Emperors, had dropped, enabled the French gradually to claim the great German king and emperor as belonging to themselves. And a crowd of stories told of him and his twelve paladins or peers, who were supposed to have led his armies. Out of these romances King Philip at once called to life the peers of France, who tried the Duke of Normandy. Philip had found out that the only way to keep a vassal in check was to unite the rest against him, and he held regular assemblies, called cours pleinières, which kept up the sense of being one body bound to keep order.

20. War of Flanders.--The great feudal princes now began to take alarm. When Innocent III. found John regardless of the interdict on England, he made Philip champion of the Church, and offered him the kingdom of England. When the French vassals were summoned to invade England, there was a flat refusal from Ferdinand of Portugal, Count of Flanders in right of his wife. Philip swore that Flanders should become France, and as John had submitted to the Pope, he turned his arms on Flanders, claiming it as the right of his son Lewis, through Isabel of Hainault. This raised a great coalition against him of all the feudal chiefs of the Low Countries, together with King John and his nephew the Emperor Otto of Brunswick, each with a different quarrel, but all really in dread of the growing power of the French crown. Philip had, besides his own direct vassals, the burghers trained to arms from the cities which had communes, and which knew that the feudal chiefs only longed to grind them down, so that they made common cause with the king. John had landed at Rochelle, and though joined by the Angevins, was defeated by Lewis; but the tug of war was in Flanders, when, in 1214, the two armies met on the bridge of Bouvines, and there was a hotly-contested battle, in which the emperor and the French king took their full share of danger. Philip was once borne down, but was aided and remounted, and Otto was almost in the hands of the French knights, when his horse, being wounded, grew unmanageable, and ran away with him out of the battle. The Counts of Boulogne and Flanders were taken prisoners, and their whole force broken, except 700 Brabançons, who stood like a wall and were all killed. Bouvines was the first great French victory, a victory won by men of the Romance speech over a Teutonic alliance of English, Flemings, and Germans. It was also the first of the

many battles on the one frontier where Gaul is unguarded by nature.

21. Lewis the Lion in England, 1215. A year later King John's intolerable tyranny drove the English barons to wring the Great Charter from him. He then called in the aid of Brabançon mercenaries against them. The barons then offered the crown to Lewis, who was called the Lion, as the husband of John's niece, Blanche of Castile, and put him in possession of the Tower of London. In 1216 John's death changed the national feelings, and Englishmen turned to his young son Henry III. They now looked on Lewis as a foreign enemy, of whom they must rid themselves as soon as possible. Lewis' army was defeated at the Fair of Lincoln in 1217, and the reinforcements on their way to him destroyed in mid channel by Hubert de Burgh. He was forced to come to terms with Henry III., not having gained England, but having carried out all Philip's lifelong designs for humbling the House of Anjou. At the beginning of Philip's reign Henry II. held two-thirds of the lands which were fiefs of the crown of France. At the end of it all save the duchy of Aquitaine and the Norman islands had passed from Henry III.

CHAPTER IV.

EXTENSION OF THE KING'S POWER IN THE SOUTH.

I. The Albigenses, 1200.-While Philip was engaged in the struggle with the House of Anjou, another war was going on to the southward. All the country which spoke the Langue d'oc, or Provençal tongue, including the fiefs of the French crown between the Loire and the Rhone, had little in common with the North. The original natives had been largely Iberians, not Gauls; the Roman settlement had been much fuller and more lasting than in the north; the Teutonic conquerors had been Goths, not Franks, their religion Arian, not Catholic. And though they had since been reconciled to the Church, there was still a bias towards freedom of thought. The Persian belief in dual deities for good and evil had several times broken out in the early Church under the name of

the Manichæan and Paulician heresies, and had spread in the lands lying north of the Eastern Empire. Some Paulicians, when driven from the East, had found a refuge in the Pyrenees, where their creed smouldered till the general activity of mind in the twelfth century brought it forward. Those who held it were commonly called Albigenses, from the city of Alby, and seem to have held very mischievous and wild doctrines. Their "perfect

ones " tortured their bodies like Hindoo fakeers, but the general mass of the people were utterly licentious, despising marriage, and setting the moral law at nought. Meanwhile they abused the Catholic clergy and system in terms that have led some to think them of the same opinions as Protestants, whereas they had nothing in common with them but hatred to Rome. The whole country was in a corrupt state, and the clergy had fallen into vicious habits, which the Albigenses were not slow to hold up to scorn and mockery. Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was a bold, high-spirited, clever man, free-thinking and loose in morals, with a strong contempt for the clergy and impatient; of their claims. Without professing the Albigensian doctrine, he did not withdraw his favour from such as did so, and it spread throughout his county and that of Provence. Missions of Cistercian monks were sent by Innocent III. to preach the faith, but in vain; and Peter of Castelnau, one of these monks was, after rebuking the Count of Toulouse, murdered by some of his followers in a wood in 1207.

