to be king of England. She brought him in marriage the entire of western France. Henry added to it Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, which he took from his brother, and Quercy, lost by the count of Toulouse, who also nearly lost its capital. He reduced to submission Auvergne, Limoussin, Berry, and bought La Marche. On his death he possessed nearly three-fourths of France.

Louis VII. had not lost all this ground without a struggle. He had commenced by supporting the pretensions of Geoffrey Plantaganet against his brother Henry; had thrown himself into Toulouse, and had saved it from the English. When the chancellor of England, the famous Thomas à Becket, who exercised a species of ecclesiastic royalty, departed from England in consequence of the persecutions which he experienced at the hands of the king, Louis received him as a martyr-a martyr, indeed, for Becket having, after lengthened negotiations with Henry, returned to England, was assassinated at the very foot of the altar. Later, the sons of Henry, having rebelled against their father, secretly incited thereto by their mother, incensed at his amours, were sustained against their father by the king of France. But the unhappy Louis was destined to be unfortunate throughout. The murderer of Becket, abandoned by everybody, took into his pay large bodies of the banditti-like soldiery with whom the continent swarmed, and who were always ready to fight zealously, and bravely too, in any cause that afforded regular pay and promised large plunder. Louis was defeated at Verneuil. After this Henry purchased the favour of Rome, declared himself a vassal of the pope, and walked barefooted to the shrine of that now-sainted Thomas à Becket who in life had caused him so much annoyance and danger. Having prostrated himself before the shrine, he next caused the monks of the place to be assembled, and, stripping off his garments, submitted his bare shoulders to the Scourge. He thus forwarded the great object he had in view-the conciliation of the zealous goodwill of all his subjects; for amongst all ranks, not excepting the very highest, superstition then had a mysterious and a mighty power. In three weeks he delivered his kingdom from his enemies, who were invading it on all sides. He reduced his rebellious vassals to submission, and re-appeared suddenly on the continent to deliver the capital of Normandy, which was besieged by the French army. Nothing was left to the king of France but to demand peace from his vassal (1174).

Louis was struck by a palsy, under which he lingered for many months. He died (1180) at the age of sixty, greatly regretted by his subjects, and was buried in the monastery of Barbeau on the Seine, a building of his own foundation, and where his widow caused a magnificent tomb to be erected. He possessed many amiable qualities; tender, compassionate, courageous, and devout; brave and prudent, but deficient of all greatness of mind and political ability. His talents were moderate, and but little improved by education. Notwithstanding the deficiencies of his mind and his errors of judgment, he was regretted by his subjects, over whom he had an authority never possessed by his predecessors.

Philip II., surnamed Augustus.-Philip Augustus had to repair the errors of his father, and devoted himself to the task with rare perseverance. One of his earliest acts was to espouse the daughter of the count of Flanders

in opposition to his mother and his uncles. He caused the provinces of Amiens and a portion of Vermandois to be ceded to him: this was a position in front of Normandy which he did not suffer the count of Flanders to re-conquer. His friend Richard, he who was called the "lion-hearted," having rebelled against his father (Henry II., king of England), Philip deemed the occasion opportune to retake the important places of Mans and Tours. By means of the one he disquieted Normandy and Brittany; by the other he held the Loire.

Third Crusade.-Meanwhile the empire of the Christians in the East was crumbling away. Jerusalem had again fallen in the power of the infidels. The kings of France and England were obliged to take up the cross. They embarked with their soldiers, Philip at Genoa, Richard at Marseilles, and they wintered in Sicily, and there laid the foundation of their future jealousy and hatred. Philip forced Richard to remove his standard, which he had planted on the walls of Messina. At length they arrived before Acre, of which Guy de Lusignan had commenced the siege. It was once more the struggle between Europe and Asia. The victory remained with the Christians, the besieged giving themselves up to the discretion of the victors (1194).

Philip Augustus, unable to endure the superior renown and prowess of Richard Cœur de Lion, on a plea of ill health, abandoned the campaign, but left 10,000 men under the command of the duke of Burgundy. He returned in time to take his share of the inheritance of Philip of Alsatia, and took to himself Artois and St. Omer in right of his wife Isabella.

