No overwhelming growth of the royal domain in Northern France marked the reign of Louis, but the vast acquisitions of Philip II. were quietly absorbed, and their inhabitants became good Frenchmen. Four fiefs of the first order now alone remained in the north, and only two of these—Flanders and Brittany—retained a separatist character. Despite their extension of power over the Pyrenees, the house of Blois-Champagne was ever friendly to Louis, and his purchase of Macon had kept Burgundy in check. No great harm to the central power followed, when in 1237 Louis made his brother Robert Count of Artois, and in 1245 his youngest brother Charles became Count of Anjou and Maine, especially as, in the latter case, Touraine, the ancient dependency of Anjou, was retained within the royal domain. At the later date Louis also granted appanages to his younger sons, Peter becoming Count of Alençon, and Robert Count of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. But the subsequent marriage of Robert to the heir of Bourbon brought another great fief under the control of the royal house. Charles’s early government of Anjou was vigorous and successful, and did something to reconcile the ancient county to its practical loss of independence. But Charles soon found a better sphere for his energies in the imperial lands adjacent to the French kingdom. He strove for a time to establish himself in the county of Hainault, as the ally of Margaret of Flanders. He finally found a more fruitful field in the Arelate, where he proved a worthy brother to Alfonse of Poitiers, as the precursor of Northern influence over the South.

The fall of Toulouse left the county of Provence the one great centre of the South French national spirit. Though technically no part of the French kingdom, it was one in language, manners, and sympathies with the county of Toulouse, whose princes had indeed acquired possession of the so-called March of Provence, between the Durance and the Isère. So long as the Languedocian civilisation was strong, the hereditary animosities of the Counts of Provence and the Counts of Toulouse did much to weaken the political cohesion of two kindred peoples. In the face of the wave of Northern aggression, signs were not wanting that the ancient feuds of the courts of Aix and Toulouse were abating. Raymond Berengar V. had been Count of Provence since 1209. By his marriage with Beatrix, daughter of Thomas, Count of Savoy, he had established a close union with the active and aggressive house that was beginning to make itself a formidable power in the upper region of the ancient Arelate. But four daughters only were the offspring of the union, and were not some special precautions taken there was the danger lest Raymond Berengar should be the last of his race to rule in Provence. |Marriages of his daughters.| The astute Provençal looked out early for wealthy husbands for his daughters. The eldest, Margaret, became the wife of St. Louis himself in 1234. Two years later Eleanor, the second, was wedded to Henry III. of England. The third, Sanchia, was espoused in 1244 to Richard earl of Cornwall, the future King of the Romans. The youngest, Beatrice, was the destined heiress of Provence, and everything depended upon her choice of a husband. During the crisis of the struggle in the south-west, Raymond VII. repudiated his Spanish wife and became a suitor for the hand of Beatrice. Had such a union been accomplished, it would have been easy to cheat Alfonse of Poitiers of the Toulouse succession, and a brilliant prospect was opened out of a great national state in southern Gaul, formed by the union of Toulouse and Provence, which would have surrounded the royal Sénéchaussées of Beaucaire and Carcassonne, and might well have proved strong enough to ward off the aggressions of the northerners. But with the collapse of the English power at Saintes and the submission of Raymond at Lorris, this glowing vision vanished for ever. It was too late in the day to stem the tide that had already overflowed. Raymond Berengar died in 1245, and soon after the marriage of Beatrice to Charles of Anjou established a Northern court at Aix as well as at Poitiers.

For the next twenty years (1245–1265) Charles of Anjou carried on in Provence the same work that Alfonse had long been doing at Poitiers and was soon to begin at Toulouse. The ablest, strongest, fiercest, and most unscrupulous of the sons of Louis VIII., the new Count of Provence thoroughly established Northern methods of government and Northern ideals of life in the last home of the civilisation of the Troubadours. Charles’s success was brilliant and lasting. The great churchmen, like the archbishop of Arles, ceased to be temporal sovereigns. The feudal nobles lost their independence when their leader, Barral des Baux, despairing of holding his rock-built stronghold against his suzerain, gave up his pursuit of feudal freedom and became one of Charles’s most trusted ministers. The cities, which had hitherto vied with their Italian neighbours in their love of absolute autonomy, saw their municipal franchises destroyed when revolted Marseilles was starved into submission, while the care Charles showed for its commercial interests soon did something to reconcile the wealthy citizens to the loss of their liberties. Master of every order of his subjects, Charles welded all Provence together by the skilful execution of good laws. As a result of his careful policy, he was gradually able to dispense with his Northern followers and intrust administration and arms to his Provençal subjects. The last of the Troubadours fled to the more congenial courts of Aragon and northern Italy. The successes of Charles began that long series of French aggressions on the Arelate, which only ceased when Savoy itself became French less than forty years ago. This was the natural and inevitable result of the development of the idea of nationality and the decay of the imperial principle. As the Provençal lands could not form a national state of their own, they ultimately found their salvation in incorporation with the more vigorous nationality of the Langue d’oil.

