England came personally to the assistance of the Flemish
   Count, because of the hatred he felt towards Philip of France.
   Otho, Emperor of Germany, who had been excommunicated and
   deposed by the Pope, and who was struggling for his crown with
   the young Hohenstaufen, Frederick II., took part in the melee,
   because John was his uncle, and because the Pope was for
   Philip, and because Germany dreaded the rising power of
   France. So the war, which seemed at first to be a trifling
   affair in a corner, became in fact a grand clearing storm, for
   the settlement of many large issues, important to all Europe.
   The settlement was accomplished by a single decisive battle,
   fought at Bouvines (1214), not far from Tournay. It
   established effectively in France the feudal superiority and
   actual sovereignty of the king. It evoked a national spirit
   among the French people, having been their first national
   victory, won under the banners of a definite kingdom, over
   foreign foes. It was a triumph for the Papacy and the Church
   and a crushing blow to those who dared resist the mandates of
   Rome. It sent King John back to England so humbled and
   weakened that he had little stomach for the contest which
   awaited him there, and the grand event of the signing of Magna
   Charta next year was more easily brought about. It settled the
   fate of Otho of Germany, and cleared the bright opening of the
   stormy career of Frederick II., his successor. Thus the battle
   of Bouvines, which is not a famous field in common knowledge,
   must really be numbered among the great and important battles
   of the world.

   When Philip Augustus died in 1223, the regality which he
   bequeathed to his son, Louis VIII., was something vastly
   greater than that which came to him from his predecessors. He
   had enhanced both the dignity and the power, both the
   authority and the prestige, of the Crown, and made a
   substantial kingdom of France. Louis VIII. enlarged his
   dominions by the conquest of Lower Poitou and the taking of
   Rochelle from the English; but he sowed the seeds of future
   weakness in the monarchy by creating great duchies for his
   children, which became as troublesome to later kings as
   Normandy and Anjou had been to those before him.

Saint Louis.

   Louis IX.--Saint Louis in the calendar of the Catholic
   Church--who came to the throne in 1226, while a child of
   eleven years, was a king of so noble a type that he stands
   nearly alone in history. Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor, and
   King Alfred of England, are the only sovereigns who seem
   worthy to be compared with him; and even the purity of those
   rare souls is not quite so simple and so selfless, perhaps, as
   that which shines in the beautiful character of this most
   Christian king. His goodness was of that quality which rises
   to greatness--above all other measures of greatness in the
   distinction of men. It was of that quality which even a wicked
   world is compelled to feel and to bend to as a power, much
   exceeding the power of state-craft or of the sword. Of all the
   kings of his line, this Saint Louis was probably the one who
   had least thought of a royal interest in France distinct from
   the interest of the people of France; and the one who
   consciously did least to aggrandize the monarchy and enlarge
   its powers; but no king before him or after him was so much
   the true architect of the foundations of the absolute French
   monarchy of later times. His constant purpose was to give
   peace to his kingdom and justice to his people; to end
   violence and wrong-doing.
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   In pursuing this purpose, he gave a new character and a new
   influence to the royal courts,--established them in public
   confidence,--accustomed his subjects to appeal to them; he
   denounced the brutal senselessness of trials by combat, and
   commanded their abolition; he gave encouragement to the study
   and the introduction of Roman law, and so helped to dispel the
   crude political as well as legal ideas that feudalism rested
   on. His measures in these directions all tended to the
   undermining of the feudal system and to the breaking down of
   the independence of the great vassals who divided sovereignty
   with the king. At the same time the upright soul of King
   Louis, devotedly pious son of the Church as he was, yielded
   his conscience to it, and the just ordinances of his kingdom,
   no more than he yielded to the haughty turbulence of the great
   vassals of the crown.

   The great misfortunes of the reign of Saint Louis were the two
   calamitous Crusades in which he engaged (1248-1254, and 1270),
   and in the last of which he died. They were futile in every
   way--as unwisely conducted as they were unwisely conceived;
   but they count among the few errors of a noble, great life.
   Regarded altogether, in the light which after-history throws
   back upon it, the reign of Louis IX. is more loftily
   distinguished than any other in the annals of France.

Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface.

   There is little to distinguish the reign of St. Louis' son,
   Philip III., "le Hardi," "the Rash" (1270-1285), though the
   remains of the great fief of Toulouse were added in his time
   to the royal domain; but under the grandson of St. Louis, the
   fourth Philip, surnamed "le Bel," there was a season of storms
   in France. This Philip was unquestionably a man of clear, cold
   intellect, and of powerful, unbending will. There was nothing
   of the soldier in him, much of the lawyer-like mind and
   disposition. The men of the gown were his counsellors; he
   advanced their influence, and promoted the acceptance in
   France of the principles of the Roman or civil law, which were
   antagonistic to feudal ideas. In his attitude towards the
   Papacy--which had declined greatly in character and power
   within the century past--he was extraordinarily bold. His
   famous quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. resulted in
   humiliations to the head of the Church from which, in some
   respects, there was no recovery. The quarrel arose on
   questions connected chiefly with the taxing of the clergy. The
   Pope launched one angry Bull after another against the
   audacious king, and the latter retorted with Ordinances which
   were as effective as the Bulls. Excommunication was defied;
   the Inquisition was suppressed in France; appeal taken to a
   General Council of the Church. At last Boniface suffered
   personal violence at the hands of a party of hired ruffians,
   in French pay, who attacked him at his country residence, and
   received such indignities that he expired soon after of shame
   and rage. The pope immediately succeeding died a few months
   later, and dark suspicions as to the cause of his death were
   entertained; for he gave place (1305) to one, Clement V., who
   was the tool of the French king, bound to him by pledges and
   guarantees before his election. This Pope Clement removed the
   papal residence from Rome to Avignon, and for a long
   period--the period known as "the Babylonish Captivity"--the
   Holy See was subservient to the monarchy of France.

