Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273 - T. F. Tout - Страница 11

Table of Contents

The last Carolingians—Hugh the Great—Election of Hugh Capet, and its results—The first four Capetians, Hugh, Robert II., Henry I., Philip I.—The great Fiefs under the early Capetians—Normandy—Brittany—Flanders—Vermandois—Champagne and Blois—Anjou—Burgundy—Aquitaine and Poitou—Toulouse—Beginnings of French influence.

The last Carolingian Kings of the West Franks.

While the first great Saxon kings were reviving the power of their eastern kingdom, the expiring Carolingian house still carried on an unavailing struggle for the possession of the old realm of the West Franks. Charles the Simple was the last Carolingian to exercise any real authority in France. He had obtained a powerful ally by his concession of Normandy to Rolf and his vikings. He had witnessed the revolt of the Lotharingians from Germany to France, and had attained many successes through their support. |Charles the Simple, 896–929.| Yet the concluding years of his reign were troubled in the extreme, until he succumbed before the formidable coalition of Robert, Count of Paris, the brother of the dead King Odo, and the chief representative of the new order, with his two mighty sons-in-law, Herbert, Count of Vermandois, and Rudolf, Duke of Burgundy. |Robert, 922–923.| Robert got himself crowned king in 922, but was slain in battle in 923, leaving his famous son, Hugh the Great, too young to succeed to his disputed kingdom. This left Rudolf of Burgundy as king of the Franks, or, rather, of those who still resisted Charles the Simple [see Period I., pp. 503–5]. |Rudolf, 923–936.| When Charles died in prison in 929, Rudolf had no longer a nominal rival. He reigned until his death in 936. But his power was miserably weak, and real authority still resided with the great feudatories, whose possessions had now become hereditary for so long a time that they were now associated by close ties to the districts which they ruled.

Hugh the Great was a man of very different calibre from his fierce ancestors. Robert the Strong, the founder of the house, had been a warrior pure and simple. His sons, Odo and Robert, the two dukes who had in turn grasped the sceptre, had faithfully followed in his footsteps. Wanting in policy and statecraft, they had been less powerful as kings than as dukes. Hugh the Great, the first statesman of the Robertian house, was a shrewd tactician, who saw that his fortunes could best be established by playing a waiting game. |Policy of Hugh the Great.| He heaped up treasure, and accumulated fresh fiefs, but on the death of his Burgundian brother-in-law he declined the royal dignity, preferring to exercise an unseen influence over a king of his own choice to exposing himself to the certainty of exciting the jealousy of every great lord in France, by raising himself above them as their king.

Louis IV., 936–954.

There was only one sacred family which every lord admitted to be above himself. Even in its humiliation the Carolingian name was still one to conjure with. As Hugh would not be king himself, he wisely fell back on the legitimate stock of the West Frankish royal house. He turned his eyes over the Channel, where Louis, son of Charles the Simple, and his West Saxon queen, Eadgifu, daughter of Edward the Elder, was living quietly at the court of his uncle Athelstan. Louis was only fifteen years old, and was likely to be grateful to his powerful protector. He was elected king by the Frankish lords, and duly crowned at Reims. In memory of his exile he was called ‘Louis from beyond sea’ (Ultramarinus, Outremer). In the list of French kings he is reckoned as Louis IV.

Hugh the Great was rewarded by the renewal in his favour of the title ‘Duke of the French,’ which had already been borne by his father Robert in the days of Charles the Simple. This title suggested a power, half military and half national, analogous to that held by the dukes of the nations in Germany. |The Duke of the French.| But if this were the case, Hugh’s power as duke would have probably been restricted to ‘Francia,’ a region which, in common speech, was now limited to the Gaulish regions north of the Seine. It is not clear, however, that the power of the Duke of the French had any territorial limitation other than that of the limits of the West Frankish kingdom as prescribed by the treaty of Verdun. Wherever Louis ruled as ‘king,’ Hugh wielded authority as ‘duke.’ He was a permanent prime minister, a mayor of the palace, a justiciar of the Anglo-Norman type, rather than a territorial duke. Indeed, Hugh’s chief domains were not in ‘Francia’ at all. Despite his possession of Paris, his chief fiefs were still in the cradle of his house, the district between the Seine and Loire, to which the term Neustria was now commonly applied. Here his authority stretched as far westwards as the county of Maine, which he had obtained in his youth from the weakness of Rudolf of Burgundy. Moreover, in the lack of all central royal authority, half the chief vassals of the north had thought it prudent to commend themselves to the mighty lord of Neustria, and, with the Duke of Normandy at their head, had become his feudal dependants. Hugh was no longer simply a great feudatory. Even in name, he was the second man in Gaul. In fact, he was a long way the first.

