Part 83

Frederick died while on a crusade and was succeeded (1190) by his son, Henry VI., who had married the daughter and heiress of the King of Sicily and who acquired that kingdom in her right. His short reign was occupied mostly in subduing the Sicilian possession. When he died (1197) his son Frederick was a child. Frederick succeeded to the crown of Sicily, but his rights in Germany (where his father had already caused him to be crowned "King of the Romans"--the step preliminary to an imperial election) were entirely ignored. The German crown was disputed between a Swabian and a Saxon claimant, and the Saxon, Otho, was King and Emperor in name, until 1218, when he died. But he, too, quarreled with a pope, about the lands of the Countess Matilda, which she gave to the Church; and his quarrel was with Innocent III., a pope who realized the autocracy which Hildebrand had looked forward to, and who lifted the Papacy to the greatest height of power it ever attained. To cast down Otho, Innocent took up the cause of Frederick, who received the royal crown a second time, at Aix-la-Chapelle (1215) and the imperial crown at Rome (1220). Frederick II. (his designation) was one of the few men of actual genius who have ever sprung from the sovereign families of the world; a man so far in advance of his time that he appears like a modern among his mediæval contemporaries. He was superior to the superstitions of his age,--superior to its bigotries and its provincialisms. His large sympathies and cosmopolitan frame of mind were acted upon by all the new impulses of the epoch of the crusades, and made him reflect, in his brilliant character, as in a mirror, the civilizing processes that were working on his generation.

Between such an emperor as Frederick II. and such popes as Innocent III. and his immediate successors, there could not fail to be collision and strife. The man who might, perhaps, under other circumstances, have given some quicker movement to the hands which measure human, progress on the dial of time, spent his life in barely proving his ability to live and reign under the anathemas and proscriptions of the Church. But he fought a losing fight, even when he seemed to be winning victories in northern Italy, over the Guelf cities of Lombardy, and when the party of the Ghibellines appeared to be ascendant throughout the peninsula. His death (1250) was the end of the Hohenstaufens as an imperial family. His son, Conrad, who survived him four years, was king of Sicily and had been crowned king of Germany; but he never wore the crown imperial. Conrad's illegitimate brother, Manfred, succeeded on the Sicilian throne; but the implacable Papacy gave his kingdom to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX. of France, and invited a crusade for the conquest of it. Manfred was slain in battle, Conrad's young son, Conradin, perished on the scaffold, and the Hohenstaufens disappeared from history. Their rights, or claims, in Sicily and Naples, passed to the Spanish House of Aragon, by the marriage of Manfred's daughter to the Aragonese king; whence long strife between the House of Anjou and the House of Aragon, and a troubled history for the Neapolitans and the Sicilians during some centuries. In the end, Anjou kept Naples, while Aragon won Sicily; the kings in both lines called themselves Kings of Sicily, and a subsequent re-union of the two crowns created a very queerly named "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies."

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Germany and the Empire.

After the death of Frederick II., the German kings, while maintaining the imperial title, practically abandoned their serious attempts to enforce an actual sovereignty in Italy. The Holy Roman Empire, as a political factor comprehending more than Germany, now ceased in reality to exist. The name lived on, but only to represent a flattering fiction for magnifying the rank and importance of the German kings. In Italy, the conflict, as between Papacy and Empire, or between Lombard republican cities and Empire, was at an end. No further occasion existed for an imperial party, or an anti-imperial party. The Guelf and Ghibelline names and divisions had no more the little meaning that first belonged to them. But Guelfs and Ghibellines raged against one another, more furiously than before, and generations passed before their feud died out.