2. The Crusade against the Albigenses, 1208. Innocent III. in great wrath declared Raymond and his subjects foes to the faith, and in 1208 proclaimed a war against them as a crusade, equally meritorious with fighting in the Holy Land. There was no lack of willing crusaders, though Philip declared that he had enough on his hands with watching King John and the Emperor Otto. The leader was Simon, Count of Montfort, in France, a devout, ambitious, and merciless warrior who claimed also the earldom of Leicester in England. his approach Raymond quailed, and as the price of pardon, yielded seven of his best castles, was scourged by the legate at the door of the church of St. Giles, and took the Cross to fight against his own people. His nephew, Raymond Roger, Viscount of Beziers, would not brook such submission nor give up the heretics in his city, which was besieged in 1209. He was not within the

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place, and the townsmen defied the crusaders by throwing the gospels over the walls, crying, "There is your law. We heed it not. Keep it to yourselves." They made a sally in full strength, but the crusaders drove them back, rushed into the town with them, and made a most ruthless slaughter. It is said that, when Simon de Montfort asked Abbot Arnold Amaury how to discern between Catholic and heretic, the answer was, "Kill all alike, God will know his own." The viscount was at Carcassonne, whence he sent to his other uncle, Peter I., King of Aragon for aid, and was advised by him to go in person to the camp to explain that he was no heretic. There however Abbot Amaury insisted on making him prisoner as a means of forcing the surrender of Carcassonne, and his captivity was continued till his death, while his lands were given to Simon de Montfort. The other crusaders returned home, but Simon remained to carry on a pitiless persecution of the surviving heretics, calling upon the Count of Toulouse to perform his promise of rooting out heresy in his lands. This Raymond was as little able as willing to do, and the war began again in 1210, the crusaders making havoc of the whole county, while Raymond shut himself up in Toulouse with all who had escaped. Simon now began to deal with the land as his own conquest, with the clear object of founding a principality for himself. He held a parliament and divided the confiscated lands among his barons, thus interfering with the rights of Peter of Aragon, who held Roussillon and other fiefs in Southern Gaul. Peter appealed to the Pope, but obtaining no redress, took up arms and crossed the Pyrenees in September, 1213. The Southern barons joined him to a man; the French from the North flocked to Simon's standard. Peter was

overthrown with complete defeat by Simon's army at Muret, and was himself among the slain. The remaining cities opened their gates, and the conquest seemed complete. Simon was declared prince of the conquered lands by the synod of clergy at Montpellier.

3. The Lateran Council, 1215.-In 1215 Innocent III. held the Council of the Lateran, when Dominic Guzman was authorised to form his order of friars, called the Dominicans, for preaching and contending with false doctrine. Into their hands was put the newly-invented means of dealing with heresy, called the Inquisition, by which search was made into alleged heretical opinions, and those whom the spiritual power condemned were handed

over to the secular power for punishment. At this council the fate of Toulouse was debated. Raymond and his son were present, and were kindly received by the Pope, who was much shocked at their account of the barbarities committed in their county. It was decided that Simon should keep the fiefs of the French crown he had won on the right bank of the Rhone, and that those on the left bank, which belonged to the Empire, should be left in the hands of the Church to be restored to the son of the despoiled count, if he showed himself worthy.

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4. Death of Simon de Montfort, 1218. When Raymond of Toulouse and his son landed at Marseilles, they found that great city warm in their cause, and no sooner did they raise their standard than all the remains of the Albigenses, and all the Catholics of the South joined them. The war began again; a new crusade was preached, and Toulouse, which had expelled its garrison, was besieged by Montfort himself in 1218. While hearing mass, he was told that the besieged were setting fire to his chief machine. He rose from his knees, saying, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,' and a few minutes later was killed by a stone from a mangonel. His dominion died with him. His younger son of his own name was afterwards famous both in England and in Gascony. His elder son, Amalric, had married the daughter of the Count of Viennois, a prince of the Empire just beyond the Rhone, who bore the title of Dauphin or Dolphin. He found himself unable to cope with the Southern nobles, though the king's eldest son Lewis the Lion, on returning from England, came to head the crusade. Amalric, finding he could not keep either Beziers or Nîmes, offered them to the king, but wary Philip would not plunge into such a war, refused them, let Raymond's son succeed him peaceably in 1222, and permitted the Albigenses to live in peace.

5. Death of Philip II., 1223.-The papal legate in vain summoned a synod at Sens to force Philip to seize Toulouse. The king was already wasting in low fever, and died on the 14th of July, 1223. He had found France a kingdom of small strength, with a king in constant rivalry with vassals greater than their lord; he left it a powerful state, to which many great fiefs had been annexed, where the king had full weight, and where order was beginning to prevail.

6. Lewis VIII., 1223.-The reign of Lewis VIII, was