   In this contest with the Papacy, Philip threw himself on the
   support of the whole body of his people, convoking (1302) the
   first meeting of the Three Estates--the first of the few
   general Parliaments--ever assembled in France.

Destruction of the Templars.

   A more sinister event in the reign of Philip IV. was his
   prosecution and destruction of the famous Order of the Knights
   Templars. The dark, dramatic story has been told many times,
   and its incidents are familiar. Perhaps there will never be
   agreement as to the bottom of truth that might exist in the
   charges brought against the Order; but few question the fact
   that its blackest guilt in the eyes of the French King was its
   wealth, which he coveted and which he was resolved to find
   reasons for taking to himself. The knights were accused of
   infidelity, blasphemy, and abominable vices. They were tried,
   tortured, tempted to confessions, burned at the stake, and
   their lands and goods were divided between the Crown and the
   Knights of St. John.

Flemish Wealth and Independence.

   The wilful king had little mercy in his cold heart and few
   scruples in his calculating brain. His character was not
   admirable; but the ends which he compassed were mostly good
   for the strength and independence of the monarchy of France,
   and, on the whole, for the welfare of the people subject to
   it. Even the disasters of his reign had sometimes their good
   effect: as in the case of his failure to subjugate the great
   county of Flanders. Originally a fief of the Kings of France,
   it had been growing apart from the French monarchy, through
   the independent interests and feelings that rose in it with
   the increase of wealth among its singularly industrious and
   thrifty people. The Low Countries, or Netherlands, on both
   sides of the Rhine, had been the first in western Europe to
   develop industrial arts and the trade that goes with them in a
   thoroughly intelligent and systematic way. The Flemings were
   leaders in this industrial development. Their country was full
   of busy cities,--communes, with large liberties in
   possession,--where prosperous artisans, pursuing many crafts,
   were organized in gilds and felt strong for the defense of
   their chartered rights. Ghent exceeded Paris in riches and
   population at the end of the thirteenth century. Bruges was
   nearly its equal; and there were many of less note. The
   country was already a prize to be coveted by kings; and the
   kings of France, who claimed the rights of feudal superiority
   over its count, had long been seeking to make their
   sovereignty direct, while the spirit of the Flemings carried
   them more and more toward independence.

   In 1294, Philip IV. became involved in war with Edward I. of
   England over Guienne. Flanders, which traded largely with
   England and was in close friendship with the English king and
   people, took sides with the latter, and was basely abandoned
   when Philip and Edward made peace, in 1302. The French king
   then seized his opportunity to subjugate the Flemings, which
   he practically accomplished for a time, mastering all of their
   cities except Ghent. His need and his greed made the burden of
   taxes which he now laid on these new subjects very heavy and
   they were soon in revolt. By accident, and the folly of the
   French, they won a fearfully decisive victory at Courtray,
   where some thousands of the nobles and knights of France
   charged blindly into a canal, and were drowned, suffocated and
   slaughtered in heaps. The carnage was so great that it broke
   the strength of the feudal chivalry of France, and the French
   crown, while it lost Flanders, yet gained power from the very
   disaster.

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   In 1314, Philip IV. died, leaving three sons, who occupied the
   throne for brief terms in succession: Louis X, surnamed Hutin
   (disorder), who survived his father little more than a year;
   Philip V., called "the Long" (1316-1322), and Charles IV.,
   known as "the Fair" (1322-1328). With the death of Charles the
   Fair, the direct line of the Capetian Kings came to an end,
   and Philip, Count of Valois, first cousin of the late kings,
   and grandson of Philip III., came to the throne, as Philip
   VI.--introducing the Valois line of kings.

Claims of Edward III. of England.

   The so-called Salic law, excluding females, in France, from
   the throne, had now, in the arrangement of these recent
   successions, been affirmed and enforced. It was promptly
   disputed by King Edward III. of England, who claimed the
   French crown by right of his mother, daughter of Philip IV.
   and sister of the last three kings. His attempt to enforce
   this claim was the beginning of the wicked, desolating
   "Hundred Years War" between England and France, which
   well-nigh ruined the latter, while it contributed in the
   former to the advancement of the commons in political power.

England after the Norman Conquest.

   The England of the reign of Edward III., when the Hundred
   Years War began, was a country quite different in condition
   from that which our narrative left, at the time it had yielded
   (about 1071) to William the Norman conqueror. The English
   people were brought low by that subjugation, and the yoke
   which the Normans laid upon them was heavy indeed. They were
   stripped of their lands by confiscation; they were disarmed
   and disorganized; every attempt at rebellion failed miserably,
   and every failure brought wider confiscations. The old
   nobility suffered most and its ranks were thinned. England
   became Norman in its aristocracy and remained English in its
   commons and its villeinage.

Modified Feudalism in England.

   Before the Conquest, feudalism had crept into its southern
   parts and was working a slow change of its old free Germanic
   institutions. But the Normans quickened the change and widened
   it. At the same time they controlled it in certain ways,
   favorably both to the monarchy and the people. They
   established a feudal system, but it was a system different
   from that which broke up the unity of both kingdoms of the
   Franks. William, shrewd statesman that he was, took care that
   no dangerous great fiefs should be created; and he took care,
   too, that every landlord in England should swear fealty direct
   to the king,--thus placing the Crown in immediate relations
   with all its subjects, permitting no intermediary lord to take
   their first allegiance to himself and pass it on at second
   hand to a mere crowned overlord.

