The appeal to Rome was pushed by Ingeburge's brother, Knut IV., and the Pope, Celestine III., at length granted the appeal, on March 13, 1196, reversing the decree of the council of Compiègne. The papal power was then in very weak hands, and it was fear of offending the great King of France that had occasioned the long delay in rendering justice to Ingeburge. That something more than a mere papal decree would be needed to subdue Philippe was apparent when, in June, 1196, he married Agnes de Meranie, the lovely daughter of a German prince who, under the title of Duke of Meranie, ruled the Tyrol, Istria, and a part of Bohemia. The papal menaces had not deterred the king from this insolent act of disobedience; and Pope Celestine made no attempt to coerce him by resort to more rigorous measures. Ingeburge continued to live in confinement, while Philippe enjoyed the love of his new wife, against whom no one could lay the guilt of her husband's licentious conduct.
In January, 1198, Pope Celestine was succeeded by Innocent III., one of the greatest of the occupants of the chair of St. Peter. He was of an inflexible character, not to be turned aside by any considerations of policy or of humanity from what he conceived to be his duty; and his duty it was, and his right, according to his idea, to dominate the world and the kings thereof. When the friends of Ingeburge called her case to his attention, Pope Innocent wrote letter after letter of remonstrance to Philippe Auguste, "the eldest son of the Church," summoning him to return to the paths of duty and relinquish his "concubine", Agnes de Meranie. He urged Philippe's spiritual adviser to bring him to reason by pious exhortation. All else failing, he sent Cardinal Pierre of Capua as a special legate, with injunctions to present the Church's ultimatum to the king: he must either take Ingeburge back at once, with all honor, as his lawful consort, or the entire kingdom would be put under interdict. The legate pleaded and threatened in vain; after a year of exasperating evasion the king was still not obedient. The legate at last summoned a council and pronounced the interdict, all the prelates receiving stringent orders to observe it under pain of suspension. From December, 1199, to September, 1200, France was under a general interdict.
In the case of Bertha and Robert, the ecclesiastical censures had affected only the guilty couple; in the case of Bertrade and Philippe I., only the places inhabited by them had been smitten. But the Church had now grown stronger; now the whole kingdom was to suffer because of the recalcitrant king. Everywhere religious services ceased, for the clergy were in sympathy with or afraid of the vigorous statesman now in the papal chair. The churches were closed, the altars dismantled, the crosses reversed, the bells silent, as during the solemn days in memory of Christ's Passion. The accustomed religious exercises ceased; but that was only a small part of the horror, for no more sacraments, save extreme unction and baptism of infants, could be celebrated. There were no marriages: when the king wished to marry his son to the young Blanche de Castille he was obliged to go into Normandy, into English territory, to have the ceremony performed. There were no more funerals, for the Pope forbade burials, whether in hallowed or in unhallowed ground: the air was filled with the pestilential stench from unburied corpses. The voice of the people rose in wrath against their impious king; it was he who was bringing all this woe upon the land. Philippe and Agnes lived on, she happy in the love of her king, and in her children, Philippe and Marie, he stubbornly resistant. He deprived bishops of their sees and sequestered their goods; he punished even laymen for daring to take the side of the Pope. But at last he must yield, for his people would endure no more.
Ingeburge was taken back as wife and queen, being at last released from the chateau of Etampes where she had been confined. But the king, deeply in love with Agnes, declared that this recognition of Ingeburge was only provisional, since he meant to appeal once more to Rome for an annulment of the marriage. The fair Agnes, the victim of these unfortunate circumstances, did not long survive the separation from Philippe, whose passionate love she returned. A few weeks later she died at Poissi, giving birth to a short-lived son named Tristan, the pledge of his mother's sorrows. She had given Philippe two children before this, and, though her union with the king had been stigmatized as immoral by the Church, the Pope recognized the legitimacy of the offspring in November, 1201. It was her son Philippe, surnamed Hurepel, who became Count de Boulogne, and played no pleasing rôle under Blanche de Castille.
The death of Agnes de Meranie did not tend to soften Philippe's feelings toward Ingeburge. She was imprisoned anew, and treated with every indignity that could be devised, short of calling down again the wrath of Pope Innocent. For eleven years she was treated in this way, and was constantly urged, by entreaties and threats, to take the veil, while Philippe was continuing his efforts to have the marriage annulled. In 1212, however, Philippe had need of the friendship of Rome. Ingeburge was again taken from her prison at Etampes and received at court: the victory of the Pope was complete, as far as the letter of the law was concerned. There was never any love between the royal pair, and could not be; for between them stood the sad ghost of Agnes de Meranie to incite Ingeburge to jealousy and Philippe to fresh aversion.