While the long, profitless Italian conflict of the Emperors went on, their kingship in Germany suffered sorely. As they grasped at a shadowy imperial title, the substance of royal authority slipped from them. Their frequent prolonged absence in Italy gave opportunities for enlarged independence to the German princes and feudal lords; their difficulties beyond the Alps forced them to buy support from their vassals at home by fatal concessions and grants; their neglect of German affairs weakened the ties of loyalty, and provoked revolts. The result might have been a dissolution of Germany so complete as to give rise to two or three strong states, if another potent influence had not worked injury in a different way. This came from the custom of equalized inheritance which prevailed among the Germans. The law of primogeniture, which already governed hereditary transmissions of territorial sovereignty in many countries, even where it did not give an undivided private estate, as in England, to the eldest son of a family, got footing in Germany very late and very slowly. At the time now described, it was the quite common practice to divide principalities between all the sons surviving a deceased duke or margrave. It was this practice which gave rise to the astonishing number of petty states into which Germany came to be divided, and the forms of which are still intact. It was this, in the main, which prevented the growth of any states to a power that would absorb the rest. On the other hand, the flimsy, half fictitious general constitution which the Empire substituted for such an one as the Kingdom of Germany would naturally have grown into, made an effective centralization of sovereignty--easy as the conditions seemed to be prepared for it--quite impossible.

Free Cities in Germany and their Leagues.

One happy consequence of this state of things was the enfranchisement, either wholly or nearly so, of many thriving cities. The growth of cities, as centers of industry and commerce, and the development of municipal freedom among them, was considerably later in Germany than in Italy, France and the Netherlands; but the independence gained by some among them was more entire than in the Low Countries or in France, and more lasting than in Italy.

Most of the free cities of Germany were directly or immediately subject to the Emperor, and wholly independent of the princes whose territories surrounded them; whence they were called "imperial cities." This relationship bound them to the Empire by strong ties; they had less to fear from it than from the nearer small potentates of their country; and it probably drew a considerable part of such strength as it possessed, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from their support. Their own power was being augmented at this period by the formation of extensive Leagues among them, for common defense, and for the protection, regulation and extension of their trade. In that age of lawless violence, there was so little force in government, everywhere, and so entire a want of co-operation between governments, that the operations of trade were exposed to piracy, robbery, and black-mail, on every sea and in every land. By the organization of their Leagues, the energetic merchants of north-western Europe did for themselves what their half-civilized governments failed to do for them. They not only created effective agencies for the protection of their trade, but they legislated, nationally and internationally, for themselves, establishing codes and regulations, negotiating commercial treaties, making war, and exercising many functions and powers that seem strange to modern times. The great Hansa, or Hanseatic League, which rose to importance in the thirteenth century among the cities in the north of Germany, was the most extensive, the longest lasting and the most formidable of these confederations. It controlled the trade between Germany, England, Russia, the Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands, and through the latter it made exchanges with southern Europe and the East. It waged successful war with Denmark, Sweden and Norway combined, in defiance of the opposition of the Emperor and the Pope. But the growth of its power engendered an arrogance which provoked enmity in all countries, while the slow crystalizing of nationalities in Europe, with national sentiments and ambitions, worked in all directions against the commercial monopoly of the Hansa towns. By the end of the fifteenth century their league had begun to break up and its power to decline. The lesser associations of similar character--such as the Rhenish and the Swabian--had been shorter-lived.

The Great Interregnum.

These city-confederations represented in their time the only movement of concentration that appeared in Germany. Every other activity seemed tending toward dissolution. Headship there was none for a quarter of a century after Frederick II. died. The election of the Kings, who took rank and title as Emperors when crowned by the Pope, had now become the exclusive privilege of three prince-bishops and four temporal princes, who acquired the title of Electors. Jealous of one another, and of all the greater lords outside their electoral college, it was against their policy to confer the scepter on any man who seemed likely to wield it with a strong hand. For twenty years--a period in German history known as the Great Interregnum--they kept the throne practically vacant. Part of the Electors were bribed to choose Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of the English King Henry III., and the other part gave their votes to Alfonso, King of Castile. Alfonso never came to be crowned, either as King or Emperor; Richard was crowned King, but exercised no power and lived mostly in his own country. The Empire was virtually extinct; the Kingdom hardly less so. Burgundy fell away from the imperial jurisdiction even more than Italy did. Considerable parts of it passed to France.

