Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/550

 500 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE which helped bring about the decline of the once flourishing fairs of Champagne; (2) the depreciation of the coinage; (3) ruinous measures against the Lombards, Jews, and Tem- plars, who were the chief bankers, financiers, and capitalists of the time. Of his treatment of the Templars we shall speak in another connection; he despoiled and exiled the Jews; the Lombards, too, were driven out, their goods were confiscated and debts to them were canceled except that the principal was to be paid to the Crown. Philip's officials found it no easy task to collect the direct taxes upon capital and income, to which the country was not yet accustomed. They generally allowed the feudal lords to collect it from their sub-vassals and keep a fraction for themselves, and the towns to compound for a fixed sum which they might raise from their citizens by any assessment they chose. Those who strenuously objected to the tax were assured that it would not serve as a precedent and that they would probably never again be called on to contribute, if they would help the king in his dire need this time. Nobles who refused to pay were mentioned by name to the king. But the collectors less often treated with individual com- munes and holders of fiefs than with the assembled nobility and town representatives of an entire feudal region. In this case they often had to make concessions and promises, ex- pressed in written charters, in order to get the desired grants of money. The feudal nobility thus regained some of the privileges of which St. Louis had deprived them, and various local charters were granted. The Church, too, extracted charters guaranteeing its liberties in return for the contribu- tions which it was forced to make to the king ; but the conces- sions made were so qualified by reservations or so vaguely expressed that the king seldom observed them afterwards. And, as we have said before, no document like the Great Charter was forced from the king and then enforced upon him thereafter by united action, and no power over taxa- tion like that of the English Parliament was acquired by any general assembly representing the French nation. Such an assembly, however, now came into existence.