features which it retained till the fall of the republic. In 1321 a disastrous war with Castruccio Castracani discredited the signory, and displayed the weakness of a government which changed every two months. To remedy this, a council of twelve |The ‘Buonuomini.| buonuomini was created, two from each sesto or district. They were to hold office for six months instead of two, and the signory was to take no important step without consulting them. Two years later a far more important change was made, when the system of filling offices by lot was introduced. Hitherto the members of the outgoing administration had elected their successors. But the city was disquieted by factious quarrels at each election, and there was no security for that equality which was rapidly becoming a passion among the Florentines. In 1323 it was determined to hold a squittinio, or scrutiny, every two |The ‘Squittinio,’ 1323.| years in place of the elections every two months. A committee was formed of the signory for the time being with the councils of the greater guilds and other influential citizens. A list was drawn up of all citizens qualified for office by age and by being clear of debt to the state (netti di specchio). Their names were then put up to ballot in the committee. The voting was by black and white beans, the former being in favour of the candidate. All the names which received not less than two-thirds of the black beans were placed in bags (imborsare), and from these bags they were drawn to fill vacancies as they arose. When the bags were empty a new squittinio became necessary. It resulted from this system that qualified citizens had a fairly equal chance of selection, but there was no security that offices would go to the most capable, and the arrangement was liable to serious abuses. The party which could obtain a majority in the selecting committee (balia), was certain to secure most of the offices for its own partisans for at least two years.

By 1323 the Florentine constitution had assumed a fairly definite shape. At its head stood the gonfalonier of justice and the six priors, who had the chief conduct of affairs and the right of initiating legislation. Then came the twelve buonuomini, who were a sort of privy council to the signory, and served as a check on its power. Next in rank were the capitano del popolo, once the chief magistrate of the city, and the sixteen gonfaloniers of companies, who were responsible for police and military arrangements. These were known as the three greater offices (i tre maggiori). In critical times special magistracies were sometimes created for a limited time, such as the eight of war (otto di guerra), or the ten of the sea (dieci del mare). There were two legislative councils: the consiglio del popolo, three hundred in number, containing only popolani; and the consiglio del commune, numbering two hundred and fifty, to which nobles were also admitted. Besides the regular municipal magistracies, there was an |The ‘Parte Guelfa.’| important body, the parte guelfa, which exercised very great political influence. This corporation, which had its own captains and council, had been formed after the great Guelf victory of 1267 to administer the confiscated property of the exiled Ghibellines. Its great wealth and efficient organisation were employed for the assiduous maintenance of Guelf ascendency, and in later times for resisting the claims of the lower classes to a voice in the government.

Of the northern states only three deserve special mention |Genoa.| at this time. Genoa, isolated in the north-western corner and surrounded by mountains, plays a very slight part in the general history of Italy, though it has some considerable importance as commanding the direct route from Provence to the peninsula. The energies of its citizens were mainly absorbed in the acquisition of wealth by eastern trade, in maintaining wars with Pisa and Venice, and in the incessant feuds of the great families of Doria and Spinola. Milan, which had long held a predominant position among |Milan.| the Lombard towns, was already beginning to lose its republican independence. There, as in Florence, class divisions were mixed up with the quarrels of factions. In 1259 the Guelf leader, Martino della Torre, headed the citizens in a successful struggle against the Ghibelline nobles, and took advantage of his victory to assume the lordship of the city. The neighbouring towns of Lodi, Como, Vercelli, and Bergamo fell one after another under the rule of the Della Torre. But in 1277 a revolution was effected by the Ghibellines under the Archbishop of Milan, Otto Visconti, to whom the lordship of the city was transferred, and from whom it passed on his death in 1295 to his nephew Matteo Visconti, the ancestor of the later dukes of Milan. But the Visconti dynasty was not yet permanently established, and in 1302 a Guelf league was formed among the chief Lombard towns which forced Matteo to withdraw, and Guido della Torre became the ruler of Milan.

Venice, the last of the important northern states, was even |Venice.| more isolated from Italy than Genoa, both by geography and by its absorbing interests in the Levant. The overthrow of the Greek Empire in 1204 had given Venice a commanding position in the east, but the restoration of 1261 had raised a very formidable rival in Genoa, and for more than a century the two republics were engaged in a series of costly and exhausting wars. But the main interest of Venetian history at this time lies in the building up of that oligarchical constitution which gave to Venice a vigour and consistency of political action quite unique in Italy, and enabled her in the fifteenth century to establish a very formidable power on the mainland.

The institutions of Venice, though sufficiently alien from |Constitution of Venice.| modern usages, were simplicity itself as compared with those of Florence. This simplicity is due primarily to the entire absence in Venice of a landed nobility, whose power had to be overthrown in other Italian cities by a series of revolts on the part of the citizens, and also to the fact that Venice remained completely untouched by the faction fights of Guelfs and Ghibellines. At the head of the state stood the doge, elected for life, and in early |The Doge.| times possessed of almost autocratic power. But his authority had been gradually limited by the compulsory association of councillors, by the exaction of a solemn oath on election (promissione ducale), and by the creation of new institutions. By the fourteenth century the doge had become an ornamental sovereign, surrounded by great pomp and ceremonial, presiding in all assemblies, but possessed of no power of initiation and of no means of exerting more than personal influence. A doge of strong character might still mould the destinies of Venice, but it was by persuading his colleagues, not by the exercise of any regal authority. The election of the doge rested originally with the whole people. In 1172 a council, which grew into the Maggior Consiglio, was intrusted with the task, which was gradually delegated to small committees chosen in various ways. At last, in 1268, the elaborate system was adopted which lasted till the fall of the republic. All members of the Grand Council over thirty years of age drew balls from an urn, and thirty of these balls were gilt. The thirty who drew the gilt balls were reduced to nine by a second drawing of lots. The nine elected forty, seven votes being a necessary minimum. The forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who elected twenty-five, each receiving at least nine votes. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, who elected forty-five, who must each receive seven votes. The forty-five were reduced to eleven, who chose forty-one, each to receive nine votes. The forty-one then took an oath and proceeded to vote for the vacant office. The voting was repeated until some candidate had received at least twenty-five votes, and he became doge. The form of demanding popular approval of the election did not become obsolete until the election of Francesco Foscari in 1423.

With the doge were associated six ducal councillors, who were necessarily consulted on every subject and without whom the doge could do nothing. In fact, the ducal functions were really discharged, not by the doge, but by a committee of seven of whom the doge was one. The Collegio or cabinet of ministers (savii), conducted the routine work of administration, and prepared all business for the other public bodies. The business of every department passed through the Collegio, in which the six savii grandi presided in weekly terms. The Quarantia, or Forty, was originally created in the twelfth century to act as a permanent senate, but it was gradually limited to judicial functions, and became the great law-court of Venice. The functions of the senate fell to the Pregadi, a body of a hundred and sixty members, whose name was derived from the originally voluntary consultation of prominent citizens by the doge. The Pregadi became a permanent part of the constitution in 1229. Their chief business was the first consideration of all legislative proposals, the appointment of ambassadors, and the general supervision of foreign affairs.

At the basis of the constitution was the Maggior Consiglio, |The Great Council.| which had gradually taken the place of the primary assembly of all citizens. The council was originally elective, and its rise was a natural result of the growth of Venetian population. But in 1297 a law was carried which finally changed the government of Venice from a democracy to a close oligarchy. A list was drawn up of all who had sat in the Great Council for the last four years, and their names were put up to ballot in the Quarantia. All who received twelve votes were to be members of the council. Three electors were to be appointed every year to make a list of any other candidates, and their names, if approved by the doge and his councillors, were to be balloted by the Quarantia. For a few years the addition of names was frequent, though few candidates were successful unless their ancestors had at some time or other had a seat in the council. But in 1315 the names of all eligible candidates were drawn up once for all and placed in a book, and in 1319 the three annual electors were abolished. Henceforth membership of the Great Council became a hereditary privilege, and the admission of a member’s son as soon as he had reached the age of twenty-five was regarded as a matter of course. The serrata del Maggior Consiglio, or closing of the Great Council, divided the Venetian population into two sharply defined classes: the nobles, who had the privilege of membership, and the lower classes, who were for ever excluded from any voice in the government.

Although the abolition of popular election in 1297 was a change to which things had long been tending, it could hardly take place without exciting considerable discontent. Several conspiracies were formed against the new oligarchy, and after the failure of a formidable plot under Bajamonte Tiepolo in 1310, it was determined to devise some new machinery for the detection and repression of future revolts. Ten members were chosen by |Council of Ten, 1319.| the Great Council to act as a sort of committee of public safety. So useful did they prove that they were renewed year after year, and in 1335 they were made a permanent part of the constitution. The Council really consisted of seventeen, as the doge and his six councillors were associated with the Ten. The latter were elected yearly, and could not hold office again till a year had elapsed. The proper function of the Ten was to act as a court of exceptional jurisdiction, somewhat like the Star Chamber in England. In this capacity they served as the efficient bulwark of the Venetian aristocracy, and coerced the inferior citizens into passive acquiescence in the rule of their superiors. As time went on, the Ten became more and more powerful, and began to interfere in the general conduct of affairs. So great became the passion for secrecy in the Venetian government, that in the sixteenth century the Ten began to delegate their functions to a sub-committee, the three Inquisitors of State.

For sixty years Italy had been allowed to take its own course without any attempt at interference on the part of its nominal suzerain in Germany. The news that Henry of |Henry VII. in Italy, 1310-1313.| Luxemburg, elected in 1308, was preparing to visit Italy and to revive the imperial power, made a profound impression in the peninsula, where the Guelf and Ghibelline parties were as active and bellicose as ever. These party names had by this time ceased to express any essential difference of principle. The imperial suzerainty in the north, and the papal suzerainty in the south were equally shadowy, and neither seemed substantial enough to fight for. The idea that the Guelfs were the champions of republican liberty as against aggressive despots, had ceased to have any real foundation in facts. A Della Torre was just as dangerous to the liberties of Milan as a Visconti. Since the Popes had called in the House of Anjou, and especially since a Pope had fixed his residence in Avignon, it was impossible to contend that the Guelfs were the champions of Italian independence against foreign domination. The anomalous relations of Italian parties were reflected in the equally anomalous position of Henry VII. A German prince elected by German princes to the throne of the Hohenstaufen, he seemed destined to revive the principles of Ghibellinism and to assume the headship of a revived Ghibelline faction. On the other hand, Henry was French by education and sympathies, he owed his election to the clerical partisans of France acting under papal influence, and he was accompanied in his march by legates whom the Pope had authorised to confer upon him the imperial crown in Rome. It was no empty pretence of moderation, but the expression of a real policy, when Henry professed that he belonged to neither faction and intended to act as a mediator between them. And his actions corresponded with his professions. As he passed through the Lombard cities he insisted on the return of all political exiles, whichever party they belonged to. In Milan, where he received the iron crown of Lombardy (January 6, 1311), he recalled Matteo Visconti without overthrowing the rule of Guido della Torre. But the Italians themselves had no sympathy with his impartiality. Henry VII., like most of his German predecessors, was in need of money, and the attempt to levy a contribution of 100,000 ducats provoked a rising in Milan. The rising was suppressed, but it resulted in an inevitable alliance between the Emperor and the Ghibellines. Guido della Torre and his family were driven into exile, and an attempted rebellion in the Guelf cities was suppressed. Brescia alone made any lengthy resistance to the German army. Before leaving Lombardy, Henry appointed imperial vicars in the chief cities, and in Milan he intrusted the office to Matteo Visconti, thus finally establishing the dynasty which ruled Milan for a century and a half, and at one time seemed likely to unite the whole of northern Italy under its sway.

From this time the difficulties of Henry VII. rapidly increased. The force of circumstances had compelled him to become a Ghibelline against his will. The hopes which that party built upon his arrival are expressed in the De Monarchia of Dante. Peace could only be bestowed upon Italy by a strong monarchy, and such a monarchy could only be established by a German king with the traditions of the Empire at his back. But the more enthusiastic the Ghibellines became, the more resolute was the opposition of the Guelfs. Robert of Naples, the close ally of Clement V., did not venture to embark on open hostilities, but he was rendered both jealous and uneasy by Henry’s progress, and did not hesitate to intrigue against him. Henry VII. succeeded in obtaining the lordship of Genoa and Pisa, the latter of which was always on the Ghibelline side. But Florence, the leading Guelf city in Tuscany, obstinately refused to admit the German king or his troops, and he was compelled to pass on one side on his journey to Rome. There he found the greater part of the city occupied by the Guelf family of Orsini, assisted by a Neapolitan force. A battle would have been necessary to obtain possession of St. Peter’s, and the coronation ceremony had to take place in the church of St. John Lateran (June 29, 1312). Henry VII. was now convinced that the reduction of Italy to obedience could only be accomplished by force of arms. King Robert had as yet avoided any declaration of war, and it would have been dangerous to attack Naples while the Guelfs in the north were strong enough to cut off communications with Germany. It was decided to strike terror into the Guelfs by the reduction of Florence. The German troops advanced to the city walls in September, 1312, but they found them too strong and too well garrisoned to venture on an attack. Henry retreated to Pisa to await reinforcement. Against Robert of Naples, who was preparing to give active assistance to Florence, he issued the imperial ban, and concluded an alliance with the Aragonese king of Sicily. Henry had commenced his march to meet the Neapolitan troops, when he suddenly died of |Death of Henry VII., 1313.| fever at Buonconvento, twelve miles from Siena (August 24, 1313). The Ghibellines believed that he had been poisoned by a Dominican monk in administering the sacrament. The schemes of Henry VII. were entirely out of date: the Holy Roman Empire, as Dante understood it, was already an anachronism: and the Emperor’s death is only important as marking the failure of the last serious attempt to reduce Italy to obedience to a German king. The forces of disunion were strong enough to break up any monarchy; it was only an added weakness that the monarchy was claimed by a foreigner.