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Rise of the House of Austria.

At last, in 1273, the interregnum was ended by the election of a German noble to be King of Germany. This was Rodolph, Count of Hapsburg,--lord of a small domain and of little importance from his own possessions, which explains, without doubt, his selection. But Rodolph proved to be a vigorous king, and he founded a family of such lasting stamina and such self-seeking capability that it secured in time permanent possession of the German crown, and acquired, outside of Germany, a great dominion of its own. He began the aggrandizement of his House by taking the fine duchy of Austria from the kingdom of Bohemia and bestowing it upon his sons. He was energetic in improving opportunities like this, and energetic, too, in destroying the castles of robber-knights and hanging the robbers on their own battlements; but of substantial authority or power he had little enough. He never went to Rome for the imperial crown; nor troubled himself much with Italian affairs.

On Rodolph's death (1291), his son Albert of Austria was a candidate for the crown. The Electors rejected him and ejected another poor noble, Adolphus of Nassau; but Adolphus displeased them after a few years, and they decreed his deposition, electing Albert in his place. War followed and Adolphus was killed. Albert's reign was one of vigor, but he accomplished little of permanent effect. He planted one of his sons on the throne of Bohemia, where the reigning family had become extinct; but the new king died in a few months, much hated, and the Bohemians resisted an Austrian successor. In 1308, Albert was assassinated, and the electors raised Count Henry of Luxemburg to the throne, as Henry VII. Henry VII. was the first king of Germany since the Hohenstaufens who went to Italy (1310) for the crown of Lombardy and the crown of the Cæsars, both of which he received. The Ghibelline party was still strong among the Italians. In the distracted state of that country there were many patriots--the poet Dante prominent among them--who hoped great things from the reappearance of an emperor; but the enthusiastic welcome he received was mainly from those furious partisans who looked for a party triumph to be won under the new emperor's lead. When they found that he would not let himself be made an instrument of faction in the unhappy country, they turned against him. His undertakings in Italy promised nothing but failure, when he died suddenly (1313), from poison, as the Germans believed. His successor in Germany, chosen by the majority of the electors, was Lewis of Bavaria; but Frederick the Fair of Austria, supported by a minority, disputed the election, and there was civil war for twelve years, until Frederick, a prisoner, so won the heart of Lewis that the latter divided the throne with him and the two reigned together.

France under the Capetians.

While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of authority and law which creates stable and substantial power. France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian kings, had made little progress to that end. At the accession (1103) of the fourth of those kings, namely, Louis VI., it is estimated that the actual possessions of the Crown, over which it exercised sovereignty direct, equalled no more than about five of the modern departments of France; while twenty-nine were in the great fiefs of Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Vermandois, and Boulogne, where the royal authority was but nominal; thirty-three, south of the Loire, were hardly connected with the Crown, and twenty-one were then dependent on the Empire. The actual "France," as a kingdom, at that time, was very small. "The real domain of Louis VI. was almost confined to the five towns of Paris, Orleans, Estampes, Melun, and Compiegne, and to estates in their neighbourhood." But the strengthening of the Crown was slightly begun in the reign of this king, by his wise policy of encouraging the enfranchisement of the communes, as noted before, which introduced a helpful alliance between the monarchy and the burgher-class, or third estate, as it came to be called, of the cities, against the feudal aristocracy.

But progress in that direction was slight at first and slowly made. Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her, and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the French king.

French recovery of Normandy and Anjou,

But the next king in France, Philip, called Augustus (1180), who was the son of Louis VII., wrought a change of these circumstances. He was a prince of remarkable vigor, and he rallied with rare ability all the forces that the Crown could command. He wrested Vermandois from the Count of Flanders, and extorted submission from the rebellious Duke of Burgundy. Suspending his projects at home for a time, to go crusading to the Holy Land in company with King Richard of England, he resumed them with fresh energy after Richard's death. The latter was succeeded by his mean brother John, who seems to have been hated with unanimity. John was accused of the murder of his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who disputed the inheritance from Richard. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, John, though King of England, was nevertheless a vassal of the King of France. Philip summoned him, on charges, to be tried by his peers. John failed to answer the summons, and the forfeiture of his fiefs was promptly declared. The French king stood well prepared to make the confiscation effective, while John, in serious trouble with his English subjects, could offer little resistance. Thus the Norman realm of the English kings--their original dominion--was lost beyond recovery, and with it Anjou and Maine. They held Guienne and Poitou for some years; but the bases of the French monarchy were broadened immensely from the day when the great Norman and Angevin fiefs became royal domain.