   The effect of this diluted organization of feudalism in
   England was to make the monarchy so strong, from the
   beginning, that both aristocracy and commons were naturally
   put on their defence against it, and acquired a feeling of
   association, a sense of common interest, a habit of alliance,
   which became very important influences in the political
   history of the nation. In France, as we have seen, there had
   been nothing of this. There, at the beginning, the feudal
   aristocracy was dominant, and held itself so haughtily above
   the commons, or Third Estate, that no political cooperation
   between the two orders could be thought of when circumstances
   called for it. The kings slowly undermined the aristocratic
   power, using the communes in the process; and when, at last,
   the power of the monarchy had become threatening to both
   orders in the state, they were separated by too great an
   alienation of feeling and habit to act well together.

   It was the great good fortune of England that feudalism was
   curbed by a strong monarchy. It was the greater good fortune
   of the English people that their primitive Germanic
   institutions--their folk-moots, and their whole simple popular
   system of local government--should have had so long and sturdy
   a growth before the feudal scheme of society began seriously
   to intrude upon them. The Norman conqueror did no violence to
   those institutions. He claimed to be a lawful English king,
   respecting English laws. The laws, the customs, the
   organization of government, were, indeed, greatly modified in
   time; but the modification was slow, and the base of the whole
   political structure that rose in the Anglo-Norman kingdom
   remained wholly English.

Norman Influences in England.

   The Normans brought with them into England a more active,
   enterprising, enquiring spirit than had animated the land
   before. They brought an increase of learning and of the
   appetite for knowledge. They brought a more educated taste in
   art, to improve the building of the country and its
   workmanship in general. They brought a wider acquaintance with
   the affairs of the outside world, and drew England into
   political relations with her continental neighbors, which were
   not happy for her in the end, but which may have contributed
   for a time to her development. They brought, also, a more
   powerful organization of the Church, which gave England
   trouble in later days.

The Conqueror's Sons.

   When the Conqueror died (1087), his eldest son Robert
   succeeded him in Normandy, but he wished the crown of England
   to go to his son William, called Rufus, or "the Red." He could
   not settle the succession by his will, because in theory the
   succession was subject to the choice or assent of the nobles
   of the realm. But, in fact, William Rufus became king through
   mere tardiness of opposition; and when, a few months after his
   coronation, a formidable rebellion broke out among the Normans
   in England, who preferred his wayward brother Robert, it was
   the native English who sustained him and established him on
   the throne. The same thing occurred again after William Rufus
   died (1100). The Norman English tried again to bring in Duke
   Robert, while the native English preferred the younger
   brother, Henry, who was born among them. They won the day.
   Henry I., called Beauclerc, the Scholar, was seated on the
   throne. Unlike William Rufus, who had no gratitude for the
   support the English gave him, and ruled them harshly, Henry
   showed favor to his English subjects, and, during his reign of
   thirty-five years, the two races were so effectually
   reconciled and drawn together that little distinction between
   them appears thereafter.

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   Henry acquired Normandy, as well as England, uniting again the
   two sovereignties of his father. His thriftless brother,
   Robert, had pledged the dukedom to William Rufus, who lent him
   money for a crusading expedition. Returning penniless, Robert
   tried to recover his heritage; but Henry claimed it and made
   good the claim.

Anarchy in Stephen's Reign.

   At Henry's death, the succession fell into dispute. He had
   lost his only son. His daughter, Matilda, first married to the
   Emperor Henry V., had subsequently wedded Count Geoffrey of
   Anjou, by whom she had a son. Henry strove, during his life,
   to bind his nobles by oath to accept Matilda and her son as
   his successors. But on his death (1135) their promises were
   broken. They gave the crown to Stephen of Blois, whose mother
   was Henry's sister; whereupon there ensued the most dreadful
   period of civil war and anarchy that England ever knew.
   Stephen, at his coronation, swore to promises which he did not
   keep, losing many of his supporters for that reason; the
   Empress Matilda and her young son Henry had numerous
   partisans; and each side was able to destroy effectually the
   authority of the other. "The price of the support given to
   both was the same--absolute licence to build castles, to
   practise private war, to hang their private enemies, to
   plunder their neighbours, to coin their money, to exercise
   their petty tyrannies as they pleased." "Castles innumerable
   sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled
   with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined. The feudal
   spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even
   party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own
   behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its
   triumph ensured its fall" (Stubbs).

Angevin Kings of England.

   At length, in 1153, peace was made by a treaty which left
   Stephen in possession of the throne during his life, but made
   Henry, already recognized as Duke of Normandy, his heir.
   Stephen died the following year, and Henry II., now twenty-one
   years old, came quietly into his kingdom, beginning a new
   royal line, called the Angevin kings, because of their descent
   from Geoffrey of Anjou; also taking the name Plantagenets from
   Geoffrey's fashion of wearing a bit of broom, Planta Genista,
   in his hat.

   Henry II. proved, happily, to be a king of the strong
   character that was needed in the England of that wretched
   time. He was bold and energetic, yet sagacious, prudent,
   politic. He loved power and he used it with an unsparing hand;
   but he used it with wise judgment, and England was the better
   for it. He struck hard and persistently at the lawlessness of
   feudalism, and practically ended it forever as a menace to
   order and unity of government in England. He destroyed
   hundreds of the castles which had sprung up throughout the
   land in Stephen's time, to be nests of robbers and strongholds
   of rebellion. He humbled the turbulent barons. He did in
   England, for the promotion of justice, and for the enforcement
   of the royal authority, what Louis IX. did a little later in
   France: that is, he reorganized and strengthened the king's
   courts, creating a judicial system which, in its most
   essential features, has existed to the present time. His
   organizing hand brought system and efficiency into every
   department of the government. He demanded of the Church that
   its clergy should be subject to the common laws of the
   kingdom, in matters of crime, and to trial before the ordinary
   courts; and it was this most just reform of a crying
   abuse--the exemption of clerics from the jurisdiction of
   secular courts--which brought about the memorable collision
   of King Henry with Thomas Becket, the inflexible archbishop of
   Canterbury. Becket's tragical death made a martyr of him, and
   placed Henry in a penitential position which checked his great
   works of reform; but, on the whole, his reign was one of
   splendid success, and shines among the epochs that throw light
   on the great after-career of the English nation.

