Both armies numbered in their ranks not only all the feudal chivalry on the two sides, but burgher-forces, those from the majority of the great cities of Flanders being for Otho, and those from sixteen towns or communes of France for Philip Augustus. It was not, as we have seen, the first time that the forces from the French rural districts had taken part in the king’s wars; Louis the Fat had often received their aid against the tyrannical and turbulent lords of his small kingdom; but since the reign of Louis the Fat the organization and importance of the communes had made great progress in France; and it was not only rural communes, but considerable cities, such as Amiens, Arras, Beauvais, Compiegne, and Soissons, which sent to the army of Philip Augustus bodies of men in large numbers and ready trained to arms. Contemporary historians put the army of Otho at one hundred thousand, and that of Philip Augustus at from fifty to sixty thousand men; but amongst modern historians one of the most eminent, M. Sismondi, reduces them both to some fifteen or twenty thousand. One would say that the reduction is as excessive as the original estimate. However that may be, the communal forces evidently filled an important place in the king’s army at Bouvines, and maintained it brilliantly. So soon as Philip had placed himself at the head of the first line of his troops, “the men of Soissons,” says William the Breton, who was present at the battle, “being impatient and inflamed by the words of Bishop Guerin, let out their horses at the full speed of their legs, and attacked the enemy.” But the Flemish knights prick not forward to the encounter, indignant that the first charge against them was not made by knights, as would have been seemly, and remain motionless at their post. The men of Soissons, meanwhile, see no need of dealing softly with them and humoring them, so thrust them roughly, upset them from their horses, slay a many of them, and force them to leave their place or defend themselves, willy nilly. At last, the Chevalier Eustace, scorning the burghers and proud of his illustrious ancestors, moves out into the middle of the plain, and with haughty voice, roars, “Death to the French!” The battle soon became general and obstinate; it was a multitude of hand-to-hand fights in the midst of a confused melley. In this melley, the knights of the Emperor Otho did not forget the instructions he had given them before the engagement: they sought out the King of France himself, to aim their blows at him; and ere long they knew him by the presence of the royal standard, and made their way almost up to him. The communes, and chiefly those of Corbeil, Amiens, Beauvais, Compiegne, and Arras, thereupon pierced through the battalions of the knights and placed themselves in front of the king, when some German infantry crept up round Philip, and with hooks and light lances threw him down from his horse; but a small body of knights who had remained by him overthrew, dispersed, and slew these infantry, and the king, recovering himself more quickly than had been expected, leaped upon another horse, and dashed again into the melley. Then danger threatened the Emperor Otho in his turn. The French drove back those about him, and came right up to him; a sword thrust, delivered with vigor, entered the brain of Otho’s horse; the horse, mortally wounded, reared up and turned his head in the direction whence he had come; and the emperor, thus carried away, showed his back to the French, and was off in full flight. “Ye will see his face no more to-day,” said Philip to his followers: and he said truly. In vain did William des Barres, the first knight of his day in strength, and valor, and renown, dash off in pursuit of the emperor; twice he was on the point of seizing him, but Otho escaped, thanks to the swiftness of his horse and the great number of his German knights, who, whilst their emperor was flying, were fighting to a miracle. But their bravery saved only their master; the battle of Bouvines was lost for the Anglo-Germano-Flemish coalition. It was still prolonged for several hours; but in the evening it was over, and the prisoners of note were conducted to Philip Augustus. There were five counts, Ferrand of Flanders, Renaud of Boulogne, William of Salisbury, a natural brother of King John, Otho of Tecklemburg, and Conrad of Dartmund; and twenty-five barons “bearing their own standard to battle.” Philip Augustus spared all their lives; sent away the Earl of Salisbury to his brother, confined the Count of Boulogne at Peronne, where he was subjected “to very rigorous imprisonment, with chains so short that he could scarce move one step,” and as for the Count of Flanders, his sometime regent, Philip dragged him in chains in his train.