CHAPTER III
FRANCE UNDER THE LATER CAPETS, 1270-1328

Progress of the French Monarchy—Its difficulties—Philip III.—The inheritance to Toulouse, Champagne, and Navarre—Wars with Castile and Aragon—Accession of Philip IV. and the importance of his reign—His War with England and Flanders—His relations with the Papacy—The suppression of the Templars—His policy of annexation—His domestic government—The King’s Court and its departments: the conseil du roi, the chambre des comptes, and the Parlement of Paris—The States-General—Financial maladministration—Death of Philip IV.—Louis X.—His death and the succession question—The Salic Law—The short reigns of Philip V. and Charles IV.

The history of the modern kingdom of France begins with the break-up of the great Karoling Empire in the treaty of Verdun (843). Western Francia, split off from the other dominions of Charles the Great, continued for a century to be ruled by his degenerate descendants. But the decentralising movement did not stop with the division of the Frankish Empire into three fairly well-defined units. The dukes and counts, who had been provincial governors under Charles the Great, took advantage of the growing weakness of the central power to make their position hereditary and practically independent. Superficial unity was only maintained by the necessity of making head against the attacks of the Northmen. The successful resistance of Paris to these invaders gave to the dukes of Paris, the lords of the Isle de France, the royal title which the Karolings at Laon were too feeble to defend. But the early kings of the House of Capet were as powerless as their predecessors. They themselves belonged to the feudal nobles, they owed the crown to the support of their fellows, they were avowedly only primi inter pares. Hugh Capet himself acknowledged this when he undertook to do nothing of importance without consulting the tenants-in-chief. During the eleventh century France was little more than a geographical expression: its political unity was a mere shadow: its ecclesiastical unity was independent of the crown. But in the twelfth century two movements began |Progress of the French monarchy.| which were destined to exert the most decisive influence on the fortunes of France: the rise of the communes, and the growth of the royal power. There was no formal alliance between the crown and the bourgeoisie, but they had obvious common interests in opposition to the feudal nobles, and they rendered the most vital assistance to each other. Feudalism, attacked both from above and from below, seemed destined to perish. The three kings who dealt the most fatal blows to aristocratic isolation were Philip Augustus (1180-1223), Louis IX. (1226-1270), and Philip IV. (1285-1314). The third estate rendered its greatest service to the monarchy by giving birth to the class of lawyers. To their superior training and their persistent advocacy of the principles of Roman Law was due the gradual break-down of feudal jurisdiction. The cour du roy, at first either the court of the royal domain or the court of peers for the trial of cases concerning tenants-in-chief, became, as the Parliament of Paris, the supreme judicial court for the whole of France. Side by side with the advance of the central judicial power, another great change was going on—the extension of the royal domain. In the great fiefs female succession was admitted in default of male heirs, and this proved fatal to the permanence of many of the old families. With regard to the crown there was no acknowledged rule of succession, because no occasion for dispute arose. From the accession of Hugh Capet in 987, to the death of Louis X. in 1316, there was never wanting a son to succeed to his father. This uninterrupted male succession for so many generations, almost unparalleled among the reigning families of Europe, was an invaluable element of strength to the crown in its struggle with feudalism. One by one the great fiefs fell in, were conquered, or were acquired by marriage with heiresses. The most notable successes were the acquisition of Normandy by Philip Augustus, and of Languedoc after the Albigensian crusade. By the time of Philip the Fair the only provinces which retained their feudal independence were the county of Flanders in the north, the duchy of Brittany in the west, the duchy of Burgundy in the east, and the duchy of Aquitaine in the south. The royal power and the territorial unity of France had advanced pari passu, and Philip IV. found himself strong enough to attempt acquisitions beyond the traditional frontiers of France.

So far—during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the tendency towards centralisation, in spite of temporary obstacles and checks, had achieved that success which usually attends directness and persistence of aim, and a politic, if sometimes unscrupulous, choice of means. But at the death of Philip IV. this progress was suddenly arrested, and during the next two centuries a struggle had to be carried |Difficulties of the monarchy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.| on, differing in many respects from that which had gone before, but still involving many of the same problems and ultimately terminating in a victory for the same side. One essential factor in this struggle was the tenure of the duchy of Aquitaine by a foreign prince—the king of England. Obvious interest impelled English kings, like Edward III. and Henry V., to ally themselves with all the forces of disunion in France, and their efforts were aided and stimulated by the chance which gave them a colourable claim to the French crown. But the difficulties of the French kings of the House of Valois were not due merely to English intervention. There were two fatal flaws in their own policy and that of their predecessors. (1) While taking every advantage of the movement of the lower classes, the kings had done little or nothing to satisfy their legitimate aspirations. They gave the lawyers a distinguished position in the service of the crown, and that was all. Before long, the third estate was sure to weary of an alliance in which all the substantial advantages were on one side; and if the commons were able or willing to form a coalition with the nobles against the crown, they might impose checks upon the royal power similar to those which were enforced by the English parliament. That this danger was a real one will be seen when we come to consider the attitude adopted by the States-General at the time of the battle of Poitiers.[^[3]] (2) While destroying the old feudal nobility, the French kings had created a new one. As the great fiefs fell in, many of them were granted out again as appanages to members of the royal family. Doubtless it was considered that blood-relationship would be sufficient to unite their interests with those of the monarchy. But this proved a complete miscalculation. Relationship counts for very little in politics as against the impulse given by selfish interests. Edward III. tried a similar policy in England, and it led to the Wars of the Roses. In France it led to the long contest of the Burgundians and Armagnacs, to the Praguerie of 1440, and to the League of the Public Weal of 1465. The féodalité apanagée, as French writers call these nobles of royal birth in contradistinction to the old féodalité territoriale, did not long delay to assume the same attitude as their predecessors, and became the opponents of the monarchy which had created them. Their overthrow tasked the devotion of the capable servants of Charles VII., and gave full employment to the mingled craft and resolution of Louis XI.

The futile expedition to Tunis, the expiring effort of that crusading impulse which had urged mediæval Europe to |Philip III., 1270-1285.| heroic deeds, cost France the life of the noblest of her long line of kings. Louis IX. was almost the only French ruler who combined the highest moral virtues with eminent political capacity. His son and successor, Philip III., could claim neither of his father’s characteristics. He was illiterate, and the rashness which earned him the name of le Hardi was not redeemed by any clear insight or any signs of ability. He was only in name the head of the House of Capet: the real master of French policy was his uncle, Charles of Anjou. Paris looked for guidance to Naples, rather than Naples to Paris. That the French monarchy continued to advance, in spite of the incapacity of the king, is a signal proof of its inherent strength and of the ability of the trained lawyers who served it. The reign of Philip III., obscure as it appears at first sight, was marked by the acquisition of three important provinces, of which two remained permanently subject to the crown.

Among the numerous victims who perished on the return journey from Tunis were Alfonso of Poitiers (August 21, 1271), brother of St. Louis, and his wife Jeanne |The Toulouse inheritance.| of Toulouse, the last descendant of the famous House of St. Gilles. They left no children, and their vast inheritance, including the counties of Toulouse, Poitou, Auvergne, and the marquisate of Provence,[^[4]] fell to the French crown. The only exceptions were the district of Agenais, which was claimed by the English king, and the Venaissin, near Avignon, which was ceded to the Papacy in accordance with the treaty of Meaux in 1229. Thus France completed the absorption of Languedoc, which had been begun in the crusade against the Albigenses. It is true that Philip undertook to rule his new territories as count, and not as king, and that he created a special parliament and law-court at Toulouse, but these concessions to local independence were only temporary and illusory.

In 1274 occurred another important death, that of Henry, King of Navarre and Count of Champagne and Brie, leaving |Champagne and Navarre.| an only daughter, Jeanne, aged three years. The widow, Blanche of Artois, carried the infant heiress to France and threw herself on the protection of the king. Philip at once occupied Champagne and Brie, which were henceforth united to the crown. At the same time he procured a dispensation from Pope Gregory X. for the future marriage of Jeanne to his own second son Philip, who soon afterwards became heir to the throne by the death of his elder brother. The people of Navarre revolted against this high-handed settlement of their fate by a foreign prince, but their resistance was crushed by a French army, and Philip assumed the government of the kingdom as guardian for his future daughter-in-law.

These territorial gains were the only notable successes of Philip III.’s reign, and his remaining years were mainly occupied |Wars with Castile and Aragon.| with two futile wars in Spain. Alfonso X., formerly the claimant of the throne of the Cæsars, was still reigning in Castile, but the actual conduct of affairs fell in his old age to his sons, Ferdinand de la Cerda and Sancho. The elder, who had married Philip III.’s sister Blanche, died in 1275, leaving two sons. The Castilian Cortes, in regulating the succession, passed over these children, and secured the crown on Alfonso’s death to Sancho, who had earned the name of ‘the Brave’ for his exploits against the Moors. Philip was indignant at the exclusion of his nephews, and took up arms to support their claims. But his invasion of Castile was so reckless and ill-planned as to gain him the name of le Hardi, and he was unable to force a passage through the mountains. His intervention was naturally fruitless, and Sancho succeeded to Castile on his father’s death.

The second war was more prolonged. The Sicilian Vespers in 1282 (v. p. [25]), which resulted in the transfer of Sicily to Peter III. of Aragon, made a profound impression in France, and many nobles hurried to offer their services to Charles of Anjou. The Pope excommunicated Peter III., and offered the crown of Aragon to Philip III.’s second surviving son, Charles of Valois, on condition that it should never be united to France. The offer was accepted in 1284, and in the next year Philip himself headed a great expedition against Aragon, which was dignified by the name of a crusade. The capture of the fortresses of Elna and Girona, both after an obstinate resistance, were the only successes of the campaign. Roger di Loria with his Catalan sailors destroyed the French fleet, and cut off the possibility of receiving supplies by sea. At the same time disease broke out in the French army. Philip found it necessary to retreat, and died at Perpignan |Death of Philip III., 1285.| on October 5, 1285. He left three sons: Philip, who in 1284 had married Jeanne, heiress of Navarre; Charles, Count of Valois and Alençon, and titular King of Aragon; and Louis, Count of Evreux, whose descendants afterwards ruled in Navarre.

Philip IV. was seventeen years old when he succeeded his father, and he died at the age of forty-seven. In the course |Philip IV., 1285-1314.| of these thirty years he set a mark upon French life and government which has never been completely effaced, not even by the floods of successive revolutions. Yet our knowledge of his reign, and especially of his person and character, is singularly scanty. That he was good-looking we know from his being called le Bel, but we are not informed whether he was tall or short. His character we have to infer from his actions, and we are forced to conclude that it was far less attractive than his face. This dearth of contemporary records is the more notable when it is contrasted with the striking picture which we possess of his grandfather, and with the wealth of narrative on the subject of the fourteenth century wars. Philip was not the man to be the hero of a Joinville or a Froissart, and no Philippe de Commines had yet arisen. There is little that is heroic or picturesque about his reign. The most striking scene, the humiliation of Boniface VIII., is repulsive in itself and is discreditable to Philip’s memory. It may even be said that there was little result to show for his restless activity. The two enterprises which he had most at heart—the annexation of Aquitaine and Flanders—ended in failure. His only territorial acquisition of importance was Lyons. The suppression of the Templars was not an achievement to be proud of. A notable victory was gained over the Papacy, but it was gained by discreditable methods; and, after all, the residence at Avignon brought no permanent advantages to France. Philip’s great work lay in the comparatively obscure details of domestic government, in the improvement and completion of administrative machinery, and in the removal of all obstacles in the way of an efficient despotism. These are achievements which escape the notice of historians who are attracted by the heroes of chivalry, but they produce far more definite and deep-seated results than the most brilliant exploits on the battlefield. It must be admitted that Philip IV. was cruel and cold-blooded; that his regard for the letter of the law was a mere disguise for unscrupulousness; that this unscrupulousness was the more repulsive for the hypocrisy which could always find pretexts to justify it; it may even be admitted that his failures in external politics outweighed his successes,—yet he must be always memorable as the real founder of that administrative centralisation which has ever since been the dominant characteristic of the government of France, and has been a prominent cause of the subsequent greatness, if also of the subsequent disasters, of that country.