   Aside from his importance as an English statesman, Henry II.
   figured largely, in his time, among the most powerful of the
   monarchs of Europe. His dominions on the continent embraced
   much more of the territory of modern France than was ruled
   directly by the contemporary French king, though nominally he
   held them as a vassal of the latter. Normandy came to him from
   his grandfather; from his father he inherited the large
   possessions of the House of Anjou; by his marriage with
   Eleanor of Aquitaine (divorced by Louis VII. of France, as
   mentioned already) he acquired her wide and rich domain. On
   the continent, therefore, he ruled Normandy, Maine, Touraine,
   Anjou, Guienne, Poitou and Gascony. He may be said to have
   added Ireland to his English kingdom, for he began the
   conquest. He held a great place, in his century, and
   historically he is a notable figure in the time.

   His rebellious, undutiful son Richard, Cœur de Lion, the
   Crusader, the hard fighter, the knight of many rude
   adventures, who succeeded Henry II. in 1189, is popularly
   better known than he; but Richard's noisy brief career shows
   poorly when compared with his father's life of thoughtful
   statesmanship. It does not show meanly, however, like that of
   the younger son, John, who came to the throne in 1199. The
   story of John's probable murder of his young nephew, Arthur,
   of Brittany, and of his consequent loss of all the Angevin
   lands, and of Normandy (excepting only the Norman islands, the
   Jerseys, which have remained English to our own day) has been
   briefly told heretofore, when the reign of Philip Augustus of
   France was under review.

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   The whole reign of John was ignominious. He quarreled with the
   Pope--with the inflexible Innocent III., who humbled many
   kings--over a nomination to the Archbishopric of Canterbury
   (1205); his kingdom was put under interdict (1208); he was
   threatened with deposition; and when, in affright, he
   surrendered, it was so abjectly done that he swore fealty to
   the Pope, as a vassal to his suzerain, consenting to hold his
   kingdom as a fief of the Apostolic See. The triumph of the
   Papacy in this dispute brought one great good to England. It
   made Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, and thereby
   gave a wise and righteous leader to the opponents of the
   king's oppressive rule. Lords and commons, laity and clergy,
   were all alike sufferers from John's greed, his perfidy, his
   mean devices and his contempt of law. Langton rallied them to
   a sober, stern, united demonstration, which awed King John,
   and compelled him to put his seal to Magna Charta--the grand
   Charter of English liberties (1215). A few weeks later he
   tried to annul what he had done, with encouragement from the
   Pope, who anathematized the Charter and all who had to do with
   it. Then certain of the barons, in their rage, offered the
   English crown to the heir of France, afterwards Louis VIII.;
   and the French prince actually came to England (1216) with an
   army to secure it. But before the forces gathered on each side
   were brought to any decisive battle, John died. Louis'
   partisans then dropped away from him and the next year, after
   a defeat at sea, he returned to France.

Henry III. and the Barons' War.

   John left a son, a lad of nine years, who grew to be a better
   man than himself, though not a good king, for he was weak and
   untruthful in character, though amiable and probably
   well-meaning. He held the throne for fifty-six years, during
   which long time, after his minority was passed, no minister of
   ability and honorable character could get and keep office in
   the royal service. He was jealous of ministers, preferring
   mere administrative clerks; while he was docile to favorites,
   and picked them for the most part from a swarm of foreign
   adventurers whom the nation detested. The Great Charter of his
   father had been reaffirmed in his name soon after he received
   the crown, and in 1225 he was required to issue it a third
   time, as the condition of a grant of money; but he would not
   rule honestly in compliance with its provisions, and sought
   continually to lay and collect heavy taxes in unlawful ways.
   He spent money extravagantly, and was foolish and reckless in
   foreign undertakings, accepting, for example, the Kingdom of
   Sicily, offered to his son Edmund by the Pope, whose gift
   could only be made good by force of arms. At the same time he
   was servile to the popes, whose increasing demands for money
   from England were rousing even the clergy to resistance. So
   the causes of discontent grew abundantly until they brought it
   to a serious head. All classes of the people were drawn
   together again, as they had been to resist the aggressions of
   John. The great councils of the kingdom, or assemblies of
   barons and bishops (which had taken the place of the
   witenagemot of the old English time, and which now began to be
   called Parliaments), became more and more united against the
   king. At last the discontent found a leader of high capacity
   and of heroic if not blameless character, in Simon de
   Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon de Montfort was of foreign
   birth,--son of that fanatical crusader of the same name, who
   spread ruin over the fair country of the Albigeois. The
   English earldom of Leicester had passed to his family, and the
   younger Simon, receiving it, came to England and became an
   Englishman. After some years he threw himself into the
   struggle with the Crown, and his leadership was soon
   recognized. In 1258, a parliament held at London compelled the
   king to consent to the appointment of an extraordinary
   commission of twenty-four barons, clothed with full power to
   reform the government. The commission was named at a
   subsequent meeting of parliament, the same year, at Oxford,
   where the grievances to be redressed were set forth in a paper
   known as the Provisions of Oxford. From the twenty-four
   commissioners there were chosen fifteen to be the King's
   Council. This was really the creation of a new constitution
   for the kingdom, and Henry swore to observe it. But ere long
   he procured a bull from the Pope, absolving him from his oath,
   and he began to prepare for throwing off the restraints that
   had been put upon him. The other side took up arms, under
   Simon's lead; but peace was preserved for a time by referring
   all questions in dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX. of
   France. The arbiter decided against the barons (1264) and
   Montfort's party refused to abide by the award. Then followed
   the civil conflict known as the Barons' War. The king was
   defeated and taken prisoner, and was obliged to submit to
   conditions which practically transferred the administration of
   the government to three counsellors, of whom Simon de Montfort
   was the chief.