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The Albigenses.

Events in the south of France, during Philip's reign, prepared the way for a further aggrandisement of the Crown. Ancient Latin civilization had lingered longer there, in spirit, at least, than in the central and northern districts of the kingdom, and the state of society intellectually was both livelier and more refined. It was the region of Europe where thought first showed signs of independence, and where the spiritual despotism of Rome was disputed first. A sect arose in Languedoc which took its name from the district of Albi, and which offended the Church perhaps more by the freedom of opinion that it claimed than by the heresy of the opinions themselves. These Albigeois, or Albigenses, had been at issue with the clergy of their country and with the Papacy for some years before Innocent III., the pontifical autocrat of his age, proclaimed a crusade against them (1208), and launched his sentence of excommunication against Raymond, Count of Toulouse, who gave them countenance if not sympathy. The fanatical Simon de Montfort, father of the great noble of like name who figures more grandly in English history, took the lead of the Crusade, to which bigots and brutal adventurers flocked together. Languedoc was wasted with fire and sword, and after twenty years of intermittent war, in which Peter of Aragon took part, assisting the Albigeois, the Count of Toulouse purchased peace for his ruined land by ceding part of it to the king of France, and giving his daughter in marriage to the king's brother Alphonso,--by which marriage the remainder of the country was transferred, a few years later, to the French crown.

The Battle of Bouvines.

Philip Augustus, in whose reign this brutal crushing of Provençal France began, took little part in it, but he saw with no unwillingness another too powerful vassal brought low. The next blow of like kind he struck with his own hand. John of England had quarreled with the mighty Pope Innocent III.; his kingdom had been placed under interdict and his subjects absolved from their allegiance. Philip of France eagerly offered to become the executor of the papal decree, and gathered an army for the invasion of England, to oust John from his throne. But John hastened now to make peace with the Church, submitting himself, surrendering his kingdom to the Pope, and receiving it back as a papal fief. This accomplished, the all-powerful pontiff persuaded the French king to turn his army against the Count of Flanders, who had never been reduced to a proper degree of submission to his feudal sovereign. He seems to have become the recognized head of a body of nobles who showed alarm and resentment at the growing power of the Crown, and the war which ensued was quite extraordinary in its political importance. King John of England came personally to the assistance of the Flemish Count, because of the hatred he felt towards Philip of France. Otho, Emperor of Germany, who had been excommunicated and deposed by the Pope, and who was struggling for his crown with the young Hohenstaufen, Frederick II., took part in the melee, because John was his uncle, and because the Pope was for Philip, and because Germany dreaded the rising power of France. So the war, which seemed at first to be a trifling affair in a corner, became in fact a grand clearing storm, for the settlement of many large issues, important to all Europe. The settlement was accomplished by a single decisive battle, fought at Bouvines (1214), not far from Tournay. It established effectively in France the feudal superiority and actual sovereignty of the king. It evoked a national spirit among the French people, having been their first national victory, won under the banners of a definite kingdom, over foreign foes. It was a triumph for the Papacy and the Church and a crushing blow to those who dared resist the mandates of Rome. It sent King John back to England so humbled and weakened that he had little stomach for the contest which awaited him there, and the grand event of the signing of Magna Charta next year was more easily brought about. It settled the fate of Otho of Germany, and cleared the bright opening of the stormy career of Frederick II., his successor. Thus the battle of Bouvines, which is not a famous field in common knowledge, must really be numbered among the great and important battles of the world.

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

Saint Louis.