If this estimate of the reign be correct, it is obvious that we need not linger long over Philip’s foreign relations, and that our attention will be better devoted to his domestic measures. The war with Aragon, which he inherited, never interested him, as the only possible gainers by it were his brother and his cousin. After lasting for nearly twenty years, it ended in the final loss of Sicily by the House of Anjou, and the abandonment by Charles of Valois of his claims on Aragon on condition that his cousin, Charles II. of Naples, should give up to him his appanages of Anjou and Maine. Before this settlement had been arrived at, Philip had turned his attention to a far more exciting enterprise—the attempt to |Wars with England.| wrest Guienne and Gascony from Edward I. of England. These provinces had been united to the English crown since the marriage of Henry II. with Eleanor of Aquitaine, and on the whole they were fairly satisfied to remain subject to their distant ruler, whose island kingdom gave them a convenient market for the produce of their vineyards. But Edward I. had his hands full with the suppression of discontent in his recent conquests in Wales, and with enforcing his lately acknowledged suzerainty over Scotland. This gave Philip IV. an opportunity which he was not slow to seize. Taking advantage of a naval quarrel between some Norman sailors and the mariners of the Cinque Ports, and of the refusal of the Gascons to acknowledge the judicial authority of the French courts, Philip summoned Edward I. to appear before him to answer for the breach of his obligations as a vassal (November, 1293). Edward was aware that a contumacious attitude towards his suzerain would set a dangerous example to John Balliol in Scotland, and did all in his power to avoid a rupture. Unable to go to France in person he sent as a proxy his brother Edmund, who had married Philip’s mother-in-law, Blanche of Artois. On this docile envoy Philip played what can only be described as ‘the confidence trick.’ He assured him of his perfect friendliness to England, offered the hand of his sister Margaret to Edward, who was now a widower, and in return he demanded that, as a mere sign of trust and submission, Gascony should be ceded to him for a period of forty days. Edmund consented; but on the expiration of the time, Philip declared the English king to be contumacious for not having appeared in person, and his troops remained in occupation of the Gascon fortresses. After this there was no alternative but war. Edward was at an immense disadvantage. He had a war with Scotland and Wales on his hands; his subjects, especially the clergy, were discontented at his exactions, and the enemy was already in possession of a large part of his territories. His only ally of importance, Adolf of Nassau, was too impotent in Germany to effect any diversion. On the other hand, Philip offered aid to John Balliol, and thus laid the foundation of that permanent alliance between France and Scotland which lasted till the reign of Mary Stuart. The actual hostilities were unimportant, but the balance of success was decidedly against the English. It was at this time that Boniface VIII.’s attempt to interfere led to his first quarrel with Philip IV., and to the issue of the bull Clericis laicos (v. p. [29]). In 1297 the war assumed a new phase. Edward I. had succeeded in deposing John Balliol and in conquering Scotland, so that he was now free to take part in the continental war. At the same time he found an ally in Count Guy of Flanders, who had hitherto been kept passive by Philip’s detention of his daughter as a hostage. But Edward was again hampered by quarrels with the clergy and the barons, and the latter refused to serve in Gascony if the king persisted in going in person to Flanders. The result was that Guienne and Gascony were left defenceless, while Edward and his Flemish ally were unable to make head against the French. This check and the outbreak of a Scotch rebellion under Wallace forced Edward to make overtures for peace, and Philip determined to postpone the annexation of Aquitaine until he had completed the reduction of Flanders. Boniface VIII. had been compelled by difficulties in Italy to draw closer to the French king, and he had published a modified interpretation of his bull against clerical contributions to secular rulers. He was now allowed to act as mediator, though Philip protested that he accepted his mediation as a private person and not as Pope. It was arranged that both parties should retain their possessions as they stood until the conclusion of a final settlement. As a security for future peace, Edward I. was to marry Philip’s sister, Margaret, and the young Edward of Wales was betrothed to Philip’s daughter, Isabella. Both kings abandoned their allies (June 30, 1298).

While Edward I. returned to defeat Wallace at the battle of Falkirk, Flanders was left at Philip’s mercy. The Flemish citizens had no love for their count, and would render him no assistance. In this hopeless position, Guy |War in Flanders.| was induced by the treacherous promises of Charles of Valois to trust to the clemency of his suzerain. He was at once thrown into prison, and his fief was declared forfeited to the crown (1300). On his first visit to his new province, Philip’s cupidity was excited by the wealth which he found there. His wife, Jeanne of Navarre, exclaimed, when she saw the jewellery of the ladies of Bruges: ‘I thought I was the only queen in France, but I find that here there are six hundred.’ The attempt to gratify the greed thus aroused was certain to lead to discontent. The Flemings were as fond of their wealth as they were jealous of their independence. They soon discovered that it was better to be oppressed by their count than to be both oppressed and pillaged by their French governor, Jacques de Chatillon. The signal for a general rebellion was given in Bruges, as twenty years before in Palermo, by a massacre of the French. Philip despatched a large feudal army under Robert of Artois to crush the insurgents. The French nobles reckoned on an easy victory over unwarlike and ill-armed citizens, but they were undone by their own confidence and recklessness, and were utterly routed in the famous battle of Courtrai (July 11, 1302). This was the first of a great series of battles which taught Europe that an infantry force, if properly led and handled, could more than hold their own against mounted and heavily accoutred men-at-arms. It was some time before the lesson was thoroughly learned; but when it was mastered, the military system of the Middle Ages collapsed, and with it perished the social organisation which rested on the invincibility of the knightly force. Philip IV. advanced in person to recover the lost honour and power of France, but the approach of winter compelled him to retire without having done anything towards the suppression of the rebellion. The great disaster of 1302, the first which Philip had yet experienced, came at the crisis of his quarrel with the Papacy, and forced him to moderate his ambition. In 1303 he concluded a final peace with Edward I. and resigned his acquisitions in Aquitaine. In 1304, Boniface VIII. being dead, a great effort was made for the reduction of Flanders. At Mons-en-Puelle (August 18), by carefully avoiding the ruinous mistakes at Courtrai, Philip succeeded in defeating the Flemings; but his victory was hardly won, and was by no means so decisive as that of his opponents had been. Within three weeks the rebels had re-formed their army and were as formidable and undaunted as ever. Philip found himself compelled to recognise that he had undertaken a task beyond his strength, and he hastened to escape from it by concluding a treaty (June, 1305). Robert of Béthune, the eldest son of Count Guy, who had died in prison in 1303, was invested with the fiefs of Flanders, Nevers, and Rethel; the Flemings undertook to pay 200,000 livres to the French king, and to hand over as security for the payment Douai, Lille, and other towns on the southern frontier. It was long since a French king had suffered such a humiliating check. In 1300, Philip seemed to have secured the whole of Flanders and the greater part of Aquitaine. Four years later he had lost both provinces.

Philip’s relations with the Papacy have been already alluded to (v. p. [29]). In his quarrel with Boniface VIII. he had substantial justice on his side, and the national development of France necessitated an energetic resistance to the exorbitant pretensions of the mediæval Papacy. But these considerations do not justify the brutality of the French soldiery at Anagni, nor the vindictiveness with which Philip persisted in blackening the character of Boniface after the latter’s death. Equally inexcusable was his treatment of the ill-fated Benedict XI., though there is no reasonable ground for believing the charge that Philip’s agents poisoned the Pope in consequence of his excommunication of Boniface’s assailants. In Clement V. the king was face to face with a Pope upon whose subservience he had reasonable claims, and who was fully his match in diplomatic subtlety and in the want of scruples. The hold which Philip obtained upon the Papacy at this time enabled him to effect the blackest action of his reign, the destruction of the Templars. The crusades in the East had come to an |Suppression of the Templars.| end with the fall of Acre in 1291, and the Orders which had been formed for the defence or conquest of Palestine must inevitably fall victims to the jealousy which their wealth and independence excited in Europe, or they must undertake some new task which would justify their existence and give them a renewed hold on the public opinion of Europe. The Knights of St. John and of the German Order of St. Mary chose the latter course, and secured a prolongation of their corporate existence—the one in Prussia, and the other in the island of Rhodes. The Templars, who had been the most prominent in the wars of Palestine, were the least prepared to find a new occupation, and their inaction impaled them on the other horn of the dilemma. It is needless to go through the long catalogue of charges, some horrible and some absurd, which were brought by the king’s agents against the Order. It was inevitable that a celibate society of warriors should give occasion for the belief that the vow of chastity was not always observed. It is credible that in their intercourse with the Saracens many of the knights may have been led into unbelief, or even to adopt a contemptuous and irreverent attitude towards Christianity. But it is not credible that the whole Order was guilty of the obscenity, blasphemy, and irreligion that were charged against its members. Confessions extorted under horrible tortures and recanted when health and sanity were restored, do not constitute evidence from which any reasonable conclusions can be drawn. But Philip IV. was deaf to all considerations of justice or of clemency, and his iron will extorted a condemnation from judicial tribunals and from the Pope. In 1310, after the trial had lasted for two years, fifty-four knights were burned in Paris, and many other executions followed. In 1312 the Order was formally suppressed, and its possessions transferred to the Knights of St. John. This last provision was only imperfectly fulfilled, and much of the Templars’ hoarded wealth never passed from the hands of the king. In 1314 the last grand master, Jacques de Molai, after a solemn retractation of all extorted confessions, and a denial of the truth of all charges against the Order, perished at the stake on an island in the Seine.

Philip’s last success was an encroachment on those border territories between France and Germany which constituted |Encroachments in Arles.| the obsolete kingdom of Arles. The first step towards their annexation to France had been taken when Philip III. inherited the marquisate of Provence (see above, p. [47]). In 1291 Philip IV. had arranged a marriage between his second son, Philip, and Jeanne, daughter and heiress of Otto IV., Count of Burgundy. This marriage brought Franche-Comté under French influence, but did not result in the final annexation of the province, which was not accomplished till the treaty of Nymegen in 1678. For a long time the city of Lyons and the adjacent territory had been objects of French covetousness, and constant quarrels between the archbishop and the citizens offered frequent pretexts for intervention. At last, in 1312, taking advantage of the Emperor Henry VII.’s absence in Italy, Philip IV. ventured to take the final step, and Lyons was incorporated with France.

We must now turn to Philip IV.’s domestic government, |Domestic Government.| which constitutes his sole claim to a place among the great kings of history. His aims were those of his predecessors—those, in fact, of all kings in the later Middle Ages who wished to extend their power. He had to destroy feudalism as a basis of government, or, in the words of a great historian, to ‘eliminate the doctrine of tenure from political life.’ The essential vice of the feudal system was that every man was directly bound only to the immediate lord of whom he held his land; the connection with that lord’s suzerain was purely indirect. Hence came an inevitable tendency to disruption; the tie between vassal and lord was stronger than the indirect tie between the sub-tenant and the king; if a great noble rebelled he could compel his tenants to follow him even against his suzerain. For this system, which had many merits, but was inconsistent with either national unity or a strong government, Philip desired to substitute an organisation in which all Frenchmen, whether tenants-in-chief or sub-tenants, should stand in equal subjection to the law and to the king as the source and guardian of the law.

To accomplish this end, an efficient administrative machinery was necessary, and of this the foundations had been laid by Philip’s predecessors. The country was divided into bailliages in the north and sénéchaussées in the south. Philip IV. regulated and extended the functions of the bailiffs and seneschals, and employed them not only to carry out his edicts in the provinces, but also to supply him with that accurate local information without which centralisation is useless and incompetent. Besides these local officials, he |The King’s Court.| had the cour du roi which attended his person. This body, the earliest institution of Capetian France, was originally merely the court of the king’s domain, and consisted of the household officers and the immediate domain tenants. From time to time, however, the king must have had to decide questions concerning the great tenants-in-chief, and by the essential principle of feudalism such questions must be referred to their equals. Hence arose the court of peers, the creation of which is assigned by tradition to Philip Augustus when he summoned John of England to answer for the murder of Arthur of Brittany. Whether this court ever had a separate existence from the domain court is difficult to decide, but if it had, it soon lost it. In the reign of Louis IX. the domain court was transformed, when necessary, into a court of peers by the addition to it of some of the great vassals. At the same time, the court was made more efficient by the introduction of trained lawyers. Under Philip IV. these lawyers became the real managers of the work of justice and administration; and the nobles, though retaining the right of attendance, preferred as a rule to absent themselves from business in which their want of legal training placed them at a conspicuous disadvantage. The work of the court included all departments of government: the advising of the king, the management of finance, and the administration of justice. And the judicial work was enormously increased, partly by the compulsion of the nobles to allow appeals from their local courts to that of the suzerain, and partly by the reservation of an increasing number of cas royaux—i.e. cases which had to be brought in the first instance before the king. It was impossible for one body of men to discharge such a vast mass of business, and the court was gradually split up into three great departments, which continued, with modifications in detail, to conduct the routine administration of France till the Revolution.

(1) The first of these divisions was the conseil du roi, which corresponds roughly to the Privy Council in England. It consisted of the great officers of the household with fifteen councillors of state and two or more secretaries. Its chief business was to advise the king in all affairs of government. Ordinary jurisdiction was delegated to the Parliament, but the council continued to exercise judicial power. Appeals could in the last instance be made to the king in council, and he could evoke cases to it from other courts.

(2) The chambre des comptes was the financial division of the royal court, and resembles the English Exchequer. It received and audited the accounts of the bailiffs and seneschals; it had jurisdiction in all financial suits, and it registered all edicts and deeds which concerned the domain.

(3) The most famous of the three bodies was the great law-court of France, the Parliament of Paris. Its functions correspond to those of the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas in England, but its peculiar history arises from the maintenance of a corporate unity and authority which the English judges never possessed. Philip IV. not only gave to the Parliament a separate existence, he also fixed its sessions in Paris, and organised its three earliest sub-divisions. The chambre des requêtes decided the lesser cases of first instance brought directly before the Parliament. The chambre des enquêtes received and prepared for further consideration all appeals from lower courts. The grande chambre was the largest and most important of the sub-divisions, and is often called the Parliament by itself. In it the peers retained the right of sitting down to the Revolution, but they only appeared on formal occasions. The grande chambre decided all important appeals, and cases of first instance concerning the peers, the royal officers, and the members of the sovereign courts. At first the Parliament only met twice a year, at Easter and All Saints. But the two sessions proved insufficient to discharge the growing business of the court, and, later in the century, it was made a permanent court, and its members were appointed for life or during the royal pleasure. In addition to its judicial work, the Parliament had to register all royal edicts, treaties of peace, and other formal documents. This was originally a duty rather than a right; and it was not till much later that the Parliament based upon this practice a claim to remonstrate against, or even to veto, the edicts of the king.

The organisation of this administrative machinery is the greatest achievement of Philip IV.’s domestic government. |The States-General.| But his reign is also noteworthy for the origin of the States-General, which at one time promised to become the basis of a constitutional system of government such as was our Parliament established in England, but was ultimately crushed into insignificance by the crown which had created it as a mere instrument to serve its own ends. The first meeting was held in 1302, when Philip wished to parade the unanimity of his subjects in opposing the pretensions of Boniface VIII. They were summoned again in 1308 to condemn the Templars, and in 1314 to support the king in a renewed war with Flanders. Philip may have found a model for these assemblies either in the provincial estates of Languedoc and Brittany, or in the Cortes of Castile and Aragon, but it is more than probable that he was inspired by the example of his great contemporary, Edward I. of England, who in 1295 had summoned the famous ‘model parliament,’ and had himself in 1301 obtained a protest against the papal claims from a parliament at Lincoln.