Development of the English Parliament;

   In January, 1265, a memorable parliament was called together.
   It was the first national assembly in which the larger element
   of the English Commons made its appearance; for Montfort had
   summoned to it certain representatives of borough towns, along
   with the barons, the bishops and the abbots, and along,
   moreover, with representative knights, who had been gaining
   admittance of late years to what now became a convocation of
   the Three Estates. The parliamentary model thus roughly shaped
   by the great Earl of Leicester was not continuously followed
   until another generation came; but it is his glory,
   nevertheless, to have given to England the norm and principle
   on which its unexampled parliament was framed. By dissensions
   among themselves, Simon de Montfort and his party soon lost
   the great advantage they had won, and on another appeal to
   arms they were defeated (1265) by the king's valiant and able
   son, afterwards King Edward I., and Montfort was slain. It was
   seven years after this before Edward succeeded his father, and
   nine before he came to the throne, because he was absent on a
   Crusade; but when he did, it was to prove himself, not merely
   one of the few statesmen-kings of England, but one large
   enough in mind to take lessons from the vanquished enemies of
   the Crown. He, in reality, took up the half-planned
   constitutional work of Simon de Montfort, in the development
   of the English Parliament as a body representative of all
   orders in the nation, and carried it forward to substantial
   completion. He did it because he had wit to see that the
   people he ruled could be led more easily than they could be
   driven, and that their free-giving of supplies to the Crown
   would be more open-handed than their giving under compulsion.
   The year 1295 "witnessed the first summons of a perfect and
   model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops,
   deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned
   severally in person by the king's special writ, and the
   commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing
   them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two
   elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from
   each borough" (Stubbs).
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   Two years later, the very fundamental principle of the English
   Constitution was established, by a Confirmation of the
   Charters, conceded in Edward's absence by his son, but
   afterwards assented to by him, which definitely renounced the
   right of the king to tax the nation without its consent. Thus
   the reign of Edward I. was really the most important in the
   constitutional history of England. It was scarcely less
   important in the history of English jurisprudence; for Edward
   was in full sympathy with the spirit of an age in which the
   study and reform of the law were wonderfully awakened
   throughout Europe. The great statutes of his reign are among
   the monuments of Edward's statesmanship, and not the least
   important of them are those by which he checked the
   encroachments of the Church and its dangerous acquisition of
   wealth.

   At the same time, the temper of this vigorous king was warlike
   and aggressive. He subdued the Welsh and annexed Wales as a
   principality to England. He enforced the feudal supremacy
   which the English kings claimed over Scotland, and, upon the
   Scottish throne becoming vacant, in 1290, seated John Baliol,
   as a vassal who did homage to him. The war of Scottish
   Independence then ensued, of which William Wallace and Robert
   Bruce were the heroes. Wallace perished on an English scaffold
   in 1305; Bruce, the next year, secured the Scottish crown, and
   eventually broke the bonds in which his country was held.

   Edward I. died in 1307, and his kingly capability died with
   him. He transmitted neither spirit nor wisdom to his son, the
   second Edward, who gave himself and his kingdom up to foreign
   favorites, as his grandfather had done. His angry subjects
   practically took the government out of his hands (1310), and
   confided it to a body of twenty-one members, called Ordainers.
   His reign of twenty years was one of protracted strife and
   disorder; but the constitutional power of Parliament made
   gains. In outward appearance, however, there was nothing to
   redeem the wretchedness of the time. The struggle of factions
   was pushed to civil war; while Scotland, by the great blow
   struck at Bannockburn (1314), made her independence complete.
   In 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whose descent was as royal
   as the king's, but who headed the opponents of Edward and
   Edward's unworthy favorites, was defeated in battle, taken
   prisoner, and brought to the block. This martyrdom, as it was
   called, embalmed Lancaster's memory in the hearts of the
   people.

Edward III. and his French Claims.

   The queen of Edward II., Isabella of France, daughter of
   Philip the Fair, made, at last, common cause with his enemies.
   In January, 1327, he was forced to formally resign the crown,
   and in September of the same year he was murdered, the queen,
   with little doubt, assenting to the deed. His son, Edward
   III., who now came to the throne, founded claims to the crown
   of France upon the rights of his mother, whose three brothers,
   as we have seen, had been crowned in succession and had died,
   bringing the direct line of royalty in France to an end. By
   this claim the two countries were plunged into the miseries of
   the dreadful Hundred Years War, and the progress of
   civilization in Europe was seriously checked.

Recovery of Christian Spain.

   Before entering that dark century of war, it will be necessary
   to go back a little in time, and carry our survey farther
   afield, in the countries of Europe more remote from the center
   of the events we have already scanned. In Spain, for example,
   there should be noticed, very briefly, the turning movement of
   the tide of Mahometan conquest which drove the Spanish
   Christians into the mountains of the North. In the eighth
   century, their little principality of Asturia had widened into
   the small kingdom of Leon, and the eastern county of Leon had
   taken the name of Castella (Castile) from the number of forts
   or castles with which it bristled, on the Moorish border. East
   of Leon, in the Pyrenees, there grew up about the same time the
   kingdom of Navarre, which became important in the eleventh
   century, under an enterprising king, Sancho the Great, who
   seized Castile and made a separate kingdom of it, which he
   bequeathed to his son. The same Navarrese king extended his
   dominion over a considerable part of the Spanish March, which
   Charlemagne had wrested from the Moors in the ninth century,
   and out of this territory the kingdom of Aragon was presently
   formed. These four kingdoms, of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and
   Aragon, were shuffled together and divided again, in changing
   combinations, many times during the next century or two; but
   Castile and Leon were permanently united in 1230. Meantime
   Portugal, wrested from the Moors, became a distinct kingdom;
   while Navarre was reduced in size and importance. Castile,
   Aragon, and Portugal are from that time the Christian Powers
   in the Peninsula which carried on the unending war with their
   Moslem neighbors. By the end of the thirteenth century they
   had driven the Moors into the extreme south of the peninsula,
   where the latter, thenceforth, held little beyond the small
   kingdom of Granada, which defended itself for two centuries
   more.