The last Carolingians were in no wise puppets and do-nothings like the last Merovingians. Louis IV. proved a strenuous warrior, with a full sense of his royal dignity. He ruled directly over little more than the hill-town of Laon and its neighbourhood, but he did wonders with his scanty resources. He married a sister of Otto the Great, and with German help was able to press severely his former patron. But Otto soon withdrew beyond the Rhine, and Louis, deprived of his help, and ever planning schemes too vast for his resources, was soon altogether at Hugh’s mercy. In 946 he was driven out of Laon: ‘the only town,’ as he complained, ‘where I could shut myself up with my wife and children, the town that I prefer to my life.’ In his despair he laid his wrongs before King Otto and a council of bishops at Ingelheim. Hugh prudently yielded before the threatened thunders of the Church. He renewed his homage to King Louis, and restored Laon to him. ‘Henceforth,’ says the chronicler, ‘their friendship was as firm as their struggles had formerly been violent.’ When Louis died suddenly in 954, his thirteen-year-old son, Lothair, was chosen king through Hugh’s influence. Two years later the great duke died.

Hugh the Great’s son and successor was also named Hugh. He is famous in history by the surname of ‘Capet,’ which he obtained from bearing the cope of the abbot of St. Martin’s at Tours, but which, like most famous surnames, has no contemporary authority. Brought up in his father’s school, he was clear-headed, cunning, resourceful, and cold-blooded. |Hugh Capet and King Lothair, 954–986.| He soon extended the power of his house, establishing one of his brothers in Burgundy, and marrying Adelaide, the heiress of Poitou, so as to be able to push forward claims in the lands beyond the Loire. Both in policy and resources he overmatched the young king Lothair, who tried as he grew up to play his father’s part; but his means were too small, and he embarked on contradictory policies which destroyed each other. His father had relied upon the support of Otto I., but Lothair, tempted by the long tradition of loyalty which bound Lotharingia to the Carolingian house, sought to find a substitute for his dwindling patrimony in northern France by winning domains for himself in that region. The strong Saxon kings would not tolerate the falling away of Lorraine from their Empire. Otto II. invaded France [see page 38] and vigorously punished the presumptuous Carolingian. Henceforth Lothair had no support against the subtle policy of the new Duke of the French. He even alienated Adalbero, the famous Archbishop of Reims, and the last prominent ecclesiastical upholder of the tottering dynasty, so that he repudiated the traditional policy of his see, and allied himself with the duke and the Emperor. Gerbert, the ‘scholasticus’ of Adalbero’s cathedral school, and the author of his policy, established an alliance between Hugh Capet and Otto III., and was soon able to boast that Lothair was but king in name, and that the real king was Duke Hugh. After losing the support of the Germans and of the Church, the Carolingians had absolutely nothing left but their own paltry resources. Yet Lothair gallantly struggled on till his death, in 986, after a nominal reign of thirty-two years. |Louis V., 986–987.| His son, Louis V., who had reigned jointly with him since 979, succeeded to his phantom kingship, and contrived to win over Duke Hugh, at whose instigation he led an expedition into Poitou. But Louis also quarrelled with Archbishop Adalbero, and alienated the Church. Adalbero intrigued against him, and the prelate’s triumph was hastened by Louis’ premature death in the hunting-field (987). He was the last of the Carolingian kings.

Election of Hugh Capet, 987.

For a century the Robertian house had struggled with the house of Charles the Great. Its premature triumph under Odo and Robert had put off the final day of success. But the patient and shrewd policy of Hugh the Great and Hugh Capet was at last rewarded with victory. Louis V. left no son. His uncle Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, was his nearest heir, but was in no position to push forward his pretensions. The pear was at last ripe, and Hugh Capet had no longer any motive for avoiding the semblance of the power, of which he had long enjoyed the reality. Adalbero and Gerbert now showed great activity. Adalbero harangued the barons and bishops on the duty that lay before them. ‘We know,’ he said, ‘that Charles of Lorraine has his partisans who pretend that the throne belongs to him by hereditary right. But we believe that kingship is not acquired by hereditary right, but that we ought only to raise to that dignity the man who is marked out, not only by nobleness of birth, but by wisdom, loyalty, and magnanimity.’ The magnates took the cue, and elected Hugh king of the French. The Church ratified the choice of the nobles by the solemn coronation of the new king at Noyon. The Duke of the Normans and the Count of Anjou lent him the support of their arms. The Emperor recognised Hugh, on condition that he waived all claims over Lotharingia.

