Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/580

 544 FRANCE [HISTORY. 1270- 1300. Philip III. Philip Fair. are founded. The king and his lawyers were certainly quite as unwilling to allow the church as the baronage to win independence, and to plunge the kingdom into con fusion. Philip III., the Rash, succeeded on his father s death, an unlearned, weak man, whose history is uneventful, save that it is the period in which the foreign influence of France received a great check through the Sicilian Vespers (1282), which deprived Charles of Anjou of his throne, in spite of the urgent efforts of the papacy, Philip was also unlucky in his dealings with Aragon ; on his return from an expedition into Spain, in which he ruined a great fleet and army, he fell ill and died, in 1285. In 1274 the count of Champagne, Henry of Navarre, had died, leaving one child, a girl, three years old. She was affianced in 1276 to Philip, son of Philip III., and Navarre was thus brought into the French kingdom. And so it fell out that when Philip IV., the &quot; Fair,&quot; that proud young prince, succeeded, he was already master of the fortunes of a larger France than had ever yet been known. Lawyers surrounded his throne from the beginning; he was the fitting leader in a great revival of the Roman law, that terrible enemy to feudalism and the mediaeval papacy. In the beginning of his reign Philip IV. worked by means of his lawyers ; they put a stop, in large part, to clerical administration ; the parliament fell completely into their hands, and ere long (1302) was permanently fixed at Paris, and became the chief legal authority in the realm. The king s fiscal necessities threatened to overwhelm him ; the older system of sustenance, based on the royal domain, had completely given way. To this reign France owes the first beginnings of a formidable system of taxation ; to Philip IV. is due the ill-sounding maltote, the &quot; ill-levied&quot; tax. He seized what he could, wrung the Jews, confiscated the wealth of the Templars, turned everything into hard cash, sold privileges to towns, tampered with the coin ; by sumptuary laws he succeeded in taxing even his nobles. This state of need and greed brought on the great strife of his reign, the quarrel with Boniface VIII. It was a many-sided struggle, that of the temporal against the spiritual authority, that of the civil against the canon law ; that of the lawyers against the clergy ; that of France against Italy. Soon after his accession in 1294 Boniface VIII. had tried to mediate between the two great lawyer-princes, Edward I. of England and Philip the Fair. The kings took it much amiss ; and when in 1296 Boni face issued the famous bull Clericis laicos, which forbade the clergy to pay taxes to the civil power unless the papal power sanctioned them, Philip answered by an ordinance which prohibited the export of valuables of all kinds from the kingdom. The pope s reply created open breach, and Philip let loose his lawyers on the Italian priests. The strife, however, was speedily allayed, and a seeming reconciliation took place over the canonization of Louis IX., which occurred on the anniversary of his death, St Bartholomew s day 1297. Boniface also mediated success fully between the French and English kings, securing a large part of Aquitaine to France. It was, however, but a truce, which enabled Philip, not only to win this portion of Aquitaine, but to attach to himself the friendship of the duke of Brittany, and to occupy Flanders. So things went on till the year of jubliee, 1300, when Boniface seemed to have been lifted up above all the princes of the earth. About this time the pope nominated as his legate in France Saisset bishop of Pamiers, an open foe to the French crown. He made use of his new authority to stir up strife in the south, and Philip IV. arrested him at Pamiers as a traitor. Forthwith the old strife broke out again, a terrible war of words ensuing, lawyer s pamphlets met by papal bulls, which affirmed (as in the great Aus- 13( culta fili bull) the supremacy of the pope over all kings. The king threw himself on the patriotism of his people, and called together the three Estates of France, nobles, clergy, and burghers, to sit at Paris and consider his grievances. The nobles and burghers spoke out bravely for their king against the papal claims ; the clergy applied for leave to attend the council convoked at Home. Their request was refused ; if thsy went their goods would be forfeited. Just before this had broken out a revolt at Bruges (1302), in which the enraged Flemish had risen on and destroyed their new masters ; the French nobles, eager for vengeance and spoil, hastily assembled and marched northwards, under the guidance of Robert of Artois ; hard by Courtrai the Flemish burghers, led by Guy of Namur, inflicted on them the worst defeat ever yet sustained by French chivalry ; the &quot; Day of the Spurs &quot; was a fitting name for a carnage after which four thousand gilt spurs were hung as trophies in Courtrai cathedral. The foremost men of France had perished in a ditch ; and though for the moment Boniface rejoiced, and deemed his rival to be ruined, in the event this overthrow of feud alism turned completely to the king s advantage. The bishops, thinking also that the royal power was broken, set forth for Rome. For the moment even Philip seemed to lose confidence, and the papacy enunciated its highest claims. The king, however, soon recovered force ; he made peace with Edward of England, ceding Guienue to him, and marrying his daughter Isabella to the younger Edward. It was now that he debased the coin and imposed the odious maltote. William of Nogaret was sent to Italy to lodge with the pope the king s appeal from his authority to a general council and a legitimate pope. In reply the pope announced that he was about to lay an interdict on the kingdom. Then Nogaret called in the help of the Colounas, the family foes of Boniface, who gladly seized the pope at Anagni ; the mortifications and privations of the moment were too much for the aged pontiff, and though the Romans delivered him from captivity, he gave way and died. Thus was Philip IV. delivered from his worst antagonist. In 1304 he made peace with the Flemish, giving up his claim to Flanders, and drawing himself to gether to complete his victory over the papacy. In 1305 he succeeded in forcing on the conclave of cardinals his nominee Bertrand de Goth, archbishop of Bordeaux, who became pope as Clement V., and was consecrated at Lyons; then the great &quot; captivity &quot; began. Clement, as the price of his elevation, cancelled the bulls of Boniface, and pardoned the king s lawyers ; he created nine French cardinals, so as to secure the king s influence in the conclave. Philip pressed him to condemn the memory of Boniface, and to consent to the ruin of the Templars ; this, however, the poor pope avoided, with pretexts sufficient for the time. When Philip pressed him still more closely, for the Templars were rich and unpopular, and busy rumour had darkened their character with fancied details of unholy crimes, Clement endeavoured to escape by flight. The king arrested him, and brought him back to Poitiers. In 1309 this miserable pontiff was allowed to travel southward, though Philip absolutely refused to let him return to Rome, and was fain to fix his seat at Avignon on the Rhone, a city then in the possession of Charles V. of Anjou, and hard by the papal county of the Venaissin. Here the papacy abode in discredit and subjection to the French crown for seventy years. The condemnation of Boniface was deferred awhile ; it was but a barren revenge, and the Templars were a richer spoil. In spite of their heroic defence and resistance, they were condemned in 1310, and perished as martyrs to their cause. In 1312 the abolition of the Order was