Moorish Civilization and its Decay.

   The Christians were winners and the Moslems were losers in
   this long battle, because adversity had disciplined the one
   and prosperity had relaxed and vitiated the other. Success
   bred disunion, and the spoils of victory engendered
   corruption, among the followers of Mahomet, very quickly in
   their career. The middle of the eighth century was hardly
   passed when the huge empire they had conquered broke in twain,
   and two Caliphates on one side of the Mediterranean, imitated the
   two Roman Empires on the other. We have seen how the Caliphate
   of the East, with its seat at Bagdad, went steadily to wreck;
   but fresh converts of Islam, out of deserts at the North, were
   in readiness, there, to gather the fragments and construct a
   new Mahometan power. In the West, where the Caliphs held their
   court at Cordova, the same crumbling of their power befell
   them, through feuds and jealousies and the decay of a sensuous
   race; but there were none to rebuild it in the Prophet's name.
   The Moor gave way to the Castilian in Spain for reasons not
   differing very much from the reasons which explain the
   supplanting of the Arab by the Turk in the East.

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   While its grandeur lasted in Spain,--from the eighth to the
   eleventh centuries--the empire of the Saracens, or Moors, was
   the most splendid of its age. It developed a civilization
   which must have been far finer, in the superficial showing,
   and in much of its spirit as well, than anything found in
   Christian Europe at that time. Its religious temper was less
   fierce and intolerant. Its intellectual disposition was
   towards broader thinking and freer inquiry. Its artistic
   feeling was truer and more instinctive. It took lessons from
   classic learning and philosophy before Germanized Europe had
   become aware of the existence of either, and it gave the
   lessons at second hand to its Christian neighbors. Its
   industries were conducted with a knowledge and a skill that
   could be found among no other people. Says Dr. Draper: "Europe
   at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement,
   more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of
   which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs.
   Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. Their houses
   were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by
   furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by
   underground pipes from flower beds. They had baths, and
   libraries, and dining halls, fountains of quicksilver and
   water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of
   dancing to lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and
   gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern neighbors, the
   feasts of the Saracens were marked with sobriety."

   The brilliancy of the Moorish civilization seems like that of
   some short-lived flower, which may spring from a thin soil of
   no lasting fertility. The qualities which yielded it had their
   season of ascendancy over the deeper-lying forces that worked
   in the Gothic mind of Christian Spain; but time exhausted the
   one, while it matured the other.

Mediæval Spanish Character.

   There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and
   religions in the peninsula affected the character of the
   Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill,
   than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened
   and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures
   they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a
   lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered
   and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some
   likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the
   partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. It
   tended to put bigotry in the place of piety--religious rancor
   in the place of charity--priests and images in the place of
   Christ--much more among the Spaniards than among other
   peoples; for they, alone, were Crusaders against the Moslem
   for eight hundred years.

Early Free Institutions in Spain.

   The political effects of those centuries of struggle in the
   peninsula were also remarkable and strangely mixed. In all the
   earlier stages of the national development, until the close of
   the mediæval period, there seems to have been as promising a
   growth of popular institutions, in most directions, as can be
   found in England itself. Apparently, there was more good
   feeling between classes than elsewhere in Europe. Nobles,
   knights and commons fought side by side in so continuous a
   battle that they were more friendly and familiar in
   acquaintance with one another. Moreover, the ennobled and the
   knighted were greatly more numerous in Spain than in the
   neighboring countries. The kings were lavish of such honors in
   rewarding valor, on every battlefield and after every campaign.
   It was impossible, therefore, for so great a distance to widen
   between the grandee and the peasant or the burgher as that
   which separated the lord and the citizen in Germany or France.
   The division of Christian Spain into several petty kingdoms,
   and the circumstances under which they were placed, retarded
   the growth of monarchical power, and yet did not tend to a
   feudal disintegration of society; because the pressure of its
   perpetual war with the infidels forced the preservation of a
   certain degree of unity, sufficient to be a saving influence.
   At the same time, the Spanish cities became prosperous, and
   naturally, in the circumstances of the country, acquired much
   freedom and many privileges. The inhabitants of some cities in
   Aragon enjoyed the privileges of nobility as a body; the
   magistrates of other cities were ennobled. Both in Aragon and
   Castile, the towns had deputies in the Cortes before any
   representatives of boroughs sat in the English Parliament; and
   the Cortes seems to have been, in the twelfth and thirteenth
   centuries, a more potent factor in government than any
   assembly of estates in any other part of Europe.

   But something was wanting in Spain that was not wanting in
   England and in the Netherlands, for example, to complete the
   evolution of a popular government from this hopeful beginning.
   And the primary want, it would seem, was a political sense or
   faculty in the people. To illustrate this in one particular:
   the Castilian Commons did not grasp the strings of the
   national purse when they had it in their hands, as the
   practical Englishmen did. They allowed the election of
   deputies from the towns to slip out of their hands and to
   become an official function of the municipalities, where it
   was corrupted and controlled by the Crown. In Aragon, the
   popular rights were more efficiently maintained, perhaps; but
   even there the political faculty of the people must have been
   defective, as compared with that of the nations in the North
   which developed free government from less promising germs.
   And, yet, it is possible that the whole subsequent failure of
   Spain may be fully explained by the ruinous prosperity of her
   career in the sixteenth century,--by the fatal gold it gave
   her from America, and the independent power it put into the
   hands of her kings.

