An accident coming immediately after the second Crusade, an accident which for the mo ment seemed to check the rise of the Capetian house, proved within half a century the main factcir of 'its:definite establishment The heiress of the crown of England, Matilda, the grand daughter of the Conqueror, and widow of the German emperor, had married the lord of the great Province of Anjou. Her son, Henry, landed 'as a boy in defense of his mother's rights against:Stephen of Boulogne who had contested the English succession and was adcnowledged heir. In 1154, therefore, by various relation ships Brittany, Anjou and other lordships were in the 'hands of a young and vigorous soldier who' also became king of England and Duke of Normandy. Or, to put it as the French 'law yers saw it, the •dukes of :Brittany and Nor mandy, the Cciunt of Anjou, 'etc.,• were all Merged in• one person, and that person was the powerfful king of England. Nor was this all: The vast territories of Aquitaine, a feudal over ' lordithip which; roughly speaking, comprised all the soinbirest of France, had ended in the •hands of an heiress, Eleanor; the male succes :sion had failed. Eleanor had first been mar ried to Louis VII of France, and had accom panied him on his crusade; her desperate char acter had led to a divorce, and immediately upon its pronouncement at Berne, Aquitaine, after its momentary union with the crown 'of Paris, fell into the hands of this same young 'daintant to the crown of England, for the :divorced woman married him. The position, therefore, on Henry H's accession was this: That the feudal lordships of all Gallic territory West of a line drawn roughly from the centre of the Pyrenees to the neighborhood of the . mouth of the Somme were in the hands of one tnan, and that man the king of England. In pure theory the French Crown stood as it had stood before: it was• still overlord of the whole, and Henry of England had to do homage sep arately for each province; but in practice three things gravely modified this theory. First, the united control of territories which in the aggre gate formed two-thirds of French territory; 'secondly, the fact that these two-thirds included the maritime and commercial portion of every single great French river (Rouen, Nantes, Bor deaux, were all within Henry's boundaries) and thirdly, the' complication by which these mari time provinces were in the hands of an island king. There is little doubt that if the relation ship had endured for a couple of generations, its theoretical side would have weakened to such a degree that the Capetian power would have dwindled to a shadow and very soon a Plantagenet would have ruled in Paris. It did not endure. When Louis VII died in 1180 he was succeeded by his son Philip Augustus, a , man in whont the energies and the clear judg ment of this new birth of civilization seemed to centre. It is evident that from the begin ning of his reign Philip Augustus' great object was to destroy the overwhelming position of the house of Anjou. Fissures were opened in 'the great fabric by the perpetual revolts of Henry's sons under the impulse of their mother, a curse to her second, as she had been to her first, husband. The fall of Jerusalem in 1187 led to a third crusade. The old king Henry died; his son, •Richard I of England, still nom inally the lord of all these territories, went to the rescue of the Holy Land as did Philip Au gustus himself.• Richard was imprisoned on his return; the French king intrigued to prolong that imprisonment, and though he failed, for tune was on hisside when Richard I died at the siege of a castle in 1199, leaving England and all the. French lordships to his brother John. The opportunity afforded by John's character was exceptional; his premature regency, his license, the envy aroused by his cultivation and his prowess, united against him the feudal aris tocracy of England. The claims of Arthur, his nephew, the heir to Brittany, and in strict right his senior in succession to all the territories, coupled with complaints due to his marriage with the betrothed of the Count of la Marche, and the rising of Poitou, gave Philip Augustus a pretext for summoning John as feudal in ferior to clear himself before a court of his peers. He failed to do so; his land was declared forfeit; the claims of Arthur were pressed. This was in 1202. In the war that followed young Arthur was captured and shortly after ward disappeared. John was accused of the murder, and the powerful armies of Philip were supported by the general indignation of Europe. By the end of 1205 only a few towns near the seacoast remained in the hands of the English king. Though the physical conquest of the Angevin terntories was thus achieved, the vic tory was not really ratified till 1214. In that year John, the best diplomatist of his age, ral lied against Philip Augustus all the forces which it was possible to bring, moral and material, into the field. The Count of Flanders, against whom Philip Augustus had resolutely set the Roman municipalities of that district, the Ger man emperor, and the sympathy of the papacy were marshalled in this critical month of July against the French Crown. Philip Augustus won a decisive victory. It was not only a de cisive victory for the French Crown at that moment, it was one of the very few battles in -which history may be said definitely to have marked the success or failure of a great his torical cause, and it affirms for 600 years the power of the French monarchy and for a much longer and indefinite period the unity and exist ence of the French nation. It had also its re action upon England, for the aristocratic in surrection against John was emboldened by this defeat of his to press on to the consumma tion of Magna Charta.
