As for the crusades, the situation of Louis was with respect to them quite different and his responsibility far more personal. The crusades had certainly, in their origin, been the spontaneous and universal impulse of Christian Europe towards an object lofty, disinterested, and worthy of the devotion of men; and St. Louis was, without any doubt, the most lofty, disinterested, and heroic representative of this grand Christian movement. But towards the middle of the thirteenth century the moral complexion of the crusades had already undergone great alteration; the salutary effect they were to have exercised for the advancement of European civilization still loomed obscurely in the distance; whilst their evil results were already clearly manifesting themselves, and they had no longer that beauty lent by spontaneous and general feeling which had been their strength and their apology. Weariness, doubt, and common sense had, so far as this matter was concerned, done their work amongst all classes of the feudal community. As Sire de Joinville, so also had many knights, honest burghers, and simple country-folks recognized the flaws in the enterprise, and felt no more belief in its success. It is the glory of St. Louis that he was, in the thirteenth century, the faithful and virtuous representative of the crusade such as it was when it sprang from the womb of united Christendom, and when Godfrey de Bouillon was its leader at the end of the eleventh. It was the misdemeanor of St. Louis, and a great error in his judgment, that he prolonged, by his blindly prejudiced obstinacy, a movement which was more and more inopportune and illegitimate, for it was becoming day by day more factitious and more inane.
In the long line of kings of France, called Most Christian Kings, only two, Charlemagne and Louis IX., have received the still more august title of Saint. As for Charlemagne, we must not be too exacting in the way of proofs of his legal right to that title in the Catholic Church; he was canonized, in 1165 or 1166, only by the anti-pope Pascal III., through the influence of Frederick Barbarossa; and since that time, the canonization of Charlemagne has never been officially allowed and declared by any popes recognized as legitimate. They tolerated and tacitly admitted it, on account, no doubt, of the services rendered by Charlemagne to the papacy. But Charlemagne had ardent and influential admirers outside the pale of popes and emperors; he was the great man and the popular hero of the Germanic race in Western Europe. His saintship was welcomed with acclamation in a great part of Germany, where it had always been religiously kept up. Prom the earliest date of the University of Paris, he had been the patron there of all students of the German race. In France, nevertheless, his position as a saint was still obscure and doubtful, when Louis XI., towards the end of the fifteenth century, by some motive now difficult to unravel, but probably in order to take from his enemy, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, who was in possession of the fairest provinces of Charlemagne’s empire, the exclusive privilege of so great a memory, ordained that there should be rendered to the illustrious emperor the honors due to the saints; and he appointed the 28th of January for his feast-day, with a threat of the penalty of death against all who should refuse conformity with the order. Neither the command nor the threat of Louis XI. had any great effect. It does not appear that, in the Church of France, the saintship of Charlemagne was any the more generally admitted and kept up; but the University of Paris faithfully maintained its traditions, and some two centuries after Louis XI., in 1661, without expressly giving to Charlemagne the title of saint, it loudly proclaimed him its patron, and made his feast-day an annual and solemn institution, which, in spite of some hesitation on the part of the parliament of Paris, and in spite of the revolutions of our time, still exists as the grand feast-day throughout the area of our classical studies. The University of France repaid Charlemagne for the service she had received from him; she protected his saintship as he had protected her schools and her scholars.
The saintship of Louis IX. was not the object of such doubt, and had no such need of learned and determined protectors. Claimed as it was on the very morrow of his death, not only by his son Philip III., called The Bold, and by the barons and prelates of the kingdom, but also by the public voice of France and of Europe, it at once became the subject of investigations and deliberations on the part of the Holy See. For twenty-four years, new popes, filling in rapid succession the chair of St. Peter (Gregory X., Innocent V., John XXI., Nicholas III., Martin IV., Honorius IV., Nicholas IV., St. Celestine V., and Boniface VIII.), prosecuted the customary inquiries touching the faith and life, the virtues and miracles, of the late king; and it was Boniface VIII., the pope destined to carry on against Philip the Handsome, grandson of St. Louis, the most violent of struggles, who decreed, on the 11th of August, 1297, the canonization of the most Christian amongst the kings of France, and one of the truest Christians, king or simple, in France and in Europe.
St. Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III., a prince, no doubt, of some personal valor, since he has retained in history the nickname of The Bold, but not otherwise beyond mediocrity. His reign had an unfortunate beginning. After having passed several months before Tunis, in slack and unsuccessful continuation of his father’s crusade, he gave it up, and re-embarked in November, 1270, with the remnants of an army anxious to quit “that accursed land,” wrote one of the crusaders, “where we languish rather than live, exposed to torments of dust, fury of winds, corruption of atmosphere, and putrefaction of corpses.” A tempest caught the fleet on the coast of Sicily; and Philip lost, by it several vessels, four or five thousand men, and all the money he had received from the Mussulmans of Tunis as the price of his departure. Whilst passing through Italy, at Cosenza, his wife, Isabel of Aragon, six months gone with child, fell from her horse, was delivered of a child which lived barely a few hours, and died herself a day or two afterwards, leaving her husband almost as sick as sad. He at last arrived at Paris, on the 21st of May, 1271, bringing back with him five royal biers, that of his father, that of his brother, John Tristan, Count of Nevers, that of his brother-in-law, Theobald King of Navarre, that of his wife, and that of his son. The day after his arrival he conducted them all in state to the Abbey of St. Denis, and was crowned at Rheims, not until the 30th of August following. His reign, which lasted fifteen years, was a period of neither repose nor glory. He engaged in war several times over in Southern France and in the north of Spain, in 1272, against Roger Bernard, Count of Foix, and in 1285 against Don Pedro III., King of Aragon, attempting conquests and gaining victories, but becoming easily disgusted with his enterprises and gaining no result of importance or durability. Without his taking himself any official or active part in the matter, the name and credit of France were more than once compromised in the affairs of Italy through the continual wars and intrigues of his uncle Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, who was just as ambitious, just as turbulent, and just as tyrannical as his brother St. Louis was scrupulous, temperate, and just. It was in the reign of Philip the Bold that there took place in Sicily, on the 30th of March, 1282, that notorious massacre of the French which is known by the name of Sicilian Vespers, which was provoked by the unbridled excesses of Charles of Anjou’s comrades, and through which many noble French families had to suffer cruelly.
At the same time, the celebrated Italian Admiral Roger de Loria inflicted, by sea, on the French party in Italy, the Provincal navy, and the army of Philip the Bold, who was engaged upon incursions into Spain, considerable reverses and losses. At the same period the foundations were being laid in Germany and in the north of Italy, in the person of Rudolph of Hapsburg, elected emperor, of the greatness reached by the House of Austria, which was destined to be so formidable a rival to France. The government of Philip III. showed hardly more ability at home than in Europe; not that the king was himself violent, tyrannical, greedy of power or money, and unpopular; he was, on the contrary, honorable, moderate in respect of his personal claims, simple in his manners, sincerely pious and gentle towards the humble; but he was at the same time weak, credulous, very illiterate, say the chroniclers, and without penetration, foresight, or intelligent and determined will. He fell under the influence of an inferior servant of his house, Peter de la Brosse, who had been surgeon and barber first of all to St. Louis and then to Philip III., who made him, before long, his chancellor and familiar counsellor. Being, though a skilful and active intriguer, entirely concerned with his own personal fortunes and those of his family, this barber-mushroom was soon a mark for the jealousy and the attacks of the great lords of the court. And he joined issue with them, and even with the young queen, Maria of Brabant, the second wife of Philip III. Accusations of treason, of poisoning and peculation, were raised against him, and, in 1276, he was hanged at Paris, on the thieves’ gibbet, in presence of the Dukes of Burgundy and Brabant, the Count of Artois, and many other personages of note, who took pleasure in witnessing his execution. His condemnation, “the cause of which remained unknown to the people,” says the chronicler William of Nangis, “was a great source of astonishment and grumbling.” Peter de la Brosse was one of the first examples, in French history, of those favorites who did not understand that, if the scandal caused by their elevation were not to entail their ruin, it was incumbent upon them to be great men.
In spite of the want of ability and the weakness conspicuous in the government of Philip the Bold, the kingship in France had, in his reign, better fortunes than could have been expected.
The death, without children, of his uncle Alphonso, St. Louis’s brother, Count of Poitiers and also Count of Toulouse, through his wife, Joan, daughter of Raymond VII., put Philip in possession of those fair provinces. He at first possessed the count-ship of Toulouse merely with the title of count, and as a private domain which was not definitively incorporated with the crown of France until a century later. Certain disputes arose between England and France in respect of this great inheritance; and Philip ended them by ceding Agenois to Edward I., King of England, and keeping Quercy. He also ceded to Pope Urban IV. the county of Venaissin, with its capital Avignon, which the court of Rome claimed by virtue of a gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, and which, through a course of many disputations and vicissitudes, remained in possession of the Holy See until it was reunited to France on the 19th of February, 1797, by the treaty of Tolentino. But, notwithstanding these concessions, when Philip the Bold died, at Perpignan, the 5th of October, 1285, on his return from his expedition in Aragon, the sovereignty in Southern France, as far as the frontiers of Spain, had been won for the kingship of France.
A Flemish chronicler, a monk at Egmont, describes the character of Philip the Bold’s successor in the following words: “A certain King of France, also named Philip, eaten up by the fever of avarice and cupidity.” And that was not the only fever inherent in Philip IV., called The Handsome; he was a prey also to that of ambition, and, above all, to that of power. When he mounted the throne, at seventeen years of age, he was handsome, as his nickname tells us, cold, taciturn, harsh, brave at need, but without fire or dash, able in the formation of his designs, and obstinate in prosecuting them by craft or violence, by means of bribery or cruelty, with wit to choose and support his servants, passionately vindictive against his enemies, and faithless and unsympathetic towards his subjects, but from time to time taking care to conciliate them, either by calling them to his aid in his difficulties or his dangers, or by giving them protection against other oppressors. Never, perhaps, was king better served by circumstances or more successful in his enterprises; but he is the first of the Capetians who had a scandalous contempt for rights, abused success, and thrust the king-ship, in France, upon the high road of that arrogant and reckless egotism which is sometimes compatible with ability and glory, but which carries with it in the germ, and sooner or later brings out in full bloom, the native vices and fatal consequences of arbitrary and absolute power.