Northern and North-eastern Europe.

   While the Spaniards in their southern peninsula were wrestling
   with the infidel Moor, their Gothic kindred of Sweden, and the
   other Norse nations of that opposite extremity of Europe, had
   been casting off paganism and emerging from the barbarism of
   their piratical age, very slowly. It was not until the tenth
   and eleventh centuries that Christianity got footing among
   them. It was not until the thirteenth century that unity and
   order, the fruits of firm government, began to be really fixed
   in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas.

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   The same is substantially true of the greater Slavic states on
   the eastern side of Europe. The Poles had accepted
   Christianity in the tenth century, and their dukes, in the
   same century, had assumed the title of kings. In the twelfth
   century they had acquired a large dominion and exercised great
   power; but the kingdom was divided, was brought into collision
   with the Teutonic Knights, who conquered Prussia, and it fell
   into a disordered state. The Russians had been Christianized
   in the same missionary century--the tenth; but civilization
   made slow progress among them, and their nation was being
   divided and re-divided in shifting principalities by
   contending families and lords. In the thirteenth century they
   were overwhelmed by the fearful calamity of a conquest by
   Mongol or Tartar hordes, and fell under the brutal domination
   of the successors of Genghis Khan.

Latin Conquest of Constantinople.

   At Constantinople, the old Greek-Roman Empire of the East had
   been passing through singular changes since we noticed it
   last. The dread with which Alexius Comnenius saw the coming of
   the Crusaders in 1097 was justified by the experience of his
   successors, after little more than a hundred years. In 1204, a
   crusade, which is sometimes numbered as the fourth and
   sometimes as the fifth in the crusading series, was diverted
   by Venetian influence from the rescue of Jerusalem to the
   conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly in the interest of a
   claimant of the Imperial throne. The city was taken and
   pillaged, and the Greek line of Emperors was supplanted by a
   Frank or Latin line, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was
   the first. But this Latin Empire was reduced to a fraction of
   the conquered dominion, the remainder being divided among
   several partners in the conquest; while two Greek princes of
   the fallen house saved fragments of the ancient realm in Asia,
   and throned themselves as emperors at Trebizond and Nicæa. The
   Latin Empire was maintained, feebly and without dignity, a
   little more than half a century; and then (1261) it was
   extinguished by the sovereign of its Nicæan rival, Michael
   Palæologus, who took Constantinople by a night surprise,
   helped by treachery within. Thus the Greek or Byzantine Empire
   was restored, but much shorn of its former European
   possessions, and much weakened by loss of commerce and wealth.
   It was soon involved in a fresh struggle for life with the
   Turks.

The Thirteenth Century.

   We have now, in our general survey of European history, just
   passed beyond the thirteenth century, and it will be
   instructive to pause here a moment and glance back over the
   movements and events which distinguish that remarkable age.
   For the thirteenth century, while it belongs chronologically
   to mediæval times, seems nearer in spirit to the
   Renaissance--shows more of the travail of the birth of our
   modern mind and life--than the fourteenth, and even more than
   the greater part of the years of the fifteenth century.

   For England, it was the century in which the enduring bases of
   constitutional government were laid down; within which Magna
   Charta and its Confirmations were signed; within which the
   Parliament of Simon de Montfort and the Parliaments of Edward
   I. gave a representative form and a controlling power to the
   wonderful legislature of the English nation. In France, it was
   the century of the Albigenses; of Saint Louis and his judicial
   reforms; and it stretched within two years of the first
   meeting of the States-General of the kingdom. In Switzerland,
   it was the century which began the union of the three forest
   cantons. In Spain, it was the century which gave Aragon the
   "General Privilege" of Peter III.; in Hungary, it was the
   century of its Golden Bull. In Italy it was the century of
   Frederick II.,--the man of modern spirit set in mediæval
   circumstances; and it was the century, too, which moulded the
   city-republics that resisted and defeated his despotic
   pretensions. Everywhere, it was an age of impulses toward
   freedom, and of mighty upward strivings out of the chaos and
   darkness of the feudal state. It was an age of vast energies,
   directed with practical judgment and power. It organized the
   great league of the Hansa Towns, which surpassed, as an
   enterprise of combination in commercial affairs, the most
   stupendous undertakings of the present time. It put the
   weavers and traders of Flanders on a footing with knights and
   princes. In Venice and Genoa it crowned the merchant like a
   king. It sent Marco Polo to Cathay, and inoculated men with
   the itch of exploration from which they find no ease to this
   day. It was the century which saw painting revived as a living
   art in the world by Cimabue and Giotto, and sculpture restored
   by Niccola Pisano. It was the age of great church-building in
   Italy, in Germany and in France. It was the century of St.
   Francis of Assisi, and of the creation of the mendicant orders
   in the Church,--a true religious reformation in its spirit,
   however unhappy in effect it may have been. It was the time of
   the high tide of mediæval learning; the epoch of Aquinas, of
   Duns Scotus, of Roger Bacon; the true birth-time of the
   Universities of Paris and Oxford. It was the century which
   educated Dante for his immortal work.

The Fourteenth Century.