The States-General under Philip IV. are especially remarkable for their numbers. All tenants-in-chief, whether clerical or lay, were invited to attend in person, and those who were prevented by any unavoidable cause might send proxies. The cathedral chapters and monasteries sent representatives; and so did all the towns of any size in the kingdom. There was no attempt to determine the condition which entitled a man either to vote or to be elected. The only class which was unrepresented was the peasantry. When the States met, they were divided into three estates: clergy, nobles, and citizens. The meeting only lasted a day, and there was no general discussion. The royal spokesman explained the object for which they were summoned, and then each estate separately drew up a document in accordance with the wishes of the king.

It is obvious that the summons of the States-General was not in any way forced upon the king by external pressure, but was a mere expedient to strengthen his hands. The assembly never got rid of this taint on their origin. If a French king thought his end could be best attained by summoning the States-General, he summoned them: but if, on the contrary, he thought it advisable to treat separately with the various provinces, he did so. Later in the century an attempt was made to secure regular assemblies with definite authority, but the attempt was a failure, and parliamentary government was never established in France until the nineteenth century.

The whole of Philip’s rule is marked by the steady encroachments upon feudal independence and privilege of an unscrupulous but efficient despotism. He claimed for the crown the right of creating peers, which he exercised in favour of Charles II. of Naples and of Robert of Artois. He raised to the rank of nobles men who had no qualification either by descent or by tenure, and was thus enabled to reward those ministers who borrowed from Roman Law the phrase, quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, and coined from it a French legal adage, which the monarchy might have taken for its motto: que veut le roi, si veut la loi. But there was one glaring defect in Philip IV.’s government, which he also bequeathed to his successors. His financial |Financial maladministration.| administration was as incompetent as it was tyrannical and oppressive. He strained to the utmost the normal sources of revenue, the income from the domain and the feudal incidents. When these were exhausted, he imposed gabelles or taxes on the sale of commodities. But these taxes he was foolish enough to farm out to his creditors in order to obtain large sums of ready money. Such an expedient, especially in early times, always results in loss to the state and oppression to the taxpayer. More ruinous, because more dishonest, was the constant debasement of the coinage, which Philip carried to such lengths that contemporaries called him the ‘false coiner.’ Thus the founder of the French monarchy was also responsible for the defect which ultimately ruined his creation. It is an extraordinary thing that France, one of the richest countries in Europe, and in some ways one of the most efficiently governed, never had a sound financial system under the old monarchy. Philip’s successors imitated the defects as well as the merits of his rule. To his devices of farming the taxes and of debasing the currency they added the disastrous practice of selling offices, and of increasing their value by granting their holders exemption from taxation. Many Frenchmen saw and deplored the evil results of this system, but no one was strong enough to apply a drastic remedy. The deficit which resulted was the immediate occasion, though not the cause, of the great revolution. It may be fanciful, but it is not preposterous, to contend that, if Philip IV. had been a capable and honest financier, the Bourbons might still be seated on the throne of France.

Such a harsh government as that of Philip IV. could not possibly be popular. His direct attack upon their |Death of Philip IV.| interests exasperated the noblesse, and his financial extortions alienated the bourgeoisie. In 1314 a new war broke out with Flanders, and Philip attempted to defray its expense by a heavy tax upon all commodities, to be levied on their sale, from both seller and purchaser. This caused an explosion, and for the first and only time nobles and third estate were leagued together against the king. Such an alliance threatened to ruin the monarchy, and Philip was forced to yield. He abolished the tax, and promised to redress the grievances of his subjects as regards the coinage. Soon after this humiliation he died (November 29, 1314).

During the next fourteen years Philip’s three sons ruled in rapid succession, and their reigns are chiefly notable for |Louis X., 1314-16.| the establishment of the all-important rule of succession which excluded females from the succession to the French throne. The eldest, Louis X., was only twenty-four years old at his father’s death, and took no interest in the work of government. The conduct of affairs was allowed to fall into the hands of his uncle, Charles of Valois, who had always sympathised with the feudal opposition to Philip IV. The triumph of the reactionary party was seen in the trial and execution of Enguerrand de Marigny, one of the chief advisers of the late king. But the nobles, freed for the moment from royal domination, were short-sighted enough to throw over their recent alliance with the bourgeoisie, and thus lost an excellent chance of imposing permanent restrictions upon the power of the crown. The concessions which they obtained were solely in the interests of their own class, and even they were not national concessions but were embodied in a series of provincial charters. The absence of national unity, to which these events testified, was a cause of the ultimate victory of the monarchy, which had never again to face such a hostile union of classes as had been formed for the moment in 1314.

Apart from this momentary victory of the feudal nobles, the reign of Louis X. is absolutely uneventful. He got rid of his first wife, Margaret of Burgundy, in order that he might marry Clementia, sister of Carobert of Hungary. He also undertook an expedition to Flanders in order to force the Count to observe his treaty obligations; but the campaign was wholly unsuccessful, and soon afterwards the young king died, on June 5, 1316. His death was more |Succession question in 1316.| important than his life, as it gave rise to the first doubtful succession since the reign of Hugh Capet. For the first time for more than three centuries there was no male heir to the crown, as Louis only left a daughter, Jeanne, the offspring of his first marriage. As the question of female succession had never arisen before, there was no rule to decide either way. But the problem in this case was further complicated by the fact that Clementia, Louis’s second wife, was expecting a child to be born five months after her husband’s death. Until this event took place nothing could be settled, and during the necessary interregnum the regency was naturally intrusted to Philip, the elder brother of the late king. Meanwhile the interests of Jeanne were maintained by her maternal uncle, Eudes IV. of Burgundy, with whom Philip concluded a treaty. This provided that if Clementia gave birth to a son he should succeed to the whole inheritance, but if the posthumous child were a daughter, then Jeanne was to have Navarre, Champagne, and Brie until she was of marriageable age, when she was to choose whether to renounce the crown of France or to demand a formal consideration of her claims.

In November, 1316, Louis X.’s widow gave birth to a son, who is reckoned in the list of French kings as John I. The child was born on a Sunday, and died on the following Friday. Thus the claims of Jeanne were left in full force, but they were seriously prejudiced by the fact that during the previous five months her uncle had obtained a firm hold of the reins of government, which he was by no means prepared to resign. The Duke of Burgundy was bribed to abandon the cause of Jeanne by a marriage with Philip’s daughter, and by the gift of Franche-Comté and 500,000 crowns as his bride’s dowry. The French lawyers, sharing the general prejudice against female rule, which resulted from so long a period of male succession, hunted out a clause in the laws of the Salian Franks which forbade |The so-called Salic Law.| the inheritance by women of terra Salica. This clause they arbitrarily applied to the crown, and thus coined the famous expression, the Salic Law. But it must never be forgotten that the exclusion of women from the throne of France rests, not upon any ancient rule, but upon the precedent of Jeanne’s exclusion in 1316, followed and confirmed by further exclusions in 1322 and 1328.

Once securely established on the throne, Philip V. showed |Philip V., 1316-22.| himself a resolute and able ruler. The reaction in favour of feudal independence was checked; the lawyers recovered their ascendency in the royal counsels; and the administrative machinery of Philip IV. was once more set in working order. Numerous assemblies were held, in which the third estate was fully represented; and a vigorous attempt was made to improve trade, and to check provincial isolation by establishing uniformity in coinage, weights, and measures. But Philip did not live long enough to carry out designs which, if successful, might have given him a place among the great administrators of France. He died in 1322 leaving only daughters, and his brother Charles IV. had little difficulty in seizing, not only the throne, |Charles IV., 1322-28.| but also Navarre, Champagne, and Brie, which ought to have been left in the hands of Jeanne. The reign of Charles is of little importance except in connection with England, where Edward II. was deposed and murdered by a conspiracy headed by his faithless wife and Charles’s sister, Isabella of France. To his nephew, the young Edward III., Charles handed over Guienne, but retained the district of Agen, to be the source of future disputes. With Charles IV.’s death (January 31, 1328) the main line of the House of Capet came to an end. There was still one doubt as to the rule or custom of succession. That women could not themselves hold the crown had been settled by three successive precedents within twelve years. But could they transmit a claim to their male descendants? There were in 1328 two possible claimants on this ground—Philip, the son of Eudes IV. of Burgundy by a daughter of Philip V., and Edward III. of England, whose mother was a sister of the three last kings. But France was not likely to adopt a rule of succession which might at any moment give the crown to a foreign prince. And so the crown passed to the nearest male heir, Philip of Valois.

CHAPTER IV
FRANCE UNDER THE EARLY VALOIS, 1328-1380

The accession of Philip of Valois—His relations with Navarre and England—Robert of Artois—Philip’s action in Gascony, Scotland, and Flanders brings on War with England—Edward III. and Jacob van Artevelde—Edward III. claims the French Crown—Beginning of the Hundred Years’ War—English Expedition into Picardy—The succession in Brittany followed by a war—The Murder of Artevelde—The battle of Crecy and siege of Calais—Annexation of Dauphiné to France—Accession of King John and renewal of the war with England—Battle of Poitiers—Etienne Marcel and the States-General of 1355 and 1357—The Ordinance of March 3, 1357—Anarchy in France—The Murder of the Marshals—Royalist reaction—The Jacquerie—The Murder of Marcel and the capture of Paris—English Invasion of 1359 followed by the Treaty of Bretigni—The succession to Burgundy—Charles V/’s Government—Success of his policy in Brittany and Spain—The reconquest of the English Provinces—Last years of Charles V/—Du Guesclin and de Clisson.

The first result of the accession of Philip VI. was the severance |Accession of Philip of Valois, 1328.| of the crowns of France and Navarre, which had been united since the marriage of Philip the Fair (see p. [48]). Navarre was now given up to Jeanne, the daughter of Louis X., and her husband, Philip of Evreux. In return Jeanne abandoned all other claims, either to the French crown or to the provinces of Champagne and Brie. By this bargain Philip secured his throne against one possible claimant, and confirmed the exclusion of female succession in France. Another rival, Edward III. of England, who could contend that females might transmit a claim to a male heir, was not at the moment very formidable. He was very young, he had obtained the throne through his father’s deposition in 1327, and for the time he was under the tutelage of his mother Isabella and her paramour Mortimer. So far from putting forward a claim to the French crown, Edward III. came over to Amiens in 1329, and recognised Philip VI. by doing homage to him for his inherited possessions in Aquitaine.

So confident was Philip in the strength of his position that he did not hesitate to provoke enemies both at home and abroad, and this recklessness ultimately led to a quarrel with England, and to the outbreak of a war which lasted more than a hundred years, and exercised the most decisive influence upon the development of both nations. Among the nobles who had contributed most to bring about Philip VI.’s accession was his brother-in-law, Robert of Artois. He was a grandson of Count Robert of |Robert of Artois.| Artois, who had fallen in the battle of Courtrai in 1302. In spite of the normal preference for male succession, the grandson had been excluded in favour of his aunt Matilda, whose daughter Jeanne had married Philip V. Robert had made several efforts to vindicate his claim to Artois, but without success. On the accession of Philip VI., however, he was confident of obtaining justice, and at once commenced a suit for the purpose of proving that the inheritance had been unlawfully withheld from him. Matilda and Jeanne came to Paris to defend their rights, and both of them died within a short interval of each other, not without strong suspicions of foul play. Their claims now passed to Margaret, the daughter of Jeanne and Philip V. Robert of Artois found himself accused, not only of employing poison to rid himself of his rivals, but also of forging documents in support of his claims, and of employing magic arts against the king himself. His supposed accomplices were tortured into some sort of confession, and Robert, finding that he had lost the royal favour on which he had reckoned, fled from the court. The suit was decided against him (1332), and he himself sentenced to banishment. He found a refuge in England, and in his eagerness for revenge set himself to urge Edward III. to claim the French throne on the ground of his mother’s descent from Philip IV.

Edward III. might have paid little attention to such obviously interested advice had not events elsewhere brought him into hostile relations with France. Philip VI. was suspected, with some justice, of desiring to imitate his uncle’s policy in Gascony, and to bring that province directly under his rule. More serious still was his conduct in regard to |War in Scotland.| Scotland. The treaty of Northampton in 1328, by which the independence of Scotland had been recognised, had stipulated for the restoration of their lands to those nobles who had supported England in the war. Robert Bruce died in 1329 without carrying out this part of the treaty, and the nobles who ruled during the minority of his son David were not likely to give up possessions which had fallen into their own hands. The dispossessed nobles determined to maintain their own cause in arms, and a successful battle at Dupplin Moor enabled them to place Edward Balliol upon the Scottish throne. Edward III. had given no aid to this expedition, but now that the revolution was accomplished, he was willing to profit by it and to receive Edward Balliol’s homage. But the partisans of David Bruce rallied from their first defeat and drove Balliol from the throne. Edward III. now led an army into Scotland, won the battle of Halidon Hill (1333), captured Berwick, and restored Balliol. The result was a renewal of the Scottish war, and the party of independence appealed for aid to France. Philip VI. did not hesitate to secure such a useful ally in case of future difficulties with England. French troops were despatched to Scotland, and the safety of the young Scottish king was secured by sending him to France. From this time may be dated the permanent alliance between France and Scotland, which was at once a grievance and a source of serious embarrassment to English rulers.