It is difficult to determine, from the evidence of contemporaries, which was the more rejoiced at and proud of this victory, king or people. “The same day, when evening approached,” says William the Breton, “the army returned laden with spoils to the camp; and the king, with a heart full of joy and gratitude, offered a thousand thanksgivings to the Supreme King, who had vouchsaved to him a triumph over so many enemies. And in order that posterity might preserve forever a memorial of so great a success, the Bishop of Senlis founded, outside the walls of that town, a chapel, which he named Victory, and which, endowed with great possessions and having a government according to canonical rule, enjoyed the honor of possessing an abbot and a holy convent. . . . Who can recount, imagine, or set down with a pen, on parchment or tablets, the cheers of joy, the hymns of triumph, and the numberless dances of the people; the sweet chants of the clergy; the harmonious sounds of warlike instruments; the solemn decorations of the churches, inside and out; the streets, the houses, the roads of all the castles and towns, hung with curtains and tapestry of silk and covered with flowers, shrubs and green branches; all the inhabitants of every sort, sex, and age running from every quarter to see so grand a triumph; peasants and harvesters breaking off their work, hanging round their necks their sickles and hoes (for it was the season of harvest), and throwing themselves in a throng upon the roads to see in irons that Count of Flanders, that Fernand whose arms they had formerly dreaded!”
It was no groundless joy on the part of the people, and a spontaneous instinct gave them a forecast of the importance of that triumph which elicited their cheers. The battle of Bouvines was not the victory of Philip Augustus, alone, over a coalition of foreign princes; the victory was the work of king and people, barons, knights, burghers, and peasants of Ile-de-France, of Orleanness, of Picardy, of Normandy, of Champagne, and of Burgundy. And this union of different classes and different populations in a sentiment, a contest, and a triumph shared in common was a decisive step in the organization and unity of France. The victory of Bouvines marked the commencement of the time at which men might speak, and indeed did speak, by one single name, of the French. The nation in France and the kingship in France on that day rose out of and above the feudal system.
Philip Augustus was about the same time apprised of his son Louis’s success on the banks of the Loire. The incapacity and swaggering insolence of King John had made all his Poitevine allies disgusted with him; he had been obliged to abandon his attack upon the King of France in the provinces, and the insurrection, growing daily more serious, of the English barons and clergy for the purpose of obtaining Magna Charta was preparing for him other reverses. He had ceased to be a dangerous rival to Philip.
No period has had better reason than our own to know how successes and conquests can intoxicate warlike kings; but Philip, whose valor, on occasion, was second to none, had no actual inclination towards war or towards conquest for the sole pleasure of extending his dominion. “Liking better, according to his custom,” says William the Breton, “to conquer by peace than by war,” he hasted to put an end by treaties, truces, or contracts to his quarrels with King John, the Count of Flanders, and the principal lords made prisoners at Bouvines; discretion, in his case, was proof against the temptations of circumstances, or the promptings of passion, and he took care not to overtly compromise his power, his responsibility, and the honor of his name by enterprises which did not naturally come in his way, or which he considered without chances of success. Whilst still a youth, he had given, in 1191, a sure proof of that self-command which is so rare amongst ambitious princes by withdrawing from the crusade in which he had been engaged with Richard Coeur de Lion; and it was still more apparent in two great events at the latter end of his reign—the crusade against the Albigensians and his son Louis’s expedition in England, the crown of which had, in 1215, been offered to him by the barons at war with King John in defence of Magna Charta.
The organization of the kingdom, the nation, and the kingship in France was not the only great event and the only great achievement of that epoch. At the same time that this political movement was going on in the State, a religious and intellectual ferment was making head in the Church and in men’s minds. After the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks, the Christian clergy, sole depositaries of all lights to lighten their age, and sole possessors of any idea of opposing the conquerors with arguments other than those of brute force, or of employing towards the vanquished any instrument of subjection other than violence, became the connecting link between the nation of the conquerors and the nation of the conquered, and, in the name of one and the same divine law, enjoined obedience on the subjects, and, in the case of the masters, moderated the transports of power. But in the course of this active and salutary participation in the affairs of the world, the Christian clergy lost somewhat of their primitive and proper character; religion in their hands was a means of power as well as of civilization; and its principal members became rich, and frequently substituted