 Chapter 16 Europe in the Middle Ages by Irena Lifford Plunkett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 16 The Faith of the Middle Ages A modern student, when he passes from school to a university, soon finds that he is standing at a crossroads. He cannot hope, like a philosopher of the 16th century, to take all knowledge for his province, but must choose which of the many signposts he will follow— law, classics, science, economics, chemistry, medicine, to name but a few of the more important. Medieval minds would have been sorely puzzled by some of these avenues of knowledge, while the rest they would denounce as mere sidetracks, leading by a devious route to the main high road of theology. Science, for instance, the patient searching after truth by building up knowledge from facts and accepting nothing as a fact that has not been verified by proof, was a closed book in the 13th century. Roger Bacon, an English friar, one of the first to attempt scientific experiments, was regarded with such suspicion on account of his researches and his sarcastic comments on the views of his day that he was believed to be in league with the devil, and even the favor of a pope more enlightened than most of his contemporaries could not save him in later years from imprisonment as a suspected magician. Men and women hate to change the ideas in which they have been brought up, and in the 13th century they readily accepted his facts. Such fabulous stories told by early Christian writers as that of the phoenix who at 500 years old cast herself into a sacred fire emerging renewed in health and vigor from her own ashes, or of the pelican killing her young at birth and reviving them in another three days, or of the unicorn resisting all the while to the hunter but captured easily by a pure maiden. The charm of such natural history lay to medieval minds not in its legendary quaintness, but in the use to which it could be turned in pointing a moral or adorning the doctrines of theology. Theology was the chief course of study at Paris, just as Roman law reigned at Bologna. It comprised a thorough mastery of the scriptures as expounded by fathers of the church and also of what was then known through Latin and Arabic translations of the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Although he had been a pagan, Aristotle was almost as much revered by many medieval theologians as Saint Jerome or Saint Augustine, and it was their life work to try and reconcile his views with those of Catholic Christianity. The philosophy that resulted from the study of these very different authorities is called scholasticism, and those who gave patient years of thought to the arguments that built up and maintained its theories, the schoolmen. The first of the great Paris theologians was Peter Abelard, a Breton, handsome, self-confident, ready of tongue and brain, having studied dialectics, that is, the system of reasoning by which the medieval mind constructed its philosophy. He aroused the disgust of his masters by drawing away their pupils through his eloquence and originality, and as soon as he understood the subject matter sufficiently to lecture on his own account. In Paris, so many young men of his day crowded around his desk that Abelard has been sometimes called the founder of the university. This is not true, but his popularity may be said to have decided that Paris, rather than any other town, should become the intellectual center of France. Greedly, his audience listened while he endeavored to prove by human reason beliefs that the church taught as a matter of faith, and though he had set out with the intention of defending her, it was with the church that he soon came into conflict. One of his books, called Yes and No, contained a brief summary of the views of early Christian fathers on various theological questions. Drawn into such close proximity, some of these views were found to conflict and the Breton lecturer became an object of suspicion in ecclesiastical quarters, especially to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who believed that human reason was given to men merely that he might accept the teaching of the church and not raise arguments or criticisms concerning it. Peter Abelard, he wrote to the Pope, is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. The man is great in his own eyes, this scrutinizer of majesty and fabricator of heresies. The minds of the two men were indeed utterly opposed, types of conflicting human thought in all ages. Saint Bernard, in spite of his frank denunciations of the sins of the church, was docile to the voice of her authority and hated and feared the pride of the human intellect as the deadliest of all sins. Abelard, by nature inquisitive and skeptical, regarded his deft brain as a surgeon's knife given to him to cut away diseased or worn out tissues from the thought of his day in order to leave it healthier and purer. As antagonists they were no match, for Saint Bernard was infinitely the greater man, without any of the others petty vanity and worldliness to confuse the issue for which they struggled. He had behind him also the sympathy of medieval minds not as yet awakened to any spirit of inquiry, and so the Breton was driven into the retirement of a monk cell and his condemned works publicly burned. One of his pupils, Peter Lombard, adopted his master's method without arousing the anger of the Orthodox by any daring feats of controversy and produced a book of sentences or opinions that became the textbook for scholasticism, just as the Decretum was the authority for students of Roman law. Without being a work of genius, the sentences cleared a pathway through the jungle of medieval thought for more original minds, while the discovery in the latter half of the 12th century of several hitherto unknown works of Aristotle gave added zest to the researches of the schoolmen. Greatest of all these schoolmen was Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor, as he has sometimes been called. Aquinas was a neapolitan of a noble family who ran away from home as a boy to join the Dominicans, an order of wandering preachers of whose foundation we shall shortly speak. Thomas was recaptured and brought home by his elder brother, a noble at the court of Frederick II, but neither threats nor imprisonment could persuade the young novice to give up the life he had chosen. After a year he broke the bars of his window, escaped from Naples, and went to Cologne in Paris where he studied theology, emerging from this education the greatest lecturer and teacher of his day. In his Summa Theologica, his best known book, he set forth his belief in man's highest good as the chief thought of God, using both the commentaries of the Church Fathers and the works of Aristotle as quarries to provide the material for fashioning his arguments. Like Abelard, he believed in the voice of reason, but without any of the Breton's probing skepticism. Human reason, bridled by divine grace, was the guide he sought to lead his pen through the maze of theology, and so clear and judicial were his methods, so brilliant the intellect that shone through his writings that Aquinas became for later generations an authority almost equal to St. Augustine. The intense preoccupation of medieval minds with theology and the importance attached to right belief are the most striking mental characteristics of the period with which we are dealing. Today we are inclined to judge a man by his actions rather than by his beliefs. To sum