CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS AND THE GROWTH OF PARIS

From 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers of France were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[38] grandson and great-grandson of Robert the Strong. Lay abbots of St. Martin of Tours, St. Denis, and St. Germain, Counts of Paris and Dukes of France, they pursued the policy of the mayors of the palace in Merovingian times, accepting the nominal kingship of the degenerate Carlovingians--Louis from overseas, Lothaire, and Louis the Lazy--until the time was ripe to pick up the fallen sceptre. They founded a new line of kings of France which stretches onward through history for a thousand years until the guillotine of the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom Dante, following a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of Paris, and whom he hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust and purging their avarice in the fifth cornice of Purgatory.

Their patrimony was a small one--the provinces of the Isle de France, La Brie, La Beauce, Beauvais and Valois; but their sway extended over the land of the Langue d'oil, with its strenuous northern life, _le doux royaume de la France_, the sweet realm of France, cradle of the great French Monarchy and home of art, learning and chivalry. The globe of the earth, symbol of universal empire, gives way to the hand of justice as the emblem of kingship. They were, it is true, little more than seigneurs over other seigneurs, some of whom were almost as powerful as they; but that little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were consecrated of the Church, contained within it a potency of future grandeur. They were the Lord's anointed, supported by the Lord's Vicar on earth: to disobey them was to disobey God. Tribal sovereignty had now given way to territorial sovereignty. Feudal lords and abbots were supreme within their own domains. The people, long forsaken by their emperors, had in their turn forsaken them. In order "not to be at the mercy of all the great ones they surrendered themselves to one of the great ones" and in exchange for protection gave troth and service. Cities, churches and monasteries now assumed a new aspect. Paris had demonstrated the value of a walled city, for the dread Rollo himself had three times assaulted it in vain. During the latter part of the Norman terror, from all parts of North France, monks and nuns and priests had brought their holy relics within its walls as to a city of refuge. Gone were the lines of villas from Gallo-Roman times extending freely into the country. Fortifications were everywhere raised around the dwelling-places of men. The ample spaces within cities were soon to give place to crowded houses and narrow streets. The might of the archbishops, bishops and abbots increased: they sat in the councils of kings and dominated the administration of justice; the moral, social and political life of the country centred around them. Armed with the sword and the cross they held almost absolute sway over their little republics; coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small armies and went to the chase in almost regal state. The land bristled with castles and fortified towns and abbeys, and was parcelled out into territories of varying extent, from great duchies equal to a dozen modern departments, to the small domain just enough to maintain a single knight.

The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life. Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God, the old world "seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her out-worn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white vesture of new churches." Everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, men strove in emulation to build the finest temples to God. The wooden roofs of the Merovingian and Carlovingian basilicas had ill withstood the ravage of war and fire. Stone took the place of wood, the heavy thrust of the roof led to increased mural strength, walls were buttressed, columns thickened. Massive towers of defence, at first round, then polygonal, then square, flanked the west fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred vessels and relics might be preserved and defended in case of attack. Soon spaces are clamant for decoration, the stone soars into the beauty of Gothic vaulting and tracery, "the solid and lofty shafts ascend and press onward in agile files, and in the sacred gloom are like unto an army of giants that meditate war with invisible powers."[39]

The Capets are more intimately associated with the growth of Paris than any of the earlier dynasties, and at no period in French history is the ecclesiastical expansion more marked. Under the long reign of Hugh's son, King Robert the Pious, no less than fourteen monasteries and seven churches were built or rebuilt in or around the city. A new and magnificent palace and hall of Justice, with its royal chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, rose on the site of the old Roman basilica and palace in the Cité. The king was no less charitable than pious. Troops of the poor and afflicted followed him when he went abroad, and he fed a thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his munificent piety, he was early made to feel the power of the Church. His union with Queen Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he had married a year before his accession, was condemned by the pope as incestuous, and he was summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved his wife dearly, resisted the papal authority, and excommunication and interdict followed.[40] Everyone fled from him; only the servants are said to have remained, who purged with fire all the vessels which were contaminated by the guilty couple's touch. The misery of his people at length subdued the king's spirit, and he cast off his faithful and beloved queen.