The revolution of 987 was easily accomplished, because the old order was so nearly dead. It involved no striking change in form. The Capetian kings posed as the lawful successors of the Carolingians: they had the same conceptions of sovereignty, and followed the same principles of government. |Its results.| Yet those are not far wrong who regard the accession of Hugh as the starting-point of all later French history. It is easy to exaggerate the nature of the change. It is unsafe to make the change of dynasty a triumph of one race over another. It has been the fashion to say that, with the last of the Carolingians, disappear the last of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul, and that their power had passed on to the Romanised Celts whom they had ruled so long. But there is no scrap of evidence to prove that the later Carolings were different in tongue, ideas, or policy from the Robertian house. There was no real national feeling in the tenth century, and, if there were, no proof that the one house was more national than the other. Nevertheless, the passing away of the line of Charles the Great does complete the process which the Treaty of Verdun had begun. The Capetian king had a limited localised power, a power that in due course could become national; and if he looked back, like the Carolings, to the traditions of imperial monarchy and order, he had no temptation to look back, as the Carolings were bound to look back, to the imperial ideas of universal dominion. He had no claim to rule beyond the limits ascribed to the West Frankish kingdom in the Treaty of Verdun. He was king of the French, the new Romance people that had grown up as the result of the amalgamation of conquering Frank and conquered Roman. He spoke the infant French tongue; his ambitions were limited to French soil; he represented the new nationality that soon began to take a foremost place amidst all the nations of Europe. But the triumph of the Capetian was not even in anticipation a simple national triumph. It was only in after ages, when France had become great, that she could look back and see in his accession the beginnings of her separate national monarchy. Personally, Hugh Capet was doubtless, like Harold of England some two generations later, an embodiment of the new national character and energy. But, less fortunate than Harold, he had time enough to live to show how powerless was a national hero, amidst an order of society in which the national ideal could have no place. He was rather the mighty feudatory, raised by his own order to a position of pre-eminence to represent the predominance of feudal ideas. The Carolings had fallen, not because of their own weakness, and still less by reason of any want of sympathy between them and the French nation. They were pushed out of power because France had become so fully feudalised that there was no room for an authority that had no solid basis of feudal support. France had become divided among a series of great fiefs. None of these fiefs fell to the ruling family, which was thus, as the result of the preponderance of the feudal principle, deprived of revenue, army, lands, and reputation. Hugh Capet inherited all that had kept the Carolingian power alive so long; but in addition to that he could supplement the theoretical claims of monarchy by right divine, by the practical arguments drawn from the possession of one of the strongest fiefs. Thus the new dynasty saved the monarchy by strengthening it with a great fief. No doubt the feudatories acted unwisely in having a king at all. But a nominal monarchy was part of the feudal system, and the barons could console themselves by believing that in becoming king of the French, Hugh still remained one of themselves. He was not surrounded with the mystic reverence due to the descendants of Charlemagne. As Harold, in becoming king of the English, did not cease to be earl of the West Saxons, so Hugh, in ascending the French throne, was still in all essentials the duke of the French. Harold and Hugh alike found but a questioning obedience in the great earls and counts, who looked upon the upstart kings as their equals. The Norman Conquest destroyed Harold before it could be early demonstrated what a long step in the direction of feudalism was made by his accession. Hugh Capet and his successors had time to bear the full brunt of the feudal shock. The most powerful of dukes proved the weakest of kings. It was only gradually that the ceremonial centre, round which the cumbrous fabric of French feudalism revolved, became the real heart of French national life. Yet, even in the feeble reigns of the first four Capetian kings, it is plain that France had begun a new existence. The history of the Carolingians is a history of decline. The history of the Capetians is a story of progress. While beyond the Rhine and Alps the continuance of the imperial theory choked the growth of German and Italian national life, the disappearance of these remnants of the past proved a blessing to Gaul. The history of modern Europe is the history of the development of nationalities. That history may be said in a sense to begin with the establishment of the first of an unbroken dynasty of national kings over what was destined to become one of the greatest of modern nations.

It is only with these limitations that the election of Hugh can be regarded as a triumph either of feudalism or of nationality. But it is entirely true that Hugh’s accession was the triumph of the Church. Adalbero, and Gerbert working through Adalbero, really gave Hugh the throne. Gerbert could truly boast that the Church had revived the royal name after it had long been almost dead among the French. Amidst the horrors of feudal anarchy, the sounder part of the Church still upheld in monarchy the Roman tradition of orderly rule, and taught that the king governed by God’s grace, because without a strong king the thousand petty tyrants of feudalism would have no restraint upon their lust and greed. But even this was an ideal far beyond the vision of the tenth century; though in later generations it was to bear fruit. The immediate results of Hugh Capet’s election were far different from its ultimate results. The conditions upon which his brother magnates had elected him king meant in practice that they should enjoy in their territories the same power that he enjoyed on his own domain. Save his theoretical pre-eminence, Hugh got very little from his royal title. The only resources on which he could depend implicitly were those which he derived from his own lands and vassals. There was no national organisation, no royal revenue, and practically no royal army, as the term of feudal service was too short to carry on a real campaign, even if the king could have trusted his vassals’ levies. The royal title involved responsibilities, but brought with it little corresponding power.