English and French troops were now fighting each other as auxiliaries on Scottish soil, and it was obvious that the two countries must soon be involved in open strife. The final impulse was supplied by events in Flanders. In the fourteenth |Flanders.| century Flanders was the most important trading and manufacturing country in western Europe. Ghent was the Manchester, and Bruges the Liverpool, of that day. In Bruges we are told that merchants from seventeen kingdoms had settled homes, while strangers journeyed thither from all parts of the known world. It was the great centre-point of mediæval commerce, where the products of north, south, and east were brought together and exchanged against each other. Still more important to the Flemings themselves and to their relations with England was the manufacture of wool. England produced the longest and finest wool, which was woven into cloth and worsted on the looms of Ghent and Ypres. With France, on the other hand, the relations of the Flemings were purely political. The Count of Flanders, who found his subjects very difficult to govern, was the vassal of the French king, and his authority could hardly be maintained without the aid of his suzerain. To the material interests of the Flemings France was almost wholly alien. France, as contrasted with the other states of Europe, was little affected by the commercial spirit of the age. While Edward III. and the Black Prince, who appear in the pages of Froissart as mirrors of chivalry, were yet sufficiently practical to encourage the industrial interests of their subjects, the Valois kings pursued a totally different policy. They crushed industry by excessive and ill-judged imposts. They maintained no police to give safety to the foreign merchant, and foreign wares were kept out of France by the insecurity of the roads and the heavy duties upon imports. This difference is paralleled by the difference in the military system of the two countries. The English king, supported by the growing wealth of his subjects, was able to leave the majority of his people at home, and to make war with a well-paid and equipped mercenary army. The King of France, after extorting all he could wring from the pockets of his subjects, compelled them to serve in the old feudal array, and led them to be butchered by opponents who were numerically inferior, but had been trained to war, and were not distracted from the work before them by the sense that they were neglecting their material interests at home.

Philip VI. had been involved in a Flemish war at the very beginning of his reign. The citizens of West Flanders, headed by Bruges and Ypres, rose in revolt against their Count, Lewis, who appealed for aid to the French king. A feudal army was led to his assistance, and the citizens, weakened by the abstention of Ghent, were crushed at the battle of Cassel (1328). The Flemings had to suffer, not only for their unsuccessful rebellion, but also for their previous victory at Courtrai, which had now been so ruinously reversed. Their leaders were mercilessly hunted to death, the town charters were confiscated, and their fortifications razed to the ground. The authority of the count was restored, but he was more than ever the dependent vassal of the French king. In 1336, at the command of Philip VI., he ordered the imprisonment of all Englishmen in Flanders. Edward III. promptly retaliated by prohibiting the exportation of English wool and the import of foreign cloth. Flemish artisans were induced to emigrate to England, and to lay the foundations of a prosperous woollen manufacture in Norfolk.

These events, which may be taken as the actual origin of the hundred years’ war, illustrate the folly and recklessness of |Alliance of England with the Flemings.| Philip VI. So far his quarrel with Edward III. in Aquitaine and in Scotland had been a personal quarrel; and the English people, though reluctant to lose the profitable trade with Bordeaux, were by no means enthusiastic either for the continental dominions of their king, or even for the establishment of his suzerainty over Scotland. But to strike at English trade with Flanders was to inflict a mortal blow at the most sensitive of English interests. From this time the quarrel with France became a national as well as a royal quarrel, and Edward could count upon the unanimous support of his subjects. Still more serious was the effect of Philip’s action in Flanders. In the fourteenth century, as in the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, England had the stronger position in a trade dispute with the Continent. The Flemish market was important to England, but English wool was indispensable to Flanders. The reprisals of Edward III., forced upon him by the action of the French king, threatened the Flemings with the ruin of their most important industry. A new rising, more formidable than that of 1328, was at once planned. Ghent, which had then held aloof, was now prepared to play its part; and in Ghent arose a leader, Jacob van |Jacob van Artevelde.| Artevelde, whose eloquence and decision gave him for a time practical omnipotence, while his guidance gave to the movement a unity and consistency which previous rebellions had too often lacked. His avowed object was to restore the supply of wool to the Flemish looms, and for this purpose to establish friendly relations with England. He assembled at Ghent the men of the chief cities, and ‘showed them that they could not live without the King of England; for all Flanders was supported by cloth-making, and without wool one could not make cloth; therefore he urged them to keep the English king their friend.’ At the same time he was anxious to avoid any needless infraction of feudal law, and therefore suggested that Edward should claim the French crown, pointing out that the Flemings could not lawfully serve the King of England against the King of France, but that they could serve the lawful King of France against the usurper.

Edward III. saw that war was inevitable; and the arguments of Artevelde convinced him, if any conviction were needed, |Edward III. claims the French crown.| that by putting forward a claim to the crown he would gain powerful supporters, and in the end more substantial advantages. In 1337 he published his claim before a parliament, and set to work to form continental alliances. The Emperor, Lewis the Bavarian, indignant at Philip’s dictation to the Pope, Benedict XII., was willing to support the English king. In September, 1338, he met Edward at Coblentz, and formally invested him with the office of imperial vicar in the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine. The Duke of Brabant and several other princes of the Netherlands were persuaded or bribed to promise contingents to the English army. Edward’s position seemed to be of overwhelming strength. He could attack France on both sides, from Flanders and Artois on the north-east, and from Guienne and Gascony on the south-west.

But the English successes were by no means so great as had been confidently expected. Edward’s first expedition |Opening of hostilities.| into Picardy in 1339 was a complete failure. The Emperor, vacillating as ever, would give no effective aid, the Flemings were content with the recovery of the wool supply, and it was only the sluggishness of Philip VI. which enabled the English forces to retire without serious loss. In 1340 the enterprise was renewed. A French and Genoese fleet had been collected off Sluys to dispute the landing. The Genoese commander refused to fight in a position which made it impossible to manœuvre, and left the French vessels to be utterly destroyed in the first important encounter of the war. But this naval victory was the solitary triumph of the campaign. Although the Flemings, under the influence of Artevelde, gave more active assistance than in the previous year, Edward was repulsed from the walls of St. Omer and Tournai. In September he concluded a truce for nine months with Philip VI. The only gainers by the war were the Flemings, who had practically abrogated the authority of their count, and had organised an independent federation of communes.

It seemed for the moment as if the war might collapse altogether in 1340. Edward’s allies had either deserted him or were obviously lukewarm in his cause. He had spent vast sums of money without having any substantial result to show for it. His subjects were discontented, and Edward chose this moment for a violent quarrel with his chief minister, Archbishop Stratford, who was backed up by the English parliament. But the dwindling flames of the war were rekindled into a blaze by a quarrel about the succession in Brittany. Duke John III. died in 1340, |Succession quarrel in Brittany.| leaving no children. Of his two brothers, the elder was dead, but had left a daughter, Jeanne, who was married to Charles of Blois, a nephew of Philip VI. The younger brother was John de Montfort, who claimed the vacant duchy as the nearest male heir. The Count of Blois appealed, on behalf of his wife, to the Parliament of Paris, and that court decided in her favour. The result was a civil war between the French and the Celtic population of Brittany, the Celts supporting de Montfort and rejecting the rule of Charles of Blois as an alien. Philip VI. determined to support the cause of his nephew and the decision of his parliament. De Montfort crossed over to England and recognised Edward III. by doing homage to him for Brittany. Thus in the case of Brittany, as in that of Artois, the two kings were committed to principles which ran counter to their own claims. The French king, who owed his crown to the so-called Salic law,[^[5]] appeared as the champion of female succession; while Edward III., who claimed to be King of France through his mother, contended for the exclusive right of the male heir.

The war in Brittany offered to Edward III. ‘the finest |War in Brittany.| possible entry for the conquest of the kingdom of France,’ but his intervention served rather to prolong than to decide the struggle. Charles of Blois, with the aid of John of Normandy, the heir to the French crown, began by gaining important successes. Nantes was captured, and John de Montfort sent prisoner to Paris. But the heroic Countess of Montfort, a sister of the Count of Flanders, supported her husband’s cause with masculine energy and courage, and the arrival of English succour restored the balance of forces in Brittany. But Edward III. still found himself confronted by superior numbers, and in 1343 papal mediation succeeded in arranging a general truce for three years. The truce, however, was not allowed to run its full term. John de Montfort escaped from his prison, and the severity with which Philip VI. punished some nobles in Brittany and Normandy for suspected treason led to a renewal of hostilities in 1345. Edward III. determined to make greater efforts than ever, and to attack France on three sides—from Guienne, Brittany, and Flanders. In Guienne Henry of Lancaster gained a considerable victory at Auberoche, and captured several fortresses which were held by the French. In Brittany John de Montfort died, leaving his claims to his son, and his death prevented any important operations from being undertaken. Meanwhile Edward himself prepared to co-operate with the Flemings on the north-east. But his plans were interrupted by what appeared to be a great disaster to his cause. Jacob van Artevelde had incurred the distrust of his fellow-citizens. |Murder of Artevelde.| He had found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the jarring pretensions of the rival cities, or to compose the jealous divisions of the fullers and weavers of Ghent. In his alliance with England he had gone further than the majority of the Flemings desired. They would have been content to impose conditions upon their count, whereas Artevelde had schemed to depose him altogether, and to transfer the direct government of Flanders to the Prince of Wales. But the final accusation against the once popular leader was that he had placed the great treasure of Flanders at the disposal of the English king. In a rising of the infuriated mob, Artevelde’s house was stormed and he himself slain. For the moment Edward feared that he might lose his hold upon Flanders. But Artevelde’s policy survived him. The Flemings were not prepared to make unconditional submission to their count, and to extort conditions the alliance with England must be maintained. They hastened to excuse their conduct to the English king, to assure him of the continuance of their support. But Edward had received the news of another loss, which checked his advance in 1345. This was the death of his brother-in-law, William IV. of Holland, Hainault, and Zealand. As he left no children, his territories were seized by Lewis the Bavarian and conferred upon one of his younger sons (see p. 108). The Emperor had already deserted the English alliance, and the establishment of the House of Wittelsbach in the dominions of William IV. broke up the coalition which Edward III. had formed on the borders of France.

These checks induced Edward, not to relax his efforts, but to alter his plans. The military interest of 1346 seemed likely to |Campaign of 1346.| be concentrated in the south-west. A large French army under Philip’s eldest son, John of Normandy, entered Guienne, recovered many of the places lost in the previous year, and besieged the inferior English troops in Aiguillon. Edward III. collected a large army at Southampton, and set sail on July 2. His intention was to land at Bordeaux, and march to the relief of Aiguillon. But his voyage was hindered by storms, and the advice of some of his French followers induced him to make for the coast of Normandy. The province was wholly unprepared for attack, and the English met with little resistance on their devastating march. Along the valley of the Seine they advanced as far as Poissi, where the flames of the burning houses were seen from the walls of Paris. Meanwhile, Philip VI. had strained every nerve to collect a second army for the defence of his capital. Among the allies who came to his aid were John of Bohemia and the newly elected King of the Romans, Charles IV. But Edward declined to assault Paris, or to face an army which was now larger than his own. Misleading Philip by a feint in the direction of Tours, he crossed the Seine at Poissi, and marched at full speed towards Picardy, in order to effect a junction with the Flemings. Philip followed with his enormous force, and the destruction of the bridges over the Somme seemed to shut the English in a trap. But a captured peasant guided Edward to a comparatively unguarded ford at Blanche Taque, and the French arrived just as the last of the enemy had crossed. The battle, however, was only postponed, though the crossing of the river enabled Edward to choose his own ground, instead of fighting at a disadvantage with an impassable river behind him. To continue the retreat with an exhausted army pursued by superior numbers must have ended in disaster, and Edward drew up his troops at Crecy, near Abbeville, |Battle of Crecy, 1346.| to try the hazard of the first pitched battle of the war. The result was to teach the world a lesson in the art of warfare which had only been imperfectly suggested by the battles of Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn, and Courtrai. It was a combat of infantry against cavalry, of missile weapons against heavy armour and lances, of trained professional soldiers against a combination of foreign mercenaries with disorderly feudal levies. And the inevitable result was made the more decisive by the utter want of generalship on the part of the French king. Obeying a momentary impulse of rage, he ordered his troops to engage when they were exhausted by a long march. The Genoese crossbows were wetted by rain, and their bolts fell harmless, while they were exposed to a hail of arrows from the English longbows. Then the men-at-arms charged over the unfortunate Genoese, and were already in disorder before they could reach the enemy. There was individual prowess in plenty, but no organisation or discipline, and the bravest of the assailants only rushed upon a certain fate. Philip fled in despair, but the King of Bohemia, the Counts of Flanders and Alençon, and many lesser princes and nobles, were left dead upon the field. Edward III. made no attempt to turn back upon France. It would have been difficult for him to feed his soldiers in a district which had been already swept bare by the requisitions and the pillage of two great armies. After allowing three days for rest and the burying of the dead, he continued his march northwards, and laid siege to Calais. His victory had decisive results both in the west and the south. The siege of Aiguillon was raised, and the retirement of the Duke of Normandy left Guienne at the mercy of the English. Henry of Lancaster recovered the places lost at the beginning of the year, and, entering Poitou, took and sacked Poitiers. In Brittany the French cause met with almost equal disasters. Charles of Blois was captured and carried a prisoner to England, and, though his wife continued the struggle, the party of de Montfort had for a time a secure predominance. To complete the list of failures, an attempted diversion by David of Scotland, who invaded England in the autumn of 1346, ended in the king’s defeat and capture at the battle of Nevill’s Cross.

Meanwhile Edward III. was engaged in the blockade of Calais, where Jean de Vienne held out with heroic obstinacy |Siege of Calais, 1346-7.| for nearly a whole year. The death of Lewis of Flanders at Crecy seemed to open the prospect of a reconciliation of the Flemings with France, and if this could have been effected, the siege would probably have ended in failure. The young Count, Lewis de Mâle, had done nothing to incur the enmity of his subjects, and they welcomed his return with enthusiasm. But in their treaty with Edward III. the Flemings had agreed that their new ruler should marry an English princess. This stipulation Lewis refused to fulfil, and when the citizens tried to coerce him, he escaped from subjects who had become his gaolers and returned to the French court. His departure left the Flemings bound to the English alliance, and to Philip VI.’s lavish offers of bribes they turned a deaf ear. The siege could only be raised by force, and Philip collected an army for that purpose. But when he approached he found the English too strongly entrenched, and retired without risking a battle. Thus, deprived of all hope of succour from outside, the defenders were forced to accept Edward’s terms, and to hand over the town, with six of the principal burghers, to his mercy. The burghers were spared on the entreaty of Queen Philippa, but the whole population of Calais was expelled to make room for English settlers. Gradually, as Edward’s wrath at the prolonged resistance died away, some of the original inhabitants were allowed to return, but the population of Calais continued to be preponderantly English during the two centuries that it remained subject to England.