The beautiful and imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor, proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the anathemas of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from her southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes, invaded the court and shocked the austere piety of the king. He perceived the corrupting influence on the simple manners of the Franks of their licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute lives, but was powerless to dismiss them. The tyrannous temper of his new consort became the torment of his life. He was forced even to conceal his acts of charity. One day, on returning from prayers, he perceived that his lance by the queen's orders had been adorned with richly chased silver. He looked around his palace and was not long in finding a poor, tattered wretch whom he ordered to search for a tool, and the pair locked themselves in a room. The silver was soon stripped from the lance and the king hastily thrust it into the beggar's wallet and bade him escape before the queen discovered the loss. The poor whom he admitted to his table, despite the angry protests of the queen, at times ill repaid his charity. On one occasion a tassel of gold was cut from his robe, and on the thief being discovered the king simply remarked: "Well, perhaps he has greater need of it than I, may God bless its service to him." The very fringe was sometimes stripped from his cloak as he walked abroad, but he never could be induced to punish any of these poor spoilers of his person. There is, however, an obverse to this ardent piety and noble enthusiasm:--the merciless persecution and spoliation of the Jews and the first executions of heretics[41] recorded in France.

In 1022 two priests, one of whom had been the queen's confessor, and eleven laymen were condemned to be burnt at the stake at Orleans for heresy. The king spent nine hours wrestling with them in prayer and argument, but in vain. As the unhappy wretches were being led to execution, Constance leaned forward, savagely struck at her old confessor and gouged out one of his eyes. She was applauded for her zeal.

The economic condition of the people was far from satisfactory. Famine and pestilence claimed their victims with appalling frequency, and between 970 and 1040, forty-eight famines and plagues are known to historians; that of 1033 is recounted by the chronicler, Raoul Glaber, with details so ghastly that the heart sickens and the hand faints at their transcription. Slavery existed everywhere: it was regarded as an integral part of the divine order of things. The Church aimed at alleviating the lot of the slave, not at abolishing slavery. At a division of serfs, held in common between the priors of two abbeys in 1087, the children were shared, male and female, without any reference to their parents. Archbishops fulminated against serfs who tried to escape from their lords, quoting the words of the apostle: "Serfs be subject in all things to your masters." A serf was valued at so much money, like a horse or an ox. The serfs of the Church at Paris were sent to the law courts to give evidence for their bishop or prior, or to do battle for them in the event of a judicial duel. The freemen in the eleventh century began to rebel against fighting with a despised serf, and refused the duel, whereupon early in the next century the king and his court decided that the serfs might lawfully testify and fight against freemen, and whoso refused the trial by battle should lose his suit and suffer excommunication. The prelates exchanged serfs, used them as substitutes in times of war, allowed them to marry outside their church or abbey only by special permission and on condition that all children were equally divided between the two proprietors. If a female serf married a freeman he and their children became serfs. Serfs were only permitted to make a will by consent of their master; every favour was paid for and liberty bought at a great price. Whole _bourgades_ were often in a state of serfdom. Merchants even and artizans in towns owed part of their produce to the seigneur. In the eleventh century burgesses as well as serfs and Jews were given to churches, exchanged, sold or left in wills by their seigneurs. The story of mediæval France is the story of the efforts of serf and burgess to win their economic freedom[42] and of her kings to tame the insolence of disobedient vassals and to make their shadowy kingship a real thing. And the story of mediæval France is closed only by the great Revolution.