up a character as good or bad because its owner is generous or selfish, kind or cruel, brave or cowardly. In the 12th or 13th centuries, this would have seemed a holy fault standard. The ideal of conduct, for one thing, maintained by monks like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, was so exalted that to the ordinary men and women in an age of cruelty and fierce passions, a good life seemed impossible, say for saints. The sins and failings of the rest of the world received a very easy pardon, except for mesetics, and it was generally felt that God and his mercy, through the intercession of the kindly saints, would be compassionate to human weakness so long as the sinner repented, confessed, and clung to a belief in the teaching of the church. This teaching, or faith, declared to have been given by Christ to his apostles, set forth in the writing of the Christian Fathers, gathered together in the creeds and sacraments defined by church councils, preached and expounded by the clergy and theologians, defended by the Pope, was the torch that could alone guide man's wavering footsteps to the city of God. Do you know what I shall gain? asked the French count of the 13th century, in that during this mortal life I have believed as holy church teachers, I shall have a crown in the heavens above the angels, for the angels cannot but believe in as much as they see God face to face. Heresy, the refusal to accept the teaching of the church, was the one unpardonable sin, a moral leprosy worse and medievalized than any human disease because it affected the soul, not the body, and the life of the soul was everlasting. The heretic must be suppressed, converted if possible, but if not burned and forgotten like a diseased rag, lest his wrong beliefs should infect others and so lose their souls also eternally. Today we know that neither suppression nor burnings can ultimately extinguish that independence of thought and spirit of inquiry that are as much the motive power of some human nature's as the acceptance of authority is to others. Tolerance, and how far it can be extended to actions as well as beliefs, is one of the problems that the world is still studying. The towns and provinces where the first battles were fought are sown with the blood and ashes of those who neither sought nor offered the way of compromise as a solution. Another of Abelard's pupils, beside the Orthodox Peter Lombard, was an Italian, Arnold of Bressia, in many ways a man of like intellect with his master, self-centered, restless, and ambitious. When he returned home from the university he had once took a violent part in the life of the Bressian Commune, declaring publicly that the church should return to the days of apostolic poverty and urging the citizens to cast off the yoke of their bishop. Exiled from Italy by the anger of the Pope, and clergy at his views, he went again to Paris, where he taught in the university until, by the king's command, he was driven away. He next found a refuge in Germany under the protection of a papal legate who had known and admired him in earlier days. But this news aroused a furious anger of St. Bernard. Arnold of Bressia, he wrote to the legate, whose speech is honey, whose doctrine poison, the man whom Bressia has vomited forth, whom Rome adhors, whom France drives into exile, whom Germany curses, whom Italy refuses to receive, obtains thy support. To be his friend is to be the foe of the Pope and God. The legate contrived by mediation to reconcile the heretic temporarily with the church. But Arnold was by nature a firebrand, and, having settled in Rome, soon became a leader in one of the many plots to make that city a free town, owing allegiance only to the emperor. Largely through his efforts, the Pope was compelled to go into exile. But later, the Romans, under the fear of an interdict that would deprive them of the visits of pilgrims out of whom they usually made their living, deserted him, and the Republican leader was forced to fly. Captured amongst the Italian hills, he was taken to Rome and burned, his ashes being thrown into the Tiber, lest they should be claimed as relics by those of the populace who still loved him. His judges need not have taken this precaution, for neither Arnold's religious nor political views could claim any large measure of public approval in his own day. Elsewhere, indeed, heresy and rebellion were seething, but it was not till the beginning of the 13th century that the outbreak became a vital problem for the papacy. The widest area of heresy was in the provinces of Languedoc and Provence, to whose precocious mental development we have already referred. The Counts of Toulouse no longer ruled in the 13th century over any modern Spain, but north of the Pyrenees, they were tenants-in-chief to the French king for one of the most fertile provinces in southern France. While, as Marqueses of Provence, they were vassals of the emperor for the country beyond the Rhône. Semi-independent at the control of either of these overlords, Count Raymond VI presided over a court famed for its luxury and gaiety of heart, its light morals, and its unorthodox religious views. When he received complaints from Marome that his people were deriding the Catholic faith and stoning his bishops and priests, he scarcely pretended to regret, for his sceptical nature was quite unshocked by heresy, and both he and his nobles fully approved a popular insistence on apostolic poverty, a doctrine that enabled them to appropriate ecclesiastical lands and revenues for their own purposes. The heretical sects in Leggedoc are many. Perhaps the most important are those of the Albigenses and Waldencians. The former practically denied Christianity, maintaining that good and evil were co-equal powers, and that Christ's death was of no avail to save mankind. The Waldencians, or poor men of Lyon, on the other hand, had at first tried to find acceptance for their beliefs within the church. Peter Waldo, their founder, a rich merchant of Lyon, had translated some of the Gospels from Latin into the language of the countryside, and, having given away all his goods, he traveled from village to village preaching and trying, with his followers, to imitate the lives of the apostles in simplicity and poverty. In spite of condemnation from the Pope, who was suspicious of their teaching, the Waldencians increased in number. They declared that the authority of the Bible was superior to that of the church, appointed ministers of their own, and denied many of the principal articles of faith that the church insisted were necessary to salvation. The medieval church taught that only through belief in these articles of faith, that is, in the creeds and sacraments, as administered by the clergy, could man hope to be saved. The most important of the sacraments, of which there were seven, was the miracle of the mass, sometimes called transubstantiation. Its origin was in the last supper when Christ, before his crucifixion, gave his disciples bread and wine, saying, Take, eat, this is my body. Take, drink, this is my blood, which was shed for you. The medieval church declared that every time at the service of mass the priest offered up the host, or consecrated bread, Christ was sacrificed anew for the sins of the world, and that the bread became, in truth, converted into the substance of his body. The Waldencians, in many sects that later broke away from the tenets of the medieval church, denied this miracle, and also the sacred character of the priests