The fall of Calais was the last military disaster of Philip VI.’s reign. Both England and France were exhausted by the strain of the contest, and the outbreak of the terrible Black Death, which ravaged western Europe in 1348 and 1349, diverted men’s minds from international quarrels. A truce, originally concluded for ten months, was prolonged by mutual consent for several years. Philip concluded his reign in peace, and before his death (August 22, 1350) he was able to add an important province to France, and thus to gain some consolation for the losses |Dauphiné annexed to France.| of the English war. Among the largest fragments of the old kingdoms of Arles was Dauphiné, ruled as a fief of the Empire by the Dauphins of Vienne. The last of these princes, Humbert, had supported Lewis the Bavarian in his struggles against France and the Avignon Popes. But like so many of the Emperor’s allies, he was alienated by Lewis’s weakness and selfishness, and pecuniary troubles forced him to change his policy and to draw closer to France. In 1343 he concluded a treaty with Philip VI. by which Dauphiné, in default of lawful issue to himself, was to fall to a younger son of the French king. In the next year this treaty was modified to secure the inheritance to the heirs to the French crown; and finally in 1349 Humbert’s life-interest in the province was bought out by payment of a large sum, and Dauphiné was handed over to the House of Valois, and in the course of the next generation became the regular appanage of the eldest son of the reigning king. About the same time, France acquired another advantage on the side of Flanders. In 1348 Lewis de Mâle recovered his county, and by encouraging internal quarrels among his subjects, he not only evaded the hated obligation of an English marriage, but also restored some measure of authority over the turbulent Flemings. As long as his power could be maintained, it might be hoped that France would escape the dangers of Flemish co-operation with the English.

John the Good, as he is called by the caprice of historical nomenclature, was no better a ruler than his father, and was even more unfortunate. He had already been active both in military and civil affairs, but had |Accession of King John, 1350.| profited little by his experience. War, in his eyes, was nothing but a tournament on a large scale. Of orderly finance he had no conception; and as to the welfare of his subjects he had neither interest nor insight. He was a reckless spendthrift, imbued with the chivalrous ideals of the day, and subject to sudden gusts of passion, alternating with fitful and uncalculating acts of generosity. His accession marks the appearance on the scene of a new generation of actors. The Black Death had been most fatal to the lower classes, but it had by no means spared those of higher rank. In a single year John had lost his mother, Jeanne of Burgundy; his first wife, the sister of Charles IV.; his uncle Eudes IV., who had added Franche-Comté to the duchy of Burgundy, and now left both Burgundies to an infant grandson, Philip de Rouvre; and his cousin, Jeanne of Navarre, whose kingdom and possessions in France passed to her son, deservedly known in history as Charles the Bad, and destined to be the evil genius of France in the hour of her worst misfortunes. In England there had been a similar clearance of prominent personages. Edward III. still lived, but he played little further part in the French war, where his place was taken by the Black Prince.

The truce with England expired in 1351, but for some years the revived hostilities were only local and unimportant. So great was the mutual exhaustion of the two states, that the new Pope, Innocent VI., elected in 1352, almost succeeded in negotiating a general peace. But, as before, it was internal disturbances in France which led to a renewal of the war. Charles of Navarre had been invested with the county of Evreux and with the large possessions of his |Renewed war with the English.| mother in Normandy and the Ile-de-France. He had also received in 1352 the hand of the king’s daughter, Jeanne. But his ambition was still unsatisfied, and John took no further pains to conciliate a prince who could advance claims to Champagne and Brie, and might, under favourable circumstances, become a rival candidate for the crown. In 1354 the king’s favourite, Charles of Spain, was assassinated by the emissaries of the King of Navarre. John was induced to pardon his son-in-law; but the reconciliation was only hollow, and Charles was impelled by real or imaginary grievances to open negotiations with Edward III. The English king could not resist the temptation of invading France with the aid of so powerful an ally, and prepared to enter Normandy through Calais in 1355. This danger compelled John once more to make overtures to his rebellious son-in-law, and Edward found himself deprived of the promised aid. He landed at Calais, ravaged the neighbouring districts, and then withdrew to repel a Scottish invasion. The Black Prince was more successful. Starting from Bordeaux, he marched through Languedoc, treating that province as Edward III. had treated Normandy in 1346. But the French king was as reckless as ever. Early in 1356 he surprised Charles of Navarre as he was banqueting with the Dauphin at Rouen, put his chief supporters to death, and carried the king a prisoner to Paris. The result of this violent act was to excite general disaffection. Charles’s brother, Philip of Navarre, promptly took up arms, and appealed for English support. The Black Prince was not slow to respond. His plan was to march northward through the most fertile districts of France, cross the Loire, and advance through Maine to join the rebels in Normandy. But his force was insufficient for such an enterprise. John hastily collected an army, the Loire valley was blocked, and Prince Edward had to retire before vastly superior numbers.

John hurried eagerly in pursuit, and actually reached Poitiers before the enemy. A battle was now inevitable. So hopeless |Battle of Poitiers, 1356.| were the odds that the Black Prince was willing to accept any honourable terms, but John declined to let the enemy escape. All the advantages, however, of superior numbers were thrown away by the egregious folly of the French king. He sent a small detachment of men-at-arms to attack the English position on the hill, while he ordered the bulk of his army to dismount on the plain. The men-at-arms, who had to advance by a narrow lane under the arrows of the English archers, were speedily routed, and the English cavalry followed up this success by butchering the dismounted host, who could neither stand their charge nor fly. The king, after fighting bravely to the last, was taken prisoner with his youngest son Philip, and the flower of the French nobility either shared his captivity or escaped it only by death on the field. As at Crecy, the English made no attempt to profit by their victory. The Black Prince was content to carry his illustrious prisoner to Bordeaux, whence he subsequently despatched him to London.

The crushing defeat at Poitiers and the captivity of the king marked the climax of a long series of disasters, of which |Discontent in France.| the cause was to be sought in the continued maladministration of French kings and ministers. No country could be brought into such a plight as that to which France was reduced without giving rise to serious and dangerous discontent, and this discontent had already found expression before the campaign of 1356. From 1350 to 1355 frequent assemblies of local estates had been held for the raising of supplies, and these had not been voted without ominous grumbling and demands for redress of grievances. At last, in November 1355, King John had found it necessary to convoke the States-General of Languedoil, |States-General of 1355.| in order to deliberate on the best mode of resisting the national foes. The ‘deputies of the three estates’—for nobles and clergy could only attend when elected by their order—met in Paris on November 30. The orator of the third estate, in the formal reply to the chancellor’s opening speech, was Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants in Paris, and for the next four years one of the most important men in France. After deliberating on the matters submitted to them, the States drew up the great ordinance of December 28, 1355. They granted to the king a gabelle upon salt, and a tax of eight deniers the pound on the sale of all commodities. These are to be levied upon all classes—clergy, nobles, non-nobles, and even the members of the royal family. The collection of the taxes is to be superintended by delegates chosen by the estates, and the expenditure is to be controlled by a council of nine, three from each estate. Purveyance and the arbitrary alteration of the money-standard were forbidden. Finally, the dates were fixed for two subsequent sessions—one in March and the other in November of the next year.

It is obvious that the States-General acted, whether consciously or unconsciously, in imitation of the English Parliament, and took advantage of the financial difficulties of the crown to impose constitutional checks upon the royal power. But, unfortunately, the financial skill of the estates was by no means equal to |Financial blunders of the States.| the importance of their objects, or to their energy in striving after them. The gabelle on salt has in all ages been the most unpopular tax in France, and the tax upon sales breaks all the canons of taxation which modern economists have agreed to accept. Great disaffection was excited by the attempt to collect the tax, and in some provinces serious disturbances took place. When the States-General met in March they yielded at once to the expression of public opinion, repealed the obnoxious taxes, and imposed in their place an extraordinary income-tax, which was so adjusted that the percentage increased as the income diminished. After taking steps to control the collection and expenditure of the revenue, the estates adjourned till May 6. They then discovered that the amount raised was wholly insufficient to defray the necessary expenditure, and in their ignorance and perplexity they reimposed the unpopular taxes on salt and sales, and ordered the levy in June and August of two extra charges upon incomes.

After the battle of Poitiers matters seemed more hopeless than ever. The king’s eldest son, Charles,[^[6]] assumed the government on his father’s imprisonment, but he displayed little of the wisdom or capacity for which he was afterwards renowned. His first act was to convene the States-General |States-General of Oct. 1356.| on October 17. The assembly was unusually large, the third estate being represented by exceptional numbers. Of the nobles, however, the attendance was very small. Large numbers of them had perished at Poitiers, and the survivors were discredited. Thus the balance of classes, so necessary for the success of constitutional changes, was overthrown. The third estate became preponderant in the assembly, and its leader, Marcel, obtained considerable support from the clergy through his ally Robert Lecoq, Bishop of Laon. The demands of the estates were far more extreme than those of the earlier assemblies. They were no longer content to impose checks upon the government, but determined to take it into their own hands. The royal ministers were to be dismissed, and thirty-six delegates—twelve from each estate—were to be appointed to manage the affairs of the kingdom. At the same time, outspoken complaints were made of the failure to carry out promised reforms, especially in the matter of the coinage, and the release of the King of Navarre was demanded. But the Dauphin, encouraged by the grant of a considerable subsidy from the estates of Languedoc, was not prepared to hand over his authority to the States-General. He prorogued the assembly, endeavoured to raise money from the provincial estates, and even ventured on a new debasement of the currency. The reforming party was driven by this obstinacy to revolutionary methods. The mob rose in Paris, and Marcel ordered the royal officials to cease minting the inferior coins. The Dauphin, who had gone to Metz to demand the mediation of Charles IV. with England, returned to find his capital in open revolt. Unable to resist the popular demands, he was forced to hold a new meeting of the States-General on February 5, and to accept the ordinance which they drew up of March 3, 1357. In |Ordinance of March 3, 1357.| this the policy which had been proposed in the earlier session was carried out, and the royal power was subordinated to that of the States. The commission of thirty-six was definitely appointed to superintend every branch of the administration. An aid was granted for the maintenance of 3000 men-at-arms, but it was to be collected and spent, not by royal officials, but by nominees of the States. The predominance of the third estate is conspicuous in the articles directed against the nobles. They were forbidden to carry on private wars, and if they disregarded the prohibition, the local authorities or the people might arrest them and compel them to desist by fines or imprisonment. Not only was purveyance forbidden, but it was permitted to the people to assemble at the ringing of a bell, and to oppose its collectors by force.

King John, who was about to start from Bordeaux to London, sent a message to Paris to annul an ordinance which dealt so shrewd a blow at the royal authority. But the Parisians were not prepared to submit to a distant and captive king, the Dauphin was forced to promulgate the ordinance, and the revolution in the government of France was completed. |Anarchy in France.| The thirty-six showed their power by purging the royal council and the magistracy of all who were suspected of hostility to the popular party. But any hopes that the change of rulers would bring prosperity to France were doomed to disappointment. The revolutionary government was no more successful than that which it had superseded. The provinces were not prepared to submit to the dictation of Paris, and their discontent encouraged the Dauphin to wait for an opportunity of recovering power. The nobles became more and more indignant at the predominance of the bourgeois. The English, still exulting in their triumph of the previous year, were content to accept a truce for two years; but the mercenary troops, deprived of their legitimate occupation, wandered about the country pillaging or levying blackmail on the people. Conscious that their position was insecure, and that the Dauphin might at any moment become actively hostile, Marcel and his associates endeavoured to secure a powerful ally by releasing Charles of Navarre (November, 1357). The only result was to kindle a civil war. The Dauphin had been compelled to promise the restoration of all his cousin’s possessions, but his lieutenants would not give up the strong places, and Charles the Bad took up arms. For the moment he was the ally of the bourgeois, but he had no real sympathy with the cause of reform, and sought to fish in troubled waters for his own gain. The disasters of the ruling dynasty seemed to offer him a fair chance of establishing a right to the throne. In his speeches to the people he was careful to point out that his own claim was much stronger than that of Edward III.

As the reforming movement became weaker and more discredited, it began to adopt more violent and revolutionary methods. The career of Marcel is marked by increasing narrowness and selfishness. He had begun by advocating measures for the regeneration of France, then he had become the champion of the third estate; within that estate he was driven to maintain the preponderance of Paris and its mob; and at last he had to fight in Paris for his own personal ascendency. At the beginning of 1358 his adherents adopted as their ensign a red and blue cap. The Dauphin was raising an army against the King of Navarre, and had recalled many of his former ministers. A new exhibition of mob violence was necessary to intimidate him into submission. Marcel forced his way into the Louvre, |Murder of the marshals.| where the marshals of Normandy and Champagne were murdered in their master’s presence. The unfortunate prince fell on his knees to beg for his own life, and had to submit to the indignity of wearing the parti-coloured cap, which was placed on his head by Marcel himself. For the moment this deplorable act seemed to have achieved its end. The Dauphin was cowed into submission; his unpopular advisers were dismissed, and Charles of Navarre was admitted to Paris and formally reconciled with his cousin.

But the murder of the marshals was really as impolitic as it was criminal. The open dictation of the mob, and the failure of the bourgeois government to remedy the misfortunes of France, provoked a violent reaction in |Royalist reaction.| favour of the monarchy which had been so insultingly defied. With fatal self-confidence Marcel allowed the Dauphin, who now assumed the title of regent, to leave Paris and to throw himself upon the loyalty of the provinces. Charles summoned the States-General to meet in May 1358, at Compiègne instead of in Paris. The meeting was not very numerous, but it expressed the prevalent sentiment of France in favour of royalty. Marcel endeavoured to strengthen himself by forming a league of towns for the maintenance of common interests, but it was only joined by the towns in the immediate neighbourhood of Paris. Civil war was inevitable, and the new fortifications which Marcel had built to protect the capital against English attack were now to be employed for the defence of the citizens against their fellow-countrymen.