The declining years of King Robert were embittered by the impiety of rebellious sons, who were reduced to submission only at the price of a protracted and bloody campaign in Burgundy. The broken-hearted father did not long survive his victory. He died in his palace at Melun in 1031, and the benisons and lamentations of the poor and lowly winged his spirit to its rest. If we may believe some writers, pious King Robert's memory is enshrined in the hymnology of the Church, which he enriched with some beautiful compositions: he was often seen to enter St. Denis in regal habit to lead the choir at matins, and would sometimes challenge the monks to a singing contest; once, it is said, when importuned by his queen to immortalise her name in song, he began, "O Constantia Martyrum!" The delighted Constance heard no further and was satisfied.

Scarcely had the grave closed over the dead king at St. Denis when Constance plotted with some of the nobles to place Robert, her youngest and favourite son, on the throne in place of Henry, the rightful heir, who fled to Normandy to implore the aid of Duke Robert. The cultivation of the arts of peace had not enfeebled the fighting powers of the Normans. Robert fell upon the queen's supporters with reckless[43] bravery and crushed them in three decisive battles. Henry gained his crown but at the cost of a big slice of territory which advanced the Norman boundary to within twenty leagues of Paris. The queen survived her humiliation but a short time, and her death at Melun in 1032 and Henry's generosity to his enemies gave peace to the kingdom.

In 1053, towards the end of Henry's almost unchronicled reign, an alarming rumour came to Paris. The priests of St. Ermeran at Ratisbon claimed to have possession of the body of St. Denis, which they alleged had been stolen from the abbey in 892 by one Gisalbert. The loss of a province would not have evoked livelier emotion, and Henry at once took measures to convince France and Christendom that the true body was still at St. Denis. Before an immense concourse of bishops, abbots, princes and people, presided over by the king, his brother and the archbishops of Rheims and of Canterbury, the remains of St. Denis and his two companions were solemnly drawn out of the silver coffers in which they had been placed, by Dagobert, together with a nail from the cross and part of the crown of thorns, all locked with two keys in a kind of cupboard richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession they were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored to their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests of Ratisbon, fortified with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to the possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations to the relics at St. Denis.

The chief architectural event of Henry's reign at Paris was the rebuilding on a more magnificent scale of the Merovingian church and abbey of St. Martin in the Fields (des Champs), whose blackened walls and desolate lands were eloquent of the Norman terror. The buildings stood outside Paris about a mile beyond the Cité on the great Roman road to the north, where St. Martin on his way to Paris healed a leper. The foundation, which soon grew to be one of the wealthiest in France, included a hostel for poor pilgrims endowed by Philip I. with a mill on the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an oven.[44]

In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was secularised, the abbot was patron of twenty-nine priories, three vicarates and thirty-five parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some of the old building has been incorporated in the existing Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. The Gothic priory chapel, with its fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a machinery-room, and the refectory, one of the most precious and beautiful creations attributed to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.

Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and dishonour his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and brigandage. Early in his career he followed the evil counsels of his provost Etienne, and purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St. Germain des Prés to pay for his dissolute pleasures. "As the sacrilegious pair," says the chronicler, "drew near the relics, Etienne was smitten with blindness and the terrified Philip fled." Simony filled his gaping purse; bishoprics and other preferments were openly sold to the highest bidder, and one day when an abbot complained that he had been kept waiting while a rich competitor for a bishopric had been admitted, the king answered: "Wait a while until I have made my money of him; I will then accuse him of simony, and you shall have the reversion."