who could perform it. According to the church, her clergy at ordination received, through the laying on of the bishop's hands, some of the mysterious power that Christ is given to St. Peter. Conferring on them, the power also to forgive sins. No matter if the priest became idle or vicious, he still, by virtue of his ordination, retained his sacred character, and to lay hands upon him was to incur the wrath of God. Even in the 12th century, when St. Bernard traveled in Languidog, he had been horrified to find the sacraments no longer sacred in the priests without respect. His attempts at remonstrance were met with stones and threats, while the establishment of an episcopal inquisition to inquire into and stamp out this hostility only increased Provencal bitterness and determination. I would rather be a Jew, was an expression of disdain in the Middle Ages, but in Toulouse the people said, I had rather be a priest, and the clergy who walked abroad were forced to conceal their tunchers for fear of assault. Heresy can only be destroyed by solid instruction, was innocent the third's first verdict. It is by preaching the truth that we sap foundations of error. He therefore sent some Cistercians to hold a mission in Languidog, and in their company traveled a young Spaniard, Dominic de Guzmán, burning to win souls for the faith or suffer martyrdom. The Cistercians rode on horses with a large train of servants and with wagons drawn by oxen to carry their clothes and their food. This display aroused the scornful mirth of the Albigenses and Waldencians. See, they cried, the wealthy missionaries of a God who was humbled and despised, loaded with honors. Everywhere were the same ridicule and contempt, and it was in this moment of failure that Dominic de Spaniard interposed, speaking earnestly to those who were with him of the contrast between the heretic ministers and their lives of poverty and self-denial with the luxury and worldliness of the local clergy, and even with the ostentations parade of his fellow preachers. Because he had long practiced austerities himself, wearing a hair shirt, fasting often, and denying himself every pleasure, the young Spaniard received a respectful hearing, and so fired the Cistercians with his enthusiasm that they set away their horses and baggage wagons and set out on foot through the country to try and win the populace by different methods. With him went Dominic barefoot, exulting in this opportunity of bearing witness in the face of danger to the faith he held so precious. The attitude of the men and women of Lenguidol towards the papal mission was no longer derisive, but it remained hostile, for they also held their faith sacred, while all the racial prejudice of the countryside was thrown into the balance of opposition to Rome. Thus converts were few and angry gatherings at which stones were thrown at the strangers many, and so matters drifted on and the mission grew more and more discouraged. In 1208 occurred a violent crisis, for the papal legate having excommunicated Count Raymond of Palouse for appropriating certain church lands and refusing to restore them, was murdered and the count himself implicated in the crime. Seeing that, as in the case of Henry II and Beckett, it had been his angry curses that had prompted some knights to do the deed. Innocent three at once declared the count deposed and preached a crusade against him in his subjects as heretics. Twenty years of bloodshed and cruelty followed, for under the command of the French count Simon de Montfort, an utterly unscrupulous and brutal general. The Orthodox legions of northern France gathered at the papal summons to stamp out the independence of the South that they had always hated as a rival. Languidote, her nobles and people united, fought hard for her religious and political freedom, but the struggle was uneven and she was finally forced into submission. Thirty thousand of her sons and daughters had perished and with them the civilization and culture that had made the name of Provence, Glorious and Medieval Europe. The name of Dominic the Spaniard does not appear in the bloodstain annals of the Albigensian Crusade. He had advocated very different measures and in twelve sixteen pursuing his ideal, received from the Pope, leave to form an order of preaching brothers, modeled on the monastic orders except that the friars, freighters or brothers as these monks were called, were commanded not to live permanently in communities, but to spend their lives traveling about from village to village preaching as they went. They were to beg their daily bread and the very order itself was forbidden to acquire wealth, their founder hoping by the stringent rule to prevent the worldliness that had corrupted the other religious communities. Dominic or Saint Dominic, for the enthusiasm of the medieval church soon canonized him, was a son of his age and his intense devotion to the fate. But his spiritual outlook was beyond the comprehension of all, save a few. In Innocent Three may be found a more typical figure of the early thirteenth century and to innocent standard, and not to that of their founder, the followers of Saint Dominic for the most part conformed. Pope Innocent had advocated the driving out of error by right teaching, but his failure by this method woken him an exasperation that made the obstinate heresy of Languidoke seem a moral and social plague to be suppressed ruthlessly. Thorough in this undertaking, as in all to which he set his mind at hand, he added to the slaughter of Simon de Montfort's crusade the terrible and efficient machinery of the Inquisition, and this during the pontificate of Gregory the Ninth was transferred from the jurisdiction of local bishops to that of the Papal Sea. The Inquisitors, empowered to discover heresy and convert the heretic by torture and fire, were mainly Dominicans selected for this task on account of their theological training and the very devotion to the faith on which their founder had laid such stress. The most important political fruits of the Albigensian crusade were gathered by Philip II of France who at himself stood aloof from the struggle, though permitting and encouraging his nobles to take the cross. By the deposition and fall of his powerful tenant-in-chief, the Count of Toulouse, the center and south of France, hitherto so proudly independent, lost a formidable ally, and large tracts of Poitou and Aquitaine fell under royal influence and were incorporated amongst the crowned lands. This process continued under Philip's son, Louis the Eighth, who himself joined in the crusade and marched with an army down the valley of the Rhône, capturing Evanon and arriving almost at the gates of Toulouse. His sudden illness and death brought the campaign to an end, but his widow, Blanche of Castile, acting as regent for her son, the boy-king Louis the Ninth, concluded a treaty with a new Count of Toulouse, Raymond VII, that left the noble a chastened and submissive vassal of both king and pope. Among other things, he was forced to acknowledge one of the French king's younger brothers as his successor in the county of Provence. It is pleasant to turn from the Albigensian crusade, one of the blackest pictures of the Middle Ages, to its best and brightest, the story of Saint Francis of Assisi. In 1182 there was born at Assisi, a little Umbrian village, a boy whom his mother named John, but whom his father, a rich merchant who had lately traveled in France, nicknamed Francis or the Frenchman. Saint Dominic