Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/242

 2 3 o THE LATER MIDDLE AGES the French fief of Flanders, and the Imperial fief of Franche Comte. Later, marriages added to the dominions of the Duke of Burgundy practically the whole of what we now call Belgium and Holland, forming the Low Countries or Netherlands. It was the ambition of Charles the Bold to complete the territorial connection between Burgundy and the Netherlands, and to annex the southern part of old Burgundy so as to create a consolidated territory from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, between France and the empire. India. Throughout this period, a series of Mohammedan dynasties ruled in Northern India, at one time extending their sway over almost the whole peninsula. The Mohammedans, however, are always a conquering military caste, ruling by the sword over a very much larger Hindu population, in whose eyes they are aliens and accursed, and who in their eyes are infidels and idolaters. At the close of the period, a great Hindu kingdom has arisen in the south. Chivalry. This period is often entitled the Age of Chivalry ; it was the age when the knight's professed ideal was that of utter loyalty to God and to his ladye-love, of defending the weak, and of righting the wrong. The ideal, however, does not often seem to have been pursued ; even among those who were regarded as mirrors of chivalry, like our own ' Black Prince,' there was usually little enough consideration for the weak if they happened to be of humble birth. The liveliest picture of the fourteenth century is to be found in the chronicles of Froissart, where we see Chivalry at its brightest ; it is at its blackest in the contemporary records of the reign of our King Stephen in the twelfth century. Probably, however, Chivalry was at its real best in the days when the power of the papacy was at its greatest, during the thirteenth century ; an age when the 'enthusiasm of humanity' was preached by the newly instituted orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans ; the age whose finest qualities were concentrated in the person of the French king, St. Louis.