Regal irresponsibility led in 1092 to a greater crime. Most popular of the twelfth-century stories sung by the _trouvères_ of North France was that of Tortulf, the Breton outlaw, the Robin Hood of his day, who won by his prowess against the Normans the lordship of rich lands by the Loire, and with his son, Ingelar, founded the famous house of Anjou. In 1092 Foulques de Réchin, lord of Anjou--whose handsome grandson Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet from the sprig of broom (_genêt_) he wore in his helmet, was to father a race of English kings--had to wife Bertrarde, fairest of the ladies of France, whose two predecessors had been cast off like vile courtesans. Philip, when on a visit to the count at Tours became inflamed with passion at beholding her, and she was easily induced to elope with him under the promise that she should share his throne. His queen, Bertha, mother of his two children, was pitilessly driven from his bed and imprisoned at Montreuil, and two of his venal bishops were found to bestow the blessings of the Church on the new union. But the thunder of Rome came swift and terrible. Philip laid aside his crown and sceptre, grovelled before the pontiff, and implored forgiveness, but continued to live with his mistress. Next year a new pope excommunicated the guilty pair and laid their kingdom under the ban. The same Council, however, of Clermont, which fulminated against Philip, stirred Christendom to the first crusade, and in the magnificent enthusiasm of the moment Philip was permitted to live outwardly submissive but secretly rebellious. He crowned Bertrarde at Troyes, and lived on his vicious life, while Bertha was dying of a broken heart in her prison at Montreuil. Monkish legends tell of the excommunicated king languishing, a scrofulous wretch, in a deserted court; but there is little doubt that the impious monarch died, tardily repentant, at his palace at Melun, after a reign of nearly half a century. It was a reign void of honour or profit to France. He left his son Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to little more than a baronage over a few _comtés_, whose cities of Paris, Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by insolent and rebellious vassals, one of whom, the Seigneur de Puisset, had inflicted a disgraceful defeat on Philip in 1081. Many of the great seigneurs were but freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and lawlessness of these and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail on merchants and travellers, made commerce almost impossible. Corruption, too, had invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the thrones of bishops, and a dual effort was made by king and Church to remedy the evils of the times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the Church might be purged of wolves in sheep's clothing: the Capetian monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent and powerful vassals to law and obedience.

In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out--"Where is the archbishop?" he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse, gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging permission to kiss the old man's hand and to offer him a noble escort to safeguard him through his territory. It was the moral influence of prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money, and to make and unmake kings.

The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France, religious houses--the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Cîteaux, Clairvaux--sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord, "adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by their purity and righteousness." "How fair a thing it is," exclaims St. Bernard, "to live in perfect unity! One weeps for his sins; another sings praises to the Lord. One teaches the sciences; another prays. One leads the active; another the contemplative, life. One burns with charity; another is prone in humility. Nought is here but the house of God and the very gate of heaven."

St. Bernard was the terror of mothers and of wives. His austerity, his loving-kindness,[45] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate eloquence, carried all before him. St. Bernard was the dictator of Christendom; he it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting garments[46] looked like harlots rather than monks.

In the polluting atmosphere of Philip's reign matters grew worse. St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as "a house of Satan, a den of thieves." "The walls of the churches of Christ were resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish; their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich." "Bishops dressed like women; the successors of St. Peter rode about on white mules, loaded with gold and precious stones, apparelled in fine silk, surrounded with soldiers and followed by a brilliant train. They were rather the successors of Constantine."

In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fossés seemed so hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather than imperil his soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In 1107 the bishop of Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey of St. Eloy and extirpate the evils there flourishing. The nuns, it was reported, had so declined in grace, owing to the proximity of the court and intercourse with the world, that they had lost all sense of shame and lived in open sin, breaking the bonds of common decency. The scandal was so great that the bishop determined to cut them off from the house of the Lord. The abbey was reduced to a priory and given over to the abbot of the now reformed monastery of St. Maur, and its vast lands were parcelled out into several parishes.[47] The rights of the canons of Notre Dame were to be maintained; on St. Eloy's day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish them with six pigs, two and a half measures of wine and three of fine wheat, and on St. Paul's day with eight sheep, the same quantity of wine, six crowns and one obole. The present Rue de la Cité and the Boulevard du Palais give approximately the east and west boundaries of the suppressed abbey, part of whose site is now occupied by the Prefecture de Police.