had developed his fiery faith in an austere and intensely religious home, but Francis shared the lighthearted sociable intercourse of an Italian town, and in boyhood was distinguished only from his fellows by his generosity, innate purity, and irrepressible joy in life. When he grew up, Francis went to fight with the forces of Assisi against the neighboring city of Perugia, and was taken prisoner of some others of his fellow townsmen and thrown into a dungeon. The grumbling and bitterness of the majority during that twelve months of captivity were very natural, but Francis, unlike the rest, met the general discomfort with serene good humor, even merriment, so that not for the last time in his career he was denounced as crazy. On his release and return home the merchant Bernadon wished his son to cut some figure in the world, and when the young man dreamed of shining armor and a military glory, he provided him with all he had asked in the way of clothes and accoutrement and sent him in the train of a wealthy noble who was going to fight in Naples. Halfway on his journey Francis turned back to Assisi. God, he believed, had told him to do so. Why, he could not tell. He tried to follow the frivolous life he had led before, but now the laughter of his companions seemed to ring hollow in his ears. It was as if they found pleasure in his shadow while he alone was conscious that somewhere close was a reality of joy that, if he could only discover it, would illuminate the whole world. Then his call came. But to the comfortable citizens of Assisi it seemed like a voice of madness. The young Bernadon, it was rumored, had been seen in the company of lepers and entertaining beggars at his table. Almost all the money and goods he possessed had been given away. Nay, there came a final word that he had sold his horse and left his home to live in a cave outside of town. The people shook their heads at such folly and sympathized with the old Bernadon at this end to his fine ambitions for his son. Pietro Bernadon, in truth, had developed such a furious anger that he appealed to the Bishop of Assisi in treating him either to persuade Francis to give up his new way of life or else to compel him to surrender the few belongings he still had left. Francis was then summoned and in the Bishop's presence handed back to his father his purse and even his very clothes. Penelous he stood before Assisi, who had often ridden through the streets a rich man's air, and it was a beggar's gray robe with a white cross roughly chalked upon it that he adopted as the uniform of his new career. His fellow townsmen had been moved by this complete renunciation, but mingled at first with their admiration was a half-scornful incredulity. They could understand saints ardent in defense of the faith against heresy, fiery in their denunciation of all worldly pleasures, for such belonged to the religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages. But this son of Assisi who raised no banner in controversy and found an equal joy of life in the sunshine on the hillside in the warmth of a fire in the squalor of a slum was at first beyond their spiritual vision. Yet Francis Bernadon belonged as truly to the medieval world as Saint Dominic or Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. In his spirit was mingled the self-denial of the poor men of Lyon and the romance of the Provençal singers. These troubadours sang of knights whose glory and boast were the life service of some incomparable lady. Francis exalted in his servitude to my lady poverty, in his soul aflame with a chivalry in contrast to which the conventional devotion of poets burned him. In honor of my lady poverty the rich merchant's son had cast away as father's affection, his military ambitions, his comfortable home and gay clothes, and because of the strength and depth of his devotion the surrender left no bitterness, only an intense joy that found beauty amid the rags, disease, and filth of the most sordid surroundings. For some time it never occurred to Francis to found an order from amongst the men who, irresistibly drawn by his sincerity and joy, wished to become his followers and share his privations and work amongst the poor and the sick. When they asked him for a rule of life, such as that possessed by the monastic foundations, he led them to the nearest church, in the words of a chronicler, quote, commencing to pray because they were simple men and did not know where to find the gospel text relating to the renouncing of the world, they asked the Lord devoutly that he would deign to show them his will at the first opening of the book. When they had prayed, the blessed Francis, taking in his hands the closed book, kneeling before the altar, opened it, and as I fell upon the precept of the Lord, if thou wouldst be perfect, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, at which the blessed Francis was very glad and gave thanks to God, end quote. Thus, in dedication to the service of my lady poverty, the order of the lesser brethren, the Minerites, or the poor men of Assisi, was founded and received permission from Innocent III to carry on its work amongst lepers and outcasts, though it was not till 1223 that formal sanction for an order was received from Rome. Three years later, St. Francis died, and the friars who had lived with him declared that he had followed Christ so closely that in his hands and feet were found the stigmata, or marks of the wounds his master had endured in the agony of crucifixion. Tales had been handed down of humility and gentleness, and of how, in the early days of the order, he would go himself and beg the daily bread for his small community, rather than send his companions to encounter possible insults. Of how, in an age that set little store even by human lives, he would rescue doves in their cages that lads carried about for sale and set them free. And of how, because he read something of God's soul and every creature that had life, he preached to the birds as well as to men. Brotherhood, to the friar of Assisi, meant the union not only of all human souls, but of all creation in the praise of God, and daily he offered thanks for the help of his brothers, the sun and the fire and the wind, and for his sisters, the moon and the water, and for his mother, the earth. It was his love of nature, most strange in the 13th century, that is one of the strongest bonds between St. Francis and the women and men of today. He told the brother who made the garden, says his chronicler, not to devote all of it to vegetables, but to have some part for flowering plants, which in their season produce brother flowers, for love of him who is called Flower the Field and Lily of the Valley. He said, indeed, that Brother Gardener always ought to make a beautiful patch, in some part of the garden, and plant it with all sorts of sweet-smelling herbs and herbs that produce beautiful flowers, so that in their season they may invite men, seeing them, to praise the Lord. For every creature cries aloud, God made me for thy sake, O man! Once the true beauty of St. Francis' life was recognized, his followers increased rapidly and no longer had to fear insult or injury when they begged. Crowds, indeed, collected to hear them preach and to bring them offerings. Some Franciscans settled in France and Germany, others went to England during the reign of Henry III, and lived among the slums of London, Oxford and Norwich, wherever it seemed to them that they could best serve lady poverty. St. Francis