Struck by the contrast between their weakness and the commanding position of later French kings, historians have dwelt with almost exaggerated emphasis on the powerlessness of Hugh Capet and his first three successors. Yet the early Capetians were not so feeble as they are sometimes described. The French king was still the centre round which the feudal system revolved. He had a store of legal claims and traditions of authority, which at any favourable moment he could put into force. He was the only ruler whose authority extended even in name all over France. He inherited the traditions of the Carolingians and Merovingians, and, rightly or wrongly, was regarded as their successor. Moreover, the lay fiefs were, luckily for the monarchy, cut up by the great ecclesiastical territories, over which the king stood in a better position. Though feudal in a certain sense, the great Church dignitary was never a mere feudalist. His power was not hereditary. On his death the custody of the temporalities of his see passed into the royal hands, and it was the settled royal policy to keep churches vacant as long as possible. Only in a few favoured fiefs, like Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine, did the regale slip altogether into the hands of the local dukes. Moreover, the disputes and the weakness of the chapters gave the king the preponderating voice in elections. Even stronger was the royal position in relation to the monasteries. The greatest abbeys throughout France were ‘royal abbeys,’ over which the king possessed the same right as over bishoprics. Weaker than the bishops, the abbots looked up even more than the secular prelates to the royal support against the grasping and simoniacal lay-lords. The king favoured the Cluniac reformers, knowing that the more earnest the Churchmen, the more they would be opposed to feudal influence. Thus it was that every great Church fief was a centre of royal influence. Over the Church lands of central France—the provinces of Sens, Reims, Tours, and Bourges—the early Capetian was a real king. Even from the point of view of material resources, the king was in every whit as favourable a position as any one of his chief vassals. His own domains were large, rich, and centrally situated. Though lavish grants to the chief monasteries, and the need of paying for each step of their upward progress by conciliating the feudal magnates, had eaten away much of the old Robertian domain; though the great Counts of Anjou and Blois had established themselves in virtual independence within the limits of the domain of Hugh the Great, Hugh Capet still held the country between the Seine and the Loire, including the county of Paris, Orléans and its district, Senlis, Etampes, and Melun, with scattered possessions in more distant places, Picardy, Champagne, Berri, Touraine, and Auvergne. Paris was not as yet so important a place as it afterwards became, and it is an exaggeration to make it the centre of his power. Hugh could only conciliate his chief adviser and supporter, Bouchard the Venerable, the greatest lord of the royal domain, and count already of Vendôme, Corbeil, and Melun, by granting him his own county of Paris. The title of ‘royal count’ of Paris suggested that Bouchard was a royal officer rather than a simple feudatory, and after Bouchard had retired into a monastery, the county of Paris was henceforth kept strictly in the king’s hands. The second Capetian acquired with Montreuil-sur-Mer a seaport near the English Channel. For a time the Capetians held the duchy of Burgundy. Moreover, they were men of energy and vigour who made the best of their limited resources. But their lot was a hard one. Even in their own domains, between the Seine and Loire, the leading mesne lords, lay and secular, exercised such extensive jurisdiction that there was little room left for the authority of the suzerain. Besides the task—as yet hopeless—of reducing the great vassals of the crown to order, the Capetian kings had the preliminary task of establishing their authority within their own domains. Even this smaller work was not accomplished for more than a century. But, luckily for the kings, each one of the great feudatories was similarly occupied. The barons of Normandy and Aquitaine gave more trouble to their respective dukes than the barons of the Isle of France gave to the lord of Paris. Power was in reality distributed among hundreds of feudal chieftains. It was so divided that no one was strong enough to really rule at all. France suffered all the miseries of feudal anarchy, when every petty lord of a castle ruled like a little king over his own domain. Yet it was something that her contests were now between Frenchmen and Frenchmen. Something was gained in the passing away of the barbarian invasions of the tenth century.

The first four Capetians. Hugh, 987–996.

The details of the political history of the first four Capetian reigns are insignificant, and need not be told at length. Hugh Capet reigned from 987 to 996. He had little difficulty in obtaining general recognition, even from the lords of the distant south. But he had some trouble in upholding his claims against the Carolingian claimant, Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who received the powerful support of the church of Reims, after Adalbero’s death, and continued for some time to maintain himself in the old Carolingian fortress of Laon. Hugh continued with wise policy to maintain his hold over the church of Reims, and so to destroy the last possible stronghold of the Carolingians. He did not even scruple to sacrifice the trusty Gerbert to serve his dynastic ambitions. Within modest limits, the reign of the founder of the new dynasty was a successful one.