But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris, 1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting, against the majority of the Council, the pope's decrees excluding married clerics from the churches. The reform of the canons of Notre Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent in 1128 to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and canons, supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was stripped of his revenues and hastened back to his metropolitan, the archbishop of Sens. The archbishop laid Paris under interdict and the influence of St. Bernard himself was needed to compose the quarrel.

On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor were ambushed and the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of Louis VII., Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the troubles excited at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia. When celebrating mass before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve the canons had stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on which the pontiff's knees might rest. When the pope retired to the sacristy to disrobe, his officers claimed the carpet, according to usage; the canons and their servants resisted, and there was a bout of fisticuffs and sticks. The king intervened, and anointed majesty himself was struck. A scuffle ensued, during which the carpet was torn to shreds in a tug-of-war between the claimants. Here was urgent need for reform. The pope decided to introduce the new discipline and appointed a fresh set of canons. The dispossessed canons met them with insults and violence, drowned their voices by howling and other indignities, and only ceased on being threatened with the loss of their eyes and other secular penalties.

Louis the Lusty was the pioneer of the great French Monarchy. He had none of Philip's indolence, and was ever on the move, hewing his way, sword in hand, through his domains, subduing the violence, and burning and razing the castles of his insolent and disobedient vassals. The famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, and led the Church to make common cause with him and lend her diocesan militia. It was a poor bald _curé_ who, when all else despaired, led the assault on the keep of the castle of Le Puisset; he seized on a plank of wood, assailed the palisade, calling on the hesitating royal troops to follow him; they were shamed by his bravery and the castle was won.

The social revolution known as the enfranchisement of the commons and the growth of towns begins in the reign of Louis VI. The king would have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant soldier-king, destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of the Church, the vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of France from the mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just government.

It is in Louis VI.'s reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme (golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin's cloak as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a formidable army was menacing France. Louis rallied all his friends to withstand him and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. The abbot took from the altar the standard--famed to have been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by the first liege man of the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery was in danger of attack--and handed it to the king. The sacred banner was fashioned of silk in the form of a gonfalon, of the colours of fire and gold, and was suspended at the head of a gilded lance.

There was a solemn ceremony, the _Remise des corps saints_, at the royal abbey when the king returned with his court to give thanks and to restore the banner to the altar. He carried the relics of the holy martyrs on his shoulders in procession, then replaced them whence they were taken and made oblations. A yet more superb spectacle was given to the Parisians when Pope Innocent II., a refugee from the violence of the anti-papal party at Rome, came to celebrate the Easter mass at St. Denis. The pope and his cardinals were mounted on fair steeds, barons and seigneurs on foot led the pope's white horse by the bridle. As he passed, the Jews presented him with a scroll of the law wrapped in a veil--"May it please God to remove the veil from your hearts," answered the pope. The solemn mass ended, pope and cardinals repaired to the cloisters where tables were spread with the Easter feast. They first partook of the Paschal lamb, reclining on the carpet in the fashion of the ancients, then, rising, took their places at table. After the repast a magnificent procession went its way to Paris, to be met by the whole city with King Louis and Prince Philip at their head.

The manner of the young prince's tragic death gives an insight into the state of a mediæval town. He was riding one day for amusement in the streets of Paris, attended by one esquire, when a pig ran between his horse's feet; the lad was thrown and died before the last sacraments could be administered. He was only fourteen years of age, and all France wept for him.

The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris, which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king and the seat of his government. The market, now known as Les Halles, was established at a place called Champeaux, belonging to St. Denis of the Prison. William of Champeaux founded the great abbey of St. Victor,[48] famed for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Bernard lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife Adelaide, the king built a nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed it with lands, ovens, the house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some shops and a slaughter-house in Paris, and a small _bourg_, still known as Bourg-la-Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of fishing at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings yearly from the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of Ste. Geneviève la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying of the plague of the burning sickness (_les ardents_); of St. Jacques de la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Boeufs, so named from the heads of oxen carved on the portal, were also built.