The foreign policy of St. Louis was inspired by the same spirit of justice and peace that regulated his dealings with his feudatories. We have seen his watchful care of the just rights of the English king. His Treaty of Corbeil of 1258, with James I., king of Aragon, was based on the same principles as the Treaty of Paris with Henry III. |His relations to Spain.| By it Louis renounced all rights over the county of Barcelona, in return for James’s abandonment of his claims over Foix and all lands north of Roussillon. By an almost nominal concession, Louis thus broke the close tie between the kindred civilisations north and south of the Pyrenees which, in the days of the Albigensian Wars, had threatened to counterbalance the growing influence of the French crown over the south. By the marriage of Louis’s eldest son, Philip, to James’s daughter, Isabella of Aragon, the personal tie between the two realms was made the stronger. Two daughters of Louis were wedded to Spanish princes, one to the son of the king of Castile, another to Theobald the Young, king of Navarre and count of Champagne. Even the establishment of the most faithful of the great feudatories in the little kingdom of Navarre helped, rather than hindered, the progress of the French monarchy. The Champenois Joinville became the most attached follower, the most enthusiastic biographer of St. Louis.

The long quarrel of Papacy and Empire gave ample opportunities for an ambitious prince to draw profit to France from their dissensions. The anti-clerical policy of Frederick II. afforded plenty of pretexts to so pious a king as Louis for putting himself on the papal side and making what annexations he could at the expense of Frederick’s weakness. But though troubled by the Emperor’s ecclesiastical attitude, Louis did not forget Frederick’s forbearance in the days when Blanche of Castile was struggling single-handed against the feudal party, and he was by no means satisfied with the rancorous attitude of the Papacy. He therefore strove to take up a strict neutrality between Pope and Emperor. He rejected the offer of the imperial crown which Gregory IX. made to Robert of Artois. He refused to receive Innocent IV. when he fled from Italy, and disregarded the deposition of the Emperor at Lyons. He strove hard at Cluny to reconcile Innocent and Frederick. The only occasion when he prepared to uphold the Pope was when it was believed that Frederick was crossing Mont Cenis with a great army in full march for Lyons. This judicious policy was especially pursued by him since he realised that the essential condition of a new Crusade was the friendship of Cæsar and the Pope. When the last chances of reconciliation were ended, he went, in 1248, to Egypt, to fight single-handed for the cause which he had at heart. On his return in 1254, he found Frederick dead and the Empire as good as destroyed. Yet during the weary years of the Great Interregnum, he never, as we shall see, departed from the ancient strictness of his policy. He had no wish that his brother-in-law, Richard of Cornwall, should revive the ancient alliance of England and Germany. He preferred to recognise Alfonso of Castile, but he took no direct action to sustain his preference. The position of Richard in Germany removed his last scruples about the Sicilian inheritance. He allowed Charles of Anjou to accept in 1265 the Sicilian throne, and marred his later policy by his undue deference to his unscrupulous brother. The deviation of the Crusade of 1270 to Tunis was the result of Charles’s wish to strengthen his Italian position. Louis’s death was thus in a measure due to the influence of the prince who had become the evil spirit of the French royal house.

Towards the end of his reign Louis was incontestably the first prince of Europe. The collapse of the Hohenstaufen, the weakness of his English brother-in-law, the position of his own brethren in the South and in Italy; the degradation of the feudatories, all contributed to make the power of Louis great, but the unique position which the French monarch now held was due not so much to his authority and resources as to the ascendency won by his personal character and virtues. His reputation for impartiality and his recognised love of peace and justice made him the natural arbiter in every delicate question, the general peace-maker in every European quarrel. Louis’s arbitration between Henry III. and his barons, if the least successful of his interventions, was but one example of his activity in this direction, both with regard to foreign princes and his own feudatories. It was too much to expect that even the best of kings would decide otherwise than in favour of a brother monarch against an aristocracy whose avowed object was the transference of the royal authority to a committee of barons. It speaks strongly for Louis that the English barons should ever have consented to submit to his decision.

