There had been many surprises. Close contact had softened prejudices. The infidel had found that the crusader was something more than the most brutal and stupid of barbarians, as he had supposed; and the crusader, that the profaning infidel was not the monster he expected to find. In fact, the European discovered that in the Saracen and the Greek they met a civilization much more advanced, more learned, and more polished than their own. More civilization was brought out of the East than was carried into it by its Christian invaders. And it was through this strange and disastrous experience that the art and the thought of Europe received its first impulse toward a great future.
During the fifteen years of the reign of Louis's son, Philip III., France moved on under the momentum received from his father. But the succeeding reign of Philip IV. was epoch-making. That imperious, strong-willed son of Saint Louis demanded that the clergy should share the state's burden by contributing to its revenue. Pope Boniface VIII., imperious and strong-willed as he, immediately issued a bull, forbidding the clergy to pay, or the officers to receive, such taxes. The answer to this was a royal edict forbidding the exportation of precious metals (of course including money) from France to Italy, thus cutting off from the pope the large revenue from the Church in France.
The quarrel resolved itself at last into a question of the relative authority of king and pope in the kingdom. In order to fortify his position, and perhaps to show his contempt for clergy and barons alike, Philip took a step which profoundly affected the future of France. At a great council summoned to consider these papal claims, he commanded the presence not only of the ecclesiastics and nobles, the two governing estates, but also summoned the representatives of the towns and cities—the Tiers État! Prelate, baron, and bourgeois for the first time met in a Council of State.
A king who was the impersonation of absolutism had created the States-General (1302); had forged the instrument which would eventually effect for France a deliverance from monarchy itself!
The cause of the king was sustained by the council; the claims of the pope were rejected. Still not satisfied, Philip then audaciously proposed a general ecclesiastical council to determine whether Boniface legitimately wore the triple crown. When the old man died, as is said from the shock of this attempt, the king was master of the situation. Gifts had already been distributed among corrupt cardinals in the conclave. The papacy was at his feet, and might be in his hand. The most dissolute of his own archbishops was selected as his tool, and, as Clement V., succeeded to the chair of St. Peter. The centre of the ecclesiastical world was then removed from Rome to Avignon, where it could be under Philip's immediate direction, and the astonishing period in the history of the papacy, known as the Babylonian Captivity, which was to last for seventy years, under seven popes, had commenced.
The Knights Templar, those appointed guardians of the Holy Sepulchre and defenders of Jerusalem, it is to be supposed were not in sympathy with these things. Whatever the cause, their extermination was decreed. Accused of impossible crimes, the whole brotherhood was arrested in one day, and, at a summary trial, condemned, Philip himself, in that old palace on the island in the Seine, giving orders for the fagots to be laid, and the immediate execution of the grand master and many others.
Philip's death, occurring as it did soon after this sacrilege, was popularly believed to be a manifestation of God's wrath; and the death of his three sons, Louis, Philip, and Charles, who successively reigned during a period of only fourteen years, leaving the family extinct, seemed a further proof that a curse rested upon the house.
The question of the succession, for the first time since Hugh Capet, was in doubt. By the existing Salic Law only male descendants were eligible to the throne of France. The three sons of Philip IV. had died, leaving each a daughter, so the son of Charles of Valois, only brother of Philip IV., was the nearest in descent from Hugh Capet; and thus the crown passed to the Valois branch of the family in the person of Philip VI. (1328).