Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/578

 542 FRANCE HISTORY. 1213-23. both he showed himself as the chief friend of the papacy ; but while in the south he mainly contented himself with passive approval till towards the end of the struggle, in the north he set himself to take an active part, and in 1213 called an assembly of barons at Soissons, to prepare for an invasion of England. From this, however, he was stayed by Pandulf, the pope s legate, and turned his hand in stead against Ferrand of Flanders., who had refused to obey his summons. His fleet, sent up to occupy the mouth of the Scheldt, was attacked and ruined by English ships, and Philip got but a poor consolation by pillaging some of the wealthy Flemish cities. In 1214 he had to face a grand coalition of enemies. Ferrand was supported on one hand by the king of England, on the other by the emperor Otho, the former undertaking to attack Poitou, the latter to enter Flanders. The moment was very critical for Philip; his barons went in heart with the feudal lords against their royal master. John, however, though he landed at La Ptochelle and took Angers, fell back on the first resistance, and was of no avail. Otho entered Flanders, and Philip came up to meet him. They met at Bouvines (29th Aug. 1214), and there Philip won a great victory over Flemings, Germans, and English. Otho fled, a ruined man ; Ferrand of Flanders, the earl of Salisbury, and Renaud of Boulogne were prisoners. To the battle of Bouvines are due on the one hand the firm establishment of the French monarchy, on the other the security of English baronial liberties by Magna Charta. Philip had now secured the west, weakened the south, and crushed the great coalition of the north. Little remained for him but to consolidate his power. He had sent his son Louis into England to support the barons against King John; when, however, John died the English barons and people refused to depose his son Henry III. ; Louis had to withdraw to France. Charao For the remainder of his life Philip lived in peace, save ter of when he interposed to support the northern invaders of the A n o. lt&amp;gt; south of France. His government was wise and tranquil ; t us he allied himself closely with the church throughout ; and when he died in 1223 he left a large part of the fortune he had amassed to his clergy, while he took care to hand his great territories unbroken to his son Louis VIII. Philip Augustus was, as has been said, &quot; a great king, not a great man.&quot; His name survives to France in the memory of the fact that by conquering Normandy he made royalty great. He was also king of Paris, for he built the present Notre Dame, erected her market, paved and cleansed the streets, built almshouses, secured a good water-supply, strengthened her defences by making new walls around the city ; above all, he sanctioned and supported, if he did not actually found, her university. To his action in this and to the abatement of grudges between France and England we owe it that the first of English universities, Oxford, drew her earliest inspiration from Paris, and was established in the main on the same lines. New branches of study were cultivated ; medicine, experimental philosophy, and law began to occupy the minds of men. And Philip was, by character and knowledge of his position, a lawyer. If great men are noted for their passion for justice, great kings are irresistibly attracted towards law ; and Philip, with his de light in the newly-revived Roman law, stands fair compari son with the &quot;English Justinian,&quot; Edward I. For the Roman law provided high sanction for his kingly claims, a sharp instrument for the punishing of popes and princes. The king s sagacity carried him safely through great crises of the fate of royalty, through his struggles with the papacy and with the powerful feudal princes. Besides Normandy and Brittany, Flanders, Champagne, and Languedoc had to bow before his authority ; while he reduced the power of the great lords, he actually had the courage to give them a special organization by establishing the great court of peers, whom he called together to help 122 him in condemning King John. Proud, cold, and sagacious, Philip is among the greatest of the founders of the later French royalty. His successor Louis VIII. reigned only three years Lou (1223-1226). In an attempt to carry out the wishes of the V1 1 church in the south, and to crush the heretics, he was at tacked by camp fever after the siege of Avignon. He died, leaving behind him a young son Louis, then twelve years Sail old, under the care of his vigorous and ambitious widow Lou Blanche of Castile. The early years of the reign of Louis IX. were spent in ceaseless strife. The great lords thought that they discerned in the accession of a child their watched- for opportunity; but the vigour of Queen Blanche, and the hearty support of Paris and the towns, made them accept the treaty of St Aubin clu Cormier in 1231 ; the king s posi tion was secured, and his troubles came to an end. Henry III. of England, on whose aid the princes had depended, failed them, and they were fain to make the best terms they could. This struggle was followed by a long contest with the bishops, in which the young king learnt lessons which stood him in good stead ; it is probably to this con test that he owed the successes of his later life, that he was able, as few kings had been, to combine earnest devo tion with an absolute superiority to priestly rule and in fluence. In many ways circumstances proved friendly to the young king. Theobald of Champagne, becoming king of Navarre, sold some valuable fiefs to Louis ; the Treaty of Meaux a little time before had closed the contest between north and south by the submission of Raymond VII., count of Toulouse ; one after another the leading nobles ceased to compete with the crown. During all these early years of his reign Louis had constant help from the strong- hand of his mother ; imperious and masterful, she ruled him and the land thoroughly and successfully. He stood wisely clear of the great struggle which went on all these years between Frederick II. and the papacy. In 1242 came the king s first serious warfare. He had tried to set his brother Alphonse over Poitou and Auvergne, whereon the reluctant nobles called in Henry III. to their help. Henry came with a small army and large sup plies. Louis, however, hastened down to meet him, reduced all the country north of the Charente, defeated him twice, and that incompetent prince fell back to Bordeaux, where he wasted his time and means. In 1243 he was obliged to make his peace with Louis, and gladly withdrew to England. At this same time Raymond VII. also rose against the king ; he was, however, soon reduced to order. In 1244 the last of the Albigeusians perished at Mont Segur, the whole of them preferring to be burnt rather than retract their opinions. Fitly to end this period of his life, Louis IX. issued an edict that no lord should hold fiefs under both the king of France and the king of England ; almost all his lords abandoned their English allegiance, and rallied round him alone. This movement made the distinction between English and French feeling stronger, and rendered the wars of the future more really national. In 1245 Charles of Anjou, the king s brother, wedded the great heiress of the south, the Countess Beatrice. This fortunate marriage closed the independent political life of Provence, which thus passed to the house of Anjou ; its fortunes were consequently long bound up with those of the kingdom of Sicily. Up to this time Louis IX., being mostly under the coni mand of his mother, had shown little sign of greater quali ties; now came the crisis which called them forth. He had acted with singular prudence in the contests which sur rounded his earlier years, had held aloof from the investi ture wars, had stood clear of eastern complications, had kept his barons quiet. Now, however, he was no longer