The internal government of Louis IX. must now be considered. His attitude towards the feudal barons has been already illustrated. The narrowness of his vision and the justness of his character combined to make it impossible for him to adopt an anti-feudal policy like that of his grandson, Philip the Fair. He was the defender of all existing lawful authority, but if he intervened to protect the oppressed barons from the zeal of his too active officials, he more often used his influence to make the barons exercise towards their dependants the same rigid justice he was ever willing to manifest to them. His forbidding of private war, the judicial duel, and the tournaments which were often little better than thinly disguised war, were the result of his love of peace and order; but they cut at the root of feudal ideas, with which indeed any real measure of peace and order were almost incompatible.

Louis’s relations to the Church bring out strongly the best sides of his character. No king was ever so anxious to give the Church its due, and to protect churchmen from grasping barons or greedy crown officials. He regarded his rights of patronage and his custody of the temporalities of vacant sees as sacred trusts, and he strove, so far as he could, to prevail upon his barons to follow in his footsteps. Guided by the wise counsels of William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris for the first twenty years of his reign, he safeguarded the interests of the monarchy as well as the interests of the Church. It was in his reign that the married clerks engaged in commerce were, at Louis’s instance, abandoned to the jurisdiction of the lay tribunals, and yet Louis more than once associated himself with his barons in protesting against the growing aggressions of the ecclesiastical courts. It was under Louis that the French clergy first felt the weight of regular and systematic taxation. The extraordinary favour which he showed to the Mendicants cost him something of the good wishes of the secular clergy and of the older orders. Franciscans and Dominicans were his chaplains and confessors, his habitual companions, and the instruments even of his secular policy. Their influence over him contributed towards the establishment of the Mendicants in a strong position in the University of Paris, despite violent secular opposition. Through the Mendicants Louis was ever inclined to ally himself with the Pope against the secular clergy. Yet that alliance had, as we have seen, its limits. The champions of Gallican liberties in the fifteenth century were not altogether at fault in regarding St. Louis as the first upholder of the national freedom of the French Church. The so-called ‘Pragmatic Sanction of St. Louis’ is indeed a forgery of the fifteenth century, but the hostility it expresses to simony, to papal taxation, to the temporal claims of Rome and the abuses of ecclesiastical elections, do not go far beyond his practice. It was, however, quite impossible for a pious churchman of the thirteenth century to formulate the doctrines of national independence that were afterwards upheld by the fathers of Constance and Basel.

The greatest result of St. Louis’s home government was the enlargement and definition of the administrative system which first sprang up as the result of the expansion of the monarchy under Philip II. This arose from the same necessities as the Anglo-Norman system, which had been perfected by Henry of Anjou, and in many details presents remarkable analogies to the polity already established beyond the Channel. The king was the centre of the whole system. His advisers were no longer the hereditary functionaries of the primitive monarchy. The royal household (l’hôtel du roi) now consisted of a band of clerks and knights, the chaplains, the scribes, the advisers and defenders of the king, and of the subordinate servants, who discharged purely menial and domestic functions. From the powerful body of clerks and knights of the household sprang the official class which represented the monarchy throughout the kingdom. Though many of the clerks were doubtless trained lawyers, the ministers of St. Louis were far from showing that pettifogging and litigious spirit that inspired king and household alike in the days of Philip the Fair.

All France was divided into great provinces, and at the head of each was placed a royal official, called a bailli in the north and a sénéchal in the south, who roughly corresponded to, though they governed a greater extent of territory than, the sheriffs of the English crown. They nominated the provosts and inferior officers; they administered justice; collected the royal revenue; and were charged with the superintendence of the royal relations to the neighbouring feudatories as well as with the administration of their own districts. |Enquesteurs.| Their annual visits to the Exchequer connected them with the central government, and a further link between the central and local administration was found in the regular institution by St. Louis of enquesteurs, the missi dominici, or the itinerant justices of the Capetian monarchy, who, though casually employed by earlier kings, were now made a permanent element in the administrative system.