himself, before he died, had been puzzled and almost alarmed by the popularity he had never courted, and he confessed sadly that, instead of living the lives of saints, some of those who professed to follow him were feigned to receive praise and honor by rehearsing and preaching the works that the saints did themselves achieve. He was right in his fear for the future. Rules are a dead letter without the spirit of understanding that gives them a true obedience, and the secret of his joyous and unassuming self-denial Francis could only be queathed to a few. Preaching, not for the sake of helping man and glorifying God, but in order to earn the wealth and esteem their founder had held his dross, this was the temptation to which the gray brethren succumbed, and within the generation that had known St. Francis himself avarice and self-satisfaction, following their wide popularity, soon led the Franciscans into quarrels with the other religious orders and with the lecturers of the universities and the secular clergy. These looked upon them mendicants as interlopers, trying to thieve congregation, fees and revenues to which they had no right. None of the faithful, says a contemporary Benedictine sourly, believed that they can be saved unless they are under the direction of the preachers or minorites. The power of the Franciscans, as of the Dominicans, was encouraged by the majority of popes, who, like Innocent III, recognized in their enthusiasm a new weapon with which to defend Rome from the accusations of worldliness and corruption. In return for papal sympathy and support, the friars became Rome's most ardent champions, and in defense of a system, rather than in devotion to an ideal of life, they deteriorated and accepted the ordinary religious standard of their day. Once more a wave of reform had swept into the medieval church in a cleansing flood, only to be lost in the abtide of reaction. Yet this ultimate failure did not mean that the force of the wave was spent in vain. St. Francis could not stem the corruption of the 13th century, but his simple sincerity could reveal again to mankind an almost forgotten truth that the road to the love of God is the love of humanity. The Benedictine order was the retreat from the world, the Franciscan the return to it. These words show that the medieval mind, with its suspicion and dread of human nature, was undergoing transformation. Already it showed a gleam of that more modern spirit that traces something of the divine and every work of God, and therefore does not feel distressed, but sympathy and interest. To St. Augustine the way to the Sevitus day had been a precipitous and narrow road for each human soul, encompassed by legions of evil in its struggle for salvation. To St. Francis it was a pathway, steep indeed and rough, but bright with flowers and so lit by the joy of serving others that the pilgrims scarce realized his feet were bleeding from the stones. In the dungeons of Perugia the mirth of Francis Bernadon has been called by his companions craziness, and to those whose eyes read evil rather than good in this world his message still borders on madness. Yet the Saint of Assisi has had his followers in all ages since his death, distinguished not necessarily by the Grey Friars robe, but by their silent spending of themselves for others, and their joyous belief in God and man. Chapter 17 France under two strong kings We have seen that Philip Augustus laid the foundations of a strong French monarchy, but his death was followed by feudal reaction, the nobles struggling in every way by fraud or violence to recover the independence that they had lost. Louis VIII, the new king, in order to checkmate their designs, determined to divide his lands amongst his sons, all the younger paying allegiance to the eldest, but each directly responsible for the administration of his own province. Perhaps at the time this was the most obvious means of ruling in the interests of a crown, a kingdom that, in its rapid absorption of Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Palouse had outrun the central government. Yet it was, in truth, a short-sighted policy for, since these apanages or royal fives were hereditary, they ended by replacing the old feudal nobility with anew, the more arrogant in its ambitions because it could claim kinship with the House of Capet. Louis VIII did not live long enough to put his plan into execution, and Louis IX, the boy of XII at the time of his accession, though accepting later the provision made for his younger brothers and his father's will, was enabled, partly by the administrative ability of his mother and guardian, Queen Blanche, partly by his own personality, to maintain his supremacy undiminished. On one occasion his brother, the Count of Arju, had imprisoned a knight in anger that the man should have dared to appeal to the king's court against a judicial decision he himself had given. I will have but one king in France, exclaimed Louis when he heard, and ordered the knight to be released and that both he and the Count should bring their case to Paris for royal judgment. Heavy penalties were also inflicted by Louis on any promoters of private warfare, while the baronage was restricted in its right to coin money. At this time, eighty nobles beside the king are said to have possessed their own mince. Louis, who knew the feudal coinage, was freely debased for bad at circulation except in the province where it had been minted, while his own money, which was a far higher value, was made current everywhere. Men and women naturally prefer good coins to bad in exchange for merchandise, and so the king hoped that the bathed money, when restricted and used, would gradually be driven out of existence. If Louis believed in his rights as an absolute king, he had an equally high conception of the duties that such rights involved. Make thyself beloved by thy people, he said to his son, for I would rather that a scotchman came from Scotland and governed my subjects well and equitably than that thou shouldst govern them badly. Royal justice, like the coinage, must be superior to any other justice, and so the chroniclers tell us that Louis selected as his bailiffs and centeshalls those who were loyal and wise of upright conduct and good reputation, above all, men with clean hands. Knowing the ease with which even well-meaning officials could be corrupted by money and honors, he ordered his deputies neither to receive nor give presents, while he warned his judges always to lean rather to the side of the poor than of the rich, in the case of law, until evidence revealed the truth. Philip Augustus had followed justice because he believed that it paid and his subjects had feared him and respected him. His grandson, with his keen sense of honor, shrank from injustice as something unclean, and we are told that the people loved him as men love God and the saints. Like nearly all the kings of France, Louis was a devout son of the Church, and it was under his protection that Innocent IV resided safely at Lyon when Frederick II had driven him from Rome. Nevertheless, the king's sincere love of the faith that later won him canonization as a saint never hindered his determination that he would be master of all his subjects, both lay and ecclesiastical. If the clergy sinned after the manner of laymen, he was firm that they should be tried in the lay courts, and while as contemporary Henry III of England remained a feeble victim of papal encroachments, Louis boldly declared, it