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proved sufficient to erase or tread out the old vestiges of municipal freedom. It happened, too, that the struggle betwixt church and aristocracy was maintained more especially in towns. The bishop and the count almost always disputed the sovereignty of the town; and popular rights, in consequence, must have been at times invoked by the weaker party. In Italy, where this struggle was fiercest, owing to the quarrels betwixt pope and emperor, the cities took the earliest advantage of this position. The citizens, leagued together in their own interest, formed communes or municipal councils, and, balancing their attachment and support betwixt the contending parties, succeeded in establishing their independence. Security thus gained from their rapacious masters, commerce, wealth, order, respect, the natural consequences of liberty, were found to follow. The south of France first caught this spirit from their neighbours on the other side of the Alps. The towns of Provence and Languedoc early erected themselves into little republics, more or less independent of neighbouring princes, under the rule of their own consuls. But Languedoc or Provence could not as yet be considered as making part of the French monarchy. Under Philip I. the towns of the north began to imitate those of the south. Mantes, according to some, was the first commune; according to others, Noyon. It was in the reign of Louis the Fat that the communes openly asserted and established their civic privileges. only revenues of that prince were drawn from his good cities; and it behoved him, on this account, to set them free from the yoke of other masters or spoliators. The formation of the civic magistracies and militia checked mightily the arrogance of the barons: and Louis, without supposing in him any principle of policy too profound or foreseeing for his age, could not but perceive this tendency, and encourage it. Beauvais, Noyon, Laon, Amiens, and Soissons, had all charters granted them by Louis the Fat. In some towns the bishops favoured, in some they opposed, the enfranchisement of the com

The

mons. The barons were in general averse. The king was obliged to wage a tedious war against the family of Couci, which, by means of a fortress, kept possession of the town of Amiens. He at length took and razed it; and the seignory of the De Coucis merged in the township of Amiens.

It was not merely by military exploits, and by the elevation of the tiers état or third estate, that the royal authority progressed during the reign of Louis VI. The judicial authority attributed to the monarch by the feudal system, and exercised by him in his court or council of peers, made him the arbiter of disputed successions. It was thus that Philip I. had extended his influence over the province of Berri. His son Louis interfered in the quarrels of the house of Bourbon, where a minor struggled against the usurpation of his uncle. Louis entered the Bourbonnois with an army in 1115, took Germigny, the principal fortress of Aymon of Bourbon, and compelled him to submit. Not since the early Carlovingians had the banners of a king of France been seen so far from his capital. The continued rivalry betwixt the Normans or English, and the French, excited and kept alive the warlike spirit of both nations. Henry I. reigned in England, and also in Normandy, which he had usurped from his brother Robert. Louis took the part of the latter, as well as of his son William; and mutual wars, or rather ravages, were frequent, with intervals of peace, betwixt the nations.

One event that occurred during these wars marks strongly the cruel spirit of the age: Henry I. was struggling against an insurrection of the Norman barons in favour of his nephew: this was the moment chosen by the Count of Breteuil to demand of the king the fortress of Ivry, which adjoined his possessions. The count had married Henry's natural daughter Juliana, and hence esteemed that he had a claim upon his generosity. It was not the moment to refuse the demand of a noble. Henry, however, was reluctant to give up Ivry; but, in order to content Breteuil, he ordered

1121.

DEFEAT OF LOUIS AT BRENNEVILLE.

43

Harenc, the royal governor of the town, to deliver up his son to the lord of Breteuil; at the same time making the count deliver his daughters by Juliana, as counterhostages, to his own keeping. He thus ensured that Harenc would not sally from his place of command, or otherwise make use of it to annoy or injure the Count of Breteuil. The latter, however, was not satisfied with the arrangement. He laid siege to the fortress of Ivry, and threatened to put his hostage, the governor's son, to death, in case the latter did not surrender his trust. Breteuil reasoned that his children would, at all events, be safe in the custody of their grandfather. Harenc would not deliver Ivry; and the Count of Breteuil, in pursuance of his threat, put out the eyes of his young hostage. Raoul de Harenc flew to the feet of Henry, and, in the rage of sorrow and resentment, demanded the daughters of his enemy, that he might use the terrible right of reprisal. Henry hesitated. The monarch was cruelly situated: but the ideas of feudal justice prevailed in his mind over attachment to his kin. The monarch delivered his grandchildren, the daughters of the Count of Breteuil, and Harenc tore out their eyes, and cut off their noses, in execution of the vengeance that he deemed just.

