Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/547

 THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 497 when the lords of Poitou joined with many of the nobles and towns of Gascony and Languedoc against him, and received support from Raymond VII, the Count of Toulouse, and the Kings of England and Aragon. After 1243 there were no more feudal risings against Louis, who gave good and strong government where Henry III and his foreign favorites were guilty of mis- Relations rule. Louis then proceeded to broaden the juris- ana^for-^ 1 diction of the royal courts at the expense of the eign powers feudal tribunals and to encourage appeals to the Parlement of Paris, to do away with the wager of battle in trials within his own domain and to forbid private wars the realm over. He improved the royal coinage so that the people would prefer it to that of the feudal lords, and he forbade the cir- culation of any other coins in his own domain, but could only secure that his coins should not be excluded from the fiefs of his great vassals who still retained the right of coin- age within their own territories. Louis's brothers became lords of a number of the chief feudal states: Robert was Count of Artois and other northern provinces ; Alf onse was Count of Poitou and Auvergne and heir to the vast County of Toulouse; Charles of Anjou also held Maine and gained Provence by marriage and gradually subjected its cities and then went off to conquer southern Italy. After numerous hostilities, truces, and long negotiations, Louis made with Henry III in 1259 the Treaty of Paris, by which Henry abandoned all claim to the lost provinces of Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, while Louis surren- dered Guienne and Gascony to the English king, who, how- ever, was to be his vassal for these. The preceding year Louis had made the Treaty of Corbeil with the King of Aragon, settling their boundary along the Mediterranean coast. Philip III, who was too devoted to the interests of his uncle, Charles of Anjou, and of the pope, pre- Phili In pared a vast expedition to punish the King of and Aragon for having deprived Charles of the island l lp of Sicily, but the undertaking turned out a complete fail-