At this critical moment the evils of France were suddenly multiplied by the rising of a class for which neither king, nobles, nor citizens had done anything. The |The Jacquerie.| serfs or villeins of France had suffered terrible hardships within the last decade. Their numbers had been decimated by the Black Death, and the survivors had to add to their own tasks the work of those who had perished. Their hard-won savings had been wrung from them to pay the ransom of their lords, who had fallen into the hands of the English at Poitiers or elsewhere. The lands from which they extracted a scanty living were devastated by the mercenary soldiers in peace as well as in war. Despairing of redress, they determined, at any rate, to avenge their sufferings. The story of their revolt is one of almost unredeemed horror. It began in the district of Beauvais, and rapidly spread over Champagne, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France. Castles were burned; men, women, and even children were tortured and put to death. But the nobles soon recovered from the first panic, and took arms against enemies whom they now loathed as much as they had previously despised them. The ill-armed peasants were unable to face the trained men-at-arms, and the suppression of the revolt was as murderous and destructive as its outbreak.

There was little real sympathy between peasants and bourgeois. They had, it is true, a common enemy in the nobles, and Marcel had tried to use the Jacquerie as a diversion in his own favour. But he gave no efficient aid to his allies, and his half-hearted connection only brought upon himself the discredit and disaster of their ruinous defeat. From the victorious troops of the nobles the regent was able to form an army for the reduction of his rebellious capital. The citizens were bellicose, but they were not warlike, and it was necessary to bring trained troops to |Siege of Paris.| the aid of their undisciplined valour. Charles of Navarre was appointed captain-general of Paris, and brought a mercenary army for its defence. But the king’s aims were as purely selfish as ever. While professing to defend the city, he was negotiating with the regent for its surrender. Such proceedings excited serious mistrust, which was increased by quarrels between the citizens and the soldiers of Navarre. At last the king left Paris for St. Denis, and further resistance seemed almost hopeless. The citizens were willing to make terms, but the Dauphin would not negotiate with the murderer of the marshals. Marcel felt that in such a dilemma he could no longer trust his followers. A party was already formed within the city which was hostile to his continued ascendency, and in favour of restoring the royal authority. If the citizens had to choose between their own safety and the interests of their provost, their choice could not be long delayed. There was only one apparent means of escape, and Marcel clutched at it. He offered to surrender Paris to Charles of Navarre, and to proclaim him King of France. But on the very night when this treacherous design was to be carried out, Marcel was assassinated by one of his |Murder of Marcel.| own followers (July 31, 1358). It is easy to see and condemn the errors of his later career, but his name will always be memorable in French history as the leader of the most notable attempt, before 1789, to give to France a constitutional form of government.

Two days after the death of Marcel the regent Charles entered Paris, and the restoration of the royal authority was signalised by the severe punishment of its chief opponents. In the next year Charles bought off the King of Navarre, who had lost all hopes of gaining the crown with the collapse of the bourgeois revolution. There still remained the war with England. During the truce John had been negotiating for his release, and in 1359 he agreed to the cession of nearly the whole of northern and western France. But the Dauphin was of opinion that the mutilation of his inheritance was too high a price to pay for his father’s liberty. He convened the States-General, now the docile instrument of the prince whose authority had been so recently defied by its predecessors. The so-called treaty of London was unanimously rejected, and Edward III. had no alternative but to renew the war. He collected an enormous army for the invasion of France in October, 1359. But the Dauphin had learned a lesson from experience, and would fight no more battles like Crecy and Poitiers. The English army |English invasion, 1359.| advanced to Rheims, but found the city too strongly defended. An attack upon Burgundy was repelled, not by arms, but by the payment of a large sum of money. Edward marched against Paris, but the Dauphin refused to quit the shelter of the walls, and the invaders had to turn westwards to Chartres. The country had been so desolated by war and pestilence that it was difficult to feed the army, the season was wet and unfavourable, and Edward III., finding that his army was wasting away without gaining any success, agreed to negotiate. By the treaty of Bretigni (May 8, 1360) he renounced |Treaty of Bretigni.| his claims to the French throne and to the Norman and Plantagenet provinces north of the Loire. In return he was to enjoy full sovereignty, without any homage to the French king, in his own conquest of Calais, and in the possessions which Eleanor had brought to Henry II., viz. Guienne, Gascony, Poitou, Saintonge, and a number of smaller territories. France was to renounce the Scottish, and England the Flemish alliance. The ransom of King John was fixed at three million crowns, to be paid in six yearly instalments. On receipt of the first instalment the king was to be released, but hostages were to be given for the payment of the remainder. It was not easy to raise the ransom from exhausted France; but Galeazzo Visconti was opportunely willing to pay six hundred thousand gold florins to gain for his son the hand of a French princess, and this bargain with the Milanese despot enabled John to return to his kingdom. He seems, however, to have found the cares of government a disagreeable burden after the comparative gaiety of his imprisonment in London. In 1363 his second son, Louis of Anjou, escaped from Calais, whither he had gone as one of his father’s hostages. John seized the opportunity to parade a chivalrous regard for his plighted word, and at the same time to abandon duties which had become difficult and distasteful. Leaving the regency once more to his eldest son, he sailed to England in January 1364, and died in London three months later. Before his departure he had done one act which is of cardinal importance in the history of France. In 1361 a return of the plague had carried off Philip de Rouvre, the childless ruler of Burgundy, Franche-Comté, and Artois. The two latter provinces, which had come to Philip through the female line, passed to Margaret of Flanders, but the duchy |Duchy of Burgundy.| of Burgundy escheated to the crown. A prudent king would have retained the direct rule of so valuable a possession; but John, with reckless generosity, gave it away to his fourth son Philip, who had fought boldly by his side at Poitiers, and had shared his captivity. This Philip the Bold is the founder of the great line of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy.

The new king, Charles V., had been the practical ruler of France since the battle of Poitiers. During those eight years |Government of Charles V.| he had learned from harsh experience many lessons which stood him in good stead when circumstances enabled him to gain some success. The very weakness of his bodily health, which contemporaries attributed to poison administered by Charles of Navarre during their early friendship, debarred him from the active exercises of chivalry, and impelled him to cultivate his mental faculties. Fragile, timid, a stranger to the joys of the tournament and the battle-field, he seems strangely out of place in the days of the Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin, of John Chandos and the Captal de Buch. Yet Charles V. is the greatest of the Valois kings before Louis XI., and must be reckoned among the founders of modern France. His chief task was to restore the despotic power of the crown, which had been so rudely shaken between 1355 and 1358. Arbitrary taxation was to supersede the grant of supplies by the estates; military and civil officials were to be royal nominees; even the local assessors and collectors of taxes were to be under the supervision and control of the crown. Only once did the States-General meet during the reign, and then they were summoned merely to strengthen the king’s hands. But the despotism of Charles V. was a capable and orderly government, wholly different from that of his predecessors. It is curious to note how this absolute king adopts and turns to his own advantage the expedients of his enemies. He reimposed the gabelle on salt, and the aides or taxes on the sale of commodities, the two financial expedients of the States of 1355. He retained the élus, the local collectors whom the States had nominated to levy these charges, though he was careful to take their appointment into his own hands. He gave tardy expression to the will of the estates by putting an end to the debasement of the currency, the worst of all grievances, and by imposing strict limitations on the right of purveyance. When his brother, Louis of Anjou, provoked discontent by his brutal administration in Languedoc, Charles did not hesitate to dismiss him from the governorship, and to grant redress to the complainants. Such a government was a great and a novel boon in the fourteenth century, and it is only on its financial side that it is open to hostile criticism. The expenses, both civil and military, were enormous, and the people were subjected to a heavier burden of taxation than they had ever experienced before. And the taxes were not only excessive in amount and arbitrary in their imposition, they were also oppressive and unequal. To increase the receipts from the gabelle, Charles V. introduced the practice of requiring every family to purchase at least a fixed amount of salt from the royal granaries; and the principle of equality, which is enjoined in his ordinances, was infringed by the frequent grant or sale of exemptions, sometimes to a class, sometimes to a district or a corporation. It is these exemptions, multiplied as time goes on, which make the financial system of France, down to the Revolution, so unjust, so disorderly, and so inefficient. And Charles V. was also responsible for a disastrous innovation. His predecessors had received a revenue from customs duties levied on the frontiers of their kingdom. Charles was the first to hamper domestic trade by imposing customs on the transit from one province to another.

But in spite of these drawbacks the administration of Charles V. was eminently successful, and it was this success which led his subjects to approve, or even to welcome, the |The French welcome absolute rule.| arbitrary character of his rule. A people which had suffered from every kind of misfortune, from foreign invasion, pestilence, and civil strife, as the French had done in the middle of the fourteenth century, is never very eager to limit the power of a capable ruler. What it needs is a government which will maintain order at home, and retrieve the national honour by victories over foreign foes; and to such a government much will be forgiven. If the English had reason to approve the personal rule of the Tudor sovereigns, the French a century earlier had infinitely more reason to support a king who gratified their most imperious desires. For not only did Charles V. remedy the most glaring defects of his predecessors’ administration, but this most unmilitary of kings was able to gain triumphs over the hated English which a few years before must have seemed impossible.

The first opportunity for an indirect renewal of the strife with England was offered by affairs in Brittany. The treaty |War in Brittany.| of Bretigni had left unsettled the long struggle between John de Montfort and Charles of Blois, and England and France were not pledged to abandon the cause of their respective candidates. In the very year of his accession Charles V. determined to strike a vigorous blow in favour of the House of Blois, and sent Bertrand du Guesclin, whose military genius he had already detected, to lead a considerable force into Brittany. But this first enterprise was not crowned with success. The superior discipline of the English mercenaries enabled them to gain a decisive victory in the hard-fought battle of Aurai (September 29, 1364). Charles of Blois was slain, and Bertrand du Guesclin was left a prisoner in the hands of John Chandos. To prevent a complete transfer of the allegiance of Brittany to the English king Charles V. found it necessary to negotiate, and in April, 1365, John de Montfort was recognised as duke, with the proviso that if he died without male issue the duchy should pass to the eldest son of Charles of Blois.

More important in its ultimate results was French intervention in Castile. The government of Peter the Cruel had excited the bitter enmity of his subjects, who |War in Castile.| found a champion in the king’s bastard half-brother, Henry of Trastamara. Henry appealed for aid to France, and Charles V. welcomed the opportunity to rid his country of the hated free companies. Bertrand du Guesclin, who had been ransomed from his captors, raised an army among these professional soldiers, and crossed the Pyrenees at the end of 1365. The task of the invaders was facilitated by a general revolt of the Castilians. Henry of Trastamara was crowned king, and Peter fled to Bordeaux to implore English assistance. The Black Prince was conscious that French ascendency in the Spanish peninsula threatened his duchy of Aquitaine, and chivalrous motives impelled him to support a legitimate king against a usurper. Peter made the most lavish promises of pay to his auxiliaries, and the Black Prince became surety for the good faith of his guest. In 1367 all preparations were complete, and the treacherous Charles of Navarre gave a passage through his kingdom to the invaders. Between Najara and Navarrette, not far from the later battle-field of Vittoria, a complete victory was won over the French and Castilian forces. Du Guesclin was once more a captive, Peter the Cruel recovered his crown, and Henry of Trastamara had to seek safety in exile. But Peter proved to be as faithless as he was cruel. He declined to fulfil his promises to allies who seemed to be no longer necessary, and the English prince was in great straits to satisfy the soldiers who had trusted in his surety. To make matters worse the troops were wasted with disease, and the Black Prince himself contracted a fever which remained in his blood and led to his early death. With his temper embittered and his health broken, he led the remnants of his army back to Gascony. His departure was followed by a new revolution in Castile. Henry of Trastamara returned to reclaim the crown, and du Guesclin, whom the Black Prince imprudently allowed to pay a second ransom, once more entered his service. In 1369 the French troops won the battle of Montiel, and in a personal interview which followed Peter was stabbed to the heart by his half-brother. Thus all the fruits of the battle of Najara were lost, and a king was seated in Castile who was pledged to the French alliance.

These events in Castile encouraged Charles V. to carry out a long-cherished design for the reconquest of the English |Renewal of English war.| provinces. A pretext for a rupture was found in the discontent which was excited in Aquitaine by the heavy taxes levied by the Black Prince to defray the expenses of his Spanish expedition. In 1368 several of the Gascon nobles, regardless of the treaty of Bretigni, appealed to Charles V., as their suzerain, to redress their grievances. Charles delayed a final rupture until he had made his preparations, and had heard of the triumph of his ally in Castile. In 1369 he summoned the Black Prince to appear in Paris to answer the complaints of his subjects before the court of peers. Edward replied grimly that he would willingly go to Paris, but with sixty thousand men in his company. It was easier, however, to utter the threat than to carry it out. The conditions which had enabled the English to gain some conspicuous successes in the earlier war were now altered, and to some extent reversed. The wise government of Charles V. had already removed many of the administrative evils which had crippled France under his grandfather and his father. Thanks to du Guesclin, the French king could now put into the field a professional army under capable leaders, in place of the disorderly feudal levies which had been cut to pieces at Crecy and Poitiers. The Black Prince was no longer the active and resolute commander that he had shown himself before his illness, and he lost some of his most capable lieutenants, notably Chandos, who died in 1370. The provinces ceded at Bretigni had had some years’ experience of English rule, and their discontent was stimulated by a growing sense of national sympathy with the rest of France. Another very prominent cause of the reversal of military success in the years following 1369 is to be found in the cautious tactics deliberately adopted and enforced by Charles V. himself. For an invading army victory is imperatively necessary; for the defenders it is enough not to be defeated. Charles forbade his generals, no matter what provocation they received, to risk an engagement in the open field. They were to shut their troops in the strong towns, and to leave the English armies to be wasted by disease, by want of provisions, and by the difficulty of coercing a |English disasters.| hostile population. As the invaders departed, the French could harass their march, cut off stragglers and supplies, and occupy the territory which the enemy was compelled to evacuate. These tactics were eminently successful, and they were immensely aided by the support of the Castilian fleet, which enabled the French to gain a temporary naval ascendency. This deprived the English of direct communication with the coast of Aquitaine, and forced them to carry on military operations at a disastrous distance from their ultimate base of supplies. Almost the only English success was the capture of Limoges in 1370 by the Black Prince, who blackened his own reputation by ordering an indiscriminate massacre of the inhabitants. Soon afterwards he was compelled by illness to return to England, and to resign his duchy of Aquitaine, which he never revisited. In 1372 the English fleet, which was carrying an army under the Earl of Pembroke to Bordeaux, was destroyed off La Rochelle by the combined naval forces of France and Castile. A new and larger force was prepared in 1373 under John of Gaunt, but in consequence of this maritime disaster it was necessary to land the troops at Calais. Thence John of Gaunt marched right across France, but he found no enemy to beat in the field, and he could not take a single fortress. Meanwhile his troops melted away through desertion, disease, and famine. A defeated army could hardly have been in a more lamentable condition than that of which a scanty and impoverished remnant succeeded in reaching Bordeaux. The failure of this great effort on the part of England was decisive. Already several provinces had been practically lost, and by 1374, of all the vast possessions which had been gained at Bretigni, there remained only Calais in the north, and the strip of land stretching from Bordeaux to Bayonne. In 1375 the Pope succeeded in negotiating a truce for two years, and before its expiry both the Black Prince and Edward III. had died, and England, bitterly chagrined at such complete and unexpected disasters, had passed under the rule of a child.