   The century which followed was a period of many wars--of
   ruinous and deadly wars, and miserable demoralizations and
   disorders, which depressed all Europe by their effects. In the
   front of them all was the wicked Hundred Years War, forced on
   France by the ambition of an English king to wear two crowns;
   while with it came the bloody insurrection of the Jacquerie,
   the ravages of the free companies, and ruinous anarchy
   everywhere. Then, in Italy, there was a duel to the death
   between Venice and Genoa; and a long, wasting contest of
   rivals for the possession of Naples. In Germany, a contested
   imperial election, and the struggle of the Swiss against the
   Austrian Dukes. In Flanders, repeated revolts under the two
   Artevelds. In the East, the terrible fight of Christendom with
   the advancing Turk. And while men were everywhere so busily
   slaying one another, there came the great pestilence which
   they called the Black Death, to help them in the grim work,
   and Europe was half depopulated by it. At the same time, the
   Church, which might have kindled some beacon lights of faith
   and hope in the midst of all this darkness and terror, was
   sinking to its lowest state, and Rome had become an unruled
   robbers' den.

   There were a few voices heard, above the wailing and the
   battle-din of the afflicted age, which charmed and comforted
   it; voices which preached the pure gospel of Wycliffe and
   Huss,--which recited the great epic of Dante,--which syllabled
   the melodious verse of Petrarch and Chaucer,--which told the
   gay tales of Boccaccio; but the pauses of peace in which men
   might listen to such messages and give themselves to such
   delights were neither many nor long.

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The Hundred Years War.

   The conflict between England and France began in Flanders,
   then connected with the English very closely in trade. Philip
   VI. of France forced the Count of Flanders to expel English
   merchants from his territory. Edward III. retaliated (1336) by
   forbidding the exportation of wool to Flanders, and this
   speedily reduced the Flemish weavers to idleness. They rose in
   revolt, drove out their count, and formed an alliance with
   England, under the lead of Jacob van Arteveld, a brewer, of
   Ghent. The next year (1337) Edward joined the Flemings with an
   army and entered France; but made no successful advance,
   although his fleet won a victory, in a sea-fight off Sluys,
   and hostilities were soon suspended by a truce. In 1341 they
   were renewed in Brittany, over a disputed succession to the
   dukedom, and the scattered sieges and chivalric combats which
   made up the war in that region for two years are described
   with minuteness by Froissart, the gossipy chronicler of the
   time. After a second truce, the grimly serious stage of the
   war was reached in 1346. It was in that year that the English
   won the victory at Crécy, which was the pride and boast of
   their nation for centuries; and the next season they took
   Calais, which they held for more than two hundred years.

   Philip died in 1350 and was succeeded by his son John. In
   1355, Edward of England repeated his invasion, ravaging
   Artois, while his son, the Black Prince, from Guienne (which
   the English had held since the Angevin time), devastated
   Languedoc. The next year, this last named prince made another
   sally from Bordeaux, northwards, towards the Loire, and was
   encountered by the French king, with a splendid army, at
   Poitiers. The victory of the English in this case was more
   overwhelming than at Crécy, although they were greatly
   outnumbered. King John was taken prisoner and conveyed to
   London. His kingdom was in confusion. The dauphin called
   together the States-General of France, and that body, in which
   the commons, or third estate, attained to a majority in numbers,
   assumed powers and compelled assent to reforms which seemed
   likely to place it on a footing of equal importance with the
   Parliament of England. The leader of the third estate in these
   measures was Etienne or Stephen Marcel, provost of Paris, a
   man of commanding energy and courage. The dauphin, under
   orders from his captive father, attempted to nullify the
   ordinances of the States-General. Paris rose at the call of
   Marcel and the frightened prince became submissive; but the
   nobles of the provinces resented these high-handed proceedings
   of the Parisians and civil war ensued. The peasants, who were
   in great misery, took advantage of the situation to rise in
   support of the Paris burgesses, and for the redressing of
   their own wrongs. This insurrection of the Jacquerie, as it is
   known, produced horrible deeds of outrage and massacre on both
   sides, and seems to have had no other result. Paris, meantime
   (1358), was besieged and hard pressed; Marcel, suspected of an
   intended treachery, was killed, and with his death the whole
   attempt to assert popular rights fell to the ground.

   The state of France at this time was one of measureless
   misery. It was overrun with freebooters--discharged soldiers,
   desperate homeless and idle men, and the ruffians who always
   bestir themselves when authority disappears. They roamed the
   country in bands, large and small, stripped it of what war had
   spared, and left famine behind them.

   At length, in 1360, terms of peace were agreed upon, in a
   treaty signed at Bretigny, and fighting ceased, except in
   Brittany, where the war went on for four years more. By the
   treaty, all French claims upon Aquitaine and the dependencies
   were given up, and Edward acquired full sovereignty there, no
   longer owing homage, as a vassal, to the king of France.
   Calais, too, was ceded to England, and so heavy a ransom was
   exacted from the captive King John that he failed to collect
   money for the payment of it and died in London (1364).

Charles the Wise.

   Charles V., who now ruled independently, as he had ruled for
   some years in his father's name, proved to be a more prudent
   and capable prince, and his counsellors and captains were
   wisely chosen. He was a man of studious tastes and of
   considerable learning for that age, with intelligence to see
   and understand the greater sources of evil in his kingdom.
   Above all, he had patience enough to plant better things in
   the seed and wait for them to grow, which is one of the
   grander secrets of statesmanship. By careful, judicious
   measures, he and those who shared the task of government with
   him slowly improved the discipline and condition of their
   armies. The "great companies" of freebooters, too strong to be
   put down, were lured out of the kingdom by an expedition into
   Spain, which the famous warrior Du Guesclin commanded, and
   which was sent against the detestable Pedro, called the Cruel,
   of Castile, whom the English supported. A stringent economy in
   public expenditure was introduced, and the management of the
   finances was improved. The towns were encouraged to strengthen