material weapons for the spiritual authority which had originally been their only reliance. When they were in a condition to hold their own against powerful laymen, they frequently adopted the powerful laymen’s morals and shared their ignorance; and in the seventh and eighth centuries the barbarism which held the world in its clutches had made inroads upon the Church. Charlemagne essayed to resuscitate dying civilization, and sought amongst the clergy his chief means of success; he founded schools, filled them with students to whom promises of ecclesiastical preferments were held out as rewards of their merit, and, in fine, exerted himself with all his might to restore to the Christian Church her dignity and her influence. When Charlemagne was dead, nearly all his great achievements disappeared in the chaos which came after him; his schools alone survived and preserved certain centres of intellectual activity. When the feudal system had become established, and had introduced some rule into social relations, when the fate of mankind appeared no longer entirely left to the risks of force, intellect once more found some sort of employment, and once more assumed some sort of sway. Active and educated minds once more began to watch with some sort of independence the social facts before their eyes, to stigmatize vices and to seek for remedies. The spectacle afforded by their age could not fail to strike them. Society, after having made some few strides away from physical chaos, seemed in danger of falling into moral chaos; morals had sunk far below the laws, and religion was in deplorable contrast to morals. It was not laymen only who abandoned themselves with impunity to every excess of violence and licentiousness; scandals were frequent amongst the clergy themselves; bishoprics and other ecclesiastical benefices, publicly sold or left by will, passed down through families from father to son, and from husband to wife, and the possessions of the Church served for dowry to the daughters of bishops. Absolution was at a low quotation in the market, and redemption for sins of the greatest enormity cost scarcely the price of founding a church or a monastery. Horror-stricken at the sight of such corruption in the only things they at that time recognized as holy, men no longer knew where to find the rule of life or the safeguard of conscience. But it is the peculiar and glorious characteristic of Christianity that it is unable to bear for long, without making an effort to check them, the vices it has been unable to prevent, and that it always carries in its womb the vigorous germ of human regeneration. In the midst of their irregularities, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the outbreak of a grand religious, moral, and intellectual fermentation, and it was the Church herself that had the honor and the power of taking the initiative in the reformation. Under the influence of Gregory VII. the rigor of the popes began to declare itself against the scandals of the episcopate, the traffic in ecclesiastical benefices, and the bad morals of the secular clergy. At the same time, austere men exerted themselves to rekindle the fervor of monastic life, re-established rigid rules in the cloister, and refilled the monasteries by their preaching and example. St. Robert of Moleme founded the order of Citeaux; St. Norbert that of Premontre; St. Bernard detached Clairvaux from Meaux, which he considered too worldly; St. Bruno built Chartreuse; St. Hugo, St. Gerard, and others besides gave the Abbey of Cluni its renown; and ecclesiastical reform extended everywhere. Hereupon rich and powerful laymen, filled with ardor for their faith or fear for their eternal welfare, went seeking after solitude, and devoted themselves to prayer in the monasteries they had founded or enriched with their wealth; whole families were dispersed amongst various religious houses; and all the severities of penance hardly sufficed to quiet imaginations scared at the perils of living in the world or at the vices of their age. And, at the same time, in addition to this outburst of piety, ignorance was decried and stigmatized as the source of the prevailing evils; the function of teaching was included amongst the duties of the religious estate; and every newly-founded or reformed monastery became a school in which pupils of all conditions were gratuitously instructed in the sciences known by the name of liberal arts. Bold spirits began to use the rights of individual thought in opposition to the authority of established doctrines; and others, without dreaming of opposing, strove at any rate to understand, which is the way to produce discussion. Activity and freedom of thought were receiving development at the same time that fervent faith and fervent piety were.
This great moral movement of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries arose from events very different in different parts of the beautiful country which was not yet, but was from that time forward tending to become, France. Amongst these events, which cannot be here recounted in detail, we will fix upon two, which were the most striking, and the most productive of important consequences in the whole history of the epoch, the quarrel of Abelard with St. Bernard and the crusade against the Albigensians. We shall there see how Northern France and Southern France differed one from the other before the bloody crisis which was to unite them in one single name and one common destiny.
