Fig. 29.—The fortified Bridge of Lamentano, near Rome, theatre of the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, in the Twelfth Century.
St. Louis, following in the footsteps of Philip Augustus, laboured to suppress the abuses of the feudal régime; he compelled his barons to choose between the fiefs which they held from him and those which they had received from the kings of England; he rooted out the old feudal stocks, created a new feudalism, not less valiant but more moral than the old, and never lost sight of the formidable opposition which the old nobility had ventured to set up against the Queen-Regent, Blanche of Castile, when it declared that the young King Louis should not be consecrated until the suzerain aristocracy was restored to the plenitude of its privileges. After Louis IX., French feudalism, transformed by the saint-king, was neither less haughty, less trivial, nor less insolent than before, but it was more favourable to the crown and less hostile to the Church. It formed a brilliant array of chivalry, full of enthusiasm and impetuosity, commencing a battle well, always winning it at the very beginning of the action, but losing it afterwards for want of being supported by a national body of infantry, whose help it despised; it made up a body of cavalry admirably adapted for tournaments and feats of arms, but incapable of carrying on a regular warfare, or even of ensuring success in a great battle. The victories of Mons-en-Puelle, under Philip IV., and of Cassel, under Philip of Valois (1328), increased to the utmost the blind confidence of the French nobility, and brought about, by absolutely identical means, the disasters of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt (1346, 1356, 1415).
From the events which took place during the space of a century, from the accession to the imperial throne of the Emperor Louis V. (1313) to the Peace of Brétigny (1360), it was made manifest that the destinies of the feudal world rested henceforth upon France and England, those two rival powers, both of which were acquisitive and inflexible; that the Emperor and the Pope occupied but the second place in this latest evolution of feudalism; that Rome, compelled to bend towards France, gave the latter a considerable preponderance, and that the force of equilibrium must inevitably bring together the King of England and the Emperor of Germany. The French royalty, despite the vicissitudes caused by an incessant struggle against the English, despite the ravages of the plague, which had depopulated two-thirds of the kingdom, despite its financial burdens and the precarious position of the monarchy, continued its work of assimilation and feudal incorporation; the suzerainty attaching to the great fiefs gradually fell under the jurisdiction of the sovereign, while, upon the right bank of the Rhine, the great barons remained almost as omnipotent as ever they had been.
There existed in Germany at that time two kinds of leagues between the nobility, the one offensive and the other defensive; that of the Gauerbinate or Gauerbschaften, by virtue of which the petty nobility formed family pacts for transmitting their fiefs by indirect line when the direct line should fail, and for reconstructing or repairing their castles out of a common fund; and that of the Teutonic Hanse, the league of the prince-archbishops and electors with sixty towns upon the Rhine. Rodolph of Hapsburg (Fig. 30), a monarch as resolute as he was able, put a stop to proceedings which were full of danger to the imperial authority, compelled his vassals to do him homage, and razed to the ground seventy fortresses whose feudal brigandage had scattered desolation and ruin; but, after his death, the usurpation of the suzerain lords began afresh, and the Bulle d’Or, which was the basis of public right in Germany, confirmed the downfall of the imperial suzerainty (1378).
Fig. 30.—Equestrian Stone Statue of Rodolph of Hapsburg, Emperor of Germany, by Erwin de Steinbach, placed above the Grand Portal of Strasburg Cathedral (Thirteenth Century).
Fig. 31.—Maximilian of Austria, with Mary of Burgundy, his wife, only daughter of Charles the Bold, and their young son Philip, afterwards King of Castile.—“Abridged Chronicles of Burgundy,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Library of M. Ambroise-Firmin Didot.
In France, on the other hand, as each convocation of the States-General was attended with the creation or levying of some new tax, the third estate attempted to exact all the more from royalty in proportion as it gratified the latter’s pecuniary demands, claiming to have a voice in the question of peace or war, to direct the financial affairs of the kingdom, to be convoked every year, and to share, with the two other orders, the weight of the charges the profit of which ought to be shared by all. The feudal nobility resisted the exorbitant pretensions of the third estate, but when they saw this class forming a secret alliance with the clergy, and setting on foot a formidable league, the password of which was the destruction of the castles and the annihilation of the nobles, they hesitated, and did nothing until the horrible excesses committed by the league in the country districts had given the feudal reaction a character of legality. In 1383, after the battle of Rosebecque, which inflicted a heavy blow upon the communal cause in Flanders and in France, it seemed as if the power of suzerainty was about to revive once more. Froissart, in his Chronicles, rejoiced at this fact, because he believed that social order was threatened with utter ruin (see his Chronicles, year 1383); but French chivalry succumbed in its turn at Agincourt beneath the onslaught of the English archers. This was the final condemnation of feudal armies, as well as of the system which these armies represented, and which they had failed in sustaining. French feudalism had already ceased to be anything more than a storehouse of traditions which were still held in respect, and of old customs which had fallen into disuse among the ancient nobility.