Ingeburge could never have been happy with Philippe, though he treated her more considerately and fairly during the last years of his life. When her husband died, in 1223, and his son Louis VIII. came to the throne, Ingeburge was nearer peace than she had been since she left her native land. We hear, henceforth, almost nothing of her; there was no role for a dowager queen, especially one who was a foreigner associated with most distressing events for France. We do find her name as one of the notabilities in the solemn procession which, on August 2, 1224, went from the cathedral of Notre Dame to the Abbey of St. Antoine, to ask of the Lord of Hosts for a victory for the arms of Louis VIII. at Rochelle. Now and again her name occurs in the accounts of the royal household while that careful economist, Blanche de Castille, is governing France. She is called "la reine d'Orléans," because she lived at Orléans, part of the domain reserved to her as Queen Dowager. Here she lived quietly, and let us hope not unhappily, till her death in 1237. She lived in the midst of great events in which she could take no part; and only her sorrows have preserved for us this fragment of her story.
Before we begin the history of the greatest queen France had yet seen, Blanche de Castille, it might be well to note some of the changes in social conditions since the age of the early Capetians. These changes were, fortunately, all in the direction of amelioration; for the civilization of France, of Europe, was taking long strides during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and an advance in civilization involves an improvement in the condition of women. Historians usually look at the matter from the point of view of man; it must be our endeavor to treat of social conditions and their causes rather from the point of view of woman.
Glancing at the history of France for a moment, it is easy enough to distinguish certain causes or motive forces in the advance in civilization. Because it is usually quite overlooked, we shall name first the influence of contact with that very society of Provence which France was bending her energies to bring to utter ruin. Unquestionably the trouvères of northern France owed something of their art to the troubadours of southern France, even if the former were more than mere imitators. The softening effect of the musical and literary arts professed by these poets need not be dwelt upon, but we might remark that it was to the ladies of France, in most cases, that the trouvères sang, and that this conversion of the bard, singing the glories of his chief, into the minstrel, still singing of battles but also of fair ladies and for the ears of fair ladies, is a fact not lacking significance. Woman was no longer the mere toy of the warrior; it is no longer Aude, barely mentioned in the Chanson de Roland, but Nicolette, that fairest, sweetest of the mediæval heroines of romance, who is of more interest than Aucassin in the story. And this little chantefable, as it is aptly called, of Aucassin et Nicolette, is so nearly Provençal that Provence has claimed it; it lies on the borderland between the manner of the troubadours and that of the trouvères. A woman is here distinctly a heroine, no longer a mere foil to the hero; and the lovely little tale is manifestly intended to please an audience of ladies as well as of knights.
We have spoken of this Provençal influence and sought to illustrate what may be the method of its working, through the minstrel in the lady's bower, but we do not care to lay too much stress upon it, because it may not be entirely distinct from a still greater and kindred influence. When the hosts of Peter the Hermit, crazed with religious fanaticism such as the world sees but once in a great while, straggled back from their crusade it might have been thought that they brought with them nothing but the memory of their sufferings, or the precious memory of those holy places they had journeyed so far and endured so much to see. But their crusade had been a success; they had won the holy places from the infidel, and after they had achieved their success they had had time to look about them upon the new civilization with which they found themselves in contact. When they come back to their homes they bring enthusiastic memories of the glories of the East, and soon the spirit of sheer adventure replaces, almost insensibly, religious feeling, and crusade follows crusade, till we find one that does not even pretend to go to Palestine, but devotes itself to the conquest of Constantinople, full of riches and luxuries undreamed of in France. When Geoffrey Villehardouin gives a glowing description of the magnificence of Constantinople we see that already there is appreciation of things that the first crusaders would have scorned or ruthlessly destroyed. The influence of the Crusades in introducing higher standards of domestic comfort, greater luxury, greater refinement, has been too often dwelt upon to need further notice here.
The cause of woman and of civilization was helped in another way by the Crusades. While the warlike barons found a vent for their surplus fighting blood in smiting the infidel and robbing the Greek, there was peace at home, for private wars and feuds ceased. The barons, moreover, needed money to continue their sojourn in the army of Christ; and we hear that in the splendor of the preparations for that Crusade in which Eleanor took part the nobles of France vied with each other till they were almost ruined. To get this money they sold freedom to their slaves, immunity from vexatious feudal rights to their serfs, privileges and charters to their burgesses. While they themselves were spending their money and acquiring expensive tastes and refined ideas in contact with the Greeks and Saracens, their subjects were acquiring a greater degree of freedom, and their king, if he were a wise one, was consolidating his kingdom and girding up his loins for more effective resistance to their turbulence. The strength of the monarchy increased as the power of the independent baronage decreased, and the strength of the monarchy meant greater tranquillity, greater respect for law, and the fostering of conditions favorable to the growth of commerce.