Meanwhile yet another factor had entered into the rapidly growing consolidation of the Capetian hegemony. The Albigensian Crusade had been undertaken and had succeeded.
Contact with the East has invariably pro duced upon Western Europeans an effect which may be compared with the effect of a spell, and usually of a maleficent spell. Its effects may be clearly observed in those modern nations which have the misfortune to be intimately mixed (especially if their governing class is intimately mixed) with the Asiatic. Oriental customs and vices and Oriental weakening of European health enter in with too much knowl edge of the East. The Crusades, now a century old, had cast such a spell over the highly civil ized townships of the south of France, and a confused mass of Oriental customs whose origins or nucleus had in the town of Albi overspread the county of Toulouse and its surrounding territory. The danger grew with 'startling rapidity; the Pope called against it the military power of the overlord, the north ern barons especially answered the call; the fight began in 1208, and the re-establishment of Christian unity and civilization was effected within four years. This campaign, which in the eyes of contemporaries was mainly a cam paign for the unity of the health of Christen dom, has for these notes the particular im portance that it converted what was already a nominal into a real supremacy of the power of Paris over the southern portions of Gaul. The date 1215 may be taken as the term of all this development. England was now pledged to an aristocratic policy which would weaken the growth of a great civilized state. The Lateran Council had affirmed, in its most determined form, the framework of mediaeval Catholicism, the Capetian crown had triumphed over all its enemies at Bouvines, the south was definitely in the grip of the monarchy; and on the south ern frontiers of Spain the great and successful fight of Navas de Tolosas had extinguished forever the threat of the Mohammedan.
Henceforward Islam dwelt only upon sufferance between the extreme boundaries of Andalusia. In Paris, the Louvre, the symbol of the estab lished monarchy was built, and round the city the great new wall, built at civic expense, was the symbol of that new mediaeval civilization which was in a way the resurrection of the Roman municipality. The university was char tered and active; the epoch of the 13th century, the climax of the French race and certainly the climax of European development between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, had come to flower. Philip Augustus died in 1223. The three short years of his son Louis VIII were mainly -distinguished for a triumphant march through the south, and in 1226 the personality who stands most for the 13th century in Europe and in France, that of Saint Louis, the grandson of Philip Augustus, was seated upon the throne.