The principal feat of the war betwixt Henry and Louis was produced by accident. The two kings, each at the head of some five hundred knights, encountered one another in the plain of Brenneville. An engagement ensued, in which Louis was routed, and most of the French made prisoners. Only three were killed: to such perfection had defensive armour been brought-so much had war sunk to the mimickry of a tournament. Another enterprise of Louis, in the year 1121, marks the rapid increase of the king's influence. A few years

since he had established his authority in the Bourbonnois: now he extended it to Auvergne. In a quarrel betwixt the count and bishop of Clermont, the latter appealed to Louis, who summoned the count to his supreme court, and, on his refusal to appear, marched with an army and

subdued him, as he had previously the lord of Bourbon. The counts of Anjou and of Nevers aided him in the expedition. They felt no reluctance in carrying into effect the decrees of that court of peers of which they formed a part. Louis VI. died in 1137. It is strange that history could find for this monarch no epithet save that of the Fat, at the same time that it records innumerable proofs of a gifted mind, of an active and enterprising spirit.

Thus

Towards the conclusion of this monarch's reign, fortune came to reward and crown his efforts for the extension of the royal authority. William, Count of Poitiers, about to undertake a pilgrimage, from which he had the presentiment that he never should return, offered his daughter Eleonora in marriage to Louis the Young, son of Louis the Fat. She was the heiress of her father's possessions, which surpassed in extent and importance those of the king of France himself, comprising Guienne and Poitou,—all the country, in fact, betwixt the Loire and the Adour. The marriage was celebrated at Bourdeaux; and soon after it arrived tidings of the deaths both of the king and of the Count of Poitiers. Louis VII., or the Young, succeeded to dominions and authority infinitely more ample than those which his father had inherited. But the want of talent in the son did away with all these advantages. Nevertheless he commenced his reign with spirit. refractory nobles, and resolved to rights to the county of Toulouse. town. He failed in taking it, indeed: but the king of France, at the head of an army, made his name and power known for the first time to the inhabitants of the south. During a war carried on about the same time against Thibaud, Count of Champagne, an accident occurred, which had a marked effect upon the future conduct and character of Louis the Young. He had taken by storm the castle of Vitry, and set fire to it. The flames chanced to catch the neighbouring church, into which the population had crowded, to preserve themselves from

He chastised several support the queen's Louis besieged that

1147.

THE SECOND CRUSADE.

45

the fury of the soldiery. It appears that they had no means of escape. Thirteen hundred men, women, and children, perished in the conflagration. Louis was horror-struck on beholding the mass of half consumed bodies, and the weight of the remorse hung ever after upon him, and weighed down his spirit. It was the chief cause that induced him to assume the cross, and to lead that expedition to Jerusalem which is known in history as the second crusade.

Edessa, one of the principal towns possessed and garrisoned by the French in Palestine, was taken by the sultan of Aleppo, and the inhabitants put to the sword. The tidings stirred up all Christendom to vengeance. Assemblies and councils were called, and a final one met at Vezelay, in which the enthusiasm of that of Clermont was equalled. The celebrated Saint Bernard was the eloquent haranguer upon this occasion, and filled the place of Peter the Hermit; having, however, unlike his predecessor, the good sense to refuse the conduct of the expedition when it was offered to him. The emperor Conrad and Louis VII. each led an army of upwards of a hundred thousand men through the valley of the Danube to Constantinople. No sooner, however, had they passed into Asia, than the Germans, who preceded the French, were routed and cut to pieces. The army of the latter took a more circuitous path, but scarcely with better fortune. One half of their number was cut off; the rest reached Satalia, a sea-port opposite to Cyprus, where the king and his nobles, weary of the tedious march by land, took shipping for Palestine, leaving their followers to make the best of their way on foot, without guide or leader. All that remained perished. And of the two hundred thousand warriors who had left the west of Europe, bold of spirit and resplendent in arms, Louis only, with a band of some hundred of cavaliers, reached the Holy Land. The ignominy of this ill success, and the desertion of his followers, fell upon king Louis; and he felt it, not to rally and redeem his character, but to sink under the