is unheard of that the Holy See, when it is in need, should impose subsidies on the Church of France and levy those contributions on temporal goods that can only be imposed by the king. No storm of protest was aroused, for the papacy and its bitter struggle with the empire was largely dependent on French support, while Louis' transparent purity of motive in maintaining his supremacy disarmed indignation. An Italian friar, who saw him humbly sharing the meal of some Franciscan brethren, described him as more monk than king. This assumption was at first sight borne out by his daily life. His simple diet and love of somber clothes, his habit of rising from his bed at midnight, and in the early morning to share in the services of the Church, his hatred of oaths, lying, and idle gossip, his almost reckless charity, the eager help he offered in nursing the sick amongst his pair of slums and in washing the feet of the most repulsive beggars who crowded at his gate. He was frail and slender, says the same Italian, with an angelic expression and dove's eyes full of grace. Perhaps if Louis had not been called to the life of a king, he might have become a friar, but, living in the world, he loved his wife and children and would sometimes tease the former by protesting, when she complained how poorly he dressed, that if he put on gaudy clothes to please her, she must also go and grab a tire to please him. Those of his subjects who saw Louis on the battlefield describe him as the finest night ever seen and recount tales of their difficulty in restraining his hot courage that would carry him into the fiercest hand-to-hand conflict without any thought of personal danger. Yet this king was a lover of peace in his heart. He wished to be friends with all his Christian neighbors and, well content with the lands that already belonged to the French crown, he negotiated a treaty by which he recognized English claims to the Duchy of Guine. Less successful was his effort to act as mediator between popes and emperors, but if he could not secure peace, he determined at least to remain as neutral in the struggle as possible, refusing the imperial crown when the pope deposed Frederick II. Nor would he reap advantage out of the anarchy that followed on that emperor's death. War between Christians was hateful to Louis because it prevented any combined action against the Turks, for in him, as an innocent three, burned the old crusading spirit that had never quite died out in France. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, a French peasant lad, Stephen, had preached a new crusade, saying that God had told him in a vision that it was left for Christian children to succeed where their elders had failed in recovering the Holy Sepulchre. Thousands of boys and girls, some of them only twelve or thirteen years of age, collected at Marseille an eager response to this message. They expected that a pathway would be open to them across the sea as in the days of Moses and the chosen people, and when they had waited for some time in vain for this miracle, they allowed themselves to be entrapped by false merchants who, though Christian in name, would allow nothing to stand in the way of the gold that they coveted. Enticed on board ship, disarmed, bound and manacled, the unfortunate young crusaders were sold in the marketplaces of Egypt and Syria to become the slaves of the Muslims whom they had hoped to conquer. When he had first heard of the children's crusade, innocent three had exclaimed that children shame us indeed, and St. Louis, the inheritor of their spirit, felt that his kingship would be shamed unless he used his power and influence to convert and overthrow the Turk. One of his subjects who loved him, Monsieur de Jeanville, has left us a graphic personal account of the expedition undertaken against Egypt. From Cyprus, the headquarters of the crusaders, a fleet of some one thousand eight hundred vessels, great and small, sailed to Damietta at the mouth of the Nile, and Louis, seeing his ensign born ashore, would not be restrained but leaped himself into the water, lance in hand, shouting his battle cry of Mont-Joy Sainte-Denis. Before the impetuosity of an army inspired by this zeal, the town soon fell, but the medieval mind had reckoned little with the difficulties of climate, and soon the unhealthy mists that hung over the Delta of the Nile were decimating the Christian ranks with fever and dysentery, while many of the best troops perished in unimportant skirmishes into which daring, rather than a wise judgment had led them. The advance, once checked, became a retreat. The retreat, a route, and St. Louis, refusing to desert his rear guard, was taken prisoner by the Mohammedans. The disaster was complete, for only on the surrender of Damietta and the payment of a huge ransom was the king released, but his patience and chivalry redeemed his failure from all stain of ignominy. Instead of returning to France, he sailed to the Holy Land, where, though Jerusalem had again fallen to the Turks after Frederick II's temporary possession of it, yet a strip of seaboard, including the port of Acre, remained to the Christians. Louis believed that, unless he persevered in fulfilling his vow, crusaders of a lesser rank would lose their hope and courage, and so, enfeebled by disease, he stayed for three years in Palestine, until the death of his mother, Queen Blanche, whom he had left his region in France, compelled him to return home. Johnville relates how, on this voyage, because of the fierceness of the storm, the sailors would have put the king ashore at Cyprus, but Louis feared a panic amongst the terrified troops if he agreed. There is none, he said, that does not love his life as much as I love mine, and these, per adventure, would never return to their own land. Therefore, I like better to place my own person in God's hands than to do this harm to the many people who are here. Louis reached France in safety, but, chafing at his crusading failures, he once more took to cross against the advice of his barons in 1270. It was his aim to regain Tunis, and so to free part of North Africa, at least, from Mohammedan rule. To this task he brought his old religious enthusiasm, but France was weary of crusades, and many of those who had fought willingly in Syria and Egypt now refused to follow him, leaving the greater part of his army to be composed of mercenaries tempted only by their pay. Landing near Carthage the crusaders soon found themselves outnumbered, and were blockaded by their foes amid the ruins of the town. Pestilence swept the crowded in sanitary camp, and one of the first to follow victim was the delicate king. Lord, have pity on thy people whom I have led here. Send them to their homes in safety. Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, nor let them be forced to deny thy holy name. The dying words of the saint are characteristic of his love of the faith and of his people, and everywhere in the camp and in France, when the news of his death reached her, there was mourning for this king among kings who had sacrificed his life for his ideals. Yet the flame of enthusiasm he had tried to keep a light quickly flickered out into the darkness, and his son and successor, Philip III, made a truce with the Sultan of Tunis that enabled him to withdraw his army and embark for home. The only person really annoyed by this arrangement was the English Prince Edward, afterward Edward I, who arrived on the scene just at the time of St. Louis' death, thirsting for a campaign in military glory. But owing to the general indifference, he was forced to give up the idea of a war in Africa and continue his journey alone to the Holy Land. Philip III of France has left little mark on history. He stands with the title of the rash between two kings of dominant personality. His father canonized as a saint before the century had closed, and his son Philip IV, the fair, anything but a saint in his hard, unscrupulous dealings with the world, but yet one of the strongest rulers that France has known. Philip IV was only seventeen when he became king. From his nickname, Lebel, it is obvious that he was handsome, but no kindly Joineville has left a record of his personal life and character. We can only draw our conclusions from his acts, and these show him ruthless in his ambitions, mean and vindictive. In his dealings with the papacy, Philip's conduct stands contrasted with the usual affectionate reverence of his predecessors. But this contrast is partly accounted for by the fact that, at the end of the quarrel between empire and papacy, Rome found herself regarding France from a very changed standpoint to the early days of that encounter. Ever since the time of Gregory VII, the Hohenstaufen emperors had loomed like a thundercloud on the papal horizon, but with the execution of Conradin, the last of the royal line, this threatening atmosphere had cleared. The empire fell a prey to civil war during the great Interrequim, that is, during the seventeen years when English, Spanish, and German princes contended without any decisive results for the imperial crown. Count Rudolph of Habsburg, who at last emerged triumphant, had learned at least one diplomatic lesson, that, if he wished to have a free hand in Germany, he could do so best as a friend of the Pope, not as his enemy. One of his earliest acts was to ratify a Concordat with Rome in which he resigned all those imperial claims to the lands belonging to the Holy See that Frederick II had put forward. He also agreed to acknowledge Count Charles Vengeux, brother of St. Louis and the Pope's chief ally as Count of Provence and King of Naples and Sicily. Italy was thus freed from German intervention, but her cities remained torn by the factions of gulfs and gibbillens, and the iron hand of the French lay as heavily on the kingdom as ever the Hohenstaufen's despotic scepter. The Sicilians, restless under the yoke, began to mourn Frederick, who, whatever his sins, had been born and bred in the south, the son of a southern princess, while these French were cruel with the indifferent ferocity of strangers who despised those whom they oppressed. Out of the sullen hatred of the multitude, stirred of a sudden to white heat by the assault of a French soldier on a woman of Palermo, sprang the Sicilian vestiburs, the rebellion and massacre of an Easter Monday night when more than four thousand of the hated strangers, men, women, and children, were put to death and their bodies flung into an open pit. Charles Vengeux prepared a fitting revenge for this insult to his race, a revenge that he intended to exact to the uttermost farthing, for he had little of his brother's sense of justice and tender heart. But while he made his preparations, a Spanish prince, Peter III of Aragon, came to the rescue of the Sicilians with a large fleet. A fierce war followed, but, in spite of defeats, treaties that would have sacrificed her to the interests of kings and continuous papal threats. Cicely clung staunch to her new ally, gaining at last as a recognized Aragonese possession, a triumphant independence of the Angevin Kingdom of Naples. Rome, under a pope who was merely the puppet of Charles Vengeux, had hurled anathemas at Peter III, but his successors of more independent mind envied the Sicilians. It was of little use for Rome to throw off the horned staff and chains, if she must rivet in their stead those of the French House of Angeux. This was the fear that made her look with cold suspicion on her once well-beloved sons, the kings of France, whose relations of the blood royal were also kings of Naples. In 1924, Pope Boniface VIII, sometimes called the last of the medieval popes, because any hope of realizing the worldwide ambitions of a Hildebrand or an innocent III died with him, was elected to the chair of Saint Peter. His jubilee, held at Rome in 1300 to celebrate the new century, was of a splendor to dazzle the thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe who poured their offerings into his coffers, but its glamour was delusive. Already he had suffered rebuffs and encounters with the kings of England and France, for when he published a bull, Clarissa Slakos, that forbade the clergy to pay taxes any longer to a lay ruler, Edward I at once condemned the English church to outlawry, until from fear of the wholesale robbery of their lands and goods his bishops consented to a compromise that made the bull a dead letter. Philip IV of France, on his part, was even more violent, for he retaliated by ordering his subjects to send no more contributions to Rome of any kind. A wiser man than Boniface might have realized from his failures that the growth of nationality was proving too strong for any theories of world government, whether papal or imperial. But old and stubborn he could not set aside his Hildebrandine ideals, when one of his legates, a Frenchman, embarked on a dispute with Philip IV, Boniface told him to meet the king with open defiance, upon which Philip immediately ordered the ecclesiastics arrest, and that his arch-bishop should degrade him from his office. Boniface then fulminated threats of excommunication and deposition to which the French king replied by an act of open violence. The agent he chose to inflict this insult was a certain Nogaret, grandson of an Albigensian heretic who had been burned at the stake, and this man joined himself to some of the nobles of the Roman Campana who had equally little reverence for the head of Christendom. Heavily armed, they appeared in the village of Anigny, where Boniface VIII was staying, and demanded to see him. Outside in the street their minute arms stood shouting Death to the Pope. Boniface could hear them from his audience chamber, but though he was 86, his courage did not fail him. Clad in his full pontifical robes, his cross in one hand, his keys of Saint Peter in the other, he received the intruders. Nogaret roughly demanded his abdication. Here is my head, here is my neck, he replied. Betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like him, I will at least die Pope. At this, one of the Roman nobles struck him across the face with his mailed glove, felling him to the ground and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered. It was the Provençal's mission to intimidate rather than to murder, and while he argued with the Italians a hostile crowd assembled to rescue their vicar, and the French agents were forced to fly. The proud old man survived the indignities he had suffered by only a few weeks, and his successor, having dared to excommunicate those who took part in the scene at Anigny, died also with mysterious suddenness. No definite suspicion attached to Philip IV, but rumor whispered the fatal word poison, and the conclave of Cardinal spent ten uneasy months in trying to find a new pope. At last a choice emerged from the conclave, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with a title of Clement V. He was crowned at Lyon and never ventured into Italy, choosing as his