He was but a child, under the tutelage of his mother, Blanche of Castille, but even during the period of her guardianship, which was troubled by civil war, as such minorities invariably were, the power of the Crown was but the more con firmed; and from the time when the king was of age until he undertook in 1248 his first cru sade, there was established by example and by vigorous action• so absolute a strength in the monarchy that all the defeats and vicissitudes of the next 200 years were unable to shake it. It had 'acquired a sanctity that was almost leg endary and an actual force which made it co incident with the National life. The crusade of Saint Louis was directed against Egypt, for Pal estine was now a dependency of Cairo and the recovery of the Holy Land could only be ac complished by the reduction of the Mohamme dan power upon the Nile. The five or six years during which the effort lasted were, upon the whole, unsuccessful. Saint Louis returned in 1254 with a vastly increased reputation, by far the chief figure in Europe, but there remained of the old French garrisons in the Levant noth ing but few port towns at the mercy of oc casional sieges, and doomed to ultimate capture. The 16 years that followed were years of quiet and successful administration, during which the most interesting experiment was that in which Saint Louis, after defeating Henry III, the Eng lish king, in the south, granted him a narrow territory in that region as the price of what was imagined to be a lasting peace. The king, though long past his 50 years, was moved in 1270 to another crusade. The attempt this time was made against Tunis, but at its very incep tion Saint Louis died on the spot that is now marked by his chapel at Carthage. It. is possi ble that the expedition to Tunis was suggested by the position of his brother, Charles of Anjou, in the south' of Italy, for Charles, who 25 years before had married the heiress of Provence (thereby still further increasing the power of the house of Paris) had been called in by the Pope to combat the last efforts of the German Empire in Italy, and held for the moment, but only for the moment, the sovereignty of Sicily and of the kingdom of Naples. The massacre of the French in Sicily in 1282 put an end to his power, but it did not afford any opportunity for the interference of the Empire with the papacy or with the affairs of the Italian Penin sula. With the fall of the last Hohenstauffen, the mixture of the Germans in Italian affairs comes to an end and henceforth the anarchic welter and ill-organized conception, which had called itself for the last 300 years the Empire, meant nothing more in politics than a loose con federation of shifting Teutonic lordships. The valley of the Rhone, over which a German exec utive had nominally existed for so long, though not yet technically subject to the French king, was now virtually within the orbit of which Paris was the centre. The reign of Philip III, son of Saint Louis, from 1270 to 1285, contains little of moment. His son Philip the Fair, who came to the throne in this latter year, marks, despite evident signs of internal decay, the summit of the material power of this first un broken Capetian line. His mother, the heiress of Navarre, brought to the Crown that kingdom or province. His long struggle with the papacy ended in the capture of that institution, the election at Lyons in 1305 of Clement V, and the presence at Avignon of French popes for 70 years. He had the strength to destroy the gross and highly dangerous power of the Templars, a military order which had grown to be an im mensely wealthy secret society upon which the just execration of the European populace fell from every side. When he died in 1314 it seemed as though no further advance could be made in the strength of the French sovereigns. Yet it is from that date, or shortly after, that the chief peril of the nation and of the house itself must be counted. For Philip the Fair left three sons •, and, by a catastrophe hitherto unknown in all the three centuries which had seen the rise of this great family, a direct male heir to the suc cession failed. These three sons, Louis X Philip V and Charles IV, each enjoyed a brief reign, and each failed to leave a son who would succeed him. The whole course of the three reigns covers no more than 12 years, and the only chance of a direct succession lay in a man child, John, who died within a week of his birth. Charles IV did indeed leave a daughter, but the tradition which had strengthened for so long and whose example had been so glori ous, by which a male heir alone could succeed, led through a curious legendary fiction or mem ory, embodied at last in definite constitutional terms and called' by the name of ((the Salic Law,* to the rule that only a man should suc ceed to the throne. The nearest male heir, therefore, if this baby daughter of Charles IV were to be set aside, was the first cousin of Charles IV, Philip of Valois. Philip the Fair's brother Charles had been granted the title and position of Valois. It was his son who now laid claim to and immediately mounted the throne in the year 1328, 14 years after the death of his uncle. The Capetian house had pro ceeded without check from father to son in the virtual control of the town of Paris and the duchy of France for more than 400 years. For 340 it had held that position with increasing magnificence, the son regularly succeeding the father, and crowned in the father's lifetime. It had at last come to be the 'strong ruler of a great and united nation, a nation which' was the centre and core of mediaeval civilization. It was impossible that so great a change, though it were but the accession of a near collateral, should pass unchallenged, and the challenge came from Edward III of Englatid. There was no claim worth calling a claim upon• his part to the French throne, nor is it absolutely certain •that at first •he pat lonvard the plea of blood. To inherit at all he would have to inherit ,through women, and even so he did not stand first in the succession. The policy of the French king of Flanders, his harassing of the great English trade with the ports of the Low Coun tries, afforded a pretext in 1336. In 1337 hos tilities broke out; in 1339 the English king, Ed . ward III, quartered upon his shield the lilies of France, which were not finally abandoned until the middle of the 18th century. And from that year may be said to date, in legal and her aldic theory at least, the struggle of the Hun dred Years' War.