The effect of that march was overwhelming; the sudden expansion of experience, the awak ening of the mind, which accompanied it, pro duced the Middle Ages. And when from 1100 to 1115 such lords as had not established them selves in the East returned to Gaul, they dis covered the monarchy renewed, and the na tional movement in full strength under the vig orous personality of Louis, who, though the first of that name in the Capetian line, called himself, in memory of the Carlovingians and of the Merovingians, The towns, the hierarchy, the populace, everywhere seconded this refounder of the monarchy, and when he died, in 1137, his son Louis succeeded, heir to an executive power which was no longer founded upon territorial possession nor merely the nominal feudal bond between the great over lords, but possessed a military power of in numerable garrisoned fortresses, of a legal cor poration actively allied to the Crown, and of market-towns and great cities which throughout the territory of Gaul were prepared increasingly to insist with every new generation upon the power of the king of Paris in whom they saw the living figure of the nation.
Now, at the end of the first third of the 12th century, France and Europe were fully awake. A whole generation had grown up accustomed to territorial expansion (it was a generation since the Christians had entered Toledo and a generation since the first Christian king of Hungary had died; a generation since civiliza tion had re-entered England and a generation since the first Crusade had brought the West into touch again with the East and had begun again to teach the Christians of the Mediterra nean the uses of the sea. It was a generation since the papacy had become a free and self organized thing, elected from within the hier archy, and a generation since unity of disci pline had been established throughout the West by the powerful will of Gregory VII).
The first effect of the new life was the awak ening of intellectual discussion, and of this dis cussion France, and Paris in particular, were the seat. It turned upon the fundamental prob lem of allphilosophy, the reality of ideas. It had for protagonist Saint Bernard upon the or thodox side, and, in a'manner which pretended to compromise but which was really opposin, the brilliant genius of Abelard upon the side that would have led to schisms and perhaps at last to the negation of God. That debate con sciously or unconsciously is still in progress; the affections and sympathies of the two parties are to-day much the same. Out of it arose as its first fruit the University. Paris began to found those colleges and to group them into that united organism which soon became the great European model for the collegiate uni versity. Parallel with the growth of a' new
curiosity came in the same place and front the same people the marvelous symbol of Gothic architecture. Sugar, the abbot of Saint Denis, the friend and counsellor of King Louis VI, and in a sense the guardian of his son, was the first to light the flame. The south tower of his facade is the first bit of true Gothic in Europe. The same masons who had built it in their youth might have lived in their late manhood to see the beginning of Notre Dame; and with Notre Dame, the first great Gothic building of northwestern Europe, the style was fixed.
All this movement and advance corresponded to the reign of Louis VII, the son of Louis VI, and to that middle period of the century which is marked by "the Second Cru sade,)) and in which it was increasingly felt that the French hold on Palestine was doubtful and precarious. This reign was of great length; it stretched from 1137 to 1180; its central episode, the Crusade, was undertaken upon the news of the fall of the frontier fortress of Edessa; it occupied the two years from 1147 to 1149, consisted in a futile attempt to take Damascus, and did little other than weaken the prestige of the Christian name in the East.
As has already been pointed out, not only the Crusades but the new movement and ex pansion of Europe, the reflowering of civiliza tion had necessarily helped the growth of the power of the Crown; that power, apart from the ceaseless support of the clergy, the lawyers and the towns, reposed upon two territorial bases, the king's political position as superior over the great provincial lords, and the king's economic position as private lord over a num ber of manors and countrysides. In the first of these he could grow only by the growth of an idea, but in the second he could grow in a material and actual manner. Already the cru sading movement had led in Louis VI's time to the Crown's becoming direct lord of the province of Berri, and thus obtaining direct possession of a district south of the Loire, and in a vast number of minor cases, only a certain propor tion of which even are recorded, the commercial and military movement of the time was letting isolated manors and lordships fall by escheat, by confiscation, by disputed possession, and in general by the active presence and effort of the lawyers, into the king's hands; and with every new step in the power of the kingship, the con sciousness and unity of the nation increased also.