residence the city of Avignon in Provence. Here, for just over seventy years, during the Babylonian captivity, as it was usually called, a succession of popes reigned under French influence, having exchanged the imperial yoke for one still more binding. Philip IV at once made use of this French head of Christendom to condemn the order of Templars, which, from their powerful organization and extensive revenues, he had long regarded with dislike and envy. The Crusades at an end, the Templars had outlived the object to their foundation, while the self-denial imposed upon them in their roving, uncoistered life exposed them to constant temptations, to which many of the less spiritual succumbed. Thus their suppression was probably wise, but Philip IV, a pitiless enemy, did not merely suppress. He pursued the knights of the temple with vindictive cruelty. Hundreds were thrown into dungeons, and there tortured into confessing crimes, the committal of which they afterwards recanted in vain, while the principal officers were burned at the stake in the marketplaces of the large French towns. By papal commands the revenues of the Templars passed into the exchequer of the knights of Saint John, who still guarded one of the outposts of Christendom, the island of Rhodes. But the French king took care that a substantial part of the money confiscated in France went instead to his own treasury. Philip was indeed in serious financial straits, for the revenues of the royal domains were proving quite inadequate to meet the expenses of a government that now extended its sway over the length and breadth of France. Philip tried many expedients to meet the deficiency, most of them bad. Such were the frequent debasement of the coinage, and the imposition of the gavel, that is, attacks on the sale of goods. This was justly hated because instead of encouraging commerce it penalized industry by adding to the price of nearly every commodity put on the market. Thus the gavel imposed on grain would mean that a man must pay tax on it three times over, first in the form of grain, then of flour, and finally as bread. Worse even than the gavel was Philip's method of farming the taxes, that is, of selling the right to collect them to some speculator, who would make himself responsible to the government for a round sum and then squeeze what extra money he could out of the unfortunate populace in order to repay his efforts. It is not then for any improved financial administration that the reign of Philip IV is worthy of praise. His was no original genius, but rather a practical ability for developing the schemes invented by his predecessors. Like them he hated and distrusted his insubordinate baronage, and, seeking to impose his fierce will upon them, turned for advice and obedience to men of lesser rank employing as the main instrument of his government the lawyer class that Philip Augustus and Louis IX had introduced in limited numbers amongst the feudal office holders at their court. The employment of trained workers in the place of amateurs resulted in improved administration, so it followed that under Philip IV the French government began to take a definitely modern stamp and became divided into separate departments for considering different kinds of work. Thus it was the duty of the consul de Roy or king's council to give the sovereign advice, of the chambre de comptes or chamber of finance to deal with financial questions, of the parliament or chief judicial court to sit in Paris for two months, at least twice a year, to hold assizes and give judgments. The parliament de Paris resembles the English parliament somewhat in name, but except for a right later acquired of registering royal edicts its work is entirely judicial, not legislative. The body in France that most nearly corresponded to the English parliament was the state's general composed of representatives of the three estates or classes of clergy, nobles, and citizens. The peasants of France who composed a greater part of their population were not represented at all. Philip IV summoned the state's general several times to approve his suggestions, but unlike the model parliament called for by his English contemporary Edward I for similar reasons, it never developed into a legislative assembly that could act as a competent check upon royal tyranny. But existed merely as it seemed to accept responsibility for its rulers' laws and financial demands, whether good or bad, its weakness arose partly from the fact that it often sat only for a day at a time and so had no leisure to discuss the measures laid before it, but still more owing to the class selfishness that prevented the three classes from combining to insist on reforms before they would vote any taxes. This was very unfortunate for France, since on the one occasion that the nobles and burgers actually did combine in refusing to submit an especially obnoxious cabal that hit both their pockets, Philip IV was forced to yield, reluctantly enough because the loss of the money led to his failure in the war in Flanders. Flanders was a fife of the French crown, and because its count his tenant and chief had dared to rebel against him, Philip had flung him into prison and declared his lands confiscated. Then, with his queen, he had ridden north to visit this territory, now owning direct allegiance to himself, in the belief that he had nothing to do but give orders to its inhabitants and await their immediate fulfillment. Their chroniclers tell us that the royal pair were overcome with astonishment at the display of fine clothes and jewels made by the burgers of Bruges to do them honor. I thought that there was only one queen in France, exclaimed Philip's consort discontentedly. Here I see at least six hundred. The king, always with an eye to the main chance, regarded the brilliant throng more philosophically. They seemed to him very suitable subjects for taxation. But the Flemings had won their wealth by a sturdy independence of spirit, both in the marketplace and on the high seas. They had been indifferent to the fate of their count, but at any time preferred the risks of rebellion to being plucked like geese by the king of France. On the field of Quartry, where Philip brought his army to punish their insolence, the Flemish burgers taught Europe, as their Milanese fellows had at Legano in the 12th century, that citizen levies could hold their own against heavily armed feudal troops. And although the king's careful generalship redeemed this defeat two years later, he found the victory he obtained barren of fruit. Within a few weeks the burgers apparent collapse, yet another citizen's army had rallied to attack the royal camp, and Philip, declaring angrily that it reigned Flemings, was driven to conclude a peace. Besides hating the independence of the Flemings, Philip IV grudged the English supremacy over the Duchy of Guine that his grandfather had so willingly acknowledged. To his jealous eyes it ran it wedged like an alien dagger into the heart of his kingdom. And, watching his opportunity until Edward I was involved in wars with Wales and Scotland, Philip crossed the borders of the Duchy and by force or craft obtained control of the greater number of its fortresses. There is little doubt that had he lived he would gradually have absorbed the whole of the southern provinces. But when only 46 he died, mourned by few of his subjects, and yet one of the kings who had set his stamp with the most lasting results upon the government of France. End of Chapter 17