Robert II., the Pious, 996–1031.

In the very year of his accession, Hugh provided for the hereditary transmission of his power by associating his son Robert in the kingship. On Hugh’s death Robert, already with nine years’ experience as a crowned king, became sole monarch. He had been a pupil of Gerbert’s, and was sufficiently learned to be able to compose hymns and argue on points of theology with bishops. His character was amiable, his charity abundant; he was of soft and ready speech, and amiable manners. He showed such fervent devotion that he was surnamed Robert the Pious, and contributed more than any other Capetian king to identify the Church and the dynasty. He was not the weak uxorious prince that his enemies describe him, but a mighty hunter, a vigorous warrior, and an active statesman. He made constant efforts, both to enlarge his domain and establish his authority over the great vassals. He kept up friendly relations with Normandy. He married Bertha, widow of Odo I., Count of Chartres, Tours, and Blois, his father’s worst enemy, in the hope of regaining the three rich counties that had slipped away from the heritage of Hugh the Great. But Bertha was within the prohibited degrees; and the Pope insisting upon the unlawfulness of the union, Robert was excommunicated, and after a long struggle gave her up. But in 1019, the establishment of Odo II. of Blois, the son of Bertha by her former marriage, in the county of Troyes, did something to avenge the lady’s memory. Robert’s third marriage with Constance of Arles, the daughter of a Provençal lord, led to several royal visits to his wife’s native regions which was a step towards establishing Capetian influence in the south. But the men of Robert’s own territories disliked the hard, greedy queen, and the clergy in particular resented her introduction, into the court of Paris, of the refined but lax southern manners. Robert’s most important exploit was the conquest of Burgundy. His uncle, Duke Henry, had died without an heir, and after a struggle of fourteen years’ duration, Robert got possession of the great fief; but he soon granted it to his eldest surviving son Henry, whom, faithful to his father’s policy, he had crowned king in 1027. He twice went on pilgrimage to Rome, and was offered the throne of Italy by the Lombard lords, who were opposed to Conrad the Salic; yet he found much difficulty in chastising any petty lord of the Orléanais or the Beauce, who chose to defy him.

Henry I., 1031–1060.

During the declining years of Robert II., Queen Constance exercised an increasing influence. She wished to set aside the young king, Henry of Burgundy, the natural heir, in favour of his younger brother Robert. But the old king insisted on the rights of the first-born, and civil war broke out between the brothers, though before long they united their arms against their father. When King Robert died, the contest was renewed; but finally Henry secured the throne for himself, and pacified his younger brother by the grant of Burgundy, which thus went permanently back to a separate line of rulers. Henry I.’s inauspicious beginning lost some ground to the monarchy, which under him perhaps attained its lowest point of power. But Henry, if not very wise, was brave and active. Though his resources prevented any great expeditions, he strove by a series of petty fights and sieges to protect his frontiers against two of the strongest and most disloyal of his vassals—the Count of Blois, and the Duke of Normandy. In neither case was he successful. Odo II., after a long struggle, was able to establish his power on a firm basis, both in Champagne and Blois. But after Odo’s death in 1037, Henry managed to absorb some of his fiefs in the royal domain, and scored a considerable triumph by transferring Touraine from the overpowerful house of Blois to Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou. The young duke, William of Normandy, who owed his throne to the support of Henry, which had secured the defeat of the rebel barons at Val-ès-Dunes, soon grew so powerful as to excite the apprehensions of his overlord. In an unlucky hour, Henry broke the tradition of friendship that had so long united Rouen and Paris. He twice invaded Normandy, but on both occasions the future conqueror of England proved more than a match for him. In 1054 Henry was defeated at Mortemer, and again, in 1058, at Varaville. Another difficulty in the way of the monarchy was the fact that Henry married late, and his health was already breaking up when the eldest son, borne to him by his wife Anne of Russia, was still a child. Nevertheless, in 1059, Henry procured the coronation of his seven-year-old son Philip at Reims, and the great gathering of magnates from all parts of France that attended the ceremony showed that the succession to the throne was still an event of national interest. Yet with all his weakness, Henry I. held firm to the ancient traditions of the Frankish monarchy. When the reforming Pope Leo IX. held his synod of Reims to denounce simony, Henry was so jealous of the Pope that he prevented the French prelates from attending it. He watched with alarm the results of the absorption of Lorraine and the kingdom of Arles in the Empire, and boldly wrote to Henry III., claiming by hereditary right the palace at Aachen, possessed by his ancestors, and all the Lotharingian kingdom kept from its rightful owners by the tyranny of the German king. It is significant that the weakest of the early Capetians should thus pose against the strongest of the Emperors as the inheritor of the Carolingian tradition.