Richard, in the meantime, continued to fight his way to Jerusalem, and after being the means of gaining the battle of Ascalon, in which forty thousand Saracens fell, he arrived even within sight of the Holy City. But here the other leaders showed so much disinclination to prosecute further the perilous enterprise, that all Richard could do was to conclude a truce with Saladin on equal conditions, the terms of which, according to the strange superstition of the times, were three years, three months, three weeks, and three hours. He then set out in return; but when travelling through Germany in the habit of a pilgrim, he was seized by the duke of Austria, whom he had insulted at the siege of Acre, and sold by him to the emperor, likewise his personal enemy. When at length ransomed for £300,000, he found, on his return home, his kingdom just about to pass into the hands of his brother John, who had been instigated by Philip to usurp the throne; and this gave rise to a furious warfare between the two heroes of the crusade. Pope Innocent III. interposed his mediation.

It was well that Philip listened to the voice of the pontiff. His divorce from his second wife, Ingeburge of Denmark, had set the church against him; his great vassals were jealous of his aggrandisement. Reduced to inaction, he was unable even to profit by the death of Richard. He only possessed himself of Evreux, and waited to be reconciled with the pope to renew the war. The experience which he had had in a former expedition to Palestine deterred him from taking part in the fourth crusade. He suffered a count of Champagne, to place himself at the head of the crusaders, who on their way forgot the Holy Sepulchre, and conquered Constantinople (1204). The moment had arrived to take back a portion of France from the king of England. Philip sup

ported the claims of Arthur Plantaganet, son of Geoffrey and Constance, who was the undisputed heir of the dukedom of Brittany by right of his mother, but who also claimed through his father the crown of England with its dependencies. He attacked his uncle John's provinces, and was supported by his Breton nobles, but was surprised while besieging queen Elinor in Poitou, and made prisoner with a large portion of his troops (1202). Arthur was no more heard of, and John was accused of having killed him with his own hands. Philip now made his prerogative effective : he summoned king John to answer for the alleged murder before his peers; on default, John was adjudged contumacious, and the territories he held in France were declared forfeit to his liege lord. Philip Augustus hastened to carry this sentence into execution; he seized upon Normandy, Brittany, Maine, of all the country which John then possessed south of the Loire, and the portions of Touraine and Anjou situated on the north of that river. John had raised an army, had overrun Poitou and Anjou, always flying before Philip, who was seeking him to give him battle.

Philip had long meditated the conquest of England, for which he thought the time had now arrived. John had been excommunicated by the pope, and the king of France was charged with carrying the apostolic sentence into effect. Philip assembled a fleet and an immense army. John, to ward off the blow, not only became reconciled to the Roman see, but made himself and his kingdom feudatory to the pope. He won over to his side the count of Flanders, allied himself with his nephew, the emperor Otho, stirred up all the Belgian provinces, crossed the sea, and landed at Rochelle. But Philip gained a great victory at Bouvines, on the Meuse (1214), and the counts of Flanders and Boulogne were brought in fetters to Paris. In the conflict the king had been struck down, trampled under the horses' feet, and wounded in the throat.

War of the Albigenses.-Meanwhile the entire of the south of France seemed ready to detach itself from the church. The first reformed religion was preached in Languedoc, two hundred years before Wickliffe, and three hundred before Luther. The seed had been sown by societies for the amendment of manners, and had received encouragement from the popes, who considered the purpose beneficial; but from attacking the practice, it was an easy step to question the doctrines of the Romish church, and many in the south of France had adopted the principles afterwards promulgated by Luther, or had carried their opinions into heretical extremes. These reformers denied transubstantiation, rejected confession, refused to acknowledge marriage and confirmation to be sacraments, and forbad the worship of images; but some also had followed the errors of the Manicheans, who mix up Oriental ideas about the spiritual world with the unsullied teaching of the Scriptures. In 1167 the Manichean bishops had held a council near Toulouse. The heresy had spread, notwithstanding the preaching of St. Bernard and the thunders of Rome, and threatened to extend to Flanders, Germany, and England. The Benedictine monks preached a crusade against them. Crowds of adventurers flocked to the standard, and a formidable army was assembled at Lyons in the spring of 1209, under the command of the legate commander, Amalric, abbot of Citeaux. The fury of the erusaders first fell upon the town of Beziers: they had scarcely set down before the unfortunate town, when a sally of the garrison was repulsed