In 1378 hostilities were resumed, though the English wished to prolong the truce, and it seemed almost inevitable that Charles V. would complete his task of expelling |Last years of Charles V.| the foreigner from French soil. The English had no longer any allies in France. John de Montfort, who had clung to his old protectors ever since the outbreak of war in 1369, had been expelled from Brittany, which was now almost wholly occupied by royal troops. Charles of Navarre, who had been a traitor to both sides in turn, discovered his mistake in allowing the English power to be so completely depressed, and opened negotiations with John of Gaunt for a joint effort to recover the lost provinces. But between France and Castile the King of Navarre found himself powerless. The royal troops seized the strong places which he possessed in France, while the Castilians entered Navarre and laid siege to Pampeluna. Charles the Bad was deserted even by his own son, and was forced to make a humiliating peace in 1378. If the French forces had now been concentrated on the reduction of Bordeaux and Bayonne, and if the Castilian fleet had been employed to cut off reinforcements by sea, the English must have lost their last strongholds in Aquitaine. But Charles V. was tempted by his successes to undertake a more ambitious project—the annexation of the duchy of Brittany to the royal domain. Such a plan at once raised the whole of Brittany against him. The supporters of the House of Blois, who had fought for the king against de Montfort, were resolute to defend the independence of their province. The great soldiers of France, Bertrand du Guesclin and Olivier de Clisson, were Bretons by birth, and though they obeyed the royal orders, their action in Brittany was reluctant and inefficient. The rebellion was wholly successful; John de Montfort was restored to his duchy, and was even welcomed by the widowed Countess of Blois, who had so long championed the cause of her husband against him. This failure in Brittany was a bitter disappointment to Charles V., and his chagrin was increased by the death of Bertrand du Guesclin. The king himself did not long survive his most brilliant and faithful servant, and at the time of his death (September 16, 1380), the English still possessed a foothold in the north and south of France, which enabled them to make disastrous use of the disorders of the next reign.

CHAPTER V
LEWIS THE BAVARIAN AND THE AVIGNON POPES, 1314-1347

Disputed election to the Empire—Quarrel between Lewis IV. and John XXII.—The Franciscans and the Pope—The Heresy of the Beatific Vision—National feeling in Germany—Causes of the failure of Lewis as Emperor—The Expedition of the Emperor to Italy—Lewis supports the Anti-Pope—His retirement from Italy—His position in 1338—The Succession question in the Tyrol—Election of Charles IV.—Death of Lewis.

The death of the Emperor Henry VII. (1313) gave occasion for one of those disputed elections which were almost inevitable as |Disputed election in the Empire.| long as there was no central power strong enough to control German factions, and as long as the rules or custom of election were uncertain and ill-defined. The Hapsburgs eagerly grasped at the opportunity of recovering the power they had lost by the death of Albert I. Their opponents, headed as before by Baldwin of Trier, passed over John of Bohemia on account of his youth, and put forward as their candidate Lewis, Duke of Upper Bavaria. The rival forces were not ill-balanced. On October 19, 1314, Frederick the Handsome, son of Albert I., was chosen at Sachsenhausen by the Archbishop of Köln, Henry of Carinthia, still claiming the crown of Bohemia (see p. [18]), the Elector Palatine, and the Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg. On the following day five electors—the Archbishops of Mainz and Trier, John of Bohemia, Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg—gave their votes at Frankfurt in favour of Lewis the Bavarian. Thus two votes—those of Saxony and Bohemia—were cast by rival claimants upon both sides. On November 25, a double coronation took place: Frederick being crowned at Bonn, and Lewis at Aachen. The dispute could only be settled by arms; and a desultory war, lasting for seven years, was closed in 1322 by the battle of Mühldorf, where the capture of his rival seemed to secure the final victory of Lewis.

But the very completeness of Lewis’s triumph only served to provoke a far more formidable enemy than the Hapsburg duke. As long as the war lasted in Germany, the Pope had been content to pursue his policy of strengthening the Guelf party in Italy, confident that his Ghibelline opponents could receive no assistance from beyond the Alps. Clement V., on hearing of the death of Henry VII., had seized the opportunity to claim the administration, and to grant the office of imperial vicar during the vacancy to his patron and ally, Robert of Naples. John XXII., who succeeded Clement in 1316, after an interregnum of over two years, continued his predecessor’s policy. But Robert of Naples could only just hold his own against the Visconti and other Ghibelline leaders; and the battle of Mühldorf seemed likely to turn the scale decisively against the Guelfs. In his partisanship for the Angevin cause, John XXII. determined to revive the most extreme claims of the mediæval Papacy. On the pretext that he had |Quarrel of Lewis IV. and John XXII.| the right to decide the disputed election, and that neither claimant could assume the imperial office without his sanction, he called upon Lewis to plead his cause before the Roman Curia (1323), and, when he failed to appear, pronounced him contumacious and finally proceeded to issue a bull of excommunication against him. Thus commenced a struggle between the Empire and Papacy which was continued under the pontificates of Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI., and was hardly terminated by the death of Lewis in 1347.

In many ways this struggle looks like a revival of past struggles between Emperors and Popes, and to raise the old questions as to the relations of Church and State. But if it |Peculiarities of the quarrel.| is examined a little closer, it will be found to differ in several important respects from its predecessors, and to present peculiar characteristics of its own. In the first place, the dispute arises from more petty causes, and the combatants are of lesser mould than the protagonists of earlier times. There is no Hildebrand or Innocent III. among the Avignon Popes, and Lewis the Bavarian lacks both the courage and the imposing personality of Frederick Barbarossa or Frederick II. The pretensions of the rival powers are less far-reaching and exalted; and if at times we find the language of the past reproduced in the papal bulls, it sounds unreal and almost ridiculous. No more conclusive illustration of the decline of both Papacy and Empire can be presented than the impression of unreality and insignificance produced on the mind by the records of this long and obstinate contest.

Yet it is hardly probable that this impression was shared by contemporary spectators. To them the struggle must have seemed to involve questions of vital importance. No previous contest between the rival heads of Christendom had produced so much literature, or literature of such merit and significance. Michael of Cesena, the general of the Franciscan Order, John of Jandun, and William of Ockham, ‘The Invincible Doctor,’ exhausted the subtleties of the scholastic philosophy in their championship of the imperial position against papal pretensions. Above all, Marsiglio of Padua, in his great work the Defensor Pacis, examined with equal acuteness and insight the fundamental relations of the spiritual and secular powers, and laid down principles which were destined to find at any rate partial expression in the Reformation.[^[7]]

This outburst of literary and philosophical activity was due in great part to the fact that for the first time in the long strife between Papacy and Empire, the struggle involved doctrinal differences. Hitherto the contest had been between Church and State, and the Church had been for the most part united. But, on the present occasion, the Church was profoundly divided. The great Franciscan Order had been founded by the professed advocate of clerical poverty. In course of time this original principle |The Franciscans and the Pope.| had been departed from, and the Order had amassed considerable wealth, though it had been found desirable to conceal the change by making the Pope the trustee, and giving the Order the mere usufruct of its property. This lapse from the strictness of the original rules had given rise to a schism within the Order. The Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli, maintained that Christ and the Apostles held no individual or corporate property, and that the Church was bound to copy the examples of its founders. This doctrine, which was accepted by a chapter of the Order in 1322, was not likely to find favour with a Pope who was accused, with good reason, of avarice. John XXII., urged on by the Dominicans, denounced the doctrine as heretical, and thereby alienated the Franciscans, who could plead in their favour a bull of Nicolas III., and appealed from the authority of the Pope to a General Council of the Church. In common hostility to John XXII., the Franciscans espoused the cause of Lewis the Bavarian, and it was among them that he found his most enthusiastic champions, and his most influential advisers.

This antagonism of a section of the Church to its own head seemed likely to be increased in John XXII.’s later years, when he was induced to favour the |Heresy of the Beatific Vision.| dogma that the dead are not admitted to the divine presence until after the final day of judgment. This contention struck at the root of the prevalent custom of invoking the mediation of the saints, and provoked a storm of opposition throughout Europe. Even the French king threatened to abandon the cause of so heterodox a Pope, and on his death-bed John found it prudent or necessary to retract his too hasty opinion.

It is obvious that these doctrinal disputes weakened the Papacy, and so far tended to give the Emperor an advantage. But this gain to Lewis was as nothing compared with the strength which he derived from the most noteworthy peculiarity of the struggle. In all previous contests with the Empire, the Popes had been able to command the services of an anti-imperial party within Germany, and this party had included not only the great ecclesiastics, but many of the lay princes. But in the great critical moments of the struggle with Lewis, this was found to be impossible. For the first time in history the German ruler found himself |National sentiment in Germany.| backed up by a vigorous national sentiment among his subjects, a sentiment quite as strong as that which had supported Philip IV. of France against Boniface VIII. The primary cause of this unwonted union among German princes and people was undoubtedly the residence at Avignon and the subservience of the Popes to France. The national revolt against a spiritual authority which allowed itself to become the tool of a hostile state, led in England to the issue of the great statutes of Provisors and Præmunire, and found equally resolute expression in Germany in the famous decrees of 1338. Benedict XII., more moderate and placable than his predecessor, had been on the verge of a reconciliation with the Emperor, but was actually forbidden to put an end to the quarrel by the imperious Philip VI. This open dictation on the part of the French king drove the Germans to fury. In July, 1338, all the electors with the exception of the King of Bohemia met at Rense on the Rhine, and formally resolved that the imperial authority proceeds directly from God, and that the prince who is legally chosen by the electors becomes king and emperor without any further ceremony or confirmation. This meeting is noteworthy in the constitutional history of Germany as the first occasion on which the electors assumed corporate functions other than the filling of a vacancy in the throne. In the following month, a numerously attended diet at Frankfort endorsed the declaration of Rense, and proceeded to draw up laws which should strengthen the central power. The punishment of death is decreed against all breakers of the public peace: the feudal tenant who takes arms against his imperial overlord is declared to forfeit both life and property: whoever refuses to take up arms at the summons of the Emperor is pronounced guilty of felony. The decrees of Frankfort seem to promise a revival of the German monarchy.

In spite of all these advantages on the side of the Emperor, the quarrel ended, not exactly in a papal triumph, yet in the complete and humiliating discomfiture of Lewis. Doubtless the personal character of the Emperor |Causes of Lewis’s failure.| contributed essentially to this result. Lewis was well-meaning but vacillating: he could take strenuous measures under the influence of a stronger will, but when he lost his adviser his habitual irresolution and his superstitious dread of the terrors of excommunication returned upon him. To carry through the contest he required the firmness, the intellectual craft, and the want of reverence of a Philip the Fair; and he had none of these qualities. On more than one critical occasion, when success seemed within his grasp, he alienated and disgusted his supporters by grovelling offers to purchase absolution by surrendering all the principles which were at stake in the quarrel. Moreover, the doctrinal disputes in which he became involved, although a source of weakness to the Pope, were not an equal source of strength to the Emperor. The Franciscans had many powerful opponents, especially in the great rival Order of St. Dominic, and these were alienated from the Emperor by his alliance with a faction in the Church. The Franciscan cause rested upon an unpractical enthusiasm which could not command the lasting support of the clergy, accustomed as they were to wealth and to the influence which it confers. And in the end, the strong corporate spirit of the Church was inevitably aroused and alienated by the spectacle of a secular ruler interfering in questions of dogma, and claiming a right of interpretation and decision.

There was, too, in the Emperor’s position a fundamental weakness which, unless detected and remedied, was inevitably fatal to his success. Neither Lewis nor the Franciscan advisers who in the early years of the struggle dictated his conduct, could realise that the conditions of the Middle Ages were passing away. They could not see that the old imperial pretensions were obsolete; that intervention in Italy had always brought ruin to German kings; that even in Italy the Guelfs had the stronger, because the less anti-national, position; and that the Ghibellines, the professed champions of imperial ascendency, only pursued this policy for their own ends, and had no real desire to weaken their independence by the foundation of a strong Italian monarchy. Lewis had an almost unique opportunity of building up such a monarchy in Germany, not on the lines of the mediæval Empire, but on the basis of the newly awakened national sentiment and sympathy. This opportunity he threw away because he had no conception of the conditions under which alone such success could be attained. Instead of endeavouring to rule as an Edward I. or a Philip IV., he set himself to imitate the Ottos of the tenth century.