Philip I., 1060–1108.

In 1060 Henry died, and the little Philip I. was acknowledged as his successor without a murmur. During his minority, Count Baldwin V. of Flanders held the regency, paying perhaps more regard to his interests as a great feudatory, than to his duty to his ward. It was possibly owing to this attitude that Baldwin allowed his son-in-law, William the Bastard, to fit out the famous expedition which led to the conquest of England, and thus gave one of the chief vassals of France a stronger position than his overlord. The year after the battle of Hastings Baldwin of Flanders died, and henceforward Philip ruled in his own name. As he grew up, he gained a bad reputation for greed, debauchery, idleness, and sloth. Before he attained old age he had become extraordinarily fat and unwieldy, while ill-health still further diminished his activity. Yet Philip was a shrewd man, of sharp and biting speech, and clear political vision. His quarrel with the Church was the result of his private vices rather than his public policy. As early as 1073 he was bitterly denounced by Gregory VII. as the most simoniac, adulterous, and sacrilegious of kings. But he gave most offence to the Church when, in 1092, he repudiated his wife, Bertha of Holland (with whom he had lived for more than twenty years), in favour of Bertrada of Montfort, the wife of Fulk Réchin, Count of Anjou, whom he married after a complaisant bishop had declared her former union null. This bold step brought on Philip’s head not only the arms of the injured Fulk, and of Bertha’s kinsfolk, but a sentence of excommunication from Urban II. (1094). Though a way to reconciliation was soon opened up by the death of Bertha, the Pope nevertheless persisted in requiring Philip to repudiate his adulterous consort. Philip never gave up Bertrada, and never received the full absolution of the Church. Nevertheless, the war which he carried on against the Papacy did not cost him the allegiance of his subjects, though to it was added a long conflict with Gregory VII.’s ally, William the Conqueror. So weak was he that he dared not prevent the holding of councils on French soil at which he was excommunicated, and the great crusading movement proclaimed. But Philip was more active and more shrewd than his ecclesiastical enemies thought. He turned his attention with single-minded energy towards the increase of the royal domain, preferring the inglorious gain of a castle or a petty lordship to indulging in those vague and futile claims by which his three predecessors had sought in vain to hide their powerlessness. He took possession of the lapsed fief of Vermandois, and, not being strong enough to hold the district in his own hands, established there his brother Hugh the Great, the famous crusading hero and the father of a long line of Capetian counts of Vermandois, who were all through the next century among the surest supports of the Capetian throne. Philip also absorbed the Vexin and the Valois, thus securing important outworks to protect his city of Paris from Normandy and Champagne. By his politic purchase of Bourges, Philip for the first time established the royal power on a solid basis south of the Loire. But the weak point of Philip’s acquisitions was that he had not force sufficient to hold them firmly against opposition. Hampered by the constant unfriendliness of the Church, broken in health and troubled in conscience, he ended his life miserably enough. Formally reconciled to the Pope before the end of his days, he died in the habit of a monk, declaring that his sins made him unworthy to be laid beside his ancestors and St. Denis, and humbly consigning himself to the protection of St. Benedict. When the vault at Fleury closed over his remains, French history began a new starting-point. Philip I. was the last of the early Capetians who were content to go on reigning without governing, after the fashion of the later Carolingians. It was reserved for his successors to convert formal claims into actual possessions. Nevertheless, the work of Philip set them on the right track. In his shrewd limitation of policy to matters of practical moment, and his keen insight into the drift of affairs, the gross, profligate, mocking Philip prepared the way for the truer expansion of France under his son and grandson. His reign is the bridge between the period of the early Capetians and the more fruitful and progressive period that begins with Louis VI.

The great fiefs under the early Capetians.

The history of the struggles of the Capetians and Carolingians, and of the first faint efforts of the former house to realise some of the high pretensions of the old Frankish monarchy, is only one side of the history of France during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Divided as was all the western world, there was no part of it more utterly divided in feeling and interest than the kingdom of the West Franks. When the early Capetians were carrying on their petty warfare in the regions between Seine and Loire, or making their vain progresses and emphasising their barren claims over more distant regions, half a score of feudal potentates as able, as wealthy, and as vigorous as themselves were building up a series of local states with foundations as strong, and patriotism as intense, as those of the lords of Paris. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw the consolidation of the provincial nationalities of France, the growing up of those strong local states which play so conspicuous a part in later mediæval French history, and which, centuries after their absorption into the royal domain, continued to be centres of keen local feeling, and are not crushed out of existence even by modern patriotism and the levelling-up of the Revolution. Equally important with their political influence was their influence on arts, language, and literature. Into the details of this history it is impossible to go; but without a general survey of the process, we should lose the key to the subsequent history of France.