with such vigour that the besiegers entered the town together with the routed host of the citizens. Word of this unexpected success was instantly brought to the abbot of Citeaux, and his orders were demanded as to how the innocent were to be distinguished from the guilty. "Slay them all," exclaimed the legate of the vicar of Christ; "the Lord will know his own.' The entire population was in consequence put to the sword; no woman nor infant was spared. Upwards of twenty thousand human beings perished in the massacre the sanguinary first-fruits of modern persecution. Carcassonne, in which viscount Beziers had shut himself up, was next invested; the crusaders stormed the town, singing Veni Creator, and burnt nearly five hundred heretics. Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, was the most prominent warrior of the crusaders, who, in a general assembly, gave him the lordships of Beziers and Carcassonne in reward of his zeal and valour; and to make the gift sure, it was accompanied by the person of his rival. The unfortunate viscount soon after perished in prison. The crusaders, having served beyond the term allotted to them by the pope to merit indulgences, disbanded. In order to give themselves time to organise another army, they dallied with Raymond count of Toulouse; they even suffered him to go to Rome to plead his cause. The king of France, the duke of Burgundy, and the king of Arragon sympathised with him, and recommended him to the clemency of the pope; but the abbot of Citeaux and Simon de Montfort remained inflexible. The count of Toulouse resisted odious and impossible conditions. All the nobles of the Pyrenees declared for him. The war recommenced, or rather continued. Simon de Montfort had already taken and ravaged all the territories of viscount Beziers. He undertook the siege of Toulouse. Repulsed by the allies of Raymond, he defeated the count of Foix at Castelnaudry and at Muret. The king of Arragon perished with upwards of fifteen thousand men. The counts of Foix, of Comminges, of Roussillon, and the count of Toulouse himself, gave in their submission to the legate. The council of Latran divided their spoils (1215).

The cruel de Montfort did not enjoy his share long. In 1217 the Toulousians again revolted, and war once more broke out betwixt count Raymond and Simon de Montfort. The latter formed the siege of the capital, and was engaged in repelling a sally, when a stone from one of the walls struck him, and put an end to his existence. His son experienced reverses and a sanguinary reaction, and when he was bereft of nearly all his power he ceded to Philip Augustus his rights in Languedoc. Thus the crown of France gathered the fruits of this impious war (1222). Philip Augustus finding his health decline, arranged his worldly affairs, and feeling some remorse at the manner in which he had gained his wealth, he appropriated a part for repaying the persons whose money he had unjustly taken in his lifetime. He died of a fever (1223) at Mantes, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, and was buried at St. Denis.

Results of the Reign of Philip Augustus.-Philip Augustus added grandeur and material power to the moral strength which royalty already possessed under Louis the Fat. Out of the seventy-eight departments into which he divided the kingdom, fifty-seven were the results of his own conquests. Authority consolidated itself in his hands in proportion as he extended the domains of the crown; he established a royal jurisdiction, and

established legal relations between himself and his vassals. According to the romantic traditions of the court of Charlemagne, he had twelve peers who gave to his ordinances the force of law throughout the whole territory of the kingdom. He put the police on an efficient footing; he walled and paved Paris and the principal towns under his sway; he built markets, aqueducts, and other useful monuments; continued the works of the church of Notre Dame, the first stone of which had been laid in 1163, and which was only finished two centuries later. He encouraged literature by the foundation of professorships, and granted privileges to that university which was destined to become so powerful a fever in the hands of kings. He likewise improved the discipline of the army; and, with all his enterprises and expenses, so ordered his finances as to leave a considerable treasure at his death. His power was growing, whilst that of the feudal houses was crumbling away around him. It might already be seen that the territorial unity would ere long meet no further obstacles.