Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/679

 RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 623 Turks. Shrewd Louis XI, the son of Charles VII, cared nothing for courtiers and pomp. He preferred to see his nobility stowed safely away in dungeons. But he liked to stop at the houses of substantial citizens, take dinner with them, and learn popular opinion. His dress and his manners were plebeian ; he chose his assistants regardless of rank ; and he granted many privileges to the cities, although he also taxed them heavily. The monarch grew more powerful as the middle class be- came more prominent. This was natural since the feudal lords had been a check upon them both. Al- Military and though Charles VII at first had been such an financial .... . . . . r r power gained unpromising king and the victim of corrupt fav- by Charles orites, as his reign progressed he procured better vn advisers and was successful not only in expelling the Eng- lish, but also in augmenting permanently the power of the Crown. The Estates General met only once during his reign and then agreed to a perpetual annual direct tax, or taille, of 1,200,000 livres for the support of a standing army. Nobles, clergy, most of the royal officials and soldiers, and the citizens of self-governing towns were exempted from the taille, which thus fell chiefly upon the peasants. With this permanent grant the king was able to have at his beck a permanent army, regularly paid and hence well disciplined and loyal. He needed no longer to appeal to individual captains to raise bands of mercenaries, and then have diffi- culty in paying them or in disbanding them when the war was over. Indeed, henceforth no one but the king and his royal officials could raise and maintain troops. The new army consisted of fifteen companies of knights or heavy- armed cavalry with accompanying men-at-arms and pages, and of free archers, of whom one was to be supplied by each of the sixteen thousand parishes in France, and of the ar- tillery. The native bowmen did not prove a great success, however, and Louis XI relied in their place for infantry largely upon hired Swiss or Scotch soldiers. Back in 1440, as dauphin, Louis had participated in a conspiracy of the feudal nobility against his father, Charles