Normandy.

The first among the great fiefs of France to acquire a distinct character of its own was Normandy, which since the treaty of Clair-on-Epte in 911 had been handed over by Charles the Simple to Rolf the Ganger and his Viking followers. The pirates gave up their wandering life of plunder, became Christians, and tillers of the soil. Rollo divided the lands of his duchy among his kinsfolk and followers. In one or two generations, the descendants of the pirate chieftains became the turbulent feudal aristocracy that held even their fierce dukes in check, and found the little duchy too small a field for their ambition and enterprise. For a time they retained their Norse character. In some districts, especially in the Bessin and the Côtentin, the great mass of the population had become Scandinavian in tongue and manners. Constant relations with Norwegian and Danish kings kept alive the memory of their old home. Harold Blue Tooth protected Duke Richard against Louis IV. Swegen sought the help of the lord of Rouen in avenging the massacre of St. Brice on the English. But the ready wit and quick adaptability of the Scandinavian races could not long withstand the French influences surrounding them. The constant friendly relations between the Norman dukes and both the Carolingian and Capetian kings precipitated the change. The dukes and barons of Normandy became French in tongue and manners. But they became French with a difference. The French of Caen and Rouen were more restless, more enterprising, more ambitious, and more daring than the French of Paris and Orleans. The contemporary chroniclers saw the importance of the distinction. ‘O France,’ says Dudo of Saint-Quentin, ‘thou wert crushed to the earth. Behold, there comes to thee a new race from Denmark. Peace is made between her and thee. That race will raise thy name and thy power to the heavens.’ Nor was this prophecy a false one. Despite its constant turbulence, Normandy became filled with a vigorous local life that soon flowed over its own borders. What the Normans could not teach themselves, they learnt from wandering Italians or Burgundians. The Normans stood in the forefront of all the great movements of the time. They upheld the Capetians against the Carolingians. They became the disciples of Cluny, and from the Norman abbey of Le Bec soon flowed a stream of culture and civilisation that bade fair to rival Cluny itself. They covered their land with great minsters, and wrote stirring chansons de geste in their Norman dialect of the French tongue. Yet they kept themselves so free of their suzerain’s influence, that not even through the Church could the Capetian kings exercise any authority in Normandy. Throughout the whole province of Rouen, the Church depended either upon the local seigneur or upon the Norman duke. They were the champions of the Hildebrandine Papacy. They were foremost in the Crusades. Their duke, William the Bastard, conquered England, and in the next generation his Norman followers swarmed over Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Private Norman adventurers attempted to found a kingdom in Spain, and set up a monarchy in southern Italy strong enough to wrest Sicily from Islam [see pages 104–118]. Throughout the length and breadth of Europe, Norman warriors, priests, and poets made the French name famous. With the activity of the Normans first begins the preponderance of French ideas, customs, and language throughout the western world.

Brittany.

The old Celtic tribal state of Brittany had been almost overwhelmed by the Norman invasions, and had lost all its former prosperity. The most sacred shrines of the vast crowd of the Breton saints were pillaged and destroyed. At the best, the holy relics were transferred to Paris, to Orléans, or some other safe spot, far away from the marauding pagan. When Rolf got from Charles the Simple the duchy of Normandy, it is said that he asked for fresh land to plunder, while his followers learnt the arts of peace in their new home. In some vague way Charles granted him rights of suzerainty over Brittany. The Normans harried the land for another generation, and, as later in Wales and Ireland, many Norman chieftains settled down in the more fertile eastern districts of Upper Brittany. But a Celtic reaction followed. Led by Alan of the Twisted Beard (barbe torte), the native Bretons rose against their oppressors and made common cause with the Gallo-Roman peasantry against them. Alan became the founder of the county (afterwards duchy) of Brittany, a state half French and half Celtic, including besides ‘la Bretagne bretonnante’ of the western peninsula of Lower Brittany, the French-speaking lands of the Lower Loire and the Vilaine, with the purely French town of Rennes for its capital, and the equally French Nantes for its chief seaport. But despite the differences of tongue and custom, there was an essential unity of feeling in the new duchy, based on the disappearance both of the Celtic tribal system and the Gallo-Roman provincial system in favour of a feudalism that was common to Celt and Frenchman alike. Brittany, despite its composite origin, retained and still retains a marked type of local nationality, less active and energetic than the Norman, but more dogged, persevering, and enduring. When Alan Barbe-torte died in 952, Brittany had become an organised feudal state.

Flanders.