Under St. Louis a process of differentiation similar to that which had evolved the Exchequer, Curia Regis, and other courts from the great councils of the Anglo-Norman kings, divided into three bodies the royal court of the Capetian kings. The Grand Conseil became the administrative and political assembly; the Parlement grew into the judicial mouthpiece of the crown; and Maîtres des Comptes received and regulated the royal revenue. While the political Council still followed the king in the ceaseless wanderings of a mediæval sovereign, the Parliament gradually settled down permanently at Paris. With the elaboration of its organisation came an extension of its competence. Churchmen and lawyers agreed in believing that the king was the sole source of justice. Appeals to the king’s court became, under St. Louis, the substitute for the trial by combat, which he abolished. Not only were the inferior courts of the baillage or prévôté subordinate to the king’s court. It became usual for appeals to be taken to Paris from the highest courts of the greatest feudatories of the realm. The doctrine of the cas royal, the plea reserved exclusively for the cognisance of the crown, materially aided the extension of the Parliament of Paris. |The Parliament of Paris and the Extension of the Royal Jurisdiction.| Alfonse of Poitiers, as we have seen, imitated in his own fief the example of his sovereign and brother. The financial reforms of St. Louis, though important, were not so radical as his judicial changes. The Gens des Comptes in session at the Temple in Paris prepared the way for the organisation of the Chambre des Comptes under Philip the Fair. But almost alone of mediæval sovereigns, St. Louis was well able ‘to live of his own,’ and the ordinary revenue of the crown left a surplus for his religious and charitable foundations. |Finance and the Coinage.| Only the rare great wars, and the two Crusades of the king, necessitated recourse to exceptional taxation. Yet Louis was able to carry out a thoroughgoing reform of the coinage, and carefully upheld the value and purity of the circulating medium. In 1263 he issued an ordinance by which he gained for the royal mints the monopoly of supplying the monetary needs of the royal domain. Wherever no seignorial money was coined, there the royal money was to circulate exclusively. All that was allowed to the seignorial currency was that it should be accepted concurrently with the king’s money in those fiefs where the lord had an established right of mintage. It was, however, to be so struck that every one might see that it plainly differed from the products of the mints of the crown. This reform in itself was a great encouragement to trade. The protection of the communes by the king, the sound peace which enabled merchants to buy and sell without molestation, and the establishment of new towns, especially in the south, all furthered the growth of commerce. |The Towns and Trade.| The ville of Carcassonne, whose plan to this day preserves the right lines and measured regularity of an American city, and which, with its Gothic churches and its busy industries stands to this day in such vivid contrast to the desolate cité on the height, the witness of departed military glories, is an example of the numerous class of Villeneuves and Villefranches founded by St. Louis in his newly won domains in the Languedoc. Louis’s Christian zeal, no less than his hatred of usury, caused him to deal with excessive rigour with the Jews. |Jews and Cahorsins.| He was almost as intolerant of the Lombard and Cahorsin usurers, who had now begun to rival with the Israelites in finance. One of the least pleasing sides of the saint’s character was his cruel severity to blasphemers, heretics, and unbelievers. The same zeal led St. Louis twice to abandon France while he went on crusade. [See chapter xix.] But neither his long sojourn in Egypt and Syria nor his death at Tunis destroyed the effect of his work for his kingdom. Queen Blanche resumed her vigorous rule of France as regent during Louis’s absence from 1248 to her death in 1253, the year before his return. |The Pastoureaux.| The chief trouble Blanche had was with the strange popular gathering of the Pastoureaux, which, assembled under the pretext that shepherds and workmen were to supply the remissness of lords and knights and rescue St. Louis from the Egyptians, soon became a wild carnival of brigandage, which the regent had considerable difficulty in suppressing (1251). In 1270 Philip the Bold, the saint’s dull, but pious, docile, hard-fighting, and well-meaning son, succeeded as easily in the camp at Tunis as he could have done in Paris itself. The work of St. Louis was quietly and unostentatiously continued during the first years of Philip III.’s reign. In his later years the baleful influence of Charles of Anjou turned the heir of St. Louis to a more active and greedy policy that prepared the way for the extraordinary success of Philip the Fair, whose triumphant reign marks the end of the process that had begun with the early Capetians.