In France properly so called at that time, north of the Rhone and the Loire, the church had herself accomplished the chief part of the reforms which had become necessary. It was there that the most active and most eloquent of the reforming monks had appeared, had preached, and had founded or regenerated a great number of monasteries. It was there that, at first amongst the clergy, and then, through their example, amongst the laity, Christian discipline and morals had resumed some sway. There, too, the Christian faith and church were, amongst the mass of the population, but little or not at all assailed; heretics, when any appeared, obtained support neither from princes nor people; they were proceeded against, condemned, and burned, without their exciting public sympathy by their presence, or public commiseration by their punishment. It was in the very midst of the clergy themselves, amongst literates and teachers, that, in Northern France, the intellectual and innovating movement of the period was manifested and concentrated. The movement was vigorous and earnest, and it was a really studious host which thronged to the lessons of Abelard at Paris, on Mount St. Genevieve, at Melun, at Corbeil, and at the Paraclete; but this host contained but few of the people; the greater part of those who formed it were either already in the church, or soon, in various capacities, about to be. And the discussions raised at the meetings corresponded with the persons attending them; there was the disputation of the schools; there was no founding of sects; the lessons of Abelard and the questions he handled were scientifico-religious; it was to expound and propagate what they regarded as the philosophy of Christianity, that masters and pupils made bold use of the freedom of thought; they made but slight war upon the existing practical abuses of the church; they differed from her in the interpretation and comments contained in some of her dogmas; and they considered themselves in a position to explain and confirm faith by reason. The chiefs of the church, with St. Bernard at their head, were not slow to descry, in these interpretations and comments based upon science, danger to the simple and pure faith of the Christian; they saw the apparition of dawning rationalism confronting orthodoxy. They were, as all their contemporaries were, wholly strangers to the bare notion of freedom of thought and conscience, and they began a zealous struggle against the new teachers; but they did not push it to the last cruel extremities. They had many a handle against Abelard: his private life, the scandal of his connection with Heloise, the restless and haughty fickleness of his character, laid him open to severe strictures; but his stern adversaries did not take so much advantage of them as they might have taken. They had his doctrines condemned at the councils of Soissons and Sens; they prohibited him from public lecturing; and they imposed upon him the seclusion of the cloister; but they did not even harbor the notion of having him burned as a heretic, and science and glory were respected in his person, even when his ideas were proscribed. Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluni, one of the most highly considered and honored prelates of the church, received him amongst his own monks, and treated him with paternal kindness, taking care of his health, as well as of his eternal welfare; and he who was the adversary of St. Bernard and the teacher condemned by the councils of Soissons and Sens, died peacefully, on the 21st of April, 1142, in the abbey of St. Marcellus, near Chalon-sur-Saone, after having received the sacraments with much piety, and in presence of all the brethren of the monastery. “Thus,” wrote Peter the Venerable to Heloise, abbess for eleven years past of the Paraclete, “the man who, by his singular authority in science, was known to nearly all the world, and was illustrious wherever he was known, learned, in the school of Him who said, ‘Know that I am meek and lowly of heart,’ to remain meek and lowly; and, as it is but right to believe, he has thus returned to Him.”
The struggle of Abelard with the Church of Northern France and the crusade against the Albigensians in Southern France are divided by much more than diversity and contrast; there is an abyss between them. In their religious condition, and in the nature as well as degree of their civilization, the populations of the two regions were radically different. In the north-east, between the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Loire, Christianity had been obliged to deal with little more than the barbarism and ignorance of the German conquerors. In the south, on the two banks of the Rhone and the Garonne, along the Mediterranean, and by the Pyrenees, it had encountered all manner of institutions, traditions, religions, and disbeliefs, Greek, Roman, African, Oriental, Pagan, and Mussulman; the frequent invasions and long stay of the Saracens in those countries had mingled Arab blood with the Gallic, Roman, Asiatic, and Visigothic, and this mixture of so many different races, tongues, creeds, and ideas had resulted in a civilization more developed, more elegant, more humane, and more liberal, but far less coherent, simple, and strong, morally as well as politically, than the warlike, feudal civilization of Germanic France. In the religious order especially, the dissimilarity was profound. In Northern France, in spite of internal disorder, and through the influence of its bishops, missionaries, and monastic reformers, the orthodox Church had obtained a decided superiority and full dominion; but in Southern France, on the contrary, all the controversies, all the sects, and all the mystical or philosophical heresies which had disturbed Christendom from the second century to the ninth, had crept in and spread abroad. In it there were Arians, Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Cathars (the pure), and other sects of more local or more recent origin and name, Albigensians, Vaudians, Good People and Poor of Lyons, some piously possessed with the desire of returning to the pure faith and fraternal organization of the primitive evangelical Church, others given over to the extravagances of imagination or asceticism. The