The county of Flanders grew up in the flat country between the Scheldt and the sea. Like Brittany, it had suffered terribly from Norman invasions. Like Brittany, it was not homogeneous in language and custom. In all the northern and eastern districts the Low Dutch tongue prevailed, but in the south-east, round Lille and Douai, French was spoken. Baldwin of the Iron Arm, a Carolingian official who became the son-in-law of Charles the Bald, distinguished himself by leading the Flemings to victory against the Normans, and obtained from his father-in-law an hereditary supremacy over the whole district bounded by the Scheldt, the North Sea, and the Canche, and therefore including the modern Artois with the homage of great barons like the counts of Boulogne and Saint-Pol. Four other Counts Baldwin continued their ancestor’s exploits. Of these the most famous was Baldwin V., the uncle and guardian of Philip I., and the father-in-law of William the Conqueror. It was under Baldwin V. that the Flemish towns, whose strong walls had served to shelter previous generations from the Viking marauders, first enter upon their long career of political liberty and industrial prosperity. When Baldwin V. died in 1067, the year after his son-in-law’s establishment in England, mediæval Flanders had well begun its glorious but tumultuous and blood-stained career. |Vermandois.| To the south of Flanders lay the Vermandois, round its chief town of Saint Quentin, and including the northern parts of the restricted ‘Francia’ of the tenth century. We have seen the importance of its counts in the days of the struggle of Carolingians and Capetians, and the establishment of a Capetian line of counts of Vermandois in the person of Hugh the Great, the brother of Philip I.

Champagne and Blois.

Champagne became the chief fief of north-eastern France. A special feature in this district was the power of the bishops, and in consequence the influence of the crown. The metropolitans of Reims played a great local as well as a great national part. The bishops of Châlons became counts of their cathedral city; the bishops of Troyes, the local capital, only just failed in attaining the same end. ‘Everywhere,’ we are told, ‘the mighty oppressed the feeble, and men, like fishes, swallowed each other up.’ In the course of the tenth century a strong lay power arose in this district under the counts of Troyes. During the tenth century the country was held by a branch of the house of Vermandois. In 1019 it passed, as we have seen, to the house of Blois. However, the power of the family was soon endangered by the separation of Champagne and Blois under the two elder sons of Odo II., after his death in 1037.

The county of Blois, itself the original seat of the Capetians but carved out of their dwindling domain in favour of a hostile house, had already been united with that of Chartres. The establishment of the same house in Troyes created a state which pressed upon Paris both from the west, south, and east, and was frequently hostile to it. Before long, this powerful line began to absorb the lesser feudatories of the eastern marchland, and to make its influence felt even over the great ecclesiastical dignitaries. After the county of Vitry was transferred from the obedience of the Archbishop of Reims to the authority of the counts of Troyes, the lords of the amalgamated fiefs assumed the wider title of counts of Champagne, and became one of the greatest powers in France. Against these gains the loss of Touraine was but a small one. Odo’s grandson, Stephen, Count of Blois and Chartres (1089–1102), was one of the heroes of the First Crusade, and the father, by his wife Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, of a numerous family in whose time the house of Blois attained its highest prosperity. His second son, Theobald (II. of Champagne and IV. of Blois, called Theobald the Great, died 1152) reigned over both Blois and Champagne. His third son, Stephen, acquired not only the counties of Mortain and Boulogne but the throne of England. His fourth son, Henry, was the famous Bishop of Winchester. Though Blois and Champagne again separated under different lines of the house of Blois after Theobald’s death, their policy remained united, and their influence was still formidable.

Anjou.

Like Blois, Anjou grew up out of the original domains of Robert the Strong. Fulk the Red, who died in 941, and was rewarded with Anjou for his prowess in resisting the Normans, was the first hereditary Count of Anjou of whom history has any knowledge, though legends tell of earlier mythical heroes and a witch ancestress, whose taint twisted into evil the strong passions and high courage of the later representatives of the race. Though their exploits are told in a somewhat romantic form, there remains enough to enable us to form more individual impressions of the fierce, wayward Angevin lords than of most of the shadowy heroes of early feudalism. With Geoffrey Martel, great-grandson of Fulk the Red, who died in 1060, the first line of the Counts of Anjou became extinct; but his sister’s son Geoffrey the Bearded got possession of the county, and became the ancestor of the famous line that later ages than their own celebrated as the house of Plantagenet. His descendants grew in dominions and influence. Touraine they had possessed since Henry I. had transferred that county from the house of Blois to Geoffrey Martel. They now turned their eyes on Maine, the border district that separated them from the Normans. This brought about a long struggle between the Norman dukes and the Angevin counts, which was not finally ended until Henry I. of Normandy and England married his daughter, the widowed Empress Matilda, to Geoffrey the Fair, from which marriage sprang the greatest of the Angevins, Henry II. of England, Normandy and Anjou.