princes and the great laic lords of the country, the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges, the Viscount of Beziers, and many others had not remained unaffected by this condition of the people: the majority were accused of tolerating and even protecting the heretics; and some were suspected of allowing their ideas to penetrate within their own households. The bold sallies of the critical and jeering spirit, and the abandonment of established creeds and discipline, bring about, before long, a relaxation of morals; and liberty requires long time and many trials before it learns to disavow and rise superior to license. In many of the feudal courts and castles of Languedoc, Provence, and Aquitaine, imaginations, words, and lives were licentious; and the charming poetry of the troubadours and the gallant adventures of knights caused it to be too easily forgotten that morality was but little more regarded than the faith. Dating from the latter half of the eleventh century, not only the popes, but the whole orthodox Church of France and its spiritual heads, were seriously disquieted at the state of mind of Southern France, and the dangers it threatened to the whole of Christendom. In 1145 St. Bernard, in all the lustre of his name and influence, undertook, in concert with Cardinal Alberic, legate of the Pope Eugenius III., to go and preach against the heretics in the countship of Toulouse. “We see here,” he wrote to Alphonse Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, “churches without flocks, flocks without priests, priests without the respect which is their due, and Christians without Christ; men die in their sins without being reconciled by penance or admitted to the holy communion; souls are sent pell-mell before the awful tribunal of God; the grace of baptism is refused to little children; those to whom the Lord said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me,’ do not obtain the means of coming to salvation. Is it because of a belief that these little children have no need of the Saviour, inasmuch as they are little? Is it then for nought that our Lord from being great became little? What say I? Is it then for nought that He was scourged and spat upon, crucified and dead?” St. Bernard preached with great success in Toulouse itself, but he was not satisfied with easy successes. He had come to fight the heretics; and he went to look for them where he was told he would find them numerous and powerful. “He repaired,” says a contemporary chronicler, “to the castle of Vertfeuil (or Verfeil, in the district of Toulouse), where flourished at that time the scions of a numerous nobility and of a multitude of people, thinking that, if he could extinguish heretical perversity in this place where it was so very much spread, it would be easy for him to make head against it elsewhere. When he had begun preaching, in the church, against those who were of most consideration in the place, they went out, and the people followed them; but the holy man, going out after them, gave utterance to the word of God in the public streets. The nobles then hid themselves on all sides in their houses; and as for him, he continued to preach to the common people who came about him. Whereupon, the others making uproar and knocking upon the doors, so that the crowd could not hear his voice, he then, having shaken off the dust from his feet as a testimony against them, departed from their midst, and, looking on the town, cursed it, saying, ‘Vertfeuil, God wither thee!’ Now there were, at that time, in the castle, a hundred knights abiding, having arms, banners, and horses, and keeping themselves at their own expense, not at the expense of other.”
After the not very effectual mission of St. Bernard, who died in 1153, and for half a century, the orthodox Church was several times occupied with the heretics of Southern France, who were before long called Albigensians, either because they were numerous in the diocese of Albi, or because the council of Lombers, one of the first at which their condemnation was expressly pronounced (in 1165), was held in that diocese. But the measures adopted at that time against them were at first feebly executed, and had but little effect. The new ideas spread more and more; and in 1167 the innovators themselves held, at St. Felix-de-Caraman, a petty council, at which they appointed bishops for districts where they had numerous partisans. Raymond VI., who, in 1195, succeeded his father, Raymond V., as Count of Toulouse, was supposed to be favorably disposed towards them; he admitted them to intimacy with him, and, it was said, allowed himself, in respect of the orthodox Church, great liberty of thought and speech. Meanwhile the great days and the chief actors in the struggle commenced by St. Bernard were approaching. In 1198, Lothaire Conti, a pupil of the University of Paris, was elected pope, with the title of Innocent III.; and, four or five years later, Simon, Count of Montfort l’Amaury, came back from the fifth crusade in the East, with a celebrity already established by his valor and his zeal against the infidels. Innocent III., no unworthy rival of Gregory VII., his late predecessor in the Holy See, had the same grandeur of ideas and the same fixity of purpose, with less headiness in his character, and more knowledge of the world, and more of the spirit of policy. He looked upon the whole of Christendom as his kingdom, and upon himself as the king whose business it was to make prevalent everywhere the law of God. Simon, as Count of Montfort l’Amaury, was not a powerful lord; but he was descended, it was said, from a natural son of King Robert his mother, who was English, had left him heir to the earldom of Leicester, and he had for his wife Alice de Montmorency. His social status and his personal renown, superior as they were to his worldly fortunes, authorized in his case any flight of ambition; and in the East he had learned to believe that anything was allowed to him in the service of the Christian faith. Innocent III., on receiving the tiara, set to work at once upon the government of Christendom. Simon de Montfort, on returning from Palestine, did not dream of the new crusade to which he was soon to be summoned, and for which he was so well prepared.